The Book of Cthulhu

The Doom that Came to Innsmouth

Brian McNaughton

We need not dust off the history of our nation’s dealings with the Indians to find examples of genocide nor even go so far from our doorsteps as Montgomery, Alabama, to see instances of racism. Right here in our own state of Massachusetts, in February of 1928, agents of the U. S. Treasury and Justice Departments perpetrated crimes worthy of Nazi Germany against a powerless minority of our citizens…. When the dust of this jack-booted invasion had settled, no citizens [of Innsmouth, Massachusetts] were found guilty of any crime but the desire to live their peaceful lives in privacy and raise their children in the faith of their fathers. The mass internments and confiscations have never been plausibly explained or legally justified nor has compensation ever been so much as attempted to the innocent victims of this official hooliganism.

—Sen John F. Kennedy,

Commencement Address

to the Class of 1959 at

Miskatonic University,

Arkham, Mass.

Grandma had been a bootlegger, according to a family joke that we didn’t share with her when we visited the nursing-home.

I did… once. “Is it true that you got busted by Eliot Ness, Grandma?” I asked, wise-ass kid that I was. She started carrying on about “Loch Ness,” and getting very worked up, because that place was important to her religion.

“You got a golden crown waiting for you there, Joe, a crown that outshines the sun,” she croaked in her liquid way, a way that nobody but me understood half the time. Even when I got the words, I wasn’t always sure what they meant.

My name isn’t “Joe,” by the way, it’s Bob, Bob Smith, but she always got me confused with her brother that she adored, Joe Sargent, long ago passed over. Ignored or even mocked by the bitchy attendants who kept her strapped in her bed, she clung to a pathetic scrap of pride that her brother—or I—used to drive a dinky bus in Massachusetts that connected the Back of Beyond with the Middle of Nowhere.

She thought it was a big deal that he had been allowed to hobnob with “outside folk.” Her religion had been dead set against contact with non-believers, and only a few special people were allowed to “swim beyond the school,” as she called any travel outside of Innsmouth. She bitterly regretted that she had been forced to swim way beyond the school and, what with one thing and another, never swam back.

Her life was pretty dismal. She was brought up in the strict cult that owned her hometown, not much of a town at its best, but she’d loved it. She never recovered from the shock when the Feds invaded and trashed her birthplace. Mom theorized that it was a Prohibition raid that got out of hand when some deputies recruited from nearby towns grabbed the chance to express their prejudice against Innsmouth people. They roughed them up a lot, I guess, but to hear Grandma tell it, they herded people into cellars and set fire to the houses, then opened up with tommy-guns on anyone who tried to escape. But this was the United States of America, after all, and I was sure she had confused real events with movies about Nazis.

They sent her to a camp in Oklahoma, where she said a lot of people died of “separation from the Great Mother,” which meant they missed the ocean. Swimming was a sacrament to these people.

Franklin D. Roosevelt inherited the mess when he came into office in 1932 and was reportedly horrified, although he had bigger problems on his mind at the time. Even though a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, Marcus Allen Coolidge, tried to prevent or delay their release, the president just closed the camp with as little fuss as possible, leaving the inmates to find their own way home. I guess having a few hundred more bums on the road during the Great Depression seemed preferable to letting J. Edgar Hoover run a concentration camp.

Funny thing about that: Grandma insisted that Hoover had Innsmouth blood, that he had “the look,” and that he persecuted his own people because they reminded him of a heritage he rejected, But she was always claiming famous people as “really one of us,” Gloria Swanson and Edward G. Robinson, for instance. The only famous person she claimed to be certain about was Albert Fish, a cannibal and serial child-killer who went to the electric-chair in 1936.

She tried to make her way back east by hopping freight-trains, a pretty rough way for a woman to get around, though not all that uncommon in those days. It was not the most direct way to get anywhere, and with stops at jails and hobo-jungles, with detours that took her from Louisiana to Minnesota, she finally gave up when she got to Seattle. It was the wrong side of the continent, she said, but it was near an ocean.

There she met a fisherman named Newman, a bastard who married Grandma for no other reason than the universal superstition that her people had a way with fish. You can say “Innsmouth” to a trawlerman from Norway or Japan and, if he’s old enough, you’ll get a startled look of recognition, even though he usually doesn’t want to talk about it. Newman used to take her along on his boat as a good-luck charm. When he didn’t catch anything, he would beat her.

Grandma started to go round the bend after Mom was born, but it was fifteen years before Newman put her away. Mom left home not long after, and I was twelve years old before she made an effort to locate her mother and visit her.

I nagged her into doing it, because I have always been intensely curious about my roots. As far back as I can remember, I felt different from other people. I used to daydream about the magnificent welcome l would get when my real parents—the King and Queen of Mars, maybe—tracked me down. I had night-time dreams of flying, or maybe swimming, through the stupendous galleries of a twilight city like nothing I had even heard about on earth. I believe I had those dreams even before I was exposed to some of Grandma’s wilder ravings.

For Mom, the reunion was shattering. “God, she’s ugly! And she’s crazy as a bedbug.” Mom shivered with loathing. “And she smells.” She cried all the way home on the bus. Later I would sometimes catch her looking at me in a strange way, as if trying to decide whether I was starting to take after Grandma.

She wanted nothing more to do with her mother. I believed she would have forbidden me to visit her if I asked, so I never asked. Knowing I was different, I learned early to protect my secrets and wriggle around the rules made for other people. In case you think I’m bragging, nobody even suspected me when I finally helped her escape, to say nothing of other things I’ve managed to get away with. But in those days I got to see Grandma once or twice a month by making up stories or skipping school to walk and hitchhike my way to the nursing-home, which was way out near Issaquah.

I didn’t think she was ugly, I thought she was beautiful, so sleek and graceful in her old-fashioned way. Her huge eyes would transfigure her face when she talked about her home and her beliefs and seemed actually to be gazing on the vasty deep. I didn’t think she was completely crazy, either, not when her stories raised echoes from my own dreams. As for smelling bad, that was the fault of the attendants, but I would raise hell whenever I went there until they cleaned her up and tended the sores from her restraints. Even when I was a kid, people knew I meant business when I looked at them in a certain way.

Since I was so different from other people, it stood to reason that my religion must be different from theirs, so I embraced Grandma’s. I only wish I’d listened harder and understood more, and that Grandma’s ordeal hadn’t left her so confused. The story about the beautiful princess sleeping under the sea, waiting for me to wake her with the stones and the baptism, fueled my teen-age masturbation fantasies. I hated to consider the possibility that this was all wrong, that Grandma had mixed up her religion with the story of Sleeping Beauty.

