The Innsmouth Belle
FOR SOME WHILE, NATE HAD BEEN PLANNING A river trip. Not just any river trip, mind you, but a scientific survey of the Miskatonic River upstream from Arkham as far as it was navigable. He wished to examine the wildlife along its banks, especially any that fell outside the Linnaean norm and therefore into his own particular sphere of interest. Study of certain passages of the Necronomicon had led him to conclude that the upper reaches of the Miskatonic would prove unusually fruitful in that regard, for the deep forests and the mountain country through which the river ran were rife with legend and folklore pertaining to queer beasts, many of which matched descriptions contained in entries in that dread black tome.
He had already secured the hire of a small sternwheeler paddle steamer, and the crew to go with it, and there was a spare cabin on the upper deck that he could readily see me occupying. I would, furthermore, be free to avail myself of a well-equipped laboratory on board, where I could continue my development of Intercranial Cognition Transference unimpeded. Nobody would interfere with my work, and the only interruptions to my routine would come in the form of expeditions onto dry land to trap specimens. Nate said he would be glad of my company on those, for he might have need of my breadth of knowledge and my keen intellect.
It sounded almost too good to be true. Nate was right about one thing, certainly: I had no place at Miskatonic. I began to think that the university had been lucky to have me, not the other way round, and that depriving me of my scholarship was rank ingratitude on the dean’s part, not to mention ignorance. In later years Miskatonic would have been proud to have been associated with me and honoured to call me an alumnus. Well, it had blown that chance. Zachariah Conroy would go on to become one of the greats of science – another Newton, another Darwin – and Miskatonic University would be nothing but a footnote in his life history, and an insignificant one at that. It would be forever known as the school that failed to nurture the brightest talent ever to have crossed its threshold.
But would this expedition really be the sensible next step for me? I bombarded Nate with further questions. How long did he anticipate the voyage would last? Was it likely to be dangerous? And why had he neglected to mention anything about it before now?
Nate had his answers ready. He estimated we would be away for two months, three at the most. He could not guarantee that there would be no risk, but we would be well armed and he would never knowingly put me in harm’s way. As for not mentioning it before, he had merely been waiting for the right moment. Already much of the groundwork for the expedition had been laid, but he had been intending to broach the subject with me only when a departure date had been fixed and his plans were further developed. He could not have foreseen that I would run into difficulties at Miskatonic, and it was a tragedy for sure, but from his point of view it was also propitious. He could not think of anyone he would rather have making discoveries with him than his best friend, who was also one of the finest biologists to walk the earth.
I heard the words “best friend” and knew I was hooked. Nate and I shook hands and polished off the rest of the bottle of wine, then another. That night I slept in my dorm room for the very last time. The next morning I packed up my belongings and bade goodbye to Lake, who said he was sorry to see me go but seemed, to judge by the curtness of his farewell, far from heartbroken. I moved into a vacant room at Nate’s boarding house, the rent for which he paid on my behalf, and together we set about preparing for the trip in earnest.
* * *
The ensuing few weeks flew by in a whirl of activity. There was much to be organised, and I took the onus of it upon myself. I wanted to prove to Nate that I was committed and that I was grateful to have been invited along. Without this opportunity I didn’t know what I would have done with myself. Going home to Boston with my tail between my legs was never an option. I felt that I was better off considering myself an orphan from now on, my parents effectively dead to me. This caused me some regret but at the same time invigorated me, instilling in me a resolve to stand on my own two feet.
There were provisions to be bought, including dry goods, laboratory materials, weapons and ammunition, and clothing appropriate to the climate and terrain we would be encountering, along with a few trinkets such as paste jewellery and coloured crayons, for it was conceivable that we might run into Indians en route and would need something to barter with in exchange for supplies such as fresh meat or else offer as bribes in order to secure safe passage through hostile territory. The prospect of meeting wild Indians unnerved me. I was aware that some of the regional tribes had a fierce reputation and did not take kindly to “paleface” interlopers. Yet I was also excited. I was soon to be going on an adventure, something that so far had been in short supply during my life. I reckoned I would come back from the Miskatonic expedition older, wiser and with a fund of entrancing stories to tell. It would be, all said and done, an experience.
The paddle steamer Nate had hired, when I first clapped eyes on her at Arkham’s docks, did somewhat dampen my enthusiasm. She had seen much better days, indeed better decades. Her hull was in need of a good scraping and repainting, and the seams between her timbers could have done with fresh caulk. Her gunwales were bumped and scuffed from countless minor collisions. Her superstructure – two storeys of deck amidships – had a worrying list to it, as though at any moment it might shear diagonally and collapse. Her paddle wheel, meanwhile, consisted of planks that looked half-rotten set within an iron framework that was mostly rust. She was a respectable size, measuring some sixty feet from bow to stern, and robustly broad in the beam, but I was not entirely convinced of her river-worthiness. A submerged rock, a sandbar, even just rough water might cause sufficient damage to put paid to her progress and possibly put a hole in her. I consoled myself with the thought that we were only going to be on a river, not in the middle of the ocean. Should disaster strike, the shore, and safety, would never be more than a short swim away. I suppose I had in the back of my mind thoughts of Absalom and his seagoing demise. I surely did not have to fear a similar fate befalling me, yet a certain feeling of apprehension was inescapable.
