Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

No, not human, but certainly the forelimb of something, something big, at least a third again larger than her own hand, and “Jesus,” she whispered again. Lacey lifted the fossil from the excelsior, gently because there was no telling how stable it was, how many decades since anyone had even bothered to open the box. She counted almost all the elements of the manus—carpals and metacarpals, phalanges— and the lower part of the forearm, sturdy radius and ulna ending abruptly in a ragged break, the dull glint of gypsum or quartz flakes showing from the exposed interior of the fossil. There was bony webbing or spines preserved between the fingers, and the three that were complete ended in short, sharp ungual claws; a small patch of what appeared to be scales or dermal ossicles on the palm just below the fifth metacarpal, oval disks with deeply concave centres unlike anything she could remember ever having seen before. Here and there, small bits of greenish-grey limestone still clung to the bones, but most of the hard matrix had been scraped away.

Lacey sat down on a wooden stool near Cabinet 34, her dizzy head too full of questions and astonishment, heart racing, the giddy, breathless excitement of discovery, and she forced herself to shut her eyes for a moment. Gathering shreds of calm from the darkness behind her lids, counting backwards from thirty until her pulse began to return to normal; she opened her eyes again and turned the fossil over to examine the other side. The bone surface on the back of the hand was not so well preserved, weathered as though that side had been exposed to the forces of erosion for some time before it was collected, the smooth, cortical layer cracked and worn completely away in places. There was a lot more of the greenish limestone matrix on that side, too, and a small snail’s shell embedded in the rock near the base of the middle finger.

“What are you?” she asked the fossil, as if it might tell her, as simple as that, and everything else forgotten now, all her fine coelacanths and rhipidistians, for this newest miracle. Lacey turned it over again, examining the palm-side more closely, the pebbly configuration of wrist bones, quickly identifying the ulnare, what she thought must be the intermedium, and when she finally glanced at her watch it was almost six-thirty. At least an hour since she opened the box and she’d have to hurry to make her seven o’clock lecture. She returned the hand to the excelsior, paused a moment for one last, lingering glimpse of the thing before putting the lid back on. Overhead, high above the exhibits halls and the slate-tiled roof of the Pratt Museum, a thunderclap boomed and echoed across the valley, and Lacey tried to remember if shed left her umbrella in her apartment.

1:49 P.M.

Sitting next to a woman who smells like wintergreen candy and mothballs, the steady clackclackclack of razorwheels against the rails, and Lacey’s been staring at the photograph from the manila envelope for almost five minutes now. A movie still, she thinks, the glossy black-and-white photograph creased and dog-eared at one corner, and it shows an old man with a white moustache standing with two Indians beside a rocky outcrop. Someplace warm, someplace tropical because there are palmetto fronds at one edge of the photograph. It isn’t hot on the train, but Lacey’s sweating anyway, her palms gone slick and clammy, tiny beads like nectar standing out on her forehead and upper lip. The old man in the photograph is holding something cradled in both hands, clutching it like a holy relic, a grail, the prize at the end of a life-long search.

...’cause you’ve seen it all, from top to bottom and pole to pole...

The man in the photograph is holding the Innsmouth fossil. Or he’s holding a replica so perfect that it must have been cast from the original and it really doesn’t make much difference, either way. She turns the picture over and there’s a label stuck to the back— Copyright © 1954 Universal-International—typed with a typewriter that drops its “N’s”.

There was a letter in the envelope, as well. A faded photocopy of a letter, careless, sprawling handwriting that she can only just decipher:

Mr. Zacharias R. Gilman, Esq.

7 High Street

Ipswich, Mass.

15 January 1952

Mr. William Alland

Universal Studios

Los Angeles, Cal.

Dear Mr. Alland,