“I expect to follow my grandfather’s wishes,” said Abner.
The old man nodded. But his eyes were troubled, and it was plain that he had little faith in Abner.
“How’d you find out I was here, Uncle Zebulon?” Abner asked.
“I had the word ye’d come. It was my bounden duty to talk to ye. The
Whateleys has a curse on ’em. Thar’s been them naow gone to graoun’ has had to dew with the devil, and thar’s some what whistled turrible things aout o’ the air, and thar’s some what had to dew with things that wasn’t all human nor all fish but lived in the water and swum aout—way aout—to sea, and thar’s some what growed in on themselves and got all mazed and queer—and thar’s what happened on Sentinel Hill that time—Lavinny’s Wilbur—and that other one by the Sentinel Stone—Gawd, I shake when I think on it . . .”
“Now, Grandpa—don’t ye git yer dander up,” chided the boy.
“I wun’t, I wun’t,” said the old man tremulously. “It’s all died away naow.
It’s forgot—by all but me and them what took the signs daown—the signs that pointed to Dunwich, sayin’ it was too turrible a place to know about . . .” He shook his head and was silent.
“Uncle Zebulon,” said Abner. “I never saw my Aunt Sarah.”
“No, no, boy—she was locked up that time. Afore you was borned, I think it was.”
“Why?”
“Only Luther knowed—and Gawd. Now Luther’s gone, and Gawd dun’t
seem like He knowed Dunwich was still here.”
“What was Aunt Sarah doing in Innsmouth?”
“Visitin’ kin.”
“Are there Whateleys there, too?”
“Not Whateleys. Marshes. Old Obed Marsh that was Pa’s cousin. Him and
his wife that he faound in the trade—at Ponape, if ye know whar that is.”
“I do.”
“Ye dew? I never knowed. They say Sarey was visitin’ Marsh kin—Obed’s
son or grandson—I never knowed which. Never heered. Dun’t care. She was thar quite a spell. They say when she come back she was different. Flightly.
Unsettled. Sassed her pa. And then, not long after, he locked her up in that room till she died.”
“How long after?”
“Three, four months. And Luther never said what fer. Nobody saw her again after that till the day she wuz laid aout in her coffin. Two year, might be three years ago. Thar was that time nigh onto a year after she come back from Innsmouth thar was sech goins-on here at this house—a-fightin’ and a-screamin’
and a-screechin’—most everyone in Dunwich heerd it, but no one went to see whut it was, and next day Luther he said it was only Sarey took with a spell.
Might be it was. Might be it was suthin’ else . . .”
“What else, Uncle Zebulon?”
“Devil’s work,” said the old man instantly. “But I fergit—ye’re the
eddicated one. Ain’t many Whateleys ever bin eddicated. Thar was Lavinny—
she read them turrible books what was no good for her. And Sarey—she read some. Them as has only a little learnin’ might’s well have none—they ain’t fit to handle life with only a little learnin’, they’re fitter with none a-tall.”
Abner smiled.
“Dun't ye laugh, boy!”
“I’m not laughing, Uncle Zebulon. I agree with you.”
“Then ef ye come face to face with it, ye’ll know what to dew. Ye wun’t stop and think—ye’ll jest dew.”
“With what?”
“I wisht I knowed, Abner. I dun’t. Gawd knows. Luther knowed. Luther’s dead. It comes on me Sarey knowed, too. Sarey’s dead. Now nobody’s knows whut turrible thing it was. Ef I was a prayin’ man, I’d pray you dun’t find aout— but ef ye dew, dun’t stop to figger it aout by eddication, jest dew whut ye have to dew. Yer grandpa kep’ a record—look fer it. Ye might learn whut kind a people the Marshes was—they wasn’t like us—suthin’ turrible happened to ’em—and might be it reached aout and tetched Sarey . . .”
Something stood between the old man and Abner Whateley—something
unvoiced, perhaps unknown; but it was something that cast a chill about Abner for all his conscious attempt to belittle what he felt.
