THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH

I

During the winter of 1927-28 officials of the Federal government made a strange
and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts
seaport of Innsmouth. The public first learned of it in February, when a vast
series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and
dynamiting--under suitable precautions--of an enormous number of crumbling,
worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront.
Uninquiring souls let this occurrence pass as one of the major clashes in a
spasmodic war on liquor.

Keener news-followers, however, wondered at the prodigious number of arrests,
the abnormally large force of men used in making them, and the secrecy
surrounding the disposal of the prisoners. No trials, or even definite charges
were reported; nor were any of the captives seen thereafter in the regular gaols
of the nation. There were vague statements about disease and concentration
camps, and later about dispersal in various naval and military prisons, but
nothing positive ever developed. Innsmouth itself was left almost depopulated,
and it is even now only beginning to show signs of a sluggishly revived
existence.

Complaints from many liberal organizations were met with long confidential
discussions, and representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and
prisons. As a result, these societies became surprisingly passive and reticent.
Newspaper men were harder to manage, but seemed largely to cooperate with the
government in the end. Only one paper--a tabloid always discounted because of
its wild policy--mentioned the deep diving submarine that discharged torpedoes
downward in the marine abyss just beyond Devil Reef. That item, gathered by
chance in a haunt of sailors, seemed indeed rather far-fetched; since the low,
black reef lay a full mile and a half out from Innsmouth Harbour.

People around the country and in the nearby towns muttered a great deal among
themselves, but said very little to the outer world. They had talked about dying
and half-deserted Innsmouth for nearly a century, and nothing new could be
wilder or more hideous than what they had whispered and hinted at years before.
Many things had taught them secretiveness, and there was no need to exert
pressure on them. Besides, they really knew little; for wide salt marshes,
desolate and unpeopled, kept neighbors off from Innsmouth on the landward side.

But at last I am going to defy the ban on speech about this thing. Results, I am
certain, are so thorough that no public harm save a shock of repulsion could
ever accrue from a hinting of what was found by those horrified men at
Innsmouth. Besides, what was found might possibly have more than one
explanation. I do not know just how much of the whole tale has been told even to
me, and I have many reasons for not wishing to probe deeper. For my contact with
this affair has been closer than that of any other layman, and I have carried
away impressions which are yet to drive me to drastic measures.

It was I who fled frantically out of Innsmouth in the early morning hours of
July 16, 1927, and whose frightened appeals for government inquiry and action
brought on the whole reported episode. I was willing enough to stay mute while
the affair was fresh and uncertain; but now that it is an old story, with public
interest and curiosity gone, I have an odd craving to whisper about those few
frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly-shadowed seaport of death and
blasphemous abnormality. The mere telling helps me to restore confidence in my
own faculties; to reassure myself that I was not the first to succumb to a
contagious nightmare hallucination. It helps me, too, in making up my mind
regarding a certain terrible step which lies ahead of me.

I never heard of Innsmouth till the day before I saw it for the first and--so
far--last time. I was celebrating my coming of age by a tour of New
England--sightseeing, antiquarian, and genealogical--and had planned to go
directly from ancient Newburyport to Arkham, whence my mother's family was
derived. I had no car, but was travelling by train, trolley and motor-coach,
always seeking the cheapest possible route. In Newburyport they told me that the
steam train was the thing to take to Arkham; and it was only at the station
ticket-office, when I demurred at the high fare, that I learned about Innsmouth.
The stout, shrewd-faced agent, whose speech shewed him to be no local man,
seemed sympathetic toward my efforts at economy, and made a suggestion that none
of my other informants had offered.

"You could take that old bus, I suppose," he said with a certain hesitation,
"but it ain't thought much of hereabouts. It goes through Innsmouth--you may
have heard about that--and so the people don't like it. Run by an Innsmouth
fellow--Joe Sargent--but never gets any custom from here, or Arkham either, I
guess. Wonder it keeps running at all. I s'pose it's cheap enough, but I never
see mor'n two or three people in it--nobody but those Innsmouth folk. Leaves the
square--front of Hammond's Drug Store--at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. unless they've
changed lately. Looks like a terrible rattletrap--I've never been on it."

That was the first I ever heard of shadowed Innsmouth. Any reference to a town
not shown on common maps or listed in recent guidebooks would have interested
me, and the agent's odd manner of allusion roused something like real curiosity.
A town able to inspire such dislike in it its neighbors, I thought, must be at
least rather unusual, and worthy of a tourist's attention. If it came before
Arkham I would stop off there and so I asked the agent to tell me something
about it. He was very deliberate, and spoke with an air of feeling slightly
superior to what he said.

"Innsmouth? Well, it's a queer kind of a town down at the mouth of the Manuxet.
Used to be almost a city--quite a port before the War of 1812--but all gone to
pieces in the last hundred years or so. No railroad now--B. and M. never went
through, and the branch line from Rowley was given up years ago.

"More empty houses than there are people, I guess, and no business to speak of
except fishing and lobstering. Everybody trades mostly either here or in Arkham
or Ipswich. Once they had quite a few mills, but nothing's left now except one
gold refinery running on the leanest kind of part time.

"That refinery, though, used to be a big thing, and old man Marsh, who owns it,
must be richer'n Croesus. Queer old duck, though, and sticks mighty close in his
home. He's supposed to have developed some skin disease or deformity late in
life that makes him keep out of sight. Grandson of Captain Obed Marsh, who
founded the business. His mother seems to've been some kind of foreigner--they
say a South Sea islander--so everybody raised Cain when he married an Ipswich
girl fifty years ago. They always do that about Innsmouth people, and folks here
and hereabouts always try to cover up any Innsmouth blood they have in 'em. But
Marsh's children and grandchildren look just like anyone else far's I can see.
I've had 'em pointed out to me here--though, come to think of it, the elder
children don't seem to be around lately. Never saw the old man.

"And why is everybody so down on Innsmouth? Well, young fellow, you mustn't take
too much stock in what people here say. They're hard to get started, but once
they do get started they never let up. They've been telling things about
Innsmouth--whispering 'em, mostly--for the last hundred years, I guess, and I
gather they're more scared than anything else. Some of the stories would make
you laugh--about old Captain Marsh driving bargains with the devil and bringing
imps out of hell to live in Innsmouth, or about some kind of devil-worship and
awful sacrifices in some place near the wharves that people stumbled on around
1845 or thereabouts--but I come from Panton, Vermont, and that kind of story
don't go down with me.

"You ought to hear, though, what some of the old-timers tell about the black
reef off the coast--Devil Reef, they call it. It's well above water a good part
of the time, and never much below it, but at that you could hardly call it an
island. The story is that there's a whole legion of devils seen sometimes on
that reef--sprawled about, or darting in and out of some kind of caves near the
top. It's a rugged, uneven thing, a good bit over a mile out, and toward the end
of shipping days sailors used to make big detours just to avoid it.

"That is, sailors that didn't hail from Innsmouth. One of the things they had
against old Captain Marsh was that he was supposed to land on it sometimes at
night when the tide was right. Maybe he did, for I dare say the rock formation
was interesting, and it's just barely possible he was looking for pirate loot
and maybe finding it; but there was talk of his dealing with demons there. Fact
is, I guess on the whole it was really the Captain that gave the bad reputation
to the reef.

"That was before the big epidemic of 1846, when over half the folks in Innsmouth
was carried off. They never did quite figure out what the trouble was, but it
was probably some foreign kind of disease brought from China or somewhere by the
shipping. It surely was bad enough--there was riots over it, and all sorts of
ghastly doings that I don't believe ever got outside of town--and it left the
place in awful shape. Never came back--there can't be more'n 300 or 400 people
living there now.

"But the real thing behind the way folks feel is simply race prejudice--and I
don't say I'm blaming those that hold it. I hate those Innsmouth folks myself,
and I wouldn't care to go to their town. I s'pose you know--though I can see
you're a Westerner by your talk--what a lot our New England ships used to have
to do with queer ports in Africa, Asia, the South Seas, and everywhere else, and
what queer kinds of people they sometimes brought back with 'em. You've probably
heard about the Salem man that came home with a Chinese wife, and maybe you know
there's still a bunch of Fiji Islanders somewhere around Cape Cod.

"Well, there must be something like that back of the Innsmouth people. The place
always was badly cut off from the rest of the country by marshes and creeks and
we can't be sure about the ins and outs of the matter; but it's pretty clear
that old Captain Marsh must have brought home some odd specimens when he had all
three of his ships in commission back in the twenties and thirties. There
certainly is a strange kind of streak in the Innsmouth folks today--I don't know
how to explain it but it sort of makes you crawl. You'll notice a little in
Sargent if you take his bus. Some of 'em have queer narrow heads with flat noses
and bulgy, stary eyes that never seem to shut, and their skin ain't quite right.
Rough and scabby, and the sides of the necks are all shriveled or creased up.
Get bald, too, very young. The older fellows look the worst--fact is, I don't
believe I've ever seen a very old chap of that kind. Guess they must die of
looking in the glass! Animals hate 'em--they used to have lots of horse trouble
before the autos came in.

"Nobody around here or in Arkham or Ipswich will have anything to do with 'em,
and they act kind of offish themselves when they come to town or when anyone
tries to fish on their grounds. Queer how fish are always thick off Innsmouth
Harbour when there ain't any anywhere else around--but just try to fish there
yourself and see how the folks chase you off! Those people used to come here on
the railroad--walking and taking the train at Rowley after the branch was
dropped--but now they use that bus.

"Yes, there's a hotel in Innsmouth--called the Gilman House--but I don't believe
it can amount to much. I wouldn't advise you to try it. Better stay over here
and take the ten o'clock bus tomorrow morning; then you can get an evening bus
there for Arkham at eight o'clock. There was a factory inspector who stopped at
the Gilman a couple of years ago and he had a lot of unpleasant hints about the
place. Seems they get a queer crowd there, for this fellow heard voices in other
rooms--though most of 'em was empty--that gave him the shivers. It was foreign
talk he thought, but he said the bad thing about it was the kind of voice that
sometimes spoke. It sounded so unnatural--slopping like, he said--that he didn't
dare undress and go to sleep. Just waited up and lit out the first thing in the
morning. The talk went on most all night.

"This fellow--Casey, his name was--had a lot to say about how the Innsmouth folk
watched him and seemed kind of on guard. He found the Marsh refinery a queer
place--it's in an old mill on the lower falls of the Manuxet. What he said
tallied up with what I'd heard. Books in bad shape, and no clear account of any
kind of dealings. You know it's always been a kind of mystery where the Marshes
get the gold they refine. They've never seemed to do much buying in that line,
but years ago they shipped out an enormous lot of ingots.

"Used to be talk of a queer foreign kind of jewelry that the sailors and
refinery men sometimes sold on the sly, or that was seen once or twice on some
of the Marsh women-folks. People allowed maybe old Captain Obed traded for it in
some heathen port, especially since he always ordered stacks of glass beads and
trinkets such as seafaring men used to get for native trade. Others thought and
still think he'd found an old pirate cache out on Devil Reef. But here's a funny
thing. The old Captain's been dead these sixty years, and there's ain't been a
good-sized ship out of the place since the Civil War; but just the same the
Marshes still keep on buying a few of those native trade things--mostly glass
and rubber gewgaws, they tell me. Maybe the Innsmouth folks like 'em to look at
themselves--Gawd knows they've gotten to be about as bad as South Sea cannibals
and Guinea savages.

"That plague of '46 must have taken off the best blood in the place. Anyway,
they're a doubtful lot now, and the Marshes and other rich folks are as bad as
any. As I told you, there probably ain't more'n 400 people in the whole town in
spite of all the streets they say there are. I guess they're what they call
'white trash' down South--lawless and sly, and full of secret things. They get a
lot of fish and lobsters and do exporting by truck. Queer how the fish swarm
right there and nowhere else.

"Nobody can ever keep track of these people, and state school officials and
census men have a devil of a time. You can bet that prying strangers ain't
welcome around Innsmouth. I've heard personally of more'n one business or
government man that's disappeared there, and there's loose talk of one who went
crazy and is out at Danvers now. They must have fixed up some awful scare for
that fellow.

"That's why I wouldn't go at night if I was you. I've never been there and have
no wish to go, but I guess a daytime trip couldn't hurt you--even though the
people hereabouts will advise you not to make it. If you're just sightseeing,
and looking for old-time stuff, Innsmouth ought to be quite a place for you."

And so I spent part of that evening at the Newburyport Public Library looking up
data about Innsmouth. When I had tried to question the natives in the shops, the
lunchroom, the garages, and the fire station, I had found them even harder to
get started than the ticket agent had predicted; and realized that I could not
spare the time to overcome their first instinctive reticence. They had a kind of
obscure suspiciousness, as if there were something amiss with anyone too much
interested in Innsmouth. At the Y. M. C. A., where I was stopping, the clerk
merely discouraged my going to such a dismal, decadent place; and the people at
the library shewed much the same attitude. Clearly, in the eyes of the educated,
Innsmouth was merely an exaggerated case of civic degeneration.

The Essex County histories on the library shelves had very little to say, except
that the town was founded in 1643, noted for shipbuilding before the Revolution,
a seat of great marine prosperity in the early 19th century, and later a minor
factory center using the Manuxet as power. The epidemic and riots of 1846 were
very sparsely treated, as if they formed a discredit to the county.

References to decline were few, though the significance of the later record was
unmistakable. After the Civil War all industrial life was confined to the Marsh
Refining Company, and the marketing of gold ingots formed the only remaining bit
of major commerce aside from the eternal fishing. That fishing paid less and
less as the price of the commodity fell and large-scale corporations offered
competition, but there was never a dearth of fish around Innsmouth Harbour.
Foreigners seldom settled there, and there was some discreetly veiled evidence
that a number of Poles and Portuguese who had tried it had been scattered in a
peculiarly drastic fashion.

Most interesting of all was a glancing reference to the strange jewelry vaguely
associated with Innsmouth. It had evidently impressed the whole countryside more
than a little, for mention was made of specimens in the museum of Miskatonic
University at Arkham, and in the display room of the Newburyport Historical
Society. The fragmentary descriptions of these things were bald and prosaic, but
they hinted to me an undercurrent of persistent strangeness. Something about
them seemed so odd and provocative that I could not put them out of my mind, and
despite the relative lateness of the hour I resolved to see the local
sample--said to be a large, queerly-proportioned thing evidently meant for a
tiara--if it could possibly be arranged.

The librarian gave me a note of introduction to the curator of the Society, a
Miss Anna Tilton, who lived nearby, and after a brief explanation that ancient
gentlewoman was kind enough to pilot me into the closed building, since the hour
was not outrageously late. The collection was a notable one indeed, but in my
present mood I had eyes for nothing but the bizarre object which glistened in a
corner cupboard under the electric lights.

It took no excessive sensitiveness to beauty to make me literally gasp at the
strange, unearthly splendour of the alien, opulent phantasy that rested there on
a purple velvet cushion. Even now I can hardly describe what I saw, though it
was clearly enough a sort of tiara, as the description had said. It was tall in
front, and with a very large and curiously irregular periphery, as if designed
for a head of almost freakishly elliptical outline. The material seemed to be
predominantly gold, though a weird lighter lustrousness hinted at some strange
alloy with an equally beautiful and scarcely identifiable metal. Its condition
was almost perfect, and one could have spent hours in studying the striking and
puzzlingly untraditional designs--some simply geometrical, and some plainly
marine--chased or moulded in high relief on its surface with a craftsmanship of
incredible skill and grace.

