Innsmouth Nightmares

  At times the propinquity of the sea seemed alarmingly evident, as I could detect the lapping of waves even through the seemingly solid tunnel walls. As before in the pub, the closeness and clamminess of my surroundings caused an intense itchiness to throb over my face, neck, and arms. Our trudging set up disturbing echoes throughout the tunnel; that didn’t seem to worry my guide, who was solely concerned with traversing this channel as quickly as he could, not caring whether I was agile or adept enough to follow his increasingly agitated course.

  Without warning we came around a sharp bend and were forced to stop— indeed, I almost collided with my guide as he halted in front of a wall made of compacted dirt, against which a rickety wooden ladder was leaning. Pausing only for a moment, the man ascended the ladder, blandly assuming I would follow.

  The wooden trapdoor that lay at least ten feet above us was apparently not locked, for the guide merely pushed it up with the back of his head and his shoulders, stepping out into the open air without troubling to offer me any assistance as I myself emerged from the bowels of the earth. He headed jerkily toward an incredibly aged and battered pickup truck that lay in a kind of ditch or depression next to an unpaved road, climbed into it, and waited impatiently for me to do likewise.

  As I mechanically did so, the man pulled a key from the pocket of his trousers, started the vehicle, and deftly steered it onto the road. The sound of the sea was now plainly audible; and as soon as my eyes had adjusted to the circumambient darkness, I could see the vast expanse of the North Sea to my left, less than a hundred yards from the road.

  I could tell at once that we were heading to Dunwich.

  I had neglected to do any research into that neighbor of the English Innsmouth, but somehow I had assumed that it was all but deserted. It had, of course, been a thriving port from as early as the Anglo-Saxon period (when it was the capital of the Kingdom of the East Angles) to as late as the nineteenth century; but the wearing away of the shore through the relentless advance of the sea had, so I believed, rendered it all but uninhabitable. To be sure, as we drove the relatively short distance from Innsmouth to Dunwich and entered the hamlet, I could see that it constituted nothing but a single dirt road flanked by decaying stone or brick houses on either side, many of them appearing unoccupied. I could detect nothing in the way of a public building—no town hall, restaurant, petrol station, or pub—and in this near-pitch darkness it could well have been a ghost town of the sort that can still be found in the remoter reaches of the American West.

  My guide led me to one structure that seemed a trifle less decrepit than the others. Braking abruptly, he merely gestured with his head in that direction and said laconically:

  “In there.”

  Why I obeyed his orders so unquestioningly I could scarcely have explained to myself. An overriding sense of doom and futility overwhelmed me, as if I had ventured into a course of action that had been fated from the beginning of time to lead to my own—and perhaps the world’s—extirpation.

  I knocked tentatively on the thick wooden door. Almost before my knocking had ceased, the door opened infinitesimally and a face peered up at me. I could not tell if this stunted parody on humanity was male or female, but when it uttered a single sentence I could tell it was a woman.

  “You the Waite that come from Ameriker?”

  I nodded, sensing that the inquirer would either not have known my father’s name or, more likely, have felt that my connection to my mother was the more vital relation.

  She opened the door only as far as was required to let me enter, then slammed it.

  What I saw as I entered in the cramped, dimly lit cottage was a couple so far advanced in the “Innsmouth look” that their human attributes were all but obliterated. The woman who had grudgingly ushered me into her home was all but bald, with only a few strands of thin, stringy, dun-coloured hair dangling from a piebald head whose facial features were scabrous and scaly as if afflicted with some vile scrofulous disease. The elderly man who sat stolidly in an easy chair toward the back of the room betrayed the severe distortion of the skull that I had noticed in the bartender of that seedy pub in Innsmouth, while the fingers of his hands were fusing together with the characteristic webbing that any number of older denizens in my Massachusetts hometown had exhibited as they aged.

  As I stood hesitantly near the front door, the woman almost barked at me:

  “Ye’d better sit down. That chair will do well enough for ye.” She nodded curtly at a straight chair that, uncomfortable as it was, seemed better suited for its purpose than the mangy sofa on which she presently lowered herself.

