        

  They always served a bite to eat first—crumpets or small cakes or sandwiches with the crusts sliced off. This time the Purple Emperor found the tidbit extremely slight and unsatisfying. However, it was merely a brief spark on the palate, heralding the taste he craved. He steered his vast, all-encompassing consciousness away from the minor disappointment. He’d long anticipated the glory coming next.

  They’d found a new rose, one that promised to furnish a taste more gratifying than all others he’d tried. And he’d tried them all. They’d found this new one and waited for it to mature to the peak of potential perfection. They’d drawn it here from its universe and plucked its petals and prepared it in the most careful manner, mindful always of the Purple Emperor’s particular preferences.

  Excitement thrilled through him. He could hardly wait to experience this new taste, this new delight, the finest of all. Time meant little to one who continuously experienced every moment of existence simultaneously, yet the Purple Emperor chose to single out this moment to savor everlastingly.

  “BRING ME MY TEA,” the Purple Emperor commanded.

  A Child's Christmas in Innsmouth

  ( with apologies to Dylan Thomas and H. P. Lovecraft)

  ~ Kevin Wetmore

  During the winter of 1927-1928, officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in my hometown, the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. I am going to defy the ban on speaking of what happened that season, as it was, perhaps, the most magical Christmas I remember.

  One Yulemas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant chanting of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether six Deep Ones dragged off a victim under my bedroom window when I was twelve or whether twelve Deep Ones dragged off a victim under my bedroom window when I was six.

  All the Yulemases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong nightgaunt bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the sea and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wine-dark, yuggoth-cold water, and out comes a human hand, gnawed upon. Realizing I cannot regift it, I toss it back in the waves, an early present for some fish, perhaps.

  It was on the afternoon of Yulemas Eve of 1927, and I was in Mrs. Pickman's garden, waiting for cats, with her nephew Richard Upton, visiting from witch-haunted Arkham for the holidays. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas in Innsmouth. December, in my memory, is as white and gray as was my uncle’s skin before he finally returned to the sea. But there were cats. Richard and I often pretended to be ghouls. Patient, cold and callous, our arms wrapped in towels as if winding sheets, we waited to prey upon the fuzzy little corpses in the snow. The wise cats never appeared. We youthful ghouls would go hungry, then descend into snowball fights until Mrs. Pickman declared it was time to go in and that I should run off home.

  Just then her voice arose in a shriek. “Fire!” Mrs. Pickman cried.

  We ran from the garden towards Gilman House. It’s a hotel that’s often mostly empty. Smoke poured out of the dining room, smelling of burnt wood and seaweed. We charged towards the blaze.

  This was better than all the cats in Ulthar standing on the wall in a row. We bounded up to Gilman House, laden with snowballs, determined to use them to help put out the fire. Running past Mrs. Pickman, a siren on the sidewalk, wailing for all to ear of the imminent tragedy unfolding. We stopped at the open door of the smoke-filled room.

  Something was burning all right; perhaps it was Mr. Gilman, who always slept there after midday dinner with a newspaper over his face. But he was standing in the middle of the room, saying, “A fine Yulemas!” and smacking at the smoke with an oar he kept on hand for emergencies, though more likely a rowdy flatlander than a fire.

  “Call the fire brigade,” cried Mrs. Pickman from the sidewalk. “They won't be there,” said Mr. Gilman, “it's Yulemas.” There was no fire to be seen, only clouds of smoke and Mr. Gilman standing in the middle of them.

  “Do something,” he said. And we threw all our snowballs into the smoke - I think we missed Mr. Gilman - and ran out of the house to the telephone box in the square.

  We called the fire brigade, and soon the fire engine came and three squat men in helmets and raincoats brought a hose into the house sprayed salt water all throughout the room. “Nobody could have had a noisier Christmas Eve,” cried Mr. Gilman.

  The firemen turned off the hose and stood in the wet, smoky room staring at him. One mumbled in the local dialect, “Obed Marsh be a-sayin’ only dull sheep go a-prayin’ to the Christian heaven as it don’t help ‘em none.” He stared, unblinking at Mr. Gilman. “Didn’t see you at the solstice out by the reef.”

  Just then, Mr. Gilman’s sister, Richard’s aunt, came downstairs, peered into the dripping, smoky parlor, and asked, “Would you like anything to read?” She always said the right thing, always.

  Years and years ago, when I was a boy, we played in the caves down by the shore, the insistent sound of the incoming tide echoed throughout town—I do not ever remember hearing the sound of the tide going out. We would sing and swim and fish and live our lives to the susurrus of the incoming tide.

  I remember that year of the fire, before the government came in and destroyed the reef and we all moved across the country to another coast, it snowed and snowed and snowed. I excitedly told my uncle when he came to visit that it snowed the year before, too. I made a snowman and Emily Marsh knocked it down and then I knocked Emily Marsh down and then Mrs. Gilman, Richard’s aunt, served us tea and talked about how to properly behave and told us that the snow falling was not the same snow from years past, as in Innsmouth the snow does not just fall from the sky but joins with the damp on the ground and comes shawling out of the ground and swims and drifts out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a cold, silvery seaweed.

