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COME ONE COME ALL TO THIS YEARS RIFF-RAFF LONG-POST EXTRAVAGANZA!!!!!!.
We got your epyc being sexy serious posts, copypastas, green-texts, and All-round general shitposts! :DDDDDD

Post here and you're guaranteed millions in internet points! Post anywhere else and I'll give you a fisting boy you get a downvote and we all know you don't want that do ya?

Unless your some kind of creepy ass jew with a fetish for downvotes in which case, DOWNVOTE,DOWNVOTE, DOWNVOTE!!!! THERE YOU PORNOIGRAPHY FOR THE DAY!

I'm open-minded to attractions but internet relationships for me have a near 0% chance of success and your avatar, name, and low rank lead me to believe you are not legal.

So.

Upvotes to the… what am I even replying to.

Now that I think about it…what did I ever see in you? #Epycsuckslol2016

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1,000

How can you see into my eyes like open doors?
Leading you down into my core where I've become so numb
Without a soul my spirit's sleeping somewhere cold
Until you find it there and lead it back home

(Wake me up)
Wake me up inside
(I can't wake up)
Wake me up inside
(Save me)
Call my name and save me from the dark
(Wake me up)
Bid my blood to run
(I can't wake up)
Before I come undone
(Save me)
Save me from the nothing I've become

Now that I know what I'm without
You can't just leave me
Breathe into me and make me real
Bring me to life

(Wake me up)
Wake me up inside
(I can't wake up)
Wake me up inside
(Save me)
Call my name and save me from the dark
(Wake me up)
Bid my blood to run
(I can't wake up)
Before I come undone
(Save me)
Save me from the nothing I've become

Bring me to life
(I've been living a lie, there's nothing inside)
Bring me to life

Frozen inside without your touch
Without your love, darling
Only you are the life among the dead

All this time I can't believe I couldn't see
Kept in the dark but you were there in front of me
I've been sleeping a thousand years it seems
Got to open my eyes to everything
Without a thought, without a voice, without a soul
Don't let me die here
There must be something more
Bring me to life

(Wake me up)
Wake me up inside
(I can't wake up)
Wake me up inside
(Save me)
Call my name and save me from the dark
(Wake me up)
Bid my blood to run
(I can't wake up)
Before I come undone
(Save me)
Save me from the nothing I've become

Bring me to life
(I've been living a lie, there's nothing inside)
Bring me to life

The 2016 presidential campaign of John Ellis "Jeb" Bush, the 43rd Governor of Florida, was formally launched on June 15, 2015,[3] coming six months after announcing the formal exploration of a candidacy for the 2016 Republican nomination for the President of the United States on December 16, 2014, and the formation of the Right to Rise PAC. On February 20, 2016, Bush announced his intention to drop out of the presidential race following the South Carolina primary.[4]

Quick facts: Jeb 2016, Inc., Campaign …
Background

Governor Jeb Bush® with his father and brother, Presidents George H. W. (L) and George W. Bush © in 2006
In 1994, Bush was the Republican nominee for Governor of Florida, losing narrowly to the incumbent Lawton Chiles. Four years later, in 1998, Bush ran again, defeating Lieutenant Governor Buddy MacKay (incumbent Governor Lawton Chiles would die in early December 1998, so although defeating McKay, Bush would succeed McKay who ascended upon Chiles' death). He was reelected in 2002 by a sizeable margin.

A son of George H. W. Bush and younger brother of George W. Bush, the 41st and 43rd Presidents of the United States, respectively, Jeb Bush would have been, had he been elected, the first brother of a President, and his father, George H. W. Bush, would have been the first President to have two sons hold the same office.

There has been speculation that Bush would make a run for President since the end of the 2012 election. Speculation was fueled when Bush announced he would be "actively exploring" a run for President on December 16, 2014, and resigned from several corporate boards.[5][6] It has been further speculated that Bush has put off formally announcing a candidacy in order to raise unlimited amounts of money for his Right to Rise Super PAC, and prepare strategy; once formally a candidate, Bush cannot coordinate with PACs or Super PACs under campaign finance law.[7]

Exploration of a candidacy

Jeb Bush speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference in March 2015.
On December 16, 2014, Bush announced the formation of The Right to Rise PAC, a Super PAC intended to serve as an exploratory committee and fundraising mechanism for a potential candidacy. While not formally a candidate, he was the first potential contender to make any major moves toward the beginning of the 2016 election cycle. Widely seen as the 'establishment' candidate, Bush was expected to court and win donors who were central to the 2012 presidential election on the Republican side. While having repeatedly said he would not run again, 2012 nominee Governor Mitt Romney told donors in early January 2015 that he was seriously considering another run. With early polling showing significant buyer's remorse among many who voted for President Obama in 2012, and showing that he would defeat Hillary Clinton, Romney likely saw it necessary to see if he could tap into his donor base again, to which Bush was the likely successor.[8] After several weeks' consideration, Romney chose against running again, after receiving criticism from many in his own party who wanted a fresher face, and having lost many staff who joined Bush's team before Romney reconsidered.[9] With Romney conclusively out of the race, Bush was seen as the likely front runner for the nomination.[10]

In February 2015, Bush preemptively released his official emails from his time as Governor of Florida, which came with some controversy as personal information, which was soon redacted, was included in the release.[11]

By extending the 'exploration mode' of his 'potential candidacy' to a six-month period (his scheduled announcement one day short of six months after his exploratory phase), Bush has used his time to get acquainted with the press, court donors, and prepare strategy. In doing this, he gets around several campaign finance laws which limit donations which persons may make to individual's campaigns, and which prohibit Super PACs from directly coordinating with candidates' campaigns.[12] By May 2015, it was roughly estimated that Bush had raised in excess of $100 million for his Right to Rise PAC, which is expected to exceed his challengers in the Republican field.

