by Neil Gaiman
I didn’t think she was ugly, I thought she was beautiful, so sleek and graceful in her old-fashioned way. Her huge eyes would transfigure her face when she talked about her home and her beliefs and seemed actually to be gazing on the vasty deep. I didn’t think she was completely crazy, either, not when her stories raised echoes from my own dreams. As for smelling bad, that was the fault of the attendants, but I would raise hell whenever I went there until they cleaned her up and tended the sores from her restraints. Even when I was a kid, people knew I meant business when I looked at them in a certain way.
Since I was so different from other people, it stood to reason that my religion must be different from theirs, so I embraced Grandma’s. I only wish I’d listened harder and understood more, and that Grandma’s ordeal hadn’t left her so confused. The story about the beautiful princess sleeping under the sea, waiting for me to wake her with the stones and the baptism, fueled my teen-age masturbation fantasies. I hated to consider the possibility that this was all wrong, that Grandma had mixed up her religion with the story of Sleeping Beauty.
Even though I searched every library and old bookshop in Washington and Oregon, even though I wrote dozens of letters to professors and churchmen, I never found any solid information about the beliefs and practices of the Esoteric Order of Dagon. Maybe there just weren’t any more Dagonites.
Maybe I was the last one.
“My Grandma’s brother used to drive this bus.”
The driver glanced at me with annoyance.
“Not this bus, I mean, one that traveled the same route between Newburyport and Innsmouth in the old days, before—”
“See that sign? Don’t talk to the driver,” he said in the flat, Yankee way that reminds me of ducks quacking.
“You still don’t much take kindly to Innsmouth folks around here, do you?”
“Sure, we do.” At last I got a sort of smile out of him in the rear-view mirror as he added, “Because there ain’t any.”
I believed him. It was hard to imagine a romantically ruined town and its otherworldly cultists in this wasteland of stripmalls and Dairy Queens, where summer shacks had been converted into year-round homes for people who couldn’t afford trailers. In this clutter that had been dumped willy-nilly onto a strangled marshland, you knew you were nearing the sea only when the junked automobiles in the yards gave way to junked boats, when the handwritten, cardboard signs in the windows said LIVE BAIT instead of BEAUTY SALON.
The last of the other passengers had got off at a mall with a K-Mart a few miles back. I had studied them all guardedly for any resemblance to Grandma, or maybe to myself, but they were nothing but long-chinned, quacking Yankees in John Deere hats or pastel hair-rollers. Nobody but me was going all the way to Innsmouth. I would have liked to ask the bus driver if he thought I had “the look,” but maybe his attitude said it all.
My own look is pretty damned odd, ever since alopecia hit me like a truck last year. Some people with the disease can brazen it out: yeah, I got no hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes, this is how I look, so fuck you, Jack. I admire such people, I even like their clean, smooth appearance, but I have spent my lifetime trying to blend in, so that’s not my way. Besides, I couldn’t have done that even if I’d wanted to, not after the onset of psoriasis a few months later. A perfectly bald head might go unremarked, but a perfectly bald, peeling head draws jeers in the street from children.
One alternative is to use false hair, and that might pass muster if you are rich enough to afford a very good rug and have the skill and patience of a makeup-artist. I wasn’t rich. Pop had called himself an entrepreneur, which meant he would start doomed businesses and run them, or get me to run them—like the famous Ice Kween Ice Kreem Co.—until he got bored or they failed. After he died and I sorted out his disastrous affairs, I was left with a second-hand record shop in one of Seattle’s more blighted areas, which I hung onto because I thought it would be a good way to find girls. I hadn’t realized that it’s mostly guys who buy old records. Correction: mostly guys who shoplift them.
A second alternative is to look for miracle cures. The first doctor I consulted had told me the brutal truth, that my hairlessness was hereditary and incurable, tough luck. He was more hopeful but no more helpful about the rash, which he said I would have until it went away. That didn’t stop me from going around in my cheap wig, often-crooked eyebrows and ruddled face to every charlatan in the phone book.
