Haggopian and Other Stories

Dagon’s Bell

One of Steve Jones’ first choices when he was gathering tales for his 1994 Fedogan & Bremer collection, Shadows over Innsmouth—after HPL’s ill-fated seaport and its batrachian inhabitants—“Dagon’s Bell” had been written all of eleven years earlier and had seen its initial printing in Paul Ganley’s Weirdbook in 1988. Written five years before that, in those somewhat bleak years after I had done my 22-year stint and left the financial security of my job in the British Army, this story is most definitely set against HPL’s Mythos backdrop. The location is my own, however (and nowhere near Innsmouth!), and so is the style of writing. I honestly believe that Lovecraft himself would have enjoyed this one.

I: Deep Kelp

It strikes me as funny sometimes how scraps of information—fragments of seemingly dissociated fact and half-seen or -felt fancies and intuitions, bits of local legend and immemorial myth—can suddenly connect and expand until the total is far greater than the sum of the parts, like a jigsaw puzzle. Or perhaps not necessarily funny…odd.

Flotsam left high and dry by the tide, scurf of the rolling sea; a half-obliterated figure glimpsed on an ancient, well-rubbed coin through the glass of a museum’s showcase; old-wives’ tales of hauntings and hoary nights, and the ringing of some sepulchral, sunken bell at the rising of the tide; the strange speculations of sea-coal gatherers supping their ale in old North-East pubs, where the sound of the ocean’s wash is never far distant beyond smoke-yellowed bull’s-eye windowpanes. Items like that, apparently unconnected.

But in the end there was really much more to it than that. For these things were only the pieces of the puzzle; the picture, complete, was vaster far than its component parts. Indeed cosmic…

• • •

I long ago promised myself that I would never again speak or even think of David Parker and the occurrences of that night at Kettlethorpe Farm (which formed, in any case, a tale almost too grotesque for belief); but now, these years later…well, my promise seems rather redundant. On the other hand it is possible that a valuable warning lies inherent in what I have to say, for which reason, despite the unlikely circumstance that I shall be taken at all seriously, I now put pen to paper.

My name is William Trafford, which hardly matters, but I had known David Parker at school—a Secondary Modern in a colliery village by the sea—before he passed his college examinations, and I was the one who would later share with him Kettlethorpe’s terrible secret.

In fact I had known David well: the son of a miner, he was never typical of his colliery contemporaries but gentle in his ways and lacking the coarseness of the locality and its guttural accents. That is not to belittle the North-Easterner in general (after all, I became one myself!) for in all truth they are the salt of the earth; but the nature of their work, and what that work has gradually made of their environment, has moulded them into a hard and clannish lot. David Parker, by his nature, was not of that clan, that is all; and neither was I at that time.

My parents were Yorkshire born and bred, only moving to Harden in County Durham when my father bought a newsagent’s shop there. Hence the friendship that sprang up between us, born not so much out of straightforward compatibility as of the fact that we both felt outsiders. A friendship which lasted for five years from a time when we were both eight years of age, and which was only renewed upon David’s release from his studies in London twelve years later. That was in 1951.

Meanwhile, in the years flown between…

My father was now dead and my mother more or less confined, and I had expanded the business to two more shops in Hartlepool, both of them under steady and industrious managers, and several smaller but growing concerns much removed from the sale of magazines and newspapers in the local colliery villages. Thus my time was mainly taken up with business matters, but in the highest capacity, which hardly consisted of back-breaking work. What time remained I was pleased to spend, on those occasions when he was available, in the company of my old school friend.

And he too had done well, and would do even better. His studies had been in architecture and design, but within two short years of his return he expanded these spheres to include interior decoration and landscape gardening, setting up a profitable business of his own and building himself an enviable reputation in his fields.

And so it can be seen that the war had been kind to both of us. Too young to have been involved, we had made capital while the world was fighting; now while the world licked its wounds and rediscovered its directions, we were already on course and beginning to ride the crest. Mercenary? No, for we had been mere boys when the war started and were little more than boys when it ended.

But now, eight years later…

We were, or saw ourselves as being, very nearly sophisticates in a mainly unsophisticated society—that is to say part of a very narrow spectrum—and so once more felt drawn together. Even so, we made odd companions. At least externally, superficially. Oh, I suppose our characters, drives and ambitions were similar, but physically we were poles apart. David was dark, handsome and well-proportioned; I was sort of dumpy, sandy, pale to the point of being pallid. I was not unhealthy, but set beside David Parker I certainly looked it!

On the day in question, that is to say the day when the first unconnected fragment presented itself—a Friday in September ’53, it was, just a few days before the Feast of the Exaltation, sometimes called Roodmas in those parts, and occasionally by a far older name—we met in a bar overlooking the sea on old Hartlepool’s headland. On those occasions when we got together like this we would normally try to keep business out of the conversation, but there were times when it seemed to intrude almost of necessity. This was one such.

I had not noticed Jackie Foster standing at the bar upon entering, but certainly he had seen me. Foster was a foreman with a small fleet of sea-coal gathering trucks of which I was co-owner, and he should not have been there in the pub at that time but out and about his work. Possibly he considered it prudent to come over and explain his presence, just in case I had seen him, and he did so in a single word.

“Kelp?” David repeated, looking puzzled; so that I felt compelled to explain.

“Seaweed,” I said. “Following a bad blow, it comes up on the beach in thick drifts. But—” and I looked at Foster pointedly “—I’ve never before known it to stop the sea-coalers.”

The man shuffled uncomfortably for a moment, took off his cap and scratched his head. “Oh, once or twice ah’ve known it almost this bad, but before your time in the game. It slimes up the rocks an’ the wheels of the lorries slip in the stuff. Bloody arful! An’ stinks like death. It’s lyin’ feet thick on arl the beaches from here ta Sunderland!”

“Kelp,” David said again, thoughtfully. “Isn’t that the weed people used to gather up and cook into a soup?”

Foster wrinkled his nose. “Hungry folks’ll eat just about owt, ah suppose, Mr. Parker—but they’d not eat this muck. We carl it ‘deep kelp’. It’s not unusual this time of year—Roodmas time or thereabouts—and generally hangs about for a week or so until the tides clear it or it rots away.”

David continued to look interested and Foster continued:

“Funny stuff. Ah mean, you’ll not find it in any book of seaweeds—not that ah’ve ever seen. As a lad ah was daft on nature an’ arl. Collected birds’ eggs, took spore prints of mushrooms an’ toadstools, pressed leaves an’ flowers in books—arl that daft stuff—but in arl the books ah read ah never did find a mention of deep kelp.” He turned back to me. “Anyway, boss, there’s enough of the stuff on the beach to keep the lorries off. It’s not that they canna get onto the sands, but when they do they canna see the coal for weed. So ah’ve sent the lorries south to Seaton Carew. The beach is pretty clear down there, ah’m told. Not much coal, but better than nowt.”

My friend and I had almost finished eating by then. As Foster made to leave, I suggested to David: “Let’s finish our drinks, climb down the old sea wall and have a look.”

“Right!” David agreed at once. “I’m curious about this stuff.” Foster had heard and he turned back to us, shaking his head concernedly. “It’s up to you, gents,” he said, “but you won’t like it. Stinks, man! Arful! There’s kids who play on the beach arl the live-long day, but you’ll not find them there now. Just the bloody weed, lyin’ there an’ turnin’ to rot!”

II: A Wedding and a Warning

In any event, we went to see for ourselves, and if I had doubted Foster then I had wronged him. The stuff was awful, and it did stink. I had seen it before, always at this time of year, but never in such quantities. There had been a bit of a blow the night before, however, and that probably explained it. To my mind, anyway. David’s mind was a fraction more inquiring.

“Deep kelp,” he murmured, standing on the weed-strewn rocks, his hair blowing in a salty, stenchy breeze off the sea. “I don’t see it at all.”

“What don’t you see?”

“Well, if this stuff comes from the deeps—I mean from really deep down—surely it would take a real upheaval to drive it onto the beaches like this. Why, there must be thousands and thousands of tons of the stuff! All the way from here to Sunderland? Twenty miles of it?”

I shrugged. “It’ll clear, just like Foster said. A day or two, that’s all. And he’s right: with this stuff lying so thick, you can’t see the streaks of coal.”

“How about the coal?” he said, his mind again grasping after knowledge. “I mean, where does it come from?”

“Same place as the weed,” I answered, “most of it. Come and see.” I crossed to a narrow strip of sand between waves of deep kelp. There I found and picked up a pair of blocky, fist-sized lumps of ocean-rounded rock. Knocking them together, I broke off fragments. Inside, one rock showed a greyish-brown uniformity; the other was black and shiny, finely layered, pure coal.

“I wouldn’t have known the difference,” David admitted.

“Neither would I!” I grinned. “But the sea-coalers rarely err. They say there’s an open seam way out there,” I nodded toward the open sea. “Not unlikely, seeing as how this entire county is riddled with rich mines. Myself, I believe a lot of the coal simply gets washed out of the tippings, the stony debris rejected at the screens. Coal is light and easily washed ashore. The stones are heavy and roll out—downhill, as it were—into deeper water.”

