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THE INNSMOUTH HERITAGE

The directions Ann had dictated over the phone allowed me to reach Innsmouth without too much difficulty; I doubt that I would have fared so well had I been forced to rely upon the map printed on the end-papers of her book or had I been forced to seek assistance along the way.

While descending from the precipitous ridge east of the town I was able to compare my own impressions of Innsmouth’s appear­ance with the account given by Ann in her opening chapter. When she spoke to me on the phone she had told me that the book’s de­scription was “optimistic” and I could easily see why she had felt compelled to offer such a warning. Even the book had not dared to use the word “unspoiled”, but Ann had done her best to imply that Innsmouth was full of what we in England would call “old world charm”. Old the buildings certainly were, but charming they were not. The present inhabitants—mostly “incomers” or “part-timers”, according to Ann—had apparently made what efforts they could to redeem the houses from dereliction and decay, but the renovated fa­cades and the new paint only succeeded in making the village look garish as well as neglected.

It proved, mercifully, that one of the principal exceptions to this rule was the New Gilman House, where a room had been reserved for me. It was one of the few recent buildings in the village, dating back no further than the sixties. The lobby was tastefully decorated and furnished, and the desk-clerk was as attentive as one expects American desk-clerks to be.

“My name’s Stevenson,” I told him. “I believe Miss Eliot re­served a room for me.”

“Best in the house, sir,” he assured me. I was prepared to be­lieve it—Ann owned the place. “You sound English, sir,” he added, as he handed me a reservation card. “Is that where you know the boss from?”

“That’s right,” I said, diffidently. “Could you tell Miss Eliot that I’m here, do you think?”

“Sure thing,” he replied. “You want me to help you with that bag?”

I shook my head, and made my own way up to my room. It was on the top floor, and it had what passed for a good view. Indeed, it would have been a very good view had it not been for the general dereliction of the waterfront houses, over whose roofs I had to look to see the ocean. Out towards the horizon I could see the white water where the breakers were tumbling over Devil Reef.

I was still looking out that way when Ann came in behind me. “David,” she said. “It’s good to see you.”

I turned round a little awkwardly, and extended my hand to be shaken, feeling uncomfortably embarrassed.

“You don’t look a day older,” she said, hypocritically. It had been thirteen years since I last saw her.

“Well,” I said, “I looked middle-aged even in my teens. But you look wonderful. Being a capitalist obviously suits you. How much of the town do you own?”

“Only about three-quarters,” she said, with an airy wave of her slender hand. “Uncle Ned bought the land for peanuts back in the thirties, and now it’s worth—peanuts. All his grand ambitions to ‘put the place back on the map’ came to nothing. He got tenants for some of the properties he fixed up, but they’re most week-enders who live in the city and can’t afford authentic status symbols. We get a few hundred tourists through during the season—curiosity-seekers, fishermen, people wanting to get away from it all, but it’s hardly enough to keep the hotel going. That’s why I wrote the book—but I guess I still had too much of the dry historian in me and not enough of the sensational journalist. I should have made more of all those old stories, but I couldn’t get my conscience past the lack of hard evidence.”

“That’s what a university education does for you,” I said. Ann and I had met at university in Manchester—the real Manchester, not the place to which fate and coincidence had now brought me—when she was studying history and I was studying biochemistry. We were good friends—in the literal rather than the euphemistic sense, alas— but we hadn’t kept in touch afterwards, until she discovered by acci­dent that I was in New Hampshire and had written to me, enclosing her book with news of her career as a woman of property. I had planned to come to see her even before I read the book, thus finding the excuse that made the prospect even more inviting.

As she watched me unpack, the expression in her grey eyes was quite inscrutable. Politeness aside, she really did look good— handsome rather than pretty, but clear of complexion and stately in manner.

“I suppose your coming over to the States is part of the infa­mous Brain Drain,” she said. “Was it the dollars, or the research fa­cilities that lured you away?”

“Both,” I said. “Mostly the latter. Human geneticists aren’t worth that much, and I haven’t published enough to be regarded as a grand catch. I’m just a foot-soldier in the long campaign to map and understand the human genome.”

“It beats being chief custodian of Innsmouth and its history,” she said, so flatly as to leave no possibility of a polite contradiction.

I shrugged. “Well,” I said, “If I get a paper out of this, it will put Innsmouth on the scientific map, at least—although I doubt that the hotel will get much business out of it. I can’t imagine that there’ll be a legion of geneticists following in my trail.”

