Shadows Over Innsmouth

by Stephen Jones (Editor)

  I went directly home to Toledo from Boston, and later spent a month at Maumee recuperating from my ordeal. In September I entered Oberlin for my final year, and from then till the next June was busy with studies and other wholesome activities—reminded of the bygone terror only by occasional official visits from government men in connection with the campaign which my pleas and evidence had started. Around the middle of July—just a year after the Innsmouth experience—I spent a week with my late mother’s family in Cleveland; checking some of my new genealogical data with the various notes, traditions, and bits of heirloom material in existence there, and seeing what kind of a connected chart I could construct.

  I did not exactly relish this task, for the atmosphere of the Williamson home had always depressed me. There was a strain of morbidity there, and my mother had never encouraged my visiting her parents as a child, although she always welcomed her father when he came to Toledo. My Arkham-born grandmother had seemed strange and almost terrifying to me, and I do not think I grieved when she disappeared. I was eight years old then, and it was said that she had wandered off in grief after the suicide of my uncle Douglas, her eldest son. He had shot himself after a trip to New England— the same trip, no doubt, which had caused him to be recalled at the Arkham Historical Society.

  This uncle had resembled her, and I had never liked him either.

  Something about the staring, unwinking expression of both of them had given me a vague, unaccountable uneasiness. My mother and uncle Walter had not looked like that. They were like their father, though poor little cousin Lawrence—Walter’s son—had been an almost perfect duplicate of his grandmother before his condition took him to the permanent seclusion of a sanitarium at Canton. I had not seen him in four years, but my uncle once implied that his state, both mental and physical, was very bad. This worry had probably been a major cause of his mother’s death two years before.

  My grandfather and his widowed son Walter now comprised the Cleveland household, but the memory of older times hung thickly over it. I still disliked the place, and tried to get my researches done as quickly as possible. Williamson records and traditions were supplied in abundance by my grandfather; though for Orne material I had to depend on my uncle Walter, who put at my disposal the contents of all his files, including notes, letters, cuttings, heirlooms, photographs, and miniatures.

  It was in going over the letters and pictures on the Orne side that I began to acquire a kind of terror of my own ancestry. As I have said, my grandmother and uncle Douglas had always disturbed me. Now, years after their passing, I gazed at their pictured faces with a measurably heightened feeling of repulsion and alienation. I could not at first understand the change, but gradually a horrible sort of comparison began to obtrude itself on my unconscious mind despite the steady refusal of my consciousness to admit even the least suspicion of it. It was clear that the typical expression of these faces now suggested something it had not suggested before—something which would bring stark panic if too openly thought of.

  But the worst shock came when my uncle showed me the Orne jewellery in a downtown safe-deposit vault. Some of the items were delicate and inspiring enough, but there was one box of strange old pieces descended from my mysterious great-grandmother which my uncle was almost reluctant to produce. They were, he said, of very grotesque and almost repulsive design, and had never to his knowledge been publicly worn; though my grandmother used to enjoy looking at them. Vague legends of bad luck clustered around them, and my great-grandmother’s French governess had said they ought not to be worn in New England, though it would be quite safe to wear them in Europe.

  As my uncle began slowly and grudgingly to unwrap the things he urged me not to be shocked by the strangeness and frequent hideousness of the designs. Artists and archaeologists who had seen them pronounced their workmanship superlatively and exotically exquisite, though no one seemed able to define their exact material or assign them to any specific art tradition. There were two armlets, a tiara, and a kind of pectoral; the latter having in high relief certain figures of almost unbearable extravagance.

  During this description I had kept a tight rein on my emotions, but my face must have betrayed my mounting fears. My uncle looked concerned, and paused in his unwrapping to study my countenance. I motioned to him to continue, which he did with renewed signs of reluctance. He seemed to expect some demonstration when the first piece—the tiara—became visible, but I doubt if he expected quite what actually happened. I did not expect it, either, for I thought I was thoroughly forewarned regarding what the jewellery would turn out to be. What I did was to faint silently away, just as I had done in that brier-choked railway cut a year before.

  From that day on my life has been a nightmare of brooding and apprehension, nor do I know how much is hideous truth and how much madness. My great-grandmother had been a Marsh of unknown source whose husband lived in Arkham—and did not old Zadok say that the daughter of Obed Marsh by a monstrous mother was married to an Arkham man through a trick? What was it the ancient toper had muttered about the likeness of my eyes to Captain Obed’s? In Arkham, too, the curator had told me I had the true Marsh eyes. Was Obed Marsh my own great-great-grandfather? Who—or what—then, was my great-great-grandmother? But perhaps this was all madness. Those whitish-gold ornaments might easily have been bought from some Innsmouth sailor by the father of my greatgrandmother, whoever he was. And that look in the staring-eyed faces of my grandmother and self-slain uncle might be sheer fancy on my part—sheer fancy, bolstered up by the Innsmouth shadow which had so darkly coloured my imagination. But why had my uncle killed himself after an ancestral quest in New England?