The longer I looked, the more the thing fascinated me; and in this fascination
there was a curiously disturbing element hardly to be classified or accounted
for. At first I decided that it was the queer other-worldly quality of the art
which made me uneasy. All other art objects I had ever seen either belonged to
some known racial or national stream, or else were consciously modernistic
defiances of every recognized stream. This tiara was neither. It clearly
belonged to some settled technique of infinite maturity and perfection, yet that
technique was utterly remote from any--Eastern or Western, ancient or
modern--which I had ever heard of or seen exemplified. It was as if the
workmanship were that of another planet.

However, I soon saw that my uneasiness had a second and perhaps equally potent
source residing in the pictorial and mathematical suggestion of the strange
designs. The patterns all hinted of remote secrets and unimaginable abysses in
time and space, and the monotonously aquatic nature of the reliefs became almost
sinister. Among these reliefs were fabulous monsters of abhorrent grotesqueness
and malignity--half ichthyic and half batrachian in suggestion--which one could
not dissociate from a certain haunting and uncomfortable sense of pseudomemory,
as if they called up some image from deep cells and tissues whose retentive
functions are wholly primal and awesomely ancestral. At times I fancied that
every contour of these blasphemous fish-frogs was over-flowing with the ultimate
quintessence of unknown and inhuman evil.

In odd contrast to the tiara's aspect was its brief and prosy history as related
by Miss Tilton. It had been pawned for a ridiculous sum at a shop in State
Street in 1873, by a drunken Innsmouth man shortly afterward killed in a brawl.
The Society had acquired it directly from the pawnbroker, at once giving it a
display worthy of its quality. It was labeled as of probable East-Indian or
Indochinese provenance, though the attribution was frankly tentative.

Miss Tilton, comparing all possible hypotheses regarding its origin and its
presence in New England, was inclined to believe that it formed part of some
exotic pirate hoard discovered by old Captain Obed Marsh. This view was surely
not weakened by the insistent offers of purchase at a high price which the
Marshes began to make as soon as they knew of its presence, and which they
repeated to this day despite the Society's unvarying determination not to sell.

As the good lady shewed me out of the building she made it clear that the pirate
theory of the Marsh fortune was a popular one among the intelligent people of
the region. Her own attitude toward shadowed Innsmouth--which she never
seen--was one of disgust at a community slipping far down the cultural scale,
and she assured me that the rumours of devil-worship were partly justified by a
peculiar secret cult which had gained force there and engulfed all the orthodox
churches.

It was called, she said, "The Esoteric Order of Dagon," and was undoubtedly a
debased, quasi-pagan thing imported from the East a century before, at a time
when the Innsmouth fisheries seemed to be going barren. Its persistence among a
simple people was quite natural in view of the sudden and permanent return of
abundantly fine fishing, and it soon came to be the greatest influence in the
town, replacing Freemasonry altogether and taking up headquarters in the old
Masonic Hall on New Church Green.

All this, to the pious Miss Tilton, formed an excellent reason for shunning the
ancient town of decay and desolation; but to me it was merely a fresh incentive.
To my architectural and historical anticipations was now added an acute
anthropological zeal, and I could scarcely sleep in my small room at the "Y" as
the night wore away.

II

Shortly before ten the next morning I stood with one small valise in front of
Hammond's Drug Store in old Market Square waiting for the Innsmouth bus. As the
hour for its arrival drew near I noticed a general drift of the loungers to
other places up the street, or to the Ideal Lunch across the square. Evidently
the ticket-agent had not exaggerated the dislike which local People bore toward
Innsmouth and its denizens. In a few moments a small motor-coach of extreme
decrepitude and dirty grey colour rattled down State Street, made a turn, and
drew up at the curb beside me. I felt immediately that it was the right one; a
guess which the half-illegible sign on the
windshield--Arkham-Innsmouth-Newburyport--soon verified.

There were only three passengers--dark, unkempt men of sullen visage and
somewhat youthful cast--and when the vehicle stopped they clumsily shambled out
and began walking up State Street in a silent, almost furtive fashion. The
driver also alighted, and I watched him as he went into the drug store to make
some purchase. This, I reflected, must be the Joe Sargent mentioned by the
ticket-agent; and even before I noticed any details there spread over me a wave
of spontaneous aversion which could be neither checked nor explained. It
suddenly struck me as very natural that the local people should not wish to ride
on a bus owned and driven by this man, or to visit any oftener than possible the
habitat of such a man and his kinsfolk.

When the driver came out of the store I looked at him more carefully and tried
to determine the source of my evil impression. He was a thin, stoop-shouldered
man not much under six feet tall, dressed in shabby blue civilian clothes and
wearing a frayed golf cap. His age was perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep
creases in the sides of his neck made him seem older when one did not study his
dull, expressionless face. He had a narrow head, bulging, watery-blue eyes that
seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly
undeveloped ears. His long thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed
almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled
in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if
peeling from some cutaneous disease. His hands were large and heavily veined,
and had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikingly short in
proportion to the rest of the structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl
closely into the huge palm. As he walked toward the bus I observed his
peculiarly shambling gait and saw that his feet were inordinately immense. The
more I studied them the more I wondered how he could buy any shoes to fit them.

A certain greasiness about the fellow increased my dislike. He was evidently
given to working or lounging around the fish docks, and carried with him much of
their characteristic smell. Just what foreign blood was in him I could not even
guess. His oddities certainly did not look Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine or
negroid, yet I could see why the people found him alien. I myself would have
thought of biological degeneration rather than alienage.

I was sorry when I saw there would be no other passengers on the bus. Somehow I
did not like the idea of riding alone with this driver. But as leaving time
obviously approached I conquered my qualms and followed the man aboard,
extending him a dollar bill and murmuring the single word "Innsmouth." He looked
curiously at me for a second as he returned forty cents change without speaking.
I took a seat far behind him, but on the same side of the bus, since I wished to
watch the shore during the journey.

At length the decrepit vehicle stared with a jerk, and rattled noisily past the
old brick buildings of State Street amidst a cloud of vapour from the exhaust.
Glancing at the people on the sidewalks, I thought I detected in them a curious
wish to avoid looking at the bus--or at least a wish to avoid seeming to look at
it. Then we turned to the left into High Street, where the going was smoother;
flying by stately old mansions of the early republic and still older colonial
farmhouses, passing the Lower Green and Parker River, and finally emerging into
a long, monotonous stretch of open shore country.

The day was warm and sunny, but the landscape of sand and sedge-grass, and
stunted shrubbery became more and desolate as we proceeded. Out the window I
could see the blue water and the sandy line of Plum Island, and we presently
drew very near the beach as our narrow road veered off from the main highway to
Rowley and Ipswich. There were no visible houses, and I could tell by the state
of the road that traffic was very light hereabouts. The weather-worn telephone
poles carried only two wires. Now and then we crossed crude wooden bridges over
tidal creeks that wound far inland and promoted the general isolation of the
region.

Once in a while I noticed dead stumps and crumbling foundation-walls above the
drifting sand, and recalled the old tradition quoted in one of the histories I
had read, that this was once a fertile and thickly-settled countryside. The
change, it was said, came simultaneously with the Innsmouth epidemic of l846,
and was thought by simple folk to have a dark connection with hidden forces of
evil. Actually, it was caused by the unwise cutting of woodlands near the shore,
which robbed the soil of the best protection and opened the way for waves of
wind-blown sand.

At last we lost sight of Plum Island and saw the vast expanse of the open
Atlantic on our left. Our narrow course began to climb steeply, and I felt a
singular sense of disquiet in looking at the lonely crest ahead where the rutted
road-way met the sky. It was as if the bus were about to keep on in its ascent,
leaving the sane earth altogether and merging with the unknown arcana of upper
air and cryptical sky. The smell of the sea took on ominous implications, and
the silent driver's bent, rigid back and narrow head became more and more
hateful. As I looked at him I saw that the back of his head was almost as
hairless as his face, having only a few straggling yellow strands upon a grey
scabrous surface.

Then we reached the crest and beheld the outspread valley beyond, where the
Manuxet joins the sea just north of the long line of cliffs that culminate in
Kingsport Head and veer off toward Cape Ann. On the far misty horizon I could
just make out the dizzy profile of the Head, topped by the queer ancient house
of which so many legends are told; but for the moment all my attention was
captured by the nearer panorama just below me. I had, I realized, come face to
face with rumour-shadowed Innsmouth.

It was a town of wide extent and dense construction, yet one with a portentous
dearth of visible life. From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke
came, and the three tall steeples loomed stark and unpainted against the seaward
horizon. One of them was crumbling down at the top, and in that and another
there were only black gaping holes where clock-dials should have been. The vast
huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyed with offensive
clearness the idea of wormy decay, and as we approached along the now descending
road I could see that many roofs had wholly caved in. There were some large
square Georgian houses, too, with hipped roofs, cupolas, and railed "widow's
walks." These were mostly well back from the water, and one or two seemed to be
in moderately sound condition. Stretching inland from among them I saw the
rusted, grass-grown line of the abandoned railway, with leaning telegraph-poles
now devoid of wires, and the half-obscured lines of the old carriage roads to
Rowley and Ipswich.

The decay was worst close to the waterfront, though in its very midst I could
spy the white belfry of a fairly well preserved brick structure which looked
like a small factory. The harbour, long clogged with sand, was enclosed by an
ancient stone breakwater; on which I could begin to discern the minute forms of
a few seated fishermen, and at whose end were what looked like the foundations
of a bygone lighthouse. A sandy tongue had formed inside this barrier and upon
it I saw a few decrepit cabins, moored dories, and scattered lobster-pots. The
only deep water seemed to be where the river poured out past the belfried
structure and turned southward to join the ocean at the breakwater's end.

Here and there the ruins of wharves jutted out from the shore to end in
indeterminate rottenness, those farthest south seeming the most decayed. And far
out at sea, despite a high tide, I glimpsed a long, black line scarcely rising
above the water yet carrying a suggestion of odd latent malignancy. This, I
knew, must be Devil Reef. As I looked, a subtle, curious sense of beckoning
seemed superadded to the grim repulsion; and oddly enough, I found this overtone
more disturbing than the primary impression.

We met no one on the road, but presently began to pass deserted farms in varying
stages of ruin. Then I noticed a few inhabited houses with rags stuffed in the
broken windows and shells and dead fish lying about the littered yards. Once or
twice I saw listless-looking people working in barren gardens or digging clams
on the fishy-smelling beach below, and groups of dirty, simian-visaged children
playing around weed-grown doorsteps. Somehow these people seemed more
disquieting than the dismal buildings, for almost every one had certain
peculiarities of face and motions which I instinctively disliked without being
able to define or comprehend them. For a second I thought this typical physique
suggested some picture I had seen, perhaps in a book, under circumstances of
particular horror or melancholy; but this pseudo-recollection passed very
quickly.

As the bus reached a lower level I began to catch the steady note of a waterfall
through the unnatural stillness, The leaning, unpainted houses grew thicker,
lined both sides of the road, and displayed more urban tendencies than did those
we were leaving behind, The panorama ahead had contracted to a street scene, and
in spots I could see where a cobblestone pavement and stretches of brick
sidewalk had formerly existed. All the houses were apparently deserted, and
there were occasional gaps where tumbledown chimneys and cellar walls told of
buildings that had collapsed. Pervading everything was the most nauseous fishy
odour imaginable.

Soon cross streets and junctions began to appear; those on the left leading to
shoreward realms of unpaved squalor and decay, while those on the right shewed
vistas of departed grandeur. So far I had seen no people in the town, but there
now came signs of a sparse habitation--curtained windows here and there, and an
occasional battered motorcar at the curb. Pavement and sidewalks were
increasingly well-defined, and though most of the houses were quite old--wood
and brick structures of the early 19th century--they were obviously kept fit for
habitation. As an amateur antiquarian I almost lost my olfactory disgust and my
feeling of menace and repulsion amidst this rich, unaltered survival from the
past.

But I was not to reach my destination without one very strong impression of
poignantly disagreeable quality. The bus had come to a sort of open concourse or
radial point with churches on two sides and the bedraggled remains of a circular
green in the centre, and I was looking at a large pillared hall on the
right-hand junction ahead. The structure's once white paint was now gray and
peeling and the black and gold sign on the pediment was so faded that I could
only with difficulty make out the words "Esoteric Order of Dagon." This, then
was the former Masonic Hall now given over to a degraded cult. As I strained to
decipher this inscription my notice was distracted by the raucous tones of a
cracked bell across the street, and I quickly turned to look out the window on
my side of the coach.

The sound came from a squat stone church of manifestly later date than most of
the houses, built in a clumsy Gothic fashion and having a disproportionately
high basement with shuttered windows. Though the hands of its clock were missing
on the side I glimpsed, I knew that those hoarse strokes were tolling the hour
of eleven. Then suddenly all thoughts of time were blotted out by an onrushing
image of sharp intensity and unaccountable horror which had seized me before I
knew what it really was. The door of the church basement was open, revealing a
rectangle of blackness inside. And as I looked, a certain object crossed or
seemed to cross that dark rectangle; burning into my brain a momentary
conception of nightmare which was all the more maddening because analysis could
not shew a single nightmarish quality in it.

It was a living object--the first except the driver that I had seen since
entering the compact part of the town--and had I been in a steadier mood I would
have found nothing whatever of terror in it. Clearly, as I realised a moment
later, it was the pastor; clad in some peculiar vestments doubtless introduced
since the Order of Dagon had modified the ritual of the local churches. The
thing which had probably caught my first subconscious glance and supplied the
touch of bizarre horror was the tall tiara he wore; an almost exact duplicate of
the one Miss Tilton had shown me the previous evening. This, acting on my
imagination, had supplied namelessly sinister qualities to the indeterminate
face and robed, shambling form beneath it. There was not, I soon decided, any
reason why I should have felt that shuddering touch of evil pseudo-memory. Was
it not natural that a local mystery cult should adopt among its regimentals an
unique type of head-dress made familiar to the community in some strange
way--perhaps as treasure-trove?

A very thin sprinkling of repellent-looking youngish people now became visible
on the sidewalks--lone individuals, and silent knots of two or three. The lower
floors of the crumbling houses sometimes harboured small shops with dingy signs,
and I noticed a parked truck or two as we rattled along. The sound of waterfalls
became more and more distinct, and presently I saw a fairly deep river-gorge
ahead, spanned by a wide, iron-railed highway bridge beyond which a large square
opened out. As we clanked over the bridge I looked out on both sides and
observed some factory buildings on the edge of the grassy bluff or part way
down. The water far below was very abundant, and I could see two vigorous sets
of falls upstream on my right and at least one downstream on my left. From this
point the noise was quite deafening. Then we rolled into the large semicircular
square across the river and drew up on the right-hand side in front of a tall,
cupola crowned building with remnants of yellow paint and with a half-effaced
sign proclaiming it to be the Gilman House.

I was glad to get out of that bus, and at once proceeded to check my valise in
the shabby hotel lobby. There was only one person in sight--an elderly man
without what I had come to call the "Innsmouth look"--and I decided not to ask
him any of the questions which bothered me; remembering that odd things had been
noticed in this hotel. Instead, I strolled out on the square, from which the bus
had already gone, and studied the scene minutely and appraisingly.