She sat down on the edge of the bed. “I’m afraid it might not be so easy,” she said. “All that stuff in the book about the Innsmouth look is a bit out of date. Back in the twenties, when the population of the town was less than four hundred, it may well have been ex­actly the kind of inbred community you’re looking for, but the post­war years brought in a couple of thousand outsiders. In spite of the tendency of the old families to keep to themselves, the majority mar­ried out. I’ve looked through the records, and most of the families that used to be important in the town are extinct—the Marshes, the Waites, the Gilmans. If it hadn’t been for the English branch, I guess the Eliots would have died out too. The Innsmouth look still exists, but it’s a thing of the past—you won’t see more than a trace of it in anyone under forty.”

“Age is immaterial,” I assured her.

“That’s not the only problem. Almost all of those who have the look are shy about it—or their relatives are. They tend to hide them­selves away. It won’t be easy to get them to co-operate.”

“But you know who they are—you can introduce me.”

“I know who some of them are, but that doesn’t mean that I can help you much. I may be an Eliot, but to the old Innsmouthers I’m just another incomer, not to be trusted. There’s only one person who could effectively act as an intermediary for you, and it won’t be easy to persuade him to do it.”

“Is he the fisherman you mentioned over the phone—Gideon Sargent?”

“That’s right,” she said. “He’s one of the few lookers who doesn’t hide himself away, although he shows the signs more clearly than anyone else I’ve seen. He’s saner than most—got himself an education under the G.I. Bill after serving in the Pacific in ’45—but he’s not what you might call talkative. He won’t hide, but he doesn’t like being the visible archetype of the Innsmouth look—he resents tourists gawping at him as much as anyone would, and he always refuses to take them out to Devil Reef in his boat. He’s always very polite to me, but I really can’t say how he’ll react to you. He’s in his sixties now—never married.”

“That’s not so unusual,” I observed. I was unmarried; so was Ann.

“Maybe not,” she replied, with a slight laugh. “But I can’t help harboring an unreasonable suspicion that the reason he never mar­ried is that he could never find a girl who looked fishy enough.”

* * * *

I thought this a cruel remark, though Ann obviously hadn’t meant it to be. I thought it even crueler when I eventually saw Gideon Sargent, because I immediately jumped to the opposite con­clusion: that no girl could possibly contemplate marrying him, be­cause he looked too fishy by half.

The description that Ann had quoted in her book was accurate enough detail by detail—narrow head, flat nose, staring eyes, rough skin and baldness—but could not suffice to give an adequate im­pression of the eerie whole. The old man’s tanned face put me in mind of a wizened koi carp, although I could not tell, at first— because his jacket collar was turned up—whether he had the gill­like markings on his neck that were the last and strangest of the stig­mata of the Innsmouth folk.

Sargent was sitting on a canvas chair on the deck of his boat when we went to see him, patiently mending a fishing-net. He did not look up as we approached, but I had no doubt that he had seen us from afar and knew well enough that we were coming to see him.

“Hello, Gideon,” said Ann, when we were close enough. “This is Dr. David Stevenson, a friend of mine from England. He lives in Manchester now, teaching college.”

Still the old man didn’t look up. “Don’t do trips round the reef,” he said, laconically. “You know that, Miss Ann.”

“He’s not a tourist, Gideon,” she said. “He’s a scientist. He’d like to talk to you.”

“Why’s that?” he asked, still without altering his attitude. “‘Cause I’m a freak, I suppose?”

“No,” said Ann, uncomfortably “of course not....”

I held up my hand to stop her, and said: “Yes, Mr. Sargent,” I said. “That is why, after a manner of speaking. I’m a geneticist, and I’m interested in people who are physically unusual. I’d like to ex­plain that to you, if I may.”

Ann shook her head in annoyance, certain that I’d said the wrong thing, but the old man didn’t seem offended.

“When I were a young’un,” he commented, abstractedly, “there was a man offered Ma a hunnerd dollars for me. Wanned t’put me in a glass tank in some kinda sideshow. She said no. Blamed fool— hunnerd dollars was worth summin then.” His accent was very odd, and certainly not what I’d come to think of as a typical New Eng­land accent. Although he slurred common words, he tended to take more trouble over longer ones, and I thought I could still perceive the lingering legacy of his education.

“Do you know what ‘genetics’ means, Mr. Sargent?” I asked. “I really would like to explain why it’s important that I talk to you.”

At last he looked up, and looked me in the eye. I was ready for it, and didn’t flinch from the disconcerting stare.

“I know what genes are, Doc,” he said, coolly. “I bin a little cu­rious myself, y’know, to fin’ out how I got to be this way. You gonna tell me? Or is that what y’wanner figure out?”

“It’s what I want to figure out, Mr. Sargent,” I told him, breath­ing a slight sigh of relief. “Can I come aboard?”

“Nope,” he replied. “Taint convenient. You at the hotel?”

