Innsmouth Nightmares Read online

  The largest building is the Marsh Refinery, which lies on the bank of the Manuxet River, which itself bisects the town. Running perpendicular to the river is Innsmouth’s main street, Federal, which connects this isolated community, in theory at least, with Newburyport and Arkham.

  It was on this road that we came that springtime of 1960, having traveled, first luxuriously, by train from New York and then, more plainly, in the old bus of which we were the only passengers. Though it was spring, there was no sign of it as we approached the town and the shadow of Innsmouth first fell on us. Truman, beside me, tightened the long scarf around his neck and looked pensive. “What wonderful architecture, Nelle,” he murmured.

  I would not have called it that; not exactly. An aura of sinister mystery had surrounded the town since 1928, when the federal authorities swooped over Innsmouth, arrested most of its residents on suspicion of bootlegging, and set explosives to Devil Reef. The town had lain fallow for several years, yet gradually and quietly, began to fill up again.

  Truman, when he first became interested in the murder, wrote to Miskatonic, where some of the more obscure records of the Innsmouth raid are stored. He did not share with me what he found there, though I knew it troubled him.

  On the train, sharing a compartment, I was awakened in the night by his voice. Usually high-pitched, it had changed to a deep, resonant bass completely unlike him. He lay very still on his cot, and when I looked at him, I was startled, for though he was clearly asleep, his eyes were open, staring into some dark abyss. When he spoke, it was in gibberish, and I transcribed what I could make out of the “words.” He kept repeating the phrase “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” as though it meant something deep and profound to him: but what troubled me most was the almost unholy glee in his voice when he said it.

  He had grown taciturn and withdrawn as we approached Innsmouth. His eyes were feverish and bright. As we drove into the town, we saw on either side of Federal ruined houses, broken windows, gardens grown wild with neglect. But they were not abandoned. Shadows moved behind the staring windows and skulked under the awnings of the roofs. They moved furtively but also self-assuredly, if such a thing is possible. They were like people waiting to take their proper place again in the world.

  The smell of swamps filled the air, a smell of decay but also of wildlife untamed by human civilization. Our driver had not uttered a single word on the journey. He was a curious specimen himself, with bulging, staring eyes and a dripping nose, and he was wrapped up tightly despite the warmth of the car. Truman had tried asking him about the murder; but the man feigned no knowledge of the English language, though he took our money willingly enough.

  I, too, stared out at the town; and, shudderingly, wondered what had brought me to this dismal place. Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans—in fact, few New Englanders—had ever heard of Innsmouth. What brought us here was a small notice published in The New York Times; and its understated horror drew Truman to this place like a fish caught in the powerful lure of hooked bait.

  Innsmouth, Mass., Nov. 15 [1959] (UPI—A wealthy fisherman, his wife, and their two young children were found dead in their home. They had been killed by gutting knife after being bound and gagged…There were no signs of a struggle, and nothing had been stolen.

  We drove past abandoned Baptist churches, and as we came to the river the smell of the sea came on the breeze as powerful as a punch and we saw, on our left, the Marsh Refinery. It had been an imposing building once, and I could imagine its dark grandeur when it was alive, the workers drawn from all over Innsmouth every morning before sunrise and the boats coming in from the sea. From here, too, I could still see the jagged outline of rocks out beyond the ruined lighthouse on the breakwater, which led into a coral-laden outcrop in the distant sea.

  “I thought the Treasury Department dynamited Devil Reef,” Truman murmured beside me. I squinted, but I could see the black outcrop clearly still, and it seemed to me, though it was perhaps lunacy, that I saw distant shapes moving about its glistening rocks.

  “Perhaps they had merely destroyed the shipments of whiskey,” I said.

  “Yes…I am sure you’re right, Nelle.” I looked at him sharply. There was a distant gaze in his eyes, as though he were not seeing the sea at all, but what lay beyond it, or rather deep beneath. “In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

  “Excuse me?” I said—rather sharply. There was that curious name again, spoken in Truman’s dreams.

