Shadows Over Innsmouth

“Certainly. But this passage is absolutely straight. We have only to retrace our steps.”

The Dean shrugged.

“That’s as may be. But if we come to a side passage...”

Andrew Bellows had his head on one side now, his face taut and strained in the yellow cone of the torchlight, his hand still playing out the thick twine as they slowly advanced. He spoke as though musing to himself.

“There will be no side passages, unless they give direct crossaccess to the others. Have you forgotten the subsidiaries? They all lead toward Innsmouth and the sea. And they slightly diverge, as I had earlier observed.”

There was a dreamy quality in his voice now.

“Like the setting sun.”

The Dean looked at him sharply, all his earlier fears forgotten.

“What are you trying to say?”

“I don’t know, really. But there is a greater mystery here than even I had earlier contemplated.”

The two men were silent now for five minutes or so as they made steady progress in the warm, still air, the only sound their faint breathing and the sharp, brittle echoes of their onward march. The earlier draught they had felt in the concourse seemed to have died out. They had gone something like a quarter of a mile, the surveyor judged, and the great ball of twine he was unreeling had perceptibly diminished.

Then, he was aware of an almost imperceptible curve in the tunnel, that he knew from his professional experience must bring it eventually to the sea if it ran so far, directly to the ancient seaport of Innsmouth. At the same time there was a faint inrush of air on the two men’s faces and an indefinable odour; it had in it a stale, musty smell, mingled with another, stronger aroma; almost as if they were approaching a fish market. The two men, as though seized by a single thought, increased their pace.

Almost at once they were arrested by a strange sight in that mathematically precise world where every surface and plane of the circular walls of the tunnel and its footing beneath, seemed to have been meticulously incised as though with a ruler, so straight and orderly was everything.

Ahead was chaos, depicted in the wavering yellow torchlight; great blocks of stone, smooth as if carved with some gigantic knife, lay tumbled and awry, from floor to ceiling. Yet to the surveyor’s expert eye it did not look as though there had been a rock fall. For one thing, the blocks were of a different material to that of the granite from which the passages were hewn. These rocks were dark brown, basaltic and incredibly old; it was as though they had been brought there from a distance. Bellows’ lip trembled slightly and his voice also as he whispered to his companion.

“It’s almost as though some beings had brought these blocks here... for the sole purpose of blocking the tunnel.”

Darrow did not speak and the two men stood immobile, their souls weighed down with the secret thoughts within them. The dust marks had long died out, which was bizarre in itself, so it was obvious that no one had preceded them there, along the tunnel floor. Therefore, the prodigious power that had erected this mighty barrier had come from the other side; that which lay toward the sea and the great reef of Innsmouth.

“This is beyond belief,” Bellows muttered at last.

The only answer he got was a strangled gargling noise from his companion. It was so unexpected and horrible in that place that the surveyor almost dropped the torch. He had the revolver out now and moved it in a steady arc but nothing stirred in the smooth expanse of tunnel except for the wavering torchlight. He became aware that Darrow had dropped to his knees. His face was ghastly in the dim light.

“Did you see them?” he asked in a strangled voice.

Bellows felt a sudden chill and he kept his voice steady with an effort.

“No, I saw nothing.”

The Dean leaned against him for support.

“Terrible squirming things, with flat heads like snakes. They seemed to go through the wall.”

Bellows’ voice was trembling as he replied.

“Let us get out of here,” he muttered in a low voice, not far from panic himself.

He half-dragged his companion away from the rock wall and they set off at a tottering run, the ball of twine abandoned now, the torchlight dancing on the roof of the passage.

They were both near collapse when they reached the circular chamber and Bellows had to support his companion. Behind them the echoes of their mad progress were prolonged for a far greater interval of time than they should have been.

V

“I am going to show you something few people have ever seen,” said Darrow.

It was almost dusk now and the two men were back in the Dean’s study.

“I have had a de-code done of some of the books in the sealed section of the library here. By one of my most brilliant colleagues, Jefferson Holroyd. He spent time on the staff some years ago and now lectures here regularly. Perhaps you’ve heard of him?”

Bellows glanced at the half-empty whiskey bottle on the desk between them and re-filled his glass. He felt ashamed of his earlier panic now but it was evident that his companion had suffered a far more severe shock; he had had to cancel his lecture and the two men had gone straight to his quarters, after re-sealing the tunnel workings behind them. They seemed to have been talking for hours.

“Vaguely,” Bellows said. “What’s this business of de-coding? Are these the famous secret books of which I’ve heard so often?”

The Dean nodded. His face had lost something of its pallor and he appeared more at ease, though he occasionally shot worried glances about the comfortable panelled room. Lights were beginning to prick the distant campus and he moved somewhat unsteadily to draw the thick velvet drapes across the windows. Then he returned to the desk.

“About this hallucination,” the surveyor went on, as his companion resumed his seat. “I would suggest...”

Darrow shook his head.

“That was no hallucination, Andrew. Those things were as real as you and I, though I glimpsed them only for a few seconds.”

Bellows persisted.

“The strange atmosphere, the wavering torchlight, the tension of the moment...” he suggested.

Again the vehement shaking of the head.

“Nothing like that. Listen, Andrew, I’m going to tell you something. Something that I shouldn’t because the knowledge is restricted to a mere handful of people. Above all, we don’t want a panic on campus here.”

He lowered his voice as though somebody or something might be listening.

“Peculiar things have been happening over the past two years or so. Strange, unexplainable things, of which this latest is but one manifestation. That’s why I asked the help of Holroyd. He’s one of the most brilliant cryptographers in the States. He’s also a scholar with a mastery of ancient languages. I set him to work on some of the typed copies of the rare volumes here. He’s starting to get results. That was why some of the material was stolen from the locked section.”

Bellows looked at him sombrely.

“How can you possibly know that?”

Darrow shook his head.

“I just know, Andrew. Deep in my bones.”

He smiled thinly, pouring himself more whiskey, with a dash of soda-water this time.

“Fortunately, I’d had everything in those books copied. There are three typescripts of each, all safely under lock and key in areas only two people know about. One of these persons is myself; the other is the University Librarian.”

“I don’t really know what you’re trying to tell me,” Bellows said after a long interval of silence. “There doesn’t seem to be any point in all these strange happenings...”

Darrow leaned forward across the desk, his face a strained, taut mask, bisected by the white line of his straggly moustache.

“There is a point, Andrew. A terrible pattern here. That is why I have such faith in Holroyd. If anyone can find the key to these awful mysteries it is he. I have taken the liberty of sending for him. He should be here within the next ten minutes. He is a man of unimpeachable integrity and he has iron nerve. You and he would be ideally suited to lead the exploration of these passages together. I’m afraid I could not descend there again. My nerves have been too badly shaken. And now there are the problems of the police investigation...”

“You surprise me,” Bellows said. “I have heard strange rumours about the campus, of course. Gossip about odd happenings over a long period of time. Lights that switch on and off in the students’ halls of residence. The discovery of the body of Conley in that pond; the thefts of the books. But I did not know until today that you were so involved or that you had discerned a pattern in all this.”

The Dean smiled rather wearily.

“I have learned to conceal my true feelings over the years, my dear Andrew,” he said gently. “It is an invaluable attribute when one is dealing with academics, many of them powerful personalities who are sometimes at war with one another.”

Bellows smiled too.

“That is not confined merely to the academic world. We all have our crosses to bear.”

He stood up as there came a firm, confident rapping at the study door. He waited with interest as the Dean hurried to let the newcomer in.

Holroyd was a good-looking man of about forty-five, lean but powerfully built, with a thick shock of curly hair, just starting to turn grey and a heavy black moustache which made a startling contrast with his strong white teeth when he smiled, which was a frequent occurrence with him. Steady brown eyes surveyed the two men as he stood framed in the doorway before being led over to the desk to be introduced to Bellows, whom he already knew by sight.

“I’d like you to come to the Library, Dr. Darrow,” he said without preamble. “I have worked out a mechanical method of assessing the data, using mathematical formulae. The results should be quite interesting. The method could be useful to Miskatonic in the future.”

He smiled at the Dean’s rising excitement.

“Please don’t get your hopes up too high, gentlemen. But it’s a start.”

The Dean wrinkled up his face.

“Do you mean to say that you actually have some results?”

Holroyd hovered uncertainly between the desk and the door.

“I dislike making too high a claim, Dean, as you know. But things are interesting. These writings are some sort of code, without doubt. And I have managed to reduce a few sentences to English.”

The Dean’s excitement seemed to have passed to Bellows also because he rose impetuously.

“This we must see.”

The three men were talking animatedly, almost as though they had been friends for years as they passed through the Dean’s private apartments and ascended the great gloomy staircase which led to the architecturally splendid but somewhat forbidding Central Library of the University. A slight trace of the sunset still lingered and the oriel windows in the arcade leading to the bookstacks themselves stained the parquet blood-red and cast brooding shadows before them as the trio hurried on. But none of them had any thought for their surroundings and presently they found themselves in a vast, shadowy area where green-shaded lamps burned.

It was an L-shaped reference section, set out with long deal tables, many of them weighted down with massive leather-bound volumes; it adjoined the locked and sealed section of the Library to which access was barred to everyone but the Chief Librarian and the Dean himself. Bellows wondered why that gentleman had himself not been consulted but was told by the Dean that he was currently on leave from his post to visit a sick relative in Maine.

Holroyd had brought the typed symbols of the volume on which he had been working down to the Dean’s study with him but his working notes and other material were still scattered about the table as he had left them. There had been an unusual scuttling noise as the men entered and Holroyd looked sharply round the great shadowy place, where the rays of the setting sun competed with the green-shaded lamps.

“Was there anyone in here when you came down?” the Dean asked, unnecessarily sharply, the surveyor thought.

“Not that I know of,” Holroyd replied. “The main library is usually left open, is it not, for students’ evening study?”

“Of course,” the Dean assented hastily. “That was not my meaning...”

He broke off, following the direction in which Holroyd was looking. Bellows stared too, noting for the first time the jumbled mass of metal that was lying beneath the far table.

Holroyd swore and went arrow-swift to scrabble among the wreckage. He rose white-faced and incredulous.

“Your deciphering machine?” said the Dean in a tremulous voice.

Holroyd nodded.

“Almost seventeen months’ work, gentlemen. Destroyed in a few seconds.”

The Dean’s voice rose.

“By God, if this is students’ work...”

Holroyd shook his head.

“You know that is not so.”

“But how can you tell?” said Bellows, puzzled. “If there is no one in here...”

Holroyd’s handsome face was regaining its normal complexion now.

“The Dean knows what I’m talking about, Mr. Bellows. If you’ll forgive me...”

He went over quickly, ignoring the wreckage of the shining metal machine on the floor.

“Could it have fallen by itself?” asked Bellows helplessly.

Neither man answered, both absorbed by the cryptographer’s frantic scrabbling among the tangled sheets of paper on the desk. Presently Holroyd straightened, his breath coming fast and shallow.

“Nothing?” said the Dean heavily.

Holroyd sank into a chair, looking at his two companions unseeingly. The three men started as a shadow swept across the doorway through which they had just entered. But it was only a college servant hovering uncertainly in the shadowy space.

“It is all right, Tibbs,” said the Dean in his normal voice. “A slight accident. I will call if I need you.”

The man withdrew with a muffled apology.

“Merely sheets of blank paper,” said Holroyd, answering the Dean’s previous question, which now seemed to the three men as though it had been spoken at a period remote in time.

“You mentioned something about English phrases,” said Darrow when another long interval had elapsed. “Can you remember what it was you were going to tell us?”

An astonishing change had taken place in Holroyd since the Dean had begun speaking. He passed his hand across his forehead.

“They seem to have slipped my mind temporarily,” he said apologetically.

“Perhaps the typed notes will refresh your memory,” Bellows suggested.

He had not finished speaking when the folder, which Holroyd had placed on a corner of the table, suddenly fluttered to the floor, as though a strong but unseen, unfelt wind had rippled through the vast library. The papers were scattered all about the floor and as the two men went to help their companion sort and collate them they saw that they were nothing more than blank sheets of paper too.

VI

“It is impossible,” the Dean agreed, “and yet it has happened.”

The air in this corner of the library was thick with tobacco smoke and Tibbs still hovered, keeping students away from the section, though light and the low murmur of conversation came reassuringly from beyond the far bookstacks.

“The contents of that book have vanished; you cannot remember anything of the de-code; and the machine on which you spent so much time has been destroyed,” said Bellows. “This is all of a piece with what happened to the Dean in the tunnel today. It makes a thorough exploration of all the underground passages even more urgent in my opinion.”

“Perhaps,” said Holroyd heavily. “But it behooves us to go carefully. My research has been put back, it is true. But it is only a delay, not an impasse. A copy of the machine can soon be reconstructed from my working drawings; we have the original of the volume on which I was working under lock and key; and I shall not need anything so fallible as my memory once we begin. And the notes Mr. Bellows has given me are invaluable. The inscriptions in that concourse are similar to those on which I have been working.”

Bellows looked sceptical.

“Perhaps that is all these people needed,” he suggested. “Time.”

“What people?” said the Dean, startled.

Bellows turned to give him a grim glance. “All right, then. Perhaps not people. What would you prefer? Things?”

The Dean’s lips were trembling now. There was no doubt about it, Bellows thought.

“You feel there is some connection between what happened tonight and what I saw in that passage?”

Bellows shrugged.

“It could be possible. Many strange incidents have been happening at Miskatonic, from what you tell me. What is your opinion, Mr. Holroyd?”

“I am inclined to agree. I have been shaken tonight, I will admit.”

Holroyd glanced at his watch.

“It’s almost ten o’clock. Time to eat, surely. There’s nothing else we can do tonight, anyway. And Tibbs is waiting to lock up.”

The three men walked back down the great staircase in a sombre silence.

VII

Captain of Detectives Cornelius Oates eased his way out of the stifling atmosphere of the green-painted room and gulped in moist air with gratitude. From the height of Oak Point police station, where the body had been brought, he had a wide sweep of distant Innsmouth to the left; far out, beyond the reef, there was a band of gauzy mist in which a flock of birds were diving and soaring in a strange tangle, as they fought over some booty on the sullen surface of the sea beneath them; a sea which, inexplicably, did not seem to give back much light from the almost obscenely overripe orange moon that hung low in the sky; overripe too were the almost jungle smells that seemed to come from the rotting wharves of the old downtown dock area of Innsmouth and the melancholy croaking of frogs served only to emphasise the outlandishness of the place to which grim duty had brought him a few short days ago.

Oates sighed. He was a big man, dressed in city clothes and used to city ways; but he was the best there was in that corner of the nation and he had been brought in from the county seat to lead investigations into the series of events that had puzzled and horrified some of the more backward and outlandish denizens of the Arkham-Innsmouth area.

Oates turned with relief as the door behind him opened and the narrow, sandy head of Dr. Ewart Lancaster, the local police surgeon, appeared in the opening.

“Ever seen anything like it, doc?”

The medic shrugged.

“You were right, Captain. I’ve been in practice in these parts more’n forty years and it’s outside my experience, I don’t mind admitting.”

Oates looked at him shrewdly in the bright light that sliced the warm darkness from the open door. Even the weather was strange in this benighted place. The doctor lit the stump of a cigar he took from his waistcoat pocket, handed a pack of Havanas to his companion. The police officer selected one fastidiously with the air of a connoisseur, thanked the doctor gruffly and the two men smoked in silence, the gracious aroma expelling the charnel atmosphere of the dissecting room they had just left behind them.

“Yes, Captain,” said Dr. Lancaster grimly. “As you remarked on the phone. The facial features removed as though with some sort of obscene sponge. Everything fused together, obliterated. What am I going to put in my report?”

Oates shrugged, his thoughts far away, back in the relatively sane and mundane atmosphere of the city streets he had so recently left.

“Fish, perhaps,” he began awkwardly.

Lancaster looked at him incredulously.

“In that pond?” he said mildly. “I’ve never seen any form of animal life that could do that to a man.”

“You misunderstand me, doc,” the police officer went on. “For the record, I mean. We’ve got to put something. The guy fell in, maybe; the shock of the cold water induced a heart attack; the nibbling of fish and the action of the water over a few days?”

The doctor gave a twisted smile.

“You might buy it, Captain. I might buy it. But will the city authorities? They’re the ones we have to watch.”

He looked at the big detective shrewdly.

“What’s your real opinion?”

If he expected an enlightening answer he was disappointed.

Oates scratched his chin, his eyes still fixed on the shimmering mass of mist beyond the reef.

“We have to put something in the report, doc. That’s all I’m saying. It may not satisfy us but it has to stop all these silly questions and square the hicks until we can get back to the bottom of things.”

Dr. Lancaster had his eyes fixed on Oates’ face. He spoke reluctantly.

“You say the Arkham newspaper files you want are away for binding. Go to Innsmouth and poke around incognito. Look at the newspaper reports of a couple of years ago in the library there.”

He paused.

“There’s all sorts of old tales about creatures that live in the sea beyond the reef. Some people believe they’re trying to take over human beings, maybe the entire populations of Innsmouth and Arkham. Nonsense, of course, but it’s a starting point.”

Oates kept his gaze concentrated far out, conscious of the increasing odour of the swamplands that pressed close to Oak Point on the landward side.

“All I can say is, I admire your fortitude, Dr. Lancaster. You’ve been here forty years. I’ve had enough in forty hours.”

The doctor smiled grimly, pulling appreciatively on his cigar. “You get used to anything,” he observed.

“Maybe,” said Oates. “But the Arkham-Innsmouth area is the damnedest, queerest place I ever struck. With a little more persuading it could sure enough scare the hell out of me.”

VIII

Holroyd woke with a start. At first he did not know where he was. Then he remembered that he had told the Dean and Bellows that he would not return to his house that night. He had quarters on campus where he sometimes slept when he was working late. Now he guessed the moonlight stealing through the window shutters had fallen across his face and wakened him. The sonorous booming of clocks began then; a nightly symphony that combined the steeple timepieces of many of Arkham’s crumbling old churches; mingled among those of the much younger but more melodious of the University’s public clocks in halls of residence; in chapels; and on the façades of the three great University churches. Although the concert could not have lasted more than a minute or so—such was the discrepancy between the ancient clockwork, often slow by two minutes or more and the more modern, often in advance—he eventually made out that it was somewhere around 3:00 a.m. When the wind was right he could sometimes make out the faint echo of Innsmouth’s own public timepieces.

Holroyd was about to turn over when he became aware, for the first time, that something unusual was taking place in the room. He guessed, subconsciously, that it was this which had first alerted him from deep sleep. A furtive, insidious noise such as might be made by a child, or perhaps a very old person, rubbing pieces of dry paper together. The mental image was an innocuous one, perhaps, but so incongruous in that time and place that Holroyd began to perspire.

The sound seemed to emanate from somewhere near the wall at his head, pass slowly across the room to a point near the window, only to return once more, becoming a little louder each time. Holroyd closed his eyes but that did no good; the sound did not go away neither did it diminish. Instead, it merely increased his anxiety, for as the furtive noise came closer to him it seemed that something terrible might happen if he did not keep his eyes open. By so doing, he felt, he would hold the thing—whatever it was—at bay by the mere act of being awake, alert and in full possession of his faculties.

At the third passage of the presence Holroyd felt impelled to get up; he could still see nothing, but the light switch was at the far side of the room and to gain it he would have to pass the entire length of the wall from which the sounds were coming. This, understandably enough, he was reluctant to do. Instead, he put on his trousers over his pyjamas, began to insinuate his feet into his slippers, by the shimmering half-light of the moon spilling into the room.

