Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

Violet looked incipiently upset at his tone, and Dick wondered if he wasn’t going too far. He needed her in the Agency, but she could be maddening at times. Like a real girl.

“Out with it, Vile,” he barked.

Violet crossed her arms and kept quiet.

“I apologize for my tactlessness,” said Dick. “But this is vitally important. We might be able to put that ammonite-abuser out of business, with immeasurable benefit to science.”

Violet melted. “Very well. I heard this from Alderman Hooke’s father…”

Before her paleontology craze, Violet fancied herself a collector of folklore. She had gone around asking old people to tell stories or sing songs or remember why things were called what they were called. She was going to write them all up in a book of local legends and had wanted Uncle Davey to draw the pictures. She was still working on her book, but it was about Dinosaurs in Dorset now.

“I didn’t make much of it, because it wasn’t much of a legend. Just a scrap of history.”

“With a spy,” prompted Ernest. “A spy who came out of the sea!”

Violet nodded. “That’s more or less it. When England was at war with France, everyone thought Napoleon…”

“Boney!” put in Ernest, making fang-fingers at the corners of his mouth.

“Yes, Boney… everyone thought he was going to invade, like William the Conqueror. Along the coast people watched the seas. Signal-fires were prepared, like with the Spanish Armada. Most thought it likely the French would strike at Dover, but round here they tapped the sides of their noses…”

Violet imitated an old person tapping her long nose.

“…and said the last army to invade Britain had landed at Lyme, and the next would too. The last army was Monmouth’s, during his rebellion. He landed at the Cobb and marched up to Sedgmoor, where he was defeated. There are lots of legends about the Duke of Monmouth…”

Dick made a get-to-the-point gesture.

“Any rate, near the end of the eighteenth century, a man named Jacob Orris formed a vigilance patrol to keep watch on the beaches. Orris’s daughter married a sea-captain called Lud Sellwood; they begat drowned George and old Devil’s Belly-Button. Come to think, Orris’s patrol was like Sellwood’s Church Militant—an excuse to shout at folk and break things. Orris started a campaign to get “French beans” renamed “Free-from-Tyranny beans”, and had his men attack grocer’s stalls when no one agreed with him. Orris was expecting a fleet to heave to in Lyme Bay and land an army, but knew spies would be put ashore first to scout the around. One night, during a terrible storm, Orris caught a spy flung up on the shingle.”

“And…?”

“That’s it, really. I expect they hit him with hammers and killed him, but if anyone really knows, they aren’t saying.”

Dick was disappointed.

“Tell him how it was a special spy,” said Ernest.

Dick was intrigued again. Especially since Violet obviously didn’t want to say more.

“He was a sea-ghost,” announced Ernest.

“Old Hooke said the spy had walked across the channel,” admitted Violet. “On the bottom of the sea, in a special diving suit. He was a Frenchman, but—and you have to remember stories get twisted over the years—he had gills sewn into his neck so he could breathe underwater. As far as anyone knew round here, all Corsicans were like that. They said it was probably Boney’s cousin.”

“And they killed him?”

Violet shrugged. “I expect so.”

“And kept him pickled,” said Ernest.

“Now that isn’t true. One version of this story is that Orris had the dead spy stuffed, then hidden away. But the family would have found the thing and thrown it out by now. And we’d know whether it was a man or, as Granny Ball says, a trained seal. Stories are like limpets on rocks. They stick on and get thicker until you can’t see what was there in the first place.”

Dick whistled.

“I don’t see how this can have anything to do with what Sellwood is about now,” said Violet. “This may not have happened, and if it did, it was a hundred years ago. Sellwood wasn’t even born then. His parents were still children.”

“My dear Vile, a century-old mystery is still a mystery. And crime can seep into a family like water in the foundations, passed down from father to son…”

“Father to daughter to son, in this case.”

“I haven’t forgotten that. This mystery goes deep. It’s all about the past. And haven’t you said that a century is just a heartbeat in the long life of the planet?”

She was coming round, he saw.

“We have to get into Orris Priory,” said Dick.

III

BA BQ WDP SDPY QJ ABHO, BQ WJTFOH’Q IS

RBOOSH

“Why are we on the shingle?” asked Ernest. “The Priory is up there, on top of the Cleeve.”

Dick had been waiting for the question. Deductions impressed more if he didn’t just come out with cleverness, but waited for a prompt.

“Remember yesterday? Sellwood seemed to turn up suddenly, with Fose and Fessel. If they’d been walking on the beach, we’d have seen them ages before they arrived. But we didn’t. Therefore, there must be a secret way. A smugglers’ tunnel.”