The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels (2 page)

“That’s what a university education does for you,” I said. Ann and I had met at university in Manchester—the real Manchester, not the place to which fate and coincidence had now brought me—when she was studying history and I was studying biochemistry. We were good friends—in the literal rather than the euphemistic sense, alas— but we hadn’t kept in touch afterwards, until she discovered by accident that I was in New Hampshire and had written to me, enclosing her book with news of her career as a woman of property. I had planned to come to see her even before I read the book, thus finding the excuse that made the prospect even more inviting.

As she watched me unpack, the expression in her grey eyes was quite inscrutable. Politeness aside, she really did look good— handsome rather than pretty, but clear of complexion and stately in manner.

“I suppose your coming over to the States is part of the infamous Brain Drain,” she said. “Was it the dollars, or the research facilities that lured you away?”

“Both,” I said. “Mostly the latter. Human geneticists aren’t worth
that
much, and I haven’t published enough to be regarded as a grand catch. I’m just a foot-soldier in the long campaign to map and understand the human genome.”

“It beats being chief custodian of Innsmouth and its history,” she said, so flatly as to leave no possibility of a polite contradiction.

I shrugged. “Well,” I said, “If I get a paper out of this, it will put Innsmouth on the scientific map, at least—although I doubt that the hotel will get much business out of it. I can’t imagine that there’ll be a legion of geneticists following in my trail.”

She sat down on the edge of the bed. “I’m afraid it might not be so easy,” she said. “All that stuff in the book about the Innsmouth look is a bit out of date. Back in the twenties, when the population of the town was less than four hundred, it may well have been exactly the kind of inbred community you’re looking for, but the postwar years brought in a couple of thousand outsiders. In spite of the tendency of the old families to keep to themselves, the majority married out. I’ve looked through the records, and most of the families that used to be important in the town are extinct—the Marshes, the Waites, the Gilmans. If it hadn’t been for the English branch, I guess the Eliots would have died out too. The Innsmouth look still exists, but it’s a thing of the past—you won’t see more than a trace of it in anyone under forty.”

“Age is immaterial,” I assured her.

“That’s not the only problem. Almost all of those who have the look are shy about it—or their relatives are. They tend to hide themselves away. It won’t be easy to get them to co-operate.”

“But you know who they are—you can introduce me.”

“I know who some of them are, but that doesn’t mean that I can help you much. I may be an Eliot, but to the old Innsmouthers I’m just another incomer, not to be trusted. There’s only one person who could effectively act as an intermediary for you, and it won’t be easy to persuade him to do it.”

“Is he the fisherman you mentioned over the phone—Gideon Sargent?”

“That’s right,” she said. “He’s one of the few lookers who doesn’t hide himself away, although he shows the signs more clearly than anyone else I’ve seen. He’s saner than most—got himself an education under the G.I. Bill after serving in the Pacific in ’45—but he’s not what you might call talkative. He won’t hide, but he doesn’t like being the visible archetype of the Innsmouth look—he resents tourists gawping at him as much as anyone would, and he always refuses to take them out to Devil Reef in his boat. He’s always very polite to me, but I really can’t say how he’ll react to you. He’s in his sixties now—never married.”

“That’s not so unusual,” I observed. I was unmarried; so was Ann.

“Maybe not,” she replied, with a slight laugh. “But I can’t help harboring an unreasonable suspicion that the reason he never married is that he could never find a girl who looked fishy enough.”

* * * *

I thought this a cruel remark, though Ann obviously hadn’t meant it to be. I thought it even crueler when I eventually saw Gideon Sargent, because I immediately jumped to the opposite conclusion: that no girl could possibly contemplate marrying him, because he looked too fishy by half.

The description that Ann had quoted in her book was accurate enough detail by detail—narrow head, flat nose, staring eyes, rough skin and baldness—but could not suffice to give an adequate impression of the eerie whole. The old man’s tanned face put me in mind of a wizened koi carp, although I could not tell, at first— because his jacket collar was turned up—whether he had the gilllike markings on his neck that were the last and strangest of the stigmata of the Innsmouth folk.

Sargent was sitting on a canvas chair on the deck of his boat when we went to see him, patiently mending a fishing-net. He did not look up as we approached, but I had no doubt that he had seen us from afar and knew well enough that we were coming to see him.

“Hello, Gideon,” said Ann, when we were close enough. “This is Dr. David Stevenson, a friend of mine from England. He lives in Manchester now, teaching college.”

Still the old man didn’t look up. “Don’t do trips round the reef,” he said, laconically. “You know that, Miss Ann.”

“He’s not a tourist, Gideon,” she said. “He’s a scientist. He’d like to talk to you.”

“Why’s that?” he asked, still without altering his attitude. “‘Cause I’m a freak, I suppose?”

“No,” said Ann, uncomfortably “of course not....”

I held up my hand to stop her, and said: “Yes, Mr. Sargent,” I said. “That is why, after a manner of speaking. I’m a geneticist, and I’m interested in people who are physically unusual. I’d like to explain that to you, if I may.”

Ann shook her head in annoyance, certain that I’d said the wrong thing, but the old man didn’t seem offended.

“When I were a young’un,” he commented, abstractedly, “there was a man offered Ma a hunnerd dollars for me. Wanned t’put me in a glass tank in some kinda sideshow. She said no. Blamed fool— hunnerd dollars was worth summin then.” His accent was very odd, and certainly not what I’d come to think of as a typical New England accent. Although he slurred common words, he tended to take more trouble over longer ones, and I thought I could still perceive the lingering legacy of his education.

“Do you know what ‘genetics’ means, Mr. Sargent?” I asked. “I really would like to explain why it’s important that I talk to you.”

