Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth Read online

  Fose and Fessel raised their hammers.

  Violet leaned over, as if protecting a pet lamb from slaughter-men.

  “Out of the way, foolish girl.”

  “It’s mine,” she said.

  “It’s nobody’s, and no good to anybody. It must be smashed. God would wish it…”

  “But this find is important. To science.”

  Sellwood looked as if that bite of cooker was in his throat, making his eyes water.

  “Science! Bah, stuff and nonsense! Devil’s charm, my girl, that’s what this is!”

  “It was alive, millions of millions of years ago.”

  “The Earth is less than six thousand years old, child, as you would know if you read your scriptures.”

  Violet, angry, stood up to argue. “But that’s not true. There’s proof. This is…”

  Fose and Fessel took their opportunity, and brought the hammers down. The fossil split. Sharp chips flew. Violet—appalled, hands in tiny fists, mouth open—didn’t notice her shin bleeding.

  “You can’t…”

  “These so-called proofs, stone bones and long-dead dragons,” said Sellwood, “are the Devil’s trickeries.”

  The Brethren smashed the ammonite to shards and powder.

  “This was put here to fool weak minds,” lectured the Reverend. “It is the Church Militant’s sacred work to destroy such obscenities, lest more be tempted to blasphemy. This is not science, this is sacrilege.”

  “It was mine,” Violet said quietly.

  “I have saved you from error. You should thank me.”

  Ernest came over to see what the noise was about. Sellwood bestowed a smile on the lad that afforded a glimpse of terrifying teeth.

  Teeth on monsters were fine with Ernest; teeth like Sellwood’s would give him nightmares.

  “A job well done,” said the Reverend. “Let us look further. More infernal things may have sprung up.”

  Brother Fose leered at Violet and patted her on the head, which made her flinch. Brother Fessel looked stern disapproval at this familiarity. They followed Sellwood, swinging hammers, scouting for something to break to bits. Dick had an idea they’d rather be pounding on something that squealed and bled than something so long dead it had turned to stone.

  Violet wasn’t crying. But she was hating.

  More than before, Dick was convinced Sellwood was behind some vile endeavor. He had the look of a smuggler, or a spy.

  Richard Riddle, Boy Detective, would bring the villain to book.

  II

  QRS NDPS JA QRS DGGJHBQS DHHBRBFDQJM

  Uncle Davey had let Dick set up the office of the Richard Riddle Detective Agency in a small room under the eaves. A gable window led to a small balcony that looked like a ship’s crow’s-nest. Seaview Chase was a large, complicated house on Black Ven, a jagged rise above Lyme Bay, an ideal vantage point for surveying the town and the sea.

  Dick had installed his equipment—a microscope, boxes and folders, reference books, his collection of clues and trophies. Violet had donated some small fossils and her hammers and trowels. Ernest wanted space on the wall for the head of their first murderer: he had an idea that when a murderer was hanged, the police gave the head as a souvenir to the detective who caught him.

  The evening after the fossil-smashing incident, Dick sat in the office and opened a new file and wrote Qrs Ndps ja qrs Dggjhbqs Dhhbrbfdqjm on a fresh sheet of paper. It was the RRDA. Special Cipher for The Case of the Ammonite Annihilator.

  After breakfast the next day, the follow-up investigation began. Dick went into the airy studio on the first floor and asked Uncle Davey what he knew about Sellwood.

  “Grim-visage?” said Uncle Davey, pulling a face. “Dresses as if it were fifty years ago? Of him, I know, to be frank, not much. He once called with a presentation copy of some verminous volume, printed at his own expense. I think he wanted me to find a proper publisher. Put on a scary smile to ingratiate. Maeve didn’t like him. He hasn’t been back. Book’s around somewhere, probably. Must chuck it one day. It’ll be in one of those piles.”

  He stabbed a paintbrush towards the stacks which grew against one wall and went back to painting—a ship at sea, only there were eyes in the sea if you looked close enough, and faces in the clouds and the folds of sail-cloth. Uncle Davey liked hiding things.

  When Violet and Ernest arrived, they set to searching book-piles.

