“Those things out there know; yes, I tell you, they know even what we are thinking; even as we sit here in my quiet house beings are regarding us with alien eyes. As the Captain has so cleverly deduced, together with the good doctor, they come from beyond the reef. That is the storm-centre which has plagued Innsmouth and, to a certain extent, Arkham, for a long, long time. I see Captain Oates, at least, believes me. He is a very wise man. Perhaps he may be the saving of us. Who knows. Dr. Lancaster too. But these things are diabolically cunning and they seem to be everywhere.
“Why do you think I ran headlong through the darkness tonight? Not only to escape their physical presence but their infiltration. Oh, yes, gentlemen. They have learned how to infiltrate the brains of human beings and to assume their personalities even, these Old Ones. That is why I had to do what I did tonight. I could see the reptilian trait in his eyes. It was him or me. I had to do it, gentlemen, I’m sure you see that. These things are everywhere.
“I see some of the officers present tonight remain sceptical. Well, that is only to be expected. You wonder, perhaps, why I keep my hands hidden beneath these thick gloves, even indoors. It is because I fear the taint myself. And when I saw the webbing between his fingers as he rang the bell, I knew there was only one way of it. You will say, of course, that I obeyed the promptings of these things from the reef, who have learned to assume human identity. I tell you that my character and will power have been able to rise above all that.
“It was rather the opposite, gentlemen. I knew he meant me great harm even from the furtive way he went around the house before announcing himself by means of the doorbell. Ah, if only you knew how I suffered during those minutes which seemed like hours. But you will want the proof. Please come to the kitchen, gentlemen. There is a trapdoor beneath the table, let into the parquet. Yes, if those two strong officers would move it, we shall be able to open the hatch.
“There, gentlemen, there! Weltering in his own blood! Is it not a hideous spectacle! Yet, what was I to do? It must be obvious to the meanest intelligence here that the metamorphosis was upon it. I struck just in time, did I not?
“Be careful of that ladder, gentlemen. The treads are slippery, as you can see... Not blood, though it may look red to you. Greenish ichor, rather. And the stench! It is something I shall carry with me to the grave.
“What a hideous sight! I should have burned him, of course, but it was impossible here in the house; or in this closely-knit urban atmosphere. I see you shake your heads; I sense the disbelief in your eyes. Fools! I tell you it is but the facsimile of the man you knew, the hideous masquerade of a devilish thing from beyond. Gentlemen. Gentlemen! Please believe me! Why do you advance to pinion me. I am not mad! I beg you to believe me...”
XVIII
REPORT FROM CAPTAIN OF DETECTIVES OATES TO CHIEF OF BUREAU, STATE POLICE:
1. My plan of action, as outlined in the main report enclosed herewith, is of my own origination and I bear the entire responsibility, except in respect of the medical conclusions drawn up by Dr. Lancaster. As you will realise from radio and newspapers long before you get this, the plan will have been carried out.
2. The purpose of this appendix is merely to assure you of the logic of my actions and the inescapable conclusions to which I have been led since my arrival in Arkham. I refer you to my earlier missives, particularly Nos. 1, 2 and 3 and the attached material provided by Dr. Lancaster.
3. As you will learn in due course, Jefferson Holroyd, eminent scholar of Miskatonic University, has been transported to the County Asylum, on the medical advice of Dr. Lancaster, who signed the certificate of committal, and by my orders also. He committed murder while insane and a preliminary medical examination has revealed startling changes not only in his personality but in certain degenerative and repellent physical aspects. These are dealt with by Dr. Lancaster in some detail.
4. The remains of one of the strange creatures glimpsed in the areas of Arkham and Innsmouth, three-quarters incinerated by fire, as the result of Dr. Lancaster’s timely action, have been refrigerated in the city mortuary in Arkham and are available for further medical inspection. From the physical characteristics exhibited you will see why my actions tomorrow night are so necessary.
