by James Wade
“You’ll have to get better acquainted with Flip,” Wilhelm was saying. “If you’re to help us learn to interpret delphinese, you and he should become good friends.”
There was a commotion in the water. Flip turned abruptly to his left and swam off semisubmerged, emitting as he did so the first dolphin sound I had ever heard: a shrill whistle of derision.
VI
That evening after dinner, Josephine and I walked on the beach under a moon that shone only intermittently through scurrying clouds. Dr. Wilhelm was in his office writing up notes, and the housekeeper-cook, last to leave of the staff each evening, was just rattling off toward San Simeon in the Institute’s Land Rover.
I found that I didn’t know what to make of my feelings toward Jo. When I had seen her in the pool with the dolphin that morning, she had attracted me intensely, seeming in her proper element. But at dinner, in a frilly cocktail gown that somehow didn’t suit her, she once more repelled me with her sallow skin, her bulging, humorless eyes.
“Tomorrow the hypnosis sessions are to begin,” I reminded her as we paced slowly toward the surf s edge. “Are you sure you really want to undergo this? After all, you say you have no confidence in this approach, and that may inhibit your response to it."
“I’ll do as Fred thinks best, and I’ll assume what he assumes, temporarily at least. I’ve become quite good at that, within limits. Did you know he once wanted me to marry him? That’s where I drew the line, though.”
“No." I was embarrassed by her abrupt interjection of personal matters.
“I think it was for convenience, mostly. His first wife had died, we were working together, we shared the same interests—even the fact that we had to stay here together overnight, to watch over the work twenty-four hours a day when that was necessary—well, it would have made things easier, but I told him no.”
“How did you first become interested in—delphinology, is that the word?” I sought to change the subject. We had reached the point beyond which the waves retreated, leaving streaks of hissing, iridescent foam half visible in the gloom.
“Actually, I’ve always been fascinated by the sea and things that live underwater. I used to spend half my time at the aquarium back home in Boston—either there or down at the harbor.”
“Your family comes from Boston?”
“Not originally. My father was in the Navy, and we lived there a long time, ever since Mother died. His family came from a run-down seaport mill-town called Innsmouth, up past Marblehead. The Gilmans are an old family there. They were in whaling and the East Indies trade as far back as two hundred years ago, and I suppose that’s where my oceanographic interests come from.”
“Do you often go back there?”
“I’ve never been there, strange as it seems. The whole place almost burned to the ground back in the 1920’s, before I was born. My father said it was a dead, depressing place, and made me promise years ago to keep away from it—I don’t know exactly why. That was just after his last trip there, and on his next voyage he was lost overboard from a destroyer he commanded. No one ever knew how; it was calm weather.”
“Weren’t you ever curious about why he warned you away from—what was it, Innsville?” I faltered.
“Yes, especially after he died. I looked up the newspapers from around the time of the big fire—the Boston libraries had almost nothing else on Innsmouth—and found one story that might have had some bearing. It was full of preposterous hints about how the people of Innsmouth had brought back some sort of hybrid heathen savages with them from the South Seas years ago, and started a devil-worship cult that brought them sunken treasure and supernatural power over the weather. The story suggested that the men had interbred with their Polynesian priestesses or whatever, and that was one reason why people nearby shunned and hated them.”
I thought of Josephine’s swarthy skin and strange eyes, and wondered. We had covered a mile or more from the Institute, and were suddenly aware that the darkness ahead was laced with a faint flickering, as of a fire on the beach to the south. At the same time, a sort of low mumble or glutinous chant became audible from the same direction. All at once, a high hysterical wail, reverberating in shocking ecstasy, burst forth on the night air, prolonging itself incredibly—now terror-stricken, now mockingly ironic, now mindlessly animal—rising and falling in a frenzy that suggested only delirium or insanity raised to the highest possible human—or inhuman—pitch.
Without thought or volition, Josephine and I found ourselves clinging together and kissing with an abandon that echoed the wild caterwauling down the beach.
The hippies, it seemed, were holding their promised ritual to exorcise the evil influence of the sinister creatures from the sea.