None of them helped, but a Dr. Errol, who went to the trouble of asking for my medical and personal history, had heard about Innsmouth. He was up on all the angles of squeezing money out of patients, insurance companies and the government, and he urged me to apply for assistance under the Kennedy-Keaton Act. I didn’t imagine it would be as simple as filling out a form and cashing a check, but I was floored by what I did get by registered mail within two days:
Pursuant to provisions of the Federal Reparations Art of 1962, as amended in 1994, which offers compensation to residents of Innsmouth, MA, or their legal heirs or assigns for actions by agents of the U.S. Government on or about February 14, 1928, et seq., you are required to present yourself to the Field Office of the US. Public Health Service, 291 N Eliot St., Innsmouth, MA 01939-1750. in order to duly process your claim. Failure to appear is punishable by a fine of not more than ten thousand dollars ($10,000) and/or imprisonment for up to five (5) years.
Food lodging and appropriate clothing will be provided for approximately ten (10) days while you undergo such tests and interviews as are required by law. Additionally, you are permitted to bring any personal effects which may be carried in a case no larger than 40X30x7.62 cm. and weighing no more than 2.3 kg. The importation of photographic equipment, audio or video recording devices, firearms or other weapons, alcohol, tobacco, combustible materials or controlled substances into the Facility is prohibited by law and punishable by a fine of not more than ten thousand dollars ($10,000) and/or imprisonment for up to Five (5) years.
At the time of your induction into the Facility, you will be required to present your birth certificate, Social Security card and photographic ID (Passport, state driver’s license, or Other deemed acceptable by the Examiner), current bank and credit-card statements, along with any documentation in the form of personal letters, diaries, family photographs, etc., that may relevate to your claim. Additionally, it is required that you complete the enclosed Questionnaire, Medical Release Forms and Waiver of Liability and return them, duly signed and notarized, to the above address, postmarked no later than five (5) business days from receipt of this communication.
Failure to comply with this notice or any of its provisions or with any rules, regulations or provisions not explicitized herein, is punishable by a fine of not more than ten thousand dollars ($10,000.00) and/or imprisonment for a period of up to five (5) years.
(signed) I.M. Saltonstall, M.D.
Field Director
Innsmouth Facility
U.S. Public Health Service.
Because I am the way I am, my first thought when I got this horrifying letter was to change my name and make a run for the Fiji Islands. Not only did I vividly recall Grandma’s stories about tommy-guns and concentration-camps, I had my own reasons for avoiding government scrutiny. No amount of money was worth this kind of grief.
But…. I had always wanted to visit Innsmouth. I had been held back by the fear of barging in where outsiders were mistrusted. This summons gave me a legitimate reason to visit my ancestral home and question people who might have answers. My clerk could run the record-shop at least as well as I could in my absence, and the government promised in fine print to pay my travel expenses.
I had misgivings about the tone of the summons, but I told myself that was how bureaucrats did things, and I still believed that I wasn’t living in the People’s Republic of China. I filled out all the forms as honestly as I dared and sent them off. I actually began looking forward to my trip. I would go by bus and see the country. It would be the first real va
cation I ever had, and it would be free.
Was it too much to hope that I might at last meet the torpid beauty beneath the sea, Mother Hydra, the Ice Kween who would be woken by my kisses and the special stones?
The jolting of the bus mused me from a half-doze. The road had become narrow and pot-holed, and on either side the marshland reasserted itself. Black little creeks ran through it, with here and there a boat forlornly anchored. I wondered how the owners could get to and from them in the trackless swamp without using other boats, and I laughed silently at the picture of confusion this evoked.
I was shocked to discover the bus-driver studying me sourly in the mirror. I wiped the smile from my face and tried to check my wig and eyebrows without seeming to.
