Smoke and Mirrors (18 page)

S HOGGOTH ’ S O LD P ECULIAR

B
enjamin Lassiter was coming to the unavoidable conclusion that the woman who had written
A Walking Tour of the British Coastline,
the book he was carrying in his backpack, had never been on a walking tour of any kind, and would probably not recognize the British coastline if it were to dance through her bedroom at the head of a marching band, singing “I’m the British Coastline” in a loud and cheerful voice while accompanying itself on the kazoo.

He had been following her advice for five days now and had little to show for it, except blisters and a backache.
All British seaside resorts contain a number of bed-and-breakfast establishments, who will be only too delighted to put you up in the “off-season.”
was one such piece of advice. Ben had crossed it out and written in the margin beside it:
All British seaside resorts contain a handful of bed-and-breakfast establishments, the owners of which take off to Spain or Provence or somewhere on the last day of September, locking the doors behind them as they go.

He had added a number of other marginal notes, too. Such as
Do not repeat not under any circumstances order fried eggs again in any roadside cafe
and
What is it with the fish-and-chips thing?
and
No they are not.
That last was written beside a paragraph which claimed that, if there was one thing that the inhabitants of scenic villages on the British coastline were pleased to see, it was a young American tourist on a walking tour.

For five hellish days, Ben had walked from village to village, had drunk sweet tea and instant coffee in cafeterias and cafes and stared out at gray rocky vistas and at the slate-colored sea, shivered under his two thick sweaters, got wet, and failed to see any of the sights that were promised.

Sitting in the bus shelter in which he had unrolled his sleeping bag one night, he had begun to translate key descriptive words:
charming
he decided, meant
nondescript; scenic
meant
ugly but with a nice view if the rain ever lets up; delightful
probably meant
We’ve never been here and don’t know anyone who has.
He had also come to the conclusion that the more exotic the name of the village, the duller the village.

Thus it was that Ben Lassiter came, on the fifth day, somewhere north of Bootle, to the village of Innsmouth, which was rated neither
charming, scenic,
nor
delightful
in his guidebook. There were no descriptions of the rusting pier, nor the mounds of rotting lobster pots upon the pebbly beach.

On the seafront were three bed-and-breakfasts next to each other: Sea View, Mon Repose, and Shub Niggurath, each with a neon
VACANCIES
sign turned off in the window of the front parlor, each with a
CLOSED FOR THE SEASON
notice thumbtacked to the front door.

There were no cafes open on the seafront. The lone fish-and-chip shop had a
CLOSED
sign up. Ben waited outside for it to open as the gray afternoon light faded into dusk. Finally a small, slightly frog-faced woman came down the road, and she unlocked the door of the shop. Ben asked her when they would be open for business, and she looked at him, puzzled, and said, “It’s Monday, dear. We’re never open on Monday.” Then she went into the fish-and-chip shop and locked the door behind her, leaving Ben cold and hungry on her doorstep.

Ben had been raised in a dry town in northern Texas: the only water was in backyard swimming pools, and the only way to travel was in an air-conditioned pickup truck. So the idea of walking, by the sea, in a country where they spoke English of a sort, had appealed to him. Ben’s hometown was double dry: it prided itself on having banned alcohol thirty years before the rest of America leapt onto the Prohibition bandwagon, and on never having got off again; thus all Ben knew of pubs was that they were sinful places, like bars, only with cuter names. The author of
A Walking Tour of the British Coastline
had, however, suggested that pubs were good places to go to find local color and local information, that one should always “stand one’s round,” and that some of them sold food.

The Innsmouth pub was called
The Book of Dead Names
and the sign over the door informed Ben that the proprietor was one
A. Al-Hazred
, licensed to sell wines and spirits. Ben wondered if this meant that they would serve Indian food, which he had eaten on his arrival in Bootle and rather enjoyed. He paused at the signs directing him to the
Public Bar
or the
Saloon Bar,
wondering if British Public Bars were private like their Public Schools, and eventually, because it sounded more like something you would find in a Western, going into the Saloon Bar.

The Saloon Bar was almost empty. It smelled like last week’s spilled beer and the day-before-yesterday’s cigarette smoke. Behind the bar was a plump woman with bottle-blonde hair. Sitting in one corner were a couple of gentlemen wearing long gray raincoats and scarves. They were playing dominoes and sipping dark brown foam-topped beerish drinks from dimpled glass tankards.

