The Lonely Shadows: Tales of Horror and the Cthulhu Mythos (16 page)

For a time, since we outnumbered them by almost two to one, we succeeded in driving them back from their objective. But as they retreated along Main Street, a great horde of natives burst out of Waite Street, forcing us back towards the bridge over the Manuxet.

In the distance, I could clearly pick out more gunfire coming from all directions but concentrated mainly near the center of the town and along the waterfront and guessed that fighting had broken out in several places. Already, we had suffered a number of casualties, seven men had been killed and almost twice that number wounded.

Luckily, the majority of the natives were unarmed, relying on sheer weight of numbers to overwhelm us. Several were killed within the first few minutes but the rest came on, heedless of their casualties.

It was the bridge that temporarily saved us. On either side, the riverbank as far as the falls, was far too steep and treacherous to be readily scaled and the Manuxet was in full flood after the recent rains, thereby preventing the creatures from crossing the river and assaulting us from the rear.

For almost an hour we managed to hold off the attackers, inflicting terrible carnage among their ranks. When they began to pull back, we believed we had beaten them off and although firing could still be heard around the town center, it was sporadic, and it appeared the situation was slowly being brought under control.

After what several of us had witnessed in the cellar below the Marsh mansion, I think we believed we were prepared for anything. But nothing could have prepared us for what came next.

It was Silas Benson who suddenly called our attention to the river below us. As I have said, the Manuxet was in full flood but now it teemed with black shapes, swimming upstream against the racing current. That they had come from the sea was immediately obvious. Literally hundreds of them came swarming onto the bank and one horrified glance was enough to show that these creatures were even less human than those we had stumbled upon earlier.

Hopping in a manner hideously suggestive of frogs, they clambered up the steep sides with ease. There was no chance of defeating such a multitude and our only hope of survival was to flee, across the bridge, and along Main Street. Another bank of natives, surging out of Dock Street, attempted to halt us and our ammunition was almost spent by the time we broke through them. Four more of our number was killed before we reached the relative safety of my house where we barricaded ourselves in.

By now it was abundantly clear that those monsters from the sea had taken over the whole of the town. Sporadic firing could still be heard in the distance but we all knew that further resistance was futile.

By the morning of the next day, after spending the night confined to the house, we finally pieced together the full story of what had happened. Obed Marsh and those imprisoned with him had been released. Both of the Federal investigators who had accompanied us to the Marsh mansion had been slaughtered. John Lawrence, editor of the
Innsmouth Courier
on Dock Street, who had often spoken out against Marsh, had been dragged into the street and murdered. The presses and printing equipment had been smashed and the offices set on fire.

Thus it was that Obed Marsh now controlled the whole of Innsmouth. His word was law. Within weeks, the old Masonic Temple on Federal Street had been taken over and replaced by the Esoteric Order of Dagon.

Only a handful of the townsfolk were allowed to leave Innsmouth. These were mostly Lithuanians and Poles. Whether Marsh considered that no one outside Innsmouth would believe anything of what they said about the town or whether, not being descendants of the original settlers, he adjudged them to be of no importance, no one knew. After they had gone, those who remained were allowed to join the Esoteric Order of Dagon. There were few who declined.

It was not only the gold which made people join this new religion Marsh had brought back with him, nor the fact that, by now, most folk were mortally afraid of him. What persuaded the majority to join was that Marsh promised all who joined that, if they took his five oaths and obeyed him implicitly, they would never die.

When I was asked to join, I refused, as did my son. I had read sufficient concerning the rites that had been practiced in nearby Arkham during the witch trials to know that similar inducements had been made then, that all who worshipped Satan would be granted eternal life. At the time, I knew it to be nothing more than myth and superstition, merely an enticement to get people to join in their unholy rites.

Now, however, I know differently. It soon became apparent that Marsh was involved with those deep ones much more deeply than was first thought. In return for their continued aid, he declared that the townspeople must mate with these creatures. He, himself, was forced to take a wife from among them although she was never seen abroad and no one was able to tell who—or what—she was.

All of that happened almost twenty years ago. More and more of the folk, particularly the younger ones, acquired the same look as many of those natives we had found in Marsh’s cellar and some, as the years passed, were even worse, being little different from those creatures which had come from the sea to take over the town. Almost all of the Marsh, Gilman, Hogg and Brewster families were affected by this Innsmouth look. Curiously, Ephraim Waite’s family remained untainted even though he was one of Marsh’s closest acquaintances.

Rumor had it, however, that Waite had once resided in Arkham and had a reputation as a wizard, some even suggesting that he was the same warlock as was present before and during the witch trials there, two centuries earlier. That this was nothing more than idle gossip, spread by those who were more afraid of him than of Obed Marsh, seemed undeniable.

It was now becoming more difficult and dangerous for me to keep watch on Marsh’s activities. Even though the deep ones had returned to the sea shortly after Marsh’s release from jail, a score of years before, those who bore the Innsmouth look were in the majority and any of the population untouched by it were kept under close scrutiny.

Only those who belonged to the Order were allowed in the vicinity of the Esoteric Order of Dagon Hall. Nevertheless, on a number of occasions I managed to approach within fifty yards or it under cover of darkness. Even on those nights when there was no service taking place the building was never silent. Strange echoes seemed to come from somewhere deep beneath the foundations; weird sounds like nothing I had heard before.

But things were worse whenever a service was being held. Just to see some of those who attended made me want to turn and run. Scaled things that wore voluminous clothing to conceal the true shapes of what lay beneath, walking upright like men but with a horrible hopping gait that set my teeth on edge. And the chanting which came from within was something born out of nightmare. Harsh gutturals such as could never have been uttered by normal human throats; croaks and piping whistles, more reminiscent of the frogs and whippoorwills in the hills around Arkham than anything remotely approaching human speech.

