The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels. Brian Stableford
that?” he asked, still without altering his attitude. “‘Cause I’m a freak, I suppose?”
“No,” said Ann, uncomfortably “of course not....”
I held up my hand to stop her, and said: “Yes, Mr. Sargent,” I said. “That is why, after a manner of speaking. I’m a geneticist, and I’m interested in people who are physically unusual. I’d like to explain that to you, if I may.”
Ann shook her head in annoyance, certain that I’d said the wrong thing, but the old man didn’t seem offended.
“When I were a young’un,” he commented, abstractedly, “there was a man offered Ma a hunnerd dollars for me. Wanned t’put me in a glass tank in some kinda sideshow. She said no. Blamed fool— hunnerd dollars was worth summin then.” His accent was very odd, and certainly not what I’d come to think of as a typical New England accent. Although he slurred common words, he tended to take more trouble over longer ones, and I thought I could still perceive the lingering legacy of his education.
“Do you know what ‘genetics’ means, Mr. Sargent?” I asked. “I really would like to explain why it’s important that I talk to you.”
At last he looked up, and looked me in the eye. I was ready for it, and didn’t flinch from the disconcerting stare.
“I know what genes are, Doc,” he said, coolly. “I bin a little curious myself, y’know, to fin’ out how I got to be this way. You gonna tell me? Or is that what y’wanner figure out?”
“It’s what I want to figure out, Mr. Sargent,” I told him, breathing a slight sigh of relief. “Can I come aboard?”
“Nope,” he replied. “Taint convenient. You at the hotel?”
“Yes I am.”
“See y’there t’night. Quarter of eight. You pay f’r the liquor.” “Okay,” I said. “Thanks, Mr. Sargent. I appreciate it.”
“Don’ mention it,” he said. “An’ I still don’ do trips to the reef. Or pose f’r Jap cameras—you mind me, now, Miss Ann.”
“I mind you, Gideon,” she answered, as we turned away.
As soon as we were out of earshot, she said: “You’re honored, David. He’s never come to the hotel before—and not because no one ever offered to buy him a drink before. He still remembers the old place, and he doesn’t like what Uncle Ned put up in its place, any more than he likes all the colonists who moved in when the village was all-but-dead in the thirties.”
We were passing an area of the waterfront that looked like a post-war bomb-site—or one of those areas in the real Manchester where they bulldozed the old slums but still haven’t got round to building anything else instead.
“This is the part of the town that was torched, isn’t it?” I said. “Sure is,” she replied. “Way back in ’27. Nobody really knows how it happened, although there are plenty of wild stories. Gang warfare can be counted out—there was no substantial bootlegging hereabouts. Arson for arson’s sake, probably. It’s mostly mine now—Uncle Ned wanted to rebuild but never could raise the finance. I’d sell the land to any developer who’d take it on, but I’m not hopeful about my chances of getting rid of it.”
“Did the navy really fire torpedoes into the trench beyond the reef?” I asked, remembering a story which she’d quoted in her book.
“Depth charges,” she said. “I took the trouble to look up the documents, hoping there’d be something sensational behind it, but it seems that they were just testing them. There’s very deep water out there—a crack in the continental shelf—and it was convenient for checking the pressure-triggers across the whole spectrum of settings. The navy didn’t bother to ask the locals, or to tell them what was going on; the information was still classified then, I guess. It’s not unnatural that the wacky stories about sea-monsters were able to flourish uncontradicted.”
“Pity,” I said, looking back at the crumbling jetties as we began to climb the shallow hill towards Washington Street. “I rather liked all that stuff about the Esoteric Order of Dagon conducting its hideous rites in the old Masonic Hall, and Obed Marsh’s covenant with the forces of watery evil.”
“The Esoteric Order of Dagon was real enough,” she said. “But it’s hard to find out what its rituals involved, or what its adherents actually believed, because it was careful not to produce or keep any records—not even sacred documents. It seems to have been one of a group of crazy quasi-gnostic cults which made a big thing about a book called the Necronomicon—they mostly died out at about the time the first fully-annotated translation was issued by the Miskatonic University Press. The whole point of being an esoteric sect is lost when your core text becomes exoteric, I guess.
“As for old Obed’s fabulous adventures in the South Seas, almost all the extant accounts can be traced back to tales that used to be told by the town character back in the twenties—an old lush named Zadok Allen. I can’t swear that every last detail originated in the dregs of a whisky bottle, but I’d be willing to bet my inheritance that Captain Marsh’s career was a good deal less eventful than it seemed once Zadok had finished embroidering it.”
“But the Marshes really did run a gold refinery hereabouts? And at least some of the so-called Innsmouth jewelry is real?”
“Oh sure—the refinery was the last relic of the town’s industrial heyday, which petered out mid-nineteenth century after a big epidemic. I’ve looked at the account-books, though, and it did hardly any business for thirty-five or forty years before it closed down. It’s gone now, of course. The few authentic surviving examples of the old Innsmouth jewelry are less beautiful and less exotic than rumor represents, but they’re interesting enough—and certainly not local in origin. There are a couple of shops in town where they make ‘genuine imitations’ for tourists and other interested parties—one manufacturer swears blind that the originals were made by pre-Columbian Indians, the other that they were found by Old Obed during his travels. Take your pick.”
I nodded, sagely, as if to say that it was what I’d suspected all along.
“What are you looking for, David?” she asked, suddenly. “You don’t really think that there’s anything in Zadok Allen’s fantasies, do you? You surely can’t seriously entertain the hypothesis that the old Innsmouthers were some kind of weird crossbreed with an alien race!”
I laughed. “No,” I reassured her, with complete sincerely. “I don’t believe that—nor do I believe that they’re some kind of throwback to our phantom aquatic ancestors. You’d better sit in tonight when I explain the facts of life to old Gideon; the reality is likely to be far more prosaic than that, alas.”
“Why alas?” she asked.
“Because what I’m looking for will only generate a paper. If the folklore quoted in your book were even half-true, it would be worth a Nobel Prize.”
* * * *
Gideon Sargent presented himself at the hotel right on time. He was dressed in what I presumed was his Sunday best, but the ensemble included a roll-neck sweater, which kept the sides of his neck concealed. There were half a dozen people in the bar, and Gideon drew a couple of curious glances from the out-of-towners, but he was only a little self-conscious. He was used to carrying his stigmata.
He drank neat bourbon, but he drank slowly, like a man who had no intention of getting loaded. I asked a few questions to find out exactly how much he did know about genes, and it turned out that he really was familiar with the basics. I felt confident that I could give him a reasonably full explanation of my project.
“We’ve already begun the business of mapping the human genome,” I told him. “The job will require the collective efforts of thousands of people in more than a hundred research centers, and even then it will take fifteen or twenty years, but we have the tools to do it. While we’re doing