To his dismay, however, his right foot seemed to plunge immediately into cold, swampy water, instead of the familiar confines of the slipper. He withdrew his foot as though stung and then he saw the long, grey serpent-thing with the blind white eyes, moving with incredible speed across the carpet, writhing and fibrillating as though it contained a thousand different entities. He let out shriek after shriek as the grey monstrosity darted up his trouser-leg. A nauseous stench was in his nostrils and there was burning pain as he lost consciousness.

When he came to himself he was lying on his bed and there was nothing but the usual muffled night sounds that came faintly to the sleeping campus of Miskatonic University. He felt as though he had been running and his pyjamas were saturated with sweat. Somehow, he dragged himself to the light-switch and the blinding light brought reality and the release from nightmare. His slippers were warm and dry, marshalled in their usual place at the side of the bed. It was obvious from their position on the bedside chair that he had never put on his trousers the night before. Relief flooded through him. The whole thing was nightmare then.

But as he turned there came again that nauseous stench. Blood was in his throat; his vocal organs had been so constricted with terror in the dream that he must have bitten his tongue. But why did that awful smell persist? It was then that he saw the trails of dreadful grey slime on the legs of his pyjama trousers. He came near to fainting then.

IX

The following day Oates drove out to Innsmouth in an official police car which he had converted to a civilian vehicle by the simple expedient of affixing masking tape over the police department insignia on the door panels. He wanted to be discreet and he felt oppressed by the abnormality of the events that were beginning to enmesh him. Especially after the doctor’s remarks the night before.

It was a dark, sullen day and the old turnpike route, mostly deserted except for the odd farm cart, led him through steep gorges within which the Manuxet ran in raging whiteness; the black rocks which lined the gorges and the white threads of water, combined with the coldness of the air and the loneliness of the situation—for there were few habitations that he could see—inducing a chill of the soul rather than that of the bone; the babbling of the river had a strange, ethereal effect, like the insistent whispering of voices in his ear and twice he almost ran off the road due to the distraction this caused him. He stopped at last and lit a cigarette, glancing down at the gorge at his left side. He was a big, confident man, who had seen death in many forms during his long years as a senior detective, but he was out of his depth here.

Not only in Arkham but physically here on this lonely road, where none of the official police formulas would work, and certainly not in Innsmouth, his destination; a rundown, degraded city, he had heard; a place of sullen silences; of in-breeding; and curious folk who made their furtive livings in ways that he suspected the law would disapprove of. He remembered the words of a fellow officer who had done three years’ duty as a young constable in that degenerate place and some of the more vivid phrases came back to him now.

He buttoned up his thick overcoat round his neck, for the car was an open tourer that he had borrowed from the Arkham authorities, and took a pull at the thermos flask of hot coffee he had thoughtfully provided himself with. The roaring of the water in his ears was having a hypnotic effect and the stark black and white, the contrast of the foaming water against the jet-black of the rocks, reminded him uncomfortably of death; perhaps because the juxtaposition recalled the skeletal effect of stripped bone against the blackness of the gorge. He shook off these fanciful thoughts, re-corked the thermos and drove on a few miles more, the comforting feel of his police revolver in its webbing harness reassuring against his breastbone.

He was almost at his destination and the Manuxet gorges opened out to an estuary proper where the sullen pound of the river, yellowish brown now, started to mingle with the green of the outer sea. He stopped the car again and picked up his binoculars from the passenger seat. For a long while he studied the dark reef off the shore of Innsmouth, where the Atlantic surf boomed relentlessly, oblivious of the dark sea birds which flapped and soared above the wavetops; studying the large caves half-seen amid the spray, glimpsing the dark tumbling forms that appeared and disappeared amid the foam; seals, perhaps, or possibly larger sea birds dipping in the boiling welter.

It was turned midday when he at last put the nose of the car into the crumbling suburbs of the old seaport and working from an out-of-date map—for the few passersby huddled in their overcoats did not seem inclined to stop or talk—eventually found the public library, a surprisingly massive brownstone edifice with a pseudo-Greek portico. Oates walked up a dusty marble staircase, his footsteps raising echoes, and eventually made out a faded gilt sign which directed him to the reference section. He had, of course, already been to the main library in Arkham but, as he had told the doctor, had been surprised to find that all their major newspaper files for the past few years had been sent to the County Library Depot for re-binding.

Rather than drive over half Massachusetts he had thought it more convenient to first sample the facilities at Innsmouth, while heeding the advice of Arkham’s police chief not to advertise his presence there. He had already decided on the latter course in any event and now, as he tramped the dusty corridors, he was already regretting his errand for it seemed an unlikely quest in such unprepossessing surroundings.

But soft electric lights bloomed ahead and a few moments later he found himself in the presence of an elderly spinster lady, named Miss Thatcher, the reference librarian, who gave him the freedom of the shelves. It was obvious that her duties were not onerous and Oates’ brisk personality a marked contrast to those of the few silent, hunched figures at the reading desks in the section behind her.

Oates asked for the relevant newspaper files, which were speedily produced, and he was directed to a side-table beneath a reading lamp, where the bound volumes of the Innsmouth Recorder and other regional journals were spread out close to hand. Oates had cleverly asked for several years, including those which had nothing to do with his researches and he busied himself firstly with the pretence of going through these volumes and making pencilled notes which had no connection with his quest.

He was uneasily aware that some of the huddled figures had frozen unnaturally at his entrance and that their pallid, seemingly-uncomprehending faces were turned moon-like toward him; the blank, unformed features reminding the Captain of Detectives of nothing so much as those unfortunates he had occasionally seen incarcerated in lunatic asylums in the great cities of the East. But he flicked the pages unconcernedly, all the while making innocuous noises to Miss Thatcher, who had hovered solicitously at his elbow. But she was soon called away to her desk and Oates was free to pursue his real researches. These concerned the disturbances which had shattered the relative calm of Innsmouth some years earlier. As he read on through the yellowing pages Oates gradually recalled some of the salient features which had sent ripples through the wider world. The catalyst had been a young man, a descendant of Obed Marsh, who had fled the city and had alerted the Federal authorities, who had in turn carried out a series of raids during the years 1928 and 1929.

This had led to the dynamiting of a large number of derelict waterfront properties and, even more strangely, the US Navy had sent vessels which had directed torpedoes downward to caverns deep beneath the great reef which lay a mile or two off the Innsmouth shore. As Oates read on his bewilderment increased but, intrigued, he persisted, and within an hour he had a set of disconnected facts which were as strange as anything he had ever been called upon to investigate. Almost as strange as the present set of circumstances which were the subject of his current investigation, he thought wryly.

If he remembered rightly, the young man involved in the affair and whose precipitate flight from the city had first alerted the authorities, had later been incarcerated in an asylum in upstate New York and to the best of Oates’ knowledge, there he remained. The detective’s thoughts were disturbed by an irritating rustling and he noticed that one of the derelicts at the adjoining table was making for the door, rolling up a crumpled newspaper as he went. Oates then became aware that the librarian was on the telephone; in the yellow light which silhouetted her in her cubicle, he could see that she was half-turned toward him and seemed to be arguing with someone at the other end of the line.

It was at this point that Oates made a strange discovery. The stories in which he was so interested were headlined on the front pages of the journals and were followed by the first paragraphs of the stories in heavy black type. But on every occasion when he consulted the turn-page which should have continued the narratives, it was to be confronted with other stories, with never a follow-up headline or the remainder of the story.

Miss Thatcher was approaching him now, her lips set in a thin, rigid line.

“We are closing shortly, sir. May I have the volumes?”

Oates was about to expostulate because he assumed from the printed notices elsewhere in the building that it was hours from closing time. But something kept his mouth closed. Similarly, he had been about to point out the curious factor of the missing stories but again he remained silent. There was a curious rigidity; a sense of expectancy in the figures about him that impelled him to silence. He was a very cautious man and he had been in many tight corners. There was nothing sinister about the library; on the surface at any rate; but a sixth sense which every police officer must have told him that silence was the most prudent course at the present stage.

So he smiled pleasantly at the woman and helped her to carry the heavy volumes back to the racks from which they had been extracted. Obviously Miss Thatcher had telephoned some higher authority; or some higher authority had telephoned her. Oates was inclined to discount the latter because no one could know he was here. Or did they? He re-seated himself at the table, stroking his heavy chin. Someone in police headquarters at Arkham, perhaps? Or possibly Miss Thatcher, alarmed for some reason at a stranger’s questioning, had contacted her immediate superior in the same building and asked for instructions. That was more likely and he again began to relax, though aware more than ever of the curious, even alien eyes regarding him from the silent tables in the yellow dusk.

Miss Thatcher paused in front of the table.

“Ten minutes, sir,” she said in a clear, precise voice. “Then we close.”

Oates nodded.

“Thank you for your help, madam.”

The woman drew herself up as though startled. Then she recollected herself.

“Glad to have been of service, sir.”

She glanced at the big clock on the far wall.

“It is early closing today, you see.”

Oates nodded. The woman might well be right, in which case there was nothing sinister in her attitude. He would check from the notices on the way out. He waited until she had gone back to her desk and then produced a notebook from his pocket. He tore off a sheet from the top and started scribbling in pencil with a strong, steady hand.

Beneath FACTS he began to make notations under number headings.

1. A number of strange occurrences at Miskatonic University, Arkham, in the spring of 1932. Doors opening and shutting of their own volition; lights switching on and off without cause; taps ditto.

2. Great storm of 1932, which caused tremendous damage at Innsmouth, also affected Arkham. A corollary to the great tidal bore of the Manuxet in the autumn of 1930 which caused floods, drowning, and curious effects of “white lightning.”

3. Whirlwind which stripped roofs and caused much damage in Innsmouth and Arkham on the same night.

4. Thefts of numbers of arcane and esoteric books at the Library of the University of Miskatonic, Arkham, in a locked section kept by the Chief Librarian, Jethro Staveley. Great heat cracked window glass and shelves were charred. Thief never found.

5. Recently. Large stone cross on campus at the University suddenly collapsed, almost killing the Dean, Dr. Darrow. Inside of column seemed to be “rotted away,” though this was a manifest impossibility.

6. Large concourse and number of underground tunnels discovered beneath cross area by surveyor, Andrew Bellows.

7. He and Darrow descend to the catacombs. Darrow badly frightened by something he has seen, which he describes as “being like serpents.” Conversely, Bellows sees nothing. Most of these events are kept from press and authorities. My subsequent interview with Darrow elicits all these facts at third-hand.

8. Holroyd’s cryptological investigations into the typed copies of books from the sealed section of the library brought to an end by the smashing of his de-coding machine and the theft or mislaying of the decoded papers. Holroyd reluctant to let the authorities know the nature of his discoveries lest the police think him “fanciful.” Memory now affected.

9. MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL, the thing which brought the matter to our attention in the first place; the mysterious death

of the college janitor, Jeb Conley, who was found floating in a pool fed by an underground spring, after being missing for some days. His features had been erased in a manner quite outside my experience and that of the Medical Examiner, Dr. Lancaster.

10. Another curious feature is that when Darrow and Bellows investigated the caverns, there were marks in the dust, obviously made by the passage of some heavy person or persons. Later, the marks were found to be completely erased and a perfectly engineered passage, leading in the direction of Innsmouth and the sea, incidentally, was found to be blocked by a fall of rock; the passages appear to be made of granite and the thing sounds like a manifest impossibility.

11. Are any or all of these events connected? If so, how?

12. Where do we go from here?

13. Obvious conclusion: fairly urgent that we should organise a thorough search of these tunnels without further delay.

Oates’ scribblings were interrupted by a loud creaking noise. He rose from the table to find himself alone, except for the old lady librarian, who was hovering by her desk with her hat and coat on. Already, she had extinguished most of the lights, and the detective found himself in semi-darkness.

He picked up the sheet of paper and walked briskly down toward the entrance to the reference section, his footsteps echoing loudly beneath the vaulted ceiling.

“Good afternoon, Ma’am.”

Miss Thatcher gave him a courteous little half-bobbing bow.

“Goodbye, sir,” she said primly.

Oates went on to the stairhead, hearing the grating of the lock behind him as she closed the big main door. The light above her desk was extinguished by an external switch in the corridor, he noted, before the angle of the passage hid her from view. As he paused at the top of the stairs he was startled by a sudden draught on the nape of his neck. It was icy and he was so taken aback he staggered for a moment.

The next instant, the sheet of notations pencilled on both sides of the large piece of notepaper went sailing down the shadowy staircase. But Oates was an astute officer and he had his wits about him. He was light on his toes for such a big man and he pounded downward, aware that the strange blast of air was keeping pace, holding the dancing sheet just out of his reach. As Oates reached the main doors of the library the ruled sheet was still whirling as though it had a life of its own; almost as if it were controlled by a string.

It was flapping desperately against the big double doors, as if it were trying to gain the street beyond. A thin man with a scar on his face was outside, struggling to get in. But Oates was on familiar ground now. He had the sheet firmly between thumb and forefinger, put his shoulder firmly to the door. It flew back, smashing the thin man across the side of his jaw. He gave a sharp yelp of pain and fell back, making a hissing noise between jagged teeth.

“I’m so sorry,” said Oates pleasantly. “I didn’t see anyone there.”

He put a match to the sheet of notepaper, used it as a spill to light a cigarette. He stood there savouring the expression on the thin man’s face as he watched the sheet turn to ash, while he nursed his jaw with a filthy handkerchief.

“I hope I didn’t hurt you.”

The thin man hissed something incomprehensible from beneath the handkerchief and slid through the door like a snake. He ascended the steps two at a time while Oates was left with the impression of hatred in the dead-insect eyes. He glanced back over his shoulder, making sure the ash he ground beneath his feet would not leave any information for anyone who might pass that way, glimpsed a notice in the vestibule. Miss Thatcher was right. Today was early closing day for the library.

He went back to his car, parked in a side street. His trained eye immediately noted two things wrong. Someone had pulled at the tape on the door panels which hid its identity as a police vehicle. The second came after he had got into the driving seat, conscious of prying eyes behind shaded windows round about. He tested the brakes carefully; after a few pumping motions he found they faded suspiciously. He remembered the dark and twisting road that led through the gorges back to Arkham.

He sought out a garage in the same street, showed the sullen, reluctant man there his badge of authority; he had his vehicle towed to the workshop and stood over the man until he had made good the repair. When he had tested the linkage and was satisfied that it was secure he put a ten-dollar bill on the counter of the grimy office. He deliberately showed the man the butt of his revolver as he rebuttoned his overcoat.

“Take this as a warning,” he said. “And remember it. The state authorities know I’m here. So no more tricks.”

The man kept his eyes on the floor.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he mumbled.

“I think you do,” Oates said curtly.

He drove quickly out of Innsmouth, through the growing dusk. He watched the rear mirror all the way but there was no sign of anything or anyone following. Nevertheless he did not relax his precautions all the way through the miles of gorges, the sound of the Manuxet making a menacing roar in his ears. It was only when he gained the fresh air of the uplands that he relaxed his guard. He had much to think about as he reached the outskirts of Arkham.

X

Dr. Darrow slept badly that night. Such dreams as he had were troubled. When he awoke he found it was only 2:00 a.m. and he lay for a long time watching the moonlight at the window bars, his mind confused and distrait. Was he really losing his mental faculties? His confusion stemmed from the fact of an interview he had had with Captain Oates as soon as that officer had returned from Innsmouth late that afternoon.

Strangely, the air had then been hot and stormy and just after the two men met in the Dean’s study the tempest had broken; a wind like a roaring furnace followed by thunder, lightning and such a tornado of rain that the good doctor hadn’t seen in all his long years. Perhaps that was why the interview between the two men had partaken of melodrama.

The Dean had been on difficult ground, of course. Though he had been too polite to say so the former had been certain that the big detective had strongly disapproved of the University’s earlier actions; or rather lack of actions. That they had not reported the strange incidents to the police; and that they had tried to hush up even the discovery of the body of Jeb Conley. That had been a primary mistake, the Dean felt, and had not disposed the police favourably toward them. But Oates had been fair, he had to give him that.

The detective had read from his earlier notes of their first conversation, soon after the body had been discovered and the County had decided to send over one of its most efficient and high-ranking officers to take charge. All had gone well until the matter of the collapse of the memorial cross had come up. Tired of the great display of lightning at the windows the two men had drawn the drapes and retired to the Dean’s desk where they could talk and make notes in comparative comfort in an area where the storm was merely a distant disturbance.

“I’d just like to run through your earlier statements,” Oates had said.

The Dean nodded, listening half-impatiently, blinking violently from time to time at each clap of thunder, as though the unseen lightning troubled his eyes.

“You say you saw these strange creatures come out of the tunnel walls?”

“Eigh? What’s that,” Darrow interrupted sharply. “There must be some mistake. I really don’t understand.”

“I have it verbatim here,” Oates said shortly. “That’s what you told me. I have a complete description. Let me repeat what you first said. Perhaps that will refresh your memory.”

He had not read more than two sentences before Darrow interrupted again.

“That’s not what I said at all,” he commented irritably. “You must have got things wrong. That’s what happened to Bellows. He saw these things. Or so he told me. He was in such a state of collapse I had to help him out of the tunnel.”

There were spots of red on Oates’ cheeks now.

“Come now, Dr. Darrow,” he said sternly. “All this was said in the presence of a stenographer. She took notes separately and I’m sure she will corroborate what I’ve got down here. Apart from Bellows’ own statement, of course.”

It was the Dean’s turn to look bewildered. He licked his lips nervously.

“I’m sure I don’t understand, Captain. To the best of my recollection I saw nothing. It was Bellows who spoke of seeing these weird creatures.”

Oates paused and made another note in his book.

“And you’re prepared to swear to that,” he said heavily.

The Dean hesitated again.

“Well, I don’t quite know. What does Bellows say?”

Oates let out a heavy sigh, his brow clouded with anger.

“He says exactly what he’s always said, doctor,” he retorted crisply. “I think you’d really best reconsider your position. This is a very serious matter. And revoking a sworn testimony isn’t something a man in your public position ought to enter into lightly.”

There was a heavy silence between the two, while the thunder rumbled and rattled at the windowpanes of the curtained room. Presently the Dean made a nervous drumming noise with his fingers on the desk surface. He looked lost and miserable; out of his depth. Oates felt a stirring of pity for him, even amid his irritation.

“Perhaps you’d better sleep on it, doctor,” he said gently. “These events seem to have upset a great many people. And I shall have to prepare a party to descend into those vaults tomorrow. A number of State troopers will be here first thing. Do you feel fit enough to accompany us?”

The Dean flushed as though his integrity had been brought into question.

“Of course,” he said firmly.

It was Oates’ turn to look staggered.

“But you said categorically earlier that you were so nervous and shattered that nothing would induce you to go down there again!”

Red spots were standing out on Darrow’s cheeks as well now.

“Oh, did I?” he said vaguely. “If you say so, Mr. Oates.”

The big detective laid down his notebook as though it were about to explode and passed a hand over his face, his mind racing furiously over the booming concussion of the storm raging outside. He had just remembered something. Details that tied up with the Dean’s current mental lapse. Blank sheets of paper where there had been notes before. He would question Holroyd again about his own lapse of memory. And only this morning his own carefully prepared notes had almost been lost due to a malign breeze which had sprung up in an enclosed building. Was someone—or something—working in a way beyond his comprehension to obliterate knowledge of events taking place in Arkham and Innsmouth? Something connected with the cataclysms of two years earlier?

