The Lonely Shadows: Tales of Horror and the Cthulhu Mythos (11 page)

There was a solitary figure standing there with his back to me and for a moment, I thought it was Trevelyan. Then I saw it was Rohan. He turned as I came up to him.

“You’ve seen him? Ben Trevelyan,” he shouted hoarsely. “He’s gone out again, hoping it will be different this time. But he can’t escape his fate, no one can.”

I gripped him by the arm. “Goddamnit, man; I’ve seen that boat. It’s all rotten. He’ll never survive.”

“If she wills it, he’ll survive. Only to go through with it again and again whenever the storms come.”

Towards the ocean, there was very little visible. Huge waves pounded the beach. Spray stung our eyes as we tried to peer into the pitch blackness.

“He’ll not come back yet,” Rohan yelled. “He’s out there somewhere, riding the storm, waiting for her and hoping against hope that the boat founders and he goes down with her. But she won’t let him.”

We must have stood there for almost an hour watching the white horses rolling in from the ocean, hammering against the jetty until it seemed that even the obdurate stone must surely crumble.

Then Rohan’s hand gripped my shoulder as he pointed a shaking finger towards the sea.

“There!”
he shrieked. “Do you see them?”

Dashing the teeming rain from my eyes, I stared in the direction of the rocks. For several seconds, I saw nothing. Then the entire sky lit up in a glaring sheet of white and I saw everything.

The sails were merely long shreds of cloth, flapping like pennants around the masts. Trevelyan was there on the deck, his hands around the wheel.

And there was another figure beside him.

It was the slim figure of a woman, dressed all in white, her long hair streaming in the wind. Both were struggling violently on the canting deck, hands clamped around the wheel; one striving to turn the vessel onto the rocks and the other, her dress billowing in the gale, struggling to guide it through the narrow gap so that Trevelyan might continue to live with his endless burden of guilt.

“She’ll win,” Rohan screamed in my ear. “She always wins.”

Darkness rushed in to blot out the hideous scene, to erase it temporarily from my sight. I could only stand and try to visualize what was happening just beyond the clawing barrier which waited to tear the bottom out of any hapless vessel unfortunate enough to smash into it.

I could no longer doubt the veracity of the old tales circulating in Corvellan. I knew I was not hallucinating or imagining what I had seen, limned in that lightning glare. Somehow, that boat would drift safely into harbour and Ben Trevelyan would have to live with the memory of cold-blooded murder on his soul.

But then, even above the banshee shrieking of the gale, we heard a sound that neither of us expected. It was the unmistakable splintering of wood. When the next flash came, it revealed only the raging turmoil of the ocean, funnelling between those two narrow headlands.

Rohan made a curious sign with his left hand, then turned and made his way back along the jetty. I followed him quickly, not wanting to stay another minute in that accursed place.

The next day, I decided to cut short my holiday and leave Corvellan. Something very terrible had happened there two decades earlier and the final act in the drama had been played out the previous night.

In the clear light of day, on that fine, sunny morning, it all seemed like a bad dream. Had I really seen that second figure or had I, in those few seconds when that lightning flash had lit up the scene, merely imagined it? Had it been nothing more than an image conjured up by my overwrought mind, already filled with a chaotic confusion of thoughts brought on by everything I had been told, After packing my things, I went down to the jetty for one last time. By now, the sea was calm and the tide almost out. There was nothing to remind me of what had happened during the night.

Then, just as I was about to retrace my steps, I noticed something in the water. It was nothing more than a plain piece of wood, bobbing gently in the swell. But then an incoming wave suddenly flipped it over and I saw what was on the other side.

It was part of the bow of Trevelyan’s boat. But what sent a sudden chill through me and had me hastening from that terrible place, was the name now etched upon it, stark and clear. In deep letters, as if gouged by long, sharp, ragged fingernails—
SHIRLEY’S REVENGE
!

UNDERSEA QUEST

In the autumn of 1927, the United States Federal Authorities were approached by Professor Derby of Miskatonic University concerning certain incidents occurring in the seaport town of Innsmouth as told to him by a Robert Olmstead. It had been known for some time that a trade in gold articles existed between Innsmouth and the neighbouring towns of Arkham, Rowley and Ipswich, such items occasionally turning up as far a field as Boston.

However, Olmstead further claimed that illegal immigrants were also present in the town, that a large number of murders had been committed and several people known to have visited Innsmouth had unaccountably disappeared, leaving no clues as to their vanishing.

Acting on this information, two Federal investigators were sent to Innsmouth to look into these claims. When neither man returned, it was decided that an armed raid was to be organized to determine the truth behind the stories of smuggling, murder and the disappearance of a number of individuals.

What happened on February 1928 was never released to the public. The testimony of three agents who accompanied this force Into Innsmouth, given in three official reports has been kept under lock and key on the orders of the Federal authorities. All subsequent inquiries as to the contents of these reports have been met with the same answer. There never were such documents, the raid was merely to arrest certain individuals for tax evasion, and any suggestions to the contrary are simply pure invention and speculation on the part of the newspapers of that time.

Until now, it has proved impossible to establish whether such reports do indeed exist and, if they do, what is set down in them. The account that follows is based upon photographic copies of the TOP SECRET documents, which have lain in the archives of the Federal Building for more than seventy years.

How they come to be in my possession is not only irrelevant but also highly dangerous for certain individuals, including myself. Likewise, the name of the person who obtained them must be protected since, were it to become known, he would certainly face a long period of imprisonment or, like those in Innsmouth, simply vanish off the face of the Earth.

