The Innsmouth Syndrome

by Philip Hemplow

  “Well, I never said it was an infectious process.”

  “But you do think it’s a disease?” persisted Carla.

  “It seems, to me, the most plausible explanation. The feet, the hands, the eyes? The missing hair? Teeth? The lesions on the Ramsgate boy?”

  “Well, from what I understand the children were using drugs. That can explain some of the symptoms. Especially if their supply was cut with toxic chemicals of some kind.”

  “And the other features? Webbed fingers?”

  “It’s hard to say. This is a small town, it’s remote ... over the generations it’s probably become a bit consanguineous.”

  “The changes in bone structure, then. You saw the pictures of the eyes? Did you see the extra cartilage being laid down around the face?”

  “Yes, and that is strange. Something congenital, presumably.”

  “In all four of them? Only two of them have the same father, and only two have the same mother.”

  The road they were following became a two-lane bridge across the Manuxet river. The pilings were fortified with tangled accumulations of rubbish – shopping baskets, discarded beer cans, plastic bags – around which the brackish, eutrophic water simmered, heavy with silt.

  “Well, it could be foetal alcohol syndrome” retorted Carla. “Or something their mothers took during pregnancy. Phenytoin. Lithium. Something like that. Can we even rule out that the skulls were damaged in the accident?”

  The examiner laughed, mirthlessly. “The “Accident”? Oh, I know that’s what the police called it, but it is a bit disingenuous?”

  “You don’t think it was an accident?”

  “No! The four of them must have made a pact. Or three of them, at least. The Parker girl was drugged, she might have been in the car involuntarily.” He sighed. “They drove the car off the road on purpose. It was suicide.”

  Carla felt herself becoming defensive now, as he became increasingly animated. “What makes you so sure?”

  “Well, I’m not sure, but it is a safe assumption. Innsmouth is the teen suicide capital of Massachusetts. Per capita, five times as many child deaths as Boston – and that’s just the reported ones. Most of them are suicides.”

  “Why? Is it that bad here?”

  “This is a poor area, Dr Edwards. The towns around here have been hit hard by the recession. Innsmouth didn’t have much going for it in the first place. Look at any metric you like: unemployment, crime, teen pregnancy, truancy, missing persons, literacy ... across the board, this place is deprived. These are the people who fall through the gaps. They don’t visit a doctor, they don’t attend school most of the time, most of them don’t have jobs. The only support system that’s engaged at all with the community here is the church.”

  “I saw the church in the town centre, but it was derelict.”

  “Once, Innsmouth had three churches. They were all closed down. Burned. No, there’s a church group that operates out of a converted warehouse down on Water Street. They give out food and clothes, run some AA meetings, that kind of thing. That’s about all that’s going on here though.”

  He sounded frustrated. Looked it too, pinching the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. Carla wavered, trying to find a diplomatic way of saying what she really didn’t want to say.

  “OK” she began, “it certainly sounds as though there are issues here.” Dr Khalil looked at her, his brow furrowed. Carla pressed on. “What I’m saying is, if you want to draw attention to shortcomings in the welfare system here ... you know, if that’s why you reported these deaths –“

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” interrupted the examiner, exasperated. “You don’t get it do you? This isn’t some ... social crusade! Here, I’ll show you! Come on, come in here!”

  He steered Carla towards the door of a shop. It didn’t have a visible name but it seemed to be some kind of electrical repairs shop. A sign taped to the door offered `cash 4 applyances working / broke’. The sidewalk outside it was piled high with rusting refrigerators and washing machines, obscuring the windows.

  A bell jangled as Dr Khalil pushed open the door and led the way into the gloomy interior. Carla followed hesitantly, wincing at the shop’s sepulchral smell of dust and lingering, marine putridity.

  The right hand side of the shop seemed to be the display area, and was lit by a couple of wall-mounted spots. The shelves underneath were dedicated to ostensibly functioning goods - kettles, clocks, radios, microwaves, video recorders, car stereos, a couple of ghetto blasters - not much that had been made in the last two decades. In the middle of the shop were broken but still recognisable items that had evidently been cannibalised for parts. Entropy seemed to increase towards the left hand wall, on which were shelves with nothing but random loose components.

  Khalil coaxed Carla forwards through the graveyard of consumer goods, towards the cash desk. Behind it sat a fat, dirty man, who appeared to be wearing nothing but grubby dungarees and a baseball cap with `Kaiser Cement’ written across it. He was watching wrestling on a portable TV, and didn’t look up until Khalil rapped a coin on the counter.

  The examiner began talking – some spurious story about needing an obscure part for a fax machine – but Carla wasn’t really listening. She was too transfixed by the face behind the counter.

  The man’s suspicious, piggy eyes were at the opposite extremes of his face, far from the subtle swelling which was all that remained of his nose. His ears seemed to have atrophied away to almost nothing, and if he had ever had a neck it had been absorbed by rich rolls of fat under his chin. He seemed to have some kind of acute psoriasis too, his skin dry and flaking; and, like the children on the autopsy tables, he had no eyebrows or lashes.

