The Shadow Over Innsmouth | Page 2

ain't thought much of hereabouts. It goes through
Innsmouth - you may have heard about that - and so the people don't
like it. Run by an Innsmouth fellow - Joe Sargent - but never gets any
custom from here, or Arkham either, I guess. Wonder it keeps running
at all. I s'pose it's cheap enough, but I never see mor'n two or three
people in it - nobody but those Innsmouth folk. Leaves the square -
front of Hammond's Drug Store - at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. unless they've
changed lately. Looks like a terrible rattletrap - I've never been on it."
That was the first I ever heard of shadowed Innsmouth. Any reference
to a town not shown on common map or listed in recent guidebooks
would have interested me, and the agent's odd manner of allusion
roused something like real curiosity. A town able to inspire such dislike
in it its neighbors, I thought, must be at least rather unusual, and worthy
of a tourist's attention. If it came before Arkham I would stop off there
and so I asked the agent to tell me something about it. He was very
deliberate, and spoke with an air of feeling slightly superior to what he
said.
"Innsmouth? Well, it's a queer kind of a town down at the mouth of the
Manuxet. Used to be almost a city - quite a port before the War of 1812
- but all gone to pieces in the last hundred years or so. No railroad now
- B. and M. never went through, and the branch line from Rowley was
given up years ago.
"More empty houses' than there are people, I guess, and no business to

speak of except fishing and lobstering. Everybody trades mostly either
here or in Arkham or Ipswich. Once they had quite a few mills, but
nothing's left now except one gold refinery running on the leanest kind
of part time.
"That refinery, though, used to be a big thing, and old man Marsh, who
owns it, must be richer'n Croesus. Queer old duck, though, and sticks
mighty close in his home. He's supposed to have developed some skin
disease or deformity late in life that makes him keep out of sight.
Grandson of Captain Obed Marsh, who founded the business. His
mother seems to've been some kind of foreigner - they say a South Sea
islander - so everybody raised Cain when he married an Ipswich girl
fifty years ago. They always do that about Innsmouth people, and folks
here and hereabouts always try to cover up any Innsmouth blood they
have in 'em. But Marsh's children and grandchildren look just like
anyone else far's I can see. I've had 'em pointed out to me here - though,
come to think of it, the elder children don't seem to be around lately.
Never saw the old man.
"And why is everybody so down on Innsmouth? Well, young fellow,
you mustn't take too much stock in what people here say. They're hard
to get started, but once they do get started they never let up. They've
been telling things about Innsmouth - whispering 'em, mostly - for the
last hundred years, I guess, and I gather they're more scared than
anything else. Some of the stories would make you laugh - about old
Captain Marsh driving bargains with the devil and bringing imps out of
hell to live in Innsmouth, or about some kind of devil-worship and
awful sacrifices in some place near the wharves that people stumbled
on around 1845 or thereabouts - but I come from Panton, Vermont, and
that kind of story don't go down with me.
"You ought to hear, though, what some of the old-timers tell about the
black reef off the coast - Devil Reef, they call it. It's well above water a
good part of the time, and never much below it, but at that you could
hardly call it an island. The story is that there's a whole legion of devils
seen sometimes on that reef-sprawled about, or darting in and out of
some kind of caves near the top. It's a rugged, uneven thing, a good bit

over a mile out, and toward the end of shipping days sailors used to
make big detours just to avoid it.
"That is, sailors that didn't hail from Innsmouth. One of the things they
had against old Captain Marsh was that he was supposed to land on it
sometimes at night when the tide was right... Maybe he did, for I dare
say the rock formation was interesting, and it's just barely possible he
was looking for pirate loot and maybe finding it; but there was talk of
his dealing with demons there. Fact is, I guess on the whole it