Even though I searched every library and old bookshop in Washington and Oregon, even though I wrote dozens of letters to professors and churchmen, I never found any solid information about the beliefs and practices of the Esoteric Order of Dagon. Maybe there just weren’t any more Dagonites.

Maybe I was the last one.

“My Grandma’s brother used to drive this bus.”

The driver glanced at me with annoyance.

“Not this bus, I mean, one that traveled the same route between Newburyport and Innsmouth in the old days, before—”

“See that sign? Don’t talk to the driver,” he said in the flat, Yankee way that reminds me of ducks quacking.

“You still don’t much take kindly to Innsmouth folks around here, do you?”

“Sure, we do.” At last I got a sort of smile out of him in the rear-view mirror as he added, “Because there ain’t any.”

I believed him. It was hard to imagine a romantically ruined town and its otherworldly cultists in this wasteland of stripmalls and Dairy Queens, where summer shacks had been converted into year-round homes for people who couldn’t afford trailers. In this clutter that had been dumped willy-nilly onto a strangled marshland, you knew you were nearing the sea only when the junked automobiles in the yards gave way to junked boats, when the handwritten, cardboard signs in the windows said LIVE BAIT instead of BEAUTY SALON.

The last of the other passengers had got off at a mall with a K-Mart a few miles back. I had studied them all guardedly for any resemblance to Grandma, or maybe to myself, but they were nothing but long-chinned, quacking Yankees in John Deere hats or pastel hair-rollers. Nobody but me was going all the way to Innsmouth. I would have liked to ask the bus driver if he thought I had “the look,” but maybe his attitude said it all.

My own look is pretty damned odd, ever since alopecia hit me like a truck last year. Some people with the disease can brazen it out: yeah, I got no hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes, this is how I look, so fuck you, Jack. I admire such people, I even like their clean, smooth appearance, but I have spent my lifetime trying to blend in, so that’s not my way. Besides, I couldn’t have done that even if I’d wanted to, not after the onset of psoriasis a few months later. A perfectly bald head might go unremarked, but a perfectly bald, peeling head draws jeers in the street from children.

One alternative is to use false hair, and that might pass muster if you are rich enough to afford a very good rug and have the skill and patience of a makeup-artist. I wasn’t rich. Pop had called himself an entrepreneur, which meant he would start doomed businesses and run them, or get me to run them—like the famous Ice Kween Ice Kreem Co.—until he got bored or they failed. After he died and I sorted out his disastrous affairs, I was left with a second-hand record shop in one of Seattle’s more blighted areas, which I hung onto because I thought it would be a good way to find girls. I hadn’t realized that it’s mostly guys who buy old records. Correction: mostly guys who shoplift them.

A second alternative is to look for miracle cures. The first doctor I consulted had told me the brutal truth, that my hairlessness was hereditary and incurable, tough luck. He was more hopeful but no more helpful about the rash, which he said I would have until it went away. That didn’t stop me from going around in my cheap wig, often-crooked eyebrows and ruddled face to every charlatan in the phone book.

None of them helped, but a Dr. Errol, who went to the trouble of asking for my medical and personal history, had heard about Innsmouth. He was up on all the angles of squeezing money out of patients, insurance companies and the government, and he urged me to apply for assistance under the Kennedy-Keaton Act. I didn’t imagine it would be as simple as filling out a form and cashing a check, but I was floored by what I did get by registered mail within two days:

Pursuant to provisions of the Federal Reparations Art of 1962, as amended in 1994, which offers compensation to residents of Innsmouth, MA, or their legal heirs or assigns for actions by agents of the U.S. Government on or about February 14, 1928, et seq., you are required to present yourself to the Field Office of the US. Public Health Service, 291 N Eliot St., Innsmouth, MA 01939-1750. in order to duly process your claim. Failure to appear is punishable by a fine of not more than ten thousand dollars ($10,000) and/or imprisonment for up to five (5) years.

Food lodging and appropriate clothing will be provided for approximately ten (10) days while you undergo such tests and interviews as are required by law. Additionally, you are permitted to bring any personal effects which may be carried in a case no larger than 40X30x7.62 cm. and weighing no more than 2.3 kg. The importation of photographic equipment, audio or video recording devices, firearms or other weapons, alcohol, tobacco, combustible materials or controlled substances into the Facility is prohibited by law and punishable by a fine of not more than ten thousand dollars ($10,000) and/or imprisonment for up to Five (5) years.

At the time of your induction into the Facility, you will be required to present your birth certificate, Social Security card and photographic ID (Passport, state driver’s license, or Other deemed acceptable by the Examiner), current bank and credit-card statements, along with any documentation in the form of personal letters, diaries, family photographs, etc., that may relevate to your claim. Additionally, it is required that you complete the enclosed Questionnaire, Medical Release Forms and Waiver of Liability and return them, duly signed and notarized, to the above address, postmarked no later than five (5) business days from receipt of this communication.

Failure to comply with this notice or any of its provisions or with any rules, regulations or provisions not explicitized herein, is punishable by a fine of not more than ten thousand dollars ($10,000.00) and/or imprisonment for a period of up to five (5) years.

(signed) I.M. Saltonstall, M.D.

Field Director

Innsmouth Facility

U.S. Public Health Service.

Because I am the way I am, my first thought when I got this horrifying letter was to change my name and make a run for the Fiji Islands. Not only did I vividly recall Grandma’s stories about tommy-guns and concentration-camps, I had my own reasons for avoiding government scrutiny. No amount of money was worth this kind of grief.

But…. I had always wanted to visit Innsmouth. I had been held back by the fear of barging in where outsiders were mistrusted. This summons gave me a legitimate reason to visit my ancestral home and question people who might have answers. My clerk could run the record-shop at least as well as I could in my absence, and the government promised in fine print to pay my travel expenses.

I had misgivings about the tone of the summons, but I told myself that was how bureaucrats did things, and I still believed that I wasn’t living in the People’s Republic of China. I filled out all the forms as honestly as I dared and sent them off. I actually began looking forward to my trip. I would go by bus and see the country. It would be the first real vacation I ever had, and it would be free.

Was it too much to hope that I might at last meet the torpid beauty beneath the sea, Mother Hydra, the Ice Kween who would be woken by my kisses and the special stones?

