“Now you startin’ to use that big ol’ brain of yours, missy,” the woman says. “You tell us where it’s hid, who you gave it to, and maybe you gonna get to live just a little bit longer.”
“She ain’t gonna tell you jack shit,” the man sneers.
The rag pile makes a fluttering, anxious sound, and Lacey tries to sit up, but the van swerves and bounces over something, a pothole or a speed bump, a fucking old lady crossing the street for all she knows, and she tumbles over on her face again.
“It’s in the box,” she snarls, rolling onto her back and she kicks out with her left foot and hits nothing but the metal side wall. The rag pile gurgles and sputters wildly and so Lacey kicks the van again, harder than before. “Haven’t you even opened the goddamn box?”
“Bitch, ain’t nothin’ we want in that box,” the woman says. “You already handed it off to Monalisa, didn’t you?”
“Of course she fucking gave it to him. Jesus, what the fuck else do you think she did with it?”
“I told you to shut up and drive.”
“Fuck you,” and then a car horn blares and everything dissolves into the banshee wail of squealing brakes, tyres burning themselves down to naked, steelbelt bones, the impact hardly half a heartbeat later, and Lacey is thrown backwards into the gurgling rag pile. Something soft, at least, she thinks, wondering if she’s dead already and just hasn’t figured it all out yet, and the man in the sunglasses screams like a woman.
And there’s light, a flood of clean, warm sunlight across her face before the gunfire—three shots—blam, blam, blam. The rag pile abruptly stops gurgling and someone takes her by the arm, someone pulling her out of the van, out of hell and back into the world again.
“I can’t see,” she says, and the blindfold falls away to leave her squinting and blinking at the rough brick walls of an alleyway, a sagging fire escape, the stink of a garbage dumpster but even that smells good after the van.
“Wow,” the old man says, grinning scarecrow of an old man in a blue fedora and a shiny, gabardine suit, blue bow tie to match his hat. “I saw someone do that in a movie once. I never imagined it would actually work.”
There’s a huge revolver clutched in his bony right hand, the blindfold dangling from the fingers of his left, and his violet-grey eyes sparkle like amethysts and spring water.
“Professor Solomon Monalisa, at your service,” he says, lets the blindfold fall to the ground and holds one twig-thin hand out to Lacey. “You had us all worried, Miss Morrow. You shouldn’t have run like that.”
Lacey stares at his outstretched hand, and there are sirens now.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot about the handcuffs. I’m afraid we’ll have to attend to those elsewhere, though. I don’t think we should be here when the police show up and start asking questions, do you?”
“No,” she says, and the old man takes her arm again and starts to lead her away from the wrecked van.
“Wait. The box,” she says and tries to turn around, but he stops her and puts a hand across her eyes.
“What’s back there, Miss Morrow, you don’t want to see it.”
“They have the box. The Innsmouth fossil—”
“I have the fossil,” he says. “And it’s quite safe, I assure you. Come now, Miss Morrow. We don’t have much time.”
And he leads her away from the van, down the long, narrow alley and there’s a door back there, a tall wooden door with peeling red paint and he opens it with a silver key.
EXCERPT FROM NEW AMERICAN MONSTERS: MORE THAN MYTH?
BY GERALD DURRELL (HILL AND WANG, NEW YORK, 1959]
...which is certainly enough to make us pause and wonder about the possibility of a connection between at least some of these sightings and the celluloid fantasies being churned out by Hollywood film-makers. If we insist upon objectivity and are willing to entertain the notion of unknown animals, we must also, it seems, be equally willing to entertain the possibility that a few of these beasts may exist as much in the realm of the psychologist as that of the biologist. I can think of no better example of what I mean than the strange and frightening reports from Massachusetts proceeding the release of Creature from the Black Lagoon six years ago.
