The Shadow Over Innsmouth

The Shadow Over Innsmouth
H. P. Lovecraft

I
During the winter of 1927-28 officials of the Federal government made
a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient
Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. The public first learned of it in
February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by
the deliberate burning and dynamiting - under suitable precautions - of
an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty
houses along the abandoned waterfront. Uninquiring souls let this
occurrence pass as one of the major clashes in a spasmodic war on
liquor.
Keener news-followers, however, wondered at the prodigious number
of arrests, the abnormally large force of men used in making them, and
the secrecy surrounding the disposal of the prisoners. No trials, or even
definite charges were reported; nor were any of the captives seen
thereafter in the regular gaols of the nation. There were vague
statements about disease and concentration camps, and law about
dispersal in various naval and military prisons, inn nothing positive
ever developed. Innsmouth itself was left almost depopulated, and it is
even now only beginning to show signs of a sluggishly revived
existence.
Complaints from many liberal organizations were met with long
confidential discussions, and representatives were taken on trips to
certain camps and prisons. As a result, these societies became
surprisingly passive and reticent. Newspaper men were harder to
manage, but seemed largely to cooperate with the government in the
end. Only one paper - a tabloid always discounted because of its wild
policy - mentioned the deep diving submarine that discharged

torpedoes downward in the marine abyss just beyond Devil Reef. That
item, gathered by chance in a haunt of Sailors, seemed indeed rather
far-fetched; since the low, black reef lieu a full mile and a half out from
Innsmouth Harbour.
People around the country and in the nearby towns muttered a great
deal among themselves, but said very little to the outer world. They had
talked about dying and half-deserted Innsmouth for nearly a century,
and nothing new could be wilder or more hideous than what they had
whispered and hinted at years before. Many things had taught them
secretiveness, and there was no need to exert pressure on them. Besides,
they really knew little; for wide salt marshes, desolate and unpeopled,
kept neighbors off from Innsmouth on the landward side.
But at last I am going to defy the ban on speech about this thing.
Results, I am certain, are so thorough that no public harm save a shock
of repulsion could ever accrue from a hinting of what was found by
those horrified men at Innsmouth. Besides, what was found might
possibly have more than one explanation. I do not know just how much
of the whole tale has been told even to me, and I have many reasons for
not wishing to probe deeper. For my contact with this affair has been
closer than that of any other layman, and I have carried away
impressions which are yet to drive me to drastic measures.
It was I who fled frantically out of Innsmouth in the early morning
hours of July 16, 1927, and whose frightened appeals for government
inquiry and action brought on the whole reported episode. I was willing
enough to stay mute while the affair was fresh and uncertain; but now
that it is an old story, with public interest and curiosity gone, I have an
odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that
ill-rumored and evilly-shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous
abnormality. The mere telling helps me to restore confidence in my
own faculties; to reassure myself that I was not the first to succumb to a
contagious nightmare hallucination. It helps me, too in making up my
mind regarding a certain terrible step which lies ahead of me.
I never heard of Innsmouth till the day before I saw it for the first and -
so far - last time. I was celebrating my coming of age by a tour of New

England - sightseeing, antiquarian, and genealogical - and had planned
to go directly from ancient Newburyport to Arkham, whence my
mother's family was derived. I had no car, but was travelling by train,
trolley and motor-coach, always seeking the cheapest possible route. In
Newburyport they told me that the steam train was the thing to take to
Arkham; and it was only at the station ticket-office, when I demurred at
the high fare, that I learned about Innsmouth. The stout, shrewd-faced
agent, whose speech shewed him to be no local man, seemed
sympathetic toward my efforts at economy, and made a suggestion that
none of my other informants had offered.
"You could take that old bus, I suppose," he said with a certain
hesitation, "but it