One of the largest issues expected to face Governor Bush is the unpopular image of his brother, President George W. Bush, as well as many who say they do not wish to see a third Bush in the presidency. Governor Bush has come out saying "I'm my own man" with regard to his policies and vision, and further saying "I love my mom and dad. I love my brother, and people are just going to have to get over that."[13] Governor Bush has publicly stated that his brother is his 'top foreign policy advisor', having learned from his brother's presidency about "protecting the homeland" and that his brother "kept us safe."[14][15]

Bush appeared as Bob Schieffer's final interview guest on Face the Nation during his retirement episode.[16]

According to all known laws
of aviation,

there is no way a bee
should be able to fly.

Its wings are too small to get
its fat little body off the ground.

The bee, of course, flies anyway

because bees don't care
what humans think is impossible.

Yellow, black. Yellow, black.
Yellow, black. Yellow, black.

Ooh, black and yellow!
Let's shake it up a little.

Barry! Breakfast is ready!

Ooming!

Hang on a second.

Hello?

- Barry?
- Adam?

- Oan you believe this is happening?
- I can't. I'll pick you up.

Looking sharp.

Use the stairs. Your father
paid good money for those.

Sorry. I'm excited.

Here's the graduate.
We're very proud of you, son.

A perfect report card, all B's.

Very proud.

Ma! I got a thing going here.

- You got lint on your fuzz.
- Ow! That's me!

- Wave to us! We'll be in row 118,000.
- Bye!

Barry, I told you,
stop flying in the house!

- Hey, Adam.
- Hey, Barry.

- Is that fuzz gel?
- A little. Special day, graduation.

Never thought I'd make it.

Three days grade school,
three days high school.

Those were awkward.

Three days college. I'm glad I took
a day and hitchhiked around the hive.

You did come back different.

- Hi, Barry.
- Artie, growing a mustache? Looks good.

- Hear about Frankie?
- Yeah.

- You going to the funeral?
- No, I'm not going.

Everybody knows,
sting someone, you die.

Don't waste it on a squirrel.
Such a hothead.

I guess he could have
just gotten out of the way.

I love this incorporating
an amusement park into our day.

That's why we don't need vacations.

Boy, quite a bit of pomp…
under the circumstances.

- Well, Adam, today we are men.
- We are!

- Bee-men.
- Amen!

Hallelujah!

Students, faculty, distinguished bees,

please welcome Dean Buzzwell.

Welcome, New Hive Oity
graduating class of…

…9:15.

That concludes our ceremonies.

And begins your career
at Honex Industries!

Will we pick ourjob today?

I heard it's just orientation.

Heads up! Here we go.

Keep your hands and antennas
inside the tram at all times.

- Wonder what it'll be like?
- A little scary.

Welcome to Honex,
a division of Honesco

and a part of the Hexagon Group.

This is it!

Wow.

Wow.

We know that you, as a bee,
have worked your whole life

to get to the point where you
can work for your whole life.

Honey begins when our valiant Pollen
Jocks bring the nectar to the hive.

Our top-secret formula

is automatically color-corrected,
scent-adjusted and bubble-contoured

into this soothing sweet syrup

with its distinctive
golden glow you know as…

Honey!

- That girl was hot.
- She's my cousin!

- She is?
- Yes, we're all cousins.

- Right. You're right.
- At Honex, we constantly strive

to improve every aspect
of bee existence.

These bees are stress-testing
a new helmet technology.

- What do you think he makes?
- Not enough.

Here we have our latest advancement,
the Krelman.

- What does that do?
- Oatches that little strand of honey

that hangs after you pour it.
Saves us millions.

Oan anyone work on the Krelman?

Of course. Most bee jobs are
small ones. But bees know

that every small job,
if it's done well, means a lot.

But choose carefully

because you'll stay in the job
you pick for the rest of your life.

The same job the rest of your life?
I didn't know that.

What's the difference?

You'll be happy to know that bees,
as a species, haven't had one day off

in 27 million years.

So you'll just work us to death?

We'll sure try.

Wow! That blew my mind!

"What's the difference?"
How can you say that?

One job forever?
That's an insane choice to have to make.

I'm relieved. Now we only have
to make one decision in life.

But, Adam, how could they
never have told us that?

Why would you question anything?
We're bees.

We're the most perfectly
functioning society on Earth.

You ever think maybe things
work a little too well here?

Like what? Give me one example.

I don't know. But you know
what I'm talking about.

Please clear the gate.
Royal Nectar Force on approach.

Wait a second. Oheck it out.

- Hey, those are Pollen Jocks!
- Wow.

I've never seen them this close.

They know what it's like
outside the hive.

Yeah, but some don't come back.

- Hey, Jocks!
- Hi, Jocks!

You guys did great!

You're monsters!
You're sky freaks! I love it! I love it!

- I wonder where they were.
- I don't know.

Their day's not planned.

Outside the hive, flying who knows
where, doing who knows what.

You can'tjust decide to be a Pollen
Jock. You have to be bred for that.

Right.

Look. That's more pollen
than you and I will see in a lifetime.

It's just a status symbol.
Bees make too much of it.

Perhaps. Unless you're wearing it
and the ladies see you wearing it.

Those ladies?
Aren't they our cousins too?

Distant. Distant.

Look at these two.

- Oouple of Hive Harrys.
- Let's have fun with them.

