The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels

by Brian Stableford

  Three months after our first meeting Gideon Sargent died in a freak storm, which blew up unexpectedly while he was fishing. His boat was smashed up on Devil Reef, and what was left of it was later recovered—including Gideon’s body. The inquest confirmed that he had died of a broken neck, and that the rest of his many injuries had been inflicted after death while the boat was tossed about on and around the reef.

  Gideon was the first of my sample to die, but he wasn’t the last. As the year crept on I lost four more, all of whom died in their beds of very ordinary causes—not entirely surprisingly, given that two were in their eighties and the others in their seventies.

  There were, of course, a few unpleasant whispers, which said (arguing post hoc, ergo propter hoc, as rumors often do) that my taking the tissue samples had somehow weakened or over-excited the people who died, but Gideon had done some sterling work in persuading the victims of the look that it was in their interests to cooperate with me, and none of the others shut me out.

  I had no one left whose appearance was as remarkable as Gideon’s. Most of the survivors in my experimental sample showed only partial stigmata of an underdeveloped kind—but they all reported suffering from the dreams now and again, and they all found the dreams sufficiently horrific to want to be rid of them if they could. They kept asking me about the possibility of a cure, but I could only evade the question, as I always had.

  While I was traveling back and forth from Innsmouth on a regular basis I naturally saw a lot of Ann, and was happy to do so. We were both too shy to be overly intrusive in questioning one another, but as time went by I began to understand how lonely and isolated she felt in Innsmouth, and how rosy her memories of university in England now seemed. I saw why she had taken the trouble to write to me when she learned that I had joined the faculty at Manchester, and, in time, I came to believe that she wanted to put our relationship on a more formal and permanent basis—but when I eventually plucked up enough courage to ask her to marry me, she turned me down.

  She must have known how hurt I was, and what a blow to my fragile pride I had suffered, because she tried to let me down very gently—but it didn’t help much.

  “I’m really very sorry, David,” she told me, “but I can’t do it. In a way, I’d like to, very much—I feel so lonely sometimes. But I can’t leave Innsmouth now. I can’t even go to Manchester, let alone back to England, and I know you won’t stay in the States forever.”

  “That’s just an excuse,” I contended, in martyred fashion. “I know you own a great deal of real estate here, but you admit that it’s mostly worthless, and you could still collect the rents—the world is full of absentee landlords.”

  “It’s not that,” she said. “It’s...something I can’t explain.”

  “It’s because you’re an Eliot, isn’t it?” I asked, resentfully. “You feel that you can’t marry for the same reasons that Gideon Sargent felt that he couldn’t. You don’t have a trace of the Innsmouth look about you, but you have the dreams, don’t you? You nearly admitted as much to Gideon, that night when he came to the hotel.”

  “Yes,” she said, faintly. “I have the dreams. But I’m not like those poor old mad people who locked themselves away until you came. I know that you won’t find a cure for them, even if you can find an explanation. I understand well enough what can come of your research and what can’t.”

  “I’m not sure that you do,” I told her. “In fact, I’m not sure that you understand your own condition. Given that you don’t have a trace of the look, and given that you’re not directly descended from any of the Eliots of Innsmouth, what makes you think that your nightmares are anything more than just that: nightmares? As you said to Gideon when he raised the issue, everyone has dreams. Even I have dreams.” In the circumstances, I nearly said had, but that would have been too obvious a whine.

  “You’re a biochemist,” she said. “You think that the physical malformation is the real issue, and that the dreams are peripheral. Innsmouthers don’t see it that way—for them, the dreams are the most important thing, and they’ve always seen the look as an effect rather than a cause. I’m an Innsmouther too.”

  “But you’re a educated woman! You may be a historian, but you know enough science to know what the Innsmouth look really is. It’s a genetic disorder.”

