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object:1f.lovecraft - Discarded Draft of
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter

“The Shadow over Innsmouth”

[pp. 1–6:]
It was in the summer of 1927 that I suddenly cut short my sightseeing
tour of New England and returned to Cleveland under a nervous strain. I
have seldom mentioned the particulars of this trip, and hardly know why
I do so now except that a recent newspaper cutting has somehow relieved
the tension which formerly existed. A sweeping fire, it appears, has
wiped out most of the empty ancient houses along the deserted Innsmouth
waterfront as well as a certain number of buildings farther inland;
while a singularly simultaneous explosion, heard for many miles around,
has destroyed to a vast depth the great black reef a mile and a half
out from shore where the sea-bottom abruptly falls to form an
incalculable abyss. For certain reasons I take great satisfaction in
these occurrences, even the first of which seems to me a blessing
rather than a disaster. Especially am I glad that the old brick
jewellery factory and the pillared Order of Dagon Hall have gone along
with the rest. There is talk of incendiarism, and I suppose old Father
Iwanicki could tell much if he chose; but what I know gives a very
unusual angle to my opinion.
I never heard of Innsmouth till the day before I saw it for the first
and last time. It does not seem to be mentioned on any modern map, and
I was planning to go directly from Newburyport to Arkham, and thence to
Gloucester, if I could find transportation. I had no car, but was
travelling by motor coach, train, and trolley, 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 heard about
Innsmouth. The 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 isn’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 man—Joe Sargent—but never gets any custom from
here, or from Arkham either, I guess. Wonder it keeps running at all. I
suppose it’s cheap enough, but I never see more than two or three
people in it—nobody but those Innsmouth folks. 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 Innsmouth. Any reference to a town
not listed in the 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 its neighbours, I thought, must be at
least rather unusual, and worthy of a sightseer’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 somewhat
superior to what he said.
“Innsmouth? Well, it’s a queer kind of a town down at the mouth of the
Manuxet. It used to be almost a city—quite a seaport before the War of
1812—but the place has all gone to pieces in the last hundred years or
so. There’s no railroad—the B & M never went through there, 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. Everybody
trades either here or in Arkham or Ipswich. At one time they had quite
a number of mills there, but nothing’s left now but one jewellery
refinery.
“That’s a pretty prominent proposition, though—all the travelling
salesmen seem to know about it. Makes a special kind of fancy jewellery
out of a secret alloy that nobody can analyse very well. They say it’s
platinum, silver, and gold—but these people sell it so cheap that you
can hardly believe it. Guess they have a corner on that kind of goods.
“Old man Marsh, who owns the thing, must be richer than Croesus. Queer
old duck, though, and sticks pretty close around the town. He’s the
grandson of Capt. Obed Marsh, who founded the business. His mother was
some kind of foreigner—they say a South Sea native—so everybody raised
Cain when he married an Ipswich girl fifty years ago. They always do
that about Innsmouth people. But his children and grandchildren look
just like anybody else so far as I can see. I’ve had ’em pointed out to
me here. Never saw the old man.
“And why is everybody so down on Innsmouth? Well—you mustn’t take too
much stock in what people around here say. They’re hard to get started,
but once they do get started they never stop. 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 1850 or
thereabouts—but I come from Panton, Vermont, and that kind of story
doesn’t go down with me.
“The real thing behind all this 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 suppose you
know—though I can see you’re a Westerner by the way you talk—what a lot
our New England ships used to have to do with queer ports in Asia,
Africa, the South Seas, and everywhere else, and what queer kinds of
people they sometimes brought back with them. You’ve probably heard
about the Salem man that came back with a Chinese wife, and maybe you
know there’s still a colony of Fiji Islanders somewhere around Cape
Cod.
“Well, there must be something like that back of the Innsmouth people.
The place was always badly cut off from the rest of the country by salt
marshes and inlets, and we can’t be sure about the ins and outs of the
matter, but it’s pretty plain that old Captain Marsh must have brought
home some odd specimens when he had all three of his ships in
commission back in the 1830’s and 1840’s. There certainly is a strange
kind of a streak in the Innsmouth folks today—I don’t know how to
express it, but it sort of makes me crawl. You’ll notice it a little in
Joe Sargent if you take that bus. Some of them have flat noses, big
mouths, weak retreating chins, and a funny kind of rough grey skin. The
sides of their necks are sort of shrivelled or creased up, and they get
bald very young. Nobody around here or in Arkham will have anything to
do with them, and they act kind of offish themselves when they come to
town. They used to ride on the railroad, walking and taking the train
at Rowley or Ipswich, 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 8 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. It seems they get a
queer crowd there, for this fellow heard voices in other rooms that
gave him the shivers. It was foreign talk, 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 go to sleep. Just
kept dressed and lit out early in the morning. The talk went on most of
the night.