The jolting of the bus mused me from a half-doze. The road had become narrow and pot-holed, and on either side the marshland reasserted itself. Black little creeks ran through it, with here and there a boat forlornly anchored. I wondered how the owners could get to and from them in the trackless swamp without using other boats, and I laughed silently at the picture of confusion this evoked.

I was shocked to discover the bus-driver studying me sourly in the mirror. I wiped the smile from my face and tried to check my wig and eyebrows without seeming to.

My embarrassment vanished when I realized that the ocean shimmered before me through the windshield. The sight has always stirred profound emotions within me, the nameless but powerful feelings evoked in others by great music or poetry, and this, the Atlantic, the very ocean of my dreams, stirred me as I never had been before. I sat up straighter and wriggled for a better look, wishing the driver were the sort of person who would have let me run forward to gaze out beside him.

Then, in the foreground, I saw the town.

I had assumed it would be not much different from other depressed towns I had glimpsed on the way. Despite hard times and a genuine disaster in the past, the indomitable Yankees would have put a bold face on things and got on with their God-given mission to make money. Seaside real estate was worth something, wherever it might be, and I had half-expected to be affronted by a welter of marinas and condos, with maybe a theme-park, a water-slide and a gauntlet of shack-up motels. In my worst imaginings, the weird charm of the town would have been buried under a Sea-Tac Strip East that stretched all the way to Boston, complete with hookers who quacked like ducks.

I was wrong. The Feds had killed it seventy years ago, and it was still dead. Toward the beach, where you might have expected some rebuilding, the devastation was complete. The burnt-out shells of industrial buildings remained, but the sites of former houses were marked only by free-standing chimneys and clogged cellar-holes.

Just before we reached the bottom of a hill and the oceanfront dropped out of view, I noticed a metallic glimmer stitching the rubble. It looked like a fence topped with razor-wire, separating the seaward ruins from the rest of Innsmouth. Oddly, it looked shiny and new.

After contemptuously scrawling the receipt I required and ignoring my sarcastically cheerful promise to see him in a week or so, the driver dropped me at the Gilman House in Town Square, a once-gracious building in the Georgian mode whose upper windows, like most of the shops in the square, had been boarded up.

The clerk looked like a forlorn refugee from Woodstock who took his style from David Crosby, his tie knotted loosely as if worn under protest. As a further comment on his job and perhaps the town itself, his tie bore a reproduction of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. He asked suspiciously, “Will you be checking in, Sir?”

“No, I have to stay at the Facility on Eliot Street, but can I check this bag here?”

“That Public Health thing?” His desire to peer closely at me struggled painfully with one to retreat beyond the range of contagion.

You see many people going that way?”

“None at all until lately. Then a couple weeks ago, four or five turned up. And there was a girl last week, Ms. Gilman, just like the hotel, she asked for directions.” He added, as if to distinguish her from me and the others, “She was nice.”

He put a receipt on the counter beside my ten-dollar bill, which he hadn’t picked up.

“Hey, if you see Mr. Marsh out there, ask him what he wants done with his suitcase. We can’t hang onto it forever, and I ain’t heard a word from him since he left it.”

Marsh, Gilman: these were both names from the old days. I was unprepared for a stirring of what you might call nostalgia-by-proxy. I looked away for a moment, and the seedy lobby was dimmed by tears. At last, I would actually get to meet some of my people!

“What’s chances of getting in a swim before I go?”

“We got no pool. You’d have to go to the Ramada out on 1-A—”

“No, no, I meant in the ocean. Is there anyplace by the beach to change?”

“You don’t want to swim in the ocean here. Well, maybe you do, but you can’t. Everything east of the Old Square has been off limits since I been here, and that’s twenty years come September.”

“Off limits?” I’d seen the fence, but still the authoritarian phrase surprised me.

“Didn’t you see that burnt-out area? An Air Force plane crashed. Back in the nineteen-fifties, I think it was, a terrible tragedy, wrecked half the town, and it was carrying a bomb they never found. I ain’t caught myself glowing in the dark yet, so I guess it’s safe enough here, but you don’t want to go swimming in nookie-leer waste. That’s why you’re here for that Public Health thing, ain’t you? Children of people who got zapped?”

“I guess,” I said, hiding my amusement. “Are any people still living here from the old days? People named Marsh, or Gilman, or Sargent?”

“Some, I think, but you really want to ask Old Lady Waite, she’s our local expert. Most of the people in town now are Portuguese, they came here to fish, only they have to go to Marblehead to do it on account of the pollution. But they live here because houses are really cheap.”

“Where would I find her?”

“You want to go down Bank Street, that’s the second left as you leave the hotel, and you can’t miss her house, it’s the only one on the river side of the street. Past her house, you hang a left on Adams, and that’ll take you into Eliot. But the Facility is a long walk, it’s halfway back to Ipswich, and Larry, that’s our only cab-driver, he took a fare to Boston this morning and ain’t come back yet.”

“I don’t mind the walk. I’d like to do some sight-seeing.”

He withheld comment, even though I knew he wanted to make one.

Leaving the hotel, I happened to glance back through the streaked glass of the door. The clerk hadn’t touched my money or my bag before I left, and I now observed him taking the bag from the counter. He had first wrapped his hand in a red bandanna to protect it from germs. Or radiation.

A Portuguese bar at the corner of Bank Street, outside of which a few swarthy loafers muttered about me to one another, marked the apex of Innsmouth’s social scene. Beyond that point, the houses on the left side guarded their inhabitants behind drawn shades, lulling them with a varied chorus of air-conditioners. Here and there shadows would stir at windows as I walked up the steep street, but the residents were good at concealing themselves. I saw no one, not even a hand at a drape as it shifted.

Above a picture-postcard falls, the Manuxet grew far more energetic and noisy than any human as it raced between bulkheaded banks, and even frightening. The river had penetrated the ancient pilings to undermine the footway on the right. Gaps yawned in the sidewalk. I’m sure the road was next on its list, then the buttoned-up houses, until it swept all of Innsmouth and then New England out to sea. Its continuous roar, made up of a million gurgles and mutters, was alarmingly loud as it echoed off the blank house-fronts, and I seemed to eavesdrop on a wealth of incomprehensible conversations in a din that threatened at any moment to become clear.

I stayed to the left-hand side, but no one came out, as I half-expected, to glare at me and demand that I account for myself. In the far distance a lonely dog barked an interminable litany of grievances that probably had nothing to do with my return to the seat of my ancestors.

