The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack: Anthology Part 16

Sargent was sitting on a canvas chair on the deck of his boat when we went to see him, patiently mending a fishing-net. He did not look up as we approached, but I had no doubt that he had seen us from afar and knew well enough that we were coming to see him.

"h.e.l.lo, Gideon," said Ann, when we were close enough. "This is Dr. David Stevenson, a friend of mine from England. He lives in Manchester now, teaching college."

Still the old man didn't look up. "Don't do trips round the reef," he said, laconically. "You know that, Miss Ann."

"He's not a tourist, Gideon," she said. "He's a scientist. He'd like to talk to you."

"Why's that?" he asked, still without altering his att.i.tude. "'Cause I'm a freak, I suppose?"

"No," said Ann, uncomfortably "of course not...."

I held up my hand to stop her, and said: "Yes, Mr. Sargent," I said. "That is why, after a manner of speaking. I'm a geneticist, and I'm interested in people who are physically unusual. I'd like to explain that to you, if I may."

Ann shook her head in annoyance, certain that I'd said the wrong thing, but the old man didn't seem offended.

"When I were a young'un," he commented, abstractedly, "there was a man offered Ma a hunnerd dollars for me. Wanned t'put me in a gla.s.s tank in some kinda sideshow. She said no. Blamed fool- hunnerd dollars was worth summin then." His accent was very odd, and certainly not what I'd come to think of as a typical New England accent. Although he slurred common words, he tended to take more trouble over longer ones, and I thought I could still perceive the lingering legacy of his education.

"Do you know what 'genetics' means, Mr. Sargent?" I asked. "I really would like to explain why it's important that I talk to you."

At last he looked up, and looked me in the eye. I was ready for it, and didn't flinch from the disconcerting stare.

"I know what genes are, Doc," he said, coolly. "I bin a little curious myself, y'know, to fin' out how I got to be this way. You gonna tell me? Or is that what y'wanner figure out?"

"It's what I want to figure out, Mr. Sargent," I told him, breathing a slight sigh of relief. "Can I come aboard?"

"Nope," he replied. "Taint convenient. You at the hotel?"

"Yes I am."

"See y'there t'night. Quarter of eight. You pay f'r the liquor." "Okay," I said. "Thanks, Mr. Sargent. I appreciate it."

"Don' mention it," he said. "An' I still don' do trips to the reef. Or pose f'r j.a.p cameras-you mind me, now, Miss Ann."

"I mind you, Gideon," she answered, as we turned away.

As soon as we were out of earshot, she said: "You're honored, David. He's never come to the hotel before-and not because no one ever offered to buy him a drink before. He still remembers the old place, and he doesn't like what Uncle Ned put up in its place, any more than he likes all the colonists who moved in when the village was all-but-dead in the thirties."

We were pa.s.sing an area of the waterfront that looked like a post-war bomb-site-or one of those areas in the real Manchester where they bulldozed the old slums but still haven't got round to building anything else instead.

"This is the part of the town that was torched, isn't it?" I said. "Sure is," she replied. "Way back in '27. n.o.body really knows how it happened, although there are plenty of wild stories. Gang warfare can be counted out-there was no substantial bootlegging hereabouts. Arson for arson's sake, probably. It's mostly mine now-Uncle Ned wanted to rebuild but never could raise the finance. I'd sell the land to any developer who'd take it on, but I'm not hopeful about my chances of getting rid of it."

"Did the navy really fire torpedoes into the trench beyond the reef?" I asked, remembering a story which she'd quoted in her book.

"Depth charges," she said. "I took the trouble to look up the doc.u.ments, hoping there'd be something sensational behind it, but it seems that they were just testing them. There's very deep water out there-a crack in the continental shelf-and it was convenient for checking the pressure-triggers across the whole spectrum of settings. The navy didn't bother to ask the locals, or to tell them what was going on; the information was still cla.s.sified then, I guess. It's not unnatural that the wacky stories about sea-monsters were able to flourish uncontradicted."

"Pity," I said, looking back at the crumbling jetties as we began to climb the shallow hill towards Washington Street. "I rather liked all that stuff about the Esoteric Order of Dagon conducting its hideous rites in the old Masonic Hall, and Obed Marsh's covenant with the forces of watery evil."

