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 Dark Water

By J.S. Cook
A Kildevil Cove Mystery

Disgraced detective Deiniol “Danny” Quirke returns to Kildevil

Cove, the Newfoundland fishing village of his youth, to bury his
abusive grandfather and dispose of the old man’s empty house.
Devastated by the recent death of his beloved wife and mired in an
internal police investigation that will likely spell the end of his career,
he’s in no mood to reminisce about Auld Lang Syne with the people
who made his childhood a living hell.
Secrets Danny thought were buried forever rise violently to the
surface when the bones of local boy Llewellyn Single, drowned thirty
years before, wash up on the beach. Only two people truly know
what happened: Danny Quirke and his former best friend—now
bitter enemy—millionaire Tadhg Heaney.
Two things matter to Tadhg: money and his teenage daughter
Lily, who is dying of advanced neuroblastoma. When Lily’s estranged
mother returns to claim her, the only person Tadhg can turn to is
Danny. And when Danny is accused of Llewellyn’s murder, he must
ally with Tadhg, whom he cannot help but desire, because those
who believe he is responsible are looking for revenge.

Previously published by Dreamspinner Press as Wind and Dark

Water, March 2020.
To my sister Jen, who reads everything I write.
 Acknowledgements

THANKS AS always to Elizabeth North for saying yes to this book, and
to my editors, Andi Byassee and Nicole Dowd, who made sense of
my confusion. Heartfelt appreciation to L.C. Chase for an absolutely
gorgeous cover, and to everyone at Dreamspinner who made sure
this novel saw print. I am forever in your debt.
 Chapter One

