by Paula Guran
The kittens, their hunger sated for the time being, have all disappeared back beneath the porch, to the cool shadows below.
“Yeah,” Frank mutters, “beat it. The lot of you. Stuff your faces and leave me here holding an empty can. Lotta gratitude that is, you bums.”
Lithe and supple lads they were
Marching merrily away—
Was it only yesterday?
Frank Buckle, he sips his illegal whiskey, and he rocks in his grandmother’s chair, and he watches the demon sun shining bright as diamonds off the greasy river. He reminds himself that there’s always the shotgun he keeps beside his bed, and he tries not to think about where that burning river leads.
4.
She was only fourteen years of age when Annie Phelps took a keen interest in the things that wash up along the sands and shingle beaches of Innsmouth Harbor, the breakwater, and the marshy shorelines to the north and south of the port. The strandings and junk, the flotsam and jetsam of commerce and mishap, the remains of dead and dying creatures, fronds and branches of the kelp and algae forests that grow below the waves. As a child, her parents didn’t exactly encourage her boyish fascinations, but neither did they discourage them. When she was eighteen, she would have gone away to study natural history and anatomy and chemistry at a university in Arkham, maybe, or Boston, or even Providence. But there wasn’t the money for her tuition. So, she stayed at home, instead, and cared for her ailing mother and father.
Annie didn’t marry, preferring always the company of women to that of men.
There is talk that she enjoys much more than their platonic company. However, in a shadowed and ill-starred place like Innsmouth, there are always far darker rumors than whispers of Sapphic passion to provide the grist for clothesline gossips. She was twenty- eight years when the influenza of ’18 claimed Charles and Beulah Phelps, and afterwards she sold their listing Georgian house on Hancock Street and took up residence in three adjoining rooms in Hephzibah Peabody’s boarding house on River Street. Her study and bedroom both have excellent views of the gurgling Manuxet.
Annie Phelps makes a modest living as a seamstress and a typist, keeping back most of the income from the sales of the house on Hancock for that proverbial rainy day. But her passion has remained for those treasures she finds on the shore, and hardly three days pass that she doesn’t find time to make her way down to the fish markets or past the waterfront, where few women dare to venture alone, to see what the boats or the tides or a fortuitous storm have hauled in to arouse her curiosity. Most of the fishermen and fishmongers, the sailors, boatwrights, deckhands, and dockworkers, knew her by sight and left her be.
This day, this sweltering late Monday afternoon in July, she sits at her father’s old roll-top desk, in her study, a small room lined with shelves loaded down with books and jars of biological specimens she’s pickled in solutions of formaldehyde.
There are squid and sea cucumbers, eels and baby dogfish. Among the books and jars, there are also the bones of whales and dolphins, the jaws of a Great White shark, the skull and shell of a loggerhead sea turtle. There are also fossils and minerals sent to her by correspondents—of which she has many—from as far away as Montana, California, and Mexico. The pride of her collection is an enormous petrified whale vertebra from the Eocene of Alabama, fully two feet long. She pays Mrs. Peabody a little extra to allow her to keep this cabinet of oddities, but that doesn’t prevent the old woman from regularly grousing about Annie’s peculiar collection or the unpleasant odors that sometimes leak from beneath her door.
Annie Phelps has four cats: a black-and-white tom she’s named Huxley; a fat gray tom with one yellow eye and one blue eye, whom she’s named Darwin; a perpetually thin calico lady, Mary Anning; and, finally, the skittish young girl she christened Rowena after a Saxon woman in Ivanhoe. When she’s not entertaining a friend or a lover, the cats are all the companionship she needs, even if the apartment is rather too small for all five of them, and even though they claw her mother’s already threadbare heirlooms and leave the rooms smelling of piss. The cats are another thing she pays Mrs. Peabody extra to overlook. Were it not for the fact that it’s getting harder and harder to find lodgers, the landlady likely would not be willing to make these concessions to Annie’s eccentricities.
On this afternoon, she sits drinking a lukewarm glass of lemonade, spiked with a dash of Jamaican ginger, the jake she gets from a pharmacist over on Federal.