At last he looked up, and looked me in the eye. I was ready for it, and didn’t flinch from the disconcerting stare.

“I know what genes are, Doc,” he said, coolly. “I bin a little curious myself, y’know, to fin’ out how I got to be this way. You gonna tell me? Or is that what y’wanner figure out?”

“It’s what I want to figure out, Mr. Sargent,” I told him, breathing a slight sigh of relief. “Can I come aboard?”

“Nope,” he replied. “Taint convenient. You at the hotel?”

“Yes I am.”

“See y’there t’night. Quarter of eight. You pay f’r the liquor.” “Okay,” I said. “Thanks, Mr. Sargent. I appreciate it.”

“Don’ mention it,” he said. “An’ I
still
don’ do trips to the reef. Or pose f’r Jap cameras—you mind me, now, Miss Ann.”

“I mind you, Gideon,” she answered, as we turned away.

As soon as we were out of earshot, she said: “You’re honored, David. He’s never come to the hotel before—and not because no one ever offered to buy him a drink before. He still remembers the old place, and he doesn’t like what Uncle Ned put up in its place, any more than he likes all the colonists who moved in when the village was all-but-dead in the thirties.”

We were passing an area of the waterfront that looked like a post-war bomb-site—or one of those areas in the real Manchester where they bulldozed the old slums but still haven’t got round to building anything else instead.

“This is the part of the town that was torched, isn’t it?” I said. “Sure is,” she replied. “Way back in ’27. Nobody really knows how it happened, although there are plenty of wild stories. Gang warfare can be counted out—there was no substantial bootlegging hereabouts. Arson for arson’s sake, probably. It’s mostly mine now—Uncle Ned wanted to rebuild but never could raise the finance. I’d sell the land to any developer who’d take it on, but I’m not hopeful about my chances of getting rid of it.”

“Did the navy really fire torpedoes into the trench beyond the reef?” I asked, remembering a story which she’d quoted in her book.

“Depth charges,” she said. “I took the trouble to look up the documents, hoping there’d be something sensational behind it, but it seems that they were just testing them. There’s very deep water out there—a crack in the continental shelf—and it was convenient for checking the pressure-triggers across the whole spectrum of settings. The navy didn’t bother to ask the locals, or to tell them what was going on; the information was still classified then, I guess. It’s not unnatural that the wacky stories about sea-monsters were able to flourish uncontradicted.”

“Pity,” I said, looking back at the crumbling jetties as we began to climb the shallow hill towards Washington Street. “I rather liked all that stuff about the Esoteric Order of Dagon conducting its hideous rites in the old Masonic Hall, and Obed Marsh’s covenant with the forces of watery evil.”

“The Esoteric Order of Dagon was real enough,” she said. “But it’s hard to find out what its rituals involved, or what its adherents actually believed, because it was careful not to produce or keep any records—not even sacred documents. It seems to have been one of a group of crazy quasi-gnostic cults which made a big thing about a book called the
Necronomicon
—they mostly died out at about the time the first fully-annotated translation was issued by the Miskatonic University Press. The whole point of being an esoteric sect is lost when your core text becomes exoteric, I guess.

“As for old Obed’s fabulous adventures in the South Seas, almost all the extant accounts can be traced back to tales that used to be told by the town character back in the twenties—an old lush named Zadok Allen. I can’t swear that every last detail originated in the dregs of a whisky bottle, but I’d be willing to bet my inheritance that Captain Marsh’s career was a good deal less eventful than it seemed once Zadok had finished embroidering it.”

“But the Marshes really did run a gold refinery hereabouts? And at least
some
of the so-called Innsmouth jewelry is real?”

“Oh sure—the refinery was the last relic of the town’s industrial heyday, which petered out mid-nineteenth century after a big epidemic. I’ve looked at the account-books, though, and it did hardly any business for thirty-five or forty years before it closed down. It’s gone now, of course. The few authentic surviving examples of the old Innsmouth jewelry are less beautiful and less exotic than rumor represents, but they’re interesting enough—and certainly not local in origin. There are a couple of shops in town where they make ‘genuine imitations’ for tourists and other interested parties—one manufacturer swears blind that the originals were made by pre-Columbian Indians, the other that they were found by Old Obed during his travels. Take your pick.”

I nodded, sagely, as if to say that it was what I’d suspected all along.

“What are you looking for, David?” she asked, suddenly. “You don’t really think that there’s anything in Zadok Allen’s fantasies, do you? You surely can’t seriously entertain the hypothesis that the old Innsmouthers were some kind of weird crossbreed with an alien race!”

I laughed. “No,” I reassured her, with complete sincerely. “I don’t believe that—nor do I believe that they’re some kind of throwback to our phantom aquatic ancestors. You’d better sit in tonight when I explain the facts of life to old Gideon; the reality is likely to be far more prosaic than that, alas.”

“Why
alas
?” she asked.

“Because what I’m looking for will only generate a paper. If the folklore quoted in your book were even half-true, it would be worth a Nobel Prize.”

* * * *

Gideon Sargent presented himself at the hotel right on time. He was dressed in what I presumed was his Sunday best, but the ensemble included a roll-neck sweater, which kept the sides of his neck concealed. There were half a dozen people in the bar, and Gideon drew a couple of curious glances from the out-of-towners, but he was only a little self-conscious. He was used to carrying his stigmata.

He drank neat bourbon, but he drank slowly, like a man who had no intention of getting loaded. I asked a few questions to find out exactly how much he did know about genes, and it turned out that he really was familiar with the basics. I felt confident that I could give him a reasonably full explanation of my project.