“Yes I am.”

“See y’there t’night. Quarter of eight. You pay f’r the liquor.” “Okay,” I said. “Thanks, Mr. Sargent. I appreciate it.”

“Don’ mention it,” he said. “An’ I still don’ do trips to the reef. Or pose f’r Jap cameras—you mind me, now, Miss Ann.”

“I mind you, Gideon,” she answered, as we turned away.

As soon as we were out of earshot, she said: “You’re honored, David. He’s never come to the hotel before—and not because no one ever offered to buy him a drink before. He still remembers the old place, and he doesn’t like what Uncle Ned put up in its place, any more than he likes all the colonists who moved in when the vil­lage was all-but-dead in the thirties.”

We were passing an area of the waterfront that looked like a post-war bomb-site—or one of those areas in the real Manchester where they bulldozed the old slums but still haven’t got round to building anything else instead.

“This is the part of the town that was torched, isn’t it?” I said. “Sure is,” she replied. “Way back in ’27. Nobody really knows how it happened, although there are plenty of wild stories. Gang warfare can be counted out—there was no substantial bootlegging hereabouts. Arson for arson’s sake, probably. It’s mostly mine now—Uncle Ned wanted to rebuild but never could raise the fi­nance. I’d sell the land to any developer who’d take it on, but I’m not hopeful about my chances of getting rid of it.”

“Did the navy really fire torpedoes into the trench beyond the reef?” I asked, remembering a story which she’d quoted in her book.

“Depth charges,” she said. “I took the trouble to look up the documents, hoping there’d be something sensational behind it, but it seems that they were just testing them. There’s very deep water out there—a crack in the continental shelf—and it was convenient for checking the pressure-triggers across the whole spectrum of settings. The navy didn’t bother to ask the locals, or to tell them what was going on; the information was still classified then, I guess. It’s not unnatural that the wacky stories about sea-monsters were able to flourish uncontradicted.”

“Pity,” I said, looking back at the crumbling jetties as we began to climb the shallow hill towards Washington Street. “I rather liked all that stuff about the Esoteric Order of Dagon conducting its hide­ous rites in the old Masonic Hall, and Obed Marsh’s covenant with the forces of watery evil.”

“The Esoteric Order of Dagon was real enough,” she said. “But it’s hard to find out what its rituals involved, or what its adherents actually believed, because it was careful not to produce or keep any records—not even sacred documents. It seems to have been one of a group of crazy quasi-gnostic cults which made a big thing about a book called the Necronomicon—they mostly died out at about the time the first fully-annotated translation was issued by the Miskatonic University Press. The whole point of being an esoteric sect is lost when your core text becomes exoteric, I guess.

“As for old Obed’s fabulous adventures in the South Seas, al­most all the extant accounts can be traced back to tales that used to be told by the town character back in the twenties—an old lush named Zadok Allen. I can’t swear that every last detail originated in the dregs of a whisky bottle, but I’d be willing to bet my inheritance that Captain Marsh’s career was a good deal less eventful than it seemed once Zadok had finished embroidering it.”

“But the Marshes really did run a gold refinery hereabouts? And at least some of the so-called Innsmouth jewelry is real?”

“Oh sure—the refinery was the last relic of the town’s industrial heyday, which petered out mid-nineteenth century after a big epi­demic. I’ve looked at the account-books, though, and it did hardly any business for thirty-five or forty years before it closed down. It’s gone now, of course. The few authentic surviving examples of the old Innsmouth jewelry are less beautiful and less exotic than rumor represents, but they’re interesting enough—and certainly not local in origin. There are a couple of shops in town where they make ‘genu­ine imitations’ for tourists and other interested parties—one manu­facturer swears blind that the originals were made by pre-Columbian Indians, the other that they were found by Old Obed during his trav­els. Take your pick.”

I nodded, sagely, as if to say that it was what I’d suspected all along.

“What are you looking for, David?” she asked, suddenly. “You don’t really think that there’s anything in Zadok Allen’s fantasies, do you? You surely can’t seriously entertain the hypothesis that the old Innsmouthers were some kind of weird crossbreed with an alien race!”

I laughed. “No,” I reassured her, with complete sincerely. “I don’t believe that—nor do I believe that they’re some kind of throw­back to our phantom aquatic ancestors. You’d better sit in tonight when I explain the facts of life to old Gideon; the reality is likely to be far more prosaic than that, alas.”

“Why alas?” she asked.

“Because what I’m looking for will only generate a paper. If the folklore quoted in your book were even half-true, it would be worth a Nobel Prize.”

