Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth Page 6

  “And we believe they’re here, Dr. Marston.” This from Albert Hartley, taking back the centre of attention. He was interrupted by a middle-aged woman who entered the room wearing a housedress and apron. “There’s coffee and cocoa on the stove for anybody who wants them,” she announced.

  Hartley looked exasperated. “Thanks, Mom. Not right now, please.”

  The woman withdrew.

  “They’re out in the Bay, even as we speak,” Hartley resumed. “They have a whole city down there. When people disappear, when you hear about people jumping off the new bridge to Marin, the Deep Ones are involved in that.”

  Marston frowned. It was hard to take these kids seriously but he had promised Aurelia Blenheim and he was going to do his best. “I think the jumpers are suicides.”

  “That’s what you’re supposed to think. The Deep Ones, they’re amphibians. Lovecraft said so in his writings. They look like regular people at first. They grow up among us, they could be anybody. Then as they get older they start to show their true nature. It’s called the Innsmouth Look. They start to resemble frogs or toads. Eventually they have to go back to the sea, to live with their own people.”

  Marston picked up his abandoned sandwich and took a bite. Mom Hartley made good snacks, anyway. The sandwich was spiced salami and crisp lettuce with a really sharp mustard, served on hard-crusted sourdough. Marston had a good appetite, and besides, chewing earnestly away at Mom Hartley’s salami sandwich gave him an excuse not to answer young Albert Hartley’s wild assertions.

  Now a girl sitting surrounded by boys spoke up. “My name is Narda Long, Dr. Marston.”

  Del Marston nodded.

  “We don’t think that there has to be war with the Deep Ones.” Narda wore her medium-brown hair in curls. Her face would be pretty, Marston decided, in a few years when she shed her baby fat. It would help her figure, too. For now, she filled her pink blouse and plaid skirt a bit more amply than she might, but in this crowd anyone young and female would get all the attention she wanted.

  The room was filled with a buzz. Apparently the New Deep Ones Society was divided between those who thought they could make league with the wet folk and those who considered the amphibians the implacable enemies of land-dwellers.

  “If we’d just make friends with them, I’m sure they’d leave us alone. Or even help us. Who knows what treasures there are in the sea, on the sea bottom, and we probably have things here on land that would help them.”

  “That’s right.” The boy sitting next to Narda Long agreed. “We have these battles and we go shooting torpedoes around and we set off depth charges, we’re probably ruining their cities. No wonder they’re mad at us.”

  “What can you tell us about the Deep Ones, Dr. Marston?” The only other non-hostile girl in the room, a freckled redhead, asked.

  Marston shook his head. “I think you invited the wrong person to your meeting. You need a folklorist or maybe a mystic. Somebody from the Classics Department might be good. I’m just a marine geologist. I study things like underwater volcanism and seismology, and their effect on shore structures and the way bodies of water behave. It’s all pretty dry stuff.”

  Nobody got the joke.

  The debate went on, the let’s-be-friends-with-the-frogs group versus the it’s-a-fight-to-the-finish group. Finally Del Marston looked at his watch and exchanged a signal with Aurelia Blenheim.

  “I’m sorry but I have to teach an early class tomorrow,” she announced. “You know, we old folks can’t stay up as late as we used to, not if we’re going to go to work in the morning.”

  * * *

  “Thanks for getting us out of there,” Marston addressed Aurelia Blenheim. “Another five minutes and I was about ready to take a couple of those young blockheads and knock their skulls together.”

  Aurelia Blenheim laughed. “They weren’t that bad, Delbert. They’re young, they can’t help that, and a certain amount of foolish passion goes with the territory.”

  “I suppose so,” Marston grumbled. “And a couple of them even seemed moderately intelligent. The only one who seemed sensible was the young sailor—what was his name?”

  “Ben Keeler. You weren’t just impressed by his hero-worshipping attitude, by any chance.”