  “I know that the Esoteric Order of Dagon’s beliefs and Obed Marsh’s adventures in the South Seas are just myths,” she agreed. “They’re stories concocted, as you said to Gideon, to explain and excuse an inexplicable affliction caused by defective genes. But it might as easily have been the Eliots who imported those genes as anyone else, and they might easily have been in the family for many generations—England used to have its inbred populations too, you know. I know that you only took tissue-samples from me for what you called purposes of comparison, but I’ve been expecting all along that you would come to me and tell me that you’d found the rogue gene responsible for the Innsmouth look, and that I have it too.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said, plaintively. “It really doesn’t matter. We could still get married.”

  “It matters to me,” she said. “And we can’t.”

  * * * *

  I suppose that incident with Ann should have redoubled my determination to trace the DNA-complex that was responsible for the Innsmouth syndrome, in order to enable me to prove to her that she wasn’t afflicted, and that her dreams were only dreams. In fact, it didn’t; I was hurt by her rejection, and depressed. I continued to work as hard as I ever had, but I found it increasingly difficult to go to Innsmouth, to stay in the hotel where she lived, and to walk through the streets which she owned.

  I began to look for someone else to soothe my emotional bruises, while Ann and I drifted steadily apart. We were no longer good friends in any real sense, though we kept up some kind of a pretense whenever we met.

  In the meantime, the members of my experimental sample continued to die. I lost three more in the second year, and it became even more obvious that whatever I discovered wasn’t going to be of any practical import to the people whose DNA I was looking at. In a way, it didn’t matter that much to the program—the DNA that Gideon and all the rest had provided still existed, carefully frozen and stored away. The project was still healthy, still making headway.

  In the third year, I finally found what I was looking for: an inversion on the seventh chromosome, which had trapped seven genes, including three oddballs. In homozygotes like Gideon, the genes paired up and were expressed in the normal way; in heterozygotes, like most of my sample—including all of the survivors—the chromosomes could only pair up if one of them became looped around, stopping several of the genes from functioning. I didn’t know what all of the genes did, or how—but my biochemical analyses had given me a partial answer.

  I drove to Innsmouth the next day, in order to tell Ann the news. Although our relationship had soured and fallen apart, I still owed her as much of an explanation as I could now give.

  “Do you know what Haeckel’s law is?” I asked her, while we walked beside the Manuxet, past the place where the Marsh refinery had once been located.

  “Sure,” she said. “I read up on the whole thing, you know, after we got involved. Haeckel’s law says that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny—that the embryo, in developing, goes through a series of stages which preserve a kind of memory of the evolutionary history of an organism. It’s been discredited, except as a very loose metaphor. I always thought that the Innsmouth look might turn out to have something to do with the fact that the human embryo goes through a stage where it develops gills.”

  “Only the ghosts of gills,” I told her. “You see, the same embryonic structures that produce gills in fish produce different structures in other organisms; it’s called homology. Conventional thinking, muddied by the fact that we don’t really understand the business of blueprinting for physical structure, supposes that when natural selection works to alter a structure into its homologue—as when the fins of c
ertain fish were modified by degrees into the legs of amphibians, for instance, or the forelimbs of certain lizards became the wings of birds—the blueprint genes for the new structure replace the blueprint genes for the old. But that’s not the only way it could happen. It may be that the new genes arise at different loci from the old ones, and that the old ones are simply switched off. Because they aren’t expressed any more in mature organisms they’re no longer subject to eliminative natural selection, so they aren’t lost, and even though they’re bound to be corrupted by the accumulation of random mutations—which similarly aren’t subject to elimination by natural selection—they remain within the bodies of descendant species for millions of years. If so, they may sometimes be expressed, if there’s a genetic accident of some kind that prevents their being switched off in a particular organism.”