“In that case it seems a pity,” said David. “—That the coal can’t be gathered, I mean.”

“Oh?”

“Why, yes. Surely, if there is an open seam in the sea, the coal would get washed ashore with the kelp. Underneath this stuff, there’s probably tons of it just waiting to be shovelled up!”

I frowned and answered: “You could well be right…” But then I shrugged. “Ah, well, not to worry. It’ll still be there after the weed has gone.” And I winked at him. “Coal doesn’t rot, you see?”

He wasn’t listening but kneeling, lifting a rope of the offensive stuff in his hands. It was heavy, leprous white in the stem or body, deep dark green in the leaf. Hybrid, the flesh of the stuff was—well, fleshy—more animal than vegetable. Bladders were present everywhere, large as a man’s thumbs. David popped one and gave a disgusted grunt, then came to his feet.

“God!” he exclaimed, holding his nose. And again: “God!”

I laughed and we picked our way back to the steps in the old sea wall.

And that was that: a fragment, an incident unconnected with anything much. An item of little real interest. One of Nature’s periodic quirks, affecting nothing a great deal. Apparently…

• • •

It seemed not long after the time of the deep kelp that David got tied up with his wedding plans. I had known, of course, that he had a girl—June Anderson, a solicitor’s daughter from Sunderland, which boasts the prettiest girls in all the land—for I had met her and found her utterly charming; but I had not realised that things were so advanced.

I say it did not seem a long time, and now looking back I see that the period was indeed quite short—the very next summer. Perhaps the span of time was foreshortened even more for me by the suddenness with which their plans culminated. For all was brought dramatically forward by the curious and unexpected vacancy of Kettlethorpe Farm, an extensive property on the edge of Kettlethorpe Dene.

No longer a farm proper but a forlorn relic of another age, the great stone house and its out-buildings were badly in need of repair; but in David’s eyes the place had an Olde Worlde magic all its own, and with his expertise he knew that he could soon convert it into a modern home of great beauty and value. And the place was going remarkably cheap.

As to the farm’s previous tenant: here something peculiar. And here too the second link in my seemingly unconnected chain of occurrences and circumstances.

Old Jason Carpenter had not been well liked in the locality, in fact not at all. Grey-bearded, taciturn, cold and reclusive—with eyes grey as the rolling North Sea and never a smile for man or beast—he had occupied Kettlethorpe Farm for close on thirty years. Never a wife, a manservant or maid, not even a neighbour had entered the place on old Jason’s invitation. No one strayed onto the grounds for fear of Jason’s dog and shotgun; even tradesmen were wary on those rare occasions when they must make deliveries.

But Carpenter had liked his beer and rum chaser, and twice a week would visit The Trust Hotel in Harden. There he had used to sit in the smokeroom and linger over his tipple, his dog Bones alert under the table and between his master’s feet. And customers had used to fear Bones a little, but not as much as the dog feared his master.

And now Jason Carpenter was gone. Note that I do not say dead, simply gone, disappeared. There was no evidence to support any other conclusion—not at that time. it had happened like this:

Over a period of several months various tradesmen had reported Jason’s absence from Kettlethorpe, and eventually, because his customary seat at The Trust had been vacant over that same period, members of the local police went to the farm and forced entry into the main building. No trace had been found of the old hermit, but the police had come away instead with certain documents—chiefly a will, of sorts—which had evidently been left pending just such a search or investigation.

In the documents the recluse had directed that in the event of his “termination of occupancy”, the house, attendant buildings and grounds “be allowed to relapse into the dirt and decay from which they sprang”; but since it was later shown that he was in considerable debt, the property had been put up for sale to settle his various accounts. The house had in fact been under threat of the bailiffs.

All of this, of course, had taken some considerable time, during which a thorough search of the rambling house, its outbuildings and grounds had been made for obvious reasons. But to no avail.

Jason Carpenter was gone. He had not been known to have relatives; indeed, very little had been known of him at all; it was almost as if he had never been. And to many of the people of Harden, that made for a most satisfactory epitaph.

One other note: it would seem that his “termination of occupancy” had come about during the Roodmas time of the deep kelp…

• • •

And so to the wedding of David Parker and June Anderson, a sparkling affair held at the Catholic Church in Harden, where not even the drab, near-distant background of the colliery’s chimneys and cooling towers should have been able to dampen the gaiety and excitement of the moment. And yet even here, in the steep, crowd-packed streets outside the church, a note of discord. Just one, but one too many.

For as the cheering commenced and the couple left the church to be showered with confetti and jostled to their car, I overheard as if they were spoken directly into my ear—or uttered especially for my notice—the words of a crone in shawl and pinafore, come out of her smoke-grimed miner’s terraced house to shake her head and mutter:

“Aye, an’ he’ll take that bonnie lass to Kettlethorpe, will he? Arl the bells are ringin’ now, it’s true, but what about the other bell, eh? It’s only rung once or twice arl these lang years—since old Jason had the house—but now there’s word it’s ringin’ again, when nights are dark an’ the sea has a swell to it.”

I heard it as clearly as that, for I was one of the spectators. I would have been more closely linked with the celebrations but had expected to be busy, and only by the skin of my teeth managed to be there at all. But when I heard the guttural imprecation of the old lady I turned to seek her out, even caught a glimpse of her, before being engulfed by a horde of Harden urchins leaping for a handful of hurled pennies, threepenny bits and sixpences as the newlyweds’ car drove off.

By which time summer thunderclouds had gathered, breaking at the command of a distant flash of lightning, and rain had begun to pelt down. Which served to put an end to the matter. The crowd rapidly dispersed and I headed for shelter.

But…I would have liked to know what the old woman had meant…

III: Ghost Story

“Haunted?” I echoed David’s words.

I had bumped into him at the library in Hartlepool some three weeks after his wedding. A voracious reader, an “addict” for hard-boiled detective novels, I had been on my way in as he was coming out.

“Haunted, yes!” he repeated, his voice half-amused, half-excited. “The old farm—haunted!”

The alarm his words conjured in me was almost immediately relieved by his grin and wide-awake expression. Whatever ghosts they were at the farm, he obviously didn’t fear them. Was he having a little joke at my expense? I grinned with him, saying: “Well, I shouldn’t care to have been your ghosts. Not for the last thirty years, at any rate. Not with old man Carpenter about the place. That would be a classic case of the biter bit!”

“Old Jason Carpenter,” he reminded me, smiling still but less brilliantly, “has disappeared, remember?”

“Oh!” I said, feeling a little foolish. “Of course he has.” And I followed up quickly with: “But what do you mean, haunted?”

“Local village legend,” he shrugged. “I heard it from Father Nicholls, who married us. He had it from the priest before him, and so on. Handed down for centuries, so to speak. I wouldn’t have known if he hadn’t stopped me and asked how we were getting on up at the farm. If we’d seen anything—you know—odd? He wouldn’t have said anything more but I pressed him.”

“And?”

“Well, it seems the original owners were something of a fishy bunch.”

“Fishy?”

“Quite literally! I mean, they looked fishy. Or maybe froggy? Protuberant lips, wide-mouthed, scaly-skinned, pop-eyed—you name it. To use Father Nicholls’ own expression, ‘ichthyic’.”

“Slow down,” I told him, seeing his excitement rising up again. “First of all, what do you mean by the ‘original’ owners? The people who built the place?”

“Good heavens, no!” he chuckled; and then he took me by the elbow and guided me into the library and to a table. We sat. “No one knows—no one can remember—who actually built the place. If ever there were records, well, they’re long lost. God, it probably dates back to Roman times! It’s likely as old as the Wall itself—even older. Certainly it has been a landmark on maps for the last four hundred and fifty years. No, I mean the first recorded family to live there. Which was something like two and a half centuries ago.”

“And they were—” I couldn’t help frowning “—odd-looking, these people?”

“Right! And odd not only in their looks. That was probably just a case of regressive genes, the result of indiscriminate inbreeding. Anyway, the locals shunned them—not that there were any real ‘locals’ in those days, you understand. I mean, the closest villages or towns then were Hartlepool, Sunderland, Durham and Seaham Harbour. Maybe a handful of other, smaller places—I haven’t checked. But this country was wild! And it stayed that way, more or less, until the modern roads were built. Then came the railways, to service the pits, and so on.”

I nodded, becoming involved with David’s enthusiasm, finding myself carried along by it. “And the people at the farm stayed there down the generations?”

“Not quite,” he answered. “Apparently there was something of a hiatus in their tenancy around a hundred and fifty years ago; but later, about the time of the American Civil War, a family came over from Innsmouth in New England and bought the place up. They, too, had the degenerate looks of earlier tenants; might even have been an offshoot of the same family, returning to their ancestral home, as it were. They made a living farming and fishing. Fairly industrious, it would seem, but surly and clannish. Name of Waite. By then, though, the ‘ghosts’ were well established in local folklore. They came in two manifestations, apparently.”

“Oh?”

