by Brian Lumley
I listened until Williamson had done with dictating his statement to the police, then I quickly checked my room. Every scrap of paperwork I had collected on my uncle's case was gone. (I later learned that Thappon’s tape-recordings had been stolen from his Harley Street office during the hours of the previous night.)
Then it was my turn—by which time my head was spinning with the mad thoughts whirling round and around inside it. Dully, mechanically, I told the police as much as I knew of the evening’s occurrences, which was not a great deal. All the while, I had to fight to keep myself under control. They were so, well, professional about it all. But then, when they asked me for a description of my car, my control finally went. I laughed hysterically and told them not to worry about the car: first thing in the morning I would go down to Dilham and pick it up myself…
THE RETURN OF THE DEEP ONES
I: The Conch
My prime purpose in the time which remains to me—and I have reason to believe that there may not be a great deal of that—is to chronicle the events leading up to my present untenable situation. In so doing I intend to leave a warning and an indictment against the insidious encroachment of horrors previously undreamed of. Without a doubt the veracity of the facts I shall present will be questioned, but of one thing I am certain: that if ever the whole truth of the matter is known, Man will never again pretend to occupy his much—vaunted role as “Master of His Own Destiny!” He is not!—and has he ever been?
I now find myself questioning the fundamental laws of space and time—those oh-so-long-accepted concepts of cosmogony, of heredity, and of all matters anthropological—yes, and the very basis of human existence itself. Yet the start of it all seemed so very innocuous. I look back on it now, and—
But it were best that I begin at the very beginning …
Some few short weeks ago in the late spring, I received via airmail package from America a fairly large, unusual, especially attractive conch. The shell, carefully wrapped against any possible breakage, was as big as my two fists together. It had an almost circular aperture of about two inches in diameter, and its reddish colour and spiked, tightly coiled whorl gave it the appearance almost of a huge, venomous insect. Of course, when I call the shell “attractive”, I speak as a man who once found in all sea—shells the entire spectrum of Nature’s beauty epitomized. In retrospect, I suppose others might well have found the shell quite repulsive.
My hitherto unknown benefactor gave an address in Innsmouth, a coastal town in America’s New England, and he had penned a brief letter of introduction:
Dear Mr Vollister,
Please forgive this unsolicited intrusion, but having read your recent articles in Oceans, I know you to be a conchologist of note and a well—known marine biologist. To show my appreciation of your work (I myself was always deeply interested in conchology but never had a professional’s aptitude for the work), I herewith enclose a conch from local waters. I am told that the shell is not at all common on your own Atlantic coastline, and since this is an especially beautiful specimen I thought you might like to own it. In the event of your already having one in your collection, then please forgive the frivolous impulse which alone prompted me to do this and accept the shell anyway as a token of my admiration.
Yours very sincerely
William P. Marsh
To say that I was delighted with this completely unexpected gift would be to understate my feelings severely. And as for Mr Marsh’s comment about the relative scarcity of his shell on my side of the Atlantic: that, too, was an understatement of no small magnitude.
While I am fairly conversant with all manner of conches on a world—wide scale, my particular speciality concerns those molluscs indigenous to British waters. I could therefore state with some certainty that no such shell was ever taken from the sea off Britain’s coast, and I had not previously known of its existence on any coast! The thing was completely new to me; in all my wide experience I had never before come across its like.
To complicate matters and astound me even further, after my initial surprise had worn off and when I sat down to study the shell in greater detail, I discovered one more fact whose singularity would normally have been immediately apparent to me: namely that the shell was sinistral. Looked at from the pointed end, its spiral wound anti—clockwise, towards the left. I knew of only half a dozen shells like this in the whole world, all in private collections and all, in the eyes of their owners, quite priceless.
In short, this shell appeared quite unique; but despite its sinistrality I saw nothing actually ‘sinister’ about it. Not then.
It was not long, however, before I came to realize that the new conch had somehow … changed things? Yes, I think that is perhaps the best way to put it: to say that the shell had wrought a change in me, in my perceptions. And the first manifestation of the change took place that very night.
