At which she sighed, relaxing a little in her chair…
And taking that as his signal to depart, Jamieson stood up. “I must be off,” he said. “It’s late and I’ve some things to do before bed.” Then, as he made his way to the door, he said: “Do give my regards to Anne, won’t you? It’s a shame I missed her—or perhaps not, since we needed to have our talk.”
Jilly had followed him—rather stumblingly, he thought—and at the door said, “I really d-d-don’t know how to thank you. My mind feels so much more at ease now. But then it always does after I-I-I’ve spoken with you.” She waited until he’d got into his car, and waved him a shaky goodbye before closing the door.
Pulling away from the house, the old man noticed an almost furtive flicker of movement in the drapes of an upstairs window. It was Anne’s bedroom; and very briefly he saw her face—those huge eyes of hers—in the gap of partly drawn-aside curtains. At which he wondered how long she had been awake; even wondered if she had been asleep! And if not, how much she’d overheard.
Or had she perhaps already known it all…?
• • •
The long winter with its various ailments—Anne White’s laryngitis, and Doreen Tremain’s ’flu—merged slowly into spring; green shoots became flowers in village gardens or window boxes; lowering skies brightened, becoming bluer day to day.
But among these changes were others, not nearly so natural and far less benign, and old Jamieson was witness to them all.
He would see the beachcomber—“young Geoff,” indeed, as if he were just another village youth—shambling along the tidemark. But he wasn’t like other youths, and he was ailing.
Jamieson watched him in his binoculars, that tired shambler on the shore: his slow lurching, feet flip-flopping, shoulders sloping, head down and collar up. And despite that the weather was much improved, he no longer went out to sea. Oh, he looked at the sea—constantly pausing to lift his ugly head and gaze out across that wide wet horizon—gaze longingly, the old man thought, as he attempted to read something of emotion into the near-distant visage—but the youth’s great former ability in the water, and his untried but suspected strength on dry land, these seemed absent now. Plainly put, he was in decline.
The old man had heard rumours in the village pub. The fishing was much improved but Tom Foster wasn’t doing as well as in previous years; he’d lost his good luck charm, the backward boy who guided his boat to the best fishing grounds. At least, that was how they saw it, the other fishermen, but it was Tom Foster himself who had told the old man the truth of it one evening in the Sailor’s Rest.
“It’s the boy,” he said, concernedly. “Um’s not umself. Um says the sea lures um, and um’s afeared of it. Oh, um walks the shore and watches all the whitecaps, the seahorses come rollin’ in, but um ain’t about ter go aridin’ on ’em. I dun’t know what um means, but um keeps complainin’ as how um ‘ain’t ready,’ and doubts um ever will be, but if um ‘goes now’ it’ll be the end of um. Lord only knows where um’s thinkin’ of goin’! And truth is, um sickens. So while I knows um’d come out with me if I was ter ask um, I won’t fer um’s sake. The only good thing: um lies in the bath a lot, keeps umself well soaked in fresh water so um’s skin dun’t suffer much and there be no more of them fish-lice.”
And the leathery old seaman had shrugged—though in no way negligently—as he finished his pint, and then his ruminations with the words, “No more sea swimmin’, no more fish-lice—it’s as simple as that. But as fer the rest of it…I worries about um, that I do.”
“Answer me one question,” the old man had begged of Foster then. “Tell me, why did you take him in? You had no obligation in that respect. I mean, it wasn’t as if the youth—the child—was of your blood. He was a foundling, and there were, well, complications right from the start.”
Foster had nodded. “It were my woman, the missus, who took ter um. Her great-granny had told of just such young ’uns when um were a little ’un out in the islands. And Ma Foster felt fer um, um did. Me too, ’ventually, seein’ as how we’ve had um all this time. But we always knew who um’s dad were. No big secret that, fer um were here plain ter see. Gone now, though, but um did used ter pay um’s share.”
“George White gave you money?”
“Fer Geoff’s upkeep, yes.” Foster had readily admitted it. “That’s a fact. The poor bugger were sellin’ off bits of precious stuff—jewell’ry and such—in all the towns around. Fer the lad, true enough, but also fer um’s own pleasure…or so I’ve heard it said. But that’s none of my business…”
Then there was poor Jilly White. She, too—her health—was very obviously in decline. Her nightmares were of constant concern, having grown repetitive and increasingly weird to the point of grotesque. Also, her speech and mobility were suffering badly; she stuttered, often repeated herself, occasionally fell while negotiating the most simple routines both in and out of doors. Indeed, she had become something of a prisoner in her own home; she only rarely ventured down onto the beach, to sit with her daughter in the weak but welcome spring sunshine.
As to her dreams:
It had been a long-drawn-out process, but Jamieson had been patient; he had managed to extract something of the nightmarish contents of Jilly’s dreams from the lady herself, the rest from Anne during the return journey from a language lesson trip into St. Austell. Unsurprisingly, all of the worst dreams were centered upon George White, Jilly’s ex-husband; not on his suicide, as might at least in some part be expected, but on his disease: its progression and acceleration toward the end.
In particular she dreamed of frogs or the batrachia in general, and of fish…but not as creatures of Nature. The horror of these visitations was that they were completely alien, gross mutations or hybrids of man and monster. And the man was George White, his human face and something of his form transposed upon those of the amphibia and fishes alike—and all too often upon beings who had the physical components of both genera and more! In short, Jilly dreamed of Deep Ones, where George was a member of that aquatic society!
And Anne White told of how her mother mumbled and gibbered, gasping her horror of “great wet eyes that wouldn’t or couldn’t close;” or “scales as sharp and rough as a file;” or “the flaps in George’s neck, going right through to the inside and pulsing like…like gills when he snorted or choked in his sleep!” But these things with regard to her mother’s nightmares weren’t all that Anne had spoken of on the occasion of that revealing drive home from her language lesson. For she had also been perfectly open in telling Jamieson:
“I know you saw me at my window that time when you brought her pills and spoke to my mother at length, the night you told her about Innsmouth. I heard you start to talk, got out of bed, and sat listening at the head of the stairs. I was as quiet as could be and must have heard almost everything you said.”
And Jamieson had nodded. “Things she probably wouldn’t have spoken of if she’d known you were awake? Did it…bother you, our conversation?”
“Perhaps a little…but no, not really,” she had answered. “I know more than my mother gives me credit for. But about what you told her, in connection with my father and what she dreamed about him, well, there is something I’d like to know—without that you need to repeat it to her.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. You said that you’d seen those sick Innsmouth people, ‘in every stage of degeneration.’ And I wondered…”