Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

You may have read of some strange goings-on at Innsmouth in February. I have no very clear information about it, but it must surely have been in the papers somewhere, however silent our Massachusetts papers seem to have been. All I can gather about the affair is that a large band of Federal officers of some kind descended upon the town and spirited away some of the citizens—among them some of my own relatives, though which I am at a loss to say since I’ve never troubled to ascertain how many of them there are—or were, as the case may be. What I can pick up in Innsmouth has reference to some kind of South Pacific trade in which certain shipping interests in the town were still evidently engaged, though this seems to be pretty far-fetched, insofar as the docks are all but abandoned, and actually largely useless for the ships now plying the Atlantic, most of which go to the larger and more modern ports. Quite apart from the reasons for the Federal action—and considerably of more importance to me, as you will see—is the indisputable fact that, coincident with the raid on Innsmouth, some naval vessels appeared off the coast in the vicinity of what is known as Devil Reef, and there dropped a power of depth charges! These set off such turmoil in the depths that a subsequent storm washed ashore all manner of debris, of which a peculiar blue clay came in along the water’s edge here. It seemed to me very much like that moulding clay of similar colour found in various parts of interior America and often used for the manufacture of bricks, particularly years ago when more modern methods of brick-making were not available to builders. Well, what is important about all this is that I gathered up the clay I could find before the sea took it back again, and I have been working on an entirely new piece I’ve tentatively titled “Sea Goddess”—and I am wildly enthusiastic about its possibilities. You will see it when you come down next week, and I am certain you will like it even more than my “Rima”.

Contrary to his expectations, however. I found myself oddly repelled at my first sight of Corey’s new statue. The figure was lissome, save for rather heavier pelvic structure than I thought fitting, and Corey had chosen to alter the feet with webbing between the toes.

“Why?” I asked him.

“I really don’t know,” he said. “The fact is I hadn’t planned to do it. It just happened.”

“And those disfiguring marks on the neck?” He was apparently still at work in that area.

He gave an embarrassed laugh, and a strange expression came into his eyes. “I wish I could explain those marks to my own satisfaction, Ken,” he said. “I woke up yesterday morning to find that I must have been working in my sleep, for there were slits in the neck below her ears—on both sides—slits like—well, like gills. I’m repairing the damage now.”

“Perhaps a ‘sea goddess’ ought to have gills,” I said.

“I’d guess it came about as a result of what I picked up in Innsmouth day before yesterday when I went in for some things I needed. More talk of the Marsh clan. It boiled down to the suggestion that members of the family were reclusive by choice because they had some kind of physical deformity that related to a legend tying them to certain South Sea islanders. This is the kind of fairy tale that ignorant people take up and embellish—though I grant that this one is more unusual than the kind one commonly picks up, related to the Judaeo-Christian morality pattern. I dreamed about it that night—and evidently walked in my sleep and worked out some part of the dream on my ‘Sea Goddess’.”

However strange I thought it, I made no further comments on the incident. What he said was logical, and I confess that I was appreciably more interested in the Innsmouth lore than in the disfigurement of the “Sea Goddess”.

Moreover, I was somewhat taken aback at Corey’s evident preoccupation. He was animated enough when we were in conversation, no matter what the subject, but I could not help noticing an air of abstraction whenever we were not—as if he had something on his mind of which he was reluctant to speak, something that vaguely troubled him, but of which he had no certain knowledge himself, or knowledge insufficient to permit him to speak. This showed itself in various ways—a distant look in his eyes, an occasional expression of bafflement, a far gazing out to sea, and now and then a bit of wandering in his talk, an edging off the subject, as were some more demanding thought intruding upon the subject under discussion.

I have thought since that I ought to have taken the initiative and explored the preoccupation so manifest to me; I deferred doing so because I thought it did not concern me and to have done so seemed to me an invasion of Corey’s privacy. Though we were friends of long standing, it did not seem that it should be incumbent upon me to intrude upon matters that were patently his alone, and he did not offer to introduce the subject himself, which, I felt, precluded my doing so.