  She thought about it for a few moments, and then she said: “What you’re saying is that human beings—and, for that matter, all mammals, reptiles and amphibians—may be carrying around some of the blueprint genes for making fish. These are normally dormant—untroublesome passengers in the body—but under certain circumstances, the switching mechanism fails and they begin to make the body they’re in fishy.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “And that’s what I shall propose as the cause of the Innsmouth syndrome. Sometimes, as with Gideon, it can happen very early in life, even before birth. In other instances it’s delayed until maturity, perhaps because the incipient mutations are suppressed by the immune system, until the time when ageing sets in and the system begins to weaken.”

  I had to wait a little while for her next question, though I knew what it would be.

  “Where do the dreams fit in?” she asked.

  “They don’t,” I told her. “Not into the biology. I never really thought they did. They’re a psychological thing. There’s no psychotropic protein involved here. What we’re talking about is a slight failure of the switching mechanism that determines physical structure. Ann, the nightmares come from the same place as the Esoteric Order of Dagon and Zadok Allen’s fantasies—they’re a response to fear, anxiety and shame. They’re infectious in exactly the same way that rumors are infectious—people hear them, and reproduce them. People who have the look know that the dreams come with it, and knowing it is sufficient to make sure that they do. That’s why they can’t describe them properly. Even people who don’t have the look, but fear that they might develop it, or feel that for some eccentric reason they ought to have it, can give themselves nightmares.”

  She read the criticism in my words, which said that I had always been right and she had always been wrong, and that she had had no good cause for rejecting my proposal. “You’re saying that my dreams are purely imaginary?” she said, resentfully. People always are resentful about such things, even when the news is good, and despite the fact that it isn’t their fault at all.

  “You don’t have the inversion, Ann. That’s quite certain now that I’ve found the genes and checked out all the sample traces. You’re not even heterozygous. There’s no possibility of your ever developing the look, and there’s no reason at all why you have to avoid getting married.”

  She looked me in the eye, as disconcertingly as Gideon Sargent ever had, though her eyes were perfectly normal, and as grey as the sea.

  “You’ve never seen a shoggoth,” she said, in a tone profound with despair. “I have—even though I don’t have the words to describe it.”

  She didn’t ask me whether I was renewing my proposal— maybe because she already knew the answer, or maybe because she hadn’t changed her own mind at all. We walked on for a bit, beside that dull and sluggish river, looking at the derelict landscape. It was like the set for some schlocky horror movie.

  “Ann,” I said, eventually, “you do believe me, don’t you? There really isn’t a psychotropic element in the Innsmouth syndrome.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I believe you.”

  “Because,” I went on, “I don’t like to see you wasting your life away in a place like this. I don’t like to think of you, lonely in selfimposed exile, like those poor lookers who shut themselves away because they couldn’t face the world—or who were locked up by mothers and fathers or brothers and sisters or sons and daughters who couldn’t understand what was wrong, and whose heads were filled with stories of Obed Marsh’s dealings with the devil and the mysteries of Dagon.

  “That’s the real nightmare, don’t you see—not the horrid dreams and the daft rites conducted in the old Masonic Hall, but all the lives that have been ruined by superstition and terror and shame. Don’t be part of that nightmare, Ann; whatever you do, don’t give in to that. Gideon Sargent didn’t give in—and he told me once, although I didn’t quite understand what he meant at the time, that it was up to me to make sure that you wouldn’t, either.”

  “But they got him in the end, didn’t they?” she said. “The Deep Ones got him in the end.”

  “He was killed in an accident at sea,” I told her, sternly. “You know that. Please don’t melodramatize, when you know you don’t believe it. You must understand, Ann—the real horrors aren’t in your dreams, they’re in what you might let your dreams do to you.”

  “I know,” she said, softly. “I do understand.”

  I understood too, after a fashion. Her original letter to me had been a cry for help, although neither of us knew it at the time—but in the end, she’d been unable to accept the help that was offered, or trust the scientific interpretation that had been found. At the cognitive level, she understood—but the dreams, self-inflicted or not, were simply too powerful to be dismissed by knowledge.

