Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

by Stephen Jones

  I flashed my torch into the depths but could see no bottom, only the spiral staircase endlessly revolving into the blackness. The masonry that clad the walls was smooth and its composition was what is called “Cyclopean”—that is, huge irregular slabs of stone had been dressed and fitted together, making the wall look like a gigantic piece of crazy-paving on the vertical.

  The whole, including the spiral steps, was an astonishing feat of construction and certainly not, in my view, medieval. Anglo-Saxon, then? Even less likely. Roman? I had never seen Roman work that remotely resembled this.

  Soon the top of the well had become a little white disc, no bigger than the moon. I trudged downwards, taking care not to touch the walls if I could avoid it. They were covered with a thin layer of something dark and glistening, sticky to the touch, that left a dark brown stain on the hands, like half-dried blood. My dear old tweed jacket was already ruined.

  I had entered a world of silence, and if silence can be said to echo, then it did. I suppose what I am saying is that the slightest scrape of my feet on the stone steps came back to me in echoes a thousand fold. Once I coughed and it was like a fusillade of rifle shots. The scent of something decaying and fishlike was getting stronger.

  Then I heard a faint pattering sound behind and above me. I looked around and saw a light flickering and flashing, then further pattering, then what sounded like a stifled oath. I shone my torch upwards. Something was coming down the stairway towards me.

  It was that infernal ass Bertie Winship! He was carrying a tiny little toy electric torch that was about as much use down there as a paper bag in a thunderstorm.

  I gave the blighter a good piece of my mind and told him in no uncertain terms to go back up at once, but he was unrepentant.

  “Sorry, old fellow,” he said, “I simply couldn’t resist it. Anyway, I thought you could do with the company.”

  I was barely able to admit it to myself, but he was right. The ancient solitude was beginning to oppress me. I told him sharply to put away his stupid little flashlight and take the other of my two torches. I also told him to remain silent as we made our way down.

  I don’t know how long we had been going, but the entrance to the well was only a pinpoint of light above us—no more than a distant star on a dark night—when we came across the carvings.

  The first of them was a frieze carved into the stone, about a foot and a half in depth that ran the whole of the way around the well, broken only by the run of the staircase. It was a continuous key pattern, or, if you like, a set of interlinked swastikas. Apart from anything else it was astonishing to find workmanship like this at such a depth. What possible purpose could it serve?

  I could only conjecture that its presence suggested that an early civilisation, probably of Aryan origin, had been at work here and created the descent for ritual purposes. I began to speculate that it might have been used to commune with spirits of the dead, or some Chthonic deity of the underworld. This structure could be an early monument to a mystery religion, perhaps the earliest in these islands, predating Mithraism by hundreds, even thousands of years.

  My thoughts were beginning to run away with me when Bertie gave an odd little yelp. His torch had strayed onto a panel carved in low relief, just opposite him. The artist was skilled and the execution showed no signs of imprecision or crudity. The manner was vaguely reminiscent of those to be found on Babylonian and Assyrian monuments: precise, but stylised.

  It showed a group of figures huddled together, one of which was wearing a kind of crown or diadem and seemed to be dominating the others. The figures were not human, nor recognisably animal. They looked like some strange miscegenation between a sea creature, of an octapoid kind, and a human or ape. By one of them I was rather unpleasantly reminded of the figure engraved on Felix Cutbirth’s card.

  “By Jove,” said Bertie, “I wouldn’t like to meet one of those on a dark night.”

  I told Bertie to stop making idiotic remarks and we continued our descent. There were several more of these relief sculptures, each one stranger than the last. One depicted a group of human beings kneeling in homage, heads touching the ground like Moslems at prayer, before a strange lopsided creature with a head far too big for its body. In another further down, four men in profile were carrying a rigid human body horizontally. They appeared to be feeding it to one of the strange half-fish creatures; in fact most of the body’s head had already entered the beast’s vast open mouth.

