ELDRITCH HORRORS: DARK TALES

The People of the Island

by Paul Mackintosh

(Excerpt pp. 220-222, Eldritch Horrors: Dark Tales)

Sullen and unforthcoming, the villagers nonetheless seemed to grudgingly accept the foreign intrusion. The one directly unsettling aspect to life on the island was the incessant chorus of frogs, louder in the wet season but never entirely absent, that welled up from creeks and drainage channels, puddles and ditches, hidden behind the primordial tree ferns and conifers. Falsetto to basso, they squeaked and belched, tweeted and yawped, till their calls reverberated round the vale as if in a gigantic echo chamber, amplified by ten thousand throat sacs.

Jobless since the extinction of their market gardening trade, the islanders spent their days lounging or performing nameless tasks on the porches of their iron-roofed shacks, snarling and barking at each other, or scraping harrows across the tiny square fields, or dangling sticks into the ponds, around two metres square on average, lined in dun cement or grey brick, that yawned seemingly at random by plots and paths. Peering into these, Abney saw no sign of their purpose; no sluices or conduits for irrigation, no pipes or taps, just dark still water or green sheets of lily pads and pond scum. A few had short flights of steps set into their rims, leading cryptically down into the water.

He discussed the pools, or tanks, whatever they were, with one of the few other residents he could respect, Dr. Zhang Ming. Spry and wizened as any Confucian ancient in an ink painting, Dr. Zhang was a mainland emigre who had retired to the island, although Abney gathered that he still practiced occasionally in a small surgery in Kennedy Town. Peering through his round tortoiseshell spectacles at the tank at their feet, as they stood together on a narrow cement path skirting the shoreline, Dr. Zhang chewed his lip then whistled between stained peglike teeth.

“There is no apparent use for them that I know,” he mused. “They are too small to water these little fields, and they seem to be in the wrong places for water storage tanks. They are not practical for aquaculture. A few of my friends in the local ethnological societies have asked about them. When I interviewed the locals, they just shrugged and told me they had always been here.”

“That doesn’t sound like a very helpful answer,” Abney rejoined. “Are they always like that?”

Dr. Zhang chuckled, his rheumy eyes twinkling as he gazed back along the way towards the main village. “They are a miserable lot, aren’t they? You know they are not even related to the main Cantonese clans, nor to the hakka or boat people around the Pearl River Delta? They are probably not even Han Chinese, but are more like the Austronesian aboriginals of Taiwan. Probably they are descendants of the original indigenes of the region, who were already living here when the Han peoples moved down from the north to settle these southern coastal fringes. Apparently they stayed on their lands when the Kangxi Emperor ordered the coasts cleared: no one could be bothered to evict them. They may have been in continuous occupation of these lands for thousands of years, even tens of thousands. Their true ethnic origins are a mystery, rather like the frogs.”

He gestured idly at a small green-grey specimen squatting at the edge of the path like a dollop of gum.

“The frogs? What’s so mysterious about them?” Abney asked, puzzled.

The doctor smiled with a hint of intellectual self-satisfaction. “Well, the island has been cut off from the mainland and even the larger islands for thousands of years. And yet, there is a remarkable profusion of species of frogs. Remember the difficulties that amphibians have with salt water. Indeed, it’s remarkable that one of the oldest aquatic orders, which was croaking in the swamps where the dinosaurs foraged, has such a problem with the sea. Are these ones the descendants of relict colonies left from when the land bridge was cut? Were they carried here on boats, or did they drift over on logs of wood? Or are we to conjecture some unknown marine phase in their life cycle to account for their wide distribution? The islanders themselves are just such a mystery.”

(...)

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TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Paul S. Kemp:
One Thousand and One Words

W. H. Pugmire
Recompense of Sorrow (brand-new Sesqua Valley!)

Ron Shiflet
Out of the Frying Pan

Don Webb
The Jest of Yig

Gary Hill
Rest in Peace, Jeremy Randall

Simon Bleaken
Ashanna's Whispers

Leigh Blackmore
The Return of Zoth-Ommog

Thomas Strømsholt
Devouring Darkness Hovers

Benjamin Szumskyj
A Haunting From Beyond

Linda Navroth
The Specimen

Dan Clore
The Dying God

Blake Wilson
The Door to Nowhere

Paul Mackintosh
The People of the Island

Henrik Sandbeck Harksen
The Bibliophile