Transmission 02 · Geography · Drowned Moon III
The Baltic Is Just R'lyeh With Better Trams
A small, brackish apocalypse with ferry snacks and a timetable the Old Ones could learn from.
Lovecraft put his nightmare city at 47°9′S, 126°43′W, which is a long way to go for architecture that Gdańsk already had, plus heating. I have stood on both shelves of the map. One of them sells smoked eel in a paper cone. Guess which one I respect.
The Baltic is not the Pacific. The Pacific is a show-off, all depth and teeth. The Baltic is a cousin who shows up damp, complains about the Prussians, and then quietly outlives everyone at the table. It is brackish because the Old Ones take their coffee the same way: mostly dark, a little sweet, with industrial runoff for complexity.
A short comparative table, in prose
Innsmouth has a look. Sopot has a pier. Both are full of people who know something and will not tell you until the third beer. R'lyeh has cyclopean masonry; Gdańsk has cranes that were, I am quite sure, shy shoggoths who took a welding course and unionized. Amber, sold along the shore in every other window, is fossilized screaming with a clasp. I own three pieces. I wear none of them to family dinners. They hum.
The trams run on time, which is more than you can say for the stars.
Tourists come to the coast for the wind and leave with a sense that the horizon is negotiating. They blame the weather. The weather is innocent. The weather is merely the public-facing department of something with more offices. If you stand on Hel — the peninsula, not the eschatology — and face the water long enough, a pillar will consider revealing itself, then remember it has a reputation and sink again. Very Polish. We invented understatement and then drowned it so no one would brag.
I am not saying R'lyeh is a suburb of Gdynia. I am saying that if the sleeper ever wants decent public transport, he knows where to move. We have pierogi, a European Union flag, and a sea that is already halfway to being a mood. The rent is lower than Arkham. The fog works weekends.
Coordinates for the lost: Gdańsk 54°21′N 18°39′E. Bring a ticket. The inspector does not accept sanity as fare, though he will stamp it.