"The Esoteric Order of Dagon was real enough," she said. "But it's hard to find out what its rituals involved, or what its adherents actually believed, because it was careful not to produce or keep any records-not even sacred doc.u.ments. It seems to have been one of a group of crazy quasi-gnostic cults which made a big thing about a book called the Necronomicon-they mostly died out at about the time the first fully-annotated translation was issued by the Miskatonic University Press. The whole point of being an esoteric sect is lost when your core text becomes exoteric, I guess.

"As for old Obed's fabulous adventures in the South Seas, almost all the extant accounts can be traced back to tales that used to be told by the town character back in the twenties-an old lush named Zadok Allen. I can't swear that every last detail originated in the dregs of a whisky bottle, but I'd be willing to bet my inheritance that Captain Marsh's career was a good deal less eventful than it seemed once Zadok had finished embroidering it."

"But the Marshes really did run a gold refinery hereabouts? And at least some of the so-called Innsmouth jewelry is real?"

"Oh sure-the refinery was the last relic of the town's industrial heyday, which petered out mid-nineteenth century after a big epidemic. I've looked at the account-books, though, and it did hardly any business for thirty-five or forty years before it closed down. It's gone now, of course. The few authentic surviving examples of the old Innsmouth jewelry are less beautiful and less exotic than rumor represents, but they're interesting enough-and certainly not local in origin. There are a couple of shops in town where they make 'genuine imitations' for tourists and other interested parties-one manufacturer swears blind that the originals were made by pre-Columbian Indians, the other that they were found by Old Obed during his travels. Take your pick."

I nodded, sagely, as if to say that it was what I'd suspected all along.

"What are you looking for, David?" she asked, suddenly. "You don't really think that there's anything in Zadok Allen's fantasies, do you? You surely can't seriously entertain the hypothesis that the old Innsmouthers were some kind of weird crossbreed with an alien race!"

I laughed. "No," I rea.s.sured her, with complete sincerely. "I don't believe that-nor do I believe that they're some kind of throwback to our phantom aquatic ancestors. You'd better sit in tonight when I explain the facts of life to old Gideon; the reality is likely to be far more prosaic than that, alas."

"Why alas?" she asked.

"Because what I'm looking for will only generate a paper. If the folklore quoted in your book were even half-true, it would be worth a n.o.bel Prize."

Gideon Sargent presented himself at the hotel right on time. He was dressed in what I presumed was his Sunday best, but the ensemble included a roll-neck sweater, which kept the sides of his neck concealed. There were half a dozen people in the bar, and Gideon drew a couple of curious glances from the out-of-towners, but he was only a little self-conscious. He was used to carrying his stigmata.

He drank neat bourbon, but he drank slowly, like a man who had no intention of getting loaded. I asked a few questions to find out exactly how much he did know about genes, and it turned out that he really was familiar with the basics. I felt confident that I could give him a reasonably full explanation of my project.

"We've already begun the business of mapping the human genome," I told him. "The job will require the collective efforts of thousands of people in more than a hundred research centers, and even then it will take fifteen or twenty years, but we have the tools to do it. While we're doing it, we hope to get closer to the answers to certain basic problems.

"One of these problems is that we don't know how genes collaborate to produce a particular physical form. We know how they code for the protein building blocks, but we don't know much about the biochemical blueprint that instructs a growing embryo how to develop into a man instead of a whale or an ostrich. Now, this may seem odd, but one of the best ways of figuring out how things work is to study examples which have gone wrong, to see what's missing or distorted. By doing that, you can build up a picture of what's necessary in order for the job to be done properly. For that reason, geneticists are very interested in human mutations-I'm particularly interested in those which cause physical malformation.

"Unfortunately, physical mutants usually fall into a few well-defined categories, mostly a.s.sociated with radical and fairly obvious disruptions of whole chromosomes. There are very few viable human variations that operate on a larger scale than changing the color of the skin, or the epicanthic fold that makes Oriental eyes distinctive. That's not entirely surprising, because those which have arisen in the past have mostly been eliminated from the gene-pool by natural selection, or diluted out of existence by hybridization. It's one of the ironies of our trade that, while molecular genetics was becoming sophisticated enough to make them significant, the highly inbred communities of the world were disappearing. All we have in America is a handful of religious communities whose acc.u.mulations of recessive genes aren't, for the most part, very interesting. As soon as I read Ann's book I realized that Innsmouth must have been a real genetic treasure-trove back in the twenties. I hope that there still might be time to recover some vital information."

