The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels

by Brian Stableford

  “I’ll drink to that,” said Captain Rowland, although it was unclear to his eleven dinner companions exactly what he meant by “that.”

  * * * *

  At the writers’ table, the talk was similarly dominated by Mr. Edison’s impending demonstration.

  “It will be interesting to converse with Shakespeare,” said Mr. Huneker.

  “Chaucer and Malory,” Mr. Robertson speculated.

  “King Arthur himself, and Sir Perceval too,” suggested Mr. Twain.

  “Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus,” added Mr. Chambers.

  “Charles Baudelaire and Villiers de l’Isle Adam,” M. Lorrain put in.

  “Sappho and Catherine the Great,” mused Ms. Lee.

  “Napoleon Bonaparte and Georges Cadoudal,” was M. Feval’s slightly mischievous suggestion.

  “Horatio Nelson and the Duke of Wellington,” countered the man from the Telegraph.

  “Walter Raleigh and Elizabeth I,” supplied the man from the Mail.

  “Simon Magus and Apollonius of Tyana,” said M. Apollinaire.

  “Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan,” M. Jarry contributed.

  “All mere flights of destiny’s fancy,” Mr. Vane opined. “We shall all meet the Lord, whether Mr. Edison’s machine works or not, and we shall all be judged.

  “Percy Shelley and John Keats,” Mr. Huneker went on, blithely.

  “Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Swift,” Mr. Robertson added.

  “George Washington and Julius Caesar,” said Mr. Twain.

  “Homer and General Custer,” added Mr. Chambers.

  “Salome and Cleopatra,” was M. Lorrain’s second contribution.

  “Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci,” Ms. Lee suggested.

  “Fra Diavolo and Cartouche,” said M. Feval fils.

  “Jack Sheppard and Dick Turpin,” riposted the man from the Telegraph.

  “Richard III and Henry VIII,” said the man from the Mail.

  “Merlin and Morgana la Fee,” said M. Apollinaire.

  “Gilles de Rais and Jeanne d’Arc,” said M. Jarry.

  “If the lines of communication remain open, of course,” M. Feval observed. “We’ll have some stiff competition in the new century. If every home in the world acquires one of Mr. Edison’s machines, Father will want me to serve as his amanuensis, I’m sure. Now that we have the electric light-bulb and the typewriter, the transcription of the deads’ pent-up literary works could become a long and arduous task.”

  “It could be worse,” said Mr. Twain. “We might be historians.”

  * * * *

  When the dining-room had emptied again, the gentlemen reassembled in the saloon, where they brought out their pipes and cigars, as usual—except for those who preferred a glass of absinthe, with or without a dash of ether.

  Mr. Edison’s machine had already been set up, and connected to the ship’s generator. In appearance it was somewhat reminiscent of a cross between a telephone exchange and a church organ, its manifold pipes being tuned to catch and amplify the voices of the dead, while its multitudinous switches were designed to secure and facilitate connections between the mundane and astral planes.

  There was a stool at the front, from which all the indicators were visible and all the controls accessible, but Edison did not take his seat immediately; he busied himself checking the various connections for a full fifteen minutes, during which interval his audience—augmented now by Edward Rocambole, a select handful of his fellow second-class passengers and an equal number of representatives of the third class—shuffled for position. Almost all of the watchers were standing up, the seating in the saloon being arranged about the walls, offering a very poor view. Thanks to the Titan’s stabilizers, the waiting men were only swaying gently from side to side even though the storm outside was raging as never before.

  Finally, the moment of truth arrived. Mr. Edison turned to his audience, bowed, and opened his mouth to make a speech.

  “Oh, get on with it, man!” said the Duke of Buccleuch, rudely. “We all know why we’re here. Let’s hear what the dead have to say, if anything.”

  Edison was obviously not pleased by this demand but he scanned the faces of the crowd, as if in order to measure their opinion. What he saw there evidently disposed him against further delay, and he sat down. He reached out his right hand to take the lever that would activate the machine’s electricity supply, and pulled it down decisively.