5. As detailed in my main report, the body of Dr. Darrow, Dean of the Faculty of Miskatonic University, hideously mangled and hacked about with a kitchen knife, was found in a cellar beneath the house of Jefferson Holroyd. He has already confessed to the murder and there is no doubt he was responsible for the unfortunate man’s death. Please see specific details in my main report.
6. None of these facts have yet been made known to the press or the general public and if I do not return from the action we have proposed to take, please understand that I have acted from the best of all possible motives.
7. All the matters briefly glanced over in Headings 1 to 6 above are fully expanded upon in the main reports by myself and Dr. Lancaster and bizarre as you may think them, I can assure you they are well attested by reliable witnesses. The missing State troopers under the command of Captain Uriah Dale must be presumed dead; there is no doubt of that and I would be grateful if you would have the next of kin informed.
The names and ranks of those officers who fell in the line of duty in the passages leading in the Innsmouth direction are detailed in the attached list, compiled by colleagues from the State Police.
I recommend that Sergeant John P. Ellermann be advanced to the rank of Captain for the distinguished service in these matters he has rendered over the past few days.
I am, sir, your obedient servant
Cornelius Oates
Captain of Detectives, County Force.
XIX
Dr. Lancaster’s face was corpse-like and strained in the weird bluish lighting of the tunnels. They were in the fifth and largest of the passages, the one that sloped steeply away toward Innsmouth and the sea. There were dozens of State troopers, heavily armed, standing on guard but nothing had been seen or heard for the past two days.
Bellows was hurrying down the sloping tunnel toward them. He too had changed over the past forty-eight hours, Oates thought.
“A message from Ellermann on the surface,” the surveyor said. “Telephone message just came in from the army officer commanding the operations at Innsmouth. The town has been entirely evacuated. All civilians and animals have been removed from the area, the nearest being some five miles back.”
“House to house clearance?” said Oates.
Bellows nodded. “House to house. Ambulances removed a number of invalids to district hospitals.”
Lancaster expressed his approval.
“It seems to have been a pretty thorough operation,” he said.
Oates turned back to Bellows.
“What time?”
“The message came through at eight o’clock. It’s taken me half-an-hour to get down here. The cordon of State Police and Army personnel were withdrawing by truck then. They should be back in position now, sealing off all roads leading to Innsmouth and the sea.”
Oates again glanced at his wristwatch. He had himself, together with the civic authorities, checked the placing of the blasting powder the previous night. The caves along the Innsmouth shore had been thoroughly checked and nothing had been found; but subterranean caverns still led off a large pit on shore descending steeply beneath the surface of the sea, out toward the reef.
Here Bellows’ expertise had proved invaluable. All involved had agreed that it would be far too dangerous to try to explore out there. But the configurations of the monstrous tunnels had helped in that respect. A number of rubber-wheeled trolleys had been constructed, the explosive carefully loaded aboard them, and each individual load had been winched with infinite care down the precipitous slopes into incredible depths.
Bellows had devised an ingenious arrangement to account for any curves in the tunnels. There was a circular rail running around each trolley, within which the individual loads of blasting powder had been
carefully packed, protected by padding; the trolley wheels were made to swivel in any direction, so that as soon as one of the vehicles came in contact with a wall or other obstacle, it would immediately set off at another tangent, impelled by its own weight.
The winches were equipped with measuring devices and before they came to a halt they had registered in excess of five thousand feet. Engineering works on the beach, where the tunnels came out, had consisted of cutting a deep trench on the seashore leading to the vast pit on the beach which led sloping away toward and under the sea.
A silence had fallen between the three men most involved in the work of the past days, though in reality there was tremendous noise down here, not only from the hundreds of men engaged, but from the heavy throbbing of the pumps. For many hours thousands of gallons of gasoline had been delivered from those pumps, the fuel sluicing down, eventually debouching into the deep trench on the beach and thence to the huge tunnel that led beneath the sea. The air was heavy with the stink of gasoline. This was a dangerous task and everyone involved had been relieved of matches or anything which might cause a spark and all personnel wore rubber-soled boots.
