The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels Read online

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 1992, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009 by Brian Stableford. All rights reserved.

  INTRODUCTION

  Writers of imaginative fiction are often asked where they get their ideas from. The fact is that they come from anywhere and everywhere, that the writerly state of mind involves living in an atmosphere that is as profusely-scattered with ideas as the cities of industrial England used to be with the smoke-particles that served as nuclei for the precipitation of smog. Literature is, after all, little more than a temporary weather-phenomenon, which flourished for a while when the climate was conductive and is now in the process of dying out, not because of the activation of any kind of Clear Air Act but merely because the intellectual air we breathe nowadays is too arid to support it. Most writers, however, find that sort of explanation too tedious, so they mostly manufacture shorter and wittier formulae for use as replies. I always say that I steal them, although I readily acknowledge that this is an empty boast. It is after all, great writers who steal; the rest of us merely borrow.

  One of the side-effects of the historical growth of prose fiction, which became as profuse as an Amazonian rain forest in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, although it will presumably dwindle away to a mere blasted heath in the twenty-first, is that the smoke-particles around which literary ideas might form were intensively recycled, recklessly multiplied in the meantime by a quasi-microbial process of fission. The easiest place for any modern writer to find ideas to steal, or merely borrow, is the work of other writers.

  Unlike common-or-garden theft and borrowing, of course, literary appropriation is subject to a mutation rate so extreme that one might almost suspect the everpresence of some strange background radiation of the kind that was once mislabeled “inspiration”. (Cynics, of course, might suggest that it is more akin to chemical pollution, but cynics have such dirty minds that one would naturally expect them to manifest such a preference.) At any rate, the literary recycling and reproduction of previously-owned ideas always involves a certain amount of alteration. The distinction between literary theft and literary borrowing is akin to that between beneficial and injurious mutation, the observed ratio being not dissimilar to that pertaining to biological mutation—although successive generations of fiction, not being subject to such rigorous processes of eliminative selection, tend to conserve far more deleterious mutations than successive generations of natural organisms.

  The mutational processes to which recycled ideas are routinely subject are many and varied, but it is easy enough to identify some broad categories, the most important of which are extrapolation, inversion, perversion and subversion. The categories are, of course, far more distinct in theoretical terms than they ever are in quotidian practice; most actual transformations combine the elementary strategies in idiosyncratic ways. All the stories in this collection are extrapolations, that being inherent to the definition of a sequel, but all of them also feature a degree of perversion and subversion, and it is the degree and direction of these further adjustments that characterize me as a writer. I am, I fear, unassailably addicted to perversion and subversion, albeit in a purely literary sense. (In real life I am a run-of-the-mill recluse with hardly any personality at all.) Some readers—those in search of straightforward hommages, slavish pastiches, or further segments cut from the infinitely-repeating patterns that some successful literary series tend to become—might conceivably be disappointed by my notion of how sequels ought to be written. Hopefully, others won’t.

  The pattern formed by assembling these sequels inevitably provides some insight into my tastes as a reader, but cannot be taken as a straightforward indicator thereof. Collections of sequels to the works of famous writers are frequently commissioned nowadays in pursuit of marketing strategies, attempting to exploit the cachet attached to the names of writers whose modern celebrity is stubborn but regrettably posthumous. Some of the stories in this collection were written in response to invitations to submit to anthologies of that sort, and are thus representative of eccentric juxtapositions of market forces and my own inclinations.

  “The Innsmouth Heritage” is a sequel to “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” by H. P. Lovecraft. It was commissioned for use in an anthology called Shadows Over Innsmouth, edited by Stephen Jones, but when the anthology initially failed to sell I redirected it to a specialist publisher of Lovecraftiana, Necronomicon Press, who issued it as a chapbook in 1992. The anthology eventually sold to Fedogan & Bremer, who published it in 1994.

  “The Picture” is a sequel to The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. It was first published in the second issue of The Seventh Seal in 2000.

  “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” is a sequel to one of the items in the Golden Legend, assembled by Jacobus de Voragine, although earlier versions of the story predated that collection; it might better be regarded as an alternative version of the story reproduced by Voragine, and subsequently stolen or borrowed by many other artists and writers. It was first published in The Secret History of Vampires edited by Darrell Schweitzer, published by DAW in 2007.

  “The Ugly Cygnet by Hans Realist Andersen” is a sequel to “The Ugly Duckling” by Hans Christian Andersen. It originally appeared in the fourth issue of The Seventh Seal in 2001.

  “Art in the Blood” is an addition to the Sherlock Holmes series by Arthur Conan Doyle, although it combines the features of that series with those of H. P. Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu Mythos,” as per the brief of the anthology for which it was written, Shadows Over Baker Street edited by John Pelan and Michael Reaves, published by Del Rey in 2003.

  “Mr. Brimstone and Dr. Treacle” is a sequel to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. It first appeared (under the pseudonym Francis Amery) in Naked Truth 6 (1996).

  “Jehan Thun’s Quest” is a sequel to “Maitre Zacharius” by Jules Verne. It was written for The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures edited by Mike Ashley and Eric Brown, published in the UK by Robinson and in the USA by Carroll & Graf in 2005.

