Innsmouth Nightmares

  Although open to the public, the Marsh House was a private museum. It had been founded by the family who had given what was actually a mansion their name. Four stories tall, red brick with white trim, the residence had been built in the Federal style. It stood, simple and austere, amidst a scattering of large trees on the ocean side of the island, at the dead end of a cobbled street whose sidewalks had buckled with the decades’ weather. A threadbare lawn stretched from the house’s back door to the short drop off to the shoreline. The three of us walked to its edge. Amidst the rocks crowding the sand, a half-dozen posts, broken and weatherbeaten, marked points on a line receding into the waves. The remains of the family’s private dock, Edward said. According to him, the Marshes had been one of the major families in Mason during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That was when the village had gone by a different name, Innsmouth.

  “Why’d they change it?” Henry said.

  “Some kind of disease broke out in the early thirties,” Edward said, “or maybe it was the late twenties. Whatever it was was pretty bad, virulent. The place was quarantined; there were actual soldiers stationed on the road to keep people out.”

  “Or in,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Edward said. “Something else went on, too, about the same time. Government raids—like, the F.B.I.. The village used to be a lot bigger. The docks extended pretty far over the water. There were a lot of warehouses built on them—houses, too, like, half the village. The federal agents were interested in the warehouses. Supposedly, they arrested a lot of people.”

  “Smugglers,” I said. “Had to be.”

  “Could be,” Edward said. He turned, and Henry and I followed him around to the front of the house and the museum’s entrance. A kid somewhere in our age range, wearing an oversized Red Sox jersey and perched on a tall chair, raised his eyes from the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated he was lingering over and asked how many. I said, “Three.” As I did, I heard a tremendous crash, as if two enormous gears had clashed together. The kid, his chair, the wall behind him, were suddenly clear, transparent, as if made of glass. Through a series of ghostly layers, I glimpsed the lawn behind the mansion, the ocean. Head wheeling, I jerked my hand to my eyes. Behind me, Edward said, “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” I said, because what else was I going to say? I lowered my hand, hoping I’d spoken truthfully.

  It appeared I had. The kid, the house, were once more solid. Whatever had just happened to me was, to put it mildly, disorienting, but Edward gave me no time to dwell on it. Pushing in front of me, he asked where the Gauguin painting was. The exhibit was on the main floor, the kid said, in the dining room, which was located on the ocean side of the museum. He pointed us to a stack of photocopied guides sloping on top of a low table across from him. Next to the folded sheets sat an undersized caricature of a pirate’s treasure chest with a slot through its lid and the word DONATIONS stenciled on its side. Henry extracted a couple of crumpled dollar bills from the front pocket of his jeans and pushed them through the slot, which guilted me into doing the same. Edward was already off ahead of us, making his way into the house.

  Though high-ceilinged, its rooms were smaller than its exterior implied. Each one was crammed full of what I assumed was its original furniture, plus a selection of objects associated by a common theme. The first room we entered was decorated with a dozen ships in bottles, the containers ranging in size from a small, green-tinted medicine bottle to a large, clear bottle whose contents would have served a sizable dinner party. All of the model ships were sailing vessels, two and three masters. I didn’t see their names anywhere on the bottles. The bottled ships went with the harpoons leaning against one corner of the room, the cutlasses laddered on the wall opposite. An assortment of sextants and compasses covered the top of one side table, while a collection of carved pieces of what I thought were bone had been laid on top of another. “This was how the Marshes made their fortune,” Edward said, “on the sea. They did some piracy during the Revolution, and some whaling later on, but mostly, they were into trading.”

  Neither Henry nor I doubted Edward’s information. Especially when he wanted to go someplace, do something, he researched it as thoroughly as if he were going to present a lecture on it—which he often did to Henry and me, and sometimes to our sisters. Henry said, “What did they trade?”

  “All kinds of stuff,” Edward said. We followed him into the next room. Sitting on its high-backed chairs, a pair of complete suits of samurai armor greeted us. A sheathed katana spanned the knees of each one. A folding screen whose panels were painted with koi had been positioned slightly behind the chairs and their armor. More swords were displayed on the room’s walls, alongside elaborately embroidered kimonos whose flattened sleeves reminded me of pressed flowers. Clusters of side tables held sets of china cups, saucers, and plates. “All right,” Henry said, “this is pretty cool.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  That room opened onto a hallway which ran left toward the back of the mansion. Sneakers squeaking on the floor’s polished wood, the three of us passed portraits of old and old-looking men and women, wearing the fashions and expressions of a century or more in the past. “Hey,” Henry said, “you didn’t finish telling us why they changed this place’s name.”

  “Oh,” Edward said, “no big mystery. The village never recovered from the epidemic and the government raids. Did I mention the fire? There was a big fire—maybe in 1942? Burned almost all of the docks, the warehouses, pretty much everything over the water. People thought the Germans had set it—you know, saboteurs, on account of the war. There was some kind of massive chemical spill—something that had been stored in one of the warehouses. It poisoned the sea pretty far out. Things kept going downhill until the late sixties, when there was a move to revitalize the area, bring it back to prosperity. As part of that, the local officials decided to change the name to Mason, which was what the English called it when they first wrote about it. They cleaned up the shore, which was full of wreckage from the fire, and knocked down pretty much all the remaining piers, which weren’t in great shape. I guess it worked for a little while, but there wasn’t anything out here you couldn’t find in Newburyport. Unless they have a specific reason to visit here, people don’t.”

