Cthulhu Lives!: An Eldritch Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft (14 page)

Damp and none the wiser, I stopped at the edge of the path that slid back up the cliff and raised my eyes to the guesthouse squatting at the top. It was an even toss which was least hospitable – the sloshing murk, or that slumped shit-hole and its lurking yokels.

At least I might be able to get some food at the house.

♦

Butter melted over the potatoes, even though they were barely done. It formed a slick, oily puddle around the limp white fish that squatted on the plate, taunting me. The edge of the fork wouldn’t cut it. It was barely cooked at all. I had to tear at it with my knife to pull pale, translucent, rubbery mouthfuls from the fillet. Not that this seemed to bother my hosts, who chewed open-mouthed around me without any sense of shame or manners. For all the prayers on the walls, they hadn’t said grace. We sat, chewing at each other in uncomfortable silence while I forced my way through the meal.

The whole time, the two women stared at me, one gaze milky-eyed and one clear. The possible daughter’s eyes were keen and green, and she stared at me with unalloyed fascination. It made her look demure, and her old fashioned clothing seemed somehow inappropriate. The man watched me too, but the gaze of the women was something you felt, almost physical. Like being pinched and prodded and judged. It was making me nauseous, as if the food wasn’t enough to do that all by itself.

I finally managed to choke down the last rubbery bite. The watery taste of the fish lingered in my mouth, making me salivate – but not with hunger. I tried to break the silence. “I found a coin, down on the beach this morning.”

“Oh, ah? A shilling or somethin’ from the town, reckon?” The old man picked his dentures.

“No, older I think,” I said, low and quiet, unsettled by the staring women. I fished in my pocket and plucked out the old golden coin I’d found, set it on the stained tablecloth and pushed it over towards him.

The old man plucked it from the table, holding it up close to his rheumy eye for inspection. “Ah, Celtic, yes. Very old, and gold too. We get detectorists down from time to time, looking for them sorts of things, but this place is ’ard to find, and the cliffs can be dangerous. Especially after a storm. We find some bits and pieces from time to time. I can show you after we eat, if’n you’re interested...” He let the last word hang, elongating the vowels strangely, and smiling to me with a peculiar twinkle in his eye.

“Oh, aren’t we finished?” I shouldn’t have asked.

The old woman got up hurriedly and scurried out to the kitchen. She returned carrying a horrid-looking rice-pudding with a leathery black skin. I swallowed the nausea welling up in my mouth as best I could. “Lovely.”

♦

My stomach moaned as the strange old man led me up to his room. He paused every few steps on the creaking stair to turn back and make sure I was still following. He seemed excited somehow, licking his lips, his hands wringing together limply as he took me into his bedroom and turned on the light. It was so dim it only seemed to lengthen the shadows and frankly, I was glad I couldn’t see too well.

The room had the same pervading smell of damp that plagued the whole house. The curtains were drawn and faded by the sun. Filthy cobwebs clung to them, festooning every corner. Beneath the damp were other smells, stale sweat and the hanging miasma of barely-cooked fish from the kitchen below. All that was forgotten though, as the wizened old boy dragged a case out from under the bed and flipped it open. Even in the light of that fly-speckled bulb it glittered. The reflected sparkle from the case lit the old man’s face up with a buttery glow. “We finds things time to time as well. A little retirement fund.” He winked.

It was amazing, a trove of gold coins of all different sorts, golden torcs, clasps, brooches. I was no expert, but it all looked crude, old, ancient even.

“Afore the Romans, an’ perhaps a little after, too,” he offered. I picked up a torc, a kind of golden collar. “A professor came some time back an’ told us all ’is theories.” He laughed, a sort of snorting cough. “Don’t know much about it all mesself, but ’e left some books if you want to read about it.”

“I’d like that.” My voice sounded strange to me, almost reverential. To be holding something so old, so priceless. I set it back down, carefully, in the case. The old man rummaged around some more, dragging out another battered suitcase, turfing out old clothes and heaving out a couple of books.

“Villagers used to find this stuff all the time. There were a little museum of the stuff in the church. Professor said they were offerin’s or somesuch. I weren’t payin’ too much attention. But ’ere you go.” He laid the thick, hard-backed books in my hands. “Best read them, if’n you want to know more. I s’pose you’re stayin’ another night?”