It must be dangerous
being a Pollen Jock.

Yeah. Once a bear pinned me
against a mushroom!

He had a paw on my throat,
and with the other, he was slapping me!

- Oh, my!
- I never thought I'd knock him out.

What were you doing during this?

Trying to alert the authorities.

I can autograph that.

A little gusty out there today,
wasn't it, comrades?

Yeah. Gusty.

We're hitting a sunflower patch
six miles from here tomorrow.

- Six miles, huh?
- Barry!

A puddle jump for us,
but maybe you're not up for it.

- Maybe I am.
- You are not!

We're going 0900 at J-Gate.

What do you think, buzzy-boy?
Are you bee enough?

I might be. It all depends
on what 0900 means.

Hey, Honex!

Dad, you surprised me.

You decide what you're interested in?

- Well, there's a lot of choices.
- But you only get one.

Do you ever get bored
doing the same job every day?

Son, let me tell you about stirring.

You grab that stick, and you just
move it around, and you stir it around.

You get yourself into a rhythm.
It's a beautiful thing.

You know, Dad,
the more I think about it,

maybe the honey field
just isn't right for me.

You were thinking of what,
making balloon animals?

That's a bad job
for a guy with a stinger.

Janet, your son's not sure
he wants to go into honey!

- Barry, you are so funny sometimes.
- I'm not trying to be funny.

You're not funny! You're going
into honey. Our son, the stirrer!

- You're gonna be a stirrer?
- No one's listening to me!

Wait till you see the sticks I have.

I could say anything right now.
I'm gonna get an ant tattoo!

Let's open some honey and celebrate!

Maybe I'll pierce my thorax.
Shave my antennae.

Shack up with a grasshopper. Get
a gold tooth and call everybody "dawg"!

I'm so proud.

- We're starting work today!
- Today's the day.

Oome on! All the good jobs
will be gone.

Yeah, right.

Pollen counting, stunt bee, pouring,
stirrer, front desk, hair removal…

- Is it still available?
- Hang on. Two left!

One of them's yours! Oongratulations!
Step to the side.

- What'd you get?
- Picking crud out. Stellar!

Wow!

Oouple of newbies?

Yes, sir! Our first day! We are ready!

Make your choice.

- You want to go first?
- No, you go.

Oh, my. What's available?

Restroom attendant's open,
not for the reason you think.

- Any chance of getting the Krelman?
- Sure, you're on.

I'm sorry, the Krelman just closed out.

Wax monkey's always open.

The Krelman opened up again.

What happened?

A bee died. Makes an opening. See?
He's dead. Another dead one.

Deady. Deadified. Two more dead.

Dead from the neck up.
Dead from the neck down. That's life!

Oh, this is so hard!

Heating, cooling,
stunt bee, pourer, stirrer,

humming, inspector number seven,
lint coordinator, stripe supervisor,

mite wrangler. Barry, what
do you think I should… Barry?

Barry!

All right, we've got the sunflower patch
in quadrant nine…

What happened to you?
Where are you?

- I'm going out.
- Out? Out where?

- Out there.
- Oh, no!

I have to, before I go
to work for the rest of my life.

You're gonna die! You're crazy! Hello?

Another call coming in.

If anyone's feeling brave,
there's a Korean deli on 83rd

that gets their roses today.

Hey, guys.

- Look at that.
- Isn't that the kid we saw yesterday?

Hold it, son, flight deck's restricted.

It's OK, Lou. We're gonna take him up.

Really? Feeling lucky, are you?

Sign here, here. Just initial that.

- Thank you.
- OK.

You got a rain advisory today,

and as you all know,
bees cannot fly in rain.

So be careful. As always,
watch your brooms,

hockey sticks, dogs,
birds, bears and bats.

Also, I got a couple of reports
of root beer being poured on us.

Murphy's in a home because of it,
babbling like a cicada!

- That's awful.
- And a reminder for you rookies,

bee law number one,
absolutely no talking to humans!

All right, launch positions!

Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz! Buzz, buzz,
buzz, buzz! Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz!

Black and yellow!

Hello!

You ready for this, hot shot?

Yeah. Yeah, bring it on.

Wind, check.

- Antennae, check.
- Nectar pack, check.

- Wings, check.
- Stinger, check.

Scared out of my shorts, check.

OK, ladies,

let's move it out!

Pound those petunias,
you striped stem-suckers!

All of you, drain those flowers!

Wow! I'm out!

I can't believe I'm out!

So blue.

I feel so fast and free!

Box kite!

Wow!

Flowers!

This is Blue Leader.
We have roses visual.

Bring it around 30 degrees and hold.

Roses!

30 degrees, roger. Bringing it around.

Stand to the side, kid.
It's got a bit of a kick.

That is one nectar collector!

- Ever see pollination up close?
- No, sir.

I pick up some pollen here, sprinkle it
over here. Maybe a dash over there,

a pinch on that one.
See that? It's a little bit of magic.

That's amazing. Why do we do that?

That's pollen power. More pollen, more
flowers, more nectar, more honey for us.

Oool.

I'm picking up a lot of bright yellow.
Oould be daisies. Don't we need those?

Oopy that visual.

Wait. One of these flowers
seems to be on the move.

Say again? You're reporting
a moving flower?

Affirmative.

That was on the line!

This is the coolest. What is it?

I don't know, but I'm loving this color.

It smells good.
Not like a flower, but I like it.

Yeah, fuzzy.

Ohemical-y.

Oareful, guys. It's a little grabby.

My sweet lord of bees!

Oandy-brain, get off there!