  “Do you know what a cargo cult is, Nelle?” he said, apropos of nothing. We were crossing the river along the narrow bridge. I had the sense that our driver was listening keenly; had in fact startled awake from the wheel when that name was spoken. Cthulhu. It made me shiver with an illogical dread.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s a form of new religion from the South Pacific islands. Melanesia. I read an article about it, I believe. It’s based on the idea that if you build a simulacrum of a thing, the real thing will manifest itself. So the local people build mock runways in the hope planes land with magical cargo or little wharfs in the hope that great big ships will land. That sort of thing.”

  “Yes,” Truman said, and there was that queer, bright look in his eyes again. “Only it’s not new, Nelle…it is the oldest form of ritual there is. Hello, I believe this is our hotel.”

  We found ourselves in the town square, which seemed all but abandoned but for a drugstore and the offices of the Marsh Company, where to my surprise lights shone in the window. It was gloomy, though when we had left Newburyport it had been a cheery, bright spring day. Truman hopped off the bus with renewed enthusiasm. He seemed suddenly almost manic. He spoke a few words to the driver, who reacted as though Truman were poisonous. In moments we found ourselves standing alone in the square, the bus roaring away as fast as its old engine could take it. Overhead the clouds parted like a grotesque, leering mouth, and a ray of sunlight probed out like a sick tongue.

  “What did you say to him?” I said, discomfited.

  “I merely asked him where the old Order of Dagon hall was situated.”

  Not for the first time I felt Truman had been keeping from me his true interest in the case. “What?” I said.

  “A mystery cult rumored to have practiced in this area in days gone by,” Truman said placidly. “I came across it in the reference material from Miskatonic. Very interesting.”

  “Has it any relevance to the murder?” I said. Though the square appeared deserted, I felt unseen eyes on us, and felt rather than saw shapes moving beyond the ruined buildings, alert and yet awkward, as though motion on land was somehow alien to them.

  “I don’t know,” Truman said. “It’s probably of little account. Come on, Nelle, let’s see what delightful accommodation this charming little town has to offer the weary traveller—” and, leaving me to pick up the bags, he began to march towards a large and crumbling two-story house by the abandoned fire station. No doubt the chance of a fire in this eternally damp place was minimal. Sighing, I picked up our luggage and followed him, though every instinct I possessed told me to run after the bus and get out of Innsmouth as quickly as it would carry me.

  Yet the bus was gone to Arkham, and was not due back for a day or two; and so the two of us, Truman and I, made our way to the hotel before the fall of night.

  2.

  The home of Jedediah Marsh and his family was set near the wharf. There were many descendants of old Obed Marsh in the town, but Jedediah, it was said, was of the direct lineage. He was well-respected in the town, of the first to return following the Treasury’s raid. Beside his work as a fisherman, he was ranked high in the Esoteric Order of Dagon, a curious effect of local folklore, for it was said that the town was founded by the men who traded with the islanders of the South Pacific and had brought back with them, from across the seas, some of the native inhabitants’ rituals and beliefs.

  Beside Jedediah, there was Mary, his wife, a woman of delicat
e disposition; his son, Douglas, fifteen, who helped his father in the fishing business; and his daughter, Nancy, who was a year younger than her brother, a quiet girl much given to melancholy. Two older daughters had flown the coop: one trained as a nurse in Arkham, and the other had “gone to the sea,” as the local people of Innsmouth are liable to say when pressed.

  They were found, the family Marsh, on the morning of November fourteen, 1959, by the sheriff. The house lay silent and still. On finding no sign in the rooms, the sheriff and his men at last went downstairs to the cellar. The walls were of sheer stone, yet the proximity of the house to the ocean resulted in salt tears, which formed spontaneously on the walls and dripped down. The air was cold and smelled of eternal damp. They found the Marshes in the cellar. They had been bound together around an ancient black stone, which dominated the center of the cellar and was its only feature. Each of them had been gutted with a sharp knife of the sort used to cut open large fish. Their blood on the flagstones had remained wet and its color seemed more green than red.