I nodded, and he seemed pleased with that. He ushered me back to my room as he hobbled down the stairs to give the good news to his wife. I sat and cracked open the book, straining to see in the dim light of my room and poring over the absent professor’s materials.

♦

The books were old, musty, going back to the ’20s and the ’30s. They spoke of archaeological finds I had never heard of in a style of English as dusty as the books themselves. The print was small and hard to read in the room’s half-light. The content was likewise dry and academic and beyond my understanding. Even so, I strove to learn what I could, while it did its best to send me to sleep.

The little I could take in seemed fascinating. The ancient Celts had a tradition, it seemed, of offering riches to their gods in bogs, rivers, lakes and pits. Exactly the sorts of things the old man had in his case, even if there were no weapons, no armor, no shields in his trove.

Here though, these goods had to be offerings to the sea, and I saw little in these books about such a thing. Would such offerings ever be found, given the tides and storms? And what about the sheer size of the sea? If the water were an entrance to the underworld, as the books suggested some Celts had believed, what greater doorway could there be than the sea? This must have been why the professor had come here. He was seeking to understand why so much should be found here in this lost town, of all places.

I read all afternoon, and into the evening. It grew dark, and my eyes watered with the strain. I was clutching at straws, but something inside me felt that the answers to my family and town’s pasts were here in these books. If I could just find them. When I next looked at my watch, the hands read after midnight. I stared at it. Had I left the room and eaten again? I couldn’t remember. My eyes were gritty with reading, but still I couldn’t put the books down.

Then, some few minutes later, there came a soft knock upon my door.

I wiped my watering eyes and set the book down a moment, then opened the door.

The daughter – I assumed – stood there, wide green eyes looking up at me. Her feet were bare and she rocked on her heels, an unsettlingly false smile on her lips. “May I come in, sir?”

Sir?
The demure politeness seemed to go beyond her dress to something else and, unbidden, the thought came to me that her parents must be cruel to keep her so beaten down and silent. Even those words were barely a whisper. I nodded to her and turned back into the room.

“What did you want?”

She gave no voice to anything, but the door clicked shut and there was a flutter of fabric. My back stiffened as I turned, and I bit my lip as I looked at her.

The old-fashioned dress was in a pile at her feet, and her loose-limbed, slender body was naked in the dim light. She was more shadow than flesh, and what could be seen was pale and lovely.

“I don’t think...” I began, but she stopped me in a moment. She stepped up to me, soft and lean and small against me. She was urgent and shameless, her mouth at my lips, silencing me as she pushed me back with surprising strength onto the creaking little bed.

I didn’t even try to protest, even though I knew it was a bad idea. It had been a while since the willing girls of London town, and even the cynical fashionistas of Soho hadn’t been as forward, as demanding as this girl. She held me down, squirmed on top of me and stripped me bare, tearing buttons and scratching flesh with rough nails in her eagerness.

“Everything.” She followed the single word with a sibilant hiss in the dark. The light caught her eyes, flaring them red, like an animal in headlights. Her sharp nails and long fingers twisted my watch from my wrist, and then it was just us. Skin and hair, nails and teeth, and nothing more.

She was cool but wet, demanding and fierce, sharp little teeth biting into my shoulder as she writhed on me. There was nothing I could do, nothing I wanted to do. She took what she wanted with a fierce and consuming need. I didn’t even know her name. When she quivered against me, stifling the slight gasp she allowed herself, she took me over the edge so powerfully, so suddenly, that the borders of my vision dimmed.

By the time my senses came back to me, she was slipping away again. She left me spent, exposed, the cold of the room freezing my damp flesh as sweat evaporated. A flash of milky leg, hip, breast. The whip of red hair tumbled from its pins. A brief flare of her dress, clutched in one hand. Then she was gone again, leaving me confused and thirsty, shivering as the wound from her teeth began to throb.

♦

I couldn’t sleep. The girl – I could hardly believe that I still didn’t know any of their names
‒
had unsettled me. Her scent lingered in the cramped bedroom, fighting with the smell of damp and my own sweat to dominate the room. It was cold now though, and I huddled deep under the covers. Not that it seemed to help. Every time I closed my eyes, I had the unsettling feeling that she was back in the room, standing over me. It kept jerking me back awake, heart pounding. She had bitten me, hard enough to draw blood, and it still ached, even though the bleeding had stopped.

