Lovecraft, H P - The Shadow Over Innsmouth

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The Shadow Over Innsmouth

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written Nov? - 3 Dec 1931

Published 1936 in The Shadow over Innsmouth, Everett, PA: Visionary Publishing Co., p.

13-158.

During the winter of 1927-28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and

secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of

Innsmouth. The public first learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and

arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting - under suitable

precautions - of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty

houses along the abandoned waterfront. Uninquiring souls let this occurrence pass as one

of the major clashes in a spasmodic war on liquor.

Keener news-followers, however, wondered at the prodigious number of arrests, the

abnormally large force of men used in making them, and the secrecy surrounding the

disposal of the prisoners. No trials, or even definite charges were reported; nor were any

of the captives seen thereafter in the regular gaols of the nation. There were vague

statements about disease and concentration camps, and later about dispersal in various

naval and military prisons, but nothing positive ever developed. Innsmouth itself was left

almost depopulated, and it is even now only beginning to show signs of a sluggishly

revived existence.

Complaints from many liberal organizations were met with long confidential discussions,

and representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and prisons. As a result, these

societies became surprisingly passive and reticent. Newspaper men were harder to

manage, but seemed largely to cooperate with the government in the end. Only one paper

- a tabloid always discounted because of its wild policy - mentioned the deep diving

submarine that discharged torpedoes downward in the marine abyss just beyond Devil

Reef. That item, gathered by chance in a haunt of sailors, seemed indeed rather far-

fetched; since the low, black reef lay a full mile and a half out from Innsmouth Harbour.

People around the country and in the nearby towns muttered a great deal among

themselves, but said very little to the outer world. They had talked about dying and half-

deserted Innsmouth for nearly a century, and nothing new could be wilder or more

hideous than what they had whispered and hinted at years before. Many things had taught

them secretiveness, and there was no need to exert pressure on them. Besides, they really

knew little; for wide salt marshes, desolate and unpeopled, kept neighbors off from

Innsmouth on the landward side.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

But at last I am going to defy the ban on speech about this thing. Results, I am certain, are

so thorough that no public harm save a shock of repulsion could ever accrue from a

hinting of what was found by those horrified men at Innsmouth. Besides, what was found

might possibly have more than one explanation. I do not know just how much of the

whole tale has been told even to me, and I have many reasons for not wishing to probe

deeper. For my contact with this affair has been closer than that of any other layman, and

I have carried away impressions which are yet to drive me to drastic measures.

It was I who fled frantically out of Innsmouth in the early morning hours of July 16,

1927, and whose frightened appeals for government inquiry and action brought on the

whole reported episode. I was willing enough to stay mute while the affair was fresh and

uncertain; but now that it is an old story, with public interest and curiosity gone, I have an

odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly-

shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality. The mere telling helps me to

restore confidence in my own faculties; to reassure myself that I was not the first to

succumb to a contagious nightmare hallucination. It helps me, too, in making up my mind

regarding a certain terrible step which lies ahead of me.

I never heard of Innsmouth till the day before I saw it for the first and - so far - last time.

I was celebrating my coming of age by a tour of New England - sightseeing, antiquarian,

and genealogical - and had planned to go directly from ancient Newburyport to Arkham,

whence my mother's family was derived. I had no car, but was travelling by train, trolley

and motor-coach, always seeking the cheapest possible route. In Newburyport they told

me that the steam train was the thing to take to Arkham; and it was only at the station

ticket-office, when I demurred at the high fare, that I learned about Innsmouth. The stout,

shrewd-faced agent, whose speech shewed him to be no local man, seemed sympathetic

toward my efforts at economy, and made a suggestion that none of my other informants

had offered.