The river roared more loudly, constricted by a granite outcropping of the bank where some scruffy woods and a small cottage, the only house on the river side, clung perilously in a fine, perpetual mist. The house was very old, to judge by the small, lead-filled windows of imperfect glass, and I fancied that its unpainted cedar shakes might have been made with an ax. It was oddly out of proportion, as many old New England houses seem to me, with the single story dwarfed by a bloated chimney and roof.

I knocked, then repeated it before the door opened. I took a step back from a disturbing figure, a tall, slim and impenetrably veiled woman.

“Excuse me, my name is—”

“No, don’t tell me. It’s Sargent isn’t it? You could be Joe, just a couple years before he passed over.”

And hers could have been my Grandma’s voice, either because of a local accent or locally hereditary quirk. Before I even suspected that I might, I burst into tears.

“Alma Sargent was my Grandma, yes, Joe’s sister, but my name is Bob Smith,” I said when I could speak.

“Bob is a good name, a real Innsmouth name. Come in, Bob.”

I was about to sit in a straight chair opposite her rocker when she demanded, “What’s that you got in your pocket?”

“Nothing,” I mumbled, feeling like a trapped kid.

“Show me! In the name of Mother Hydra!”

She was definitely not a lady I could refuse. I pulled out the three pyramidal chunks of granite that had caught my eye on the way to her house. She studied them closely, then spat on them and held them tight in her gloved hand for a moment as if willing them to reveal their secrets. “These are okay,” she said at last, handing them back. “These’ll do.” She added playfully, “Figure on finding somebody to baptize while you’re in town, Bob?”

“Well.” I coughed, looked away, wondered if my rash was bad enough today to hide my blushing.

“I see you follow the old ways, that’s good. I expect Alma taught you? It’s a cryin’ shame you can’t do the baptizing out on Devil Reef, like Our Lord intended, but the Navy blasted the bejesus out of it in twenty-eight. But if you do it with the right spirit, you can perform a baptism even out in the middle of Kansas.”

I had spent sleepless nights struggling with that point of theology, and her words took an enormous weight off my soul.

Before I could thank her, she said, “Love that name! Bob. I do believe I can prophesy a truly glorious future for you. So tell me all about yourself, Bob.”

I did. My God! I never thought I could have revealed such secrets to a stranger unless I had gone stark, raving mad, but they just tumbled out. And she accepted them. Instead of ordering me out or screaming for help, Old Lady Waite nodded and murmured… approval. Often I knew that she was smiling gently behind her veil, amused by my account of my clumsy efforts to be true to my heritage, but her amusement was in no way contemptuous.

Even as I spoke so unguardedly, I wondered about the spell she had cast over me. The unfamiliar emotion I felt was as strong as love is reputed to be, but it would be crazy to suppose that I had fallen in love with a woman almost three times my age whose face was veiled. She was in fact concealed completely in dark, old-fashioned clothing, and might have been a mannikin if she hadn’t murmured from time to time, if her rocker hadn’t moved rhythmically.

I was forced to the conclusion that I felt at home, and that I had never felt that way anywhere, not even in my boyhood home with my own parents. The feeling seemed to be generated by a combination of subtle influences that I didn’t perceive until I tried hard to sort them out. Nothing around me, not the spare furniture of colonial design, the home-hooked rugs on the mirror-polished floor with its wide and irregular boards, the huge, unlit fireplace that doubled as an oven with its iron doors, was inconsistent with the eighteenth century, a time that has always seemed more congenial to me. I saw no television set, no tawdry magazines, no brightly-packaged products of mass consumption. I believed that the unlit lamps were fueled by kerosene, for I saw no electrical outlets or wires. Despite the absence of air conditioning, the house was comfortably cool and dank behind its small windows, beaded by the river’s mist, and under its huge roof this atmosphere, together with an indefinable odor that came from the woman herself and all she had touched, must have been responsible for my profound sense of comfort.

But none of these factors really explained my feelings as well as my first impression, that I had fallen under a magical spell.

“Alma must have passed over,” she said. “I’m surprised she hasn’t come by. We were best friends, and I thought she’d just love to tease me about the long time I’m taking.”

“It was fourteen years ago when I helped her with the last rites, but it was a long ways off. Puget Sound.”

“Oh! Then I expect she’ll be by one of these days.”

“Actually it was a river that runs into the Sound,” I admitted a bit guiltily. I have a deep aversion against speaking the name, but I forced myself: “The Green River.”

The name provoked no special reaction. She just said, “Fresh water is okay.”

“But pretty swift.”

Her laughter was surprisingly youthful. “This river out here is pretty swift, but it doesn’t stop old friends from coming to call on me when they’re of a mind.”

“Do you suppose I could…?”

“Meet them? Sure, why not! How long you plan to be in town? You can stay right here with me, so’s not to miss anyone.”

“I wish I could, but I came here to take advantage of the federal reparations. I have to stay at—”

“Not the Facility! Oh, my,” she groaned. She stopped rocking for the first time since she’d sat down.

“What? What’s wrong? The program was sponsored by President Kennedy, and he seemed—”

“He was a friend to our kind, a real true friend. You ever wonder how he happened to survive so long in the ocean, injured as he was, after his PT-boat got sunk? And did you ever see a picture of his daddy’s mistress, Gloria Swanson? Those eyes of hers say it all, if you know what to look for. But what he seems mostly now is dead, and laws have a way of getting amended. This one got amended with bells on, to say nothing of books and candles. The Facility caught some local folks when they first set up shop, but I saw right through them, and I wanted no part of it. I told that wicked Dr. Saltonstall take his stethoscope and stick it. Fortunately Ramon Medeiros, he’s the mayor now, is a good friend to all of us, and he’s moving heaven and earth to get that place shut down.” She chuckled. “He leaves the sea to me. I’d give Ramon a call right now if l had one of those goddamn telephone machines—”

Someone knocked on the door. It was a loud, peremptory, no-nonsense knock.

“I bet that’s not Ed McMahon and Dick Clark, come to make me rich,” she said.

“What should I do? Is the back—”

“You don’t really suppose they’re not out there, too, do you? If you were foolish enough to sign anything you better go, because Uncle Sam is an alligator: dumb as hell and easy to avoid, but once he gets his jaws set, he won’t let go. Your best bet is to go along with them now so you don’t get hurt, and let me do what I can on the outside.”

