Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for
articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their
staring faces lacked. But for all of their monstrousness they were not unfamiliar to me. I
knew too well what they must be--for was not the memory of that evil
tiara at Newburyport still fresh? They were the blasphemous fish-frogs
of the nameless design--living and horrible--and as I saw them I knew
also of what that humped, tiaraed priest in the black church basement
had so fearsomely reminded me. Their number was past guessing. It
seemed to me that there were limitless swarms of them--and certainly my
momentary glimpse could have shown only the least fraction. In another
instant everything was blotted out by a merciful fit of fainting; the
first I had ever had. V


It was a gentle daylight rain that awaked me from my stupor in the
brush-grown railway cut, and when I staggered out to the roadway ahead
I saw no trace of any prints in the fresh mud. Innsmouth's ruined roofs
and toppling steeples loomed up grayly toward the southeast, but not a
living creature did I spy in all the desolate salt marshes around. My
watch was still going, and told me that the hour was past noon. The reality of what I had been through was highly uncertain in my mind,
but I felt that something hideous lay in the background. I must get
away from evil-shadowed Innsmouth--and accordingly I began to test
my cramped, wearied powers of locomotion. Despite weakness, hunger,
horror, and bewilderment I found myself after a time able to walk; so
started slowly along the muddy road to Rowley. Before evening I was
in the village, getting a meal and providing myself with presentable
clothes. I caught the night train to Arkham, and the next day talked
long and earnestly with government officials there; a process I later
repeated in Boston. With the main result of these colloquies the public
is now familiar--and I wish, for normality's sake, there were nothing
more to tell. Perhaps it is madness that is overtaking me--yet perhaps
a greater horror--or a greater marvel--is reaching out. I dared not look for that piece of strange jewelry said to be in the
Miskatonic University Museum. I did, however, improve my stay in Arkham
by collecting some genealogical notes I had long wished to possess;
very rough and hasty data, it is true, but capable of good use later
on when I might have time to collate and codify them. The curator of
the historical society there--Mr. E. Lapham Peabody--was very courteous
about assisting me, and expressed unusual interest when I told him I
was a grandson of Eliza Orne of Arkham, who was born in 1867 and had
married James Williamson of Ohio at the age of seventeen. It seemed that a maternal uncle of mine had been there many years
before on a quest much like my own; and that my grandmother's family
was a topic of some local curiosity. There had, Mr. Peabody said, been
considerable discussion about the marriage of her father, Benjamin
Orne, just after the Civil War; since the ancestry of the bride was
peculiarly puzzling. That bride was understood to have been an orphaned
Marsh of New Hampshire--a cousin of the Essex County Marshes--but her
education had been in France and she knew very little of her family. A
guardian had deposited funds in a Boston bank to maintain her and her
French governess; but that guardian's name was unfamiliar to Arkham
people, and in time he dropped out of sight, so that the governess
assumed his role by court appointment. The French-woman--now long
dead--was very taciturn, and there were those who said she could have
told more than she did. But the most baffling thing was the inability of anyone to place
the recorded parents of the young woman--Enoch and Lydia (Meserve)
Marsh--among the known families of New Hampshire. Possibly,
many suggested, she was the natural daughter of some Marsh of
prominence--she certainly had the true Marsh eyes. Most of the
puzzling was done after her early death, which took place at the birth
of my grandmother--her only child. Having formed some disagreeable
impressions connected with the name of Marsh, I did not welcome the
news that it belonged on my own ancestral tree; nor was I pleased
by Mr. Peabody's suggestion that I had the true Marsh eyes myself. However, I was grateful for data which I knew would prove valuable;
and took copious notes and lists of book references regarding the
well-documented Orne family. I went directly home to Toledo from Boston, and later spent a month
at Maumee recuperating from my ordeal. In September I entered Oberlin
for my final year, and from then till the next June was busy with
studies and other wholesome activities--reminded of the bygone terror
only by occasional official visits from government men in connection
with the campaign which my pleas and evidence had started. Around the
middle of July--just a year after the Innsmouth experience--I spent a
week with my late mother's family in Cleveland; checking some of my
new genealogical data with the various notes, traditions, and bits
of heirloom material in existence there, and seeing what kind of a
connected chart I could construct. I did not exactly relish this task, for the atmosphere of the
Williamson home had always depressed me. There was a strain of
morbidity there, and my mother had never encouraged my visiting her
parents as a child, although she always welcomed her father when
he came to Toledo. My Arkham-born grandmother had seemed strange
and almost terrifying to me, and I do not think I grieved when she
disappeared. I was eight years old then, and it was said that she had
wandered off in grief after the suicide of my uncle Douglas, her eldest
son. He had shot himself after a trip to New England--the same trip,
no doubt, which had caused him to be recalled at the Arkham Historical
Society. This uncle had resembled her, and I had never liked him either. Something about the staring, unwinking expression of both of them
had given me a vague, unaccountable uneasiness. My mother and uncle
Walter had not looked like that. They were like their father, though
poor little cousin Lawrence--Walter's son--had been an almost perfect
duplicate of his grandmother before his condition took him to the
permanent seclusion of a sanitarium at Canton. I had not seen him in
four years, but my uncle once implied that his state, both mental and
physical, was very bad. This worry had probably been a major cause of
his mother's death two years before. My grandfather and his widowered son Walter now comprised the Cleveland
household, but the memory of older times hung thickly over it. I still
disliked the place, and tried to get my researches done as quickly as
possible. Williamson records and traditions were supplied in abundance
by my grandfather; though for Orne material I had to depend on my uncle
Walter, who put at my disposal the contents of all his files, including
notes, letters, cuttings, heirlooms, photographs, and miniatures.