Welcome to the inaugural fiction issue of Innsmouth Free Press. This summer, our theme is “water”. Nick Mamatas brings us a hopeful re-imagining of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” in “And Then, And Then, And Then …”. Pamela K. Kinney takes us briefly back to land and describes a tentacled apocalypse at the grocery store in “Azathoth is Here”. Robert Borski shows us how to gentle a Mythos monster in “The Cthulhu Whisperer”. Caroline Totten tells …
I woke up. I ate a banana and a bagel. I turned on the TV and watched the news from Boston. It was going to be cloudy. Someone had a book out about carbohydrates. There was a lot of traffic. I felt good to be home, away from all the commuters and the highways. I almost never leave town. I ate another banana and then a peanut butter sandwich because I was still hungry. I stopped being …
My mother and father loved the sea, but its dark water terrified me. At night, I would huddle on the Innsmouth beach next to my mother while she held the lantern as a signal for my father. He would wade out into the cove, carrying the lobster cage, and then the strobe light attached to his head would sink into the water. He said lobsters came out at night to feed and that was the time to harvest. …
She fingers the voodoo doll and looks past me out the window. Ocean waves rise and fall in the listless light of evening. Autumn breezes taste of salt and anticipation. I don’t often have guests, but it’s not unheard-of for devoted fans to find my beach-front alcove far from any other house along the shore. They come to meet the reclusive author who writes weird and disturbing stories of other worlds so closely resembling our own.
“They’re …
The little boy had opalescent eyes and imbricated skin. He was human. He walked on two feet with ten toes, had two hands with ten fingers. Yet those feet and hands were webbed. And he almost smelled like seaweed. Like his mother.
His father worried about him. He didn’t like to take his son down to the beach. The few times they went, to go clamming or just to walk and pick up seashells, the boy …