The sight waiting for me at the door was unnerving, for the heavy-set older man and his grinning, dapper companion bore a skewed likeness to the pitchmen she had named.

“Mr. Smith?” the dapper one said. “We heard you might need a lift to the Facility.”

“Want to go for a nice ride, too, Mrs. Waite?” the other one said to the woman standing just behind me. “That would save everybody a lot of hassle.”

“You don’t know what hassle is, sonny-boy. You’ll find out if you do Mr. Smith, here, any harm.”

“Harm? We’re here to help you people, don’t you understand? How long do you think you can fuck with the U.S. Government?”

“How deep is the ocean?” she laughed.

“Ed” hummed the tune she had quoted all during the ride. It was proof that spells of a sort really can be cast on others, and I tried to take that as a good omen.

I was unprepared for the Facility, a Victorian fantasy of sooty bricks that managed to look both brutal and whimsical, a bad combination. The high fence around the grounds, capped with broken glass, was part of the original design, but the electronic gate looked brand new. The guard who controlled it was armed. As I was hurried up the front steps, I saw that the new sign over the door only partly concealed the original name in bas-relief:

MANUXET ASYLUM FOR THE INSANE.

The interior corridors were huge and ill-lit, wainscotted in dark wood and smelling of dust, disinfectant and century-old misery. Most alarming was the emptiness. Except for my escort and a few attendants who were trying to avoid notice or look busy, I suspected that I might be the only one here.

This suspicion was born out in the days that followed, but I didn’t regret my isolation. The first thing they did was take away my false hair and give me a chemical shower that aggravated my rash. Bald and scabrous, clad in an orange jump-suit, I might have been an imperfectly fashioned android under study by the normally-dressed people and white-uniformed keepers who hustled me here and there to determine where my creation had gone wrong. Under these circumstances, I wanted to meet no one whose opinion might have mattered to me.

Forced to choose the one thing about the Facility I liked least, I would have picked Dr. Isaac Mordecai Saltonstall, the director. A long-faced, long-fingered scarecrow in tweeds, he treated me like a child, or worse. Sometimes when he stared at me blankly over his tented fingers I imagined he was trying to decide whether to have me gassed now or later. At least he didn’t quack, but he swallowed his vowels, except for an occasional “a” as broad as a barn door. His diplomas said he had gone to Harvard and identified him, curiously enough, as a psychiatrist.

“The Seattle police questioned you in July of eighty-three and again in September of that year,” he asked as he studied my distressingly thick dossier.

This was the first time that subject had come up. I was sorely tempted to babble, but I followed the rule I had observed since arriving: say nothing unless asked a direct question. That had always worked with the police.

“Why do you suppose that was?” he said at last.

“I guess they were being thorough.”

“But why you?”

“I was there.”

“At the murders?”

That was a low blow, but I took it without flinching. “No, not at the murders!” It seemed reasonable to inject a little anger into my voice. “I drove by the Strip, where many of the girls were abducted, in my ice-cream truck every day. The hookers were my customers, I recognized some of the victims. Maybe the Green River Killer was a customer, too. But it turned out I couldn’t help. I was never a suspect!”

“No need to get excited,” Dr. Saltonstall said: ‘We have to be thorough, too. Now your grandmother went missing from the nursing-home not long before the first murder, didn’t she?”

“She wandered off, yes.”

“You didn’t help her pass over, did you?”

I tried to conceal my shock at his use of these words with more anger: “What, killed my Grandma? I loved her!”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Yes, you did. People use euphemisms for dying, like pass over. Do you think I helped her commit suicide or something?”

“People do?”

“Other people. I always try to say what I mean. So, do I get my money? When do I get out of here?”

“Do you still have your rocks?”

The previous interviews had covered only medical details. I guess he had been trying to lull my suspicions. Today he was coming at me from all sides, jabbing me where I least expected it.

“Rocks?”

“You had some rocks in your pocket when you came here.”

“Oh. Those.” I made a show of searching the deep pocket of the jump-suit. “Yeah.”

“Why do you carry rocks in your pocket?”

Better than in my head you know-it-all son of a bitch! “I picked them up in town.” I smiled. “Genuine Innsmouth rocks. Souvenirs. I don’t know why I do it. If I see an odd-shaped rock or a bird-feather, or, I don’t know, an unusual bottle-cap, I pick it up. For luck, I guess.”

He wrote something in my dossier. If he had believed me, it was “obsessive-compulsive.”

“Where is everybody?” I asked, deciding to go on the offensive. “Do you have a Mr. Marsh here?”

“He left. How do you know him?”

“The clerk at the hotel told me he never returned for his bag. If he left here, why didn’t he go back for it?”

He wrote something else: Have clerk killed? No, the hotel-clerk was one of their spies. He must have told them I was at Old Lady Waite’s house.

“Mr. Marsh left the day you arrived. He probably picked up his bag after you spoke to the clerk.”

It pleased me that his lie should be so transparent, but maybe it shouldn’t have. Maybe he didn’t care if he was believed by a man who would soon follow Mr. Marsh into limbo.

“What about a girl named Gilman?”

“Ondine Gilman? She’s here. Haven’t you met her?”

“No,” I said evenly, “I haven’t.”

“It’s a big place. You’re sure to run into her.”

It was no surprise at all when I went to enter the cafeteria that evening and saw, for the first time, another person seated at one of the plastic tables. She wore a jump-suit like mine, but she exhibited no pathological symptoms.

I was reluctant to enter, not just because of my appearance but because I knew that she or I, or both, was being manipulated by Dr. Saltonstall. I forced myself.

“Ondine Gilman,” she responded when I brought a tray to her table and introduced myself.

“Really?”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. I heard the name, and I thought… well, I thought Dr. Saltonstall might have planted an impostor.”

She laughed. “He makes me paranoid, too.”

She tried to avoid looking at me directly, but I stared hard at her. Her blue eyes were large and rather protuberant, but not so much as Grandma’s or mine. I saw no hint of extra skin between her fingers, no rash, and certainly no alopecia: her auburn hair was real.

“You don’t look like an Innsmouth person,” I said.

She grimaced. “I’m not. And since they know I’m not, I wonder why the hell I’m still here!”

She had raised her voice for the benefit of the bored server at the counter, but he continued to look bored.

“It’s none of my business—”

“Sure it is, we’re in this together. You’d think if they won’t let me go home, they’d at least let me have a goddamn cigarette, it’s not as if this place is bursting at the seams with people whose lungs I can pollute. Why can’t I go home?”

