H.P. Lovecraft. The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written Nov? - 3 Dec 1931
Published 1936 in The Shadow over Innsmouth, Everett, PA: Visionary
Publishing Co., p. 13-158.
I
During the winter of 1927-28 officials of the Federal government made a
strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient
Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. The public first learned of it in
February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by
the deliberate burning and dynamiting - under suitable precautions - of an
enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses
along the abandoned waterfront. Uninquiring souls let this occurrence pass
as one of the major clashes in a spasmodic war on liquor.
Keener news-followers, however, wondered at the prodigious number of
arrests, the abnormally large force of men used in making them, and the
secrecy surrounding the disposal of the prisoners. No trials, or even
definite charges were reported; nor were any of the captives seen
thereafter in the regular gaols of the nation. There were vague statements
about disease and concentration camps, and later about dispersal in
various naval and military prisons, but nothing positive ever developed.
Innsmouth itself was left almost depopulated, and it is even now only
beginning to show signs of a sluggishly revived existence.
Complaints from many liberal organizations were met with long confidential
discussions, and representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and
prisons. As a result, these societies became surprisingly passive and
reticent. Newspaper men were harder to manage, but seemed largely to
cooperate with the government in the end. Only one paper - a tabloid
always discounted because of its wild policy - mentioned the deep diving
submarine that discharged torpedoes downward in the marine abyss just
beyond Devil Reef. That item, gathered by chance in a haunt of sailors,
seemed indeed rather far-fetched; since the low, black reef lay a full
mile and a half out from Innsmouth Harbour.
People around the country and in the nearby towns muttered a great deal
among themselves, but said very little to the outer world. They had talked
about dying and half-deserted Innsmouth for nearly a century, and nothing
new could be wilder or more hideous than what they had whispered and
hinted at years before. Many things had taught them secretiveness, and
there was no need to exert pressure on them. Besides, they really knew
little; for wide salt marshes, desolate and unpeopled, kept neighbors off
from Innsmouth on the landward side.
But at last I am going to defy the ban on speech about this thing.
Results, I am certain, are so thorough that no public harm save a shock of
repulsion could ever accrue from a hinting of what was found by those
horrified men at Innsmouth. Besides, what was found might possibly have
more than one explanation. I do not know just how much of the whole tale
has been told even to me, and I have many reasons for not wishing to probe
deeper. For my contact with this affair has been closer than that of any
other layman, and I have carried away impressions which are yet to drive
me to drastic measures.
It was I who fled frantically out of Innsmouth in the early morning hours
of July 16, 1927, and whose frightened appeals for government inquiry and
action brought on the whole reported episode. I was willing enough to stay
mute while the affair was fresh and uncertain; but now that it is an old
story, with public interest and curiosity gone, I have an odd craving to
whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and
evilly-shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality. The mere
telling helps me to restore confidence in my own faculties; to reassure
myself that I was not the first to succumb to a contagious nightmare
hallucination. It helps me, too, in making up my mind regarding a certain
terrible step which lies ahead of me.
I never heard of Innsmouth till the day before I saw it for the first and
- so far - last time. I was celebrating my coming of age by a tour of New
England - sightseeing, antiquarian, and genealogical - and had planned to
go directly from ancient Newburyport to Arkham, whence my mother's family
was derived. I had no car, but was travelling by train, trolley and
motor-coach, always seeking the cheapest possible route. In Newburyport
they told me that the steam train was the thing to take to Arkham; and it
was only at the station ticket-office, when I demurred at the high fare,
that I learned about Innsmouth. The stout, shrewd-faced agent, whose
speech shewed him to be no local man, seemed sympathetic toward my efforts
at economy, and made a suggestion that none of my other informants had
offered.
"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. Wonder it keeps running at all. I
s'pose it's cheap enough, but I never see mor'n two or three people in it
- nobody but those Innsmouth folk. 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 odd manner of allusion roused something
like real curiosity. A town able to inspire such dislike in it its
neighbors, I thought, must be at least rather unusual, and worthy of a
tourist's attention. If it came before Arkham I would stop off there and
so I asked the agent to tell me something about it. He was very
deliberate, and spoke with an air of feeling slightly superior to what he
said.
"Innsmouth? Well, it's a queer kind of a town down at the mouth of the
Manuxet. Used to be almost a city - quite a port before the War of 1812 -
but all gone to pieces in the last hundred years or so. No railroad now -
B. and M. never went through, and the branch line from Rowley was given up
years ago.
"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 he 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 anyone else 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 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
thereabouts - 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 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, starry eyes
that never seem to shut, and their skin ain't quite right. Rough and
scabby, and the sides of the 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 the autos came in.
"Nobody around here or in Arkham or Ipswich will have anything to do with
'em, and they act kind of offish themselves when they come to town or when
anyone tries to fish on their grounds. Queer how fish are always thick off
Innsmouth Harbour when there ain't any anywhere else around - but just try
to fish there yourself and see how the folks chase you off! Those people
used to come here on the railroad - walking and taking the train at Rowley
after the branch was dropped - but now they use that bus.
"Yes, there's a hotel in Innsmouth - called the Gilman House - but I don't
believe it can amount to much. I wouldn't advise you to try it. Better
stay over here and take the ten o'clock bus tomorrow morning; then you can
get an evening bus there for Arkham at eight o'clock. There was a factory
inspector who stopped at the Gilman a couple of years ago and he had a lot
of unpleasant hints about the place. Seems they get a queer crowd there,
for this fellow heard voices in other rooms - though most of 'em was empty
- that gave him the shivers. It was foreign talk he thought, but he said
the bad thing about it was the kind of voice that sometimes spoke. It
sounded so unnatural - slopping like, he said - that he didn't dare
undress and go to sleep. Just waited up and lit out the first thing in the
morning. The talk went on most all night.
