Shadows Over Innsmouth

by Stephen Jones (Editor)

  The air in this corner of the library was thick with tobacco smoke and Tibbs still hovered, keeping students away from the section, though light and the low murmur of conversation came reassuringly from beyond the far bookstacks.

  “The contents of that book have vanished; you cannot remember anything of the de-code; and the machine on which you spent so much time has been destroyed,” said Bellows. “This is all of a piece with what happened to the Dean in the tunnel today. It makes a thorough exploration of all the underground passages even more urgent in my opinion.”

  “Perhaps,” said Holroyd heavily. “But it behooves us to go carefully. My research has been put back, it is true. But it is only a delay, not an impasse. A copy of the machine can soon be reconstructed from my working drawings; we have the original of the volume on which I was working under lock and key; and I shall not need anything so fallible as my memory once we begin. And the notes Mr. Bellows has given me are invaluable. The inscriptions in that concourse are similar to those on which I have been working.”

  Bellows looked sceptical.

  “Perhaps that is all these people needed,” he suggested. “Time.”

  “What people?” said the Dean, startled.

  Bellows turned to give him a grim glance. “All right, then. Perhaps not people. What would you prefer? Things?”

  The Dean’s lips were trembling now. There was no doubt about it, Bellows thought.

  “You feel there is some connection between what happened tonight and what I saw in that passage?”

  Bellows shrugged.

  “It could be possible. Many strange incidents have been happening at Miskatonic, from what you tell me. What is your opinion, Mr. Holroyd?”

  “I am inclined to agree. I have been shaken tonight, I will admit.”

  Holroyd glanced at his watch.

  “It’s almost ten o’clock. Time to eat, surely. There’s nothing else we can do tonight, anyway. And Tibbs is waiting to lock up.”

  The three men walked back down the great staircase in a sombre silence.

  VII

  Captain of Detectives Cornelius Oates eased his way out of the stifling atmosphere of the green-painted room and gulped in moist air with gratitude. From the height of Oak Point police station, where the body had been brought, he had a wide sweep of distant Innsmouth to the left; far out, beyond the reef, there was a band of gauzy mist in which a flock of birds were diving and soaring in a strange tangle, as they fought over some booty on the sullen surface of the sea beneath them; a sea which, inexplicably, did not seem to give back much light from the almost obscenely overripe orange moon that hung low in the sky; overripe too were the almost jungle smells that seemed to come from the rotting wharves of the old downtown dock area of Innsmouth and the melancholy croaking of frogs served only to emphasise the outlandishness of the place to which grim duty had brought him a few short days ago.

  Oates sighed. He was a big man, dressed in city clothes and used to city ways; but he was the best there was in that corner of the nation and he had been brought in from the county seat to lead investigations into the series of events that had puzzled and horrified some of the more backward and outlandish denizens of the Arkham-Innsmouth area.

  Oates turned with relief as the door behind him opened and the narrow, sandy head of Dr. Ewart Lancaster, the local police surgeon, appeared in the opening.

  “Ever seen anything like it, doc?”

  The medic shrugged.

  “You were right, Captain. I’ve been in practice in these parts more’n forty years and it’s outside my experience, I don’t mind admitting.”

  Oates looked at him shrewdly in the bright light that sliced the warm darkness from the open door. Even the weather was strange in this benighted place. The doctor lit the stump of a cigar he took from his waistcoat pocket, handed a pack of Havanas to his companion. The police officer selected one fastidiously with the air of a connoisseur, thanked the doctor gruffly and the two men smoked in silence, the gracious aroma expelling the charnel atmosphere of the dissecting room they had just left behind them.

  “Yes, Captain,” said Dr. Lancaster grimly. “As you remarked on the phone. The facial features removed as though with some sort of obscene sponge. Everything fused together, obliterated. What am I going to put in my report?”

  Oates shrugged, his thoughts far away, back in the relatively sane and mundane atmosphere of the city streets he had so recently left.