Gideon didn't reply immediately, and for a moment or two I thought he hadn't understood. But then he said: "Not many people got the look any more. Some don' show it 'til they're older, but I don' see much sign of it comin' thru in anyone I see. Ain't no Marshes or Waites any more, and the only Eliots"-he paused to look at Ann-"are distant cousins o' the ones that settled here in the old days."

"But there are a few others, besides yourself, who show some of the signs, aren't there?" Ann put in.

"A few," Gideon admitted.

"And they'd co-operate with Dr. Stevenson-if you asked them to."

"Mebbe," he said. He seemed moodily thoughtful, as though something in the conversation had disturbed him. "But it's too late to do us any good, ain't it, Doc?"

I didn't have to ask what he meant. He meant that whatever understanding I might glean from my researches would only be of theoretical value. I wouldn't be able to help the Innsmouthers look normal.

It was, in any case, extremely unlikely that my work would lead to anything which could qualify as a "cure" for those afflicted with the Innsmouth stigmata, but there was really no longer any need for that. The Innsmouthers had taken care of the problem themselves. I remembered what I'd said about gross malformations being eliminated from the gene-pool by natural selection, and realized that I'd used the word "natural" in a rather euphemistic way-as many people do nowadays. The selective pressure would work both ways: the incomers who'd re-colonized Innsmouth after the war would have been just as reluctant to marry people who had the Innsmouth look as people who had the Innsmouth look would have been to pa.s.s it on to their children.

Gideon Sargent was certainly not the only looker who'd never married, and I was sure that he wouldn't have, even if there'd been a girl who looked like he did.

"I'm sorry, Gideon," I said. "It's a cruel irony that your ancestors had to suffer the burden of ignorance and superst.i.tion because genetics didn't exist, and that now genetics does exist, there's not much left for you to gain from a specific a.n.a.lysis of your condition. But let's not underestimate the value of understanding, Gabriel. It was because your forefathers lacked a true understanding that they felt compelled to invent the Esoteric Order of Dagon, to fill the vacuum of their ignorance and to maintain the pretence that there was something to be proud of in Innsmouth's plight. And that's why stories like the ones Zadok Allen used to tell gained such currency- because they provided a kind of excuse for it all. I'm truly sorry that I'm too late to serve your purposes, Gideon-I only hope that I'm not too late to serve mine. Will you help me?"

He looked at me with those big saucery eyes, so uncannily frightening in their innocence.

"Is there anythin' y'can do, Doc?" he asked. "Not about the bones, nor the eyes-I know we're stuck wi' them. But the dreams, Doc-can y'do anythin' about the dreams?"

I looked sideways at Ann, uncertainly. There had been something in her book about dreams, I recalled, but I hadn't paid much attention to it. It hadn't seemed to be part of the problem, as seen from a biochemist's point of view. Obviously Gideon saw things differently; to him they were the very heart of the problem, and it was because of them that he'd consented to hear me out.

"Everybody has dreams, Gideon," said Ann. "They don't mean anything."

He turned round to stare at her, in that same appalling fashion. "Do you have dreams, Miss Ann?" he asked, with seemingly tender concern.

Ann didn't answer, so I stepped into the breach again. "Tell me about the dreams, Gideon," I said. "I don't really know how they fit in."

He looked back at me, obviously surprised that I didn't know everything. After all, I was a doctor, wasn't I? I was the gene-wizard who knew what people were made of.

"All of us who got the look are dreamers," he said, in a painstakingly didactic fashion. "Taint the bones an' the eyes as kills us in the end-'tis the dreams that call us out to the reef an' bid us dive into the pit. Not many's as strong as me, Doc-I know I got the look as bad as any, an' had it all the time from bein' a kid, but us Sargents was allus less superst.i.tious than the likes o' the Marshes, even if Obed's kin did have all the money 'fore it pa.s.sed to Ned Eliot. My granpa ran the first motor-bus out o'here, tryin' to keep us connected to Arkham after the branch-line from Rowley was abandoned. It's the ones that change goes mad, Doc-they're the ones as starts believin'."

"Believing what, Gideon?" I asked, quietly.

"Believin' as the dreams is true...believin' in Dagon an' Cthulhu an' Pth'thya-l'yi...believin' as how they c'n breathe through their gills'n dive all the way to the bottom of the ocean to Y'hanthlei...believin' in the Deep Ones. That's what happens to the people wi' the look, Doc. Natural selection-ain't that what y'called it?"