* * * *

Gideon Sargent presented himself at the hotel right on time. He was dressed in what I presumed was his Sunday best, but the en­semble included a roll-neck sweater, which kept the sides of his neck concealed. There were half a dozen people in the bar, and Gideon drew a couple of curious glances from the out-of-towners, but he was only a little self-conscious. He was used to carrying his stigmata.

He drank neat bourbon, but he drank slowly, like a man who had no intention of getting loaded. I asked a few questions to find out exactly how much he did know about genes, and it turned out that he really was familiar with the basics. I felt confident that I could give him a reasonably full explanation of my project.

“We’ve already begun the business of mapping the human ge­nome,” I told him. “The job will require the collective efforts of thousands of people in more than a hundred research centers, and even then it will take fifteen or twenty years, but we have the tools to do it. While we’re doing it, we hope to get closer to the answers to certain basic problems.

“One of these problems is that we don’t know how genes col­laborate to produce a particular physical form. We know how they code for the protein building blocks, but we don’t know much about the biochemical blueprint that instructs a growing embryo how to develop into a man instead of a whale or an ostrich. Now, this may seem odd, but one of the best ways of figuring out how things work is to study examples which have gone wrong, to see what’s missing or distorted. By doing that, you can build up a picture of what’s nec­essary in order for the job to be done properly. For that reason, ge­neticists are very interested in human mutations—I’m particularly interested in those which cause physical malformation.

“Unfortunately, physical mutants usually fall into a few well-defined categories, mostly associated with radical and fairly obvious disruptions of whole chromosomes. There are very few viable hu­man variations that operate on a larger scale than changing the color of the skin, or the epicanthic fold that makes Oriental eyes distinc­tive. That’s not entirely surprising, because those which have arisen in the past have mostly been eliminated from the gene-pool by natu­ral selection, or diluted out of existence by hybridization. It’s one of the ironies of our trade that, while molecular genetics was becoming sophisticated enough to make them significant, the highly inbred communities of the world were disappearing. All we have in Amer­ica is a handful of religious communities whose accumulations of recessive genes aren’t, for the most part, very interesting. As soon as I read Ann’s book I realized that Innsmouth must have been a real genetic treasure-trove back in the twenties. I hope that there still might be time to recover some vital information.”

Gideon didn’t reply immediately, and for a moment or two I thought he hadn’t understood. But then he said: “Not many people got the look any more. Some don’ show it ’til they’re older, but I don’ see much sign of it comin’ thru in anyone I see. Ain’t no Marshes or Waites any more, and the only Eliots”—he paused to look at Ann—“are distant cousins o’ the ones that settled here in the old days.”

“But there are a few others, besides yourself, who show some of the signs, aren’t there?” Ann put in.

“A few,” Gideon admitted.

“And they’d co-operate with Dr. Stevenson—if you asked them to.”

“Mebbe,” he said. He seemed moodily thoughtful, as though something in the conversation had disturbed him. “But it’s too late to do us any good, ain’t it, Doc?”

I didn’t have to ask what he meant. He meant that whatever un­derstanding I might glean from my researches would only be of theoretical value. I wouldn’t be able to help the Innsmouthers look normal.

It was, in any case, extremely unlikely that my work would lead to anything which could qualify as a “cure” for those afflicted with the Innsmouth stigmata, but there was really no longer any need for that. The Innsmouthers had taken care of the problem themselves. I remembered what I’d said about gross malformations being elimi­nated from the gene-pool by natural selection, and realized that I’d used the word “natural” in a rather euphemistic way—as many peo­ple do nowadays. The selective pressure would work both ways: the incomers who’d re-colonized Innsmouth after the war would have been just as reluctant to marry people who had the Innsmouth look as people who had the Innsmouth look would have been to pass it on to their children.

Gideon Sargent was certainly not the only looker who’d never married, and I was sure that he wouldn’t have, even if there’d been a girl who looked like he did.

“I’m sorry, Gideon,” I said. “It’s a cruel irony that your ances­tors had to suffer the burden of ignorance and superstition because genetics didn’t exist, and that now genetics does exist, there’s not much left for you to gain from a specific analysis of your condition. But let’s not underestimate the value of understanding, Gabriel. It was because your forefathers lacked a true understanding that they felt compelled to invent the Esoteric Order of Dagon, to fill the vac­uum of their ignorance and to maintain the pretence that there was something to be proud of in Innsmouth’s plight. And that’s why sto­ries like the ones Zadok Allen used to tell gained such currency— because they provided a kind of excuse for it all. I’m truly sorry that I’m too late to serve your purposes, Gideon—I only hope that I’m not too late to serve mine. Will you help me?”

He looked at me with those big saucery eyes, so uncannily frightening in their innocence.