“This man—Casey, his name was—had a lot to say about the old Marsh
factory, and what he said fitted in very well with some of the wild
stories. The books were in no kind of shape, and the machinery looked
old and almost abandoned, as if it hadn’t been run a great deal. The
place still used water power from the Lower Falls of the Manuxet. There
were only a few employees, and they didn’t seem to be doing much. It
made me think, when he told me, about the local rumours that Marsh
doesn’t actually make the stuff he sells. Many people say he doesn’t
get enough factory supplies to be really running the place, and that he
must be importing those queer ornaments from somewhere—heaven knows
where. I don’t believe that, though. The Marshes have been selling
those outlandish rings and armlets and tiaras and things for nearly a
hundred years; and if there were anywhere else where they got ’em, the
general public would have found out all about it by this time. Then,
too, there’s no shipping or in-bound trucking around Innsmouth that
would account for such imports. What does get imported is the queerest
kind of glass and rubber trinkets—makes you think of what they used to
buy in the old days to trade with savages. But it’s a straight fact
that all inspectors run up against queer things at the plant. Twenty
odd years ago one of them disappeared at Innsmouth—never heard of
again—and I myself knew George Cole, who went insane down there one
night, and had to be lugged away by two men from the Danvers asylum,
where he is now. He talks of some kind of sound and shrieks things
about ‘scaly water-devils’.
“And that makes me think of another of the old stories—about the black
reef off the coast. Devil’s Reef, they call it. It’s almost above water
a good part of the time, but at that you could hardly call it a real
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 sailors used to make great detours just to avoid
it. One of the things they had against Captain Marsh was that he used
to land on it sometimes when it was fairly dry. Probably the rock
formation interested him, but there was talk about his having dealings
with demons. That was before the big epidemic of 1846, when over half
the people in Innsmouth were 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.
“Maybe that plague took off the best blood in Innsmouth. Anyway,
they’re a doubtful lot now—and there can’t be more than 500 or 600 of
them. The rich Marshes are as bad as any. I guess they’re all what
people call ‘white trash’ down South—lawless and sly, and full of
secret doings. Lobster fishermen, mostly—exporting by truck. Nobody can
ever keep track of ’em, and state school officials and census people
have a devil of a time. That’s why I wouldn’t go at night if I were
you. I’ve never been there and have no wish to go, but I guess a
daytime trip wouldn’t hurt you—even though the people here will advise
you not to take it. If you’re just sightseeing, Innsmouth ought to be
quite a place for you.”
And so I spent that evening at the Newburyport Public Library looking
up data about Innsmouth. When I had tried to question natives in the
shops, the lunch room, and the fire station I had found them even
harder to get started than the ticket agent had predicted, and realised
that I could not spare the time to overcome their first instinctive
reticence. They had a kind of obscure suspiciousness. At the YMCA the
clerk merely discouraged my going to such a dismal, decadent place, and
the people at the library shewed much the same attitude, holding
Innsmouth to be merely an exaggerated case of civic degeneration.
The Essex County histories on the 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
nineteenth century, and later on a minor factory centre using the
Manuxet as power. References to decline were very few, though the
significance of the later records was unmistakable. After the Civil War
all industrial life centred in the Marsh Refining Company at the Lower
Falls, and the marketing of its products formed the only remaining bit
of major commerce. There were very few foreigners; mostly Poles and
Portuguese on the southern fringe of the town. Local finances were very
bad, and but for the Marsh factory the place would have been bankrupt.
I saw a good many booklets and catalogues and advertising calendars of
the Marsh Refining Company in the business department of the library,
and began to realise what a striking thing that lone industry was. The
jewels and ornaments it sold were of the finest possible artistry and
the most extreme originality; so delicately wrought, indeed, that one
could not doubt but that handicraft played a large part in at least
their final stages of manufacture. Some of the half-tone pictures of
them interested me profoundly, for the strangeness and beauty of the
designs seemed to my eye indicative of a profound and exotic genius—a
genius so spectacular and bizarre that one could not help wondering
whence the inspiration had come. It was easy to credit the boast of one
of the booklets that this jewellery was a favourite with persons of
sophisticated taste, and that several specimens were exhibited in
museums of modern craftsmanship.
