FOREWORD: Dear Ruthanna Emrys, please don't punch me for writing this. Your books inspired me to make smut. It's your fault.
The delivery address on the tablet clearly showed: "Innsmouth, Massachusetts."
"What the hell is this?"
Curtis checked his delivery address, and re-checked the tablet's messaging app, wondering if it was some prank deployed by a rival company. Or some college horror fan "nerd" trying to look cool. Curtis wasn't a "nerd" in the broad sense of the description but was astute about America's weirdest horror author, Howard Philips Lovecraft, and his antics regarding New England geography, cosmic mythology, and the unsavory connotations about aquatic species, racism, horror, sex, and mollusks.
Especially sexuality.
And mollusks.
And sexuality.
And more mollusks.
After all, it was 2011. The Age of the Internet made Cthulhu a plushy octopus giving television shows.
Curtis thought Innsmouth was a myth, an urban legend. It wasn't on Google Maps. It wasn't on any phone registry--no social services or infrastructure.
He was certain that this was a prank. After fifteen minutes of talking with the warehouse manager, he stood corrected, puzzled.
Now suddenly the town of Innsmouth was on the Internet, and for some reason, nerds didn't flock in millions. There was still a craze going on, yet Innsmouth stayed a quiet, cozy backwater with few spots for tourism due to the weather. It was probably because the Internet made entertainment and Lovecraftian "nerdom" an instance of common weirdness rather than a shocking horror that would be in the spotlight of history.
And he had to deliver boxes laden with rattling trinkets, all laden in the back of his tiny van waiting in the DELIVER-U warehouse, a small-time American company that, despite foreign pressure, simply did not accept being bought out. Strangely enough, one of Curtis' colleagues, the old geezer Castro who occasionally drove DELIVER-U vans to upstate New York snapped at him when he saw the tablet's address.
"Lord in heaven, the fuck are you headed to?" He wheezed before lighting his cigar and rambled about "those races", "faggots" and "them sexual degenerates and trannies" before telling him that he should get the hell out of town after dropping off the delivery.
"I know about that Innsmouth, son..." He drawled in an accent that mildly sounded like a xenophobic Southern rant despite himself being relatively brown. "Them folks thar, the fishy nig-"
"Castro put that away!" Curtis hissed, noticing the metallic flask he seemed to be nursing. "You wanna get written up?"
The mildly Hispanic-looking man merely stashed it inside his ass pocket before starting to ramble again:
"That writer back in the '20s, you kids like to talk about him, eh? He knew it. Them in the seas..." Curtis sneered at these words and just pressed his finger on the tablet's delivery icon before starting to head to the van with the boxes.
The old man with ambiguous ethnicity didn't give up.
"Get the hell out of there before them trannies, faggots, and fishy nig-"
"Whatever." Curtis sighed, ignoring the racist remark, starting the van and slowly driving towards the highway. His delivery was a short drive in a quiet, cozy trip through New England's roads under the silvery, cloud-filled sky smelling like freshly-cut grass and ozone. He blissfully overlooked the fact that there wasn't any cut grass around, nor were there any thunderstorms approaching.
Yet.
The van rumbled forward under its load, the engine groaning toward its destination, its cargo safely packed.
The roads looked almost lonely, with the soft drizzle of unexpected autumn rain and its constant pitter-patter on the van's roof keeping him company. At the end of a detour that Curtis could have sworn did not exist a month ago, he passed through a small, dark forested opening with massive trees and a swampy lowland that took nearly half an hour to drive through.
The GPS showed that the road was clear enough and nothing was out of the ordinary; Curtis had seen enough horror movies and had the mindset about realizing when something was wrong. So he decided to think that the road was simply unusually well hidden until now.
After another twenty minutes of driving, he finally descended into a bay that looked almost hidden from any view, surrounded by cliffs.
It was a cozy, isolated town, half of it built on the seaside, a strangely well-built medley of brick houses, old 19th-century cottages, and modern concrete buildings no taller than two stories, complete with a boardwalk from the early 20s.
The radio he rarely kept running during his quiet deliveries chirped, displaying that he was approaching his target in two minutes.
The town had an open arch for a gate, much like an old-fashioned frontier town, strangely shaped from yellow metal bars smelted and shaped like fern stalks.
"Innsmouth, drive carefuly"
Curtis had a single, quiet shrug of laughter. There even was a typo.
Unlike its literary description, it was not a dreary, fog-choked hellhole of fish-like humanoid rednecks.
It was a cozy, quiet commune of strange cultural artifacts, patterns, and architectures, an amalgam between an Afro-Caribbean coastal village, a Wiccan commune, a Puritan New England town, and a New Age beatnik squatter town.