The steamer was called the Innsmouth Belle, the name emblazoned upon her bow in jaunty but faded letters. Her captain was Abner Brenneman, a man for whom the term “grizzled” seemed to have been invented. He was in his sixties and said to me – in a New Englander accent so thick I sometimes struggled to understand him – that he had plied his trade on steamers since boyhood, primarily along the inland waterways and coastal inlets of Essex County. He had owned the Belle since 1881 and used her in the capacity of a freighter, lugging cargo between points as far apart as Marblehead and Rockport. He knew the Miskatonic intimately, at least from Kingsport to Lake Makadewa, beyond which body of water he had never needed to go. The boat herself he had purchased off an Innsmouther for what he considered “a song”.
“In fact the fellow was more than keen ter be rid o’ her,” he said, taking a swig from the hipflask that was never far from his side, “complainin’ ter me as haow Innsmouth jest ain’t never been right since the plague o’ ’46. Since then, the town’s a-sunk into decline an’ degeneracy, it an’ most everywhere else araound those parts – Devil’s Reef, the Manuxet river, Plum Island – has become the haunt o’ things, unnameable things, things that walk like men but ain’t, things that seem more at haome in the water than on the land. There’s no work there, he said ter me, not for a sane, normal human being, hence him sellin’ the Belle and retirin’ ter Ipswich. An’ he could go ter his grave happy if he never heard the word ‘Innsmouth’ agin.”
Brenneman, who preferred to be addressed as “Skipper”, chuckled through his shaggy whiskers as he recounted this anecdote, and seemed to wish to dismiss the seller’s assertions as just so much nonsense, but his rheumy old eyes hinted otherwise. He showed us around the steamer, enumerating her many qualities with pride, not least her boom-mounted block-and-tackle pulley with a load-bearing capacity of up to five hundredweight, and her twenty-horsepower engine, able to defy the Miskatonic’s current even during spring when snowmelt turned entire stretches into raging torrents. Luckily, he said, the past winter had been relatively mild, with little snowfall, so we need not worry too much on that account. He certainly appeared fond of the Belle, but not to the extent that he lavished a great deal of attention upon her upkeep. I got the impression that he felt tied to her but tired of her, like a husband unhappily married to a shrewish wife and trying to make the best of the arrangement.
The first mate was his son, known to all as Junior. In his thirties, he was the spit of his father but the inner qualities that had crystallised in the senior Brenneman as a wry, truculent curmudgeonliness were, in Junior, taking a meaner turn. You could see it in his cagey eyes and hyena grin, the rangy lope of his gait, the louche, sneering drawl with which he spoke. By the time he reached his father’s age, he would not be as likeable. He would be altogether a more brittle, less reliable proposition.
Rounding out the crew’s complement was a giant of a Negro by the name of Charley. He had no clearly defined role aboard the Belle but seemed to be a general factotum – deckhand, cook, coal shoveller, lookout; whatever the circumstances required. My parents had Negro maids, so I was accustomed to dealing with his sort. What struck me immediately about Charley, however, was that unlike Harriet and Susannah, who rarely met one’s eye, he was vivacious and garrulous. He even clapped me on the shoulder as I shook hands with him, and although I deemed this a mark of overfamiliarity, I was prepared to pardon it because he had a wide, winning smile and such an air of geniality about him. As it happened, Charley would become the crewman whom, of the three, I trusted the most and who showed me the greatest courtesy. The other two would earn my enmity.
* * *
By late March we were all set. Then heavy rains arrived, swelling the Miskatonic to perilous heights and causing it to burst its banks in several places, flooding adjacent farmland. We waited until the river subsided, but it was not until early April that Skipper Brenneman finally declared we could get under way.
The day of our departure dawned bright and clear. The Miskatonic was turbid but not intimidatingly so. A great pillar of black smoke purled up from the Innsmouth Belle’s funnel as Nate and I climbed the gangplank. The deck thrummed underfoot with the vibration of the idling engine. We had on board everything we required to see us through the next hundred days, and I must admit to feeling, as I embarked, a sense of anticipation that was three parts eagerness to one part trepidation. It was not as though we were voyaging into the unknown, not exactly. This was no Lewis and Clark enterprise. The Miskatonic had been mapped all the way to its source, and there were settlements along its banks even past Lake Makadewa, albeit meagre ones. Yet there were still regions of land along its course that none save the native Indians had ever ventured into; whole tracts of rough country that civilised folk like us had not explored and tamed.
Nate and I stood side by side at the prow as Junior cast off the ropes and the skipper in his for’ard-situated pilothouse guided the Belle away from dock. Nate slid an arm around my shoulders, and his face was one enormous grin. “This is it, Zach,” he said. “Two thousand dollars it is costing me, but I know it is going to be worth every penny.”
I nodded, and believed it to be true, because back then everything Nate said I believed to be true.
