The Shadow Over Innsmouth | Page 5

I resolved
to see the local sample - said to be a large, queerly-proportioned thing
evidently meant for a tiara - if it could possibly be arranged.
The librarian gave me a note of introduction to the curator of the
Society, a Miss Anna Tilton, who lived nearby, and after a brief
explanation that ancient gentlewoman was kind enough to pilot me into
the closed building, since the hour was not outrageously late. The
collection was a notable one indeed, but in my present mood I had eyes
for nothing but the bizarre object which glistened in a corner cupboard
under the electric lights.
It took no excessive sensitiveness to beauty to make me literally gasp at
the strange, unearthly splendour of the alien, opulent phantasy that
rested there on a purple velvet cushion. Even now I can hardly describe
what I saw, though it was clearly enough a sort of tiara, as the
description had said. It was tall in front, and with a very large and
curiously irregular periphery, as if designed for a head of almost
freakishly elliptical outline. The material seemed to be predominantly
gold, though a weird lighter lustrousness hinted at some strange alloy
with an equally beautiful and scarcely identifiable metal. Its condition
was almost perfect, and one could have spent hours in studying the
striking and puzzlingly untraditional designs - some simply geometrical,
and some plainly marine - chased or moulded in high relief on its
surface with a craftsmanship of incredible skill and grace.
The longer I looked, the more the thing fascinated me; and in this
fascination there was a curiously disturbing element hardly to be
classified or accounted for. At first I decided that it was the queer
other-worldly quality of the art which made me uneasy. All other art
objects I had ever seen either belonged to some known racial or
national stream, or else were consciously modernistic defiances of
every recognized stream. This tiara was neither. It clearly belonged to
some settled technique of infinite maturity and perfection, yet that
technique was utterly remote from any - Eastern or Western, ancient or

modern - which I had ever heard of or seen exemplified. It was as if the
workmanship were that of another planet.
However, I soon saw that my uneasiness had a second and perhaps
equally potent source residing in the pictorial and mathematical
suggestion of the strange designs. The patterns all hinted of remote
secrets and unimaginable abysses in time and space, and the
monotonously aquatic nature of the reliefs became almost sinister.
Among these reliefs were fabulous monsters of abhorrent
grotesqueness and malignity - half ichthyic and half batrachian in
suggestion - which one could not dissociate from a certain haunting and
uncomfortable sense of pseudomemory, as if they called up some
image from deep cells and tissues whose retentive functions are wholly
primal and awesomely ancestral. At times I fancied that every contour
of these blasphemous fish-frogs was over-flowing with the ultimate
quintessence of unknown and inhuman evil.
In odd contrast to the tiara's aspect was its brief and prosy history as
related by Miss Tilton. It had been pawned for a ridiculous sum at a
stop in State Street in 1873, by a drunken Innsmouth man shortly
afterward killed in a brawl. The Society had acquired it directly from
the pawnbroker, at once giving it a display worthy of its quality. It was
labeled as of probable East-Indian or Indochinese provenance, though
the attribution was frankly tentative.
Miss Tilton, comparing all possible hypotheses regarding its origin and
its presence in New England, was inclined to believe that it formed part
of some exotic pirate hoard discovered by old Captain Obed Marik.
This view was surely not weakened by the insistent offers of purchase
at a high price which the Marshes began to make as soon as they knew
of its presence, and which they repeated to this day despite the
Society's unvarying determination not to sell.
As the good lady shewed me out of the building she made it clear that
the pirate theory of the Marsh fortune was a popular one among the
intelligent people of the region. Her own attitude toward shadowed
Innsmouth - which she never seen - was one of disgust at a community
slipping far down the cultural scale, and she assured me that the

rumours of devil-worship were partly justified by a peculiar secret cult
which had gained force there and engulfed all the orthodox churches.
It was called, she said, 'The Esoteric Order of Dagon", and was
undoubtedly a debased, quasi-pagan thing imported from the East a
century before, at a time when the Innsmouth fisheries seemed to be
going barren. Its persistence among a simple people was quite natural
in view of the sudden and permanent return