  The overall effect was almost toadlike, an impression that was only reinforced when he replied to Dr Khalil in a guttural tone that managed to be both drawling and stentorian at the same time.

  Carla was so mesmerised by his appearance that it was only when Dr Khalil tugged at her sleeve that she realised they had finished talking. Looking grave, Khalil guided her back out into the ashy sunlight and fresh air.

  “My God!” exclaimed Carla, as soon as they were outside.

  “You see?” said the examiner.

  “Are they – is he related to any of the kids in the car?”

  “Not as far as I know” replied Khalil, beginning to walk towards the seafront again. “Just Innsmouth born and bred. Like that man over there.”

  He pointed at the driver of a rusting, white taxi that had parked on the other side of the street. The man was smoking a cigarette and flicking idly through the pages of what appeared to be a pornographic magazine. He looked to be Latino, but had the same peculiar dishevelment of features as the man in the shop.

  “I – I don’t get it.” admitted Carla. By way of response, Dr Khalil nodded at a kiosk selling newspapers and cigarettes. Carla followed his gaze. A morbidly obese woman with a dirty face glared back at her with another pair of unnaturally offset eyes.

  Carla’s confusion mounted. She turned as if to demand answers of the examiner, thought better of it, and wheeled about again. Her brain worked furiously, trying to reconcile the evidence of her eyes, cycling through and discarding explanations. Dr Khalil laid a hand on her shoulder and opened his mouth to say something. Carla shook his hand off and marched towards the news kiosk.

  The woman regarded her approach warily, giving the minutest nod in response to Carla’s faux-jolly “good morning”. Her skin, Carla saw, was not dry or peeling like the others, but seemed to be coated in an unnaturally thick film of glutinous sebum. Dried mucous was crusted around her nostrils, and the highly unconvincing golden ringlets hanging around her face were obviously a wig. As she approached, Carla’s nostrils were assailed by a powerful stench that strongly suggested the woman would benefit from a course of metronidazole.

  Carla asked her for a local paper. The vendor sniffed and licked her lips before replying. Her tongue was bizarrely pointed with a grey dis
colouration, and Carla thought she saw a row of strange, ring-like weals on the bottom of it before it darted back behind small, sharp-looking teeth.

  “Ain’t ‘ere yet” croaked the woman, huskily.

  “Er ... oh! Right. Well ... um ... a bottle of water, please.”

  The woman sighed wetly and sniffed again, but groped under the counter for a bottle of mineral water nonetheless. She dropped it clumsily on the magazines arrayed in front of her, her gloved fingers momentarily undulating upwards ... Carla blinked. Upwards? She thrust a banknote towards the woman, telling her to keep the change, and strode back towards Dr Khalil, ready to assail him with questions. The examiner gave her a warning look, touched her elbow, and resumed course for the sea front.

  “What is going on here?” hissed Carla, as soon as they were out of earshot. “That woman ... all of them. How long have you known about this?”

  The examiner considered the question. “Well, I suppose it depends on your definition” he answered, carefully. “Since I arrived in the area, I’ve heard mutterings about people from Innsmouth. People saying they’re ugly, not to be trusted ... I just put it down to the kind of local rivalry you tend to get in these places. After I saw the car crash victims I took more of an interest. I came to interview the families, to see if I could find an explanation for their ... physiologies, and I saw it even more pronounced in their parents. And all over the town. Which is when I decided to report it.”

  “You reported it to the EPA first though.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? Did you find something?”

  “Well, I wanted to report it to somebody, and the only explanation I could think of was that these people had been exposed to some kind of environmental hazard.”

  Carla weighed the possibility. “PCBs, heavy metals, something like that?”

  The examiner nodded. “Yes. Something – I hate to resort to clichè, but – something in the water, perhaps? They say there used to be a gold refinery in the town, many years ago. I don’t know how one refines gold, but it doesn’t seem impossible that they could have used something unpleasant. Maybe something that leached into the ground, polluted the water table.”

  “It would have to be something pretty exotic to cause a syndrome as specific as this” pointed out Carla. The examiner shook his head. “No. I changed my mind about that. I don’t think it fits anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, it seems to me that the symptoms – can we call them symptoms now? – are more pronounced in the older residents.”

  “So, not a teratogen then. It has to be something that has a cumulative dose effect, accumulates in the tissues over time. If it takes a few years of exposure to build up to a toxic level -”

  “Again, no. Visitors to the town do not seem to be affected. I’m sure you’ve seen some of them, people who work here, may have been here for many years. They have no trace of illness. It is only in the people who are born here, in the families that have been here for many generations. I have dismissed radioactive contamination, also, for this reason.”

  “No, ionising rads wouldn’t do this. Besides, you’d see cancers.” murmured Carla, thinking out loud. “Well then, what?”