The last remark, in her flattest, hardest quack, was also addressed to the server, who retreated to the kitchen without comment.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“If you’re not an Innsmouth person—”

“Then why am I here? It’s embarrassing. No, it isn’t, it’s funny, actually. My father looked sort of like you before he….”

“Passed over?”

She seemed startled. “That was what he said he was going to do, that’s the phrase he used. Only he didn’t die, he ran away. I never knew why, but maybe I do now.”

“Why?”

“He wasn’t my father, that’s why. They found that out as soon as they took my first blood-test, and then they confirmed it with DNA. My father, Wade Gilman, had Innsmouth parents, but my biological father must’ve been the mailman or somebody. I never even suspected that until they took the blood-test, but maybe my father suspected it long before, and that’s why he left.”

She strove for a light tone, but her voice shook. I said, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s a bitch. I just came here to get some money for art school in Providence, so they lock me up without cigarettes and tell me my mother was screwing around. Have they put you in the tank yet?”

“What’s that?”

“They truss you up and dump you in a tank full of water to see how long you can hold your breath. They make damn sure you’re not faking, too, they keep you under till you pass out. And they do it again and again. They put me in the tank even after they knew I wan’t a Kermie!”

“A what!”

“I’m sorry, that’s not nice, I guess. That’s what they call Smouthies—Innsmouth people, I mean—in Rowley, where I come from. For Kermit the Frog?”

“Why don’t they let you leave?”

“That’s my question, Dr. Einstein!” Annoyed by the close scrutiny I had given her, she stared back at me and added coldly: “You’ve got enough problems of your own, I guess.”

“There were some other people—applicants—when you came here, weren’t there?”

“Oh, yeah, this place was really hopping….” She looked as if she wanted to bite her tongue.

“They looked like me, you mean?”

“No, I meant…. Okay, if that’s what you want, they looked like you.” She didn’t like being put on the defensive, and she stopped trying to hide her contempt for me. “It should have been obvious that I didn’t belong.”

“What happened to them?

She shrugged. “One day they were gone. We didn’t become best friends. Nobody said good-bye. I guess they just took their money and hopped away.”

“Did you see them leave?”

“No.” She glanced uneasily toward the counter, but we were still alone. “What’s your point?”

“Maybe they didn’t leave.”

“Huh? Oh, come on! You mean they killed them?” Her surprise was overdone. I think she had considered that possibility on her own and was trying to reject it. “But they wouldn’t kill me. I’m not like them!”

“I guess it was all a terrible mistake,” I said mildly. “They’ll ask you to promise not to tell anybody that they tortured you, or that all the Kermies disappeared, and let you go. Tomorrow, probably.”

“You son of a bitch. Being sarcastic doesn’t help.”

“Do you want to go? Without waiting for them to tidy up all the paperwork, or whatever it is they say they’re doing?”

“Damn. Are you serious? You don’t look exactly like a….”

“A knight in shining armor?”

“A man of action, I was going to say.”

“My looks are deceptive.” This misplaced nitwit had irritated me. Born in an earlier time, she would have egged on the thugs who massacred the detested “Smouthies.” My tone was bitter as I added, “Just think of me as the Frog Prince.”

“Jesus, don’t look at me like that!” She failed to repress a shudder. “I think I believe you.”

The second floor of the wing where my room lay had originally comprised four cavernous wards, but the one on the end had been divided with drywall into thirty cubicles under a false ceiling, each barely large enough to contain a single bed, plastic chair and fiberboard writing-desk, all of them bolted in place to discourage their use as weapons. A reproduction of a bland Matisse seascape was similarly bolted to the brick exterior wall. Mine could be considered a first-class accommodation, I suppose, since it shared one of the old madhouse windows, heavily barred and screened, with an adjoining cubicle. Standing on the chair, I had a view of the gatehouse in the distance and, under the window, most of the parking lot.

The door was the most interesting feature of my cell, for it wouldn’t have met the security standards of a dollhouse. I believed the lock could be spread with one of the long but sloppily-installed bolts I had extracted from Matisse. I hadn’t experimented, though, for fear of marking the door or even splintering it.

Swathed as he was in medical degrees and patrician breeding, I don’t think Dr. Saltonstall ever considered that anyone would mistrust him or try to escape his prison. And if they did, his omnipotent drugs would stop them. Every night I had been given a big red capsule that I dutifully swallowed, and every night it knocked me out within ten minutes. Tonight I concealed it under my tongue until I could spit it out.

I lay quietly in my bed for an hour or so until I heard cars starting up, four in succession. I climbed onto the chair and watched as they drove to the gate and were let through. While I watched, the doctor himself strode across the parking lot to his car and left. Two others followed him within the next ten minutes, leaving only one car. When a fat man in uniform trudged from the gatehouse to the main building carrying a brown bag, I was sure the Facility had now shut down for the night.

The gap between the door and the jamb wasn’t as wide as I’d thought. I couldn’t push the bolt in even when I leaned on it with all my weight. I hesitated to hammer it with the heel of my shoe, but I had no choice. If the guard heard me, I told myself, he would assume I was signalling for help and take his time about responding. I had another bad moment when the cheap bolt I was using as a lever seemed on the verge of bending. Again, I had no choice. I pushed harder. The bolt held and the door sprang open.

I had the freedom of their new, plasterboard corridor, but an insuperable hurdle might remain: the heavy, iron door of the former ward. If they had locked that door—but they hadn’t. This was more of the doctor’s smug faith in drugs, I supposed.

I prowled along the outer corridor, where the only light glowed in an EXIT sign. I heard tinny voices and laughter as I approached the main stairway, where a broad landing overlooked the lobby. The guard I had seen sat at a desk by the front door, watching television and eating a sandwich. It seemed rather melodramatic not to just stroll naturally across the landing, but I tiptoed.

At the end of the next wing I found another ward converted to cubicles, and it seemed likely that this would be the women’s quarters. The first ten doors were unlocked, the rooms empty. When I found the eleventh locked, it seemed likely I would find Ondine Gilman behind it.

This door was just as flimsy as the one on my own cell, and since it opened inward, I believed I could simply kick it open. This worked, but the thunderous crash of the door against the wall made me cringe. I ran to the outer corridor to listen. Minutes passed. I heard nothing except the canned laughter of the television until a human guffaw joined in, testimony that the guard’s attention was fully occupied.

I felt confident enough to snap on the light after I had closed the woman’s door behind me. She didn’t stir.