  The machine crackled and hummed. The pipes emitted eerie sounds, reminiscent of harp strings stirred by a wayward wind—but then the voices began to come through.

  They were voices—no one in the saloon could have any doubt about that—but it was quite impossible to distinguish what any one of them might be saying. There were thousands, perhaps millions, all attempting to speak at the same time, in every living language and at least as many that were no longer extant.

  None of the voices was shouting, at first; they were all speaking in a conversational tone, as if they did not realize how much competition there was to be heard. As the minutes went by, however, this intelligence seemed to filter back to wherever the dead were lodged. The voices were raised a little—and then more than a little. Fortunately, the volume of their clamor was limited by the power of the amplifiers that Mr. Edison had fitted to his machine, and he immediately reached out to turn the knob that would quiet the chorus—with the result that the voices of the dead became a mere murmurous blur, denied all insistency as well as all coherency.

  Edison’s own voice was clearly audible over the muted hubbub when he turned to his audience to say: “If you will be patient, gentlemen, I am certain that our friends on the Other Side will begin to sort themselves out, and make arrangements to address us by turns, in order that each of them might make himself heard. It is just a matter...?”

  He was interrupted then, by an unexpected event.

  Allan Quatermain, who happened to be looking out of one of the portholes, observed four bolts of lightning descend simultaneously from widely disparate parts of the sky, converging upon the funnels of the Titan. All four struck at the same instant, each one picking out a funnel with unerring accuracy.

  The cables connecting the ship’s internal telegraph system had been imperfectly repaired, but there was nevertheless a continuous circuit running from the bow to the stern, and from the crow’s nest to the keel. It ran through every bulkhead and every compartment, every cabin on every deck, every hold and locker, every davit and stanchion, every rivet and joint. The lightning surged through the hull, possessing every fiber of the vessel’s being.

  The Titan’s wiring burnt out within a fraction of a second and Mr. Edison’s machine collapsed in a heap of slag, although it left the man himself miraculously untouched, perched upon his stool. So diffuse was the shock, in fact, that the men standing in the saloon, their womenfolk in their cabins, and even the masses huddled in steerage felt nothing more than a tingling in their nerves, more stimulant than injury.

  Nobody aboard the Titan died as a direct result of the multiple lightning strike, but the flood of electrical energy was by no means inconsequential. Communication between the Titan and the world of the dead was cut off almost instantly—but almost instantly was still a measurable time, and the interval was enough to permit a considerable effect.

  Exactly what that effect was, no one aboard the Titan could accurately discern, and the only man aboard with wit enough even to form a hypothesis was Jean Tenebre, who had briefly borrowed the identity of the elephant-hunter Allan Quatermain.

  If the real Quatermain had made any posthumous protest, his voice went unheard.

  What the Chevalier Tenebre hypothesized was that by far the greater portion of the power of the multiple lightning-strike, which had so conspicuously failed to blast the Titan to smithereens or strike dead its crew and passengers, had actually passed through the ship’s telegraph system and Mr. Edison’s machine into the realm of the dead, where it had wreaked havoc.

  What the realm o
f the dead might be, or where it might be located, the chevalier had no idea—-but he supposed that its fabric must be delicate and that the souls of the dead must be electrical phenomena of a far gentler kind than the lighting of Atlantic storms.

  Thomas Edison had presumably been correct to dispute William Randolph Hearst’s claim the Edison’s machine might only enable the Titan’s passengers to hear the screams of the damned in Hell— but if the souls of dead humankind had not been in Hell when Edison closed his master-switch, they obtained a taste of it now.

  And they screamed.

  They screamed inaudibly, for the most part, because the pipes of Edison’s machines had melted and their connections had been dissolved—but there was one exception to this rule.

  The brothers Tenebre and Count Lugard’s party were not the only individuals on board the Titan who might have been classified as “undead.” The fragment of the creature that had washed up on the beach at Nettlestone Point, having earlier been found by a fishing-vessel off Madeira and lost again from the Dunwich, also had an exotic kind of life left in it. Like many supposedly primitive invertebrates, the part was capable of reproducing the whole, under the right existential conditions and with the appropriate energy intake.