  “Fish, perhaps,” he began awkwardly.

  Lancaster looked at him incredulously.

  “In that pond?” he said mildly. “I’ve never seen any form of animal life that could do that to a man.”

  “You misunderstand me, doc,” the police officer went on. “For the record, I mean. We’ve got to put something. The guy fell in, maybe; the shock of the cold water induced a heart attack; the nibbling of fish and the action of the water over a few days?”

  The doctor gave a twisted smile.

  “You might buy it, Captain. I might buy it. But will the city authorities? They’re the ones we have to watch.”

  He looked at the big detective shrewdly.

  “What’s your real opinion?”

  If he expected an enlightening answer he was disappointed.

  Oates scratched his chin, his eyes still fixed on the shimmering mass of mist beyond the reef.

  “We have to put something in the report, doc. That’s all I’m saying. It may not satisfy us but it has to stop all these silly questions and square the hicks until we can get back to the bottom of things.”

  Dr. Lancaster had his eyes fixed on Oates’ face. He spoke reluctantly.

  “You say the Arkham newspaper files you want are away for binding. Go to Innsmouth and poke around incognito. Look at the newspaper reports of a couple of years ago in the library there.”

  He paused.

  “There’s all sorts of old tales about creatures that live in the sea beyond the reef. Some people believe they’re trying to take over human beings, maybe the entire populations of Innsmouth and Arkham. Nonsense, of course, but it’s a starting point.”

  Oates kept his gaze concentrated far out, conscious of the increasing odour of the swamplands that pressed close to Oak Point on the landward side.

  “All I can say is, I admire your fortitude, Dr. Lancaster. You’ve been here forty years. I’ve had enough in forty hours.”

  The doctor smiled grimly, pulling appreciatively on his cigar. “You get used to anything,” he observed.

  “Maybe,” said Oates. “But the Arkham-Innsmouth area is the damnedest, queerest place I ever struck. With a little more persuading it could sure enough scare the hell out of me.”

  VIII

  Holroyd woke with a start. At first he did not know where he was. Then he remembered that he had told the Dean and Bellows that he would not return to his house that night. He had quarters on campus where he sometimes slept when he was working late. Now he guessed the moonlight stealing through the window shutters had fallen across his face and wakened him. The sonorous booming of clocks began then; a nightly symphony that combined the steeple timepieces of many of Arkham’s crumbling old churches; mingled among those of the much younger but more melodious of the University’s public clocks in halls of residence; in chapels; and on the façades of the three great University churches. Although the concert could not have lasted more than a minute or so—such was the discrepancy between the ancient clockwork, often slow by two minutes or more and the more modern, often in advance—he eventually made out that it was somewhere around 3:00 a.m. When the wind was right he could sometimes make out the faint echo of Innsmouth’s own public timepieces.

  Holroyd was about to turn over when he became aware, for the first time, that something unusual was taking place in the room. He guessed, subconsciously, that it was this which had first alerted him from deep sleep. A furtive, insidious noise such as might be made by a child, or perhaps a very old person, rubbing pieces of dry paper together. The men
tal image was an innocuous one, perhaps, but so incongruous in that time and place that Holroyd began to perspire.

  The sound seemed to emanate from somewhere near the wall at his head, pass slowly across the room to a point near the window, only to return once more, becoming a little louder each time. Holroyd closed his eyes but that did no good; the sound did not go away neither did it diminish. Instead, it merely increased his anxiety, for as the furtive noise came closer to him it seemed that something terrible might happen if he did not keep his eyes open. By so doing, he felt, he would hold the thing—whatever it was—at bay by the mere act of being awake, alert and in full possession of his faculties.

  At the third passage of the presence Holroyd felt impelled to get up; he could still see nothing, but the light switch was at the far side of the room and to gain it he would have to pass the entire length of the wall from which the sounds were coming. This, understandably enough, he was reluctant to do. Instead, he put on his trousers over his pyjamas, began to insinuate his feet into his slippers, by the shimmering half-light of the moon spilling into the room.