One side of the cobblestoned open space was the straight line of the river; the
other was a semicircle of slant-roofed brick buildings of about the 1800 period,
from which several streets radiated away to the southeast, south, and southwest.
Lamps were depressingly few and small--all low-powered incandescents--and I was
glad that my plans called for departure before dark, even though I knew the moon
would be bright. The buildings were all in fair condition, and included perhaps
a dozen shops in current operation; of which one was a grocery of the First
National chain, others a dismal restaurant, a drug store, and a wholesale
fish-dealer's office, and still another, at the eastward extremity of the square
near the river an office of the town's only industry--the Marsh Refining
Company. There were perhaps ten people visible, and four or five automobiles and
motor trucks stood scattered about. I did not need to be told that this was the
civic centre of Innsmouth. Eastward I could catch blue glimpses of the harbour,
against which rose the decaying remains of three once beautiful Georgian
steeples. And toward the shore on the opposite bank of the river I saw the white
belfry surmounting what I took to be the Marsh refinery.

For some reason or other I chose to make my first inquiries at the chain
grocery, whose personnel was not likely to be native to Innsmouth. I found a
solitary boy of about seventeen in charge, and was pleased to note the
brightness and affability which promised cheerful information. He seemed
exceptionally eager to talk, and I soon gathered that he did not like the place,
its fishy smell, or its furtive people. A word with any outsider was a relief to
him. He hailed from Arkham, boarded with a family who came from Ipswich, and
went back whenever he got a moment off. His family did not like him to work in
Innsmouth, but the chain had transferred him there and he did not wish to give
up his job.

There was, he said, no public library or chamber of commerce in Innsmouth, but I
could probably find my way about. The street I had come down was Federal. West
of that were the fine old residence streets--Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and
Adams--and east of it were the shoreward slums. It was in these slums--along
Main Street--that I would find the old Georgian churches, but they were all long
abandoned. It would be well not to make oneself too conspicuous in such
neighbourhoods--especially north of the river since the people were sullen and
hostile. Some strangers had even disappeared.

Certain spots were almost forbidden territory, as he had learned at considerable
cost. One must not, for example, linger much around the Marsh refinery, or
around any of the still used churches, or around the pillared Order of Dagon
Hall at New Church Green. Those churches were very odd--all violently disavowed
by their respective denominations elsewhere, and apparently using the queerest
kind of ceremonials and clerical vestments. Their creeds were heterodox and
mysterious, involving hints of certain marvelous transformations leading to
bodily immorality--of a sort--on this earth. The youth's own pastor--Dr. Wallace
of Asbury M. E. Church in Arkham--had gravely urged him not to join any church
in Innsmouth.

As for the Innsmouth people--the youth hardly knew what to make of them. They
were as furtive and seldom seen as animals that live in burrows, and one could
hardly imagine how they passed the time apart from their desultory fishing.
Perhaps--judging from the quantities of bootleg liquor they consumed--they lay
for most of the daylight hours in an alcoholic stupor. They seemed sullenly
banded together in some sort of fellowship and understanding--despising the
world as if they had access to other and preferable spheres of entity. Their
appearance--especially those staring, unwinking eyes which one never saw
shut--was certainly shocking enough; and their voices were disgusting. It was
awful to hear them chanting in their churches at night, and especially during
their main festivals or revivals, which fell twice a year on April 30th and
October 31st.

They were very fond of the water, and swam a great deal in both river and
harbour. Swimming races out to Devil Reef were very common, and everyone in
sight seemed well able to share in this arduous sport. When one came to think of
it, it was generally only rather young people who were seen about in public, and
of these the oldest were apt to be the most tainted-looking. When exceptions did
occur, they were mostly persons with no trace of aberrancy, like the old clerk
at the hotel. One wondered what became of the bulk of the older folk, and
whether the "Innsmouth look" were not a strange and insidious disease-phenomenon
which increased its hold as years advanced.

Only a very rare affliction, of course, could bring about such vast and radical
anatomical changes in a single individual after maturity--changes invoking
osseous factors as basic as the shape of the skull--but then, even this aspect
was no more baffling and unheard-of than the visible features of the malady as a
whole. It would be hard, the youth implied, to form any real conclusions
regarding such a matter; since one never came to know the natives personally no
matter how long one might live in Innsmouth.

The youth was certain that many specimens even worse than the worst visible ones
were kept locked indoors in some places. People sometimes heard the queerest
kind of sounds. The tottering waterfront hovels north of the river were
reputedly connected by hidden tunnels, being thus a veritable warren of unseen
abnormalities. What kind of foreign blood--if any--these beings had, it was
impossible to tell. They sometimes kept certain especially repulsive characters
out of sight when government and others from the outside world came to town.

It would be of no use, my informant said, to ask the natives anything about the
place. The only one who would talk was a very aged but normal looking man who
lived at the poorhouse on the north rim of the town and spent his time walking
about or lounging around the fire station. This hoary character, Zadok Allen,
was 96 years old and somewhat touched in the head, besides being the town
drunkard. He was a strange, furtive creature who constantly looked over his
shoulder as if afraid of something, and when sober could not be persuaded to
talk at all with strangers. He was, however, unable to resist any offer of his
favorite poison; and once drunk would furnish the most astonishing fragments of
whispered reminiscence.

After all, though, little useful data could be gained from him; since his
stories were all insane, incomplete hints of impossible marvels and horrors
which could have no source save in his own disordered fancy. Nobody ever
believed him, but the natives did not like him to drink and talk with strangers;
and it was not always safe to be seen questioning him. It was probably from him
that some of the wildest popular whispers and delusions were derived.

Several non-native residents had reported monstrous glimpses from time to time,
but between old Zadok's tales and the malformed inhabitants it was no wonder
such illusions were current. None of the non-natives ever stayed out late at
night, there being a widespread impression that it was not wise to do so.
Besides, the streets were loathsomely dark.

As for business--the abundance of fish was certainly almost uncanny, but the
natives were taking less and less advantage of it. Moreover, prices were falling
and competition was growing. Of course the town's real business was the
refinery, whose commercial office was on the square only a few doors east of
where we stood. Old Man Marsh was never seen, but sometimes went to the works in
a closed, curtained car.

There were all sorts of rumors about how Marsh had come to look. He had once
been a great dandy; and people said he still wore the frock-coated finery of the
Edwardian age curiously adapted to certain deformities. His son had formerly
conducted the office in the square, but latterly they had been keeping out of
sight a good deal and leaving the brunt of affairs to the younger generation.
The sons and their sisters had come to look very queer, especially the elder
ones; and it was said that their health was failing.

One of the Marsh daughters was a repellent, reptilian-looking woman who wore an
excess of weird jewellery clearly of the same exotic tradition as that to which
the strange tiara belonged. My informant had noticed it many times, and had
heard it spoken of as coming from some secret hoard, either of pirates or of
demons. The clergymen--or priests, or whatever they were called nowadays--also
wore this kind of ornament as a headdress; but one seldom caught glimpses of
them. Other specimens the youth had not seen, though many were rumoured to exist
around Innsmouth.

The Marshes, together with the other three gently bred families of the town--the
Waites, the Gilmans, and the Eliots--were all very retiring. They lived in
immense houses along Washington Street, and several were reputed to harbour in
concealment certain living kinsfolk whose personal aspect forbade public view,
and whose deaths had been reported and recorded.

Warning me that many of the street signs were down, the youth drew for my
benefit a rough but ample and painstaking sketch map of the town's salient
features. After a moment's study I felt sure that it would be of great help, and
pocketed it with profuse thanks. Disliking the dinginess of the single
restaurant I had seen, I bought a fair supply of cheese crackers and ginger
wafers to serve as a lunch later on. My program, I decided, would be to thread
the principal streets, talk with any non-natives I might encounter, and catch
the eight o'clock coach for Arkham. The town, I could see, formed a significant
and exaggerated example of communal decay; but being no sociologist I would
limit my serious observations to the field of architecture.

Thus I began my systematic though half-bewildered tour of Innsmouth's narrow,
shadow-blighted ways. Crossing the bridge and turning toward the roar of the
lower falls, I passed close to the Marsh refinery, which seemed to be oddly free
from the noise of industry. The building stood on the steep river bluff near a
bridge and an open confluence of streets which I took to be the earliest civic
center, displaced after the Revolution by the present Town Square.

Re-crossing the gorge on the Main Street bridge, I struck a region of utter
desertion which somehow made me shudder. Collapsing huddles of gambrel roofs
formed a jagged and fantastic skyline, above which rose the ghoulish,
decapitated steeple of an ancient church. Some houses along Main Street were
tenanted, but most were tightly boarded up. Down unpaved side streets I saw the
black, gaping windows of deserted hovels, many of which leaned at perilous and
incredible angles through the sinking of part of the foundations. Those windows
stared so spectrally that it took courage to turn eastward toward the
waterfront. Certainly, the terror of a deserted house swells in geometrical
rather than arithmetical progression as houses multiply to form a city of stark
desolation. The sight of such endless avenues of fishy-eyed vacancy and death,
and the thought of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given
over to cob-webs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigial fears
and aversions that not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse.

Fish Street was as deserted as Main, though it differed in having many brick and
stone warehouses still in excellent shape. Water Street was almost its
duplicate, save that there were great seaward gaps where wharves had been. Not a
living thing did I see except for the scattered fishermen on the distant
break-water, and not a sound did I hear save the lapping of the harbour tides
and the roar of the falls in the Manuxet. The town was getting more and more on
my nerves, and I looked behind me furtively as I picked my way back over the
tottering Water Street bridge. The Fish Street bridge, according to the sketch,
was in ruins.

North of the river there were traces of squalid life--active fish-packing houses
in Water Street, smoking chimneys and patched roofs here and there, occasional
sounds from indeterminate sources, and infrequent shambling forms in the dismal
streets and unpaved lanes--but I seemed to find this even more oppressive than
the southerly desertion. For one thing, the people were more hideous and
abnormal than those near the centre of the town; so that I was several times
evilly reminded of something utterly fantastic which I could not quite place.
Undoubtedly the alien strain in the Innsmouth folk was stronger here than
farther inland--unless, indeed, the "Innsmouth look" were a disease rather than
a blood stain, in which case this district might be held to harbour the more
advanced cases.

One detail that annoyed me was the distribution of the few faint sounds I heard.
They ought naturally to have come wholly from the visibly inhabited houses, yet
in reality were often strongest inside the most rigidly boarded-up facades.
There were creakings, scurryings, and hoarse doubtful noises; and I thought
uncomfortably about the hidden tunnels suggested by the grocery boy. Suddenly I
found myself wondering what the voices of those denizens would be like. I had
heard no speech so far in this quarter, and was unaccountably anxious not to do
so.

Pausing only long enough to look at two fine but ruinous old churches at Main
and Church Streets, I hastened out of that vile waterfront slum. My next logical
goal was New Church Green, but somehow or other I could not bear to repass the
church in whose basement I had glimpsed the inexplicably frightening form of
that strangely diademmed priest or pastor. Besides, the grocery youth had told
me that churches, as well as the Order of Dagon Hall, were not advisable
neighbourhoods for strangers.

Accordingly I kept north along Main to Martin, then turning inland, crossing
Federal Street safely north of the Green, and entering the decayed patrician
neighbourhood of northern Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams Streets.
Though these stately old avenues were ill-surfaced and unkempt, their elm-shaded
dignity had not entirely departed. Mansion after mansion claimed my gaze, most
of them decrepit and boarded up amidst neglected grounds, but one or two in each
street shewing signs of occupancy. In Washington Street there was a row of four
or five in excellent repair and with finely-tended lawns and gardens. The most
sumptuous of these--with wide terraced parterres extending back the whole way to
Lafayette Street--I took to be the home of Old Man Marsh, the afflicted refinery
owner.

In all these streets no living thing was visible, and I wondered at the complete
absence of cats and dogs from Innsmouth. Another thing which puzzled and
disturbed me, even in some of the best-preserved mansions, was the tightly
shuttered condition of many third-story and attic windows. Furtiveness and
secretiveness seemed universal in this hushed city of alienage and death, and I
could not escape the sensation of being watched from ambush on every hand by
sly, staring eyes that never shut.

I shivered as the cracked stroke of three sounded from a belfry on my left. Too
well did I recall the squat church from which those notes came. Following
Washington Street toward the river, I now faced a new zone of former industry
and commerce; noting the ruins of a factory ahead, and seeing others, with the
traces of an old railway station and covered railway bridge beyond, up the gorge
on my right.

The uncertain bridge now before me was posted with a warning sign, but I took
the risk and crossed again to the south bank where traces of life reappeared.
Furtive, shambling creatures stared cryptically in my direction, and more normal
faces eyed me coldly and curiously. Innsmouth was rapidly becoming intolerable,
and I turned down Paine Street toward the Square in the hope of getting some
vehicle to take me to Arkham before the still-distant starting-time of that
sinister bus.

It was then that I saw the tumbledown fire station on my left, and noticed the
red faced, bushy-bearded, watery eyed old man in nondescript rags who sat on a
bench in front of it talking with a pair of unkempt but not abnormal looking
firemen. This, of course, must be Zadok Allen, the half-crazed, liquorish
nonagenarian whose tales of old Innsmouth and its shadow were so hideous and
incredible.

III

It must have been some imp of the perverse--or some sardonic pull from dark,
hidden sources--which made me change my plans as I did. I had long before
resolved to limit my observations to architecture alone, and I was even then
hurrying toward the Square in an effort to get quick transportation out of this
festering city of death and decay; but the sight of old Zadok Allen set up new
currents in my mind and made me slacken my pace uncertainly.

I had been assured that the old man could do nothing but hint at wild,
disjointed, and incredible legends, and I had been warned that the natives made
it unsafe to be seen talking with him; yet the thought of this aged witness to
the town's decay, with memories going back to the early days of ships and
factories, was a lure that no amount of reason could make me resist. After all,
the strangest and maddest of myths are often merely symbols or allegories based
upon truth--and old Zadok must have seen everything which went on around
Innsmouth for the last ninety years. Curiosity flared up beyond sense and
caution, and in my youthful egotism I fancied I might be able to sift a nucleus
of real history from the confused, extravagant outpouring I would probably
extract with the aid of raw whiskey.

I knew that I could not accost him then and there, for the firemen would surely
notice and object. Instead, I reflected, I would prepare by getting some bootleg
liquor at a place where the grocery boy had told me it was plentiful. Then I
would loaf near the fire station in apparent casualness, and fall in with old
Zadok after he had started on one of his frequent rambles. The youth had said
that he was very restless, seldom sitting around the station for more than an
hour or two at a time.

A quart bottle of whiskey was easily, though not cheaply, obtained in the rear
of a dingy variety-store just off the Square in Eliot Street. The dirty-looking
fellow who waited on me had a touch of the staring "Innsmouth look", but was
quite civil in his way; being perhaps used to the custom of such convivial
strangers--truckmen, gold-buyers, and the like--as were occasionally in town.

Reentering the Square I saw that luck was with me; for--shuffling out of Paine
Street around the corner of the Gilman House--I glimpsed nothing less than the
tall, lean, tattered form of old Zadok Allen himself. In accordance with my
plan, I attracted his attention by brandishing my newly-purchased bottle: and
soon realised that he had begun to shuffle wistfully after me as I turned into
Waite Street on my way to the most deserted region I could think of.

I was steering my course by the map the grocery boy had prepared, and was aiming
for the wholly abandoned stretch of southern waterfront which I had previously
visited. The only people in sight there had been the fishermen on the distant
breakwater; and by going a few squares south I could get beyond the range of
these, finding a pair of seats on some abandoned wharf and being free to
question old Zadok unobserved for an indefinite time. Before I reached Main
Street I could hear a faint and wheezy "Hey, Mister!" behind me and I presently
allowed the old man to catch up and take copious pulls from the quart bottle.