  I sat down as indicated, but continued to say nothing. The woman—presumably the Mrs. Waite who held some unspecified relationship to my mother—looked at me almost as if I were a dimwitted schoolboy and said sharply:

  “Well, it’s about time ye got ‘ere. Yer parents be dead these four months now, ain’t it?”

  “That’s true,” I managed to mumble. “But I wasn’t certain what to do—what was really going on here—”

  “Yeah?” Mrs. Waite interrupted. “Well, that goes fer us, too. As ye can see, we been kicked out o’ Innsmouth—’asked ter leave,’ as the almighty Maxwell Gilman put it with that silver tongue of ‘is. They musta known about those letters we sent to yer kin—they seem ter know everything ‘round ‘ere.”

  “So exactly what is happening—or about to happen?”

  “I wish ter Gawd we knew!” Mr. Waite exploded out of the dark corner of the room. “They stopped letting us in ter their meetin’s once they sensed we wuz on the ‘other side.’ But they’re plannin’ somet’in’ awright—somet’in’ big. What it is, and how they plan to dew it, Gawd only knows…”

  “But,” I protested, “how could this Maxwell Gilman really do anything? My father’s diary spoke of cataclysmic events that might threaten the entire planet. Gilman can’t possibly have that kind of power.”

  “Can’t he?” Mrs. Gilman almost shrieked in a snide voice that chilled me to the bone. “Can’t he?” she repeated in a whisper. “What do you know about ‘im? How can you possibly know what kind o’ ‘power’ he has?”

  “I know nothing about him!” I exploded. “No one in Innsmouth will even admit his existence.”

  “Oh, he exists awright,” Mr. Waite said sardonically.

  “Well, where am I to find him?” I cried. “And what am I to do? How can I—or even the three of us—strike back at him? Or are there more who would join us?”

  “A few more,” Mrs. Waite said without enthusiasm. “But most are on the side of the Deep Ones. After all, they’ll end up down there one o’ these days. So would we—we could take the plunge right now if we dared.”

  I pondered for a moment. “So why aren’t you on the side of the Deep Ones? I can point to my father as the source of my allegiance to humanity…but— but—it doesn’t seem…” I broke off clumsily.

  “No,” Mrs. Waite said in a horrible travesty of humour, “we ain’t so pretty anymore—not much human blood in us. We’ve ‘turned,’ that’s a fact. Why we ain’t on their side, I couldn’t really tell ye—maybe it’s becuz we always thought a ‘live-and-let-live’ policy was best. What Gilman is set to do will make everyone’s life a horror—humans and Deep Ones alike. Maybe he don’t care—maybe he jest wants to take everyone down with the ship, if ye catch my meanin’. I wouldn’t put it past him to destroy the whole bloomin’ planet jest to satisfy his bloodlust.”

  “But again,” I said, “how can he do that?”

  “I tell ye, I don’t know!” Mrs. Waite shouted at me. “They kicked us out afore their plans were set. But I put it to ye, young feller, he could and he will!”

  I was curiously unable to dismiss her words as the ravings of a lunatic or the vengeful fantasies of one who had been ostracized from the community in which she had lived her whole life. This couple had been on the scene at least at the beginning of whatever plans Gilman had had for universal destruction, and at a minimu
m they had to have some soupçon of evidence of his abilities. But their months-long isolation had rendered them ignorant of critical details, and all they could do was fume impotently.

  My subsequent discussions with the pair were inconclusive. They didn’t even know where Gilman resided anymore, and in any case they expressed doubt that he could be found easily—there were all manner of secret warrens where he could lie unconcealed even from other denizens of the unwholesome town. What further course of action any of us could take was a puzzle, but I vowed to continue my investigations, even though the couple expressed cynical doubts of any positive result.

