Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

by Stephen Jones

  The Dean took all this in with a kind of weary resignation, as I suppose it was the answer he was expecting. The cloisters had been deserted when we entered them, but just as we were about to leave we heard a voice.

  “I see you!” It said. The voice was a man’s; the tone was mocking with a hint of menace about it.

  We looked around. Finally we saw a face poking over the wall of one of the open Gothic arcades. On the head was a battered sombrero. It was Cutbirth.

  The Dean started violently when he saw him, executing a little involuntary jump which made Cutbirth laugh as he got up off his knees, lifted a long leg over the cloister wall and stepped through the arcade onto the cloister garth.

  “You may not walk on this grass!” yapped the Dean.

  “Why not? You do.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  Cutbirth began to walk lazily towards us over the manicured lawn, removing his hat as he did so. He must have been about forty, but age with such a strange creature was hard to assess. He was long and loosely built, with abnormally large hands. His skin was a yellowish colour, coarse and porous in texture. His head was a large, virtually hairless oval, but the features were small, strangely caught together in the middle of his face, like those of a horrible baby. He was trying to exude an air of insouciant mockery, but the eyes—green, I think—were full of rage.

  “I might ask you the same question,” said Cutbirth. His accent was odd. He spoke with the languid drawl of the upper classes, but some of his vowels were pure rural Morsetshire.

  “It is none of your business,” said the Dean raising his voice and sounding petulant.

  “I think it is, Mr. Dean. You do realise that this has been a sacred spot long before your psalm-singing milk-white Christians started erecting their pious monstrosities over it? I know what you want to do. You want to obliterate the sanctity of centuries. You want to banish the Old Gods forever. And for what? For some damned, provincial little water trough to slake the putrid tongues of cheap charabanc tourists!”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Never you mind, Mr. Dean.” Then turning to me, with disdainful a glance at my sandals, he said: “And what’s your little game, my Communist Friend?”

  “Don’t answer him!” said the Dean. To tell the truth, I was so shocked at being denounced as a Communist on account of my footwear that I was incapable of speech. “Will you kindly leave forthwith, or I shall be forced to summon assistance and have you thrown off.”

  Cutbirth laughed harshly: “I warn you, Dean Grice—” he pronounced it grease “—the House of Dagon will suffer wrong no more! The Old Gods are awaking from their long sleep and you would do well not to despise their help in the gathering storm. Soon the rivers of Europe will run with blood. You will bleat for the Nazarene to help you, but he will not come, and the tide of blood will advance till it engulfs even Morchester. I warn you, Grice!”

  With that he turned and left us, jamming his sombrero down on his head as he did so. Despite this faintly ludicrous gesture we were both stunned—I might almost say impressed—by his speech. For nearly a minute we stood there silent, motionless. Though, objectively, I have nothing but contempt for Cutbirth, I had been made aware of a certain power in him, or about him.

  The Dean finally broke the silence: “Come, Dr. Vilier. Let me show you the library where you will be conducting your researches.”

  “What was that about the House of Dagon?”

  “Oh, just his usual nonsense,” said the Dean irritably. Then he paused, hesitating whether to confide in me. At last he said: “Felix Cutbirth is by way of being an artist. I had the misfortune to see some of his paintings at an exhibition in Morchester not so long ago. They are vile things, vile… But not without accomplishment. He studied at the Slade in London, I believe. While there, he became involved with something called the Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult society. You remember: Yeats, Crowley, Machen, Mathers—?” I nodded. “Well, after a while he became dissatisfied with them and broke away to found his own little magical sect called the Order of Dagon. I am happy to say it failed miserably. On his return to Morchester, Cutbirth tried to set up the Order here. He had a temple for a while at the back of a Turkish Restaurant in Morchester High Street, but neither the temple nor the restaurant prospered. He still has a few devotees among the credulous of this city, but they may be counted on the fingers of one hand. That is all we need to know about Mr. Cutbirth!”