I began putting out feelers as we walked amidst the omnipresent desolation and
crazily tilted ruins, but found that the aged tongue did not loosen as quickly
as I had expected. At length I saw a grass-grown opening toward the sea between
crumbling brick walls, with the weedy length of an earth-and-masonry wharf
projecting beyond. Piles of moss-covered stones near the water promised
tolerable seats, and the scene was sheltered from all possible view by a ruined
warehouse on the north. Here, I thought was the ideal place for a long secret
colloquy; so I guided my companion down the lane and picked out spots to sit in
among the mossy stones. The air of death and desertion was ghoulish, and the
smell of fish almost insufferable; but I was resolved to let nothing deter me.

About four hours remained for conversation if I were to catch the eight o'clock
coach for Arkham, and I began to dole out more liquor to the ancient tippler;
meanwhile eating my own frugal lunch. In my donations I was careful not to
overshoot the mark, for I did not wish Zadok's vinous garrulousness to pass into
a stupor. After an hour his furtive taciturnity shewed signs of disappearing,
but much to my disappointment he still sidetracked my questions about Innsmouth
and its shadow-haunted past. He would babble of current topics, revealing a wide
acquaintance with newspapers and a great tendency to philosophise in a
sententious village fashion.

Toward the end of the second hour I feared my quart of whiskey would not be
enough to produce results, and was wondering whether I had better leave old
Zadok and go back for more. Just then, however, chance made the opening which my
questions had been unable to make; and the wheezing ancient's rambling took a
turn that caused me to lean forward and listen alertly. My back was toward the
fishy-smelling sea, but he was facing it and something or other had caused his
wandering gaze to light on the low, distant line of Devil Reef, then showing
plainly and almost fascinatingly above the waves. The sight seemed to displease
him, for he began a series of weak curses which ended in a confidential whisper
and a knowing leer. He bent toward me, took hold of my coat lapel, and hissed
out some hints that could not be mistaken,

"Thar's whar it all begun--that cursed place of all wickedness whar the deep
water starts. Gate o' hell--sheer drop daown to a bottom no saoundin'-line kin
tech. Ol' Cap'n Obed done it--him that faound aout more'n was good fer him in
the Saouth Sea islands.

"Everybody was in a bad way them days. Trade fallin' off, mills losin'
business--even the new ones--an' the best of our menfolks kilt aprivateerin' in
the War of 1812 or lost with the Elizy brig an' the Ranger scow--both on 'em
Gilman venters. Obed Marsh he had three ships afloat--brigantine Columby, brig
Hefty, an' barque Sumatry Queen. He was the only one as kep' on with the
East-Injy an' Pacific trade, though Esdras Martin's barkentine Malay Bride made
a venter as late as twenty-eight.

"Never was nobody like Cap'n Obed--old limb o' Satan! Heh, heh! I kin mind him
a-tellin' abaout furren parts, an' callin' all the folks stupid for goin' to
Christian meetin' an' bearin' their burdens meek an' lowly. Says they'd orter
git better gods like some o' the folks in the Injies--gods as ud bring 'em good
fishin' in return for their sacrifices, an' ud reely answer folks's prayers.

"Matt Eliot, his fust mate, talked a lot too, only he was again' folks's doin'
any heathen things. Told abaout an island east of Othaheite whar they was a lot
o' stone ruins older'n anybody knew anything abaout, kind o' like them on
Ponape, in the Carolines, but with carven's of faces that looked like the big
statues on Easter Island. Thar was a little volcanic island near thar, too, whar
they was other ruins with diff'rent carvin'--ruins all wore away like they'd ben
under the sea onct, an' with picters of awful monsters all over 'em.

"Wal, Sir, Matt he says the natives araound thar had all the fish they cud
ketch, an' sported bracelets an' armlets an' head rigs made aout o' a queer kind
o' gold an' covered with picters o' monsters jest like the ones carved over the
ruins on the little island--sorter fish-like frogs or froglike fishes that was
drawed in all kinds o' positions likes they was human bein's. Nobody cud get
aout o' them whar they got all the stuff, an' all the other natives wondered
haow they managed to find fish in plenty even when the very next island had lean
pickin's. Matt he got to wonderon' too an' so did Cap'n Obed. Obed he notices,
besides, that lots of the hn'some young folks ud drop aout o' sight fer good
from year to year, an' that they wan't many old folks around. Also, he thinks
some of the folks looked durned queer even for Kanakys.

"It took Obed to git the truth aout o' them heathen. I dun't know haow he done
it, but he begun by tradin' fer the gold-like things they wore. Ast 'em whar
they come from, an' ef they cud git more, an' finally wormed the story aout o'
the old chief--Walakea, they called him. Nobody but Obed ud ever a believed the
old yeller devil, but the Cap'n cud read folks like they was books. Heh, heh!
Nobody never believes me naow when I tell 'em, an' I dun't s'pose you will,
young feller--though come to look at ye, ye hev kind o' got them sharp-readin'
eyes like Obed had."

The old man's whisper grew fainter, and I found myself shuddering at the
terrible and sincere portentousness of his intonation, even though I knew his
tale could be nothing but drunken phantasy.

"Wal, Sir, Obed he larnt that they's things on this arth as most folks never
heerd about--an' wouldn't believe ef they did hear. It seems these Kanakys was
sacrificin' heaps o' their young men an' maidens to some kind o' god-things that
lived under the sea, an' gittin' all kinds o' favour in return. They met the
things on the little islet with the queer ruins, an' it seems them awful picters
o' frog-fish monsters was supposed to be picters o' these things. Mebbe they was
the kind o' critters as got all the mermaid stories an' sech started.

"They had all kinds a' cities on the sea-bottom, an' this island was heaved up
from thar. Seem they was some of the things alive in the stone buildin's when
the island come up sudden to the surface, That's how the Kanakys got wind they
was daown thar. Made sign-talk as soon as they got over bein' skeert, an' pieced
up a bargain afore long.

"Them things liked human sacrifices. Had had 'em ages afore, but lost track o'
the upper world after a time. What they done to the victims it ain't fer me to
say, an' I guess Obed wa'n't none too sharp abaout askin'. But it was all right
with the heathens, because they'd ben havin' a hard time an' was desp'rate
abaout everything. They give a sarten number o' young folks to the sea-things
twice every year--May-Eve an' Hallawe'en--reg'lar as cud be. Also give some a'
the carved knick-knacks they made. What the things agreed to give in return was
plenty a' fish--they druv 'em in from all over the sea--an' a few gold-like
things naow an' then.

"Wal, as I says, the natives met the things on the little volcanic islet--goin'
thar in canoes with the sacrifices et cet'ry, and bringin' back any of the
gold-like jools as was comin' to 'em. At fust the things didn't never go onto
the main island, but arter a time they come to want to. Seems they hankered
arter mixin' with the folks, an' havin' j'int ceremonies on the big
days--May-Eve an' Hallowe'en. Ye see, they was able to live both in ant aout o'
water--what they call amphibians, I guess. The Kanakys told 'em as haow folks
from the other islands might wanta wipe 'an out if they got wind o' their bein'
thar, but they says they dun't keer much, because they cud wipe aout the hull
brood o' humans ef they was willin' to bother--that is, any as didn't be, sarten
signs sech as was used onct by the lost Old Ones, whoever they was. But not
wantin' to bother, they'd lay low when anybody visited the island.

"When it come to matin' with them toad-lookin' fishes, the Kanakys kind o'
balked, but finally they larnt something as put a new face on the matter. Seems
that human folks has got a kind a' relation to sech water-beasts--that
everything alive come aout o' the water onct an' only needs a little change to
go back agin. Them things told the Kanakys that ef they mixed bloods there'd be
children as ud look human at fust, but later turn more'n more like the things,
till finally they'd take to the water an' jine the main lot o' things daown har.
An' this is the important part, young feller--them as turned into fish things
an' went into the water wouldn't never die. Them things never died excep' they
was kilt violent.

"Wal, Sir, it seems by the time Obed knowed them islanders they was all full o'
fish blood from them deep-water things. When they got old an' begun to shew it,
they was kep' hid until they felt like takin' to the water an' quittin' the
place. Some was more teched than others, an' some never did change quite enough
to take to the water; but mosily they turned out jest the way them things said.
Them as was born more like the things changed arly, but them as was nearly human
sometimes stayed on the island till they was past seventy, though they'd usually
go daown under for trial trips afore that. Folks as had took to the water
gen'rally come back a good deal to visit, so's a man ud often be a'talkin' to
his own five-times-great-grandfather who'd left the dry land a couple o' hundred
years or so afore.

"Everybody got aout o' the idee o' dyin'--excep' in canoe wars with the other
islanders, or as sacrifices to the sea-gods daown below, or from snakebite or
plague or sharp gallopin' ailments or somethin' afore they cud take to the
water--but simply looked forrad to a kind o' change that wa'n't a bit horrible
arter a while. They thought what they'd got was well wuth all they'd had to give
up--an' I guess Obed kind o' come to think the same hisself when he'd chewed
over old Walakea's story a bit. Walakea, though, was one of the few as hadn't
got none of the fish blood--bein' of a royal line that intermarried with royal
lines on other islands.

"Walakea he shewed Obed a lot o' rites an' incantations as had to do with the
sea things, an' let him see some o' the folks in the village as had changed a
lot from human shape. Somehaow or other, though, he never would let him see one
of the reg'lar things from right aout o' the water. In the end he give him a
funny kind o' thingumajig made aout o' lead or something, that he said ud bring
up the fish things from any place in the water whar they might be a nest o' 'em.
The idee was to drop it daown with the right kind o' prayers an' sech. Walakea
allowed as the things was scattered all over the world, so's anybody that looked
abaout cud find a nest an' bring 'em up ef they was wanted.

"Matt he didn't like this business at all, an' wanted Obed shud keep away from
the island; but the Cap'n was sharp fer gain, an' faound he cud get them
gold-like things so cheap it ud pay him to make a specialty of them. Things went
on that way for years an' Obed got enough o' that gold-like stuff to make him
start the refinery in Waite's old run-daown fullin' mill. He didn't dass sell
the pieces like they was, for folks ud be all the time askin' questions. All the
same his crews ud get a piece an' dispose of it naow and then, even though they
was swore to keep quiet; an' he let his women-folks wear some o' the pieces as
was more human-like than most.

"Well, come abaout thutty-eight--when I was seven year' old--Obed he faound the
island people all wiped aout between v'yages. Seems the other islanders had got
wind o' what was goin' on, and had took matters into their own hands. S'pose
they must a had, after all, them old magic signs as the sea things says was the
only things they was afeard of. No tellin' what any o' them Kanakys will chance
to git a holt of when the sea-bottom throws up some island with ruins older'n
the deluge. Pious cusses, these was--they didn't leave nothin' standin' on
either the main island or the little volcanic islet excep' what parts of the
ruins was too big to knock daown. In some places they was little stones strewed
abaout--like charms--with somethin' on 'em like what ye call a swastika
naowadays. Prob'ly them was the Old Ones' signs. Folks all wiped aout no trace
o' no gold-like things an' none the nearby Kanakys ud breathe a word abaout the
matter. Wouldn't even admit they'd ever ben any people on that island.

"That naturally hit Obed pretty hard, seein' as his normal trade was doin' very
poor. It hit the whole of Innsmouth, too, because in seafarint days what
profited the master of a ship gen'lly profited the crew proportionate. Most of
the folks araound the taown took the hard times kind o' sheep-like an' resigned,
but they was in bad shape because the fishin' was peterin' aout an' the mills
wan't doin' none too well.

"Then's the time Obed he begun a-cursin' at the folks fer bein' dull sheep an'
prayin' to a Christian heaven as didn't help 'em none. He told 'em he'd knowed
o' folks as prayed to gods that give somethin' ye reely need, an' says ef a good
bunch o' men ud stand by him, he cud mebbe get a holt o' sarten paowers as ud
bring plenty o' fish an' quite a bit of gold. O' course them as sarved on the
Sumatry Queen, an' seed the island knowed what he meant, an' wa'n't none too
anxious to get clost to sea-things like they'd heard tell on, but them as didn't
know what 'twas all abaout got kind o' swayed by what Obed had to say, and begun
to ast him what he cud do to sit 'em on the way to the faith as ud bring 'em
results."

Here the old man faltered, mumbled, and lapsed into a moody and apprehensive
silence; glancing nervously over his shoulder and then turning back to stare
fascinatedly at the distant black reef. When I spoke to him he did not answer,
so I knew I would have to let him finish the bottle. The insane yarn I was
hearing interested me profoundly, for I fancied there was contained within it a
sort of crude allegory based upon the strangeness of Innsmouth and elaborated by
an imagination at once creative and full of scraps of exotic legend. Not for a
moment did I believe that the tale had any really substantial foundation; but
none the less the account held a hint of genuine terror if only because it
brought in references to strange jewels clearly akin to the malign tiara I had
seen at Newburyport. Perhaps the ornaments had, after all, come from some
strange island; and possibly the wild stories were lies of the bygone Obed
himself rather than of this antique toper.

I handed Zadok the bottle, and he drained it to the last drop. It was curious
how he could stand so much whiskey, for not even a trace of thickness had come
into his high, wheezy voice. He licked the nose of the bottle and slipped it
into his pocket, then beginning to nod and whisper softly to himself. I bent
close to catch any articulate words he might utter, and thought I saw a sardonic
smile behind the stained bushy whiskers. Yes--he was really forming words, and I
could grasp a fair proportion of them.

"Poor Matt--Matt he allus was agin it--tried to line up the folks on his side,
an' had long talks with the preachers--no use--they run the Congregational
parson aout o' taown, an' the Methodist feller quit--never did see Resolved
Babcock, the Baptist parson, agin--Wrath o' Jehovy--I was a mightly little
critter, but I heerd what I heerd an, seen what I seen--Dagon an'
Ashtoreth--Belial an' Beelzebub--Golden Caff an' the idols o' Canaan an' the
Philistines--Babylonish abominations--Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin--."

He stopped again, and from the look in his watery blue eyes I feared he was
close to a stupor after all. But when I gently shook his shoulder he turned on
me with astonishing alertness and snapped out some more obscure phrases.

"Dun't believe me, hey? Hey, heh, heh--then jest tell me, young feller, why
Cap'n Obed an' twenty odd other folks used to row aout to Devil Reef in the dead
o' night an' chant things so laoud ye cud hear 'em all over taown when the wind
was right? Tell me that, hey? An' tell me why Obed was allus droppin' heavy
things daown into the deep water t'other side o' the reef whar the bottom shoots
daown like a cliff lower'n ye kin saound? Tell me what he done with that
funny-shaped lead thingumajig as Walakea give him? Hey, boy? An' what did they
all haowl on May-Eve, an, agin the next Hallowe'en? An' why'd the new church
parsons--fellers as used to be sailors--wear them queer robes an' cover
their-selves with them gold-like things Obed brung? Hey?"

The watery blue eyes were almost savage and maniacal now, and the dirty white
beard bristled electrically. Old Zadok probably saw me shrink back, for he began
to cackle evilly.

"Heh, heh, heh, heh! Beginnin' to see, hey? Mebbe ye'd like to a ben me in them
days, when I seed things at night aout to sea from the cupalo top o' my haouse.
Oh, I kin tell ye' little pitchers hev big ears, an' I wa'n't missin' nothin' o'
what was gossiped abaout Cap'n Obed an' the folks aout to the reef! Heh, heh,
heh! Haow abaout the night I took my pa's ship's glass up to the cupalo an' seed
the reef a-bristlin' thick with shapes that dove off quick soon's the moon riz?

"Obed an' the folks was in a dory, but them shapes dove off the far side into
the deep water an' never come up...