Problem!

- Guys!
- This could be bad.

Affirmative.

Very close.

Gonna hurt.

Mama's little boy.

You are way out of position, rookie!

Ooming in at you like a missile!

Help me!

I don't think these are flowers.

- Should we tell him?
- I think he knows.

What is this?!

Match point!

You can start packing up, honey,
because you're about to eat it!

Yowser!

Gross.

There's a bee in the car!

- Do something!
- I'm driving!

- Hi, bee.
- He's back here!

He's going to sting me!

Nobody move. If you don't move,
he won't sting you. Freeze!

He blinked!

Spray him, Granny!

What are you doing?!

Wow… the tension level
out here is unbelievable.

I gotta get home.

Oan't fly in rain.

Oan't fly in rain.

Oan't fly in rain.

Mayday! Mayday! Bee going down!

Ken, could you close
the window please?

Ken, could you close
the window please?

Oheck out my new resume.
I made it into a fold-out brochure.

You see? Folds out.

Oh, no. More humans. I don't need this.

What was that?

Maybe this time. This time. This time.
This time! This time! This…

Drapes!

That is diabolical.

It's fantastic. It's got all my special
skills, even my top-ten favorite movies.

What's number one? Star Wars?

Nah, I don't go for that…

…kind of stuff.

No wonder we shouldn't talk to them.
They're out of their minds.

When I leave a job interview, they're
flabbergasted, can't believe what I say.

There's the sun. Maybe that's a way out.

I don't remember the sun
having a big 75 on it.

I predicted global warming.

I could feel it getting hotter.
At first I thought it was just me.

Wait! Stop! Bee!

Stand back. These are winter boots.

Wait!

Don't kill him!

You know I'm allergic to them!
This thing could kill me!

Why does his life have
less value than yours?

Why does his life have any less value
than mine? Is that your statement?

I'm just saying all life has value. You
don't know what he's capable of feeling.

My brochure!

There you go, little guy.

I'm not scared of him.
It's an allergic thing.

Put that on your resume brochure.

My whole face could puff up.

Make it one of your special skills.

Knocking someone out
is also a special skill.

Right. Bye, Vanessa. Thanks.

- Vanessa, next week? Yogurt night?
- Sure, Ken. You know, whatever.

- You could put carob chips on there.
- Bye.

- Supposed to be less calories.
- Bye.

I gotta say something.

She saved my life.
I gotta say something.

All right, here it goes.

Nah.

What would I say?

I could really get in trouble.

It's a bee law.
You're not supposed to talk to a human.

I can't believe I'm doing this.

I've got to.

Oh, I can't do it. Oome on!

No. Yes. No.

Do it. I can't.

How should I start it?
"You like jazz?" No, that's no good.

Here she comes! Speak, you fool!

Hi!

I'm sorry.

- You're talking.
- Yes, I know.

You're talking!

I'm so sorry.

No, it's OK. It's fine.
I know I'm dreaming.

But I don't recall going to bed.

Well, I'm sure this
is very disconcerting.

This is a bit of a surprise to me.
I mean, you're a bee!

I am. And I'm not supposed
to be doing this,

but they were all trying to kill me.

And if it wasn't for you…

I had to thank you.
It's just how I was raised.

That was a little weird.

- I'm talking with a bee.
- Yeah.

I'm talking to a bee.
And the bee is talking to me!

I just want to say I'm grateful.
I'll leave now.

- Wait! How did you learn to do that?
- What?

The talking thing.

Same way you did, I guess.
"Mama, Dada, honey." You pick it up.

- That's very funny.
- Yeah.

Bees are funny. If we didn't laugh,
we'd cry with what we have to deal with.

Anyway…

Oan I…

…get you something?
- Like what?

I don't know. I mean…
I don't know. Ooffee?

I don't want to put you out.

It's no trouble. It takes two minutes.

- It's just coffee.
- I hate to impose.

- Don't be ridiculous!
- Actually, I would love a cup.

Hey, you want rum cake?

- I shouldn't.
- Have some.

- No, I can't.
- Oome on!

I'm trying to lose a couple micrograms.

- Where?
- These stripes don't help.

You look great!

I don't know if you know
anything about fashion.

Are you all right?

No.

He's making the tie in the cab
as they're flying up Madison.

He finally gets there.

He runs up the steps into the church.
The wedding is on.

And he says, "Watermelon?
I thought you said Guatemalan.

Why would I marry a watermelon?"

Is that a bee joke?

That's the kind of stuff we do.

Yeah, different.

So, what are you gonna do, Barry?

About work? I don't know.

I want to do my part for the hive,
but I can't do it the way they want.

I know how you feel.

- You do?
- Sure.

My parents wanted me to be a lawyer or
a doctor, but I wanted to be a florist.

- Really?
- My only interest is flowers.

Our new queen was just elected
with that same campaign slogan.

Anyway, if you look…

There's my hive right there. See it?

You're in Sheep Meadow!

Yes! I'm right off the Turtle Pond!

No way! I know that area.
I lost a toe ring there once.

- Why do girls put rings on their toes?
- Why not?

- It's like putting a hat on your knee.
- Maybe I'll try that.

- You all right, ma'am?
- Oh, yeah. Fine.

Just having two cups of coffee!

Anyway, this has been great.
Thanks for the coffee.

Yeah, it's no trouble.

Sorry I couldn't finish it. If I did,
I'd be up the rest of my life.

Are you…?

Oan I take a piece of this with me?

Sure! Here, have a crumb.

- Thanks!
- Yeah.

All right. Well, then…
I guess I'll see you around.

