The Shadow Over Innsmouth by H. P. Lovecraft (new books to read TXT) š
- Author: H. P. Lovecraft
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The Shadow Over Innsmouth
H. P. Lovecraft
IDuring the winter of 1927-28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. The public first learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting - under suitable precautions - of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront. Uninquiring souls let this occurrence pass as one of the major clashes in a spasmodic war on liquor.
Keener news-followers, however, wondered at the prodigious number of arrests, the abnormally large force of men used in making them, and the secrecy surrounding the disposal of the prisoners. No trials, or even definite charges were reported; nor were any of the captives seen thereafter in the regular gaols of the nation. There were vague statements about disease and concentration camps, and law about dispersal in various naval and military prisons, inn nothing positive ever developed. Innsmouth itself was left almost depopulated, and it is even now only beginning to show signs of a sluggishly revived existence.
Complaints from many liberal organizations were met with long confidential discussions, and representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and prisons. As a result, these societies became surprisingly passive and reticent. Newspaper men were harder to manage, but seemed largely to cooperate with the government in the end. Only one paper - a tabloid always discounted because of its wild policy - mentioned the deep diving submarine that discharged torpedoes downward in the marine abyss just beyond Devil Reef. That item, gathered by chance in a haunt of Sailors, seemed indeed rather far-fetched; since the low, black reef lieu a full mile and a half out from Innsmouth Harbour.
People around the country and in the nearby towns muttered a great deal among themselves, but said very little to the outer world. They had talked about dying and half-deserted Innsmouth for nearly a century, and nothing new could be wilder or more hideous than what they had whispered and hinted at years before. Many things had taught them secretiveness, and there was no need to exert pressure on them. Besides, they really knew little; for wide salt marshes, desolate and unpeopled, kept neighbors off from Innsmouth on the landward side.
But at last I am going to defy the ban on speech about this thing. Results, I am certain, are so thorough that no public harm save a shock of repulsion could ever accrue from a hinting of what was found by those horrified men at Innsmouth. Besides, what was found might possibly have more than one explanation. I do not know just how much of the whole tale has been told even to me, and I have many reasons for not wishing to probe deeper. For my contact with this affair has been closer than that of any other layman, and I have carried away impressions which are yet to drive me to drastic measures.
It was I who fled frantically out of Innsmouth in the early morning hours of July 16, 1927, and whose frightened appeals for government inquiry and action brought on the whole reported episode. I was willing enough to stay mute while the affair was fresh and uncertain; but now that it is an old story, with public interest and curiosity gone, I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly-shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality. The mere telling helps me to restore confidence in my own faculties; to reassure myself that I was not the first to succumb to a contagious nightmare hallucination. It helps me, too in making up my mind regarding a certain terrible step which lies ahead of me.
I never heard of Innsmouth till the day before I saw it for the first and - so far - last time. I was celebrating my coming of age by a tour of New England - sightseeing, antiquarian, and genealogical - and had planned to go directly from ancient Newburyport to Arkham, whence my motherās family was derived. I had no car, but was travelling by train, trolley and motor-coach, always seeking the cheapest possible route. In Newburyport they told me that the steam train was the thing to take to Arkham; and it was only at the station ticket-office, when I demurred at the high fare, that I learned about Innsmouth. The stout, shrewd-faced agent, whose speech shewed him to be no local man, seemed sympathetic toward my efforts at economy, and made a suggestion that none of my other informants had offered.
āYou could take that old bus, I suppose,ā he said with a certain hesitation, ābut it aināt thought much of hereabouts. It goes through Innsmouth - you may have heard about that - and so the people donāt like it. Run by an Innsmouth fellow - Joe Sargent - but never gets any custom from here, or Arkham either, I guess. Wonder it keeps running at all. I sāpose itās cheap enough, but I never see morān two or three people in it - nobody but those Innsmouth folk. Leaves the square - front of Hammondās Drug Store - at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. unless theyāve changed lately. Looks like a terrible rattletrap - Iāve never been on it.ā
That was the first I ever heard of shadowed Innsmouth. Any reference to a town not shown on common map or listed in recent guidebooks would have interested me, and the agentās odd manner of allusion roused something like real curiosity. A town able to inspire such dislike in it its neighbors, I thought, must be at least rather unusual, and worthy of a touristās attention. If it came before Arkham I would stop off there and so I asked the agent to tell me something about it. He was very deliberate, and spoke with an air of feeling slightly superior to what he said.
