During the winter of 1927-28 officials of the Federal government
made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the
ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. The public first learned
of it in February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred,
followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting - under suitable
precautions - of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and
supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront. Uninquiring
souls let this occurrence pass as one of the major clashes in a
spasmodic war on liquor.
Keener news-followers, however, wondered at the prodigious number of
arrests, the abnormally large force of men used in making them, and
the secrecy surrounding the disposal of the prisoners. No trials, or
even definite charges were reported; nor were any of the captives
seen thereafter in the regular gaols of the nation. There were vague
statements about disease and concentration camps, and later about
dispersal in various naval and military prisons, but nothing
positive ever developed. Innsmouth itself was left almost
depopulated, and it is even now only beginning to show signs of a
sluggishly revived existence.
Complaints from many liberal organizations were met with long
confidential discussions, and representatives were taken on trips to
certain camps and prisons. As a result, these societies became
surprisingly passive and reticent. Newspaper men were harder to
manage, but seemed largely to cooperate with the government in the
end. Only one paper - a tabloid always discounted because of its
wild policy - mentioned the deep diving submarine that discharged
torpedoes downward in the marine abyss just beyond Devil Reef. That
item, gathered by chance in a haunt of sailors, seemed indeed rather
far-fetched; since the low, black reef lay a full mile and a half
out from Innsmouth Harbour.
People around the country and in the nearby towns muttered a great
deal among themselves, but said very little to the outer world. They
had talked about dying and half-deserted Innsmouth for nearly a
century, and nothing new could be wilder or more hideous than what
they had whispered and hinted at years before. Many things had
taught them secretiveness, and there was no need to exert pressure
on them. Besides, they really knew little; for wide salt marshes,
desolate and unpeopled, kept neighbors off from Innsmouth on the
landward side.
But at last I am going to defy the ban on speech about this thing.
Results, I am certain, are so thorough that no public harm save a
shock of repulsion could ever accrue from a hinting of what was
found by those horrified men at Innsmouth. Besides, what was found
might possibly have more than one explanation. I do not know just
how much of the whole tale has been told even to me, and I have many
reasons for not wishing to probe deeper. For my contact with this
affair has been closer than that of any other layman, and I have
carried away impressions which are yet to drive me to drastic
measures.
It was I who fled frantically out of Innsmouth in the early morning
hours of July 16, 1927, and whose frightened appeals for government
inquiry and action brought on the whole reported episode. I was
willing enough to stay mute while the affair was fresh and
uncertain; but now that it is an old story, with public interest and
curiosity gone, I have an odd craving to whisper about those few
frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly-shadowed seaport of
death and blasphemous abnormality. The mere telling helps me to
restore confidence in my own faculties; to reassure myself that I
was not the first to succumb to a contagious nightmare
hallucination. It helps me, too, in making up my mind regarding a
certain terrible step which lies ahead of me.
I never heard of Innsmouth till the day before I saw it for the
first and - so far - last time. I was celebrating my coming of age
by a tour of New England - sightseeing, antiquarian, and
genealogical - and had planned to go directly from ancient
Newburyport to Arkham, whence my mother's family was derived. I had
no car, but was travelling by train, trolley and motor-coach, always
seeking the cheapest possible route. In Newburyport they told me
that the steam train was the thing to take to Arkham; and it was
only at the station ticket-office, when I demurred at the high fare,
that I learned about Innsmouth. The stout, shrewd-faced agent, whose
speech shewed him to be no local man, seemed sympathetic toward my
efforts at economy, and made a suggestion that none of my other
informants had offered.
"You could take that
old bus, I suppose," he said with a certain hesitation, "but it
ain't thought much of hereabouts. It goes through Innsmouth -
you may have heard about that - and so the people don't like it.
Run by an Innsmouth fellow - Joe Sargent - but never gets any
custom from here, or Arkham either, I guess. Wonder it keeps
running at all. I s'pose it's cheap enough, but I never see
mor'n two or three people in it - nobody but those Innsmouth
folk. Leaves the square - front of Hammond's Drug Store - at 10
a.m. and 7 p.m. unless they've changed lately. Looks like a
terrible rattletrap - I've never been on it."
That was the first I
ever heard of shadowed Innsmouth. Any reference to a town not shown
on common maps or listed in recent guidebooks would have interested
me, and the agent's odd manner of allusion roused something like
real curiosity. A town able to inspire such dislike in it its
neighbors, I thought, must be at least rather unusual, and worthy of
a tourist's attention. If it came before Arkham I would stop off
there and so I asked the agent to tell me something about it. He was
very deliberate, and spoke with an air of feeling slightly superior
to what he said.
"Innsmouth? Well,
it's a queer kind of a town down at the mouth of the Manuxet.
Used to be almost a city - quite a port before the War of 1812 -
but all gone to pieces in the last hundred years or so. No
railroad now - B. and M. never went through, and the branch line
from Rowley was given up years ago.
"More empty houses than there are people, I guess, and no
business to speak of except fishing and lobstering. Everybody
trades mostly either here or in Arkham or Ipswich. Once they had
quite a few mills, but nothing's left now except one gold
refinery running on the leanest kind of part time.
"That refinery, though, used to he a big thing, and old man
Marsh, who owns it, must be richer'n Croesus. Queer old duck,
though, and sticks mighty close in his home. He's supposed to
have developed some skin disease or deformity late in life that
makes him keep out of sight. Grandson of Captain Obed Marsh, who
founded the business. His mother seems to've been some kind of
foreigner - they say a South Sea islander - so everybody raised
Cain when he married an Ipswich girl fifty years ago. They
always do that about Innsmouth people, and folks here and
hereabouts always try to cover up any Innsmouth blood they have
in 'em. But Marsh's children and grandchildren look just like
anyone else far's I can see. I've had 'em pointed out to me here
- though, come to think of it, the elder children don't seem to
be around lately. Never saw the old man.
"And why is everybody so down on Innsmouth? Well, young fellow,
you mustn't take too much stock in what people here say. They're
hard to get started, but once they do get started they never let
up. They've been telling things about Innsmouth - whispering 'em,
mostly - for the last hundred years, I guess, and I gather
they're more scared than anything else. Some of the stories
would make you laugh - about old Captain Marsh driving bargains
with the devil and bringing imps out of hell to live in
Innsmouth, or about some kind of devil-worship and awful
sacrifices in some place near the wharves that people stumbled
on around 1845 or thereabouts - but I come from Panton, Vermont,
and that kind of story don't go down with me.
"You ought to hear, though, what some of the old-timers tell
about the black reef off the coast - Devil Reef, they call it.
It's well above water a good part of the time, and never much
below it, but at that you could hardly call it an island. The
story is that there's a whole legion of devils seen sometimes on
that reef - sprawled about, or darting in and out of some kind
of caves near the top. It's a rugged, uneven thing, a good bit
over a mile out, and toward the end of shipping days sailors
used to make big detours just to avoid it.
"That is, sailors that didn't hail from Innsmouth. One of the
things they had against old Captain Marsh was that he was
supposed to land on it sometimes at night when the tide was
right. Maybe he did, for I dare say the rock formation was
interesting, and it's just barely possible he was looking for
pirate loot and maybe finding it; but there was talk of his
dealing with demons there. Fact is, I guess on the whole it was
really the Captain that gave the bad reputation to the reef.
"That was before the big epidemic of 1846, when over half the
folks in Innsmouth was carried off. They never did quite figure
out what the trouble was, but it was probably some foreign kind
of disease brought from China or somewhere by the shipping. It
surely was bad enough - there was riots over it, and all sorts
of ghastly doings that I don't believe ever got outside of town
- and it left the place in awful shape. Never came back - there
can't be more'n 300 or 400 people living there now.
"But the real thing behind the way folks feel is simply race
prejudice - and I don't say I'm blaming those that hold it. I
hate those Innsmouth folks myself, and I wouldn't care to go to
their town. I s'pose you know - though I can see you're a
Westerner by your talk - what a lot our New England ships - used
to have to do with queer ports in Africa, Asia, the South Seas,
and everywhere else, and what queer kinds of people they
sometimes brought back with 'em. You've probably heard about the
Salem man that came home with a Chinese wife, and maybe you know
there's still a bunch of Fiji Islanders somewhere around Cape
Cod.
"Well, there must be something like that back of the Innsmouth
people. The place always was badly cut off from the rest of the
country by marshes and creeks and we can't be sure about the ins
and outs of the matter; but it's pretty clear that old Captain
Marsh must have brought home some odd specimens when he had all
three of his ships in commission back in the twenties and
thirties. There certainly is a strange kind of streak in the
Innsmouth folks today - I don't know how to explain it but it
sort of makes you crawl. You'll notice a little in Sargent if
you take his bus. Some of 'em have queer narrow heads with flat
noses and bulgy, starry eyes that never seem to shut, and their
skin ain't quite right. Rough and scabby, and the sides of the
necks are all shriveled or creased up. Get bald, too, very
young. The older fellows look the worst - fact is, I don't
believe I've ever seen a very old chap of that kind. Guess they
must die of looking in the glass! Animals hate 'em - they used
to have lots of horse trouble before the autos came in.
"Nobody around here or in Arkham or Ipswich will have anything
to do with 'em, and they act kind of offish themselves when they
come to town or when anyone tries to fish on their grounds.
Queer how fish are always thick off Innsmouth Harbour when there
ain't any anywhere else around - but just try to fish there
yourself and see how the folks chase you off! Those people used
to come here on the railroad - walking and taking the train at
Rowley after the branch was dropped - but now they use that bus.
"Yes, there's a hotel in Innsmouth - called the Gilman House -
but I don't believe it can amount to much. I wouldn't advise you
to try it. Better stay over here and take the ten o'clock bus
tomorrow morning; then you can get an evening bus there for
Arkham at eight o'clock. There was a factory inspector who
stopped at the Gilman a couple of years ago and he had a lot of
unpleasant hints about the place. Seems they get a queer crowd
there, for this fellow heard voices in other rooms - though most
of 'em was empty - that gave him the shivers. It was foreign
talk he thought, but he said the bad thing about it was the kind
of voice that sometimes spoke. It sounded so unnatural -
slopping like, he said - that he didn't dare undress and go to
sleep. Just waited up and lit out the first thing in the
morning. The talk went on most all night.
"This fellow - Casey, his name was - had a lot to say about how
the Innsmouth folk, watched him and seemed kind of on guard. He
found the Marsh refinery a queer place - it's in an old mill on
the lower falls of the Manuxet. What he said tallied up with
what I'd heard. Books in bad shape, and no clear account of any
kind of dealings. You know it's always been a kind of mystery
where the Marshes get the gold they refine. They've never seemed
to do much buying in that line, but years ago they shipped out
an enormous lot of ingots.
"Used to be talk of a queer foreign kind of jewelry that the
sailors and refinery men sometimes sold on the sly, or that was
seen once or twice on some of the Marsh women-folks. People
allowed maybe old Captain Obed traded for it in some heathen
port, especially since he always ordered stacks of glass beads
and trinkets such as seafaring men used to get for native trade.
Others thought and still think he'd found an old pirate cache
out on Devil Reef. But here's a funny thing. The old Captain's
been dead these sixty years, and there's ain't been a good-sized
ship out of the place since the Civil War; but just the same the
Marshes still keep on buying a few of those native trade things
- mostly glass and rubber gewgaws, they tell me. Maybe the
Innsmouth folks like 'em to look at themselves - Gawd knows
they've gotten to be about as bad as South Sea cannibals and
Guinea savages.
"That plague of '46 must have taken off the best blood in the
place. Anyway, they're a doubtful lot now, and the Marshes and
other rich folks are as bad as any. As I told you, there
probably ain't more'n 400 people in the whole town in spite of
all the streets they say there are. I guess they're what they
call 'white trash' down South - lawless and sly, and full of
secret things. They get a lot of fish and lobsters and do
exporting by truck. Queer how the fish swarm right there and
nowhere else.
"Nobody can ever keep track of these people, and state school
officials and census men have a devil of a time. You can bet
that prying strangers ain't welcome around Innsmouth. I've heard
personally of more'n one business or government man that's
disappeared there, and there's loose talk of one who went crazy
and is out at Danvers now. They must have fixed up some awful
scare for that fellow.
"That's why I wouldn't go at night if I was you. I've never been
there and have no wish to go, but I guess a daytime trip
couldn't hurt you - even though the people hereabouts will
advise you not to make it. If you're just sightseeing, and
looking for old-time stuff, Innsmouth ought to be quite a place
for you."
And so I spent part of
that evening at the Newburyport Public Library looking up data about
Innsmouth. When I had tried to question the natives in the shops,
the lunchroom, the garages, and the fire station, I had found them
even harder to get started than the ticket agent had predicted; and
realized that I could not spare the time to overcome their first
instinctive reticence. They had a kind of obscure suspiciousness, as
if there were something amiss with anyone too much interested in
Innsmouth. At the Y. M. C. A., where I was stopping, the clerk
merely discouraged my going to such a dismal, decadent place; and
the people at the library shewed much the same attitude. Clearly, in
the eyes of the educated, Innsmouth was merely an exaggerated case
of civic degeneration.
The Essex County histories on the library shelves had very little to
say, except that the town was founded in 1643, noted for
shipbuilding before the Revolution, a seat of great marine
prosperity in the early 19th century, and later a minor factory
center using the Manuxet as power. The epidemic and riots of 1846
were very sparsely treated, as if they formed a discredit to the
county.
References to decline were few, though the significance of the later
record was unmistakable. After the Civil War all industrial life was
confined to the Marsh Refining Company, and the marketing of gold
ingots formed the only remaining bit of major commerce aside from
the eternal fishing. That fishing paid less and less as the price of
the commodity fell and large-scale corporations offered competition,
but there was never a dearth of fish around Innsmouth Harbour.
Foreigners seldom settled there, and there was some discreetly
veiled evidence that a number of Poles and Portuguese who had tried
it had been scattered in a peculiarly drastic fashion.
Most interesting of all was a glancing reference to the strange
jewelry vaguely associated with Innsmouth. It had evidently
impressed the whole countryside more than a little, for mention was
made of specimens in the museum of Miskatonic University at Arkham,
and in the display room of the Newburyport Historical Society. The
fragmentary descriptions of these things were bald and prosaic, but
they hinted to me an undercurrent of persistent strangeness.
Something about them seemed so odd and provocative that I could not
put them out of my mind, and despite the relative lateness of the
hour I resolved to see the local sample - said to be a large,
queerly-proportioned thing evidently meant for a tiara - if it could
possibly be arranged.
The librarian gave me a note of introduction to the curator of the
Society, a Miss Anna Tilton, who lived nearby, and after a brief
explanation that ancient gentlewoman was kind enough to pilot me
into the closed building, since the hour was not outrageously late.
The collection was a notable one indeed, but in my present mood I
had eyes for nothing but the bizarre object which glistened in a
corner cupboard under the electric lights.
It took no excessive sensitiveness to beauty to make me literally
gasp at the strange, unearthly splendour of the alien, opulent
phantasy that rested there on a purple velvet cushion. Even now I
can hardly describe what I saw, though it was clearly enough a sort
of tiara, as the description had said. It was tall in front, and
with a very large and curiously irregular periphery, as if designed
for a head of almost freakishly elliptical outline. The material
seemed to be predominantly gold, though a weird lighter lustrousness
hinted at some strange alloy with an equally beautiful and scarcely
identifiable metal. Its condition was almost perfect, and one could
have spent hours in studying the striking and puzzlingly
untraditional designs - some simply geometrical, and some plainly
marine - chased or moulded in high relief on its surface with a
craftsmanship of incredible skill and grace.
