“Henry, listen! Do you really intend to waste a bullet on me? I mean, look what’s coming, Henry…!”
They were Shoggoths, two of them, under the direction of a solitary Deep One. They came into view apparently from nowhere, simply appearing from the suck and the thrust to glide toward us… at least the Shoggoths approached us, while the Deep One held back and kept his watery great eyes on his charges, making sure they carried out their orders—whatever those might be—to the letter. But of course I knew exactly what they had been told to do.
Suddenly gibbering, Henry released me and turned his attention on the twin pillars of blackly tossing, undulating filth, slime and alien jelly as the advancing creatures formed more huge, slithering, soulless and half-vacant eyes in addition to the many they already had, and came flowing upon him. He fired once, twice, three times… until the hammer clicked metallically, first on a dead round, and once again, but hollowly, on an empty chamber. And finally, cursing, Henry hurled the useless weapon directly into the tarry protoplasm of one of that awesome pair of nine-foot nightmares. Then, as if noticing for the first time just how close they were, he turned and made to run or stagger away from them… but too late!
Moving with scarcely believable speed, they were upon him; they towered over him to left and right, putting out ropey pseudopods to trap Henry’s spindly arms. And closing with his thin, smoking, desperately vibrating body, they slowly but surely melted him, sucking him into themselves and burning him as fuel for the biological engines that they were…
As his agonised shrieking tapered and died, along with Henry himself, and as the smoke and gushing steam of his catabolism rose up from the feeding creatures, the loathsome fetor of Henry Chattaway’s demise might have been almost as sickening as the live smell of his executioners; but in combination, overwhelming the already rancid air to burn like acid in my nostrils even though I had moved well away, the two taints together were far more than twice as nauseating.
And I was glad that it was finally over, for my sake if not for the old man’s…
In backing away from all this I had come up against a different kind of body with a smell which I could at least tolerate; indeed I even appreciated it. The Shoggoth-herder looked at me rather curiously for a moment, his almost chinless face turned a little on one side. But then as he sniffed at me and recognised my Innsmouth heritage, my ancestry, he further acknowledged my role in these matters by turning away from me and once more taking command of the Shoggoths.
Left to my own devices I shrugged off a regretful, perhaps vaguely guilty feeling and set about climbing the stairway with the tall treads. This was hard work indeed, for I was already weary from my journey through the Underground with old man Chattaway and his suitcase full of impotent batteries.
But up there, high overhead, I knew the ovens would also be hard at work. And long or short pig, what difference did that make when I was this hungry? Hadn’t men eaten fish, and in France frogs, too? But the word from others I had spoken to was that this appears to be a problem with changelings such as myself, changelings who—while waiting for their change, when at last they, too, can go down to the water—hunt humans: sooner or later they begin to sympathise, even empathise with the hunted.
However, and despite the greater effort, I soon began to climb faster. For also up there were the cages and other habitats… and at least one lovely teenage girl; a girl called Dawn, who had never known a man—or for that matter a Deep One—or not until comparatively recently, anyway. A great shame, that there were others more or less like me up there, but I expected she would still be very fresh.
And, so that I wouldn’t fall victim to mistaken identity on the way up, I commenced chanting: “Ph’nglui gwlihu’nath, Bgg’ha Im’ykh I’ihu’nagl fhtagn…!” And surprising me even as I sang, there it was again: that oh-so-faint feeling of guilt!
But what the hell, and I shrugged it off. For after all, it was like I had told Henry: certain kinds of men can become accustomed—can get used—to almost anything.
Yes, and not only men…
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 seminal 1960s EC fanzine, Spa-Fon.
Many years later, a meeting with acclaimed 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.
The artist has long been an admirer of the writings of H. P. Lovecraft and his circle. His works have taken him to picturesque Innsmouth on more than one occasion, about which he has this to say: “The people of Innsmouth have been most kind to me over the years and I’ve enjoyed using them as models, although—and Lovecraft knew this—the ‘Innsmouth look’ as he referred to it, can be a bit hard to nail down on paper. There is, quite frankly, a tendency to over-exaggerate, which I’d like to believe I’ve avoided with my work this time around. I only hope they are as pleased with the results as I am.
“Whether embraced by the Innsmouth folk or not,” he adds, “these illustrations are dedicated to my late brother Jay—a small token for showing me the way not only to Innsmouth, but other fantastic locales as well.”
Broecker was also one of the contributing artists to Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, and this new edition of Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth features additional illustrations that were not included in the Fedogan & Bremer hardcover.
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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, Ghosts Know, The Kind Folk, Bad Thoughts, Think Yourself Lucky 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).