Something inimical to life as normal people knew it? Oates was a man of immense experience in his profession and intensely pragmatic. He bit his lip. Even he felt deep undercurrents into which he would rather not venture at the moment. So he stifled all his inner misgivings and merely dismissed the Dean as gently as possible. He would talk the thing over with the medical examiner later. The two men saw eye to eye and the doctor’s coldly professional expertise would give much-needed ballast to his own thoughts.

There was also the matter of the person who had tampered with the brakes of his car. That was of definite human agency. So much for the more fanciful imaginings of the Dean and Holroyd. Oates’ nostrils twitched with slight amusement at his recollection of Arkham’s police chief when the city detective had mentioned the matter of his expenses regarding the garage bill. He had fulminated about the difference between city and rural budgets. The recollection had lightened the tension slightly as Oates proceeded further into the dark morass into which he was becoming entrapped.

His musings had been interrupted by an urgent telephone call from the doctor. It was quite dark when Oates arrived at Oak Point police station on the outskirts of the city and fireflies made a faint green miasma over the marshes that fringed the shore. Again, the croaking of frogs sounded loud and menacing in this God-forsaken spot. Oates wondered, not for the first time, why the city authorities had chosen to erect a substantial police building out here, with not only cells but a mortuary and post-mortem facilities.

But his questionings had been met with shrugs. Arkham had been expanding as a city at that time and there had been a railroad wreck in the area, which had badly strained both police and medical resources. Also, the city fathers had hoped to enlarge the urban boundaries by expanding housing facilities which had never materialised. Now, the station was manned by a sergeant and two other officers while the mortuary facilities were seldom used. Dr. Lancaster had his own theories, of course, but so far he had kept them to himself. He was more forthcoming on the autopsy findings, however. The mortuary had been currently re-opened at this remote spot halfway between Arkham and Innsmouth to avoid further press speculation. Not that there had been much; merely the odd paragraph or two.

The authorities had played down the death of Conley and the corpse had been removed here with such promptitude that no pressmen had been able to view the body before it left the area of the pond. A police car driven by the bored sergeant drove away as Oates arrived and he acknowledged the uniformed officer’s languid wave with a similar gesture of his own. He wondered what had been so urgent that Lancaster’s call could not have waited until morning.

He walked up the narrow concrete path to the front door of the reception office where a lanky, red-haired officer was speaking in low tones into the old-fashioned sit-up-and-beg type telephone. Oates lifted up the counter flap and went on in back, down a green-painted corridor where filing cabinets were glimpsed behind half-frosted panel doors, and where dim bulbs in stark metal fittings merely emphasised the bleakness of this lonely outpost of law and order.

Dr. Lancaster was waiting just inside the mortuary door, a serious expression on his face. He wore ordinary street clothes and he began without preamble.

“I came over to clean up and finish off my report about an hour ago,” he said. “The place is locked, because the mortuary is outside Halloran’s jurisdiction.”

Halloran was the uniform sergeant in charge of the Oak Point station.

“Well?” Oates queried, watching the doctor’s face intently. There was a pallor about the cheeks and a deep seriousness in back of the eyes that hadn’t been there before.

“I’d just like you to look at this,” Lancaster said.

He led the way down between the mortuary tables to a more secluded area where a tap dripped into a white porcelain sink with a melancholy sound in the silence.

The back door was hanging askew on its hinges and there was the smell of burning in the air. Oates gave a small exclamation as he knelt and looked at the half-melted and buckled metal of the hinges and door-lock.

“Curious, eh?” said the doctor solemnly. “Who’d want to rob this place?”

Oates stood up, dusting the knee of his trousers.

“There’s been a robbery, then?”

“Oh, yes. Police evidence.”

Oates followed the other’s eyes to where drag-marks went across the concrete path to a woodland area fringing the swamp. He followed them down, keeping in the light spilling past the wrecked door, conscious now of a bitter pungency. He noticed slime then, on the edge of the concrete path, and again caught a nauseous stench. The doctor had joined him.

“It won’t be any use following,” he said wearily. “That way leads only to the swamp. That’s where they’ve taken Conley.”

The detective looked at him, momentarily struck dumb.

“The corpse?” he said wonderingly. “But who’d want a corpse?”

Lancaster shrugged, edging back toward the lit sanity of the police station.

“No one in their senses. But we aren’t dealing with the normal. That body represented evidence. Evidence of something abnormal. Now it’s disappeared.”

Oates said nothing. He glanced at a piece of paper the doctor held out to him. It had crude lettering scribbled on it in an illiterate hand; Oates made out the roughly formed sentence: DON’T MEDDLE WITH THINGS THAT DON’T CONCERN YOU.

He reached out for the paper to examine it more closely when a sudden wind sprang up that took the two men by surprise. The note was whirled from their grasp, halfway between doctor and police officer. Then it was gone toward the dark wood and they saw it no more. Oates clamped his lips tight shut, opened them again to speak of the incident in the library. He had a quick mental image of the man with the scar.

Then he decided to keep his own counsel. After all, what was the use?

All he said was, “We’d better sort out something sensible for your report,” as he led the way back inside the station.

The doctor lingered, listening to the croaking of the frogs, watching the distant points of green light over the swamp.

He gave a short laugh.

“Does it matter what we put, Captain? No one’s going to believe us, anyway.”

XI

Bellows was first down the dark opening beneath the fallen cross, confident and professional as he guided the cohorts of strong, uniformed State troopers into the large concourse so that the whole place was soon a humming mass of activity.

Despite the Dean’s eagerness to descend, Oates had again glimpsed a strangeness in the academic’s demeanour and had pressed him to remain above. Several of the biggest and strongest officers remained above ground level, for such activity on campus could not pass unnoticed, but the stationing of police vehicles and wooden planking barriers were sufficient to keep the general public at a distance.

Powerful electric torches were being distributed and many of these would be stationed at intervals along the tunnels in order to provide permanent lighting while the searches went on. By their light Oates had more than once glimpsed strange expressions on Holroyd’s face. He was a changed man from the previous day and more than once the Captain of Detectives had asked the cryptologist if he was all right.

“Of course,” he had replied, somewhat irritably, Oates thought. “Why should I not be?”

Now Oates shook his head.

“You don’t look well,” he commented. “That was quite a jolt you had yesterday.”

Holroyd shrugged. He had his face turned away from the other but Oates could still see muscles working in the lean throat. Holroyd did not look too reliable for the work they might have to do and Oates resolved to stick close to him.

Now he called a short conference in the centre of the concourse, briefing the State troopers again as to the plan of action. Each man had been issued with a whistle and a pre-arranged code would bring reinforcements and help as required. When he was certain that all the officers had a clear idea of what they should do, he asked them to remain in the concourse while a small party again reconnoitred the central tunnel. Both Darrow and Bellows had told him it was completely blocked by fallen masonry but he wanted to make sure.

A uniformed police captain and six State troopers accompanied Bellows, Oates and Holroyd into the central tunnel. The place was as light as day as three of the police deployed their torches and the party set out with brisk, confident steps. Unlike Bellows’ original exploration with the Dean, this morning’s excursion was brief; in a very few minutes, it seemed, they came up against the blockage in the tunnel but a sudden exclamation of astonishment from the surveyor brought the party to a halt.

“What’s wrong?” Oates asked sharply, taking in the barrier ahead.

Bellows turned amazed features to him.

“This is impossible.”

“I don’t understand.”

Bellows ignored him, ran forward and passed his fingers over the wall before them.

“A broken fall of jagged stone blocks completely sealed this tunnel. Today there’s a smooth, unbroken masonry wall that looks as though it has been here for years. The thing is impossible...”

He sounded stunned.

Oates could not suppress a slight prickling of the scalp but he seemed quite normal as he questioned the surveyor.

“You’re sure about this? Might you not have been mistaken? You had only low-powered torches, if I recall...”

Bellows shook his head fiercely.

The police captain caught Oates’ eyes. Both men could sense the growing unease among the uniformed personnel; Holroyd’s face was a mass of perspiration.

“Let’s get on with the search, Mr. Oates,” said the uniformed captain, his face a granite mask. “We can sort this out later.”

“Surely,” said Oates with relief and the party then turned abruptly and marched back down the tunnel, those present keeping their thoughts to themselves. But Oates knew that Bellows’ self-confidence was crumbling and Holroyd was close to cracking even before they had started. He might get the latter to stay with the rearguard while they explored the other six tunnels.

The next two hours were ones of unceasing activity. Large contingents of police, split into four parties, explored the remaining passages. Oates led one, the police captain the second and Bellows and Holroyd the third and fourth, though Oates made sure another senior police officer was close to Holroyd throughout. Three of the parties had returned within the two hours; they had tramped through miles of smooth, man-made passages without seeing anything untoward.

Strangely, all three passages had petered out, coming to precisely engineered points; the vee-shapes accurately and smoothly hewn until they met. No one had seen anything like it. While they waited, Oates saw the Dean’s anxious face hovering halfway up the slope beyond the trapdoor and joined him for some fresh air, at the same time giving him the latest news on the day’s activities.

The two men’s conversation was interrupted by the arrival of a big State trooper from the sixth smaller tunnel—that on the extreme left of the concourse—in a condition of barely suppressed excitement. They had found an extremely long and obviously travelled tunnel, wide and slightly curving, which was now leading downward at the point they had reached, some two miles in. The Captain of State troopers had wisely called a halt there and had sent Strang, the trooper, to report the discovery to Oates and the others.

There were twenty officers in the party, including Holroyd, and the trooper did not anticipate any particular danger at the time he had left to make his way back. Oates had some reservations, however, and conferred aside with Bellows, while the State troopers split themselves into two parties. The bulk would remain behind in the concourse as a reserve and guard the tunnel entrances, until the main party returned.

A few minutes later the relief party set off to rejoin the others in the most westerly of the tunnels and Oates soon saw that the passage was indeed different from the others. Though the entrance was insignificant it soon widened out and the roof was so high it was almost beyond the range of their torches. It curved slightly in places and was soon going downhill, though always in a westerly direction.

Bellows had a compass with him and the needle, though it swung a little, always bore to the west. Now there was a breeze blowing in their faces and with it came the faint musty smell Oates had already noted at Oak Point.

“What do you make of the direction?” Oates asked, after he had estimated they must be more than halfway to the rendezvous point.

The surveyor shrugged.

“Toward Innsmouth and the sea,” he replied shortly. “But I find the engineering talents employed absolutely stupefying. All this is unique in my experience.”

Oates nodded.

“It’s also a little too convenient for my liking.”

Bellows looked at him, his face strained in the light of the torches the two men carried. They were alone, the trooper who had come to fetch them remaining in the concourse with the rear party.

“I don’t quite understand.”

“All the other passages blocked or sealed. As though something wanted us to take this one. The most westerly route. The one that leads to Innsmouth and the sea.”

Bellows shook his head.

“Beyond the reef,” he said in almost dreamy tones. “I’d come to much the same conclusion myself.”

The two men quickened their pace. They were going round a gentle curve, ever more subtly downward when they came to a dark section of tunnel. The way had been lit by torches placed on the passage floor before, but now there was no sign of light in the jet-blackness ahead. Then Oates’ torch caught a flash in the gloom and at the same moment his foot kicked against something. Bellows was before him. The remains of the metal torch was oddly buckled, the metal seemingly melted. The surveyor almost dropped it as he straightened.

“Still warm,” he whispered.

At the same time there came a faint warning whistle from far ahead, a sharp fusillade of gun shots and a strange bleating noise that reverberated against the dark, smooth walls ahead. The two men were already pounding toward the source of the sounds, Oates’ revolver out, throats constricted with fear, minds clouded with thoughts of the unknown.

XII

Oates stopped their headlong rush in a few moments, putting his hand on his companion’s arm.

“We’re not thinking straight.”

He put the whistle to his lips, blew with all his might. Bellows joined him. Then they stood, torches burning steadily in the darkness, listening with straining ears. Ten seconds passed, then twenty; moments long as eternity. Then, the silvery answering notes that spelt out: We are on our way. They seemed to pierce the darkness like rays of shining light. Oates and Bellows ran on, conscious that there were no sounds ahead of them. Their torches showed nothing but the tunnel, leading steadily downward; a salt wind now, blowing on their faces, bearing with it the strange smell of subterranean depths. The passage was becoming smaller as it went downhill.

At last they came to a curve more extreme than the others, the way ahead more precipitate. The dancing torch beams picked out shapeless pieces of metal on the floor of the tunnel. Oates recognised with a tightening of the throat the distorted, half-melted remnants of what had once been police revolvers. There were no signs of a struggle but something that looked like scorch marks on the passage walls ahead. That and vestiges of the grey slime that Oates had seen out at Oak Point. He came to a full stop, held the wrist of the other man.

“But aren’t we going on?” Bellows said. “The others may be hurt or in great danger.”

Oates shook his head.

“That’s what they want us to do,” he said, his voice betraying a slight tremor. “The whole thing has been made too simple. The Captain should have waited. Instead, it’s my bet he went on down that slope. It looks a bad place.”

Bellows directed his torch downward, conscious of a faint humming sound about them.

“For an ambush?”

Oates shrugged.

“For anything. Anything bad, that is. We stay here until the others come up. The Captain’s party may be beyond all help by now, anyway.”

Bellows’ face was grey.

“You can’t mean that. Holroyd too...?”

“I do mean it. There are things around here inimical to man. They come from the Innsmouth area. These tunnels were probably their chief outlets to the outside world. They’ve established a firm foothold in Innsmouth, and now in Arkham, probably with the aid of local people. Two years ago they almost succeeded. Now they’re trying again. And they don’t intend to fail.”

Bellows’ face was glazed with perspiration.

“This all sounds insane...” he began hoarsely.

“You’ll just have to trust me,” Oates told him. “I’ve got some of the pieces. But there are still a lot missing. Maybe we’ll never know the whole truth. And we can’t yet tell friend from foe. Someone in Arkham blew the whistle on me yesterday when I went to Innsmouth. My visit was expected. Measures were taken. I’m lucky to be here.”

Bellows laughed cynically.

“Lucky, did you say?”

He turned as they caught the welcome sound of running feet behind them. At the same time the slithering noise ahead began once more, mingled with the bleating they had heard earlier. The dancing torch beams caught flickering shapes, snake-like heads that hissed and darted fire. An insidious music began in their ears, mingled with obscene whisperings that seemed to penetrate their brains. Oates gritted his teeth, started to fire blindly into the mass of squamous serpent-beings that advanced up the tunnel toward them.

His nerves steadied; this was something he could see. The bullets would probably make little impression but the deafening explosions beneath the vaulted roof blotted out the inroads that were being made into his mind. Something tore ahead of him and he saw one of the things slither to a halt; it seemed to flicker and disappear into the wall. The awful stink was in their nostrils. Then there came the reassuring sound of heavy boots on the tunnel floor and the space was filled with a great mass of State troopers.

The tunnel was wreathed in smoke as they knelt and started to fire steadily into the packed mass of rope-like beings that blocked the passage ahead. They wavered and broke and seemed to trickle away like water. Oates felt his legs buckle beneath him and then there were strong hands under his arms and he was being dragged clear, together with the surveyor. As by some unspoken command the band of men that blocked the tunnel stepped slowly backward, keeping ranks unbroken, torches held steadily, going upward to the sanity of the concourse and the open air far above.

“Explosives are the only answer,” Bellows whispered brokenly.

“Maybe,” said Oates shortly, sheathing his revolver, his nerve restored. “Though the things that were able to drill all this might find them but an ineffective deterrent.”

“Have you any better suggestions? We must block these tunnels somehow.”

His voice broke into a rasping shudder.

“Did you see those creatures’ eyes?”

Oates nodded grimly.

“I’m not likely to forget.”

The strange march continued, the whole party walking backward, weapons raised.

They did not regain normality until they could hear answering whistles from the concourse. Then the babble of voices surrounded them and amid the tumult Bellows suddenly felt his legs going from under him and he lapsed unconscious to the ground.

XIII

REPORT FROM CAPTAIN OF DETECTIVES OATES TO CHIEF OF BUREAU, STATE POLICE:

In submitting the attached report I would like to make a few general observations which would not normally come within the purview of the Department.

1. In the event of anything happening to me I would like you to contact and rely upon the testimony of Dr. Ewart Lancaster, police surgeon of Arkham, who has seen many strange things in his career, but none stranger, I think, than the happenings at Arkham and Innsmouth these past few months.

2. Please also contact those people mentioned in my report; i.e. Dr. Darrow, Dean of the Faculty at Miskatonic; the cryptologist Jefferson Holroyd; and the surveyor Andrew Bellows, all of whom have experienced a number of the events detailed in the report.

3. Dr. Lancaster’s original autopsy findings on the man Jeb Conley (and which must now supersede those he prepared for public consumption) can be absolutely relied upon and I corroborate them in every detail. Please see paragraph 34 (c) for my own preliminary findings and for my corroboration of Dr. Lancaster’s experiences at Oak Point police station two nights ago. Conley’s death was undoubtedly murder, and the disappearance of the corpse and the bizarre and unexplained manner of death should not obscure that.

4. Thorough investigation should be made among senior personnel of the Arkham Police Department and also among citizens of both Arkham and Innsmouth, for it was obvious that my trip to Innsmouth was leaked in advance and this could have led to my death when the brakes of the police vehicle I was using

were tampered with. Local people are obviously working in with these creatures though for what reasons; e.g. profit, coercion, fear etc., my investigations have not yet revealed.

5. As strange and inexplicable as you may find my official report I urge you not to ignore it and ask you to remember our twenty-year friendship and whether you have ever had occasion to doubt the veracity of the material I have previously placed before you.

With every regard, I am, sir,

Your obedient servant,

Cornelius Oates

Captain of Detectives, County Force.

XIV

Holroyd was running. The insidious voices were still in his ears and the weirdness and wildness of what he had seen was so recent and so strong that it seemed to have completely burned itself into his consciousness. He appeared to have been running for hours, because it was now dark; his clothing was torn and dishevelled; his face and hands scratched and bleeding; and the perspiration streamed from every pore.

He had left the University area and as though by some atavistic instinct was making for his own house off campus, as the neighbourhood seemed familiar to him. He remembered, as he went up the zigzag concrete path that led to the front door, that his housekeeper was not due there today. He usually dined in college that evening. That would be good. No one must see him in this condition.

He slackened his pace, realising he was near collapse. As he put his key in the front door-lock his head swam and he almost fell. He clung to the bunch of keys, willed himself not to faint. Not that he had any idea as to why he should have fainted. His memory had been erased as though some unknown force had insidiously eroded the patterns from his brain. All he could recollect was that he had been deadly afraid; that he had taken flight; and that he was now home.

He let himself into the deserted house, switched on the entrance light and carefully avoiding his image in a silver-gilt mirror, somehow got upstairs, almost on his hands and knees. He avoided switching on the bedroom light, undressed quickly by the glow of a street lamp spilling in through the window and ran a shower. The sting of the cold water, rapidly effaced by the hot, seemed to revive him and a quarter of an hour later, dressed in clean clothes and with a glass of whiskey in his hand he felt almost restored to normal.

He was aware of hunger then and pausing only to put his mud-stained clothing into the laundry basket for the housekeeper to attend to next day, he padded downstairs, finding some legs of chicken and a blueberry pie in the kitchen icebox. He sat down at the small pine table in the kitchen, consuming the makeshift meal, his mind suspended in a state of neutrality. A blank opaqueness obtruded between himself and reality, as though a veil of mist had descended over his perceptions. It was not unpleasant and he tried to prolong the feeling, almost revelling in the animal comfort of the food and the drink and his clean dothes after the terrors of the past hours.

