The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels. Brian Stableford
or “part-timers”, according to Ann—had apparently made what efforts they could to redeem the houses from dereliction and decay, but the renovated facades and the new paint only succeeded in making the village look garish as well as neglected.
It proved, mercifully, that one of the principal exceptions to this rule was the New Gilman House, where a room had been reserved for me. It was one of the few recent buildings in the village, dating back no further than the sixties. The lobby was tastefully decorated and furnished, and the desk-clerk was as attentive as one expects American desk-clerks to be.
“My name’s Stevenson,” I told him. “I believe Miss Eliot reserved a room for me.”
“Best in the house, sir,” he assured me. I was prepared to believe it—Ann owned the place. “You sound English, sir,” he added, as he handed me a reservation card. “Is that where you know the boss from?”
“That’s right,” I said, diffidently. “Could you tell Miss Eliot that I’m here, do you think?”
“Sure thing,” he replied. “You want me to help you with that bag?”
I shook my head, and made my own way up to my room. It was on the top floor, and it had what passed for a good view. Indeed, it would have been a very good view had it not been for the general dereliction of the waterfront houses, over whose roofs I had to look to see the ocean. Out towards the horizon I could see the white water where the breakers were tumbling over Devil Reef.
I was still looking out that way when Ann came in behind me. “David,” she said. “It’s good to see you.”
I turned round a little awkwardly, and extended my hand to be shaken, feeling uncomfortably embarrassed.
“You don’t look a day older,” she said, hypocritically. It had been thirteen years since I last saw her.
“Well,” I said, “I looked middle-aged even in my teens. But you look wonderful. Being a capitalist obviously suits you. How much of the town do you own?”
“Only about three-quarters,” she said, with an airy wave of her slender hand. “Uncle Ned bought the land for peanuts back in the thirties, and now it’s worth—peanuts. All his grand ambitions to ‘put the place back on the map’ came to nothing. He got tenants for some of the properties he fixed up, but they’re most week-enders who live in the city and can’t afford authentic status symbols. We get a few hundred tourists through during the season—curiosity-seekers, fishermen, people wanting to get away from it all, but it’s hardly enough to keep the hotel going. That’s why I wrote the book—but I guess I still had too much of the dry historian in me and not enough of the sensational journalist. I should have made more of all those old stories, but I couldn’t get my conscience past the lack of hard evidence.”
“That’s what a university education does for you,” I said. Ann and I had met at university in Manchester—the real Manchester, not the place to which fate and coincidence had now brought me—when she was studying history and I was studying biochemistry. We were good friends—in the literal rather than the euphemistic sense, alas— but we hadn’t kept in touch afterwards, until she discovered by accident that I was in New Hampshire and had written to me, enclosing her book with news of her career as a woman of property. I had planned to come to see her even before I read the book, thus finding the excuse that made the prospect even more inviting.
As she watched me unpack, the expression in her grey eyes was quite inscrutable. Politeness aside, she really did look good— handsome rather than pretty, but clear of complexion and stately in manner.
“I suppose your coming over to the States is part of the infamous Brain Drain,” she said. “Was it the dollars, or the research facilities that lured you away?”
“Both,” I said. “Mostly the latter. Human geneticists aren’t worth that much, and I haven’t published enough to be regarded as a grand catch. I’m just a foot-soldier in the long campaign to map and understand the human genome.”
“It beats being chief custodian of Innsmouth and its history,” she said, so flatly as to leave no possibility of a polite contradiction.
I shrugged. “Well,” I said, “If I get a paper out of this, it will put Innsmouth on the scientific map, at least—although I doubt that the hotel will get much business out of it. I can’t imagine that there’ll be a legion of geneticists following in my trail.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed. “I’m afraid it might not be so easy,” she said. “All that stuff in the book about the Innsmouth look is a bit out of date. Back in the twenties, when the population of the town was less than four hundred, it may well have been exactly the kind of inbred community you’re looking for, but the postwar years brought in a couple of thousand outsiders. In spite of the tendency of the old families to keep to themselves, the majority married out. I’ve looked through the records, and most of the families that used to be important in the town are extinct—the Marshes, the Waites, the Gilmans. If it hadn’t been for the English branch, I guess the Eliots would have died out too. The Innsmouth look still exists, but it’s a thing of the past—you won’t see more than a trace of it in anyone under forty.”
“Age is immaterial,” I assured her.
“That’s not the only problem. Almost all of those who have the look are shy about it—or their relatives are. They tend to hide themselves away. It won’t be easy to get them to co-operate.”
“But you know who they are—you can introduce me.”
“I know who some of them are, but that doesn’t mean that I can help you much. I may be an Eliot, but to the old Innsmouthers I’m just another incomer, not to be trusted. There’s only one person who could effectively act as an intermediary for you, and it won’t be easy to persuade him to do it.”
“Is he the fisherman you mentioned over the phone—Gideon Sargent?”
“That’s right,” she said. “He’s one of the few lookers who doesn’t hide himself away, although he shows the signs more clearly than anyone else I’ve seen. He’s saner than most—got himself an education under the G.I. Bill after serving in the Pacific in ’45—but he’s not what you might call talkative. He won’t hide, but he doesn’t like being the visible archetype of the Innsmouth look—he resents tourists gawping at him as much as anyone would, and he always refuses to take them out to Devil Reef in his boat. He’s always very polite to me, but I really can’t say how he’ll react to you. He’s in his sixties now—never married.”
“That’s not so unusual,” I observed. I was unmarried; so was Ann.
“Maybe not,” she replied, with a slight laugh. “But I can’t help harboring an unreasonable suspicion that the reason he never married is that he could never find a girl who looked fishy enough.”
* * * *
I thought this a cruel remark, though Ann obviously hadn’t meant it to be. I thought it even crueler when I eventually saw Gideon Sargent, because I immediately jumped to the opposite conclusion: that no girl could possibly contemplate marrying him, because he looked too fishy by half.
The description that Ann had quoted in her book was accurate enough detail by detail—narrow head, flat nose, staring eyes, rough skin and baldness—but could not suffice to give an adequate impression of the eerie whole. The old man’s tanned face put me in mind of a wizened koi carp, although I could not tell, at first— because his jacket collar was turned up—whether he had the gilllike markings on his neck that were the last and strangest of the stigmata of the Innsmouth folk.
Sargent was sitting on a canvas chair on the deck of his boat when we went to see him, patiently mending a fishing-net. He did not look up as we approached, but I had no doubt that he had seen us from afar and knew well enough that we were coming to see him.
“Hello, Gideon,” said Ann, when we were close enough. “This is Dr. David Stevenson, a friend of mine from England. He lives