The Watchers Out of Time (33 page)

The saloon, which we finally reached, was plainly of nineteenth century origin; and it was equally clear that nothing in the way of improvement had been done to the building or its interior since it had gone up, for the place was unbelievably rundown and shabby. A slovenly middle-aged man sat behind the bar reading a copy of the
Arkham Advertiser,
and two old men, one of them asleep, sat at it, far apart.

Corey ordered a glass of brandy, and I did likewise.

The bartender did not disguise a cautious interest in us.

“Seth Akins?” asked Corey presently.

The bartender nodded toward the customer who slept at the bar.

“What’ll he drink?” asked Corey.

“Anything.”

“Let’s have a brandy for him.”

The bartender poured a shot of brandy into an ill-washed glass and put it down on the bar. Corey took it down to where the old man slept, sat down beside, and nudged him awake.

“Have one on me,” he invited.

The old fellow looked up, revealing a grizzled face and bleary eyes under touseled grey hair. He saw the brandy, grabbed it, grinning uncertainly, and drank it down.

Corey began to question him, at first only establishing his identity as an old resident of Innsmouth, and talking in a general fashion about the village and the surrounding country to Arkham and Newburyport. Akins talked freely enough; Corey bought him another drink, and then another.

But Akins’s ease of speech faded as soon as Corey mentioned the old families, particularly the Marshes. The old man grew markedly more cautious, his eyes darting longingly toward the door, as if he would have liked to escape. Corey, however, pressed him hard, and Akins yielded.

“Guess thar ain’t no harm sayin’ things naow,” he said finally. “Most o’ them Marshes is gone since the guv’mint come in last month. And no one knows whar to, but they ain’t come back.” He rambled quite a bit, but, after circling the subject for some time, he came at last to the “East Injy trade” and “Cap’n Obed Marsh—who begun it all. He had some kind a truck with them East Injuns—brung back some o’ thar women an’ kep’ ’em in that big house he’d built—an’ after that, the young Marshes got that queer look an’ took to swimmin’ aout to Devil Reef an’ they’d be gone fer a long time—haours—an’ it wasn’t natural bein’ under water so long. Cap’n Obed married one o’ them women—an’ some o’ the younger Marshes went aout to the East Injys an’ brung back more. The Marsh trade never fell off like the others’. All three o’ Cap’n Obed’s ships—the brig
Columby,
an’ the barque
Sumatry Queen,
an’ another brig,
Hetty
—sailed the oceans for the East Injy an’ the Pacific trade without ever a accident. An’ them people—them East Injuns an’ the Marshes—they begun a new kind a religion—they called it the Order o’ Dagon—an’ there was a lot o’ talk, whisperin’ whar nobuddy heerd it, abaout what went on at their meetin’s, an’ young folk—well, maybe they got lost, but nobuddy ever saw ’em again, an’ thar was all that talk about sacreefices—
human
sacreefices—abaout the same time the young folks dropped aout o’ sight—none o’ them Marshes or Gilmans or Waites or Eliots, though, none o’ thar young folk ever got lost. An’ thar was all them whispers abaout some place called ‘Ryeh’ an’ somethin’ named ‘Thooloo’—some kin’t Dagon, seems like….”

At this Corey broke in with a question, seeking to clarify Akins’s reference; but the old man knew nothing, and I did not understand until later the reason for Corey’s sudden interest.

Akins went on. “People kep’ away from them Marshes—an’ the others, too. But it was the Marshes that had that queer look mostly. It got so bad some o’ them never went aout o’ the house, unless it was at night, an’ then it was most o’ the time to go swimmin’ in the ocean. They cud swim like fish, people said—I never saw ’em myself, and nobuddy talked much cuz we noticed whenever anybuddy talked a lot he sort o’ dropped aout o’ sight—like the young people—and were never heerd from again.

“Cap’n Obed larnt a lot o’ things in Ponape an’ from the Kanakys—all abaout people they called the ‘Deep Ones’ that lives under the water—an’ he brought back all kinds o’ carved things, queer fish things and things from under the water that wasn’t fish-things—Gawd knows what them things wuz!”

“What did he do with those carvings?” put in Corey.