  “Not in the least. Sincere and merited admiration is never misplaced and is always appreciated.”

  “What a lovely aphorism.” Aurelia Blenheim leaned forward and switched on the Cord’s radio. The Phaeton had cleared the Bay Bridge, the structural steel and giant cables of which would have interfered with reception. A late-night broadcaster was rhapsodising about the progress of General Clark’s forces in Italy and the successes of Admiral Nimitz’s fleet against the Japanese. The announcer must have been local because he went on to talk about Nimitz’s pre-war connection with the University of California in Berkeley.

  When the news broadcast ended Marston switched to a station playing a Mozart clarinet piece. “You don’t really think those kids have something, do you?” he asked his companion.

  “I try to keep an open mind.”

  Marston asked, not for the first time, how his friend had first encountered the New Deep Ones. As usual she referred to a vague relationship between herself and Mrs. Hartley. “We went to school together a million years ago. I was in her wedding. Poor Walter, her husband, was on a sub that went down in the Pacific. She carries on and I try to keep her spirits up.”

  “And you really do have a class in the morning,” Marston commented. He drove through Berkeley, dropped her at her home on Garber Street and returned to his home on Brookside Drive.

  He refused further invitations to attend meetings of the New Deep Ones. His feet were bothering him and walking had become difficult and uncomfortable if not downright painful. And he was having problems with his jaw and teeth. He consulted his dentist and his medical doctor alternately. Each reported that he could find no source for Marston’s difficulties and referred him to the other.

  Marston worked at his office on campus, solving problems brought to him from local naval installations. He reduced his social schedule until he was a near recluse, moving between his bachelor’s bungalow and his office on the university campus. He met requests for his company with increasing abrasive refusals until the day he realised he was excluded from faculty cocktail parties and all but the most compulsory of campus events.

  The conversation he had in part overheard, in part contributed to, at the meeting of the New Deep Ones preyed on his mind. Several times he sought out Aurelia Blenheim, by now not only his longest-enduring acquaintance but virtually his only friend. Over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine he queried her about Selena Hartley, young Albert’s mother. At least Aurelia Blenheim had revealed her friend’s first name.

  Her maiden name had been Curwen. She was a native San Franciscan, descended from the founder of Curwen Heights. She had married Walter at the height of the tumultuous Roaring Twenties and had struggled at his side through the years of the Depression to preserve their relationship and to keep the old house, built by the original Eben Curwen during the previous century, in the family.

  Beyond that, Aurelia Blenheim had no information to share with Delbert Marston.

  Naval Intelligence had ferreted out Japanese plans to send submarines against the West Coast of the United States. To Marston this made no sense. Earlier in the war, after the Japanese had decimated the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor and had conquered the Philippines and Wake Island, it would have made sense. But the Japanese were being forced back by General MacArthur’s island-hopping campaign and General LeMay’s fire-bombing of the home islands.

  An anti-submarine net had been strung across the Golden Gate in 1942, when a direct attack by Admiral Yamamoto’s forces seemed imminent. The attack had never come, but the Navy had been spooked by their intelligence and Marston was called on to help design a new and improved underwater defence line. Knowing the Navy, the war would be over before the new defences were built and the defences w
ould be outdated before another war could make them useful, but Marston was not one to shirk his duty.

  He spent his days touring the Bay and the Golden Gate in naval motor launches, alternating the excursions with long days at the desk calculator and the drawing board. His nights he spent in his living room, looking out over Brookside Drive, listening to music, and drinking scotch whiskey. It was almost impossible to find good single malt nowadays, far more difficult than it had been during the laughably ineffective Prohibition of Marston’s youth. He shuddered at the thought of having to switch to blended swill.