"Haow'd ye like to be a little shaver alone up in a cupola a-watchin' shapes as
wa'n't human shapes?...Heh?...Heh, heh, heh ..."

The old man was getting hysterical, and I began to shiver with a nameless alarm.
He laid a gnarled claw on my shoulder, and it seemed to me that its shaking was
not altogether that of mirth.

"S'pose one night ye seed somethin' heavy heaved offen Obed's dory beyond the
reef' and then learned next day a young feller was missin' from home. Hey! Did
anybody ever see hide or hair o' Hiram Gilman agin. Did they? An' Nick Pierce,
an' Luelly Waite, an' Adoniram Saouthwick, an' Henry Garrison. Hey? Heh, heh,
heh, heh...Shapes talkin' sign language with their hands...them as had reel
hands ...

"Wal, Sir, that was the time Obed begun to git on his feet agin. Folks see his
three darters a-wearin' gold-like things as nobody'd never see on 'em afore, an'
smoke stared comin' aout o' the refin'ry chimbly. Other folks was prosp'rin,
too--fish begun to swarm into the harbour fit to kill an' heaven knows what
sized cargoes we begun to ship aout to Newb'ryport, Arkham, an' Boston. 'Twas
then Obed got the ol' branch railrud put through. Some Kingsport fishermen heerd
abaout the ketch an' come up in sloops, but they was all lost. Nobody never see
'em agin. An' jest then our folk organised the Esoteric Order 0' Dagon, an'
bought Masonic Hall offen Calvary Commandery for it...heh, heh, heh! Matt Eliot
was a Mason an' agin the sellin', but he dropped aout o' sight jest then.

"Remember, I ain't sayin' Obed was set on hevin' things jest like they was on
that Kanaky isle. I dun't think he aimed at fust to do no mixin', nor raise no
younguns to take to the water an' turn into fishes with eternal life. He wanted
them gold things, an' was willin' to pay heavy, an' I guess the others was
satisfied fer a while ...

"Come in' forty-six the taown done some lookin' an' thinkin' fer itself. Too
many folks missin'--too much wild preachin' at meetin' of a Sunday--too much
talk abaout that reef. I guess I done a bit by tellin' Selectman Mowry what I
see from the cupalo. They was a party one night as follered Obed's craowd aout
to the reef, an' I heerd shots betwixt the dories. Nex' day Obed and thutty-two
others was in gaol, with everybody a-wonderin' jest what was afoot and jest what
charge agin 'em cud he got to holt. God, ef anybody'd look'd ahead...a couple o'
weeks later, when nothin' had ben throwed into the sea fer thet long..."

Zadok was shewing sings of fright and exhaustion, and I let him keep silence for
a while, though glancing apprehensively at my watch. The tide had turned and was
coming in now, and the sound of the waves seemed to arouse him. I was glad of
that tide, for at high water the fishy smell might not be so bad. Again I
strained to catch his whispers.

"That awful night...I seed 'em. I was up in the cupalo...hordes of 'em...swarms
of 'em...all over the reef an' swimmin' up the harbour into the Manuxet...God,
what happened in the streets of Innsmouth that night...they rattled our door,
but pa wouldn't open...then he clumb aout the kitchen winder with his musket to
find Selecman Mowry an' see what he cud do...Maounds o' the dead an' the
dyin'...shots and screams...shaoutin' in Ol Squar an' Taown Squar an' New Church
Green--gaol throwed open...--proclamation...treason...called it the plague when
folks come in an' faoud haff our people missin'...nobody left but them as ud
jine in with Obed an' them things or else keep quiet...never heard o' my pa no
more..."

The old man was panting and perspiring profusely. His grip on my shoulder
tightened.

"Everything cleaned up in the mornin'--but they was traces...Obed he kinder
takes charge an' says things is goin' to be changed... others'll worship with us
at meetin'-time, an' sarten haouses hez got to entertin guests...they wanted to
mix like they done with the Kanakys, an' he for one didn't feel baound to stop
'em. Far gone, was Obed...jest like a crazy man on the subjeck. He says they
brung us fish an' treasure, an' shud hev what they hankered after..."

"Nothin' was to be diff'runt on the aoutside; only we was to keep shy o'
strangers ef we knowed what was good fer us.

"We all hed to take the Oath o' Dagon, an' later on they was secon' an' third
oaths that some o' us took. Them as ud help special, ud git special
rewards--gold an' sech--No use balkin', fer they was millions of 'em daown thar.
They'd ruther not start risin' an' wipin' aout human-kind, but ef they was gave
away an' forced to, they cud do a lot toward jest that. We didn't hev them old
charms to cut 'em off like folks in the Saouth Sea did, an' them Kanakys wudn't
never give away their secrets.

"Yield up enough sacrifices an' savage knick-knacks an' harbourage in the taown
when they wanted it, an' they'd let well enough alone. Wudn't bother no
strangers as might bear tales aoutside--that is, withaout they got pryin'. All
in the band of the faithful--Order 0' Dagon--an' the children shud never die,
but go back to the Mother Hydra an' Father Dagon what we all come from
onct...Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl
fhtaga--"

Old Zadok was fast lapsing into stark raving, and I held my breath. Poor old
soul--to what pitiful depths of hallucination had his liquor, plus his hatred of
the decay, alienage, and disease around him, brought that fertile, imaginative
brain? He began to moan now, and tears were coursing down his channelled checks
into the depths of his beard.

"God, what I seen senct I was fifteen year' old--Mene, mene, tekel,
upharsin!--the folks as was missin', and them as kilt theirselves--them as told
things in Arkham or Ipswich or sech places was all called crazy, like you're
callin' me right naow--but God, what I seen--They'd a kilt me long ago fer' what
I know, only I'd took the fust an' secon' Oaths o' Dago offen Obed, so was
pertected unlessen a jury of 'em proved I told things knowin' an'
delib'rit...but I wudn't take the third Oath--I'd a died ruther'n take that--

"It got wuss araound Civil War time, when children born senct 'forty-six begun
to grow up--some 'em, that is. I was afeared--never did no pryin' arter that
awful night, an' never see one o'--them--clost to in all my life. That is, never
no full-blooded one. I went to the war, an' ef I'd a had any guts or sense I'd a
never come back, but settled away from here. But folks wrote me things wa'n't so
bad. That, I s'pose, was because gov'munt draft men was in taown arter
'sixty-three. Arter the war it was jest as bad agin. People begun to fall
off--mills an' shops shet daown--shippin' stopped an' the harbour choked
up--railrud give up--but they...they never stopped swimmin' in an' aout o' the
river from that cursed reef o' Satan--an' more an' more attic winders got
a-boarded up, an' more an' more noises was heerd in haouses as wa'n't s'posed to
hev nobody in 'em...

"Folks aoutside hev their stories abaout us--s'pose you've heerd a plenty on
'em, seein' what questions ye ast--stories abaout things they've seed naow an'
then, an' abaout that queer joolry as still comes in from somewhars an' ain't
quite all melted up--but nothin' never gits def'nite. Nobody'll believe nothin'.
They call them gold-like things pirate loot, an' allaow the Innsmouth folks hez
furren blood or is dis-tempered or somethin'. Beside, them that lives here shoo
off as many strangers as they kin, an' encourage the rest not to git very
cur'ous, specially raound night time. Beasts balk at the critters--hosses wuss'n
mules--but when they got autos that was all right.

"In 'forty-six Cap'n Obed took a second wife that nobody in the taown never
see--some says he didn't want to, but was made to by them as he'd called in--had
three children by her--two as disappeared young, but one gal as looked like
anybody else an' was eddicated in Europe. Obed finally got her married off by a
trick to an Arkham feller as didn't suspect nothin'. But nobody aoutside'll hav
nothin' to do with Innsmouth folks naow. Barnabas Marsh that runs the refin'ry
now is Obed's grandson by his fust wife--son of Onesiphorus, his eldest son, but
his mother was another o' them as wa'n't never seen aoutdoors.

"Right naow Barnabas is abaout changed. Can't shet his eyes no more, an' is all
aout o' shape. They say he still wears clothes, but he'll take to the water
soon. Mebbe he's tried it already--they do sometimes go daown for little spells
afore they go daown for good. Ain't ben seed abaout in public fer nigh on ten
year'. Dun't know haow his poor wife kin feel--she come from Ipiwich, an' they
nigh lynched Barnabas when he courted her fifty odd year' ago. Obed he died in
'seventy-eight an' all the next gen'ration is gone naow--the fust wife's
children dead, and the rest...God knows..."

The sound of the incoming tide was now very insistent, and little by little it
seemed to change the old man's mood from maudlin tearfulness to watchful fear.
He would pause now and then to renew those nervous glances over his shoulder or
out toward the reef, and despite the wild absurdity of his tale, I could not
help beginning to share his apprehensiveness. Zadok now grew shriller, seemed to
be trying to whip up his courage with louder speech.

"Hey, yew, why dun't ye say somethin'? Haow'd ye like to be livin' in a taown
like this, with everything a-rottin' an' dyin', an' boarded-up monsters crawlin'
an' bleatin' an' barkin' an' hoppin' araoun' black cellars an' attics every way
ye turn? Hey? Haow'd ye like to hear the haowlin' night arter night from the
churches an' Order o' Dagon Hall, an' know what's doin' part o' the haowlin'?
Haow'd ye like to hear what comes from that awful reef every May-Eve an'
Hallowmass? Hey? Think the old man's crazy, eh? Wal, Sir, let me tell ye that
ain't the wust!"

Zadok was really screaming now, and the mad frenzy of his voice disturbed me
more than I care to own.

"Curse ye, dun't set thar a'starin' at me with them eyes--I tell Obed Marsh he's
in hell, an, hez got to stay thar! Heh, heh...in hell, I says! Can't git me--I
hain't done nothin' nor told nobody nothin'--

"Oh, you, young feller? Wal, even ef I hain't told nobody nothin' yet, I'm
a'goin' to naow! Yew jest set still an' listen to me, boy--this is what I ain't
never told nobody...I says I didn't get to do pryin' arter that night--but I
faound things about jest the same!"

"Yew want to know what the reel horror is, hey? Wal, it's this--it ain't what
them fish devils hez done, but what they're a-goin' to do! They're a-bringin'
things up aout o' whar they come from into the taown--been doin' it fer years,
an' slackenin' up lately. Them haouses north o' the river be-twixt Water an'
Main Streets is full of 'em--them devils an' what they brung--an' when they git
ready...I say, when they git...ever hear tell of a shoggoth?

"Hey, d'ye hear me? I tell ye I know what them things be--I seen 'em one night
when...eh-ahhh-ah! e'yahhh..."

The hideous suddenness and inhuman frightfulness of the old man's shriek almost
made me faint. His eyes, looking past me toward the malodorous sea, were
positively starting from his head; while his face was a mask of fear worthy of
Greek tragedy. His bony claw dug monstrously into my shoulder, and he made no
motion as I turned my head to look at whatever he had glimpsed.

There was nothing that I could see. Only the incoming tide, with perhaps one set
of ripples more local than the long-flung line of breakers. But now Zadok was
shaking me, and I turned back to watch the melting of that fear-frozen face into
a chaos of twitching eyelids and mumbling gums. Presently his voice came
back--albeit as a trembling whisper.

"Git aout o' here! Get aout o' here! They seen us--git aout fer your life! Dun't
wait fer nothin'--they know naow--Run fer it--quick--aout o' this taown--"

Another heavy wave dashed against the loosing masonry of the bygone wharf, and
changed the mad ancient's whisper to another inhuman and blood-curdling scream.
"E-yaahhhh!...Yheaaaaaa!..."

Before I could recover my scattered wits he had relaxed his clutch on my
shoulder and dashed wildly inland toward the street, reeling northward around
the ruined warehouse wall.

I glanced back at the sea, but there was nothing there. And when I reached Water
Street and looked along it toward the north there was no remaining trace of
Zadok Allen.

IV

I can hardly describe the mood in which I was left by this harrowing episode--an
episode at once mad and pitiful, grotesque and terrifying. The grocery boy had
prepared me for it, yet the reality left me none the less bewildered and
disturbed. Puerile though the story was, old Zadok's insane earnestness and
horror had communicated to me a mounting unrest which joined with my earlier
sense of loathing for the town and its blight of intangible shadow.

Later I might sift the tale and extract some nucleus of historic allegory; just
now I wished to put it out of my head. The hour grown perilously late--my watch
said 7:15, and the Arkham bus left Town Square at eight--so I tried to give my
thoughts as neutral and practical a cast as possible, meanwhile walking rapidly
through the deserted streets of gaping roofs and leaning houses toward the hotel
where I had checked my valise and would find my bus.

Though the golden light of late afternoon gave the ancient roofs and decrepit
chimneys an air of mystic loveliness and peace, I could not help glancing over
my shoulder now and then. I would surely be very glad to get out of malodorous
and fear-shadowed Innsmouth, and wished there were some other vehicle than the
bus driven by that sinister-looking fellow Sargent. Yet I did not hurry too
precipitately, for there were architectural details worth viewing at every
silent corner; and I could easily, I calculated, cover the necessary distance in
a half-hour.

Studying the grocery youth's map and seeking a route I had not traversed before,
I chose Marsh Street instead of State for my approach to Town Square. Near the
corner of Fall Street I began to see scattered groups of furtive whisperers, and
when I finally reached the Square I saw that almost all the loiterers were
congregated around the door of the Gilman House. It seemed as if many bulging,
watery, unwinking eyes looked oddly at me as I claimed my valise in the lobby,
and I hoped that none of these unpleasant creatures would be my
fellow-passengers on the coach.

The bus, rather early, rattled in with three passengers somewhat before eight,
and an evil-looking fellow on the sidewalk muttered a few indistinguishable
words to the driver. Sargent threw out a mail-bag and a roll of newspapers, and
entered the hotel; while the passengers--the same men whom I had seen arriving
in Newburyport that morning--shambled to the sidewalk and exchanged some faint
guttural words with a loafer in a language I could have sworn was not English. I
boarded the empty coach and took the seat I had taken before, but was hardly
settled before Sargent re-appeared and began mumbling in a throaty voice of
peculiar repulsiveness.

I was, it appeared, in very bad luck. There had been something wrong with the
engine, despite the excellent time made from Newburyport, and the bus could not
complete the journey to Arkham. No, it could not possibly be repaired that
night, nor was there any other way of getting transportation out of Innsmouth
either to Arkham or elsewhere. Sargent was sorry, but I would have to stop over
at the Gilman. Probably the clerk would make the price easy for me, but there
was nothing else to do. Almost dazed by this sudden obstacle, and violently
dreading the fall of night in this decaying and half-unlighted town, I left the
bus and reentered the hotel lobby; where the sullen queer-looking night clerk
told me I could have Room 428 on next the top floor--large, but without running
water--for a dollar.

Despite what I had heard of this hotel in Newburyport, I signed the register,
paid my dollar, let the clerk take my valise, and followed that sour, solitary
attendant up three creaking flights of stairs past dusty corridors which seemed
wholly devoid of life. My room was a dismal rear one with two windows and bare,
cheap furnishings, overlooked a dingy court-yard otherwise hemmed in by low,
deserted brick blocks, and commanded a view of decrepit westward-stretching
roofs with a marshy countryside beyond. At the end of the corridor was a
bathroom--a discouraging relique with ancient marble bowl, tin tub, faint
electric light, and musty wooded paneling around all the plumbing fixtures.