All together.
Curtis raised his brows as he saw a few stalls and vendors.
Voodoo witches of Afro-Caribbean heritage and appearance hawked their goods to what few tourists visited via bus, extremely pale-skinned girls with big, wide eyes and slightly off-proportion facial features read palms and fortunes via cards, while a scruffy-looking, red-haired, freckled young girl with a sleepy expression and oversized farmer's overalls sold what seemed to be marijuana from a large tray, scratching her hair while looking half asleep, her cute bare feet resting on a smaller stool.
Curtis blinked: her eyes were shining yellow like gold, unnaturally so.
The largest building he drove past had a sign named: "MARSH GOLD REFINERY". From what Curtis could see as he drove by, Blue-collar workers of strange ethnicities Curtis couldn't name, drove forklifts and carts with electric motors, carrying shiny yellow metals just like the stories he read.
"Gold?" He mumbled to himself as he turned the van to the left, to his target. The refinery was not like the one he knew in a long-forgotten video game he played long ago nor in the book. It was a small smelter, no larger than a humble four-story apartment block with electrical buzzing coming from its depths; a squat, two-story factory with comically long chimneys.
The workers looked similar to the description in Lovecraft's stories: with strangely misshapen faces, dour and isolated in their expressions.
Some glared at Curtis' van passing by in a slow cruise. He did not notice them.
He was too shocked to think such stories could be real.
Eventually, he found the delivery address, a three-story Victorian-Era construction that looked like a small manor, yet had colorful signs showing it was a "Curiosity Shoppe", a bar, a diner, and a hotel at the same time, situated close to the beach and away from the gold refinery. The building had outdoor vendor stalls, with many strange, colored aquatic curiosities made from seashells and shiny stones visible across the street under the sunlight, and its many rooms reserved for guests had thick curtains. The building itself, mere minutes away from the streets of the newly-rejuvenating industry struck a haunting contrast, built in front of a cool seaside beach with silvery sand and the occasional gleaming starfish.
"Ye Olde Innsmouth Inn," the sign said.
Parking the van next to it, Curtis opened the back of the vehicle and piled the boxes onto a trolley. With an electric whine, he drove the trolley inside the shop to make the delivery.
As he passed through the door, the rattle of beaded ropes made a lovely tune, a small, electronic photocell-operated bell rang, singing his entrance into the lobby where a few old people of mixed-race origin lounged and sat half asleep, watching an old tube television. It looked delightfully rustic.
"Hello!" A cheerful voice rang behind the counter. "I'll be over in a minute!"
Curtis took his time looking around: it was a mix between a curiosity shop and a small family hotel, with books and occult items on sale. He could see that the entire bookshelves were full of books about H.P Lovecraft, and aquatic documentaries.
It was a girl with pale, almost translucent skin dressed like a stereotypical, sexualized Halloween witch, with a short skirt that is more fitting for a young, lewd secretary cosplay.
Curtis blinked: the dress she wore was a thin, one-piece dress of shimmering, silk-like material that concealed only a few features of her body, her jet-black hair tied in a long braid that reached nearly to the ground. Her eyes were big, almost too big with black irises that made the whites of her eyes nearly non-existent. Her face was pretty, although it looked slightly off as if the eyes were a bit too large and to the sides, her features delicate and almost elf-like.
"Blessed be!" She smiled gently and waved in a shy motion. "Can I help you?"
"I...have a delivery for Innsmouth Magic Shop..." Curtis stammered, showing the tablet.
"Oh yes! Let me help you unpack..." She walked around the counter, approaching him with a smile.
Her legs were not as delicate as her body, Curtis noted; thick, and muscular like a habitual swimmer's, her feet clad in wide shoes. "My grandma had bought some memorabilia from her home. I think that's delivery."
Curtis had to raise an eyebrow. He had himself loaded some of these boxes, and the contents were full of weird junk.
"Yeah. The delivery is huge. I'll help you out."
"Thank you!" The girl chimed happily, her stare more than friendly when she met Curtis' eyes, making his heart tingle.
She was almost mysterious, with the features of a beautiful swimmer with a doll-like face. Curtis could swear there was a hint of a mildly aquatic origin as if she was a siren of some fantasy art drawing, with jawline, eyes, and sharp teeth having a very faintly noticeable otherworldly origin. That said, the girl wasn't "beautiful" in the conventional sense: any pageant or contest would perceive her features as slightly off bordering on uncanny valley.
And her stare was pleasant. Her eyes warmed seeing Curtis' appearance, her smile becoming warm and friendly. The knowing, sweet stare warmed his heart like a warm, coastal autumn wind.
"Let's go. I'm Aphia."
"Aphia?"