  “Like a ghost town,” Henry said.

  “A ghost town that can’t disappear,” Edward said. “Although, there’s a story—”

  The rest of the sentence stayed in his mouth, kept there by his first sight of the painting that met us when we turned right at the end of the hall. The picture had been propped on an easel, set up near the French doors that gave a view of the back lawn and the ocean. The mid-afternoon light pouring through the glass was the only illumination in the room; though I noticed a row of track lighting on the ceiling whose lights were all turned in the painting’s direction. A pair of short brass poles held a thick purple rope to mark the limit of our approach. Despite them, the effect of the display was casual, as if the artist might have stepped away from the canvas only a moment or two before.

  The painting itself was smaller than I was anticipating. Since it was a work by a famous artist, I assumed the piece would be at minimum the size of the portraits we had just passed, three feet or so high, two feet or so wide. This picture was half as large. It showed a beach scene, done in the simple lines and rich colors that defined Gauguin’s later style. At its center, a figure executed in dark blues and black stood on a slight sandy rise, its thin arms held to either side, palms out. Its head was an exaggerated oval, the eyes blank, the features heavy, and was crowned with a pair of wings that swept down behind its torso. At its feet, a trio of figures lay on their sides, their backs to the viewer, their arms and legs tucked in front of them in what could have been positions of birth or death. Their skin was pale white, ruddy in places. Below them, a pool of water, possibly an ocean inlet, was busy with dark green and yellow reflections that suggested forms swimming beneath its surface. In the distance behind the b
lue figure, the ocean rolled in white waves from left to right, toward a yellow shore curving to receive them.

  What drew the eye, however, more than the strange blue form, which I assumed was either an idol or a priest, or the patches of green and yellow, which appeared to outline figures whose arms and legs were long, serpentine, was a patch of canvas to the right of center. There, what had been a tall figure rendered in dark greens and yellow-white had been smeared until unrecognizable, apparently by someone who had taken a cloth soaked in turpentine or a similar fluid and done their best to rub out whatever had been painted there.

  Almost simultaneously, Edward said, “There it is,” and Henry and I said, “What happened to it?”

  “It was defaced,” Henry said.

  “No duh,” I said. “Who did it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “No one’s sure. Gauguin himself never said that much about the picture. He was living in Tahiti when he painted it. He had finished this huge painting, one he called, Where Do We Come From? Who Are We? Where Are We Going? It was supposed to be his magnum opus, his crowning achievement as an artist. He told a couple of friends he was going to commit suicide once it was done. According to Gauguin, he kept his pledge. He went into the mountains, took some arsenic, and lay down so, he said, the ants could have him.”

  “Obviously,” I said, “he didn’t.”

  “Or the poison didn’t work,” Edward said, “which was what he said had happened. Supposedly, when he realized he wasn’t going to die, he wandered down to the beach and saw…something.”

  “What?” Henry said.

  “He didn’t say,” Edward said. “But he returned to his home, located a piece of canvas, and set to work on this painting. He was done in a week. In part, that was because he recycled elements from an earlier painting, Day of the Gods. That one has the same composition, the idol in the middle of the beach setting. Day of the Gods, though, is full of people, mostly women, and they’re all part of a celebration of the blue idol, the god. There’s all kinds of symbolism in it, but it’s basically a happy painting. This one…” He shook his head. “Not so much.”

  “What’s it called?” I said.

  “What the Sea Gave.”

  “Who’s the blue guy supposed to be?” Henry said.

  “Gauguin called him an image of the Beyond,” Edward said. “I read one critic who said he represents a Polynesian god whose name I can’t remember. I read another guy who said Gauguin had transplanted the figure from a Buddhist temple he’d seen somewhere. He’s some kind of divinity.”

  “Why is he holding out his hands like that?” Henry said.

  Edward shrugged. “Beats me.”

  “It looks like he’s separating things,” I said, “keeping them apart.”

  “Could be,” Edward said.

  “What about the damaged part?” Henry said.

  “There’s no mention of anything wrong with it in Gauguin’s letters,” Edward said, “which you’d think there would be if anyone had defaced it while he was still alive. Although…most of the stuff he painted, he sent to Paris to be sold. It doesn’t seem like he did that with this picture.”

  “Could he have rubbed out the spot?” I said.

  “I guess,” Edward said, “but you wonder why he wouldn’t paint over it, or trash the painting, if he felt that strongly about it.”

  “How did these guys get hold of it?” I said, “The Marshes?”

