DOWN TO THE BOOTS

The fen stank of fish. The moonlit puddles stretched as far as her eyes could see, as she shuffled ponderously from her shanty house at the sodden side of the sea-strained lands. For years, the waves had not returned to within sight of her leaning roofs and staircase chimney-stacks, as if they had been mopped up by the pernickety underGod who had more common ground with a housewife washing the public pavements outside her suburban semi than with Madge ... she just stopped and stared, balding broom in her hand, surrendering her heart as well as her hearth to the sluggish entropy of Earth’s curds and separates…

Madge leaned on the broom handle, just listening to the distant irregular pulse of the sea. The lighthouse, one luminous speck far out amid the other floaters in her eyes, tried in vain to keep rhythm with the natural bloodbeat of the Earth... it failed mainly because the beacon’s stokers had gone home for their breakfast in far-off Innsmouth Town.

Furthermore, she could just discern the pitiful drone of tuneless foghorns, as if even further out on the plane of her memories there lurked the blackened hulks of her various husbands’ fishing steamers, long exhausted of fuel as well as catch. The fishes’ flapping tails had in fact ceased their futile puddle-stirrings, ever since the seas withdrew in much panic during the Great Storm of ‘87: none of the fish had managed to stay the dreadful surge and were merely beached around Madge’s shanty, like so many suffocating slimy insects, with salt gill tears.

Tonight, the moon was full: it revealed the herring-bones’ clicking as nothing but the fitful wind amid their teetering attempts to become one giant skeleton memorial of the One Fish Soul. Madge could not fathom the foghorns’ relentlessness. They made no sense, except, perhaps, the fog drifting with the moving air across the sea proper, was probably due to arrive here any minute, allowing the wind then to blow off to other more seasonable commitments inland.

Her husbands were all dead, except hopefully the latest one. And he had trudged off through the puddles even earlier that night. So early, he’d not even bothered to go to bed. He did not want to miss the tide, as so many of his predecessors had done before finally catching it late in their lives ... and the tide’s beginnings were at the end of beach upon beach of hardening ribbed mud. His boots, on first leaving the shanty, had made loud sucking noises, the deep treads reaching even beyond Madge’s drowsing ears, into a dream where she could not find the ability to follow. Life’s pull was stronger. Waking was the magnetic north, draining her blood in sporadic spurts towards the poles of her death.

None of them come back. It was tantamount to a ritual, a delayed menstrual sacrifice, which seemed as pointless as it were self-destructive. Fishing, though, was in her husbands’ essence, more in the nature of hooking mouthless cancers from the swamp in the belly than God’s critters from the draining creeks of the sea lands.

As she stood at the shanty door, she managed to imagine the propeller-choked steamers upon the craters of churning brine that could still bear their floating hulks: the fly-rods spinning webs from deckrail to deckrail into a vast tangled cat’s cradle game she and her sister often fell out over in the olden days: the trailing nets flapping in their wake like so much living weed: the monsters deep down at the bottom of the involuted chimney-cores of dead volcanos, their serrated backfins carving as far up as possible, in foolhardy attempts to return to the universe, to that huge space above the sky where they’d been created out of nothing but the mind-power of the master creature who stood above even God in the hierarchy of dreams ...

Yes, they were nothing but dreams, Madge insisted. She stomped her foot, but lost it in the process beneath the mulch.

Then she saw them: her husband’s thigh boots stood out from the fen like the blackened stumps of Earth’s teeth, ill-pulled by a dentist God, Himself with a grin of decaying vampire fangs, each of these two death prongs liable to hurt Him more than his victim ...

She shook herself. Dreaming again. They could not be his boots. But, if not, what were they?

That previous night, they’d spoken, perhaps for the last time.

“Don’t forget to take your lunchbox, Owen ... and your leggings are hanging up by the latchdoor”.

“I don’t want the leggings. The boots are quite enough - reaching to the crutch as they do”.

“But your most li-able parts will then be open to the soakings…”

“Did I ever tell you of my father? He said don’t be caught dead in your leggings, son, for people’ll think you were a nancy-boy...”

“What rubbish!” She bit her tongue.

“No, there’s something to that. There’s not enough time to be a belt-and-braces man. Life’s too thin for moithering…”

Unaccountably, tears had filled his eyes. But then she put it down to remembering his dad. Perhaps he’d left his own wife, in similar circumstances, to go fishing. There seemed no point in such an occupation, when the fishers themselves never came back ... nor the fish with them. Only the stale bread would ever have to suffice, with no bony slimy innards to make two slices palatable enough.

She’d kissed him on the salt-stained lips for the first time, before retiring for the night, knowing he would sit up until it was time to go. How could anyone sit and do nothing? Her own thoughts were not sufficient to keep her going, without her hands doing something, like tatting, fishbone knitting, or baking stale bread: like making a start on the growing housework: but even such chores which seemed to multiply even as she slaved over them, could not staunch the fevering of her brain: she needed more: there was no rest inside her: she’d rather be dead than idle.

The dawn was slowly slipping up the side of the sky like a creamy yellow sea with clouds for waves. The moon had nowhere to hide, the land being flattened to the end of sight. Only the two tall boots stood up like sentries, betokening Owen’d become a ghost even before he’d left the catchment area of the shanty and before he got to the edge of the so-called sea: where his craft would still be bobbing at anchor, or beached upon the frozen ripples of the mud …

His leatherskin jacket-top smacks were lying beside the boots like a dead monster’s hide, its inner body gutted like a fish and gambolling off somewhere to fright another new widow with its kinship to a giant insect.

She whispered to her widowmaker’s ghost, in case it could hear: “I told you to take your leggings”. But that did not seem to make much sense: so she took the stubbled broom and proceeded to sweep up the endless puddles, as best she could in the circumstances.

Published 'Dagon' 1989
And various book versions of 'Shadows Over Innsmouth' edited by Stephen Jones