  In the nights before Yulemas, the bells in the steeple of the Esoteric Order of Dagon rang their tidings over the bandaged town, over the frozen sea foam of the powder and ice-cream hills, over the crackling sea. And if you looked out your window, because you could not sleep, you would see the strange men in peacoats or slickers, shuffling through the streets of Innsmouth, huffing and puffing, making ghosts with their breaths. Some would carry wrapped packages and you did not know if they were gifts for solstice or Christmas or maybe strange things from the South Seas. But you knew it was Yuletime, and it was wonderful to be a child in Innsmouth at Yuletime.

  It seemed that all the churches boomed for joy under my window as the end of the year grew closer. Under the tree of harpoons in the living room we would wake to find all kinds of presents. There were the useful presents: scarves to cover gills, mittens for fins, tam-o'-shanters for misshapen heads, balaclavas that stay on underwater, made from aunts who always wore wool next to their scales and wanted the children to stay warm. Then there were the useless presents: a Mother Hydra doll, hardboiled toffee and sardine crunch, bright tin sailors and toy boats, and easy games for little hybrids, complete with instructions that can be played on land or underwater, and once, by a mistake no one could explain, a ship’s axe.

  My nephew once asked me if the Yulemases of my childhood had a lot of uncles, like he experienced. There are always uncles at Christmas. The same uncles. The ones that would pass around a bottle and share stories of Obed Marsh, sitting by the decrepit chimney, eating peppermint-infused fish heads. As a boy I would fall asleep in my bed to the low murmur of the uncles, still downstairs telling tales of Father Dagon into the night.

  The one memory I have that brings no pleasure—some of those mornings an old man trod the piling streets, a fawn-bowlered, red-faced, bushy-bearded, watery-eyed old man in nondescript rags. A very aged but normal-looking man who lived at the poorhouse on the north rim of the town and spent his time walking about or lounging around the fire station. I was surprised he had not followed the firetruck to the Gilman House when it has its blaze on Yulemas eve. His name was Zadok Allen and I hated him on sight and sound. I remember hearing the uncles speak of him. He drank, but not like them, not good South Sea rum but something they called “rot gut.” And when he drank he would talk. He would say things, all sorts of things, even to flatlanders. If I remember it was around that Christmas that was the last we saw of Zadok. Not long after I heard the uncles tell my mother that he had, “Gone to be with Father Dagon.”

  I remember going out with bright new boots that Yulemas, running through that white world as the tide came in with my mates Jim and Dan and Jack, leaving huge footprints in the snow behind me.

  “I bet people will think Deep Ones ran through the town.”

  “What would you do it you saw a Deep One coming down the street?”

  “Deep Ones come down my street all the time!”

  “Your Uncle’s a Deep One!”

  “So what? So’s yours!”

  “Let’s write things in the snow.”

  “Let’s go to Mr. Olmstead’s house and write ‘Mr. Olmstead looks like a shoggoth’ on his lawn!”

  “Let’s push a snowball through his letter box!”

  We walked on the white shore and watched the fishes watch it snow. The silent one-clouded heavens drifted on to the sea and we wandered along the incoming tide until Dan’s uncle came out of the sea and encouraged us to go back home before the sky grew too dark, which always happened sooner when it snowed.

  We returned home through the poor streets when there wasn't the shaving of a moon to light the way, trudging uphill away from the waves lapping the snow-covered sand and rocks. Our Christmases would end in the cries of the dock birds and the hooting of ships in the whirling bay out by Devil’s Reef, and I was lucky that year as one of my uncles poured a bit of rum into my clam juice because, “it’s only once a year and you’re no longer a fry.”

  Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the concertina, another the fife, a third flipped over a bucket to drum upon the bottom. It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the kelp wine, sang a song about a sailor who married a fish; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. Beyond that, I heard the sound of the tide coming in. I blew out the oil lamp, I got into bed, I said some words to the close and holy darkness and to Mother Hydra and Father Dagon, and then I slept.

  Splinterbone

  ~ Megan Lee Beals

  The splinter in Beth’s palm comes out longer than it entered. The end she holds pinched between fingers is the gray wood of old boards. As it exits it thins from the size of a toothpick down until it is no finer than a hair, and it turns the milky white of living bone. It is longer than the depth of the palm she pulls it from, as long as her middle finger when it finally comes away, and when she holds it to the light, she finds that the end is translucent.

  Her husband, Greg, gags at the sight and looks away from her, but she barely notices. Greg hasn’t really looked at her in months, only at her distended belly. He touches it with his open hand and feels the taught skin as if she is nothing more than a membrane, a thin barrier between him and his child.

  “Are you worried?” he asks. There is spittle at the corner of his mouth. He rubs it away with a thumb. He still does not meet her eye.