TWICE NOW Deiniol Quirke had pulled off the highway, intending to
turn around and head back to the city. Twice he had talked himself
out of it. At Whitbourne he’d stopped to get gas before the turnoff,
arguing with himself while he filled the tank. The wind was straight
out of the northwest, and it poured cold down on him like water.
Why was he always having to deal with things like this? And it wasn’t
like his sister, Sandra, was going to get up off her arse. She’d always
had a knack for avoiding anything unpleasant to do with family, and
he was usually the one left holding whatever bag the unpleasantness
happened to be in. “Are you sure you’re not coming?” he’d asked her
for what felt like the thousandth time. “He was our grandfather,
Sandra.”
“I know what he was,” she told him. “Believe me, Danny. I know
what he was. Better than anybody.”
He’d been lulled almost into insensibility by the endless road
when he saw the turnoff for the small Newfoundland town of Kildevil
Cove late that October afternoon. The place hadn’t changed a great
deal, but it never did, and he suspected it never would. He could
come back here in a thousand years’ time, and it would be exactly
the same: the same long sweep of hills coming into and going out of
the village, the thin ribbon of road leading down to the sea, the post
office, the little shop. It was a place caught deep in the onward
course of time. He’d driven from town in a record hour and a half,
ignoring the posted speed limits, overtaking every other vehicle on
the road. Why the hurry? It wasn’t pleasant anticipation that drove
him, but a clear and present sense of dread, knowing this was
something he had to take care of, but not liking the idea one little
bit. “Needs must,” as Nan would say, “when the devil drives.”
 He slowed his car by the white house that marked the beginning
of his grandfather’s lane, but turned in the other direction, away
from it, and followed the patchy strip of asphalt towards the sea. It
was early still; he’d awakened at four thirty that morning, dragged
out of sleep by another of those godforsaken dreams. Maybe it
would stop, in time. At least that’s what they’d told him. He didn’t
believe a word out of their mouths, any of them. What the hell did
any of them know about it? It hadn’t happened to them. It had
happened to him, and he would never be able to successfully scrub
it from his memory. It would follow him to his grave.
At the end of the road, he saw the familiar shape of a white
saltbox house, its bland face turned towards the ocean. The winds
today were brutal, dashing enormous waves against the rocks, and
the tide was high. There would be a full moon that night. He pulled
his rented car onto the gravel drive, as close as possible to the
house. The cliffs in the area had been unstable as long as he could
remember, and he didn’t trust the peaty, saturated ground to hold.
The house was just about hanging off the cliff. Some stormy night
during a November gale it would tip over the edge, give itself up to
the icy North Atlantic. Good riddance to it. There were no good
memories for him here.
He’d only packed the one bag, a leather holdall that he’d had
forever and a day. It had been all around the world with him, to
conferences and seminars where all the great crime-solving minds
met to pick each other’s brains, drink and flirt, and screw each other
in any number of faceless hotel rooms. Year before last it had been
Taiwan. Before that, Australia. This year it would be nowhere at all.
He fetched the bag out of the back seat, handling it as carefully as a
holy relic. It contained a bottle of his favourite Scotch, twelve years
old, single malt, capable of obliterating insomnia and nightmares no
matter the strength. Wonderful, peace-giving booze.
The gravel drive was merely an illusion, as was the narrow strip
of grass at the front. He’d forgotten all that. There was more land at
the back, tussock and ground juniper, overlaid in places with yellow
autumn grass. The wind howled, shuddering the ground, rocking the
rental car where it stood, scouring the skin of his face and making
his hair stand on end. Good to be home, he thought sourly. But the
air was fresh here and smelled of salt and peat—earthy smells, not
like the crowded cities of the world. He filled his lungs with it,
sucked it down like water. He could almost believe he was out of the
world altogether. He’d been gone for a while, seconded overseas to
the main Irish police station in Dublin, loaned out to the Garda
Síochána because a serial killer had decided to cut a swath through
that spring’s latest crop of debutantes. Bloody upper classes. Leave
it to the fucking quality to find trouble in the last place anybody
would expect. And here he was, home again, but not because he
wanted to be; he had no choice, not really. Lucky enough he didn’t
have to stay. With his severance pay and the savings he’d put by
over the years, he had secured a rental apartment in St. John’s with
a good view of the Narrows and the Southside Hills—the standard
postcard optics.
He climbed the front steps—wooden, weathered, far too steep,
or maybe that was his advancing age—and dropped his bag on the
landing. The agent had messengered the keys to him the week
before, and he fumbled in his pockets for them. He got them out
and promptly dropped them. His hands were none too steady
anymore. There was a time he had the steadiest hands in the world,
but not now. Not now and never again. He bent with a muffled curse
and picked the keys up, fitted the right one in the door, and pushed
it open. Welcome home, Danny my boy. Here’s right where you’ve
landed, arse over teakettle.
He pushed the heavy wooden door closed, shutting out the
keening wind, and sighed with something like relief as he turned the
key in the lock. Bit of bloody foolishness that was. Nobody had
cause to lock their doors around here, and no one ever did. These
people didn’t worry about some great big fucker with a sawed-off
shotgun forcing his way in at some ungodly hour of the morning, or
a disheveled smackhead taking up semi-permanent residence in one
of the outbuildings. Nothing here to be afraid of, Danny. Don’t be so
frigging foolish.
He could have stayed in Grandar’s house, except it seemed too
ghoulish, even for him. The old place had been empty for weeks
now, but he felt it would be wrong. Grandar had died in that house.
To walk in there now would feel far too much like trespass—and this
was close enough, the now-vacant home of a local family who’d
pulled up stakes and moved to Alberta. The town, though, was just
the same, the place where Danny had spent his formative years
getting into fifty kinds of trouble, chasing the local sheep around,
and pestering the old people, getting underfoot and in the way. He’d
played here, going past the house out to the point of land where it
narrowed dangerously to a thin slice of cliff that dropped four
hundred feet to the sea below. He was never afraid in those days.
There was nothing to be afraid of.
He could have bought this house if he had the money, and
supposing that was what he wanted. The real-estate agent was an
old friend, and she quoted him a good price. He could have paid for
it in cash, no questions asked—except he knew if he came back to
Kildevil Cove permanently, he’d take to drink. He’d crawl inside a
bottle and never come out.
He was deathly tired… of everything, but especially of questions.
He didn’t want to answer any more questions. He wanted