  As walking became increasingly painful he spent more hours in the University pool. Even sitting in an easy chair or lying in bed he had to deal with discomfort, and the ongoing changes in his jaw and teeth made eating a nasty chore. He was losing his teeth one by one, and new ones were emerging in their place. He’d heard of people getting a third set of teeth, it was a rare but not-unknown phenomenon. His own new teeth were triangular in shape and razor-sharp. Only when he had slipped into the waters of the pool did the pain in his extremities ease, and even his mouth felt less discomfort.

  Yet he was drawing unwelcome glances in the changing area at the pool. He altered his routine, suiting up at home and wearing baggy clothing over his trunks until he reached the locker room. There he would doff his outer costume and plunge into the water, staying beneath the surface as long as he could before rising for air. As time passed he found himself able to stay under for longer periods. He ascribed this to the practice of almost daily swims.

  One day he stayed under for a period that must have set his personal record. When he surfaced he was the centre of attention. One of the other swimmers muttered, “Say, you must have been down there for five or six minutes. How do you do that?”

  Marston growled an answer, then hastened to his locker, pulled his baggy clothing on over his wet body and dripping suit, and headed for home.

  That night he drove to the Berkeley Marina. He parked his Cord, looked around and ascertained that he was alone. He walked to the water’s edge, disrobed, and slipped into the Bay. The water was icy but somehow it eased the now-constant ache in his legs and feet. His hands, too, seemed to be changing their shape in some small, subtle way. They were uncomfortable, as well. He wondered if he was developing arthritis.

  He swam out toward Angel Island. He had no way of knowing just how far he had gone or how long he had remained submerged, but he felt that it must have been fifteen or twenty minutes. He broke surface and realised that he was not out of breath. In fact, he had to force himself to inhale the fog-drenched night air. His neck itched and he rubbed it with his hands, feeling horizontal ridges of muscle that he had never noticed before.

  He looked around, searching for landmarks, but the enforced wartime blackout precluded the use of bright lights in the cities that lined San Francisco Bay. He made out the silhouette of Bay Bridge against the sky, then that of the Golden Gate Bridge. He turned in the water, recognising the forbidding fortifications of Alcatraz. Without inhaling again he ducked beneath the surface and swam back toward the Berkeley shoreline. In time he waded from the cold, brackish waters of the Bay. By contrast, the night air felt warm against his body. He shook like a dog to rid himself of water, pulled on his clothing, and drove home.

  In the Brookside Drive cottage he drew a polished captain’s chair to an open window. Through the window he could hear the soft gurgle of the nearby stream that gave the thoroughfare its name. Odd, Marston thought, that he had never noticed this before. The sound brought with it a melancholy, pleasant feeling. He thought of putting a record on the turntable, had even selected Handel’s ‘Music for the Royal Fireworks’, and pouring himself a scotch while he listened to the recording, but instead brought a pillow from his bedroom and placed it on the living room carpet.

  He lay down in darkness and closed his eyes, letting the sound of the stream fill his consciousness. He fell asleep and dreamed of dark waters, strange creatures and ancient cities beneath the sea. He awoke the following morning and staggered to the mirror in his bedroom. He brushed water from his hair.

  * * *

  By the end of May, in normal times, the university’s spring semester would have ended and the students departed, leaving Berkeley a quiet suburb of Oakland instead of the bustling community of scholars it became during the academic year. But in wartime the military had set up accelerated programs for the education of junior officers, and the University of California was on a year-round schedule.

  Delbert Marston’s assignments from his naval superiors had changed as well. The computations and design of the anti-submarine defences were completed and construction was well under way. The data provided to Marston now was peculiar and the requested analytical reports were more peculiar than ever. In Europe the long-anticipated cross-channel invasion had taken place and Allied forces were pushing the Wehrmacht back toward Germany. In the Pacific Japanese troops were resisting with fanatical dedication, whole units dying to the last soldier rather than raise the flag of surrender.