“Some as didn’t go to the Dagon Hall he sold—an’ fer a good price, a real good price they fetched. But they’re all gone naow, all gone—an’ the Order of Dagon’s all done an’ the Marshes ain’t been seen hereabaouts ever since they dynamited the warehouses. An’ they wan’t all arrested, neither—no, sir, they do say what was left o’ them Marshes jist walked daown’t the shore an’ aout into the water an’ kilt themselves.” At this point he cackled mirthlessly. “But nobuddy ain’t seen a one o’ them Marsh bodies, thar ain’t been no corp’ seen all up an’ daown the shore.”

He had reached this point in his narrative when something extremely odd took place. He suddenly fixed widening eyes on my companion, his jaw dropped, his hands began to shake; for a moment or two he was frozen in that position; then he shrugged himself up and off the barstool, turned, and in a stumbling run burst out of the building into the street, a long, despairing cry shuddering back through the wintry air.

To say that we were astonished is to put it mildly. Seth Akins’s sudden turning from Corey was so totally unexpected that we gazed at each other in astonishment. It was not until later that it occurred to me that Akins’s superstition-ridden mind must have been shaken by the sight of the curious corrugations on Corey’s neck below his ears—for in the course of our conversation with the old man, Corey’s thick scarf, which had protected his neck from the still cold March air, had loosened and fallen to drape over his chest in a short loop, disclosing the indentations and rough skin which had always been a part of Jeffrey Corey’s neck, that wattled area so suggestive of age and wear.

No other explanation offered itself, and I made no mention of it to Corey, lest I disturb him further, for he was visibly upset, and there was nothing to be gained by upsetting him further.

“What a rigmarole!” I cried, once we were again on Washington Street.

He nodded abstractedly, but I could see plainly that some aspects of the old fellow’s account had made an impression of sorts—and a not entirely pleasant one—on my companion. He could smile, but ruefully, and at my further comments he only shrugged, as if he did not wish to speak of the things we had heard from Akins.

He was remarkably silent throughout that evening, and rather noticeably preoccupied, even more so than he had been previously. I recall resenting somewhat his unwillingness to share whatever burdened his thoughts, but of course this was his decision to make, not mine, and I suspect that what churned through his mind that evening must have seemed to him far-fetched and outlandish enough to make him want to spare himself the ridicule he evidently expected from me. Therefore, after several probing questions which he turned off, I did not again return to the subject of Seth Akins and the Innsmouth legends.

I returned to New York in the morning.

Further excerpts from Jeffrey Corey’s
Journal.

“March 18. Woke this morning convinced that I had not slept alone last night. Impressions on pillow, in bed. Room and bed very
damp,
as if someone wet had got into bed beside me. I know intuitively it was a woman. But
how?
Some alarm at the thought that the Marsh madness may be beginning to show in me.
Footprints
on the floor.”

“March 19. ‘Sea Goddess’ gone! The door open. Someone must have got in during the night and taken it. Its sale value could hardly be accounted as worth the risk! Nothing else taken.”

“March 20. Dreamed all night about everything Seth Akins said. Saw Captain Obed Marsh under the sea! Very ancient.
Gilled!
Swam to far below the surface of the Atlantic off Devil Reef. Many others, both men and women. The queer Marsh look! Oh, the power and the glory!”

“March 21. Night of the equinox. My neck throbbed with pain all night. Could not sleep. Got up and walked down to the shore. How the sea draws me! I was never so aware of it before, but I remember now how as a child I used to fancy I
heard
—way off in mid-continent!—the sound of the sea, of the sea’s drift and the windy waves!—A fearful sense of anticipation filled me all night long.”

Under this same date—March 21—Corey’s last letter to me was written. He said nothing in it of his dreams, but he did write about the soreness of his neck.

“It isn’t my throat—that’s clear. No difficulty swallowing. The pain seems to be in that disfigured area of skin—wattled or wart-like or fissured, whatever you prefer to call it—beneath my ears. I cannot describe it; it isn’t the pain one associates with stiffness or friction or a bruise. It’s as if the skin were about to break outward, and it goes deep. And at the same time I cannot rid myself of the conviction that something is about to happen—something I both dread and look forward to, and all manner of
ancestral awareness
—however badly I put it—obsess me!”

I replied, advising him to see a doctor, and promising to visit him early in April.

By that time Corey had vanished.

There was some evidence to show that he had gone down to the Atlantic and walked in—whether with the intention of swimming or of taking his life could not be ascertained. The prints of his bare feet were discovered in what remained of that odd clay thrown up by the sea in February, but there were no returning prints. There was no farewell message of any kind, but there were instructions left for me directing the disposal of his effects, and I was named administrator of his estate—which suggested that some apprehension did exist in his mind.

