Echoes From the Abyss

November in Innsmouth never consults anyone.

The fog rolls in from the Atlantic, enveloping the entire town like a soaked gray blanket. At 5:40 a.m. on the fishing pier, old Harlan Baker stubbed out his cigarette on the gunwale. The white vapor he exhaled mingled with the sea fog, making it impossible to tell which was his own. His knuckles were thick, and the crevices of his fingernails held forty-seven years of fishy stench that could never be washed away.

The winch creaked.

The net rose from the black water, heavy beyond belief. Harlan squinted, his cloudy blue eyes fixed on the surface. He’d lived on these waters for sixty-nine years and had seen every damn thing—torpedo casings from World War II, a refrigerator from the ’80s, and a whole supermarket shopping cart hauled up the year before, rusted like an iron tree sprouting from the seabed.

But whatever was in the net wasn’t a fish.

A waterproof canvas bag was tangled in the net, encrusted with seaweed and barnacles, like a cocoon spun by some deep-sea creature. Seawater dripped from the folds of the canvas onto the deck; the color was off—not pure and clear, but tinged with a hint of brownish-yellow.

Harlan crouched down. His knees cracked like dry twigs snapping.

The fish knife sliced open a corner of the canvas. A smell burst out—not rot, but something else. Rust. Ink. Saltwater. And that scent of myrrh found in churches, clinging sweetly and cloyingly to the back of his nose. Harlan’s stomach lurched, and his Adam’s apple bobbed. He cut a larger opening in the canvas.

A man was curled up inside.

Naked. His limbs were arranged in a fetal position, knees pressed against his chest, hands clasped together in front of him, as if in prayer—the prayer of a dead man.

A symbol was carved into the center of his forehead—not with a knife, but with some blunt instrument, repeatedly chiseled until the skin and flesh were peeled back, exposing the whitish periosteum beneath. Three arcs encircled a dot.

His skin was smeared with a dark brown substance that had dried and cracked into a dense network of lines, like contour lines on an ancient map. Later, the coroner would identify it as a mixture of sheep’s blood and cuttlefish ink. The sheep’s blood provided a dark red base, while the cuttlefish ink produced a deep brown verging on black—

When mixed, the two liquids oxidized on the skin into a color resembling dried blood, yet darker and richer—like ink retrieved from the depths of the ocean.

His mouth was slightly agape, his lips secured with black thread—ordinary sewing thread, not surgical sutures. The corners of his mouth were pulled upward into a curve, not a smile, but a far older expression. Harlan shone his flashlight inside and saw a dark yellow object wedged between the base of the tongue and the roof of the mouth. Parchment.

He didn’t touch the paper. He was sixty-nine years old—old enough to know there were some things he shouldn’t touch. He also knew that once he touched certain things, they would stick to his hands forever.

Harlan stood up and pulled his cell phone from his pocket. His fingers hovered over the keys for a long time, not out of fear, but because he was trying to decide who to call. The police? The Coast Guard? Or the town priest?

In the end, he dialed three numbers. The police were the last.

Forty minutes later, the Insmouth Police Department’s patrol cars filled the pier.

Red and blue lights blurred in the fog, like the color seeping from a wound. Another two hours passed before the State Police’s black SUV arrived, its tires crunching over the broken shells on the pier with a fine, crackling sound.

Last to arrive was the FBI’s gray sedan, which pulled up silently outside the police tape; the sound of the door opening and closing was as soft as a sigh.

Denise Parker stepped out of the black SUV.

She was forty-one, divorced, and had no children. A member of the State Police Criminal Investigation Division with nineteen years of service. Some in the office called her “The Freezer” because she never smiled. In truth, it wasn’t that she didn’t smile—she had simply forgotten how. A smile was an expression that required practice, and she hadn’t had anyone to practice it with in a long time.

Her face was sharply defined, with high cheekbones and deep-set eyes; her brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail so tight it almost pulled the corners of her eyes upward.

She wore a dark gray suit and flat shoes, the soles of which made no sound as they touched the wet wooden planks of the pier. It was a habit—nineteen years of crime scene investigations had taught her one thing:

Before identifying the deceased, do not disturb anything, not even the air.

Chief McRae of the Innsmouth Police Department was waiting for her at the pier. He looked terrible—not the kind of terrible that comes from a sleepless night, but the kind where something is clenching his insides. The coffee cup in his hand was trembling.