“Ondine!” I said, and, more loudly, “Miss Gilman!”

Curled on her side, she breathed deeply and evenly. Her breathing didn’t change even when I shook her by the shoulder. I stood considering my options for a moment, then lifted her covers and pushed her green hospital gown above her waist. She continued to sleep soundly even when I peeled her underpants down and extricated her feet.

I wasn’t displeased by what I saw and touched, but I wished I still had my ice-cream truck. An hour in the locker would have done wonders for her superior attitude. I restored everything as it had been except for the panties, indecent, red ones of the sort favored by roadside whores. After using them to wipe the evidence of my visit from her buttocks, I wadded them into my pocket and turned off the light. She continued to breathe evenly.

I was tempted to try the stones for size, but decided she would keep while I explored the Facility.

The stairs marked as an exit led me down to an unguarded rear door. I stepped outside and savored a warm night that was loud with crickets, frogs and… sirens? I strained my ears, but I couldn’t identify the sounds in the distance. They might have been sirens, or even thin screams.

The stairs continued down to the basement, where I knew the medical department was housed. I had been given tests here, but I hadn’t suspected its extent. There was a fully equipped operating theater and other rooms that held machines liberally plastered with radiation warnings.

The last room, and the largest, was obviously a morgue. Nevertheless it was a shock to pull out a drawer and find a naked body. And a second. And a third. And…. They were Innsmouth people, every one of them, and they were dead. I couldn’t say what had killed them, but they had all been stitched up crudely after autopsies.

My knees wobbled, the room swam, and without further warning I found myself throwing up until my stomach clenched down on itself like a hard, painful, empty fist.

My shock and sickness gave way to fury. I raged down the line, pulling out drawer after drawer. Fifteen of them. Twenty! Someone would pay, someone would pay dearly. These were my people, my own unique, precious people, standing even further above Saltonstall and his henchmen than those butchers fancied they stood above worms. Left to evolve in peace, they would have shed their simian traits and passed over into magnificent beings who would have lived for all time in the glorious kingdom of the Lord. But now, denied all hope of transfiguration, they were just so many dead chimps.

“Father Dagon!” I screamed. “Mother Hydra! Where were you!”

I came at last upon a drawer whose contents shocked me into stillness. Those evil savages had succeeded in meddling with something they couldn’t even begin to comprehend. It was the ultimate obscenity, a blasphemy for which no human words exist, and I forced my imperfect tongue to struggle with curses that were more appropriate, but still woefully inadequate to the horror. With drugs, with surgery or radiation, they had forced a Deep One to pass over on dry land.

It was huge, and even in its desiccated state it was beautiful, godlike. My hands fumbled reverently over the dry scales, the pathetically limp crest of spikes that should have stood proud. Sobbing bitterly, I promised a hundred sacrifices, a thousand, a holocaust that would rouse Father Dagon and make the sea rise up to the sky and draw down the moon in its awful wrath.

Stroking the massive chest, I realized that I felt no stitches. I looked closely. I saw no obvious wounds at all. I felt no heartbeat or respiration either, but it was possible, just barely, that he had shut down all his systems hard when faced with the horror of a landlocked metamorphosis. As Grandma was so fond of quoting, “That is not dead which can eternal lie….”

I dashed back to the next room, where I had seen a sink. I looked about for a bucket of some kind, but—better! I smashed the glass case holding a firehose, oblivious to the shrieking alarm this set off, and wrenched the wheel over until the hose came to life like a wrathful dragon, spewing a destructive jet that smashed cases of fiendish instruments and foul drugs open and hurled their contents clattering and crashing through the torture-chambers.

I manhandled it back to the morgue and directed the stream on the ceiling above the Deep One, bouncing down a flood of life-giving water on the poor victim.

I didn’t notice when the alarm was silenced. I couldn’t understand why the hose suddenly went limp and dry. Then I became aware of the man quacking furiously at the door to the next room.

“Put that down, you goddamn loony! Drop it, asshole, or you are dead meat!”

I had found what I wanted, a human being to absorb the full force of my rage, and I threw the hose aside and stalked toward him.

“Don’t you realize what you’re doing here!” I screamed. “Don’t you know—”

“I know what I’m doing is catching a goddamn Loony who’s fucking up the hospital. Stop! Stop right now! This here is a .357 Magnum, shit-head, and it’s about to tear out your spine and pin it to the far wall. I am not joking with you.”

I stopped. What could I have been thinking of? All hope of escape was lost. Dr. Saltonstall would lock me up tight. More probably he would take no more chances with me, and I would be filling one of these morgue-drawers before lunchtime tomorrow.

“That’s better. Assume the position.”

I knew what he meant. I turned to the wall, leaning forward to support my weight with my hands on a closed drawer. He strutted up behind me and took great delight in kicking my ankles wider apart.

“Scabby son of an Innsmouth bitch,” he snarled, “I’m really hurting to blow your baldy-ass head all over the wall just for laughs, so don’t try nothing, you hear? I just want an excuse to blow one of you scum-suckers away. What the hell you got here?”

He had found the rocks I had been saving, which he hurled on the floor. He thrust his hand into my other pocket and extracted Ondine’s panties. After a moment of baffled silence, he made a gagging noise of utter loathing.

“You goddamn pervert!” he screamed.

The wall hit me in the face, cracking teeth. I only then became aware of a worse pain where he had hit the back of my head with his gun. I wondered how I had wound up on my knees. They hurt, too.

“Bastard bastard bastard!” he screamed, kicking me in the back as if trying to squash a bug to paste. “You got me to touch your goddamn frogspawn jackoff rag—”

He stopped kicking me. I tried to stop my sobbing and groaning so I could hear what he was saying, though his words were strangely muffled. It sounded as if he were choking. Was it too much to hope that he was dying of apoplexy?

I managed to twist my head around. I couldn’t imagine what was happening to him. Most of his face was covered by a wet, black cloth, and he was apparently standing a foot off the floor, his heavy-duty oxfords and white tube-socks jerking spasmodically.

But it was no cloth that covered his face. It was the huge, webbed hand of the dark figure that loomed behind him, the Deep One I had revived.

“Praise Mother Hydra!” I sobbed.

“Praise her name!” a rich, deep, croaking voice responded.

“Sokay, sweetie,” I slurred, dumping Ondine Gilman into a lobby chair of the hotel that, most inaccurately, bore her name. “Jus’ get us a room, okay?”

“Wha… ?Where?”