Some search—desultory at best—was made for Corey’s body along the shore both above and below Innsmouth, but this was fruitless, and a coroner’s inquest had no trouble in coming to the conclusion that Corey had met his death by misadventure.

No record of the facts that seemed pertinent to the mystery of his disappearance could possibly be left without a brief account of what I saw off Devil Reef in the twilight of the night of April 17th.

It was a tranquil evening; the sea was as of glass, and no wind stirred the evening air. I had been in the last stages of disposing of Corey’s effects and had chosen to go out for a row off Innsmouth. What I had heard of Devil Reef drew me inevitably toward its remains—a few jagged and broken stones that jutted above the surface at low tide well over a mile off the village. The sun had gone down, a fine afterglow lay in the western sky, and the sea was a deep cobalt as far as the eye could reach.

I had only just reached the reef when there was a great disturbance of the water. The surface broke in many places; I paused and sat quite still, guessing that a school of dolphins might be surfacing and anticipating with some pleasure what I might see.

But it was not dolphins at all. It was some kind of sea-dweller of which I had no knowledge. Indeed, in the fading light, the swimmers looked both fish-like and squamously human. All but one pair of them remained well away from the boat in which I sat.

That pair—one clearly a female creature of an oddly claylike color, the other male—came quite close to the boat in which I sat, watching with mixed feelings not untinged with the kind of terror that takes its rise in a profound fear of the unknown. They swam past, surfacing and diving, and, having passed, the lighter-skinned of the two creatures turned and distinctly flashed me a glance, making a strange guttural sound that was not unlike a half-strangled crying-out of my name: “Ken!” and left me with the clear and unmistakable conviction
that the gilled sea-thing wore the face of Jeffrey Corey!

It haunts my dreams even now.

T
HE
W
ATCHERS
O
UT OF
T
IME

I

         On a spring day in 1935, there arrived at the home of Nicholas Walters in Surrey a communication from Stephen Boyle, of Boyle, Monahan, Prescott & Bigelow, 37 Beacon Street, Boston, Massachusetts, addressed to his father, Charles Walters, seven years dead. The letter, couched in rather old-fashioned legal terminology, puzzled Nicholas, a solitary young man, almost as old as the century; it made reference to “ancestral property” situated in Massachusetts, to which the addressee had fallen heir seven years before, though, because of the uncertain health of one Ambrose Boyle of Springfield—“my late cousin”—there had been a failure to notify the heir, accounting for a delay of seven years, during which the property—“a house and various outbuildings, set in north central Massachusetts, the entire land area of the property comprising fifty acres more or less,” had been untenanted.

Nicholas Walters had no memory of his father’s ever making mention of any such property. Indeed, the elder Walters had been a close-mouthed man, and, after the death of his wife a decade before his own passing, had grown increasingly reclusive and morose, much given to solitary introspection, and very little communication with anyone. What Nicholas chiefly remembered about him was his father’s habit on occasion of studying Nicholas’s features, always with some faint apprehension and a disturbing habit of shaking his head forbiddingly as if he did not like something of what he saw—certainly not the finely-chiseled nose, but perhaps the wide mouth, or the curious lobeless ears, or the large pale blue slightly bulging eyes behind the spectacles Nicholas had worn since he was a child, to facilitate his favorite pastime of reading. Nicholas could not recall that his father had even so much as made a passing reference to the United States, though his mother had told Nicholas that he had been born in that same state of Massachusetts to which the solicitor’s letter referred.

He pondered the matter for two days. His initial perplexity gave place to curiosity; his reluctance to stir thinned, and an odd kind of anticipation rose in him, investing the American property in a mysterious haze that made it seem attractive; so that, by the third day after his receipt of the letter addressed to his father, he cabled Stephen Boyle and announced his coming. Within the day he booked a flight to New York, and within the week he presented himself at the offices of Boyle, Monahan, Prescott & Bigelow.

Stephen Boyle, the senior partner, proved to be a tall, thin gentleman of some seventy years; he was quite grey, but nevertheless carried a full head of hair and long sideboards. He wore a pince-nez on a long black silk ribbon, his face was somewhat pinched with wrinkles, his thin lips were pursed, and his blue eyes very sharp. There was about him that general air of preoccupation, so common to men of affairs, suggesting that his mind was so busy with various matters that the problem in hand was almost too trivial to command his attention. His manner, however, was extremely courteous.

