THE INNSMOUTH HERITAGE, by Brian Stableford
The directions Ann had dictated over the phone allowed me to reach Innsmouth without too much difficulty; I doubt that I would have fared so well had I been forced to rely upon the map printed on the end-papers of her book or had I been forced to seek assistance along the way.
While descending from the precipitous ridge east of the town I was able to compare my own impressions of Innsmouth’s appearance with the account given by Ann in her opening chapter. When she spoke to me on the phone she had told me that the book’s description was “optimistic” and I could easily see why she had felt compelled to offer such a warning. Even the book had not dared to use the word “unspoiled,” but Ann had done her best to imply that Innsmouth was full of what we in England would call “old world charm.” Old the buildings certainly were, but charming they were not. The present inhabitants—mostly “incomers” or “part-timers,” according to Ann—had apparently made what efforts they could to redeem the houses from dereliction and decay, but the renovated facades and the new paint only succeeded in making the village look garish as well as neglected.
It proved, mercifully, that one of the principal exceptions to this rule was the New Gilman House, where a room had been reserved for me. It was one of the few recent buildings in the village, dating back no further than the sixties. The lobby was tastefully decorated and furnished, and the desk-clerk was as attentive as one expects American desk-clerks to be.
“My name’s Stevenson,” I told him. “I believe Miss Eliot reserved a room for me.”
“Best in the house, sir,” he assured me. I was prepared to believe it—Ann owned the place. “You sound English, sir,” he added, as he handed me a reservation card. “Is that where you know the boss from?”
“That’s right,” I said, diffidently. “Could you tell Miss Eliot that I’m here, do you think?”
“Sure thing,” he replied. “You want me to help you with that bag?”
I shook my head, and made my own way up to my room. It was on the top floor, and it had what passed for a good view. Indeed, it would have been a very good view had it not been for the general dereliction of the waterfront houses, over whose roofs I had to look to see the ocean. Out towards the horizon I could see the white water where the breakers were tumbling over Devil Reef.
I was still looking out that way when Ann came in behind me. “David,” she said. “It’s good to see you.”
I turned round a little awkwardly, and extended my hand to be shaken, feeling uncomfortably embarrassed.
“You don’t look a day older,” she said, hypocritically. It had been thirteen years since I last saw her.
“Well,” I said, “I looked middle-aged even in my teens. But you look wonderful. Being a capitalist obviously suits you. How much of the town do you own?”
“Only about three-quarters,” she said, with an airy wave of her slender hand. “Uncle Ned bought the land for peanuts back in the thirties, and now it’s worth—peanuts. All his grand ambitions to ‘put the place back on the map’ came to nothing. He got tenants for some of the properties he fixed up, but they’re most week-enders who live in the city and can’t afford authentic status symbols. We get a few hundred tourists through during the season—curiosity-seekers, fishermen, people wanting to get away from it all, but it’s hardly enough to keep the hotel going. That’s why I wrote the book—but I guess I still had too much of the dry historian in me and not enough of the sensational journalist. I should have made more of all those old stories, but I couldn’t get my conscience past the lack of hard evidence.”
“That’s what a university education does for you,” I said. Ann and I had met at university in Manchester—the real Manchester, not the place to which fate and coincidence had now brought me—when she was studying history and I was studying biochemistry. We were good friends—in the literal rather than the euphemistic sense, alas— but we hadn’t kept in touch afterwards, until she discovered by accident that I was in New Hampshire and had written to me, enclosing her book with news of her career as a woman of property. I had planned to come to see her even before I read the book, thus finding the excuse that made the prospect even more inviting.
As she watched me unpack, the expression in her grey eyes was quite inscrutable. Politeness aside, she really did look good— handsome rather than pretty, but clear of complexion and stately in manner.
“I suppose your coming over to the States is part of the infamous Brain Drain,” she said. “Was it the dollars, or the research facilities that lured you away?”
“Both,” I said. “Mostly the latter. Human geneticists aren’t worth that much, and I haven’t published enough to be regarded as a grand catch. I’m just a foot-soldier in the long campaign to map and understand the human genome.”