  “The Immortals of Atlantis” is, in some ultimate sense, a sequel to Plato’s Timaeus and Critias, although it actually refers back to some of the multitudinous other sequels produced in the interim, especially those associated with the nineteenth century occult revival. It first appeared in disLocations edited by Ian Whates and published by the Newcon Press in 2007.

  “Between the Chapters” is a sequel to the third chapter of Genesis, filling in the narrative gap which separates that chapter from the following one. It appears here for the first time.

  “Three Versions of a Fable” is a sequel to “The Nightingale and the Rose” by Oscar Wilde, which was itself a calculatedly-perverted version of a story by Hans Christian Andersen. It first appeared in Bats and Red Velvet 14 (1995).

  “The Titan Unwrecked; or, Futility Revisited” is a sequel to Le Chevalier Tenebre by Paul Feval, which I translated into English as Knightshade; it is also a sequel to a hypothetical alternative version of a story by Morley Robertson that was originally called “Futility,” although it is better known as “The Wreck of the Titan,” and to similar alternative versions of the Allan Quatermain series by H. Rider Haggard and Dracula by Bram Stoker, as well as to the Rocambole series originated by Pierre-Alexis Ponson du Terrail and carried forward by other hands. As if that were not complication enough, it also features Lovecraftian elements closely akin to those featured in “The Innsmouth Heritage” and “Art in the Blood.” It first appeared in Tales of the Shadowmen, edited by Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier, published by Black Coat Press in 2005.

  THE INNSMOUTH HERITAGE
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br />   The directions Ann had dictated over the phone allowed me to reach Innsmouth without too much difficulty; I doubt that I would have fared so well had I been forced to rely upon the map printed on the end-papers of her book or had I been forced to seek assistance along the way.

  While descending from the precipitous ridge east of the town I was able to compare my own impressions of Innsmouth’s appearance with the account given by Ann in her opening chapter. When she spoke to me on the phone she had told me that the book’s description was “optimistic” and I could easily see why she had felt compelled to offer such a warning. Even the book had not dared to use the word “unspoiled”, but Ann had done her best to imply that Innsmouth was full of what we in England would call “old world charm”. Old the buildings certainly were, but charming they were not. The present inhabitants—mostly “incomers” or “part-timers”, according to Ann—had apparently made what efforts they could to redeem the houses from dereliction and decay, but the renovated facades and the new paint only succeeded in making the village look garish as well as neglected.

  It proved, mercifully, that one of the principal exceptions to this rule was the New Gilman House, where a room had been reserved for me. It was one of the few recent buildings in the village, dating back no further than the sixties. The lobby was tastefully decorated and furnished, and the desk-clerk was as attentive as one expects American desk-clerks to be.

  “My name’s Stevenson,” I told him. “I believe Miss Eliot reserved a room for me.”

  “Best in the house, sir,” he assured me. I was prepared to believe it—Ann owned the place. “You sound English, sir,” he added, as he handed me a reservation card. “Is that where you know the boss from?”

  “That’s right,” I said, diffidently. “Could you tell Miss Eliot that I’m here, do you think?”

  “Sure thing,” he replied. “You want me to help you with that bag?”

  I shook my head, and made my own way up to my room. It was on the top floor, and it had what passed for a good view. Indeed, it would have been a very good view had it not been for the general dereliction of the waterfront houses, over whose roofs I had to look to see the ocean. Out towards the horizon I could see the white water where the breakers were tumbling over Devil Reef.

  I was still looking out that way when Ann came in behind me. “David,” she said. “It’s good to see you.”

  I turned round a little awkwardly, and extended my hand to be shaken, feeling uncomfortably embarrassed.

  “You don’t look a day older,” she said, hypocritically. It had been thirteen years since I last saw her.

  “Well,” I said, “I looked middle-aged even in my teens. But you look wonderful. Being a capitalist obviously suits you. How much of the town do you own?”

  “Only about three-quarters,” she said, with an airy wave of her slender hand. “Uncle Ned bought the land for peanuts back in the thirties, and now it’s worth—peanuts. All his grand ambitions to ‘put the place back on the map’ came to nothing. He got tenants for some of the properties he fixed up, but they’re most week-enders who live in the city and can’t afford authentic status symbols. We get a few hundred tourists through during the season—curiosity-seekers, fishermen, people wanting to get away from it all, but it’s hardly enough to keep the hotel going. That’s why I wrote the book—but I guess I still had too much of the dry historian in me and not enough of the sensational journalist. I should have made more of all those old stories, but I couldn’t get my conscience past the lack of hard evidence.”

  “That’s what a university education does for you,” I said. Ann and I had met at university in Manchester—the real Manchester, not the place to which fate and coincidence had now brought me—when she was studying history and I was studying biochemistry. We were good friends—in the literal rather than the euphemistic sense, alas— but we hadn’t kept in touch afterwards, until she discovered by accident that I was in New Hampshire and had written to me, enclosing her book with news of her career as a woman of property. I had planned to come to see her even before I read the book, thus finding the excuse that made the prospect even more inviting.