  And with that we proceeded to the library.

  SEPTEMBER 13TH

  This is my second day in the library and I have made some progress. There is surprisingly little information to be had on the well other than the rather surprising fact that it has not been used as such since the early twelfth century. A date of 1107 or 1108 is usually given for the closing of the well, but no explanation is given. I presume that it became contaminated in some way, but I could not understand why the whole structure was not destroyed.

  Today, however, I have made a discovery. Of course the real story will, I suspect, remain hidden, but at least we have the legend. Legends are revealing in their own way.

  One of the oldest volumes in the library is a kind of scrapbook, an untidy binding together of all sorts of early manuscripts to do with the Cathedral. Most of these are deeds and charters and inventories, not very interesting, but towards the end of the book I found what I recognised as a very early—perhaps even the original—manuscript of William of Morchester’s Gesta Anselmi.

  In the 1160s Archbishop Thomas Becket was, no doubt for his own political purposes, pressing the Pope to make a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm (1033–1109) a saint. To this end he commissioned William of Morchester to write a life of Anselm, praising him and listing all his miracles: a hagiography in other words. This William called the Gesta Anselmi or “The Deeds of Anselm”.

  It is a typical work of the period, with very little of historical value in it. It deals in the kind of absurd legends and miracles that the Medievals loved: Anselm restores sight to a blind man; he revives a dead child; a barren woman prays at the tomb of Anselm and soon finds herself with child, and so on. I had seen copies of it before, but this manuscript seemed fuller and older than the others.

  Towards the end of the MS I came across a passage that I had certainly never previously encountered. Several lines had been drawn through it, as if the scribe had deemed it unsuitable for further publication, but I was able to read it quite easily. It began:

  Anselmus cum in Priorium Benedictinum Morcastri advenerat monachos valde perturbatos de puteo suo vidit…

  When Anselm came to the Benedictine Priory at Morchester he saw the monks in much distress on account of their well. For they had built their cloister around an ancient well which had been there for many centuries and where in time past many foul and blasphemous ceremonies had been enacted to worship the ancient Gods and Demons of the Pagans. For, it was said, in the depths of this ancient well were many caverns and paths beneath the earth which connected with sea caverns on the southern shores. [In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the sea was much closer to Morchester than it is now.] And it was said that these demons came out of the sea and through the caverns to the well where they had been worshipped as gods in former times.

  Now certain of the monks, hoping to draw greater quantities of the sweet water to be found in the well, had descended into its depths to dig deeper and uncover new springs. But in so doing they had awakened the demons who had lain dormant in caverns beneath the well for many centuries. They had troubled their unholy sleep and awakened their anger. And these demons had arisen from the well to bring destruction on the monks and the people of Morchester. The monks were tormented by ill dreams and by odours as of fish putrefying. Women of the town began to give birth to all manner of abominations: infants with two heads, and mouths in their fundaments, horns upon their head, many arms but without hands; and one had the face of a great serpent. Such was their consternation that the whole people cried
out to Anselm to deliver them from terrors by night and abominations by day.

  Then did the Blessed Anselm pronounce absolution for the sins of the whole people. Having done so, the Archbishop, taking his staff of office which contained a reliquary holding a fragment of the true cross and a thumbnail of St. Paul, ordered the monks to let him down into the depths of the well. There Blessed Anselm remained for seven days and seven nights alone wrestling with the spawn of Hell and in particularly the chief of these demons whose name was—[Here the manuscript has been corrected, scratched out and altered several times so that the name is unclear. My best guess is Dagonus.]

  After seven days and seven nights Blessed Anselm commanded that he be lifted out of the well for he had vanquished the demons therein. Thereupon he commanded that a lid of oak bound with iron be placed over the well and that no person should thereafter remove it, and that new wells be dug to the north of the Abbey. And moreover, Anselm blessed the waters of the Orr [the river that flows past Morchester] so that water might be drawn from it in safety. And he commanded that a great cathedral be erected in place of the Abbey Church for all the people, and that this cathedral be consecrated to St. Michael the Archangel, the vanquisher of demons, and St. George, the slayer of dragons.