  But as the Office of War Information reminded the American public, the conflict was far from over. The Germans had developed flying bombs and rocket weapons and were using them against Allied forces in France and Belgium, and sending them to wreak havoc in England. If they could develop longer-range models, even the US would be in danger. A Nazi super-scientist named Heisenberg was rumoured to be developing a weapon of unprecedented power that could be delivered to New York by a jet-propelled flying wing bomber. The whole thing seemed like a scenario from a Fritz Lang movie.

  Still, Marston made his way to his office each morning, labouring on feet that sent agony lancing up his increasingly deformed legs. Once at work he found it hard even to hold a pencil, relying on an assistant to take dictation rather than try to write up his own notes. He seldom spoke with anyone save his naval superiors and assistants.

  His only pleasures were his solitary, nocturnal excursions beneath the surface of the Bay. He no longer bothered with the fiction of breathing air once he entered the Bay, relying on water inhaled through his now wide mouth and expelled through the gill slits in his neck once his body had extracted its oxygen content.

  He saw shapes beneath the water now, sometimes dark, sometimes sickly luminescent. At first he avoided them, then he began to pursue them. He couldn’t make out their appearance well, either, although as time passed he began to develop more acute vision in the dark medium. From time to time one of the shapes would swim toward him, then flash aside when he reached out to touch it.

  One night he found one of the creatures drifting aimlessly a few feet beneath the surface. He swam to it and saw that it was more or less human in outline but clearly not human. He reached for it and it did not flash away. Once he grasped it he realised that it was dead, its flesh horribly torn as if it had been caught in the propeller of a passing ship. Even as he studied the strange cadaver two more shapes flashed into sight and snatched it from his grasp, moving first out of his reach and then out of his sight.

  But he had touched the remains. The flesh was white and stringy, the skin as smooth and slick as that of a giant frog.

  Despite the changes he was undergoing he managed to maintain the pretence of normality, taking his meals, filling his Cord Phaeton with precious, rationed gasoline, sending his laundry out to be done, keeping his modest lodgings in order.

  Late one Saturday afternoon he nearly collided with Aurelia Blenheim while pushing a shopping cart in the aisle of the grocery store nearest his home. He was shocked at her haggard appearance. How long had it been since their last meeting? How could she have aged so badly? He thought of his own changed appearance and wondered if he looked as worrisome to Aurelia as she to him.

  The expression on Aurelia Blenheim’s face showed shock and deep concern. “Delbert,” the elderly woman exclaimed, “are you all right?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “But you look so—are you certain?”

  “
Yes,” he growled. He should have turned and left the store the instant he spotted Blenheim, but he had failed to act and now he was caught. “I’m just a little tired,” he explained. “Very tired, in fact. The war. So much work.”

  “I’m coming to your house,” Blenheim asserted. “I’m going to make dinner for you. You’re not taking care of yourself. You’re headed for the hospital if you don’t get yourself together. You should be ashamed!”

  When they reached Marston’s cottage he turned his key in the door lock and stood aside to let Aurelia Blenheim enter first. Marston carried the bag of groceries Blenheim had helped him select. She had even loaned him a few ration stamps and tokens to complete his purchase.

  The selection of foodstuffs was far more extensive than the Spartan diet Marston had been living on in recent months. In fact he occasionally supplemented his nourishment during his nocturnal swims in the Bay. That body was densely populated with marine species that throve in its cold, brackish waters. Marston became ravenous when he came upon the abalone, eels, crabs, clams and small octopods that lurked in the silted seabed. When he came upon one he would devour it raw, fresh, and sometimes living. His new teeth could pierce the shell of a living crab as if it were paper.

  Just inside the doorway Aurelia Blenheim bent over and picked up a buff-coloured envelope. “Here’s a telegram for you, Delbert.”

  He took the envelope from her and opened it. The message was typed in capital letters on strips of buff paper and glued to the message form. The telegram came from a Captain Kinne, commanding officer of the Naval Weapons Station at Port Chicago, a village on the shore of Suisun Bay, an extension of San Francisco Bay fed by the Sacramento River.