The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels. Brian Stableford

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СКАЧАТЬ head, flat nose, staring eyes, rough skin and baldness—but could not suffice to give an adequate im­pression of the eerie whole. The old man’s tanned face put me in mind of a wizened koi carp, although I could not tell, at first— because his jacket collar was turned up—whether he had the gill­like markings on his neck that were the last and strangest of the stig­mata of the Innsmouth folk.

      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.

      “Hello, 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 attitude. “‘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 glass 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 Jap 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 passing 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. Nobody 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 documents, 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 classified 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 documents. 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 СКАЧАТЬ