Annie is very careful how often she imbibes, because she’s well aware of the cases of paralysis and even death that have resulted from excessive use of the extract.
Darwin and Huxley are both perched on the back of the roll-top. Darwin has scaled a stack of monographs on malacology and the hydromedusae of coastal New England. Meanwhile, Huxley has wedged himself between one of her compound microscopes and a copy of Lyell’s Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man. Both cats are purring loudly and watching as she composes a letter to Dr. Osborn at the American Museum. Occasionally, she’ll send him a few of her more intriguing specimens and is proud that some have become permanent additions to the museum’s collections in Manhattan.
“What will he think of this piece, Mr. Darwin?” she asks the cat. “Frankly, I think it may be the most fascinating and curious object I’ve sent him yet.” Darwin shuts his yellow-green eyes.
“Yes, well, what do you know, you chubby old fool?”
Annie stops writing and stares at the jawbone in its cardboard box, cradled in wads of excelsior. It’s a bit worn from having been rolled about in the surf, but is unbroken and still has all its teeth. At first glance, she took it for the jaw of a man or woman, some unfortunate soul drowned in the harbor or the cold sea beyond the Water Street jetty. But that impression was fleeting, lasting hardly longer than the time it took her to pick the bone up off the sand. It’s much too elongate and slender to be the jaw of any normal human being, and both the condyle and the coronoid process all but absent. The mental protuberance of the mandibular symphysis is almost blade-like. But the teeth are the strangest of all the strange jawbone’s features.
Instead of the normal adult human compliment of four incisors, two canines, and eight molars, the teeth are homodont—completely undifferentiated—and more closely resemble the fangs of a garpike than those of any mammal.
Standing at the edge of the murky harbor, low waves sloshing insistently against the shore, Annie Phelps was briefly gripped by an almost irresistible urge to toss the strange bone away from her, to give it back to the sea from whence it had come. To be rid of it. She squinted through the mist, out past the lines of ruined and decaying wharves, at the low dark line of rock that the people of Innsmouth call Devil Reef. Growing up, she heard all the tales about the reef, yarns of pirate gold, sirens, and sea demons, and she knows, too, of the locals who compete in swimming races out to the granite ridge on moonlit nights, a sport sponsored by the Esoteric Order, a religious sect who long ago took over the Masonic Hall at New Church Green.
But she didn’t throw the bone away. She carefully wrapped it in newspaper and added it to her basket with the other day’s finds.
Annie Phelps is a rational woman of the twentieth century, a woman of science and reason, even if her circumstances mean that she will never be more than an amateur naturalist. She is not bound by the fearful, superstitious ways of so many of the people of the town, all those citizens of Innsmouth who mistake the effects of inbreeding, disease, and poor nutrition among the Marshes, Eliots, Gilmans, Waites, and other old families of the town for some metaphysical transformation brought about by the secretive rites and rituals of the Order of Dagon—as certainly a witch-cult as any described in the scholarly works of Margaret Murray. Growing up, she heard all that bushwa, and she sometimes feels anger and embarrassment at the way so many of her neighbors live in terror of whatever goes on inside the dilapidated, pillared hall.
“It certainly isn’t a fossil,” she says to Huxley, ignoring the less-than-useful Mr. Darwin. �
�There’s no sign whatsoever of permineralization. It’s no sort of reptile, and I don’t believe it’s a fish, neither cartilaginous or osteichthyan. But I can’t believe it’s a mammal, either.”
If the cat has an opinion, he keeps it to himself.
Annie writes a few more lines of her letter—
I am very grateful for the copy of your description of Hesperopithicus, though I must confess it still looks to me very like a pig’s tooth.
—and then she glances at the jawbone again.
“The water gets deep out past the reef,” she says to Huxley and Darwin, “and who knows what might be swimming around out there.”
The cats purr, and Huxley begins vigorously cleaning his ears.
The enclosed specimen has entirely confounded all my best attempts at classification. Beyond the self-evident fact that it resides somewhere within the Vertebrata, I’m entirely at a loss.
Sometimes, Annie dares to imagine she will one day find something entirely new to science, and Dr. Osborn—or someone else—will name the new animal or plant after her. She stares at the jaw and considers a number of appropriate Latin binomina, if it should prove to be something novel, finally settling on Deinognathus phelpsae, Phelp’s terrible jaw. She likes that. She likes that very much.
