Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

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

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

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

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

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

Del Marston nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody got the joke.

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I try to keep an open mind.”

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