I licked my lips. "Everyone with the look has these dreams?" I queried. If it were true, I realized, it might make the Innsmouth enigma more interesting. Physical malformation was one thing, but specific a.s.sociated psychotropic effects was quite another. I was tempted to explain to Gideon that one of the other great unsolved questions about the way the genes worked was how they affected mind and behavior via the chemistry of the brain, but that would have meant taking the discussion out into deeper water than he could be expected to handle. There was, of course, a simpler and more probable explanation for the dreams, but, in confrontation with Gideon's quiet intensity, I couldn't help but wonder whether there might be something more profound here.

"The dreams allus go wi' the look," he insisted. "I had 'em all my life. Real horrors, sometimes-unearthly. Can't describe 'em, but take my word for it, Doc, you don' ever want to meet 'em. I'm way past carin' about the look, Doc, but if you could do summin 'bout the dreams...I'll dig up the others f'r ye. Every last one."

It would mean widening the tests, I knew, but I could see that it might be worth it. If the dreams were significant, at the biochemical level, I could have something really hot. Not a n.o.bel Prize, but a real reputation-maker. The implications of discovering a whole new cla.s.s of hallucinogens were so awesome that I had difficulty pulling myself back down to earth. First catch your hare, I reminded myself, carefully.

"I can't make any promises, Gideon," I told him, trying hard to give the impression that I was being overly modest. "It's not easy to locate abnormal DNA, let alone map it and figure out exactly what it's doing. And I have to say that I have my reservations about the possibility of finding a simple answer, which might lend itself to some kind of straightforward treatment. But I'll do the best I can to find an explanation of the dreams, and, once we have an explanation, we'll be able to see what might be done to banish them. If you can get these people to agree to my taking blood and tissue-samples, I'll certainly do what I can."

"I c'n do it," he promised me. Then he stood up, obviously having said what he came to say, and heard what he'd hoped to hear. I put out my hand to shake his, but he didn't take it. Instead, he said: "Walk me to the sh.o.r.e, will y'Doc?"

I was almost as surprised by this as Ann was, but I agreed. As we went out, I told her that I'd be back in half an hour.

At first, we walked down the hill in silence. I began to wonder whether he really had anything to say to me, as I'd a.s.sumed, or whether it was just some curious whim that had inspired him to ask me to go with him. When we were within sight of the seafront, though, he suddenly said: "You known Miss Ann a long time?"

"Sixteen years," I told him, figuring that it wasn't worth wasting time on an explanation of the fact that we hadn't communicated at all for twelve-and-a-half out of the last thirteen.

"You marry her," he said, as though it were the most natural instruction in the world for one stranger to give another. "Take her to Manchester-or back to England, even better. Innsm'th's a bad place f'r them as owns it, even if they ain't got the look. Don' leave it to y'r kids...will it to the state or summin. I know you think I'm crazy, Doc, you bein' an educated man 'n' all, but I know Innsm'th-I got it in th' bones, th' blood an' th' dreams. Taint worth it. Take her away, Doc. Please."

I opened my mouth to answer, but he'd timed his speech to preclude that possibility. We were now in one of the narrow waterfront streets which had survived the great fire, and he was already pausing before one of the shabby hovels, opening the door.

"Can't invite y'in," he said, tersely. "Taint convenient. G'night, Doc."

Before I could say a single word, the door closed in my face.

Gideon was as good as his word. He knew where to find the remaining Innsmouthers who had the look, and he knew how to bully or cajole them into seeing me. A few he persuaded to come to the hotel; the rest I was permitted to visit in their homes-where some of them had been virtual prisoners for thirty years and more.

It took me a week to gather up my first set of samples and take them back to Manchester. Two weeks after that, I returned with more equipment, and took a further set of tissue specimens, some from the people I'd already seen, others-for the sake of comparison-from their unafflicted kinfolk. I threw myself into the project with great enthusiasm, despite that I still had a good deal of routine work to do, both as a research worker and in connection with my teaching. I made what pa.s.ses in my business for rapid headway, but it wasn't rapid enough for the people of Innsmouth-not that there was ever any real possibility of making good my promise to find a way to banish their evil dreams.

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 circ.u.mstances, 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 oddb.a.l.l.s. In h.o.m.ozygotes 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 a.n.a.lyses 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 h.o.m.ology. 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 h.o.m.ologue-as when the fins of certain 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 acc.u.mulation 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 pa.s.sengers in the body-but under certain circ.u.mstances, the switching mechanism fails and they begin to make the body they're in fishy."