Many years ago, I visited Innsmouth, an ancient depopulated Massachusetts seaport where whispers of hideous events that took place in 1846 have dissuaded outsiders from settling there for over 160 years.

I was accompanied by the writer, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who had made a close study of the decaying town and its unusual inhabitants.

‘What few Innsmouth people are left seem to share certain congenital deformities,’ he told me.

Some frogs don’t croak

‘As you can see, they tend to be thin and stooped, have narrow heads, protruding watery-blue eyes that never seem to blink, very flat noses, receding foreheads and chins, long thick lips, singularly undeveloped ears, very little hair apart from a few tufts here and there, and odd deep creases on the sides of their necks.

‘Their hands are large, thick and clumsy while their fingers are very short, webbed, and have a tendency to curl inward. That peculiar shambling gait of theirs comes from their long powerful legs and huge ungainly feet.’

According to Lovecraft, Innsmouth’s remaining dwellers interbreed and never seem to age. They appear to survive from fishing surprisingly large shoals of fish that gather just off the black Devil’s Reef outside the crumbling harbour which has long been clogged with sand.

‘A secretive town, its inhabitants are all followers of The Esoteric Order of Dagon,’ he said, ‘a debased pagan rite whose dark history is best forgotten.’

A lone survivor from the wreck

He then told me a story of a lifeboat from the wreck of the passenger steamship SS Valencia off the south west coast of Vancouver Island – found floating in the area in 1933, in remarkably good condition, 27 years after the ship sank.

‘The lifeboat contained one person who survived the wreck – Charles Dexter Ward from Providence, Rhode Island,’ said Lovecraft. ‘He couldn’t or perhaps wouldn’t explain where he had been all those years and why he hadn’t aged.

‘What he did recall was sailing on the SS Valencia after a huge storm and sea quake and landing with the crew and other passengers on an unknown island that looked as though it had just surfaced from the depths of the ocean.

‘Ward told me that everything about the island was abnormal and that its geometry was non-Euclid, disturbing, and somehow obscene. After venturing into the island, trying not to slip on its sloping oozing mud banks, SS Valencia’s crew and passengers clambered up some titan black granite blocks which could have been no mortal staircase.

‘Under a heavy leaden sky that seemed distorted and menacing we came across an immense stone door carved with a hideous bas-relief of an enormous squid-dragon.

‘We then tried pushing at various places on the door, which suddenly opened inwards. The aperture was black with an almost material darkness and the foul odour arising from the newly opened depths was absolutely intolerable.

‘But what was far far worse,’ said Ward, ‘was the nasty slopping sucking sound of something indescribable and inhuman that lumbered and squeezed its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the light of day…

‘It was at this point that we all started screaming and running for our lives…

‘After that I can remember no more, except for a name – Cthulu, the haunter of the dark – and an eerie couplet:

‘That is not dead which can eternal lie.
And with strange aeons even death may die.’

Go on a cruise, while the going’s good

While Lovecraft was telling me all this over an appallingly bad dinner in our dilapidated hotel that reeked of fish in Innsmouth, we realised we were being closely observed by the other frog-like local diners and waiter, who were muttering to each other and slyly pointing at us.

We decided not to continue our enquiries into the human sacrifices that were said to be made at midnight on Devil’s Rock to the Deep Ones, and make a run for it.

As for booking a Virgin Holidays Cruise to that remote dark volcanic island that lies somewhere in the Pacific ocean, I’ve decided to take a cruise to the Med, instead and do some more online research, especially at www.innsmouthfreepress.com

But I’ll leave locked in my bank’s safe my rare copy of Abdul Alhazred’s Necronomicon, which is said to come from the estate of Charles Dexter Ward’s ill-reputed ancestor, the late Joseph Curwen – for just handling its gruesome cover gives me nightmares.

The fact that Alhazred’s mighty tome is bound in human skin and inked in blood and was never meant for the world of the living would also make it difficult to get through customs.

James Leavey

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Posted in Humour