  It took a long time. Violet kept getting interested in irrelevant findings. Mostly titles about pixies and fairies and curses.

  Sellwood’s book had migrated to near the bottom of an especially towering pile. Extracting it brought about a bad tumble that alerted Aunt Maeve, who rushed in assuming the whole of Black Ven was giving way and the house would soon be crashing into Lyme Bay. Uncle Davey cheerfully kicked the spill of volumes into a corner and said he’d sort them out one day, then noticed a wave suitable for hiding an eye in and forgot about the children. Aunt Maeve went off to get warm milk with drops of something from Cook.

  In the office, the detectives pored over their find for clues.

  “Omphalos Diabolicus, or: The Hoax of ‘Pre-History’,” intoned Dick, “by the Reverend Daniel Sturdevant Sellwood, published 1897, Orris Press, Dorset.” Uncle Davey said he paid for the printing, so I deduce that he is the sole proprietor of this phantom publisher. Ah-hah, the pages have not been cut after the first chapter, so I further deduce that it must be deadly dull stuff.”

  He tossed the book to Violet, who got to work with a long knife, slitting the leaves as if they were the author’s throat. Then she flicked through pages, pausing only to report relevant facts. One of her talents was gutting books, discovering the few useful pages like a prospector panning gold dust out of river-dirt.

  Daniel Sellwood wasn’t a proper clergyman any more. He had been booted out of the Church of England after shouting that the Bishop should burn Mr. Darwin along with his published works. Now, Sellwood had his own sect, the Church Militant—but most of his congregation were paid servants. Sellwood came from a wealthy Dorset family, rich from trade and shipping, and had been packed off to parson school because an older brother, George, was supposed to inherit the fortune—only the brother was lost at sea, along with his wife Rebecca and little daughter Ruth, and Daniel’s expectations increased. The sinking of the Sophy Briggs was a famous maritime mystery like the Mary Celeste and Captain Nemo: thirty years ago, the pride of the Orris-Sellwood Line went down in calm seas, with all hands lost. Sellwood skipped over the loss in a sentence, then spent pages talking up the “divine revelation” which convinced him to found a church rather than keep up the business.

  According to Violet, a lot of folk around Lyme resented being thrown out of work when Sellwood dismantled his shipping concern and dedicated the family fortune to preaching anti-Darwinism.

  “What’s an omphalo-thing?” asked Ernest.

  “The title means ‘the Devil’s Belly-Button’,” said Violet, which made Ernest giggle. “He’s put Greek and Latin words together, which is poor Classics. Apart from his stupid ideas, he’s a terrible writer. Listen… ‘all the multitudinarious flora and fauna of divine creation constitute veritable evidence of the proof of the pellucid and undiluted accuracy of the Word of God Almighty Unchallenged as set down in the shining, burning, shimmering sentences, chapters and, indeed, books of the Old and New Testaments, hereinafter known to all righteous and right-thinking men as the Holy Bible of Glorious God.’ It’s as if he’s saying ‘this is the true truthiest truest truth of truthdom ever told truly by truth-trusters’.”

  “How do the belly-buttons come into it?” asked Dick.

  “Adam and Eve were supposed to have been created with navels, though—since they weren’t born like other people—they oughtn’t to have them.”

  This was over Ernest’s head, but Dick knew how babies came and that his navel was a knot, where a cord had been cut and tied.

  “To Sellwood’s way of thinking, just as Adam and Eve were creat
ed to seem as if they had normal parents, the Earth was created as if it had a pre-history, with geological and fossil evidence in place to make the planet appear much older than it says in the Bible.”

  “That’s silly,” said Ernest.

  “Don’t tell me, tell Sellwood,” said Violet. “He’s a silly, stupid man.

  He doesn’t want to know the truth, or anyone else to either, so he breaks fossils and shouts down lecturers. His theory isn’t even original. A man named Gosse wrote a book with the same idea, though Gosse claimed God buried fossils to fool people while Sellwood says it was the Devil.”

  Violet was quite annoyed.

  “I think it’s an excuse to go round bullying people,” said Dick. “A cover for his real, sinister purpose.”

  “If you ask me, what he does is sinister enough by itself.”