My embarrassment vanished when I realized that the ocean shimmered before me through the windshield. The sight has always stirred profound emotions within me, the nameless but powerful feelings evoked in others by great music or poetry, and this, the Atlantic, the very ocean of my dreams, stirred me as I never had been before. I sat up straighter and wriggled for a better look, wishing the driver were the sort of person who would have let me run forward to gaze out beside him.
Then, in the foreground, I saw the town.
I had assumed it would be not much different from other depressed towns I had glimpsed on the way. Despite hard times and a genuine disaster in the past, the indomitable Yankees would have put a bold face on things and got on with their God-given mission to make money. Seaside real estate was worth something, wherever it might be, and I had half-expected to be affronted by a welter of marinas and condos, with maybe a theme-park, a water-slide and a gauntlet of shack-up motels. In my worst imaginings, the weird charm of the town would have been buried under a Sea-Tac Strip East that stretched all the way to Boston, complete with hookers who quacked like ducks.
I was wrong. The Feds had killed it seventy years ago, and it was still dead. Toward the beach, where you might have expected some rebuilding, the devastation was complete. The burnt-out shells of industrial buildings remained, but the sites of former houses were marked only by free-standing chimneys and clogged cellar-holes.
Just before we reached the bottom of a hill and the oceanfront dropped out of view, I noticed a metallic glimmer stitching the rubble. It looked like a fence topped with razor-wire, separating the seaward ruins from the rest of Innsmouth. Oddly, it looked shiny and new.
After contemptuously scrawling the receipt I required and ignoring my sarcastically cheerful promise to see him in a week or so, the driver dropped me at the Gilman House in Town Square, a once-gracious building in the Georgian mode whose upper windows, like most of the shops in the square, had been boarded up.
The clerk looked like a forlorn refugee from Woodstock who took his style from David Crosby, his tie knotted loosely as if worn under protest. As a further comment on his job and perhaps the town itself, his tie bore a reproduction of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. He asked suspiciously, “Will you be checking in, Sir?”
“No, I have to stay at the Facility on Eliot Street, but can I check this bag here?”
“That Public Health thing?” His desire to peer closely at me struggled painfully with one to retreat beyond the range of contagion.
You see many people going that way?”
“None at all until lately. Then a couple weeks ago, four or five turned up. And there was a girl last week, Ms. Gilman, just like the hotel, she asked for directions.” He added, as if to distinguish her from me and the others, “She was nice.”
He put a receipt on the counter beside my ten-dollar bill, which he hadn’t picked up.
“Hey, if you see Mr. Marsh out there, ask him what he wants done with his suitcase. We can’t hang onto it forever, and I ain’t heard a word from him since he left it.”
Marsh, Gilman: these were both names from the old days. I was unprepared for a stirring of what you might call nostalgia-by-proxy. I looked away for a moment, and the seedy lobby was dimmed by tears. At last, I would actually get to meet some of my people!
“What’s chances of getting in a swim before I go?”
“We got no pool. You’d have to go to the Ramada out on 1-A—”
“No, no, I meant in the ocean. Is there anyplace by the beach to change?”
“You don’t want to swim in the ocean here. Well, maybe you do, but you can’t. Everything east of the Old Square has been off limits since I been here, and that’s twenty years come September.”
“Off limits?” I’d seen the fence, but still the authoritarian phrase surprised me.
“Didn’t you see that burnt-out area? An Air Force plane crashed. Back in the nineteen-fifties, I think it was, a terrible tragedy, wrecked half the town, and it was carrying a bomb they never found. I ain’t caught myself glowing in the dark yet, so I guess it’s safe enough here, but you don’t want to go swimming in nookie-leer waste. That’s why you’re here for that Public Health thing, ain’t you? Children of people who got zapped?”
“I guess,” I said, hiding my amusement. “Are any people still living here from the old days? People named Marsh, or Gilman, or Sargent?”