"You could take that old bus, I suppose," he said with a certain hesitation, "but it ain't

thought much of hereabouts. It goes through Innsmouth - you may have heard about that -

and so the people don't like it. Run by an Innsmouth fellow - Joe Sargent - but never gets

any custom from here, or Arkham either, I guess. Wonder it keeps running at all. I s'pose

it's cheap enough, but I never see mor'n two or three people in it - nobody but those

Innsmouth folk. Leaves the square - front of Hammond's Drug Store - at 10 a.m. and 7

p.m. unless they've changed lately. Looks like a terrible rattletrap - I've never been on it."

That was the first I ever heard of shadowed Innsmouth. Any reference to a town not

shown on common maps or listed in recent guidebooks would have interested me, and the

agent's odd manner of allusion roused something like real curiosity. A town able to

inspire such dislike in it its neighbors, I thought, must be at least rather unusual, and

worthy of a tourist's attention. If it came before Arkham I would stop off there and so I

asked the agent to tell me something about it. He was very deliberate, and spoke with an

air of feeling slightly superior to what he said.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

"Innsmouth? Well, it's a queer kind of a town down at the mouth of the Manuxet. Used to

be almost a city - quite a port before the War of 1812 - but all gone to pieces in the last

hundred years or so. No railroad now - B. and M. never went through, and the branch line

from Rowley was given up years ago.

"More empty houses than there are people, I guess, and no business to speak of except

fishing and lobstering. Everybody trades mostly either here or in Arkham or Ipswich.

Once they had quite a few mills, but nothing's left now except one gold refinery running

on the leanest kind of part time.

"That refinery, though, used to he a big thing, and old man Marsh, who owns it, must be

richer'n Croesus. Queer old duck, though, and sticks mighty close in his home. He's

supposed to have developed some skin disease or deformity late in life that makes him

keep out of sight. Grandson of Captain Obed Marsh, who founded the business. His

mother seems to've been some kind of foreigner - they say a South Sea islander - so

everybody raised Cain when he married an Ipswich girl fifty years ago. They always do

that about Innsmouth people, and folks here and hereabouts always try to cover up any

Innsmouth blood they have in 'em. But Marsh's children and grandchildren look just like

anyone else far's I can see. I've had 'em pointed out to me here - though, come to think of

it, the elder children don't seem to be around lately. Never saw the old man.

"And why is everybody so down on Innsmouth? Well, young fellow, you mustn't take too

much stock in what people here say. They're hard to get started, but once they do get

started they never let up. They've been telling things about Innsmouth - whispering 'em,

mostly - for the last hundred years, I guess, and I gather they're more scared than

anything else. Some of the stories would make you laugh - about old Captain Marsh

driving bargains with the devil and bringing imps out of hell to live in Innsmouth, or

about some kind of devil-worship and awful sacrifices in some place near the wharves

that people stumbled on around 1845 or thereabouts - but I come from Panton, Vermont,

and that kind of story don't go down with me.

"You ought to hear, though, what some of the old-timers tell about the black reef off the

coast - Devil Reef, they call it. It's well above water a good part of the time, and never

much below it, but at that you could hardly call it an island. The story is that there's a

whole legion of devils seen sometimes on that reef - sprawled about, or darting in and out

of some kind of caves near the top. It's a rugged, uneven thing, a good bit over a mile out,

and toward the end of shipping days sailors used to make big detours just to avoid it.

"That is, sailors that didn't hail from Innsmouth. One of the things they had against old

Captain Marsh was that he was supposed to land on it sometimes at night when the tide

was right. Maybe he did, for I dare say the rock formation was interesting, and it's just

barely possible he was looking for pirate loot and maybe finding it; but there was talk of

his dealing with demons there. Fact is, I guess on the whole it was really the Captain that

gave the bad reputation to the reef.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

"That was before the big epidemic of 1846, when over half the folks in Innsmouth was

carried off. They never did quite figure out what the trouble was, but it was probably

some foreign kind of disease brought from China or somewhere by the shipping. It surely

was bad enough - there was riots over it, and all sorts of ghastly doings that I don't

believe ever got outside of town - and it left the place in awful shape. Never came back -

there can't be more'n 300 or 400 people living there now.

