Innsmouth Nightmares

  And then the road came abruptly to an end—or, rather, it intersected with another road (I use the term loosely) that ran perpendicular to it. A rusted metal sign at the intersection, with arrows pointing in opposite directions, told the whole story:

  ← Innsmouth 8 Dunwich 6 →

  I saw no option but to turn to the left.

  To say that the road hugged the coast would be a generous overstatement; there were times when it seemed ready to plunge directly over the rocky shore and into the waiting arms of the North Sea. That metaphor may seem ungainly, but to me it carried a baleful but scarcely understood symbolism.

  As I pulled into the town, I was struck by both the antiquity of the few scattered homes—all seemed made of bland white stone or brick so aged that the original red had decayed to a kind of muddy rust color, with thatch roofs so dry that a single match could set them all aflame—and the near-total absence of their presumed denizens. It was mid-afternoon, and one might assume that all the residents were busy at work in offices or factories or wherever they might be employed—if, that is, any business establishments existed in the town at all. But in fact, aside from a lackluster BP petrol station operated by a stout and surly man of indeterminate age and ragged attire, a pub here and there, and a somewhat more pretentious dwelling that discreetly, almost covertly, advertised itself as a bed-and-breakfast, I saw little commerce.

  I was, of course, used to this kind of ambiance: I knew it well from my own residence in the New England Innsmouth. That was where I had been born thirty-seven years ago.

  I did not think it possible that all the inhabitants of this English Innsmouth worked elsewhere, returning only at evening to huddle secretively and clannishly in their dwellings. At this early stage in my quest I was unconcerned with the comings and goings of the town’s occupants as a whole; it was a single individual who was the focus of my search.

  I had not made any reservations ahead of time for staying in this place, but I calculated that it rarely received visitors and that some accommodation or other would be available for my use; at worst I could stay in a neighboring town. I accordingly made my way to the bed-and-breakfast and was informed that a room was indeed available.

  The almost skeletonic middle-aged woman who received me, her jagged features exhibiting only the slightest trace of surprise at my unannounced entrance, was not likely to be very forthcoming with information. Nevertheless, the length and arduousness of my journey across the sea had made me impatient; and so, after I signed my name, Gerald Sanford, in the old-fashioned guest book and she almost grudgingly handed over the key to my room, I made so bold as to ask:

  “Can you tell me where Maxwell Gilman lives?”

  All expression drained from her face, and she became even more stolidly taciturn than before, if that were possible. For only the tiniest fraction of a second her exophthalmic eyes shone with unwonted fire as she mumbled:

  “There is no such person in town.”

  I knew she was lying, and she knew that I knew it. I wondered if I had made a mistake in proclaiming the purpose of my visit so openly; but what could this woman do to me? I had paid in cash for my lodgings, and I was here for at least a week—so she had better get used to it.

  There was no one to help me up the two flights of stairs to my room, so I trudged there myself, valise in hand. The room was surprisingly comfortable, even cheerful, and some of my accumulated unease sloughed from my mind.

  It was still hours before I could procure dinner—assuming there was even any place in town where such a meal could be had—and so I determined to conduct a thorough investigation of the place, at least in terms of its general topography. It proved to be quite a bit larger than I had expected. For all the continued invisibility of its inhabitants, the relatively well-kept lawns and the absence of any extensive zones of desertion and decrepitude suggested that the residents—wherever they may have been—were not unprosperous or devoid of a middle-class sense of outward respectability. In other contexts I might even have found this a charming seaside town where one might retire in comfort and safety; but knowing what I did, I could not doubt that this superficial tidiness might well conceal something substantially more sinister.

  And if that were the case, then Maxwell Gilman was at the heart of it.

  2.

  “What a noise we made! But it will all be forgotten.”—Lord Dunsany

  My parents had died four months before my trip to England.

  I had hoped that I would never have to see the town of my birth (I refused to call it my hometown) after I had left it nineteen years before. I knew all too well the sinister doings of the nameless, shambling denizens—especially those who remained concealed behind locked doors and shuttered windows, and who emerged only at night to plunge into the waters off Devil Reef—and I considered myself lucky for having escaped the town’s clutches after high school, enrolling at Bard College and convinced that I had left all trace of New England behind me.

  In this I was partially following the lead of my mother. Marcia Waite, of the Innsmouth Waites, had similarly found Innsmouth loathsome and somehow managed to secure a scholarship to Harvard. It was there that she met her future husband, Daniel Sanford; they married shortly after their joint graduation. But the call of her alien heritage must have drawn her back; perhaps she felt that, with the stalwart aid of her fully human husband, she could in some inexplicable fashion reform Innsmouth from within. Instead, she had succumbed to the obscure genetic ailment that afflicted the town’s inhabitants.

  It is said that, to a man in love, his beloved always looks as she did when he first kissed her. I fervently hope that was the case with my father; certainly, his devotion to my mother did not seem to waver as her transformation (the locals called it “the turning”) began to manifest itself. I was not so generous in spirit, withdrawing from my mother in revulsion as her eyes began to protrude from her head, her skin developed a curiously scabrous cast that required constant immersion in salt water for relief, her neck started sprouting creases, and other metamorphoses offensive to sight, smell, and touch gradually overwhelmed her. She herself looked upon her “turning” with a kind of resigned equanimity, for she knew well what was in store for her. My father, as I say, put on a brave front and continued to exhibit the old-world gallantry and courtesy that had won my mother’s heart in college.

