The bar was indeed warm. I stamped the snow off my boots and went inside. It was almost empty and smelled of old ashtrays and stale beer. A couple of elderly men were playing chess by the bar. The barman was reading a battered old gilt-and-green-leather edition of the poetical works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
"Hey. How about a Jack Daniel's, straight up?"
"Sure thing. You're new in town," he told me, putting his book face down on the bar, pouring the drink into a glass.
"Does it show?"
He smiled, passed me the Jack Daniel's. The glass was filthy, with a greasy thumbprint on the side, and I shrugged and knocked back the drink anyway. I could barely taste it.
"Hair of the dog?" he said.
"In a manner of speaking."
"There is a belief," said the barman, whose fox-red hair was tightly greased back, "that the lykanthropoi can be returned to their natural forms by thanking them, while they're in wolf form, or by calling them by their given names."
"Yeah? Well, thanks."
He poured another shot for me, unasked. He looked a little like Peter Lorre, but then, most of the folk in Innsmouth look a little like Peter Lorre, including my landlady.
I sank the Jack Daniel's, this time felt it burning down into my stomach, the way it should.
"It's what they say. I never said I believed it."
"What do you believe?"
"Burn the girdle."
"Pardon?"
"The lykanthropoi have girdles of human skin, given to them at their first transformation by their masters in Hell. Burn the girdle."
One of the old chess players turned to me then, his eyes huge and blind and protruding. "If you drink rainwater out of warg-wolf's pawprint, that'll make a wolf of you, when the moon is full," he said. "The only cure is to hunt down the wolf that made the print in the first place and cut off its head with a knife forged of virgin silver."
"Virgin, huh?" I smiled.
His chess partner, bald and wrinkled, shook his head and croaked a single sad sound. Then he moved his queen and croaked again.
There are people like him all over Innsmouth.
I paid for the drinks and left a dollar tip on the bar. The barman was reading his book once more and ignored it.
Outside the bar big wet kissy flakes of snow had begun to fall, settling in my hair and eyelashes. I hate snow. I hate New England. I hate Innsmouth: it's no place to be alone, but if there's a good place to be alone, I've not found it yet. Still, business has kept me on the move for more moons than I like to think about. Business, and other things.
I walked a couple of blocks down Marsh Street-like most of Innsmouth, an unattractive mixture of eighteenth-century American Gothic houses, late-nineteenth-century stunted brown-stones, and late-twentieth prefab grey-brick boxes-until I got to a boarded-up fried chicken joint, and I went up the stone steps next to the store and unlocked the rusting metal security door.
There was a liquor store across the street; a palmist was operating on the second floor.
Someone had scrawled graffiti in black marker on the metaclass="underline" JUST DIE, it said. Like it was easy.
The stairs were bare wood; the plaster was stained and peeling. My one-room office was at the top of the stairs.
I don't stay anywhere long enough to bother with my name in gilt on glass. It was handwritten in block letters on a piece of ripped cardboard that I'd thumbtacked to the door.
LAWRENCE TALBOT ADJUSTER
I unlocked the door to my office and went in.
I inspected my office, while adjectives like seedy and rancid and squalid wandered through my head, then gave up, outclassed. It was fairly unprepossessing-a desk, an office chair, an empty filing cabinet; a window; which gave you a terrific view of the liquor store and the empty palmist's. The smell of old cooking grease permeated from the store below. I wondered how long the fried chicken joint had been boarded up; I imagined a multitude of black cockroaches swarming over every surface in the darkness beneath me.
"That's the shape of the world that you're thinking of there," said a deep dark voice, deep enough that I felt it in the pit of my stomach.
There was an old armchair in one corner of the office. The remains of a pattern showed through the patina of age and grease the years had given it. It was the colour of dust.
The fat man sitting in the armchair, his eyes still tightly closed, continued: "We look about in puzzlement at our world, with a sense of unease and disquiet. We think of ourselves as scholars in arcane liturgies, single men trapped in worlds beyond our devising. The truth is far simpler: there are things in the darkness beneath us that wish us harm."
His head was lolled back on the armchair, and the tip of his tongue poked out of the corner of his mouth.
"You read my mind?"
The man in the armchair took a slow deep breath that rattled in the back of his throat. He really was immensely fat, with stubby fingers like discoloured sausages. He wore a thick old coat, once black, now an indeterminate grey. The snow on his boots had not entirely melted.
"Perhaps. The end of the world is a strange concept. The world is always ending, and the end is always being averted, by love or foolishness or just plain old dumb luck.
"Ah well. It's too late now: The Elder Gods have chosen their vessels. When the moon rises…"
A thin trickle of drool came from one corner of his mouth, oozed down in a thread of silver to his collar. Something scuttled from his collar into the shadows of his coat.
"Yeah? What happens when the moon rises?"
The man in the armchair stirred, opened two little eyes, red and swollen, and blinked them in waking.
"I dreamed I had many mouths," he said, his new voice oddly small and breathy for such a huge man. "I dreamed every mouth was opening and closing independently. Some mouths were talking, some whispering, some eating, some waiting in silence."
He looked around, wiped the spittle from the corner of his mouth, sat back in the chair, blinking puzzledly. "Who are you?"
"I'm the guy who rents this office," I told him.
He belched suddenly, loudly. "I'm sorry," he said in his breathy voice, and lifted himself heavily from the armchair. He was shorter than I was, when he was standing. He looked me up and down blearily. "Silver bullets," he pronounced after a short pause. "Old-fashioned remedy."
"Yeah," I told him. "That's so obvious-must be why I didn't think of it. Gee, I could just kick myself. I really could."
"You're making fun of an old man," he told me.
"Not really. I'm sorry. Now, out of here. Some of us have work to do."
He shambled out. I sat down in the swivel chair at the desk by the window and discovered, after some minutes, through trial and error, that if I swivelled the chair to the left, it fell off its base.
So I sat still and waited for the dusty black telephone on my desk to ring while the light slowly leaked away from the winter sky.
Ring.
A man's voice: Had I thought about aluminum siding? I put down the phone.
There was no heating in the office. I wondered how long the fat man had been asleep in the armchair.
Twenty minutes later the phone rang again. A crying woman implored me to help her find her five-year-old daughter, missing since last night, stolen from her bed. The family dog had vanished, too.
I don't do missing children, I told her. I'm sorry: too many bad memories. I put down the telephone, feeling sick again.
It was getting dark now, and, for the first time since I had been in Innsmouth, the neon sign across the street flicked on. It told me that MADAME EZEKIEL performed TAROT READINGS AND PALMISTRY.