  As she watched me unpack, the expression in her grey eyes was quite inscrutable. Politeness aside, she really did look good— handsome rather than pretty, but clear of complexion and stately in manner.

  “I suppose your coming over to the States is part of the infamous Brain Drain,” she said. “Was it the dollars, or the research facilities that lured you away?”

  “Both,” I said. “Mostly the latter. Human geneticists aren’t worth that much, and I haven’t published enough to be regarded as a grand catch. I’m just a foot-soldier in the long campaign to map and understand the human genome.”

  “It beats being chief custodian of Innsmouth and its history,” she said, so flatly as to leave no possibility of a polite contradiction.

  I shrugged. “Well,” I said, “If I get a paper out of this, it will put Innsmouth on the scientific map, at least—although I doubt that the hotel will get much business out of it. I can’t imagine that there’ll be a legion of geneticists following in my trail.”

  She sat down on the edge of the bed. “I’m afraid it might not be so easy,” she said. “All that stuff in the book about the Innsmouth look is a bit out of date. Back in the twenties, when the population of the town was less than four hundred, it may well have been exactly the kind of inbred community you’re looking for, but the postwar years brought in a couple of thousand outsiders. In spite of the tendency of the old families to keep to themselves, the majority married out. I’ve looked through the records, and most of the families that used to be important in the town are extinct—the Marshes, the Waites, the Gilmans. If it hadn’t been for the English branch, I guess the Eliots would have died out too. The Innsmouth look still exists, but it’s a thing of the past—you won’t see more than a trace of it in anyone under forty.”

  “Age is immaterial,” I assured her.

  “That’s not the only problem. Almost all of those who have the look are shy about it—or their relatives are. They tend to hide themselves away. It won’t be easy to get them to co-operate.”

  “But you know who they are—you can introduce me.”

  “I know who some of them are, but that doesn’t mean that I can help you much. I may be an Eliot, but to the old Innsmouthers I’m just another incomer, not to be trusted. There’s only one person who could effectively act as an intermediary for you, and it won’t be easy to persuade him to do it.”

  “Is he the fisherman you mentioned over the phone—Gideon Sargent?”

  “That’s right,” she said. “He’s one of the few lookers who doesn’t hide himself away, although he shows the signs more clearly than anyone else I’ve seen. He’s saner than most—got himself an education under the G.I. Bill after serving in the Pacific in ’45—but he’s not what you might call talkative. He won’t hide, but he doesn’t like being the visible archetype of the Innsmouth look—he resents tourists gawping at him as much as anyone would, and he always refuses to take them out to Devil Reef in his boat. He’s always very polite to me, but I really can’t say how he’ll react to you. He’s in his sixties now—never married.”

  “That’s not so unusual,” I observed. I was unmarried; so was Ann.

  “Maybe not,” she replied, with a slight laugh. “But I can’t help harboring an unreasonable suspicion that the reason he never married is that he could never find a girl who looked fishy enough.”

  * * * *

  I thought this a cruel remark, though Ann obviously hadn’t meant it to be. I thought it even crueler when I eventually saw Gideon Sargent, because I immediately jumped to the opposite conclusion: that no girl could possibly contemplate marrying him, because he looked too fishy by half.

  The description that Ann had quoted in her book was accurate enough detail by detail—narrow head, flat nose, staring eyes, rough skin and baldness—but could not suffice to give an adequate impr
ession of the eerie whole. The old man’s tanned face put me in mind of a wizened koi carp, although I could not tell, at first— because his jacket collar was turned up—whether he had the gilllike markings on his neck that were the last and strangest of the stigmata of the Innsmouth folk.

  Sargent was sitting on a canvas chair on the deck of his boat when we went to see him, patiently mending a fishing-net. He did not look up as we approached, but I had no doubt that he had seen us from afar and knew well enough that we were coming to see him.

  “Hello, Gideon,” said Ann, when we were close enough. “This is Dr. David Stevenson, a friend of mine from England. He lives in Manchester now, teaching college.”

  Still the old man didn’t look up. “Don’t do trips round the reef,” he said, laconically. “You know that, Miss Ann.”

  “He’s not a tourist, Gideon,” she said. “He’s a scientist. He’d like to talk to you.”

  “Why’s that?” he asked, still without altering his attitude. “‘Cause I’m a freak, I suppose?”

  “No,” said Ann, uncomfortably “of course not....”

  I held up my hand to stop her, and said: “Yes, Mr. Sargent,” I said. “That is why, after a manner of speaking. I’m a geneticist, and I’m interested in people who are physically unusual. I’d like to explain that to you, if I may.”

  Ann shook her head in annoyance, certain that I’d said the wrong thing, but the old man didn’t seem offended.

  “When I were a young’un,” he commented, abstractedly, “there was a man offered Ma a hunnerd dollars for me. Wanned t’put me in a glass tank in some kinda sideshow. She said no. Blamed fool— hunnerd dollars was worth summin then.” His accent was very odd, and certainly not what I’d come to think of as a typical New England accent. Although he slurred common words, he tended to take more trouble over longer ones, and I thought I could still perceive the lingering legacy of his education.