“It beats being chief custodian of Innsmouth and its history,” she said, so flatly as to leave no possibility of a polite contradiction.
I shrugged. “Well,” I said, “If I get a paper out of this, it will put Innsmouth on the scientific map, at least—although I doubt that the hotel will get much business out of it. I can’t imagine that there’ll be a legion of geneticists following in my trail.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed. “I’m afraid it might not be so easy,” she said. “All that stuff in the book about the Innsmouth look is a bit out of date. Back in the twenties, when the population of the town was less than four hundred, it may well have been exactly the kind of inbred community you’re looking for, but the postwar years brought in a couple of thousand outsiders. In spite of the tendency of the old families to keep to themselves, the majority married out. I’ve looked through the records, and most of the families that used to be important in the town are extinct—the Marshes, the Waites, the Gilmans. If it hadn’t been for the English branch, I guess the Eliots would have died out too. The Innsmouth look still exists, but it’s a thing of the past—you won’t see more than a trace of it in anyone under forty.”
“Age is immaterial,” I assured her.
“That’s not the only problem. Almost all of those who have the look are shy about it—or their relatives are. They tend to hide themselves away. It won’t be easy to get them to co-operate.”
“But you know who they are—you can introduce me.”
“I know who some of them are, but that doesn’t mean that I can help you much. I may be an Eliot, but to the old Innsmouthers I’m just another incomer, not to be trusted. There’s only one person who could effectively act as an intermediary for you, and it won’t be easy to persuade him to do it.”
“Is he the fisherman you mentioned over the phone—Gideon Sargent?”
“That’s right,” she said. “He’s one of the few lookers who doesn’t hide himself away, although he shows the signs more clearly than anyone else I’ve seen. He’s saner than most—got himself an education under the G.I. Bill after serving in the Pacific in ’45—but he’s not what you might call talkative. He won’t hide, but he doesn’t like being the visible archetype of the Innsmouth look—he resents tourists gawping at him as much as anyone would, and he always refuses to take them out to Devil Reef in his boat. He’s always very polite to me, but I really can’t say how he’ll react to you. He’s in his sixties now—never married.”
“That’s not so unusual,” I observed. I was unmarried; so was Ann.
“Maybe not,” she replied, with a slight laugh. “But I can’t help harboring an unreasonable suspicion that the reason he never married is that he could never find a girl who looked fishy enough.”
* * * *
I thought this a cruel remark, though Ann obviously hadn’t meant it to be. I thought it even crueler when I eventually saw Gideon Sargent, because I immediately jumped to the opposite conclusion: that no girl could possibly contemplate marrying him, because he looked too fishy by half.
The description that Ann had quoted in her book was accurate enough detail by detail—narrow head, flat nose, staring eyes, ro
ugh skin and baldness—but could not suffice to give an adequate impression of the eerie whole. The old man’s tanned face put me in mind of a wizened koi carp, although I could not tell, at first— because his jacket collar was turned up—whether he had the gilllike markings on his neck that were the last and strangest of the stigmata of the Innsmouth folk.
Sargent was sitting on a canvas chair on the deck of his boat when we went to see him, patiently mending a fishing-net. He did not look up as we approached, but I had no doubt that he had seen us from afar and knew well enough that we were coming to see him.
“Hello, Gideon,” said Ann, when we were close enough. “This is Dr. David Stevenson, a friend of mine from England. He lives in Manchester now, teaching college.”
Still the old man didn’t look up. “Don’t do trips round the reef,” he said, laconically. “You know that, Miss Ann.”
“He’s not a tourist, Gideon,” she said. “He’s a scientist. He’d like to talk to you.”
“Why’s that?” he asked, still without altering his attitude. “‘Cause I’m a freak, I suppose?”
“No,” said Ann, uncomfortably “of course not.…”
I held up my hand to stop her, and said: “Yes, Mr. Sargent,” I said. “That is why, after a manner of speaking. I’m a geneticist, and I’m interested in people who are physically unusual. I’d like to explain that to you, if I may.”