  Shortly after that my foot encountered not another stone step but soft, muddy soil. We were at the bottom of the well. I commanded Bertie to stop and tried the ground. I was afraid it was a quagmire into which we might sink, never to be recovered, but the soil, though moist and soft, appeared to be solidly founded.

  I then noticed a strange thing. The aperture at the well-head was almost exactly ten feet across, but the chamber at its base was wider. I measured it with the tape I had brought for the purpose and discovered that we were in a circular space slightly over twenty-three feet in diameter.

  We must have been walking down a funnel that slowly tapered towards the top, but the widening (or narrowing, depending which way you look at it) had been done so gradually and with such cunning that we had never noticed.

  The air at the bottom was not free of the odour of rotten fish, but it was not rank or stuffy, and it was almost as if a breeze was coming from somewhere. I noticed that at opposite ends of the circular wall were two black spaces with pointed arches, just wide and tall enough for a man of average height to walk through them. I shone my torch into one of them and it revealed a long, narrow tunnel leading into more blackness.

  By this time Bertie had reached the bottom too, and was talking his usual nonsense. He had got it into his head that the whole thing was connected with King Arthur and Merlin, or some such twaddle. He said that the two apertures were bound to lead to “treasure chambers” and that we should explore them at once. I was resolved to do no such thing. We had had quite enough excitement for one day, but just then Bertie let out a cry.

  “I say, look at this!” he said.

  I prepared myself for yet another inanity, but Bertie had actually found something. He had been idly pushing his foot about in the mud and flashing his torch at it when he had come across something shiny. He pulled it out of the mud and we did our best to clean it up with our pocket-handkerchiefs.

  It shone still because it was made of some incorruptible metal or metals, pale yellow in colour. I suspected an alloy of gold and platinum, but this was highly improbable for such an obviously ancient artefact. The workmanship was very fine, but when I say fine, I do not exactly mean beautiful.

  It was circular and in the shape of a coronet or diadem, but if it was a sort of crown, then the head it had enclosed was monstrous, at least twice the size of an ordinary adult human head. The pattern was one of intricately entwined whorls and concentric circles which, when you looked closely at them, resolved themselves into the coiling limbs of strange creatures whose bulging eyes were represented by some sort of milky-white semiprecious stone. They were not pearls, but could have been white jade, though this seemed unlikely for England. The lowest band or border was composed of the interconnecting key pattern of swastikas that we had seen on the walls above us.

  While Bertie was babbling on about how he had found King Arthur’s crown, I took out the camera from my knapsack and put a flash bulb into the attachment. I only had a few bulbs so I had to choose my subjects carefully. I took one of the area we stood in as a whole to give an impression of the remarkable structure we had found. I took another, at Bertie’s earnest request, of him holding the giant diadem. I then decided that I should point the camera down the two tunnels that projected from our central chamber.

  I took one without any effect, but when my camera flashed down the other tunnel I thought I saw through my viewfinder something move at the end of the passageway I was photographing: a pale grey-green something that was smooth and glistening. The next moment
I heard a noise, halfway between a groan and a retching cough, but cavernous and hugely magnified. I turned sharply round to see if it was Bertie playing some stupid joke, but he was staring back at me, white and horrified.

  The next minute we were storming up those spiral stairs as fast as we could go. Bertie, who was ahead of me, stumbled several times. Each time I picked him up and on we went. By the time we had reached the end of the steps and the rope ladder we were both gasping for breath. It was at least five minutes before we made the final ascent.

  As we came out of the well the sun was setting in a clear evening sky, but for a few seconds it seemed impossibly bright to us. I ordered the rope ladder to be drawn up and the lid of the well to be replaced.

  I had my camera with me. I turned and asked Bertie if he still had the crown with him, but he said he had dropped it on the way up. I believed him; I think I believed him, but he had his arms folded across his jacket in an odd way.

  Bertie had recovered from his fright amazingly quickly and was soon chattering away to the Clerk of Works about the well’s “amazing archaeological importance”. I noticed, though, that he was very unspecific about our discoveries and for that, I suppose, I should be grateful.

