Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

I shut the gate and struggled to remain upright on the slippery rock as I headed down to where the taxi was parked. The driver, my friend from Manchester, helped me to get the suitcase in the boot and then I was safely in the back seat and we were trundling over the causeway, now dry, the withdrawn tide collected in the surrounding rock pools, serene, all threat in abeyance; you’d be forgiven for thinking there was no such thing as high-tide here.

I felt in my pocket for the hag stone, momentarily panicked by the possibility I’d left it in the bed, but it was there, smooth and warm, and I clasped it as we headed towards the airport.

The heat in the taxi was thick and restful. I felt it seep into my bones.

Movement.

I jerked my head up and the muscles in my neck yelled at me. The sea was flat and relatively calm. No boats. But closer, down on a track beneath the road, what was that? It was Mr. Gluckmann, walking with his hands deep in his pockets, his wispy hair flailing around his head like seaweed lacing a submersed rock. He looked up as we slowly went by and his shaded eyes were shark-black. He smiled. I nodded, glad to see him fall behind us as the road improved and the taxi driver leaned on the accelerator.

Gluckmann raised his hand and I mirrored him. The hag stone was in my fingers. As I withdrew it, my view of the diminishing Gluckmann was impeded until he appeared within its hole, as he returned his arm to his overcoat pocket. And I had to close my eyes against the thrash in my chest and force myself over and over to believe that what I had seen in that ancient frame was skin and bone, and not the sinuous curve of a tentacle.

ON THE REEF

by

CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

OSCAR WILDE (1891)

THERE ARE RITES that do not die. There are ceremonies and sacraments that thrive even after the most vicious oppressions. Indeed, some may grow stronger under such duress, stronger and more determined, so that even though devotees are scattered and holy ground defiled, the rituals will find a way. The people will find a way back, down long decades and even centuries, to stand where strange beings were summoned—call them gods or demons or numina; call them what you will, as all words only signify and may not ever define or constrain the nature of these entities. Temples are burned and rebuilt. Sacred groves are felled, but new trees take root and flourish.

And so it is with this ragged granite skerry a mile and a half out from the ruins of a Massachusetts harbour town that drew its final, hitching breaths in the winter of 1928. Cartographers rarely take note of it, and when they do, it’s only to mark the location for this or that volume of local hauntings or guides for legend-trippers. Even the teenagers from Rowley and Ipswich have largely left it alone, and the crumbling concrete walls are almost entirely free of the spray-painted graffiti that nowadays marks their comings and goings.

Beyond the lower falls of the Castle Neck (which the Wampanoag tribes named Manuxet), where the river takes an abrupt south-eastern turn before emptying into the Essex Bay, lies the shattered waste that once was Innsmouth. More than half-buried now by the tall advancing dunes sprawls this tumbledown wreck of planks weathered grey as oysters, a disarray of cobblestone streets and brick sidewalks, the stubs of chimneys, and rows of warehouses and docks rusted away to almost nothing. But the North Shore wasteland doesn’t end at the shore, for the bay is filled with sunken trawlers and purse seiners, a graveyard of lobster pots and steel hulls, jute rope and oaken staves, where sea robins and flounder and spiny blue crabs have had the final word.

However, the subject at hand is not the fall of Innsmouth town, nor what little remains of its avenues and storefronts. The subject at hand is the dogged persistence of ritual, and its tendency to triumph over adversity and prejudice. The difficulty of forever erasing belief from the mind of man. We may glimpse the ruins, as a point of reference, but are soon enough drawn back around to the black granite reef, its rough spine exposed only at low tide. Now, it’s one hour after sundown on a Halloween night, and a fat harvest moon as fiery orange as molten iron has just cleared the horizon. You’d think the sea would steam from the light of such a moon, but the water’s too cold and far too deep.