Shadows Over Innsmouth

by Stephen Jones (Editor)

  As if the very mention of her name were a summons, June’s voice came down to us: “David, is that Bill? I’ll be down at once.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself on my account,” I called out, my voice still a little shaky. “And certainly not if you don’t feel too well.”

  “I’m fine!” her voice insisted. “I was just a little tired, that’s all.”

  I was myself again, gratefully accepting a scotch and soda, swilling a parched dryness from my mouth and throat.

  “There,” said David, seeming to read my thoughts. “You look more your old self now.”

  “First time that ever happened to me,” I told him. “I suppose your ‘miasma’ theory must be correct. Anyway, I’ll be up on my feet again in a minute.” As I spoke I let my eyes wander about the interior of what would be the house’s main living room.

  The room was large, for the main part oak-panelled, almost stripped of its old furniture and looking extremely austere. I recalled the bonfire, its pale flames licking at the upthrusting, worm-eaten leg of a chair...

  One wall was of the original hard stone, polished by the years, creating an effect normally thought desirable in modern homes but perfectly natural here and in no way contrived. All in all a charming room. Ages-blackened beams bowed almost imperceptibly toward the centre where they crossed the low ceiling wall to wall.

  “Built to last,” said David. “Three hundred years old at least, those beams, but the basic structure is—” he shrugged, “—I’m not sure, not yet. This is one of five lower rooms, all about the same size. I’ve cleared most of them out now, burnt up most of the old furniture; but there were one or two pieces worth renovation. Most of the stuff I’ve saved is in what used to be old man Carpenter’s study. And the place is—will be—beautiful. When I’m through with it. Gloomy at the moment, yes, but that’s because of the windows. I’m afraid most of these old small-panes will have to go. The place needs opening up.”

  “Opening up, yes,” I repeated him, sensing a vague irritation or tension in him, a sort of urgency.

  “Here,” he said, “are you feeling all right now? I’d like you to see the plate I took that rubbing from.”

  “The Dagon plate,” I said at once, biting my tongue a moment too late.

  He looked at me, stared at me, and slowly smiled. “So you looked it up, did you? Dagon, yes—or Neptune, as the Romans called him. Come on, I’ll show you.” And as we left the house he yelled back over his shoulder: “June—we’re just going over to the enclosure. Back soon.”

  “Enclosure?” I followed him toward the mouth of the horseshoe of buildings. “I thought you said the brass was on a lintel?”

  “So it is, over a doorway—but the building has no roof and so I call it an enclosure. See?” and he pointed. The mouth of the horseshoe was formed of a pair of small, rough stone buildings set perhaps twenty-five yards apart, which were identical in design but for the one main discrepancy David had mentioned—namely that the one on the left had no roof.

  “Perhaps it fell in?” I suggested as we approached the structure.

  David shook his head. “No,” he said, “there never was a roof. Look at the tops of the walls. They’re flush. No gaps to show where roof support beams might have been positioned. If you make a comparison with the other building you’ll see what I mean. Anyway, whatever its original purpose, old man Carpenter filled it with junk: bags of rusty old nails, worn-out tools, that sort of thing. Oh, yes— and he kept his firewood here, under a tarpaulin.”

  I glanced inside the place, leaning against the wall and poking my head in through the vacant doorway. The wall stood in its own shadow and was cold to my touch. Beams of sunlight, glancing in over the top of the west wall, filled the place with dust motes that drifted like swarms of aimless microbes in the strangely musty air. There was a mixed smell of rust and rot, of some small dead thing, and of... the sea? The last could only be a passing fancy, no sooner imagined than forgotten.

  I shaded my eyes against the dusty sunbeams. Rotted sacks spilled nails and bolts upon a stone-flagged floor; farming implements red with rust were heaped like metal skeletons against one wall; at the back, heavy blocks of wood stuck out from beneath a mould-spotted tarpaulin. A dead rat or squirrel close to my feet seethed with maggots.

  I blinked in the hazy light, shuddered—not so much at sight of the small corpse as at a sudden chill of the psyche—and hastily withdrew my head.

  “There you are,” said David, his matter-of-fact tone bringing me back down to earth. “The brass.”

