“Yes?”
He looked quickly away. “I’ve made... discoveries.”
I waited.
“I’ve found things out, yes, yes—and—” His eyes flared up for a moment in the firelight, then dulled.
“And?”
“Damn it!” he turned on me and the towel fell from his shoulders. Quickly he snatched it up and covered himself—but not before I had seen how thin mere months had made him. “Damn it!” he mumbled again, less vehemently now. “Must you repeat everything I say? God, I do enough of that myself! I go over everything—over and over and over...”
I sat in silence, waiting. He would tell it in his own time.
And eventually he continued. “I’ve made discoveries, and I’ve heard... things.” He looked from the fire to me, peered at me, ran trembling fingers through his hair. And did I detect streaks of grey in that once jet mop? “I’ve heard the bell!”
“Then it’s time you got out of there!” I said at once. “Time you got June out, too.”
“I know, I know!” he answered, his expression tortured. He gripped my arm. “But I’m not finished yet. I don’t know it all, not yet. It lures me, Bill. I have to know...”
“Know what?” It was my turn to show my agitation. “What do you need to know, you fool? Isn’t it enough that the place is evil? You know that much. And yet you stay on there. Get out, that’s my advice. Get out now!”
“No!” his denial was emphatic. “I’m not finished. There has to be an end to it. The place must be cleansed.” He stared again into the fire.
“So you do admit it’s evil?”
“Of course it is. Yes, I know it is. But leave, get out? I can’t, and June—”
“Yes?”
“She won’t!” He gave a muffled sob and turned watery, searching eyes full upon me. “The place is like... like a magnet! It has a genius loci. It’s a focal point for God-only-knows-what forces. Evil? Oh, yes! An evil come down all the centuries. But I bought the place and I shall cleanse it—end it forever, whatever it is.”
“Look,” I tried reasoning with him, “let’s go back, now, the two of us. Let’s get June out of there and bring her back here for the night. How did you get here anyway? Surely not on foot, on a night like this?”
“No, no,” he shook his head. “Car broke down halfway up the hill. Rain must have got under the bonnet. I’ll pick it up tomorrow.” He stood up, looked suddenly afraid, wild-eyed. “I’ve been away too long. Bill, will you run me back? June’s there—alone! She was sleeping when I left. I can fill you in on the details while you drive...”
VII: MANIFESTATION
I made him take another brandy, threw a coat over his shoulders, bustled him out to my car. Moments later we were rolling down into Harden and he was telling me all that had happened between times. As best I remember, this is what he said:
“Since that day you visited us I’ve been hard at work. Real work, I mean. Not the other thing, not delving—not all of the time, anyway. I got the grounds inside the walls tidied up, even tried a little preliminary landscaping. And the house: the old windows out, new ones in. Plenty of light. But still the place was musty. As the summer turned I began burning old Carpenter’s wood, drying out the house, ridding it of the odour of centuries—a smell that was always thicker at night. And fresh paint, too, lots of it. Mainly white, all bright and new. June picked up a lot; you must have noticed how down she was? Yes, well she seemed to be on the mend. I thought I had the— the ‘miasma’—on the run. Hah!” he gave a bitter snort. “A ‘summer miasma’, I called it. Blind, blind!”
“Go on,” I urged him, driving carefully through the wet streets.
“Eventually, to give myself room to sort out the furniture and so on, I got round to chucking the old shelves and books out of Carpenter’s study. That would have been okay, but... I looked into some of those books. That was an error. I should have simply burned the lot, along with the wormy old chairs and shreds of carpet. And yet, in a way, I’m glad I didn’t.”
I could feel David’s fevered eyes burning me in the car’s dark interior, fixed upon me as he spoke.
“The knowledge in those books, Bill. The dark secrets, the damnable mysteries. You know, if anyone does, what a fool I am for a mystery. I was hooked; work ceased; I had to know! But those books and manuscripts: the Unter-Zee Kulten and Hydrophinnae. Doorfen’s treatise on submarine civilisations and the Johansen Narrative of 1925. A great sheaf of notes purporting to be from American government files for 1928, when federal agents ‘raided’ Innsmouth, a decaying, horror-haunted town on the coast of New England; and other scraps and fragments from all the world’s mythologies, all of them concerned with the worship of a great god of the sea.”
“Innsmouth?” my ears pricked up. I had heard that name mentioned once before. “But isn’t that the place—?”
“—The place which spawned that family, the Waites, who came over and settled at Kettlethorpe about the time of the American Civil War? That’s right,” he nodded an affirmative, stared out into the rain-black night. “And old Carpenter who had the house for thirty years, he came from Innsmouth, too!”
“He was of the same people?”
“No, not him. The very opposite. He was at the farm for the same reason I am—now. Oh, he was strange, reclusive—who wouldn’t be? I’ve read his diaries and I understand. Not everything, for even in his writing he held back, didn’t explain too much. Why should he? His diaries were for him, aids to memory. They weren’t meant for others to understand, but I fathomed a lot of it. The rest was in those government files.
“Innsmouth prospered in the time of the clipper ships and the old trade routes. The captains and men of some of those old ships brought back wives from Polynesia—and also their strange rites of worship, their gods. There was queer blood in those native women, and it spread rapidly. As the years passed the entire town became infected. Whole families grew up tainted. They were less than human, amphibian creatures more of the sea than the land. Merfolk, yes! Tritons, who worshipped Dagon in the deeps: ‘Deep Ones’, as old Carpenter called them. Then came the federal raid of ’28. But it came too late for old Carpenter.
“He had a store in Innsmouth, but well away from the secret places—away from the boarded-up streets and houses and churches where the worst of them had their dens and held their meetings and kept their rites. His wife was long dead of some wasting disease, but his daughter was alive and schooling in Arkham. Shortly before the raid she came home, little more than a girl. And she became—I don’t know—lured. It’s a word that sticks in my mind. A very real word, to me.
“Anyway, the Deep Ones took her, gave her to something they called out of the sea. She disappeared. Maybe she was dead, maybe something worse. They’d have killed Carpenter then, because he’d learned too much about them and wanted revenge, but the government raid put an end to any personal reprisals or vendettas. Put an end to Innsmouth, too. Why, they just about wrecked the town! Vast areas of complete demolition. They even depth-charged a reef a mile out in the sea...
“Well, after things quieted down Carpenter stayed on a while in Innsmouth, what was left of it. He was settling his affairs, I suppose, and maybe ensuring that the evil was at an end. Which must have been how he learned that it wasn’t at an end but spreading like some awful blight. And because he suspected the survivors of the raid might seek haven in old strongholds abroad, finally he came to Kettlethorpe.”