“I’ll learn what I can, Uncle Zebulon,” he promised.
The old man nodded and beckoned to the boy. He signified that he wished to rise, to return to the buggy. The boy came running.
“Ef ye need me, Abner, send word to Tobias,” said Zebulon Whateley. “I’ll come—ef I can.”
“Thank you.”
Abner and the boy helped the old man back into the buggy. Zebulon
Whateley raised his forearm in a gesture of farewell, the boy whipped up the horse, and the buggy drew away.
Abner stood for a moment looking after the departing vehicle. He was both troubled and irritated—troubled at the suggestion of something dreadful which lurked beneath Zebulon Whateley’s words of warning, irritated because his grandfather, despite all his adjurations, had left him so little to act upon. Yet this must have been because his grandfather evidently believed there might be nothing untoward to greet his grandson when at last Abner Whateley arrived at the old house. It could be nothing other by way of explanation.
Yet Abner was not entirely convinced. Was the matter one of such horror that Abner should not know of it unless he had to? Or had Luther Whateley laid down a key to the riddle elsewhere in the house? He doubted it. It would not be Grandfather’s way to seek the devious when he had always been so blunt and direct.
He went into the house with his groceries, put them away, and sat down to map out a plan of action. The very first thing to be accomplished was a survey of the mill part of the structure, to determine whether any machinery could be salvaged. Next he must find someone who would undertake to tear down the mill and the room above it. Thereafter he must dispose of the house and adjoining property, though he had a sinking feeling of futility at the conviction that he would never find anyone who would want to settle in so forlorn a corner of Massachusetts as Dunwich.
He began at once to carry out his obligations.
His search of the mill, however, disclosed that the machinery which had been in it—save for such pieces as were fixed to the running of the wheel—had been removed, and presumably sold. Perhaps the increment from the sale was part of that very legacy Luther Whateley had deposited in the bank at Arkham for his grandson. Abner was thus spared the necessity of removing the machinery before beginning the planned demolition. The dust in the old mill almost suffocated him; it lay an inch thick over everything, and it rose in great gusts to cloud about him when he walked through the empty, cobwebbed rooms.
Dust muffled his footsteps and he was glad to leave the mill to go around and look at the wheel.
He worked his way around the wooden ledge to the frame of the wheel,
somewhat uncertain, lest the wood give way and plunge him into the water beneath; but the construction was firm, the wood did not give, and he was soon at the wheel. It appeared to be a splendid example of middle nineteenth century work. It would be a shame to tear it apart, thought Abner. Perhaps the wheel could be removed, and a place could be found for it either in some museum or in some one of those buildings which were forever being reconstructed by wealthy persons interested in the preservation of the American heritage.
He was about to turn away from the wheel, when his eye was caught by a series of small wet prints on the paddles. He bent closer to examine them, but, apart from ascertaining that they were already in part dried, he could not see in them more than marks left by some small animal, probably batrachian—a frog or a toad—which had apparently mounted the wheel in the early hours before the rising of the sun. His eyes, raising, followed the line of the wheel to the broken out shutters of the room above.
He stood for a moment, thinking. He recalled the batrachian creature he had glimpsed along the baseboard of the shuttered room. Perhaps it had escaped thr
ough the broken pane? Or, more likely, perhaps another of its kind had discovered its presence and gone up to it. A faint apprehension stirred in him, but he brushed it away in irritation that a man of his intelligence should have been sufficiently stirred by the aura of ignorant, superstitious mystery clinging to his grandfather’s memory to respond to it.
Nevertheless, he went around and mounted the stairs to the shuttered room.
He half expected, when he unlocked the door, to find some significant change in the aspect of the room as he remembered it from last night, but, apart from the unaccustomed daylight streaming into the room, there was no alteration.
He crossed to the window.