The longer I looked, the more the thing fascinated me; and in this
fascination there was a curiously disturbing element hardly to be
classified or accounted for. At first I decided that it was the
queer other-worldly quality of the art which made me uneasy. All
other art objects I had ever seen either belonged to some known
racial or national stream, or else were consciously modernistic
defiances of every recognized stream. This tiara was neither. It
clearly belonged to some settled technique of infinite maturity and
perfection, yet that technique was utterly remote from any - Eastern
or Western, ancient or modern - which I had ever heard of or seen
exemplified. It was as if the workmanship were that of another
planet.
However, I soon saw that my uneasiness had a second and perhaps
equally potent source residing in the pictorial and mathematical
suggestion of the strange designs. The patterns all hinted of remote
secrets and unimaginable abysses in time and space, and the
monotonously aquatic nature of the reliefs became almost sinister.
Among these reliefs were fabulous monsters of abhorrent
grotesqueness and malignity - half ichthyic and half batrachian in
suggestion - which one could not dissociate from a certain haunting
and uncomfortable sense of pseudomemory, as if they called up some
image from deep cells and tissues whose retentive functions are
wholly primal and awesomely ancestral. At times I fancied that every
contour of these blasphemous fish-frogs was over-flowing with the
ultimate quintessence of unknown and inhuman evil.
In odd contrast to the tiara's aspect was its brief and prosy
history as related by Miss Tilton. It had been pawned for a
ridiculous sum at a shop in State Street in 1873, by a drunken
Innsmouth man shortly afterward killed in a brawl. The Society had
acquired it directly from the pawnbroker, at once giving it a
display worthy of its quality. It was labeled as of probable
East-Indian or Indochinese provenance, though the attribution was
frankly tentative.
Miss Tilton, comparing all possible hypotheses regarding its origin
and its presence in New England, was inclined to believe that it
formed part of some exotic pirate hoard discovered by old Captain
Obed Marsh. This view was surely not weakened by the insistent
offers of purchase at a high price which the Marshes began to make
as soon as they knew of its presence, and which they repeated to
this day despite the Society's unvarying determination not to sell.
As the good lady shewed me out of the building she made it clear
that the pirate theory of the Marsh fortune was a popular one among
the intelligent people of the region. Her own attitude toward
shadowed Innsmouth - which she never seen - was one of disgust at a
community slipping far down the cultural scale, and she assured me
that the rumours of devil-worship were partly justified by a
peculiar secret cult which had gained force there and engulfed all
the orthodox churches.
It was called, she said, "The Esoteric Order of Dagon", and was
undoubtedly a debased, quasi-pagan thing imported from the East a
century before, at a time when the Innsmouth fisheries seemed to be
going barren. Its persistence among a simple people was quite
natural in view of the sudden and permanent return of abundantly
fine fishing, and it soon came to be the greatest influence in the
town, replacing Freemasonry altogether and taking up headquarters in
the old Masonic Hall on New Church Green.
All this, to the pious Miss Tilton, formed an excellent reason for
shunning the ancient town of decay and desolation; but to me it was
merely a fresh incentive. To my architectural and historical
anticipations was now added an acute anthropological zeal, and I
could scarcely sleep in my small room at the "Y" as the night wore
away.
II
Shortly before ten the next morning I stood with one small valise in
front of Hammond's Drug Store in old Market Square waiting for the
Innsmouth bus. As the hour for its arrival drew near I noticed a
general drift of the loungers to other places up the street, or to
the Ideal Lunch across the square. Evidently the ticket-agent had
not exaggerated the dislike which local People bore toward Innsmouth
and its denizens. In a few moments a small motor-coach of extreme
decrepitude and dirty grey colour rattled down State Street, made a
turn, and drew up at the curb beside me. I felt immediately that it
was the right one; a guess which the half-illegible sign on the
windshield - Arkham-Innsmouth-Newburyport - soon verified.
There were only three passengers - dark, unkempt men of sullen
visage and somewhat youthful cast - and when the vehicle stopped
they clumsily shambled out and began walking up State Street in a
silent, almost furtive fashion. The driver also alighted, and I
watched him as he went into the drug store to make some purchase.
This, I reflected, must be the Joe Sargent mentioned by the
ticket-agent; and even before I noticed any details there spread
over me a wave of spontaneous aversion which could be neither
checked nor explained. It suddenly struck me as very natural that
the local people should not wish to ride on a bus owned and driven
by this man, or to visit any oftener than possible the habitat of
such a man and his kinsfolk.
When the driver came out of the store I looked at him more carefully
and tried to determine the source of my evil impression. He was a
thin, stoop-shouldered man not much under six feet tall, dressed in
shabby blue civilian clothes and wearing a frayed golf cap. His age
was perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep creases in the sides of
his neck made him seem older when one did not study his dull,
expressionless face. He had a narrow head, bulging, watery-blue eyes
that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and
chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. His long thick lip and
coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some
sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches;
and in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling
from some cutaneous disease. His hands were large and heavily
veined, and had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were
strikingly short in proportion to the rest of the structure, and
seemed to have a tendency to curl closely into the huge palm. As he
walked toward the bus I observed his peculiarly shambling gait and
saw that his feet were inordinately immense. The more I studied them
the more I wondered how he could buy any shoes to fit them.
A certain greasiness about the fellow increased my dislike. He was
evidently given to working or lounging around the fish docks, and
carried with him much of their characteristic smell. Just what
foreign blood was in him I could not even guess. His oddities
certainly did not look Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine or negroid,
yet I could see why the people found him alien. I myself would have
thought of biological degeneration rather than alienage.
I was sorry when I saw there would be no other passengers on the
bus. Somehow I did not like the idea of riding alone with this
driver. But as leaving time obviously approached I conquered my
qualms and followed the man aboard, extending him a dollar bill and
murmuring the single word "Innsmouth." He looked curiously at me for
a second as he returned forty cents change without speaking. I took
a seat far behind him, but on the same side of the bus, since I
wished to watch the shore during the journey.
At length the decrepit vehicle stared with a jerk, and rattled
noisily past the old brick buildings of State Street amidst a cloud
of vapour from the exhaust. Glancing at the people on the sidewalks,
I thought I detected in them a curious wish to avoid looking at the
bus - or at least a wish to avoid seeming to look at it. Then we
turned to the left into High Street, where the going was smoother;
flying by stately old mansions of the early republic and still older
colonial farmhouses, passing the Lower Green and Parker River, and
finally emerging into a long, monotonous stretch of open shore
country.
The day was warm and sunny, but the landscape of sand and
sedge-grass, and stunted shrubbery became more and desolate as we
proceeded. Out the window I could see the blue water and the sandy
line of Plum Island, and we presently drew very near the beach as
our narrow road veered off from the main highway to Rowley and
Ipswich. There were no visible houses, and I could tell by the state
of the road that traffic was very light hereabouts. The weather-worn
telephone poles carried only two wires. Now and then we crossed
crude wooden bridges over tidal creeks that wound far inland and
promoted the general isolation of the region.
Once in a while I noticed dead stumps and crumbling foundation-walls
above the drifting sand, and recalled the old tradition quoted in
one of the histories I had read, that this was once a fertile and
thickly-settled countryside. The change, it was said, came
simultaneously with the Innsmouth epidemic of l846, and was thought
by simple folk to have a dark connection with hidden forces of evil.
Actually, it was caused by the unwise cutting of woodlands near the
shore, which robbed the soil of the best protection and opened the
way for waves of wind-blown sand.
At last we lost sight of Plum Island and saw the vast expanse of the
open Atlantic on our left. Our narrow course began to climb steeply,
and I felt a singular sense of disquiet in looking at the lonely
crest ahead where the rutted road-way met the sky. It was as if the
bus were about to keep on in its ascent, leaving the sane earth
altogether and merging with the unknown arcana of upper air and
cryptical sky. The smell of the sea took on ominous implications,
and the silent driver's bent, rigid back and narrow head became more
and more hateful. As I looked at him I saw that the back of his head
was almost as hairless as his face, having only a few straggling
yellow strands upon a grey scabrous surface.
Then we reached the crest and beheld the outspread valley beyond,
where the Manuxet joins the sea just north of the long line of
cliffs that culminate in Kingsport Head and veer off toward Cape
Ann. On the far misty horizon I could just make out the dizzy
profile of the Head, topped by the queer ancient house of which so
many legends are told; but for the moment all my attention was
captured by the nearer panorama just below me. I had, I realized,
come face to face with rumour-shadowed Innsmouth.
It was a town of wide extent and dense construction, yet one with a
portentous dearth of visible life. From the tangle of chimney-pots
scarcely a wisp of smoke came, and the three tall steeples loomed
stark and unpainted against the seaward horizon. One of them was
crumbling down at the top, and in that and another there were only
black gaping holes where clock-dials should have been. The vast
huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyed with
offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, and as we approached
along the now descending road I could see that many roofs had wholly
caved in. There were some large square Georgian houses, too, with
hipped roofs, cupolas, and railed "widow's walks." These were mostly
well back from the water, and one or two seemed to be in moderately
sound condition. Stretching inland from among them I saw the rusted,
grass-grown line of the abandoned railway, with leaning
telegraph-poles now devoid of wires, and the half-obscured lines of
the old carriage roads to Rowley and Ipswich.
The decay was worst close to the waterfront, though in its very
midst I could spy the white belfry of a fairly well preserved brick
structure which looked like a small factory. The harbour, long
clogged with sand, was enclosed by an ancient stone breakwater; on
which I could begin to discern the minute forms of a few seated
fishermen, and at whose end were what looked like the foundations of
a bygone lighthouse. A sandy tongue had formed inside this barrier
and upon it I saw a few decrepit cabins, moored dories, and
scattered lobster-pots. The only deep water seemed to be where the
river poured out past the belfried structure and turned southward to
join the ocean at the breakwater's end.
Here and there the ruins of wharves jutted out from the shore to end
in indeterminate rottenness, those farthest south seeming the most
decayed. And far out at sea, despite a high tide, I glimpsed a long,
black line scarcely rising above the water yet carrying a suggestion
of odd latent malignancy. This, I knew, must be Devil Reef. As I
looked, a subtle, curious sense of beckoning seemed superadded to
the grim repulsion; and oddly enough, I found this overtone more
disturbing than the primary impression.
We met no one on the road, but presently began to pass deserted
farms in varying stages of ruin. Then I noticed a few inhabited
houses with rags stuffed in the broken windows and shells and dead
fish lying about the littered yards. Once or twice I saw
listless-looking people working in barren gardens or digging clams
on the fishy-smelling beach below, and groups of dirty, simian-visaged
children playing around weed-grown doorsteps. Somehow these people
seemed more disquieting than the dismal buildings, for almost every
one had certain peculiarities of face and motions which I
instinctively disliked without being able to define or comprehend
them. For a second I thought this typical physique suggested some
picture I had seen, perhaps in a book, under circumstances of
particular horror or melancholy; but this pseudo-recollection passed
very quickly.
As the bus reached a lower level I began to catch the steady note of
a waterfall through the unnatural stillness, The leaning, unpainted
houses grew thicker, lined both sides of the road, and displayed
more urban tendencies than did those we were leaving behind, The
panorama ahead had contracted to a street scene, and in spots I
could see where a cobblestone pavement and stretches of brick
sidewalk had formerly existed. All the houses were apparently
deserted, and there were occasional gaps where tumbledown chimneys
and cellar walls told of buildings that had collapsed. Pervading
everything was the most nauseous fishy odour imaginable.
Soon cross streets and junctions began to appear; those on the left
leading to shoreward realms of unpaved squalor and decay, while
those on the right shewed vistas of departed grandeur. So far I had
seen no people in the town, but there now came signs of a sparse
habitation - curtained windows here and there, and an occasional
battered motorcar at the curb. Pavement and sidewalks were
increasingly well-defined, and though most of the houses were quite
old - wood and brick structures of the early 19th century - they
were obviously kept fit for habitation. As an amateur antiquarian I
almost lost my olfactory disgust and my feeling of menace and
repulsion amidst this rich, unaltered survival from the past.
But I was not to reach my destination without one very strong
impression of poignantly disagreeable quality. The bus had come to a
sort of open concourse or radial point with churches on two sides
and the bedraggled remains of a circular green in the centre, and I
was looking at a large pillared hall on the right-hand junction
ahead. The structure's once white paint was now gray and peeling and
the black and gold sign on the pediment was so faded that I could
only with difficulty make out the words "Esoteric Order of Dagon".
This, then was the former Masonic Hall now given over to a degraded
cult. As I strained to decipher this inscription my notice was
distracted by the raucous tones of a cracked bell across the street,
and I quickly turned to look out the window on my side of the coach.
The sound came from a squat stone church of manifestly later date
than most of the houses, built in a clumsy Gothic fashion and having
a disproportionately high basement with shuttered windows. Though
the hands of its clock were missing on the side I glimpsed, I knew
that those hoarse strokes were tolling the hour of eleven. Then
suddenly all thoughts of time were blotted out by an onrushing image
of sharp intensity and unaccountable horror which had seized me
before I knew what it really was. The door of the church basement
was open, revealing a rectangle of blackness inside. And as I
looked, a certain object crossed or seemed to cross that dark
rectangle; burning into my brain a momentary conception of nightmare
which was all the more maddening because analysis could not shew a
single nightmarish quality in it.
It was a living object - the first except the driver that I had seen
since entering the compact part of the town - and had I been in a
steadier mood I would have found nothing whatever of terror in it.
Clearly, as I realised a moment later, it was the pastor; clad in
some peculiar vestments doubtless introduced since the Order of
Dagon had modified the ritual of the local churches. The thing which
had probably caught my first subconscious glance and supplied the
touch of bizarre horror was the tall tiara he wore; an almost exact
duplicate of the one Miss Tilton had shown me the previous evening.
This, acting on my imagination, had supplied namelessly sinister
qualities to the indeterminate face and robed, shambling form
beneath it. There was not, I soon decided, any reason why I should
have felt that shuddering touch of evil pseudo-memory. Was it not
natural that a local mystery cult should adopt among its regimentals
an unique type of head-dress made familiar to the community in some
strange way - perhaps as treasure-trove?
A very thin sprinkling of repellent-looking youngish people now
became visible on the sidewalks - lone individuals, and silent knots
of two or three. The lower floors of the crumbling houses sometimes
harboured small shops with dingy signs, and I noticed a parked truck
or two as we rattled along. The sound of waterfalls became more and
more distinct, and presently I saw a fairly deep river-gorge ahead,
spanned by a wide, iron-railed highway bridge beyond which a large
square opened out. As we clanked over the bridge I looked out on
both sides and observed some factory buildings on the edge of the
grassy bluff or part way down. The water far below was very
abundant, and I could see two vigorous sets of falls upstream on my
right and at least one downstream on my left. From this point the
noise was quite deafening. Then we rolled into the large
semicircular square across the river and drew up on the right-hand
side in front of a tall, cupola crowned building with remnants of
yellow paint and with a half-effaced sign proclaiming it to be the
Gilman House.
I was glad to get out of that bus, and at once proceeded to check my
valise in the shabby hotel lobby. There was only one person in sight
- an elderly man without what I had come to call the "Innsmouth
look" - and I decided not to ask him any of the questions which
bothered me; remembering that odd things had been noticed in this
hotel. Instead, I strolled out on the square, from which the bus had
already gone, and studied the scene minutely and appraisingly.