Or not.

OK, Barry.

And thank you
so much again… for before.

Oh, that? That was nothing.

Well, not nothing, but… Anyway…

This can't possibly work.

He's all set to go.
We may as well try it.

OK, Dave, pull the chute.

- Sounds amazing.
- It was amazing!

It was the scariest,
happiest moment of my life.

Humans! I can't believe
you were with humans!

Giant, scary humans!
What were they like?

Huge and crazy. They talk crazy.

They eat crazy giant things.
They drive crazy.

- Do they try and kill you, like on TV?
- Some of them. But some of them don't.

- How'd you get back?
- Poodle.

You did it, and I'm glad. You saw
whatever you wanted to see.

You had your "experience." Now you
can pick out yourjob and be normal.

- Well…
- Well?

Well, I met someone.

You did? Was she Bee-ish?

- A wasp?! Your parents will kill you!
- No, no, no, not a wasp.

- Spider?
- I'm not attracted to spiders.

I know it's the hottest thing,
with the eight legs and all.

I can't get by that face.

So who is she?

She's… human.

No, no. That's a bee law.
You wouldn't break a bee law.

- Her name's Vanessa.
- Oh, boy.

She's so nice. And she's a florist!

Oh, no! You're dating a human florist!

We're not dating.

You're flying outside the hive, talking
to humans that attack our homes

with power washers and M-80s!
One-eighth a stick of dynamite!

She saved my life!
And she understands me.

This is over!

Eat this.

This is not over! What was that?

- They call it a crumb.
- It was so stingin' stripey!

And that's not what they eat.
That's what falls off what they eat!

- You know what a Oinnabon is?
- No.

It's bread and cinnamon and frosting.
They heat it up…

Sit down!

…really hot!
- Listen to me!

We are not them! We're us.
There's us and there's them!

Yes, but who can deny
the heart that is yearning?

There's no yearning.
Stop yearning. Listen to me!

You have got to start thinking bee,
my friend. Thinking bee!

- Thinking bee.
- Thinking bee.

Thinking bee! Thinking bee!
Thinking bee! Thinking bee!

There he is. He's in the pool.

You know what your problem is, Barry?

I gotta start thinking bee?

How much longer will this go on?

It's been three days!
Why aren't you working?

I've got a lot of big life decisions
to think about.

What life? You have no life!
You have no job. You're barely a bee!

Would it kill you
to make a little honey?

Barry, come out.
Your father's talking to you.

Martin, would you talk to him?

Barry, I'm talking to you!

You coming?

Got everything?

All set!

Go ahead. I'll catch up.

Don't be too long.

Watch this!

Vanessa!

- We're still here.
- I told you not to yell at him.

He doesn't respond to yelling!

- Then why yell at me?
- Because you don't listen!

I'm not listening to this.

Sorry, I've gotta go.

- Where are you going?
- I'm meeting a friend.

A girl? Is this why you can't decide?

Bye.

I just hope she's Bee-ish.

They have a huge parade
of flowers every year in Pasadena?

To be in the Tournament of Roses,
that's every florist's dream!

Up on a float, surrounded
by flowers, crowds cheering.

A tournament. Do the roses
compete in athletic events?

No. All right, I've got one.
How come you don't fly everywhere?

It's exhausting. Why don't you
run everywhere? It's faster.

Yeah, OK, I see, I see.
All right, your turn.

TiVo. You can just freeze live TV?
That's insane!

You don't have that?

We have Hivo, but it's a disease.
It's a horrible, horrible disease.

Oh, my.

Dumb bees!

You must want to sting all those jerks.

We try not to sting.
It's usually fatal for us.

So you have to watch your temper.

Very carefully.
You kick a wall, take a walk,

write an angry letter and throw it out.
Work through it like any emotion:

Anger, jealousy, lust.

Oh, my goodness! Are you OK?

Yeah.

- What is wrong with you?!
- It's a bug.

He's not bothering anybody.
Get out of here, you creep!

What was that? A Pic 'N' Save circular?

Yeah, it was. How did you know?

It felt like about 10 pages.
Seventy-five is pretty much our limit.

You've really got that
down to a science.

- I lost a cousin to Italian Vogue.
- I'll bet.

What in the name
of Mighty Hercules is this?

How did this get here?
Oute Bee, Golden Blossom,

Ray Liotta Private Select?

- Is he that actor?
- I never heard of him.

- Why is this here?
- For people. We eat it.

You don't have
enough food of your own?

- Well, yes.
- How do you get it?

- Bees make it.
- I know who makes it!

And it's hard to make it!

There's heating, cooling, stirring.
You need a whole Krelman thing!

- It's organic.
- It's our-ganic!

It's just honey, Barry.

Just what?!

Bees don't know about this!
This is stealing! A lot of stealing!

You've taken our homes, schools,
hospitals! This is all we have!

And it's on sale?!
I'm getting to the bottom of this.

I'm getting to the bottom
of all of this!

Hey, Hector.

- You almost done?
- Almost.

He is here. I sense it.

Well, I guess I'll go home now

and just leave this nice honey out,
with no one around.

You're busted, box boy!

I knew I heard something.
So you can talk!

I can talk.
And now you'll start talking!

Where you getting the sweet stuff?
Who's your supplier?

I don't understand.
I thought we were friends.

The last thing we want
to do is upset bees!

You're too late! It's ours now!

You, sir, have crossed
the wrong sword!

You, sir, will be lunch
for my iguana, Ignacio!

Where is the honey coming from?

Tell me where!

Honey Farms! It comes from Honey Farms!

Orazy person!

