Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

He was merely catching up to his friends, neighbours and relatives. By the time of those Prohibition-era raids, most of the others had been this way for years—decades, some of them. Although they aged, they didn’t seem to weaken and, while they could be killed, if merely left to themselves, they most certainly didn’t die.

They could languish, though. As those first years went on, with the Innsmouth prisoners scattered throughout a handful of remote quarantine facilities across New England, it became obvious that they didn’t do well in the kind of environment reserved for normal prisoners: barred cells, bright lights, exercise yards… dryness. Some of them developed a skin condition that resembled powdery mildew, a white, dusty crust that spread across them in patches. There was a genuine fear that, whatever it was, it might jump from captives to captors, and prove more virulent in wholly human hosts, although this never happened.

Thus it was decided: they didn’t need a standard prison so much as they needed their own zoo. That they got it was something she found strangely heartening. What was missing from the report, presumably because she had no need to know, was why.

While she didn’t want to admit it, Kerry had no illusions—the expedient thing would’ve been to kill them off. No one would have known, and undoubtedly there would’ve been those who found it an easy order to carry out. It was wartime, and if war proved anything, it proved how simple it was to dehumanise people even when they looked just like you. This was 1942, and this was already happening on an industrial scale across Europe. These people from Innsmouth would have had few advocates. To merely look at them was to feel revulsion, to sense a challenge to everything you thought you knew about the world, about what could and couldn’t be. Most people would look at them and think they deserved to die. They were an insult to existence, to cherished beliefs.

Yet they lived. They’d outlived the men who’d rounded them up, and their first jailers, and most of their jailers since. They’d outlived everyone who’d opted to keep them a secret down through the generations… yet for what?

Perhaps morality had factored into the decision to keep them alive, but she doubted morality had weighed heaviest. Maybe, paradoxically, it had been done out of fear. They may have rounded up over two hundred of Innsmouth’s strangest, but many more had escaped—by most accounts, fleeing into the harbour, then the ocean beyond. To exterminate these captives because they were unnatural would be to throw away the greatest resource they might possess in case they ever faced these beings again, under worse circumstances.

Full disclosure, Escovedo had promised. She would know as much as he did. But when she finished the report along with the cocoa, she had no faith whatsoever that she was on par with the colonel, or that even he’d been told the half of it himself.

How much did a man need to know, really, to be a glorified prison warden?

Questions nagged, starting with the numbers. She slung on her coat and headed back out into the rain, even colder now, as it needled down from a dusk descending on the island like a dark grey blanket. She found the colonel still in his office, and supposed by now he was used to people dripping on his floor.

“What happened to the rest of them?” she asked. “Your report says there were over two hundred to start with. And that this place was built to house up to three hundred. So I guess somebody thought more might turn up. But you’re down to sixty-three. And they don’t die of natural causes. So what happened to the others?”

“What does it matter? For your purposes, I mean. What you’re here to do.”

“Did you know that animals understand the idea of extermination? Wolves do. Dogs at the pound do. Cattle do, once they get to the slaughterhouse pens. They may not be able to articulate it, but they pick up on it. From miles away, sometimes, they can pick up on it.” She felt a chilly drop of water slither down her forehead. “I don’t know about fish or reptiles. But whatever humanity may still exist in these prisoners of yours, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s left them just as sensitive to the concept of extermination, or worse.”

He looked at her blankly, waiting for more. He didn’t get it.

“For all I know, you’re sending me in there as the latest interrogator who wants to find out the best way to commit genocide on the rest of their kind. That’s why it matters. Is that how they’re going to see me?”

Escovedo looked at her for a long time, his gaze fixated on her, not moving, just studying her increasing unease as she tried to divine what he was thinking: if he was angry, or disappointed, or considering sending her home before she’d even set foot in the prison. He stared so long she had no idea which it could be, until she realised that the stare was the point.