“Some, I think, but you really want to ask Old Lady Waite, she’s our local expert. Most of the people in town now are Portuguese, they came here to fish, only they have to go to Marblehead to do it on account of the pollution. But they live here because houses are really cheap.”
“Where would I find her?”
“You want to go down Bank Street, that’s the second left as you leave the hotel, and you can’t miss her house, it’s the only one on the river side of the street. Past her house, you hang a left on Adams, and that’ll take you into Eliot. But the Facility is a long walk, it’s halfway back to Ipswich, and Larry, that’s our only cab-driver, he took a fare to Boston this morning and ain’t come back yet.”
“I don’t mind the walk. I’d like to do some sight-seeing.”
He withheld comment, even though I knew he wanted to make one.
Leaving the hotel, I happened to glance back through the streaked glass of the door. The clerk hadn’t touched my money or my bag before I left, and I now observed him taking the bag from the counter. He had first wrapped his hand in a red bandanna to protect it from germs. Or radiation.
A Portuguese bar at the corner of Bank Street, outside of which a few swarthy loafers muttered about me to one another, marked the apex of Innsmouth’s social scene. Beyond that point, the houses on the left side guarded their inhabitants behind drawn shades, lulling them with a varied chorus of air-conditioners. Here and there shadows would stir at windows as I walked up the steep street, but the residents were good at concealing themselves. I saw no one, not even a hand at a drape as it shifted.
Above a picture-postcard falls, the Manuxet grew far more energetic and noisy than any human as it raced between bulkheaded banks, and even frightening. The river had penetrated the ancient pilings to undermine the footway on the right. Gaps yawned in the sidewalk. I’m sure the road was next on its list, then the buttoned-up houses, until it swept all of Innsmouth and then New England out to sea. Its continuous roar, made up of a million gurgles and mutters, was alarmingly loud as it echoed off the blank house-fronts, and I seemed to eavesdrop on a wealth of incomprehensible conversations in a din that threatened at any moment to become clear.
I stayed to the left-hand side, but no one came out, as I half-expected, to glare at me and demand that I account for myself. In the far distance a lonely dog barked an interminable litany of grievances that probably had nothing to do with my return to the seat of my ancestors.
The river roared more loudly, constricted by a granite outcropping of the bank where some scruffy woods and a small cottage, the only house on the river side, clung perilously in a fine, perpetual mist. The house was very old, to judge by the small, lead-filled windows of imperfect glass, and I fancied that its unpainted cedar shakes might have been made with an ax. It was oddly out of proportion, as many old New England houses see
m to me, with the single story dwarfed by a bloated chimney and roof.
I knocked, then repeated it before the door opened. I took a step back from a disturbing figure, a tall, slim and impenetrably veiled woman.
“Excuse me, my name is—”
“No, don’t tell me. It’s Sargent isn’t it? You could be Joe, just a couple years before he passed over.”
And hers could have been my Grandma’s voice, either because of a local accent or locally hereditary quirk. Before I even suspected that I might, I burst into tears.
“Alma Sargent was my Grandma, yes, Joe’s sister, but my name is Bob Smith,” I said when I could speak.
“Bob is a good name, a real Innsmouth name. Come in, Bob.”
I was about to sit in a straight chair opposite her rocker when she demanded, “What’s that you got in your pocket?”
“Nothing,” I mumbled, feeling like a trapped kid.
“Show me! In the name of Mother Hydra!”
She was definitely not a lady I could refuse. I pulled out the three pyramidal chunks of granite that had caught my eye on the way to her house. She studied them closely, then spat on them and held them tight in her gloved hand for a moment as if willing them to reveal their secrets. “These are okay,” she said at last, handing them back. “These’ll do.” She added playfully, “Figure on finding somebody to baptize while you’re in town, Bob?”
“Well.” I coughed, looked away, wondered if my rash was bad enough today to hide my blushing.
