A Mythos Grimmly

by Morgan Griffith

  “I don’t understand, gentlemen. If you have such science, you must have scientists. Where are they? And why on earth do you need me?”

  The priest stepped forth from the rest. “We had scientists. But their experiments killed them. They must have picked up some contagion they didn’t mean to create. We don’t know. None survive to explain what happened—if they even knew themselves.”

  “That’s a challenge, that’s for sure. I’m really flying blind here, but I’ll do what I can. First, though… I get the impression you were expecting me. Am I crazy, or what?”

  The men looked at each other; then one spoke. “You are not entirely unknown to us, Mr. Stanley. We have, er, kept up with you…”

  I could tell I would not be getting much more of an explanation, at least not for the present. One more try. “Listen, I really need to contact my fiancée. It looks like I’ll be away longer than I thought. Are you sure you don’t have a telephone I can use? Just this once?”

  “Mr. Stanley, we’ll, ah, look into it.”

  In view of the technology surrounding us, it was ludicrous to pretend these people were too rural and remote to keep up with the modern world. I shrugged. I probably should have suspected danger here, but I guess I am one of those naïve scientists. And I was genuinely eager to embark on the project at hand.

  I decided that Gloria would not be worried yet. I would see what I could do in a few days.

  The next few days were an adventure in crypto-biology, if not exo-biology. My hosts understood that I needed to have as much information as possible concerning the evolutionary development of their people. I was in for a shock when they paraded before me a series of individuals representing each major stage of their people’s metamorphosis. It was like one of those textbook evolutionary charts depicting the slow march of pre-humans on their way to Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon. Only these embodied the milestones in the very long life of each Innsmouther. The sight of the advanced specimens was naturally startling to me, but I was not afraid as a layman might have been. What a thrill it was for me as a biologist to see in living flesh not only the hunched and bulge-eyed type I had met and conversed with, but also the upright cousins of the shark and the Dimetrodon. I thought of various 1950s monster films. You know which is stranger between truth and fiction.

  But the greatest surprise of all was that even this was not the end goal of the evolution of the Deep Ones. Eventually the creatures would swell and bloat, quite slowly, till they lost all definition and became what they called “shoggoths.” The succession of radically different forms was analogous to the larva-pupa-adult sequence of insects, but it was strange to observe it in higher life forms, especially since these beings actually did pass from mammal, not merely to water-dwellers, but to amphibians, to fish, and then to amoeboid, albeit gigantic, creatures. My neck became stiff from constantly shaking my head in amazement.

  Another peculiarity lay in the mechanism of the mutation. The elders told me wild tales of the old days when the sea-denizens mated with the Innsmouth women. It sounded like the rape of the Sabine women, an atrocity, but these oldsters recounted the events as if they were nothing unusual or untoward. It was chilling. But as I listened carefully, it began to dawn on me that sexual union was not the only factor in the mutation process. According to town memory, it was not only the offspring of the original unions who mutated, but, given time, even those first mothers. I began to wonder if there was another means of contagion, perhaps a gene-altering virus. Or maybe something like pheromone transfer might have something to do with it. This was a hopeful possibility in that, if the well of sexual fecundity could not be refilled, there might be an alternate route to our goal.

  I did not yet realize that I was already engaged in a productive experiment along these lines.

  Absorbed in my work, I am ashamed to confess that the need to communicate with Gloria receded to the back burner. I kept thinking I would somehow do something about it, but the vagueness of the proposition, how I was to gain access to a telephone, made it easy to put it off. As weeks went by, I dreamed of her more and more. I felt more and more guilty for making her worry, as I knew she must.

  But a new development vastly complicated the situation. At first I fancied it was only my imagination, but before long I had to admit to myself that I was manifesting the Innsmouth look. My eyes, my lips, my hair, my coloration. And there was a creeping sense of emotional detachment. I shunned the realization for as long as I could, but at length I could not deny the facts. And with this understanding came another: I must not, I could not, return to my life as I knew it, especially not to Gloria.

  But this matter was soon to be taken out of my hands--when Gloria arrived in Innsmouth, looking for me. Somehow I had not foreseen this. My reaction when one of my hosts told me the news was a strange mixture of relief and panic. I longed for her but dreaded to reveal myself. As I wrapped up what I was doing and shed my lab coat, my blank-eyed patron informed me in flat tones that Gloria had appeared fully two weeks ago. They had provided comfortable accommodations, at least by Innsmouth standards, and promised to let her see me but kept putting her off with excuses that must have been pretty creative. Presumably, they did not want me distracted or tempted to abandon the research to return to my fiancée. But then it struck home with a feeling of absolute certainty that their motive was to give me more time to change. When she beheld what I had become, what I was becoming, surely she would conclude that the man she loved was gone forever. And she would be right.

  Gloria was seated, waiting patiently, in the front pew of the church, so that I saw her as soon as I came up through the trap door from the catacombs below. I had hoped to remain in the shadows while I did my best to explain and apologize, but that was now quite impossible. She saw the whole, ugly truth in a single glance and rose, running to embrace me. I wished to crush her precious frame against me, but I know she felt my reluctance. I did not know what to say.