  For more than two years I fought off these reflections with partial success. My father secured me a place in an insurance office, and I buried myself in routine as deeply as possible. In the winter of 1930— 31, however, the dreams began. They were very sparse and insidious at first, but increased in frequency and vividness as the weeks went by. Great watery spaces opened out before me, and I seemed to wander through titanic sunken porticos and labyrinths of weedy Cyclopean walls with grotesque fishes as my companions. Then the other shapes began to appear, filling me with nameless horror the moment I awoke. But during the dreams they did not horrify me at all—I was one with them; wearing their unhuman trappings, treading their aqueous ways, and praying monstrously at their evil sea-bottom temples.

  There was much more than I could remember, but even what I did remember each morning would be enough to stamp me as a madman or a genius if ever I dared write it down. Some frightful influence, I felt, was seeking gradually to drag me out of the sane world of wholesome life into unnameable abysses of blackness and alienage; and the process told heavily on me. My health and appearance grew steadily worse, till finally I was forced to give up my position and adopt the static, secluded life of an invalid. Some odd nervous affliction had me in its grip, and I found myself at times almost unable to shut my eyes.

  It was then that I began to study the mirror with mounting alarm. The slow ravages of disease are not pleasant to watch, but in my case there was something subtler and more puzzling in the background. My father seemed to notice it, too, for he began looking at me curiously and almost affrightedly. What was taking place in me? Could it be that I was coming to resemble my grandmother and uncle Douglas?

  One night I had a frightful dream in which I met my grandmother under the sea. She lived in a phosphorescent palace of many terraces, with gardens of strange leprous corals and grotesque brachiate efflorescences, and welcomed me with a warmth that may have been sardonic. She had changed—as those who take to the water change— and told me she had never died. Instead, she had gone to a spot her dead son had learned about, and had leaped to a realm whose wonders—destined for him as well—he had spurned with a smoking pistol. This was to be my realm, too—I could not escape it. I would never die, but would live with those who had lived since before man ever walked the earth.

  I met also that w
hich had been her grandmother. For eighty thousand years Pth’thya-l’yi had lived in Y’ha-nthlei, and thither she had gone back after Obed Marsh was dead. Y’ha-nthlei was not destroyed when the upper-earth men shot death into the sea. It was hurt, but not destroyed. The Deep Ones could never be destroyed, even though the palaeogean magic of the forgotten Old Ones might sometimes check them. For the present they would rest; but some day, if they remembered, they would rise again for the tribute Great Cthulhu craved. It would be a city greater than Innsmouth next time. They had planned to spread, and had brought up that which would help them, but now they must wait once more. For bringing the upper-earth men’s death I must do a penance, but that would not be heavy. This was the dream in which I saw a shoggoth for the first time, and the sight set me awake in a frenzy of screaming. That morning the mirror definitely told me I had acquired the Innsmouth look.

  So far I have not shot myself as my uncle Douglas did. I bought an automatic and almost took the step, but certain dreams deterred me. The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror. I do not believe I need to wait for the full change as most have waited. If I did, my father would probably shut me up in a sanitarium as my poor little cousin is shut up. Stupendous and unheard-of splendours await me below, and I shall seek them soon. Iä-R’lyeh! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä! No, I shall not shoot myself—I cannot be made to shoot myself.

  I shall plan my cousin’s escape from that Canton madhouse, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever.

  BEYOND THE REEF

  by BASIL COPPER

  I

  “COME IN, GENTLEMEN, come in. Make yourselves at home. The place, as you see, is in something of a mess, so I hope you’ll forgive the untidiness. Can I offer you gentlemen coffee? It’s a cold day. No? Well, just as you please. You must excuse my rudeness if I re-seat myself and finish off my own. I’m a great coffee addict, truth to tell.

  “Some cookies, perhaps? Well, there’s no accounting for taste. You’ll have come about the happenings, surely? It’s a long story and I have to collect my thoughts. But I’ll get to it, gentlemen, I’ll get to it. The Great Storm began it, of course. It disturbed a great many things, a great many lives, as you know. Took a great many lives too. Who would have thought that a mere few weeks could have wrought so great a havoc, have destroyed so many hopes and dreams?

  “Ah, I see Captain of Detectives Oates among you. All the way from the County Seat. Well, that proves the importance of what I’m saying. Truth to tell, I’ve been expecting you these past hours. But then there must have been many facts to collate, many blind alleys, many avenues to explore, if you’ll forgive the clichés. The facts themselves are so weird and bizarre I can hardly believe them myself.

  “And the tunnels, gentlemen! Have you yet explored their full possibilities? You must take care, you know. They are extremely dangerous. And who knows what lower depths those vast caverns conceal. I see you nod your heads. Even Mr. Oates looks pale. As well you might be, sir. As well you might be. The black abyss and the unnameable.

  “No, I am not mad, gentlemen, though I have seen and heard things enough to unhinge the strongest mind these past weeks. A savant and a scholar... a qualified scientist too. Where to begin? That is the problem. The State Asylum must be full of people who will seem more sane than I once my story is told. I see you have your secretary and a stenographer present, sir. Well, we shall need them both in due course.