One side of the cobblestoned open space was the straight line of the
river; the other was a semicircle of slant-roofed brick buildings of
about the 1800 period, from which several streets radiated away to
the southeast, south, and southwest. Lamps were depressingly few and
small - all low-powered incandescents - and I was glad that my plans
called for departure before dark, even though I knew the moon would
be bright. The buildings were all in fair condition, and included
perhaps a dozen shops in current operation; of which one was a
grocery of the First National chain, others a dismal restaurant, a
drug store, and a wholesale fish-dealer's office, and still another,
at the eastward extremity of the square near the river an office of
the town's only industry - the Marsh Refining Company. There were
perhaps ten people visible, and four or five automobiles and motor
trucks stood scattered about. I did not need to be told that this
was the civic centre of Innsmouth. Eastward I could catch blue
glimpses of the harbour, against which rose the decaying remains of
three once beautiful Georgian steeples. And toward the shore on the
opposite bank of the river I saw the white belfry surmounting what I
took to be the Marsh refinery.
For some reason or other I chose to make my first inquiries at the
chain grocery, whose personnel was not likely to be native to
Innsmouth. I found a solitary boy of about seventeen in charge, and
was pleased to note the brightness and affability which promised
cheerful information. He seemed exceptionally eager to talk, and I
soon gathered that he did not like the place, its fishy smell, or
its furtive people. A word with any outsider was a relief to him. He
hailed from Arkham, boarded with a family who came from Ipswich, and
went back whenever he got a moment off. His family did not like him
to work in Innsmouth, but the chain had transferred him there and he
did not wish to give up his job.
There was, he said, no public library or chamber of commerce in
Innsmouth, but I could probably find my way about. The street I had
come down was Federal. West of that were the fine old residence
streets - Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams - and east of it
were the shoreward slums. It was in these slums - along Main Street
- that I would find the old Georgian churches, but they were all
long abandoned. It would be well not to make oneself too conspicuous
in such neighbourhoods - especially north of the river since the
people were sullen and hostile. Some strangers had even disappeared.
Certain spots were almost forbidden territory, as he had learned at
considerable cost. One must not, for example, linger much around the
Marsh refinery, or around any of the still used churches, or around
the pillared Order of Dagon Hall at New Church Green. Those churches
were very odd - all violently disavowed by their respective
denominations elsewhere, and apparently using the queerest kind of
ceremonials and clerical vestments. Their creeds were heterodox and
mysterious, involving hints of certain marvelous transformations
leading to bodily immorality - of a sort - on this earth. The
youth's own pastor - Dr. Wallace of Asbury M. E. Church in Arkham -
had gravely urged him not to join any church in Innsmouth.
As for the Innsmouth people - the youth hardly knew what to make of
them. They were as furtive and seldom seen as animals that live in
burrows, and one could hardly imagine how they passed the time apart
from their desultory fishing. Perhaps - judging from the quantities
of bootleg liquor they consumed - they lay for most of the daylight
hours in an alcoholic stupor. They seemed sullenly banded together
in some sort of fellowship and understanding - despising the world
as if they had access to other and preferable spheres of entity.
Their appearance - especially those staring, unwinking eyes which
one never saw shut - was certainly shocking enough; and their voices
were disgusting. It was awful to hear them chanting in their
churches at night, and especially during their main festivals or
revivals, which fell twice a year on April 30th and October 31st.
They were very fond of the water, and swam a great deal in both
river and harbour. Swimming races out to Devil Reef were very
common, and everyone in sight seemed well able to share in this
arduous sport. When one came to think of it, it was generally only
rather young people who were seen about in public, and of these the
oldest were apt to be the most tainted-looking. When exceptions did
occur, they were mostly persons with no trace of aberrancy, like the
old clerk at the hotel. One wondered what became of the bulk of the
older folk, and whether the "Innsmouth look" were not a strange and
insidious disease-phenomenon which increased its hold as years
advanced.
Only a very rare affliction, of course, could bring about such vast
and radical anatomical changes in a single individual after maturity
- changes invoking osseous factors as basic as the shape of the
skull - but then, even this aspect was no more baffling and
unheard-of than the visible features of the malady as a whole. It
would be hard, the youth implied, to form any real conclusions
regarding such a matter; since one never came to know the natives
personally no matter how long one might live in Innsmouth.
The youth was certain that many specimens even worse than the worst
visible ones were kept locked indoors in some places. People
sometimes heard the queerest kind of sounds. The tottering
waterfront hovels north of the river were reputedly connected by
hidden tunnels, being thus a veritable warren of unseen
abnormalities. What kind of foreign blood - if any - these beings
had, it was impossible to tell. They sometimes kept certain
especially repulsive characters out of sight when government and
others from the outside world came to town.
It would be of no use, my informant said, to ask the natives
anything about the place. The only one who would talk was a very
aged but normal looking man who lived at the poorhouse on the north
rim of the town and spent his time walking about or lounging around
the fire station. This hoary character, Zadok Allen, was 96 years
old and somewhat touched in the head, besides being the town
drunkard. He was a strange, furtive creature who constantly looked
over his shoulder as if afraid of something, and when sober could
not be persuaded to talk at all with strangers. He was, however,
unable to resist any offer of his favorite poison; and once drunk
would furnish the most astonishing fragments of whispered
reminiscence.
After all, though, little useful data could be gained from him;
since his stories were all insane, incomplete hints of impossible
marvels and horrors which could have no source save in his own
disordered fancy. Nobody ever believed him, but the natives did not
like him to drink and talk with strangers; and it was not always
safe to be seen questioning him. It was probably from him that some
of the wildest popular whispers and delusions were derived.
Several non-native residents had reported monstrous glimpses from
time to time, but between old Zadok's tales and the malformed
inhabitants it was no wonder such illusions were current. None of
the non-natives ever stayed out late at night, there being a
widespread impression that it was not wise to do so. Besides, the
streets were loathsomely dark.
As for business - the abundance of fish was certainly almost
uncanny, but the natives were taking less and less advantage of it.
Moreover, prices were falling and competition was growing. Of course
the town's real business was the refinery, whose commercial office
was on the square only a few doors east of where we stood. Old Man
Marsh was never seen, but sometimes went to the works in a closed,
curtained car.
There were all sorts of rumors about how Marsh had come to look. He
had once been a great dandy; and people said he still wore the
frock-coated finery of the Edwardian age curiously adapted to
certain deformities. His son had formerly conducted the office in
the square, but latterly they had been keeping out of sight a good
deal and leaving the brunt of affairs to the younger generation. The
sons and their sisters had come to look very queer, especially the
elder ones; and it was said that their health was failing.
One of the Marsh daughters was a repellent, reptilian-looking woman
who wore an excess of weird jewellery clearly of the same exotic
tradition as that to which the strange tiara belonged. My informant
had noticed it many times, and had heard it spoken of as coming from
some secret hoard, either of pirates or of demons. The clergymen -
or priests, or whatever they were called nowadays - also wore this
kind of ornament as a headdress; but one seldom caught glimpses of
them. Other specimens the youth had not seen, though many were
rumoured to exist around Innsmouth.
The Marshes, together with the other three gently bred families of
the town - the Waites, the Gilmans, and the Eliots - were all very
retiring. They lived in immense houses along Washington Street, and
several were reputed to harbour in concealment certain living
kinsfolk whose personal aspect forbade public view, and whose deaths
had been reported and recorded.
Warning me that many of the street signs were down, the youth drew
for my benefit a rough but ample and painstaking sketch map of the
town's salient features. After a moment's study I felt sure that it
would be of great help, and pocketed it with profuse thanks.
Disliking the dinginess of the single restaurant I had seen, I
bought a fair supply of cheese crackers and ginger wafers to serve
as a lunch later on. My program, I decided, would be to thread the
principal streets, talk with any non-natives I might encounter, and
catch the eight o'clock coach for Arkham. The town, I could see,
formed a significant and exaggerated example of communal decay; but
being no sociologist I would limit my serious observations to the
field of architecture.
Thus I began my systematic though half-bewildered tour of
Innsmouth's narrow, shadow-blighted ways. Crossing the bridge and
turning toward the roar of the lower falls, I passed close to the
Marsh refinery, which seemed to be oddly free from the noise of
industry. The building stood on the steep river bluff near a bridge
and an open confluence of streets which I took to be the earliest
civic center, displaced after the Revolution by the present Town
Square.
Re-crossing the gorge on the Main Street bridge, I struck a region
of utter desertion which somehow made me shudder. Collapsing huddles
of gambrel roofs formed a jagged and fantastic skyline, above which
rose the ghoulish, decapitated steeple of an ancient church. Some
houses along Main Street were tenanted, but most were tightly
boarded up. Down unpaved side streets I saw the black, gaping
windows of deserted hovels, many of which leaned at perilous and
incredible angles through the sinking of part of the foundations.
Those windows stared so spectrally that it took courage to turn
eastward toward the waterfront. Certainly, the terror of a deserted
house swells in geometrical rather than arithmetical progression as
houses multiply to form a city of stark desolation. The sight of
such endless avenues of fishy-eyed vacancy and death, and the
thought of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments
given over to cob-webs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up
vestigial fears and aversions that not even the stoutest philosophy
can disperse.
Fish Street was as deserted as Main, though it differed in having
many brick and stone warehouses still in excellent shape. Water
Street was almost its duplicate, save that there were great seaward
gaps where wharves had been. Not a living thing did I see except for
the scattered fishermen on the distant break-water, and not a sound
did I hear save the lapping of the harbour tides and the roar of the
falls in the Manuxet. The town was getting more and more on my
nerves, and I looked behind me furtively as I picked my way back
over the tottering Water Street bridge. The Fish Street bridge,
according to the sketch, was in ruins.
North of the river there were traces of squalid life - active
fish-packing houses in Water Street, smoking chimneys and patched
roofs here and there, occasional sounds from indeterminate sources,
and infrequent shambling forms in the dismal streets and unpaved
lanes - but I seemed to find this even more oppressive than the
southerly desertion. For one thing, the people were more hideous and
abnormal than those near the centre of the town; so that I was
several times evilly reminded of something utterly fantastic which I
could not quite place. Undoubtedly the alien strain in the Innsmouth
folk was stronger here than farther inland - unless, indeed, the "Innsmouth
look" were a disease rather than a blood stain, in which case this
district might be held to harbour the more advanced cases.
One detail that annoyed me was the distribution of the few faint
sounds I heard. They ought naturally to have come wholly from the
visibly inhabited houses, yet in reality were often strongest inside
the most rigidly boarded-up facades. There were creakings,
scurryings, and hoarse doubtful noises; and I thought uncomfortably
about the hidden tunnels suggested by the grocery boy. Suddenly I
found myself wondering what the voices of those denizens would be
like. I had heard no speech so far in this quarter, and was
unaccountably anxious not to do so.
Pausing only long enough to look at two fine but ruinous old
churches at Main and Church Streets, I hastened out of that vile
waterfront slum. My next logical goal was New Church Green, but
somehow or other I could not bear to repass the church in whose
basement I had glimpsed the inexplicably frightening form of that
strangely diademmed priest or pastor. Besides, the grocery youth had
told me that churches, as well as the Order of Dagon Hall, were not
advisable neighbourhoods for strangers.
Accordingly I kept north along Main to Martin, then turning inland,
crossing Federal Street safely north of the Green, and entering the
decayed patrician neighbourhood of northern Broad, Washington,
Lafayette, and Adams Streets. Though these stately old avenues were
ill-surfaced and unkempt, their elm-shaded dignity had not entirely
departed. Mansion after mansion claimed my gaze, most of them
decrepit and boarded up amidst neglected grounds, but one or two in
each street shewing signs of occupancy. In Washington Street there
was a row of four or five in excellent repair and with finely-tended
lawns and gardens. The most sumptuous of these - with wide terraced
parterres extending back the whole way to Lafayette Street - I took
to be the home of Old Man Marsh, the afflicted refinery owner.
In all these streets no living thing was visible, and I wondered at
the complete absence of cats and dogs from Innsmouth. Another thing
which puzzled and disturbed me, even in some of the best-preserved
mansions, was the tightly shuttered condition of many third-story
and attic windows. Furtiveness and secretiveness seemed universal in
this hushed city of alienage and death, and I could not escape the
sensation of being watched from ambush on every hand by sly, staring
eyes that never shut.
I shivered as the cracked stroke of three sounded from a belfry on
my left. Too well did I recall the squat church from which those
notes came. Following Washington street toward the river, I now
faced a new zone of former industry and commerce; noting the ruins
of a factory ahead, and seeing others, with the traces of an old
railway station and covered railway bridge beyond, up the gorge on
my right.
The uncertain bridge now before me was posted with a warning sign,
but I took the risk and crossed again to the south bank where traces
of life reappeared. Furtive, shambling creatures stared cryptically
in my direction, and more normal faces eyed me coldly and curiously.
Innsmouth was rapidly becoming intolerable, and I turned down Paine
Street toward the Square in the hope of getting some vehicle to take
me to Arkham before the still-distant starting-time of that sinister
bus.
It was then that I saw the tumbledown fire station on my left, and
noticed the red faced, bushy-bearded, watery eyed old man in
nondescript rags who sat on a bench in front of it talking with a
pair of unkempt but not abnormal looking firemen. This, of course,
must be Zadok Allen, the half-crazed, liquorish nonagenarian whose
tales of old Innsmouth and its shadow were so hideous and
incredible.
III
It must have been some imp of the perverse - or some sardonic pull
from dark, hidden sources - which made me change my plans as I did.
I had long before resolved to limit my observations to architecture
alone, and I was even then hurrying toward the Square in an effort
to get quick transportation out of this festering city of death and
decay; but the sight of old Zadok Allen set up new currents in my
mind and made me slacken my pace uncertainly.
I had been assured that the old man could do nothing but hint at
wild, disjointed, and incredible legends, and I had been warned that
the natives made it unsafe to be seen talking with him; yet the
thought of this aged witness to the town's decay, with memories
going back to the early days of ships and factories, was a lure that
no amount of reason could make me resist. After all, the strangest
and maddest of myths are often merely symbols or allegories based
upon truth - and old Zadok must have seen everything which went on
around Innsmouth for the last ninety years. Curiosity flared up
beyond sense and caution, and in my youthful egotism I fancied I
might be able to sift a nucleus of real history from the confused,
extravagant outpouring I would probably extract with the aid of raw
whiskey.
I knew that I could not accost him then and there, for the firemen
would surely notice and object. Instead, I reflected, I would
prepare by getting some bootleg liquor at a place where the grocery
boy had told me it was plentiful. Then I would loaf near the fire
station in apparent casualness, and fall in with old Zadok after he
had started on one of his frequent rambles. The youth had said that
he was very restless, seldom sitting around the station for more
than an hour or two at a time.
A quart bottle of whiskey was easily, though not cheaply, obtained
in the rear of a dingy variety-store just off the Square in Eliot
Street. The dirty-looking fellow who waited on me had a touch of the
staring "Innsmouth look", but was quite civil in his way; being
perhaps used to the custom of such convivial strangers - truckmen,
gold-buyers, and the like - as were occasionally in town.
Reentering the Square I saw that luck was with me; for - shuffling
out of Paine street around the corner of the Gilman House - I
glimpsed nothing less than the tall, lean, tattered form of old
Zadok Allen himself. In accordance with my plan, I attracted his
attention by brandishing my newly-purchased bottle: and soon
realised that he had begun to shuffle wistfully after me as I turned
into Waite Street on my way to the most deserted region I could
think of.
I was steering my course by the map the grocery boy had prepared,
and was aiming for the wholly abandoned stretch of southern
waterfront which I had previously visited. The only people in sight
there had been the fishermen on the distant breakwater; and by going
a few squares south I could get beyond the range of these, finding a
pair of seats on some abandoned wharf and being free to question old
Zadok unobserved for an indefinite time. Before I reached Main
Street I could hear a faint and wheezy "Hey, Mister!" behind me and
I presently allowed the old man to catch up and take copious pulls
from the quart bottle.