  “Oh Ephraim! They warned me what to expect, but I don’t care as long as it’s you! And it is! The crucial things shine through no matter what a person looks like! I’m just so glad to see you and to hold you!”

  My protruding eyes began to shed salty tears. I croaked out something like, “But look at me! I’m not really even human anymore! Gloria, I can’t ask you to…”

  She pulled back enough to look at me unflinchingly. “Ephraim, do you think I’d abandon you if you’d gotten in a car accident or something? And don’t you realize our appearance would change pretty totally as we grew old together, I mean, even if this never happened? Sure, it’ll take a bit of getting used to, but I think I’m already over the most of it. The only thing I won’t be able to accept is if you can’t accept yourself. Can you?”

  Instead of waiting for me to say something, she kissed me. I suppose that single act should have convinced me she was right, but I just couldn’t accept her protestations of love. I just could not imagine cursing her with my grotesque presence. Nor could I even picture how we could make a life for ourselves in the world. I could never dare show myself in public. Nor could I consider asking Gloria to live with me in a hell hole like ruined Innsmouth. I said as much, my sorrowful words punctuated by her sobs. It was a terrible parting. But at least I felt I had now made a clean and necessary break from a past to which I could never return. I had my work to pursue—among my own kind.

  Months passed as I pursued my studies. If I was to make any progress, I had no choice but to conduct experiments on “human” subjects. Perhaps this would have gone easier on my conscience while I could still view the Innsmouth dwellers as alien to me. But, like it or not, I had perforce come to identify with them more and more as I came more closely to resemble them. Still, they were willing enough, seeing whatever risks might be entailed as being for their race’s greater good. I tried hormonal adjustments, artificial insemination, even manipulation and implantation of genetic materials from other deep sea species. For a while I thought great promise lay in exploiting the s
uper-malleable tissue of the shoggoths, but this proved too unstable. After all, shoggoths were not born as shoggoths and did not reproduce except, rarely, by fission. They were an advanced, and yet decadent, version of life forms whose reproductive systems lasted no longer than their previous anthropomorphic mode.

  Once I had reached this point in my research, the Innsmouth elders decided to share two rather important pieces of information with me. First, the viability of their society had long been predicated upon a proportionate balance between the largely humanoid, surface-dwelling people of Innsmouth (and, it now seemed, nearby Kingsport), the full-on Deep Ones who had retired to the off-shore trench popularly known as Devil Reef, and the shoggoths. This balance had been wholly disrupted with the sterility of the race. Even among the deep water versions things were awry as more of their number transformed into the amorphous shoggoths.

  Apparently this bizarre evolutionary development, I mean, that into shoggoths, had a certain survival value, as might be expected. The ancient civilization of the Deep Ones had historically been divided into warring clans, competing for the resources of the sea floor, even though one might have thought there was plenty to go around. Though the man-like Deep Ones were able warriors, the juggernaut shoggoths functioned as a kind of artillery, protoplasmic tanks as it were. The Deep Ones proper guided the shoggoths via a kind of telepathy, a skill anciently evolved to allow communication between deep-underwater creatures.

  The present plight of Innsmouth became clearer to me when I learned that these sub-sea wars had never really ceased. So devastating had they become that the Deep Ones were now at the point of extinction. There were so few left, here in Innsmouth, over in Kingsport, and a few other small settlements, that they feared their years as a species were numbered. Yes, I knew these beings had once had designs on the surface world, but that danger was long past. If their population were to become resurgent, might they not renew their plans for invasion? One could not take this for granted, and as a scientist, I felt it my duty to try to preserve a sorely endangered species.

  The other bit of news concerned me personally. I had wondered how and why the elders of the town had known about me and apparently kept watch over me. Who was I to them? It was not like I had a professional reputation to attract their attention. I was still only a student. Granted, they had been confident in my expertise, but even this presupposed some prior interest in me: how else would they know? Now I found out. I have said that I knew nothing of my parents, who died in my very early childhood. But it seems they did not die. They had first moved to Arkham from Innsmouth and dared remain there only so long as their physical aspect did not attract remark. When it did, they had to return to Innsmouth. They wanted me to grow up in the more prosperous Arkham because of the many opportunities, particularly educational ones, especially compared with the dismal state of decaying Innsmouth. Thus they placed me with a family who told me they were my relatives. It was through them that certain interests in Innsmouth followed my progress. Where were my true parents now? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  Why reveal all this to me now? I suppose in order to impress upon me that their plight was fully my own. But I was not convinced of that. You see, to my complete astonishment, careful daily self-examination showed me that I was gradually returning to normal. I was mystified but obviously delighted. I didn’t know how my “employers” would react to this development. But I was not worried, for my own reversal caused me to recognize what ought to have been obvious. The key to reversing the collective fortunes of Innsmouth lay in the same sort of reverse metamorphosis. And I thought I knew how it might be accomplished!

