If
humanly possible, I would use it; if not, I would have to risk more
street wandering and take the nearest intact highway bridge. The vast, barnlike length of the old bridge gleamed spectrally in the
moonlight and I saw that the ties were safe for at least a few feet
within. Entering, I began to use my flashlight, and was almost knocked
down by the cloud of bats that flapped past me. About halfway across
there was a perilous gap in the ties which I feared for a moment would
halt me; but in the end I risked a desperate jump which fortunately
succeeded. I was glad to see the moonlight again when I emerged from that macabre
tunnel. The old tracks crossed River Street at a grade, and at once
veered off into a region increasingly rural and with less and less of
Innsmouth's abhorrent fishy odor. Here the dense growth of weeds and
briers hindered me and cruelly tore my clothes, but I was none the less
glad that they were there to give me concealment in case of peril. I
knew that much of my route must be visible from the Rowley road. The marshy region began very shortly, with the single track on a low,
grassy embankment. Then came a sort of island of higher ground, where
the line passed through a shallow open cut choked with bushes and
brambles. I was very glad of this partial shelter, since at this point
the Rowley road was uncomfortably near according to my window view. Just before entering the cut I glanced behind me, but saw no pursuer. The ancient spires and roofs of decaying Innsmouth gleamed lovely and
ethereal in the magic yellow moonlight, and I thought of how they must
have looked in the old days before the shadow fell. Then, as my gaze
circled inland from the town, something less tranquil arrested my
notice and held me immobile for a second. What I saw--or fancied I saw--was a disturbing suggestion of undulant
motion far to the south; a suggestion which made me conclude that
a very large horde must be pouring out of the city along the level
Ipswich road. The distance was great, and I could distinguish nothing
in detail; but I did not at all like the look of that moving column. All sorts of unpleasant conjectures crossed my mind. I thought of those
very extreme Innsmouth types said to be hidden in crumbling, centuried
warrens near the waterfront. I thought, too, of those nameless swimmers
I had seen. Counting the parties so far glimpsed, as well as those
presumably covering other roads, the number of my pursuers must be
strangely large for a town as depopulated as Innsmouth. Who were they? Why were they here? And if such a column of them was
scouring the Ipswich road, would the patrols on the other roads be
likewise augmented? I had entered the brush-grown cut and was struggling along at a very
slow pace when that damnable fishy odor again waxed dominant. There
were sounds, too--a kind of wholesale, colossal flopping or pattering
which somehow called up images of the most detestable sort. And then both stench and sounds grew stronger, so that I paused
shivering and grateful for the cut's protection. It was here, I
recalled, that the Rowley road drew so close to the old railway before
crossing westward and diverging. Something was coming along that road,
and I must lie low till its passage and vanishment in the distance. Crouched in the bushes of that sandy cleft I felt reasonably safe, even
though I knew the searchers would have to cross the track in front of
me not much more than a hundred yards away. I would be able to see
them, but they could not, except by a malign miracle, see me. All at once I began dreading to look at them as they passed. I saw the
close moonlit space where they would surge by, and had curious thoughts
about the irredeemable pollution of that space. They would perhaps
be the worst of all Innsmouth types--something one would not care to
remember. The stench waxed overpowering, and the noises swelled to a bestial
babel of croaking, baying, and barking, without the least suggestion
of human speech. Were these indeed the voices of my pursuers? That
flopping or pattering was monstrous--I could not look upon the
degenerate creatures responsible for it. I would keep my eyes shut till
the sounds receded toward the west. The horde was very close now--the
air foul with their hoarse snarlings, and the ground almost shaking
with their alien-rhythmed footfalls. My breath nearly ceased to come,
and I put every ounce of will-power into the task of holding my eyelids
down. I am not even yet willing to say whether what followed was a hideous
actuality or only a nightmare hallucination. The later action of the
government, after my frantic appeals, would tend to confirm it as a
monstrous truth; but could not an hallucination have been repeated
under the quasi-hypnotic spell of that ancient, haunted, and shadowed
town? But I must try to tell what I thought I saw that night under the
mocking yellow moon--saw surging and hopping down the Rowley road in
plain sight in front of me as I crouched among the wild brambles of
that desolate railway cut. Of course my resolution to keep my eyes shut
had failed. It was foredoomed to failure--for who could crouch blindly
while a legion of croaking, baying entities of unknown source flopped
noisomely past, scarcely more than a hundred yards away? For I knew that a long section of them must be plainly in sight where
the sides of the cut flattened out and the road crossed the track--and
I could no longer keep myself from sampling whatever horror that
leering yellow moon might have to show. It was the end, for whatever remains to me of life on the surface of
this earth, of every vestige of mental peace and confidence in the
integrity of nature and of the human mind. Can it be possible that this
planet has actually spawned such things; that human eyes have truly
seen, as objective flesh, what man has hitherto known only in febrile
phantasy and tenuous legend? And yet I saw them in a limitless stream--flopping, hopping, croaking,
bleating--surging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a
grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them
had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal ... and some were
strangely robed ... and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly
humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man's felt hat
perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head.... I think their predominant color was a grayish-green, though they had
white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of
their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid,
while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes
that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills,
and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on
two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no
more than four limbs.