He nodded. “One of them was a gigantic, wraithlike, nebulous figure rising from the mists over Kettlethorpe Dene, seen by travellers on the old coach road or by fishermen returning to Harden along the cliff-top paths. But the interesting thing is this: if you look at a map of the district, as I’ve done, you’ll see that the farm lies in something of a depression directly between the coach road and the cliffs. Anything seen from those vantage points could conceivably be emanating from the farm itself!”

I was again beginning to find the nature of David’s discourse disturbing. Or if not what he was saying, his obvious involvement with the concept. “You seem to have gone over all of this rather thoroughly,” I remarked. “Any special reason?”

“Just my old thirst for knowledge,” he grinned. “You know I’m never happy unless I’m tracking something down—and never happier than when I’ve finally got it cornered. And after all, I do live at the place! Anyway, about the giant mist-figure: according to the legends, it was half-fish, half-man!”

“A merman?”

“Yes. And now—” he triumphantly took out a folded sheet of rubbing parchment and opened it out onto the table—“Ta-rah! And what do you make of that?”

The impression on the paper was perhaps nine inches square; a charcoal rubbing taken from a brass of some sort, I correctly imagined. It showed a mainly anthropomorphic male figure seated upon a rock-carved chair or throne, his lower half obscured by draperies of weed bearing striking resemblance to the deep kelp. The eyes of the figure were large and somewhat protuberant; his forehead sloped; his skin had the overlapping scales of a fish, and the fingers of his one visible hand where it grasped a short trident were webbed: The background was vague, reminding me of nothing so much as cyclopean submarine ruins.

“Neptune,” I said. “Or at any rate, a merman. Where did you get it?”

“I rubbed it up myself,” he said, carefully folding the sheet and replacing it in his pocket. “It’s from a plate on a lintel over a door in one of the outbuildings at Kettlethorpe.” And then for the first time he frowned. “Fishy people and a fishy symbol…”

He stared at me strangely for a moment and I felt a sudden chill in my bones—until his grin came back and he added: “And an entirely fishy story, eh?”

We left the library and I walked with him to his car. “And what’s your real interest in all of this?” I asked. “I mean, I don’t remember you as much of a folklorist?”

His look this time was curious, almost evasive. “You just won’t believe that it’s only this old inquiring mind of mine, will you?” But then his grin came back, bright and infectious as ever.

He got into his car, wound down the window and poked his head out. “Will we be seeing you soon? Isn’t it time you paid us a visit?”

“Is that an invitation?”

He started up the car. “Of course—any time.”

“Then I’ll make it soon,” I promised.

“Sooner!” he said.

Then I remembered something he had said. “David, you mentioned two manifestations of this—this ghostliness. What was the other one?”

“Eh?” He frowned at me, winding up his window. Then he stopped winding. “Oh, that. The bell, you mean…”

“Bell?” I echoed him, the skin of my neck suddenly tingling. “What bell?”

“A ghost bell!” he yelled as he pulled away from the kerb. “What else? It tolls underground or under the sea, usually when there’s a mist or a swell on the ocean. I keep listening for it, but—”

“No luck?” I asked automatically, hearing my own voice almost as that of a stranger.

“Not yet.”

And as he grinned one last time and waved a farewell, pulling away down the street, against all commonsense and logic I found myself remembering the old woman’s words outside the church: “What about the other bell, eh?”

What about the other bell, indeed…

IV: “Miasma”

Half-way back to Harden it dawned on me that I had not chosen a book for myself. My mind was still full of David Parker’s discoveries; about which, where he had displayed that curious excitement, I still experienced only a niggling disquiet.

But back at Harden, where my home stands on a hill at the southern extreme of the village, I remembered where once before I had seen something like the figure on David’s rubbing. And sure enough it was there in my antique, illustrated two-volume Family Bible; pages I had not looked into for many a year, which had become merely ornamental on my bookshelves.

The item I refer to was simply one of the many small illustrations in Judges XIII: a drawing of a piscine deity on a Philistine coin or medallion. Dagon, whose temple Samson toppled at Gaza.

Dagon…

With my memory awakened, it suddenly came to me where I had seen one other representation of this same god. Sunderland has a fine museum and my father had often taken me there when I was small. Amongst the museum’s collection of coins and medals I had seen…

“Dagon?” The curator answered my telephone inquiry with interest. “No, I’m afraid we have very little of the Philistines; no coins that I know of. Possibly it was a little later than that. Can I call you back?”

“Please do, and I’m sorry to be taking up your time like this.”

“Not at all, a pleasure. That’s what we’re here for.”

And ten minutes later he was back. “As I suspected, Mr. Trafford. We do have that coin you remembered, but it’s Phoenician, not Philistine. The Phoenicians adopted Dagon from the Philistines and called him Oannes. That’s a pattern that repeats all through history. The Romans in particular were great thieves of other people’s gods. Sometimes they adopted them openly, as with Zeus becoming Jupiter, but at other times—where the deity was especially dark or ominous, as in Summanus—they were rather more covert in their worship. Great cultists, the Romans. You’d be surprised at how many secret societies and cults came down the ages from sources such as these. But…there I go again…lecturing!”

“Not at all,” I assured him, “that’s all very interesting. And thank you very much for your time.”

“And is that it? There’s no other way in which I can assist?”

“No, that’s it. Thank you again.”

And indeed that seemed to be that…

• • •

I went to see them a fortnight later. Old Jason Carpenter had not had a telephone, and David was still in the process of having one installed, which meant that I must literally drop in on them.

Kettlethorpe lies to the north of Harden, between the modern coast road and the sea, and the view of the dene as the track dipped down from the road and wound toward the old farm was breathtaking. Under a blue sky, with seagulls wheeling and crying over a distant, fresh-ploughed field, and the hedgerows thick with honeysuckle and the droning of bees, and sweet smells of decay from the streams and hazelnut-shaded pools, the scene was very nearly idyllic. A far cry from midnight tales of ghouls and ghosties!

Then to the farm’s stone outer wall—almost a fortification, reminiscent of some forbidding feudal structure—which encompassed all of the buildings including the main house. Iron gates were open, bearing the legend “Kettlethorpe” in stark letters of iron. Inside…things already were changing.

The wall surrounded something like three and a half to four acres of ground, being the actual core of the property. I had seen several rotting “Private Property” and “Trespassers Will be Prosecuted” notices along the road, defining Kettlethorpe’s exterior boundaries, but the area bordered by the wall was the very heart of the place.

In layout: there was a sort of geometrical regularity to the spacing and positioning of the buildings. They formed a horseshoe, with the main house at its apex; the open mouth of the horseshoe faced the sea, unseen, something like a mile away beyond a rise which boasted a dense-grown stand of oaks. All of the buildings were of local stone, easily recognisable through its tough, flinty-grey texture. I am no geologist and so could not give that stone a name, but I knew that in years past it had been blasted from local quarries or cut from outcrops. To my knowledge, however, the closest of these sources was a good many miles away; the actual building of Kettlethorpe must therefore have been a Herculean task.

As this thought crossed my mind, and remembering the words of the curator of Sunderland’s museum, I had to smile. Perhaps not Herculean but something later than the Greeks. Except that I couldn’t recall a specific Roman strong-man!

And approaching the house, where I pulled up before the stone columns of its portico, I believed I could see where David had got his idea of the age of the place. Under the heat of the sun the house was redolent of the centuries; its walls massive, structurally Romanesque. The roof especially, low-peaked and broad, giving an impression of strength and endurance.

What with its outer wall and horseshoe design, the place might well be some strange old Roman temple. A temple, yes, but wavery for all its massiveness, shimmering as smoke and heat from a small bonfire in what had been a garden drifted lazily across my field of vision. A temple—ah!—but to what strange old god?

And no need to ponder the source of that thought, for certainly the business of David’s antiquarian research was still in my head; and while I had no intention of bringing that subject up, still I wondered how far he had progressed. Or perhaps by now he had discovered sufficient of Kettlethorpe to satisfy his curiosity. Perhaps, but I doubted it. No, he would follow the very devil to hell, that one, in pursuit of knowledge.

“Hello, there!” He slapped me on the back, causing me to start as I got out of my old Morris and closed its door. I started…reeled…

…He had come out of the shadows of the porch so quickly… I had not seen him… My eyes…the heat and the glaring sun and the drone of bees…

“Bill!” David’s voice came to me from a million miles away, full of concern. “What on earth…?”

“I’ve come over queer,” I heard myself say, leaning on my car as the world rocked about me.

“Queer? Man, you’re pale as death! It’s the bloody sun! Too hot by far. And the smoke from the fire. And I’ll bet you’ve been driving with your windows up. Here, let’s get you into the house.”

Hanging on to his broad shoulder, I was happy to let him lead me staggering indoors. “The hot sun,” he mumbled again, half to me, half to himself. “And the honeysuckle. Almost a miasma. Nauseating, until you get used to it. June has suffered in exactly the same way.”

V: The Enclosure

“Miasma?” I let myself fall into a cool, shady window seat.

He nodded, swimming into focus as I quickly recovered from my attack of—of whatever it had been. “Yes, a mist of pollen, invisible, borne on thermals in the air, sweet and cloying. Enough to choke a horse!”