somewhere quiet to lay his head and be left the fuck alone. The
investigation had sucked the life out of him, hours and days in that
goddamn interview room with those two bastards from the internal
investigations unit of the Gardaí, asking him the same questions over
and over again.
“Do you recall what you said?”
“I told him to let the girl go and come down off the wall.”
“So he shot himself because…?” A cynical question voiced by a
cynical senior officer, tall and skinny Joey Doyle, the bastard who
knew everything.
“I don’t know why.”
“Could you recount the events for us? In your own words, of
course.”
There weren’t any more words he could say. He’d said them all.
A particle of memory replayed itself at intervals inside his head:
standing in the pouring rain, his clothes plastered to his body,
shivering with the awful anticipation that the man with the gun was
going to use it… and he did.
“So he had the gun up to his head, and you said what, exactly?”
The interview room was a big glass box, dominated by a shiny
conference table with padded chairs set about it at intervals. Besides
Danny there were six others—four men and two women, each
holding a high rank in the Gardaí, each there to judge and condemn
him.
“I told him to come down off the wall. ‘Come down,’ I said.
‘Come down.’”
But Eamonn Nolan had no intention of coming down. He had
other plans instead.
Danny shook off the memory and went into the kitchen, where
he laid his bag on the floor. The room was the same as always,
Enterprise wood-and-oil stove, old wooden table and mismatched
chairs, hand-sewn curtains at the window—raggedy lace turned
yellow from thirty years of sun, falling into holes now, useless and
threadbare. He reached across the sink to open the window even
though it was hardly warm outside. He needed to feel the air against
his face. He turned on the taps, cupped a hand, and tasted some of
the water. It was icy cold, delicious, with a faint tang of salt. “Right
out of the rock,” his grandfather used to say. “That’s the best water
there is, my son.”
The place was spotless and smelled of Sunlight soap. He knew
that his late grandmother’s best friend Hetty Jamieson had most
likely been in the last day or so, scrubbing the place clean. He’d
been sure to hire her long before he ever stepped foot inside the
house. He didn’t want to smell anything except lemon soap and the
blacking Hetty would have used on the old stove. He had no interest
in smelling more recent memories, the scent an after-image of
happier times.
He conducted a review of the upstairs, the bedrooms with their
too-soft mattresses and iron bedsteads, each one only enough to fit
two people—two slender people, probably stacked on top of each
other, he amended—a washstand and basin in each room, and old-
fashioned chenille bedspreads on the beds. To the right of the
upstairs landing was a clothes closet, a small room with racks and
shelves for storage. He’d make sure to stack his chinos in there, and
his woollen jumpers, the cold-weather uniform he wore almost every
day of his life. Danny himself would be the first to admit it: he was a
creature of habit who liked his world to be orderly and sane and who
was vastly uncomfortable with surprises and the unexpected.
Strange to think he’d gone into police work, where everything was
surprising, uncomfortable, and violent.
He chose the bedroom he wanted, the larger of the two at the
back of the house, not near the sea. Sleeping with the window open,
the roar and chuff of it would keep him awake, and he’d come here
to rest. He tossed his holdall onto the bed and started pulling things
out of it, using the opportunity to change into baggy jeans, a faded
grey sweatshirt with a university logo on the front, and a pair of
fluffy wool socks, a leaving present from Arlene Devlin, the Scottish
departmental secretary in Dublin. She’d knit them herself out of the
softest merino wool, and she’d worked an intricate Fair Isle pattern
around the tops. He remembered his grandmother knitting his
mother a Fair Isle sweater once, a long time ago. Pale pink it was,
with a moss-green pattern worked into the yoke, accented with dark
blue and ivory. It was a beautiful sweater. His mother had neglected
to store it properly and the moths got at it. The last time he saw it,
the poor old thing was a holey ruin, not even fit for a cloth to wash
the floor with.
He padded downstairs and put the kettle on, then opened
drawers and cupboards, looking for cups and spoons. Hetty had laid
in groceries, too, a quart of milk and a loaf of homemade three-bun
bread, tea and sugar and butter, a tin of biscuits the same kind his
grandmother used to buy, a tub of molasses. She’d seen that the
house was stocked with anything he might need, right down to clean
linens in the bedroom and fresh towels in the bathroom. The
unexpected kindness touched him. So many things did nowadays,
and his emotions were always too close to the surface. He angered
easily, shouted like a lunatic, maybe slammed his fist down on the
nearest desk, but that was it. The storm was gone as quickly as it
had come, and he usually went about apologising for it. He cried as
easily, often at insignificant things, embarrassing himself. He would
probably end up as one of those foolish, weepy old men, snotting
and bawling over the obituaries in the newspaper.
He made a sandwich while the kettle boiled, and ate it at the
ancient kitchen table, paging through a copy of the Register, the
only remaining local newspaper. Everything had gone digital, or so
people said, and those who wanted their news printed on paper
were fewer every year. There was nothing here for young people,
who left as soon as they got the chance and didn’t come back,
headed for the city and good-paying jobs on the oil rigs. Every year
the population counted a few less souls as the old people died off
and hordes of “come-from-aways” bought up their empty houses to
use as vacation homes. There were strangers in the shops now,
people nobody knew, with disparate accents from other places.
There were foreigners with cameras every summer, clambering over
the hills and barrens, taking pictures of all sorts, chattering excitedly
amongst themselves about things that islanders took for granted.
They boarded whale-watching tours in their pitifully inadequate
clothing, returning off the water bright red and chilled to the bone,
wondering why no one had told them. Surely the fact that the locals
all wore rubber boots, knitted caps, and mitts and heavy wool
jumpers should have alerted them to the fact that maybe this place
wasn’t Florida. Still, it was better than the houses sitting empty,
rotting away and falling into disrepair. At least the come-from-aways
spent money in the local shops and paid retired fishermen to take
them out iceberg hunting in the spring. It helped to keep the place
going.
The Register featured the usual wedding announcements, with
lavish descriptions of the marriage attire, often with unfortunate
spelling errors (“the groom wore a bright purple cumberbun”), and
obituaries full of weepy poems culled from some ladies’ book of
days… “I am not dead, I do not sleep….” Yes, you are, he thought
with a shudder that ran the length of his entire body. Yes, you are,
and you’ll never be anything but that. His hand crept to his face,
wiping quickly, scrubbing it away, that trickle of wetness. It was
always so surprising, death, and so final.
 His grandfather’s obituary was there, halfway down the first
column on the last page.

