Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

by Stephen Jones

  I returned to New York in the morning.

  Further excerpts from Jeffrey Corey’s Journal.

  March 18. Woke this morning convinced that I had not slept alone last night. Impressions on pillow, in bed. Room and bed very damp, as if someone wet had got into bed beside me. I know intuitively it was a woman. But how? Some alarm at the thought that the Marsh madness may be beginning to show in me. Footprints on the floor.

  March 19. “Sea Goddess” gone! The door open. Someone must have got in during the night and taken it. Its sale value could hardly be accounted as worth the risk! Nothing else taken.

  March 20. Dreamed all night about everything Seth Akins said. Saw Captain Obed Marsh under the sea! Very ancient. Gilled! Swam to far below the surface of the Atlantic off Devil Reef. Many others, both men and women. The queer Marsh look! Oh, the power and the glory!

  March 21. Night of the equinox. My neck throbbed with pain all night. Could not sleep. Got up and walked down to the shore. How the sea draws me! I was never so aware of it before, but I remember now how as a child I used to fancy I heard—way off in mid-continent!—the sound of the sea, of the seas’ drift and the windy waves!—A fearful sense of anticipation filled me all night long.

  Under this same date—March 21—Corey’s last letter to me was written. He said nothing in it of his dreams, but he did write about the soreness of his neck.

  It isn’t my throat—that’s clear. No difficulty swallowing. The pain seems to be in that disfigured area of skin—wattled or wart-like or fissured, whatever you prefer to call it—beneath my ears. I cannot describe it; it isn’t the pain one associates with stiffness or friction or a bruise. It’s as if the skin were about to break outward, and it goes deep. And at the same time I cannot rid myself of the conviction that something is about to happen—something I both dread and look forward to, and all manner of ancestral awarenesses—however badly I put it—obsess me!

  I replied, advising him to see a doctor, and promising to visit him early in April.

  By that time Corey had vanished.

  There was some evidence to show that he had gone down to the Atlantic and walked in—whether with the intention of swimming or of taking his life could not be ascertained. The prints of his bare feet were discovered in what remained of that odd clay thrown up by the sea in February, but there were no returning prints. There was no farewell message of any kind, but there were instructions left for me directing the disposal of his effects, and I was named administrator of his estate—which suggested that some apprehension did exist in his mind.

  Some search—desultory at best—was made for Corey’s body along the shore both above and below Innsmouth, but this was fruitless, and a coroner’s inquest had no trouble in coming to the conclusion that Corey had met his death by misadventure.

  No record of the facts that seemed pertinent to the mystery of his disappearance could possibly be left without a brief account of what I saw off Devil Reef in the twilight of the night of April 17th.

  It was a tranquil evening; the sea was as of glass, and no wind stirred the evening air. I had been in the last stages of disposing of Corey’s effects and had chosen to go out for a row off Innsmouth. What I had heard of Devil Reef drew me inevitably toward its remains—a few jagged and broken stones that jutted above the surface at low tide well over a mile off the village. The sun had gone down, a fine afterglow lay in the western sky, and the sea was a deep cobalt as far as the eye could reach.

  I had only just reached the reef when there was a great disturbance of the water. The surface broke in many places; I paused and sat quite still, guessing that a school of dolphins might be surfacing and anticipating with some pleasure what I might see.

  But it was not dolphins at all. It was some kind of sea-dweller of which I had no knowledge. Indeed, in the fading light, the swimmers looked both fish-like and squamously human. All but one pair of them remained well away from the boat in which I sat.

  That pair—one clearly a female creature of an oddly clay-like colour, the other male—came quite close to the boat in which I sat, watching with mixed feelings not untinged with the kind of terror that takes its rise in a profound fear of the unknown. They swam past, surfacing diving, and, having passed, the lighter-skinned of the two creatures turned and distinctly flashed me a glance, making a strange guttural sound that was not unlike a half-strangled crying-out of my name: “Jack!” and left me with the clear and unmistakable conviction that the gilled sea-thing wore the face of Jeffrey Corey!