  “Fish?” Truman said. He passed me the silver platter with relish. I stared with distaste at the creature that sat there on a bed of wilted lettuce, its belly sliced open, entrails removed. It had been fried some time back and was cooling fast, and the white meat seemed tinged with green.

  “No, thanks.”

  Truman ate with relish. We were the only guests in the hotel’s dining room that night.

  The Gilman House, as this place was called, was a once-grand edifice, and recent refurbishment had clearly taken place. My room, adjoining Truman’s, was wide and spacious, though the window faced the harbor, and as night fell, I saw lights on the ocean, where Devil Reef still stood, and they made me ill at ease. I closed the window against the cold breeze and shut the blinds; yet I could still feel some malignant intelligence out there in the ocean, and pictured an eye as vast as a moon rising silently out of the waves and glaring balefully in my direction. Really, I had been having the most fanciful notions since we’d arrived.

  “Delicious,” Truman said, chewing with his mouth half-open. I grimaced.

  When I had met up with him earlier in his room, the window had been wide open, and that foreign breeze blew through the room. He had not noticed me come in.

  He sat facing the window, his eyes wide open yet unseeing. He seemed in rapture, yet when I coughed he turned and spoke as though nothing was amiss. “Tomorrow, Nelle, we shall visit the Marsh house and see for ourselves the scene of the crime.”

  The sheriff, it must be noted (himself a Marsh), had made little attempt to launch a murder investigation. A report was filed—and it was only the town’s bad luck that Truman’s inquisitive eye happened to catch the brief mention in the Times. It had fired his imagination. He was going to write an article about the murders—no, a book, he said, though when he had decided that I did not know.

  On the wall of the empty dining room stood a brass etching of some enormous and malignant fish-man, possibly of some antiquity. Its eyes glared over us. The hotel’s clerk, or proprietor—it was hard to say for sure—was a back-bent, taciturn man, of the Gilman family, who are related to the Marshes by ancient blood and marriage. He welcomed us pleasantly enough, though his gaze never settled on us directly and kept sliding away to stare into corners.

  “Do you believe the murders were committed by a drifter, as the sheriff suggests in his report?” I said. I had read the documentation on the train on our way to Newburyport.

  Truman never stopped chewing. He picked the fish’s skeleton with his fingers and sucked on the fine translucent bones. The tips of his fingers shone slick with oil. “We shall attempt to find out, won’t we, Nelle?” was all he said.

  “This is a strange town,” I said.

  “All towns are strange to the stranger,” Truman said, a little smugly.

  “Really, Truman!” I said. “You could do better than that, surely.”

  He put down the bones, what was left of them. His eyes looked at me with pretend innocence, but I had known him for too long to be fooled. “Alright,” he said, quietly. “It is strange, Nelle! It feels haunted to me, but not by ghosts, far from it. It’s haunted by vitality, by power. I can hear the sea from my room, even here I can hear it, everywhere in Innsmouth we go I can hear the sea, calling!”

  “You think the sea killed the Marshes?” I said, trying to make light of it. But Truman pursed his lips and said nothing; as though, inadvertently, I had hit too close to his real thoughts.

  That night, in my bed, I tried to go over the manuscript of my novel again, but I could make no sense of events. Boo Radley had come out of his house at last, when Scout and Jem most needed him. But as he approached them, he did so with a wet squelching sound; and when he finally materialized before the children, he was a monstrous fish-man, resplendent in scales, with large predator teeth, and his impossibly-wide mouth opened in a terrible grin and he said, “In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

  I woke up, gasping for air. I must have fallen asleep, and the air was hot, stifling. I staggered from the bed and pulled open the window, and the breeze burst into the room. “Dagon! Dagon!” I said, and somehow I knew that was the name of the monstrous creature, an elder sea-god who was yet but a servant to other, greater beings. “But you’re being ridiculous, Nelle,” I whispered. I shook my head, trying to clear it. My stomach knotted with pain, and I regretted the food I had consumed earlier. In the tap, brackish water ran sluggishly. I cupped some in my hand and tried to sip it, but spat it back out. Looking out of the window, I saw shadowed figures moving down Federal Street and congregating in the town square. Beyond the wharves, I could see lights burning clearly out on the reef. The townspeople gathered in silence underneath the window. They stood almost motionless, as though waiting for something to happen. Then, to my horror, I saw Truman step out of the hotel doors.