  “Oh, you are taking notes already? Well, it makes no matter. I have nothing to conceal, nothing to fear in this world, at least. As to the other, that is an entirely different matter... My introductory remarks will perhaps help to convince people that I am as sane as they are. Perhaps better to exist in a constant dream than a living nightmare. The oblivion of insanity would blot out images one would rather forget.

  “Please do not be impatient, sir. Mine is a story that will take up a good deal of time in the telling, I can assure you. Man’s tragedy is that wonderful machine we call the brain; memory is the curse that makes life a burden. What a disaster that memory makes us savour vain hopes and regrets to their bitterest dregs. What is it Shakespeare says? Makes tragedy of so long life... or something to that effect? Well, gentlemen, I have supped from this cup of bitterness to its very last drop.

  “Life holds nothing more. Yes, by all means keep on with your shorthand notes. I am getting to the point, I can assure you. This, then, is the sworn statement of Jefferson Holroyd, scholar and scientist, aged forty-five years, and in whole mind and body. It all began, then...”

  II

  The great storm of January of the year 1932, which struck the town of Innsmouth so cruelly, was completely unexpected, though there had been out of the way happenings which those trained to read the symptoms might have forecast had they read them aright.

  But many disparate facts needed to be taken in their entirety; the disconnected fragments, completely inexplicable at the time, could not have been seen as part of a connected whole and it is only with hindsight that meteorologists, scientists and other experts who converged on the area have been able to put something of the truth together.

  There had been tremors of things to come much earlier than that. Newspaper reports in the autumn of 1930 described a great tidal bore which swept up the Manuxet, accompanied by a curious phenomenon the locals spoke of as “white lightning.” A number of isolated farms on the fringe of the salt marshes were flooded and several people drowned while the town of Rowley was isolated for a time, though no damage was reported from there.

  Even inland Arkham was affected by something which the reports described as a “miniature whirlwind” which ripped tiles from the rafters of business premises and completely stripped the shingles from the entire roofs of the more ancient buildings. Scientists put the disturbances down to a seismic tremor or a sort of underwater earthquake far down beyond the Innsmouth reef, which was responsible for the tidal bore while meteorologists ascribed the whirlwind damage and the stormy currents and curious lightning bolts as the effect of masses of cold and warm air meeting. Then, as nothing further happened for some weeks the affair, as is usually the case, was fairly rapidly forgotten by the majority of people, except by those to whom damage or tragedy had actually happened.

  Massachusetts is a strange and ancient place, with isolated pockets and scattered communities among the gnarled hills, on the fringes of the marshes and among belts of forest so old that only archaeologists and experts in such matters are able to make an assessment of their age; a state whose remoter areas are regions which time seems to have forgotten, even in these latter days. In 1930 these aspects were even more pronounced and old books in the great library at Miskatonic University spoke of even stranger things so that the Chief Librarian, Jethro Staveley, kept such rare and esoteric works in a remote and locked section, far removed from the public bookstacks, where access was granted only to bona fide scholars or authorised researchers and academics.

  This was nominally because of the rarity and value of such arcane volumes but there were those who said that the forbidden knowledge contained within the musty leaves was the real reason why Staveley kept them under such close guard. And more astute observers put the disturbances of 1930 which culminated in the awful happenings of 1932 down to much earlier incidents, such as the burglary at the University Library as far back as the early spring of 1929, when a remote side door was forced, the locked section entered and a chained and particularly obscure tome was stolen; the solid steel links of the chain securing it to the oak shelving being melted as though they had been made of butter.

  The University authorities put this effect down to the use of some kind of
welding apparatus, their surmises being reinforced by charring of the adjacent shelving and the great heat which had cracked nearby panes of glass. But Staveley turned deathly pale when the news was brought to him and his demeanour was greatly changed after that. Fortunately, he had several typed copies of the missing volume—as indeed was the practice for all the rare documents in the sealed section which were secreted in a steel, vault-like chamber adjoining his office.

  When he had consulted these he seemed more troubled than ever and the change in his formerly bluff and friendly, not to say outgoing manner, dated from that moment, according to his closest friends in academic circles. He was closeted with the Dean for most of the following day and that gentleman, Dr. Darrow, seemed equally disturbed.

  No news of the burglary was allowed to reach the ears of the press and the incident was made light of within the University itself. But inquiries by friends and fellow academics as to the title of the missing volume and its contents were met with tight-lipped silence on the part of both men and requests to see the copies held in the Librarian’s office were answered with polite refusals.

  The incident, which had briefly rippled the normally placid life of this great university, was eventually forgotten until other, even more dramatic events impinged upon the public consciousness. Perhaps the term dramatic is a misnomer, for though taken as a chain of circumstances they partook of drama, they were perhaps rather more humdrum when viewed as isolated incidents. The first had nothing to do with the University and occurred only a few weeks after the events previously described. This was a disastrous fire that destroyed priceless 17th and 18 th century records at Arkham Public Library.

  So far as the theft was concerned, though inquiries were made on campus itself, the thief who had so desecrated the Library was never found and as nothing was ever given out beyond the immediate circle of the academic staff involved it never reached the ears of the State Police either.