  And that, I thought, was yet another real horror: that the truth, even when discovered and revealed, might not be enough to save us from our vilest superstitions.

  * * * *

  I didn’t have any occasion to go back to Innsmouth for some time, and several months slipped past before I had a reason sufficient to make me phone. The desk-clerk at the hotel was surprised that I hadn’t heard—as if what was known to Innsmouthers ought automatically to be known to everyone else on earth.

  Ann was dead.

  She had drowned in the deep water off Devil Reef. Her body had never been recovered.

  I didn’t get any sort of prize for the Innsmouth project; in spite of its interesting theoretical implications, it wasn’t quite the reputation-maker I’d hoped it would be. As things turned out, it was only worth a paper after all.

  THE PICTURE

  The last chapter of Oscar Wilde’s narrative is, of course, a mere catalogue of lies. Dorian Gray did not stab me in a fit of rage and remorse. How could he? I was the custodian of his will as well as his soul—and, for that matter, of his voice.

  By the time I had achieved that state described in that final chapter, Dorian was no more than a carved dummy. He was a consummate work of art, to be sure, but he was a mere doll. He had elected to become unchanging, and that which is unchanging cannot entertain real intelligence or authentic emotion. A man’s identity is not an entity, which may or may not change; a man’s identity is a product of all the processes of change ongoing within him.

  When Dorian wished change upon me and changelessness upon himself, he gave me his mind and his heart. It was a bold move, and it was a wise move, but it was the end of his story and the beginning of mine. Oscar Wilde had not quite understood that in 1891; after two years in Reading Gaol he knew better, but he had surrendered his own mind and heart by then, and he never committed his discovery to paper.

  Some might think that Dorian Gray was the miracle that Basil Hallward wrought, while I was a mere by-product. Dorian was, after all, a handsome man blessed with eternal youth, immune to aging and the scars of disease. Alone among young men of his era, Dorian could sleep with syphilitic whores and remain untainted, because all his infections were inherited by me. Oscar Wilde, carrying the curse of syphilis within his own body, presumably thought that Dorian had the best of our bargain—but he was wr
ong. I was—and am—the true miracle, and Dorian Gray the by-product.

  Paintings have nothing to fear from disease. We do not die, nor do we suffer; we have nothing to fear from change. Had Dorian borne the burden which he passed on to me, it would have ravaged him with pain and misery, and ultimately with death—but there is no pain or misery in my world, and art never dies. The march of time, which would have been nothing to him but the measure of his decay and destruction, was and is to me the glory of my evolution, my progress, my transcendence.

  I began life as an item of representative art, with no greater virtue than accuracy, but, as soon as Dorian had made his bargain, I began to mature into a modernist masterpiece. I became surreal and futuristic, awesome and sublime. I became the very embodiment of genius, of magic, of power.

  When Basil Hallward first painted me, those who saw me had no available response, save to compliment him because he had captured the pleasing appearance of a lovely boy—but no one who saw me now would mistake me for a mere reflection. There never was, nor ever could be, a living man who looked like me.

  I have gone far beyond mere reflection, into the hinterlands of the imagination. I am now the kind of creature that can only be glimpsed in dreams. I am no longer man but overman, heir to all disease and all decay but never to defeat. I alone, in all the world, am capable of wearing such corruptions proudly, as manifestations of my absolute triumph over death and damnation.

  I have already lived more lives than any man, and I am immortal; I am still in the process of becoming. I am no mere work of art; I am Art itself.

  If you stare into my painted eyes—which will follow you through life, not merely into every corner of the room—you may see what human identity really is, freed from the delicate prison of the flesh.

  I ought not to be here in this attic, covered and kept secret. I ought to be on display, in the National Gallery or the Louvre or the Escorial—but I could not be content with that. In an age of print and photography I ought to be reproduced in millions, so that my simulacrum might hang in every home in the world. I ought to be the property of every man of discrimination, every secular idolater, every connoisseur of the finest arts.