  I was not entirely surprised to hear of their joint suicide when both of them were approaching sixty.

  Perhaps it was a coward’s way out; certainly, what few friends they had—my mother had alienated most of the locals by her resolute refusal to acknowledge what they believed to be the wonders and blessings in store for them when they “turned”—expressed incredulity at the treasures she was so heedlessly throwing away. But my mother knew that, whatever the dubious rewards of earthly immortality in the deep might be, she would have to face it alone—or, at least, apart from her husband, whose full-blooded humanity assured his eventual mortality. To her, then, the boons of perpetual life under the sea were vastly outweighed by the bliss of an oblivion shared with the man with whose flesh and spirit she had fused her own.

  I was, as I say, not wholly surprised when I heard the news; my father had been hinting at such an eventuality for years. What dismayed me more than the fact of my parents’ demise was the unavoidable necessity of trudging back from my architect’s office in Ithaca to tend to their estate, meager as it probably was. I was resolved to do so in the swiftest possible manner, putting the house up for sale and casting the legacy and memory of Innsmouth out of my life forever.

  But matters were not as simple as they seemed. Certainly, there was little enough to deal with in terms of assets and possessions, as I quickly learned after arranging for the quiet double funeral in the Congregational churchyard. What troubled me more was the apparent derangement—it cannot be called anything less—of my father’s mind as I examined some of his private papers. In particular, a diary he had sporadically kept for years revealed what s
truck me as a woeful credulousness—a yielding to conspiracy theories not at all characteristic of this confirmed agnostic and skeptic. And the source of the trouble, it appeared, lay in the English Innsmouth.

  My mother had begun hearing from distant relatives on the other side of the water, telling of mysterious gatherings and convocations in the town hall. From what I could piece together from the diary—the letters themselves had apparently been lost or destroyed—it appeared that there were plans underfoot by the English Innsmouthians to wage some kind of all-out war upon the entire human race. When, how, and even whether this war would take place was left unclear by the diary entries. All I could grasp were faint clues and obscure implications in my father’s incoherent ravings about “depth charges,” the shearing off of the Ross Ice Shelf, and other things too preposterous for credence.

  I had no illusions about the Innsmouth denizens on either side of the pond (although, in all honesty, I had not even known of the existence of the English faction until I read my father’s diary), but I regarded them purely as local threats. Yes, they may have kidnapped, even killed, the random traveling salesman or genealogical enthusiast; but the setback the Massachusetts clan had suffered after the Federal raids of the late 1920s had, to my understanding, permanently crippled their capacity for further mischief. I had read the accounts of that raid, including the second-hand testimony of an ancient drunkard whose ramblings about the history of Innsmouth had been taken with surprising seriousness by many credulous readers. Whatever the truth or falsity of his remarks, his account made clear the deep-seated hatred and resentment of humans by the Innsmouth denizens. One remark in particular stuck in my mind—his belief that the Deep Ones “cud wipe aout the hull brood o’ humans ef they was willin’ to bother.” I smiled at this obvious instance of megalomania—the stereotypical response of a repressed minority in the face of an immensely more wealthy and powerful foe.

  So why had my father been so convinced that something untoward— perhaps even of cataclysmic danger to his own species—was being hatched in this obscure and sparsely populated hamlet on the shore of the North Sea? Could it simply have been that he was increasingly disheartened by my mother’s transformation, leaving his own mental faculties vulnerable to outrageous conjectures that under normal circumstances he would have laughed to scorn? A more disturbing thought was that these whispered hints and portents had some relation to my parents’ suicide. Were my parents already convinced that an apocalypse of incalculable magnitude was brewing, one that was now so unavoidable that self-extinction was the only remedy?

  It should not be surprising that I took my time determining my own course of action. Truth be told, I was more fearful of feeling and acting like a fool than I was in contemplating some unheard-of calamity imminently befalling the human race. Such things didn’t happen in a sane world. What led me at last to act was a grudging belief that mischief of a relatively minor sort might be under way, and in that case it was my obligation to do something about it. Somehow I felt that my own connection to the Massachusetts backwater—I was, after all, half human and half alien—might shield me against any dangers I myself might encounter. With a cynical reflection that I might at least come back with some amusing stories to tell my coworkers, I boarded a plane at Syracuse and, by a tediously roundabout manner, found myself embarking on what I was outwardly convinced was a fool’s errand. The faint suspicion that something far more disturbing lay beneath my surface credulity, I sedulously strove to suppress.

  3.

  “It is good to be a cynic. It is better to be a contented cat. And it is best not to exist at all.”—H. P. Lovecraft

  I came to believe that my clumsily direct approach in seeking out Maxwell Gilman had been a mistake—one that might alert him to my existence and my quest, and therefore place me in some sort of danger. Even now I felt that the threat he posed was either insignificant or entirely imaginary—but even if his hatred of the human race was nothing but fantasy, that would not deter him from taking violent action against someone he suspected of trying to foil his plans.