  When this seemingly-dead creature screamed, its scream had only to wait for a few microseconds before it was translated back from the fragile realm of the dead into the robust land of the living.

  It as a strange scream, more sibilant than strident, and it was a strangely powerful scream.

  As Edison’s machine had briefly demonstrated—confounding all the skeptics who had refused for centuries to believe in spiritualists and necromancers, ghostly visitations and revelatory dreams— the boundary between the human and astral planes was not unbreachable. When the unnamable creature, whose close kin had died by lightning in the Mitumba mountains, was resurrected by lightning, its scream tore a breach in that boundary, opening a way between the worlds—and through that breach, the newly-agonized souls of the human dead poured in an unimaginable and irresistible cataract.

  The breach, Jean Tenebre subsequently decided, could only have lasted for a few microseconds more than it took to make the scream audible in the first place—but while it lasted, the souls of the dead had a chance to assert themselves in the world of the living, of a kind they had never had before—not, at any rate, in such quantities.

  The souls of the dead vied with one another to dispossess the souls of the living: to claim the bodies of the Titan’s three thousand passengers for their own use and purposes.

  The competition was understandably fierce.

  There were eight people aboard the Titan whose souls could not, as it turned out, be dispossessed. The two brothers Tenebre, the count who had inverted his name, and his three lovely brides were six of them. The seventh was Edward Rocambole, whose opinion of his own heroism was so unshakable that he simply could not be persuaded to vacate his mortal habitation. The eighth was an eleven-year-old girl in steerage by the name of Myra, who was just lucky.

  As the thirty-first of December 1900 whiled away, Jean Tenebre made some slight attempt to figure out who might now be inhabiting the bodies of his fellow passengers and the Titan’s crew. He spoke seven languages himself, so he made a little more progress than another man might have, but it was still an impossible task. The dead turned out to be very discreet, and they clung to their assumed identities as stubbornly as the chevalier had ever clung to any of his multitudinous pseudonyms.

  By the time he had to dress for dinner, Jean Tenebre had found some reason to suspect that Captain John Rowland might once have been a Dutchman named Vanderdecken; that Mr. Hodgson might once have been an American gentleman named Edgar Poe; that Mr. Black might once have been Edward Teach, nicknamed Blackbeard; that William Randolph Heart might once have been Judas Iscariot; that John D. Rockefeller might once have been Nebuchadnezzar; that Andrew Carnegie might once have been Cyrus the Great; that the Duke of Buccleuch might once have been Wat Tyler; that Edison might once have been Daedalus; and that the former Lillie Langtry might now be the former Catherine de Medici; but he could not be sure.

  The one thing of which he was sure was that, in the struggle for repossession of the Earth, the meek had, in general, not prevailed.

  That night, however, dinner was served as usual, although the only meat left aboard was chicken, all the remaining pork and beef having mysteriously vanished into one of the storage-lockers adjoining the refrigeration hold.

  At the writers’ table, the conversation ran along lines that were a trifle unusual, but nevertheless perfectly civilized.

  “Are you going to stay in the writing game?” Mr. Robertson asked Mr. Twain.

  “I doubt it,” said Mr. Twain. “Not unless Edison hurries the development of moving pictures. That’s where writers will make money in future—that and broadcasting, Marconi-style. How about you, Chambers?”

  “I’m heading for Texas,” Mr. Chambers said. “Going into the oil business, I think. The twentieth century is going to need power, and there’s an ocean of black gold lying around just waiting to be sucked out. Are you with me, Huneker?”

  “All the way,” Mr. Huneker agreed. “But I might just get into automobiles. They’re not much to look at just now, but I have a feeling there’s scope in them—and a market for your oil, Chambers.”

  “You’re staying with the Mail, I suppose?” said the man from the Telegraph to his friend.