“Is that what it was? God!—I thought I was going to faint.”

“I know what you mean. June has been like it for a week. Conks out completely at high noon. Even inside it’s too close for her liking. She gets listless. She’s upstairs now, stretched out flat!”

As if the very mention of her name were a summons, June’s voice came down to us: “David, is that Bill? I’ll be down at once.”

“Don’t trouble yourself on my account,” I called out, my voice still a little shaky. “And certainly not if you don’t feel too well.”

“I’m fine!” her voice insisted. “I was just a little tired, that’s all.”

I was myself again, gratefully accepting a scotch and soda, swilling a parched dryness from my mouth and throat.

“There,” said David, seeming to read my thoughts. “You look more your old self now.”

“First time that ever happened to me,” I told him. “I suppose your ‘miasma’ theory must be correct. Anyway, I’ll be up on my feet again in a minute.” As I spoke I let my eyes wander about the interior of what would be the house’s main living-room.

The room was large, for the main part oak-panelled, almost stripped of its old furniture and looking extremely austere. I recalled the bonfire, its pale flames licking at the upthrusting, worm-eaten leg of a chair…

One wall was of the original hard stone, polished by the years, creating an effect normally thought desirable in modern homes but perfectly natural here and in no way contrived. All in all a charming room. Ages-blackened beams bowed almost imperceptibly toward the centre where they crossed the low ceiling wall to wall.

“Built to last,” said David. “Three hundred years old at least, those beams, but the basic structure is—” he shrugged “—I’m not sure, not yet. This is one of five lower rooms, all about the same size. I’ve cleared most of them out now, burnt up most of the old furniture; but there were one or two pieces worth renovation. Most of the stuff I’ve saved is in what used to be old man Carpenter’s study. And the place is—will be—beautiful. When I’m through with it. Gloomy at the moment, yes, but that’s because of the windows. I’m afraid most of these old small-panes will have to go. The place needs opening up.”

“Opening up, yes,” I repeated him, sensing a vague irritation or tension in him, a sort of urgency.

“Here,” he said, “are you feeling all right now? I’d like you to see the plate I took that rubbing from.”

“The Dagon plate,” I said at once, biting my tongue a moment too late.

He looked at me, stared at me, and slowly smiled. “So you looked it up, did you? Dagon, yes—or Neptune, as the Romans called him. Come on, I’ll show you.” And as we left the house he yelled back over his shoulder: “June—we’re just going over to the enclosure. Back soon.”

“Enclosure?” I followed him toward the mouth of the horseshoe of buildings. “I thought you said the brass was on a lintel?”

“So it is, over a doorway—but the building has no roof and so I call it an enclosure. See?” and he pointed. The mouth of the horseshoe was formed of a pair of small, rough stone buildings set perhaps twenty-five yards apart, which were identical in design but for the one main discrepancy David had mentioned—namely that the one on the left had no roof.

“Perhaps it fell in?” I suggested as we approached the structure.

David shook his head. “No,” he said, “there never was a roof. Look at the tops of the walls. They’re flush. No gaps to show where roof support beams might have been positioned. If you make a comparison with the other building you’ll see what I mean. Anyway, whatever its original purpose, old man Carpenter filled it with junk: bags of rusty old nails, worn-out tools, that sort of thing. Oh, yes and he kept his firewood here, under a tarpaulin.”

I glanced inside the place, leaning against the wall and poking my head in through the vacant doorway. The wall stood in its own shadow and was cold to my touch. Beams of sunlight, glancing in over the top of the west wall, filled the place with dust motes that drifted like swarms of aimless microbes in the strangely musty air. There was a mixed smell of rust and rot, of some small dead thing, and of…the sea? The last could only be a passing fancy, no sooner imagined than forgotten.

I shaded my eyes against the dusty sunbeams. Rotted sacks spilled nails and bolts upon a stone-flagged floor; farming implements red with rust were heaped like metal skeletons against one wall; at the back, heavy blocks of wood stuck out from beneath a mould-spotted tarpaulin. A dead rat or squirrel close to my feet seethed with maggots.

I blinked in the hazy light, shuddered—not so much at the sight of the small corpse as at a sudden chill of the psyche—and hastily withdrew my head.

“There you are,” said David, his matter-of-fact tone bringing me back down to earth. “The brass.”

Above our heads, central in the stone lintel, a square plate bore the original of David’s rubbing. I gave it a glance; an almost involuntary reaction to David’s invitation that I look, and at once looked away. He frowned, seemed disappointed. “You don’t find it interesting?”

“I find it…disturbing,” I answered at length. “Can we go back to the house? I’m sure June will be up and about by now.”

He shrugged, leading the way as we retraced our steps along sun-splashed, weed-grown paths between scrubby fruit trees and dusty, cobwebbed shrubbery. “I thought you’d be taken by it,” he said. And, “How do you mean, ‘disturbing’?”

I shook my head, had no answer for him. “Maybe it’s just me,” I finally said. “I don’t feel at my best today. I’m not up to it, that’s all.”

“Not up to what?” he asked sharply, then shrugged again before I could answer. “Suit yourself.” But after that he quickly became distant and a little surly. He wasn’t normally a moody man, but I knew him well enough to realise that I had touched upon some previously unsuspected, exposed nerve; and so I determined not to prolong my visit.

I did stay long enough to talk to June, however, though what I saw of her was hardly reassuring. She looked pinched, her face lined and pale, showing none of the rosiness one might expect in a newlywed, or in any healthy young woman in summertime. Her eyes were red-rimmed; their natural blue seeming very much watered-down; her skin looked dry, deprived of moisture; even her hair, glossy-black and bouncy on those previous occasions when we had met, seemed lacklustre now and disinterested.

It could be, of course, simply the fact that I had caught her at a bad time. Her father had died recently, as I later discovered, and of course that must still be affecting her. Also, she must have been working very hard, alongside David, trying to get the old place put to rights. Or again it could be David’s summer “miasma”—an allergy, perhaps.

Perhaps…

But why any of these things—David’s preoccupation, his near-obsession (or mine?) with occurrences and relics of the distant past; the old myths and legends of the region, of hauntings and misty phantoms and such; and June’s queer malaise—why any of these things should concern me beyond the bounds of common friendship I did not know, could not say. I only knew that I felt as if somewhere a great wheel had started to roll, and that my friend and his wife lay directly in its path, not even knowing that it bore down upon them…

VI: Dagon’s Bell

Summer rolled by in warm lazy waves; autumn saw the trees shamelessly, mindlessly stripping themselves naked (one would think they’d keep their leaves to warm them through the winter); my businesses presented periodic problems enough to keep my nose to the grindstone, and so there was little spare time in which to ponder the strangeness of the last twelve months. I saw David in the village now and then, usually at a distance; saw June, too, but much less frequently. More often than not he seemed haggard—or if not haggard, hagridden, nervous, agitated, hurried—and she was…well, spectral. Pale and willow-slim, and red-eyed (I suspected) behind dark spectacles. Married life? Or perhaps some other problem? None of my business.

Then came the time of the deep kelp once more, which was when David made it my business.

And here I must ask the reader to bear with me. The following part of the story will seem hastily written, too thoughtlessly prepared and put together. But this is how I remember it: blurred and unreal, and patterned with mismatched dialogue. It happened quickly; I see no reason to spin it out…

David’s knock was urgent on a night when the sky was black with falling rain and the wind whipped the trees to a frenzy; and yet he stood there in shirt-sleeves, shivering, gaunt in aspect and almost vacant in expression. It took several brandies and a thorough rub-down with a warm towel to bring him to a semblance of his old self, by which time he seemed more ashamed of his behaviour than eager to explain it. But I was not letting him off that lightly. The time had come, I decided, to have the thing out with him; get it out in the open, whatever it was, and see what could be done about it while there was yet time.

“Time?” He finally turned his gaze upon me from beneath his mop of tousled hair, a towel over his shoulders while his shirt steamed before my open fire. “Is there yet time? Damned if I know…” He shook his head.

“Well then, tell me,” I said, exasperated. “Or at least try. Start somewhere. You must have come to me for something. Is it you and June? Was your getting married a mistake? Or is it just the place, the old farm?”

“Oh, come on, Bill!” he snorted. “You know well enough what it is. Something of it, anyway. You experienced it yourself. Just the place?” The corners of his mouth turned down, his expression souring. “Oh, yes, it’s the place, all right. What the place was, what it might be even now…”

“Go on,” I prompted him; and he launched into the following:

“I came to ask you to come back with me. I don’t want to spend another night alone there.”

“Alone? But isn’t June there?”

He looked at me for a moment and finally managed a ghastly grin. “She is and she isn’t,” he said. “Oh, yes, yes, she’s there—but still I’m alone. Not her fault, poor love. It’s that bloody awful place!”

“Tell me about it,” I urged.

He sighed, bit his lip. And after a moment: “I think,” he began, “—I think it was a temple. And I don’t think the Romans had it first. You know, of course, that they’ve found Phoenician symbols on some of the stones at Stonehenge? Well, and what else did the ancients bring with them to old England, eh? What did we worship in those prehistoric times? The earth-mother, the sun, the rain—the sea? We’re an island, Bill. The sea was everywhere around us! And it was bountiful. It still is, but not like it was in those days. What more natural than to worship the sea—and what the sea brought?”