  It was only after Anselm’s official canonisation in 1494 that the Cathedral was rededicated to him. This was not such a radical act as it might seem because it was simply sanctioning local practice. The building had long been known by the inhabitants of Morchester as “Anselm’s Cathedral”.

  I suspect that there is a tiny core of truth in this absurd fable: namely that the well is very old indeed, which the presence of Roman brickwork confirms. It is just possible also that, as the text suggests, the well had at some stage become contaminated by seawater from an underground source. Hence also the stench of rotting fish?

  I cannot help being intrigued by the coincidence—and it is only a coincidence!—that Cutbirth’s little sect is called the Order of Dagon, and Anselm’s main adversary in the well was Dagonus.

  SEPTEMBER 15TH

  I have given the Dean a précis of my findings and he has agreed that the well should be opened up and surveyed. Bertie is in a state of high excitement and jumping up and down at the prospect of what he insists on calling “an archaeological dig”. I remind him that no digging will be involved, just the descent into a well which may, after all, be filled with rubbish, but nothing dampens Bertie. He clamours to be part of the “adventure”.

  A strange thing happened today. While I was in the cloister discussing the opening of the well with the Clerk of Works, a boy came up to me and handed me a letter. It was one of the town boys, I think, certainly very scruffy, and before I could speak to him he had run off.

  Inside the envelope was a piece of stiff card, like an invitation. It had been expensively engraved with the heading: ORDO TEMPLI DAGONIS (Order of the Temple of Dagon). Below this was an elaborate design, rather well executed but curiously unpleasant. Within a fancy baroque cartouche was a drawing of a figure crouched on a throne. I say figure because it was not wholly human nor wholly bestial, but something in-between. It seemed to be in an attitude of deep and trancelike thought, but its outward appearance was savage. Curious tentacles drooped over its mouth-parts. It reminded me somewhat of the Dean’s knocker, but I did not study it long. Below it in capitals was written:

  DO NOT MEDDLE WITH THE ANCIENT AND INFINITE. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

  The sender can only be Cutbirth.

  SEPTEMBER 21ST

  Troubling rumours from Europe. A cloudy day. The Clerk and his workmen set up equipment to raise the lid of the well and, if necessary, let me down into it. Bertie was there whenever he could to watch progress, which was painfully slow. In the first place nobody could find the keys to the padlocks which secured the wooden lid to the wall, so they had to be smashed off by main force. It was beginning to get dark before the lid was raised.

  The first of our surprises when the well was finally uncovered was the smell. A faint but still unpalatable odour, as of rotten fish, wafted up to us from the bottom of the well which was so deep that my torch could not penetrate its abysses. I noticed, however, that the well was skilfully made with dressed stone forming a perfect cylinder. The walls were virtually black and covered with a thin layer of darkish slime like the tracks of a thousand snails. We had not rope enough to let me down to the bottom, but I noticed that, some thirty feet below, steps had been built into the wall. They descended in an elegant spiral into the unseen depths and looked manageable.

  Bertie, like the ass he is, dropped a stone down the well. No splash was heard. Instead there was a sort of cracking sound that reverberated in an odd way. Perhaps the Gesta was right and there are caverns down there. That blighter Bertie then decided to try out the echo with his voice and sang what he assured me was an E flat above Middle C. The echo lasted a good ten seconds after he had stopped singing and was strange. Once it was over and I had started to tell Bertie off for his fat-headed behaviour, we both heard another sound come from the well which was most certainly not Bertie’s voice. It lasted only for a second or so, but it sounded distinctly as if some thing or things down there were scratching or fluttering about.