  It haunts my dreams even now.

  THE ARCHBISHOP’S WELL

  by REGGIE OLIVER

  MY FATHER NEVER spoke about his war experiences. That was quite common for men of his generation, but what is strange is that he hardly ever said anything to me about his life before it. I knew his academic career as a medieval historian had begun in the 1930s and that was all. It was only after his death a decade ago that I discovered the diaries that he had kept during this period, and a sort of explanation for his reticence started to emerge.

  Reading them was an odd experience for me in many ways, chiefly because the person in these diaries was not at all like the one I knew. It was hard to reconcile this lively young man with my father, the dour, sarcastic Oxford don who seldom had any time for me. Only a few characteristic quirks and turns of phrase suggested that they were the same person at all.

  The journals begin in late 1936 when, at twenty-five, my father, Dr. Charles Vilier, was appointed to a lectureship in Medieval History at the new University of Wessex. Its campus occupies land just outside the town of Bartonstone, some ten miles south-west of Morchester. My father’s first years there seem to have been carefree and happy. He was a great giver and frequenter of sherry parties, then a popular form of entertainment for those who were not quite smart enough for cocktails. By 1938, the year of the Munich Crisis, my father was beginning to be faintly aware that the world around him was darkening, but it was not until September that his own personal crisis began.

  SEPTEMBER 2ND, 1938

  Bertie Winship drove down from Morchester in his old banger. I gave him dinner at the Crown, the only half-decent hostelry in Bartonstone, and we imbibed not a few glasses of Amontillado, followed by a bottle of the best claret mine host could provide. I have barely seen young Bertie since varsity days, but he is the same cheery idiot who once introduced a python into the Master of Balliol’s lodgings, causing much consternation and merriment thereby. It is strange to think of him now as a man of the cloth, a Canon of Morchester Cathedral no less, and a master at the choir school.

  He regaled me with stories of Cathedral Life which seems to be by no means as dull as one might think. The Bishop, a gouty old sport called Bulstrode, is completely under the thumb of the Dean who goes by the name of the Very Reverend Herbert Grice. Grice is, according to Bertie, a holy terror, all for change and doing what he calls “meeting the challenges of the modern world”. Needless to say, this does not go down too well with some of his colleagues who call him “Il Duce” behind his back because he is so fearfully keen on efficiency and making the Cathedral services start and finish on time. His main opponent is the Venerable Thaddeus Hill, the Archdeacon, a white-bearded old patriarch who has been at Morchester since the Ark. All this would be very amusing but not worth recording were it not for the business of the Archbishop’s Well.

  According to Bertie, this well has stirred up a veritable hornet’s nest. It’s hard at first to conceive why. I have of course visited the Cathedral and seen it. It stands in the middle of the cloister garth, a patch of greensward on the south side of the Cathedral. The cloisters that enclose it are the oldest part of the Cathedral, dating back to the eleventh century, being the only surviving portion of the original Abbey Church of Morchester. The well, by all accounts, is even older, but it is extremely unimpressive to look at.

  It is a roughly circular enclosure of irregular stones which have been frequently repaired over the years with ugly slatherings of mortar.
The opening is capped with a heavy circular lid of oak, bound with elaborately arabesqued iron bands and attached to the stone surround by heavy iron rings and padlocks. No one knows quite why it is called the Archbishop’s Well, except of course that the Cathedral itself is St. Anselm’s, named after Anselm, the eleventh-century Archbishop of Canterbury and inventor of the celebrated Ontological Argument for the existence of God.

  Well—the pun is purely accidental—the long and short of it is that Bishop Bulstrode, at Dean Grice’s prompting of course, wants to do away with this ancient relic and replace it with something useful and “up to date”. A drinking fountain for the benefit of visitors to the Cathedral has been suggested. A drinking fountain, forsooth! No doubt one of those polished granite monstrosities that rich “philanthropists” are in the habit of inflicting on our public parks. Oddly enough, says Bertie, the Bishop’s proposal has met with quite a bit of support, but there is also some vehement opposition, most notably from old Archdeacon Hill. Bertie, to his credit, is with the old boy, but his voice counts for very little.