Dear Lord—that such blasphemies as those could exist in this sane, everyday world! I found myself on the point of believing some of the tales spread abroad in Innsmouth concerning some deep undersea city, millions of years old, lying on the ocean floor just beyond Devil Reef. When I had first heard them from Elijah Winton, I had immediately dismissed them as the ravings of a madman. But hearing those hideous sounds emanating from the Temple of Dagon made me think again.

Something unutterably evil and terrible lay out there where the seabed reputedly fell sheer for more than two thousand feet into the abyssal depths. Whatever it was, from whatever internal regions it had come, it now held Obed Marsh and his followers in its unbreakable grip.

Then, two days ago, I found myself wandering along Water Street alongside the harbor. What insane compulsion led me in that direction I could not guess. I knew I was being kept under close surveillance all of the way; that eyes were marking my every move.

Where the sense of imminent danger came from it was impossible to tell, nor was it any actual sound. Rather it was a disturbing impression of movement in the vicinity of Marsh Street and Fish Street. I could see nothing to substantiate this but the sensation grew more pronounced as I halted at a spot where it was possible to look out over the breakwater to where Devil Reef thrust its sinister outline above the water.

It was several minutes before I realized there was something different about the contours of that black reef. I had seen it hundreds of times in the past; I knew its outlines like the back of my hand. But now it seemed far higher than normal, almost as if the sea level around it had fallen substantially.

And then I recognized the full, soul-destroying horror of what I was seeing. That great mass of rock was unchanged. What distorted it was something huge and equally black, which was rising from the sea behind it.

Shuddering convulsively, unable to move a single muscle, I could only stand there, my gaze fixed immutably upon that—
thing
—which rose out of the water until it loomed high above Devil Reef. Mercifully, much of its tremendous bulk lay concealed by the rock and the ocean. Had it all been visible I am certain I would have lost what remained of my sanity in that horror-crazed instant.

There was the impression of a mass of writhing tentacles surrounding a vast, bulbous head, of what looked like great wings outspread behind the shoulders, and a mountainous bulk hidden by the reef. It dripped with great strands of obnoxious seaweed. I knew that, even from that distance, it was aware of me with a malevolent intensity. And there was something more—an aura of utter malignancy which vibrated in the air, filling my mind with images of nightmarish horror.

This, then, was the quintessence of all the evil which had come to Innsmouth; the embodiment of the abomination which Captain Obed Marsh had wittingly, or inadvertently, brought to the town in exchange for gold.

I remember little of my nightmare flight along Marsh Street and South Street. My earliest coherent memory is of slamming and bolting my door and standing, shivering violently, in the hallway. I had thought those creatures which now shambled along the streets of Innsmouth were the final symbolism of evil in this town but that monstrosity I had witnessed out in the bay was infinitely worse.

What mad perversity of nature had produced it, where it had originated, and what its terrible purpose might be, I dreaded to think. I knew it could be none other than Dagon, that pagan god these people now worshipped. I also recognized that I now knew too much, that neither Obed Marsh, nor the deep ones which infested the waters around Innsmouth, could ever allow me to leave and tell of what I had witnessed.

There is only one course open to me. I have set down everything in this narrative and I intend to conceal it where only my son, now serving with the North in the war, which has torn our country apart, can find it.

Through my window I can see the dark, misshapen figures now massing outside and it is not difficult to guess at their intentions. Very soon, they will come to break down the door.

I have to be silenced, and possibly sacrificed, so that the Esoteric Order of Dagon may continue to flourish and the worship of Dagon may go on unhindered.

But I shall thwart whatever plans they have for me. My revolver lies in front of me
on the table and there is a single bullet still remaining in the chamber!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J
OHN
S
TEPHEN
G
LASBY
was born in 1928, and graduated from Nottingham University with an honours degree in Chemistry. He started his career as a research chemist for I.C.I. in 1952, and worked for them until his retirement. Over the next two decades, he began a parallel career as an extraordinarily prolific writer of science fiction novels and short stories, his first novels appearing in the summer of 1952 from Curtis Warren Ltd. under various house pseudonyms such as “Rand Le Page” and “Berl Cameron,” as was the fashion of the day. Late in 1952, he began an astonishing association with the London publisher, John Spencer Ltd., which was to last more than twenty years.

Glasby quickly became Spencer’s main author, writing hundreds of stories and novels on commissions in several genres. Not only was Glasby required to switch back and forth from science fiction to supernatural stories (his preferred media), but also to Foreign Legion sagas, Second World War novels, hospital romances, crime novels, and westerns. He quickly amassed a large number of personal pseudonyms, the best known being “A. J. Merak,” under which name a number of his science fiction novels were reprinted in the 1960s in the United States.

When his association with John Spencer eventually ended, he took the opportunity to sell a science fiction novel under his own name to Don Wollheim at Ace Books (
Project Jove
, 1971). Always a great fan of the work of H. P. Lovecraft, he then wrote a collection of Mythos stories for August Derleth at Arkham House. Derleth suggested extensive revisions and improvements, which Glasby duly followed, but then unfortunately died before the collection could be published, and the book was returned.

Interested in astronomy since childhood, Glasby had joined the variable star section of the British Astronomical Society in 1958, and was made Director in 1965. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1960, and he published numerous textbooks and encyclopedias on astronomy and chemistry, the first being
Variable Stars
in 1968.