  My guide through the tunnel, whose identity I never ascertained, was waiting for me in his truck, as he must have known I had no other means of returning to Innsmouth. The short drive back to the town was made in silence, and as I left him and made my way up the short flight of stairs to my room at the unwelcoming bed-and-breakfast, I only yearned for a long, restful night’s sleep.

  I suppose I should not have been wholly surprised at the presence of two immense and loathsomely fishlike creatures waiting quietly for me in my room. Both flight and struggle were useless. I merely gazed at them and said:

  “What now?”

  The one who still had something in the way of lips said hoarsely:

  “You’d better come with us, mate.”

  4.

  “Human life must be some kind of mistake.”—Arthur Schopenhauer

  And so I was brought face to face with Maxwell Gilman.

  The two thugs had blindfolded me after leading me to a rickety vehicle parked on the street, and it was evident that the repeated turns they executed were meant to confuse me as to our ultimate destination. After nearly half an hour of driving, they removed my blindfold. Before us was a solitary thatch-roofed house far away from any neighboring structure and strikingly close to the lapping sea. My captors led me into the house, opened a trapdoor toward the back of the place, and compelled me to descend a metal ladder to some underground tunnel or chamber. I wryly thought to myself that I was spending more time under Innsmouth than upon its streets; but I had little time for reflection before being led to a tiny and dimly lit chamber.

  Gilman was, in appearance, not at all what I was expecting. Well beyond middle age, he exhibited few if any signs of the “Innsmouth look”; if anything, he was more human-looking than myself. I had heard of rare cases where the “turning” took place almost overnight, with unprecedented physiological and psychological changes that unmistakably exhibited the telltale stigmata of the Deep Ones. But looking at this portly, well-dressed gentleman, thin blondish hair fluttering untidily above a rubicund face, seated placidly behind a bare wooden desk, I couldn’t help feeling that he was the scion of unmixed English gentry. What puzzled me even more than his apparent normalcy was the cloud of gloom and melancholy that suffused his countenance, as if he were bearing the weight of a world whose dire fate he had no power to deflect.

  Gilman was not slow in noticing my surprise.

  “We meet at last, Mr. Sanford,” he began smoothly. “I apologize for any roughness with which you may have been treated by my associates. It was probably unnecessary, but my colleagues are perhaps not as well-bred as I am. Class distinctions still matter in this country, I fear.

  “You perhaps wonder that I am not more—aberrant—than I seem to be, at least outwardly. That is because I share an important trait with you, Mr. Sanford: I too am what some might call a ‘half-breed.’ In short, sir, I am human in one half of my parentage. But whereas you are the spawn of a human father, it is my mother who sprang from the currently dominant species on this planet.”

  Stunned, I could only say: “Where is she now?—and what does she think of…of whatever it is you are doing?”

  “Where is she now?” Gilman repeated acidly. “She is no more. It is best not to enquire into her fate. I loved her, but was not sad to see her go. My allegiance is to the other side of my ancestry, for reasons that will become clear in due time.”

  “Why have you brought me here?” I spat out. I was already becoming tired of exchanging words with what I regarded as the fount of present and future horror in this town. “And now that you have me, why don’t you just…just dispense with me at once?”

  Gilman turned his head at a crooked angle, as if investigating a paramecium exhibiting unusual signs of intelligence.

  “Mr. Sanford, I will admit that the temptation to ‘dispense’ with you without delay was substantial. You have been kept under close watch during your entire stay here, and we are also fully aware of the contacts between your relatives on both sides of the water. For some time the chances of you or anyone else interfering with my plan seemed remote; but now, things have changed to such a degree that”—and here he uttered a sigh of ineffable weariness—”it hardly seems to matter what happens to any of us.”

  He went on after a pause: “Perhaps the fortuitous parallel of our mixed-race ancestry inspires me to treat you more gently than would be my wont. Perhaps I feel you deserve to know the truth about what has been happening here—a truth, I assure you, that you would have difficulty comprehending even with what you know of the alien blood that runs through your veins.”

  “All I know,” I burst out, “is that your plans threaten all civilization, all natural law, perhaps even the fate of the solar system and the universe.”

