Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

by Stephen Jones

  He smiled. “Ah, well, but that’s always been my lot. As I believe I once told Jilly, sometimes I’m seen as a father confessor. Sort of odd, really, because I’m not a Catholic.”

  “Then what are you?” Anne tilted her head on one side. “I mean, what’s your religion? Are you an atheist?”

  “Something like that.” Jamieson shrugged. “Actually, I do have certain beliefs. But I’m not one to believe in a conventional god, if that’s what you’re asking. And you? What do you believe in?”

  “I believe in the things my father told me,” she answered dreamily. “Some beautiful things, some ugly, and some strange as the strangest myths and fables in the strangest books. But of course you know what I mean, even if I’m not sure myself.” As she spoke, she took up her book and hugged it to her chest. Bound in antique leather, dark as old oak and glossy with age, the book’s title, glimpsed between Anne’s spread fingers, consisted of just three ornately tooled letters: E.O.D.

  “Well,” said Jamieson, “and here you are with just such a book. One of your strange books, perhaps? Certainly its title is very odd. Your mother once told me she gave you such books to burn...”

  She looked at the book in her hands and said, “My father’s books? There were some she wanted rid of, yes. But I couldn’t just burn them. This is one of them. I’ve read them a lot and tried to make sense of them. Sometimes I thought I understood them; at others I was at a loss. But I knew they were important and now I know why.” And then, suddenly galvanised, gripping his arm below the elbow. “Can we please stop pretending? I know almost everything now... so won’t you please tell me the rest? And I swear to you—whatever you tell me—it will be safe with me. I think you must know that by now.”

  The old man nodded and gently disengaged himself. “I think I can do that, yes. That is, as long as you’re not going to be frightened by it, and provided you won’t run away... like your father.”

  “He was very afraid, wasn’t he?” she said. “But I’ll never understand why he stole the books and the Innsmouth jewellery. If he hadn’t taken them, maybe they’d have just let him go.”

  “I think that perhaps he planned to sell those books,” the old man answered. “In order to support himself, naturally. For of course he would have known that they were very rare and valuable. But after he fled Innsmouth, changed his name, got back a little self-confidence and started to think clearly, he must also have realised that wherever the books surfaced they would be a sure link—a clue, a pointer—to his whereabouts. And so he kept them.”

  “And yet he sold the jewellery.” She frowned.

  “Because gold is different than books.” Jamieson smiled. “It becomes very personal; the people who buy jewellery wear it, of course, but they also guard it very closely and they don’t keep it on library shelves or places where others might wonder about it. Also, your father was careful not to spread it too thickly. Some here, some there; never too much in any one place. Perhaps at one time he’d reasoned that just like the books he shouldn’t sell the jewellery—but then came the time when he had to.”

  “Yet the people of the Esoteric Order weren’t any too careful with it,” she said, questioningly.

  “Because they consider Innsmouth their town and safe,” Jamieson answered. “And also because their members rarely betray a trust. Which in turn is because there are penalties for any who do.”

  “Penalties?”

  “There are laws, Anne. Doesn’t every society have laws?”

  Her huge eyes studied his, and Jamieson felt the trust they conveyed... a mutual trust, passing in both directions. And he said, “So is there anything else I should tell you right now?”

  “A great many things,” Anne answered, musingly. “It’s just that I’m not quite sure how to ask about them. I have to think things through.” But in the next moment she was alert again:

  “You say my father changed his name?”

  “Oh yes, as part of the merry chase he’s led us—led me—all these years. But the jewellery did in the end let him down. All winter long, when I’ve been out and about, I’ve been buying it back in the towns around. I have most of it now. As for your father’s name: actually, he wasn’t a White but a Waite, from a long line—a very, very long line—of Innsmouth Waites. One of his ancestors, and mine, sailed with Obed Marsh on the Polynesian trade routes. But as for myself... well, chronologically I’m a lot closer to those old seafarers than poor George was.”

  She blinked, shook her head in bewilderment; the first time the old man had seen her caught unawares, which made him smile. And: “You’re a Waite, too?” she said. “But... Jamieson?”

