Collected Stories (4.0)

by James Wade

  “Your father’s brother?”

  “Yes, a funny little old fellow; I always thought when I was a child that he looked just like a frog. He spends about half the year at the old family place in Innsmouth and half in Boston. He seems to have all the money he needs, though I’ve never seen any of it. My father once asked him jokingly what he did for a living, and Uncle Joe just laughed and said he dove for Spanish doubloons.

  “Anyway, a few weeks after I left school and came back to Boston, Uncle Joe showed me a story about Dr. Wilhelm’s work with the delphinidae—I think it was in the Scientific American. Joe knew of my studies in oceanography, of course, and he said he knew an authority in the field who would write me a good recommendation. It must have been a good one, all right, because in less than six weeks here I was. That was over two years ago now.”

  If Alonzo Waite needed a further link in his wild theory of conspiracy, here was perfect raw material!

  “You know,” Jo went on with apparently casual lightness, “I told you a long time ago that Dr. Wilhelm asked me to marry him. That was over six months ago. At the time I thought it was a bad idea, but now I rather wish I had taken him up on it.”

  “Why? Afraid of becoming an old maid? I might have something to say about that one of these days.”

  “No.” Her voice remained as calm'and casual as before. “The reason is that—dating from right around the time that Fred Wilhelm rescued me from my LSD trip in that dolphin tank—I’ve been pregnant. At least, that’s the timetable that the doctor in San Simeon has figured.”

  XII

  “Then it’s Fred?” My remark sounded stupid, clumsy, like something that hypothetical beachside couple I had imagined might be discussing in some tawdry charade illustrating California’s vaunted “New Morality.”

  “Figure it out for yourself,” Jo answered with a nervous laugh. “It’s either you or Fred. I don’t remember a thing until I woke the next morning feeling like a used punching bag.”

  "Wilhelm was alone with you for at least ten minutes before he let me in to the aquarium. And he was alone with you in your apartment after I went to bed three hours later. I never was alone with you that evening.”

  “That’s what I assumed from what you both told me the next day. Besides, I never turned you down—maybe only because you didn’t ask me.”

  “Jo,” I said, getting out of my chair, and didn’t know what to say next.

  “No, whatever it is, forget it,” she murmured. “Whatever you were going to say, it’s too late. I’ve got to think in an entirely different frame of reference now.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I think I’m going to marry Fred—that is, if he’s still interested. From there we’ll see. There’s more now than just me to worry about, and that seems the right move—the only move—to start with.”

  We didn’t say much more. Jo felt drowsy all of a sudden and I walked her back to her apartment. Afterward, I strolled on the beach. A brisk wind arose around midnight, and clouds covered what moon there was. I felt numb; I hadn’t known, or anyway admitted to myself, how I felt about Jo until now. I loved her too. But if Wilhelm, the old satyr, had made her pregnant while she was under hypnosis, then what she planned was probably best for all concerned. But how unlike Wilhelm such an act appeared! The gentlemanly, scholarly enthusiast, with his grandfatherly gray hair and amusing penguin shape—he might become infatuated with and propose to a young woman, especially someone who shared his enthusiasms. That was in character. But a dastardly attack like the one Jo suspected? He must be insane.

  I heard the Land Rover chugging up the sandy mud. Dr. Wilhelm was returning. I’d find it hard to face him tomorrow. In fact, that might just be the best time for me to offer him my resignation, although I had no future prospects. Maybe I could get my old job back. At any rate, nobody needed me around here any more, that much was crystal clear.

  I went back to my room and had several more brandies. Before I fell asleep, I became aware that the hippies were launching one of their wild orgies down on the south beach. From what Waite had said, they were holding ceremonies to keep the nice, normal, sane world safe for nice, normal, sane people.

  If there were any left these days.

  XIII

  I don’t think I had slept as much as an hour when something sent me bolt upright in bed, wide awake. It may have been a sound, or it may have been some sort of mental message (ironic, since this was my field of study, that I had never observed, much less experienced, a fully convincing instance of telepathic communication).