“Brian Caldwell,” MacRae said, his jaw muscles tensing and relaxing as he spoke the name. “My deputy chief.”

Denise didn’t respond immediately. She crouched beside the body and stared at it for a long time.

Inside the crime scene perimeter, the forensic team was conducting a preliminary examination; camera flashes sliced every inch of the body’s skin into fragments before piecing it back together.

Denise’s gaze began at the ankles and moved upward, inch by inch. Restraint marks—on the wrists and ankles—were visible, though not deep. They weren’t caused by struggle; the victim had been bound after death, or while unconscious.

The symbol on the forehead—three arcs encircling a dot—was a variation of the Yellow Mark. She had seen something similar in the archives at Quantico. Fifteen years ago, in Louisiana, three college students had performed a pagan ritual in the swamps; one of them had been sacrificed by his companions, and the symbol on his forehead bore a seventy-percent resemblance to this one.

The parchment was carefully extracted by the coroner with tweezers and unfolded inside the evidence bag.

It was covered in a dense, bizarre script. Not English, not Spanish, not any alphabet system recognizable at a glance. The lines were twisted, like the trail of insects crawling across the paper, or perhaps a deliberate imitation of some ancient script. There was a certain pattern to the strokes; this wasn’t random scribbling—someone was trying to convey a message using this writing system.

It had the style of The Necronomicon. There was a similar case in the archives—in 1978, in Providence, a Brown University student filled an entire diary with his own invented “Arkhamite” script before jumping from the thirteenth floor. His suicide note, when translated, read: “I heard it. ”

Denise stood up. Her knees gave a faint creak, as unrelenting as the sea fog.

“The symbol on his forehead,” she began, her voice low, “was carved after death.”

The medical examiner looked up—a young woman in glasses named Chen, recently transferred from Boston. “Preliminary findings suggest so. There’s no active bleeding. If it had been carved while he was alive, the edges of the wound would have—”

“I know,” Denise interrupted. It wasn’t impatience; she simply didn’t need an explanation. What she needed was confirmation.

Something fell out of the bottom of the canvas bag and rolled to Denise’s feet.

A police badge. Brian Caldwell’s police badge. It was sent into an almost perfect circle.

Denise bent down to pick it up. She wasn’t wearing gloves, but she used the plastic lining of the evidence bag to cushion her fingers. There was a deep scratch on the metal surface of the badge, running through the center, like some kind of ritualistic act of destruction. The edges of the circle had been carefully smoothed so they wouldn’t cut her. Someone had spent a lot of time doing this.

She flipped the badge over. Engraved on the back was a line of small text—not machine-engraved, but hand-carved with a sharp tool. The letters were so small she had to lean in to read them—

The Seventh.

That afternoon, a single phrase appeared on The Boston Globe’s website: Cthulhu-style murder.

By evening, the phrase was trending nationwide.

Reporters swarmed into Innsmouth like sharks sensing blood.

CNN sent a crew; Fox News sent another. The two groups nearly came to blows outside the docks—not over the story, but over a vantage point to film the ocean.

The town already had a bad reputation—in the 1930s, the federal government had raided a local church, taking away dozens of residents; the files remain classified to this day.

It was no coincidence that Lovecraft named the port in his horror stories Innsmouth. The town’s history was like the water beneath the docks: so dark you couldn’t see the bottom, but you knew what lurked there.

Everyone believed Brian Caldwell had been sacrificed by some cult.

Denise didn’t think so.

That evening, she returned to her makeshift office—a conference room on the second floor of the Innsmouth Police Department, with windows overlooking the parking lot. She spread the crime scene photos across the entire table—the body from every angle, close-ups of the symbols, high-resolution scans of the parchment, and the bent police badge.

She studied them for a long time, then wrote a single line on a sticky note and pinned it to the edge of the desk:

The killer didn’t want the police to believe this was a ritual. The killer wanted us to believe it, and the killer wanted the police to believe it.

She stared at those words, then wrote another note:

The real question isn’t “Why did they stage it to look like a ritual?” The real question is—why did they want us to see that it was staged?

After writing that, she didn’t write a third. Because she knew that once she started asking the third question, she would ask the fourth, the fifth, until she asked the one question she couldn’t ask.

And that question was lying in a white house in North Innsmouth right now, waiting for her.