  I had, as I have said, already studied the shapeless giants called shoggoths in great detail. I dismissed it as a dead end, but now I realized that a very different approach might do the trick. The shoggoths were practically infinite in their ability to change form depending on the task at hand. Otherwise their military utility would be close to nil. What if they could mimic their earlier form as Deep Ones? Suppose they could simulate their earlier state right down to their original organs? If this were possible, there was no reason to think they would possess the reproductive defect that threatened their race. The quivering behemoths were very nearly mindless. What I would have to do would be to enlist some of the most human Innsmouthers to employ the telepathic links that had always enabled them to direct the shoggoths.

  I would have to provide a crash course to my recruits so that they might grasp and form a mental picture of the Deep One genome, the corrected version, for I had managed to find the glitch. I just hadn’t yet known how to fix it. But if the pristine genetic pattern might be placed in the consciousness, such as it was, of several of the shoggoths, they should be able to hold the restored form of their healthy ancestors long enough to reproduce. It should work. At any rate, it was the best I could do.

  We began the experiments, and it was an amazing experience to observe the reduction and redefinition of the quaking masses into humanoid form. Surely I had beheld marvels never before seen by surface-world mortals! And I may add that there was no longer even the faintest temptation to share my secrets with anyone else. I knew full well that no one could be expected to believe in either my story or my sanity, not without evidence.

  My own transformation might have counted as sufficient proof, but by this time I had completely reverted to full humanity, a thing, I was told, without precedent among the Innsmouthers. As our attempts to re-fertilize the Deep One females seemed to be proving successful, the elders took my reversion as a sign that I must be allowed to return to the outer world, and I did so with their extravagant thanks as they pressed upon me many rich presents including various bits of jewelry cast in some silver-gold metal unknown to me and encrusted with strange-hued gems. To tell the truth, I had suspected I should never be permitted to leave, knowing rather too much, but once I had begun to show the Innsmouth look, the point became moot, as I did not fancy trying to resume a normal life in such a state. But now everything was different. What had caused my return to my normal condition? Perhaps surprisingly, none of my researches offered any clue. The only thing I knew was that I had noticed the change beginning shortly after Gloria’s visit, after her kiss. But, as a man of science, I knew better than to confuse correlation with causation. Well, what matter? All I cared about was that a very surprising happy ending seemed to be at hand.

  Of course, as soon as I disembarked at the Arkham train station, I headed for Miskatonic and to Gloria’s office. Another occupied her desk chair.

  “Well, Mr. Stanley! We’ve all been wondering when we’d see you again! Welcome back! I know Gloria will be delighted to see you.”

  “Not half as delighted as I will be to see her! Is she home, do you think? I hope she’s not ill?”

  The woman frowned at this. “I’m afraid she is. I haven’t heard what exactly is wrong with her, but she calls occasionally, in fact, asking if anyone’s heard from you. She doesn’t sound too bad, maybe a little hoarse. But she’s convalescing from something. I’m sure she’d appreciate a visit.”

  As I hurried toward Gloria’s campus apartment, I reflected how she had always been severely afflicted with allergies, and it was now about the season for it. I would rejoice to do whatever I could to care for her. I hoped my sudden return might itself turn out to be a nostrum. It was with such eager anticipation that I knocked on her door. Her welcome voice, muffled through the thick wood, sounded from within.

  “It’s open. Come in.”

  By this time it was late afternoon, and I saw that no lamps were lit. The apartment was characteristically tidy but looked somehow like it had not been “lived in” for some days. I continued to the bedroom. I went on in. No lights here either, no surprise, given her illness. I stepped toward the window and pulled the curtain aside, allowing the radiance of the street lamp to reveal my face. I hoped it would be a welcome sight.

  “Ephraim! Is it really you? Can it be?” Her voice faltered in stunned disbelief. B
ut I did not discern the expected note of joy. Perhaps she had not forgiven me for rejecting her so many weeks ago. If so, I would make things right. I was sure her love for me survived, even as mine had through all those days in Innsmouth.

  “You see, my love, things are back to normal! It’s a miracle!”

  “Miracle, yes. Normal? Well, see for yourself, Ephraim.” And with that she clicked on the bedside lamp. My eyes widened as hers bulged. Blood drained from my face as I beheld the reticulated leather that covered her own.

  What is done is done. How much is my fault, the result of things I did, I cannot say. It is possible that the course of events was inevitable and that no matter what I had done the outcome was set. I do not believe in destiny, and yet I know for a fact that god-like things infest the universe and take pleasure in manipulating the lives of lesser life-forms. I know this, for I was one of their victims. Once I was a man, a writer, a dreamer, and perhaps in my own way, a mystic. Once I was Randolph Carter of Arkham, and now thanks to the whim of an entity of immense cosmic power, I had been cast through time and space to live as a stranger in a strange world.

  Yaddith is a harsh place, civilized in a way, but still bleak, and as time passed I grew progressively weary of my so-called life amongst its people. I longed to return to home, but from my studies I knew that Arkham, Earth and even the Twentieth Century were not only thousands of light years away, but also eons into the future. I had come to dread this time and place that was not my own. Even my body was alien to me, and sharing it with its original resident Zkauba, a respected mystic in his own right, made my occupation of that semi-insectoid form a burden, with little joy, and less hope.