Ben walked over to the bar. “Do you sell food here?”

The barmaid scratched the side of her nose for a moment, then admitted, grudgingly, that she could probably do him a ploughman’s.

Ben had no idea what this meant and found himself, for the hundredth time, wishing that
A Walking Tour of the British Coastline
had an American-English phrase book in the back. “Is that food?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Okay. I’ll have one of those ”

“And to drink?”

“Coke, please.”

“We haven’t got any Coke.”

“Pepsi, then.”

“No Pepsi.”

“Well, what do you have? Sprite? 7UP? Gatorade?”

She looked blanker than previously. Then she said, “I think there’s a bottle or two of cherryade in the back.”

“That’ll be fine.”

“It’ll be five pounds and twenty pence, and I’ll bring you over your ploughman’s when it’s ready.”

Ben decided as he sat at a small and slightly sticky wooden table, drinking something fizzy that both looked and tasted a bright chemical red, that a ploughman’s was probably a steak of some kind. He reached this conclusion, colored, he knew, by wishful thinking, from imagining rustic, possibly even bucolic, ploughmen leading their plump oxen through fresh-ploughed fields at sunset and because he could, by then, with equanimity and only a little help from others, have eaten an entire ox.

“Here you go. Ploughman’s,” said the barmaid, putting a plate down in front of him.

That a ploughman’s turned out to be a rectangular slab of sharp-tasting cheese, a lettuce leaf, an undersized tomato with a thumbprint in it, a mound of something wet and brown that tasted like sour jam, and a small, hard, stale roll, came as a sad disappointment to Ben, who had already decided that the British treated food as some kind of punishment. He chewed the cheese and the lettuce leaf, and cursed every ploughman in England for choosing to dine upon such swill.

The gentlemen in gray raincoats, who had been sitting in the corner, finished their game of dominoes, picked up their drinks, and came and sat beside Ben. “What you drinkin’?” one of them asked, curiously.

“It’s called cherryade,” he told them. “It tastes like something from a chemical factory.”

“Interesting you should say that,” said the shorter of the two. “Interesting you should say that. Because I had a friend worked in a chemical factory and he
never drank cherryade.
” He paused dramatically and then took a sip of his brown drink. Ben waited for him to go on, but that appeared to be that; the conversation had stopped.

In an effort to appear polite, Ben asked, in his turn, “So, what are
you
guys drinking?”

The taller of the two strangers, who had been looking lugubrious, brightened up. “Why, that’s exceedingly kind of you. Pint of Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar for me, please.”

“And for me, too,” said his friend. “I could murder a Shoggoth’s. ’Ere, I bet that would make a good advertising slogan. ‘I could murder a Shoggoth’s.’ I should write to them and suggest it. I bet they’d be very glad of me suggestin’ it.”

Ben went over to the barmaid, planning to ask her for two pints of Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar and a glass of water for himself, only to find she had already poured three pints of the dark beer.
Well,
he thought,
might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb,
and he was certain it couldn’t be worse than the cherryade. He took a sip. The beer had the kind of flavor which, he suspected, advertisers would describe as
full-bodied,
although if pressed they would have to admit that the body in question had been that of a goat.

He paid the barmaid and maneuvered his way back to his new friends.

“So. What you doin’ in Innsmouth?” asked the taller of the two. “I suppose you’re one of our American cousins, come to see the most famous of English villages.”

“They named the one in America after this one, you know,” said the smaller one.

“Is there an Innsmouth in the States?” asked Ben.

“I should say so,” said the smaller man. “He wrote about it all the time. Him whose name we don’t mention.”

“I’m sorry?” said Ben.

The little man looked over his shoulder, then he hissed, very loudly, “H. P. Lovecraft!”

“I told you not to mention that name,” said his friend, and he took a sip of the dark brown beer. “H. P. Lovecraft. H. P. bloody Lovecraft. H. bloody P. bloody Love bloody craft.” He stopped to take a breath. “What did
he
know. Eh? I mean, what did he bloody know?”

Ben sipped his beer. The name was vaguely familiar; he remembered it from rummaging through the pile of old-style vinyl LPs in the back of his father’s garage. “Weren’t they a rock group?”

“Wasn’t talkin’ about any rock group. I mean the writer.”

Ben shrugged. “I’ve never heard of him,” he admitted. “I really mostly only read Westerns. And technical manuals.”

The little man nudged his neighbor. “Here. Wilf. You hear that? He’s never heard of him.”