  To his dismay, however, his right foot seemed to plunge immediately into cold, swampy water, instead of the familiar confines of the slipper. He withdrew his foot as though stung and then he saw the long, grey serpent-thing with the blind white eyes, moving with incredible speed across the carpet, writhing and fibrillating as though it contained a thousand different entities. He let out shriek after shriek as the grey monstrosity darted up his trouser-leg. A nauseous stench was in his nostrils and there was burning pain as he lost consciousness.

  When he came to himself he was lying on his bed and there was nothing but the usual muffled night sounds that came faintly to the sleeping campus of Miskatonic University. He felt as though he had been running and his pyjamas were saturated with sweat. Somehow, he dragged himself to the light-switch and the blinding light brought reality and the release from nightmare. His slippers were warm and dry, marshalled in their usual place at the side of the bed. It was obvious from their position on the bedside chair that he had never put on his trousers the night before. Relief flooded through him. The whole thing was nightmare then.

  But as he turned there came again that nauseous stench. Blood was in his throat; his vocal organs had been so constricted with terror in the dream that he must have bitten his tongue. But why did that awful smell persist? It was then that he saw the trails of dreadful grey slime on the legs of his pyjama trousers. He came near to fainting then.

  IX

  The following day Oates drove out to Innsmouth in an official police car which he had converted to a civilian vehicle by the simple expedient of affixing masking tape over the police department insignia on the door panels. He wanted to be discreet and he felt oppressed by the abnormality of the events that were beginning to enmesh him. Especially after the doctor’s remarks the night before.

  It was a dark, sullen day and the old turnpike route, mostly deserted except for the odd farm cart, led him through steep gorges within which the Manuxet ran in raging whiteness; the black rocks which lined the gorges and the white threads of water, combined with the coldness of the air and the loneliness of the situation—for there were few habitations that he could see—inducing a chill of the soul rather than that of the bone; the babbling of the river had a strange, ethereal effect, like the insistent whispering of voices in his ear and twice he almost ran off the road due to the distraction this caused him. He stopped at last and lit a cigarette, glancing down at the gorge at his left side. He was a big, confident man, who had seen death in many forms during his long years as a senior detective, but he was out of his depth here.

  Not only in Arkham but physically here on this lonely road, where none of the official police formulas would work, and certainly not in Innsmouth, his destination; a rundown, degraded city, he had heard; a place of sullen silences; of in-breeding; and curious folk who made their furtive livings in ways that he suspected the law would disapprove of. He remembered the words of a fellow officer who had done three years’ duty as a young constable in that degenerate place and some of the more vivid phrases came back to him now.

  He buttoned up his thick overcoat round his neck, for the car was an open tourer that he had borrowed from the Arkham authorities, and took a pull at the thermos flask of hot coffee he had thoughtfully provided himself with. The roaring of the water in his ears was having a hypnotic effect and the stark black and white, the contrast of the foaming water against the jet-black of the rocks, reminded him uncomfortably of death; perhaps because the juxtaposition recalled the skeletal effect of stripped bone against the blackness of the gorge. He shook off these fanciful thoughts, re-corked the thermos and drove on a few miles more, the comforting feel of his police revolver in its webbing harness reassuring against his breastbone.

  He was almost at his destination and the Manuxet gorges opened out to an estuary proper where the sullen pound of the river, yellowish brown now, started to mingle with the green of the outer sea. He stopped the car again and picked up his binoculars from the passenger seat. For a long while he studied the dark reef off the shore of Innsmouth, where the Atlantic surf boomed relentlessly, oblivious of the dark sea birds which flapped and soared above the wavetops; studying the large caves half-seen amid the spray, glimpsing the dark tumbling forms that appeared and disappeared amid the foam; seals, perhaps, or possibly larger sea birds dipping in the boiling welter.