  Above our heads, central in the stone lintel, a square plate bore the original of David’s rubbing. I gave it a glance, an almost involuntary reaction to David’s invitation that I look, and at once looked away. He frowned, seemed disappointed. “You don’t find it interesting?”

  “I find it... disturbing,” I answered at length. “Can we go back to the house? I’m sure June will be up and about by now.”

  He shrugged, leading the way as we retraced our steps along sun-splashed, weed-grown paths between scrubby fruit trees and dusty, cobwebbed shrubbery. “I thought you’d be taken by it,” he said. And, “How do you mean, ‘disturbing’?”

  I shook my head, had no answer for him. “Maybe it’s just me,” I finally said. “I don’t feel at my best today. I’m not up to it, that’s all.”

  “Not up to what?” he asked sharply, then shrugged again before I could answer. “Suit yourself.” But after that he quickly became distant and a little surly. He wasn’t normally a moody man, but I knew him well enough to realise that I had touched upon some previously unsuspected, exposed nerve; and so I determined not to prolong my visit.

  I did stay long enough to talk to June, however, though what I saw of her was hardly reassuring. She looked pinched, her face lined and pale, showing none of the rosiness one might expect in a newlywed, or in any healthy young woman in summertime. Her eyes were red-rimmed, their natural blue seeming very much watered-down; her skin looked dry, deprived of moisture; even her hair, glossy-black and bouncy on those previous occasions when we had met, seemed lacklustre now and disinterested.

  It could be, of course, simply the fact that I had caught her at a bad time. Her father had died recently, as I later discovered, and of course that must still be affecting her. Also, she must have been working very hard, alongside David, trying to get the old place put to rights. Or again it could be David’s summer “miasma”—an allergy, perhaps.

  Perhaps...

  But why any of these things—David’s preoccupation, his near-obsession (or mine?) with occurrences and relics of the distant past; the old myths and legends of the region, of hauntings and misty phantoms and such; and June’s queer malaise—why any of these things should concern me beyond the bounds of common friendship I did not know, could not say. I only knew that I felt as if somewhere a great wheel had started to roll, and that my friend and his wife lay directly in its path, not even knowing that it bore down upon them...

  VI: DAGON’S BELL

  Summer rolled by in warm lazy waves; autumn saw the trees shamelessly, mindlessly stripping themselves naked (one would think they’d keep their leaves to warm them through the winter); my businesses presented periodic problems enough to keep my nose to the grindstone, and so there was little spare time in which to ponder the strangeness of the last twelve months. I saw David in the village now and then, usually at a distance; saw June, too, but much less frequently. More often than not he seemed haggard—or if not haggard, hagridden, nervous, agitated, hurried—and she was... well, spectral. Pale and willow-slim, and red-eyed (I suspected) behind dark spectacles. Married life? Or perhaps some other problem? None of my business.

  Then came the time of the deep kelp once more, which was when David made it my business.

  And here I must ask the reader to bear with me. The following part of the story will seem hastily written, too thoughtlessly prepared and put together. But this is how I remember it: blurred and unreal, and patterned
with mismatched dialogue. It happened quickly; I see no reason to spin it out...

  ***

  David’s knock was urgent on a night when the sky was black with falling rain and the wind whipped the trees to a frenzy; and yet he stood there in shirt-sleeves, shivering, gaunt in aspect and almost vacant in expression. It took several brandies and a thorough rub-down with a warm towel to bring him to a semblance of his old self, by which time he seemed more ashamed of his behaviour than eager to explain it. But I was not letting him off that lightly. The time had come, I decided, to have the thing out with him; get it out in the open, whatever it was, and see what could be done about it while there was yet time.

  “Time?” he finally turned his gaze upon me from beneath his mop of tousled hair, a towel over his shoulders while his shirt steamed before my open fire. “Is there yet time? Damned if I know...” He shook his head.

  “Well then, tell me,” I said, exasperated. “Or at least try. Start somewhere. You must have come to me for something. Is it you and June? Was your getting married a mistake? Or is it just the place, the old farm?”

