I abandoned it. I ran out into the street, bound for Wood Street and, beyond it, the next town—open country—any place but accursed Temphill. Down High Street, into Market Square, where the wan moonlight shared with one high lamp standard the only illumination, across the Square into Manor Street. In the distance lay the forests about Wood Street, beyond a curve, at the end of which Temphill would be left behind me. I raced down the nightmarish streets, heedless of the mists that began to rise and obscure the wooded country slopes that were my goal, the blurring of the landscape beyond the looming houses.
I ran blindly, wildly—but the hills of the open country came no nearer—and suddenly, horribly, I recognised the unlit intersections and dilapidated gables of Cloth Street—which should have been far behind me, on the other side of the river—and in a moment I found myself again in High Street, and there before me were the worn steps of that repellent church, with the car still before them! I tottered, clung to a roadside tree for a moment, my mind in chaos. Then I turned and started out again, sobbing with terror and dread, racing with pounding heart back to Market Square, back across the river, aware of a horrible vibration, a shocking, muted whistling sound I had come to know only too well, aware of fearful pursuit...
I failed to see the approaching car and had time only to throw myself backward so that the full force of its striking me was avoided. Even so, I was flung to the pavement and into blackness.
***
I woke in the hospital at Camside. A doctor returning to Camside through Temphill had been driving the car that struck me. He had taken me, unconscious and with a contusion and a broken arm, from that accursed city. He listened to my story, as much as I dared tell, and went to Temphill for my car. It could not be found. And he could find no one who had seen me or the car. Nor could he find books, papers, or diary at No. 11 South Street where Albert Young had lived. And of Clothier there was no trace—the owner of the adjacent house said he had been gone for a long time.
Perhaps they were right in telling me I had suffered a progressive hallucination. Perhaps it was an illusion, too, that I heard the doctors whispering when I was coming out of anaesthesia—whispering of the frantic way in which I had burst into the path of the car—and worse, of the strange fungus that clung to my clothes, even to my face at my lips, as if it grew there!
Perhaps. But can they explain how now, months afterward, though the very thought of Temphill fills me with loathing and dread, I feel myself irresistibly drawn to it, as if that accursed, haunted town were the mecca toward which I must make my way? I had begged them to confine me—to prison me—anything—and they only smile and try to soothe me and assure me that everything will “work itself out”— the glib, self-reassuring words that do not deceive me, the words that have a hollow sound against the magnet of Temphill and the ghostly whistling echoes that invade not only my dreams but my waking hours!
I will do what I must. Better death than that unspeakable horror...
***
Filed with the report of PC Villars on the disappearance of Richard Dodd, 9 Gayton Terrace, W.7. Manuscript in Dodd’s script, found in his room after his disappearance.
INNSMOUTH GOLD
by DAVID A. SUTTON
TALMAN GAVE ME a sceptical look. It wasn’t that he thought I was crazy, but maybe just a little nuts.
“Well, George,” he said at last, “I think you’ve been drinking too much of that sour-mash in the Kentucky sun!” I had been living south of the line for five years, that part was certainly true. As for the whiskey, I didn’t touch the stuff. Talman and I had been firm friends for around twenty years, a long relationship established through our mutual love of North American wildlife. We’d completed several expeditions together over the years on mainland America, and also once into the forested wilds of northern Canada. Eventually, my teaching commitments had meant a move of home, but luckily, or unluckily, as things worked out, half a decade on had found me back in my beloved Boston. The downside of that was I had no job and very little money.
We were sitting in the open basement of a bar near Charles Street in the Back Bay area, sipping cold beers. It was October, but the weather was mild and cloudy. The trees lining the sidewalk were beginning to transform themselves into fiery-crowned beacons of the season. I nodded to my companion, smiling. He was beginning to show his mid-forties age now with a greying hairline. Ignoring his quip about the bourbon I said, “Fred, do you remember the old days? We’d take off for the hills at the drop of a hat. At the merest sniff of something rare and interesting, with little more than fourth-hand evidence that we’d ever get to see the critter” I was, to put it mildly, selling my story.