  “Well, actually it’s Jamie’s son.” He corrected her. “Jamie Waite’s son, out of old Innsmouth. Have I shocked you? Is it so awful to discover that the kinship you’ve felt is real?”

  And after the briefest pause, while once again she studied his face: “No,” she answered, and shook her head. “I think I’ve probably guessed it—some of it—all along. And Geoff, poor Geoff... Why, it would also make you kin to him, and I think he knew it, too! It was in his eyes when he looked at you.”

  “Geoff?” The old man’s face fell and he gave a sad shake of his head. “What a pity. But he was a hopeless case who couldn’t ever have developed fully. His gills were rudimentary, useless, unformed, atrophied. Atavisms, throwbacks in bloodlines that we hoped had been successfully conditioned out, still occur occasionally. That poor boy was in one such ‘state’, trapped between his ancestral heritage and his—or his father’s—scientifically engineered or altered genes. And instead of cojoining, the two facets fought.”

  “A throwback,” she said, softly. “What a horrible description!”

  And the old man shrugged, sighed, and said, “Yes. Yet what else can we call him, the way Geoff was, and the way he looked? But one day, my dear, our ambassadors—our agents—will walk among people and look no different from them, and be completely accepted by them. Until eventually we Deep Ones will be the one race, the true amphibious race which nature always intended. We were the first... why, we came from the sea, the cradle of life itself! Given time, and the land and sea both shall be ours.”

  “Ambassadors...” Anne repeated him, letting it all sink in. “But in actual fact agents. Spies and fifth columnists.”

  “Our advance guard.” He nodded. “And who knows—you may be one of them? Indeed, that’s my intention.”

  She stroked her throat, looked suddenly alarmed. “But Geoff and me, we were of an age, of a blood. And if his—his gills? —those flaps were gills? But...” Again she stroked her throat, searchingly now. Until he caught at her hand.

  “Yours are on the inside, like mine. A genetic modification which reproduced itself perfectly in you, just as in me. That’s why your father’s desertion was so disappointing to us, and one of the reasons why I had to track him down: to see how he would spawn, and if he’d spawn true. In your case he did. In Geoff’s, he didn’t.”

  “My gills?” Yet again she stroked her throat, and then remembered something. “Ah! My laryngitis! When my throat hurt last December, and you examined me! Two or three aspirins a day was your advice to my mother, and I should gargle four or five times daily with a spoonful of salt dissolved in warm water.”

  “You wouldn’t let anyone else see you.” The old man reminded her. “And why was that, I wonder? Why me?”

  “Because I didn’t want any other doctor looking at me,” she replied. “I didn’t want anyone else examining me. Just you.”

  “Kinship,” he said. “And you made the right choice. But you needn’t worry. Your gills—at present the merest of pink slits at the base of your windpipe—are as perfect as in any foetal or infant land-born Deep One. And they’ll stay that way for... oh, a long time—as long or even longer than mine have stayed that way, and will until I’m ready—when they’ll wear through. For a month or so then they’ll feel tender as their development progresses, with fleshy canals like empty veins that will ca
rry air to your land lungs. At which time you’ll be as much at home in the sea as you are now on dry land. And that will be wonderful, my dear!”

  “You want me to... to come with you? To be a... a...?”

  “But you already are! There’s a certain faint but distinct odour about you, Anne. Yes, and I have it, too, and so did your half-brother. But you can dilute it with pills we’ve developed, and then dispel it utterly with a dab of special cologne.”

  A much longer silence, and again she took his bare forearms in her hands, stroking down from the elbow. His skin felt quite smooth in that direction. But when she stroked upwards from the wrist...

  “Yes,” she said, “I suppose I am. My skin is like yours... the scales don’t show. They’re fine and pink and golden. But if I’m to come with you, what of my mother? You still haven’t told me what’s wrong with her.”

  And now, finally, after all these truths, the old man must tell a lie. He must, because the truth was one she’d never accept—or rather she would—and all faith gone. But there had been no other way. And so:

  “Your mother,” the old man hung his head, averted his gaze, started again. “Your mother, your own dear Jilly... I’m afraid she won’t last much longer.” That much at least was the truth.

