“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 associated 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 Nobel Prize, but a real reputation-maker. The implications of discovering a whole new class 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 shore, 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 assumed, 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 passes 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