Presently he remembered the library and his de-coding machine. He got up then and went to his study, searching for some scribbled notes he had made the previous week. He returned with them and a blank scratch-pad to the kitchen, first drawing the blinds furtively as though someone might be crouching on the walk outside. He busied himself with some abstruse calculations, checking and re-checking his figures against his original notes.

A faint scratching noise against the outer walls of the house escaped his attention; or if it did not he paid it no heed, for it was like nothing more than a light wind that agitated vines that clothed the trellis on the façade. He was absorbed now and an hour must have passed while his pen passed busily over the paper. Later he was conscious that he was cold and his attention was then drawn to the whiskey glass, which was empty.

He went back to the living room and crossed to the bar to replenish his drink, oblivious of the strange shadows that were dancing across the windows outside. It was quite still now, only the faint hum of a passing automobile intruding into the deathly silence. He resumed his seat in the kitchen, went back to his notes; after a few minutes more the contents of his glass remained untasted at his elbow, so concentrated was his attention. The deep chime of an old cased clock on the landing at last brought him to realise that it was past nine o’clock.

Then he went round checking doors and windows, dropping the automatic catch on the front door, making sure the kitchen was secure too. It was a long-standing routine when he was sleeping at home and though he knew that Mrs. Karswell would have secured everything before she left, it was a habit so ingrained that he felt compelled to go through the gestures, even though he would have been shocked to find she had been lax in some respect. He paused near the back door, again checking the time from his watch, as though it were of supreme importance.

The telephone rang then and he went out into the hall to answer it. A deep, glutinous voice he did not recognise was on the other end of the line. At first he could not make out the words. The fog seemed to have descended on his brain once more. The voice was vaguely familiar but still he could not place it. The unknown caller appeared to be giving him some sort of instructions. He listened more intently, tried to concentrate on the words, which poured like smoke through his brain and out again without having any apparent effect. The voice ended at last and Holroyd thanked the dead instrument before replacing it in the cradle. He stumbled back to the kitchen, his hands over his ears, more confused than ever. He checked his watch, was shocked to see that a whole half-hour had passed. Then he picked up his glass and took a few tentative sips. The spirit seemed to rouse his sluggish spirit and he turned to his notes, conscious now of a great weariness of soul and body that had settled on him.

Even the scratching of the pen filled him with disgust and he threw it from him with a little gesture of petulance. The ink made a long blob across the whiteness of the paper which reminded him of something. But he could not make it out. He was tired. That was it. Presently he would remember. It was about this time he heard the furtive footsteps. They seemed to come down the front path and pause at the main door.

Holroyd sat as though frozen, his ears alert to the slightest sound. But there was no expected knock or ring at the doorbell.

Instead, the slouching steps were circling the house by way of the little paved path that went all the circumference of the building. The furtive noise was cut off by the angle of the house and Holroyd, still hunched agonisingly at the kitchen table, waited an age until the sound again became audible, this time on the kitchen side. Then there was a pause and a sudden brittle drumming of fingers on the kitchen windowpane. It was a tiny, almost jaunty sound as though the unseen visitor had decided to have his little joke but to the listener in the kitchen it denoted obscene horror. He sat shrivelled in his chair, waiting for a repetition but the footsteps passed on until the kitchen door was quietly tried. Holroyd almost screamed then but somehow he suppressed the sounds.

Another age passed and the footsteps moved away. Still Holroyd sat on in the paralysis of dream. When the front door bell sounded it was like an explosion of the system. Scalding waves of acid washed across the cryptologist’s nerves. He raised himself from the table, sweat beading his forehead. He drained the last of the whiskey in the glass and set off at a shambling run upstairs. From the bathroom window he could overlook the front porch. He cautiously twitched back the gauze curtain.

A dark, reassuring figure was standing in the porch light, looking bewilderedly about him. Relief flooded through Holroyd. He thought he knew who the visitor was now. But why had the man not announced himself at the beginning, instead of all that furtive circling of the building? Holroyd went over to the bathroom mirror, switched on the light and looked at himself properly for the first time. Apart from dark rings beneath the eyes and a certain pallor of complexion he looked quite normal. He paused a moment longer, adjusting his tie as the imperious pealing of the bell went on.

The visitor had evidently seen the bathroom light come on and realised he was at home. Holroyd switched it off, straightened himself up and walked slowly back down the stairs. The bell sounded again as he crossed the hall. He opened the door cautiously on the chain, unable at first to see his visitor’s face as he was standing immediately beneath the lamp, his hat shading his features.

“Come along, Holroyd,” said an irritable voice. “I have some important matters to discuss.”

“Oh, it’s you,” said Holroyd in a relieved tone. “Come in.” The guest looked about him suspiciously as he crossed the threshold. The cryptologist led the way back into the living room, drawing the heavy velvet drapes before ushering his visitor into a chair.

His mind was more alert now, thoughts beginning to crystallise.

He knew what he had to do as he crossed to the bar to offer his guest a drink.

XV

Dr. Lancaster was on a lonely stretch of highway halfway between Innsmouth and Arkham when he ran out of gasoline. He had been called urgently to a lonely farmhouse but when he arrived the people there, who did not even own a telephone, knew nothing of any medical emergency. Lancaster had sworn in a genteel sort of way, driving back the lonely miles, so preoccupied with his thoughts and his own and Oates’ problem that he had quite forgotten to look at the gauge.

Fortunately, he had left the gorges far behind and in any event he always carried a spare can in the trunk of the vehicle. It would take only a few minutes to put another two gallons in the tank. Strangely enough, he was certain the tank had been more than half full earlier in the day. There had been a strong smell of gasoline, it was true, when he regained the car at the farmhouse and it might be that there was some leak in the tank. He would have his own garage in Arkham look at it tomorrow.

He left the headlights of the vehicle on and went around in back to unlock the trunk. He was preoccupied with the present problem and the other thoughts that oppressed him but even so he thought he saw a faint shadow at the corner of his eye, just beyond the yellow cones cast by the headlamps. He was on an S-bend where the heavy trees and foliage came down almost to the road’s edge. It was a sombre place, even in daylight, yet he felt no particular sense of danger. With the expertise of long practice he quickly unscrewed the cap of the can, got the funnel from the floor of the trunk and carefully started to re-fill the tank.

He had got about halfway through this operation when he heard the faint rustling in the bushes. He stopped the pouring, screwed back the cap on the gasoline tank and put down the half-full can, all his senses alert. His mind was now directed toward the telephone call; the lateness of the hour; the loneliness of the terrain; and the fact that the people at the farm had no phone.

It all began to add up. Humming quietly to himself, though in fact his nerves were on edge, Lancaster stepped round the rear of the car, carrying the open can in his left hand while with his right he leaned into the driving seat and re-started the engine.

It made a satisfying sound in the silence of the night and simultaneously he noticed something like a flickering, snake-like undulation that came along the roadside verge. And again the stealthy crackling in the bushes. All fear dropped away from Lancaster; he was a man with very steady nerves, as he needed to be in his profession, and he knew exactly what he was going to do. He eased his cigarette lighter from his vest pocket and waited expectantly, hearing only the faint soughing of the night wind over the steady drone of the motor.

“Is there anyone there?”

Even to himself his voice sounded a little unsteady but his pulse beat evenly enough. He moved around to the rear of the car again, facing the roadside verge, strongly illuminated by the beams of the headlights. He repeated the question and again came the crackle. This time the doctor saw a bush to his right move gently, as though someone were standing there, in the shadow where the headlights’ illumination began to die away.

Then the branches parted and alien eyes, glaucous and triangular, stared out at the tense form of the doctor. There was a brittle rattling that sent fingers of fear brushing up his spine for the first time. Incredulously, he glimpsed the snake-head surmounting a semitransparent, slug-like body; the rest of it mercifully hidden by the thick undergrowth which encroached on to the road at that point. The thing lunged at him, the long body flowing like a reptile’s from out the bushes, while the rest of it was hidden.

The horrified doctor noted the vestiges of a humanoid face beneath the layers of grey-green reptilian skin and a shrill mewling cry broke from the thing as it slithered toward him with incredible speed. Lancaster screamed then but he did not lose his nerve. With a dexterity born of sheer terror he directed a stream of gasoline over the advancing monstrosity, which halted in its headlong progress. The doctor ran back, having the presence of mind to lay a trail of gasoline leading away from the car. The thing hesitated, the mewling replaced by the thin, brittle rattling he had heard before.

Then Lancaster ripped the prescription form from off the pad in his pocket, stroked the lighter with trembling fingers and lit the paper. He threw it toward the obscenity that hesitated fatally at the roadside. There was a roar as the gasoline caught and then the doctor hurled the can full at the creature while he ran to the front of the automobile with a speed that astonished him. He let off the brake and pushed the car clear of the advancing line of fire that moved with tremendous momentum.

The thing emitted a high-pitched shriek as fire licked at it, caught the bushes beyond. There was a soft explosion, presumably when the gasoline can went up, and yellow fire blossomed. Then a writhing, hiding, dying creature that yet moved and functioned with a sentient consciousness went flaming away into the darkness of the undergrowth as Lancaster, mentally expunging these horrors from his mind, let in the clutch and the car hurtled on into the merciful darkness leading back to the sanity of Arkham.

Presently even the orange glow in the rear mirror faded to blackness and Lancaster was aware that he was alive and free, albeit drenched with perspiration and shaking from his ordeal. He could hardly control the car or handle the gear-changes and when he reached the outskirts of Arkham, he parked briefly, reaching for the flask of brandy in his medical bag.

When he was sufficiently master of himself he drove home, finding the time was still only 10:00 p.m. Then he hurled himself at the telephone.

XVI

Oates was having a ham sandwich in the police canteen when the call came. At first he could not make out who was on the line but when the doctor was a little more coherent the big detective’s own excitement rapidly mounted to a state approaching that of the older man.

“What things?” he said, asking Lancaster to repeat himself for the third time.

“These obscenities,” the doctor said in a trembling voice. “They have distinct human attributes. I believe they are able to change their form at will. Innsmouth, Oates... The degenerate species of which we have spoken from time to time. I believe with all my soul that wherever they come from, they are able to physically ingest human beings.”

Oates was stunned but he went on automatically making notes.

“The old reports said things came from out the sea; from around the reef that lies off Innsmouth,” he observed slowly. “It’s all too fantastic for words.”

“Fantastic, yes,” the doctor went on, “but a reality we have to deal with. There’s a deadly danger there. But we have the answer. Gasoline!”

“Gasoline?” said Oates uncomprehendingly.

“Gasoline, man! Gasoline!” the doctor repeated. “That’s the one area they’re vulnerable. They can destroy people, yes. And they seem capable of generating great heat themselves, so powerful it can buckle metal, as we have seen. But they can’t abide fire themselves. That may be our salvation. I’ve been studying the reports for years. That’s why they wanted me out of the way. That’s why they tampered with your brakes. We were both getting too near the truth.”

“We shall both be candidates for the county asylum if this becomes public,” Oates growled.

Lancaster drummed with trembling fingers on the edge of the telephone mouthpiece.

“It’s our only salvation, man! You know I’m speaking the truth. You’ve seen those passages. And you know the left-hand one leads toward Innsmouth and the sea. Now they’re ready to take over Arkham. It all ties in. The destruction of Holroyd’s machine...”

He went on in a semi-incoherent fashion but Oates was already won over. Not that he needed winning over. He had come to much the same conclusions himself, long before tonight’s conversation.

“Those things are ready to move,” Lancaster went on. “We’ve no time to lose. Will you make the arrangements?”

“It will take a day or two,” Oates said dubiously. “We’ve got to do it right. And my superiors...”

“Leave them out of it,” Lancaster said crisply.

He sounded much calmer now.

“It may be too late if we go through official channels. You already have those squads of State troopers. That should be enough.”

“What do you propose?”

“We’d better meet tonight,” the doctor said. “I’ll come over to Police HQ. I feel too vulnerable here after what happened. We have much to talk about. We’ll need thousands of gallons of gasoline. As well as explosives.”

Oates swore.

“You know what you’re asking?”

Lancaster clicked his teeth impatiently. He seemed to have completely recovered his nerve.

“When you’ve heard my full story you’ll want to take action tonight!”

“All right,” Oates said finally. “I’ll see you in an hour. I’ll have the coffee pot on in case you need sobering up.”

The doctor gave a hollow laugh.

“I’ve taken one short slug of brandy all evening, Captain. I’m sober all right. I wish I were not.”

Oates modified his manner. His voice was gentle when he replied.

“All right, doc. I believe you. Come on in and we’ll get this thing organised.”

XVII

“It may not have been entirely my fault, gentlemen. The Captain there knows that I was well enough when he first got to know me. But events in the Library of Miskatonic and what I eventually deduced from the de-codes began to have their effect upon me. I knew that you had noted this yourself, Captain, when we spoke in the concourse when we and the State Police began to explore the passages. I knew then what the end would be but I dared not say anything.

“Those things out there know; yes, I tell you, they know even what we are thinking; even as we sit here in my quiet house beings are regarding us with alien eyes. As the Captain has so cleverly deduced, together with the good doctor, they come from beyond the reef. That is the storm-centre which has plagued Innsmouth and, to a certain extent, Arkham, for a long, long time. I see Captain Oates, at least, believes me. He is a very wise man. Perhaps he may be the saving of us. Who knows. Dr. Lancaster too. But these things are diabolically cunning and they seem to be everywhere.

“Why do you think I ran headlong through the darkness tonight? Not only to escape their physical presence but their infiltration. Oh, yes, gentlemen. They have learned how to infiltrate the brains of human beings and to assume their personalities even, these Old Ones. That is why I had to do what I did tonight. I could see the reptilian trait in his eyes. It was him or me. I had to do it, gentlemen, I’m sure you see that. These things are everywhere.

“I see some of the officers present tonight remain sceptical. Well, that is only to be expected. You wonder, perhaps, why I keep my hands hidden beneath these thick gloves, even indoors. It is because I fear the taint myself. And when I saw the webbing between his fingers as he rang the bell, I knew there was only one way of it. You will say, of course, that I obeyed the promptings of these things from the reef, who have learned to assume human identity. I tell you that my character and will power have been able to rise above all that.

“It was rather the opposite, gentlemen. I knew he meant me great harm even from the furtive way he went around the house before announcing himself by means of the doorbell. Ah, if only you knew how I suffered during those minutes which seemed like hours. But you will want the proof. Please come to the kitchen, gentlemen. There is a trapdoor beneath the table, let into the parquet. Yes, if those two strong officers would move it, we shall be able to open the hatch.

“There, gentlemen, there! Weltering in his own blood! Is it not a hideous spectacle! Yet, what was I to do? It must be obvious to the meanest intelligence here that the metamorphosis was upon it. I struck just in time, did I not?

“Be careful of that ladder, gentlemen. The treads are slippery, as you can see... Not blood, though it may look red to you. Greenish ichor, rather. And the stench! It is something I shall carry with me to the grave.

“What a hideous sight! I should have burned him, of course, but it was impossible here in the house; or in this closely-knit urban atmosphere. I see you shake your heads; I sense the disbelief in your eyes. Fools! I tell you it is but the facsimile of the man you knew, the hideous masquerade of a devilish thing from beyond. Gentlemen. Gentlemen! Please believe me! Why do you advance to pinion me. I am not mad! I beg you to believe me...”

XVIII

REPORT FROM CAPTAIN OF DETECTIVES OATES TO CHIEF OF BUREAU, STATE POLICE:

1. My plan of action, as outlined in the main report enclosed herewith, is of my own origination and I bear the entire responsibility, except in respect of the medical conclusions drawn up by Dr. Lancaster. As you will realise from radio and newspapers long before you get this, the plan will have been carried out.

2. The purpose of this appendix is merely to assure you of the logic of my actions and the inescapable conclusions to which I have been led since my arrival in Arkham. I refer you to my earlier missives, particularly Nos. 1, 2 and 3 and the attached material provided by Dr. Lancaster.

3. As you will learn in due course, Jefferson Holroyd, eminent scholar of Miskatonic University, has been transported to the County Asylum, on the medical advice of Dr. Lancaster, who signed the certificate of committal, and by my orders also. He

committed murder while insane and a preliminary medical examination has revealed startling changes not only in his personality but in certain degenerative and repellent physical aspects. These are dealt with by Dr. Lancaster in some detail.

4. The remains of one of the strange creatures glimpsed in the areas of Arkham and Innsmouth, three-quarters incinerated by fire, as the result of Dr. Lancaster’s timely action, have been refrigerated in the city mortuary in Arkham and are available for further medical inspection. From the physical characteristics exhibited you will see why my actions tomorrow night are so necessary.

5. As detailed in my main report, the body of Dr. Darrow, Dean of the Faculty of Miskatonic University, hideously mangled and hacked about with a kitchen knife, was found in a cellar beneath the house of Jefferson Holroyd. He has already confessed to the murder and there is no doubt he was responsible for the unfortunate man’s death. Please see specific details in my main report.

6. None of these facts have yet been made known to the press or the general public and if I do not return from the action we have proposed to take, please understand that I have acted from the best of all possible motives.

7. All the matters briefly glanced over in Headings 1 to 6 above are fully expanded upon in the main reports by myself and Dr. Lancaster and bizarre as you may think them, I can assure you they are well attested by reliable witnesses. The missing State troopers under the command of Captain Uriah Dale must be presumed dead; there is no doubt of that and I would be grateful if you would have the next of kin informed.

The names and ranks of those officers who fell in the line of duty in the passages leading in the Innsmouth direction are detailed

in the attached list, compiled by colleagues from the State Police.

I recommend that Sergeant John P. Ellermann be advanced to the rank of Captain for the distinguished service in these matters he has rendered over the past few days.

I am, sir, your obedient servant

Cornelius Oates

Captain of Detectives, County Force.

XIX

Dr. Lancaster’s face was corpse-like and strained in the weird bluish lighting of the tunnels. They were in the fifth and largest of the passages, the one that sloped steeply away toward Innsmouth and the sea. There were dozens of State troopers, heavily armed, standing on guard but nothing had been seen or heard for the past two days.

Bellows was hurrying down the sloping tunnel toward them. He too had changed over the past forty-eight hours, Oates thought.

“A message from Ellermann on the surface,” the surveyor said. “Telephone message just came in from the army officer commanding the operations at Innsmouth. The town has been entirely evacuated. All civilians and animals have been removed from the area, the nearest being some five miles back.”

“House to house clearance?” said Oates.

Bellows nodded. “House to house. Ambulances removed a number of invalids to district hospitals.”

Lancaster expressed his approval.

“It seems to have been a pretty thorough operation,” he said.

Oates turned back to Bellows.

“What time?”

“The message came through at eight o’clock. It’s taken me half-an-hour to get down here. The cordon of State Police and Army personnel were withdrawing by truck then. They should be back in position now, sealing off all roads leading to Innsmouth and the sea.”

Oates again glanced at his wristwatch. He had himself, together with the civic authorities, checked the placing of the blasting powder the previous night. The caves along the Innsmouth shore had been thoroughly checked and nothing had been found; but subterranean caverns still led off a large pit on shore descending steeply beneath the surface of the sea, out toward the reef.

Here Bellows’ expertise had proved invaluable. All involved had agreed that it would be far too dangerous to try to explore out there. But the configurations of the monstrous tunnels had helped in that respect. A number of rubber-wheeled trolleys had been constructed, the explosive carefully loaded aboard them, and each individual load had been winched with infinite care down the precipitous slopes into incredible depths.