“There will be a tremendous explosion,” Bellows said reflectively. “Even if the reef is not destroyed the surface of the sea will show visible signs. It will be like a miniature volcano.”
Oates nodded, his mind heavy with thought. Intercut with the images of the past weeks; the horrors of the sudden deaths; the snakelike creatures glimpsed in the tunnel and by Lancaster; the whole brooding atmosphere of the Innsmouth-Arkham axis; was the impending climax to the long drama. He had had his figures and whole scheme submitted to the most rigorous examination by engineers and mathematicians of the Miskatonic faculty and they had been adamant in their objections; not at its feasibility but at the inherent dangers.
Oates was having all the State troopers and other personnel cleared from the tunnels, of course; that was only common sense. All that gasoline had been pumped down; the telephone link had reported back that the liquid flow had reached the beach, had followed the deep ditch exactly and had disappeared into the great borehole. It must have reached the area of the blasting powder long ago. It needed only for him to ignite the chain which would detonate one of the greatest man-made explosions of modern history.
No human being would suffer; he was convinced of that. But would the resulting holocaust rid the world of something so monstrous as to be almost beyond belief? And if he failed there was an awesome responsibility on his shoulders. But he must not fail. His only regret was that he might die before learning the result of all these painstaking operations.
The scientists had warned him there would be a danger of a monstrous blowback when the gasoline ignited; in which case the passage leading to the beach would act like the barrel of a gun and send a blast of searing heat back up the shaft, roasting everything in its path.
They had urged that the pumping operation should begin at the borehole on the beach; this would have been the solution in the normal event but there were insuperable problems, in that the black basaltic cliffs dropped almost precipitously to the shore at that point, rugged boulders and chasms preventing vehicular access from the top. Similarly the main tunnel narrowed as it descended and when it debouched on to the beach the passage was only about four feet across, making it impossible for personnel and the pumps to descend that way. Any other solution would have taken months and there was no time for that.
“How are you going to do it?” the doctor asked Oates.
Real silence had fallen at last; the pumps had been switched off and the vehicles and troops and police were withdrawing up the passage, giving the three men curious looks.
“Electrical spark,” Oates said shortly. “Worked out by Bellows here. A clockwork motor on a ratchet will start operating in about twenty minutes after switch-on. We’ve worked out that’s how long it will take the trolley bearing the mechanism to reach the lower tunnel. That will set a circuit going; generating a series of sparks that should trigger off the gasoline in a further ten minutes. The theory is that a wall of fire will descend from the beach and in turn set off the blasting powder far below.”
Lancaster gave him a twisted smile.
“That’s the theory, Captain.”
Oates nodded abstractedly, looking across at the curious circular trolley with its rubber wheels.
“No sense hanging about,” he said. “I’m going to set the mechanism. I’ll join you later. You start off up now. And that’s an order.”
His two companions glanced at one another in silence.
“As long as you know what you’re doing,” Bellows said. “You sure you don’t want me to stay? I set this thing up, remember.”
Oates shook his head.
“I can manage. We’ll all meet up top.”
“So long as we don’t all meet up in the sky,” said the doctor lugubriously.
The three men exchanged strained smiles. Then the other two went, walking carefully, the stench of gasoline emphasising the volatile vaporous mixture in the air. Oates felt perspiration cold on his face. The insidious whispering inside his head had begun again. He had no time to lose.
He walked forward to where the precipitous slope leaned down into the primeval darkness beyond the reach of the specially sealed hand lamps. He pulled the trolley out gently from the wall, set the calibrating dial as Bellows had shown him, not once but a dozen times. His heart was pumping uncomfortably, even drowning out the ticking of the clockwork mechanism. He checked his watch again. He had just twenty minutes.
Oates was not a religious man but he prayed now.
“God protect us from the powers of darkness,” he said.