"But the real thing behind the way folks feel is simply race prejudice - and I don't say I'm

blaming those that hold it. I hate those Innsmouth folks myself, and I wouldn't care to go

to their town. I s'pose you know - though I can see you're a Westerner by your talk - what

a lot our New England ships - used to have to do with queer ports in Africa, Asia, the

South Seas, and everywhere else, and what queer kinds of people they sometimes brought

back with 'em. You've probably heard about the Salem man that came home with a

Chinese wife, and maybe you know there's still a bunch of Fiji Islanders somewhere

around Cape Cod.

"Well, there must be something like that back of the Innsmouth people. The place always

was badly cut off from the rest of the country by marshes and creeks and we can't be sure

about the ins and outs of the matter; but it's pretty clear that old Captain Marsh must have

brought home some odd specimens when he had all three of his ships in commission back

in the twenties and thirties. There certainly is a strange kind of streak in the Innsmouth

folks today - I don't know how to explain it but it sort of makes you crawl. You'll notice a

little in Sargent if you take his bus. Some of 'em have queer narrow heads with flat noses

and bulgy, starry eyes that never seem to shut, and their skin ain't quite right. Rough and

scabby, and the sides of the necks are all shriveled or creased up. Get bald, too, very

young. The older fellows look the worst - fact is, I don't believe I've ever seen a very old

chap of that kind. Guess they must die of looking in the glass! Animals hate 'em - they

used to have lots of horse trouble before the autos came in.

"Nobody around here or in Arkham or Ipswich will have anything to do with 'em, and

they act kind of offish themselves when they come to town or when anyone tries to fish

on their grounds. Queer how fish are always thick off Innsmouth Harbour when there

ain't any anywhere else around - but just try to fish there yourself and see how the folks

chase you off! Those people used to come here on the railroad - walking and taking the

train at Rowley after the branch was dropped - but now they use that bus.

"Yes, there's a hotel in Innsmouth - called the Gilman House - but I don't believe it can

amount to much. I wouldn't advise you to try it. Better stay over here and take the ten

o'clock bus tomorrow morning; then you can get an evening bus there for Arkham at

eight o'clock. There was a factory inspector who stopped at the Gilman a couple of years

ago and he had a lot of unpleasant hints about the place. Seems they get a queer crowd

there, for this fellow heard voices in other rooms - though most of 'em was empty - that

gave him the shivers. It was foreign talk he thought, but he said the bad thing about it was

the kind of voice that sometimes spoke. It sounded so unnatural - slopping like, he said -

that he didn't dare undress and go to sleep. Just waited up and lit out the first thing in the

morning. The talk went on most all night.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

"This fellow - Casey, his name was - had a lot to say about how the Innsmouth folk,

watched him and seemed kind of on guard. He found the Marsh refinery a queer place -

it's in an old mill on the lower falls of the Manuxet. What he said tallied up with what I'd

heard. Books in bad shape, and no clear account of any kind of dealings. You know it's

always been a kind of mystery where the Marshes get the gold they refine. They've never

seemed to do much buying in that line, but years ago they shipped out an enormous lot of

ingots.

"Used to be talk of a queer foreign kind of jewelry that the sailors and refinery men

sometimes sold on the sly, or that was seen once or twice on some of the Marsh women-

folks. People allowed maybe old Captain Obed traded for it in some heathen port,

especially since he always ordered stacks of glass beads and trinkets such as seafaring

men used to get for native trade. Others thought and still think he'd found an old pirate

cache out on Devil Reef. But here's a funny thing. The old Captain's been dead these

sixty years, and there's ain't been a good-sized ship out of the place since the Civil War;

but just the same the Marshes still keep on buying a few of those native trade things -

mostly glass and rubber gewgaws, they tell me. Maybe the Innsmouth folks like 'em to

look at themselves - Gawd knows they've gotten to be about as bad as South Sea

cannibals and Guinea savages.