Bellows had devised an ingenious arrangement to account for any curves in the tunnels. There was a circular rail running around each trolley, within which the individual loads of blasting powder had been carefully packed, protected by padding; the trolley wheels were made to swivel in any direction, so that as soon as one of the vehicles came in contact with a wall or other obstacle, it would immediately set off at another tangent, impelled by its own weight.

The winches were equipped with measuring devices and before they came to a halt they had registered in excess of five thousand feet. Engineering works on the beach, where the tunnels came out, had consisted of cutting a deep trench on the seashore leading to the vast pit on the beach which led sloping away toward and under the sea.

A silence had fallen between the three men most involved in the work of the past days, though in reality there was tremendous noise down here, not only from the hundreds of men engaged, but from the heavy throbbing of the pumps. For many hours thousands of gallons of gasoline had been delivered from those pumps, the fuel sluicing down, eventually debouching into the deep trench on the beach and thence to the huge tunnel that led beneath the sea. The air was heavy with the stink of gasoline. This was a dangerous task and everyone involved had been relieved of matches or anything which might cause a spark and all personnel wore rubber-soled boots.

“There will be a tremendous explosion,” Bellows said reflectively. “Even if the reef is not destroyed the surface of the sea will show visible signs. It will be like a miniature volcano.”

Oates nodded, his mind heavy with thought. Intercut with the images of the past weeks; the horrors of the sudden deaths; the snakelike creatures glimpsed in the tunnel and by Lancaster; the whole brooding atmosphere of the Innsmouth-Arkham axis; was the impending climax to the long drama. He had had his figures and whole scheme submitted to the most rigorous examination by engineers and mathematicians of the Miskatonic faculty and they had been adamant in their objections; not at its feasibility but at the inherent dangers.

Oates was having all the State troopers and other personnel cleared from the tunnels, of course; that was only common sense. All that gasoline had been pumped down; the telephone link had reported back that the liquid flow had reached the beach, had followed the deep ditch exactly and had disappeared into the great borehole. It must have reached the area of the blasting powder long ago. It needed only for him to ignite the chain which would detonate one of the greatest man-made explosions of modern history.

No human being would suffer; he was convinced of that. But would the resulting holocaust rid the world of something so monstrous as to be almost beyond belief? And if he failed there was an awesome responsibility on his shoulders. But he must not fail. His only regret was that he might die before learning the result of all these painstaking operations.

The scientists had warned him there would be a danger of a monstrous blowback when the gasoline ignited; in which case the passage leading to the beach would act like the barrel of a gun and send a blast of searing heat back up the shaft, roasting everything in its path.

They had urged that the pumping operation should begin at the borehole on the beach; this would have been the solution in the normal event but there were insuperable problems, in that the black basaltic cliffs dropped almost precipitously to the shore at that point, rugged boulders and chasms preventing vehicular access from the top. Similarly the main tunnel narrowed as it descended and when it debouched on to the beach the passage was only about four feet across, making it impossible for personnel and the pumps to descend that way. Any other solution would have taken months and there was no time for that.

“How are you going to do it?” the doctor asked Oates.

Real silence had fallen at last; the pumps had been switched off and the vehicles and troops and police were withdrawing up the passage, giving the three men curious looks.

“Electrical spark,” Oates said shortly. “Worked out by Bellows here. A clockwork motor on a ratchet will start operating in about twenty minutes after switch-on. We’ve worked out that’s how long it will take the trolley bearing the mechanism to reach the lower tunnel. That will set a circuit going; generating a series of sparks that should trigger off the gasoline in a further ten minutes. The theory is that a wall of fire will descend from the beach and in turn set off the blasting powder far below.”

Lancaster gave him a twisted smile.

“That’s the theory, Captain.”

Oates nodded abstractedly, looking across at the curious circular trolley with its rubber wheels.

“No sense hanging about,” he said. “I’m going to set the mechanism. I’ll join you later. You start off up now. And that’s an order.”

His two companions glanced at one another in silence.

“As long as you know what you’re doing,” Bellows said. “You sure you don’t want me to stay? I set this thing up, remember.”

Oates shook his head.

“I can manage. We’ll all meet up top.”

“So long as we don’t all meet up in the sky,” said the doctor lugubriously.

The three men exchanged strained smiles. Then the other two went, walking carefully, the stench of gasoline emphasising the volatile vaporous mixture in the air. Oates felt perspiration cold on his face. The insidious whispering inside his head had begun again. He had no time to lose.

He walked forward to where the precipitous slope leaned down into the primeval darkness beyond the reach of the specially sealed hand lamps. He pulled the trolley out gently from the wall, set the calibrating dial as Bellows had shown him, not once but a dozen times. His heart was pumping uncomfortably, even drowning out the ticking of the clockwork mechanism. He checked his watch again. He had just twenty minutes.

Oates was not a religious man but he prayed now.

“God protect us from the powers of darkness,” he said.

Then he was launching the rubber-sided trolley down the steep slope into the blackness and into the ultimate horror of the pulsating things that writhed and ululated beyond the reef that lay off the dark and blasphemous Innsmouth shore.

THE BIG FISH

by JACK YEOVIL

THE BAY CITY cops were rousting enemy aliens. As I drove through the nasty coast town, uniforms hauled an old couple out of a grocery store. The Taraki family’s neighbours huddled in thin rain howling asthmatically for bloody revenge. Pearl Harbour had struck a lot of people that way. With the Tarakis on the bus for Manzanar, neighbours descended on the store like bedraggled vultures. Produce vanished instantly, then destruction started. Caught at a sleepy stop-light, I got a good look. The Tarakis had lived over the store; now, their furniture was thrown out of the second-storey window. Fine china shattered on the sidewalk, spilling white chips like teeth into the gutter. It was inspirational, the forces of democracy rallying round to protect the United States from vicious oriental grocers, fiendishly intent on selling eggplant to a hapless civilian population.

Meanwhile my appointment was with a gent who kept three pictures on his mantelpiece, grouped in a triangle around a statue of the Virgin Mary. At the apex was his white-haired mama, to the left Charles Luciano, and to the right, Benito Mussolini. The Tarakis, American-born and registered Democrats, were headed to a dust-bowl concentration camp for the duration, while Gianni Pastore, Sicilian-born and highly unregistered capo of the Family Business, would spend his war in a marble-fronted mansion paid for by nickels and dimes dropped on the numbers game, into slot machines, or exchanged for the favours of nice girls from the old country. I’d seen his mansion before and so far been able to resist the temptation to bean one of his twelve muse statues with a bourbon bottle.

Money can buy you love but can’t even put down a deposit on good taste.

The palace was up in the hills, a little way down the boulevard from Tyrone Power. But now, Pastore was hanging his mink-banded fedora in a Bay City beachfront motel complex, which was a real estate agent’s term for a bunch of horrible shacks shoved together for the convenience of people who like sand on their carpets.

I always take a lungful of fresh air before entering a confined space with someone in Pastore’s business, so I parked the Chrysler a few blocks from the Seaview Inn and walked the rest of the way, sucking on a Camel to keep warm in the wet. They say it doesn’t rain in Southern California, but they also say the US Navy could never be taken by surprise. This February, three months into a war the rest of the world had been fighting since 1936 or 1939 depending on whether you were Chinese or Polish, it was raining almost constantly, varying between a light fall of misty drizzle in the dreary daytimes to spectacular storms, complete with DeMille lighting effects, in our fear-filled nights. Those trusty Boy Scouts scanning the horizons for Jap subs and Nazi U-Boats were filling up influenza wards, and manufacturers of raincoats and umbrellas who’d not yet converted their plants to defence production were making a killing. I didn’t mind the rain. At least rainwater is clean, unlike most other things in Bay City.

A small boy with a wooden gun leaped out of a bush and sprayed me with sound effects, interrupting his onomatopoeic chirruping with a shout of “Die, you slant-eyed Jap!” I clutched my heart, staggered back, and he finished me off with a quick burst. I died for the Emperor and tipped the kid a dime to go away. If this went on long enough, maybe little Johnny would get a chance to march off and do real killing, then maybe come home in a box or with the shakes or a taste for blood. Meanwhile, especially since someone spotted a Jap submarine off Santa Barbara, California was gearing up for the War Effort. Aside from interning grocers, our best brains were writing songs like ‘To Be Specific, It’s Our Pacific’, ‘So Long Momma, I’m Off to Yokohama’, ‘We’re Gonna Slap the Jap Right Off the Map’ and ‘When Those Little Yellow Bellies Meet the Cohens and the Kellys’. Zanuck had donated his string of Argentine polo ponies to West Point and got himself measured for a comic opera Colonel’s uniform so he could join the Signal Corps and defeat the Axis by posing for publicity photographs.

I’d tried to join up two days after Pearl Harbour but they kicked me back onto the streets. Too many concussions. Apparently, I get hit on the head too often and have a tendency to black out. When they came to mention it they were right.

The Seaview Inn was shuttered, one of the first casualties of war. It had its own jetty, and by it were a few canvas-covered motor launches shifting with the waves. In late afternoon gloom, I saw the silhouette of the Montecito, anchored strategically outside the three-mile limit. That was one good thing about the Japanese; on the downside, they might have sunk most of the US fleet but on the up, they’d put Laird Brunette’s gambling ship out of business. Nobody was enthusiastic about losing their shirt-buttons on a rigged roulette wheel if they imagined they were going to be torpedoed any moment. I’d have thought that would add an extra thrill to the whole gay, delirious business of giving Brunette money, but I’m just a poor, twenty-five-dollars-a-day detective.

The Seaview Inn was supposed to be a stopping-off point on the way to the Monty and now its trade was stopped off. The main building was sculpted out of dusty ice cream and looked like a three-storey radiogram with wave-scallop friezes. I pushed through double-doors and entered the lobby. The floor was decorated with a mosaic in which Neptune, looking like an angry Santa Claus in a swimsuit, was sticking it to a sea-nymph who shared a hairdresser with Hedy Lamarr. The nymph was naked except for some strategic shells. It was very artistic.

There was nobody at the desk and thumping the bell didn’t improve matters. Water ran down the outside of the green-tinted windows. There were a few steady drips somewhere. I lit up another Camel and went exploring. The office was locked and the desk register didn’t have any entries after December 7, 1941. My raincoat dripped and began to dry out, sticking my jacket and shirt to my shoulders. I shrugged, trying to get some air into my clothes. I noticed Neptune’s face quivering. A thin layer of water had pooled over the mosaic and various anemone-like fronds attached to the sea god were apparently getting excited. Looking at the nymph, I could understand that. Actually, I realised, only the hair was from Hedy. The face and the body were strictly Janey Wilde.

I go to the movies a lot but I’d missed most of Janey’s credits: She-Strangler of Shanghai, Tarzatt and the Tiger Girl, The Perils of Jungle Jillian. I’d seen her in the newspapers though, often in unnervingly close proximity with Pastore or Brunette. She’d started as an Olympic swimmer, picking up medals in Berlin, then followed Weissmuller and Crabbe to Hollywood. She would never get an Academy Award but her legs were in a lot of cheesecake stills publicising no particular movie. Air-brushed and made-up like a good-looking corpse, she was a fine commercial for sex. In person she was as bubbly as domestic champagne, though now running to flat. Things were slow in the detecting business, since people were more worried about imminent invasion than missing daughters or misplaced love letters. So when Janey Wilde called on me in my office in the Cahuenga Building and asked me to look up one of her ill-chosen men friends, I checked the pile of old envelopes I use as a desk diary and informed her that I was available to make inquiries into the current whereabouts of a certain big fish.

Wherever Laird Brunette was, he wasn’t here. I was beginning to figure Gianni Pastore, the gambler’s partner, wasn’t here either. Which meant I’d wasted an afternoon. Outside it rained harder, driving against the walls with a drumlike tattoo. Either there were hailstones mixed in with the water or the Jap air force was hurling fistfuls of pebbles at Bay City to demoralise the population. I don’t know why they bothered. All Hirohito had to do was slip a thick envelope to the Bay City cops and the city’s finest would hand over the whole community to the Japanese Empire with a ribbon around it and a bow on top.

There were more puddles in the lobby, little streams running from one to the other. I was reminded of the episode of The Perils of Jungle Jillian I had seen while tailing a child molester to a Saturday matinee. At the end, Janey Wilde had been caught by the Panther Princess and trapped in a room which slowly filled with water. That room had been a lot smaller than the lobby of the Seaview Inn and the water had come in a lot faster.

Behind the desk were framed photographs of pretty people in pretty clothes having a pretty time. Pastore was there, and Brunette, grinning like tiger cats, mingling with showfolk Xavier Cugat, Janey Wilde, Charles Coburn. Janice Marsh, the pop-eyed beauty rumoured to have replaced Jungle Jillian in Brunette’s affections, was well-represented in artistic poses.

On the phone, Pastore had promised faithfully to be here. He hadn’t wanted to bother with a small-timer like me but Janey Wilde’s name opened a door. I had a feeling Papa Pastore was relieved to be shaken down about Brunette, as if he wanted to talk about something. He must be busy because there were several wars on. The big one overseas and a few little ones at home. Maxie Rothko, bar owner and junior partner in the Monty, had been found drifting in the seaweed around the Santa Monica pier without much of a head to speak of. And Phil Isinglass, man-about-town lawyer and Brunette frontman, had turned up in the storm drains, lungs full of sandy mud. Disappearing was the latest craze in Brunette’s organisation. That didn’t sound good for Janey Wilde, though Pastore had talked about the Laird as if he knew Brunette was alive. But now Papa wasn’t around. I was getting annoyed with someone it wasn’t sensible to be annoyed with.

Pastore wouldn’t be in any of the beach shacks but there should be an apartment for his convenience in the main building. I decided to explore further. Jungle Jillian would expect no less. She’d hired me for five days in advance, a good thing since I’m unduly reliant on eating and drinking and other expensive diversions of the monied and idle.

The corridor that led past the office ended in a walk-up staircase. As soon as I put my size nines on the first step, it squelched. I realised something was more than usually wrong. The steps were a quiet little waterfall, seeping rather than cascading. It wasn’t just water, there was unpleasant, slimy stuff mixed in. Someone had left the bath running. My first thought was that Pastore had been distracted by a bullet. I was wrong. In the long run, he might have been happier if I’d been right.

I climbed the soggy stairs and found the apartment door unlocked but shut. Bracing myself, I pushed the door in. It encountered resistance but then sliced open, allowing a gush of water to shoot around my ankles, soaking my dark blue socks. Along with water was a three-weeks-dead-in-the-water-with-rotten-fish smell that wrapped around me like a blanket. Holding my breath, I stepped into the room. The waterfall flowed faster now. I heard a faucet running. A radio played, with funny little gurgles mixed in. A crooner was doing his best with ‘Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries’, but he sounded as if he were drowned full fathom five. I followed the music and found the bathroom.

Pastore was face down in the overflowing tub, the song coming from under him. He wore a silk lounging robe that had been pulled away from his back, his wrists tied behind him with the robe’s cord. In the end he’d been drowned. But before that hands had been laid on him, either in anger or with cold, professional skill. I’m not a coroner, so I couldn’t tell how long the Family Man had been in the water. The radio still playing and the water still running suggested Gianni had met his end recently but the stench felt older than sin.

I have a bad habit of finding bodies in Bay City and the most profit-minded police force in the country have a bad habit of trying to make connections between me and a wide variety of deceased persons. The obvious solution in this case was to make a friendly phone call, absent-mindedly forgetting to mention my name while giving the flatfeet directions to the late Mr. Pastore. Who knows, I might accidentally talk to someone honest.

That is exactly what I would have done if, just then, the man with the gun hadn’t come through the door...

***

I had Janey Wilde to blame. She’d arrived without an appointment, having picked me on a recommendation. Oddly, Laird Brunette had once said something not entirely uncomplimentary about me. We’d met. We hadn’t seriously tried to kill each other in a while. That was as good a basis for a relationship as any.

Out of her sarong, Jungle Jillian favoured sharp shoulders and a veiled pill-box. The kiddies at the matinee had liked her fine, especially when she was wrestling stuffed snakes, and dutiful Daddies took no exception to her either, especially when she was tied down and her sarong rode up a few inches. Her lips were four red grapes plumped together. When she crossed her legs you saw a swimmer’s smooth muscle under her hose.

“He’s very sweet, really,” she explained, meaning Mr. Brunette never killed anyone within ten miles of her without apologising afterwards, “not at all like they say in those dreadful scandal sheets.”

The gambler had been strange recently, especially since the war shut him down. Actually the Montecito had been out of commission for nearly a year, supposedly for a refit although as far as Janey Wilde knew no workmen had been sent out to the ship. At about the time Brunette suspended his crooked wheels, he came down with a common California complaint, a dose of crackpot religion. He’d been tangentially mixed up a few years ago with a psychic racket run by a bird named Amthor, but had apparently shifted from the mostly harmless bunco cults onto the hard stuff. Spiritualism, orgiastic rites, chanting, incense, the whole deal.

Janey blamed this sudden interest in matters occult on Janice Marsh, who had coincidentally made her name as the Panther Princess in The Perils of Jungle Jillian, a role which required her to torture Janey Wilde at least once every chapter. My employer didn’t mention that her own career had hardly soared between Jungle Jillian and She-Strangler of Shanghai, while the erstwhile Panther Princess had gone from Republic to Metro and was being built up as an exotic in the Dietrich-Garbo vein. Say what you like about Janice Marsh’s Nefertiti, she still looked like Peter Lorre to me. And according to Janey, the star had more peculiar tastes than a seafood buffet.

Brunette had apparently joined a series of fringe organisations and become quite involved, to the extent of neglecting his business and thereby irking his long-time partner, Gianni Pastore. Perhaps that was why person or persons unknown had decided the Laird wouldn’t mind if his associates died one by one. I couldn’t figure it out. The cults I’d come across mostly stayed in business by selling sex, drugs, power or reassurance to rich, stupid people. The Laird hardly fell into the category. He was too big a fish for that particular bowl.

***

The man with the gun was English, with a Ronald Colman accent and a white aviator’s scarf. He was not alone. The quiet, truck-sized bruiser I made as a fed went through my wallet while the dapper foreigner kept his automatic pointed casually at my middle.

“Peeper,” the fed snarled, showing the photostat of my licence and my supposedly impressive deputy’s badge.

“Interesting,” said the Britisher, slipping his gun into the pocket of his camel coat. Immaculate, he must have been umbrella-protected between car and building because there wasn’t a spot of rain on him. “I’m Winthrop. Edwin Winthrop.”

We shook hands. His other companion, the interesting one, was going through the deceased’s papers. She looked up, smiled with sharp white teeth, and got back to work.

“This is Mademoiselle Dieudonne.”

“Geneviève,” she said. She pronounced it “Zhe-ne-vyev,” suggesting Paris, France. She was wearing something white with silver in it and had quantities of pale blonde hair.

“And the gentleman from your Federal Bureau of Investigation is Finlay.”

The fed grunted. He looked as if he’d been brought to life by Willis H. O’Brien.

“You are interested in a Mr. Brunette,” Winthrop said. It was not a question, so there was no point in answering him. “So are we.”

“Call in a Russian and we could be the Allies,” I said.

Winthrop laughed. He was sharp. “True. I am here at the request of my government and working with the full co-operation of yours.” One of the small detective-type details I noticed was that no one even suggested informing the police about Gianni Pastore was a good idea.

“Have you ever heard ofa place called Innsmouth, Massachusetts?”

It didn’t mean anything to me and I said so.

“Count yourself lucky. Special Agent Finlay’s associates were called upon to dynamite certain unsafe structures in the sea off Innsmouth back in the twenties. It was a bad business.”

Geneviève said something sharp in French that sounded like swearing. She held up a photograph of Brunette dancing cheek to cheek with Janice Marsh.