There were prints on the sill. There were two sets of them. One appeared to be leading out, the other entering. They were not the same size. The prints leading outward were tiny, only half an inch across. Those leading in were double that size. Abner bent close and stared at them in fixed fascination.
He was not a zoologist, but he was by no means ignorant of zoology. The prints on the sill were like nothing he had ever seen before, not even in dream.
Save for being or seeming to be webbed, they were the perfect prints in miniature of human hands and feet.
Though he made a cursory search for the creature, he saw no sign of it, and finally, somewhat shaken, he retreated from the room and locked the door behind him, already regretting the impulse which had led him to it in the first place and which had caused him to burst open the shutters which for so long had walled the room away from the outer world.
III
He was not entirely surprised to learn that no one in Dunwich could be found to undertake the demolition of the mill. Even such carpenters as those who had not worked for a long time were reluctant to undertake the task, pleading a variety of excuses, which Abner easily recognized as a disguise for the superstitious fear of the place under which one and all labored. He found it necessary to drive into Aylesbury, but, though he encountered no difficulty in engaging a trio of husky young men who had formed a partnership to tear down the mill, he was forced to wait upon their previous commitments and had to return to Dunwich with the promise that they would come “in a week or ten days.”
Thereupon he set about at once to examine into all the effects of Luther Whateley which still remained in the house. There were stacks of newspapers— chiefly the Arkham Advertiser and the Aylesbury Transcript—now yellowing with age and mouldering with dust, which he set aside for burning. There were books which he determined to go over individually in order that he might not destroy anything of value. And there were letters which he would have burned at once had he not happened to glance into one of them and caught sight of the name “Marsh,” at which he read on.
“Luther, what happened to cousin Obed is a singular thing. I do not know how to tell it to you. I do not know how to make it credible. I am not sure I have all the facts in this matter. I cannot believe but that it is a rigmarole deliberately invented to conceal something of a scandalous nature, for you know the Marshes have always been given to exaggeration and had a pronounced flair for deception. Their ways are devious. They have always been.
“But the story, as I have it from cousin Alizah, is that when he was a young man Obed and some others from Innsmouth, sailing their trading ships into the Polynesian Islands, encountered there a strange people who called themselves the ‘Deep Ones’ and who had the ability to live in the water or on the earth.
Amphibians, they would then be. Does this sound credible to you? It does not to me. What is most astonishing is that Obed and some others married women of these people and brought them home to live with them.
“Now that is the legend. Here are the facts. Ever since that time, the Marshes have prospered mightily in the trade. Mrs. Marsh is never seen abroad, save on such occasions as she goes to certain closed affairs of the Order of Dagon Hall.
‘Dagon’ is said to be a sea god. I know nothing of these pagan religions, and wish to know nothing. The Marsh children have a very strange look. I do not exaggerate, Luther, when I tell you that they have such wide mouths and such chinless faces and such large staring eyes that I swear they sometimes look more like frogs than human beings! They are not, at least, so far as I can see, gilled.
The ‘Deep Ones’ are said to be possessed of gills, and to belong to Dagon or to some other deity of the sea whose name I cannot even pronounce, far less set down. No matter. It is such a rigmarole as the Marshes might well invent to serve their purposes, but by God, Luther, judging by the way the ships Captain Marsh has in the East India trade keep afloat without a smitchin of damage done to them by storm or wear—the brigantine Columbia, the barque Sumatra Queen, the brig Hetty and some others—it might almost seem that he has made some sort of bargain with Neptune himself!
“Then there are all the doings off the coast where the Marshes live. Night swimming. They swim way out off Devil Reef, which, as you know, is a mile and a half out from the harbor here at Innsmouth. People keep away from the Marshes—except the Martins and some such others among them who were also in the East India trade. Now that Obed is gone—and I suppose Mrs. Marsh may be also, since she is no longer seen anywhere—the children and the grandchildren of old Captain Obed follow in his strange ways.”