  “Just for a while,” his colleague agreed. “Provided I make editor within two years. It shouldn’t be difficult. Within five I’ll have middle England eating out of my hand. You?”

  “I fancy that I might found a tabloid of my own. The Daily Mirror, say—or The Sun, if I could be sure that swine Hearst wouldn’t sue me. I’ll not be in competition with you, mind. Wouldn’t want to confuse the poor lambs with debates or the truth, would we?”

  “Europe,” Jarry said to Apollinaire, “is ripe for looting. England and Germany will be at one another’s throats even if we don’t stir the pot, with France caught between them. Given that the sun never sets on their various imperial adventures, that puts the whole world up for grabs or very nearly.”

  “There’s going to be big money in armaments,” opined M. Feval. “Bigger and better guns, tougher and thicker armor. Civilians won’t be able to stay out of twentieth century wars, with fleets of airships raining down bombs on cities.”

  “And big money in medicine too,” M. Lorrain put in. “It always pays to have both sides covered in a major conflict—killing and healing always go hand in hand. There’ll be fortunes to be made out of any method of combating infection and syphilis. Armies are wonderful instruments for spreading the plague—all that camaraderie and rape.”

  “High explosives are passe,” Apollinaire mused. “Poison gas is the way forward. Atom bombs, maybe a little further down the line. Germ warfare too, if your medicines can provide the means to protect the folks at home.”

  “The long-term future’s in morphine and human trafficking,” Ms. Lee opined. “Even if populations aren’t displaced en masse by wars, there’s bound to be migration on a scale that beggars the imagination, and even the people who aren’t physically wounded in your universal wars will be in dire need of pain relief.”

  “We shall be judged by our actions,” Mr. Vane asserted, cheerfully. “Let’s make sure that we make better use of our second chances than we ever did with our first.”

  * * * *

  The following morning, shortly after dawn, the Titan steamed past Sandy Hook and soon came within sight of the Statue of Liberty.

  “It’s going to shake things up when this lot get ashore,”, said Ange Tenebre, still playing the role of Ayesha, as he/she drank in his/her first sight of the home of the brave and the land of the free. “You now, if I weren’t so incorrigible, I might have thought twice about stealing the bullion and the bonds, let alone Hearst’s antique gemstones.”

  “They’re too busy making future p
lans to care overmuch about minor inconveniences,” his brother said. “As for shaking things up, I doubt that America will notice anything out of the ordinary. It’s always been a land of opportunity.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting the thing in the storage-locker? The people from the New York Museum of Natural History are going to get a shock when they open it up.”

  “I expect it’ll slip over the side and head for Innsmouth,” Jean Tenebre said. “One shoggoth more or less isn’t going to disrupt the flow of history any more than adding an extra ounce of rapacity to the characters of men like Hearst and Rockefeller.”

  They were joined then by Count Lugard and his three delectable brides.

  “Did you dine well last night, Monsieur Ange?” the count asked, politely.

  “Yes indeed,” said Ange. “Poor girl seemed a trifle disconcerted, not having expected her second term on Earth to be terminated quite so rapidly, but her blood hadn’t curdled at all. You?” “Likewise—and my three lovelies had a good time also. Irma was a trifle reckless, descending no further than the second class cabins, but she says that it was worth it, just to see the expression on Monsieur Rocambole’s face when he realized that there was, after all, no gang of technicians aboard covertly collecting donations for medical research.”

  “The world is full of such misconceptions,” Ange lamented. “The only things in life that are dependable are lust and avarice.”

  “Do you not mean death and taxes?” The count asked, laughing to emphasize that he was joking. They were, after all, surrounded by evidence of the evitability of death, and they both knew perfectly well that only little people paid taxes.

  “Aren’t you afraid that the sunlight will shrivel you up and make you burst into flames?” Ange riposted, laughing just as merrily.

  The count looked up into the brightening sky, then down at the sunlight reflected in the myriad windows of a host of skyscrapers. “I shall love it here,” he said. “And my brides will have the time of their unlife. We’ll soon make ourselves felt in Manhattan. Things will never be the same again.”