Eleazar Quirke lately of this town, passed peacefully in his sleep,

leaves behind one grandson Danny, one granddaughter Sandra.
Predeceased by son Gareth and daughter-in-law Lena. In lieu of
flowers, donations to the Knights of Columbus.

That was it. Simple and direct. Danny had written it himself. The
old fellow had passed peacefully in his sleep while Danny was on his
way across the Atlantic, a late flight out of Dublin with a strong
headwind that kept him in the air for nearly six and a half hours.
There was no formal reading of the will; the little that Grandar
owned was disbursed by a lawyer in Clarke’s Beach, an old friend of
the family. He’d filed the necessary paperwork and took care of the
rest of it, sending cheques as small tokens of gratitude to those
who’d been kind to Grandar during his final weeks and months. God
love them. The kindness of the ignorant.
He finished the sandwich and dumped the crusts in the bin,
boiled the kettle for a second cup of tea. The daylight this time of
year was short, the opposite of midsummer nights where a pale blue
illumination glowed along the horizon until after ten o’clock. He went
about the house, turning on all the lights, then went about again
and turned them all off except the single pole lamp above a
wingback chair he’d already designated as his reading place. It was
opposite a small fireplace of dark mahogany with polished brass
accents, a real work of art salvaged from old Simmy Bailey’s house
on Southwest Path. Some thoughtful soul—probably Hetty—had left
kindling and old newspapers in an antique coal hod on the hearth,
and he used these to start a small fire, amazed that he still
remembered how to do it. He was a long way and many years
beyond such simple, ordinary things, but it gave him comfort,
grounded him in a way few things could.
He sank into the chair and opened a novel he’d brought with
him, a lengthy work of nearly four hundred pages about the
survivors of the Bosnian war. The night folded itself around him, and
the wind rose, roaring around the corners of the house and rattling
the windowpanes. There was no other sound except the quiet ticking
of the clock.
 Chapter Two