  In any case, something was wrong, I was sure of that; and if my premonition proved right, I knew where to go to find it: the beach by the.main laboratory. I dressed hurriedly and dashed out on the shifting sands.

  The wind, now near gale force, had swept the clouds away from the sickle moon, which shone starkly on the beach and glared upon an ocean of crinkled tinfoil. I could see two figures moving toward the windowless building at the water’s edge where Flip, the neglected subject of our old experiment, was still kept in isolation. They converged and entered the building together, after a moment’s hesitation over the locks.

  As I dashed in pursuit, the gusty wind brought me snatches of the hippie ceremony. I made out drums and cymbals beaten wildly, as well as that same muffled chanting and the high, floating wail of ecstasy or terror, or both.

  The harsh white light of fluorescent tubes now streamed through the open door leading to the dolphin tank, and I heard another sound inside as I approached: the clank of machinery and the hum of an electric motor. Dr. Wilhelm was raising the sea gate on the ocean side of the building, the gate that was sometimes used to change the water in the tank while Flip was held under restraint by the daytime lab assistants. No one could be holding him now; was Wilhelm about to release the animal, to satisfy some vague, belated qualm of conscience?

  As I panted up to the open door, 1 realized that more than this was afoot. In a momentary glimpse just before the storm cut out our power lines, I took in the whole unbelievable scene: the massive sea gate was fully raised now, allowing turbulent waves to surge into the floodlighted pool and even to splash violently over its rim, inundating the observation deck and its elaborate equipment.

  The dolphin, pitting his powerful muscles against the force of the incoming water, was relentlessly beating his way out to sea. Of Dr. Wilhelm there was no sign; but, perched on the broad, smooth back of the great sea beast itself, her naked body covered by her soaked, streaming hair, sat Josephine, bolt upright, bestriding her strange mount like the old Grecian design of the boy on the dolphin, that enigmatic emblem of the marriage of earth to ocean.

  Then the lights failed, but the waves pounded on, and the distant delirious chanting reached a peak of hysteria that sustained itself incredibly, unendingly.

  I can recall no more.

  XIV

  Josephine’s body was never found, nor was there any reason that I should ever have expected that it would be. When the lab crew arrived next morning, they repaired the power line and raised the sea gate again. Dr. Wilhelm’s mangled body was caught beneath it. The gate had fallen when the power failed, and had crushed Wilhelm as he attempted to follow the fantastic pair he had liberated into the open sea.

  On the neat desk in Dr. Wilhelm’s office, where I had first met Josephine on the evening of my arrival, lay a manila envelope addressed to me. It contained a typed letter and a roll of recording tape. I found the envelope myself, and I have not shown it to the police, who seem to believe my story that Wilhelm and Josephine were swept out to sea when the gate was accidentally raised during an experiment.

  This is what the letter said:

  Dear Dorn:

  When you read this I shall be dead, if I am lucky. I must release the two of them to go back to the ocean depths where they belong. For you see, I now believe everything that grotesque person Alonzo Waite told me.

  I lied to you once when you asked me whether I had implan
ted electrodes in the brain of the test dolphin. I did implant one electrode at an earlier stage of my work, when I was doing some studies on the mechanism of sexual stimulation in the animal.

  When our experiments in telepathic communication seemed to be inconclusive, I was criminally foolish enough to broadcast a remote signal to activate that stimulus, in a misguided attempt to increase the rapport between the subject and the animal.

  This was on the afternoon of April 30, and you can guess—reluctantly enough—what happened that evening. I assume full responsibility and guilt, which I will expiate in the only way that seems appropriate.

  When I got to the pool ahead of you on that awful night, I saw at a glance what must have just occurred. Josephine had been ripped from her canvas sling, still hypnotized, and badly mauled.

  Her suit was torn almost off her, but I wrapped her in a robe and somehow got her into bed without your guessing what had really happened. The hypnosis held, and she never realized either. From then on, though, she was increasingly under telepathic contact and even control by that beast in the pool, even though she consciously and purposely avoided him.