  “Oh, come on, Bill!” he snorted. “You know well enough what it is. Something of it, anyway. You experienced it yourself. Just the place?” the corners of his mouth turned down, his expression souring. “Oh, yes, it’s the place, all right. What the place was, what it might be even now...”

  “Go on,” I prompted him; and he launched into the following:

  “I came to ask you to come back with me. I don’t want to spend another night alone there.”

  “Alone? But isn’t June there?”

  He looked at me for a moment and finally managed a ghastly grin. “She is and she isn’t,” he said. “Oh, yes, yes, she’s there—but still I’m alone. Not her fault, poor love. It’s that bloody awful place!”

  “Tell me about it,” I urged.

  He sighed, bit his lip. And after a moment: “I think,” he began, “—I think it was a temple. And I don’t think the Romans had it first. You know, of course, that they’ve found Phoenician symbols on some of the stones at Stonehenge? Well, and what else did the ancients bring with them to old England, eh? What did we worship in those prehistoric times? The earth-mother, the sun, the rain—the sea? We’re an island, Bill. The sea was everywhere around us! And it was bountiful. It still is, but not like it was in those days. What’s more natural than to worship the sea—and what the sea brought?”

  “Its bounty?” I said.

  “That, yes, and something else. Cthulhu, Pischa, the Kraken, Dagon, Oannes, Neptune. Call him—it—what you will. But it was worshipped at Kettlethorpe, and it still remembers. Yes, and I think it comes, in certain seasons, to seek the worship it once knew and perhaps still... still...”

  “Yes?”

  He looked quickly away. “I’ve made... discoveries.”

  I waited.

  “I’ve found things out, yes, yes—and—” His eyes flared up for a moment in the firelight, then dulled.

  “And?”

  “Damn it!” he turned on me and the towel fell from his shoulders. Quickly he snatched it up and covered himself—but not before I had seen how thin mere months had made him. “Damn it!” he mumbled again, less vehemently now. “Must you repeat everything I say? God, I do enough of that myself! I go over everything—over and over and over...”

  I sat in silence, waiting. He would tell it in his own time.

  And eventually he continued. “I’ve made discoveries, and I’ve heard... things.” He looked from the fire to me, peered at me, ran trembling fingers through his hair. And did I detect streaks of grey in that once jet mop? “I’ve heard the bell!”

  “Then it’s time you got out of there!” I said at once. “Time you got June out, too.”

  “I know, I know!” he answered, his expression tortured. He gripped my arm. “But I’m not finished yet. I don’t know it all, not yet. It lures me, Bill. I have to know...”

  “Know what?” It was my turn to show my agitation. “What do you need to know, you fool? Isn’t it enough that the place is evil? You know that much. And yet you stay on there. Get out, that’s my advice. Get out now!”

  “No!” his denial was emphatic. “I’m not finished. There has to be an end to it. The place must be cleansed.” He stared again into the fire.

  “So you do admit it’s evil?”

  “Of course it is. Yes, I know it is. But leave, get out? I can’t, and June—”

  “Yes?”

  “She won’t!” He gave a muffled sob and turned watery, searching eyes full upon me. “The place is like... like a magnet! It has a genius loci. It’s a focal point for God-only-knows-what forces. Evil? Oh, yes! An evil come down all the centuries. But I bought the place and I shall cleanse it—end it forever, whatever it is.”

  “Look,” I tried reasoning with him, “let’s go back, now, the two of us. Let’s get June out of there and bring her back here for the night. How did you get here anyway? Surely not on foot, on a night like this?”

  “No, no,” he shook his head. “Car broke down halfway up the hill. Rain must have got under the bonnet. I’ll pick it up tomorrow.” He stood up, looked suddenly afraid, wild-eyed. “I’ve been away too long. Bill, will you run me back? June’s there—alone! She was sleeping when I left. I can fill you in on the details while you drive...”