TADHG HEANEY—when he was a boy, everyone had trouble with the

pronunciation of his archaic Celtic name, voiced like the first syllable
of the word ‘tiger’—tried to suppress the sick feeling in his stomach,
watching from the side as Tom Single’s digger lowered the stone
down onto fresh cement. Five years since his father had died and
they were only now getting around to this, him and his brother
Declan. It was Dec’s fault, but it always was. He was gallivanting
around Australia or somewhere with his latest conquest, a tender
young thing named Ariadne or Helena or something like that. Tadhg
didn’t remember and he didn’t really care. All he knew was the girl
was Greek and her father was a shipping magnate, a real Onassis
type who had more money than God.
I think it’s best if we agree on the design as soon as possible.
That way, we can get the stone placed before the frost sets into the
ground. He’d emailed Declan in care of his company, a London
banking firm that sent him all around the world doing God knows
what while they paid him a hefty salary and gave him an expense
account to rival the riches of Croesus.
Dec replied he didn’t care what Tadhg put on it. Just be glad the
old fucker is in the ground.
“What’s that look like to ye, Tadhg?” Tommy Single leaned out
of the cab and shouted over the engine noise. “Is it straight?”
Tadhg stepped forward and regarded the flat slab of granite in
the last of the late afternoon’s fading light. “Looks good,” he said.
“Finest kind, my son.” He wanted this over and done with. He hated
this time of year and this time of day when the light went away early
and didn’t come back for far too long. As a young boy he’d dreaded
winter with its early dusk and interminable nights, sitting with the
family in the living room and feigning interest in the six o’clock news
and the game shows that came afterwards. His mother sat sewing in
the rocking chair, pushed so far back into the corner that she didn’t
even seem to be in the room. And his old man, front and centre in
the easy chair, legs spread wide on the footrest, argued with the
television as if the people on there could hear a word he said, the
volume up on bust. He always had to get the last word.
“So you’re all right with that?” Tommy turned off the machine
and hopped down out of the cab. “If you’re not, I don’t mind—”
“That’s fine,” Tadhg cut in. He realised how abrupt it sounded
and softened it with a grin. “Honest, Tommy, it looks grand.” He
reached into his hip pocket and brought out his wallet, counted out
some bills, and handed them across. Tommy flicked through them,
then looked up at Tadhg with a confused expression.
“You gave me too much, bhoy.” He peeled off the excess and
made to give it back. “We said forty dollars, and that’s all I’m
charging ye.”
“Keep it,” Tadhg said. “Please.” He felt absurdly grateful to
Tommy, who had made this distasteful task so much easier. “God
love ye, give it to Margaret for her Christmas baking.” Tommy’s wife
Margaret made almost all the holiday cakes for the little town of
Kildevil Cove and even exported some to area shops and
restaurants. She inevitably took top prize at the community fair
every fall for her dark boiled fruitcake.
“You’re sure?” Tommy hesitated, the money still in his
outstretched hand.
Tadhg reached out and closed his fingers around it. “Take it.” He
bent in the growing darkness to look at the simple flat plaque resting
on its bed of fresh cement. It had his father’s name and his birth
and death dates. That was it. Tadhg didn’t have the stomach to
include a flowery sentimental phrase. Sentiment wasn’t something
he felt when he considered his father. Besides, what was the old
bastard going to do, rise up out of the ground and smack Tadhg a
good one in the back of the head? You did enough of that when you
were alive, you old cunt.
The placement of his father’s headstone coincided with this trip
to Kildevil Cove. Old Eleazar Quirke was dead, and Tadhg hoped to
Other documents randomly have
different content
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The shadow over
Innsmouth
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The shadow over Innsmouth

Author: H. P. Lovecraft

Illustrator: Hannes Bok

Release date: March 16, 2024 [eBook #73181]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Weird Tales, 1941

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE

SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH ***
The Shadow Over Innsmouth

Horrifying Novelette

By H. P. LOVECRAFT

Unspeakable monstrousness over-hung

the crumbling, stench-cursed town of
Innsmouth ... and folks there had somehow
got out of the idea of dying....