I began putting out feelers as we walked amidst the omnipresent
desolation and crazily tilted ruins, but found that the aged tongue
did not loosen as quickly as I had expected. At length I saw a
grass-grown opening toward the sea between crumbling brick walls,
with the weedy length of an earth-and-masonry wharf projecting
beyond. Piles of moss-covered stones near the water promised
tolerable seats, and the scene was sheltered from all possible view
by a ruined warehouse on the north. Here, I thought was the ideal
place for a long secret colloquy; so I guided my companion down the
lane and picked out spots to sit in among the mossy stones. The air
of death and desertion was ghoulish, and the smell of fish almost
insufferable; but I was resolved to let nothing deter me.
About four hours remained for conversation if I were to catch the
eight o'clock coach for Arkham, and I began to dole out more liquor
to the ancient tippler; meanwhile eating my own frugal lunch. In my
donations I was careful not to overshoot the mark, for I did not
wish Zadok's vinous garrulousness to pass into a stupor. After an
hour his furtive taciturnity shewed signs of disappearing, but much
to my disappointment he still sidetracked my questions about
Innsmouth and its shadow-haunted past. He would babble of current
topics, revealing a wide acquaintance with newspapers and a great
tendency to philosophise in a sententious village fashion.
Toward the end of the second hour I feared my quart of whiskey would
not be enough to produce results, and was wondering whether I had
better leave old Zadok and go back for more. Just then, however,
chance made the opening which my questions had been unable to make;
and the wheezing ancient's rambling took a turn that caused me to
lean forward and listen alertly. My back was toward the
fishy-smelling sea, but he was facing it and something or other had
caused his wandering gaze to light on the low, distant line of Devil
Reef, then showing plainly and almost fascinatingly above the waves.
The sight seemed to displease him, for he began a series of weak
curses which ended in a confidential whisper and a knowing leer. He
bent toward me, took hold of my coat lapel, and hissed out some
hints that could not be mistaken,
"Thar's whar it all
begun - that cursed place of all wickedness whar the deep water
starts. Gate o' hell - sheer drop daown to a bottom no saoundin'-line
kin tech. Ol' Cap'n Obed done it - him that faound aout more'n
was good fer him in the Saouth Sea islands.
"Everybody was in a bad way them days. Trade fallin' off, mills
losin' business - even the new ones - an' the best of our
menfolks kilt aprivateerin' in the War of 1812 or lost with the
Elizy brig an' the Ranger scow - both on 'em Gilman venters.
Obed Marsh he had three ships afloat - brigantine Columby, brig
Hefty, an' barque Sumatry Queen. He was the only one as kep' on
with the East-Injy an' Pacific trade, though Esdras Martin's
barkentine Malay Bride made a venter as late as twenty-eight.
"Never was nobody like Cap'n Obed - old limb o' Satan! Heh, heh!
I kin mind him a-tellin' abaout furren parts, an' callin' all
the folks stupid for goin' to Christian meetin' an' bearin'
their burdns meek an' lowly. Says they'd orter git better gods
like some o' the folks in the Injies - gods as ud bring 'em good
fishin' in return for their sacrifices, an' ud reely answer
folks's prayers.
"Matt Eliot his fust mate, talked a lot too, only he was again'
folks's doin' any heathen things. Told abaout an island east of
Othaheite whar they was a lot o' stone ruins older'n anybody
knew anying abaout, kind o' like them on Ponape, in the
Carolines, but with carven's of faces that looked like the big
statues on Easter Island. Thar was a little volcanic island near
thar, too, whar they was other ruins with diff'rent carvin' -
ruins all wore away like they'd ben under the sea onct, an' with
picters of awful monsters all over 'em.
"Wal, Sir, Matt he says the natives anound thar had all the fish
they cud ketch, an' sported bracelets an' armlets an' head rigs
made aout o' a queer kind o' gold an' covered with picters o'
monsters jest like the ones carved over the ruins on the little
island - sorter fish-like frogs or froglike fishes that was
drawed in all kinds o' positions likes they was human bein's.
Nobody cud get aout o' them whar they got all the stuff, an' all
the other natives wondered haow they managed to find fish in
plenty even when the very next island had lean pickin's. Matt he
got to wonderon' too an' so did Cap'n Obed. Obed he notices,
besides, that lots of the hn'some young folks ud drop aout o'
sight fer good from year to year, an' that they wan't many old
folks around. Also, he thinks some of the folks looked dinned
queer even for Kanakys.
"It took Obed to git the truth aout o' them heathen. I dun't
know haow he done it, but be begun by tradin' fer the gold-like
things they wore. Ast 'em whar they come from, an' ef they cud
git more, an' finally wormed the story aout o' the old chief --
Walakea, they called him. Nobody but Obed ud ever a believed the
old yeller devil, but the Cap'n cud read folks like they was
books. Heh, heh! Nobody never believes me naow when I tell 'em,
an' I dun't s'pose you will, young feller - though come to look
at ye, ye hev kind o' got them sharp-readin' eyes like Obed
had."
The old man's whisper grew fainter, and I found myself
shuddering at the terrible and sincere portentousness of his
intonation, even though I knew his tale could be nothing but
drunken phantasy.
"Wal, Sir, Obed he 'lart that they's things on this arth as most
folks never heerd about - an' wouldn't believe ef they did hear.
lt seems these Kanakys was sacrificin' heaps o' their young men
an' maidens to some kind o' god-things that lived under the sea,
an' gittin' all kinds o' favour in return. They met the things
on the little islet with the queer ruins, an' it seems them
awful picters o' frog-fish monsters was supposed to be picters
o' these things. Mebbe they was the kind o' critters as got all
the mermaid stories an' sech started.
"They had all kinds a' cities on the sea-bottom, an' this island
was heaved up from thar. Seem they was some of the things alive
in the stone buildin's when the island come up sudden to the
surface, That's how the Kanakys got wind they was daown thar.
Made sign-talk as soon as they got over bein' skeert, an' pieced
up a bargain afore long.
"Them things liked human sacrifices. Had had 'em ages afore, but
lost track o' the upper world after a time. What they done to
the victims it ain't fer me to say, an' I guess Obed was'n't
none too sharp abaout askin'. But it was all right with the
heathens, because they'd ben havin' a hard time an' was
desp'rate abaout everything. They give a sarten number o' young
folks to the sea-things twice every year - May-Eve an'
Hallawe'en - reg'lar as cud be. Also give some a' the carved
knick-knacks they made. What the things agreed to give in return
was plenty a' fish - they druv 'em in from all over the sea -
an' a few gold like things naow an' then.
"Wal, as I says, the natives met the things on the little
volcanic islet - goin' thar in canoes with the sacrifices et
cet'ry, and bringin' back any of the gold-like jools as was
comin' to 'em. At fust the things didn't never go onto the main
island, but arter a time they come to want to. Seems they
hankered arter mixin' with the folks, an' havin' j'int
ceremonies on the big days - May-Eve an' Hallowe'en. Ye see,
they was able to live both in ant aout o' water - what they call
amphibians, I guess. The Kanakys told 'em as haow folks from the
other islands might wanta wipe 'an out if they got wind o' their
bein' thar, but they says they dun't keer much, because they cud
wipe aout the hull brood o' humans ef they was willin' to bother
- that is, any as didn't be, sarten signs sech as was used onct
by the lost Old Ones, whoever they was. But not wantin' to
bother, they'd lay low when anybody visited the island.
"When it come to matin' with them toad-lookin' fishes, the
Kanakys kind o' balked, but finally they larnt something as put
a new face on the matter. Seems that human folks has got a kind
a' relation to sech water-beasts - that everything alive come
aout o' the water onct an' only needs a little change to go back
agin. Them things told the Kanakys that ef they mixed bloods
there'd be children as ud look human at fust, but later turn
more'n more like the things, till finally they'd take to the
water an' jine the main lot o' things daown har. An' this is the
important part, young feller - them as turned into fish things
an' went into the water wouldn't never die. Them things never
died excep' they was kilt violent.
"Wal, Sir, it seems by the time Obed knowed them islanders they
was all full o' fish blood from them deep water things. When
they got old an' begun to shew it, they was kep' hid until they
felt like takin' to the water an' quittin' the place. Some was
more teched than others, an' some never did change quite enough
to take to the water; but mosily they turned out jest the way
them things said. Them as was born more like the things changed
arly, but them as was nearly human sometimes stayed on the
island till they was past seventy, though they'd usually go
daown under for trial trips afore that. Folks as had took to the
water gen'rally come back a good deal to visit, so's a man ud
often be a'talkin' to his own five-times-great-grandfather who'd
left the dry land a couple o' hundred years or so afore.
"Everybody got aout o' the idee o' dyin' - excep' in canoe wars
with the other islanders, or as sacrifices to the sea-gods daown
below, or from snakebite or plague or sharp gallopin' ailments
or somethin' afore they cud take to the water - but simply
looked forrad to a kind o' change that wa'n't a bit horrible
artet a while. They thought what they'd got was well wuth all
they'd had to give up - an' I guess Obed kind o' come to think
the same hisself when he'd chewed over old Walakea's story a
bit. Walakea, though, was one of the few as hadn't got none of
the fish blood - bein' of a royal line that intermarried with
royal lines on other islands.
"Walakea he shewed Obed a lot o' rites an' incantations as had
to do with the sea things, an' let him see some o' the folks in
the village as had changed a lot from human shape. Somehaow or
other, though, he never would let him see one of the reg'lar
things from right aout o' the water. In the end he give him a
funny kind o' thingumajig made aout o' lead or something, that
he said ud bring up the fish things from any place in the water
whar they might be a nest o' 'em. The idee was to drop it daown
with the right kind o' prayers an' sech. Walakea allowed as the
things was scattered all over the world, so's anybody that
looked abaout cud find a nest an' bring 'em up ef they was
wanted.
"Matt he didn't like this business at all, an' wanted Obed shud
keep away from the island; but the Cap'n was sharp fer gain, an'
faound he cud get them gold-like things so cheap it ud pay him
to make a specialty of them. Things went on that way for years
an' Obed got enough o' that gold-like stuff to make him start
the refinery in Waite's old run-daown fullin' mill. He didn't
dass sell the pieces like they was, for folks ud be all the time
askin' questions. All the same his crews ud get a piece an'
dispose of it naow and then, even though they was swore to keep
quiet; an' he let his women-folks wear some o' the pieces as was
more human-like than most.
"Well, come abaout thutty-eight - when I was seven year' old -
Obed he faound the island people all wiped aout between v'yages.
Seems the other islanders had got wind o' what was goin' on, and
had took matters into their own hands. S'pose they must a had,
after all, them old magic signs as the sea things says was the
only things they was afeard of. No tellin' what any o' them
Kanakys will chance to git a holt of when the sea-bottom throws
up some island with ruins older'n the deluge. Pious cusses,
these was - they didn't leave nothin' standin' on either the
main island or the little volcanic islet excep' what parts of
the ruins was too big to knock daown. In some places they was
little stones strewed abaout - like charms - with somethin' on 'em
like what ye call a swastika naowadays. Prob'ly them was the Old
Ones' signs. Folks all wiped aout no trace o' no gold-like
things an' none the nearby Kanakys ud breathe a word abaout the
matter. Wouldn't even admit they'd ever ben any people on that
island.
"That naturally hit Obed pretty hard, seein' as his normal trade
was doin' very poor. It hit the whole of Innsmouth, too, because
in seafarint days what profited the master of a ship gen'lly
profited the crew proportionate. Most of the folks araound the
taown took the hard times kind o' sheep-like an' resigned, but
they was in bad shape because the fishin' was peterin' aout an'
the mills wan't doin' none too well.
"Then's the time Obed he begun a-cursin' at the folks fer bein'
dull sheep an' prayin' to a Christian heaven as didn't help 'em
none. He told 'em he'd knowed o' folks as prayed to gods that
give somethin' ye reely need, an' says ef a good bunch o' men ud
stand by him, he cud mebbe get a holt o' sarten paowers as ud
bring plenty o' fish an' quite a bit of gold. 0' course them as
sarved on the Sumatry Queen, an' seed the island knowed what he
meant, an' wa'n't none too anxious to get clost to sea-things
like they'd heard tell on, but them as didn't know what 'twas
all abaout got kind o' swayed by what Obed had to say, and begun
to ast him what he cud do to sit 'em on the way to the faith as
ud bring 'em results."
Here the old man
faltered, mumbled, and lapsed into a moody and apprehensive silence;
glancing nervously over his shoulder and then turning back to stare
fascinatedly at the distant black reef. When I spoke to him he did
not answer, so I knew I would have to let him finish the bottle. The
insane yarn I was hearing interested me profoundly, for I fancied
there was contained within it a sort of crude allegory based upon
the strangeness of Innsmouth and elaborated by an imagination at
once creative and full of scraps of exotic legend. Not for a moment
did I believe that the tale had any really substantial foundation;
but none the less the account held a hint of genuine terror if only
because it brought in references to strange jewels clearly akin to
the malign tiara I had seen at Newburyport. Perhaps the ornaments
had, after all, come from some strange island; and possibly the wild
stories were lies of the bygone Obed himself rather than of this
antique toper.
I handed Zadok the bottle, and he drained it to the last drop. It
was curious how he could stand so much whiskey, for not even a trace
of thickness had come into his high, wheezy voice. He licked the
nose of the bottle and slipped it into his pocket, then beginning to
nod and whisper softly to himself. I bent close to catch any
articulate words he might utter, and thought I saw a sardonic smile
behind the stained bushy whiskers. Yes - he was really forming
words, and I could grasp a fair proportion of them.
"Poor Matt - Matt he allus was agin it - tried to line up the folks
on his side, an' had long talks with the preachers - no use - they
run the Congregational parson aout o' taown, an' the Methodist
feller quit - never did see Resolved Babcock, the Baptist parson,
agin - Wrath 0' Jehovy - I was a mightly little critter, but I heerd
what I heerd an, seen what I seen - Dagon an' Ashtoreth - Belial an'
Beelzebub - Golden Caff an' the idols o' Canaan an' the Philistines
- Babylonish abominations - Mene, mene, tekel, upharisn - -."
He stopped again, and from the look in his watery blue eyes I feared
he was close to a stupor after all. But when I gently shook his
shoulder he turned on me with astonishing alertness and snapped out
some more obscure phrases.
"Dun't believe me,
hey? Hey, heh, heh - then jest tell me, young feller, why Cap'n
Obed an' twenty odd other folks used to row aout to Devil Reef
in the dead o' night an' chant things so laoud ye cud hear 'em
all over taown when the wind was right? Tell me that, hey? An'
tell me why Obed was allus droppin' heavy things daown into the
deep water t'other side o' the reef whar the bottom shoots daown
like a cliff lower'n ye kin saound? Tell me what he done with
that funny-shaped lead thingumajig as Walakea give him? Hey,
boy? An' what did they all haowl on May-Eve, an, agin the next
Hallowe'en? An' why'd the new church parsons - fellers as used
to he sailors - wear them queer robes an' cover their-selves
with them gold-like things Obed brung? Hey?"
The watery blue eyes
were almost savage and maniacal now, and the dirty white beard
bristled electrically. Old Zadok probably saw me shrink back, for he
began to cackle evilly.
"Heh, heh, heh, heh!
Beginni'n to see hey? Mebbe ye'd like to a ben me in them days,
when I seed things at night aout to sea from the cupalo top o'
my haouse. Oh, I kin tell ye' little pitchers hev big ears, an'
I wa'n't missin' nothin' o' what was gossiped abaout Cap'n Obed
an' the folks aout to the reef! Heh, heh, heh! Haow abaout the
night I took my pa's ship's glass up to the cupalo an' seed the
reef a-bristlin' thick with shapes that dove off quick soon's
the moon riz?
"Obed an' the folks was in a dory, but them shapes dove off the
far side into the deep water an' never come up ...