  Bertie says there was a fearful row about it at the last meeting of the Dean and Chapter a couple of days ago. The Archdeacon said that the well went back quite possibly to pre-Christian times and that to remove it would be a sacrilege. To which Dean Grice smartly replies that if the well is pre-Christian it could not possibly count as sacrilege to dispose of it.

  It was then that Bertie had what he is pleased to call his “brain wave”. He proposed that an independent expert be called in to pronounce on the historic and architectural importance of said well. When asked, in sarcastic tones by the Dean, where that expert might be found, Bertie replied that there was a just such a blighter with all the correct qualifications lecturing on things medieval only up the road at the University of Wessex, to wit, yours truly.

  I don’t know whether to feel flattered or to knock young Bertie about the mazzard for being an infernal, interfering pill. I expect nothing will come of it, though.

  SEPTEMBER 5TH

  A letter arrived this morning with the Morchester Cathedral crest embossed on the back of the envelope. Everything about it is stiff: the envelope, the note-paper within and the wording typed thereon. It is from Dean Grice inviting me over to Morchester to consult about the well and proposing a date for the meeting. The final paragraph reads as follows:

  I must earnestly entreat you to say nothing about this commission to friends or colleagues and on no account to inform the press. I cannot emphasise too strongly that the utmost confidentiality is essential. You will receive an adequate honorarium for the benefit of your expertise and any researches that might be required. However, should you breach the seal of discretion in any way, no such remuneration will be forthcoming.

  It all seemed unnecessarily pedantic to me, perhaps even a little “neurotic”, as the followers of Dr. Freud would say. What had got the wind up? Anyway, I wrote back agreeing to his terms as I must admit to being rather intrigued.

  SEPTEMBER 10TH

  This morning I took the train into Morchester, arriving shortly before ten. It was a fine, balmy day, so I walked the quarter-mile to the Deanery which is in the south-west corner of the Cathedral close. The Deanery is a pretty little three-storey Queen Anne house of mellow red brick with, over the front door, an elegant little pedimented portico made out of the local limestone. There is no bell-push, but there is a bronze knocker on the door of curious design. I believe it to have been modelled from one of the gargoyles on the Cathedral roof. (Morchester Cathedral, of course, is famous for its grotesque carvings.) It was in the shape of the head of some sort of beast. The eyes were large and saucer-like and there was little in the way of a nose, apart from a rather ugly cavity for a nostril. Where the mouth should have been there was a mass of strands or tentacles that seemed to writhe snakelike as if each one had a life of its own. It was a finely crafted piece, but all the more distasteful to handle because of it.

  Nevertheless I grasped the thing and rapped on the door which was opened by a tall, elderly, angular woman who looked as if her morning bath had had an iceberg in it. She scrutinised me with some disdain, then, pointing imperiously to her right, told me that all hawkers, vagrants and people seeking assistance from the diocese should apply at the tradesman’s entrance.

  I had on an old pair of grey flannel bags and a heavily patched tweed sports coat, but I didn’t think that I looked that disreputable. Perhaps the fact that I had no tie on and wear sandals at all times of the year gave me a bohemian or even—oh horror!—a socialist look.

  I explained that I was Dr. Vilier and had an appointment to see the Dean. The lady still regarded me with suspicion.

  “My husband is not unwell,” she said indignantly.

  Before I could explain to her that my doctorate was in History not Medicine, she had disappeared into the dark bowels of the Deanery. After a while she re-emerged from the gloom to tell me that the Dean would see me now in his study, indicating the second door on the left of a dingy corridor that passed right through the house. I smiled and tried to thank her warmly but the frost on her upper slopes failed to thaw.

  I knocked and was bidden to enter the Dean’s study. The room I came into was lit only by the light from a window which faced onto a back garden. At the bottom of the garden I could just see, through the willows, the glitter of a stream.