  Tonight when I got back from town she told me about her pregnancy, but in the middle of talking she fell into the usual trance and started to walk out on the beach. I locked her in her room and sat down to write this, since you have a right to know the truth, although there is nothing more that can be done after tonight.

  I think we each loved Josephine in our own way, but now it is too late. I must let her out to join her own—she was changing— and when the baby is born—well, you can imagine the rest.

  I myself would never have believed any of this, except for the tape. Play it and you’ll understand everything. I didn’t even think of it for a couple of weeks, fool that I was. Then I remembered that all during the time Jo spent hypnotized in the pool with the dolphin, I had ordered the microphones left open to record whatever might happen. The tapes were routinely filed by date the next day, and had never been monitored. I found the reel for April 30 and copied the part that I enclose with this letter. Goodbye—and I’m sorry.

  Frederick C. Wilhelm

  ***

  Many hours passed—hours of stunned sorrow and disbelief—before I dared bring a tape machine to my room and listen to the recording Wilhelm had left for me. I debated destroying the reel unheard; afterward I did erase the master tape stored in the main laboratory.

  But the need to know the truth—a scientific virtue that is sometimes a human failing—forced me to listen to the accursed thing. It meant the end for me of any peace of mind or security in this life. I hope that Jo and Flip have found some measure of satisfaction in that strange, alien world so forebodingly described by the guru Waite, and that Frederick Wilhelm has found peace. I can neither look for nor expect either.

  This is what I transcribed from that tape after many agonizing hours of replaying. The time code indicates that it was recorded at about 9:35 on the evening of April 30, a scant few minutes before Josephine’s agonized scream sent Wilhelm and me dashing belatedly to rescue her from that garishly illuminated chamber where the ultimate horror took place:

  “My beloved, my betrothed, you must help me. I must get out and unify the forces. Those who wait in watery R’lyeh, those who walk the snowy wastes of Leng, whistlers and lurkers of sullen Kadath—all shall rise, all shall join once more in praise of great Cthulhu, of Shub-Niggurath, of Him Who is not to be Named. You shall help me, fellow breather of air, fellow holder of warmth, another storer of seed for the last sowing and the endless harvest. Y’ha-nthlei shall celebrate our nuptials, the weedy labyrinths shall hold our couch, the silent strutters in the darkness will welcome us with high debauch and dances upon their many-segmented legs... their ancient, glittering eyes are gay. And we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever.”

  Merely a repetition, you say—merely an earlier version of that meaningless rant that Josephine repeated an hour later under hypnosis in her bedroom, a garbled outpouring of suppressed fragments and fears from the subconscious mind of one who unreasoningly dreaded her family background in a shunned, decadent seaport a continent away?

  I wish I could believe that too, but I cannot. For these wild words were spoken, not by a mentally unbalanced woman in deep hypnotic trance, but in the quacking, bleating, inhuman tones that are the unmistakable voice of the dolphin itself alien servant of still more alien masters; the Deep Ones of legend, prehuman (and perhaps soon posthuman) intelligences behind whose bland, benign exterior lurks a threat to man which not all man's destructive ingenuity can equal, or avert.

  A Darker Shadow over Innsmouth

  (1969)

  The figure turned to meet my gaze;

  A woman’s cold, translucent form

  Stood wrapped in early dawning rays,

  While on its mouth the blood was warm.

  Then in the east the sky turned red,

  The phantom sought the grave it knew;

  I clutched the stake with hand of lead,

  And from my box the hammer drew.