"That plague of '46 must have taken off the best blood in the place. Anyway, they're a

doubtful lot now, and the Marshes and other rich folks are as bad as any. As I told you,

there probably ain't more'n 400 people in the whole town in spite of all the streets they

say there are. I guess they're what they call 'white trash' down South - lawless and sly,

and full of secret things. They get a lot of fish and lobsters and do exporting by truck.

Queer how the fish swarm right there and nowhere else.

"Nobody can ever keep track of these people, and state school officials and census men

have a devil of a time. You can bet that prying strangers ain't welcome around

Innsmouth. I've heard personally of more'n one business or government man that's

disappeared there, and there's loose talk of one who went crazy and is out at Danvers

now. They must have fixed up some awful scare for that fellow.

"That's why I wouldn't go at night if I was you. I've never been there and have no wish to

go, but I guess a daytime trip couldn't hurt you - even though the people hereabouts will

advise you not to make it. If you're just sightseeing, and looking for old-time stuff,

Innsmouth ought to be quite a place for you."

And so I spent part of that evening at the Newburyport Public Library looking up data

about Innsmouth. When I had tried to question the natives in the shops, the lunchroom,

the garages, and the fire station, I had found them even harder to get started than the

ticket agent had predicted; and realized that I could not spare the time to overcome their

first instinctive reticence. They had a kind of obscure suspiciousness, as if there were

something amiss with anyone too much interested in Innsmouth. At the Y. M. C. A.,

where I was stopping, the clerk merely discouraged my going to such a dismal, decadent

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

place; and the people at the library shewed much the same attitude. Clearly, in the eyes of

the educated, Innsmouth was merely an exaggerated case of civic degeneration.

The Essex County histories on the library shelves had very little to say, except that the

town was founded in 1643, noted for shipbuilding before the Revolution, a seat of great

marine prosperity in the early 19th century, and later a minor factory center using the

Manuxet as power. The epidemic and riots of 1846 were very sparsely treated, as if they

formed a discredit to the county.

References to decline were few, though the significance of the later record was

unmistakable. After the Civil War all industrial life was confined to the Marsh Refining

Company, and the marketing of gold ingots formed the only remaining bit of major

commerce aside from the eternal fishing. That fishing paid less and less as the price of

the commodity fell and large-scale corporations offered competition, but there was never

a dearth of fish around Innsmouth Harbour. Foreigners seldom settled there, and there

was some discreetly veiled evidence that a number of Poles and Portuguese who had tried

it had been scattered in a peculiarly drastic fashion.

Most interesting of all was a glancing reference to the strange jewelry vaguely associated

with Innsmouth. It had evidently impressed the whole countryside more than a little, for

mention was made of specimens in the museum of Miskatonic University at Arkham, and

in the display room of the Newburyport Historical Society. The fragmentary descriptions

of these things were bald and prosaic, but they hinted to me an undercurrent of persistent

strangeness. Something about them seemed so odd and provocative that I could not put

them out of my mind, and despite the relative lateness of the hour I resolved to see the

local sample - said to be a large, queerly-proportioned thing evidently meant for a tiara -

if it could possibly be arranged.

The librarian gave me a note of introduction to the curator of the Society, a Miss Anna

Tilton, who lived nearby, and after a brief explanation that ancient gentlewoman was

kind enough to pilot me into the closed building, since the hour was not outrageously

late. The collection was a notable one indeed, but in my present mood I had eyes for

nothing but the bizarre object which glistened in a corner cupboard under the electric

lights.