"Haow'd ye like to be a little shaver alone up in a cupola a-watchin'
shapes as wa'n't human shapes? ...Heh? ... Heh, heh, heh ..."
The old man was getting
hysterical, and I began to shiver with a nameless alarm. He laid a
gnarled claw on my shoulder, and it seemed to me that its shaking
was not altogether that of mirth.
"S'pose one night ye
seed somethin' heavy heaved offen Obed's dory beyond the reef'
and then learned next day a young feller was missin' from home.
Hey! Did anybody ever see hide or hair o' Hiram Gilman agin. Did
they? An' Nick Pierce, an' Luelly Waite, an' Adoniram Saouthwick,
an' Henry Garrison Hey? Heh, heh, heh, heh ... Shapes talkin'
sign language with their hands ... them as had reel hands ...
"Wal, Sir, that was the time Obed begun to git on his feet agin.
Folks see his three darters a-wearin' gold-like things as
nobody'd never see on 'em afore, an' smoke stared comin' aout o'
the refin'ry chimbly. Other folks was prosp'rin, too - fish
begun to swarm into the harbour fit to kill' an' heaven knows
what sized cargoes we begun to ship aout to Newb'ryport, Arkham,
an' Boston. T'was then Obed got the ol' branch railrud put
through. Some Kingsport fishermen heerd abaout the ketch an'
come up in sloops, but they was all lost. Nobody never see 'em
agin. An' jest then our folk organised the Esoteric Order 0'
Dagon, an' bought Masoic Hall offen Calvary Commandery for it
... heh, heh, heh! Matt Eliot was a Mason an' agin the sellin',
but he dropped aout o' sight jest then.
"Remember, I ain't sayin' Obed was set on hevin' things jest
like they was on that Kanaky isle. I dun't think he aimed at
fust to do no mixin', nor raise no younguns to take to the water
an' turn into fishes with eternal life. He wanted them gold
things, an' was willin' to pay heavy, an' I guess the others was
satisfied fer a while ...
"Come in' forty-six the taown done some lookin' an' thinkin' fer
itself. Too many folks missin' - too much wild preachin' at
meetin' of a Sunday - too much talk abaout that reef. I guess I
done a bit by tellin' Selectman Mowry what I see from the cupalo.
They was a party one night as follered Obed's craowd aout to the
reef, an' I heerd shots betwixt the dories. Nex' day Obed and
thutty-two others was in gaol, with everybody a-wonderin' jest
what was afoot and jest what charge agin 'em cud he got to holt.
God, ef anybody'd look'd ahead ... a couple o' weeks later, when
nothin' had ben throwed into the sea fer thet long ...
Zadok was shewing sings
of fright and exhaustion, and I let him keep silence for a while,
though glancing apprehensively at my watch. The tide had turned and
was coming in now, and the sound of the waves seemed to arouse him.
I was glad of that tide, for at high water the fishy smell might not
be so bad. Again I strained to catch his whispers.
"That awful night
... I seed 'em. I was up in the cupalo ... hordes of 'em ...
swarms of 'em ... all over the reef an' swimmin' up the harbour
into the Manuxet ... God, what happened in the streets of
Innsmouth that night ... they rattled our door, but pa wouldn't
open ... then he clumb aout the kitchen winder with his musket
to find Selecman Mowry an' see what he cud do ... Maounds o' the
dead an' the dyin' ... shots and screams ... shaoutin' in Ol
Squar an' Taown Squar an' New Church Green - gaol throwed open
... - proclamation ... treason ... called it the plague when
folks come in an' faoud haff our people missin' ... nobody left
but them as ud jine in with Obed an' them things or else keep
quiet ... never heard o' my pa no more... "
The old man was panting
and perspiring profusely. His grip on my shoulder tightened.
"Everything cleaned
up in the mornin' - but they was traces ... Obed he kinder takes
charge an' says things is goin' to be changed ... others'll
worship with us at meetin'-time, an' sarten haouses hez got to
entertin guests ... they wanted to mix like they done with the
Kanakys, an' he for one didn't feel baound to stop 'em. Far
gone, was Obed ... jest like a crazy man on the subjeck. He says
they brung us fish an' treasure, an' shud hev what they hankered
after ..."
"Nothin' was to be diff'runt on the aoutsid; only we was to keep
shy o' strangers ef we knowed what was good fer us.
"We all hed to take the Oath o' Dagon, an' later on they was
secon' an' third oaths that some o' us took. Them as ud help
special, ud git special rewards - gold an' sech - No use balkin',
fer they was millions of 'em daown thar. They'd ruther not start
risin' an' wipin' aout human-kind, but ef they was gave away an'
forced to, they cud do a lot toward jest that. We didn't hev
them old charms to cut 'em off like folks in the Saouth Sea did,
an' them Kanakys wudu't never give away their secrets.
"Yield up enough sacrifices an' savage knick-knacks an'
harbourage in the taown when they wanted it, an' they'd let well
enough alone. Wudn't bother no strangers as might bear tales
aoutside - that is, withaout they got pryin'. All in the band of
the faithful - Order 0' Dagon - an' the children shud never die,
but go back to the Mother Hydra an' Father Dagon what we all
come from onct ... Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh
Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl fhtaga - "
Old Zadok was fast
lapsing into stark raving, and I held my breath. Poor old soul - to
what pitiful depths of hallucination had his liquor, plus his hatred
of the decay, alienage, and disease around him, brought that
fertile, imaginative brain? He began to moan now, and tears were
coursing down his channelled checks into the depths of his beard.
"God, what I seen
senct I was fifteen year' old - Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin! -
the folks as was missin', and them as kilt theirselves - them as
told things in Arkham or Ipswich or sech places was all called
crazy, like you're callin' me right naow - but God, what I seen
- They'd a kilt me long ago fer' what I know, only I'd took the
fust an' secon' Oaths o' Dago offen Obed, so was pertected
unlessen a jury of 'em proved I told things knowin' an'
delib'rit ... but I wudn't take the third Oath - I'd a died
ruther'n take that -
"It got wuss araound Civil War time, when children born senct
'forty-six begun to grow up - some 'em, that is. I was afeared -
never did no pryin' arter that awful night, an' never see one o'
- them - clost to in all my life. That is, never no full-blooded
one. I went to the war, an' ef I'd a had any guts or sense I'd a
never come back, but settled away from here. But folks wrote me
things wa'n't so bad. That, I s'pose, was because gov'munt draft
men was in taown arter 'sixty-three. Arter the war it was jest
as bad agin. People begun to fall off - mills an' shops shet
daown - shippin' stopped an' the harbour choked up - railrud
give up - but they ... they never stopped swimmin' in an' aout
o' the river from that cursed reef o' Satan - an' more an' more
attic winders got a-boarded up, an' more an' more noises was
heerd in haouses as wa'n't s'posed to hev nobody in 'em...
"Folks aoutside hev their stories abaout us - s'pose you've
heerd a plenty on 'em, seein' what questions ye ast - stories
abaout things they've seed naow an' then, an' abaout that queer
joolry as still comes in from somewhars an' ain't quite all
melted up - but nothin' never gits def'nite. Nobody'll believe
nothin'. They call them gold-like things pirate loot, an' allaow
the Innsmouth folks hez furren blood or is dis-tempered or
somethin'. Beside, them that lives here shoo off as many
strangers as they kin, an' encourage the rest not to git very
cur'ous, specially raound night time. Beasts balk at the
critters - hosses wuss'n mules - but when they got autos that
was all right.
"In 'forty-six Cap'n Obed took a second wife that nobody in the
taown never see - some says he didn't want to, but was made to
by them as he'd called in - had three children by her - two as
disappeared young, but one gal as looked like anybody else an'
was eddicated in Europe. Obed finally got her married off by a
trick to an Arkham feller as didn't suspect nothin'. But nobody
aoutside'll hav nothin' to do with Innsmouth folks naow.
Barnabas Marsh that runs the refin'ry now is Obed's grandson by
his fust wife - son of Onesiphorus, his eldest son, but his
mother was another o' them as wa'n't never seen aoutdoors.
"Right naow Barnabas is abaout changed. Can't shet his eyes no
more, an' is all aout o' shape. They say he still wears clothes,
but he'll take to the water soon. Mebbe he's tried it already -
they do sometimes go daown for little spells afore they go daown
for good. Ain't ben seed abaout in public fer nigh on ten year'.
Dun't know haow his poor wife kin feel - she come from Ipiwich,
an' they nigh lynched Barnabas when he courted her fifty odd
year' ago. Obed he died in 'seventy-eight an' all the next
gen'ration is gone naow - the fust wife's children dead, and the
rest ... God knows ..."
The sound of the
incoming tide was now very insistent, and little by little it seemed
to change the old man's mood from maudlin tearfulness to watchful
fear. He would pause now and then to renew those nervous glances
over his shoulder or out toward the reef, and despite the wild
absurdity of his tale, I could not help beginning to share his
apprehensiveness. Zadok now grew shriller, seemed to be trying to
whip up his courage with louder speech.
"Hey, yew, why dun't
ye say somethin'? Haow'd ye like to he livin' in a taown like
this, with everything a-rottin' an' dyin', an' boarded-up
monsters crawlin' an' bleatin' an' barkin' an' hoppin' araoun'
black cellars an' attics every way ye turn? Hey? Haow'd ye like
to hear the haowlin' night arter night from the churches an'
Order 0' Dagon Hall, an' know what's doin' part o' the haowlin'?
Haow'd ye like to hear what comes from that awful reef every
May-Eve an' Hallowmass? Hey? Think the old man's crazy, eh? Wal,
Sir, let me tell ye that ain't the wust!"
Zadok was really
screaming now, and the mad frenzy of his voice disturbed me more
than I care to own.
"Curse ye, dun't set
thar a'starin' at me with them eyes - I tell Obed Marsh he's in
hell, an, hez got to stay thar! Heh, heh ... in hell, I says!
Can't git me - I hain't done nothin' nor told nobody nothin' - -
"Oh, you, young feller? Wal, even ef I hain't told nobody nothin'
yet, I'm a'goin' to naow! Yew jest set still an' listen to me,
boy - this is what I ain't never told nobody... I says I didn't
get to do pryin' arter that night - but I faound things about
jest the same!"
"Yew want to know what the reel horror is, hey? Wal, it's this -
it ain't what them fish devils hez done, but what they're a-goin'
to do! They're a-bringin' things up aout o' whar they come from
into the taown - been doin' it fer years, an' slackenin' up
lately. Them haouses north o' the river be-twixt Water an' Main
Streets is full of 'em - them devils an' what they brung - an'
when they git ready ... I say, when they git... ever hear tell
of a shoggoth?
"Hey, d'ye hear me? I tell ye I know what them things be - I
seen 'em one night when ... eh-ahhh-ah! e'yahhh ... "
The hideous suddenness
and inhuman frightfulness of the old man's shriek almost made me
faint. His eyes, looking past me toward the malodorous sea, were
positively starting from his head; while his face was a mask of fear
worthy of Greek tragedy. His bony claw dug monstrously into my
shoulder, and he made no motion as I turned my head to look at
whatever he had glimpsed.
There was nothing that I could see. Only the incoming tide, with
perhaps one set of ripples more local than the long-flung line of
breakers. But now Zadok was shaking me, and I turned back to watch
the melting of that fear-frozen face into a chaos of twitching
eyelids and mumbling gums. Presently his voice came back - albeit as
a trembling whisper.
"Git aout o' here!
Get aout o' here! They seen us - git aout fer your life! Dun't
wait fer nothin' - they know naow - Run fer it - quick - aout o'
this taown - -"
Another heavy wave
dashed against the loosing masonry of the bygone wharf, and changed
the mad ancient's whisper to another inhuman and blood-curdling
scream. "E-yaahhhh! ... Yheaaaaaa!..."
Before I could recover my scattered wits he had relaxed his clutch
on my shoulder and dashed wildly inland toward the street, reeling
northward around the ruined warehouse wall.
I glanced back at the sea, but there was nothing there. And when I
reached Water Street and looked along it toward the north there was
no remaining trace of Zadok Allen.
IV
I can hardly describe the mood in which I was left by this harrowing
episode - an episode at once mad and pitiful, grotesque and
terrifying. The grocery boy had prepared me for it, yet the reality
left me none the less bewildered and disturbed. Puerile though the
story was, old Zadok's insane earnestness and horror had
communicated to me a mounting unrest which joined with my earlier
sense of loathing for the town and its blight of intangible shadow.
Later I might sift the tale and extract some nucleus of historic
allegory; just now I wished to put it out of my head. The hour grown
perilously late - my watch said 7:15, and the Arkham bus left Town
Square at eight - so I tried to give my thoughts as neutral and
practical a cast as possible, meanwhile walking rapidly through the
deserted streets of gaping roofs and leaning houses toward the hotel
where I had checked my valise and would find my bus.
Though the golden light of late afternoon gave the ancient roofs and
decrepit chimneys an air of mystic loveliness and peace, I could not
help glancing over my shoulder now and then. I would surely be very
glad to get out of malodorous and fear-shadowed Innsmouth, and
wished there were some other vehicle than the bus driven by that
sinister-looking fellow Sargent. Yet I did not hurry too
precipitately, for there were architectural details worth viewing at
every silent corner; and I could easily, I calculated, cover the
necessary distance in a half-hour.
Studying the grocery youth's map and seeking a route I had not
traversed before, I chose Marsh Street instead of State for my
approach to Town Square. Near the corner of Fall street I began to
see scattered groups of furtive whisperers, and when I finally
reached the Square I saw that almost all the loiterers were
congregated around the door of the Gilman House. It seemed as if
many bulging, watery, unwinking eyes looked oddly at me as I claimed
my valise in the lobby, and I hoped that none of these unpleasant
creatures would be my fellow-passengers on the coach.
The bus, rather early, rattled in with three passengers somewhat
before eight, and an evil-looking fellow on the sidewalk muttered a
few indistinguishable words to the driver. Sargent threw out a
mail-bag and a roll of newspapers, and entered the hotel; while the
passengers - the same men whom I had seen arriving in Newburyport
that morning - shambled to the sidewalk and exchanged some faint
guttural words with a loafer in a language I could have sworn was
not English. I boarded the empty coach and took the seat I had taken
before, but was hardly settled before Sargent re-appeared and began
mumbling in a throaty voice of peculiar repulsiveness.
I was, it appeared, in very bad luck. There had been something wrong
with the engine, despite the excellent time made from Newburyport,
and the bus could not complete the journey to Arkham. No, it could
not possibly be repaired that night, nor was there any other way of
getting transportation out of Innsmouth either to Arkham or
elsewhere. Sargent was sorry, but I would have to stop over at the
Gilman. Probably the clerk would make the price easy for me, but
there was nothing else to do. Almost dazed by this sudden obstacle,
and violently dreading the fall of night in this decaying and
half-unlighted town, I left the bus and reentered the hotel lobby;
where the sullen queer-looking night clerk told me I could have Room
428 on next the top floor - large, but without running water - for a
dollar.
Despite what I had heard of this hotel in Newburyport, I signed the
register, paid my dollar, let the clerk take my valise, and followed
that sour, solitary attendant up three creaking flights of stairs
past dusty corridors which seemed wholly devoid of life. My room was
a dismal rear one with two windows and bare, cheap furnishings,
overlooked a dingy court-yard otherwise hemmed in by low, deserted
brick blocks, and commanded a view of decrepit westward-stretching
roofs with a marshy countryside beyond. At the end of the corridor
was a bathroom - a discouraging relique with ancient marble bowl,
tin tub, faint electric light, and musty wooded paneling around all
the plumbing fixtures.