  VII: MANIFESTATION

  I made him take another brandy, threw a coat over his shoulders, bustled him out to my car. Moments later we were rolling down into Harden and he was telling me all that had happened between times. As best I remember, this is what he said:

  “Since that day you visited us I’ve been hard at work. Real work, I mean. Not the other thing, not delving—not all of the time, anyway. I got the grounds inside the walls tidied up, even tried a little preliminary landscaping. And the house: the old windows out, new ones in. Plenty of light. But still the place was musty. As the summer turned I began burning old Carpenter’s wood, drying out the house, ridding it of the odour of centuries—a smell that was always thicker at night. And fresh paint, too, lots of it. Mainly white, all bright and new. June picked up a lot; you must have noticed how down she was? Yes, well she seemed to be on the mend. I thought I had the— the ‘miasma’—on the run. Hah!” he gave a bitter snort. “A ‘summer miasma’, I called it. Blind, blind!”

  “Go on,” I urged him, driving carefully through the wet streets.

  “Eventually, to give myself room to sort out the furniture and so on, I got round to chucking the old shelves and books out of Carpenter’s study. That would have been okay, but... I looked into some of those books. That was an error. I should have simply burned the lot, along with the wormy old chairs and shreds of carpet. And yet, in a way, I’m glad I didn’t.”

  I could feel David’s fevered eyes burning me in the car’s dark interior, fixed upon me as he spoke.

  “The knowledge in those books, Bill. The dark secrets, the damnable mysteries. You know, if anyone does, what a fool I am for a mystery. I was hooked; work ceased; I had to know! But those books and manuscripts: the Unter-Zee Kulten and Hydrophinnae. Doorfen’s treatise on submarine civilisations and the Johansen Narrative of 1925. A great sheaf of notes purporting to be from American government files for 1928, when federal agents ‘raided’ Innsmouth, a decaying, horror-haunted town on the coast of New England; and other scraps and fragments from all the world’s mythologies, all of them concerned with the worship of a great god of the sea.”

  “Innsmouth?” my ears pricked up. I had heard that name mentioned once before. “But isn’t that the place—?”

  “—The place which spawned that family, the Waites, who came over and settled at Kettlethorpe about the time of the American Civil War? That’s right,” he nodded an affirmative, stared out into the rain-black night. “And old Carpenter who had the house for thirty years, he came from Innsmouth, too!”

  “He was of the same people?”

  “No, not him. The very opposite. He was at the
farm for the same reason I am—now. Oh, he was strange, reclusive—who wouldn’t be? I’ve read his diaries and I understand. Not everything, for even in his writing he held back, didn’t explain too much. Why should he? His diaries were for him, aids to memory. They weren’t meant for others to understand, but I fathomed a lot of it. The rest was in those government files.

  “Innsmouth prospered in the time of the clipper ships and the old trade routes. The captains and men of some of those old ships brought back wives from Polynesia—and also their strange rites of worship, their gods. There was queer blood in those native women, and it spread rapidly. As the years passed the entire town became infected. Whole families grew up tainted. They were less than human, amphibian creatures more of the sea than the land. Merfolk, yes! Tritons, who worshipped Dagon in the deeps: ‘Deep Ones’, as old Carpenter called them. Then came the federal raid of ’28. But it came too late for old Carpenter.

  “He had a store in Innsmouth, but well away from the secret places—away from the boarded-up streets and houses and churches where the worst of them had their dens and held their meetings and kept their rites. His wife was long dead of some wasting disease, but his daughter was alive and schooling in Arkham. Shortly before the raid she came home, little more than a girl. And she became—I don’t know—lured. It’s a word that sticks in my mind. A very real word, to me.

  “Anyway, the Deep Ones took her, gave her to something they called out of the sea. She disappeared. Maybe she was dead, maybe something worse. They’d have killed Carpenter then, because he’d learned too much about them and wanted revenge, but the government raid put an end to any personal reprisals or vendettas. Put an end to Innsmouth, too. Why, they just about wrecked the town! Vast areas of complete demolition. They even depth-charged a reef a mile out in the sea...

  “Well, after things quieted down Carpenter stayed on a while in Innsmouth, what was left of it. He was settling his affairs, I suppose, and maybe ensuring that the evil was at an end. Which must have been how he learned that it wasn’t at an end but spreading like some awful blight. And because he suspected the survivors of the raid might seek haven in old strongholds abroad, finally he came to Kettlethorpe.”