VII
The next few days can most conveniently be summarized through extracts from the clinical journal which I began to keep from the outset of our attempt to establish telepathic contact with the dolphin Flip through hypnosis of a human subject:
April 20. This morning I placed Josephine under light hypnosis, finding her an almost ideally suggestible subject. I implanted posthypnotic commands intended to keep her alert and concentrating on the dolphin’s mind to catch any message emanating from it. After I awakened her, she went back into the tank with Flip and spent the rest of the day there, playing the number games they have devised together. It is remarkable to observe how devoted the animal is to her, following her about the pool and protesting with loud barkings and bleatings whenever she leaves it. Flip will accept his food, raw whole fish, only from her hands.
I asked Dr. Wilhelm whether there was any danger from those wicked-looking hundred-toothed jaws, which snap down on the fish like a huge, lethal pair of shears. He said no; in neither history nor legend has there ever been a report of a dolphin attacking or even accidentally injuring a human. Then he quoted something from Plutarch—his erudition is profound, if one-sided— which I looked up in the library later. Here it is:
“To the dolphin alone, beyond all others, Nature has granted what the best philosophers seek: friendship for no advantage.” ...
April 22. Still no results. Wilhelm wants me to try deeper hypnosis and stronger suggestion. In fact, he proposed leaving Josephine in a trance for periods of a day or more, with just enough volition to keep her head above water in the tank. When I protested that this was dangerous, since in such a state she might well drown inadvertently, Wilhelm gave me an odd look and said, “Flip wouldn’t let her.”...
April 25. Today, in the absence of any progress whatsoever, I agreed to try Wilhelm’s second-stage plan, since Jo agrees. I put her to sleep by the pool’s edge while Flip watched curiously. (I don’t think this dolphin likes me, although I’ve had no trouble making friends with the others in the bigger tank up on the north beach.) After implanting in her subconscious the strongest admonitions to be careful in the water, I let her reenter the pool for a few hours. Her demeanor, of course, is that of a sleep walker or a comatose person. She sits on the lip of the pool or wades about in it abstractedly. Flip seems puzzled and resentful that she won’t play their usual games with him.
When I was helping Jo out of the pool after an hour or so of this, the dolphin zoomed past at terrific speed, and I was sure he was about to snap at my arm, thus making me the first dolphin- bitten human in history; but he apparently changed his mind at the last moment and veered away, quacking and creaking angrily, his single visible eye glaring balefully....
April 27. Dr. Wilhelm wants to increase the period with Jo in the pool under hypnosis. This is because when she woke up yesterday she said she remembered vague, strange impressions that might be telepathic images or messages. I’m almost certain that these are pseudomemories, created by her subconscious to please Dr. Wilhelm, and I have strongly protested any intensification of this phase of the experiment.
Those hippie orgies on the beach south of here go on almost every night till all hours. The three of us are losing sleep and getting on edge, especially Jo, wh
o tires easily after the longer periods under hypnosis.
April 28. Jo had an especially vivid impression of some sort of scenes or pictures transmitted to her during hypnosis after I brought her out of the trance this afternoon. At Wilhelm’s suggestion I put her under again to help her remember, and we taped some inconclusive question-and-answer exchanges. She spoke of a ruined stone city under the sea, with weedy arches and domes and spires, and of sea creatures moving through the sunken streets. Over and over she repeated a word that sounded like “Arlyah.” It’s all imagination, I’m sure, plus memories of poems by Poe or cheap horror fiction—maybe even the story Wilhelm read us about the Gilbert Island porpoises and their “King out of the West.” Yet Wilhelm was excited, and so was Josephine when she woke up and heard the tape played back. Both of them want me to put her in a deep trance and leave her in the pool around the clock. I consider this to be a nonsensical idea and told them so.
April 29. This morning Wilhelm pressed me again. I told him I couldn’t be responsible for what might happen, and he answered, “No, of course not; I am responsible for whatever goes on at this Institute myself.” Then he showed me a kind of canvas harness or breeches buoy affair he’d rigged up in the pool, securely anchored to the verge, where Jo could be strapped and still move around without any danger of drowning under hypnosis. I gave in and agreed to try the idea for a while.