“Is there anythin’ y’can do, Doc?” he asked. “Not about the bones, nor the eyes—I know we’re stuck wi’ them. But the dreams, Doc—can y’do anythin’ about the dreams?”

I looked sideways at Ann, uncertainly. There had been some­thing in her book about dreams, I recalled, but I hadn’t paid much attention to it. It hadn’t seemed to be part of the problem, as seen from a biochemist’s point of view. Obviously Gideon saw things differently; to him they were the very heart of the problem, and it was because of them that he’d consented to hear me out.

“Everybody has dreams, Gideon,” said Ann. “They don’t mean anything.”

He turned round to stare at her, in that same appalling fashion. “Do you have dreams, Miss Ann?” he asked, with seemingly tender concern.

Ann didn’t answer, so I stepped into the breach again. “Tell me about the dreams, Gideon,” I said. “I don’t really know how they fit in.”

He looked back at me, obviously surprised that I didn’t know everything. After all, I was a doctor, wasn’t I? I was the gene-wizard who knew what people were made of.

“All of us who got the look are dreamers,” he said, in a pains­takingly didactic fashion. “Taint the bones an’ the eyes as kills us in the end—’tis the dreams that call us out to the reef an’ bid us dive into the pit. Not many’s as strong as me, Doc—I know I got the look as bad as any, an’ had it all the time from bein’ a kid, but us Sar­gents was allus less superstitious than the likes o’ the Marshes, even if Obed’s kin did have all the money ’fore it passed to Ned Eliot. My granpa ran the first motor-bus out o’here, tryin’ to keep us con­nected to Arkham after the branch-line from Rowley was aban­doned. It’s the ones that change goes mad, Doc—they’re the ones as starts believin’.”

“Believing what, Gideon?” I asked, quietly.

“Believin’ as the dreams is true...believin’ in Dagon an’ Cthulhu an’ Pth’thya-l’yi...believin’ as how they c’n breathe through their gills’n dive all the way to the bottom of the ocean to Y’hanthlei...believin’ in the Deep Ones. That’s what happens to the peo­ple wi’ the look, Doc. Natural selection—ain’t that what y’called it?”

I licked my lips. “Everyone with the look has these dreams?” I queried. If it were true, I realized, it might make the Innsmouth enigma more interesting. Physical malformation was one thing, but specific associated psychotropic effects was quite another. I was tempted to explain to Gideon that one of the other great unsolved questions about the way the genes worked was how they affected mind and behavior via the chemistry of the brain, but that would have meant taking the discussion out into deeper water than he could be expected to handle. There was, of course, a simpler and more probable explanation for the dreams, but, in confrontation with Gideon’s quiet intensity, I couldn’t help but wonder whether there might be something more profound here.

“The dreams allus go wi’ the look,” he insisted. “I had ’em all my life. Real horrors, sometimes—unearthly. Can’t describe ’em, but take my word for it, Doc, you don’ ever want to meet ’em. I’m way past carin’ about the look, Doc, but if you could do summin ’bout the dreams...I’ll dig up the others f’r ye. Every last one.”

It would mean widening the tests, I knew, but I could see that it might be worth it. If the dreams were significant, at the biochemical level, I could have something really hot. Not a Nobel Prize, but a real reputation-maker. The implications of discovering a whole new class of hallucinogens were so awesome that I had difficulty pulling myself back down to earth. First catch your hare, I reminded my­self, carefully.

“I can’t make any promises, Gideon,” I told him, trying hard to give the impression that I was being overly modest. “It’s not easy to locate abnormal DNA, let alone map it and figure out exactly what it’s doing. And I have to say that I have my reservations about the possibility of finding a simple answer, which might lend itself to some kind of straightforward treatment. But I’ll do the best I can to find an explanation of the dreams, and, once we have an explana­tion, we’ll be able to see what might be done to banish them. If you can get these people to agree to my taking blood and tissue-samples, I’ll certainly do what I can.”

“I c’n do it,” he promised me. Then he stood up, obviously hav­ing said what he came to say, and heard what he’d hoped to hear. I put out my hand to shake his, but he didn’t take it. Instead, he said: “Walk me to the shore, will y’Doc?”

I was almost as surprised by this as Ann was, but I agreed. As we went out, I told her that I’d be back in half an hour.

At first, we walked down the hill in silence. I began to wonder whether he really had anything to say to me, as I’d assumed, or whether it was just some curious whim that had inspired him to ask me to go with him. When we were within sight of the seafront, though, he suddenly said: “You known Miss Ann a long time?”

“Sixteen years,” I told him, figuring that it wasn’t worth wast­ing time on an explanation of the fact that we hadn’t communicated at all for twelve-and-a-half out of the last thirteen.