“Do you know the lady?” Winthrop asked.

“Only in the movies. Some go for her in a big way but I think she looks like Mr. Moto.”

“Very true. Does the Esoteric Order of Dagon mean anything to you?”

“Sounds like a Church-of-the-Month alternate. Otherwise, no.”

“Captain Obed Marsh?”

“Uh-uh.”

“The Deep Ones.”

“Are they those coloured singers?”

“What about Cthulhu, Y’ha-nthlei, R’lyeh?”

“Gesundheit.”

Winthrop grinned, sharp moustache pointing. “No, not easy to say at all. Hard to fit into human mouths, you know.”

“He’s just a bedroom creeper,” Finlay said, “he don’t know nothing.”

“His grammar could be better. Doesn’t J. Edgar pay for elocution lessons?”

Finlay’s big hands opened and closed as if he would rather there were a throat in them.

“Gene?” Winthrop said.

The woman looked up, red tongue absently flicking across her red lips, and thought a moment. She said something in a foreign language that I didn’t understand.

“There’s no need to kill him,” she said in French. Thank you very much, I thought.

Winthrop shrugged and said “Fine by me.” Finlay looked disappointed.

“You’re free to go,” the Britisher told me. “We shall take care of everything. I see no point in your continuing your current line of inquiry. Send in a chit to this address,” he handed me a card, “and you’ll be reimbursed for your expenses so far. Don’t worry. We’ll carry on until this is seen through. By the way, you might care not to discuss with anyone what you’ve seen here or anything I may have said. There’s a War on, you know. Loose lips sink ships.”

I had a few clever answers but I swallowed them and left. Anyone who thought there was no need to kill me was all right in my book and I wasn’t using my razored tongue on them. As I walked to the Chrysler, several ostentatiously unofficial cars cruised past me, headed for the Seaview Inn.

It was getting dark and lightning was striking down out at sea. A flash lit up the Montecito and I counted five seconds before the thunder boomed. I had the feeling there was something out there beyond the three-mile limit besides the floating former casino, and that it was angry.

I slipped into the Chrysler and drove away from Bay City, feeling better the further inland I got.

***

I take Black Mask. It’s a long time since Hammett and the fellow who wrote the Ted Carmady stories were in it, but you occasionally get a good Cornell Woolrich or Erle Stanley Gardner. Back at my office, I saw the newsboy had been by and dropped off the Times and next month’s pulp. But there’d been a mix-up. Instead of the Mask, there was something inside the folded newspaper called Weird Tales. On the cover, a man was being attacked by two green demons and a stereotype vampire with a widow’s peak. ‘HELL ON EARTH’, A NOVELETTE OF SATAN IN A TUXEDO BY ROBERT BLOCH was blazed above the title. Also promised were A NEW LOVECRAFT SERIES, ‘HERBERT WEST—RE-ANIMATOR’ and ‘THE RAT MASTER’ BY GREYE LA SPINA. All for fifteen cents, kids. If I were a different type of detective, the brand who said nom de something and waxed a moustache whenever he found a mutilated corpse, I might have thought the substitution an omen.

In my office, I’ve always had five filing cabinets, three empty. I also had two bottles, only one empty. In a few hours, the situation would have changed by one bottle.

I found a glass without too much dust and wiped it with my clean handkerchief. I poured myself a generous slug and hit the back of my throat with it.

The radio didn’t work but I could hear Glenn Miller from somewhere. I found my glass empty and dealt with that. Sitting behind my desk, I looked at the patterns in rain on the window. If I craned I could see traffic on Hollywood Boulevard. People who didn’t spend their working days finding bodies in bathtubs were going home not to spend their evenings emptying a bottle.

After a day, I’d had some excitement but I hadn’t done much for Janey Wilde. I was no nearer being able to explain the absence of Mr. Brunette from his usual haunts than I had been when she left my office, leaving behind a tantalising whiff of essence de chine.

She’d given me some literature pertaining to Brunette’s cult involvement. Now, the third slug warming me up inside, I looked over it, waiting for inspiration to strike. Interesting echoes came up in relation to Winthrop’s shopping list of subjects of peculiar interest. I had no luck with the alphabet soup syllables he’d spat at me, mainly because “Cthulhu” sounds more like a cough than a word. But the Esoteric Order of Dagon was a group Brunette had joined, and Innsmouth, Massachusetts, was the East Coast town where the organisation was registered. The Esoteric Order had a temple on the beach-front in Venice, and its mumbo-jumbo handouts promised “ancient and intriguing rites to probe the mysteries of the Deep.” Slipped in with the recruitment bills was a studio biography of Janice Marsh, which helpfully revealed the movie star’s place of birth as Innsmouth, Massachusetts, and that she could trace her family back to Captain Obed Marsh, the famous early 19 th century explorer of whom I’d never heard. Obviously Winthrop, Geneviève and the FBI were well ahead of me in making connections. And I didn’t really know who the Englishman and the French girl were.

I wondered if I wouldn’t have been better off reading Weird Tales. I liked the sound of ‘Satan in a Tuxedo’. It wasn’t Ted Carmady with an automatic and a dame, but it would do. There was a lot more thunder and lightning and I finished the bottle. I suppose I could have gone home to sleep but the chair was no more uncomfortable than my Murphy bed.

The empty bottle rolled and I settled down, tie loose, to forget the cares of the day.

***

Thanks to the War, Pastore only made page three of the Times. Apparently the noted gambler-entrepreneur had been shot to death. If that was true, it had happened after I’d left. Then, he’d only been tortured and drowned. Police Chief John Wax dished out his usual “over by Christmas” quote about the investigation. There was no mention of the FBI, or of our allies, John Bull in a tux and Mademoiselle la Guillotine. In prison, you get papers with neat oblongs cut out to remove articles the censor feels provocative. They don’t make any difference: all newspapers have invisible oblongs. Pastore’s sterling work with underprivileged kids was mentioned but someone forgot to write about the junk he sold them when they grew into underprivileged adults. The obit photograph found him with Janey Wilde and Janice Marsh at the premiere of a George Raft movie. The phantom Jap sub off Santa Barbara got more column inches. General John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Defence Command, called for more troops to guard the coastline, prophesying “death and destruction are likely to come at any moment.” Everyone in California was looking out to sea.

After my regular morning conference with Mr. Huggins and Mr. Young, I placed a call to Janey Wilde’s Malibu residence. Most screen idols are either at the studio or asleep if you telephone before ten o’clock in the morning, but Janey, with weeks to go before shooting started on Bowery to Bataan, was at home and awake, having done her thirty lengths. Unlike almost everyone else in the industry, she thought a swimming pool was for swimming in rather than lounging beside.

She remembered instantly who I was and asked for news. I gave her a précis.

“I’ve been politely asked to refrain from further investigations,” I explained. “By some heavy hitters.”

“So you’re quitting?”

I should have said yes, but “Miss Wilde, only you can require me to quit. I thought you should know how the federal government feels.”

There was a pause.

“There’s something I didn’t tell you,” she told me. It was an expression common among my clients. “Something important.”

I let dead air hang on the line.

“It’s not so much Laird that I’m concerned about. It’s that he has Franklin.”

“Franklin?”

“The baby,” she said. “Our baby. My baby.”

“Laird Brunette has disappeared, taking a baby with him?”

“Yes.”

“Kidnapping is a crime. You might consider calling the cops.”

“A lot of things are crimes. Laird has done many of them and never spent a day in prison.”

That was true, which was why this development was strange. Kidnapping, whether personal or for profit, is the riskiest of crimes. As a rule, it’s the province only of the stupidest criminals. Laird Brunette was not a stupid criminal.

“I can’t afford bad publicity. Not when I’m so near to the roles I need.”

Bowery to Bataan was going to put her among the screen immortals.

“Franklin is supposed to be Esther’s boy. In a few years, I’ll adopt him legally. Esther is my housekeeper. It’ll work out. But I must have him back.”

“Laird is the father. He will have some rights.”

“He said he wasn’t interested. He... um, moved on... to Janice Marsh while I was... before Franklin was born.”

“He’s had a sudden attack of fatherhood and you’re not convinced?”

“I’m worried to distraction. It’s not Laird, it’s her. Janice Marsh wants my baby for something vile. I want you to get Franklin back.”

“As I mentioned, kidnapping is a crime.”

“If there’s a danger to the child, surely...”

“Do you have any proof that there is danger?”

“Well, no.”

“Have Laird Brunette or Janice Marsh ever given you reason to believe they have ill-will for the baby?”

“Not exactly.”

I considered things.

“I’ll continue with the job you hired me for, but you understand that’s all I can do. If I find Brunette, I’ll pass your worries on. Then it’s between the two of you.”

She thanked me in a flood and I got off the phone feeling I’d taken a couple of strides further into the LaBrea tar pits and could feel sucking stickiness well above my knees.

***

I should have stayed out of the rain and concentrated on chess problems but I had another four days’ worth of Jungle Jillian’s retainer in my pocket and an address for the Esoteric Order of Dagon in a clipping from a lunatic scientific journal. So I drove out to Venice, reminding myself all the way that my wipers needed fixing.

Venice, California, is a fascinating idea that didn’t work. Someone named Abbot Kinney had the notion of artificially creating a city like Venice, Italy, with canals and architecture. The canals mostly ran dry and the architecture never really caught on in a town where, in the twenties, Gloria Swanson’s bathroom was considered an aesthetic triumph. All that was left was the beach and piles of rotting fish. Venice, Italy, is the Plague Capital of Europe, so Venice, California, got one thing right.

The Esoteric Order was up the coast from Muscle Beach, housed in a discreet yacht club building with its own small marina. From the exterior, I guessed the cult business had seen better days. Seaweed had tracked up the beach, swarmed around the jetty, and was licking the lower edges of the front wall. Everything had gone green: wood, plaster, copper ornaments. And it smelled like Pastore’s bathroom, only worse. This kind of place made you wonder why the Japs were so keen on invading.

I looked at myself in the mirror and rolled my eyes. I tried to get that slap-happy, let-me-give-you-all-my-worldly-goods, gimme-some-mysteries-of-the-orient look I imagined typical of a communicant at one of these bughouse congregations. After I’d stopped laughing, I remembered the marks on Pastore and tried to take detecting seriously. Taking in my unshaven, slept-upright-in-his-clothes, two-bottles-a-day lost soul look, I congratulated myself on my foresight in spending fifteen years developing the ideal cover for a job like this.

To get in the building, I had to go down to the marina and come at it from the beach-side. There were green pillars of what looked like fungus-eaten cardboard either side of the impressive front door, which held a stained glass picture in shades of green and blue of a man with the head of a squid in a natty monk’s number, waving his eyes for the artist. Dagon, I happened to know, was half-man, half-fish, and God of the Philistines. In this town, I guess a Philistine God blended in well. It’s a great country: if you’re half-fish, pay most of your taxes, eat babies and aren’t Japanese, you have a wonderful future.

I rapped on the squid’s head but nothing happened. I looked the squid in several of his eyes and felt squirmy inside. Somehow, up close, cephalopod-face didn’t look that silly.

I pushed the door and found myself in a temple’s waiting room. It was what I’d expected: subdued lighting, old but bad paintings, a few semi-pornographic statuettes, a strong smell of last night’s incense to cover up the fish stink. It had as much religious atmosphere as a two-dollar bordello.

“Yoo-hoo,” I said, “Dagon calling...”

My voice sounded less funny echoed back at me.

I prowled, sniffing for clues. I tried saying nom de something and twiddling a non-existent moustache but nothing came to me. Perhaps I ought to switch to a meerschaum of cocaine and a deerstalker, or maybe a monocle and an interest in incunabula.

Where you’d expect a portrait of George Washington or Jean Harlow’s Mother, the Order had hung up an impressively ugly picture of “Our Founder.” Capt. Obed Marsh, dressed up like Admiral Butler, stood on the shore of a Polynesian paradise, his good ship painted with no sense of perspective on the horizon as if it were about three feet tall. The Capt., surrounded by adoring if funny-faced native tomatoes, looked about as unhappy as Errol Flynn at a Girl Scout meeting. The painter had taken a lot of trouble with the native nudes. One of the dusky lovelies had hips that would make Lombard green and a face that put me in mind of Janice Marsh. She was probably the Panther Princess’s great-great-great grandmother. In the background, just in front of the ship, was something like a squid emerging from the sea. Fumble-fingers with a brush had tripped up again. It looked as if the tentacle-waving creature were about twice the size of Obed’s clipper. The most upsetting detail was a robed and masked figure standing on the deck with a baby’s ankle in each fist. He had apparently just wrenched the child apart like a wishbone and was emptying blood into the squid’s eyes.

“Excuse me,” gargled a voice, “can I help you?”

I turned around and got a noseful of the stooped and ancient Guardian of the Cult. His robe matched the ones worn by squid-features on the door and baby-ripper in the portrait. He kept his face shadowed, his voice sounded about as good as the radio in Pastore’s bath and his breath smelled worse than Pastore after a week and a half of putrefaction.

“Good morning,” I said, letting a bird flutter in the higher ranges of my voice, “my name is, er...”

I put together the first things that came to mind. “My name is Herbert West Lovecraft. Uh, H.W. Lovecraft the Third. I’m simply fascinated by matters Ancient and Esoteric, don’t ch’know.”

“Don’t ch’know” I picked up from the fellow with the monocle and the old books.

“You wouldn’t happen to have an entry blank, would you? Or any incunabula?”

“Incunabula?” he wheezed.

“Books. Old books. Print books, published before 1500 anno domini, old sport.” See, I have a dictionary too.

“Books...”

The man was a monotonous conversationalist. He also moved like Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the front of his robe, where the squidhead was embroidered, was wet with what I was disgusted to deduce was drool.

“Old books. Arcane mysteries, don’t ch’know. Anything cyclopaean and doom-haunted is just up my old alley.”

“The Necronomicon?” He pronounced it with great respect, and great difficulty.

“Sounds just the ticket.”

Quasimodo shook his head under his hood and it lolled. I glimpsed greenish skin and large, moist eyes.

“I was recommended to come here by an old pal,” I said. “Spiffing fellow. Laird Brunette. Ever hear of him?”

I’d pushed the wrong button. Quasi straightened out and grew about two feet. Those moist eyes flashed like razors.

“You’ll have to see the Cap’n’s Daughter.”

I didn’t like the sound of that and stepped backwards, towards the door. Quasi laid a hand on my shoulder and held it fast. He was wearing mittens and I felt he had too many fingers inside them. His grip was like a gila monster’s jaw.

“That will be fine,” I said, dropping the flutter.

As if arranged, curtains parted, and I was shoved through a door. Cracking my head on the low lintel, I could see why Quasi spent most of his time hunched over. I had to bend at the neck and knees to go down the corridor. The exterior might be rotten old wood but the heart of the place was solid stone. The walls were damp, bare and covered in suggestive carvings that gave primitive art a bad name. You’d have thought I’d be getting used to the smell by now, but nothing doing. I nearly gagged.

Quasi pushed me through another door. I was in a meeting room no larger than Union Station, with a stage, rows of comfortable armchairs and lots more squid-person statues. The centrepiece was very like the mosaic at the Seaview Inn, only the nymph had less shells and Neptune more tentacles.

Quasi vanished, slamming the door behind him. I strolled over to the stage and looked at a huge book perched on a straining lectern. The fellow with the monocle would have salivated, because this looked a lot older than 1500. It wasn’t a Bible and didn’t smell healthy. It was open to an illustration of something with tentacles and slime, facing a page written in several deservedly dead languages.

“The Necronomicon,” said a throaty female voice, “of the mad Arab, Abdul Al-Hazred.”

“Mad, huh?” I turned to the speaker. “Is he not getting his royalties?”

I recognised Janice Marsh straight away. The Panther Princess wore a turban and green silk lounging pajamas, with a floorlength housecoat that cost more than I make in a year. She had on jade earrings, a pearl cluster pendant and a ruby-eyed silver squid brooch. The lighting made her face look green and her round eyes shone. She still looked like Peter Lorre, but maybe if Lorre put his face on a body like Janice Marsh’s, he’d be up for sex goddess roles too. Her silk thighs purred against each other as she walked down the temple aisle. “Mr. Lovecraft, isn’t it?”

“Call me H.W. Everyone does.”

“Have I heard of you?”

“I doubt it.”

She was close now. A tall girl, she could look me in the eye. I had the feeling the eye-jewel in her turban was looking me in the brain. She let her fingers fall on the tentacle picture for a moment, allowed them to play around like a fun-loving spider, then removed them to my upper arm, delicately tugging me away from the book. I wasn’t unhappy about that. Maybe I’m allergic to incunabula or perhaps an undiscovered prejudice against tentacled creatures, but I didn’t like being near the Necronomicon one bit. Certainly the experience didn’t compare with being near Janice Marsh.

“You’re the Cap’n’s Daughter?” I said.

“It’s an honorific title. Obed Marsh was my ancestor. In the Esoteric Order, there is always a Cap’n’s Daughter. Right now, I am she.”

“What exactly is this Dagon business about?”

She smiled, showing a row of little pearls. “It’s an alternative form of worship. It’s not a racket, honestly.”

“I never said it was.”

She shrugged.

“Many people get the wrong idea.”

Outside, the wind was rising, driving rain against the Temple. The sound effects were weird, like sickening whales calling out in the Bay.

“You were asking about Laird? Did Miss Wilde send you?”

It was my turn to shrug.

“Janey is what they call a sore loser, Mr. Lovecraft. It comes from taking all those bronze medals. Never the gold.”

“I don’t think she wants him back,” I said, “just to know where he is. He seems to have disappeared.”

“He’s often out of town on business. He likes to be mysterious. I’m sure you understand.”

My eyes kept going to the squid-face brooch. As Janice Marsh breathed, it rose and fell and rubies winked at me.

“It’s Polynesian,” she said, tapping the brooch. “The Cap’n brought it back with him to Innsmouth.”

“Ah yes, your home town.”

“It’s just a place by the sea. Like Los Angeles.”

I decided to go fishing, and hooked up some of the bait Winthrop had given me. “Were you there when J. Edgar Hoover staged his fireworks display in the twenties?”

“Yes, I was a child. Something to do with rum-runners, I think. That was during Prohibition.”

“Good years for the Laird.”

“I suppose so. He’s legitimate these days.”

“Yes. Although if he were as Scotch as he likes to pretend he is, you can be sure he’d have been deported by now.”

Janice Marsh’s eyes were sea-green. Round or not, they were fascinating. “Let me put your mind at rest, Mr. Lovecraft or whatever your name is,” she said, “the Esoteric Order of Dagon was never a front for boot-legging. In fact it has never been a front for anything. It is not a racket for duping rich widows out of inheritances. It is not an excuse for motion picture executives to gain carnal knowledge of teenage drug addicts. It is exactly what it claims to be, a church.”

“Father, Son and Holy Squid, eh?”

“I did not say we were a Christian church.”

Janice Marsh had been creeping up on me and was close enough to bite. Her active hands went to the back of my neck and angled my head down like an adjustable lamp. She put her lips on mine and squashed her face into me. I tasted lipstick, salt and caviar. Her fingers writhed up into my hair and pushed my hat off. She shut her eyes. After an hour or two of suffering in the line of duty, I put my hands on her hips and detached her body from mine. I had a fish taste in my mouth.

“That was interesting,” I said.

“An experiment,” she replied. “Your name has such a ring to it. Love... craft. It suggests expertise in a certain direction.”

“Disappointed?”

She smiled. I wondered if she had several rows of teeth, like a shark.

“Anything but.”