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Weird Tales January 1942.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
During the winter of 1927-28 Federal government officials 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 jails of the nation. There were vague
statements about disease and concentration camps, and later about
dispersal in various naval and military prisons, but nothing positive
ever developed.
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 lies a full mile and a half
out from Innsmouth Harbor.
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 raiders at Innsmouth. 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.
I never heard of Innsmouth till the day before I saw it for the first and
—so far—last time. I was celebrating my coming of age by a tour of
New England—sightseeing, antiquarian, and genealogical—and had
planned to go directly from ancient Newburyport to Arkham, whence
my mother's family was derived. I had no car, but was traveling 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 showed him to be no local man,
seemed sympathetic toward my efforts at economy, and made a
suggestion that none of my other informants had offered.
"You could take that old bus, I suppose," he said with a certain
hesitation, "but it ain't thought much of hereabouts. It goes through
Innsmouth—you may have heard about that—and so the people don't
like it. Run by an Innsmouth fellow—Joe Sargent—but never gets any
custom from here, or Arkham either, I guess. Leaves the Square—
front of Hammond's Drug Store—at 10 A.M. and 7 P.M. unless
they've changed lately. Looks like a terrible rattletrap—I've never
been on it."
That was the first I ever heard of shadowed Innsmouth. Any
reference to a town not shown on common maps or listed in recent
guidebooks would have interested me, and the agent's old manner of
allusion roused something like real curiosity. So I asked the agent to
tell me something about it.
He was very deliberate, and spoke with an air of feeling slightly
superior to what he said.
"Innsmouth? Well, it's a queer kind of 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. & M. never went through, and the branch line from
Rowley was given up years ago.
"More empty houses than there are people, I guess, and no business
to speak of except fishing and lobstering. Everybody trades mostly
either here or in Arkham or Ipswich. Once they had quite a few mills,
but nothing's left now except one gold refinery running on the leanest
kind of part time.
"That refinery, though, used to be a big thing, and Old Man Marsh,
who owns it, must be richer'n Croesus. Queer old duck, though, and
sticks mighty close in his home. He's supposed to have developed
some skin disease or deformity late in life that makes him keep out of
sight. Grandson of Captain Obed Marsh, who founded the business.
His mother seems to've been some kind of foreigner—they say a
South Sea islander—so everybody raised Cain when he married an
Ipswich girl fifty years ago. They always do that about Innsmouth
people, and folks here and hereabouts always try to cover up any
Innsmouth blood they have in 'em. But Marsh's children and
grandchildren look just like anybody else so far's I can see. I've had
'em pointed out to me here—though, come to think of it, the elder
children don't seem to be around lately. Never saw the old man.
"And why is everybody so down on Innsmouth? Well, young fellow,
you mustn't take too much stock in what people around here say.
They're hard to get started, but once they do get started they never
let up. They've been telling things about Innsmouth—whispering 'em,
mostly—for the last hundred years, I guess, and I gather they're more
scared than anything else. Some of the stories would make you laugh
—about old Captain Marsh driving bargains with the devil and
bringing imps out of hell to live in Innsmouth, or about some kind of
devil-worship and awful sacrifices in some place near the wharves
that people stumbled on around 1845 or there-abouts—but I come
from Panton, Vermont, and that kind of story don't go down with me.
"You ought to hear, though, what some of the old-timers tell about the
black reef off the coast—Devil Reef, they call it. It's well above water
a good part of the time, and never much below it, but at that you
could hardly call it an island. The story is that there's a whole legion
of devils seen sometimes on that reef—sprawled about, or darting in
and out of some kind of caves near the top. It's a rugged, uneven
thing, a good bit over a mile out, and toward the end of shipping days
sailors used to make big detours just to avoid it.
"That is, sailors that didn't hail from Innsmouth. One of the things they
had against old Captain Marsh was that he was supposed to land on
it sometimes at night when the tide was right. Maybe he did, for I dare
say the rock formation was interesting, and it's just barely possible he
was looking for pirate loot and maybe finding it; but there was talk of
his dealing with demons there. Fact is, I guess on the whole it was
really the captain that gave the bad reputation to the reef.
"That was before the big epidemic of 1846, when over half the folks in
Innsmouth was carried off. They never did quite figure out what the
trouble was, but it was probably some foreign kind of disease brought
from China or somewhere by the shipping. It surely was bad enough
—there was riots over it, and all sorts of ghastly doings that I don't
believe ever got outside of town—and it left the place in awful shape.
Never came back—there can't be more'n 300 or 400 people living
there now.
"But the real thing behind the way folks feel is simply race prejudice—
and I don't say I'm blaming those that hold it. I hate those Innsmouth
folks myself, and I wouldn't care to go to their town. I s'pose you know
—though I can see you're a Westerner by your talk—what a lot our
New England ships used to have to do with queer ports in Africa,
Asia, the South Seas, and everywhere else, and what queer kinds of
people they sometimes brought back with 'em. You've probably heard
about the Salem man that came home with a Chinese wife, and
maybe you know there's still a bunch of Fiji Islanders somewhere
around Cape Cod.
"Well, there must be something like that back of the Innsmouth
people. The place always was badly cut off from the rest of the
country by marshes and creeks, and we can't be sure about the ins
and outs of the matter; but it's pretty clear that old Captain Marsh
must have brought home some odd specimens when he had all three
of his ships in commission back in the twenties and thirties. There
certainly is a strange kind of a streak in the Innsmouth folks today—I
don't know how to explain it, but it sort of makes you crawl. You'll
notice a little in Sargent if you take his bus. Some of 'em have queer
narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, starey eyes that never seem
to shut, and their skin ain't quite right. Rough and scabby, and the
sides of their necks are all shriveled or creased up. Get bald, too,
very young. The older fellows look the worst—fact is, I don't believe
I've ever seen a very old chap of that kind. Guess they must die of
looking in the glass! Animals hate 'em—they used to have lots of
horse trouble before autos came in.
"Nobody can ever keep track of those people, and state school
officials and census men have a devil of a time. You can bet that
prying strangers ain't welcome around Innsmouth. I've heard
personally of more'n one business or government man that's
disappeared there, and there's loose talk of one who went crazy and
is out at Danvers now. They must have fixed up some awful scare for
that fellow.
"That's why I wouldn't go at night if I was you. I've never been there
and have no wish to go, but I guess a daytime trip couldn't hurt you—
even though the people hereabouts will advise you not to make it. If
you're just sightseeing, and looking for old-time stuff, Innsmouth
ought to be quite a place for you."
And so I spent part of that evening at the Newburyport Public Library
looking up data about Innsmouth. The Essex County histories on the
library shelves had very little to say, except that the town was
founded in 1643, noted for shipbuilding before the Revolution, a seat
of great marine prosperity in the early 19th century, and later a minor
factory center using the Manuxet as power. The epidemic and riots of
1846 were very sparsely treated, as if they formed a discredit to the
country.
References to decline were few, though the significance of the later
record was unmistakable. After the Civil War all industrial life was
confined to the Marsh Refining Company, and the marketing of gold
ingots formed the only remaining bit of major commerce aside from
the eternal fishing.
Most interesting of all was a glancing reference to the strange jewelry
vaguely associated with Innsmouth. It had evidently impressed the
whole countryside more than a little, for mention was made of
specimens in the museum of Miskatonic University at Arkham, and in
the display room of the Newburyport Historical Society. I resolved to
see the local sample—said to be a large, queerly-proportioned thing
evidently meant for a tiara—if it could possibly be arranged.
The librarian gave me a note of introduction to the curator of the
Society, a Miss Anna Tilton, who lived nearby, and after a brief
explanation that ancient gentlewoman was kind enough to pilot me
into the closed building, since the hour was not outrageously late.
The collection was a notable one indeed, but in my present mood I
had eyes for nothing but the bizarre object which glistened in a corner
cupboard under the electric lights.
It took no excessive sensitiveness to beauty to make me literally gasp
at the strange, unearthly splendor of the alien, opulent phantasy that
rested there on a purple velvet cushion. The longer I looked, the more
the thing fascinated me; and in this fascination there was a curiously
disturbing element hardly to be classified or accounted for. I decided
that it was the queer other-worldly quality of the art which made me
uneasy. It was as if the workmanship were that of another planet.
The patterns all hinted of remote secrets and unimaginable abysses
in time and space, and the monotonously aquatic nature of the reliefs
became almost sinister. Among these reliefs were fabulous monsters
of abhorrent grotesqueness and malignity—wholly primal and
awesomely ancestral.
At times I fancied that every contour of these blasphemous fish-frogs
was overflowing with the ultimate quintessence of unknown and
inhuman evil.
In odd contrast to the tiara's aspect was its brief and prosy history as
related by Miss Tilton. It had been pawned for a ridiculous sum at a
shop in State Street in 1873, by a drunken Innsmouth man shortly
afterward killed in a brawl.
Miss Tilton was inclined to believe that it formed part of some exotic
pirate hoard discovered by old Captain Obed Marsh. This view was
surely not weakened by the insistent offers of purchase at a high
price which the Marshes began to make as soon as they knew of its
presence, and which they repeated to this day despite the Society's
unvarying determination not to sell.
As the good lady showed me out of the building, she assured me that
the rumors of devil-worship were partly justified by a peculiar secret
cult which had gained force there and engulfed all the orthodox
churches.
It was called, she said, "The Esoteric Order of Dagon," and was
undoubtedly a debased, quasi-pagan thing imported from the East a
century before, at a time when Innsmouth fisheries seemed to be
going barren. Its persistence among a simple people was quite
natural in view of the sudden and permanent return of abundantly fine
fishing, and it soon came to be the greatest influence on the town.
All this, to the pious Miss Tilton, formed an excellent reason for
shunning the ancient town of decay and desolation; but to me it was
merely a fresh incentive; and I could scarcely sleep in my small room
at the "Y" as the night wore away.

