“I’ve told you before not to go to the waterfront. It makes you stink of rot,” her mother said, and plucked a flea off her scabbed arm.
“The whole town stinks of rot, Mom. It’s been that way for thousands of years.”
“Or maybe not so little.” Her mother wheeled herself over to the window. “What do you see when you go out to the waterfront? All you see is the litter and dead fish that clog the shore.”
“Filth can be seen everywhere. It is inescapable.”
“That’s no reason to keep going back to see more of it, Amy.”
Amy turned away. She didn’t want to hear any more. She knew what it was that really bothered her mother, but it was pointless to bring the issue to her mother’s attention. Silence was always the best response. Silence, however, teaches one to brood, but not to think, and therefore, is detrimental.
She had remained by her mother’s side for many years. She liked to think it gave them both a purpose, since they were of little consequence to anyone else. Innsmouth hadn’t changed much since the most recent war with Asia, but for the fact that it had grown more impoverished. Disaffected, unemployed, burly youths, fresh home from the war, wandered the streets like sharks prowling the water, looking for any scent of blood on which to feed. For a withered, shadowy person like Amy, their incessant sauntering through the neighbourhood was a constant dread. Worse was when the church women would stroll up to the door and ask to see her mother. Their lickerish eyes loved to feast on the deformity. The hags would squeeze their rolls of fat into their pale cars and drive away, searching for another fresh victim. Amy and her mom weren’t fresh enough, after having lived in Innsmouth all their lives, but the church women still liked to smell the deformity.
When her brother didn’t return home from Asia, Amy thought about leaving. Living in Innsmouth had never been pleasant for her, yet it seemed that Innsmouth was everywhere and, therefore, there was little point in leaving. A dull rain began to thump over the attic window. Amy knew rain always pleased the jars, so she glanced over to her mother, just to make sure she had fallen into stupor before she crept upstairs to talk with them.
They stood at the east wall, facing the window. A few raindrops trickled onto the wormy chest they stood upon. She knelt before them and began arranging the stones around them.
“I don’t want to stay here, anymore. I want to leave. When will I be able to go?” she asked the jars. The magenta one snickered unpleasantly.
“You could always kill someone and go to prison. Then you’d be gone from Innsmouth.”
“I’m not sure anyone goes to prison for murder, these days. It is 5510, after all. Now, speaking freely, that’s a different story,” said the green jar.
“Will I never change? Will I always be like my mother?” Amy appealed to them desperately. The blue jar snorted.
“You knew from the time you were small that your mother was defective. That she would never change enough to take to the sea. There’s no hereditary reason why you won’t end up the same way. The same thing happened to your aunt. That’s why she starved herself. She couldn’t go on living, caught between this world and the sea.” The blue jar expelled a deep, philosophical sigh. “I remember Irene very well. She was such a vibrant scrap of a thing. I used to love thinking about the day she’d change and begin her new life among the anemone. She was so found of beachcombing when she was your age. I just knew she’d have the most impressive anemone garden in all of Innsmouth Harbor. Fancy my horror when she turned 17 and we saw the mark of defection rise on her. You think you’ve got problems, Amy? You can’t even imagine how disappointed I was. She had everything going for her. She was well-educated in the texts; she was in regular contact with Cthulhu every time she shut her eyes. She had cursed the entire state of Massachusetts with a plague of raining human excrement for three days on her 16th birthday. We were so proud of her. But then, one year hence, it turns out that she’s basically human, after all. She doesn’t have enough of the Innsmouth blood to take to the sea. Somewhere along the way, the bland, indifferent God of Baptists must have wrenched her boundless potential for the Necronomicon into a skulking subservience for the mortal plain. As a consequence, Cthulhu can do nothing with her and she will never be a part of the sea.”
“She won’t be a part of anything, now, because she’s dead.”
“Well now, don’t go too far, Amy. I mean, who are addressing right now?” the blue jar said.
“No one. I am mad,” Amy replied. She got up and went back downstairs. This staircase was so old that it seemed it must fall, soon. The paneling needed to be mended, but there was no labourer Amy was willing to let in the house after one brawny workman had broken the pale-pearl jar when trying to fix the hole in the attic. Amy looked about the house and wondered how it had fallen into such disrepair. There wasn’t any reason for it to be like this. It had been beautiful, once. It was the only thing that was. The last few years had aged it to an ugly, leering edifice that echoed with the sound of creaks magnified to a feverish dissonance. She steeled herself to try and fix a few of the panels, herself.
While she pulled at the planks, and pathetically tried to wrench the bolts off to reset the configuration to a more acceptable level of stability, she imagined how the house could look again if she succeeded. She was too busy thinking about this to notice that she’d plunged her pick too deeply into one of the posts. It gave way with an angry thrash and she stumbled back, terrified. The staircase somehow remained standing, but now, before her, stood a yawning blackness. There was a pocket behind the stairs. She tentatively looked inside, but found nothing. Returning to the scene with a flashlight, she shined it into the depths. She could see nothing except the gauze of spider webs and the miserable muck of water-damaged drywall. The mildew of dust pervaded her nose and she stumbled back from it, angrily. She could not define the purpose of this space, so she quickly tried to cover it back up with the paneling, but her mother wheeled into the room before she could conceal the damage.
“What have you done, you stupid fiend?” her mother yelled.
“I was trying to fix the stairs. I’m tired of living in filth, among fleas, rot and dust. I never could depend on you to clean anything, even when you could still walk. All you ever do is sleep and yell, scream, and cry.”
Her mother rolled to her and slapped her across the face.
“Don’t you ever speak that way to me again, you little snot. You know I am weak and limited in what I can do.”
“You’re not so disabled you can’t thrash me whenever you like.”
“That’s right, because I know how weak and stupid flesh of my flesh is.”
They stood before each other in a tableau of mutual hatred that seethed with barbed, suppressed rage.
“I don’t ever want to look at you again. If you continue to live in this house, you will stay clear of me,” her mother finally said, and turned away from her and wheeled back into her room. Amy surprised herself by not crying. She had shed so many tears in her life. Tears for her lost brother, tears for her lost aunt, and all the snide, unrepentant treatment she’d received. Yet, through it all, she did not cry. It was the first time that tears would not come since she could always cry so easily. She was always so easy to break. They didn’t come. For the first time in a great many years, she felt a sense of relief. Maybe she would never cry again.
After her mother had gone to sleep, she went back to the staircase and opened the pocket she’d exposed earlier. It didn’t have anything in it, but it seemed like it might be part of a larger network. She crept inside. She longed for the peace of dust, but that peace was unrequited. It did not want to give solace to her. It only wanted to be dust. She sat under the panel and in the darkness. She felt like she could sit there for a million years, without compunction about not getting to see what was happening outside. She did not want to know. Certainly, the entire town of Innsmouth already knew enough about all of them, from her drunken father marauding through the streets like a fool, blasting his idiocy to anyone who would listen. If Innsmouth had a dark reputation, then the Gilmans had a particularly slurred stance in a town in desperate need to make something worse than its own blackness.