As first reported in the Ipswich Chronicle, March 20th, 1954, there was a flurry of sightings, from Gloucester north to Newburyport, of one or more scaly man-like amphibians, monstrous things that menaced boaters and were blamed for the death of at least one swimmer. On the evening of March 19th, Mrs. Cordelia Eliot of Rowley was walking along the coast near the Annisquam Harbor Lighthouse, when she saw what she later described as a “horrible fishman” paddling about just off shore. She claims to have watched it for half an hour, until the sun set and she lost sight of the creature. Four days later, there was another sighting by two fishermen near the mouth of the Annisquam River, of a “frogman with bulging red eyes and scaly greenish-black skin” wading through the shallows. When one of the men fired a shotgun at it (I haven’t yet concluded if the men routinely carried firearms on fishing trips) it slipped quietly away into deeper water.
But the lion’s share of the sightings that spring seem to have occurred in the vicinity of the “ghost town” of Innsmouth at the mouth of the Castle Neck River (previously known by its Agawam Indian name, Manuxet, a name which still persists among local old-timers). Most of these encounters are merely brief glimpses of scaly man-like creatures, usually seen from a considerable distance, either swimming near the mouth of the river or walking along its muddy banks at low tide. But one remarkable, and disturbing, account, reported by numerous local papers, involves the death of a nine-year-old boy named Lester Sargent, who drowned while swimming with friends below a small waterfall on the lower Castle Neck River. His companions reported that the boy began screaming and a great amount of blood was visible in the water. There were attempts to reach the swimmer, but the would-be rescuers were driven back by “a monster with blood-red eyes and sharp teeth.” The boy finally disappeared beneath the water and his mutilated and badly decomposed body turned up a week later on Crane Beach, a considerable distance from the falls where he disappeared. The Essex County coroner listed the cause of death as shark attack.
“I’ve seen plenty of sharks,” Harold Mowry, one of the swimmers, told reporters. “This wasn’t a shark, I swear. It had hands, with great long claws, and it dragged Lester right down and drowned him.”
Another notable sighting occurred along the old Argilla Road near Ipswich on April 2nd. The Rev. Henry Waite and his wife, Elizabeth, both avid bird watchers, claimed to have observed a “monster” strolling along the east bank of the Castle Neck River for more than an hour, before it dove into the river and vanished in a swirl of bubbles. Mrs. Waite described it as “tall and dark, and it walked a little hunched over. Through the binoculars we could see its face quite plainly. It did have a face, you know, with protruding eyes like a fish, and gills. At one point it turned and seemed to be watching us. I admit I was afraid and asked Henry if we shouldn’t go for the police. Have you ever seen that Monster from the Black Lagoon [sic] movie? Well, that’s what it looked like..”
The last of the sightings were made in early May and no further records of amphibious man-monsters near Cape Ann or Ipswich Bay are available. One report of April 27th claimed that a group of school children had, in fact, found the monster dead, but their discovery later proved to be nothing but the badly decomposed carcass of a basking shark. It is impossible, I think, not to draw connections with the release of the Universal-International horror flick on March 5th. The old bugaboo of “mass hysteria” raises its shaggy head once more...
10.23 A.M.
Late for her meeting with Jasper before the drive to the train station and Lacey rushes upstairs from the collections, is already halfway across the central rotunda of the Pratt Museum’s exhibit hall when Dr. Mary Hanisak calls out her name. Lacey stops and stands in the skeletal shadows of the mammoth and mastodon, the stuffed Indian elephant, and Dr. Hanisak is
walking quickly towards her, carrying the cardboard box with the Innsmouth fossil inside.
“Can you believe you almost forgot this thing?” she asks. “That would have been pretty embarrassing, don’t you think?”
Lacey laughs a little too loudly, her voice echoing in the museum. “Yeah,” she says. “It would have,” and she takes the box from the woman, chubby little Dr. Hanisak like a storybook gnome, Dr. Hanisak whose speciality is the evolution of rodent teeth. The box is wrapped tight with packing tape so there’s no danger of its coming open on the train.
“Then you’re all set now?”
“Ready as I’m ever going to be.”
“And you’re sure you want to do this? I mean, it’s awfully high profile. I expect you’ll be in newspapers all over the world when the reporters get a look at what’s in that box. You might even be on CNN. Aren’t you scared?”
