Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

This morning I took the train into Morchester, arriving shortly before ten. It was a fine, balmy day, so I walked the quarter-mile to the Deanery which is in the south-west corner of the Cathedral close. The Deanery is a pretty little three-storey Queen Anne house of mellow red brick with, over the front door, an elegant little pedimented portico made out of the local limestone. There is no bell-push, but there is a bronze knocker on the door of curious design. I believe it to have been modelled from one of the gargoyles on the Cathedral roof. (Morchester Cathedral, of course, is famous for its grotesque carvings.) It was in the shape of the head of some sort of beast. The eyes were large and saucer-like and there was little in the way of a nose, apart from a rather ugly cavity for a nostril. Where the mouth should have been there was a mass of strands or tentacles that seemed to writhe snakelike as if each one had a life of its own. It was a finely crafted piece, but all the more distasteful to handle because of it.

Nevertheless I grasped the thing and rapped on the door which was opened by a tall, elderly, angular woman who looked as if her morning bath had had an iceberg in it. She scrutinised me with some disdain, then, pointing imperiously to her right, told me that all hawkers, vagrants and people seeking assistance from the diocese should apply at the tradesman’s entrance.

I had on an old pair of grey flannel bags and a heavily patched tweed sports coat, but I didn’t think that I looked that disreputable. Perhaps the fact that I had no tie on and wear sandals at all times of the year gave me a bohemian or even—oh horror!—a socialist look.

I explained that I was Dr. Vilier and had an appointment to see the Dean. The lady still regarded me with suspicion.

“My husband is not unwell,” she said indignantly.

Before I could explain to her that my doctorate was in History not Medicine, she had disappeared into the dark bowels of the Deanery. After a while she re-emerged from the gloom to tell me that the Dean would see me now in his study, indicating the second door on the left of a dingy corridor that passed right through the house. I smiled and tried to thank her warmly but the frost on her upper slopes failed to thaw.

I knocked and was bidden to enter the Dean’s study. The room I came into was lit only by the light from a window which faced onto a back garden. At the bottom of the garden I could just see, through the willows, the glitter of a stream.

I have to say that Dean Grice’s welcome was not much cheerier than his wife’s. He greeted me by rising from behind his desk and favouring me with a handshake that felt like a long-dead haddock. He has a narrow face, parchment skin, and little round, silver-rimmed spectacles that glinted in the dimness of the study, occasionally turning his eyes into blank discs of reflected light. Having obtained from me the solemn assurance that I had told no one about my visit, he suggested briskly that we should walk over together to the Cathedral and take a look at the well.

As we stepped out of the deanery a cool breeze blew up. The rooks, who inhabit a stand of elms at the west end of the Cathedral close suddenly all flew as one from their “buildings” (as I believe their nests are called) in the trees and began to wheel around screeching, making their characteristic kaa, kaa sound. Once across the road and onto the green, the Dean and I took a diagonal paved path which leads directly to the West door of the Cathedral. I stared in awe at the rooks as they circled and cried. I could not get it out of my head that they were, for purposes unknown, putting on a demonstration of some kind. The Dean, evidently well accustomed to this curious animal behaviour, took no notice whatsoever.

While I was looking around me I noticed that someone was on the path behind us and trying to attract our attention. It was a tallish man wearing a cloak and a battered sombrero hat. He appeared somewhat eccentric, but as he was a hundred and fifty yards away I could not make out his features. He waved a thin arm and said “Hi!” so I alerted the Dean to his presence. The Dean, without breaking his stride, turned round to look, then almost immediately turned back and began to walk even more determinedly towards the Cathedral. I had seen a look of disgust, perhaps even of fear, pass across his ascetic features.

“We wish to have no intercourse with that man,” said the Dean.

“Who is he?”

“He is called Felix Cutbirth.”

“Unusual surname.”

“It is a variant of Cuthbert, an Anglo-Saxon name. He comes from a very old family which has lived in Morsetshire since before the Norman Conquest. Unhappily, in his case, ancient lineage is no guarantee of respectability. The Cutbirths have long had an evil reputation.”

“What does he want with us?”

“I cannot possibly imagine,” said the Dean dismissively. We were now at the West Door. “Come! Let us go into the Cathedral. He will not follow us in there, I fancy.”