But then she feels the prickling at the back of her neck and along her forearms, and the sinking, anxious feeling she first experienced the day she found the bone, and she quickly looks away and tries to focus on finishing the day’s correspondence:
. . . and at any rate, I hope this letter finds you well.
Outside, there’s a sudden commotion, a loud splashing from the river, and Annie sets her pen aside and goes to the window to see what it might have been. But there’s nothing, just the waters of the Manuxet swirling past the boarding house, dark and secret as the coming night.
“Someday,” she says to the cats, “I’m gonna pack up and leave this place. You just watch me. Someday, we’re gonna get out of here.”
5.
Ephraim Asher Peaslee closes his wrinkled eyelids, sixty-one years old and thin as vellum paper, sinking into the sweet rush and warm folds of the heroin coursing through his veins. All the world bleeds to white, and he could well be staring into the noonday sun, patiently waiting to go mercifully blind, so bright does the darkness around him blaze. But it doesn’t blind him. It doesn’t ever blind him, and neither does it burn him. He lies cradled in the worn cranberry velvet of the chaise lounge in the parlor of his house at the corner of River and Fish streets, directly across from the shattered arch of the Fish Street Bridge. The heavy drapes are drawn, like his eyelids, against the last dregs of twilight, against the rising Hay Moon, Corn Moon, Red Moon, goddamn Grain Moon, whichever folk name suits your fancy. None suit his. The moon is a cruel cyclopean eye, lidless, watchful, prying, and this night it will drag the sea so far inland, swelling the harbor and tidal river all the way back to the lower falls. It won’t be the kindly, obscuring white of his opiate high, but will lie orange and bloated, low on the horizon. It will scrape its cratered belly against the sea, hemorrhaging for all the bloodthirsty mouths that lie in wait, always, just below the waves. Oh, Ephraim Asher Peaslee has seen so many of those slithering, spiny things, has drowned again and again in their serpent coils. He’s been kissed by every undertow and riptide, dragged down screaming to bear witness to abyssal lands no human man ever was meant to see. Right now, this evening, he pushes back against those thoughts, awakened by the rising moon. He tries to cling to nothing but the heroin, the forever-white expanse laid out before him after the needle kiss. The radio’s on, “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise,” and the music makes love to his waking alabaster dream. It’s madness to be always sitting around in sadness, when you could be learning the steps of gladness. He folds his bony hands in supplication, in prayer to Saint Gershwin and the ghost of Guglielmo Marconi and the Crosley Model 51, that they have graced him with this balm, a sacred ward against the memories and the nightmares and the long hours to come before dawn. God bless, and take your choice of gods, but surely, please, bless the pharmaceutical manufacturers in faraway eastern Europe, in Turkey and Bulgaria, god bless the Chinese farmers and poppy fields, where moralizing tyrants have not yet obliterated his ragged soul’s deliverance from the abominations of Innsmouth. Pray a rosary for the white powder that ferries him away to Arctic wastes, Antarctic plains, where water is stone and nothing can swim through those crystalline rivers. I won’t open my eyes, thinks Ephraim Asher Peaslee. I won’t open my eyes until morning, and maybe not even then. Maybe I will never again open my eyes, but fall eternally, perpetually, into the saving grace of the heroin light. Then he hears the rising moon, a sound like the sky being torn open, like steam engines and furnaces, and he turns his face into a brocade pillow, wishing he were able to smother himself, but knowing better. He’s a failed suicide, several times over, a coward with straight razor and noose. And trying not to hear the moon or the sluice of the rising tide, trying only to drown in white and ancient snow and the fissured glaciers that course down the basalt flanks of Erebus, there is another sound, past the radio—Dance with Maud the countess, or just plain Lizzy. Dance until you’re blue in the face and dizzy. When you’ve learn‘d to dance in your sleep, you’re sure to win out—past crooning and tinny strings, there is the thunder, earthquake, sundering purr of Bill Bailey, his gigantic Maine Coon, twenty-five pounds if he’s an ounce. Bill Bailey, raised up from a kitten, and now he comes heroic, thinks the heroin addict