No, not so... and no help for Jilly, who would never have let her daughter go; whose daughter never would have gone while her mother lived. And those pills filled with synthetic prions—rogue proteins indistinguishable from the human form of the insidious bovine disease, developed in a laboratory in shadowy old Innsmouth— eating away at Jilly’s brain even now, faster and faster.
Anne’s hand fell from her face. “How long?”
He shook his head. “Not long. After witnessing what happened the other day, not long at all. Days, maybe? No more than a month at best. But we shall be here, you and I. And Anne, we can make up for what she’ll miss. Your years, like mine... oh, you shall have years without number!”
“It’s true, then?” Anne looked at him, and Jamieson looked back but saw no sign of tears in her eyes, which was perfectly normal. “It’s true that we go on—that our lives go on—for a long time? But not everlasting, surely?”
He shook his head. “Not everlasting, no—though it sometimes feels that way! I often lose count of my years. But I am your ancestor, yes.”
Anne sighed and stood up. And brushing sand from her dress, she took his hand, helping him to his feet. “Shall we go and be with my mother... grandfather?”
Now his smile was broad indeed—a smile he showed only to close intimates—which displayed his small, sharp, fish-like teeth. And:
“Grandfather?” he said. “Ah, no. In fact I’m your father’s great-great-grandfather! And as for yourself, Anne... well you must add another ‘great’.”
And hand in hand they walked up the beach to the house. The young girl and the old—the very old—man...?
AFTERWORD
CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES
RANDY BROECKER was born and lives in Chicago, Illinois. Inspired by the pulp magazines and EC comics he read as a child, his first published artwork appeared in Rich Hauser’s legendary 1960s EC fanzine, Spa-Fon.
Many years later, a meeting with publisher Donald M. Grant at the second World Fantasy Convention eventually led in 1979 to The Black Wolf and his first hardcover illustrations. Since then his work has appeared in books produced by PS Publishing, Robinson Publishing, Carroll & Graf, Fedogan & Bremer, Cemetery Dance, Underwood-Miller, Sarob Press, Pumpkin Books, American Fantasy, Highland Press and other imprints on both sides of the Atlantic.
He was Artist Guest of Honour at the 2002 World Horror Convention and is the author of the World Fantasy Award-nominated study Fantasy of the 20th Century: An Illustrated History from Collector’s Press, which also formed part of a three-in-one omnibus entitled Art of Imagination: 20th Century Visions of Science Fiction, Horror, and Fantasy.
“In the best of Lovecraft’s writing there is a feverish intensity not unlike that displayed in the work of Richard Upton Pickman, that painter of the perverse whose work I also happen to admire,” reveals Broecker.
“Both have the ability to convince one of the existence of the strange and wondrous horrors that they present so realistically. Horrors that I have enjoyed encountering for quite awhile now, and when given the opportunity like this to present my own interpretations, I confess that wild batrachians wouldn’t keep me away.”
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RAMSEY CAMPBELL was born in Liverpool, where he still lives with his wife Jenny. His first book, a collection of stories entitled The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, was published by August Derleth’s legendary Arkham House imprint in 1964, since when his novels have included The Doll Who Ate His Mother, The Face That Must Die, The Nameless, Incarnate, The Hungry Moon, Ancient Images, The Count of Eleven, The Long Lost, Pact of the Fathers, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain, and the movie tie-in Solomon Kane.
His short fiction has been collected in such volumes as Demons by Daylight, The Height of the Scream, Dark Companions, Scared Stiff, Waking Nightmares, Cold Print, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead, and Just Behind You. He has also edited a number of anthologies, including New Terrors, New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Fine Frights: Stories That Scared Me, Uncanny Banquet, Meddling with Ghosts, and Gathering the Bones: Original Stories from the World’s Masters of Horror (with Dennis Etchison and Jack Dann).
PS Publishing recently published the novels Ghosts Know, The Kind Folk and a new Lovecraftian novella, The Last Revelation of Gla’aki, along with the definitive edition of his early Arkham House collection, Inhabitant of the Lake, which includes all the first drafts of the stories, along with new illustrations by Randy Broecker. Forthcoming from the author is the novel Bad Thoughts, the collection Holes for Faces, and another novella, The Pretence.
Now well in to his fifth decade as one of the world’s most respected authors of horror fiction, Ramsey Campbell has won multiple World Fantasy Awards, British Fantasy Awards and Bram Stoker Awards, and is a recipient of the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award, the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the Howie Award of the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival for Lifetime Achievement, and the International Horror Guild’s Living Legend Award. He is also President of the Society of Fantastic Films.
“H. P. Lovecraft remains one of the crucial writers in the field,” Campbell explains. “He united the American tradition of weird fiction—Poe, Bierce, Chambers—with the British—Machen, Blackwood, M. R. James. He devoted his career to attempting to find the perfect form for the weird tale, and the sheer range of his work (from the documentary to the delirious) is often overlooked. Few writers in the field are more worth re-reading: certainly I find different qualities on different occasions. I recently read ‘The Outsider’ to my wife Jenny to both our pleasures. I still try to capture the Lovecraftian sense of cosmic awe in some of my tales.
“‘Raised by the Moon’ was suggested by the boating lake at West Kirby. It’s much like the area contained by the submerged wall in the story, although the town is nothing like the surroundings. Perhaps the creatures in the tale are distant cousins of the Deep Ones—we might call them the Shallowers.”
Campbell’s early story ‘The Church in the High Street’ appears in Shadows Over Innsmouth.
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HUGH BARNETT CAVE (1910-2004) was born in Chester, England, he emigrated to America with his family when he was five. Cave sold his first story, ‘Island Ordeal’, to Brief Stories in 1929, and went on to publish around 800 pieces of fiction (often under various bylines) to such pulp magazines as Weird Tales, Strange Tales, Ghost Stories, Black Book Detective Magazine, Spicy Mystery Stories and the so-called “shudder” or “weird menace” pulps, Horror Stories and Terror Tales, amongst many other titles.
The author then left the field for almost three decades, moving to Haiti and later Jamaica, where he established a coffee plantation and wrote two highly praised travel books, Haiti: Highroad to Adventure and Four Paths to Paradise: A Book About Jamaica. He also continued to write for the “slick” magazines, such as Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post and many other titles.