“You marry her,” he said, as though it were the most natural in­struction in the world for one stranger to give another. “Take her to Manchester—or back to England, even better. Innsm’th’s a bad place f’r them as owns it, even if they ain’t got the look. Don’ leave it to y’r kids...will it to the state or summin. I know you think I’m crazy, Doc, you bein’ an educated man ’n’ all, but I know Innsm’th—I got it in th’ bones, th’ blood an’ th’ dreams. Taint worth it. Take her away, Doc. Please.”

I opened my mouth to answer, but he’d timed his speech to pre­clude that possibility. We were now in one of the narrow waterfront streets which had survived the great fire, and he was already pausing before one of the shabby hovels, opening the door.

“Can’t invite y’in,” he said, tersely. “Taint convenient. G’night, Doc.”

Before I could say a single word, the door closed in my face.

* * * *

Gideon was as good as his word. He knew where to find the remaining Innsmouthers who had the look, and he knew how to bully or cajole them into seeing me. A few he persuaded to come to the hotel; the rest I was permitted to visit in their homes—where some of them had been virtual prisoners for thirty years and more.

It took me a week to gather up my first set of samples and take them back to Manchester. Two weeks after that, I returned with more equipment, and took a further set of tissue specimens, some from the people I’d already seen, others—for the sake of comparison—from their unafflicted kinfolk. I threw myself into the project with great enthusiasm, despite that I still had a good deal of routine work to do, both as a research worker and in connection with my teaching. I made what passes in my business for rapid headway, but it wasn’t rapid enough for the people of Innsmouth—not that there was ever any real possibility of making good my promise to find a way to banish their evil dreams.

Three months after our first meeting Gideon Sargent died in a freak storm, which blew up unexpectedly while he was fishing. His boat was smashed up on Devil Reef, and what was left of it was later recovered—including Gideon’s body. The inquest confirmed that he had died of a broken neck, and that the rest of his many injuries had been inflicted after death while the boat was tossed about on and around the reef.

Gideon was the first of my sample to die, but he wasn’t the last. As the year crept on I lost four more, all of whom died in their beds of very ordinary causes—not entirely surprisingly, given that two were in their eighties and the others in their seventies.

There were, of course, a few unpleasant whispers, which said (arguing post hoc, ergo propter hoc, as rumors often do) that my taking the tissue samples had somehow weakened or over-excited the people who died, but Gideon had done some sterling work in persuading the victims of the look that it was in their interests to co­operate with me, and none of the others shut me out.

I had no one left whose appearance was as remarkable as Gideon’s. Most of the survivors in my experimental sample showed only partial stigmata of an underdeveloped kind—but they all re­ported suffering from the dreams now and again, and they all found the dreams sufficiently horrific to want to be rid of them if they could. They kept asking me about the possibility of a cure, but I could only evade the question, as I always had.

While I was traveling back and forth from Innsmouth on a regu­lar basis I naturally saw a lot of Ann, and was happy to do so. We were both too shy to be overly intrusive in questioning one another, but as time went by I began to understand how lonely and isolated she felt in Innsmouth, and how rosy her memories of university in England now seemed. I saw why she had taken the trouble to write to me when she learned that I had joined the faculty at Manchester, and, in time, I came to believe that she wanted to put our relation­ship on a more formal and permanent basis—but when I eventually plucked up enough courage to ask her to marry me, she turned me down.

She must have known how hurt I was, and what a blow to my fragile pride I had suffered, because she tried to let me down very gently—but it didn’t help much.

“I’m really very sorry, David,” she told me, “but I can’t do it. In a way, I’d like to, very much—I feel so lonely sometimes. But I can’t leave Innsmouth now. I can’t even go to Manchester, let alone back to England, and I know you won’t stay in the States forever.”

“That’s just an excuse,” I contended, in martyred fashion. “I know you own a great deal of real estate here, but you admit that it’s mostly worthless, and you could still collect the rents—the world is full of absentee landlords.”

“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s...something I can’t explain.”

“It’s because you’re an Eliot, isn’t it?” I asked, resentfully. “You feel that you can’t marry for the same reasons that Gideon Sargent felt that he couldn’t. You don’t have a trace of the Innsmouth look about you, but you have the dreams, don’t you? You nearly admitted as much to Gideon, that night when he came to the hotel.”

“Yes,” she said, faintly. “I have the dreams. But I’m not like those poor old mad people who locked themselves away until you came. I know that you won’t find a cure for them, even if you can find an explanation. I understand well enough what can come of your research and what can’t.”