  “Their ships were pretty busy in that part of the world. Somehow, after Gauguin died, the painting found its way onto one of their vessels. It had been wrapped in brown paper, with no destination written on it. It ended up in one of their warehouses here, where it stayed for years, until someone decided to take a peek under the wrapping. The family wasn’t sure what to make of it; a few more years passed before a guy from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston came to examine it and tell them what they had. For a long time, they kept the painting to themselves, until they decided to turn their old home into a museum, and realized the picture could be an important part of it.”

  “Huh,” I said. For a moment, the three of us stared at the canvas. I was struck by its physicality, by the brushstrokes visible at the edges of the figures, by the minute rises and falls of the paint’s surface, by the furious spiral someone had rubbed into the picture. “What do you think was there?” I said to Edward.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe another idol, like the one in the middle.”

  “Huh.”

  We didn’t stay much longer. On our way out, we checked the closet-sized gift shop, where the kid in the Red Sox shirt sold the three of us cheap plastic samurai swords and Edward a postcard reproduction of the painting. As we meandered toward our rendezvous with our parents, Edward said, “It’s funny: when the Marshes were sailing all over the globe, there were crazy stories about them having made a deal with the Devil—but, like, a sea-Devil. Wouldn’t it be weird if that was what Gauguin had painted, a sea-Devil?”

  The reply I was about to offer was cut off by a blast of sound. The same grinding noise I had heard in the museum roared in my ears. At the same time, everything around me, the flat-faced houses, the narrow sidewalk, the potholed main street, lost its color, draining to transparency. I looked for my brothers and saw Edward beside me, translucent, the distant ocean visible through him. A feeling of immense helplessness swept over me, as if something crucial had buckled within me. I knew Henry must be behind me, but I didn’t want to turn around, in case he too was fading, and in case, in the time he was out of my sight, Edward disappeared completely. Already he, the surrounding buildings, the street, were filling with light, as if the sun had reached the exact position in the sky necessary for its rays to catch on them. My ears, my skull, rang with the slow clashing and crashing of titanic gears, of machinery vast enough to turn the sky above. Edward blazed with a brilliance that forced tears to my eyes. I fought against closing them, because I knew with terrible certainty that were I to do so, the instant I opened them, my brother would be gone.

  In the end, I did close them. They shut themselves, despite my best efforts, the pain overriding my intentions. The enormous sound continued for what felt like hours, concluding sharply, as if those gigantic gears had locked into a new position. I waited with my eyes closed until the echoes of the noise had subsided enough to admit other sounds, the boom and hiss of the surf on rock, the cries of gulls overhead, the murmur of distant voices. I opened my eyes to the great rocks of Acadia National Park jutting out into the Atlantic’s waves, to white birds hanging in the breeze, to families and couples picnicking on the rock around me. Along with the new surroundings came knowledge of the new life of which they were part. I call it new, but I apprehended this existence as the unbroken record of my experiences to that point. Except that, layered beneath this life was another, which intersected it in some places, diverged from it in more, the most significant of which was Edward, who had been erased from my family completely.

  That night, I dreamed about him. I had been quiet the long car ride back to the house my parents had rented, which I explained with an appeal to too much time in the sun. After dinner, I sat with my (diminished) family while we played cards at the kitchen table and listened to WBZ out of Boston on the radio. I lost a couple of hands of gin rummy before excusing myself. My face was flushed. I felt feverish, and took the ibuprofen my mother recommended. For a short time, I lay in my bed, listening to my parents and (one) brother and sisters continuing the game, then dropped into unconsciousness.

  My dream occurred within the painting we had viewed in the Marsh House. Edward was there, but he appeared as one of the figures in the picture, his features simplified, stylized, his hair a mass of shifting color. Behind and to his left, the blue god held its hands to either side, palms-out. Behind and to his right, a dark smear in the air occulted something whose eyes were too big and a deep, fiery yellow. The joy that rushed through me at the sight of my brother—however strange that sight might be—was tempered
by unease at the veiled form.

  Smiling, Edward said, “You’re here.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “They hid it,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The town, Innsmouth. Changing its name wasn’t enough. The problems were too extensive. They decided more drastic measures were called for.”

  “Who did?”

  “The Marshes. And others.” He gestured at the dark patch in the air.

  I kept my gaze from it. “What—”

  “You don’t need to know. They helped, that’s all.”

  “Helped with what?” I said.

  “Shifting the village. They excised it from this space and hid it in others.”

  “Others? What others?”

  “Stories, mostly, although a couple of novels and some comics, too. A few paintings, movies. They used the zones that are created when you’re reading, or watching a movie, those imaginative locations. They figured out a way to align enough of them to hold the village and its residents. There’s a lot of higher math involved; I don’t understand most of it.”

  “But what about you? You didn’t live there.”

  “I got caught in the process. It’s like these guys created a whirlpool in space and time, and I was standing too close to it. The same thing happened to a lot of people—to a lot of things, too. All of us dragged out of our old lives and washed up in a new one.”

  “I’ll save you,” I said. “Hang on. I’ll work something out.”

  “It’s too late,” Edward said. “At least, I’m pretty sure it is. Reality—your reality—has already been rewritten. I bet you have a whole new set of memories—a whole new life, don’t you?”