  I have to say that Dean Grice’s welcome was not much cheerier than his wife’s. He greeted me by rising from behind his desk and favouring me with a handshake that felt like a long-dead haddock. He has a narrow face, parchment skin, and little round, silver-rimmed spectacles that glinted in the dimness of the study, occasionally turning his eyes into blank discs of reflected light. Having obtained from me the solemn assurance that I had told no one about my visit, he suggested briskly that we should walk over together to the Cathedral and take a look at the well.

  As we stepped out of the deanery a cool breeze blew up. The rooks, who inhabit a stand of elms at the west end of the Cathedral close suddenly all flew as one from their “buildings” (as I believe their nests are called) in the trees and began to wheel around screeching, making their characteristic kaa, kaa sound. Once across the road and onto the green, the Dean and I took a diagonal paved path which leads directly to the West door of the Cathedral. I stared in awe at the rooks as they circled and cried. I could not get it out of my head that they were, for purposes unknown, putting on a demonstration of some kind. The Dean, evidently well accustomed to this curious animal behaviour, took no notice whatsoever.

  While I was looking around me I noticed that someone was on the path behind us and trying to attract our attention. It was a tallish man wearing a cloak and a battered sombrero hat. He appeared somewhat eccentric, but as he was a hundred and fifty yards away I could not make out his features. He waved a thin arm and said “Hi!” so I alerted the Dean to his presence. The Dean, without breaking his stride, turned round to look, then almost immediately turned back and began to walk even more determinedly towards the Cathedral. I had seen a look of disgust, perhaps even of fear, pass across his ascetic features.

  “We wish to have no intercourse with that man,” said the Dean.

  “Who is he?”

  “He is called Felix Cutbirth.”

  “Unusual surname.”

  “It is a variant of Cuthbert, an Anglo-Saxon name. He comes from a very old family which has lived in Morsetshire since before the Norman Conquest. Unhappily, in his case, ancient lineage is no guarantee of respectability. The Cutbirths have long had an evil reputation.”

  “What does he want with us?”

  “I cannot possibly imagine,” said the Dean dismissively. We were now at the West Door. “Come! Let us go into the Cathedral. He will not follow us in there, I fancy.”

  Once we were inside, I was conscious of a certain relaxation in the Dean. He became almost animated. Clearly he loved the place, and his knowledge of medieval architecture was intelligent and extensive. My own compleme
nted his, so we enjoyed each other’s company as we walked down the great Early English nave, like an avenue of tall and stately trees. Weak sunlight filtered through the high windows and few people were about. I glanced quickly behind me. The Dean’s surmise was correct: Cutbirth had not followed us into the Cathedral. After this brief interlude, the Dean took me out into the cloisters to survey the well.

  Though I had seen it before I had not examined it at close quarters because, as notices proclaimed, it was forbidden for ordinary mortals to tread the lawn of the cloister garth. The Dean led me boldly across it.

  “There you see,” he said. “Not a thing of beauty and a joy forever.”

  I had to admit he was right. The “thing” had been built, rebuilt and repaired over centuries. There was no unity in this strange circular wall. Some of the stones were large, some small, some rough-hewn, a few dressed. I noticed that there was a section at the base on the south side that was not made of stone at all, but brick, and Roman bricks at that. I recognised their flat shape and the excellent quality of the mortar. I mentioned my discovery to the Dean, who merely nodded.

  “Yes. That is known. Quite late Roman, I believe. Fourth or fifth century.” He seemed unimpressed. I also noticed that some of the Roman bricks had a crude drawing of an eye scratched on them: a so-called “apotropaic eye” of the kind you see on the sides of Greek fishing vessels, designed to ward off evil. This I did not mention to the Dean.

  When the Dean asked my opinion, I told him that the well was of no architectural but of great archaeological interest. I said that there would need to be a thorough archaeological survey of the well before anything was done to it and that, to expedite matters, I would, with his permission, discover all I could about the well from the Cathedral archives.