II
Shortly before ten the next morning I stood with my one small valise
in front of Hammond's Drug Store in old Market Square waiting for the
Innsmouth bus. In a few moments a small motor-coach of extreme
decrepitude and dirty gray color rattled down State Street, made a
turn, and drew up at the curb beside me. I felt immediately that it was
the right one; a guess which the half-illegible sign on the windshield
—"Arkham-Innsmouth-Newb'port"—soon verified.
There were only three passengers—dark, unkempt men of sullen
visage and somewhat youthful cast—and when the vehicle stopped
they clumsily shambled out and began walking up State Street in a
silent, almost furtive fashion. The driver also alighted. This, I
reflected, must be the Joe Sargent mentioned by the ticket-agent;
and even before I had noticed any details there spread over me a
wave of spontaneous aversion which could be neither checked nor
explained.
He was a thin, stoop-shouldered man not much under six feet tall,
dressed in shabby blue civilian clothes and wearing a frayed gray golf
cap. His age was perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep creases in the
sides of his neck made him seem older when one did not study his
dull, expressionless face. He had a narrow head, bulging, watery blue
eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and
chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. As he walked toward the bus I
observed his peculiarly shambling gait and saw that his feet were
inordinately immense. The more I studied them the more I wondered
how he could buy any shoes to fit them.
A certain greasiness about the fellow increased my dislike. He was
evidently given to working or lounging around the fish docks, and
carried with him much of their characteristic smell. Just what foreign
blood was in him I could not even guess.
I was sorry when I saw that there would be no other passengers on
the bus. Somehow I did not like the idea of riding alone with this
driver. But as the leaving time obviously approached I conquered my
qualms and followed the man aboard, extending him a dollar bill and
murmuring the single word "Innsmouth."
At length the decrepit vehicle started with a jerk, and rattled noisily
past the old brick buildings of State Street amidst a cloud of vapor
from the exhaust.
The day was warm and sunny, but the landscape of sand, sedge-
grass, and stunted shrubbery became more and more desolate as we
proceeded. Out the window I could see the blue water and the sandy
line of Plum Island, and we presently drew very near the beach as
our narrow road veered off from the main highway to Rowley and
Ipswich.
At last we lost sight of Plum Island and saw the vast expanse of the
open Atlantic on our left. Our narrow course began to climb steeply,
and I felt a singular sense of disquiet in looking at the lonely crest
ahead where the rutted roadway met the sky. It was as if the bus
were about to keep on its ascent leaving the sane earth altogether
and merging with the unknown arcana of upper air and cryptical sky.
The smell of the sea took on ominous implications, and the silent
driver's bent, rigid back and narrow head became more and more
hateful. As I looked at him I saw that the back of his head was almost
as hairless as his face, having only a few straggling yellow strands
upon a gray scabrous surface.
Then we reached the crest and beheld the outspread valley beyond,
where the Manuxet joins the sea just north of the long line of cliffs
that culminate in Kingsport Head; all my attention was captured by
the nearer panorama just below me. I had, I realized, come face to
face with rumor-shadowed Innsmouth.
It was a town of wide extent and dense construction, yet one with a
portentous dearth of visible life. The vast huddle of sagging gambrel
roofs and peaked gables conveyed with offensive clearness the idea
of wormy decay, and as we approached along the now descending
road I could see that many roofs had wholly caved in. Stretching
inland I saw the rusted, grass-grown line of the abandoned railway,
with leaning telegraph-poles now devoid of wires.
Here and there the ruins of wharves jutted out from the shore to end
in indeterminate rottenness, those farthest south seeming the most
decayed. And far out at sea, despite a high tide, I glimpsed a long,
black line scarcely rising above the water yet carrying a suggestion of
odd latent malignancy. This, I knew, must be Devil Reef. As I looked,
a subtle, curious sense of beckoning seemed superadded to the grim
repulsion; and oddly enough, I found this overtone more disturbing
than the primary impression.
As the bus reached a lower level I began to catch the steady note of
a waterfall through the unnatural stillness. The leaning, unpainted
houses grew thicker, lined both sides of the road, and displayed more
urban tendencies than did those we were leaving behind. The
panorama ahead had contracted to a street scene, and in spots I
could see where a cobblestone pavement and stretches of brick
sidewalk had formerly existed. All the houses were apparently
deserted, and there were occasional gaps where tumbledown
chimneys and cellar walls told of buildings that had collapsed.
Pervading everything was the most nauseous fishy odor imaginable.
And I was not to reach my destination without one other very strong
impression of poignantly disagreeable quality. The bus had come to a
sort of open concourse or radial point with churches on two sides and
the bedraggled remains of a circular green in the center, and I was
looking at a large pillared hall on the right-hand junction ahead. The
structure's once white paint was now gray and peeling, and the black
and gold sign on the pediment was so faded that I could only with
difficulty make out the words "Esoteric Order of Dagon."
The door of the church basement was open, revealing a rectangle of
blackness inside. And as I looked, a certain object crossed or
seemed to cross that dark rectangle; burning into my brain a
momentary conception of nightmare which was all the more
maddening because analysis could not show a single nightmarish
quality in it.
It was a living object—the first except the driver that I had seen since
entering the compact part of the town—and had I been in a steadier
mood I would have found nothing whatever of terror in it. Clearly, as I
realized a moment later, it was the pastor; clad in some peculiar
vestments doubtless introduced since the Order of Dagon had
modified the ritual of the local churches. The thing which had
probably caught my first subconscious glance and supplied the touch
of bizarre horror was the tall tiara he wore; an almost exact duplicate
of the one Miss Tilton had shown me the previous evening. This,
acting on my imagination, had supplied namelessly sinister qualities
to the indeterminate face and robed, shambling form beneath it.
A very thin sprinkling of repellent-looking youngish people now
became visible on the sidewalks—lone individuals, and silent knots of
two or three. The lower floors of the crumbling houses sometimes
harbored small shops with dingy signs, and I noticed a parked truck
or two as we rattled along. The sound of waterfalls became more and
more distinct, and presently I saw a fairly deep river-gorge ahead,
spanned by a wide, iron-railed highway bridge beyond which a large
square opened out. Then we rolled into the large semicircular square
across the river and drew up on the right-hand side in front of a tall,
cupola-crowned building with remnants of yellow paint and with a
half-effaced sign proclaiming it to be the Gilman House.
I was glad to get out of that bus, and at once proceeded to check my
valise in the shabby hotel lobby. There was only one person in sight
—an elderly man without what I had come to call the "Innsmouth
look"—and I decided not to ask him any of the questions which
bothered me; remembering that odd things had been noticed in this
hotel. Instead, I strolled out on the square, from which the bus had
already gone, and studied the scene minutely and appraisingly.
For some reason or other I chose to make my first inquiries at the
chain grocery, whose personnel was not likely to be native to
Innsmouth. I found a solitary boy of about seventeen in charge, and
was pleased to note the brightness and affability which promised
cheerful information. He seemed exceptionally eager to talk, and I
soon gathered that he did not like the place, its fishy smell, or its
furtive people. His family did not like him to work in Innsmouth, but
the chain had transferred him there and he did not wish to give up his
job.
There was, he said, no public library or chamber of commerce in
Innsmouth, but I could probably find my way about. The street I had
come down was Federal. West of that were the fine old residence
streets—Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams—and east of it
were the shoreward slums.
Certain spots were almost forbidden territory, as he had learned at
considerable cost. One must not, for example, linger much around
the Marsh refinery, or around any of the still used churches, or around
the pillared Order of Dagon Hall at New Church Green. Those
churches were very odd—all violently disavowed by their respective
denominations elsewhere, and apparently using the queerest kind of
ceremonials and clerical vestments.
As for the Innsmouth people—the youth hardly knew what to make of
them. Their appearance—especially those staring, unwinking eyes
which one never saw shut—was certainly shocking enough—and
their voices were disgusting. It was awful to hear them chanting in
their churches at night, and especially during their main festivals or
revivals, which fell twice a year on April 30 and October 31.
They were very fond of the water, and swam a great deal in both river
and harbor. Swimming races out to Devil Reef were very common,
and everyone in sight seemed well able to share in this arduous
sport.
It would be of no use, my informant said, to ask the natives anything
about the place. The only one who would talk was a very aged but
normal-looking man who lived at the poorhouse on the north rim of
the town and spent his time walking about or lounging around the fire
station. This hoary character, Zadok Allen, was 96 years old and
somewhat touched in the head, besides being the town drunkard. He
was a strange, furtive creature who constantly looked over his
shoulder as if afraid of something, and when sober could not be
persuaded to talk at all with strangers. He was, however, unable to
resist any offer of his favorite poison; and once drunk would furnish
the most astonishing fragments of whispered reminiscence.
After all, though, little useful data could be gained from him; since his
stories were all insane, incomplete hints of impossible marvels and
horrors which could have no source save in his own distorted fancy.
Nobody ever believed him, but the natives did not like him to drink
and talk with any strangers; and it was not always safe to be seen
questioning him. It was probably from him that some of the wildest
popular whispers and delusions were derived.
The Marshes, together with the other three gently bred families of the
town—the Waites, the Gilmans, and the Eliots—were all very retiring.
They lived in immense houses along Washington Street, and several
were reputed to harbor in concealment certain kinsfolk whose
personal aspect forbade public view, and whose deaths had been
reported and recorded.
Warning me that most of the street signs were down, the youth drew
for my benefit a rough but ample and painstaking sketch map of the
town's salient features. After a moment's study I felt sure that it would
be of great help, and pocketed it with profuse thanks.
Thus began my systematic though half-bewildered tour of
Innsmouth's narrow, shadow-blighted ways. Crossing the bridge and
turning toward the roar of the lower falls, I passed close to the Marsh
refinery, which seemed oddly free from the noise of industry. This
building stood on the steep river bluff near a bridge and an open
confluence of streets which I took to be the earliest civic center,
displaced after the Revolution by the present Town Square.
Re-crossing the gorge on the Main Street bridge, I struck a region of
utter desertion which somehow made me shudder. Collapsing
huddles of gambrel roofs formed a jagged and fantastic skyline,
above which rose the ghoulish, decapitated steeple of an ancient
church.
Fish Street was as deserted as Main, though it differed in having
many brick and stone warehouses still in excellent shape. Water
Street was almost its duplicate, save that there were great seaward
gaps where wharves had been. Not a living thing did I see, except for
the scattered fishermen on the distant breakwater, and not a sound
did I hear save the lapping of the harbor tides and the roar of the falls
in the Manuxet.
I kept north along Main to Martin, then turning inland, crossing
Federal Street safely north of the Green, and entering the decayed
patrician neighborhood of northern Broad, Washington, Lafayette,
and Adams Streets. Following Washington Street toward the river, I
now faced a zone of former industry and commerce; noting the ruins
of a factory ahead, and seeing others, with the traces of an old
railway station and covered railway bridge beyond up the gorge on
my right.
The uncertain bridge now before me was posted with a warning sign,
but I took the risk and crossed again to the south bank where traces
of life reappeared. Furtive, shambling creatures stared cryptically in
my direction, and more normal faces eyed me coldly and curiously.
Innsmouth was rapidly becoming intolerable, and I turned down Paine
Street toward the Square in the hope of getting some vehicle to take
me to Arkham before the still-distant starting time of that sinister bus.
It was then that I saw the tumbledown fire station on my left, and
noticed the red-faced, bushy-bearded, watery-eyed old man in
nondescript rags who sat on a bench in front of it talking with a pair of
unkempt but not abnormal-looking firemen. This, of course, must be
Zadok Allen, the half-crazed, liquorish non-agenarian whose tales of
old Innsmouth and its shadow were so hideous and incredible.

