The Shadow Over Innsmouth | Page 4

ingots.
"Used to be talk of a queer foreign kind of jewelry that the sailors and
refinery men sometimes sold on the sly, or that was seen once or twice
on some of the Marsh women-folks. People allowed maybe old Captain
Obed traded for it in some heathen port, especially since he always
ordered stacks of glass beads and trinkets such as seafaring men used to
get for native trade. Others thought and still think he'd found an old
pirate cache out on Devil Reef. But here's a funny thing. The old
Captain's been dead these sixty years, and there's ain't been a
good-sized ship out of the place since the Civil War; but just the same
the Marshes still keep on buying a few of those native trade things -
mostly glass and rubber gewgaws, they tell me. Maybe the Innsmouth
folks like 'em to look at themselves - Gawd knows they've gotten to be
about as bad as South Sea cannibals and Guinea savages.
"That plague of '46 must have taken off the best blood in the place.
Anyway, they're a doubtful lot now, and the Marshes and other rich
folks are as bad as any. As I told you, there probably ain't more'n 400
people in the whole town in spite of all the streets they say there are. I
guess they're what they call 'white trash' down South - lawless and sly,
and full of secret things. They get a lot of fish and lobsters and do
exporting by truck. Queer how the fish swarm right there and nowhere
else.
"Nobody can ever keep track of these people, and state school officials
and census men have a devil of a time. You can bet that prying
strangers ain't welcome around Innsmouth. I've heard personally of
more'n one business or government man that's disappeared there, and
there's loose talk of one who went crazy and is out at Danvers now.
They must have fixed up some awful scare for that fellow.
"That's why I wouldn't go at night if I was you. I've never been there
and have no wish to go, but I guess a daytime trip couldn't hurt you -
even though the people hereabouts will advise you not to make it. If
you're just sightseeing, and looking for old-time stuff, Innsmouth ought
to be quite a place for you."

And so I spent part of that evening at the Newburyport Public Library
looking up data about Innsmouth. When I had tried to question the
natives in the shops, the lunchroom, the garages, and the are station, I
had found them even harder to get started than the ticket agent had
predicted; and realized that I could not spare the time to overcome their
first instinctive reticence. They had a kind of obscure suspiciousness, as
if there were something amiss with anyone too much interested in
Innsmouth. At the Y. M. C. A., where I was stopping, the clerk merely
discouraged my going to such a dismal, decadent place; and the people
at the library shewed much the same attitude. Clearly, in the eyes of the
educated, Innsmouth was merely an exaggerated case of civic
degeneration.
The Essex County histories on the library shelves had very little to say,
except that the town was founded in 1643, noted for shipbuilding
before the Revolution, a seat of great marine prosperity in the early
19th century, and later a minor factory center using the Manuxet as
power. The epidemic and riots of 1846 were very sparsely treated, as if
they formed a discredit to the county.
References to decline were few, though the significance of the later
record was unmistakable. After the Civil War air industrial life was
confined to the Marsh Refining Company, and the marketing of gold
ingots formed the only remaining bit of major commerce aside from the
eternal fishing. That fishing paid less and less as the price of the
commodity fell and large-scale corporations offered competition, but
there was never a dearth of fish around Innsmouth Harbour. Foreigners
seldom settled there, and there was some discreetly veiled evidence that
a number of Poles and Portuguese who had tried it had been scattered
in a peculiarly drastic fashion.
Most interesting of all was a glancing reference to the strange jewelry
vaguely associated with Innsmouth. It had evidently impressed the
whole countryside more than a little, for mention was made of
specimens in the museum of Miskatonic University at Arkham, and in
the display room of the Newburyport Historical Society. The
fragmentary descriptions of these things were bald and prosaic, but they

hinted to me an undercurrent of persistent strangeness. Something
about them seemed so odd and provocative that I could not put them
out of my mind, and despite the relative lateness of the hour