The Shadow Over Innsmouth | Page 6

of abundantly fine fishing,
and it soon came to be the greatest influence in the town, replacing
Freemasonry altogether and taking up headquarters in the old Masonic
Hall on New Church Green.
All this, to the pious Miss Tilton, formed an excellent reason for
shunning the ancient town of decay and desolation; but to me it was
merely a fresh incentive. To my architectural and historical
anticipations was now added an acute anthropological zeal, and I could
scarcely sleep in my small room at the "Y" as the night wore away.

II
Shortly before ten the next morning I stood with one small valise in
front of Hammond's Drug Store in old Market Square waiting for the
Innsmouth bus. As the hour for its arrival drew near I noticed a general
drift of the loungers to other places up the street, or to the Ideal Lunch
across the square. Evidently the ticket-agent had not exaggerated the
dislike which local People bore toward Innsmouth and its denizens. In a
few moments a small motor-coach of extreme decrepitude and dirty
grey colour rattled down State Street, made a turn, and drew up at the
curb beside me. I felt immediately that it was the right one; a guess
which the half-legible on the windshield - Arkham - Innsmouth -
Newburyport - soon verified.
There were only three passengers - dark, unkempt men of sullen visage
and somewhat youthful cast - and when the vehicle stopped they
clumsily shambled out and began walking up State Street in a silent,
almost furtive fashion. The driver also alighted, and I watched him as

he went into the drug store to make some purchase. This, I reflected,
must be the Joe Sargent mentioned by the ticket-agent; and even before
I noticed any details there spread over me a wave of spontaneous
aversion which could be neither checked nor explained. It suddenly
struck me as very natural that the local people should not wish to ride
on a bus owned and driven by this man, or to visit any oftener than
possible the habitat of such a man and his kinsfolk.
When the driver came out of the store I looked at him more carefully
and tried to determine the source of my evil impression. He was a thin,
stoop-shouldered man not much under six feet tall, dressed in shabby
blue civilian clothes and wearing a frayed golf cap. His age was
perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep creases in the sides of his neck
made him seem older when one did not study his dull, expressionless
face. He had a narrow head, bulging, watery-blue eyes that seemed
never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly
undeveloped ears. His long thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks
seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that
straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface
seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease.
His hands were large and heavily veined, and had a very unusual
greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikingly short in proportion to
the rest of the structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl closely
into the huge palm. As he walked toward the bus I observed his
peculiarly shambling gait and saw that his feet were inordinately
immense. The more I studied them the more I wondered how he could
buy any shoes to fit them.
A certain greasiness about the fellow increased my dislike. He was
evidently given to working or lounging around the fish docks, and
carried with him much of their characteristic smell. Just what foreign
blood was in him I could not even guess. His oddities certainly did not
look Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine or negroid, yet I could see why the
people found him alien. I myself would have thought of biological
degeneration rather than alienage.
I was sorry when I saw there would be no other passengers on the bus.

Somehow I did not like the idea of riding alone with this driver. But as
leaving time obviously approached I conquered my qualms and
followed the man aboard, extending him a dollar bill and murmuring
the single word "Innsmouth." He looked curiously at me for a second as
he returned forty cents change without speaking. I took a seat far
behind him, but on the same side of the bus, since I wished to watch the
shore during the journey.
At length the decrepit vehicle stared with a jerk, and rattled noisily past
the old brick buildings of state street amidst a cloud of vapour from the
exhaust. Glancing at the people on the sidewalks, I thought I detected
in them a curious wish to avoid looking at the bus - or at least a wish to
avoid seeming