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 vacation 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 roused 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 seem 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.
“I see you follow the old ways, that's good. I expect Alma taught you? It's a cryin’ shame you can't do the baptizing out on Devil Reef, like Our Lord intended, but the Navy blasted the bejesus out of it in twenty-eight. But if you do it with the right spirit, you can perform a baptism even out in the middle of Kansas."
I had spent sleepless nights struggling with that point of theology, and her words took an enormous weight off my soul.
Before I could thank her, she said, “Love that name! Bob. I do believe I can prophesy a truly glorious future for you. So tell me all about yourself, Bob."
I did. My God! I never thought I could have revealed such secrets to a stranger unless I had gone stark, raving mad, but they just tumbled out. And she accepted them. Instead of ordering me out or screaming for help, Old Lady Waite nodded and murmured ... approval. Often I knew that she was smiling gently behind her veil, amused by my account of my clumsy efforts to be true to my heritage, but her amusement was in no way contemptuous.
Even as I spoke so unguardedly, I wondered about the spell she had cast over me. The unfamiliar emotion I felt was as strong as love is reputed to be, but it would be crazy to suppose that I had fallen in love with a woman almost three times my age whose face was veiled. She was in fact concealed completely in dark, old-fashioned clothing, and might have been a mannikin if she hadn't murmured from time to time, if her rocker hadn't moved rhythmically.
I was forced to the conclusion that I felt at home, and that I had never felt that way anywhere, not even in my boyhood home with my own parents. The feeling seemed to be generated by a combination of subtle influences that I didn't perceive until I tried hard to sort them out. Nothing around me, not the spare furniture of colonial design, the home-hooked rugs on the mirror-polished floor with its wide and irregular boards, the huge, unlit fireplace that doubled as an oven with its iron doors, was inconsistent with the eighteenth century, a time that has always seemed more congenial to me. I saw no television set, no tawdry magazines, no brightly-packaged products of mass consumption. I believed that the unlit lamps were fueled by kerosene, for I saw no electrical outlets or wires. Despite the absence of air conditioning, the house was comfortably cool and dank behind its small windows, beaded by the river's mist, and under its huge roof: this atmosphere, together with an indefinable odor that came from the woman herself and all she had touched, must have been responsible for my profound sense of comfort.
But none of these factors really explained my feelings as well as my first impression, that I had fallen under a magical spell.
“Alma must have passed over,” she said. “I'm surprised she hasn't come by. We were best friends, and I thought she'd just love to tease me about the long time I'm taking."
“It was fourteen years ago when I helped her with the last rites, but it was a long ways off. Puget Sound."
“Oh! Then I expect she'll be by one of these days."
“Actually it was a river that runs into the Sound,” I admitted a bit guiltily. I have a deep aversion against speaking the name, but I forced myself: “The Green River."
The name provoked no special reaction. She just said, “Fresh water is okay."
“But pretty swift."
Her laughter was surprisingly youthful. “This river out here is pretty swift, but it doesn't stop old friends from coming to call on me when they're of a mind."
“Do you suppose I could...?"
“Meet them? Sure, why not? How long you plan to be in town? You can stay right here with me, so's not to miss anyone."
“I wish I could, but I came here to take advantage of the federal reparations. I have to stay at—"
“Not the Facility! Oh, my,” she groaned. She stopped rocking for the first time since she'd sat down.
“What? What's wrong? The program was sponsored by President Kennedy, and he seemed—"
“He was a friend to our kind, a real true friend. You ever wonder how he happened to survive so long in the ocean, injured as he was, after his PT-boat got sunk? And did you ever see a picture of his daddy's mistress, Gloria Swanson? Those eyes of hers say it all, if you know what to look for. But what he seems mostly now is dead, and laws have a way of getting amended. This one got amended with bells on, to say nothing of books and candles. The Facility caught some local folks when they first set up shop, but I saw right through them, and I wanted no part of it. I told that wicked Dr. Saltonstall to take his stethoscope and stick it. Fortunately Ramon Medeiros, he's the mayor now, is a good friend to all of us, and he's moving heaven and earth to get that place shut down.” She chuckled. “He leaves the sea to me. I'd give Ramon a call right now if I had one of those goddamn telephone machines—"
Someone knocked on the door. It was a loud, peremptory, no-nonsense knock.
“I bet that's not Ed McMahon and Dick Clark, come to make me rich,” she said.
“What should I do? Is the back—"
“You don't really suppose they're not out there, too, do you? If you were foolish enough to sign anything you better go, because Uncle Sam is an alligator: dumb as hell and easy to avoid, but once he gets his jaws set, he won't let go. Your best bet is to go along with them now so you don't get hurt, and let me do what I can on the outside."
The sight waiting for me at the door was unnerving, for the heavy-set older man and his grinning, dapper companion bore a skewed likeness to the pitchmen she had named.
“Mr. Smith?” the dapper one said. “We heard you might need a lift to the Facility."
“Want to go for a nice ride, too, Mrs. Waite?” the other one said to the woman standing just behind me. “That would save everybody a lot of hassle."
“You don't know what hassle is, sonny-boy. You'll find out if you do Mr. Smith, here, any harm."
“Harm? We're here to help you people, don't you understand? How long do you think you can fuck with the U.S. Government?"
“How deep is the ocean?” she laughed.
“Ed” hummed the tune she had quoted all during the ride. It was proof that spells of a sort really can be cast on others, and I tried to take that as a good omen.
I was unprepared for the Facility, a Victorian fantasy of sooty bricks that managed to look both brutal and whimsical, a bad combination. The h
igh fence around the grounds, capped with broken glass, was part of the original design, but the electronic gate looked brand new. The guard who controlled it was armed. As I was hurried up the front steps, I saw that the new sign over the door only partly concealed the original name in bas-relief: Manuxet Asylum for the Insane.
The interior corridors were huge and ill-lit, wainscotted in dark wood and smelling of dust, disinfectant and century-old misery. Most alarming was the emptiness. Except for my escort and a few attendants who were trying to avoid notice or look busy, I suspected that I might be the only one here.
This suspicion was born out in the days that followed, but I didn't regret my isolation. The first thing they did was take away my false hair and give me a chemical shower that aggravated my rash. Bald and scabrous, clad in an orange jump-suit, I might have been an imperfectly fashioned android under study by the normally-dressed people and white-uniformed keepers who hustled me here and there to determine where my creation had gone wrong. Under these circumstances, I wanted to meet no one whose opinion might have mattered to me.
Forced to choose the one thing about the Facility I liked least, I would have picked Dr. Isaac Mordecai Saltonstall, the director. A long-faced, long-fingered scarecrow in tweeds, he treated me like a child, or worse. Sometimes when he stared at me blankly over his tented fingers I imagined he was trying to decide whether to have me gassed now or later. At least he didn't quack, but he swallowed his vowels, except for an occasional “a” as broad as a barn door. His diplomas said he had gone to Harvard and identified him, curiously enough, as a psychiatrist.
“The Seattle police questioned you in July of eighty-three and again in September of that year,” he asked as he studied my distressingly thick dossier.
This was the first time that subject had come up. I was sorely tempted to babble, but I followed the rule I had observed since arriving: say nothing unless asked a direct question. That had always worked with the police.
Even More Nasty Stories Page 2