* * * * * * *

It is true that the events described herein occurred more than half a century ago, that they are so bizarre that few will believe them, and that others will describe them as a deliberate hoax. Yet all were written within two weeks of the raid on Innsmouth by sober, competent agents, all of who were warned of dire consequences should they speak about the incident to any member of the public.

The decision to publish them now, more than seventy years after the event, has been taken because it is deemed essential that the world should be aware of the lurking horror that may, at any time, emerge and overwhelm mankind.

I.

Narrative of Federal agent James P. Curran:

February 27, 1928

My first acquaintance with Innsmouth was in early January 1928. Prior to that I had never heard of the town, nor could I find it marked on any map or listed in any gazetteer. My superiors had instructed me to accompany a colleague, Andrew McAlpine, from the Treasury Department, to Arkham where we were to question a certain Robert Olmstead who wished to give certain information concerning the town.

The drive from Boston to Arkham took the best part of an hour and, with McAlpine at the wheel. I spent the time going through the file that had been given to us. Apparently, Innsmouth was a small seaport town on the north coast of Massachusetts, isolated from, and shunned, by its neighbours. Once a flourishing port, it had decayed and degenerated over the last half century and was now a backward community which kept itself to itself.

Rumours concerning Innsmouth were legion. There were reports of smuggling and the importation of certain natives from some island in the South Seas during the mid-nineteenth century, presumably part of the slave trade. There was certainly a small, but significant, trade in gold items for many of these pieces were on show in Arkham, most of these produced at the Marsh refinery situated on the banks of the Manuxet River.

Reports of murder and unexplained disappearances were also catalogued in the file although whether these were on the scale believed by residents in Arkham and Rowley had not been verified. More recently, during the preceding autumn, two agents from the Treasury Department had been sent to Innsmouth to report on tax evasions and possible contraband passing through Innsmouth. Neither agent had returned and this had brought things to a head as far as the Federal authorities were concerned.

The decision to raid the town hade been taken at the highest level and a date set for February. Very little accurate information on conditions inside the town was available. However, an urgent telephone call to the Bureau from Professor Derby of Miskatonic University had resulted in our being ordered to go to the Federal office in Arkham to interview a certain Robert Olmstead who claimed to have recently escaped from Innsmouth and who had important information for us.

Olmstead turned up at the office a little after two that afternoon. He wasn’t at all what I had expected. Approximately twenty years old, he gave an address in Cleveland and my first question was why he had travelled such a distance just to visit Innsmouth.

At first, he seemed oddly evasive and kept fidgeting in his chair for a full two minutes before replying. The gist of his reply was that he was attempting to trace his ancestral history back to Arkham and there had discovered that, prior to moving there, his maternal family had originally come from nearby Innsmouth.

“Are you aware that Innsmouth has been under close surveillance by the Federal authorities for some months?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I know nothing about that,” he declared. “My only reason for going there was to trace any of my maternal relatives who might still be living in Innsmouth.”

“Then if that was your only reason,” McAlpine put in, “why did you have to flee for your life as Professor Derby has informed us?”

I could tell at once that he was hiding something from us; that something had happened there which he either didn’t want to tell, or was sure we wouldn’t believe him.

Then he cleared his throat nervously. “I spoke with one of the inhabitants, Zadok Allen, who told me things about Innsmouth which the townsfolk don’t want the outside world to know. He warned me that if they suspected I’d spoken to him, they’d kill me rather than let any of this information get out.”

“Then I think you’d better tell us what you know,” I said.

“You wouldn’t believe a word of it,” he muttered.

“Try us,” McAlpine said.

Moistening his lips, he went on, “First you have to know there are no religious denominations left in Innsmouth except for one. All of the others were shut down sixty years ago by Obed Marsh who ran the town then. Seemingly, he brought back some pagan religion from some island in the South Pacific, along with a large number of natives. Now they’re all members of the Esoteric Order of Dagon.”

“Dagon?” McAlpine inquired.

“Some kind of fish deity. They all believe he lives in some sunken city in the deeps off Devil Reef.”

I nodded. “We’ve come across people like this before. Weird cults in the bayou country. But it seems to me that what you’re suggesting here might be something more than that.”

“Take my word for it,” he said, and there was no doubting the earnestness in his tone. “This is far worse than anything you’ve come up against before. This heathen worship is bad, but there’s even worse than that in Innsmouth.”

“Worse?” I prompted, as he hesitated again.

“Much worse. I’ve seen them and even those I saw aren’t as bad as those they’ve got hidden away in the big houses on Washington, Lafayette and Addams Streets. You can hear about it from the people in Arkham. They call it the Innsmouth look. It comes from the time when those foreigners were brought into the town by Obed Marsh.

“Seems he called up others from the sea off Devil Reef and forced the folk in Innsmouth to mate with them. Call their offspring hybrids, or whatever you like, but they change. Bulging eyes, wide mouths, ears that change into gills. They often swim out to Devil Reef, maybe beyond, and when their time comes, when the change is complete, they leave Innsmouth and go down into the really deep water and remain there for ever in their sunken city they call Y’ha-nthlei.”

I threw my colleague a quick glance at that point. Closing the file in front of me, I said, “Well, Mister Olmstead, that you for your information. We’ll certainly pass it on to the proper quarter. It will then be up to our superiors as to what action, if any, needs to be taken.”

When he had gone, McAlpine and I sat looking at each other in silence. I had little doubt that something had occurred in Innsmouth to have frightened Olmstead so much that it had sent him running for his life along the abandoned railway line to Rowley.