Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

Her twenty-fifth birthday, the stormy day in early July when Lacey Morrow found the Innsmouth fossil, working late and alone in the basement of the Pratt Museum. Almost everyone else gone home already, but nothing unusual about that. Lacey pouring over the contents of Cabinet 34, drawers of Devonian fishes collected from Blossburg, Pennsylvania and Chaleur Bay, Quebec, slabs of shale and sandstone the dusky colour of charcoal, the colour of cinnamon; ancient lungfish and the last of the jawless ostracoderms, lobe-finned Eusthenopteron and the boxy, armour plates of the antiarch Bothriolepis. Relics of an age come and gone hundreds of millions of years before the dinosaurs, a time when the earliest forests lined the shores of lakes and rivers teeming with strange and monstrous fish, and vertebrates had begun to take their first clumsy steps onto dry land. And that transition her sole, consuming obsession since Lacey was an undergraduate, that alchemy of flesh and bone—fins to feet, gills to lungs—the puzzles that filled her days and nights, that filled her dreams. Her last girlfriend walking out because she’d finally had enough of Lacey’s all-night kitchen dissections, the meticulously mutilated sea bass and cod, eels and small sharks sliced up and left lying about until she found time to finish her notes and sketches. Dead things in plastic bags crammed into the freezer and the ice cubes starting to taste more like bad sushi, their Hitchcock Road apartment stinking of formalin and fish markets.

“If I grow fucking scales maybe I’ll give you a call sometime,” Julie growled, hauling her boxes of clothes and CDs from their front porch to the back of her banged-up little Honda. “If I ever meet up with a goddamn mermaid, I’ll be sure to give her your number.”

Lacey watched her drive away, feeling less than she knew she ought to feel, wishing she would cry because any normal person would cry, would at least be angry with herself or with Julie. But the tears never came, nor the anger, and after that she figured it was better to leave romantic entanglements for some later stage in her life, some faraway day when she could spare a spark of passion for anything except her studies. She kept a picture of Julie in a pewter frame beside her bed, though, so she could still pretend, from time to time, when she felt alone, when she awoke in the middle of the night and there was nothing but the sound of rain on the roof and the wind blowing cold through the streets of Amherst.

But that August afternoon she wasn’t lonely, not with the tall rows of battleship-grey steel cabinets and their stony treasures stacked neatly around her, all the company she needed and no thoughts but the precise numbers from her digital callipers—the heights and widths of pelvic girdles and scapulocoracoids, relative lengths of pectoral fins and radials. Finishing up with a perfectly preserved porolepiform that she suspected might be a new species, and Lacey noticed the box pushed all the way to the very back of the drawer, half-hidden under a cardboard tray of shale and bone fragments. Something overlooked, even though she’d thought she knew the contents of those cabinets like the back of her hand and any further surprises would only be in the details.

“Well, hello there,” she said to the box, carefully slipping it from its hiding place beneath the tray. “How’d I ever miss you, hmmm?” It wasn’t a small box—only a couple of inches deep, but easily a foot and a half square, sagging just a bit at the centre from having supported the weight of the tray for who knows how many years. There was writing on one corner of the lid, spidery fountain-pen ink faded as brown as dead leaves: from Naval dredgings, USS Cormorant (April, 1928), Lat. 42° 40″ N., Long. 70° 43″ W, NE. of old Innsmouth Harbour, Essex Co., Mass. ?Devonian. But there was no catalogue or field number, no identification either, and then Lacey opened the box and stared amazed at the thing inside.

“Jesus,” she whispered, swallowing a metallic taste like foil or a freshly filled tooth, adrenaline-silver aftertaste, and her first impression was that the thing was a hand, the articulated skeleton of a human hand lying palm-side up in the box, its fingers slightly curled and clutching at the ceiling or the bright fluorescent lights overhead. She set the box down on one of the larger Chaleur Bay slabs, stared at the tips of her own trembling fingers and the petrified bones resting in a bed of excelsior. They were dark, the waxy black of baker’s chocolate, and shiny from a thick coating of varnish or shellac.