āInnsmouth? Well, itās a queer kind of a town down at the mouth of the Manuxet. Used to be almost a city - quite a port before the War of 1812 - but all gone to pieces in the last hundred years or so. No railroad now - B. and M. never went through, and the branch line from Rowley was given up years ago.
āMore empty housesā than there are people, I guess, and no business to speak of except fishing and lobstering. Everybody trades mostly either here or in Arkham or Ipswich. Once they had quite a few mills, but nothingās left now except one gold refinery running on the leanest kind of part time.
āThat refinery, though, used to be a big thing, and old man Marsh, who owns it, must be richerān Croesus. Queer old duck, though, and sticks mighty close in his home. Heās supposed to have developed some skin disease or deformity late in life that makes him keep out of sight. Grandson of Captain Obed Marsh, who founded the business. His mother seems toāve been some kind of foreigner - they say a South Sea islander - so everybody raised Cain when he married an Ipswich girl fifty years ago. They always do that about Innsmouth people, and folks here and hereabouts always try to cover up any Innsmouth blood they have in āem. But Marshās children and grandchildren look just like anyone else farās I can see. Iāve had āem pointed out to me here - though, come to think of it, the elder children donāt seem to be around lately. Never saw the old man.
āAnd why is everybody so down on Innsmouth? Well, young fellow, you mustnāt take too much stock in what people here say. Theyāre hard to get started, but once they do get started they never let up. Theyāve been telling things about Innsmouth - whispering āem, mostly - for the last hundred years, I guess, and I gather theyāre more scared than anything else. Some of the stories would make you laugh - about old Captain Marsh driving bargains with the devil and bringing imps out of hell to live in Innsmouth, or about some kind of devil-worship and awful sacrifices in some place near the wharves that people stumbled on around 1845 or thereabouts - but I come from Panton, Vermont, and that kind of story donāt go down with me.
āYou ought to hear, though, what some of the old-timers tell about the black reef off the coast - Devil Reef, they call it. Itās well above water a good part of the time, and never much below it, but at that you could hardly call it an island. The story is that thereās a whole legion of devils seen sometimes on that reef-sprawled about, or darting in and out of some kind of caves near the top. Itās a rugged, uneven thing, a good bit over a mile out, and toward the end of shipping days sailors used to make big detours just to avoid it.
āThat is, sailors that didnāt hail from Innsmouth. One of the things they had against old Captain Marsh was that he was supposed to land on it sometimes at night when the tide was rightā¦ Maybe he did, for I dare say the rock formation was interesting, and itās just barely possible he was looking for pirate loot and maybe finding it; but there was talk of his dealing with demons there. Fact is, I guess on the whole it was really the Captain that gave the bad reputation to the reef.
āThat was before the big epidemic of 1846, when over half the folks in Innsmouth was carried off. They never did quite figure out what the trouble was, but it was probably some foreign kind of disease brought from China or somewhere by the shipping. It surely was bad enough - there was riots over it, and all sorts of ghastly doings that I donāt believe ever got outside of town - and it left the place a awful shape. Never came back - there canāt be moreān 300 or 400 people living there now.
āBut the real thing behind the way folks feel is simply race prejudice - and I donāt say Iām blaming those that hold it. I hate those Innsmouth folks myself, and I wouldnāt care to go to their town. I sāpose you know - though I can see youāre a Westerner by your talk - what a lot our New England ships used to have to do with queer ports in Africa, Asia, the South Seas, and everywhere else, and what queer kinds of people they sometimes brought back with āem. Youāve probably heard about the Salem man that came home with a Chinese wife, and maybe you know thereās still a bunch of Fiji Islanders somewhere around Cape Cod.
āWell, there must be something like that back of the Innsmouth people. The place always was badly cut off from the rest of the country by marshes and creeks and we canāt be sure about the ins and outs of the matter; but itās pretty clear that old Captain Marsh must have brought home some odd specimens when he had all three of his ships in commission back in the twenties and thirties. There certainly is a strange kind of streak in the Innsmouth folks today - I donāt know how to explain it but it
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