The letter dwindled down to commonplaces about prices—ridiculously low figures seen from this vantage of over half a century later, for Luther Whateley must have been a young man, unmarried, at the time this letter had been written to him by Ariah, a cousin of whom Abner had never heard. What it had to say of the Marshes was nothing—or all, perhaps, if Abner had had the key to the puzzle of which, he began to believe with mounting irritation, he held only certain disassociated parts.
But if Luther Whateley had believed this rigmarole, would he, years later, have permitted his daughter to visit the Marsh cousins? Abner doubted it.
He went through other letters—bills, receipts, trivial accounts of journeys made to Boston, Newburyport, Kingsport—postcards, and came at last to another letter from Cousin Ariah, written, if a comparison of dates was sufficient evidence, immediately after the one Abner had just read. They were ten days apart, and Luther would have had time to reply to that first.
Abner opened it eagerly.
The first page was an account of certain small family matters pertinent to the marriage of another cousin, evidently a sister of Ariah’s; the second a speculation about the future of the East India trade, with a paragraph about a new book by Whitman—evidently Walt; but the third was manifestly in answer to something Grandfather Whateley had evidently written concerning the Marsh branch of the family.
“Well, Luther, you may be right in this matter of race prejudice as responsible for the feeling against the Marshes. I know how people here feel about other races. It is unfortunate, perhaps, but such is their lack of education that they find much room for such prejudices. But I am not convinced that it is all due to race prejudice. I don’t know what kind of race it is that would give the Marshes after Obed that strange look. The East India people—such as I have seen and recall from my early days in the trade—have features much like our own, and only a different color to the skin—copper, I would call it. Once I did see a native who had a similar appearance, but he was evidently not typical, for he was shunned by all the workers around the ships in the harbor where I saw him. I’ve forgotten now where it was, but I think Ponape.
“To give them their due, the Marshes keep pretty much to themselves—or to those families living here under the same cloud. And they more or less run the town. It may be significant—it may have been accident—that one selectman who spoke out against them was found drowned soon after. I am the first to admit that coincidences more startling than this frequently occur, but you may be sure that people who disliked the Marshes made the most of this.
“But I know how your analytical mind is cold to such talk; I will spare you more of it.”
Thereafter not a word. Abner went through bundles of l
etters in vain. What Ariah wrote in subsequent letters dealt scrupulously with family matters of the utmost triviality. Luther Whateley had evidently made his displeasure with mere gossip clear; even as a young man, Luther must have been strictly self-disciplined. Abner found but one further reference to any mystery at Innsmouth—that was a newspaper clipping dealing in very vague terms, suggesting that the reporter who sent in the story did not really know what had taken place, with certain federal activity in and near Innsmouth in 1928—the attempted destruction of Devil Reef, and the blowing up of large sections of the waterfront, together with wholesale arrests of Marshes and Martins and some others. But this event was decades removed from Ariah’s early letters.
Abner put the letters dealing with the Marshes into his pocket, and summarily burned the rest, taking the mass of material he had gone through out along the riverbank and setting fire to it. He stood guarding it, lest a chance wind carry a spark to surrounding grass, which was unseasonably dry. He welcomed the smell of the smoke, however, for a certain dead odor lingered along the riverbank, rising from the remains of fish upon which some animal had feasted—an otter, he thought.
As he stood beside the fire, his eyes roved over the old Whateley building, and he saw, with a rueful reflection that it was high time the mill were coming down, that several panes of the window he had broken in the room that had been Aunt Sarey’s, together with a portion of the frame, had fallen out. Fragments of the window were scattered on the paddles of the mill wheel.
By the time the fire was sufficiently low to permit his leaving it, the day was drawing to a close. He ate a meager supper, and, having had his fill of reading for the day, decided against attempting to turn up his grandfather’s “record” of which Uncle Zebulon Whateley had spoken, and went out to watch the dusk and the night in from the verandah, hearing again the rising chorus of the frogs and whippoorwills.
The Lurker at the Threshold: Posthumous Collaborations Page 16