Then he was launching the rubber-sided trolley down the steep slope into the blackness and into the ultimate horror of the pulsating things that writhed and ululated beyond the reef that lay off the dark and blasphemous Innsmouth shore.
THE BIG FISH
by JACK YEOVIL
THE BAY CITY cops were rousting enemy aliens. As I drove through the nasty coast town, uniforms hauled an old couple out of a grocery store. The Taraki family’s neighbours huddled in thin rain howling asthmatically for bloody revenge. Pearl Harbour had struck a lot of people that way. With the Tarakis on the bus for Manzanar, neighbours descended on the store like bedraggled vultures. Produce vanished instantly, then destruction started. Caught at a sleepy stop-light, I got a good look. The Tarakis had lived over the store; now, their furniture was thrown out of the second-storey window. Fine china shattered on the sidewalk, spilling white chips like teeth into the gutter. It was inspirational, the forces of democracy rallying round to protect the United States from vicious oriental grocers, fiendishly intent on selling eggplant to a hapless civilian population.
Meanwhile my appointment was with a gent who kept three pictures on his mantelpiece, grouped in a triangle around a statue of the Virgin Mary. At the apex was his white-haired mama, to the left Charles Luciano, and to the right, Benito Mussolini. The Tarakis, American-born and registered Democrats, were headed to a dust-bowl concentration camp for the duration, while Gianni Pastore, Sicilian-born and highly unregistered capo of the Family Business, would spend his war in a marble-fronted mansion paid for by nickels and dimes dropped on the numbers game, into slot machines, or exchanged for the favours of nice girls from the old country. I’d seen his mansion before and so far been able to resist the temptation to bean one of his twelve muse statues with a bourbon bottle.
Money can buy you love but can’t even put down a deposit on good taste.
The palace was up in the hills, a little way down the boulevard from Tyrone Power. But now, Pastore was hanging his mink-banded fedora in a Bay City beachfront motel complex, which was a real estate agent’s term for a bunch of horrible shacks shoved together for the convenience of people who like sand on their carpets.
I always take a lungful of fresh air before entering a confined space with someone in Pastore’s business, so I parked t
he Chrysler a few blocks from the Seaview Inn and walked the rest of the way, sucking on a Camel to keep warm in the wet. They say it doesn’t rain in Southern California, but they also say the US Navy could never be taken by surprise. This February, three months into a war the rest of the world had been fighting since 1936 or 1939 depending on whether you were Chinese or Polish, it was raining almost constantly, varying between a light fall of misty drizzle in the dreary daytimes to spectacular storms, complete with DeMille lighting effects, in our fear-filled nights. Those trusty Boy Scouts scanning the horizons for Jap subs and Nazi U-Boats were filling up influenza wards, and manufacturers of raincoats and umbrellas who’d not yet converted their plants to defence production were making a killing. I didn’t mind the rain. At least rainwater is clean, unlike most other things in Bay City.
A small boy with a wooden gun leaped out of a bush and sprayed me with sound effects, interrupting his onomatopoeic chirruping with a shout of “Die, you slant-eyed Jap!” I clutched my heart, staggered back, and he finished me off with a quick burst. I died for the Emperor and tipped the kid a dime to go away. If this went on long enough, maybe little Johnny would get a chance to march off and do real killing, then maybe come home in a box or with the shakes or a taste for blood. Meanwhile, especially since someone spotted a Jap submarine off Santa Barbara, California was gearing up for the War Effort. Aside from interning grocers, our best brains were writing songs like ‘To Be Specific, It’s Our Pacific’, ‘So Long Momma, I’m Off to Yokohama’, ‘We’re Gonna Slap the Jap Right Off the Map’ and ‘When Those Little Yellow Bellies Meet the Cohens and the Kellys’. Zanuck had donated his string of Argentine polo ponies to West Point and got himself measured for a comic opera Colonel’s uniform so he could join the Signal Corps and defeat the Axis by posing for publicity photographs.
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