It took no excessive sensitiveness to beauty to make me literally gasp at the strange,

unearthly splendour of the alien, opulent phantasy that rested there on a purple velvet

cushion. Even now I can hardly describe what I saw, though it was clearly enough a sort

of tiara, as the description had said. It was tall in front, and with a very large and

curiously irregular periphery, as if designed for a head of almost freakishly elliptical

outline. The material seemed to be predominantly gold, though a weird lighter

lustrousness hinted at some strange alloy with an equally beautiful and scarcely

identifiable metal. Its condition was almost perfect, and one could have spent hours in

studying the striking and puzzlingly untraditional designs - some simply geometrical, and

some plainly marine - chased or moulded in high relief on its surface with a

craftsmanship of incredible skill and grace.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

The longer I looked, the more the thing fascinated me; and in this fascination there was a

curiously disturbing element hardly to be classified or accounted for. At first I decided

that it was the queer other-worldly quality of the art which made me uneasy. All other art

objects I had ever seen either belonged to some known racial or national stream, or else

were consciously modernistic defiances of every recognized stream. This tiara was

neither. It clearly belonged to some settled technique of infinite maturity and perfection,

yet that technique was utterly remote from any - Eastern or Western, ancient or modern -

which I had ever heard of or seen exemplified. It was as if the workmanship were that of

another planet.

However, I soon saw that my uneasiness had a second and perhaps equally potent source

residing in the pictorial and mathematical suggestion of the strange designs. The patterns

all hinted of remote secrets and unimaginable abysses in time and space, and the

monotonously aquatic nature of the reliefs became almost sinister. Among these reliefs

were fabulous monsters of abhorrent grotesqueness and malignity - half ichthyic and half

batrachian in suggestion - which one could not dissociate from a certain haunting and

uncomfortable sense of pseudomemory, as if they called up some image from deep cells

and tissues whose retentive functions are wholly primal and awesomely ancestral. At

times I fancied that every contour of these blasphemous fish-frogs was over-flowing with

the ultimate quintessence of unknown and inhuman evil.

In odd contrast to the tiara's aspect was its brief and prosy history as related by Miss

Tilton. It had been pawned for a ridiculous sum at a shop in State Street in 1873, by a

drunken Innsmouth man shortly afterward killed in a brawl. The Society had acquired it

directly from the pawnbroker, at once giving it a display worthy of its quality. It was

labeled as of probable East-Indian or Indochinese provenance, though the attribution was

frankly tentative.

Miss Tilton, comparing all possible hypotheses regarding its origin and its presence in

New England, was inclined to believe that it formed part of some exotic pirate hoard

discovered by old Captain Obed Marsh. This view was surely not weakened by the

insistent offers of purchase at a high price which the Marshes began to make as soon as

they knew of its presence, and which they repeated to this day despite the Society's

unvarying determination not to sell.

As the good lady shewed me out of the building she made it clear that the pirate theory of

the Marsh fortune was a popular one among the intelligent people of the region. Her own

attitude toward shadowed Innsmouth - which she never seen - was one of disgust at a

community slipping far down the cultural scale, and she assured me that the rumours of

devil-worship were partly justified by a peculiar secret cult which had gained force there

and engulfed all the orthodox churches.

It was called, she said, "The Esoteric Order of Dagon", and was undoubtedly a debased,

quasi-pagan thing imported from the East a century before, at a time when the Innsmouth

fisheries seemed to be going barren. Its persistence among a simple people was quite

natural in view of the sudden and permanent return of abundantly fine fishing, and it soon

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

came to be the greatest influence in the town, replacing Freemasonry altogether and

taking up headquarters in the old Masonic Hall on New Church Green.

All this, to the pious Miss Tilton, formed an excellent reason for shunning the ancient

town of decay and desolation; but to me it was merely a fresh incentive. To my

architectural and historical anticipations was now added an acute anthropological zeal,

and I could scarcely sleep in my small room at the "Y" as the night wore away.