“So do I get an invite to the back-row during your next Dagon hoedown?”

She was businesslike again. “I think you’d better report back to Janey. Tell her I’ll have Laird call her when he’s in town and put her mind at rest. She should pay you off. What with the War, it’s a waste of manpower to have you spend your time looking for someone who isn’t missing when you could be defending Lockheed from Fifth Columnists.”

“What about Franklin?”

“Franklin the President?”

“Franklin the baby.”

Her round eyes tried to widen. She was playing this scene innocent. The Panther Princess had been the same when telling the white hunter that Jungle Jillian had left the Tomb of the Jaguar hours ago.

“Miss Wilde seems to think Laird has borrowed a child of hers that she carelessly left in his care. She’d like Franklin back.”

“Janey hasn’t got a baby. She can’t have babies. It’s why she’s such a psycho-neurotic case. Her analyst is getting rich on her bewildering fantasies. She can’t tell reality from the movies. She once accused me of human sacrifice.”

“Sounds like a square rap.”

“That was in a film, Mr. Lovecraft. Cardboard knives and catsup blood.”

***

Usually at this stage in an investigation, I call my friend Bernie at the District Attorney’s office and put out a few fishing lines. This time, he phoned me. When I got into my office, I had the feeling my telephone had been ringing for a long time.

“Don’t make waves,” Bernie said.

“Pardon,” I snapped back, with my usual lightning-fast wit.

“Just don’t. It’s too cold to go for a swim this time of year.”

“Even in a bathtub.”

“Especially in a bathtub.”

“Does Mr. District Attorney send his regards?”

Bernie laughed. I had been an investigator with the DA’s office a few years back, but we’d been forced to part company.

“Forget him. I have some more impressive names on my list.”

“Let me guess. Howard Hughes?”

“Close.”

“General Stillwell?”

“Getting warmer. Try Mayor Fletcher Bowron, Governor Culbert Olson, and State Attorney General Earl Warren. Oh, and Wax, of course.”

I whistled. “All interested in little me. Who’d ’a thunk it?”

“Look, I don’t know much about this myself. They just gave me a message to pass on. In the building, they apparently think of me as your keeper.”

“Do a British gentleman, a French lady and a fed the size of Mount Rushmore have anything to do with this?”

“I’ll take the money I’ve won so far and you can pass that question on to the next sucker.”

“Fine, Bernie. Tell me, just how popular am I?”

“Tojo rates worse than you, and maybe Judas Iscariot.”

“Feels comfy. Any idea where Laird Brunette is these days?”

I heard a pause and some rumbling. Bernie was making sure his office was empty of all ears. I imagined him bringing the receiver up close and dropping his voice to a whisper.

“No one’s seen him in three months. Confidentially, I don’t miss him at all. But there are others...” Bernie coughed, a door opened, and he started talking normally or louder. “...of course, honey, I’ll be home in time for Jack Benny.”

“See you later, sweetheart,” I said, “your dinner is in the sink and I’m off to Tijuana with a professional pool player.”

“Love you,” he said, and hung up.

I’d picked up a coating of green slime on the soles of my shoes. I tried scraping them off on the edge of the desk and then used yesterday’s Times to get the stuff off the desk. The gloop looked damned esoteric to me.

I poured myself a shot from the bottle I had picked up across the street and washed the taste of Janice Marsh off my teeth.

I thought of Polynesia in the early 19th century and ofthose fisheyed native girls clustering around Capt. Marsh. Somehow, tentacles kept getting in the way of my thoughts. In theory, the Capt. should have been an ideal subject for a Dorothy Lamour movie, perhaps with Janice Marsh in the role of her great-great-great and Jon Hall or Ray Milland as girl-chasing Obed. But I was picking up Bela Lugosi vibrations from the set-up. I couldn’t help but think of bisected babies.

So far none of this running around had got me any closer to the Laird and his heir. In my mind, I drew up a list of Brunette’s known associates. Then, I mentally crossed off all the ones who were dead. That brought me up short. When people in Brunette’s business die, nobody really takes much notice except maybe to join in a few drunken choruses of “Ding-Dong, the Wicked Witch is Dead” before remembering there are plenty of other Wicked Witches in the sea. I’m just like everybody else: I don’t keep a score of dead gambler-entrepreneurs. But, thinking of it, there’d been an awful lot recently, up to and including Gianni Pastore. Apart from Rothko and Isinglass, there’d been at least three other closed casket funerals in the profession. Obviously you couldn’t blame that on the Japs. I wondered how many of the casualties had met their ends in bathtubs. The whole thing kept coming back to water. I decided I hated the stuff and swore not to let my bourbon get polluted with it.

Back out in the rain, I started hitting the bars. Brunette had a lot of friends. Maybe someone would know something.

***

By early evening, I’d propped up a succession of bars and leaned on a succession of losers. The only thing I’d come up with was the blatantly obvious information that everyone in town was scared. Most were wet, but all were scared.

Everyone was scared of two or three things at once. The Japs were high on everyone’s list. You’d be surprised to discover the number of shaky citizens who’d turned overnight from chisellers who’d barely recognise the flag into true red, white and blue patriots prepared to shed their last drop of alcoholic blood for their country. Everywhere you went, someone sounded off against Hirohito, Tojo, the Mikado, kabuki and origami. The current rash of accidental deaths in the Pastore-Brunette circle were a much less popular subject for discussion and tended to turn loudmouths into closemouths at the drop of a question.

“Something fishy,” everyone said, before changing the subject.

I was beginning to wonder whether Janey Wilde wouldn’t have done better spending her money on a radio commercial asking the Laird to give her a call. Then I found Curtis the Croupier in Maxie’s. He usually wore the full soup and fish, as if borrowed from Astaire. Now he’d exchanged his carnation, starched shirtfront and pop-up top hat for an outfit in olive drab with bars on the shoulder and a cap under one epaulette.

“Heard the bugle call, Curtis?” I asked, pushing through a crowd of patriotic admirers who had been buying the soldier boy drinks.

Curtis grinned before he recognised me, then produced a supercilious sneer. We’d met before, on the Montecito. There was a rumour going around that during Prohibition he’d once got involved in an honest card game, but if pressed he’d energetically refute it.

“Hey cheapie,” he said.

I bought myself a drink but didn’t offer him one. He had three or four lined up.

“This racket must pay,” I said. “How much did the uniform cost? You rent it from Paramount?”

The croupier was offended. “It’s real,” he said. “I’ve enlisted. I hope to be sent overseas.”

“Yeah, we ought to parachute you into Tokyo to introduce loaded dice and rickety roulette wheels.”

“You’re cynical, cheapie.” He tossed back a drink.

“No, just a realist. How come you quit the Monty?”

“Poking around in the Laird’s business?”

I raised my shoulders and dropped them again.

“Gambling has fallen off recently, along with leading figures in the industry. The original owner of this place, for instance. I bet paying for wreaths has thinned your bankroll.”

Curtis took two more drinks, quickly, and called for more. When I’d come in, there’d been a couple of chippies climbing into his hip pockets. Now he was on his own with me. He didn’t appreciate the change of scenery and I can’t say I blamed him.

“Look, cheapie,” he said, his voice suddenly low, “for your own good, just drop it. There are more important things now.”

“Like democracy?”

“You can call it that.”

“How far overseas do you want to be sent, Curtis?”

He looked at the door as if expecting five guys with tommy guns to come out of the rain for him. Then he gripped the bar to stop his hands shaking.

“As far as I can get, cheapie. The Philippines, Europe, Australia. I don’t care.”

“Going to war is a hell of a way to escape.”

“Isn’t it just? But wouldn’t Papa Gianni have been safer on Wake Island than in the tub?”

“You heard the bathtime story, then?”

Curtis nodded and took another gulp. The juke box played ‘Doodly-Acky-Sacky, Want Some Seafood, Mama’ and it was scary. Nonsense, but scary.

“They all die in water. That’s what I’ve heard. Sometimes, on the Monty, Laird would go up on deck and just look at the sea for hours. He was crazy, since he took up with that Marsh popsicle.”

“The Panther Princess?”

“You saw that one? Yeah, Janice Marsh. Pretty girl if you like clams. Laird claimed there was a sunken town in the bay. He used a lot of weird words, darkie bop or something. Jitterbug stuff. Cthul-whatever, Yog-Gimme-a-Break. He said things were going to come out of the water and sweep over the land, and he didn’t mean U-Boats.”

Curtis was uncomfortable in his uniform. There were dark patches where the rain had soaked. He’d been drinking like W.C. Fields on a bender but he wasn’t getting tight. Whatever was troubling him was too much even for Jack Daniel’s.

I thought of the Laird of the Monty. And I thought of the painting of Capt. Marsh’s clipper, with that out-of-proportion squid surfacing near it.

“He’s on the boat, isn’t he?”

Curtis didn’t say anything.

“Alone,” I thought aloud. “He’s out there alone.”

I pushed my hat to the back of my head and tried to shake booze out of my mind. It was crazy. Nobody bobs up and down in the water with a sign round their neck saying HEY TOJO, TORPEDO ME! The Monty was a floating target.

“No,” Curtis said, grabbing my arm, jarring drink out of my glass.

“He’s not out there?”

He shook his head.

“No, cheapie. He’s not out there alone.”

***

All the water taxis were in dock, securely moored and covered until the storms settled. I’d never find a boatman to take me out to the Montecito tonight. Why, everyone knew the waters were infested with Japanese subs. But I knew someone who wouldn’t care any more whether or not his boats were being treated properly. He was even past bothering if they were borrowed without his permission.

The Seaview Inn was still deserted, although there were police notices warning people away from the scene of the crime. It was dark, cold and wet, and nobody bothered me as I broke into the boathouse to find a ring of keys.

I took my pick of the taxis moored to the Seaview’s jetty and gassed her up for a short voyage. I also got my .38 Colt Super Match out from the glove compartment of the Chrysler and slung it under my armpit. During all this, I got a thorough soaking and picked up the beginnings of influenza. I hoped Jungle Jillian would appreciate the effort.

The sea was swelling under the launch and making a lot of noise. I was grateful for the noise when it came to shooting the padlock off the mooring chain but the swell soon had my stomach sloshing about in my lower abdomen. I am not an especially competent seaman.

The Monty was out there on the horizon, still visible whenever the lightning lanced. It was hardly difficult to keep the small boat aimed at the bigger one.

Getting out on the water makes you feel small. Especially when the lights of Bay City are just a scatter in the dark behind you. I got the impression of large things moving just beyond my field of perception. The chill soaked through my clothes. My hat was a felt sponge, dripping down my neck. As the launch cut towards the Monty, rain and spray needled my face. I saw my hands white and bath-wrinkled on the wheel and wished I’d brought a bottle. Come to that, I wished I was at home in bed with a mug of cocoa and Claudette Colbert. Some things in life don’t turn out the way you plan.

Three miles out, I felt the law change in my stomach. Gambling was legal and I emptied my belly over the side into the water. I stared at the remains of my toasted cheese sandwich as they floated off. I thought I saw the moon reflected greenly in the depths, but there was no moon that night.

I killed the engine and let waves wash the taxi against the side of the Monty. The small boat scraped along the hull of the gambling ship and I caught hold of a weed-furred rope ladder as it passed. I tethered the taxi and took a deep breath.

The ship sat low in the water, as if its lower cabins were flooded.

Too much seaweed climbed up towards the decks. It’d never reopen for business, even if the War were over tomorrow.

I climbed the ladder, fighting the water-weight in my clothes, and heaved myself up on deck. It was good to have something more solid than a tiny boat under me but the deck pitched like an airplane wing. I grabbed a rail and hoped my internal organs would arrange themselves back into their familiar grouping.

“Brunette,” I shouted, my voice lost in the wind.

There was nothing. I’d have to go belowdecks.

A sheet flying flags of all nations had come loose, and was whipped around with the storm. Japan, Italy and Germany were still tactlessly represented, along with several European states that weren’t really nations any more. The deck was covered in familiar slime.

I made my way around towards the ballroom doors. They’d blown in and rain splattered against the polished wood floors. I got inside and pulled the .38. It felt better in my hand than digging into my ribs.

Lightning struck nearby and I got a flash image of the abandoned ballroom, orchestra stands at one end painted with the name of a disbanded combo.

The casino was one deck down. It should have been dark but I saw a glow under a walkway door. I pushed through and cautiously descended. It wasn’t wet here but it was cold. The fish smell was strong.

“Brunette,” I shouted again.

I imagined something heavy shuffling nearby and slipped a few steps, banging my hip and arm against a bolted-down table. I kept hold of my gun, but only through superhuman strength.

The ship wasn’t deserted. That much was obvious.

I could hear music. It wasn’t Cab Calloway or Benny Goodman. There was a Hawaiian guitar in there but mainly it was a crazy choir of keening voices. I wasn’t convinced the performers were human and wondered whether Brunette was working up some kind of act with singing seals. I couldn’t make out the words but the familiar hawk-and-spit syllables of “Cthulhu” cropped up a couple of times.

I wanted to get out and go back to nasty Bay City and forget all about this. But Jungle Jillian was counting on me.

I made my way along the passage, working towards the music. A hand fell on my shoulder and my heart banged against the backsides of my eyeballs.

A twisted face stared at me out of the gloom, thickly-bearded, crater-cheeked. Laird Brunette was made up as Ben Gunn, skin shrunk onto his skull, eyes large as hen’s eggs.

His hand went over my mouth.

“Do Not Disturb,” he said, voice high and cracked.

This wasn’t the suave criminal I knew, the man with tartan cummerbunds and patent leather hair. This was some other Brunette, in the grips of a tough bout with dope or madness.

“The Deep Ones,” he said.

He let me go and I backed away.

“It is the time of the Surfacing.”

My case was over. I knew where the Laird was. All I had to do was tell Janey Wilde and give her her refund.

“There’s very little time.”

The music was louder. I heard a great number of bodies shuffling around in the casino. They couldn’t have been very agile, because they kept clumping into things and each other.

“They must be stopped. Dynamite, depth charges, torpedoes...”

“Who?” I asked. “The Japs?”

“The Deep Ones. The Dwellers in the Sister City.”

He had lost me.

A nasty thought occurred to me. As a detective, I can’t avoid making deductions. There were obviously a lot of people aboard the Monty, but mine was the only small boat in evidence. How had everyone else got out here? Surely they couldn’t have swum?

“It’s a war,” Brunette ranted, “us and them. It’s always been a war.”

I made a decision. I’d get the Laird off his boat and turn him over to Jungle Jillian. She could sort things out with the Panther Princess and her Esoteric Order. In his current state, Brunette would hand over any baby if you gave him a blanket.

I took Brunette’s thin wrist and tugged him towards the staircase. But a hatch clanged down, and I knew we were stuck.

A door opened and perfume drifted through the fish stink.

“Mr. Lovecraft, wasn’t it?” a silk-scaled voice said.

***

Janice Marsh was wearing pendant squid earrings and a lady-sized gun. And nothing else.

That wasn’t quite as nice as it sounds. The Panther Princess had no nipples, no navel and no pubic hair. She was lightly scaled between the legs and her wet skin shone like a shark’s. I imagined that if you stroked her, your palm would come away bloody. She was wearing neither the turban she’d affected earlier nor the dark wig of her pictures. Her head was completely bald, skull swelling unnaturally. She didn’t even have her eyebrows pencilled in.

“You evidently can’t take good advice.”

As mermaids go, she was scarier than cute. In the crook of her left arm, she held a bundle from which a white baby face peered with unblinking eyes. Franklin looked more like Janice Marsh than his parents.

“A pity, really,” said a tiny ventriloquist voice through Franklin’s mouth, “but there are always complications.”

Brunette gibbered with fear, chewing his beard and huddling against me.

Janice Marsh set Franklin down and he sat up, an adult struggling with a baby’s body.

“The Cap’n has come back,” she explained.

“Every generation must have a Cap’n,” said the thing in Franklin’s mind. Dribble got in the way and he wiped his angel-mouth with a fold of swaddle.

Janice Marsh clucked and pulled Laird away from me, stroking his face.

“Poor dear,” she said, flicking his chin with a long tongue. “He got out of his depth.”

She put her hands either side of Brunette’s head, pressing the butt of her gun into his cheek.

“He was talking about a Sister City,” I prompted.

She twisted the gambler’s head around and dropped him on the floor. His tongue poked out and his eyes showed only white.

“Of course,” the baby said. “The Cap’n founded two settlements. One beyond Devil Reef, off Massachusetts. And one here, under the sands of the Bay.”

We both had guns. I’d let her kill Brunette without trying to shoot her. It was the detective’s fatal flaw, curiosity. Besides, the Laird was dead inside his head long before Janice snapped his neck.

“You can still join us,” she said, hips working like a snake in time to the chanting. “There are raptures in the deeps.”

“Sister,” I said, “you’re not my type.”

Her nostrils flared in anger and slits opened in her neck, flashing liverish red lines in her white skin.

Her gun was pointed at me, safety off. Her long nails were lacquered green.

I thought I could shoot her before she shot me. But I didn’t. Something about a naked woman, no matter how strange, prevents you from killing them. Her whole body was moving with the music. I’d been wrong. Despite everything, she was beautiful.

I put my gun down and waited for her to murder me. It never happened.

***

I don’t really know the order things worked out. But first there was lightning, then, an instant later, thunder.

Light filled the passageway, hurting my eyes. Then, a rumble of noise which grew in a crescendo. The chanting was drowned.

Through the thunder cut a screech. It was a baby’s cry. Franklin’s eyes were screwed up, and he was shrieking. I had a sense of the Cap’n drowning in the baby’s mind, his purchase on the purloined body relaxing as the child cried out.

The floor beneath me shook and buckled and I heard a great straining of abused metal. A belch of hot wind surrounded me. A hole appeared. Janice Marsh moved fast, and I think she fired her gun, but whether at me on purpose or at random in reflex I couldn’t say. Her body sliced towards me and I ducked.

There was another explosion, not of thunder, and thick smoke billowed through a rupture in the floor. I was on the floor, hugging the tilting deck. Franklin slid towards me and bumped, screaming, into my head. A half-ton of water fell on us and I knew the ship was breached. My guess was that the Japs had just saved my life with a torpedo. I was waist deep in saltwater. Janice Marsh darted away in a sinuous fish motion.

Then there were heavy bodies around me, pushing me against a bulkhead. In the darkness, I was scraped by something heavy, coldskinned and foul-smelling. There were barks and cries, some of which might have come from human throats.

Fires went out and hissed as the water rose. I had Franklin in my hands and tried to hold him above water. I remembered the peril of Jungle Jillian again and found my head floating against the hard ceiling.

The Cap’n cursed in vivid 18th century language, Franklin’s little body squirming in my grasp. A toothless mouth tried to get a biter’s grip on my chin but slipped off. My feet slid and I was off-balance, pulling the baby briefly underwater. I saw his startled eyes through a wobbling film. When I pulled him out again, the Cap’n was gone and Franklin was screaming on his own. Taking a double gulp of air, I plunged under the water and struggled towards the nearest door, a hand closed over the baby’s face to keep water out of his mouth and nose.

The Montecito was going down fast enough to suggest there were plenty of holes in it. I had to make it a priority to find one. I jammed my knee at a door and it flew open. I was poured, along with several hundred gallons of water, into a large room full of stored gambling equipment. Red and white chips floated like confetti.

I got my footing and waded towards a ladder. Something large reared out of the water and shambled at me, screeching like a seabird.

I didn’t get a good look at it. Which was a mercy. Heavy arms lashed me, flopping boneless against my face. With my free hand, I pushed back at the thing, fingers slipping against cold slime. Whatever it was was in a panic and squashed through the door.