  It was turned midday when he at last put the nose of the car into the crumbling suburbs of the old seaport and working from an out-of-date map—for the few passersby huddled in their overcoats did not seem inclined to stop or talk—eventually found the public library, a surprisingly massive brownstone edifice with a pseudo-Greek portico. Oates walked up a dusty marble staircase, his footsteps raising echoes, and eventually made out a faded gilt sign which directed him to the reference section. He had, of course, already been to the main library in Arkham but, as he had told the doctor, had been surprised to find that all their major newspaper files for the past few years had been sent to the County Library Depot for re-binding.

  Rather than drive over half Massachusetts he had thought it more convenient to first sample the facilities at Innsmouth, while heeding the advice of Arkham’s police chief not to advertise his presence there. He had already decided on the latter course in any event and now, as he tramped the dusty corridors, he was already regretting his errand for it seemed an unlikely quest in such unprepossessing surroundings.

  But soft electric lights bloomed ahead and a few moments later he found himself in the presence of an elderly spinster lady, named Miss Thatcher, the reference librarian, who gave him the freedom of the shelves. It was obvious that her duties were not onerous and Oates’ brisk personality a marked contrast to those of the few silent, hunched figures at the reading desks in the section behind her.

  Oates asked for the relevant newspaper files, which were speedily produced, and he was directed to a side-table beneath a reading lamp, where the bound volumes of the Innsmouth Recorder and other regional journals were spread out close to hand. Oates had cleverly asked for several years, including those which had nothing to do with his researches and he busied himself firstly with the pretence of going through these volumes and making pencilled notes which had no connection with his quest.

  He was uneasily aware that some of the huddled figures had frozen unnaturally at his entrance and that their pallid, seemingly-uncomprehending faces were turned moon-like toward him; the blank, unformed features reminding the Captain of Detectives of nothing so much as those unfortunates he had occasionally seen incarcerated in lunatic asylums in the great cities of the East. But he flicked the pages unconcernedly, all the while making innocuous noises to Miss Thatcher, who had hovered solicitously at his elbow. But she was soon called away to her desk and Oates was free to pursue his real researches. These concerned the disturbances which had shattered the relative calm of Innsmouth some years earlier. As he read on thro
ugh the yellowing pages Oates gradually recalled some of the salient features which had sent ripples through the wider world. The catalyst had been a young man, a descendant of Obed Marsh, who had fled the city and had alerted the Federal authorities, who had in turn carried out a series of raids during the years 1928 and 1929.

  This had led to the dynamiting of a large number of derelict waterfront properties and, even more strangely, the US Navy had sent vessels which had directed torpedoes downward to caverns deep beneath the great reef which lay a mile or two off the Innsmouth shore. As Oates read on his bewilderment increased but, intrigued, he persisted, and within an hour he had a set of disconnected facts which were as strange as anything he had ever been called upon to investigate. Almost as strange as the present set of circumstances which were the subject of his current investigation, he thought wryly.

  If he remembered rightly, the young man involved in the affair and whose precipitate flight from the city had first alerted the authorities, had later been incarcerated in an asylum in upstate New York and to the best of Oates’ knowledge, there he remained. The detective’s thoughts were disturbed by an irritating rustling and he noticed that one of the derelicts at the adjoining table was making for the door, rolling up a crumpled newspaper as he went. Oates then became aware that the librarian was on the telephone; in the yellow light which silhouetted her in her cubicle, he could see that she was half-turned toward him and seemed to be arguing with someone at the other end of the line.

  It was at this point that Oates made a strange discovery. The stories in which he was so interested were headlined on the front pages of the journals and were followed by the first paragraphs of the stories in heavy black type. But on every occasion when he consulted the turn-page which should have continued the narratives, it was to be confronted with other stories, with never a follow-up headline or the remainder of the story.