April 30. Everything went off without any difficulty, and at least Jo and Wilhelm are convinced that what they call her “messages” are getting sharper and more concrete. To me, what she recalls under light hypnosis is just nonsense or fantasy, mixed in perhaps with those odd rumors concerning her father’s home town Innsmouth, which she told me about earlier. Nevertheless, the two of them want to keep it up another day or so, and I agreed since there seems to be no actual danger involved.
VIII
“No danger involved!” If, when I wrote those words, I had had even an inkling of what I know now, I would have halted the experiment immediately; either that or left this oceanside outpost on the edge of the unknown, threatened by fanatic superstition from the outside and a stiffnecked scientific hubris from within. Though the hints were there, recognizable in hindsight, still at the time I saw nothing, felt nothing but a vague, unplaceable malaise, and so did nothing; and thus I must share the guilt for what happened.
Late on the evening of April 30, soon after I had written the journal entry quoted above, Dr. Wilhelm and I were roused from our rooms by the sound of a scream which, though faint and muffled by distance, we at once recognized as Jo’s voice, not the subhuman caterwauling of our drug- debauched neighbors.
Ask me now why we had left Jo alone in the dolphin’s tank that evening and I must admit that it appears to be criminal negligence or inexcusable folly. But Wilhelm and I had stood watch over her alternately the night before as she hung half-submerged in her canvas harness and dreamed her strange dreams under the glare of the fluorescent tubes. The harness held her head and thorax well clear of the water; and Flip, lolling quiescent in the tank, seemed to drowse too (though dolphins never sleep, since they must keep surfacing to breathe, like whales). Thus this second night, at her own prior urging, Wilhelm and I had retired for dinner and then sought some relaxation in our rooms.
The scream, which jolted us both out of a vague torpor induced by a loss of sleep, came at about 10 p.m. Dr. Wilhelm’s room was nearer the main lab than mine; thus, despite his greater age and bulk, he was ahead of me in reaching the heavy iron door of the beachside aquarium. As I approached the building, I could see him fumbling with the lock, his hands trembling. I was taken aback when he wheezed breathlessly at me over his shoulder: “Wait here!”
I had no choice, for he slipped inside and clanged the door shut behind him. The lock operated automatically, and since only Wilhelm and the chief lab technician—now miles away in San Simeon—had keys, I was forced to obey.
I can recall and relive in minute detail the agony and apprehension of that vigil, while the sibilant surf piled up only yards away under a freshening wind, and the half-full moon shone down with an ironic tranquility upon that silent, windowless, spectrally white structure.
I had glanced at my watch as I ran along the beach, and can verify that it was almost exactly ten minutes after Wilhelm had slammed the door that he again opened it—slowly, gratingly, the aperture framing, as always, a rectangle of harsh, glaring light.
“Help me with her,” Wilhelm muttered from within, and turned away.
I stepped inside. He had removed Jo Gilman’s limp form from the water and had wrapped it in several of the capacious beach robes that were always at hand near the tank. Glancing beyond the inert figure, I was startled to see Jo’s canvass harness strung out dismembered across the winking surface of the water, and even part of her bright red bathing suit, which seemed entangled with the shredded canvas. The shadowy shape of the dolphin Flip I glimpsed too, fully submerged and strangely immobile in a far corner of the pool.
“To her room,” Wilhelm murmured as we lifted Jo. Somehow, staggering and sliding in the shifting sand, we gained the dormitory building, groped open the door, and stumbled through Jo’s apartment (I had never been inside, but Wilhelm seemed to know his way), finally dropping her muffled body unceremoniously onto the narrow folding bed.
“I’ll call a doctor,” I mumbled, lurching toward the door.
“No, don’t!” Wilhelm rapped, adjusting the dim bedside lamp. “She’s not really hurt—as a zoologist, I’m doctor enough myself to know that. Bring a tape recorder from the lab. I think she’s still hypnotized, and she may be able to tell us what happened.”