“Its bounty?” I said.

“That, yes, and something else. Cthulhu, Pischa, the Kraken, Dagon, Oannes, Neptune. Call him—it—what you will. But it was worshipped at Kettlethorpe, and it still remembers. Yes, and I think it comes, in certain seasons, to seek the worship it once knew and perhaps still…still…”

“Yes?”

He looked quickly away. “I’ve made…discoveries.”

I waited.

“I’ve found things out, yes, yes—and—” His eyes flared up for a moment in the firelight, then dulled.

“And?”

“Damn it!” He turned on me and the towel fell from his shoulders. Quickly he snatched it up and covered himself—but not before I had seen how thin mere months had made him. “Damn it!” he mumbled again, less vehemently now. “Must you repeat everything I say? God, I do enough of that myself! I go over everything—over and over and over…”

I sat in silence, waiting. He would tell it in his own time.

And eventually he continued. “I’ve made discoveries, and I’ve heard…things.” He looked from the fire to me, peered at me, ran trembling fingers through his hair. And did I detect streaks of grey in that once jet mop? “I’ve heard the bell!”

“Then it’s time you got out of there!” I said at once. “Time you got June out, too.”

“I know, I know!” he answered, his expression tortured. He gripped my arm. “But I’m not finished yet. I don’t know it all, not yet. It lures me, Bill. I have to know…”

“Know what?” It was my turn to show my agitation. “What do you need to know, you fool? Isn’t it enough that the place is evil? You know that much. And yet you stay on there. Get out, that’s my advice. Get out now!”

“No!” His denial was emphatic. “I’m not finished. There has to be an end to it. The place must be cleansed.” He stared again into the fire.

“So you do admit it’s evil?”

“Of course it is. Yes, I know it is. But leave, get out? I can’t, and June—”

“Yes?”

“She won’t!” He gave a muffled sob and turned watery, searching eyes full upon me. “The place is like…like a magnet! It has a genius loci. It’s a focal point for God-only-knows-what forces. Evil? Oh, yes! An evil come down all the centuries. But I bought the place and I shall cleanse it—end it forever, whatever it is.”

“Look,” I tried reasoning with him, “let’s go back, now, the two of us. Let’s get June out of there and bring her back here for the night. How did you get here anyway? Surely not on foot, not on a night like this?”

“No, no,” he shook his head. “Car broke down halfway up the hill. Rain must have got under the bonnet. I’ll pick it up tomorrow.” He stood up, looked suddenly afraid, wild-eyed. “I’ve been away too long. Bill, will you run me back? June’s there—alone! She was sleeping when I left. I can fill you in on the details while you drive…”

VII: Manifestation

I made him take another brandy, threw a coat over his shoulders, bustled him out to my car. Moments later we were rolling down into Harden and he was telling me all that had happened between times. As best I remember, this is what he said:

“Since that day you visited us I’ve been hard at work. Real work, I mean. Not the other thing, not delving—not all of the time, anyway. I got the grounds inside the walls tidied up, even tried a little preliminary landscaping. And the house: the old windows out, new ones in. Plenty of light. But still the place was musty. As the summer turned I began burning old Carpenter’s wood, drying out the house, ridding it of the odour of centuries—a smell that was always thicker at night. And fresh paint, too, lots of it. Mainly white, all bright and new. June picked up a lot; you must have noticed how down she was? Yes, well, she seemed to be on the mend. I thought I had the—the ‘miasma’ on the run. Hah!” He gave a bitter snort. “A ‘summer miasma’, I called it. Blind, blind!”

“Go on,” I urged him, driving carefully through the wet streets.

“Eventually, to give myself room to sort out the furniture and so on, I got round to chucking the old shelves and books out of Carpenter’s study. That would have been okay, but…I looked into some of those books. That was an error. I should have simply burned the lot, along with the wormy old chairs and shreds of carpet. And yet, in a way, I’m glad I didn’t.” I could feel David’s fevered eyes burning on me in the car’s dark interior, fixed upon me as he spoke.

“The knowledge in those books, Bill. The dark secrets, the damnable mysteries. You know, if anyone does, what a fool I am for a mystery. I was hooked; work ceased; I had to know! But those books and manuscripts: the Unter-Zee Kulten and Hydrophinnae. Doorfen’s treatise on submarine civilizations and the Johansen Narrative of 1925. A great sheaf of notes purporting to be from American government files for 1928, when federal agents ‘raided’ Innsmouth, a decaying, horror-haunted town on the coast of New England; and other scraps and fragments from all the world’s mythologies, all of them concerned with the worship of a great god of the sea.”

“Innsmouth?” My ears pricked up. I had heard that name mentioned once before. “But isn’t that the place—?”

“—The place which spawned that family, the Waites, who came over and settled at Kettlethorpe about the time of the American Civil War? That’s right,” he nodded an affirmative, stared out into the rain-black night. “And old Carpenter who had the house for thirty years, he came from Innsmouth, too!”

“He was of the same people?”

“No, not him. The very opposite. He was at the farm for the same reason I am—now. Oh, he was strange, reclusive—who wouldn’t be? I’ve read his diaries and I understand. Not everything, for even in his writing he held back, didn’t explain too much. Why should he? His diaries were for him, aids to memory. They weren’t meant for others to understand, but I fathomed a lot of it. The rest was in those government files.

“Innsmouth prospered in the time of the clipper ships and the old trade routes. The captains and men of some of those old ships brought back wives from Polynesia—and also their strange rites of worship, their gods. There was queer blood in those native women, and it spread rapidly. As the years passed the entire town became infected. Whole families grew up tainted. They were less than human, amphibian, creatures more of the sea than the land. Merfolk, yes! Tritons, who worshipped Dagon in the deeps: ‘Deep Ones’, as old Carpenter called them. Then came the federal raid of ’28. But it came too late for old Carpenter.

“He had a store in Innsmouth, but well away from the secret places—away from the boarded-up streets and houses and churches where the worst of them had their dens and held their meetings and kept their rites. His wife was long dead of some wasting disease, but his daughter was alive and schooling in Arkham. Shortly before the raid she came home, little more than a girl. And she became—I don’t know—lured. It’s a word that sticks in my mind. A very real word, to me.

“Anyway, the Deep Ones took her, gave her to something they called out of the sea. She disappeared. Maybe she was dead, maybe something worse. They’d have killed Carpenter then, because he’d learned too much about them and wanted revenge, but the government raid put an end to any personal reprisals or vendettas. Put an end to Innsmouth, too. Why, they just about wrecked the town! Vast areas of complete demolition. They even depth-charged a reef a mile out in the sea…

“Well, after things quieted down Carpenter stayed on a while in Innsmouth, what was left of it. He was settling his affairs, I suppose, and maybe ensuring that the evil was at an end. Which must have been how he learned that it wasn’t at an end but spreading like some awful blight. And because he suspected the survivors of the raid might seek haven in old strongholds abroad, finally he came to Kettlethorpe.”

“Here?” David’s story was beginning to make connections, was starting to add up. “Why would he come here?”

“Why? Haven’t you been listening? He’d found something out about Kettlethorpe, and he came to make sure the Innsmouth horror couldn’t spread here. Or perhaps he knew it was already here, waiting, like a cancer ready to shoot out its tentacles. Perhaps he came to stop it spreading further. Well, he’s managed that these last thirty years, but now—”

“Yes?”

“Now he’s gone, and I’m the owner of the place. Yes, and I have to see to it that whatever he was doing gets finished!”

“But what was he doing?” I asked. “And at what expense? Gone, you said. Yes, old Carpenter’s gone. But gone where? What will all of this cost you, David? And more important by far, what will it cost June?”

My words had finally stirred something in him, something he had kept suppressed, too frightened of it to look more closely. I could tell by the way he started, sat bolt upright beside me. “June? But—”

“But nothing, man! Look at yourself. Better still, take a good look at your wife. You’re going down the drain, both of you. It’s something that started the day you took that farm. I’m sure you’re right about the place, about old Carpenter, all that stuff you’ve dredged up—but now you’ve got to forget it. Sell Kettlethorpe, that’s my advice—or better still, raze it to the ground! But whatever you do—”

“Look!” He started again and gripped my arm in a suddenly claw-hard hand.

I looked, applied my brakes, brought the car skidding to a halt in the rain-puddled track. We had turned off the main road by then, where the track winds down to the farm. The rain had let up and the air had gone still as a shroud. Shroudlike, too, the silky mist that lay silently upon the near-distant dene and lapped a foot deep about the old farm’s stony walls. The scene was weird under a watery moon—but weirder by far the morbid manifestation which was even now rising up like a wraith over the farm.

A shape, yes—billowing up, composed of mist, writhing huge over the ancient buildings. The shape of some monstrous merman—the ages-evil shape of Dagon himself!