  I returned to the Deanery exhausted, and at dinner, I am afraid, proved very unforthcoming about the day’s events. Fortunately the Dean was in a very talkative mood. He was full of Mr. Chamberlain’s flight to see “Mr. Hitler” and pacify him over the Sudetenland Crisis. He sees the Prime Minister’s mission as the epitome of modern statesmanship and diplomacy. I am too weary and confused to agree or disagree openly, but I do not share his confidence in a peaceful outcome. Mrs. Dean remained entirely mute and he barely looked at her.

  The Dean then told me he had just heard the melancholy news that during the previous night the Archdeacon, the Venerable Thaddeus Hill, had died, of a “seizure”. When the Dean said the word “seizure” I noticed that his wife looked at him very sharply indeed, and I think I saw the Dean’s pale skin flush with embarrassment.

  SEPTEMBER 23RD

  In the early hours of this morning I was rudely awakened by the Dean. No, not like the night before. He entered my room and shook me awake. There were intruders in the Cathedral, he said: lights had been seen in the cloisters. I told him to alert the police; it was nothing to do with me, but he was insistent. I had never seen the Dean so animated.

  I dressed rapidly and grabbed my torch. The Dean was waiting for me downstairs in the hall with a heavy old revolver and some cartridges. Handing me the gun, he said: “Take this, my boy. My old service revolver from the Trenches. We have not a moment to lose.” I thought he must be mad.

  From the top of the stairs his wife in her night-gown stared down at us, wild and bewildered.

  We gained access by the West door but, finding nothing amiss in the Cathedral itself, we hurried on to the cloisters. There, by the light of our torches we could see the lid had been removed from the well and we could hear distant cries. Once we got to the well we could hear the cries clearly, albeit distorted by the well’s weird echo. Someone was screaming for help and I could swear the voice was Bertie’s.

  I loaded the revolver and put it in my pocket, then tucked the torch into my belt. The Dean helped me over the parapet and onto the rope ladder. So I began the descent into the well yet again. The cries from below had not stopped, but they seemed muffled and more distant than before.

  I reached the steps and began to hurry down them far more rapidly than I would have wished. Once or twice I tripped and nearly fell into the black abyss. I reached the bottom and flashed my torch about. There was nobody, nothing.

  I stood quite still, trying not to breathe too hard, the blood pounding in my head. Bertie—or whoever it was—must have gone through one of the two tunnels, but which one?

  I decided to try the one where my flash photography had surprised something. I switched off my torch and entered the Stygian blackness of the narrow tunnel. Darkness and silence enveloped me. I felt my way, along smooth, slimed walls.

  Then I began to hear something. It was like a chant, but the tune and the language were alien to me. I could see something red flicker against the glistening black walls of the tunnel. It was no more than a whisper of light, but it spoke terror to me.

  The tunnel bent slightly, then suddenly debouched into a vast cavern, over a hundred feet high. Naphtha flares, spurting naturally from the rock, lit the space with a pinkish glare from a thousand crevices. I was in an area at least as vast as the Cathedral somewhere far above me. Parts of the rock vault had been carved into strange shapes, parts had been left in their natural state, rugged and glistening.

  Again I heard the chanting and, though clearer, it was still alien to my ears:

  “Iä-R’lyeh! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä!”

  About fifty feet from me across a smooth Cyclopean pavement stood a naked man, his back to me. His hands were raised in the air, his almost hairless head thrown back in an ecstasy of adoration. At his feet lay a crumpled form in black. As I approached them across the pavement I recognised the fallen figure. It was Bertie Winship, still in his clerical cassock.

  These two were between me and a third figure who stood, or crouched, some yards in front of them. Even now I cannot, or will not describe it fully. Its colour was a greyish-green and its form was stooped with a vast elephantine head on which reposed the coronet that Bertie had discovered at the bottom of the well. Its superabundant flesh, which seemed to disintegrate into a thousand liquid limbs, quivered with infernal energy. It appeared to sway and stoop to the naked man’s chant—or was it the chant that swayed to its movement?