  “Nobody did ask you,” said Ernest, which he always said when someone was unwise enough to preface a statement with “if you ask me”. Violet stuck her tongue out at him.

  Dick was thinking.

  “It’s likely that the Sellwood family were smugglers,” he said.

  Violet agreed. “Smugglers had to have ships, and pretend to be respectable merchants. In the old days, they were all at it. You know the poem…”

  Violet stood up, put a hand on her chest, and recited, dramatically.

  “If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse’s feet,

  Don’t go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street.

  Them that ask no questions isn’t told a lie,

  Watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by.

  Five and twenty ponies, trotting through the dark,

  Brandy for the parson, ’baccy for the clerk;

  Laces for a lady, letters for a spy,

  And watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by.”

  She waited for applause, which didn’t come. But her recitation was useful. Dick had been thinking in terms of spies or smugglers, but the poem reminded him that the breeds were interdependent. It struck him that Sellwood might be a smuggler of spies, or a spy for smugglers.

  “I’ll wager ‘Tiger’ Bristow is in this, too,” he said, snapping his fingers.

  Ernest shivered, audibly.

  “Is it spying or smuggling?” he asked.

  “It’s both,” Dick replied.

  Violet sat down again, and chewed on a long, stray strand of her hair.

  “Tell Dick about the French Spy,” suggested Ernest.

  Dick was intrigued.

  “That was a long time ago, a hundred years,” she said. “It’s a local legend, not evidence.”

  “You yourself say legends always shroud some truth,” declared Dick. “We must consider all the facts, even rumors of facts, before forming a conclusion.”

  Violet shrugged. “It is about Sellwood’s house, I suppose…”

  Dick was astonished. “And you didn’t think it was relevant! Sometimes, I’m astonished by your lack of perspicacity!”

  Violet looked incipiently upset at his tone, and Dick wondered if he wasn’t going too far. He needed her in the Agency, but she could be maddening at times. Like a real girl.

  “Out with it, Vile,” he barked.

  Violet crossed her arms and kept quiet.

  “I apologize for my tactlessness,” said Dick. “But this is vitally important. We might be able to put that ammonite-abuser out of business, with immeasurable benefit to science.”

  Violet melted. “Very well. I heard this from Alderman Hooke’s father…”

  Before her paleontology craze, Violet fancied herself a collector of folklore. She had gone around asking old people to tell stories or sing songs or remember why things were called what they were called. She was going to write them all up in a book of local legends and had wanted Uncle Davey to draw the pictures. She was still working on her book, but it was about Dinosaurs in Dorset now.

  “I didn’t make much of it, because it wasn’t much of a legend. Just a scrap of history.”

  “With a spy,” prompted Ernest. “A spy who came out of the sea!”

  Violet nodded. “That’s more or less it. When England was at war with France, everyone thought Napoleon…”

  “Boney!” put in Ernest, making fang-fingers at the corners of his mouth.

  “Yes, Boney… everyone thought he was going to invade, like William the Conqueror. Along the coast people watched the seas. Signal-fires were prepared, like with the Spanish Armada. Most thought it likely the French would strike at Dover, but round here they tapped the sides of their noses…”

  Violet imitated an old person tapping her long nose.

  “…and said the last army to invade Britain had landed at Lyme, and the next would too. The last army was Monmouth’s, during his rebellion. He landed at the Cobb and marched up to Sedgmoor, where he was defeated. There are lots of legends about the Duke of Monmouth…”

  Dick made a get-to-the-point gesture.

  “Any rate, near the end of the eighteenth century, a man named Jacob Orris formed a vigilance patrol to keep watch on the beaches. Orris’s daughter married a sea-captain called Lud Sellwood; they begat drowned George and old Devil’s Belly-Button. Come to think, Orris’s patrol was like Sellwood’s Church Militant—an excuse to shout at folk and break things. Orris started a campaign to get “French beans” renamed “Free-from-Tyranny beans”, and had his men attack grocer’s stalls when no one agreed with him. Orris was expecting a fleet to heave to in Lyme Bay and land an army, but knew spies would be put ashore first to scout the around. One night, during a terrible storm, Orris caught a spy flung up on the shingle.”