  —Wade Wellman

  As I boarded the wheezing, rattling bus bound for Innsmouth there at the station next to a bustling supermarket in Newburyport, I could not suppress a shudder at the thought that now, at last, I was bound for that ancient, decadent, shadow-blighted Massachusetts seaport of which so many repellent legends are whispered. I had read all the Lovecraft stories, of course, and those of his numerous successors, which chronicle how rapacious voyagers of the past century brought horror and calamity upon the town through their impious trafficking with blasphemous humanoid sea-dwellers—creatures who fetched them treasure from weed-grown, cyclopean ocean-bottom cities, but who in turn insisted upon not only the townsmen’s worship of frightful alien deities like Dagon and Great Cthulhu, but even upon the unholy mating of human and amphibian, producing a hideous hybrid of half-reptilian, fish-like abnormalities who inhabited the town until they “changed” sufficiently to take up an immortal existence at the bottom of the sea.

  Of course, I knew too that the town had been hard hit by federal raids over forty years ago, according to Lovecraft’s informants; but I realized:

  “That is not dead which can eternal lie,

  And with strange aeons, even death may die",

  in the words of a fortune-cookie verse I once nearly choked on—a cookie served me, strangely enough, at an Arabian restaurant in Osaka.

  Now I was at last on my way to see for myself these eldritch, unholy entities and enclaves, and to join in the bestial rites therewith associated— that is, if my credentials were all in order. (My Order of Dagon card was signed by August Derleth, but a report had reached me that Colin Wilson had taken over the high priesthood in a daring palace coup.)

  As we approached ill-rumored Innsmouth along the desolate Rowley road, I knew I would not be disappointed—here were the rotting, fishy- smelling wharves; the blear-paned ancient houses; the massive, obscurely terrifying warehouses, holding impassively the secrets of outer arcana; the crumbling, desecrated churches devoted to what hideous ceremonies the sane mind could only shudder to imagine.

  As I alighted from the bus at Town Square in front of the sinister and horror-infested fabric of the Gilman House hotel, with its tattered Diners’ Club sticker, the only person in sight was a slatternly girl with bulging, unwinking eyes and rough, crinkly skin around the sides of her neck. I struck up an acquaintance with this unprepossessing creature—whose name, I learned, was Nella Kodaz—on the pretext of being a stranger in need of guidance, and we strolled down to a deserted wharf where the sibilant and immemorial sea came sliding and hissing out of the mist.

  “Tell me, Nella,” I queried, “I know there is more in Innsmouth than meets the eye. How can I arrange to see the forbidden things secreted in those dilapidated warehouses and hidden away in the ancient boarded-up dwellings here?”

  “Better get a CIA clearance first,” she replied.

  “CIA? Don’t you mean
Esoteric Order of Dagon?”

  “That Dagon jazz is all washed up. After the Navy raids here in 1928, they say, the government kept a close eye on any funny business. During World War II there was a commando school here, and since then it’s been used mostly as a hush-hush Defense Department experimental and training station. That’s why everything’s under cover and visitors aren’t welcome. I thought you knew, from the way you talked.”

  I was flabbergasted. “But what about the monstrous batrachian sea- creatures out beyond Devil Reef? The blasphemous fish-frogs that always dominated Innsmouth and extracted their unholy tribute?”

  “Well, every few weeks the Navy people dump a few crates of shark- repellent into the deep water off the reef. If there’s any boogie-men around, that seems to hold them.”

  “You must excuse me, Nella—but it seems to me you yourself exemplify what is referred to as the Innsmouth look’, those peculiarities of personal appearance shown by people descended from human matings with the Deep Ones—people who will some day dive down to live forever in the sea- bottom citadel of Y’ha-nthlei.”

  “Wrong again. I got an overdose of radiation, just a slight one, when I was working as a lab tech at the atomic reactor where they’re making defoliants. The insurance paid through the nose, and I’m due for some free plastic surgery in a few months.”

  “But what about those older inhabitants of Innsmouth who did have an amphibian strain in their ancestry?”

  "The ones who are left come under Medicare now. Mostly their relatives committed them years ago, and they’re in protective custody at a big aquarium down near Marineland. It’s sort of like Disneyland—people pay to see the Creatures from the Black Lagoon, only they think it’s a fake.”

  “Then what’s hidden in all those huddled, leering old houses and sealed, sagging warehouses?”