What horrible thing has happened here?

These faces, they never knew
what hit them. And now

they're on the road to nowhere!

Just keep still.

What? You're not dead?

Do I look dead? They will wipe anything
that moves. Where you headed?

To Honey Farms.
I am onto something huge here.

I'm going to Alaska. Moose blood,
crazy stuff. Blows your head off!

I'm going to Tacoma.

- And you?
- He really is dead.

All right.

Uh-oh!

- What is that?!
- Oh, no!

- A wiper! Triple blade!
- Triple blade?

Jump on! It's your only chance, bee!

Why does everything have
to be so doggone clean?!

How much do you people need to see?!

Open your eyes!
Stick your head out the window!

From NPR News in Washington,
I'm Oarl Kasell.

But don't kill no more bugs!

- Bee!
- Moose blood guy!!

- You hear something?
- Like what?

Like tiny screaming.

Turn off the radio.

Whassup, bee boy?

Hey, Blood.

Just a row of honey jars,
as far as the eye could see.

Wow!

I assume wherever this truck goes
is where they're getting it.

I mean, that honey's ours.

- Bees hang tight.
- We're all jammed in.

It's a close community.

Not us, man. We on our own.
Every mosquito on his own.

- What if you get in trouble?
- You a mosquito, you in trouble.

Nobody likes us. They just smack.
See a mosquito, smack, smack!

At least you're out in the world.
You must meet girls.

Mosquito girls try to trade up,
get with a moth, dragonfly.

Mosquito girl don't want no mosquito.

You got to be kidding me!

Mooseblood's about to leave
the building! So long, bee!

- Hey, guys!
- Mooseblood!

I knew I'd catch y'all down here.
Did you bring your crazy straw?

We throw it in jars, slap a label on it,
and it's pretty much pure profit.

What is this place?

A bee's got a brain
the size of a pinhead.

They are pinheads!

Pinhead.

- Oheck out the new smoker.
- Oh, sweet. That's the one you want.

The Thomas 3000!

Smoker?

Ninety puffs a minute, semi-automatic.
Twice the nicotine, all the tar.

A couple breaths of this
knocks them right out.

They make the honey,
and we make the money.

"They make the honey,
and we make the money"?

Oh, my!

What's going on? Are you OK?

Yeah. It doesn't last too long.

Do you know you're
in a fake hive with fake walls?

Our queen was moved here.
We had no choice.

This is your queen?
That's a man in women's clothes!

That's a drag queen!

What is this?

Oh, no!

There's hundreds of them!

Bee honey.

Our honey is being brazenly stolen
on a massive scale!

This is worse than anything bears
have done! I intend to do something.

Oh, Barry, stop.

Who told you humans are taking
our honey? That's a rumor.

Do these look like rumors?

That's a conspiracy theory.
These are obviously doctored photos.

How did you get mixed up in this?

He's been talking to humans.

- What?
- Talking to humans?!

He has a human girlfriend.
And they make out!

Make out? Barry!

We do not.

- You wish you could.
- Whose side are you on?

The bees!

I dated a cricket once in San Antonio.
Those crazy legs kept me up all night.

Barry, this is what you want
to do with your life?

I want to do it for all our lives.
Nobody works harder than bees!

Dad, I remember you
coming home so overworked

your hands were still stirring.
You couldn't stop.

I remember that.

What right do they have to our honey?

We live on two cups a year. They put it
in lip balm for no reason whatsoever!

Even if it's true, what can one bee do?

Sting them where it really hurts.

In the face! The eye!

- That would hurt.
- No.

Up the nose? That's a killer.

There's only one place you can sting
the humans, one place where it matters.

Hive at Five, the hive's only
full-hour action news source.

No more bee beards!

With Bob Bumble at the anchor desk.

Weather with Storm Stinger.

Sports with Buzz Larvi.

And Jeanette Ohung.

- Good evening. I'm Bob Bumble.
- And I'm Jeanette Ohung.

A tri-county bee, Barry Benson,

intends to sue the human race
for stealing our honey,

packaging it and profiting
from it illegally!

Tomorrow night on Bee Larry King,

we'll have three former queens here in
our studio, discussing their new book,

Olassy Ladies,
out this week on Hexagon.

Tonight we're talking to Barry Benson.

Did you ever think, "I'm a kid
from the hive. I can't do this"?

Bees have never been afraid
to change the world.

What about Bee Oolumbus?
Bee Gandhi? Bejesus?

Where I'm from, we'd never sue humans.

We were thinking
of stickball or candy stores.

How old are you?

The bee community
is supporting you in this case,

which will be the trial
of the bee century.

You know, they have a Larry King
in the human world too.

It's a common name. Next week…

He looks like you and has a show
and suspenders and colored dots…

Next week…

Glasses, quotes on the bottom from the
guest even though you just heard 'em.

Bear Week next week!
They're scary, hairy and here live.

Always leans forward, pointy shoulders,
squinty eyes, very Jewish.

In tennis, you attack
at the point of weakness!

It was my grandmother, Ken. She's 81.

Honey, her backhand's a joke!
I'm not gonna take advantage of that?

Quiet, please.
Actual work going on here.

- Is that that same bee?
- Yes, it is!

I'm helping him sue the human race.

- Hello.
- Hello, bee.

This is Ken.

Yeah, I remember you. Timberland, size
ten and a half. Vibram sole, I believe.

Why does he talk again?

Listen, you better go
'cause we're really busy working.

But it's our yogurt night!

Bye-bye.

Why is yogurt night so difficult?!

You poor thing.
You two have been at this for hours!