It being still daylight, I descended to the Square and looked around
for a dinner of some sort; noticing as I did so the strange glances
I received from the unwholesome loafers. Since the grocery was
closed, I was forced to patronise the restaurant I had shunned
before; a stooped, narrow-headed man with staring, unwinking eyes,
and a flat-nosed wench with unbelievably thick, clumsy hands being
in attendance. The service was all of the counter type, and it
relieved me to find that much was evidently served from cans and
packages. A bowl of vegetable soup with crackers was enough for me,
and I soon headed back for my cheerless room at the Gilman; getting
a evening paper and a fly-specked magazine from the evil-visaged
clerk at the rickety stand beside his desk.
As twilight deepened I turned on the one feeble electric bulb over
the cheap, iron-framed bed, and tried as best I could to continue
the reading I had begun. I felt it advisable to keep my mind
wholesomely occupied, for it would not do to brood over the
abnormalities of this ancient, blight-shadowed town while I was
still within its borders. The insane yarn I had heard from the aged
drunkard did not promise very pleasant dreams, and I felt I must
keep the image of his wild, watery eyes as far as possible from my
imagination.
Also, I must not dwell on what that factory inspector had told the
Newburyport ticket-agent about the Gilman House and the voices of
its nocturnal tenants - not on that, nor on the face beneath the
tiara in the black church doorway; the face for whose horror my
conscious mind could not account. It would perhaps have been easier
to keep my thoughts from disturbing topics had the room not been so
gruesomely musty. As it was, the lethal mustiness blended hideously
with the town's general fishy odour and persistently focussed one's
fancy on death and decay.
Another thing that disturbed me was the absence of a bolt on the
door of my room. One had been there, as marks clearly shewed, but
there were signs of recent removal. No doubt it had been out of
order, like so many other things in this decrepit edifice. In my
nervousness I looked around and discovered a bolt on the clothes
press which seemed to be of the same size, judging from the marks,
as the one formerly on the door. To gain a partial relief from the
general tension I busied myself by transferring this hardware to the
vacant place with the aid of a handy three-in-one device including a
screwdriver which I kept on my key-ring. The bolt fitted perfectly,
and I was somewhat relieved when I knew that I could shoot it firmly
upon retiring. Not that I had any real apprehension of its need, but
that any symbol of security was welcome in an environment of this
kind. There were adequate bolts on the two lateral doors to
connecting rooms, and these I proceeded to fasten.
I did not undress, but decided to read till I was sleepy and then
lie down with only my coat, collar, and shoes off. Taking a pocket
flash light from my valise, I placed it in my trousers, so that I
could read my watch if I woke up later in the dark. Drowsiness,
however, did not come; and when I stopped to analyse my thoughts I
found to my disquiet that I was really unconsciously listening for
something - listening for something which I dreaded but could not
name. That inspector's story must have worked on my imagination more
deeply than I had suspected. Again I tried to read, but found that I
made no progress.
After a time I seemed to hear the stairs and corridors creak at
intervals as if with footsteps, and wondered if the other rooms were
beginning to fill up. There were no voices, however, and it struck
me that there was something subtly furtive about the creaking. I did
not like it, and debated whether I had better try to sleep at all.
This town had some queer people, and there had undoubtedly been
several disappearances. Was this one of those inns where travelers
were slain for their money? Surely I had no look of excessive
prosperity. Or were the towns folk really so resentful about curious
visitors? Had my obvious sightseeing, with its frequent
map-consultations, aroused unfavorable notice. It occurred to me
that I must be in a highly nervous state to let a few random
creakings set me off speculating in this fashion - but I regretted
none the less that I was unarmed.
At length, feeling a fatigue which had nothing of drowsiness in it,
I bolted the newly outfitted hall door, turned off the light, and
threw myself down on the hard, uneven bed - coat, collar, shoes, and
all. In the darkness every faint noise of the night seemed
magnified, and a flood of doubly unpleasant thoughts swept over me.
I was sorry I had put out the light, yet was too tired to rise and
turn it on again. Then, after a long, dreary interval, and prefaced
by a fresh creaking of stairs and corridor, there came that soft,
damnably unmistakable sound which seemed like a malign fulfillment
of all my apprehensions. Without the least shadow of a doubt, the
lock of my door was being tried - cautiously, furtively, tentatively
- with a key.
My sensations upon recognising this sign of actual peril were
perhaps less rather than more tumultuous because of my previous
vague fears. I had been, albeit without definite reason,
instinctively on my guard - and that was to my advantage in the new
and real crisis, whatever it might turn out to be. Nevertheless the
change in the menace from vague premonition to immediate reality was
a profound shock, and fell upon me with the force of a genuine blow.
It never once occurred to me that the fumbling might be a mere
mistake. Malign purpose was all I could think of, and I kept deathly
quiet, awaiting the would-be intruder's next move.
After a time the cautious rattling ceased, and I heard the room to
the north entered with a pass key. Then the lock of the connecting
door to my room was softly tried. The bolt held, of course, and I
heard the floor creak as the prowler left the room. After a moment
there came another soft rattling, and I knew that the room to the
south of me was being entered. Again a furtive trying of a bolted
connecting door, and again a receding creaking. This time the
creaking went along the hall and down the stairs, so I knew that the
prowler had realised the bolted condition of my doors and was giving
up his attempt for a greater or lesser time, as the future would
shew.
The readiness with which I fell into a plan of action proves that I
must have been subconsciously fearing some menace and considering
possible avenues of escape for hours. From the first I felt that the
unseen fumbler meant a danger not to be met or dealt with, but only
to be fled from as precipitately as possible. The one thing to do
was to get out of that hotel alive as quickly as I could, and
through some channel other than the front stairs and lobby.
Rising softly and throwing my flashlight on the switch, I sought to
light the bulb over my bed in order to choose and pocket some
belongings for a swift, valiseless flight. Nothing, however,
happened; and I saw that the power had been cut off. Clearly, some
cryptic, evil movement was afoot on a large scale - just what, I
could not say. As I stood pondering with my hand on the now useless
switch I heard a muffled creaking on the floor below, and thought I
could barely distinguish voices in conversation. A moment later I
felt less sure that the deeper sounds were voices, since the
apparent hoarse barkings and loose-syllabled croakings bore so
little resemblance to recognized human speech. Then I thought with
renewed force of what the factory inspector had heard in the night
in this mouldering and pestilential building.
Having filled my pockets with the flashlight's aid, I put on my hat
and tiptoed to the windows to consider chances of descent. Despite
the state's safety regulations there was no fire escape on this side
of the hotel, and I saw that my windows commanded only a sheer three
story drop to the cobbled courtyard. On the right and left, however,
some ancient brick business blocks abutted on the hotel; their slant
roofs coming up to a reasonable jumping distance from my
fourth-story level. To reach either of these lines of buildings I
would have to be in a room two from my own - in one case on the
north and in the other case on the south - and my mind instantly set
to work what chances I had of making the transfer.
I could not, I decided, risk an emergence into the corridor; where
my footsteps would surely be heard, and where the difficulties of
entering the desired room would be insuperable. My progress, if it
was to be made at all, would have to be through the less
solidly-built connecting doors of the rooms; the locks and bolts of
which I would have to force violently, using my shoulder as a
battering-ram whenever they were set against me. This, I thought,
would be possible owing to the rickety nature of the house and its
fixtures; but I realised I could not do it noiselessly. I would have
to count on sheer speed, and the chance of getting to a window
before any hostile forces became coordinated enough to open the
right door toward me with a pass-key. My own outer door I reinforced
by pushing the bureau against it - little by little, in order to
make a minimum of sound.
I perceived that my chances were very slender, and was fully
prepared for any calamity. Even getting to another roof would not
solve the problem for there would then remain the task of reaching
the ground and escaping from the town. One thing in my favour was
the deserted and ruinous state of the abutting building and the
number of skylights gaping blackly open in each row.
Gathering from the grocery boy's map that the best route out of town
was southward, I glanced first at the connecting door on the south
side of the room. It was designed to open in my direction, hence I
saw - after drawing the bolt and finding other fastening in place -
it was not a favorable one for forcing. Accordingly abandoning it as
a route, I cautiously moved the bedstead against it to hamper any
attack which might be made on it later from the next room. The door
on the north was hung to open away from me, and this - though a test
proved it to be locked or bolted from the other side - I knew must
be my route. If I could gain the roofs of the buildings in Paine
Street and descend successfully to the ground level, I might perhaps
dart through the courtyard and the adjacent or opposite building to
Washington or Bates - or else emerge in Paine and edge around
southward into Washington. In any case, I would aim to strike
Washington somehow and get quickly out of the Town Square region. My
preference would be to avoid Paine, since the fire station there
might be open all night.
As I thought of these things I looked out over the squalid sea of
decaying roofs below me, now brightened by the beams of a moon not
much past full. On the right the black gash of the river-gorge clove
the panorama; abandoned factories and railway station clinging
barnacle-like to its sides. Beyond it the rusted railway and the
Rowley road led off through a flat marshy terrain dotted with islets
of higher and dryer scrub-grown land. On the left the creek-threaded
country-side was nearer, the narrow road to Ipswich gleaming white
in the moonlight. I could not see from my side of the hotel the
southward route toward Arkham which I had determined to take.
I was irresolutely speculating on when I had better attack the
northward door, and on how I could least audibly manage it, when I
noticed that the vague noises underfoot had given place to a fresh
and heavier creaking of the stairs. A wavering flicker of light
shewed through my transom, and the boards of the corridor began to
groan with a ponderous load. Muffled sounds of possible vocal origin
approached, and at length a firm knock came at my outer door.
For a moment I simply held my breath and waited. Eternities seemed
to elapse, and the nauseous fishy odour of my environment seemed to
mount suddenly and spectacularly. Then the knocking was repeated -
continuously, and with growing insistence. I knew that the time for
action had come, and forthwith drew the bolt of the northward
connecting door, bracing myself for the task of battering it open.
The knocking waxed louder, and I hoped that its volume would cover
the sound of my efforts. At last beginning my attempt, I lunged
again and again at the thin paneling with my left shoulder, heedless
of shock or pain. The door resisted even more than I expected, but I
did not give in. And all the while the clamour at the outer door
increased.
Finally the connecting door gave, but with such a crash that I knew
those outside must have heard. Instantly the outside knocking became
a violent battering, while keys sounded ominously in the hall doors
of the rooms on both sides of me. Rushing through the newly opened
connexion, I succeeded in bolting the northerly hall door before the
lock could he turned; but even as I did so I heard the hall door of
the third room - the one from whose window I had hoped to reach the
roof below - being tried with a pass key.
For an instant I felt absolute despair, since my trapping in a
chamber with no window egress seemed complete. A wave of almost
abnormal horror swept over me, and invested with a terrible but
unexplainable singularity the flashlight-glimpsed dust prints made
by the intruder who had lately tried my door from this room. Then,
with a dazed automatism which persisted despite hopelessness, I made
for the next connecting door and performed the blind motion of
pushing at it in an effort to get through and - granting that
fastenings might be as providentially intact as in this second room
- bolt the hall door beyond before the lock could be turned from
outside.
Sheer fortunate chance gave me my reprieve - for the connecting door
before me was not only unlocked but actually ajar. In a second I was
though, and had my right knee and shoulder against a hall door which
was visibly opening inward. My pressure took the opener off guard,
for the thing shut as I pushed, so that I could slip the
well-conditioned bolt as I had done with the other door. As I gained
this respite I heard the battering at the two other doors abate,
while a confused clatter came from the connecting door I had
shielded with the bedstead. Evidently the bulk of my assailants had
entered the southerly room and were massing in a lateral attack. But
at the same moment a pass key sounded in the next door to the north,
and I knew that a nearer peril was at hand.
The northward connecting door was wide open, but there was no time
to think about checking the already turning lock in the hall. All I
could do was to shut and bolt the open connecting door, as well as
its mate on the opposite side - pushing a bedstead against the one
and a bureau against the other, and moving a washstand in front of
the hall door. I must, I saw, trust to such makeshift barriers to
shield me till I could get out the window and on the roof of the
Paine Street block. But even in this acute moment my chief horror
was something apart from the immediate weakness of my defenses. I
was shuddering because not one of my pursuers, despite some hideous
panting, grunting, and subdued barkings at odd intervals, was
uttering an unmuffled or intelligible vocal sound.
As I moved the furniture and rushed toward the windows I heard a
frightful scurrying along the corridor toward the room north of me,
and perceived that the southward battering had ceased. Plainly, most
of my opponents were about to concentrate against the feeble
connecting door which they knew must open directly on me. Outside,
the moon played on the ridgepole of the block below, and I saw that
the jump would be desperately hazardous because of the steep surface
on which I must land.
Surveying the conditions, I chose the more southerly of the two
windows as my avenue of escape; planning to land on the inner slope
of the roof and make for the nearest sky-light. Once inside one of
the decrepit brick structures I would have to reckon with pursuit;
but I hoped to descend and dodge in and out of yawning doorways
along the shadowed courtyard, eventually getting to Washington
Street and slipping out of town toward the south.
The clatter at the northerly connecting door was now terrific, and I
saw that the weak panelling was beginning to splinter. Obviously,
the besiegers had brought some ponderous object into play as a
battering-ram. The bedstead, however, still held firm; so that I had
at least a faint chance of making good my escape. As I opened the
window I noticed that it was flanked by heavy velour draperies
suspended from a pole by brass rings, and also that there was a
large projecting catch for the shutters on the exterior. Seeing a
possible means of avoiding the dangerous jump, I yanked at the
hangings and brought them down, pole and all; then quickly hooking
two of the rings in the shutter catch and flinging the drapery
outside. The heavy folds reached fully to the abutting roof, and I
saw that the rings and catch would be likely to bear my weight. So,
climbing out of the window and down the improvised rope ladder, I
left behind me forever the morbid and horror-infested fabric of the
Gilman House.
I landed safely on the loose slates of the steep roof, and succeeded
in gaining the gaping black skylight without a slip. Glancing up at
the window I had left, I observed it was still dark, though far
across the crumbling chimneys to the north I could see lights
ominously blazing in the Order of Dagon Hall, the Baptist church,
and the Congregational church which I recalled so shiveringly. There
had seemed to be no one in the courtyard below, and I hoped there
would be a chance to get away before the spreading of a general
alarm. Flashing my pocket lamp into the skylight, I saw that there
were no steps down. The distance was slight, however, so I clambered
over the brink and dropped; striking a dusty floor littered with
crumbling boxes and barrels.
The place was ghoulish-looking, but I was past minding such
impressions and made at once for the staircase revealed by my
flashlight - after a hasty glance at my watch, which shewed the hour
to be 2 a.m. The steps creaked, but seemed tolerably sound; and I
raced down past a barnlike second storey to the ground floor. The
desolation was complete, and only echoes answered my footfalls. At
length I reached the lower hall at the end of which I saw a faint
luminous rectangle marking the ruined Paine Street doorway. Heading
the other way, I found the back door also open; and darted out and
down five stone steps to the grass-grown cobblestones of the
courtyard.
The moonbeams did not reach down here, but I could just see my way
about without using the flashlight. Some of the windows on the
Gilman House side were faintly glowing, and I thought I heard
confused sounds within. Walking softly over to the Washington Street
side I perceived several open doorways, and chose the nearest as my
route out. The hallway inside was black, and when I reached the
opposite end I saw that the street door was wedged immovably shut.
Resolved to try another building, I groped my way back toward the
courtyard, but stopped short when close to the doorway.