  “And…?”

  “That’s it, really. I expect they hit him with hammers and killed him, but if anyone really knows, they aren’t saying.”

  Dick was disappointed.

  “Tell him how it was a special spy,” said Ernest.

  Dick was intrigued again. Especially since Violet obviously didn’t want to say more.

  “He was a sea-ghost,” announced Ernest.

  “Old Hooke said the spy had walked across the channel,” admitted Violet. “On the bottom of the sea, in a special diving suit. He was a Frenchman, but—and you have to remember stories get twisted over the years—he had gills sewn into his neck so he could breathe underwater. As far as anyone knew round here, all Corsicans were like that. They said it was probably Boney’s cousin.”

  “And they killed him?”

  Violet shrugged. “I expect so.”

  “And kept him pickled,” said Ernest.

  “Now that isn’t true. One version of this story is that Orris had the dead spy stuffed, then hidden away. But the family would have found the thing and thrown it out by now. And we’d know whether it was a man or, as Granny Ball says, a trained seal. Stories are like limpets on rocks. They stick on and get thicker until you can’t see what was there in the first place.”

  Dick whistled.

  “I don’t see how this can have anything to do with what Sellwood is about now,” said Violet. “This may not have happened, and if it did, it was a hundred years ago. Sellwood wasn’t even born then. His parents were still children.”

  “My dear Vile, a century-old mystery is still a mystery. And crime can seep into a family like water in the foundations, passed down from father to son…”

  “Father to daughter to son, in this case.”

  “I haven’t forgotten that. This mystery goes deep. It’s all about the past. And haven’t you said that a century is just a heartbeat in the long life of the planet?”

  She was coming round, he saw.

  “We have to get into Orris Priory,” said Dick.

  III

  BA BQ WDP SDPY QJ ABHO, BQ WJTFOH’Q IS RBOOSH

  “Why are we on the shingle?” asked Ernest. “The Priory is up there, on top of the Cleeve.”

  Dick had been waiting for the question. Deductions impressed more if he didn’t just come out with cleverness, but waited for a promp
t.

  “Remember yesterday? Sellwood seemed to turn up suddenly, with Fose and Fessel. If they’d been walking on the beach, we’d have seen them ages before they arrived. But we didn’t. Therefore, there must be a secret way. A smugglers’ tunnel.”

  Violet found some pieces of the fossil. She looked towards the cliff.

  “We were facing out to sea, and they came from behind,” she said.

  She tossed her ammonite-shard, which rebounded off the soft rock-face.

  The cliff was too crumbly for caves that might conceal a tunnel. The children began looking closely, hoping for a hidden door.

  After a half-hour, Ernest complained that he was hungry.

  After an hour, Violet complained that she was fed up with rocks.

  Dick stuck to it. “If it was easy to find, it wouldn’t be hidden,” he kept saying.

  Ernest began to make helpful suggestions that didn’t help but needed to be argued with.

  “Maybee they came up under the sea and swam ashore?”

  “They weren’t wet and we would have seen them,” countered Dick.

  “Maybee they’ve got invisible diving suits that don’t show wetness?”

  “Those haven’t been invented yet.”

  “Maybee they’ve invented them but kept it quiet?”

  “It’s not likely…”

  “But not impossible, and you always say that ‘when you’ve eliminated the impossible…’”

  “Actually, Ernest, it is impossible!”

  “Prove it.”

  “The only way to prove something impossible is to devote your entire life to trying to achieve it, and the lives of everyone to infinity throughout eternity, then not succeed…”

  “Well, get started…”

  “…and that’s impractical!”

  Dick knew he was shouting, but when Ernest got into one of these maybee moods—which he called his “clever spells”—everyone got a headache, and usually wound up giving in and agreeing with something they knew to be absurd just to make Ernest shut up. After that, he would be hard to live with for the rest of the day, puffed up like a toad with a smugness that Violet labeled “very unattractive,” which prompted him to snipe that he didn’t want to attract anyone like her, and her to counter that he would change his mind in a few years, and him to… well, it was a cycle Dick had lived through too often.