Ann shook her head in annoyance, certain that I’d said the wrong thing, but the old man didn’t seem offended.
“When I were a young’un,” he commented, abstractedly, “there was a man offered Ma a hunnerd dollars for me. Wanned t’put me in a glass tank in some kinda sideshow. She said no. Blamed fool— hunnerd dollars was worth summin then.” His accent was very odd, and certainly not what I’d come to think of as a typical New England accent. Although he slurred common words, he tended to take more trouble over longer ones, and I thought I could still perceive the lingering legacy of his education.
“Do you know what ‘genetics’ means, Mr. Sargent?” I asked. “I really would like to explain why it’s important that I talk to you.”
At last he looked up, and looked me in the eye. I was ready for it, and didn’t flinch from the disconcerting stare.
“I know what genes are, Doc,” he said, coolly. “I bin a little curious myself, y’know, to fin’ out how I got to be this way. You gonna tell me? Or is that what y’wanner figure out?”
“It’s what I want to figure out, Mr. Sargent,” I told him, breathing a slight sigh of relief. “Can I come aboard?”
“Nope,” he replied. “Taint convenient. You at the hotel?”
“Yes I am.”
“See y’there t’night. Quarter of eight. You pay f’r the liquor.” “Okay,” I said. “Thanks, Mr. Sargent. I appreciate it.”
“Don’ mention it,” he said. “An’ I still don’ do trips to the reef. Or pose f’r Jap cameras—you mind me, now, Miss Ann.”
“I mind you, Gideon,” she answered, as we turned away.
As soon as we were out of earshot, she said: “You’re honored, David. He’s never come to the hotel before—and not because no one ever offered to buy him a drink before. He still remembers the old place, and he doesn’t like what Uncle Ned put up in its place, any more than he likes all the colonists who moved in when the village was all-but-dead in the thirties.”
We were passing an area of the waterfront that looked like a post-war bomb-site—or one of those areas in the real Manchester where they bulldozed the old slums but still haven’t got round to building anything else instead.
“This is the part of the town that was torched, isn’t it?” I said. “Sure is,” she replied. “Way back in ’27. Nobody really knows how it happened, although there are plenty of wild stories. Gang warfare can be counted out—there was no substantial bootlegging hereabouts. Arson for arson’s sake, probably. It’s mostly mine now—Uncle Ned wanted to rebuild but never could raise the finance. I’d sell the land to any developer who’d take it on, but I’m not hopeful about my chances of getting rid of it.”
“Did the navy really fire torpedoes into the trench beyond the reef?” I asked, remembering a story which she’d quoted in her book.
“Depth charges,” she said. “I took the trouble to look up the documents, hoping there’d be something sensational behind it, but it seems that they were just testing them. There’s very deep water out there—a crack in the continental shelf—and it was convenient for checking the pressure-triggers across the whole spectrum of settings. The navy didn’t bother to ask the locals, or to tell them what was going on; the information was still classified then, I guess. It’s not unnatural that the wacky stories about sea-monsters were able to flourish uncontradicted.”
“Pity,” I said, looking back at the crumbling jetties as we began to climb the shallow hill towards Washington Street. “I rather liked all that stuff about the Esoteric Order of Dagon conducting its hideous rites in the old Masonic Hall, and Obed Marsh’s covenant with the forces of watery evil.”
“The Esoteric Order of Dagon was real enough,” she said. “But it’s hard to find out what its rituals involved, or what its adherents actually believed, because it was careful not to produce or keep any records—not even sacred documents. It seems to have been one of a group of crazy quasi-gnostic cults which made a big thing about a book called the Necronomicon—they mostly died out at about the time the first fully-annotated translation was issued by the Miskatonic University Press. The whole point of being an esoteric sect is lost when your core text becomes exoteric, I guess.
