Edward Lee: The Innswich Horror

THE INNSWICH HORROR

by Edward Lee

© 2010 by Edward Lee

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Foremost, the author must thank the late, great H. P. Lovecraft for providing thirty years of horrific wonder and demented influence. I must also thank the late Brian McNaughton for early influences. Also Tim McGinnis, Bob Strauss, Richard Chizmar, and Ian Levy. I am further in debt to authors S. T. Joshi, Darrell Schweitzer, and Anthony Pearsall for their various preeminent books on the life and works of HPL. Please forgive any misrepresentations and/or errors.

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For Wendy Brewer. Be my Cthulheena.

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1.

The motor-coach noise provided an aural mental backdrop: I imagined myself as the Master, and fancied I could see what he would see beyond the drab window. Not common fields, unremarkable treelines, and a typical New England summer sky but scenes much more sinister. Blasted heaths pocking malnourished meadows and dying scrubland, trees twisted and lightning-scarred, and a sky onerous and swollen with menace. And there—yes!—over the rusted iron railing-work of a decades-old bridge, my gaze was commandeered by the sluggish Miskatonic, in whose depths God knew what lurked or lay bloated in death or states worse than death. The prosaic bus window was no longer a simple transparent pane but a prism-obscura, a looking-glass to eldritch sights, nether-chasms, and leaky rives betwixt dimensions and inconteplatable horrors. Then I blinked—

—and slumped with a smile. It was just the rushing and very healthy Essex River below and, to either side, an endless rise of pine and oak. No, though God had possessed me with an ample grasp for learning, I was not so possessed by even an irreducible fraction of the Master’s imagination. I suppose that’s why I delighted so in his tales. Imagination, indeed, was a gift better reveled in by true scribes of the fantastical.

Scribes such as Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

I shared the bus with but a half-dozen other fellows, men of hard labor, judging by their appearance; and I dared wonder if Lovecraft himself had ever ridden this same bus. If so: Which seat? Which window did he gaze past to titillate his muse? It was a funny thing, such reverence to this manner of fiction. Just as HPL was obsessed with everything from the cosmos to colonial architecture, I, it seems, am obsessed with his work.

My name is Foster Morley, thirty-three years of age, brown-haired and brown-eyed. I suppose Lovecraft might describe me as nondescript and unobtrusive, but he would likely be amused by a certain parallel. Like so many of his protagonists, I come from solid English gentry and family means, wealthy by legacy, and hold an unutilized degree from Brown University. I occupy a 180-year-old manse in stately Providence, near the Athenaeum, where my family bloodline migrated to before the Revolution. That family is now deceased, I the only offspring. Hence, by the grace of my Creator, my days are dreams in which I want for nothing, and when I am not philanthrophising… I read. I read Lovecraft, over and over again, for never have mere words on paper been able to transport me to other, more interesting worlds. Worlds not akin to this one at all—with its financial depression and its unfathomable wars. No, but instead worlds of dreadful wonder and daedalic terror.

Oddly, I was never aware of Lovecraft until I read an obituary in the Providence Evening Bulletin over two years ago, in March of 1937, commenting on the local academic fantasist’s passing and strange career. Curiosity piqued, then, I lucked upon the June, 1936, issue of the magazine Weird Tales and pored over “Shadow Out of Time.” From that point, I was duly habituated, after which I expended minor sums but fastidious effort in making everything the Master wrote a constituent of my library. My obsession was at hand, and more than that—perhaps my salvation. Though content in my companionless solitude, I now had something bereft to me for so long: mental substance, a trip to lost terrascapes every night, rather than counting tedious hours of vacuity.

I took to re-reading his work at the tree by his grave at Swan Point Cemetery; I strolled weekly past his rooming-house in College Street and would always stop to peer out upon Federal Hill and spy St. John’s Catholic Church, his model for his last tale in earnest, the brilliant “Haunter of the Dark”; I’d prowl Angell Street and Benefit, hoping that some psychic lingering of the icon might brush by me—or somehow bestow a macabre, ethereal blessing; I’d even shop weekly at the Weybosset’s Store where he so often spent his pittance on food. More than once, too, I railed to New York, to stare up in awe at the squalid Flatbush rowhouse where the Master lived off and on with his wife; most recently I lit a votive at St. Paul’s Chapel on Broadway, where they married. I took to traveling where he traveled: from Marblehead to the District of Columbia to New Orleans, from Wilbraham, Massachusetts, to Dunedin, Florida—and exclusively by steam-train or motor coach, for this afforded me to see what he saw on the same long and clattering jaunts. That process— seeing —was most crucial to me, seeing and being where he had been. I once stood at the foot of Poe’s grave in Baltimore, only because I knew that Lovecraft had stood there once as well. I even tried to purchase the looming gable-manse at 135 Benefit Street but the owners would not sell, even for the preposterous price I offered, this being, of course, the nefarious, lichen-enslimed “shunned” house.

Obsessed? Without doubt. An alienist, I’m certain, would label me with some syndrome close to clinical, something analytically Jungian. Through Lovecraft’s words I know that I was desperately in search of something, and I’ll only know what that something is when I find it.

Er, pardon me. I should say that I’ve already found it—in Innswich—perhaps to my eternal turmoil.

I’d left the servants in charge—they were quite used to my junkets of inexplicable travel by now—and had decided to retrace the fictive journey of one of his characters, that character being the unnamed protagonist of my very favorite tale, The Shadow Over Innsmouth. HPL’s own notes, according to his confidant August Derleth, name the hapless fictional character as Robert Olmstead, though the name never appears in the actual story. It is not difficult to see, however, Mr. Olmstead’s mirror-image to Lovecraft himself: an antiquary and architectural aficionado, traveling the depths of New England always by the least costly mode possible, to pursue his own obsessions.

This, then, would serve as my summer outing. Robert Olmstead departed Newburysport for Arkham on July 15, 1927, with the intention of perusing the witch-haunted town’s archives and Colonial structure. Hence, my own desire to duplicate Olmstead’s trip, again, to see what Lovecraft saw. Therefore, ever the stickler for detail, I commenced with my own sojourn on July, 15, 1939, leaving Newburysport from the same bus stop in front of the very real Hammond’s Drug Store for the town of Salem, which was HPL’s blueprint for Arkham.

I’d selected the forward-most seat on the coach, on the right-hand side, which afforded a spacious view through the windscreen. Several miles past the Essex now, the scenery seemed to denigrate in a manner that eludes sensible description; suddenly, the woods looked impoverished, the vegetation lost its summer luster, and even the road, paved only by crushed oyster shells, elicited the word sallow, though I know this sounds preposterously non-schematic. It was something, however, that existed beyond that month’s record-breaking drought. An unchecked darkness settled in my spirit for reasons I cannot define.