There was another explosion and everything shook. Water splashed upwards and I fell over. I got upright and managed to get a one-handed grip on the ladder. Franklin was still struggling and bawling, which I took to be a good sign. Somewhere near, there was a lot of shouting.

I dragged us up rung by rung and slammed my head against a hatch. If it had been battened, I’d have smashed my skull and spilled my brains. It flipped upwards and a push of water from below shoved us through the hole like a ping-pong ball in a fountain.

The Monty was on fire and there were things in the water around it. I heard the drone of airplane engines and glimpsed nearby launches. Gunfire fought with the wind. It was a full-scale attack. I made it to the deckrail and saw a boat fifty feet away. Men in yellow slickers angled tommy guns down and sprayed the water with bullets.

The gunfire whipped up the sea into a foam. Kicking things died in the water. Someone brought up his gun and fired at me. I pushed myself aside, arching my body over Franklin as bullets spanged against the deck.

My borrowed taxi must have been dragged under by the bulk of the ship.

There were definitely lights in the sea. And the sky. Over the city, in the distance, I saw firecracker bursts. Something exploded a hundred yards away and a tower of water rose, bursting like a puffball. A depth charge.

The deck was angled down and water was creeping up at us. I held on to a rope webbing, wondering whether the gambling ship still had any lifeboats. Franklin spluttered and bawled.

A white body slid by, heading for the water. I instinctively grabbed at it. Hands took hold of me and I was looking into Janice Marsh’s face. Her eyes blinked, membranes coming round from the sides, and she kissed me again. Her long tongue probed my mouth like an eel, then withdrew. She stood up, one leg bent so she was still vertical on the sloping deck. She drew air into her lungs—if she had lungs—and expelled it through her gills with a musical cry. She was slim and white in the darkness, water running off her body. Someone fired in her direction and she dived into the waves, knifing through the surface and disappearing towards the submarine lights. Bullets rippled the spot where she’d gone under.

I let go of the ropes and kicked at the deck, pushing myself away from the sinking ship. I held Franklin above the water and splashed with my legs and elbows. The Monty was dragging a lot of things under with it, and I fought against the pull so I wouldn’t be one of them. My shoulders ached and my clothes got in the way, but I kicked against the current.

The ship went down screaming, a chorus of bending steel and dying creatures. I had to make for a launch and hope not to be shot. I was lucky. Someone got a polehook into my jacket and landed us like fish. I lay on the deck, water running out of my clothes, swallowing as much air as I could breathe.

I heard Franklin yelling. His lungs were still in working order.

Someone big in a voluminous slicker, a sou’wester tied to his head, knelt by me, and slapped me in the face.

“Peeper,” he said.

***

“They’re calling it the Great Los Angeles Air Raid,” Winthrop told me as he poured a mug of British tea. “Some time last night a panic started, and everyone in Bay City shot at the sky for hours.”

“The Japs?” I said, taking a mouthful of welcome hot liquid.

“In theory. Actually, I doubt it. It’ll be recorded as a fiasco, a lot of jumpy characters with guns. While it was all going on, we engaged the enemy and emerged victorious.”

He was still dressed up for an embassy ball and didn’t look as if he’d been on deck all evening. Geneviève Dieudonne wore a fisherman’s sweater and fatigue pants, her hair up in a scarf. She was looking at a lot of sounding equipment and noting down readings.

“You’re not fighting the Japs, are you?”

Winthrop pursed his lips. “An older war, my friend. We can’t be distracted. After last night’s action, our Deep Ones won’t poke their scaly noses out for a while. Now I can do something to lick Hitler.”

“What really happened?”

“There was something dangerous in the sea, under Mr. Brunette’s boat. We have destroyed it and routed the... uh, the hostile forces. They wanted the boat as a surface station. That’s why Mr. Brunette’s associates were eliminated.”

Geneviève gave a report in French, so fast that I couldn’t follow.

“Total destruction,” Winthrop explained, “a dreadful set-back for them. It’ll put them in their place for years. Forever would be too much to hope for, but a few years will help.”

I lay back on the bunk, feeling my wounds. Already choking on phlegm, I would be lucky to escape pneumonia.

“And the little fellow is a decided dividend.”

Finlay glumly poked around, suggesting another dose of depth charges. He was cradling a mercifully sleep-struck Franklin, but didn’t look terribly maternal.

“He seems quite unaffected by it all.”

“His name is Franklin,” I told Winthrop. “On the boat, he was...”

“Not himself? I’m familiar with the condition. It’s a filthy business, you understand.”

“He’ll be all right,” Geneviève put in.

I wasn’t sure whether the rest of the slicker crew were feds or servicemen and I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to know. I could tell a Clandestine Operation when I landed in the middle of one.

“Who knows about this?” I asked. “Hoover? Roosevelt?”

Winthrop didn’t answer.

“Someone must know,” I said.

“Yes,” the Englishman said, “someone must. But this is a war the public would never believe exists. In the Bureau, Finlay’s outfit are known as ‘the Unnameables’, never mentioned by the press, never honoured or censured by the government, victories and defeats never recorded in the official history.”

The launch shifted with the waves, and I hugged myself, hoping for some warmth to creep over me. Finlay had promised to break out a bottle later but that made me resolve to stick to tea as a point of honour. I hated to fulfil his expectations.

“And America is a young country,” Winthrop explained. “In Europe, we’ve known things a lot longer.”

On shore, I’d have to tell Janey Wilde about Brunette and hand over Franklin. Some flack at Metro would be thinking of an excuse for the Panther Princess’s disappearance. Everything else—the depth charges, the sea battle, the sinking ship—would be swallowed up by the War.

All that would be left would be tales. Weird tales.

FATHER DAGON

RETURN TO INNSMOUTH

by GUY N. SMITH

FOR TWO DECADES I have fought against the urge to return to Innsmouth. I say “return,” for although I have never been there I know that diabolical place as well as if I had been born there and lived with its horrors. In my frequent nightmares I have walked its deserted streets, hastened past the former Masonic Hall that is now the Esoteric Order of Dagon, smelled the nauseating fish odours that permeate the early 19th century buildings as a reminder that nothing has changed nor ever will.

My great-aunt, Miss Anna Tilton, who dedicated her life to the service of the Newburyport Public Library, wrote her own account of the happenings at Innsmouth, a hundred pages of handscript that came to me via the will of my uncle upon his death. Enclosed with the manuscript was the published account of one Williamson, together with newspaper clippings, dated 1928-29, of the Federal government’s attack on that seaport and the subsequent torpedoing of the Devil Reef just off the coastline. Crumbling, supposedly empty, houses were dynamited and many arrests were made although there were no public trials.

I tried to convince myself that those fish-like creatures that had spawned in the sea and inter-bred with the inhabitants of Innsmouth had been annihilated, that Dagon Hall had been blasted off the face of the Earth, that the evil had been destroyed forever. My research revealed nothing which would either deny or confirm my worst fears. Innsmouth was just another seaport at the mouth of the Manuxet, cut off from civilisation by its salt marshes with their maze of creeks; Arkham, Ipswich and Newburyport might as well have been a thousand miles away.

Truly, the matter should have been no business of mine. I had been born in New York and moved to New Jersey to take up a post in insurance. My life was routine, boring but safe. I had no cause to concern myself with the evil legends of Innsmouth. Far rather that my uncle had forgotten my existence than inflicted upon me those accursed documents which plagued me day and night with their accounts of unspeakable happenings, which most sane people would have dismissed as the ramblings of some amateur writer of weird fiction whose attempts to have her works published had resulted in failure. Such was her bitterness that in her dying hour her demented and senile brain had hit upon the idea of cursing her bloodline, afflicting them with her ramblings so that they would know no peace. It was her twisted way of ensuring that her pathetic attempts at literature would survive after her death.

Only I knew that Anna Tilton was no embittered failure, for Williamson had written commendably of her attempts to help him in his own ill-fated investigation of those awful events. I began wondering how much of Innsmouth still stood, if anybody still lived and fished there now; and if so, were their bodies misshapen, their skins scaly and their eyes unblinking?

The dreams increased with frightening regularity, escalated to terrifying proportions; I was trapped in Innsmouth, a human beast of the chase hounded through those dilapidated streets by hunting packs of amphibious creatures, grunting their lust for me so that they might sacrifice me to some vile deity deep in the watery hell of that abyss off Devil Reef.

It was in the spring that I finally conceded that I must return to Innsmouth. Unless I pandered to my fears, I would surely end my days in some asylum, screaming my terror aloud during the nocturnal hours when my cell became a room in the dreaded Gilman House, the shouts of my warders becoming the inarticulate cries of my subterranean pursuers as they sought to break through to me.

My long journey took me to Newburyport where I called at the public library and saw with my own eyes that tiara, where the beginning of my worst fears were confirmed. It existed. Behind the glass of its case, resting on purple velvet, it was identical in every detail to Miss Tilton’s, and Williamson’s, description. If only, on leaving that austere building, I had boarded the next train back to New Jersey, then at least I would have spent my declining years in the comparative safety of a mental hospital. Far rather insanity and nightmares than that which befell me as a result of my decision to carry on to Innsmouth.

It was whilst I stood in the sunlit street outside the library, awaiting the arrival of the bus that would take me on the last stage of my journey, that I chanced to glimpse my shadow on the sidewalk. At first I thought that possibly the distortion was caused by some overhead obstruction of the sun’s rays, the branches of a tree or the overhang of a building. But there was nothing that could in any way have impinged upon my own shadow, cause that elongation of the skull, the squatness of the figure and the stooping of the shoulders. In panic I crossed the road and consulted my reflection in the window of a shop; I was as I had always been, yet on glancing again at my shadow I perceived that it was still grotesque.

***

Suffice that I arrived in Innsmouth towards evening, my delay caused by the lateness of the bus and the seeming reluctance of its sullen driver to reach our destination. I was the only passenger, another fact that served to disconcert me. Was it still that nobody went to Innsmouth, that the town was shunned because of its history? Or because of its present?

Innsmouth was exactly as I knew it would be. Perhaps the dereliction had been increased by the dynamiting and the passing years since Anna Tilton described it. But, essentially, it was the same place.

Those 19th century brick and wooden edifices, crumbling, windows boarded up, deserted streets, not so much as a scavenging dog or cat in sight. With an hour or so of daylight remaining, I wandered down Lafayette Street, crossed over to Adams Street and stood there surveying the shoreward slums that lay to the east. I knew they were inhabited, even though I saw nobody, sensed that something lived amidst the sprawling degradation. Yet again I looked for my shadow but the sun had slipped below the western horizon.

I almost expected to encounter old Zadok Allen sitting by the fire station but most certainly he would be dead and gone, years ago. I glimpsed some figures in the distance, staring in my direction, but they hurried away at my approach. Before me lay the circular green, beyond it that pillared building on the junction which had been the Order of Dagon Hall. I found myself shying from it, fearful lest one of its doors might be open and I should be afforded a glimpse of a priestly figure inside, wearing a tiara identical to that which rested in the glass showcase of the Newburyport Public Library. But its portals remained closed, for which I was greatly relieved.

The Gilman House was still standing, its lower windows lighted, the mullioned panes glinting evilly across the street. I hesitated. Would that there had been a means of transportation away from here before nightfall, but the bus had already departed for Arkham and the railway was disused. I accepted with a sense of trepidation that I was condemned to passing the night hours in Innsmouth.

The hotel clerk was how I expected to find him, a tall head on a short neck, his skin rough as though he suffered from eczema, his eyes staring unblinkingly at me. There was just one room vacant, he muttered as he consulted a register. I nodded and handed over three dollars.

The room itself had a familiarity about it as though I had stayed there before, the claustrophobic prison of my nightmares, and so aptly described by Williamson in his writings that it may well have been the very same one from which he had fled on that terrible night.

I knew that there would be no bolt on the door and that I would find one on the clothespress. It took me several minutes to transfer it to the door.

The north and south intersecting doors had bolts; I shot them firmly. I had not eaten but I preferred to endure the pangs of hunger rather than risk going outside in search of food. Fate had decreed that I come here; whatever the nocturnal hours had in store for me I must accept, for there was nothing that I could do to change the course of events. If I survived, and walked unscathed from here in the morning light, then I knew that I should have peace of mind for the rest of my life.

As an added precaution I pushed the heavy dresser up against the door. I could do no more in the way of self-preservation, so I lay on the bed fully clothed and tried to read by the dim light of the single bulb suspended over me. My concentration lapsed, the printed words became meaningless, and I found myself listening to the noises which came from down below.

Some time later the bulb extinguished as I had half-expected it to and plunged me into Stygian blackness. The darkness increased my sense of smell, it seemed, and I became aware of that strong fishy odour as though the fishermen of Innsmouth had piled their catch up in the street below and left it to decompose.

There were movements outside my door, stealthy steps that made a flopping sound. I tensed when I heard a key inserted in the lock; it rattled but the bolt held, and after a time the key was withdrawn. Now they were trying the other doors, giving up when they found the strong bolts obstructed their entry.

Voices uttered sounds that were neither words nor from human vocal chords, a whispered grunting that embodied their anger and frustration because I had denied them their prey. But surely wooden doors would not withstand a combined assault, sheer strength of numbers would overcome such paltry obstacles.

The stench was overpowering almost to the point of suffocation and I struggled to breathe. I recalled how Williamson had fled that night, run the gauntlet of these creatures of Dagon, but even at the height of my terror I dismissed the idea of bursting through one of the intersecting doors and leaping from a window on to the roof of an adjoining building. I pinned my hopes on my improvised fortifications, and if they succumbed to my enemy, then I accepted that I would face sacrifice in the black depths of that unfathomable abyss off Devil Reef.

I lay there rigid with fright, my fingernails gouging my palms until they bled, hearing the door weakening as those outside brought some kind of battering ram with which to split the stout woodwork. My senses swam. I attempted to scream but no sound came from my trembling lips. The darkness was becoming blacker by the second, now tinged with scarlet, as I hovered on the brink of merciful unconsciousness that would at least spare me the climax of this hideous trauma.

It was as I felt myself slipping gently into a state of blissful unawareness that I heard the door finally begin to yield.

***

The morning dawned with a dismal greyness, the fingers of daylight creeping in through the single window to stroke me into wakefulness. I sat up with a sense of disbelief, stared uncomprehendingly around me. The door was still bolted, the cumbersome dresser wedged firmly up against it. There was no sign of damage to the oaken panels.

I leaped from the bed, rushed to inspect the other two doors and discovered that neither bore any signs of damage. I was trembling violently. It appeared then that those nocturnal fiends had failed in their attempts to reach me just when it seemed that they had breached my crude defences.

Miraculously, I had survived the night hours unscathed and now, with luck, I might escape from Innsmouth and leave behind all the horrors which even the might of the armed forces had failed to destroy so many years ago.

With no small amount of trepidation I descended the stairs. There was no sign of the staring, sullen clerk, for which I was grateful. I walked out into the street and looked about me. There was not a soul in sight, just that faint marine odour which the morning breeze was beginning to dissipate.

I had no idea what time the bus departed for Arkham, but it would doubtless be hours before it arrived. Perhaps then, my best course was to begin walking along the road that led away from Innsmouth and when that battered conveyance eventually caught me up, I would board it.

I cared not for my dishevelled appearance, nor the fact that I was unwashed, my only desire to be away from here. I had purged myself of the curse handed down to me from Anna Tilton and my uncle. I had seen Innsmouth and survived the attempts of those who sought to drag me down into their hell of everlasting degradation. I would never be able to forget it but at least I was spared.

It was some time before I became aware that I had lost my way, possibly taken the wrong junction at the Green. For I seemed to be heading seawards, before me lay those flat salt marshes, intersected with wide and deep creeks, and that building at the mouth of the Manuxet was undoubtedly the infamous Marsh refinery.

I had to exert a conscious effort to turn around, almost as though the coast held me in a hypnotic grip, dragging my feet as though I had blundered into a sucking mire that was determined to hold me. Eventually, I managed it, forced myself to walk back the way I had come.

I tried to hurry but my efforts were slow, doubtless due to exhaustion after the terror of the past hours. But as I neared Innsmouth I found myself moving more easily. Whatever the effects of my proximity to the coast, I had shaken them off. Ahead of me was the road to Arkham and my step was quicker. I had made an error in my directions but, thankfully, I had rectified it.

By now the sun was up, its rays beginning to warm my chilled body and raise my spirits. It was only then that I recalled the disfiguration of my shadow on the previous day and instinctively I turned to check on it.

In that awful moment cold terror gripped me again and the faintness that had assailed me during the night returned. I stood aghast, searched the rough surface of the road around me, stared in rising panic, unable to understand.

For where previously the sun had cast a misshapen form on the ground, now there was nothing. I had no shadow.

THE CROSSING

by ADRIAN COLE

It is a common belief, particularly among Christians, that it is the Devil, and he alone, who preys on human souls, seeking to suborn or otherwise pervert them away from the light. A common belief, and a fallacy that makes the human soul so vulnerable to other forces that exist. Forces which trawl no less hungrily than Satan and his various minions and whose methods are no less insidious.

—Ludwig Kreigmann,

The Hungry Stars

AMONG MY MAIL was an unexpected postcard. The lurid blue sky, unique only to such postcards, drew my eye. Beneath it clustered the houses of a fishing village that could have been one of dozens in the south-west of England, probably Cornwall. It was an area I had always meant to visit, but never had.

I flipped the card over, frowning. The writing was so badly penned that I couldn’t read a word of it. Yet it had been addressed clearly enough, albeit in archaic, printed letters. I sat at the kitchen table, glancing at the other bills and circulars before returning to the postcard. Again I tried to read the writing, but it continued to defy me.

Later, as I was rinsing the breakfast dishes, the village on the card suddenly brought to mind my odd awakening earlier that morning.

I could smell the sea. Probably that is putting it too simply, but my mind had made the jump as I had come out of sleep. If I had tried to analyse it more fully, I would have said it was a mixture of seaweed, fish and salt. Yet it had been very strong, as strong as it had been brief. Clearly an illusion. After all, I lived almost two hundred miles from the sea and couldn’t remember the last time I’d been anywhere near it. As a child, perhaps.

My mother used to take me to the seaside, though it had been more from a sense of duty than from sharing my enthusiasm. Like all little boys, I had imagined a trip to the sea as a promise of great adventure, crammed with every conceivable pleasure. It should have been a family event, but for me it had never been that.

I had never known my father. The man, a shadow never clearly focused for me by my mother, had left her when I was no more than a few months old. Ironically he had gone to sea, a wanderer by nature.

My mother had tried to hide her bitterness, but as I grew older, I understood that particular pained darkness better. She lived with another man, Bob, who had become my surrogate father and whom she loved possessively. They hadn’t made it easy for me to show my own genuine affection for Bob, although it was a better life; some of the gaps were filled, others were lost in the occasional silences of my mother, silences that Bob never sought to disturb.

I left the kitchen. In the living room I looked at the framed photograph of my son, David. The boy was nearly twenty now. He beamed from the picture, his arm around the shoulders of a blonde girl who was so obviously as happy as he was. They’d marry soon. There was no point in my telling them they were too young. What did I know about it? I grinned to myself. Like father, like son? There was an irony in that. My own marriage had not been a success. David’s mother was remarried now.

The split had been mercifully painless, not at all like I had heard divorces were supposed to be. Irene and I had remained friends and I actually liked Tony, the man she had since married. I had always been thankful that Tony had never made it hard for me where David was concerned. Tony was sensible enough never to try to come between David and his father. As a result he had won David over very quickly.