I leaned forward and, under the pretext of giving her a kiss, pressed her carotid arteries until she lost consciousness again. After changing my modus operandii in the Northwest, I had learned that this was every bit as effective as an ice-cream locker for draining the will of baptismal candidates.

“Excuse me, Sir! Just what—oh. It’s Mr. Smith, isn’t it?”

“Bob. It’s good ol’ Bob,” I said, steering a wayward course for the desk and the clerk I had seen before, the one who had used a bandanna to pick up my bag. He was still wearing his Munch necktie. The image was a deliberate slur against my people.

“What’s going on?”

“Celebrash. Celebration. We’re outta that damn crazy-house.”

“I can see that. What’s going on outside, I meant.”

I pretended to hear the sirens for the first time. And there were indeed screams, too.

“They’re celebratin’, I guess.” I heard a burst of automatic gunfire.

“God!”he cried, starting from behind the desk.

“Hey, wait. Need a room for me and my sweetie.”

“I can’t rent you a room, you’re drunk. And I’m closing.”

“Then gimme my bag,” I said. “Left my bag, remember?”

“Oh. Sure. Then will you go?”

“Drunk, huh?”

“Where am I?” Ondine cried.

“’Sokay, honey.”

He dumped my bag on the counter, forgetting to protect his precious hand from my contagion in his confused haste. He fretted and fussed as I opened it, and he grew even more flustered at another burst of automatic fire in the distance.

“I’m not really drunk,” I said clearly as I pulled the nine-millimeter Browning out of the bag and jacked a Black Talon round into the chamber.

“What?”

“I’m just very different from you, that’s all.”

I put the bullet right through the Screamer’s bald, distorted head and through the clerk’s breastbone.

“I’m coming, dear,” I told Ondine, and hurried over to deprive her simian brain of yet more oxygen.

I was afraid she might not be able to understand what I was doing after I had stripped her and tied her to the bed in the room I had assigned us, but she came around as good as new. Nobody would have paid attention to her screams and curses over the similar noises in Town Square.

I took all the time I wanted to amuse myself, but it surprised me when dawn broke while I was still thrusting into her. I turned and saw that it was a dawn of floodlights, powerful floodlights from the section of town sealed off by razor-wire. The gunfire had become constant, but it seemed as if fewer guns were in use.

“You fucking bastard!” Ondine sobbed.

“You got part of that right,” I grunted, “but I’m the one who’s legitimate, remember!”

“Freak!”

I’d had enough of her and her filthy mouth. I pulled out and rummaged among my clothing for the stones. Her screams found surprising new energy as I inserted them in the secret places, but I managed to ignore her as I recited the words. I’m not sure if the words and the procedure are exactly right, since Grandma explained them fully only at the very last, when she had passed over and was in a fearful hurry to rejoin her people, but I have always used them.

I suspect that any human being who reads this account may think that my baptism of forty-eight women between 1982, the year Grandma passed over, and 1984 was somehow excessive. On the contrary, it was based on an exact calculation of the yearly baptisms Grandma was prevented from performing while she was interned in Oklahoma (four), and while she was confined in the nursing-home (forty-four). Despite all the hard work and laborious planning involved, to say nothing of the danger, I wanted to complete Grandma’s hecatomb and ensure that she was granted full honor among the Deep Ones as quickly as possible. Don’t you think she had suffered long enough and waited long enough already? If you still believe someone should be censured for upsetting the public with such a concentrated flurry of “criminal” activity, you might look to President Herbert Hoover, whose agents disrupted her life and prevented the free exercise of her religion, or to Sidney Newman, my grandfather, who did the same.

It was my turn to scream as the door opened. I recoiled from the figure in black that stood there, but then I saw that it was Old Lady Waite.

“I don’t know what you did, Bob,” she said admiringly, “but you sure stirred up the Host of the Sea. However,” she added as she set a crocheted bag on the bedside table and withdrew a large black book and a butcher-knife, “that’s not really the way to go about this business.” To Ondine she said, “Hush, now, child, this won’t take much longer at all. To baptize your soul we have to separate it from your body. Take heart from the fact that your suffering won’t be wasted. Even now your pain and shame are floating out like incense to feed those whose glory you can’t even begin to comprehend.”

While I watched and listened, she showed me exactly how it should be done.

The flapping roar of helicopters deafened us as we ran through the marsh. They raced toward us, flying barely higher than the reeds. I thought this was the end, but they passed right over us to the town, where they blasted the beach with rockets and cannon-fire.

“They’re killing them!” I cried.

“I doubt it,” Old Lady Waite said. “The Deep Ones are not stupid, you know. They wanted to destroy the Facility and give the boys in the back room something to chew on, and they’ve done it. They’re long gone by now, taking their dead with them. You’ll read in the papers tomorrow how some foreign fishermen got out of line when they thought they saw a sea monster, or maybe a mermaid, and how the dumb state troopers called in an air strike. There’s no fun on earth like reading the papers, if you know what to look for.”

Whatever the papers might say, our position was untenable. Dr. Saltonstall knew what I’d done in the Northwest, he hadn’t just been on a fishing expedition, and he couldn’t be the only one who knew. I had made no attempt to hide the remains of Ondine and the hotel clerk. As for Old Lady Waite, she was sure that they would come hunting for any lingering Dagonites in Innsmouth, whatever the papers might say, with her at the head of their list.

She had kept a small sloop ready for just such an emergency, and now it ghosted through the black creek under a small jib while she steered it expertly.

“Where are we going?”

“You mentioned Fiji. It’s nice there. There’s an island where the Deep Ones mix freely with the people, just like they used to do in Innsmouth. Just like they’ll do again here when this blows over and Ramon does what I told him.”

“We’re going to… to the South Pacific in this?”

“Not we, I’ll be passing over before very long at all.” She laughed at the horror on my face. “What’s the matter, can’t you swim?”

“Yes, of course, but—”

“Don’t worry. I’ll make sure you know how to sail it before I pass over. Then I’ll stick by you, or maybe our friends will.”

Old Lady Waite—but that was merely the name of her larval shell, soon to be discarded as she assumed the glorious form that I came to know and love, in every sense of those words, as Pth’th-l’yl-l’yth.

It was the magnificent soul of that companion and lover-to-be who had guided me, and who now gestured at the black water. I saw nothing at first, then aglow in the depths, a trail of phosphorescence to one side of the boat. A second followed on the other side. Large, submarine creatures escorted us.

∇