Lacey stares for a moment at the dusty bones of a sabre-tooth cat mounted near the mammoth’s feet. “You bet,” she says. “I’m terrified. But maybe it’ll at least bring in some new funding for the museum. We could use it.”
“Perhaps,” Dr. Hanisak replies uncertainly and she folds her hands and stares at the box. “You never can tell how these things will turn out, in the end.”
“I suppose not,” Lacey says, and then she looks at her watch and thanks Dr. Hanisak again. “I really have to get going,” she says and leaves the woman standing alone with the skeletons.
EXCERPT FROM FAMOUS FILM MONSTERS AND THE MEN WHO MADE THEM
BY BEN BROWNING (THE CITADEL PRESS, SECAUCUS, NJ, 1972]
Certainly there are several interesting stories floating about Hollywood regarding producer William Alland’s inspiration for the story. The one most often repeated, it would seem, recounts how Alland heard a tale during a dinner party at Orson Welles’ home regarding an ancient race of “fish-men” called the dhaghon inhabiting remote portions of the Amazon River. Local natives believed these creatures rose from the depths once a year, after floods, and abducted virgins. Naturally, the person telling the story is said to have sworn to its veracity. Another, less plausible, source of inspiration may have been a tradition in some parts of Massachusetts, in and around Gloucester, of humanoid sea monsters said to haunt a particularly treacherous stretch of coast near Ipswich Bay known appropriately enough as the “Devil’s Reef”. Rumour has it Alland knew of these legends, but decided to change the story’s setting from maritime New England to the Amazon because he preferred a more exotic and primeval locale. At any rate, one or another of these “fish stories” might have stuck with him and become the germ for the project he eventually pitched to Universal.
3:47 P.M.
Through the peeling red door and she follows the old man down long hallways dimly lit by bare, incandescent bulbs, wallpaper shreds, upstairs and downstairs, and finally, a door he opens with another silver key. A steel fire door painted all the uncountable maroon-brown shades of dried gore and butcheries and it swings open slow on ratcreaking hinges, pours the heavy scents of frigid air and formaldehyde at their feet. There’s light in there, crimson light, and Lacey looks at Dr. Solomon Monalisa and he’s smiling a doubtful, furtive smile.
“What am I going to see in there?”
“That’s a matter of opinion,” he says and holds one skinny arm out like a theatre usher leading her to an empty seat.
“I asked you a simple question. All I wanted was a simple answer.”
“Yes, but there are no simple answers, are there?”
“What’s waiting for me in there?”
“All things are but mirrors, Miss Morrow. They reflect our deepest preconceptions, our most cherished prejudices—”
“Never fucking mind,” she says and steps quickly across the threshold into a room as cold as the back of the Ford van. And the room is almost empty, high concrete walls and a concrete ceiling far overhead, banks of darkroom red lights dangling on chains, and the tank, sitting alone in the centre of it all.
“You’re a very lucky woman,” Dr. Monalisa says and the steel door clicks shut behind her. “Have you any idea, my dear, how few scientists have had this privilege? Why, I could count them all on my left hand.”
The tank is at least seven feet tall, sturdy aquarium glass held together with strips of rusted iron, filled with murky preservative gone bloody beneath the lights, and Lacey stares at the thing floating lifeless behind the glass.
“What do you see, Miss Morrow?”
“My god,” she whispers and takes another step towards the tank.
“Now that’s a curious answer.”
Neither man nor fish, neither fish nor amphibian, long legs and longer arms, and its bald, misshapen skull is turned upwards, as if those blind white eyes are gazing longingly towards Heaven. Solomon Monalisa rattles his keys and slips the handcuffs from her aching wrists.
“Grendelonyx innsmouthensis—that’s what I thought you’d see, Miss Morrow. Grendel’s claw—”
“But it’s impossible,” she whispers.
“Quite,” Dr. Solomon Monalisa says. “It is entirely, unquestionably impossible.”
“Is it real?”
“Yes, of course it’s real. Why would I show it to you otherwise.”