“Agreed,” he replied. “We sure would race off in our younger days. But, you know, George, there ain’t never been any gluttons seen in New England. North of the Hudson Bay, or Labrador maybe, but not this far south. Those animals are rare”
He used the common name for the animal we had been discussing— the wolverine. And he was right, it was extremely uncommon and certainly not to be seen in Massachusetts. However, I was angling for some excuse to pay a visit to the wooded coast around Newburyport. So I pushed again: “I have it on good authority that wolverines have been seen around the state border with New Hampshire and I’d like to make this field trip if—”
“All right, George” He interrupted, sipping his beer. “I’ll loan you the two thousand dollars. That should cover your expenses. You can use my camping gear”
I was secretly overjoyed, but tried not to show too much emotion. “And what about the Toyota?” I knew George was too good a friend to let me down, but pushing like this I was asking for a kick in the ass. However, his 4WD was a second car and I was pretty sure he could spare it for a week or so.
He stared at me for a full minute then; his keen grey eyes—eyes that had sharpened their gaze over years of animal-watching—held me like a rabbit mesmerised by a weasel. My heart lurched and I thought he was going to renege on the whole deal.
He smiled. “And the Jap car. Okay, so I’m a complete fool!”
“You won’t regret it, Fred, I really appreciate what you’re doing. The money’s just a loan too, you’ll get that back, just as soon as I get my life straight” I was beginning to babble and I knew it. “Another beer?” I felt I could now splash out with my last few dollars.
“Sure,” he replied. “But I’ll get ’em.” When he’d ordered from the waitress, he said, “How about a little wager, George? Double or quits. If you see this damned wolverine and take a picture of it I’ll stand the loan. If you fail, you owe me four big ones.”
I could hardly refuse, even though I knew I was going to lose the bet. No one was going to see a wolverine that was outside a museum anywhere in the New England woods. However, I pretended to mull it over. We had been habitual betting buddies in the old days; fifty here, fifty there as to who’d see this bird or that snake first. My reply matched the role I was playing. “It’ll make me search all the harder, but I reckon my sources are unimpeachable. You’re on!”
Over the next few days, as I was getting my loan from Talman and equipping myself in his station wagon, the October weather began to worsen. The change was still only a chill in the air, letting everyone know winter was just around the corner. Finally, I set off from Talman’s house in the Boston suburbs. Till the end he thought I was on a wild goose chase to find the southernmost sighting of the world’s most vicious mammalian carnivore. If only he’d known...
In fact, my final destination was the salt marsh that surrounded the deserted town of Innsmouth. And it wasn’t any animal I was hunting.
It was gold.
You may think I was crazy, but let me fill in the gaps and you’ll see I was driven by the lure of gold fever; and maybe a little bit of the call of the wild.
***
Innsmouth is a coastal town—thriving once I suppose, but now deserted—on the mouth of the Manuxet river, between Ipswich and Newburyport. It is surrounded by a wide salt
marsh on the landward side, a desolate and unpeopled place. During the 17th century a lot of the ancient woodland in the area was cut down, which allowed wind-blown sand to penetrate inland and this led to the creation of the morass. More recently, global warming has raised the sea level a few inches. It might not sound like much, but it has had the effect of making the wetland all the more permanent. Heavy forestation further inland adds to Innsmouth’s isolation, but that doesn’t matter, poor fishing over the last eighty-ninety years has left the town without sufficient industries to survive, hence the ghost town it’s now become.
I drove north off the Fitzgerald Expressway, along the coast on route 95 into wilder, pleasant country. Small, sleepy New England towns and radiant red and gold autumnal trees conveyed to me a sense of homeliness and safety. There ain’t a prettier sight than this State in the fall. Passing the turn-off for Arkham reminded me of the research I’d done there when first returning home from Middlesboro. That, and the things which an acquaintance had told me—Bill Poynter was a conspiracy buff and liked to delve into government records released through the Freedom of Information Act.