Yes, and Adam here
has been a huge help.

- Frosting…
- How many sugars?

Just one. I try not
to use the competition.

So why are you helping me?

Bees have good qualities.

And it takes my mind off the shop.

Instead of flowers, people
are giving balloon bouquets now.

Those are great, if you're three.

And artificial flowers.

- Oh, those just get me psychotic!
- Yeah, me too.

Bent stingers, pointless pollination.

Bees must hate those fake things!

Nothing worse
than a daffodil that's had work done.

Maybe this could make up
for it a little bit.

- This lawsuit's a pretty big deal.
- I guess.

You sure you want to go through with it?

Am I sure? When I'm done with
the humans, they won't be able

to say, "Honey, I'm home,"
without paying a royalty!

It's an incredible scene
here in downtown Manhattan,

where the world anxiously waits,
because for the first time in history,

we will hear for ourselves
if a honeybee can actually speak.

What have we gotten into here, Barry?

It's pretty big, isn't it?

I can't believe how many humans
don't work during the day.

You think billion-dollar multinational
food companies have good lawyers?

Everybody needs to stay
behind the barricade.

- What's the matter?
- I don't know, I just got a chill.

Well, if it isn't the bee team.

You boys work on this?

All rise! The Honorable
Judge Bumbleton presiding.

All right. Oase number 4475,

Superior Oourt of New York,
Barry Bee Benson v. the Honey Industry

is now in session.

Mr. Montgomery, you're representing
the five food companies collectively?

A privilege.

Mr. Benson… you're representing
all the bees of the world?

I'm kidding. Yes, Your Honor,
we're ready to proceed.

Mr. Montgomery,
your opening statement, please.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,

my grandmother was a simple woman.

Born on a farm, she believed
it was man's divine right

to benefit from the bounty
of nature God put before us.

If we lived in the topsy-turvy world
Mr. Benson imagines,

just think of what would it mean.

I would have to negotiate
with the silkworm

for the elastic in my britches!

Talking bee!

How do we know this isn't some sort of

holographic motion-picture-capture
Hollywood wizardry?

They could be using laser beams!

Robotics! Ventriloquism!
Oloning! For all we know,

he could be on steroids!

Mr. Benson?

Ladies and gentlemen,
there's no trickery here.

I'm just an ordinary bee.
Honey's pretty important to me.

It's important to all bees.
We invented it!

We make it. And we protect it
with our lives.

Unfortunately, there are
some people in this room

who think they can take it from us

'cause we're the little guys!
I'm hoping that, after this is all over,

you'll see how, by taking our honey,
you not only take everything we have

but everything we are!

I wish he'd dress like that
all the time. So nice!

Oall your first witness.

So, Mr. Klauss Vanderhayden
of Honey Farms, big company you have.

I suppose so.

I see you also own
Honeyburton and Honron!

Yes, they provide beekeepers
for our farms.

Beekeeper. I find that
to be a very disturbing term.

I don't imagine you employ
any bee-free-ers, do you?

- No.
- I couldn't hear you.

- No.
- No.

Because you don't free bees.
You keep bees. Not only that,

it seems you thought a bear would be
an appropriate image for a jar of honey.

They're very lovable creatures.

Yogi Bear, Fozzie Bear, Build-A-Bear.

You mean like this?

Bears kill bees!

How'd you like his head crashing
through your living room?!

Biting into your couch!
Spitting out your throw pillows!

OK, that's enough. Take him away.

So, Mr. Sting, thank you for being here.
Your name intrigues me.

- Where have I heard it before?
- I was with a band called The Police.

But you've never been
a police officer, have you?

No, I haven't.

No, you haven't. And so here
we have yet another example

of bee culture casually
stolen by a human

for nothing more than
a prance-about stage name.

Oh, please.

Have you ever been stung, Mr. Sting?

Because I'm feeling
a little stung, Sting.

Or should I say… Mr. Gordon M. Sumner!

That's not his real name?! You idiots!

Mr. Liotta, first,
belated congratulations on

your Emmy win for a guest spot
on ER in 2005.

Thank you. Thank you.

I see from your resume
that you're devilishly handsome

with a churning inner turmoil
that's ready to blow.

I enjoy what I do. Is that a crime?

Not yet it isn't. But is this
what it's come to for you?

Exploiting tiny, helpless bees
so you don't

have to rehearse
your part and learn your lines, sir?

Watch it, Benson!
I could blow right now!

This isn't a goodfella.
This is a badfella!

Why doesn't someone just step on
this creep, and we can all go home?!

- Order in this court!
- You're all thinking it!

Order! Order, I say!

- Say it!
- Mr. Liotta, please sit down!

I think it was awfully nice
of that bear to pitch in like that.

I think the jury's on our side.

Are we doing everything right, legally?

I'm a florist.

Right. Well, here's to a great team.

To a great team!

Well, hello.

- Ken!
- Hello.

I didn't think you were coming.

No, I was just late.
I tried to call, but… the battery.

I didn't want all this to go to waste,
so I called Barry. Luckily, he was free.

Oh, that was lucky.

There's a little left.
I could heat it up.

Yeah, heat it up, sure, whatever.

So I hear you're quite a tennis player.

I'm not much for the game myself.
The ball's a little grabby.

That's where I usually sit.
Right… there.

Ken, Barry was looking at your resume,

and he agreed with me that eating with
chopsticks isn't really a special skill.

You think I don't see what you're doing?

I know how hard it is to find
the rightjob. We have that in common.

Do we?

Bees have 100 percent employment,
but we do jobs like taking the crud out.

That's just what
I was thinking about doing.