It being still daylight, I descended to the Square and looked around for a
dinner of some sort; noticing as I did so the strange glances I received from
the unwholesome loafers. Since the grocery was closed, I was forced to patronise
the restaurant I had shunned before; a stooped, narrow-headed man with staring,
unwinking eyes, and a flat-nosed wench with unbelievably thick, clumsy hands
being in attendance. The service was all of the counter type, and it relieved me
to find that much was evidently served from cans and packages. A bowl of
vegetable soup with crackers was enough for me, and I soon headed back for my
cheerless room at the Gilman; getting a evening paper and a fly-specked magazine
from the evil-visaged clerk at the rickety stand beside his desk.

As twilight deepened I turned on the one feeble electric bulb over the cheap,
iron-framed bed, and tried as best I could to continue the reading I had begun.
I felt it advisable to keep my mind wholesomely occupied, for it would not do to
brood over the abnormalities of this ancient, blight-shadowed town while I was
still within its borders. The insane yarn I had heard from the aged drunkard did
not promise very pleasant dreams, and I felt I must keep the image of his wild,
watery eyes as far as possible from my imagination.

Also, I must not dwell on what that factory inspector had told the Newburyport
ticket-agent about the Gilman House and the voices of its nocturnal tenants--not
on that, nor on the face beneath the tiara in the black church doorway; the face
for whose horror my conscious mind could not account. It would perhaps have been
easier to keep my thoughts from disturbing topics had the room not been so
gruesomely musty. As it was, the lethal mustiness blended hideously with the
town's general fishy odour and persistently focussed one's fancy on death and
decay.

Another thing that disturbed me was the absence of a bolt on the door of my
room. One had been there, as marks clearly shewed, but there were signs of
recent removal. No doubt it had been out of order, like so many other things in
this decrepit edifice. In my nervousness I looked around and discovered a bolt
on the clothes press which seemed to be of the same size, judging from the
marks, as the one formerly on the door. To gain a partial relief from the
general tension I busied myself by transferring this hardware to the vacant
place with the aid of a handy three-in-one device including a screwdriver which
I kept on my key-ring. The bolt fitted perfectly, and I was somewhat relieved
when I knew that I could shoot it firmly upon retiring. Not that I had any real
apprehension of its need, but that any symbol of security was welcome in an
environment of this kind. There were adequate bolts on the two lateral doors to
connecting rooms, and these I proceeded to fasten.

I did not undress, but decided to read till I was sleepy and then lie down with
only my coat, collar, and shoes off. Taking a pocket flash light from my valise,
I placed it in my trousers, so that I could read my watch if I woke up later in
the dark. Drowsiness, however, did not come; and when I stopped to analyse my
thoughts I found to my disquiet that I was really unconsciously listening for
something--listening for something which I dreaded but could not name. That
inspector's story must have worked on my imagination more deeply than I had
suspected. Again I tried to read, but found that I made no progress.

After a time I seemed to hear the stairs and corridors creak at intervals as if
with footsteps, and wondered if the other rooms were beginning to fill up. There
were no voices, however, and it struck me that there was something subtly
furtive about the creaking. I did not like it, and debated whether I had better
try to sleep at all. This town had some queer people, and there had undoubtedly
been several disappearances. Was this one of those inns where travelers were
slain for their money? Surely I had no look of excessive prosperity. Or were the
towns folk really so resentful about curious visitors? Had my obvious
sightseeing, with its frequent map-consultations, aroused unfavorable notice. It
occurred to me that I must be in a highly nervous state to let a few random
creakings set me off speculating in this fashion--but I regretted none the less
that I was unarmed.

At length, feeling a fatigue which had nothing of drowsiness in it, I bolted the
newly outfitted hall door, turned off the light, and threw myself down on the
hard, uneven bed--coat, collar, shoes, and all. In the darkness every faint
noise of the night seemed magnified, and a flood of doubly unpleasant thoughts
swept over me. I was sorry I had put out the light, yet was too tired to rise
and turn it on again. Then, after a long, dreary interval, and prefaced by a
fresh creaking of stairs and corridor, there came that soft, damnably
unmistakable sound which seemed like a malign fulfillment of all my
apprehensions. Without the least shadow of a doubt, the lock of my door was
being tried--cautiously, furtively, tentatively--with a key.

My sensations upon recognising this sign of actual peril were perhaps less
rather than more tumultuous because of my previous vague fears. I had been,
albeit without definite reason, instinctively on my guard--and that was to my
advantage in the new and real crisis, whatever it might turn out to be.
Nevertheless the change in the menace from vague premonition to immediate
reality was a profound shock, and fell upon me with the force of a genuine blow.
It never once occurred to me that the fumbling might be a mere mistake. Malign
purpose was all I could think of, and I kept deathly quiet, awaiting the
would-be intruder's next move.

After a time the cautious rattling ceased, and I heard the room to the north
entered with a pass-key. Then the lock of the connecting door to my room was
softly tried. The bolt held, of course, and I heard the floor creak as the
prowler left the room. After a moment there came another soft rattling, and I
knew that the room to the south of me was being entered. Again a furtive trying
of a bolted connecting door, and again a receding creaking. This time the
creaking went along the hall and down the stairs, so I knew that the prowler had
realised the bolted condition of my doors and was giving up his attempt for a
greater or lesser time, as the future would shew.

The readiness with which I fell into a plan of action proves that I must have
been subconsciously fearing some menace and considering possible avenues of
escape for hours. From the first I felt that the unseen fumbler meant a danger
not to be met or dealt with, but only to be fled from as precipitately as
possible. The one thing to do was to get out of that hotel alive as quickly as I
could, and through some channel other than the front stairs and lobby.

Rising softly and throwing my flashlight on the switch, I sought to light the
bulb over my bed in order to choose and pocket some belongings for a swift,
valiseless flight. Nothing, however, happened; and I saw that the power had been
cut off. Clearly, some cryptic, evil movement was afoot on a large scale--just
what, I could not say. As I stood pondering with my hand on the now useless
switch I heard a muffled creaking on the floor below, and thought I could barely
distinguish voices in conversation. A moment later I felt less sure that the
deeper sounds were voices, since the apparent hoarse barkings and
loose-syllabled croakings bore so little resemblance to recognized human speech.
Then I thought with renewed force of what the factory inspector had heard in the
night in this mouldering and pestilential building.

Having filled my pockets with the flashlight's aid, I put on my hat and tiptoed
to the windows to consider chances of descent. Despite the state's safety
regulations there was no fire escape on this side of the hotel, and I saw that
my windows commanded only a sheer three story drop to the cobbled courtyard. On
the right and left, however, some ancient brick business blocks abutted on the
hotel; their slant roofs coming up to a reasonable jumping distance from my
fourth-story level. To reach either of these lines of buildings I would have to
be in a room two from my own--in one case on the north and in the other case on
the south--and my mind instantly set to work what chances I had of making the
transfer.

I could not, I decided, risk an emergence into the corridor; where my footsteps
would surely be heard, and where the difficulties of entering the desired room
would be insuperable. My progress, if it was to be made at all, would have to be
through the less solidly-built connecting doors of the rooms; the locks and
bolts of which I would have to force violently, using my shoulder as a
battering-ram whenever they were set against me. This, I thought, would be
possible owing to the rickety nature of the house and its fixtures; but I
realised I could not do it noiselessly. I would have to count on sheer speed,
and the chance of getting to a window before any hostile forces became
coordinated enough to open the right door toward me with a pass-key. My own
outer door I reinforced by pushing the bureau against it--little by little, in
order to make a minimum of sound.

I perceived that my chances were very slender, and was fully prepared for any
calamity. Even getting to another roof would not solve the problem for there
would then remain the task of reaching the ground and escaping from the town.
One thing in my favour was the deserted and ruinous state of the abutting
building and the number of skylights gaping blackly open in each row.

Gathering from the grocery boy's map that the best route out of town was
southward, I glanced first at the connecting door on the south side of the room.
It was designed to open in my direction, hence I saw--after drawing the bolt and
finding other fastening in place--it was not a favorable one for forcing.
Accordingly abandoning it as a route, I cautiously moved the bedstead against it
to hamper any attack which might be made on it later from the next room. The
door on the north was hung to open away from me, and this--though a test proved
it to be locked or bolted from the other side--I knew must be my route. If I
could gain the roofs of the buildings in Paine Street and descend successfully
to the ground level, I might perhaps dart through the courtyard and the adjacent
or opposite building to Washington or Bates--or else emerge in Paine and edge
around southward into Washington. In any case, I would aim to strike Washington
somehow and get quickly out of the Town Square region. My preference would be to
avoid Paine, since the fire station there might be open all night.

As I thought of these things I looked out over the squalid sea of decaying roofs
below me, now brightened by the beams of a moon not much past full. On the right
the black gash of the river-gorge clove the panorama; abandoned factories and
railway station clinging barnacle-like to its sides. Beyond it the rusted
railway and the Rowley road led off through a flat marshy terrain dotted with
islets of higher and dryer scrub-grown land. On the left the creek-threaded
country-side was nearer, the narrow road to Ipswich gleaming white in the
moonlight. I could not see from my side of the hotel the southward route toward
Arkham which I had determined to take.

I was irresolutely speculating on when I had better attack the northward door,
and on how I could least audibly manage it, when I noticed that the vague noises
underfoot had given place to a fresh and heavier creaking of the stairs. A
wavering flicker of light shewed through my transom, and the boards of the
corridor began to groan with a ponderous load. Muffled sounds of possible vocal
origin approached, and at length a firm knock came at my outer door.

For a moment I simply held my breath and waited. Eternities seemed to elapse,
and the nauseous fishy odour of my environment seemed to mount suddenly and
spectacularly. Then the knocking was repeated--continuously, and with growing
insistence. I knew that the time for action had come, and forthwith drew the
bolt of the northward connecting door, bracing myself for the task of battering
it open. The knocking waxed louder, and I hoped that its volume would cover the
sound of my efforts. At last beginning my attempt, I lunged again and again at
the thin paneling with my left shoulder, heedless of shock or pain. The door
resisted even more than I expected, but I did not give in. And all the while the
clamour at the outer door increased.

Finally the connecting door gave, but with such a crash that I knew those
outside must have heard. Instantly the outside knocking became a violent
battering, while keys sounded ominously in the hall doors of the rooms on both
sides of me. Rushing through the newly opened connexion, I succeeded in bolting
the northerly hall door before the lock could be turned; but even as I did so I
heard the hall door of the third room--the one from whose window I had hoped to
reach the roof below--being tried with a pass-key.

For an instant I felt absolute despair, since my trapping in a chamber with no
window egress seemed complete. A wave of almost abnormal horror swept over me,
and invested with a terrible but unexplainable singularity the
flashlight-glimpsed dust prints made by the intruder who had lately tried my
door from this room. Then, with a dazed automatism which persisted despite
hopelessness, I made for the next connecting door and performed the blind motion
of pushing at it in an effort to get through and--granting that fastenings might
be as providentially intact as in this second room--bolt the hall door beyond
before the lock could be turned from outside.

Sheer fortunate chance gave me my reprieve--for the connecting door before me
was not only unlocked but actually ajar. In a second I was though, and had my
right knee and shoulder against a hall door which was visibly opening inward. My
pressure took the opener off guard, for the thing shut as I pushed, so that I
could slip the well-conditioned bolt as I had done with the other door. As I
gained this respite I heard the battering at the two other doors abate, while a
confused clatter came from the connecting door I had shielded with the bedstead.
Evidently the bulk of my assailants had entered the southerly room and were
massing in a lateral attack. But at the same moment a pass-key sounded in the
next door to the north, and I knew that a nearer peril was at hand.

The northward connecting door was wide open, but there was no time to think
about checking the already turning lock in the hall. All I could do was to shut
and bolt the open connecting door, as well as its mate on the opposite
side--pushing a bedstead against the one and a bureau against the other, and
moving a washstand in front of the hall door. I must, I saw, trust to such
makeshift barriers to shield me till I could get out the window and on the roof
of the Paine Street block. But even in this acute moment my chief horror was
something apart from the immediate weakness of my defenses. I was shuddering
because not one of my pursuers, despite some hideous panting, grunting, and
subdued barkings at odd intervals, was uttering an unmuffled or intelligible
vocal sound.

As I moved the furniture and rushed toward the windows I heard a frightful
scurrying along the corridor toward the room north of me, and perceived that the
southward battering had ceased. Plainly, most of my opponents were about to
concentrate against the feeble connecting door which they knew must open
directly on me. Outside, the moon played on the ridgepole of the block below,
and I saw that the jump would be desperately hazardous because of the steep
surface on which I must land.

Surveying the conditions, I chose the more southerly of the two windows as my
avenue of escape; planning to land on the inner slope of the roof and make for
the nearest sky-light. Once inside one of the decrepit brick structures I would
have to reckon with pursuit; but I hoped to descend and dodge in and out of
yawning doorways along the shadowed courtyard, eventually getting to Washington
Street and slipping out of town toward the south.

The clatter at the northerly connecting door was now terrific, and I saw that
the weak panelling was beginning to splinter. Obviously, the besiegers had
brought some ponderous object into play as a battering-ram. The bedstead,
however, still held firm; so that I had at least a faint chance of making good
my escape. As I opened the window I noticed that it was flanked by heavy velour
draperies suspended from a pole by brass rings, and also that there was a large
projecting catch for the shutters on the exterior. Seeing a possible means of
avoiding the dangerous jump, I yanked at the hangings and brought them down,
pole and all; then quickly hooking two of the rings in the shutter catch and
flinging the drapery outside. The heavy folds reached fully to the abutting
roof, and I saw that the rings and catch would be likely to bear my weight. So,
climbing out of the window and down the improvised rope ladder, I left behind me
forever the morbid and horror-infested fabric of the Gilman House.

I landed safely on the loose slates of the steep roof, and succeeded in gaining
the gaping black skylight without a slip. Glancing up at the window I had left,
I observed it was still dark, though far across the crumbling chimneys to the
north I could see lights ominously blazing in the Order of Dagon Hall, the
Baptist church, and the Congregational church which I recalled so shiveringly.
There had seemed to be no one in the courtyard below, and I hoped there would be
a chance to get away before the spreading of a general alarm. Flashing my pocket
lamp into the skylight, I saw that there were no steps down. The distance was
slight, however, so I clambered over the brink and dropped; striking a dusty
floor littered with crumbling boxes and barrels.

The place was ghoulish-looking, but I was past minding such impressions and made
at once for the staircase revealed by my flashlight--after a hasty glance at my
watch, which shewed the hour to be 2 a.m. The steps creaked, but seemed
tolerably sound; and I raced down past a barnlike second storey to the ground
floor. The desolation was complete, and only echoes answered my footfalls. At
length I reached the lower hall at the end of which I saw a faint luminous
rectangle marking the ruined Paine Street doorway. Heading the other way, I
found the back door also open; and darted out and down five stone steps to the
grass-grown cobblestones of the courtyard.

The moonbeams did not reach down here, but I could just see my way about without
using the flashlight. Some of the windows on the Gilman House side were faintly
glowing, and I thought I heard confused sounds within. Walking softly over to
the Washington Street side I perceived several open doorways, and chose the
nearest as my route out. The hallway inside was black, and when I reached the
opposite end I saw that the street door was wedged immovably shut. Resolved to
try another building, I groped my way back toward the courtyard, but stopped
short when close to the doorway.