I should have shaken David off and driven on at once, of course I should, down to the farm and whatever waited there; but the sight of that figure mushrooming and firming in the dank night air was paralysing. And sitting there in the car, with the engine slowly ticking over, we shuddered as one as we heard, quite distinctly, the first muffled gonging of some damned and discordant bell. A tolling whose notes might on another occasion be sad and sorrowful, which now were filled with a menace out of the aeons.

“The bell!” David’s gasp galvanised me into action.

“I hear it,” I said, throwing the car into gear and racing down that last quarter-mile stretch to the farm. It seemed that time was frozen in those moments, but then we were through the iron gates and slewing to a halt in front of the porch. The house was bright with lights, but June—

While David tore desperately through the rooms of the house, searching upstairs and down, crying her name, I could only stand by the car and tremblingly listen to the tolling of the bell; its dull, sepulchral summons seeming to me to issue from below, from the very earth beneath my feet. And as I listened so I watched that writhing figure of mist shrink down into itself, seeming to glare from bulging eyes of mist one final ray of hatred in my direction, before spiralling down and disappearing—into the shell of that roofless building at the mouth of the horseshoe!

David, awry and babbling as he staggered from the house, saw it too. “There!” he pointed at the square, mist-wreathed building. “That’s where it is. And that’s where she’ll be. I didn’t know she knew…she must have been watching me. Bill—” he clutched at my arm “—are you with me?—Say you are, for God’s sake!” And I could only nod my head.

Hearts racing, we made for that now ghastly edifice of reeking mist—only to recoil a moment later from a figure that reeled out from beneath the lintel with the Dagon plate to fall swooning into David’s arms. June, of course—but how could it be? How could this be June?

Not the June I had known, no, but some other, some revenant of that June…

VIII: “That Place Below…”

She was gaunt, hair coarse as string, skin dry and stretched over features quite literally, shockingly altered into something…different. Strangely, David was not nearly so horrified by what he could see of her by the thin light of the moon; far more so after we had taken her back to the house. For quite apart from what were to me undeniable alterations in her looks in general—about which, as yet, he had made no comment—it then became apparent that his wife had been savaged and brutalised in the worst possible manner.

I remember, as I drove them to the emergency hospital in Hartlepool, listening to David as he cradled her in his arms in the back of the car. She was not conscious, and David barely so (certainly he was oblivious to what he babbled and sobbed over her during that nightmare journey) but my mind was working overtime as I listened to his crooning, utterly distraught voice:

“She must have watched me, poor darling, must have seen me going to that place. At first I went for the firewood—I burned up all of old Jason’s wood—but then, beneath the splinters and bits of bark, I found the millstone over the slab. The old boy had put that stone there to keep the slab down. And it had done its job, by God! Must have weighed all of two hundred and forty pounds. Impossible to shift from those slimy, narrow steps below. But I used a lever to move it, yes—and I lifted the slab and went down. Down those ancient steps—down, down, down. A maze, down there. The earth itself, honeycombed!….

“…What were they for, those burrows? What purpose were they supposed to fulfill? And who dug them? I didn’t know, but I kept it from her anyway—or thought I had. I couldn’t say why, not then, but some instinct warned me not to tell her about…about that place below. I swear to God I meant to close it up forever, choke the mouth of that—that pit! with concrete. And I’d have done it, I swear it, once I’d explored those tunnels to the full. But that millstone, June, that great heavy stone. How did you shift it? Or were you helped?

“I’ve been down there only two or three times on my own, and I never went very far. Always there was that feeling that I wasn’t alone, that things moved in the darker burrows and watched me where I crept. And that sluggish stream, bubbling blindly through airless fissures to the sea. That stream which rises and falls with the tides. And the kelp all bloated and slimy. Oh, my God! My God!”…

…And so on. But by the time we reached the hospital David had himself more or less under control again. Moreover, he had dragged from me a promise that I would let him—indeed help him—do things his own way. He had a plan which seemed both simple and faultless, one which must conclusively write finis on the entire affair. That was to say if his fears for Kettlethorpe and the conjectural region he termed “that place below” were soundly based.

As to why I so readily went along with him—why I allowed him to brush aside unspoken any protests or objections I might have entertained—quite simply, I had seen that mist-formed shape with my own eyes, and with my own ears had heard the tolling of that buried and blasphemous bell. And for all that the thing seemed fantastic, the conviction was now mine that the farm was a seat of horror and evil as great and maybe greater than any other these British Isles had ever known…

• • •

We stayed at the hospital through the night, gave identical, falsified statements to the police (an unimaginative tale of a marauder; seen fleeing under cover of the mist towards the dene), and in between sat together in a waiting area drinking coffee and quietly conversing. Quietly now, yes, for David was exhausted both physically and mentally; and much more so after he had attended that examination of his wife made imperative by her condition and by our statements.

As for June: mercifully she stayed in her traumatic state of deepest shock all through the night and well into the morning. Finally, around 10:00 a.m. we were informed that her condition, while still unstable, was no longer critical; and then, since it was very obvious that we could do nothing more, I drove David home with me to Harden.

I bedded him down in my guest-room, by which time all I wanted to do was get to my own bed for an hour or two; but about 4.00 p.m. I was awakened from uneasy dreams to find him on the telephone, his voice stridently urgent. As I went to him he put the phone down, turned to me haggard and red-eyed, his face dark with stubble. “She’s stabilised,” he, said, and: “Thank God for that! But she hasn’t come out of shock—not completely. It’s too deep-seated. At least that’s what they told me. They say she could be like it for weeks…maybe longer.”

“What will you do?” I asked him. “You’re welcome to stay here, of course, and—”

“Stay here?” he cut me short. “Yes, I’d like that—afterwards.”

I nodded, biting my lip. “I see. You intend to go through with it. Very well—but there’s still time to tell the police, you know. You could still let them deal with it.”

He uttered a harsh, barking laugh. “Can you really imagine me telling all of this to your average son-of-the-sod Hartlepool bobby? Why, even if I showed them that…the place below; what could they do about it? And should I tell them about my plan, too? What!—mention dynamite to the law, the local authorities? Oh, yes, I can just see that! Even if they didn’t put me in a straight jacket it would still take them an age to get round to doing anything. And meanwhile, if there is something down there under the farm—and Bill, we know there is—what’s to stop it or them from moving on to fresh pastures?”

When I had no answer, he continued in a more controlled, quieter tone. “Do you know what old Carpenter was doing? I’ll tell you: he was going down there in the right seasons, when he heard the bell ringing—going down below with his shotgun and blasting all hell out of what he found in those foul black tunnels! Paying them back for what they did to him and his in Innsmouth. A madman who didn’t know what he wrote in those diaries of his? No, for we’ve seen it, Bill, you and I. And we’ve heard it—heard Dagon’s bell ringing in the night, summoning that ancient evil up from the sea.

“Why, that was the old man’s sole reason for living there: so that he could take his revenge! Taciturn? A recluse? I’ll say he was! He lived to kill—to kill them! Tritons, Deep Ones, amphibian abortions born out of a timeless evil, inhuman lust and black, alien nightmare. Well, now I’ll finish what he started, only I’ll do it a damn sight faster! It’s my way or nothing.” He gazed at me, his eyes steady now and piercing, totally sane, strong as I had rarely seen him. “You’ll come?”

“First,” I said. “there’s something you must tell me. About June. She—her looks—I mean…”

“I know what you mean.” His voice contained a tremor, however tightly controlled. “It’s what makes the whole thing real for me. It’s proof positive, as if that were needed now, of all I’ve suspected and discovered of the place. I told you she wouldn’t leave the farm, didn’t I? But did you know it was her idea to buy Kettlethorpe in the first place?”

“You mean she was…lured?”

“Oh, yes, that’s exactly what I mean—but by what? By her blood, Bill! She didn’t know, was completely innocent. Not so her forebears. Her great-grandfather came from America, New England. That’s as far as I care to track it down, and no need now to take it any further. But you must see why I personally have to square it all away?”

I could only nod.

“And you will help?”

“I must be mad,” I answered, nodding again, “—or at best an idiot—but it seems I’ve already committed myself. Yes, I’ll come.”

“Now?”

“Today? At this hour? That would be madness! Before you know it, it’ll be dark, and—”

“Dark, yes!” he broke in on me. “But what odds? It’s always dark down there, Bill. We’ll need electric torches, the more the better. I have a couple at the farm. How about you?”

“I’ve a good heavy-duty torch in the car,” I told him. “Batteries, too.”

“Good! And your shotguns—we’ll need them, I think. But we’re not after pheasant this time, Bill.”

“Where will you get the dynamite?” I asked, perhaps hoping that this was something which, in his fervour, he had overlooked.

He grinned—not his old grin but a twisted, vicious thing and said: “I’ve already got it. Had it ever since I found the slab two weeks ago and first went down there. My gangers use it on big landscaping jobs. Blasting out large boulders and tree stumps saves a lot of time and effort. Saves money, too. There’s enough dynamite at the farm to demolish half of Harden!”

