Lovecraft's Monsters by Ellen Datlow

Author:Ellen Datlow
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy - Anthologies
ISBN: 9781616961213
Publisher: Tachyon Publications
Published: 2014-01-22T13:00:00+00:00

HERE'S THE SCENE: One hour past twilight on the night of a full Hay Moon—so an evening in June—an hour and spare change, and the last bend of the Castle Neck River vomits out the estuaries and salt marshes and sand bars that is, by turns, known as Essex Bay and Innsmouth Harbor. Lovecraft called the river the Manuxet, but that was never its true name. That was only some portmanteau spun from Algonquian—man, island fused with uxet, “at the river’s widest part.” Not inaccurate, as the Castle Neck here abandons any pretense at being a river, and is, instead, only the sluggish maze of shallow streams, sloughs, impassable tracts of swamps, dunes, and thickly wooded islands prefacing Essex Bay (id est, Innsmouth Harbor). On this night in June of 1920 the Hay Moon has only just cleared the horizon and shines low and red across the Atlantic beyond Ipswich Bay. To men and women alien to the decaying seaport of Innsmouth, that moon might bring a shiver. It might cause one to look away, because it could be the single eye of any god gazing out across a world to which it means to do mischief. The peculiar inhabitants of the seaport, however, revel on these nights. They strip and swim through the cold water out to the low granite spine of Devil Reef, and, by the moonlight, there they do cavort with the sorts of beings their slow metamorphoses will one day make of them. This has been the way of things since Captain Obed Marsh returned from the South Seas prior to the year of someone else’s lord, 1846 (possibly as far ago as the early 1820s), sailing back on the Sumatra Queen with new prosperity for an ailing town and the gift of transcendence and ever-lasting life for all. Returning to preach the gospel of Father Dagon and Mother Hydra.

But this is neither a geography nor a history lesson. This is something else.

Some would say this is a love story. Alright, let’s settle for that, if only for the sake of convenience. Some would go so far as to make an analogy with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, though that may be interjecting an unnecessary and, too, inappropriate degree of sentimentality into what is to come.

Once upon a time, there was a ghoul who fell in love with a daughter of the port of Innsmouth. To say the least, her parents would hardly have looked upon this as an acceptable state of affairs. She, destined one day to descend through abyssal depths to the splendor of many spired Y’ha-nthlei in the depths well beyond the shallows of Jeffreys Ledge. She might have the fortune to marry well, perhaps, even, taking for herself a husband from among the amphibious Deep Ones who inhabit the city, or, at the very least, a fine and only once-human devotee of the Esoteric Order. She would be adorned in nothing more than the fantastic, partly golden alloy diadems and bracelets and anklets, the lavalieres of uncut rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and diamonds.

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