Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

Sir, I have seen your fine horror picture “It Came From Outer Space” six times as of this writing and must say that I am in all ways impressed with your work. You have a true artist’s eye for the uncanny and deserve to be proud of your endeavours. I am enclosing some newspaper clippings, which may be of some small interest to a mind such as yours, regarding certain peculiar things that have gone on hereabouts for years. Old people here talk about the “plagues” of 1846 but they will tell you it wasn’t really no plague that set old Innsmouth on the road to ruin, if you’ve a mind to listen. They will tell you lots of things, Mr. Alland and I lie awake at night thinking about what might still go on out there at the reef. But you read the newspaper clippings for yourself, sir, and make of it what you will. I believe you might fashion a frightful film from these incidents. I will be at this address through May, should you wish to reply.

Respectfully, your avid admirer,

Zacharias Gilman

“Do you like old monster movies?” the wintergreen and mothball woman asks her and Lacey shakes her head no.

“Well, that photograph, that’s a scene from—”

“I don’t watch television,” she says.

“Oh, no, I didn’t mean made-for-TV movies. I meant real movies, the kind you see in theatres.”

“I don’t go to theatres, either.”

“Oh,” the woman says, sounding disappointed, and in a moment she turns away again and stares out the window at the autumn morning rushing by outside.

10:40 A.M.

“Well, I like it,” Dr. Morgan says, finally. “It looks good on paper.” He chews absently at the stem of his cheap pipe and puffs pungent, grey smoke clouds that smell like roasting apples. “And a binomen should look good. It should sound good, rolling off the tongue. Damn it, Lacey, it should almost taste good.”

More than three months since she found the Innsmouth fossil tucked away in Cabinet 34, and Lacey sits with Dr. Jasper Morgan in his tiny, third-floor office; all the familiar, musty comforts of that small room with its high ceilings and ornate, moulded plaster walls hidden behind solid oak shelves stuffed with dustwashed books and fossils and all the careful clutter of an academic’s life. A geologic map of Massachusetts framed and hanging slightly askew. Rheumy hiss and clank from the radiator below the window and if the glass wasn’t steamed over, she could see across the rooftops of Amherst, south to the low, autumn-stained hills beyond the town, the weathered slopes of the Holyoke Range rising blue-grey in the hazy distance.

Three months that hardly seem like three full weeks to her, days and nights, dreams and waking all become a blur of questions and hardly any answers, the fossil become her secret, shared only with Dr. Morgan, and Dr. Hanisak over in the zoology department. Hers and hers alone until she could at least begin to get her bearings and a preliminary report on the specimen could be written. When she was ready and her paper had been accepted by the journal Nature, Dr. Morgan arranged for the press conference at Yale, where she would sit in the shadow of Rudolph Zallinger’s mural and Othniel Marsh’s dinosaurs and reveal the Innsmouth fossil to the whole, wide world.

“I had to call it something,” she replies. “Seemed a shame not to have some fun with it. I have a feeling that I’m never going to find anything like this again.”

“Exactly,” and Jasper Morgan leans back in his creaky, wooden chair, takes the pipe from his mouth and stares intently into the smouldering bowl. Like a gypsy with her polished crystal ball, old man with his glowing cinders, and “‘Words,’” he says in the tone of voice he reserves for quoting anyone he holds in higher esteem than himself, “‘are in themselves among the most interesting objects of study, and the names of animals and plants are worthy of more consideration than biologists are inclined to give them.’ Unfortunately, no one seems to care very much about the aesthetics these days, no one but rusty old farts like me.”