It was no good. I was too restless, strangely impatient. My head was swimming with unstructured thoughts, fears, wonderings. The professor’s books sat beside the bed, nearly incomprehensible, but the little that I’d deciphered had instilled in me the same curiosity that must have brought the professor here.

I steeled myself, and swung off the bed into the cold night air, hurriedly pulling on my clothes. As quietly as possible, I crept out onto the landing. The boards creaked, every step sounding like the thundering tramp of a giant. I stopped, briefly, in the filthy little bathroom to soap the smell of sex from my body. Somehow that made me feel better, more human, more settled. I was up now though, awake, and I needed some air.

The door of the house creaked in its warped frame as I tiptoed out. I closed it with exaggerated slowness, sucking my teeth with unease, hoping I hadn’t woken anyone. The girl seemed to be the only other one conscious, though. A shiver ran down my spine as I stepped from the porch light and looked up to see her watching me go, cat-like, nose pressed up against the clear glass.

I put her behind me, thrusting my hands deep into my pockets to keep them warm as I picked my way back to the cliffs. There was hardly any light tonight, no moon or stars, just the distant gleam from the porch and the faintest glow on the horizon to guide my way. My hand groped in the dark for the guy-rope, and found it. At the time, it seemed the only choice. I carefully inched my way down the treacherous path, bit by bit. The shadow of the cliff made the path and the beach virtually invisible.

A slip, a tumble, part of the path gave way and I fell, sliding down the slope. I had no way to tell how high up I still was, how far it was to the beach. I panicked, so scared by the dark that I couldn’t even voice a cry. I barely managed a strangled half-yelp as I tumbled into the void.

The ground drove the breath from my body, and left me spitting sand from between my teeth. I was winded, and the bite in my shoulder flared, but I couldn’t have fallen that far. It just hurt. Nothing was broken, dignity more bruised than flesh, but still I just lay there in the damp, yielding sand for a little while, getting my breath back.

After a time, the cool dampness of the sand stirred memories from the bedroom, and that made me shudder. I sat bolt upright and struggled to my feet, brushing the sand from me with desperate pushes of my hands.

Then I saw it.

The sea was radiating light, a faint green phosphorescence that glowed brighter with every wash of the waves, then faded as they stilled. Eyes wide, I stumbled forward. Through the frothed surface of the glowing water, I imagined I could see the faintest shadows of the lost town beneath. Was it my imagination, or was I really seeing it? The squarish outlines of houses, streets, a dark shadow where the body of the church had to reach up to its still-standing spire. It was impossible to tell if it was real or a trick of the light, but it took me to the very edge of the sea.

Water lapped at the toes of my shoes as I stared into the glow. My eyes adjusted slowly to the dark. Shapes moved in the sunken town, unless they were just shadows cast by the waves. I could see where the beach sloped forward and then dropped off suddenly, down to those hidden shapes so much further below.

There was a glitter in the sand where the water slopped back again. I reached down, plucking another coin from the sand and brushing it with my thumb. Gold again. Then I saw another, further out. I peeled away shoes and socks and stepped into the chilly brine, plunging my hand down into it to pull the coin from the sullen sand.

Something different caught my eye then. A shining red, further out in the water, that seemed to twinkle like a distant star. It drew me. Distorted by the sea, it always seemed out of reach, but I waded forward until the water slopped around my hips, glowing about me with every step.

I reached out, over the precipice, towards the crimson mote. I was imagining a ruby or a garnet, perhaps set in some ancient Celtic gold. It grew big in my vision with appalling suddenness, and the water swelled. A wave swept me from my feet and something... something boneless and long-fingered, something rubbery and cold as ice, something taloned and clammy and glutinous grasped my leg and dragged me into the dark.

I don’t remember much else. Blackness. Panic. A great red eye, and teeth like broken glass.

I don’t remember how I got away.

The next thing I knew I was sitting in my car on the road back to London. A policeman was tapping the window, and asking me if I was all right. I was drenched with salt water. The car was soaked in it. Green weed still clung to my body, and my shoes and socks were nowhere to be found. I couldn’t speak to him. Couldn’t describe what I’d seen. There were ambulances, concerned people, people from the embassy, and then I was taken home. Numb with shock, and as helpless as a baby.