“But you saw—” I began breathlessly.
“I saw only what you saw,” he grated, glaring at me through lenses that picked up the muted glow of the bed lamp. “She was clinging to the edge of the pool when I went in there, only partly conscious, out of her harness, and—get the tape machine, man!”
Why I obeyed blindly I still do not understand, but I found myself again blundering along the beach, Wilhelm’s key ring in my hand, and then fumbling a portable tape recorder from the orderly storage cabinets of the main laboratory.
When I lugged the machine back to Josephine’s room, I found that Dr. Wilhelm had somehow maneuvered her into an incongruous frilly lounging robe and gotten her under the bed covers. He was massaging her wrists with a mechanical motion, and scanning her face anxiously. Her eyes were still closed, her breathing harsh and irregular.
“Is she in hypnosis or shock?” he inquired edgily.
“Either, or perhaps both,” I shot back. “At this point, the symptoms would be similar.”
"Then set up the machine.”
It soon appeared that the deep mesmeric state into which I had placed Jo that morning still held. I was able to elicit responses from her by employing the key words that I used to trigger the state of trance, so easily invoked these days as to be almost disconcerting.
“Jo, can you hear me? Tell us what happened to you,” I urged her gently. The color began to return to her face; she sighed deeply and twisted under the bed clothes. For what happened next, I have the evidence not only of my own recollections, but a transcription typed up the next day from the tape machine, whose microphone Dr. Wilhelm now held beside her pillow with tense expectancy. This is a summary—omitting some of her repetitions, and the urgings on our part—of what we heard muttered by the bruised lips of that comatose woman writhing uneasily on her cot in a dimly lit room beside the glittering, moon-drenched Pacific, close on to midnight of May Eve:
“Must get out... must get out and unify the forces. Those who wait in watery Arlyah (Sp.?), those who walk the snowy wastes of Leng, whistlers and lurkers of sullen Kadath—all shall rise, all shall join once more in praise of Great Clooloo (Sp.?), of Shub-Niggurath, of Him Who is not to be Named....
“You will help me, fellow breather of air, fellow holder of warmth, storer of seed for the last sowing and the endless harvest.... (Unpronoun
ceable name, possibly Y’ha-nthlei) shall celebrate our nuptials, the weedy labyrinths shall hold our couch, the silent strutters in darkness will welcome us with high debauch and dances upon their many-segmented legs... their ancient, glittering eyes are gay.... And we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever....”
The speaker gasped and seemed to struggle to awaken. My apprehensions had crystallized into certainty: “She’s hysterical," I whispered.
“No—no, she’s not hysterical,” Dr. Wilhelm hissed, trying in his elation to keep his voice subdued. “Not hysterical. She’s broken through. Don’t you see what this is? Don’t you see that she’s echoing ideas and images that have been projected to her? Can’t you understand? What we’ve just heard is her attempt to verbalize in English what she’s experienced today—the most astonishing thing any human being has ever experienced: communication from another intelligent species!”
IX
Of the rest of that night I remember little. The twin shocks of Jo Gilman's hysterical seizure—for so I interpreted not only her unconscious ranting but also the initial scream, and her struggle out of the restraining apparatus— plus the unreasoning interpretation placed upon these events by my employer, served to unnerve me to the extent that when Jo sank gradually into normal slumber, I excused myself to Dr. Wilhelm and reeled off to my own room a little before midnight, for ten hours of uninterrupted—if not undisturbed—sleep.
It was a distinct surprise to me when I joined the others at staff luncheon the next day to find that a reticence amounting almost to a conspiracy of silence had already grown up in regard to the events of the preceding night. Jo, although pale and shaken, referred to what had happened as her “LSD trip” before the other staff members, and Dr. Wilhelm merely spoke of an abortive phase of "Operation Dolphin” which had been given up.
In any event, Jo completely abandoned her previous intimacy with Flip. Indeed, I never once saw her in the aquarium building again; at least, not until a certain climactic occasion, the facts about which I almost hesitate to affirm, even at this juncture.