After the exchange of the customary pleasantries, he plunged directly into the matter of the estate. “You will forgive me, Mr. Walters, if I come straight to the point. We know very little of this matter. It was inherited from my cousin Ambrose—as I believe I wrote your father. He maintained an office in Springfield, and when we took it over on his death we discovered among folders pertaining to unsettled estates one devoted to the property in question, with a clear notation that it belonged, following the death of your father’s—we could not make that out, but it appeared to be ‘stepbrother’—to your father, whose name was appended to the documents, together with a notation in my cousin’s execrable Latin which we could not satisfactorily read, but which seemed to be a paragraph referring to an alteration in name—but whose name is not clear. In any case, the estate is known locally in the Dunwich area, not far from Springfield, where it lies, as the old Cyrus Whateley estate, and your father’s stepbrother—if that is what he was—was the late Aberath Whateley.”

“I’m afraid those names mean nothing to me,” Walters said. “I was scarcely two years old when we reached England—so my mother told me. I don’t recall my father ever mentioning any of his relatives on this side, and there was very little if any correspondence with them except in the last year of his life. I have some reason to believe that he intended to tell me something of the family background, but he was stricken with what the medical profession now calls a cerebral accident, which deprived him not only of virtually all mobility, but also of speech, and though the expression in his eyes indicated that he wanted desperately to speak, he died without ever regaining the power to do so. And of course he could not set down anything in writing.”

“I see.” Boyle looked thoughtful, as if coming to a decision in regard to the problem, before he continued. “Well, Mr. Walters, we’ve made some inquiries, but they haven’t come to much. That country around Dunwich—which is north central Massachusetts, as I wrote,—is a sort of backwater. In Aylesbury they call in ‘Whateley country’—and many of the old farms there do still carry mailboxes that show the onetime presence of many members of that family, though these farms are now largely deserted—following some sort of trouble there in 1928 or thereabouts—and the area itself seems to be quite decadent. But you will see that for yourself. The estate in question still stands, and is apparently in remarkably good shape, for Aberath Whateley’s been dead only about seven years and a companion who lived there with him only three. Ambrose should have written at once on Whateley’s death, but he was in precarious health for years before he died, and I suppose it was for that reason the matter slipped from mind. I take it you have your own means of transportation?”

“I bought a car in New York,” said Walters. “As long as I’m over here, I mean to see something of the States, beginning with Walden Pond, which appears to be on the way to Springfield.”

“At least in that general direction,” observed Boyle dryly. “Now, if there is anything we can do for you, please do not hesitate to call on us.”

“I’m sure I’ll be able to manage,” Walters said.

Boyle looked dubious. “What will you do with the property, Mr. Walters?”

“I’ll have to make up my mind about that when I’ve seen it,” he answered. “But I have my home in England, and it strikes my fancy. Candidly, what I’ve seen of the States so far hasn’t seemed to me encouraging.”

“I advise you not to get up any hope of selling it at even a fraction of its value,” said Boyle then. “That country is pretty decayed. Furthermore, it has an unsavory reputation.”

Walters’s interest was unaccountably quickened. “Precisely what does that mean, Mr. Boyle?”

“They tell strange tales about Dunwich.” He shrugged. “But I suppose they’re no stranger than those to be found in other remote corners of the country. And they are very probably much exaggerated.”

It was obvious to Walters that Boyle was not inclined to repeat specific tales, if he had heard them. “How do I get there?” he asked.

“It’s off the beaten path. You take a loop from the Aylesbury Pike through Dunwich and back to the Pike again at a considerable distance from there. Quite a bit of wooded terrain there, too. It’s picturesque country. What farming is done is, I believe, largely dairying. It’s very backward country—I don’t exaggerate. You can pick up the Aylesbury Pike near Concord, if you’re bound for Walden—or due west of Boston if you bear toward Worcester. Once on the Pike, continue west. Watch for a hamlet named Dean’s Corners. Just past it you’ll find a junction. You turn left there.” He chuckled. “It’ll be like turning into the American past, Mr. Walters—the far past.”