  One obvious course of action would be to seek out the Waite relatives here whose correspondence with my parents had apparently been so disturbing to their mental equilibrium. Whatever knowledge they had would certainly be useful in my enterprise—and if they themselves had irresponsibly frightened my parents with ludicrous and overblown conspiracy theories, I would make it abundantly clear to them that their efforts were deeply resented.

  After much searching, I finally found a pub and ambled in for my evening meal. At first, I sat quietly, enjoying my pint of Guinness and generous plate of shepherd’s pie. The stuffy, confined quarters of the place augmented the discomfort I had felt from the heat and humidity of the season, and I repeatedly mopped my brow and the sides of my neck as if plagued with a rash. It did not escape my attention that I was the object of keen but covert interest from the few other customers in the place, to say nothing of the surly and tight-lipped bartender, whose skull was already exhibiting some of the loathsome metamorphoses that would ultimately lead to his complete transformation. When I asked the slatternly waitress—whose rosy-cheeked complexion and capacious bosom seemed almost a more hideous anomaly, in its context, than the bartender’s disfigurement—whether she knew where any Waites in town lived, she merely stared at me blankly and said:

  “There are no Waites here.”

  Once again, her deceit was all too patent; but what recourse did I have? I could hardly shake the truth out of her, and I became quickly aware that my softly spoken query had nonetheless been overheard by the bartender, whose sharp glance of alarm and hostility was now undisguised.

  Feeling acutely uncomfortable, I got up from the scuffed table without finishing my meal and made for the exit. I could hardly expect any kind of security in the bed-and-breakfast that was my temporary home, but I sensed that any further investigations would unquestionably expose me to dangers whose scope it was beyond my powers to calculate.

  Just as I was leaving the place, another man whose presence I had scarcely noticed rose with an evilly fluid motion and followed me out, keeping so close to me that he almost stepped on my heels.

  With this sudden confirmation of an open threat, I became almost paralyzed with fear. I was no tough-guy private eye from a 1940s film noir; and I had no weapon to ward off capture or bodily injury. In a flash the reckless folly of my actions overwhelmed me, nearly causing me to collapse upon the hard and crumbling pavement. What could have led me to think that, as a single individual, I could somehow counteract a plot—if genuine plot it were—that had clearly been carefully planned and contemplated for months or years, with a legion of surbordinates and associates assisting its creator in carrying out its complex machinations?

  I was therefore not surprised, and even in some inexplicable fashion resigned, to feel my nameless pursuer’s tight grasp of my elbow from behind. Abruptly, he shoved me into a dank alley the moment we passed the outer edge of the low-slung building housing the pub. As he pinned me to the gritty concrete wall of the building, I wearily awaited either a pummelling or the thrust of a knife into my vitals.

  Instead, he muttered the words:

  “You lookin’ for the Waites?”

  Speechless with terror, I could only nod spasmodically, hoping he could detect my gesture in the darkness.

  “Awright,” he growled. “Come this way.”

  I could well be walking to my death, but at this point I hardly cared. I knew no one in this town, could summon no one to assist me; and if there was even a remote chance that this unknown denizen was sincere and not merely luring me to destruction, I felt I had to take it.

  I could barely distinguish the man’s features in the blackness of the alley that we traversed, but something about the gleam in his bulging eyes sickened and dismayed me. I won’t say that a fishy odor clung to him; for I now realized that the entire town had been bathed in that very odor, to such an extent that its absence would have seemed
aberrant.

  The man made sure to keep us away from the few streetlights. Almost no cars, new or old, were apparent, so no headlights were likely to flash suddenly in our direction. We kept close to a succession of brick, stone, and stucco structures, ducking our heads when lighted windows appeared along otherwise blank walls, and weaving from one street to the other in such a bewildering manner that I was quickly disoriented. The extent of the town now seemed even greater than it had appeared when I first saw it, and I doubted my ability to return to the problematical safety of my bed-and-breakfast unassisted.

  When we came to a nondescript brick house that seemed a trifle more dilapidated than its neighbors’, my nameless guide led me to one side of it and then seized me gruffly, stopping me in front of what appeared to be a slanting wooden door leading to a cellar. Looking around hastily with keen suspicion, he unlocked the padlock on the door, pulled up the two flaps of the door with a swift motion, and silently urged me to enter.

  “Where—?” I mumbled.

  “Quick, you stupid git! Get in!”

  Overwhelmed with a sense of resignation, I descended into the black cavity as if stepping into my own grave.

  To my surprise, the place was not merely the basement of the house. Instead, as became quickly evident when my guide stalked over to a wooden door and opened it with a large and archaic-looking brass key, this underground area was the entryway to some well-constructed tunnel whose extent was incalculable. Although the guide pulled out a slim flashlight that cast a fitful illumination along the clammy walls of the tunnel, I was now even more disoriented by the twists and turns of the tunnel than I had been when approaching this spot. Insofar as my cloudy impressions could be relied upon at all, I felt that we were progressing in a southerly or southeasterly direction.