  He walked unhurriedly, a small, unimposing figure, and the silent townspeople parted before him. As he passed among them, they began to chant, their voices rising and falling like waves. They spoke those same awful, alien words I had last heard Truman speak on the train, in which only that name, Cthulhu, could be discerned clearly. Truman walked towards the water and I wanted to run after him, to shout, to stop him, and yet I did nothing but watch. He came to the edge of the water and simply walked into the sea, and was gone.

  “Truman!” I cried. My voice felt thin in the enormous air. The chanting stopped. The townspeople, as one, turned and looked up at my window.

  The light caught them clearly, for once. I choked back a sob as I saw their scaly, grotesque faces, grayish-green in the wan light, their malignant elongated skulls, with prodigious, bulging eyes that never closed. “Truman!” I cried. “Truman!”

  “Nelle? Nelle!”

  Truman stood above me in the daylight. The window was open and sunlight streamed through. In his hand, Truman was holding a fresh mug of coffee. “You were dreaming,” he said, handing me the mug. I sat up and took a sip. It was hot and cloyingly sweet.

  “You smell as though you’ve been bathing in the seawater,” I said.

  He smiled, unaffected. “Were you dreaming of me?” he said.

  “Don’t be so vain.”

  “Come on, Nelle!” he cried. He was quite ebullient. “We have much to do this morning. No time to waste!”

  I sighed. The cobwebs of the dreams were being pulled down in the daytime. I finished my coffee and stood up. “Then let’s go,” I said.

  3.

  Sheriff Marsh met us outside the house. In the daytime, he seemed normal enough, a taciturn man, with the bulging eyes of Innsmouth but otherwise even a little handsome. He shook both our hands. “Mr Capote,” he said shyly. “I very much enjoyed Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

  “The book or the film?” Truman said.

  “I liked them both,” the sheriff said, and Truman beamed, in that selfcentered way of his. He both knew how good he was and how he craved being told. “Audrey—” he
meant Audrey Hepburn, of course, “is such a dear, you know.”

  Of course, Sheriff Marsh didn’t know. And of course, Truman was happy to prattle on about his showbiz friends as we walked the short distance to the house. The Marsh House itself was a sturdy, recent construction. A jetty extended into the murky water, where a small wooden boat bobbed harmlessly. I saw that Truman noticed it. All the while he was speaking, his eyes were darting this way and that, recording, analyzing.

  Something terrible had happened in this house. Something awful and inhuman. An aura of palpable alienness permeated the environs of the house, a sickly sun reflecting in the murky green-gray ocean water. The house itself was newly built and showed signs of being the product of a prosperity of a kind we had not seen in Innsmouth before. As the sheriff went to open the door, Truman and I conferred in low voices.

  “Smuggling, you think?”

  “The proximity to the water is suggestive.”

  “But prohibition is long gone.”

  “Something else, then, not whiskey. More exotic, perhaps.”

  “Such as?”

  But Truman just shrugged. He didn’t know—or wasn’t ready to say. The door opened. It was just an ordinary door. We followed the sheriff inside.

  Care had been taken with the maintenance of the house. The mother, Mary, we were told, was a neurotic—a small, delicate woman from Arkham who had married into Innsmouth. Photos of the children showed them possessing the Marsh characteristics, however, bulging eyes and elongated skulls. It seemed to me, studying them, that both children seemed to have fine, webbed membranes between their fingers—though it could have been a trick of the light. The walls were decorated with curious South Pacific art. Again I saw that fish-man creature, Dagon, represented in sculpture and painting. A hanging tapestry showed fantastical underwater scenes, of graceful sea-dwellers interacting with human beings who came down from boats on the surface. When I touched the tapestry, it was wet and smelled of mildew. When I touched my fingers to my tongue, briefly, they were salty.