  But Anne’s hand had flown to her mouth, and so he hurriedly continued. “She has CJD, Anne—Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease—the so-called mad cow disease, at a very advanced stage.” (That was another truth, but not the whole truth.)

  Anne’s mouth had fallen open. “Does she know?”

  “But how can I tell her? And how can you? She may never be herself again. And if or when she were herself, she would only worry about what will become of you. And there’s no way we can tell her about... well, you know what I mean. But Anne, don’t look at me like that, for there’s nothing that can be done for her. There’s no known cure, no hospital can help her. I wanted her to have her time here, with you. And of course I’m here to help in the final stages. That specialist from St. Austell, he agrees with me.”

  Finally the girl found her voice. “Then your pills were of no use to her.”

  “A placebo.” Now Jamieson lied. “They were sugar pills, to give her some relief by making her think I was helping her.”

  No, not so... and no help for Jilly, who would never have let her daughter go; whose daughter never would have gone while her mother lived. And those pills filled with synthetic prions—rogue proteins indistinguishable from the human form of the insidious bovine disease, developed in a laboratory in shadowy old Innsmouth— eating away at Jilly’s brain even now, faster and faster.

  Anne’s hand fell from her face. “How long?”

  He shook his head. “Not long. After witnessing what happened the other day, not long at all. Days, maybe? No more than a month at best. But we shall be here, you and I. And Anne, we can make up for what she’ll miss. Your years, like mine... oh, you shall have years without number!”

  “It’s true, then?” Anne looked at him, and Jamieson looked back but saw no sign of tears in her eyes, which was perfectly normal. “It’s true that we go on—that our lives go on—for a long time? But not everlasting, surely?”

  He shook his head. “Not everlasting, no—though it sometimes feels that way! I often lose count of my years. But I am your ancestor, yes.”

  Anne sighed and stood up. And brushing sand from her dress, she took his hand, helping him to his feet. “Shall we go and be with my mother... grandfather?”

  Now his smile was broad indeed—a smile he showed only to close intimates—which displayed his small, sharp, fish-like teeth. And:

  “Grandfather?” he said. “Ah, no. In fact I’m your father’s great-great-grandfather! And as for yourself, Anne... well you must add another ‘great’.”

  And hand in hand they walked up the beach to the house. The young girl and the old—the very old—man...?

  AFTERWORD

  CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

  RANDY BROECKER was born and lives in Chicago, Illinois. Inspired by the pulp magazines and EC comics he read as a child, his first published artwork appeared in Rich Hauser’s legendary 1960s EC fanzine, Spa-Fon.

  Many years later, a meeting with publisher Donald M. Grant at the second World Fantasy Convention eventually led in 1979 to The Black Wolf and his first hardcover illustrations. Since then his work has appeared in books produced by PS Publishing, Robinson Publishing, Carroll & Graf, Fedogan & Bremer, Cemetery Dance, Underwood-Miller, Sarob Press, Pumpkin Books, American Fantasy, Highland Press and other imprints on both sides of the Atlantic.

  He was Artist Guest of Honour at the 2002 World Horror Convention and is the author of the World Fantasy Award-nominated study Fantasy of the 20th Century: An Illustrated History from Collector’s Press, which also formed part of a three-in-one omnibus entitled Art of Imagination: 20th Century Visions of Science Fiction, Horror, and Fantasy.

  “In the best of Lovecraft’s writing there is a feverish intensity not unlike that displayed in the work of Richard Upton Pickman, that painter of the perverse whose work I also happen to admire,” reveals Broecker.

  “Both have the ability to convince one of the existence of the strange and wondrous horrors that they present so realistically. Horrors that I have enjoyed encountering for quite awhile now, and when given the opportunity like this to present my own interpretations, I confess that wild batrachians wouldn’t keep me away.”

  * * *

  RAMSEY CAMPBELL was born in Liverpool, where he still lives with his wife Jenny. His first book, a collection of stories entitled The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, was published by August Derleth’s legendary Arkham House imprint in 1964, since when his novels have included The Doll Who Ate His Mother, The Face That Must Die, The Nameless, Incarnate, The Hungry Moon, Ancient Images, The Count of Eleven, The Long Lost, Pact of the Fathers, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain, and the movie tie-in Solomon Kane.