  Of course she is worried. She is eight months pregnant and she has not spent a single waking minute without worry. They haven’t finished turning the spare room into a nursery. It is filled with half finished sewing, guitars in varying states of repair, and seasonal décor. There is no space to assemble the crib, nowhere to put the diaper pail. There is hardly even space for Beth herself, which is why she had sequestered herself in the room’s tiny closet and cried and cried until she spotted a little seam in the paint, where the height of the ceiling did not match that of the ceiling beyond the closet door.

  Beth did not know her house had an attic when she bought it. It was painted shut long ago, to seal away the attic mother. She did not know of the attic mother, either, because they are often shut away. An unspoken necessity for women like Beth. Women who are alone and afraid and unprepared. An attic mother is a blessing, and though she did not recognize the signs, Beth knows a blessing when she sees it.

  She cut through the seam with her box knife, pulled down the hidden stairs in a shower of dust, and found new space in her home. A place to store deferred dreams. A place to tuck away all the parts of herself that no longer fit inside her expanding body.

  There is always space in the attic.

  “Beth?” Greg had asked her something. What is he asking?

  She is still holding the splinter. There was an arrangement of splinters near the chimney when she crawled into the attic. They were in neat little rows like tally marks, or letters on a child’s practice book. Tidy and straight, bone-white and needle thin. She could almost read something in them. She wanted to read something in them. As she crept near on her hands and knees, her hand scraped against the rough edge of a board and a splinter lodged deep in her palm.

  She must have shrieked, because Greg came barreling up the stairs. He crashed into that hallowed place, flinging dust without a thought for its decades of careful accumulation. He directed her down from the attic, chastising small choices, you should have waited for me, what if there’s mold, you shouldn’t be climbing ladders in your state and now look, you’re bleeding, and suddenly Beth is in the bathroom and holding the splinter between her fingers. It was wood when it entered her palm. It is not wood anymore.

  “Are you worried?” he asks again, a sharpness in his voice and a wide animal fear in his eyes.

  “I’m fine,” says Beth. Why should she worry? All the doctors say the pregnancy is going well.

  Greg tells her to be more careful. It’s an old house. Who knows what’s hiding in the attic? He suggests she call the doctor and insists when she brushes it aside. What if whatever she picked up from that splinter hurts the baby?

  And so Beth calls the doctor. Greg always has such a level head about these things. And with the pregnancy hormones muddling her thoughts, the insomnia, the nausea, and the letters written in splinters that she could almost but not quite read, maybe there is mold in the attic. Perhaps it was an animal nest, as Greg suggests when he sweeps it aside and hauls their storage up to clear the nursery. But the bone-white splinters were lain so carefully. Like samples in a lab, or artifacts in a museum; a precious collection on display.

  Tests are run and returned and the doctor assures her that all looks well. Beth is congratulated on her caution and advised to forget the splinter and the animal nest and everything she stored in the attic. Stress isn’t good for the baby.

  She tries to forget, but she has opened her home to the attic mother. She wanted to accept the contract. It would be better for Beth if she would just accept the contract. But she’s scared, and she does not understand the attic mother for the blessing that she is, and so the attic mother resolves to wait for Beth to change her mind.

  It follows her through the deepest hours of night, into the small hours of morning. A dark shadow, tall enough to scrape the ceiling and whip-thin as the willow branches outside her bedroom window. It waits for her in the hallway, always at the nursery door.

  Beth tries not to see it. She tries not to leave the safety of the quilts on her bed. But the baby is always pressing on her bladder, and so she must brave the hall and waddle her way to the bathroom, past the great shadowy thing that whispers incessantly; sussurrow sussurrow.

  When Beth finds enough courage to look, the attic mother is gone.

  The baby comes. They name her Adrienne but call her Aidy. She is beautiful and perfect and she cries with a volume that banshees could only dream of. Beth feels as though her ears are breaking, but the internet assures her that it always feels that way. That she should delight in the cries, because the sound comes from healthy lungs. And her family tells her to wait until the girl is older and walking, because that’s when the trouble really starts. Enjoy these days when she’s young and perfect, you’ll never get them back; enjoy this time because the teen years are the hardest; enjoy every moment, every single moment. And so Beth ignores her breaking ears and the fine white sand that gathers in the wax. And when Greg’s voice sounds like he speaks from underwater she tries to listen harder because she hates to see him so frustrated but she cannot make out his words.

  Mornings are hardest, when a sound like sussurrow sussurrow sussurrow drones from the closet in the nursery. She avoids him then, because he speaks louder and louder, enough to wake Aidy from her tentative sleep. And with him shouting and the baby crying and sussurrow sussurrow she can’t remember how to speak. And later when Greg comes home sullen and tired and he sees that what he asked of her has gone unfinished or ignored, he sighs and finds some other place to be, leaving her alone with the baby and the shadowy attic mother.

  It is better to not see him in the mornings.

  The attic mother is always in the periphery now. Its terrible cracked fingernail hands stretch across the carpet whenever Beth feeds Aidy. She holds the girl close and pretends that the hands are anything else. An unfortunate shadow cast through trees, or an imperfection in the paint. She knows they are not, because branches do not vanish when looked at directly, nor do they loom behind her, bent crick-neck at the ceiling.