  I drew and cocked the Dean’s service revolver. The naked man must have heard this or my footsteps approaching, because he turned and saw me.

  “Get out, you damned fool!” he shrieked. “How dare you interfere?” It was Cutbirth, his evil baby features contorted with rage.

  “I have come to take Bertie back,” I said.

  “You cannot have him! He is already given to the gods. Go back, I tell you!”

  At this, the creature let out a groaning screech which filled the cathedral cavern with hellish sound. Cutbirth turned his back on me and again addressed the monster:

  “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh, wgah-nagl fhtagn—”

  Having uttered his cry, he stooped and picked up from the ground something shining and curved like an oriental knife. Then, with his other hand, he gathered up the unconscious form of Bertie by the collar. Bertie’s head lolled back, unwittingly presenting his white throat to Cutbirth’s blade.

  “Put him down or I shoot,” I said.

  Cutbirth laughed. “You wouldn’t dare, you damned sandal-wearing, psalm-singing socialist!”

  I pulled the trigger, but the wretched gun jammed. It was a heavy, clumsy old thing. I pulled the trigger again and the gun fired, but the shot went wide and the recoil nearly threw me onto my back. The echoes of the shot filled the cavern with a clatter like machine-gun fire.

  Then, gripping the gun in both hands, I steadied myself and took aim at Cutbirth’s head. I fired again. The bullet missed Cutbirth by quite a margin, but it hit the creature which loomed before him. It went into one of its huge, milky eyes. The eye seemed to explode with the impact, spraying out torrents of green bile in the process. A hideous shriek filled the cavern.

  Cutbirth dropped the knife and turned again towards me with rage and hatred in every knotted vein of his face. It was a fatal mistake. The beast, assuming that Cutbirth had been the perpetrator of the outrage against its eye, launched one of its great tentacle limbs against him, lashing him to the ground. Cutbirth scrambled to his feet and tried to make a run for it, but the beast was onto him with more of his limbs. A terrible unequal struggle ensued.

  Meanwhile I ran towards the unconscious form of Bertie. I was glad to find he was not dead, just heavily drugged from some hideous narcotic that Cutbirth had pumped into him. I picked him up in a fireman’s lift and ran towa
rds the little cavern entrance.

  There I put Bertie down because there was not room enough to carry him on my back through the tunnel. I would have to drag him by the feet.

  I took one last look into the cavern. The creature had Cutbirth wrapped in its limbs and their two heads were very close together. It looked horribly like a lover’s embrace. As the creature bent its head towards Cutbirth’s, I saw the man’s face for the last time. It was full of agonised fear, but also a wondering ecstasy, as if he half-welcomed the devouring kiss of his deity.

  I heard a rustling and saw that the cavern was beginning to fill with other creatures, some bigger, some smaller than the one that was now feasting on Cutbirth. They were all piscine, shambling, unearthly, imbued with some sort of mind and power that was beyond my capacity to comprehend.

  I took Bertie’s feet and began to drag him through the passage. As I was doing so he started to groan. Consciousness of a kind was returning to him, but he was still impossibly weak.

  We reached the bottom of the well, and then I had to half-drag, half-carry him up the spiral staircase. It took an age.

  When we reached the rope ladder I was faced with a problem. He was still too doped and feeble to climb it himself and I could not carry him up it on my back. Then I remembered the rope that I had tied to the staple at the bottom of the rope ladder.

  I detached the rope from the staple and tied one end of the rope securely around Bertie’s waist. Then, taking the other end of the rope, I climbed with it to the top of the rope ladder. Dawn was breaking over the Cathedral as I clambered over the well parapet. Fortunately the Dean was still there.

  With much heaving on the rope we managed to pull young Bertie to the top. He was just revived enough by this time to scramble over the well enclosure and flop exhausted onto the dewy lawn of the cloister garth.