  His short fiction has been collected in such volumes as Demons by Daylight, The Height of the Scream, Dark Companions, Scared Stiff, Waking Nightmares, Cold Print, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead, and Just Behind You. He has also edited a number of anthologies, including New Terrors, New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Fine Frights: Stories That Scared Me, Uncanny Banquet, Meddling with Ghosts, and Gathering the Bones: Original Stories from the World’s Masters of Horror (with Dennis Etchison and Jack Dann).

  PS Publishing recently published the novels Ghosts Know, The Kind Folk and a new Lovecraftian novella, The Last Revelation of Gla’aki, along with the definitive edition of his early Arkham House collection, Inhabitant of the Lake, which includes all the first drafts of the stories, along with new illustrations by Randy Broecker. Forthcoming from the author is the novel Bad Thoughts, the collection Holes for Faces, and another novella, The Pretence.

  Now well in to his fifth decade as one of the world’s most respected authors of horror fiction, Ramsey Campbell has won multiple World Fantasy Awards, British Fantasy Awards and Bram Stoker Awards, and is a recipient of the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award, the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the Howie Award of the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival for Lifetime Achievement, and the International Horror Guild’s Living Legend Award. He is also President of the Society of Fantastic Films.

  “H. P. Lovecraft remains one of the crucial writers in the field,” Campbell explains. “He united the American tradition of weird fiction—Poe, Bierce, Chambers—with the British—Machen, Blackwood, M. R. James. He devoted his career to attempting to find the perfect form for the weird tale, and the sheer range of his work (from the documentary to the delirious) is often overlooked. Few writers in the field are more worth re-reading: certainly I find different qualities on different occasions. I recently read ‘The Outsider’ to my wife Jenny to both our pleasures. I still try to capture the Lovecraftian sense of cosmic aw
e in some of my tales.

  “‘Raised by the Moon’ was suggested by the boating lake at West Kirby. It’s much like the area contained by the submerged wall in the story, although the town is nothing like the surroundings. Perhaps the creatures in the tale are distant cousins of the Deep Ones—we might call them the Shallowers.”

  Campbell’s early story ‘The Church in the High Street’ appears in Shadows Over Innsmouth.

  * * *

  HUGH BARNETT CAVE (1910-2004) was born in Chester, England, he emigrated to America with his family when he was five. Cave sold his first story, ‘Island Ordeal’, to Brief Stories in 1929, and went on to publish around 800 pieces of fiction (often under various bylines) to such pulp magazines as Weird Tales, Strange Tales, Ghost Stories, Black Book Detective Magazine, Spicy Mystery Stories and the so-called “shudder” or “weird menace” pulps, Horror Stories and Terror Tales, amongst many other titles.

  The author then left the field for almost three decades, moving to Haiti and later Jamaica, where he established a coffee plantation and wrote two highly praised travel books, Haiti: Highroad to Adventure and Four Paths to Paradise: A Book About Jamaica. He also continued to write for the “slick” magazines, such as Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post and many other titles.

  In 1977, Karl Edward Wagner’s Carcosa imprint published a hefty volume of Cave’s best horror tales, Murgunstrumm and Others, which won the World Fantasy Award, and he returned to the genre with new stories and a string of modern horror novels (most of them involving voodoo or the walking dead): Legion of the Dead, The Nebulon Horror, The Evil, Shades of Evil, Disciples of Dread, The Lower Deep, Lucifer’s Eye, Isle of the Whisperers, The Dawning, The Evil Returns and The Restless Dead.

  The Horror Writers of America presented Cave with their highest honour, the Lifetime Achievement Award, in 1991, and in 1997 he was given a Special World Fantasy Award when he attended the World Fantasy Convention in London as a Guest of Honour. Milt Thomas’ biography, Cave of a Thousand Tales: The Life & Times of Hugh B. Cave, was published by Arkham House the week after the author’s death.