hopefully, to pull my sledge up the crags of a dead and frozen volcano in the South Polar climes, Mr. Poe’s Mount Yaanek, where the filthy, unhallowed Manuxet never, never will do them mischief on this hot August night. Risking so many things—his shredded sanity not the least of all—Ephraim Asher Peaslee opens his eyes, letting the world back in, releasing his desperate hold on the white. He rolls over, and Bill Bailey stands not far from the cranberry chaise, watching him, waiting cat-patient, those amber eyes secret filled. “You hear it, too, don’t you? We ought to have run. We ought to have packed our bags and taken that rattletrap bus away to Newburyport. They’d have let us go. They have no use for the likes of us. They’d be glad to be rid of us.” The cat merely blinks, then sets about licking its shaggy chocolate coat, grooming paws and chest. “You do hear it, I know you do.” And then, close to tears and disappointed by the cat’s apparent lack of concern, by Bill Bailey’s usual pacific demeanor, the old man once more turns away and presses his face into the cushion. Sure, what has a cat to fear from the evils of an encroaching, salty sea? A holy temple child of Ubaste, privy to immemorial knowledge forever set beyond the kin of loping apes fallen from African trees and the grace of Jehovah. Bill Bailey purrs and bathes and does not move from his appointed station by the chaise. And Ephraim Asher Peaslee tries to give himself back to the white place, but finds that, in the scant handful of seconds it took him to converse with the cat, the luminous White Lands have deserted him. Left him to his own meager devices, none of which are a match for the monsters the mad and unholy men and women of the Esoteric Order see fit to call forth on nights when the moon sprawls so obscenely large in the Massachusetts heavens. Their oblations and devotions that rot and gradually discard their human forms, sending those lost souls tumbling backwards, descending the rungs of the evolutionary ladder toward steamy Devonian and Carboniferous yesteryears, muddy swamp pools, silty lagoons, dim memories held in bone and blood and cells of morphologies devised and then abandoned two hundred and fifty, three hundred million ago. Ephraim Asher Peaslee of No. 7 River Street shuts his eyes more tightly than, he would say, he ever has shut his eyes before, skating his hypodermic fix down, down, down, but not down to the sanctuary of his white realms. Some door slammed and bolted shut against him, and, instead, he has only clamoring, fish-stinking recollections of the waterfront, the docks where beings no longer human cast suspicious, swollen eyes towards interlopers. Grotesque faces half glimpsed in doorways and peering out windows. Shadows and murmurs
. The squirming green-black mass he once caught a fleeting sight of before it slipped over the edge of a pier and, with a plop, was swallowed up by the bay. The chanting and hullabaloo that pours from the old Masonic Hall. All of this and a hundred other images, sounds, and smells burned indelibly into his mind’s eye. Shuffling hulks. Naked dancers on New Church Green, seen on stormy, starless nights, whirling devil dervishes. All you preachers who delight in panning the dancing teachers, let me tell you there are a lot of features of the dance that carry you through the gates of Heaven! So many other citizens might turn their heads and convince themselves they’ve seen nothing, and anyway, what business is it of theirs, the pagan rites of the debased followers of Father Dagon and Mother Hydra? Oh, old Ephraim Asher Peaslee, he knows those names, because he can’t seem to shut out the voices that ride between the crests and troughs. Out there, as night comes on and the last scrap of sunset fades, he prays to his own heathen deities, the narcotic molecules in his veins, the radio, to keep him insensible for all the hours between now and dawn. And Bill Bailey stands guard, and listens, and waits.
6.
When even the solar system was young, a fledgling, Pre-Archean Earth was kissed by errant Theia, daughter of Selene, and four and a half billion years ago all the cooling crust of the world became once more a molten hell. Theia was obliterated for her reckless show of affection and reborn as a cold, dead sphere damned always to orbit her intended paramour; she a planet no more, but only a satellite never again permitted to touch the Earth. And so it is that the moon, spurned, scarred, diminished, has always haunted the sky, gazing spitefully across more than a million miles of near vacuum, hating silently—but not entirely powerless.