It was Poynter who first introduced me to the reason why I was so desperate to visit Innsmouth’s salt marsh. We’d been drinking pals in Middlesboro, since he and I worked for the same educational establishment. Naturally we talked a lot about our respective hobbies. His was digging for dirt and scandal in government papers. He told me one day about a major FBI raid on a little town called Innsmouth in 1928.
“The FBI cover-story was that the raid was to bring the bootleggers to justice” Poynter had said. “Innsmouth was a major centre for the production and traffic in illegal liquor. It was prohibition, after all”
“But,” I asked him, not really needing the mysterious prompting in his voice, “there was another reason for the raid, wasn’t there?”
“You said it. Geo—” he always shortened my name to sound like I was the prefix to some unmentioned Earth Science “—that raid had other fish to fry, at least for some of the senior Feds involved. It was, no less” he became conspiratorial, “to cream off a roomful of gold that lay for the taking at the town’s Obed Marsh Refinery.”
Poynter’s story didn’t sound too loony, although some of the other things I’d heard about Innsmouth did. Poynter went on to say that the Bureau people stashed their cache of gold somewhere in the marsh outside of town. And there it had remained to this day.
“Why hadn’t the agents gone back for their loot when the heat was off?” I asked him.
“Apparently there was a lot of fuss and palaver” he replied. “Seems, however, that they just couldn’t find where they’d hidden it, especially since agent Mahoney, the guy who knew the backwoods like the back of his hand, had inconveniently gotten himself shot dead in an unconnected raid in Boston a few months later.”
There arose in my mind half-a-dozen unanswered questions, so at the time I took Poynter’s story with a pinch of salt. However, I had since discovered that there was a gold refining plant in Innsmouth and that it produced some opulent, strange-looking jewellery. Its trademark appeared to be designs based on some South Sea island religion or motif. The reality of the gold factory clinched it for me. Innsmouth had died. Nobody lived there any more. The harvest of the sea had gone, depleted fish stocks turning the trawlermen inland for work; and before that, the gold which was spirited away destroyed Innsmouth’s other major industry. Maybe a few crooked FBI agents had used the liquor raid to cover their own illegal interest in Obed Marsh’s gold. Maybe that hoard still lay where it had been hidden in 1928. And maybe I could be a millionaire. It was too good a chance to pass up without at least one crack at it.
***
My drive up the coast was leisurely. I felt relaxed for the first time in months. I glanced in the rear-view mirror, and I saw that my face was looking better than it had for a long time. I’d always looked weatherbeaten, you’d expect that, but the last year or so had left me looking fifty rather than forty. But blue eyes were now keen, rather than dull; and the crow-feet around them and the sallow cheeks had almost gone. My blond hair was clean and tidy looking, instead of greasy and unkempt.
On the passenger seat lay the camera I’d bought. What I was searching for didn’t need photographing, but there was bound to be wildlife worth shooting in the woods. My destination was about sixty miles from Boston, but I felt so good that I drove slowly, stopping at places here and there, taking a few photos to familiarise myself with the autofocus Canon. A small township provided some typical New England buildings from the turn of the century and it reminded me of Arkham. I had stayed in Arkham for about a week last summer, sleeping rough for the latter half as my dwindling resources ran dangerously low. During researches at the library of the Miskatonic University, I built up a good picture of the annals of Innsmouth. That, in addition to what Poynter had told me, was all I needed to convince me about the bullion.
Innsmouth’s had its fair share of history. Besides the all-too-familiar story of the 1928 assault, which must have sounded the death-knell for the place, there were other strange stories. It was easy to see how such yarns began. My English ancestors came from legend-haunted Cornwall, where a dozen books wouldn’t be enough to document all the ghost stories of that county. Add the lost sunken city of Lyonesse and the mythic sea serpent, Morgawr, and you have a rich literature of tall tales. Let’s face it, any rural place like that has such folk stories. Innsmouth was no exception.