For out of an opened door in the Gilman House a large crowd of doubtful shapes
was pouring--lanterns bobbing in the darkness, and horrible croaking voices
exchanging low cries in what was certainly not English. The figures moved
uncertainly, and I realized to my relief that they did not know where I had
gone; but for all that they sent a shiver of horror through my frame. Their
features were indistinguishable, but their crouching, shambling gait was
abominably repellent. And worst of all, I perceived that one figure was
strangely robed, and unmistakably surmounted by a tall tiara of a design
altogether too familiar. As the figures spread throughout the courtyard, I felt
my fears increase. Suppose I could find no egress from this building on the
street side? The fishy odour was detestable, and I wondered I could stand it
without fainting. Again groping toward the street, I opened a door off the hall
and came upon an empty room with closely shuttered but sashless windows.
Fumbling in the rays of my flashlight, I found I could open the shutters; and in
another moment had climbed outside and was fully closing the aperture in its
original manner.

I was now in Washington Street, and for the moment saw no living thing nor any
light save that of the moon. From several directions in the distance, however, I
could hear the sound of hoarse voices, of footsteps, and of a curious kind of
pattering which did not sound quite like footsteps. Plainly I had no time to
lose. The points of the compass were clear to me, and I was glad that all the
street lights were turned off, as is often the custom on strongly moonlit nights
in prosperous rural regions. Some of the sounds came from the south, yet I
retained my design of escaping in that direction. There would, I knew, be plenty
of deserted doorways to shelter me in case I met any person or group who looked
like pursuers.

I walked rapidly, softly, and close to the ruined houses. While hatless and
dishevelled after my arduous climb, I did not look especially noticeable; and
stood a good chance of passing unheeded if forced to encounter any casual
wayfarer.

At Bates Street I drew into a yawning vestibule while two shambling figures
crossed in front of me, but was soon on my way again and approaching the open
space where Eliot Street obliquely crosses Washington at the intersection of
South. Though I had never seen this space, it had looked dangerous to me on the
grocery youth's map; since the moonlight would have free play there. There was
no use trying to evade it, for any alternative course would involve detours of
possibly disastrous visibility and delaying effect. The only thing to do was to
cross it boldly and openly; imitating the typical shamble of the Innsmouth folk
as best I could, and trusting that no one--or at least no pursuer of mine--would
be there.

Just how fully the pursuit was organised--and indeed, just what its purpose
might be--I could form no idea. There seemed to be unusual activity in the town,
but I judged that the news of my escape from the Gilman had not yet spread. I
would, of course, soon have to shift from Washington to some other southward
street; for that party from the hotel would doubtless be after me. I must have
left dust prints in that last old building, revealing how I had gained the
street.

The open space was, as I had expected, strongly moonlit; and I saw the remains
of a parklike, iron-railed green in its center. Fortunately no one was about
though a curious sort of buzz or roar seemed to be increasing in the direction
of Town Square. South Street was very wide, leading directly down a slight
declivity to the waterfront and commanding a long view out to sea; and I hoped
that no one would be glancing up it from afar as I crossed in the bright
moonlight.

My progress was unimpeded, and no fresh sound arose to hint that I had been
spied. Glancing about me, I involuntarily let my pace slacken for a second to
take in the sight of the sea, gorgeous in the burning moonlight at the street's
end. Far out beyond the breakwater was the dim, dark line of Devil Reef, and as
I glimpsed it I could not help thinking of all the hideous legends I had heard
in the last twenty-four hours--legends which portrayed this ragged rock as a
veritable gateway to realms of unfathomed horror and inconceivable abnormality.

Then, without warning, I saw the intermittent flashes of light on the distant
reef. They were definite and unmistakable, and awaked in my mind a blind horror
beyond all rational proportion. My muscles tightened for panic flight, held in
only by a certain unconscious caution and half-hypnotic fascination. And to make
matters worse, there now flashed forth from the lofty cupola of the Gilman
House, which loomed up to the northeast behind me, a series of analogous though
differently spaced gleams which could be nothing less than an answering signal.

Controlling my muscles, and realising afresh--how plainly visible I was, I
resumed my brisker and feignedly shambling pace; though keeping my eyes on that
hellish and ominous reef as long as the opening of South Street gave me a
seaward view. What the whole proceeding meant, I could not imagine; unless it
involved some strange rite connected with Devil Reef, or unless some party had
landed from a ship on that sinister rock. I now bent to the left around the
ruinous green; still gazing toward the ocean as it blazed in the spectral summer
moonlight, and watching the cryptical flashing of those nameless, unexplainable
beacons.

It was then that the most horrible impression of all was borne in upon me--the
impression which destroyed my last vestige of self-control and sent me running
frantically southward past the yawning black doorways and fishily staring
windows of that deserted nightmare street. For at a closer glance I saw that the
moonlit waters between the reef and the shore were far from empty. They were
alive with a teeming horde of shapes swimming inward toward the town; and even
at my vast distance and in my single moment of perception I could tell that the
bobbing heads and flailing arms were alien and aberrant in a way scarcely to be
expressed or consciously formulated.

My frantic running ceased before I had covered a block, for at my left I began
to hear something like the hue and cry of organised pursuit. There were
footsteps and guttural sounds, and a rattling motor wheezed south along Federal
Street. In a second all my plans were utterly changed--for if the southward
highway were blocked ahead of me, I must clearly find another egress from
Innsmouth. I paused and drew into a gaping doorway, reflecting how lucky I was
to have left the moonlit open space before these pursuers came down the parallel
street.

A second reflection was less comforting. Since the pursuit was down another
street, it was plain that the party was not following me directly. It had not
seen me, but was simply obeying a general plan of cutting off my escape. This,
however, implied that all roads leading out of Innsmouth were similarly
patrolled; for the people could not have known what route I intended to take. If
this were so, I would have to make my retreat across country away from any road;
but how could I do that in view of the marshy and creek-riddled nature of all
the surrounding region? For a moment my brain reeled--both from sheer
hopelessness and from a rapid increase in the omnipresent fishy odour.

Then I thought of the abandoned railway to Rowley, whose solid line of
ballasted, weed-grown earth still stretched off to the northwest from the
crumbling station on the edge at the river-gorge. There was just a chance that
the townsfolk would not think of that; since its briar-choked desertion made it
half-impassable, and the unlikeliest of all avenues for a fugitive to choose. I
had seen it clearly from my hotel window and knew about how it lay. Most of its
earlier length was uncomfortably visible from the Rowley road, and from high
places in the town itself; but one could perhaps crawl inconspicuously through
the undergrowth. At any rate, it would form my only chance of deliverance, and
there was nothing to do but try it.

Drawing inside the hall of my deserted shelter, I once more consulted the
grocery boy's map with the aid of the flashlight. The immediate problem was how
to reach the ancient railway; and I now saw that the safest course was ahead to
Babson Street; then west to Lafayette--there edging around but not crossing an
open space homologous to the one I had traversed--and subsequently back
northward and westward in a zigzagging line through Lafayette, Bates, Adam, and
Bank streets--the latter skirting the river gorge--to the abandoned and
dilapidated station I had seen from my window. My reason for going ahead to
Babson was that I wished neither to recross the earlier open space nor to begin
my westward course along a cross street as broad as South.

Starting once more, I crossed the street to the right-hand side in order to edge
around into Babson as inconspicuously as possible. Noises still continued in
Federal Street, and as I glanced behind me I thought I saw a gleam of light near
the building through which I had escaped. Anxious to leave Washington Street, I
broke into a quiet dogtrot, trusting to luck not to encounter any observing eye.
Next the corner of Babson Street I saw to my alarm that one of the houses was
still inhabited, as attested by curtains at the window; but there were no lights
within, and I passed it without disaster.

In Babson Street, which crossed Federal and might thus reveal me to the
searchers, I clung as closely as possible to the sagging, uneven buildings;
twice pausing in a doorway as the noises behind me momentarily increased. The
open space ahead shone wide and desolate under the moon, but my route would not
force me to cross it. During my second pause I began to detect a fresh
distribution of vague sounds; and upon looking cautiously out from cover beheld
a motor car darting across the open space, bound outward along Eliot Street,
which there intersects both Babson and Lafayette.

As I watched--choked by a sudden rise in the fishy odour after a short
abatement--I saw a band of uncouth, crouching shapes loping and shambling in the
same direction; and knew that this must be the party guarding the Ipswich road,
since that highway forms an extension of Eliot Street. Two of the figures I
glimpsed were in voluminous robes, and one wore a peaked diadem which glistened
whitely in the moonlight. The gait of this figure was so odd that it sent a
chill through me--for it seemed to me the creature was almost hopping.

When the last of the band was out of sight I resumed my progress; darting around
the corner into Lafayette Street, and crossing Eliot very hurriedly lest
stragglers of the party be still advancing along that thoroughfare. I did hear
some croaking and clattering sounds far off toward Town Square, but accomplished
the passage without disaster. My greatest dread was in re-crossing broad and
moonlit South Street--with its seaward view--and I had to nerve myself for the
ordeal. Someone might easily be looking, and possible Eliot Street stragglers
could not fail to glimpse me from either of two points. At the last moment I
decided I had better slacken my trot and make the crossing as before in the
shambling gait of an average Innsmouth native.

When the view of the water again opened out--this time on my right--I was
half-determined not to look at it at all. I could not however, resist; but cast
a sidelong glance as I carefully and imitatively shambled toward the protecting
shadows ahead. There was no ship visible, as I had half-expected there would be.
Instead, the first thing which caught my eye was a small rowboat pulling in
toward the abandoned wharves and laden with some bulky, tarpaulin-covered
object. Its rowers, though distantly and indistinctly seen, were of an
especially repellent aspect. Several swimmers were still discernible; while on
the far black reef I could see a faint, steady glow unlike the winking beacon
visible before, and of a curious colour which I could not precisely identify.
Above the slant roofs ahead and to the right there loomed the tall cupola of the
Gilman House, but it was completely dark. The fishy odour, dispelled for a
moment by some merciful breeze, now closed in again with maddening intensity.

I had not quite crossed the street when I heard a muttering band advancing along
Washington from the north. As they reached the broad open space where I had had
my first disquieting glimpse of the moonlit water I could see them plainly only
a block away--and was horrified by the bestial abnormality of their faces and
the doglike sub-humanness of their crouching gait. One man moved in a positively
simian way, with long arms frequently touching the ground; while another
figure--robed and tiaraed--seemed to progress in an almost hopping fashion. I
judged this party to be the one I had seen in the Gilman's courtyard--the one,
therefore, most closely on my trail. As some of the figures turned to look in my
direction I was transfixed with fright, yet managed to preserve the casual,
shambling gait I had assumed. To this day I do not know whether they saw me or
not. If they did, my stratagem must have deceived them, for they passed on
across the moonlit space without varying their course--meanwhile croaking and
jabbering in some hateful guttural patois I could not identify.

Once more in shadow, I resumed my former dog-trot past the leaning and decrepit
houses that stared blankly into the night. Having crossed to the western
sidewalk I rounded the nearest corner into Bates Street where I kept close to
the buildings on the southern side. I passed two houses shewing signs of
habitation, one of which had faint lights in upper rooms, yet met with no
obstacle. As I turned into Adams Street I felt measurably safer, but received a
shook when a man reeled out of a black doorway directly in front of me. He
proved, however, too hopelessly drunk to be a menace; so that I reached the
dismal ruins of the Bank Street warehouses in safety.

No one was stirring in that dead street beside the river-gorge, and the roar of
the waterfalls quite drowned my foot steps. It was a long dog-trot to the ruined
station, and the great brick warehouse walls around me seemed somehow more
terrifying than the fronts of private houses. At last I saw the ancient arcaded
station--or what was left of it--and made directly for the tracks that started
from its farther end.

The rails were rusty but mainly intact, and not more than half the ties had
rotted away. Walking or running on such a surface was very difficult; but I did
my best, and on the whole made very fair time. For some distance the line kept
on along the gorge's brink, but at length I reached the long covered bridge
where it crossed the chasm at a dizzying height. The condition of this bridge
would determine my next step. If humanly possible, I would use it; if not, I
would have to risk more street wandering and take the nearest intact highway
bridge.

The vast, barnlike length of the old bridge gleamed spectrally in the moonlight,
and I saw that the ties were safe for at least a few feet within. Entering, I
began to use my flashlight, and was almost knocked down by the cloud of bats
that flapped past me. About half-way across there was a perilous gap in the ties
which I feared for a moment would halt me; but in the end I risked a desperate
jump which fortunately succeeded.

I was glad to see the moonlight again when I emerged from that macabre tunnel.
The old tracks crossed River Street at grade, and at once veered off into a
region increasingly rural and with less and less of Innsmouth's abhorrent fishy
odour. Here the dense growth of weeds and briers hindered me and cruelly tore at
my clothes, but I was none the less glad that they were there to give me
concealment in case of peril. I knew that much of my route must be visible from
the Rowley road.

The marshy region began very abruptly, with the single track on a low, grassy
embankment where the weedy growth was somewhat thinner. Then came a sort of
island of higher ground, where the line passed through a shallow open cut choked
with bushes and brambles. I was very glad of this partial shelter, since at this
point the Rowley road was uncomfortably near according to my window view. At the
end of the cut it would cross the track and swerve off to a safer distance; but
meanwhile I must be exceedingly careful. I was by this time thankfully certain
that the railway itself was not patrolled.

Just before entering the cut I glanced behind me, but saw no pursuer. The
ancient spires and roofs of decaying Innsmouth gleamed lovely and ethereal in
the magic yellow moonlight, and I thought of how they must have looked in the
old days before the shadow fell. Then, as my gaze circled inland from the town,
something less tranquil arrested my notice and held me immobile for a second.

What I saw--or fancied I saw--was a disturbing suggestion of undulant motion far
to the south; a suggestion which made me conclude that a very large horde must
be pouring out of the city along the level Ipswich road. The distance was great
and I could distinguish nothing in detail; but I did not at all like the look of
that moving column. It undulated too much, and glistened too brightly in the
rays of the now westering moon. There was a suggestion of sound, too, though the
wind was blowing the other way--a suggestion of bestial scraping and bellowing
even worse than the muttering of the parties I had lately overheard.

All sorts of unpleasant conjectures crossed my mind. I thought of those very
extreme Innsmouth types said to be hidden in crumbling, centuried warrens near
the waterfront; I thought, too, of those nameless swimmers I had seen. Counting
the parties so far glimpsed, as well as those presumably covering other roads,
the number of my pursuers must be strangely large for a town as depopulated as
Innsmouth.

Whence could come the dense personnel of such a column as I now beheld? Did
those ancient, unplumbed warrens teem with a twisted, uncatalogued, and
unsuspected life? Or had some unseen ship indeed landed a legion of unknown
outsiders on that hellish reef? Who were they? Why were they here? And if such a
column of them was scouring the Ipswich road, would the patrols on the other
roads be likewise augmented?

I had entered the brush-grown cut and was struggling along at a very slow pace
when that damnable fishy odour again waxed dominant. Had the wind suddenly
changed eastward, so that it blew in from the sea and over the town? It must
have, I concluded, since I now began to hear shocking guttural murmurs from that
hitherto silent direction. There was another sound, too--a kind of wholesale,
colossal flopping or pattering which somehow called up images of the most
detestable sort. It made me think illogically of that unpleasantly undulating
column on the far-off Ipswich road.

And then both stench and sounds grew stronger, so that I paused shivering and
grateful for the cut's protection. It was here, I recalled, that the Rowley road
drew so close to the old railway before crossing westward and diverging.
Something was coming along that road, and I must lie low till its passage and
vanishment in the distance. Thank heaven these creatures employed no dogs for
tracking--though perhaps that would have been impossible amidst the omnipresent
regional odour. Crouched in the bushes of that sandy cleft I felt reasonably
safe, even though I knew the searchers would have to cross the track in front of
me not much more than a hundred yards away. I would be able to see them, but
they could not, except by a malign miracle, see me.