  Bertie was all for investigating, but I told him not to be an idiot. It was late, it was getting dark and we had done enough for the day. I told the workmen to replace the lid over the well, and it was then that we received our last surprise of the day. On the underside of the lid I noticed that something black had been nailed to the wood. A quick examination showed it to be a crucifix of heavily tarnished silver, early twelfth century and of the finest Norman workmanship.

  But what was it doing nailed to the wood, facing downwards into the blackness with nothing and no one to see it?

  I decided to leave that and other questions till a later date. I am staying at the Dean’s tonight, so as to start bright and early tomorrow. As I was walking back from the Cathedral towards the Deanery, I noticed that the rooks were making more than their usual fuss. They were wheeling around their elms, cawing away, apparently quite unable to settle for the night. A few distant dogs seemed to have caught their mood and began to howl.

  Dinner at the Deanery with the Grices was, as I had rather expected, not a lively occasion. Dean Grice is given to rather pontifical remarks on general subjects and sees himself as having very “up-to-date” opinions. He talked with some pride of his time as a chaplain in the trenches during the Great War and gave me his opinion that it had been “the war to end all wars” and that that sort of thing should on no account ever happen again. Then he asked me what I thought of “Mr. Hitler”. It took me a second or two to understand whom he was referring to. He sounded as if he were talking about an erring member of his congregation.

  Mrs. Dean has no conversation at all. Occasionally she will break her silence by simply repeating what her husband has just said. Needless to say I have retired early. I must try to get some sleep, but there seem to be an awful lot of barking or howling dogs about.

  SEPTEMBER 22ND

  I passed a pretty restless night. In addition to the dogs there were the cats. Everywhere they seemed to be out and about howling and screeching. One climbed up the sloping roof outside my window and started scrabbling at the window-pane. I tried to shoo it away several times, but it was persistent and plaintive. Finally I let it in and it made straight for my bed. I tried to push it off, but it mewed pathetically and curled itself up in the crook of my arm. There it stayed all night and, apart from purring rather too loudly, caused me no further trouble.

  But that was not the end of it. The next assault on my ears came from a most unexpected quarter. My bedroom is next to that of the Dean and his wife. It being an old house, the partition walls are quite thin, no more than lath and plaster sandwiched in between wooden panelling. At about two o’clock my fitful slumbers were disturbed by what I can only describe as a bout of amorous activity from the next room. I hesitate to write it down. I coul
d barely believe my ears at the time. To judge from the cries made by the two contenders, the event appeared to be violent and not wholly consensual on the part of Mrs. Grice. Neither can be less than sixty years of age.

  At breakfast the following morning, Mr. and Mrs. Dean were more than usually taciturn. I noticed that at different times they looked at me enquiringly. Mrs. Dean’s hair was in quiet disarray. Fortunately I had an excellent excuse to leave as soon as possible. I needed to supervise the means whereby I was to be let down into the body of the well.

  To cut a long story short, it was well into the afternoon before all was ready for the descent. A rope ladder had been found to let me down as far as the spiral steps. The idea was that, once I had reached the steps, further equipment, including a long rope, would be let down to me and I would attach the rope to the wall by means of a metal staple knocked into it. This rope would be there as a safeguard in case the steps proved treacherous. Then I was to walk down the steps into the unknown abyss. With me, in a knapsack, I had two electric torches, a tape measure, a notebook and pencils, and a small camera with flash bulb attachments.

  Bertie, needless to say, was on hand and bursting with excited enthusiasm. I asked him if he had had a disturbed night but he had, apparently, slept like a baby.

  Before I began my descent, I was suddenly seized with apprehension. I checked everything was secure and told the Clerk of Works that at least two of his men should be on hand at the well-head while I was conducting my investigations. A look was exchanged between the Clerk and his men that I did not understand, but he agreed.

  The first part of the descent was made easily. I climbed down the rope ladder to the spiral steps which were rather rough-hewn but not, as I had feared, very slippery. There the workmen let down some tools and the rope. I managed to drive a metal staple into the wall and secure a rope to it. Then, taking my electric torch, I began my descent.