Shortly before ten the next morning I stood with one small valise in front of Hammond's

Drug Store in old Market Square waiting for the Innsmouth bus. As the hour for its

arrival drew near I noticed a general drift of the loungers to other places up the street, or

to the Ideal Lunch across the square. Evidently the ticket-agent had not exaggerated the

dislike which local People bore toward Innsmouth and its denizens. In a few moments a

small motor-coach of extreme decrepitude and dirty grey colour rattled down State Street,

made a turn, and drew up at the curb beside me. I felt immediately that it was the right

one; a guess which the half-illegible sign on the windshield - Arkham-Innsmouth-

Newburyport - soon verified.

There were only three passengers - dark, unkempt men of sullen visage and somewhat

youthful cast - and when the vehicle stopped they clumsily shambled out and began

walking up State Street in a silent, almost furtive fashion. The driver also alighted, and I

watched him as he went into the drug store to make some purchase. This, I reflected,

must be the Joe Sargent mentioned by the ticket-agent; and even before I noticed any

details there spread over me a wave of spontaneous aversion which could be neither

checked nor explained. It suddenly struck me as very natural that the local people should

not wish to ride on a bus owned and driven by this man, or to visit any oftener than

possible the habitat of such a man and his kinsfolk.

When the driver came out of the store I looked at him more carefully and tried to

determine the source of my evil impression. He was a thin, stoop-shouldered man not

much under six feet tall, dressed in shabby blue civilian clothes and wearing a frayed golf

cap. His age was perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep creases in the sides of his neck

made him seem older when one did not study his dull, expressionless face. He had a

narrow head, bulging, watery-blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding

forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. His long thick lip and coarse-pored,

greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that

straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly

irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease. His hands were large and heavily

veined, and had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikingly short in

proportion to the rest of the structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl closely into

the huge palm. As he walked toward the bus I observed his peculiarly shambling gait and

saw that his feet were inordinately immense. The more I studied them the more I

wondered how he could buy any shoes to fit them.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

A certain greasiness about the fellow increased my dislike. He was evidently given to

working or lounging around the fish docks, and carried with him much of their

characteristic smell. Just what foreign blood was in him I could not even guess. His

oddities certainly did not look Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine or negroid, yet I could see

why the people found him alien. I myself would have thought of biological degeneration

rather than alienage.

I was sorry when I saw there would be no other passengers on the bus. Somehow I did

not like the idea of riding alone with this driver. But as leaving time obviously

approached I conquered my qualms and followed the man aboard, extending him a dollar

bill and murmuring the single word "Innsmouth." He looked curiously at me for a second

as he returned forty cents change without speaking. I took a seat far behind him, but on

the same side of the bus, since I wished to watch the shore during the journey.

At length the decrepit vehicle stared with a jerk, and rattled noisily past the old brick

buildings of State Street amidst a cloud of vapour from the exhaust. Glancing at the

people on the sidewalks, I thought I detected in them a curious wish to avoid looking at

the bus - or at least a wish to avoid seeming to look at it. Then we turned to the left into

High Street, where the going was smoother; flying by stately old mansions of the early

republic and still older colonial farmhouses, passing the Lower Green and Parker River,

and finally emerging into a long, monotonous stretch of open shore country.

The day was warm and sunny, but the landscape of sand and sedge-grass, and stunted

shrubbery became more and desolate as we proceeded. Out the window I could see the

blue water and the sandy line of Plum Island, and we presently drew very near the beach

as our narrow road veered off from the main highway to Rowley and Ipswich. There were

no visible houses, and I could tell by the state of the road that traffic was very light

hereabouts. The weather-worn telephone poles carried only two wires. Now and then we

crossed crude wooden bridges over tidal creeks that wound far inland and promoted the

general isolation of the region.

Once in a while I noticed dead stumps and crumbling foundation-walls above the drifting

sand, and recalled the old tradition quoted in one of the histories I had read, that this was

once a fertile and thickly-settled countryside. The change, it was said, came

simultaneously with the Innsmouth epidemic of l846, and was thought by simple folk to

have a dark connection with hidden forces of evil. Actually, it was caused by the unwise

cutting of woodlands near the shore, which robbed the soil of the best protection and

opened the way for waves of wind-blown sand.