III

I had been assured that the old man could do nothing but hint at wild,
disjointed, and incredible legends, and I had been warned that the
natives made it unsafe to be seen talking with him; yet the thought of
this aged witness to the town's decay, with memories going back to
the early days of ships and factories, was a lure that no amount of
reason could make me resist. Curiosity flared up beyond sense and
caution, and in my youthful egotism I fancied I might be able to sift a
nucleus of real history from the confused, extravagant outpouring I
would probably extract with the aid of whiskey.
A quart bottle of such was easily, though not cheaply, obtained in the
rear of a dingy variety-store just off the Square in Eliot Street.
Re-entering the Square I saw that luck was with me; for—shuffling out
of Paine Street around the corner of the Gilman House—I glimpsed
nothing less than the tall, lean, tattered form of old Zadok Allen
himself. In accordance with my plan, I attracted his attention by
brandishing my newly-purchased bottle; and soon realized that he
had begun to shuffle wistfully after me as I turned into Waite Street on
my way to the most deserted region I could think of. Before I reached
Main Street I could hear a faint and wheezy "Hey, Mister!" behind me,
and I presently allowed the old man to catch up and take copious
pulls from the quart bottle.
I began putting out feelers as we walked along to Water Street and
turned southward amidst the omnipresent desolation and crazily tilted
ruins, but found that the aged tongue did not loosen as quickly as I
had expected. At length I saw a grass-grown opening toward the sea