Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

THE TRANSITION OF ELIZABETH HASKINGS

by CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

E LIZABETH HASKINGS INHERITED the old house on Water Street from her grandfather. It would have passed to her mother, but she’d gone away to Oregon when Elizabeth was six years old, leaving her daughter with the old man. She’d said she would come back, but she never did, and after a while the letters stopped coming, and then the postcards stopped coming, too. And now Elizabeth Haskings is twenty-nine, and she has no idea whether her mother is alive or dead. It’s not something she thinks about very often. But she does understand why her mother left, that it was fear of the broad, tea-coloured water of the Ipswich River, flowing lazily down to the salt marshes and the Atlantic. Flowing down to Little Neck and the deep channel between the mainland and Plum Island, finally emptying into the ocean hardly a quarter of a mile north of Essex Bay. Elizabeth understands it was the ruins surrounding the bay, there at the mouth of the Manuxet River—labelled the Castle Neck River on more recent maps, maps drawn up after the late 1920s.

She’s never blamed her mother for running like that. But here, in Ipswich, she has the house and her job at the library, and in Oregon—or wherever she might run—she’d have nothing at all. Here she has roots, even if they’re roots she does her best not to dwell on. But this is only history, the brief annals of a young woman’s life. Relevant, certainly, but only as prologue. What happened in the town that once ringed Essex Bay, the strange seaport town that abruptly died one winter eighty-four years ago, where her grandfather lived as a boy.

It’s a Saturday night in June, and on most Saturday nights Elizabeth Haskings entertains what she quaintly thinks of as her “gentleman caller”. She enjoys saying, “Tonight, I will be visited by my gentleman caller.” Even though Michael’s gay. They work together at archives at the Ipswich Public Library, though, sometimes, he switches over to circulation. Anyway, he knows about Elizabeth’s game, and usually he brings her a small bouquet of flowers of one sort of another—calla lilies, Peruvian lilies, yellow roses fringed with red, black-eyed susans—and she carefully arranges them in one of her several vases while he cooks her dinner. She feels bad that Michael is always the one who cooks, but, truthfully, Elizabeth isn’t a very good cook, and tends to eat from the microwave most nights.

They might watch a DVD afterwards, or play Scrabble, or just sit at the wide dinner table she also inherited from her grandfather and talk. About work or books or classical music, something Michael knows much more about than she does. Truth is, he often makes her feel inadequate, but she’s never said so. She loves him, and it’s not a simple, platonic love, so she’s always kept it a secret, allowed their “dates” to seem like nothing more than a ritual between friends who seem to have more in common with one another than with most anyone else they know in the little New England town (whether that’s true or not). Sometimes, she lies in bed, thinking about him lying beside her, instead of thinking about all the things she works so hard not thinking about: the river, the sea, her lost mother, the grey, weathered boards and stone foundations where there was once a dingy town, etcetera & etcetera. It’s her secret, and she’ll never tell him.

Though, Michael knows the most terrible secret that she’ll ever have, and she’s fairly sure that his knowing it has kept her sane for the five years they’ve known one another. In an odd way, it doesn’t seem fair, the same way his always cooking doesn’t seem fair. No, much worse than that. But him knowing this awful thing about her, and her never telling him how she feels. Still, Elizabeth assures herself, telling him that would only ruin their friendship. A bird in the hand being worth two in the bush, and in this instance it really is better not to have one’s cake and eat it, too.