  “Come now,” Gilman said deprecatingly. “Even my powers do not extend that far. Civilization—human civilization, that is—was indeed my target; beyond that, I have nothing to do.”

  “But why?” I cried. “You yourself are half-human. Is there nothing from that side of your ancestry that draws your allegiance?”

  “Don’t you dare speak to me in that sanctimonious way!” Gilman exploded, arising abruptly from behind the desk to confront me. His shortness of stature was no impediment to the imposing figure he cut. “I scorn my human side like the plague; if I could purge my blood, my bones, my sinews of anything relating to the human, I would do so without delay or regret. The emergence of humanity is the greatest disaster this long-suffering globe has ever endured.

  “What have you humans done with the great gifts you have been given?” he went on in an ecstasy of misanthropic rage—”the gifts of a bountiful natural world, and the gifts of a titan intellect that in such plangently rare instances has produced an Aristotle, a Michelangelo, a Mozart? What have you done but corrupt the planet, herd countless species to extinction, and wage cruelly destructive wars over obscure points of religious doctrine or transient political advantage?

  “You dare to accuse me of endangering ‘civilization’?” he thundered, his wrath seeming to grow with each word he uttered. “You as a species are not civilized. You are more savage than the beasts of the forest. You are the only sentient creatures that kill for sport. It would have been a consummation devoutly to be wished to have extirpated the human cancer from the planet.”

  The one thing my reeling mind seized upon in this insane rant was a pair of inscrutable words toward the end. “Would have?” I said faintly.

  “Oh, yes,” Gilman went on with scarcely an interruption. “I had great plans—and I could have carried them out to the letter. Look here”—he boldly approached me, seized the lapels of my coat, and almost spat his next words in my face—”what do you really know of the Deep Ones? Do you think that the small colony that flounders under the waters near your hometown in far-off Massachusetts is of the slightest consequence? Does it not occur to you that there are dozens of such colonies under the sea in every corner of the world? If you were ever to think of the extent of all that may be brooding down under the deep, you would doubtless wish to kill yourself forthwith. And it was my plan to harness those legions of Deep Ones to extinguish your puny race as if it were an anthill brushed away by the heedless foot of a passerby.

  “It was all so carefully worked out! The details won’t interest you—they no longer interest me—but let me just hint that they involved such th
ings as the manipulation of thermal vents to raise the temperature of the seas; the harnessing of the shoggoths—you do know of them, don’t you?—to shear off the entire Ross Ice Shelf to raise the ocean levels…The earth is three-quarters water by surface mass in any event; it would not have taken a great deal of effort to cover over that insignificant remaining quarter so that your land species would have been entirely obliterated.”

  “You’re not referring to global warming?” I said incredulously. “You had a hand in that?”

  “How I wish!” Gilman cried out in a kind of mirthless laugh. “How fervently I wish! But I cannot take credit for that honor. Let me show you what really happened.”

  With that, he made an almost imperceptible motion with his head, and at his apparent command his two thugs seized me unceremoniously and dragged me in the direction in which Gilman himself was headed. A door that I had almost failed to notice led to a lightless corridor whose odor of salt water was unmistakable the moment I stepped—or was forced—into it; a distant shimmering of light and the sound of lapping waves made it all too clear that we would shortly emerge to face the wide expanse of ocean.

  The terror and unease that had been accumulating in me from the moment of my capture were now increased a thousandfold as I was led unwillingly to that aperture. Absurd and ludicrous as my personal fate now seemed in light of the danger that I still believed Maxwell Gilman to constitute to the entire planet, I nonetheless shrieked out: “No, no! I can’t swim!” The irony of my inability in light of my heritage did not escape me.

  As we came out into a short platform that led directly into the sea, Gilman turned to me contemptuously and, giving a brief glance at either side of my neck, said:

  “Oh, yes, you can.”

  With that, he stripped off his clothing and plunged into the water. My captors relieved me of my clothes and threw me into it an instant later.