Lacey nods her head and crosses the room to stand beside the tank, places one hand flat against the glass. She’s surprised that it isn’t cold to the touch. The creature inside looks pale and soft, but she knows that’s only the work of time and the caustic, preserving chemicals.
“It got tangled in a fishing net, dragged kicking into the light of day,” the old man says and his footsteps are very loud in the concrete room. “Way back in November ’29, not too long after the Navy finished up with Innsmouth. I suspect it was wounded by the torpedoes,” and he points to a deep gash near the thing’s groin. “They kept it in a basement at the university in Arkham for a time, and then it went to Washington. They moved it here right after the war.”
She almost asks him which war, and who “they” are, but she doubts he would tell her, not the truth, anyway, and she can’t take her eyes off the beautiful, terrible, impossible creature in the tank—its splayed hands, the bony webbing between its fingers, the recurved, piercing claws. “Why are you showing me this?” she finally asks instead.
“It seemed a shame not to,” he replies, his smile fading now, and he also touches the aquarium glass. “There are so few who can truly comprehend the...” and he pauses, furrowing his brow. “The wonder—yes, that’s what I mean, the wonder of it all.”
“You said you have the fossil.”
“Oh, yes. We do. I do. Dr. Hanisak was kind enough to switch the boxes for us last night, while you were finishing up at the museum.”
“Dr. Hanisak—”
“Shhhhhh,” and Monalisa holds a wrinkled index finger to his lips. “Let’s not ask too many questions, dear. I assure you, the fossil is safe and sound. I’ll give it back to you very soon. Ah, and we have all your things from the train. You’ll be wanting those back as well, I should think. But I wanted you to see our friend here first, before you see the film.”
“What film?” she asks, remembering the photograph from the manila envelope, the letter, the nosy woman asking her if she liked old monster movies.
“What odd sort of childhood did you have, Miss Morrow? Weren’t you allowed to watch television? Have you truly never seen it?”
“My mother didn’t like us watching television,” Lacey says. “We didn’t even own a TV set. She bought us books, instead. I’ve never cared much for movies. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then that may be the most remarkable part of it all. You may be the only adult in America who’s never seen Creature from the Black Lagoon,” and he chuckles softly to himself.
“I’ve heard of it.”
“I should certainly hope so.”
And at last she turns away from the dead thing floating in the tank and looks into Dr. Solomon Monalisa’s sparkling eyes. “You’
re not going to kill me?” she asks him.
“Why would I have gone to all the trouble to save you from those thugs back there if I only wanted you dead? They’d surely have seen to that for me, once they figured out you didn’t have the fossil any longer.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” Lacey says and realises that she’s started to cry.
“No,” he says. “But you weren’t meant to. No one was. It’s a secret.”
“What about my work—”
“Your article has been withdrawn from Nature. And Dr. Hanisak was good enough to cancel the press conference at the Peabody Museum.”
“And now I’m just supposed to pretend I never saw any of this?”
“No, certainly not. You’re just supposed to keep it to yourself.”
“It doesn’t make any sense. Jesus, why don’t you just destroy the fossil? Why don’t you destroy this thing?” and she slaps the glass hard with the palm of her hand. “If it’s a goddamn secret, if no one’s supposed to know, why don’t you get rid of it all?”
“Could you destroy these things?” the old man asks her. “No, I didn’t think so. Haven’t you taken an oath, of sorts, to search for answers, even when the answers are uncomfortable, even when they’re impossible? Well, you see, dear, so have I.”
“It was just lying there in the cabinet. Anyone could have found it. Anyone at all.”
“Indeed. The fossil has been missing for decades. We have no idea how it ever found its way to Amherst. But you will care for it now, yes?”
She doesn’t answer him, because she doesn’t want to say the words out loud, stares through her tears at the creature in the tank.
“Yes, I thought you would. You have an uncommon strength. Come along, Miss Morrow. We should be going now,” he says and takes her hand. “The picture will be starting soon.”
For David J. Schow, Keeper of the Black Lagoon
Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth Page 24