“I’m not sure that you do,” I told her. “In fact, I’m not sure that you understand your own condition. Given that you don’t have a trace of the look, and given that you’re not directly descended from any of the Eliots of Innsmouth, what makes you think that your nightmares are anything more than just that: nightmares? As you said to Gideon when he raised the issue, everyone has dreams. Even I have dreams.” In the circumstances, I nearly said had, but that would have been too obvious a whine.

“You’re a biochemist,” she said. “You think that the physical malformation is the real issue, and that the dreams are peripheral. Innsmouthers don’t see it that way—for them, the dreams are the most important thing, and they’ve always seen the look as an effect rather than a cause. I’m an Innsmouther too.”

“But you’re a educated woman! You may be a historian, but you know enough science to know what the Innsmouth look really is. It’s a genetic disorder.”

“I know that the Esoteric Order of Dagon’s beliefs and Obed Marsh’s adventures in the South Seas are just myths,” she agreed. “They’re stories concocted, as you said to Gideon, to explain and excuse an inexplicable affliction caused by defective genes. But it might as easily have been the Eliots who imported those genes as anyone else, and they might easily have been in the family for many generations—England used to have its inbred populations too, you know. I know that you only took tissue-samples from me for what you called purposes of comparison, but I’ve been expecting all along that you would come to me and tell me that you’d found the rogue gene responsible for the Innsmouth look, and that I have it too.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, plaintively. “It really doesn’t matter. We could still get married.”

“It matters to me,” she said. “And we can’t.”

* * * *

I suppose that incident with Ann should have redoubled my de­termination to trace the DNA-complex that was responsible for the Innsmouth syndrome, in order to enable me to prove to her that she wasn’t afflicted, and that her dreams were only dreams. In fact, it didn’t; I was hurt by her rejection, and depressed. I continued to work as hard as I ever had, but I found it increasingly difficult to go to Innsmouth, to stay in the hotel where she lived, and to walk through the streets which she owned.

I began to look for someone else to soothe my emotional bruises, while Ann and I drifted steadily apart. We were no longer good friends in any real sense, though we kept up some kind of a pretense whenever we met.

In the meantime, the members of my experimental sample con­tinued to die. I lost three more in the second year, and it became even more obvious that whatever I discovered wasn’t going to be of any practical import to the people whose DNA I was looking at. In a way, it didn’t matter that much to the program—the DNA that Gideon and all the rest had provided still existed, carefully frozen and stored away. The project was still healthy, still making head­way.

In the third year, I finally found what I was looking for: an in­version on the seventh chromosome, which had trapped seven genes, including three oddballs. In homozygotes like Gideon, the genes paired up and were expressed in the normal way; in heterozygotes, like most of my sample—including all of the survivors—the chro­mosomes could only pair up if one of them became looped around, stopping several of the genes from functioning. I didn’t know what all of the genes did, or how—but my biochemical analyses had given me a partial answer.

I drove to Innsmouth the next day, in order to tell Ann the news. Although our relationship had soured and fallen apart, I still owed her as much of an explanation as I could now give.

“Do you know what Haeckel’s law is?” I asked her, while we walked beside the Manuxet, past the place where the Marsh refinery had once been located.

“Sure,” she said. “I read up on the whole thing, you know, after we got involved. Haeckel’s law says that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny—that the embryo, in developing, goes through a series of stages which preserve a kind of memory of the evolutionary history of an organism. It’s been discredited, except as a very loose meta­phor. I always thought that the Innsmouth look might turn out to have something to do with the fact that the human embryo goes through a stage where it develops gills.”

“Only the ghosts of gills,” I told her. “You see, the same em­bryonic structures that produce gills in fish produce different struc­tures in other organisms; it’s called homology. Conventional think­ing, muddied by the fact that we don’t really understand the business of blueprinting for physical structure, supposes that when natural selection works to alter a structure into its homologue—as when the fins of certain fish were modified by degrees into the legs of am­phibians, for instance, or the forelimbs of certain lizards became the wings of birds—the blueprint genes for the new structure replace the blueprint genes for the old. But that’s not the only way it could hap­pen. It may be that the new genes arise at different loci from the old ones, and that the old ones are simply switched off. Because they aren’t expressed any more in mature organisms they’re no longer subject to eliminative natural selection, so they aren’t lost, and even though they’re bound to be corrupted by the accumulation of ran­dom mutations—which similarly aren’t subject to elimination by natural selection—they remain within the bodies of descendant spe­cies for millions of years. If so, they may sometimes be expressed, if there’s a genetic accident of some kind that prevents their being switched off in a particular organism.”

She thought about it for a few moments, and then she said: “What you’re saying is that human beings—and, for that matter, all mammals, reptiles and amphibians—may be carrying around some of the blueprint genes for making fish. These are normally dor­mant—untroublesome passengers in the body—but under certain circumstances, the switching mechanism fails and they begin to make the body they’re in fishy.”