For out of an opened door in the Gilman House a large crowd of
doubtful shapes was pouring - lanterns bobbing in the darkness, and
horrible croaking voices exchanging low cries in what was certainly
not English. The figures moved uncertainly, and I realized to my
relief that they did not know where I had gone; but for all that
they sent a shiver of horror through my frame. Their features were
indistinguishable, but their crouching, shambling gait was
abominably repellent. And worst of all, I perceived that one figure
was strangely robed, and unmistakably surmounted by a tall tiara of
a design altogether too familiar. As the figures spread throughout
the courtyard, I felt my fears increase. Suppose I could find no
egress from this building on the street side? The fishy odour was
detestable, and I wondered I could stand it without fainting. Again
groping toward the street, I opened a door off the hall and came
upon an empty room with closely shuttered but sashless windows.
Fumbling in the rays of my flashlight, I found I could open the
shutters; and in another moment had climbed outside and was fully
closing the aperture in its original manner.
I was now in Washington Street, and for the moment saw no living
thing nor any light save that of the moon. From several directions
in the distance, however, I could hear the sound of hoarse voices,
of footsteps, and of a curious kind of pattering which did not sound
quite like footsteps. Plainly I had no time to lose. The points of
the compass were clear to me, and I was glad that all the street
lights were turned off, as is often the custom on strongly moonlit
nights in prosperous rural regions. Some of the sounds came from the
south, yet I retained my design of escaping in that direction. There
would, I knew, be plenty of deserted doorways to shelter me in case
I met any person or group who looked like pursuers.
I walked rapidly, softly, and close to the ruined houses. While
hatless and dishevelled after my arduous climb, I did not look
especially noticeable; and stood a good chance of passing unheeded
if forced to encounter any casual wayfarer.
At Bates Street I drew into a yawning vestibule while two shambling
figures crossed in front of me, but was soon on my way again and
approaching the open space where Eliot Street obliquely crosses
Washington at the intersection of South. Though I had never seen
this space, it had looked dangerous to me on the grocery youth's
map; since the moonlight would have free play there. There was no
use trying to evade it, for any alternative course would involve
detours of possibly disastrous visibility and delaying effect. The
only thing to do was to cross it boldly and openly; imitating the
typical shamble of the Innsmouth folk as best I could, and trusting
that no one - or at least no pursuer of mine - would be there.
Just how fully the pursuit was organised - and indeed, just what its
purpose might be - I could form no idea. There seemed to be unusual
activity in the town, but I judged that the news of my escape from
the Gilman had not yet spread. I would, of course, soon have to
shift from Washington to some other southward street; for that party
from the hotel would doubtless be after me. I must have left dust
prints in that last old building, revealing how I had gained the
street.
The open space was, as I had expected, strongly moonlit; and I saw
the remains of a parklike, iron-railed green in its center.
Fortunately no one was about though a curious sort of buzz or roar
seemed to be increasing in the direction of Town Square. South
Street was very wide, leading directly down a slight declivity to
the waterfront and commanding a long view out a sea; and I hoped
that no one would be glancing up it from afar as I crossed in the
bright moonlight.
My progress was unimpeded, and no fresh sound arose to hint that I
had been spied. Glancing about me, I involuntarily let my pace
slacken for a second to take in the sight of the sea, gorgeous in
the burning moonlight at the street's end. Far out beyond the
breakwater was the dim, dark line of Devil Reef, and as I glimpsed
it I could not help thinking of all the hideous legends I had heard
in the last twenty-four hours - legends which portrayed this ragged
rock as a veritable gateway to realms of unfathomed horror and
inconceivable abnormality.
Then, without warning, I saw the intermittent flashes of light on
the distant reef. They were definite and unmistakable, and awaked in
my mind a blind horror beyond all rational proportion. My muscles
tightened for panic flight, held in only by a certain unconscious
caution and half-hypnotic fascination. And to make matters worse,
there now flashed forth from the lofty cupola of the Gilman House,
which loomed up to the northeast behind me, a series of analogous
though differently spaced gleams which could be nothing less than an
answering signal.
Controlling my muscles, and realising afresh - how plainly visible I
was, I resumed my brisker and feignedly shambling pace; though
keeping my eyes on that hellish and ominous reef as long as the
opening of South Street gave me a seaward view. What the whole
proceeding meant, I could not imagine; unless it involved some
strange rite connected with Devil Reef, or unless some party had
landed from a ship on that sinister rock. I now bent to the left
around the ruinous green; still gazing toward the ocean as it blazed
in the spectral summer moonlight, and watching the cryptical
flashing of those nameless, unexplainable beacons.
It was then that the most horrible impression of all was borne in
upon me - the impression which destroyed my last vestige of
self-control and sent me running frantically southward past the
yawning black doorways and fishily staring windows of that deserted
nightmare street. For at a closer glance I saw that the moonlit
waters between the reef and the shore were far from empty. They were
alive with a teeming horde of shapes swimming inward toward the
town; and even at my vast distance and in my single moment of
perception I could tell that the bobbing heads and flailing arms
were alien and aberrant in a way scarcely to be expressed or
consciously formulated.
My frantic running ceased before I had covered a block, for at my
left I began to hear something like the hue and cry of organised
pursuit. There were footsteps and gutteral sounds, and a rattling
motor wheezed south along Federal Street. In a second all my plans
were utterly changed - for if the southward highway were blocked
ahead of me, I must clearly find another egress from Innsmouth. I
paused and drew into a gaping doorway, reflecting how lucky I was to
have left the moonlit open space before these pursuers came down the
parallel street.
A second reflection was less comforting. Since the pursuit was down
another street, it was plain that the party was not following me
directly. It had not seen me, but was simply obeying a general plan
of cutting off my escape. This, however, implied that all roads
leading out of Innsmouth were similarly patrolled; for the people
could not have known what route I intended to take. If this were so,
I would have to make my retreat across country away from any road;
but how could I do that in view of the marshy and creek-riddled
nature of all the surrounding region? For a moment my brain reeled -
both from sheer hopelessness and from a rapid increase in the
omnipresent fishy odour.
Then I thought of the abandoned railway to Rowley, whose solid line
of ballasted, weed-grown earth still stretched off to the northwest
from the crumbling station on the edge at the river-gorge. There was
just a chance that the townsfolk would not think of that; since its
briar-choked desertion made it half-impassable, and the unlikeliest
of all avenues for a fugitive to choose. I had seen it clearly from
my hotel window and knew about how it lay. Most of its earlier
length was uncomfortably visible from the Rowley road, and from high
places in the town itself; but one could perhaps crawl
inconspicuously through the undergrowth. At any rate, it would form
my only chance of deliverance, and there was nothing to do but try
it.
Drawing inside the hall of my deserted shelter, I once more
consulted the grocery boy's map with the aid of the flashlight. The
immediate problem was how to reach the ancient railway; and I now
saw that the safest course was ahead to Babson Street; then west to
Lafayette - there edging around but not crossing an open space
homologous to the one I had traversed - and subsequently back
northward and westward in a zigzagging line through Lafayette,
Bates, Adam, and Bank streets - the latter skirting the river gorge
- to the abandoned and dilapidated station I had seen from my
window. My reason for going ahead to Babson was that I wished
neither to recross the earlier open space nor to begin my westward
course along a cross street as broad as South.
Starting once more, I crossed the street to the right-hand side in
order to edge around into Babeon as inconspicuously as possible.
Noises still continued in Federal Street, and as I glanced behind me
I thought I saw a gleam of light near the building through which I
had escaped. Anxious to leave Washington Street, I broke into a
quiet dogtrot, trusting to luck not to encounter any observing eye.
Next the corner of Babson Street I saw to my alarm that one of the
houses was still inhabited, as attested by curtains at the window;
but there were no lights within, and I passed it without disaster.
In Babson Street, which crossed Federal and might thus reveal me to
the searchers, I clung as closely as possible to the sagging, uneven
buildings; twice pausing in a doorway as the noises behind me
momentarily increased. The open space ahead shone wide and desolate
under the moon, but my route would not force me to cross it. During
my second pause I began to detect a fresh distribution of vague
sounds; and upon looking cautiously out from cover beheld a motor
car darting across the open space, bound outward along Eliot Street,
which there intersects both Babson and Lafayette.
As I watched - choked by a sudden rise in the fishy odour after a
short abatement - I saw a band of uncouth, crouching shapes loping
and shambling in the same direction; and knew that this must be the
party guarding the Ipswich road, since that highway forms an
extension of Eliot Street. Two of the figures I glimpsed were in
voluminous robes, and one wore a peaked diadem which glistened
whitely in the moonlight. The gait of this figure was so odd that it
sent a chill through me - for it seemed to me the creature was
almost hopping.
When the last of the band was out of sight I resumed my progress;
darting around the corner into Lafayette Street, and crossing Eliot
very hurriedly lest stragglers of the party be still advancing along
that thoroughfare. I did hear some croaking and clattering sounds
far off toward Town Square, but accomplished the passage without
disaster. My greatest dread was in re-crossing broad and moonlit
South Street - with its seaward view - and I had to nerve myself for
the ordeal. Someone might easily be looking, and possible Eliot
Street stragglers could not fail to glimpse me from either of two
points. At the last moment I decided I had better slacken my trot
and make the crossing as before in the shambling gait of an average
Innsmouth native.
When the view of the water again opened out - this time on my right
- I was half-determined not to look at it at all. I could not
however, resist; but cast a sidelong glance as I carefully and
imitatively shambled toward the protecting shadows ahead. There was
no ship visible, as I had half-expected there would be. Instead, the
first thing which caught my eye was a small rowboat pulling in
toward the abandoned wharves and laden with some bulky,
tarpaulin-covered object. Its rowers, though distantly and
indistinctly seen, were of an especially repellent aspect. Several
swimmers were still discernible; while on the far black reef I could
see a faint, steady glow unlike the winking beacon visible before,
and of a curious colour which I could not precisely identify. Above
the slant roofs ahead and to the right there loomed the tall cupola
of the Gilman House, but it was completely dark. The fishy odour,
dispelled for a moment by some merciful breeze, now closed in again
with maddening intensity.
I had not quite crossed the street when I heard a muttering band
advancing along Washington from the north. As they reached the broad
open space where I had had my first disquieting glimpse of the
moonlit water I could see them plainly only a block away - and was
horrified by the bestial abnormality of their faces and the doglike
sub-humanness of their crouching gait. One man moved in a positively
simian way, with long arms frequently touching the ground; while
another figure - robed and tiaraed - seemed to progress in an almost
hopping fashion. I judged this party to be the one I had seen in the
Gilman's courtyard - the one, therefore, most closely on my trail.
As some of the figures turned to look in my direction I was
transfixed with fright, yet managed to preserve the casual,
shambling gait I had assumed. To this day I do not know whether they
saw me or not. If they did, my stratagem must have deceived them,
for they passed on across the moonlit space without varying their
course - meanwhile croaking and jabbering in some hateful guttural
patois I could not identify.
Once more in shadow, I resumed my former dog-trot past the leaning
and decrepit houses that stared blankly into the night. Having
crossed to the western sidewalk I rounded the nearest corner into
Bates Street where I kept close to the buildings on the southern
side. I passed two houses shewing signs of habitation, one of which
had faint lights in upper rooms, yet met with no obstacle. As I
tuned into Adams Street I felt measurably safer, but received a
shook when a man reeled out of a black doorway directly in front of
me. He proved, however, too hopelessly drunk to be a menace; so that
I reached the dismal ruins of the Bank Street warehouses in safety.
No one was stirring in that dead street beside the river-gorge, and
the roar of the waterfalls quite drowned my foot steps. It was a
long dog-trot to the ruined station, and the great brick warehouse
walls around me seemed somehow more terrifying than the fronts of
private houses. At last I saw the ancient arcaded station - or what
was left of it - and made directly for the tracks that started from
its farther end.
The rails were rusty but mainly intact, and not more than half the
ties had rotted away. Walking or running on such a surface was very
difficult; but I did my best, and on the whole made very fair time.
For some distance the line kept on along the gorge's brink, but at
length I reached the long covered bridge where it crossed the chasm
at a dizzying height. The condition of this bridge would determine
my next step. If humanly possible, I would use it; if not, l would
have to risk more street wandering and take the nearest intact
highway bridge.
The vast, barnlike length of the old bridge gleamed spectrally in
the moonlight, and I saw that the ties were safe for at least a few
feet within. Entering, I began to use my flashlight, and was almost
knocked down by the cloud of bats that flapped past me. About
half-way across there was a perilous gap in the ties which I feared
for a moment would halt me; but in the end I risked a desperate jump
which fortunately succeeded.
I was glad to see the moonlight again when I emerged from that
macabre tunnel. The old tracks crossed River Street at grade, and at
once veered off into a region increasingly rural and with less and
less of Innsmouth's abhorrent fishy odour. Here the dense growth of
weeds and briers hindered me and cruelly tore at my clothes, but I
was none the less glad that they were there to give me concealment
in case of peril. I knew that much of my route must be visible from
the Rowley road.
The marshy region began very abruptly, with the single track on a
low, grassy embankment where the weedy growth was somewhat thinner.
Then came a sort of island of higher ground, where the line passed
through a shallow open cut choked with bushes and brambles. I was
very glad of this partial shelter, since at this point the Rowley
road was uncomfortably near according to my window view. At the end
of the cut it would cross the track and swerve off to a safer
distance; but meanwhile I must be exceedingly careful. I was by this
time thankfully certain that the railway itself was not patrolled.
Just before entering the cut I glanced behind me, but saw no
pursuer. The ancient spires and roofs of decaying Innsmouth gleamed
lovely and ethereal in the magic yellow moonlight, and I thought of
how they must have looked in the old days before the shadow fell.
Then, as my gaze circled inland from the town, something less
tranquil arrested my notice and held me immobile for a second.
What I saw - or fancied I saw - was a disturbing suggestion of
undulant motion far to the south; a suggestion which made me
conclude that a very large horde must be pouring out of the city
along the level Ipswich road. The distance was great and I could
distinguish nothing in detail; but I did not at all like the look of
that moving column. It undulated too much, and glistened too
brightly in the rays of the now westering moon. There was a
suggestion of sound, too, though the wind was blowing the other way
- a suggestion of bestial scraping and bellowing even worse than the
muttering of the parties I had lately overheard.
All sorts of unpleasant conjectures crossed my mind. I thought of
those very extreme Innsmouth types said to be hidden in crumbling,
centuried warrens near the waterfront; I thought, too, of those
nameless swimmers I had seen. Counting the parties so far glimpsed,
as well as those presumably covering other roads, the number of my
pursuers must be strangely large for a town as depopulated as
Innsmouth.
Whence could come the dense personnel of such a column as I now
beheld? Did those ancient, unplumbed warrens teem with a twisted,
uncatalogued, and unsuspected life? Or had some unseen ship indeed
landed a legion of unknown outsiders on that hellish reef? Who were
they? Why were they here? And if such a column of them was scouring
the Ipswich road, would the patrols on the other roads be likewise
augmented?
I had entered the brush-grown cut and was struggling along at a very
slow pace when that damnable fishy odour again waxed dominant. Had
the wind suddenly changed eastward, so that it blew in from the sea
and over the town? It must have, I concluded, since I now began to
hear shocking guttural murmurs from that hitherto silent direction.
There was another sound, too - a kind of wholesale, colossal
flopping or pattering which somehow called up images of the most
detestable sort. It made me think illogically of that unpleasantly
undulating column on the far-off Ipswich road.
And then both stench and sounds grew stronger, so that I paused
shivering and grateful for the cut's protection. It was here, I
recalled, that the Rowley road drew so close to the old railway
before crossing westward and diverging. Something was coming along
that road, and I must lie low till its passage and vanishment in the
distance. Thank heaven these creatures employed no dogs for tracking
- though perhaps that would have been impossible amidst the
omnipresent regional odour. Crouched in the bushes of that sandy
cleft I felt reasonably safe, even though I knew the searchers would
have to cross the track in front of me not much more than a hundred
yards away. I would be able to see them, but they could not, except
by a malign miracle, see me.