  The doctor gestured with his hands, palms up. “I do not know. I am hoping that you have encountered something like this before.”

  Carla didn’t reply. She didn’t want to admit that she had no more idea than the examiner did. Less, by the sound of it.

  They walked in silence for a while. The buildings here were even more rundown than those in the town centre, their walls stained black by decades of moss. The road had narrowed to a single lane with no sidewalk, but there was no traffic to endanger them.

  Bloated gulls called to them forlornly as they emerged onto the seafront. Not the stout, mustard-beaked herring gulls that would once have commanded the coast. These were sad and degraded inland scavengers, living off cold fries and discarded sandwiches, nesting in bins and painting the shoreline with high-cholesterol diarrhoea.

  It was deserted in both directions. The promenade, Water Street, had none of the trappings that might entice tourists to the coast. Apart from one very unwelcoming-looking bar, it consisted entirely of ancient warehouses. Several had collapsed completely into rubble. Still others had been shored up with what looked like pieces of flotsam to avert a similar fate. A few had been partially refurbished, with corrugated metal doors and fresh cement.

  They crossed the road to stand by the low harbour wall. The water beneath was murky, thick with weed and kelp where it splashed against the slabs of stone. To their left, where the road curved around to the other jaw of the harbour, a rotting wooden infrastructure allowed access to jetties and moorings. An impressive amount of rubbish had accumulated around and beneath it, mainly bags, bottles and cans. The only boats moored amongst the detritus were a couple of small fishing vessels, and a handful of dinghies of assorted seaworthiness.

  Carla leaned on the wall and gazed out to sea. In the middle-distance, waves burst angrily against the thin black line of a reef. Next to it, a safe water buoy periodically pulsed with red light. She remembered the flickering light that she had seen the previous night, while driving into Innsmouth. It must have been fishermen, out on those rocks.

  “What if” she said, turning back to face Dr Khalil, “What if there was some local epidemic around here back when those kids were born? Something like rubella? That explains your birth defects, it explains why outsiders are free of them ...”

  “With the exact same symptoms in each? And what about their parents? The man in the shop? The woman at the news-stand?”

  “Yeah” mumbled Carla. “It’s not a perfect fit, I admit.”

  “Not really” agreed the medical examiner – not unkindly. He seemed to have something to add, but was hesitant, searching for the right words.

  “Ah, look. Look. I did have an idea of my own – about how this syndrome might be explained. It’s probably ridiculous, but ...”

  He looked at Carla. She raised her eyebrows in mute encouragement.

  “Well, I wondered if it might be atavism.”

  “Atavism?”

  “Yes. Well, the changes are so dramatic, and – syndactyly, changes in soft and hard tissue, cartilage growth, ichthyosis, tooth loss ... maybe if the victims were exposed to some kind of agent – a chemical, or even a virus –“

  “And it triggered dormant genes” finished Carla. “Caused point mutations, reactivated old DNA.”

  “Exactly!” said Khalil, excitedly. “Ancient sequences that used to code for proteins that we don’t use any more! From way back in human evolution. Before we even were human, maybe before we even crawled up out of the sea. It is like the babies that, even today, sometimes are born with tails. Those genes are still in us, lying dormant. Of course, these genes would probably be older than that - but who can imagine all the scrap that clutters our genome?”

  Carla was sceptical. “Well, atavism is obviously a known phenomenon. It’s ... theoretically, it’s probably possible” she allowed. “But it’s wildly unlikely. The trouble is, we haven’t established any parameters. We don’t know how many cases we’re talking about, what time period they cover, or even exactly what the symptoms are. There’s no way to look for commonality between the cases until we’ve done that. We need data.”

  “You might find that the residents are not very forthcoming with that information” cautioned Khalil.

  “Well, we can get it from medical records, direct observation, whatever. It has to be the first step. What about the doctors here?”

  “The nearest doctor’s office is in Newburyport. I spoke to her. She says that she’s never had an Innsmouth patient with these kind of features in her office. She knew what features I was talking about, but she’d always just assumed that there were a lot of ugly people in Innsmouth.”

  Carla laughed, half-heartedly. “It would be really convenient if she was right.” She turned back out to sea, and sighed.
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  “Look, I don’t have the resources to do a full epidemiological investigation here. I don’t even know if the CDC as a whole does, as it doesn’t look as though lives are at immediate risk. All I can do is collect as much information as possible in the next few days and recommend further action.”

  “I understand” said Dr Khalil, gravely. “Of course I will help you in any way I can.”

  Carla glanced at him. “Can you get birth records from the local hospital? If you can go through those and find any details of abnormalities recorded by obstetricians, it would help to give us an idea of how many cases we’re dealing with. Start with the records of the four kids killed in the car crash.”

  “I ... can do that” allowed Khalil. “It might take a few days. I don’t think it will turn up much though.”

  “Why not?”