David had me, and he knew it. “It’s now, Bill, now!” he said. And after a moment’s silence he shrugged. “But—if you haven’t the spit for it—”

“I said I’d come,” I told him, “and so I will. You’re not the only one who loves a mystery, even one as terrifying as this. Now that I know such a place exists, of course I want to see it. I’m not easy about it, no, but…”

He nodded. “Then this is your last chance, for you can be sure it won’t be there for you to see tomorrow!”

IX: Descent Into Madness

Within the hour we were ready. Torches, shotguns, dynamite and fuzewire—everything we would need—all was in our hands. And as we made our way from the house at Kettlethorpe along the garden paths to the roofless enclosure, already the mists were rising and beginning to creep. And I admit here and now that if David had offered me the chance again, to back out and leave him to go it alone, I believe I might well have done so.

As it was, we entered under the lintel with the plate, found the slab as David had described it, and commenced to lever it up from its seatings.

As we worked my friend nodded his head towards a very old and massive millstone lying nearby. “That’s what Jason Carpenter used to seal it. And do you believe June could have shifted that on her own? Never! She was helped—must have been helped from below!”

At that moment the slab moved, lifted, was awkward for a moment but at our insistence slid gratingly aside. I don’t know what I expected, but the blast of foul, damp air that rushed up from below took me completely by surprise. It blew full into my face, jetting up like some noxious, invisible geyser, a pressured stench of time and ocean, darkness and damp, and alien things. And I knew it at once: that tainted odour I had first detected in the summer, which David had naively termed “a miasma”.

Was this the source, then, of that misty phantom seen on dark nights, that bloating spectre formed of fog and the rushing reek of inner earth? Patently it was, but that hardly explained the shape the thing had assumed…

• • •

In a little while the expansion and egress of pent-up gases subsided and became more a flow of cold, salty air. Other odours were there, certainly, but however alien and disgusting they no longer seemed quite so unbearable.

Slung over our shoulders we carried part-filled knapsacks which threw us a little off balance. “Careful,” David warned, descending ahead of me, “it’s steep and slippery as hell!” Which was no exaggeration.

The way was narrow, spiralling, almost perpendicular, a stairwell through solid rock which might have been cut by some huge and eccentric drill. Its steps were narrow in the tread, deep in the rise, and slimy with nitre and a film of moisture clammy as sweat. And our powerful torches cutting the way through darkness deep as night, and the walls winding down, down, ever down.

I do not know the depth to which we descended; there was an interminable sameness about that corkscrew of stone which seemed to defy measurement. But I recall something of the characters carved almost ceremoniously into its walls. Undeniably Roman, some of them, but I was equally sure that these were the most recent! The rest, having a weird, almost glyphic angularity and coarseness—a barbaric simplicity of style—must surely have predated any Roman incursion into Britain.

And so down to the floor of that place, where David paused to deposit several sticks of dynamite in a dark niche. Quickly he fitted a fuze, and while he worked so he spoke to me in a whisper which echoed sibilantly away and came rustling back in decreasing sussurations. “A long fuze for this one. We’ll light it on our way out. And at least five more like this before we’re done. I hope it’s enough. God, I don’t even know the extent of the place! I’ve been this far before and farther, but you can imagine what it’s like to be down here on your own…”

Indeed I could imagine it, and shuddered at the thought.

While David worked I stood guard, shotgun under my arm, cocked, pointing it down a black tunnel that wound away to God-knows-where. The walls of this horizontal shaft were curved inward at the top to form its ceiling, which was so low that when we commenced to follow it we were obliged to stoop. Quite obviously the tunnel was no mere work of nature; no, for it was far too regular for that, and everywhere could be seen the marks of sharp tools used to chip out the stone. One other fact which registered was this: that the walls were of the same stone from which Kettlethorpe Farm—in what original form?—must in some dim uncertain time predating all memory, myth and legend have been constructed.

And as I followed my friend, so in some dim recess of my mind I made note of these things, none of which lessened in the slightest degree the terrific weight of apprehension resting almost tangibly upon me. But follow him I did, and in a little while he was showing me fresh marks on the walls, scratches he had made on previous visits to enable him to retrace his steps.

“Necessary,” he whispered, “for just along here the tunnels begin to branch, become a maze. Really—a maze! Be a terrible thing to get lost down here…”

My imagination needed no urging, and after that I followed more closely still upon his heels, scratching marks of my own as we went. And sure enough, within a distance of perhaps fifty paces more, it began to become apparent that David had in no way exaggerated with regard to the labyrinthine nature of the place. There were side tunnels, few at first but rapidly increasing in number, which entered into our shaft from both sides and all manner of angles; and shortly after this we came to a sort of gallery wherein many of these lesser passages met.

The gallery was in fact a cavern of large dimensions with a domed ceiling perhaps thirty feet high. Its walls were literally honeycombed with tunnels entering from all directions, some of which descended steeply to regions deeper and darker still. Here, too, I heard for the first time the sluggish gurgle of unseen waters, of which David informed: “That’s a stream. You’ll see it shortly.”

He laid another explosive charge out of sight in a crevice, then indicated that I should once more follow him. We took the tunnel with the highest ceiling, which after another seventy-five to one hundred yards opened out again onto a ledge that ran above a slow-moving, blackly gleaming rivulet. The water gurgled against our direction of travel, and its surface was some twenty feet lower than the ledge; this despite the fact that the trough through which it coursed was green and black with slime and incrustations almost fully up to the ledge itself. David explained the apparent ambiguity.

“Tidal,” he said. “The tide’s just turned. It’s coming in now. I’ve seen it fifteen feet deeper than this, but that won’t be for several hours yet.” He gripped my arm, causing me to start. “And look! Look at the kelp…”

Carried on the surface of the as yet sluggish stream, great ropes of weed writhed and churned, bladders glistening in the light from our torches. “David,” my voice wavered, “I think—”

“Come on,” he said, leading off once more. “I know what you think—but we’re not going back. Not yet.” Then he paused and turned to me, his eyes burning in the darkness. “Or you can go back on your own, if you wish…?”

“David,” I hissed, “that’s a rotten thing to—”

“My God, man!” he stopped me. “D’you think you’re the only one who’s afraid?”

However paradoxically, his words buoyed me up a little, following which we moved quickly on and soon came to a second gallery. Just before reaching it the stream turned away, so that only its stench and distant gurgle stayed with us. And once more David laid charges, his actions hurried now, nervous, as if in addition to his admitted fear he had picked up something of my own barely subdued panic.

“This is as far as I’ve been,” he told me, his words coming in a sort of rapid gasping or panting. “Beyond here is fresh territory. By my reckoning we’re now well over a quarter-mile from the entrance.” He flashed the beam of his torch around the walls, causing the shadows of centuries-formed stalactites to flicker and jump. “There, the big tunnel. We’ll take that one.”

And now, every three or four paces, or wherever a side tunnel opened into ours, we were both scoring the walls to mark a fresh and foolproof trail. Now, too, my nerves really began to get the better of me. I found myself starting at every move my friend made; I kept pausing to listen, my heartbeat shuddering in the utter stillness of that nighted place. Or was it still? Did I hear something just then? The echo of a splash and the soft flop, flop of furtive footsteps in the dark?

It must be pictured:

We were in a vast subterrene warren. A place hollowed out centuries ago by…by whom? By what? And what revenants lurked here still, down here in these terrible caverns of putrid rock and festering, sewage-like streams?

Slap, slap, slap…

And that time I definitely had heard something. “David—” my voice was thin as a reedy wind. “For God’s sake—”

“Shh!” he warned, his cautionary hiss barely audible. “I heard it too, and they might have heard us! Let me just get the rest of this dynamite planted—one final big batch, it’ll have to be—and then we’ll get out of here.” He used his torch to search the walls but could find no secret place to house the explosives. “Round this next bend,” he said. “I’ll find a niche there. Don’t want the stuff to be found before it’s done its job.”

We rounded the bend, and ahead—

—A glow of rotten, phosphorescent light, a luminescence almost sufficient to make our torches redundant. We saw, and we began to understand.

The roofless building up above—the enclosure that was merely the entrance. This place here, far underground, was the actual place of worship, the subterranean temple to Dagon. We knew it as soon as we saw the great nitre-crusted bell hanging from the centre of the ceiling—the bell and the rusted iron chain which served as its rope, hanging down until its last link dangled inches above the surface and centre of a black and sullenly rippling lake of scum and rank weed…

• • •

For all that horror might follow on our very heels, still we found ourselves pulled up short by the sight of that fantastic final gallery. It was easily a hundred feet wall to wall, roughly circular, domed over and shelved around, almost an amphitheatre in the shape of its base, and obviously a natural, geological formation. Stalactites hung down from above, as in the previous gallery, and stalagmitic stumps broke the weed-pool’s surface here and there, showing that at some distant time in our planet’s past the cave had stood well above sea level.

As to the source of the pool itself: this could only be the sea. The deep kelp alone was sufficient evidence of that. And to justify and make conclusive this observation, the pool was fed by a broad expanse of water which disappeared under the ledge beneath the far wall, which my sense of direction told me lay towards the sea. The small ripples or wavelets we had noted disturbing the pool’s surface could only be the product of an influx of water from this source, doubtless the flow of the incoming tide.