I live alone, have done so since my wife died of cancer four years ago, and since then my lovely home has always seemed an extremely sparse and lonely place. Yet that night it was different. There seemed to be an almost tangible presence in the house, the feeling of a not entirely sympathetic audience to my every move and mood, so that for the first time in longer than I cared to think I felt not at all alone.
The sensation was in no way ghostly, and I certainly did not feel threatened, but at the same time I found it difficult to concentrate on my reading, and twice I actually found myself looking over my shoulder at some imagined sound or motion or whatever behind me. On both occasions my eyes turned to the new conch where I had carefully set it down upon an occasional table.
Before retiring, I wrote a letter to a friend of mine in London. He owned a marvellous collection of shells containing many thousands of specimens, and while his overall knowledge of the sciences of the seas was limited, his specialized knowledge of conches—from the shapes, colours, and sizes, to the waters in which they lived, bred, and died—was almost inexhaustible. He was perhaps the world’s foremost conchologist, and therefore probably the most reliable authority. In my letter I gave a detailed description of my latest acquisition, even to the point of doing a fairly accurate sketch of the thing, and asked for information. I made no mention of its origin.
After writing the letter, suddenly tired, I poured myself my customary nightcap and went to stand on the balcony for a few minutes. I watched the sea at low tide, calm and distant, while the moon silvered the sands below the house. Soon, beginning to feel the coolness of the night breeze off the sea, I locked the balcony's windows and went to bed.
I fell asleep almost immediately and began to dream, and my dreams that night were curiously void of visions or scenes and consisted instead of sounds. But such sounds!
They began with the mildest of susurrations: the sounds of small waves breaking on a rough and rocky shore somewhere at the edge of the world. And the sound was so pure, so innocent, that I knew—the way one always ‘knows’ in dreams—that these were the first waves and this the first shore, the shore of a primal ocean formed of a billion years of rain, that first great rain which filled in the rocky basins of the young Earth to lie volcanically warm through all the years of the pre-Cambrian age, warm yet empty of life, sterile and dead, awaiting Nature’s great awakening.
Then the watery sounds grew louder and I envisioned the primal moon—a rough sphere of partly plastic rock, alive with its own volcanic activity—wobbling uncertainly in an as yet eccentric orbit, gradually taming the tides of Earth’s mighty oceans in which, at last, the first life-forms swam and spurted, or walked on jointed chitinous limbs. And the tides came and went for a quarter-billion years as gradually the ocean’s sounds grew louder, until it seemed I could hear the cries of her denizens, forever locked in the eternal battle for life, for existence, in vast and mildly salty vaults of Ocean.
And always in the background, in my inner ear, there was a less certain sound, one that I sensed rather than heard, the impossible sound of sentience—of intelligence—however alie
n, in a world where the first dinosaurs had yet to emerge from the steaming fens of the Carboniferous.
But now, building rapidly from the surging sounds of tumultuous tides, there came the crash and roar of massive waves and the howling of ocean tempests. I heard the sundering of mighty volcanic cliffs as the raging sea brought them avalanching down, and the cries of great winged reptiles buffeted by winds that whipped imagined wave-crests to a white and frothing frenzy.
And behind all of this strange voices cried out in concerted … prayers? Prayers, yes, but to no God of Earth. This I knew, and knew also that these worshippers, whoever—whatever—they were, had predated Man in this world we call our own.
Then those strangely familiar voices receded, were swept away in a resurgence of the crazed rushing and roaring, until it seemed that I myself struggled and gyrated in pounding surf and roiling whirlpools. And at last, dizzy and overwhelmed by these awesome sounds and sensations, I started awake.
Or, rather, I seemed to wake up. My uncertainty stems from the fact that later I was made to believe that I could not possibly have awakened. Let me explain:
I have said that I started awake. Outside, the storm raged and I could plainly hear the surf on the cliffs. My first thoughts, however dull and heavy those thoughts were, involved getting up to check the windows and doors. Then I remembered having done so the night before. A glance at my watch showed me that the time was 2.15 a.m. I put my head back on to the pillows and listened for a while to the howling of the wind and the rush of water; and finally I drifted back into a sleep which, apart from very vague and fantastic impressions of limitless deeps and weed—festooned submarine cities and shrines, was restful and trouble—free.