All at once I began dreading to look at them as they passed. I saw the close
moonlit space where they would surge by, and had curious thoughts about the
irredeemable pollution of that space. They would perhaps be the worst of all
Innsmouth types--something one would not care to remember.

The stench waxed overpowering, and the noises swelled to a bestial babel of
croaking, baying and barking without the least suggestion of human speech. Were
these indeed the voices of my pursuers? Did they have dogs after all? So far I
had seen none of the lower animals in Innsmouth. That flopping or pattering was
monstrous--I could not look upon the degenerate creatures responsible for it. I
would keep my eyes shut till the sound receded toward the west. The horde was
very close now--air foul with their hoarse snarlings, and the ground almost
shaking with their alien-rhythmed footfalls. My breath nearly ceased to come,
and I put every ounce of will-power into the task of holding my eyelids down.

I am not even yet willing to say whether what followed was a hideous actuality
or only a nightmare hallucination. The later action of the government, after my
frantic appeals, would tend to confirm it as a monstrous truth; but could not an
hallucination have been repeated under the quasi-hypnotic spell of that ancient,
haunted, and shadowed town? Such places have strange properties, and the legacy
of insane legend might well have acted on more than one human imagination amidst
those dead, stench-cursed streets and huddles of rotting roofs and crumbling
steeples. Is it not possible that the germ of an actual contagious madness lurks
in the depths of that shadow over Innsmouth? Who can be sure of reality after
hearing things like the tale of old Zadok Allen? The government men never found
poor Zadok, and have no conjectures to make as to what became of him. Where does
madness leave off and reality begin? Is it possible that even my latest fear is
sheer delusion?

But I must try to tell what I thought I saw that night under the mocking yellow
moon--saw surging and hopping down the Rowley road in plain sight in front of me
as I crouched among the wild brambles of that desolate railway cut. Of course my
resolution to keep my eyes shut had failed. It was foredoomed to failure--for
who could crouch blindly while a legion of croaking, baying entities of unknown
source flopped noisomely past, scarcely more than a hundred yards away?

I thought I was prepared for the worst, and I really ought to have been prepared
considering what I had seen before.

My other pursuers had been accursedly abnormal--so should I not have been ready
to face a strengthening of the abnormal element; to look upon forms in which
there was no mixture of the normal at all? I did not open my eyes until the
raucous clamour came loudly from a point obviously straight ahead. Then I knew
that a long section of them must be plainly in sight where the sides of the cut
flattened out and the road crossed the track--and I could no longer keep myself
from sampling whatever horror that leering yellow moon might have to shew.

It was the end, for whatever remains to me of life on the surface of this earth,
of every vestige of mental peace and confidence in the integrity of nature and
of the human mind. Nothing that I could have imagined--nothing, even, that I
could have gathered had I credited old Zadok's crazy tale in the most literal
way--would be in any way comparable to the demoniac, blasphemous reality that I
saw--or believe I saw. I have tried to hint what it was in order to postpone the
horror of writing it down baldly. Can it be possible that this planet has
actually spawned such things; that human eyes have truly seen, as objective
flesh, what man has hitherto known only in febrile phantasy and tenuous legend?

And yet I saw them in a limitless stream--flopping, hopping, croaking,
bleating--urging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque,
malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of
that nameless whitish-gold metal...and some were strangely robed...and one, who
led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers,
and had a man's felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a
head.

I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white
bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were
scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the
heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of
their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped
irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad
that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly
used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their
staring faces lacked.

But for all of their monstrousness they were not unfamiliar to me. I knew too
well what they must be--for was not the memory of the evil tiara at Newburyport
still fresh? They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design--living
and horrible--and as I saw them I knew also of what that humped, tiaraed priest
in the black church basement had fearsomely reminded me. Their number was past
guessing. It seemed to me that there were limitless swarms of them and certainly
my momentary glimpse could have shewn only the least fraction. In another
instant everything was blotted out by a merciful fit of fainting; the first I
had ever had.

V

It was a gentle daylight rain that awaked me front my stupor in the brush-grown
railway cut, and when I staggered out to the roadway ahead I saw no trace of any
prints in the fresh mud. The fishy odour, too, was gone, Innsmouth's ruined
roofs and toppling steeples loomed up greyly toward the southeast, but not a
living creature did I spy in all the desolate salt marshes around. My watch was
still going, and told me that the hour was past noon.

The reality of what I had been through was highly uncertain in my mind, but I
felt that something hideous lay in the background. I must get away from
evil-shadowed Innsmouth--and accordingly I began to test my cramped, wearied
powers of locomotion. Despite weakness hunger, horror, and bewilderment I found
myself after a time able to walk; so started slowly along the muddy road to
Rowley. Before evening I was in village, getting a meal and providing myself
with presentable clothes. I caught the night train to Arkham, and the next day
talked long and earnestly with government officials there; a process I later
repeated in Boston. With the main result of these colloquies the public is now
familiar--and I wish, for normality's sake, there were nothing more to tell.
Perhaps it is madness that is overtaking me--yet perhaps a greater horror--or a
greater marvel--is reaching out.

As may well be imagined, I gave up most of the foreplanned features of the rest
of my tour--the scenic, architectural, and antiquarian diversions on which I had
counted so heavily. Nor did I dare look for that piece of strange jewelry said
to be in the Miskatonic University Museum. I did, however, improve my stay in
Arkham by collecting some genealogical notes I had long wished to possess; very
rough and hasty data, it is true, but capable of good use later on when I might
have time to collate and codify them. The curator of the historical society
there--Mr. B. Lapham Peabody--was very courteous about assisting me, and
expressed unusual interest when I told him I was a grandson of Eliza Orne of
Arkham, who was born in 1867 and had married James Williamson of Ohio at the age
of seventeen.

It seemed that a maternal uncle of mine had been there many years before on a
quest much like my own; and that my grandmother's family was a topic of some
local curiosity. There had, Mr. Peabody said, been considerable discussion about
the marriage of her father, Benjamin Orne, just after the Civil War; since the
ancestry of the bride was peculiarly puzzling. That bride was understood to have
been an orphaned Marsh of New Hampshire--a cousin of the Essex County
Marshes--but her education had been in France and she knew very little of her
family. A guardian had deposited funds in a Boston bank to maintain her and her
French governess; but that guardian's name was unfamiliar to Arkham people, and
in time he dropped out of sight, so that the governess assumed the role by court
appointment. The Frenchwoman--now long dead--was very taciturn, and there were
those who said she could have told more than she did.

But the most baffling thing was the inability of anyone to place the recorded
parents of the young woman--Enoch and Lydia (Meserve) Marsh--among the known
families of New Hampshire. Possibly, many suggested, she was the natural
daughter of some Marsh of prominence--she certainly had the true Marsh eyes.
Most of the puzzling was done after her early death, which took place at the
birth of my grandmother--her only child. Having formed some disagreeable
impressions connected with the name of Marsh, I did not welcome the news that it
belonged on my own ancestral tree; nor was I pleased by Mr. Peabody's suggestion
that I had the true Marsh eyes myself. However, I was grateful for data which I
knew would prove valuable; and took copious notes and lists of book references
regarding the well-documented Orne family.

I went directly home to Toledo from Boston, and later spent a month at Maumee
recuperating from my ordeal. In September I entered Oberlin for my final year,
and from then till the next June was busy with studies and other wholesome
activities--reminded of the bygone terror only by occasional official visits
from government men in connexion with the campaign which my pleas and evidence
had started. Around the middle of July--just a year after the Innsmouth
experience--I spent a week with my late mother's family in Cleveland; checking
some of my new genealogical data with the various notes, traditions, and bits of
heirloom material in existence there, and seeing what kind of a connected chart
I could construct.

I did not exactly relish this task, for the atmosphere of the Williamson home
had always depressed me. There was a strain of morbidity there, and my mother
had never encouraged my visiting her parents as a child, although she always
welcomed her father when he came to Toledo. My Arkham-born grandmother had
seemed strange and almost terrifying to me, and I do not think I grieved when
she disappeared. I was eight years old then, and it was said that she had
wandered off in grief after the suicide of my Uncle Douglas, her eldest son. He
had shot himself after a trip to New England--the same trip, no doubt, which had
caused him to be recalled at the Arkham Historical Society.

This uncle had resembled her, and I had never liked him either. Something about
the staring, unwinking expression of both of them had given me a vague,
unaccountable uneasiness. My mother and Uncle Walter had not looked like that.
They were like their father, though poor little cousin Lawrence--Walter's
son--had been almost perfect duplicate of his grandmother before his condition
took him to the permanent seclusion of a sanitarium at Canton. I had not seen
him in four years, but my uncle once implied that his state, both mental and
physical, was very bad. This worry had probably been a major cause of his
mother's death two years before.

My grandfather and his widowed son Walter now comprised the Cleveland household,
but the memory of older times hung thickly over it. I still disliked the place,
and tried to get my researches done as quickly as possible. Williamson records
and traditions were supplied in abundance by my grandfather; though for Orne
material I had to depend on my uncle Walter, who put at my disposal the contents
of all his files, including notes, letters, cuttings, heirlooms, photographs,
and miniatures.

It was in going over the letters and pictures on the Orne side that I began to
acquire a kind of terror of my own ancestry. As I have said, my grandmother and
Uncle Douglas had always disturbed me. Now, years after their passing, I gazed
at their pictured faces with a measurably heightened feeling of repulsion and
alienation. I could not at first understand the change, but gradually a horrible
sort of comparison began to obtrude itself on my unconscious mind despite the
steady refusal of my consciousness to admit even the least suspicion of it. It
was clear that the typical expression of these faces now suggested something it
had not suggested before--something which would bring stark panic if too openly
thought of.

But the worst shock came when my uncle shewed me the Orne jewellery in a
downtown safe deposit vault. Some of the items were delicate and inspiring
enough, but there was one box of strange old pieces descended from my mysterious
great-grandmother which my uncle was almost reluctant to produce. They were, he
said, of very grotesque and almost repulsive design, and had never to his
knowledge been publicly worn; though my grandmother used to enjoy looking at
them. Vague legends of bad luck clustered around them, and my
great-grandmother's French governess had said they ought not to be worn in New
England, though it would be quite safe to wear them in Europe.

As my uncle began slowly and grudgingly to unwrap the things he urged me not to
be shocked by the strangeness and frequent hideousness of the designs. Artists
and archaeologists who had seen them pronounced their workmanship superlatively
and exotically exquisite, though no one seemed able to define their exact
material or assign them to any specific art tradition. There were two armlets, a
tiara, and a kind of pectoral; the latter having in high relief certain figures
of almost unbearable extravagance.

During this description I had kept a tight rein on my emotions, but my face must
have betrayed my mounting fears. My uncle looked concerned, and paused in his
unwrapping to study my countenance. I motioned to him to continue, which he did
with renewed signs of reluctance. He seemed to expect some demonstration when
the first piece--the tiara--became visible, but I doubt if he expected quite
what actually happened. I did not expect it, either, for I thought I was
thoroughly forewarned regarding what the jewellery would turn out to be. What I
did was to faint silently away, just as I had done in that brier-choked railway
cut a year before.

From that day on my life has been a nightmare of brooding and apprehension nor
do I know how much is hideous truth and how much madness. My great-grandmother
had been a Marsh of unknown source whose husband lived in Arkham--and did not
old Zadok say that the daughter of Obed Marsh by a monstrous mother was married
to an Arkham man through trick? What was it the ancient toper had muttered about
the line of my eyes to Captain Obed's? In Arkham, too, the curator had told me I
had the true Marsh eyes. Was Obed Marsh my own great-great-grandfather? Who--or
what--then, was my great-great-grandmother? But perhaps this was all madness.
Those whitish-gold ornaments might easily have been bought from some Innsmouth
sailor by the father of my great-grandmother, whoever he was. And that look in
the staring-eyed faces of my grandmother and self-slain uncle might be sheer
fancy on my part--sheer fancy, bolstered up by the Innsmouth shadow which had so
darkly coloured my imagination. But why had my uncle killed himself after an
ancestral quest in New England?

For more than two years I fought off these reflections with partial success. My
father secured me a place in an insurance office, and I buried myself in routine
as deeply as possible. In the winter of 1930-31, however, the dreams began. They
were very sparse and insidious at first, but increased in frequency and
vividness as the weeks went by. Great watery spaces opened out before me, and I
seemed to wander through titanic sunken porticos and labyrinths of weedy
cyclopean walls with grotesque fishes as my companions. Then the other shapes
began to appear, filling me with nameless horror the moment I awoke. But during
the dreams they did not horrify me at all--I was one with them; wearing their
unhuman trappings, treading their aqueous ways, and praying monstrously at their
evil sea-bottom temples.

There was much more than I could remember, but even what I did remember each
morning would be enough to stamp me as a madman or a genius if ever I dared
write it down. Some frightful influence, I felt, was seeking gradually to drag
me out of the sane world of wholesome life into unnamable abysses of blackness
and alienage; and the process told heavily on me. My health and appearance grew
steadily worse, till finally I was forced to give up my position and adopt the
static, secluded life of an invalid. Some odd nervous affliction had me in its
grip, and I found myself at times almost unable to shut my eyes.

It was then that I began to study the mirror with mounting alarm. The slow
ravages of disease are not pleasant to watch, but in my case there was something
subtler and more puzzling in the background. My father seemed to notice it, too,
for he began looking at me curiously and almost affrightedly. What was taking
place in me? Could it be that I was coming to resemble my grandmother and uncle
Douglas?

One night I had a frightful dream in which I met my grandmother under the sea.
She lived in a phosphorescent palace of many terraces, with gardens of strange
leprous corals and grotesque brachiate efflorescences, and welcomed me with a
warmth that may have been sardonic. She had changed--as those who take to the
water change--and told me she had never died. Instead, she had gone to a spot
her dead son had learned about, and had leaped to a realm whose wonders--
destined for him as well--he had spurned with a smoking pistol. This was to be
my realm, too--I could not escape it. I would never die, but would live with
those who had lived since before man ever walked the earth.

I met also that which had been her grandmother. For eighty thousand years
Pth'thya-l'yi had lived in Y'ha-nthlei, and thither she had gone back after Obed
Marsh was dead. Y'ha-nthlei was not destroyed when the upper-earth men shot
death into the sea. It was hurt, but not destroyed. The Deep Ones could never be
destroyed, even though the palaeogean magic of the forgotten Old Ones might
sometimes check them. For the present they would rest; but some day, if they
remembered, they would rise again for the tribute Great Cthulhu craved. It would
be a city greater than Innsmouth next time. They had planned to spread, and had
brought up that which would help them, but now they must wait once more. For
bringing the upper-earth men's death I must do a penance, but that would not be
heavy. This was the dream in which I saw a shoggoth for the first time, and the
sight set me awake in a frenzy of screaming. That morning the mirror definitely
told me I had acquired the Innsmouth look.

So far I have not shot myself as my uncle Douglas did. I bought an automatic and
almost took the step, but certain dreams deterred me. The tense extremes of
horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps
instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a
kind of exaltation instead of terror. I do not believe I need to wait for the
full change as most have waited. If I did, my father would probably shut me up
in a sanitarium as my poor little cousin is shut up. Stupendous and unheard-of
splendors await me below, and I shall seek them soon. Ia-R'lyehl Cihuiha flgagnl
id Ia! No, I shall not shoot myself--I cannot be made to shoot myself!

I shall plan my cousin's escape from that Canton mad-house, and together we
shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef
in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned
Y'ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and
glory for ever.