II

He had not traveled far from the Aylesbury Pike on the Dunwich road before Nicholas Walters understood readily what Boyle had meant in his reference to the area. As the terrain rose, many brier-bordered stone walls made their appearance, pressing upon the road; most of these were broken down in places, with field stones scattered along the foot of the walls. The road wound into hills past great old trees, bramble-covered fences, and barren fields and pastures in country that was only sparsely settled. Occasional farms could be seen; these wore an aspect of age he had not previously encountered west of Boston; many wore an air of depressing desertion, though they were architecturally of singular interest to Walters, for he had long ago made the photographing of buildings a hobby, and such farms as he could see closer to the road, though squalid, revealed curious decorative motifs hitherto unknown to him. Some of the old barns bore on their gables designs which could only have been cabalistic, though many of these seemed not to have been otherwise painted. Here and there lesser outbuildings—sheds, cribs, and storage buildings—had fallen together. Among these abandoned farms there occurred from time to time well-kept and clearly still inhabited farms, with cattle in pasture and corn in the fields and rocky meadows that gave evidence of being cropped.

He drove slowly. The mood and atmosphere of the country filled him with an odd fascination; it was as if he had been there before, as if some ancestral memory had risen up to set his own mood. Surely it was not possible that some bridge to memory had reached back to his first two years!—and yet there were vistas and turns of the road that rose before him with a disturbing familiarity. The rounded hills brooded over the valleys; the woods were dark and crowded with trees, as if no axe or saw had ever been wielded in them; and now and then he caught sight of strange circles of tall stone pillars on the summits of the hills, reminding him of Stonehenge and the cromlechs of Devon and Cornwall. From time to time the hills were broken by deep gorges, crossed by crude wooden bridges; and openings along the base of the hills afforded glimpses of the Miskatonic River, and upper reaches of which he had seen on road maps took rise not far west of the Dunwich country and wound serpentinely through the valley beyond and on to the seat at Arkham. Occasionally, too, he saw lesser streams emptying into the Miskatonic, hardly more than rills which very probably came from springs in the hills; and once there flashed upon his vision the blue-white column of a waterfall cascading out of the dark hills.

Though the hills pressed almost precipitously upon the dusty road for much of the way, there were some infrequent openings that revealed high marshland or meadows, and now and then more farms—or what remained of them. The landscape was forbidding; the enclosing hills, the looming, pillared summits of the higher ridge leaning over, the dreary, deserted farms—all combined to convey the impression of a cleavage not only in time but in place between this area and the country along the Aylesbury Pike; and, insofar as the area around Boston was concerned, the Dunwich settlement was centuries removed.

The mood of the region pervaded him oddly; he could not explain it; he was both drawn to the country through which he drove, and repelled by it, and the deeper he penetrated into it, the greater the confirmation of that mood. The conviction that he had been here before grew upon him, even as he smiled at the thought; he was not troubled at the thought, and only remotely curious. Such impressions, he knew, are common to all mankind, and only the unlettered and superstitious tend to read meaningful mystery into them.

He came out of the hills suddenly into a broader valley, and there lay the village of Dunwich, on the far side of the Miskatonic, huddling between the river and Round Mountain on the far side. A quaint covered bridge crossed the river, a relic of that distant past to which the settlement itself obviously belonged. Rotting gambrel roofs, ruined, deserted houses, dominated by a church with a broken steeple, met his eye as he emerged from the bridge. It was a place of desolation, where even the few men and women on the streets seemed gnarled and aged by more than the passage of time.

He drew his car up at the broken-steepled church, for it had patently been given over to use as a general store, and went in to inquire of the gaunt-faced storekeeper behind the counter for directions to the property he had come to inspect.

“Aberath Whateley’s place,” he repeated, staring at him. His wide-lipped mouth worked, his lips making chewing motions, as if he were masticating Walters’s inquiry. “Ye—kin? Kin to Whateley’s?”

“My name is Walters. I’ve come from England.”

The storekeeper did not seem to have heard. He studied Walters with open-faced interest and curiosity. “Ye hey the Whateley look. Walters. Never heerd none o’ my kin speak thet name.”

“The Whateley place,” Walters reminded him.

“Might be twenty sech places. Aberath’s place, ye said. It’s shet up.”

“I have the key,” Walters said, with ill-concealed impatience and some irritation at what seemed to him the storekeeper’s crooked and mocking smile.

“Go back crost the bridge, an’ turn right. Go mebbe half a mile. Can’t miss it. Stone fence in front—medder down from thet toards the river. Wood the other three sides. ’Twant Aberath’s—’twas Cyrus Whateley’s—Old Cyrus, the smart one, the eddicated one.” He said this with an arresting sneer and added, “Ye’ll be eddicated, too. Ye dress like it.”