At last we lost sight of Plum Island and saw the vast expanse of the open Atlantic on our

left. Our narrow course began to climb steeply, and I felt a singular sense of disquiet in

looking at the lonely crest ahead where the rutted road-way met the sky. It was as if the

bus were about to keep on in its ascent, leaving the sane earth altogether and merging

with the unknown arcana of upper air and cryptical sky. The smell of the sea took on

ominous implications, and the silent driver's bent, rigid back and narrow head became

more and more hateful. As I looked at him I saw that the back of his head was almost as

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

hairless as his face, having only a few straggling yellow strands upon a grey scabrous

surface.

Then we reached the crest and beheld the outspread valley beyond, where the Manuxet

joins the sea just north of the long line of cliffs that culminate in Kingsport Head and veer

off toward Cape Ann. On the far misty horizon I could just make out the dizzy profile of

the Head, topped by the queer ancient house of which so many legends are told; but for

the moment all my attention was captured by the nearer panorama just below me. I had, I

realized, come face to face with rumour-shadowed Innsmouth.

It was a town of wide extent and dense construction, yet one with a portentous dearth of

visible life. From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came, and the

three tall steeples loomed stark and unpainted against the seaward horizon. One of them

was crumbling down at the top, and in that and another there were only black gaping

holes where clock-dials should have been. The vast huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and

peaked gables conveyed with offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, and as we

approached along the now descending road I could see that many roofs had wholly caved

in. There were some large square Georgian houses, too, with hipped roofs, cupolas, and

railed "widow's walks." These were mostly well back from the water, and one or two

seemed to be in moderately sound condition. Stretching inland from among them I saw

the rusted, grass-grown line of the abandoned railway, with leaning telegraph-poles now

devoid of wires, and the half-obscured lines of the old carriage roads to Rowley and

Ipswich.

The decay was worst close to the waterfront, though in its very midst I could spy the

white belfry of a fairly well preserved brick structure which looked like a small factory.

The harbour, long clogged with sand, was enclosed by an ancient stone breakwater; on

which I could begin to discern the minute forms of a few seated fishermen, and at whose

end were what looked like the foundations of a bygone lighthouse. A sandy tongue had

formed inside this barrier and upon it I saw a few decrepit cabins, moored dories, and

scattered lobster-pots. The only deep water seemed to be where the river poured out past

the belfried structure and turned southward to join the ocean at the breakwater's end.

Here and there the ruins of wharves jutted out from the shore to end in indeterminate

rottenness, those farthest south seeming the most decayed. And far out at sea, despite a

high tide, I glimpsed a long, black line scarcely rising above the water yet carrying a

suggestion of odd latent malignancy. This, I knew, must be Devil Reef. As I looked, a

subtle, curious sense of beckoning seemed superadded to the grim repulsion; and oddly

enough, I found this overtone more disturbing than the primary impression.

We met no one on the road, but presently began to pass deserted farms in varying stages

of ruin. Then I noticed a few inhabited houses with rags stuffed in the broken windows

and shells and dead fish lying about the littered yards. Once or twice I saw listless-

looking people working in barren gardens or digging clams on the fishy-smelling beach

below, and groups of dirty, simian-visaged children playing around weed-grown

doorsteps. Somehow these people seemed more disquieting than the dismal buildings, for

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TheShadowOverInnsmouthTheShadowOverInnsmouthbyH.P.LovecraftWrittenNov?-3Dec1931Published1936inTheShadowoverInnsmouth,Everett,PA:VisionaryPublishingCo.,p.13-158.IDuringthewinterof1927-28officialsoftheFederalgovernmentmadeastrangeandsecretinvestigationofcertainconditionsintheancientMassachusettsseapor...

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Lovecraft, H P - The Shadow Over Innsmouth

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