Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

By that time Corey had vanished.

There was some evidence to show that he had gone down to the Atlantic and walked in—whether with the intention of swimming or of taking his life could not be ascertained. The prints of his bare feet were discovered in what remained of that odd clay thrown up by the sea in February, but there were no returning prints. There was no farewell message of any kind, but there were instructions left for me directing the disposal of his effects, and I was named administrator of his estate—which suggested that some apprehension did exist in his mind.

Some search—desultory at best—was made for Corey’s body along the shore both above and below Innsmouth, but this was fruitless, and a coroner’s inquest had no trouble in coming to the conclusion that Corey had met his death by misadventure.

No record of the facts that seemed pertinent to the mystery of his disappearance could possibly be left without a brief account of what I saw off Devil Reef in the twilight of the night of April 17th.

It was a tranquil evening; the sea was as of glass, and no wind stirred the evening air. I had been in the last stages of disposing of Corey’s effects and had chosen to go out for a row off Innsmouth. What I had heard of Devil Reef drew me inevitably toward its remains—a few jagged and broken stones that jutted above the surface at low tide well over a mile off the village. The sun had gone down, a fine afterglow lay in the western sky, and the sea was a deep cobalt as far as the eye could reach.

I had only just reached the reef when there was a great disturbance of the water. The surface broke in many places; I paused and sat quite still, guessing that a school of dolphins might be surfacing and anticipating with some pleasure what I might see.

But it was not dolphins at all. It was some kind of sea-dweller of which I had no knowledge. Indeed, in the fading light, the swimmers looked both fish-like and squamously human. All but one pair of them remained well away from the boat in which I sat.

That pair—one clearly a female creature of an oddly clay-like colour, the other male—came quite close to the boat in which I sat, watching with mixed feelings not untinged with the kind of terror that takes its rise in a profound fear of the unknown. They swam past, surfacing diving, and, having passed, the lighter-skinned of the two creatures turned and distinctly flashed me a glance, making a strange guttural sound that was not unlike a half-strangled crying-out of my name: “Jack!” and left me with the clear and unmistakable conviction that the gilled sea-thing wore the face of Jeffrey Corey!

It haunts my dreams even now.

THE ARCHBISHOP’S WELL

by REGGIE OLIVER

MY FATHER NEVER spoke about his war experiences. That was quite common for men of his generation, but what is strange is that he hardly ever said anything to me about his life before it. I knew his academic career as a medieval historian had begun in the 1930s and that was all. It was only after his death a decade ago that I discovered the diaries that he had kept during this period, and a sort of explanation for his reticence started to emerge.

Reading them was an odd experience for me in many ways, chiefly because the person in these diaries was not at all like the one I knew. It was hard to reconcile this lively young man with my father, the dour, sarcastic Oxford don who seldom had any time for me. Only a few characteristic quirks and turns of phrase suggested that they were the same person at all.

The journals begin in late 1936 when, at twenty-five, my father, Dr. Charles Vilier, was appointed to a lectureship in Medieval History at the new University of Wessex. Its campus occupies land just outside the town of Bartonstone, some ten miles south-west of Morchester. My father’s first years there seem to have been carefree and happy. He was a great giver and frequenter of sherry parties, then a popular form of entertainment for those who were not quite smart enough for cocktails. By 1938, the year of the Munich Crisis, my father was beginning to be faintly aware that the world around him was darkening, but it was not until September that his own personal crisis began.

SEPTEMBER 2ND, 1938

Bertie Winship drove down from Morchester in his old banger. I gave him dinner at the Crown, the only half-decent hostelry in Bartonstone, and we imbibed not a few glasses of Amontillado, followed by a bottle of the best claret mine host could provide. I have barely seen young Bertie since varsity days, but he is the same cheery idiot who once introduced a python into the Master of Balliol’s lodgings, causing much consternation and merriment thereby. It is strange to think of him now as a man of the cloth, a Canon of Morchester Cathedral no less, and a master at the choir school.