All at once I began dreading to look at them as they passed. I saw
the close moonlit space where they would surge by, and had curious
thoughts about the irredeemable pollution of that space. They would
perhaps be the worst of all Innsmouth types - something one would
not care to remember.
The stench waxed overpowering, and the noises swelled to a bestial
babel of croaking, baying and barking without the least suggestion
of human speech. Were these indeed the voices of my pursuers? Did
they have dogs after all? So far I had seen none of the lower
animals in Innsmouth. That flopping or pattering was monstrous - I
could not look upon the degenerate creatures responsible for it. I
would keep my eyes shut till the sound receded toward the west. The
horde was very close now - air foul with their hoarse snarlings, and
the ground almost shaking with their alien-rhythmed footfalls. My
breath nearly ceased to come, and I put every ounce of will-power
into the task of holding my eyelids down.
I am not even yet willing to say whether what followed was a hideous
actuality or only a nightmare hallucination. The later action of the
government, after my frantic appeals, would tend to confirm it as a
monstrous truth; but could not an hallucination have been repeated
under the quasi-hypnotic spell of that ancient, haunted, and
shadowed town? Such places have strange properties, and the legacy
of insane legend might well have acted on more than one human
imagination amidst those dead, stench-cursed streets and huddles of
rotting roofs and crumbling steeples. Is it not possible that the
germ of an actual contagious madness lurks in the depths of that
shadow over Innsmouth? Who can be sure of reality after hearing
things like the tale of old Zadok Allen? The government men never
found poor Zadok, and have no conjectures to make as to what became
of him. Where does madness leave off and reality begin? Is it
possible that even my latest fear is sheer delusion?
But I must try to tell what I thought I saw that night under the
mocking yellow moon - saw surging and hopping down the Rowley road
in plain sight in front of me as I crouched among the wild brambles
of that desolate railway cut. Of course my resolution to keep my
eyes shut had failed. It was foredoomed to failure - for who could
crouch blindly while a legion of croaking, baying entities of
unknown source flopped noisomely past, scarcely more than a hundred
yards away?
I thought I was prepared for the worst, and I really ought to have
been prepared considering what I had seen before.
My other pursuers had been accursedly abnormal - so should I not
have been ready to face a strengthening of the abnormal element; to
look upon forms in which there was no mixture of the normal at all?
I did not open my eyes until the raucous clamour came loudly from a
point obviously straight ahead. Then I knew that a long section of
them must be plainly in sight where the sides of the cut flattened
out and the road crossed the track - and I could no longer keep
myself from sampling whatever honor that leering yellow moon might
have to shew.
It was the end, for whatever remains to me of life on the surface of
this earth, of every vestige of mental peace and confidence in the
integrity of nature and of the human mind. Nothing that I could have
imagined - nothing, even, that I could have gathered had I credited
old Zadok's crazy tale in the most literal way - would be in any way
comparable to the demoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw - or
believe I saw. I have tied to hint what it was in order to postpone
the horror of writing it down baldly. Can it be possible that this
planet has actually spawned such things; that human eyes have truly
seen, as objective flesh, what man has hitherto known only in
febrile phantasy and tenuous legend?
And yet I saw them in a limitless stream - flopping, hopping,
croaking, bleating - urging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight
in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some
of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal ... and
some were strangely robed ... and one, who led the way, was clad in
a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man's
felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head.
I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they
had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the
ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the
anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with
prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their
necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They
hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I
was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their
croaking, baying voices, clearly wed tar articulate speech, held all
the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.
But for all of their monstrousness they were not unfamiliar to me. I
knew too well what they must be - for was not the memory of the evil
tiara at Newburyport still fresh? They were the blasphemous
fish-frogs of the nameless design - living and horrible - and as I
saw them I knew also of what that humped, tiaraed priest in the
black church basement had fearsomely reminded me. Their number was
past guessing. It seemed to me that there were limitless swarms of
them and certainly my momentary glimpse could have shewn only the
least fraction. In another instant everything was blotted out by a
merciful fit of fainting; the first I had ever had.
V
It was a gentle daylight rain that awaked me front my stupor in the
brush-grown railway cut, and when I staggered out to the roadway
ahead I saw no trace of any prints in the fresh mud. The fishy odour,
too, was gone, Innsmouth's ruined roofs and toppling steeples loomed
up greyly toward the southeast, but not a living creature did I spy
in all the desolate salt marshes around. My watch was still going,
and told me that the hour was past noon.
The reality of what I had been through was highly uncertain in my
mind, but I felt that something hideous lay in the background. I
must get away from evil-shadowed Innsmouth - and accordingly I began
to test my cramped, wearied powers of locomotion. Despite weakness
hunger, horror, and bewilderment I found myself after a time able to
walk; so started slowly along the muddy road to Rowley. Before
evening I was in village, getting a meal and providing myself with
presentable cloths. I caught the night train to Arkham, and the next
day talked long and earnestly with government officials there; a
process I later repeated in Boston. With the main result of these
colloquies the public is now familiar - and I wish, for normality's
sake, there were nothing more to tell. Perhaps it is madness that is
overtaking me - yet perhaps a greater horror - or a greater marvel -
is reaching out.
As may well be imagined, I gave up most of the foreplanned features
of the rest of my tour - the scenic, architectural, and antiquarian
diversions on which I had counted so heavily. Nor did I dare look
for that piece of strange jewelry said to be in the Miskatonic
University Museum. I did, however, improve my stay in Arkham by
collecting some genealogical notes I had long wished to possess;
very rough and hasty data, it is true, but capable of good use later
no when I might have time to collate and codify them. The curator of
the historical society there - Mr. B. Lapham Peabody - was very
courteous about assisting me, and expressed unusual interest when I
told him I was a grandson of Eliza Orne of Arkham, who was born in
1867 and had married James Williamson of Ohio at the age of
seventeen.
It seemed that a material uncle of mine had been there many years
before on a quest much like my own; and that my grandmother's family
was a topic of some local curiosity. There had, Mr. Peabody said,
been considerable discussion about the marriage of her father,
Benjamin Orne, just after the Civil War; since the ancestry of the
bride was peculiarly puzzling. That bride was understood to have
been an orphaned Marsh of New Hampshire - a cousin of the Essex
County Marshes - but her education had been in France and she knew
very little of her family. A guardian had deposited funds in a
Boston bank to maintain her and her French governess; but that
guardian's name was unfamiliar to Arkham people, and in time he
dropped out of sight, so that the governess assumed the role by
court appointment. The Frenchwoman - now long dead - was very
taciturn, and there were those who said she would have told more
than she did.
But the most baffling thing was the inability of anyone to place the
recorded parents of the young woman - Enoch and Lydia (Meserve)
Marsh - among the known families of New Hampshire. Possibly, many
suggested, she was the natural daughter of some Marsh of prominence
- she certainly had the true Marsh eyes. Most of the puzzling was
done after her early death, which took place at the birth of my
grandmother - her only child. Having formed some disagreeable
impressions connected with the name of Marsh, I did not welcome the
news that it belonged on my own ancestral tree; nor was I pleased by
Mr. Peabody's suggestion that I had the true Marsh eyes myself.
However, I was grateful for data which I knew would prove valuable;
and took copious notes and lists of book references regarding the
well-documented Orne family.
I went directly home to Toledo from Boston, and later spent a month
at Maumee recuperating from my ordeal. In September I entered
Oberlin for my final year, and from then till the next June was busy
with studies and other wholesome activities - reminded of the bygone
terror only by occasional official visits from government men in
connexion with the campaign which my pleas and evidence had started.
Around the middle of July - just a year after the Innsmouth
experience - I spent a week with my late mother's family in
Cleveland; checking some of my new genealogical data with the
various notes, traditions, and bits of heirloom material in
existence there, and seeing what kind of a connected chart I could
construct.
I did not exactly relish this task, for the atmosphere of the
Williamson home had always depressed me. There was a strain of
morbidity there, and my mother had never encouraged my visiting her
parents as a child, although she always welcomed her father when he
came to Toledo. My Arkham-born grandmother had seemed strange and
almost terrifying to me, and I do not think I grieved when she
disappeared. I was eight years old then, and it was said that she
had wandered off in grief after the suicide of my Uncle Douglas, her
eldest son. He had shot himself after a trip to New England - the
same trip, no doubt, which had caused him to be recalled at the
Arkham Historical Society.
This uncle had resembled her, and I had never liked him either.
Something about the staring, unwinking expression of both of them
had given me a vague, unaccountable uneasiness. My mother and Uncle
Walter had not looked like that. They were like their father, though
poor little cousin Lawrence - Walter's son - had been almost perfect
duplicate of his grandmother before his condition took him to the
permanent seclusion of a sanitarium at Canton. I had not seen him in
four years, but my uncle once implied that his state, both mental
and physical, was very bad. This worry had probably been a major
cause of his mother's death two years before.
My grandfather and his widowed son Walter now comprised the
Cleveland household, but the memory of older times hung thickly over
it. I still disliked the place, and tried to get my researches done
as quickly as possible. Williamson records and traditions were
supplied in abundance by my grandfather; though for Orne material I
had to depend on my uncle Walter, who put at my disposal the
contents of all his files, including notes, letters, cuttings,
heirlooms, photographs, and miniatures.
It was in going over the letters and pictures on the Orne side that
I began to acquire a kind of terror of my own ancestry. As I have
said, my grandmother and Uncle Douglas had always disturbed me. Now,
years after their passing, I gazed at their pictured faces with a
measurably heightened feeling of repulsion and alienation. I could
not at first understand the change, but gradually a horrible sort of
comparison began to obtrude itself on my unconscious mind despite
the steady refusal of my consciousness to admit even the least
suspicion of it. It was clear that the typical expression of these
faces now suggested something it had not suggested before -
something which would bring stark panic if too openly thought of.
But the worst shock came when my uncle shewed me the Orne jewellery
in a downtown safe deposit vault. Some of the items were delicate
and inspiring enough, but there was one box of strange old pieces
descended from my mysterious great-grandmother which my uncle was
almost reluctant to produce. They were, he said, of very grotesque
and almost repulsive design, and had never to his knowledge been
publicly worn; though my grandmother used to enjoy looking at them.
Vague legends of bad luck clustered around them, and my
great-grandmother's French governess had said they ought not to be
worn in New England, though it would be quite safe to wear them in
Europe.
As my uncle began slowly and grudgingly to unwrap the things he
urged me not to be shocked by the strangeness and frequent
hideousness of the designs. Artists and archaeologists who had seen
them pronounced their workmanship superlatively and exotically
exquisite, though no one seemed able to define their exact material
or assign them to any specific art tradition. There were two
armlets, a tiara, and a kind of pectoral; the latter having in high
relief certain figures of almost unbearable extravagance.
During this description I had kept a tight rein on my emotions, but
my face must have betrayed my mounting fears. My uncle looked
concerned, and paused in his unwrapping to study my countenance. I
motioned to him to continue, which he did with renewed signs of
reluctance. He seemed to expect some demonstration when the first
piece - the tiara - became visible, but I doubt if he expected quite
what actually happened. I did not expect it, either, for I thought I
was thoroughly forewarned regarding what the jewellery would turn
out to be. What I did was to faint silently away, just as I had done
in that brier choked railway cut a year before.
From that day on my life has been a nightmare of brooding and
apprehension nor do I know how much is hideous truth and how much
madness. My great-grandmother had been a Marsh of unknown source
whose husband lived in Arkham - and did not old Zadok say that the
daughter of Obed Marsh by a monstrous mother was married to an
Arkham man trough trick? What was it the ancient toper had muttered
about the line of my eyes to Captain Obed's? In Arkham, too, the
curator had told me I had the true Marsh eyes. Was Obed Marsh my own
great-great-grandfather? Who - or what - then, was my
great-great-grandmother? But perhaps this was all madness. Those
whitish-gold ornaments might easily have been bought from some
Innsmouth sailor by the father of my great-grand-mother, whoever he
was. And that look in the staring-eyed faces of my grandmother and
self-slain uncle might be sheer fancy on my part - sheer fancy,
bolstered up by the Innsmouth shadow which had so darkly coloured my
imagination. But why had my uncle killed himself after an ancestral
quest in New England?
For more than two years l fought off these reflections with partial
success. My father secured me a place in an insurance office, and I
buried myself in routine as deeply as possible. In the winter of
1930-31, however, the dreams began. They were very sparse and
insidious at first, but increased in frequency and vividness as the
weeks went by. Great watery spaces opened out before me, and I
seemed to wander through titanic sunken porticos and labyrinths of
weedy cyclopean walls with grotesque fishes as my companions. Then
the other shapes began to appear, filling me with nameless horror
the moment I awoke. But during the dreams they did not horrify me at
all - I was one with them; wearing their unhuman trappings, treading
their aqueous ways, and praying monstrously at their evil sea-bottom
temples.
There was much more than I could remember, but even what I did
remember each morning would be enough to stamp me as a madman or a
genius if ever I dared write it down. Some frightful influence, I
felt, was seeking gradually to drag me out of the sane world of
wholesome life into unnamable abysses of blackness and alienage; and
the process told heavily on me. My health and appearance grew
steadily worse, till finally I was forced to give up my position and
adopt the static, secluded life of an invalid. Some odd nervous
affliction had me in its grip, and I found myself at times almost
unable to shut my eyes.
It was then that I began to study the mirror with mounting alarm.
The slow ravages of disease are not pleasant to watch, but in my
case there was something subtler and more puzzling in the
background. My father seemed to notice it, too, for he began looking
at me curiously and almost affrightedly. What was taking place in
me? Could it be that I was coming to resemble my grandmother and
uncle Douglas?
One night I had a frightful dream in which I met my grandmother
under the sea. She lived in a phosphorescent palace of many
terraces, with gardens of strange leprous corals and grotesque
brachiate efflorescences, and welcomed me with a warmth that may
have been sardonic. She had changed - as those who take to the water
change - and told me she had never died. Instead, she had gone to a
spot her dead son had learned about, and had leaped to a realm whose
wonders - destined for him as well - he had spurned with a smoking
pistol. This was to be my realm, too - I could not escape it. I
would never die, but would live with those who had lived since
before man ever walked the earth.
I met also that which had been her grandmother. For eighty thousand
years Pth'thya-l'yi had lived in Y'ha-nthlei, and thither she had
gone back after Obed Marsh was dead. Y'ha-nthlei was not destroyed
when the upper-earth men shot death into the sea. It was hurt, but
not destroyed. The Deep Ones could never be destroyed, even though
the palaeogean magic of the forgotten Old Ones might sometimes check
them. For the present they would rest; but some day, if they
remembered, they would rise again for the tribute Great Cthulhu
craved. It would be a city greater than Innsmouth next time. They
had planned to spread, and had brought up that which would help
them, but now they must wait once more. For bringing the upper-earth
men's death I must do a penance, but that would not be heavy. This
was the dream in which I saw a shoggoth for the first time, and the
sight set me awake in a frenzy of screaming. That morning the mirror
definitely told me I had acquired the Innsmouth look.
So far I have not shot myself as my uncle Douglas did. I bought an
automatic and almost took the step, but certain dreams deterred me.
The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn
toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do
strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead
of terror. I do not believe I need to wait for the full change as
most have waited. If I did, my father would probably shut me up in a
sanitarium as my poor little cousin is shut up. Stupendous and
unheard-of splendors await me below, and I shall seek them soon.
Ia-R'lyehl Cihuiha flgagnl id Ia! No, I shall not shoot myself - I
cannot be made to shoot myself!
I shall plan my cousin's escape from that Canton mad-house, and
together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out
to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses
to Cyclopean and many-columned Y'ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the
Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.