Then there was the light: that same glow of putrescence or organic decomposition seen in certain fungi, an unhealthy illumination which lent the cave an almost submarine aspect. So that even without the clean light of our electric torches, still the great bell in the ceiling would have remained plainly visible.

But that bell…who could say where it came from? Not I. Not David. Certainly this was that bell whose sepulchral tolling had penetrated even to the surface, but as to its origin…

In that peculiar way of his, David, as if reading my thoughts, confirmed: “Well, it’ll not ring again—not after this lot goes off!” And I saw that he had placed his knapsack full of dynamite out of sight beneath a low, shallow ledge in the wall and was even now uncoiling a generous length of fuze wire. Finishing the task, he glanced at me once, struck a match and set sputtering fire to the end of the wire, pushing it, too, out of sight.

“There,” he grunted, “and now we can get—” But here he paused, and I knew why.

The echo of a voice—a croak?—had come to us from somewhere not too far distant. And even as our ears strained to detect other than the slow gurgle of weed-choked waters, so there echoed again that damnably soft and furtive slap, slap, slap of nameless feet against slimy stone…

X: Deep Ones!

At that panic gripped both of us anew, was magnified as the water of the pool gurgled more loudly yet and ripples showed which could not be ascribed solely to an influx from the sea. Perhaps at this very moment something other than brine and weed was moving toward us along that murky and mysterious watercourse.

My limbs were trembling, and David was in no better condition as, throwing caution to the wind, we commenced scramblingly to retrace our steps, following those fresh marks where we had scratched them upon the walls of the maze. And behind us the hidden fuze slowly sputtering its way to that massive charge of dynamite; and approaching the great pool, some entirely conjectural thing whose every purpose we were sure must be utterly alien and hostile. While ahead…who could say?

But one thing was certain: our presence down here had finally stirred something up—maybe many somethings—and now their noises came to us even above our breathless panting, the hammering of our hearts and the clattering sounds of our flight down those black tunnels of inner earth. Their noises, yes, for no man of the sane upper world of blue skies and clean air could ever have named those echoing, glutinous bursts of sporadic croaking and clotted, inquiring gurgles and grunts as speech; and no one could mistake the slithering, slapping, flopping sounds of their pursuit for anything remotely human. Or perhaps they were remotely human, but so sunken into hybrid degeneracy as to seem totally alien to all human expectations. And all of this without ever having seen these Deep Ones—”Tritons”, as David had named them—or at least, not yet!

But as we arrived at the central gallery and paused for breath, and as David struck a second match to light the fuze of the charge previously laid there, that so far merciful omission commenced to resolve itself in a manner I shall never forget to my dying day.

It started with the senses-shattering gonging of the great bell, whose echoes were deafening in those hellish tunnels, and it ended…but I go ahead of myself.

Simultaneous with the ringing of the bell, a renewed chorus of croaking and grunting came to us from somewhere dangerously close at hand; so that David at once grabbed my arm and half-dragged me into a small side tunnel leading off at an angle from the gallery. This move had been occasioned not alone by the fact that the sounds we had heard were coming closer, but also that they issued from the very burrow by which we must make our escape! But as the madly capricious gods of fate would have it, our momentary haven proved no less terrifying in its way than the vulnerable position we had been obliged to quit.

The hole into which we had fled was no tunnel at all but an “L”-shaped cave which, when we rounded its single corner, laid naked to our eyes a hideous secret. We recoiled instinctively from a discovery grisly as it was unexpected, and I silently prayed that God—if indeed there was any good, sane God—would give me strength not to break down utterly in my extreme of horror.

In there, crumpled where he had finally been overcome, lay the ragged and torn remains of old Jason Carpenter. It could only be him; the similarly broken body of Bones, his dog, lay across his feet. And all about him on the floor of the cave, spent shotgun cartridges; and clasped in his half-rotted, half-mummied hand, that weapon which in the end had not saved him.

But he had fought—how he had fought! Jason, and his dog, too…

Theirs were not the only corpses left to wither and decay in that tomb of a cave. No, for heaped to one side was a pile of quasi-human—debris—almost beyond my powers of description. Suffice to say that I will not even attempt a description, but merely confirm that these were indeed the very monstrosities of David’s tale of crumbling Innsmouth. And if in death the things were loathsome, in life they would yet prove to be worse by far. That was still to come…

• • •

And so, with our torches reluctantly but necessarily switched off, we crouched there in the fetid darkness amidst corpses of man, dog and nightmares, and we waited. And always we were full of that awful awareness of slowly burning fuzes, of time rapidly running out. But at last the tolling of the bell ceased and its echoes died away, and the sounds of the Deep Ones decreased as they made off in a body towards the source of the summoning, and finally we made our move.

Switching on our torches we ran crouching from the cave into the gallery—and came face to face with utmost terror! A lone member of that flopping, frog-voiced horde had been posted here and now stood central in the gallery, turning startled, bulging batrachian eyes upon us as we emerged from our hiding place.

A moment later and this squat obscenity this—part-man, part-fish, part-frog creature—threw up webbed hands before its terrible face; screamed a hissing, croaking cry of rage and possibly agony, and finally hurled itself at us…

…Came frenziedly lurching, flopping and floundering, headlong into a double-barrelled barrage from the weapon I held in fingers which kept on uselessly squeezing the trigger long after the face and chest of the monster had flown into bloody tatters and its body was lifted and hurled away from us across the chamber.

Then David was yelling in my ear, tugging at me, dragging me after him, and…and all of the rest is a chaos, a madness, a nightmare of flight and fear.

I seem to recall loading my shotgun—several times, I think—and I have vague memories of discharging it a like number of times; and I believe that David, too, used his weapon, probably more successfully. As for our targets: it would have been difficult to miss them. There were clutching claws, and eyes bulging with hatred and lust; there was foul, alien breath in our faces, slime and blood and bespattered bodies obstructing our way where they fell; and always a swelling uproar of croaking and flopping and slithering as that place below became filled with the spawn of primal oceans.

Then…the Titan blast that set the rock walls to trembling, whose reverberations had no sooner subsided when a yet more ominous rumbling began… Dust and stony debris rained down from the tunnel ceilings, and a side tunnel actually collapsed into ruin as we fled past its mouth…but finally we arrived at the foot of those upward-winding stone steps in the flue-like shaft which was our exit.

Here my memory grows more distinct, too vivid if anything—as if sight of our salvation sharpened fear-numbed senses—and I see David lighting the final fuze as I stand by him, firing and reloading, firing and reloading. The sharp smell of sulphur and gunpowder in a haze of dust and flickering torch beams, and the darkness erupting anew in shambling shapes of loathsome fright. The shotgun hot in my hands, jamming at the last, refusing to break open.

Then David taking my place and firing point-blank into a mass of mewling horror, and his voice shrill and hysterical, ordering me to climb, climb and get out of that hellish place. From above I look down and see him dragged under, disappearing beneath a clawing, throbbing mass of bestiality; and their frog-eyes avidly turning upwards to follow my flight…fangs gleaming in grinning, wide-slit mouths…an instant’s pause before they come squelching and squalling up the steps behind me!

And at last…at last I emerge into moonlight and mist. And with a strength born of madness I hurl the slab into place and weight it with the millstone. For David is gone now and no need to ponder over his fate. It was quick, I saw it with my own eyes, but at least he has done what he set out to do. I know this now, as I feel from far below that shuddering concussion as the dynamite finishes its work.

Following which I stumble from the roofless building and collapse on a path between stunted fruit trees and unnaturally glossy borders of mist-damp shrubbery. And lying there I know the sensation of being shaken, of feeling the earth trembling beneath me, and of a crashing of masonry torn from foundations eaten by the ages.

And at the very end, sinking into a merciful unconsciousness, at last I am rewarded by a sight which will allow me, with the dawn, to come awake a sane, whole man. That sight which is simply this: a great drifting mass of mist, dissipating as it coils away over the dene, melting down from the shape of a rage-tormented merman to a thin and formless fog.

For I know that while Dagon himself lives on—as he has “lived” since time immemorial—the seat of his worship which Kettlethorpe has been for centuries is at last no more…

• • •

That is my story, the story of Kettlethorpe Farm, which with the dawn lay in broken ruins. Not a building remained whole or standing as I left the place, and what has become of it since I cannot say for I never returned and I have never inquired. Official records will show, of course, that there was “a considerable amount of pit subsidence” that night, sinkings and shiftings of the earth with which colliery folk the world over are all too familiar; and despite the fact that there was no storm as such at sea, still a large area of the ocean-fringing cliffs were seen to have sunken down and fallen onto the sands or into the sullen water.

What more is there to say? There was very little deep kelp that year, and in the years since the stuff has seemed to suffer a steady decline. This is hearsay, however, for I have moved inland and will never return to any region from which I might unwittingly spy the sea or hear its wash.

As for June: she died some eight months later giving premature birth to a child. In the interim her looks had turned even more strange, ichthyic, but she was never aware of it for she had become a happy little girl whose mind would never be whole again. Her doctors said that this was just as well, and for this I give thanks.

As well, too, they said, that her child died with her…