There was much supposition that the FBI foray was unrelated to the illicit distillation of whiskey (or gold for that matter), but organised to exterminate a brood of mutant humans living in the town and on Devil Reef, which lay a couple of miles offshore. The federal agents had dynamited the skerry, but my guess is that it provided a handy and secluded spot to moor the boats that were used to ship the liquor down the coast. Devil Reef is rarely seen nowadays, what with the rise in the sea level and the blasting, and it remains submerged except on occasional neap tides. Thus there was a blending of truth and fiction, an ideal mix to turn seekers after facts off the scent.
So absorbed was I in my thoughts that I nearly missed the turn-off. The old, rundown road was badly signposted and not often used. In fact, there were so many potholes in the blacktop that I was glad I was in a four-wheel drive. The road looped down, snaking into a wide valley that was all but hidden by a mixed forest. The trees and the undergrowth were making demands on the unkempt highway, encroaching, brooding over me as I drove slowly on. It was quiet, too. Unearthly quiet. All I could hear through the open window was the engine and the exhaust. I was tempted to switch on the radio, but didn’t. Finally, the road ran out of asphalt into a dirt track with coppery-leaved silver birches forming a tunnel above me. A few old tyre ruts were impressed into the dried mud, indicating that it had been some time since anyone had ventured this way.
The car bucked as it rode the uneven surface. What I was searching for was a disused railroad that at one time branched to Innsmouth from Rowley. It had been obsolete since before almost anyone could remember, and I surmised that the track, which had been laid on an embankment built across the marsh, was a likely contender as a site for the concealment of gold. My concentration was beginning to lapse, and suddenly the rightside front wheel hit a deep depression in the road. The wagon lurched sideways, coming to a stop and throwing me onto the passenger seat.
I cursed. The engine had cut out and the Toyota was tipped at a steep angle. It might be difficult to drive it out, but, as I surveyed my surroundings I noticed that the woods had become almost impenetrable for vehicles in any case. From now on I would have to move on foot. Heaving the rucksack on my back, I was again aware of the disquieting lack of birdsong. Anyhow, the first job was to scan the rather ancient map I’d bought from a bookstore along the way.
The storeowner had said that nothing much had changed in that part of the country since the cartographers last surveyed it. “There’s some bad weather ’spected,” he continued, as if I’d
asked him for the forecast. “Jest on the radio, snow’s comin’ down aff the Green Mountains.”
“No problem,” I responded. “I’m an old hand in those sort of conditions.”
The old man pulled off his bi-focals resignedly, as though his dissuading tactics had failed, which they had. He stared at me with unfocused eyes before riding another snippet to deter me. “Innsmouth’s got... folks livin’ in them rundown houses as wouldn’t take kindly to strangers.”
“Oh?” I said, my surprise showing. “I thought the town was abandoned some years ago? In any case,” I continued, “I’m not interested in the town itself, I’m actually up here checking out the wildlife.”
He didn’t seem to take my meaning immediately because he said, “Yep, that’s right—they’re wild folks livin’ up there.”
“You mean like squatters, or hippies?” I asked.
“Mebbe.”
I’d left without really looking too closely at the map, but opening it now I saw that it was detailed, showing the extent of the forest and the few homesteads that were swallowed within it; the marsh and the old rail track. There was a fairly decent plan of Innsmouth as well, the coastline, the Manuxet river and Devil Reef. A cross indicating a church in the town was given the unwieldy title ESOTERIC ORDER OF DAGON CHURCH, and I remembered the name from my earlier researches. Apparently Innsmouth had gone over to some weird religion, I surmised something like the holy wailers or Mormons, or somesuch. Either way, it didn’t stop the town profiteering from their poteen. I found my route, marked it on the map and checked my bearings. Taking a quick look at a compass, I headed north, directly into the brush. It was hard work, the undergrowth of briars dense, clasping and tearing at my boots with every step. Serried stands of mountain ash, sugar maple and fir inhibited my progress for a while, finally opening up to thickets of mountain holly, chokeberry and cinnamon fern.
Shadows Over Innsmouth Page 25