“That’s right,” I said. “And that’s what I shall propose as the cause of the Innsmouth syndrome. Sometimes, as with Gideon, it can happen very early in life, even before birth. In other instances it’s delayed until maturity, perhaps because the incipient mutations are suppressed by the immune system, until the time when ageing sets in and the system begins to weaken.”

I had to wait a little while for her next question, though I knew what it would be.

“Where do the dreams fit in?” she asked.

“They don’t,” I told her. “Not into the biology. I never really thought they did. They’re a psychological thing. There’s no psycho­tropic protein involved here. What we’re talking about is a slight failure of the switching mechanism that determines physical struc­ture. Ann, the nightmares come from the same place as the Esoteric Order of Dagon and Zadok Allen’s fantasies—they’re a response to fear, anxiety and shame. They’re infectious in exactly the same way that rumors are infectious—people hear them, and reproduce them. People who have the look know that the dreams come with it, and knowing it is sufficient to make sure that they do. That’s why they can’t describe them properly. Even people who don’t have the look, but fear that they might develop it, or feel that for some eccentric reason they ought to have it, can give themselves nightmares.”

She read the criticism in my words, which said that I had al­ways been right and she had always been wrong, and that she had had no good cause for rejecting my proposal. “You’re saying that my dreams are purely imaginary?” she said, resentfully. People al­ways are resentful about such things, even when the news is good, and despite the fact that it isn’t their fault at all.

“You don’t have the inversion, Ann. That’s quite certain now that I’ve found the genes and checked out all the sample traces. You’re not even heterozygous. There’s no possibility of your ever developing the look, and there’s no reason at all why you have to avoid getting married.”

She looked me in the eye, as disconcertingly as Gideon Sargent ever had, though her eyes were perfectly normal, and as grey as the sea.

“You’ve never seen a shoggoth,” she said, in a tone profound with despair. “I have—even though I don’t have the words to de­scribe it.”

She didn’t ask me whether I was renewing my proposal— maybe because she already knew the answer, or maybe because she hadn’t changed her own mind at all. We walked on for a bit, beside that dull and sluggish river, looking at the derelict landscape. It was like the set for some schlocky horror movie.

“Ann,” I said, eventually, “you do believe me, don’t you? There really isn’t a psychotropic element in the Innsmouth syndrome.”

“Yes,” she said. “I believe you.”

“Because,” I went on, “I don’t like to see you wasting your life away in a place like this. I don’t like to think of you, lonely in self­imposed exile, like those poor lookers who shut themselves away because they couldn’t face the world—or who were locked up by mothers and fathers or brothers and sisters or sons and daughters who couldn’t understand what was wrong, and whose heads were filled with stories of Obed Marsh’s dealings with the devil and the mysteries of Dagon.

“That’s the real nightmare, don’t you see—not the horrid dreams and the daft rites conducted in the old Masonic Hall, but all the lives that have been ruined by superstition and terror and shame. Don’t be part of that nightmare, Ann; whatever you do, don’t give in to that. Gideon Sargent didn’t give in—and he told me once, al­though I didn’t quite understand what he meant at the time, that it was up to me to make sure that you wouldn’t, either.”

“But they got him in the end, didn’t they?” she said. “The Deep Ones got him in the end.”

“He was killed in an accident at sea,” I told her, sternly. “You know that. Please don’t melodramatize, when you know you don’t believe it. You must understand, Ann—the real horrors aren’t in your dreams, they’re in what you might let your dreams do to you.”

“I know,” she said, softly. “I do understand.”

I understood too, after a fashion. Her original letter to me had been a cry for help, although neither of us knew it at the time—but in the end, she’d been unable to accept the help that was offered, or trust the scientific interpretation that had been found. At the cogni­tive level, she understood—but the dreams, self-inflicted or not, were simply too powerful to be dismissed by knowledge.

And that, I thought, was yet another real horror: that the truth, even when discovered and revealed, might not be enough to save us from our vilest superstitions.

* * * *

I didn’t have any occasion to go back to Innsmouth for some time, and several months slipped past before I had a reason suffi­cient to make me phone. The desk-clerk at the hotel was surprised that I hadn’t heard—as if what was known to Innsmouthers ought automatically to be known to everyone else on earth.

Ann was dead.

She had drowned in the deep water off Devil Reef. Her body had never been recovered.

I didn’t get any sort of prize for the Innsmouth project; in spite of its interesting theoretical implications, it wasn’t quite the reputation-maker I’d hoped it would be. As things turned out, it was only worth a paper after all.