“As for old Obed’s fabulous adventures in the South Seas, almost all the extant accounts can be traced back to tales that used to be told by the town character back in the twenties—an old lush named Zadok Allen. I can’t swear that every last detail originated in the dregs of a whisky bottle, but I’d be willing to bet my inheritance that Captain Marsh’s career was a good deal less eventful than it seemed once Zadok had finished embroidering it.”
“But the Marshes really did run a gold refinery hereabouts? And at least some of the so-called Innsmouth jewelry is real?”
“Oh sure—the refinery was the last relic of the town’s industrial heyday, which petered out mid-nineteenth century after a big epidemic. I’ve looked at the account-books, though, and it did hardly any business for thirty-five or forty years before it closed down. It’s gone now, of course. The few authentic surviving examples of the old Innsmouth jewelry are less beautiful and less exotic than rumor represents, but they’re interesting enough—and certainly not local in origin. There are a couple of shops in town where they make ‘genuine imitations’ for tourists and other interested parties—one manufacturer swears blind that the originals were made by pre-Columbian Indians, the other that they were found by Old Obed during his travels. Take your pick.”
I nodded, sagely, as if to say that it was what I’d suspected all along.
“What are you looking for, David?” she asked, suddenly. “You don’t really think that there’s anything in Zadok Allen’s fantasies, do you? You surely can’t seriously entertain the hypothesis that the old Innsmouthers were some kind of weird crossbreed with an alien race!”
I laughed. “No,” I reassured her, with complete sincerely. “I don’t believe that—nor do I believe that they’re some kind of throwback to our phantom aquatic ancestors. You’d better sit in tonight when I explain the facts of life to old Gideon; the reality is likely to be far more prosaic than that, alas.”
“Why alas?” she asked.
“Because what I’m looking for will only generate a paper. If the folklore quoted in your book were even half-true, it would be worth a Nobel Prize.”
* * * *
Gideon Sargent presented himself at the hotel right on time. He was dressed in what I presumed was his Sunday best, but the ensemble included a roll-neck sweater, which kept the sides of his neck concealed. There were half a dozen people in the bar, and Gideon drew a couple
of curious glances from the out-of-towners, but he was only a little self-conscious. He was used to carrying his stigmata.
He drank neat bourbon, but he drank slowly, like a man who had no intention of getting loaded. I asked a few questions to find out exactly how much he did know about genes, and it turned out that he really was familiar with the basics. I felt confident that I could give him a reasonably full explanation of my project.
“We’ve already begun the business of mapping the human genome,” I told him. “The job will require the collective efforts of thousands of people in more than a hundred research centers, and even then it will take fifteen or twenty years, but we have the tools to do it. While we’re doing it, we hope to get closer to the answers to certain basic problems.
“One of these problems is that we don’t know how genes collaborate to produce a particular physical form. We know how they code for the protein building blocks, but we don’t know much about the biochemical blueprint that instructs a growing embryo how to develop into a man instead of a whale or an ostrich. Now, this may seem odd, but one of the best ways of figuring out how things work is to study examples which have gone wrong, to see what’s missing or distorted. By doing that, you can build up a picture of what’s necessary in order for the job to be done properly. For that reason, geneticists are very interested in human mutations—I’m particularly interested in those which cause physical malformation.
“Unfortunately, physical mutants usually fall into a few well-defined categories, mostly associated with radical and fairly obvious disruptions of whole chromosomes. There are very few viable human variations that operate on a larger scale than changing the color of the skin, or the epicanthic fold that makes Oriental eyes distinctive. That’s not entirely surprising, because those which have arisen in the past have mostly been eliminated from the gene-pool by natural selection, or diluted out of existence by hybridization. It’s one of the ironies of our trade that, while molecular genetics was becoming sophisticated enough to make them significant, the highly inbred communities of the world were disappearing. All we have in America is a handful of religious communities whose accumulations of recessive genes aren’t, for the most part, very interesting. As soon as I read Ann’s book I realized that Innsmouth must have been a real genetic treasure-trove back in the twenties. I hope that there still might be time to recover some vital information.”
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