have the look, but fear that they might develop it, or feel that for some eccentric reason they ought to have it, can give themselves nightmares.”
She read the criticism in my words, which said that I had always been right and she had always been wrong, and that she had had no good cause for rejecting my proposal. “You’re saying that my dreams are purely imaginary?” she said, resentfully. People always are resentful about such things, even when the news is good, and despite the fact that it isn’t their fault at all.
“You don’t have the inversion, Ann. That’s quite certain now that I’ve found the genes and checked out all the sample traces. You’re not even heterozygous. There’s no possibility of your ever developing the look, and there’s no reason at all why you have to avoid getting married.”
She looked me in the eye, as disconcertingly as Gideon Sargent ever had, though her eyes were perfectly normal, and as grey as the sea.
“You’ve never seen a shoggoth,” she said, in a tone profound with despair. “I have—even though I don’t have the words to describe it.”
She didn’t ask me whether I was renewing my proposal— maybe because she already knew the answer, or maybe because she hadn’t changed her own mind at all. We walked on for a bit, beside that dull and sluggish river, looking at the derelict landscape. It was like the set for some schlocky horror movie.
“Ann,” I said, eventually, “you do believe me, don’t you? There really isn’t a psychotropic element in the Innsmouth syndrome.”
“Yes,” she said. “I believe you.”
“Because,” I went on, “I don’t like to see you wasting your life away in a place like this. I don’t like to think of you, lonely in selfimposed exile, like those poor lookers who shut themselves away because they couldn’t face the world—or who were locked up by mothers and fathers or brothers and sisters or sons and daughters who couldn’t understand what was wrong, and whose heads were filled with stories of Obed Marsh’s dealings with the devil and the mysteries of Dagon.
“That’s the real nightmare, don’t you see—not the horrid dreams and the daft rites conducted in the old Masonic Hall, but all the lives that have been ruined by superstition and terror and shame. Don’t be part of that nightmare, Ann; whatever you do, don’t give in to that. Gideon Sargent didn’t give in—and he told me once, although I didn’t quite understand what he meant at the time, that it was up to me to make sure that you wouldn’t, either.”
“But they got him in the end, didn’t they?” she said. “The Deep Ones got him in the end.”
“He was killed in an accident at sea,” I told her, sternly. “You know that. Please don’t melodramatize, when you know you don’t believe it. You must understand, Ann—the real horrors aren’t in your dreams, they’re in what you might let your dreams do to you.”
“I know,” she said, softly. “I do understand.”
I understood too, after a fashion. Her original letter to me had been a cry for help, although neither of us knew it at the time—but in the end, she’d been unable to accept the help that was offered, or trust the scientific interpretation that had been found. At the cognitive level, she understood—but the dreams, self-inflicted or not, were simply too powerful to be dismissed by knowledge.
And that, I thought, was yet another real horror: that the truth, even when discovered and revealed, might not be enough to save us from our vilest superstitions.
* * * *
I didn’t have any occasion to go back to Innsmouth for some time, and several months slipped past before I had a reason sufficient to make me phone. The desk-clerk at the hotel was surprised that I hadn’t heard—as if what was known to Innsmouthers ought automatically to be known to everyone else on earth.
Ann was dead.
She had drowned in the deep water off Devil Reef. Her body had never been recovered.
I didn’t get any sort of prize for the Innsmouth project; in spite of its interesting theoretical implications, it wasn’t quite the reputation-maker I’d hoped it would be. As things turned out, it was only worth a paper after all.
THE PICTURE
The last chapter of Oscar Wilde’s narrative is, of course, a mere catalogue of lies. Dorian Gray did not stab me in a fit of rage and remorse. How could he? I was the custodian of his will as well as his soul—and, for that matter, of his voice.
By the time I had achieved that state described in that final chapter, Dorian was no more than a carved dummy. He was a consummate work of art, to be sure, but he was a mere doll. He had elected to become unchanging, and that which is unchanging cannot entertain real intelligence or authentic emotion. A man’s identity is not an entity, which may or may not change; a man’s identity is a product of all the processes of change ongoing within him.
When Dorian wished change upon me and changelessness upon himself, he gave me his mind and his heart. It was a bold move, and it was a wise move, but it was the end of his story and the beginning of mine. Oscar Wilde had not quite understood that in 1891; after two years in Reading Gaol he knew better, but he had surrendered his own mind and heart by then, and he never committed his discovery to paper.
Some might think that Dorian Gray was the miracle that Basil Hallward wrought, while I was a mere by-product. Dorian was, after all, a handsome man blessed with eternal youth, immune to aging and the scars of disease. Alone among young men of his era, Dorian could sleep with syphilitic whores and remain untainted, because all his infections were inherited by me. Oscar Wilde, carrying the curse of syphilis within his own body, presumably thought that Dorian had the best of our bargain—but he was wrong. I was—and am—the true miracle, and Dorian Gray the by-product.
Paintings have nothing to fear from disease. We do not die, nor do we suffer; we have nothing to fear from change. Had Dorian borne the burden which he passed on to me, it would have ravaged him with pain and misery, and ultimately with death—but there is no pain or misery in my world, and art never dies. The march of time, which would have been nothing to him but the measure of his decay and destruction, was and is to me the glory of my evolution, my progress, my transcendence.
I began life as an item of representative art, with no greater virtue than accuracy, but, as soon as Dorian had made his bargain, I began to mature into a modernist masterpiece. I became surreal and futuristic, awesome and sublime. I became the very embodiment of genius, of magic, of power.
When Basil Hallward first painted me, those who saw me had no available response, save to compliment him because he had captured the pleasing appearance of a lovely boy—but no one who saw me now would mistake me for a mere reflection. There never was, nor ever could be, a living man who looked like me.
I have gone far beyond mere reflection, into the hinterlands of the imagination. I am now the kind of creature that can only be glimpsed in dreams. I am no longer man but overman, heir to all disease and all decay but never to defeat. I alone, in all the world, am capable of wearing such corruptions proudly, as manifestations of my absolute triumph over death and damnation.
I have already lived more lives than any man, and I am immortal; I am still in the process of becoming. I am no mere work of art; I am Art itself.
If you stare into my painted eyes—which will follow you through life, not merely into every corner of the room—you