Large pieces predominated—armlets, tiaras, and elaborate pendants—but
rings and lesser items were numerous. The raised or incised
designs—partly conventional and partly with a curious marine motif—were
wrought in a style of tremendous distinctiveness and of utter
dissimilarity to the art traditions of any race or epoch I knew about.
This other-worldly character was emphasised by the oddness of the
precious alloy, whose general effect was suggested in several
colour-plates. Something about these pictured things fascinated me
intensely—almost disproportionately—and I resolved to see as many
original specimens as possible both at Innsmouth and in shops and
museums elsewhere. Yet there was a distinct element of repulsion mixed
with the fascination; proceeding, perhaps, from the evil and silly old
legends about the founder of the business which the ticket-agent had
told me.
[p. 17:]
The door of the Marsh retail office was open, and I walked in with
considerable expectancy. The interior was shabby and ill-lighted, but
contained a large number of display cases of solid and capable
workmanship. A youngish man came forward to meet me, and as I studied
his face a fresh wave of disturbance passed over me. He was not
unhandsome, but there was something subtly bizarre and aberrant about
his features and vocal timbre. I could not stifle a keen sudden
aversion, and acquired an unexplained reluctance to seem like any sort
of curious investigator. Before I knew it I found myself telling the
fellow that I was a jewellery buyer for a Cleveland firm, and preparing
myself to shew a merely professional interest in what I should see.
It was hard, though, to carry out this policy. The clerk switched on
more lights and began to lead me from case to case, but when I beheld
the glittering marvels before me I could scarcely walk steadily or talk
coherently. It took no excessive sensitiveness to beauty to make one
literally gasp at the strange, alien loveliness of these opulent
objects, and as I gazed fascinatedly I saw how little justice even the
colour-plates had done them. Even now I can hardly describe what I
saw—though those who own such pieces or have seen them in shops and
museums can supply the missing data. The massed effect of so many
elaborate examples was what produced my especial feeling of awe and
unrest. For somehow or other, these singular grotesques and arabesques
did not seem to be the product of any earthly handiwork—least of all a
factory only a stone’s throw away. The patterns and traceries all
hinted of remote spaces and unimaginable abysses, and the aquatic
nature of the occasional pictorial items added to the general
unearthliness. Some of the fabulous monsters filled me with an
uncomfortable sense of dark pseudo-memory which I tried
[p. 21:]
the taint and blasphemy of furtive Innsmouth. He, like me, was a normal
being outside the pall of decay and normally terrified by it. But
because he was so inextricably close to the thing, he had been broken
in a way that I was not yet broken.
Shaking off the hands of the firemen who sought to detain him, the
ancient rose to his feet and greeted me as if I were an acquaintance.
The grocery youth had told me where most of Uncle Zadok’s liquor was
obtained, and without a word I began leading him in that
direction—through the Square and around into Eliot Street. His step was
astonishingly brisk for one of his age and bibulousness, and I
marvelled at the original strength of his constitution. My haste to
leave Innsmouth had abated for the moment, and I felt instead a queer
curiosity to dip into this mumbling patriarch’s chaotic store of
extravagant myth.
When we had brought a quart of whiskey in the rear of a dismal variety
store, I led Uncle Zadok along South Street to the utterly abandoned
section of the waterfront, and still farther southward to a point where
even the fishermen on the distant breakwater could not see us, where I
knew we could talk undisturbed. For some reason or other he seemed to
dislike this arrangement—casting nervous glances out to sea in the
direction of Devil Reef—but the lure of the whiskey was too strong for
him to resist. After we had found a seat on the edge of a rotting wharf
I gave him a pull at the bottle and waited for it to take effect.
Naturally I graduated the doses very carefully, for I did not wish the
old man’s loquacity to turn into a stupor. As he grew more mellow, I
began to venture some remarks and inquiries about Innsmouth, and was
really startled by the terrible and sincere portentousness of his
lowered voice. He did not seem as crazy as his wild tales would
indicate, and I found myself shuddering even when I could not believe
his fantastic inventions. I hardly wondered at the naive credulity of
superstitious Father Iwanicki.
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