In the morning, with the sun blazing through my bedroom window as it climbed, already mid-way to the zenith, I awakened, remembered the night's storm and, clad in my dressing-gown, went through into my study and out on to the balcony. The sea was as calm as when last I saw it; the beach at the foot of the cliffs was not strewn with the driftwood and debris I had expected; there was no evidence at all to support my storm’s existence!
But there had been a storm, surely …?
I was at the door for the delivery of the morning newspaper and I casually mentioned how fresh the world looked after the storm. The youth from the village newsagent’s shop, Graham Lane, answered:
“What, last night, Mr Vollister?” he grinned. “You must have been dreaming, sir. No storm last night …”
“About two in the morning?” I persisted, frowning. “Certainly between two and three. Wind howling and the sea in an uproar?”
He yawned and shook his head. “Not last night. I was walking with my girl on the beach until two-thirty. Beautiful night.”
Suddenly I knew that he was right, and I immediately changed the subject. “On the beach until two-thirty, Graham? With a girl? Is it that serious, then?”
He laughed. “The big day’s in September,” he said. “Would you like an invitation?”
“By all means! I’d be delighted,” I answered, and again changed the subject: “How's Old Man Lane keeping?”
“Not too good. The shop’s been too much for him for years now. Once I’m wed I think he’ll take a back seat and let me run the business.”
—And we chatted for a minute or two longer before I gave him my letter to post and let him take himself off on his bicycle. But I wasn't really concentrating on the conversation; I was trying to work out what had happened. This was something entirely outside my experience. For, after all, a dream is a dream and should in no way have supernatural complications. Dreams do not carry over into the waking world—or should not—or at least mine never had. Not until now. In the end, I simply shrugged it off with a weak and rather bewildered laugh.
Then, distractedly, though my heart was hardly in it, I scanned the newspaper and read the one or two items of interest. Afterwards I washed and dressed, made breakfast, and finally went back into the study where the strange new shell awaited my attention. I picked the thing up and thoughtfully admired it, mentally attempting a comparison with other specimens in my own large collection. In its shape it was not unlike the Sicilian Spondylus gussoni, though of course it was many times larger than that common shell. I was completely baffled.
I took down several books on conchology from their shelves and made a most diligent search, thinking that perhaps in all the hours I had previously spent researching those very books, somehow I might have missed or forgotten or simply skipped over the New England shell. But no, the thing was given no mention, not even in my most comprehensive works. It was, it must be, a hitherto unknown species. But if this were so, then why had my American benefactor seen fit to pretend that it was fairly common? And why had he sent it to me?
I carefully composed a letter to Mr. Marsh at his Innsmouth address, then spent half an hour on the telephone talking with a friend of mine in one of the larger reference libraries in London. If my own books weren’t comprehensive enough, then it was perfectly obvious that the library in nearby Newquay wouldn’t be able to offer much. London should have been a different matter entirely. But that as it may be, my efforts once more proved fruitless; the conch I described was nowhere to be found on record.
That afternoon I took my daily walk in the village, posted my letter to Mr. Marsh, purchased one or two household items, and finally headed for home again. I had an article to finish, and worked at it for an hour or so before retiring early. Slightly apprehensive though I was about sleeping (the thought had come to me from somewhere that my problem—if indeed I had a problem—was most likely tied up with my subconscious, my sleeping mind), I nevertheless passed a completely undisturbed night and, following a light breakfast, went back to work on my manuscript.
And so life went on, once more mundane and tranquil enough, for two more days and nights until the weekend came around. By that time, while my new shell remained as enigmatic and unknowable as ever, the edge of its mystery had become dulled for me, particularly since receiving from Ian Carling, my great conchologist colleague, a telephone call which, while his excitement at my news was amply apparent, left me just as unenlightened as before. He did mention, though, that he had spoken of my discovery to a friend of his, “a queer sort of chap but likable enough in his own way”, who had said he might contact me. At Ian’s request I made a mental note to obtain photographs of the shell and get them off to him as soon as possible.
But then, just before noon, when I had barely started upon the final revision of my manuscript, my telephone rang again … and continued to ring insistently, so that I was obliged to leave my work to answer it. The caller introduced himself as one David Semple, of Mayfair in London, and he was that friend whom Ian Carling had mentioned.