"This fellow - Casey, his name was - had a lot to say about how the
Innsmouth folk, watched him and seemed kind of on guard. He found the
Marsh refinery a queer place - it's in an old mill on the lower falls of
the Manuxet. What he said tallied up with what I'd heard. Books in bad
shape, and no clear account of any kind of dealings. You know it's always
been a kind of mystery where the Marshes get the gold they refine. They've
never seemed to do much buying in that line, but years ago they shipped
out an enormous lot of ingots.
"Used to be talk of a queer foreign kind of jewelry that the sailors and
refinery men sometimes sold on the sly, or that was seen once or twice on
some of the Marsh women-folks. People allowed maybe old Captain Obed
traded for it in some heathen port, especially since he always ordered
stacks of glass beads and trinkets such as seafaring men used to get for
native trade. Others thought and still think he'd found an old pirate
cache out on Devil Reef. But here's a funny thing. The old Captain's been
dead these sixty years, and there's ain't been a good-sized ship out of
the place since the Civil War; but just the same the Marshes still keep on
buying a few of those native trade things - mostly glass and rubber
gewgaws, they tell me. Maybe the Innsmouth folks like 'em to look at
themselves - Gawd knows they've gotten to be about as bad as South Sea
cannibals and Guinea savages.
"That plague of '46 must have taken off the best blood in the place.
Anyway, they're a doubtful lot now, and the Marshes and other rich folks
are as bad as any. As I told you, there probably ain't more'n 400 people
in the whole town in spite of all the streets they say there are. I guess
they're what they call 'white trash' down South - lawless and sly, and
full of secret things. They get a lot of fish and lobsters and do
exporting by truck. Queer how the fish swarm right there and nowhere else.
"Nobody can ever keep track of these 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. When I had tried to question the natives
in the shops, the lunchroom, the garages, and the fire station, I had
found them even harder to get started than the ticket agent had predicted;
and realized that I could not spare the time to overcome their first
instinctive reticence. They had a kind of obscure suspiciousness, as if
there were something amiss with anyone too much interested in Innsmouth.
At the Y. M. C. A., where I was stopping, the clerk merely discouraged my
going to such a dismal, decadent place; and the people at the library
shewed much the same attitude. Clearly, in the eyes of the educated,
Innsmouth was merely an exaggerated case of civic degeneration.
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 county.
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. That fishing paid less and less as the price of the commodity
fell and large-scale corporations offered competition, but there was never
a dearth of fish around Innsmouth Harbour. Foreigners seldom settled
there, and there was some discreetly veiled evidence that a number of
Poles and Portuguese who had tried it had been scattered in a peculiarly
drastic fashion.
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. The fragmentary descriptions of these
things were bald and prosaic, but they hinted to me an undercurrent of
persistent strangeness. Something about them seemed so odd and provocative
that I could not put them out of my mind, and despite the relative
lateness of the hour 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 splendour of the alien, opulent phantasy that
rested there on a purple velvet cushion. Even now I can hardly describe
what I saw, though it was clearly enough a sort of tiara, as the
description had said. It was tall in front, and with a very large and
curiously irregular periphery, as if designed for a head of almost
freakishly elliptical outline. The material seemed to be predominantly
gold, though a weird lighter lustrousness hinted at some strange alloy
with an equally beautiful and scarcely identifiable metal. Its condition
was almost perfect, and one could have spent hours in studying the
striking and puzzlingly untraditional designs - some simply geometrical,
and some plainly marine - chased or moulded in high relief on its surface
with a craftsmanship of incredible skill and grace.
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. At first I decided that it was the queer
other-worldly quality of the art which made me uneasy. All other art
objects I had ever seen either belonged to some known racial or national
stream, or else were consciously modernistic defiances of every recognized
stream. This tiara was neither. It clearly belonged to some settled
technique of infinite maturity and perfection, yet that technique was
utterly remote from any - Eastern or Western, ancient or modern - which I
had ever heard of or seen exemplified. It was as if the workmanship were
that of another planet.
However, I soon saw that my uneasiness had a second and perhaps equally
potent source residing in the pictorial and mathematical suggestion of the
strange designs. 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 - half ichthyic
and half batrachian in suggestion - which one could not dissociate from a
certain haunting and uncomfortable sense of pseudomemory, as if they
called up some image from deep cells and tissues whose retentive functions
are wholly primal and awesomely ancestral. At times I fancied that every
contour of these blasphemous fish-frogs was over-flowing 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. The Society had acquired it directly from the
pawnbroker, at once giving it a display worthy of its quality. It was
labeled as of probable East-Indian or Indochinese provenance, though the
attribution was frankly tentative.
Miss Tilton, comparing all possible hypotheses regarding its origin and
its presence in New England, 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 shewed me out of the building she made it clear that the
pirate theory of the Marsh fortune was a popular one among the intelligent
people of the region. Her own attitude toward shadowed Innsmouth - which
she never seen - was one of disgust at a community slipping far down the
cultural scale, and she assured me that the rumours 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 the 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 in the town, replacing Freemasonry altogether
and taking up headquarters in the old Masonic Hall on New Church Green.
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. To my architectural and historical anticipations was
now added an acute anthropological zeal, 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 one small valise in front
of Hammond's Drug Store in old Market Square waiting for the Innsmouth
bus. As the hour for its arrival drew near I noticed a general drift of
the loungers to other places up the street, or to the Ideal Lunch across
