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.”
“Well. There’s no harm in that. I used to read that Zane Grey,” said the taller.
“Yes. Well. That’s nothing to be proud of. This bloke—what did you say your name was?”
“Ben. Ben Lassiter. And you are . . . ? ”
The little man smiled; he looked awfully like a frog, thought Ben. “I’m Seth,” he said. “And my friend here is called Wilf.”
“Charmed,” said Wilf.
“Hi,” said Ben.
“Frankly,” said the little man, “I agree with you.”
“You do?” said Ben, perplexed.
The little man nodded. “Yer. H. P. Lovecraft. I don’t know what the fuss is about. He couldn’t bloody write.” He slurped his stout, then licked the foam from his lips with a long and flexible tongue. “I mean, for starters, you look at them words he used. Eldritch. You know what eldritch means?”
Ben shook his head. He seemed to be discussing literature with two strangers in an English pub while drinking beer. He wondered for a moment if he had become someone else, while he wasn’t looking. The beer tasted less bad, the farther down the glass he went, and was beginning to erase the lingering aftertaste of
