Freckles

More about Freckles

In the decaying seaside town of Innsmouth—its rotting wharves whispering to the tide and its windows glimmering faintly with phosphorescent mold—there appeared one summer a boy unlike any other. He was called simply Ernest Blyne, though some of the elders, those who remembered the old pacts and tides, murmured that he was not born, but surfaced.

Ernest was round of face and silent of manner, his large tinted spectacles reflecting colors no sane spectrum could name. When the sunlight struck him, his skin seemed to shimmer—not with sweat, but with countless motes of color, as if his flesh were made of living pigment. Some said he was afflicted with a rare disease; others whispered that his hues changed with the phases of the moon.

He spent long afternoons by the tidal pools, gazing into the still water where strange coral growths pulsed beneath the sand. Fishermen claimed that when Ernest leaned too close, the water brightened with hues unseen in any earthly sea—purples that devoured thought, greens that hummed. Children mocked him until they realized that his laughter made the air tremble, that behind his lenses his eyes did not quite move in the same rhythm as theirs.

By autumn, the color began to spread. The walls of his family’s house glowed faintly at night, covered in moving dots like colonies of microscopic stars. The local doctor who came to investigate was found a week later, his body drained of hue entirely, his skin a blank ivory shell.

Old Zadok Allen—one of the last living links to the Esoteric Order—claimed to have seen Ernest down by Devil Reef at dusk. “He weren’t alone,” Zadok whispered, trembling. “Somethin’ rose up out o’ them depths, somethin’ full o’ eyes an’ scales that shimmered like his skin—an’ the boy spoke to it in colors, not words. Whole sky turned inside out for a moment, it did.”

Winter came, and the town grew silent. The tides began to glow, reflecting the same mottled radiance as Ernest’s flesh. On the coldest night of February, every light in Innsmouth flickered and died. From the sea came a hum, low and immense, as if all the colors of the world were gathering for a single, terrible chorus.

When dawn arrived, the boy was gone. Only a faint residue of dotted pigment remained, scattered like dust across his empty bed—each speck pulsing faintly in the dark, as though dreaming of depth and pressure and chromatic abyss.

Years later, divers exploring the ruins of Devil Reef reported seeing a colossal face beneath the coral. It was not monstrous, only human, though it shimmered with a million living colors. Some swore it smiled through the murk—its teeth small, childlike, and gleaming with light that had never touched the sun.

They say even now, when the tide recedes, the sand glows faintly in patterns like a face half-forgotten. The children of Innsmouth do not go near the water when that happens. They say the colors whisper. They say they call your name.