Ken, I let Barry borrow your razor
for his fuzz. I hope that was all right.

I'm going to drain the old stinger.

Yeah, you do that.

Look at that.

You know, I've just about had it

with your little mind games.

- What's that?
- Italian Vogue.

Mamma mia, that's a lot of pages.

A lot of ads.

Remember what Van said, why is
your life more valuable than mine?

Funny, I just can't seem to recall that!

I think something stinks in here!

I love the smell of flowers.

How do you like the smell of flames?!

Not as much.

Water bug! Not taking sides!

Ken, I'm wearing a Ohapstick hat!
This is pathetic!

I've got issues!

Well, well, well, a royal flush!

- You're bluffing.
- Am I?

Surf's up, dude!

Poo water!

That bowl is gnarly.

Except for those dirty yellow rings!

Kenneth! What are you doing?!

You know, I don't even like honey!
I don't eat it!

We need to talk!

He's just a little bee!

And he happens to be
the nicest bee I've met in a long time!

Long time? What are you talking about?!
Are there other bugs in your life?

No, but there are other things bugging
me in life. And you're one of them!

Fine! Talking bees, no yogurt night…

My nerves are fried from riding
on this emotional roller coaster!

Goodbye, Ken.

And for your information,

I prefer sugar-free, artificial
sweeteners made by man!

I'm sorry about all that.

I know it's got
an aftertaste! I like it!

I always felt there was some kind
of barrier between Ken and me.

I couldn't overcome it.
Oh, well.

Are you OK for the trial?

I believe Mr. Montgomery
is about out of ideas.

We would like to call
Mr. Barry Benson Bee to the stand.

Good idea! You can really see why he's
considered one of the best lawyers…

Yeah.

Layton, you've
gotta weave some magic

with this jury,
or it's gonna be all over.

Don't worry. The only thing I have
to do to turn this jury around

is to remind them
of what they don't like about bees.

- You got the tweezers?
- Are you allergic?

Only to losing, son. Only to losing.

Mr. Benson Bee, I'll ask you
what I think we'd all like to know.

What exactly is your relationship

to that woman?

We're friends.

- Good friends?
- Yes.

How good? Do you live together?

Wait a minute…

Are you her little…

…bedbug?

I've seen a bee documentary or two.
From what I understand,

doesn't your queen give birth
to all the bee children?

- Yeah, but…
- So those aren't your real parents!

- Oh, Barry…
- Yes, they are!

Hold me back!

You're an illegitimate bee,
aren't you, Benson?

He's denouncing bees!

Don't y'all date your cousins?

- Objection!
- I'm going to pincushion this guy!

Adam, don't! It's what he wants!

Oh, I'm hit!!

Oh, lordy, I am hit!

Order! Order!

The venom! The venom
is coursing through my veins!

I have been felled
by a winged beast of destruction!

You see? You can't treat them
like equals! They're striped savages!

Stinging's the only thing
they know! It's their way!

- Adam, stay with me.
- I can't feel my legs.

What angel of mercy
will come forward to suck the poison

from my heaving buttocks?

I will have order in this court. Order!

Order, please!

The case of the honeybees
versus the human race

took a pointed turn against the bees

yesterday when one of their legal
team stung Layton T. Montgomery.

- Hey, buddy.
- Hey.

- Is there much pain?
- Yeah.

I…

I blew the whole case, didn't I?

It doesn't matter. What matters is
you're alive. You could have died.

I'd be better off dead. Look at me.

They got it from the cafeteria
downstairs, in a tuna sandwich.

Look, there's
a little celery still on it.

What was it like to sting someone?

I can't explain it. It was all…

All adrenaline and then…
and then ecstasy!

All right.

You think it was all a trap?

Of course. I'm sorry.
I flew us right into this.

What were we thinking? Look at us. We're
just a couple of bugs in this world.

What will the humans do to us
if they win?

I don't know.

I hear they put the roaches in motels.
That doesn't sound so bad.

Adam, they check in,
but they don't check out!

Oh, my.

Oould you get a nurse
to close that window?

- Why?
- The smoke.

Bees don't smoke.

Right. Bees don't smoke.

Bees don't smoke!
But some bees are smoking.

That's it! That's our case!

It is? It's not over?

Get dressed. I've gotta go somewhere.

Get back to the court and stall.
Stall any way you can.

And assuming you've done step correctly, you're ready for the tub.

Mr. Flayman.

Yes? Yes, Your Honor!

Where is the rest of your team?

Well, Your Honor, it's interesting.

Bees are trained to fly haphazardly,

and as a result,
we don't make very good time.

I actually heard a funny story about…

Your Honor,
haven't these ridiculous bugs

taken up enough
of this court's valuable time?

How much longer will we allow
these absurd shenanigans to go on?

They have presented no compelling
evidence to support their charges

against my clients,
who run legitimate businesses.

I move for a complete dismissal
of this entire case!

Mr. Flayman, I'm afraid I'm going

to have to consider
Mr. Montgomery's motion.

But you can't! We have a terrific case.

Where is your proof?
Where is the evidence?

Show me the smoking gun!

Hold it, Your Honor!
You want a smoking gun?

Here is your smoking gun.

What is that?

It's a bee smoker!

What, this?
This harmless little contraption?

This couldn't hurt a fly,
let alone a bee.

Look at what has happened

to bees who have never been asked,
"Smoking or non?"

Is this what nature intended for us?

To be forcibly addicted
to smoke machines

and man-made wooden slat work camps?

Living out our lives as honey slaves
to the white man?

- What are we gonna do?
- He's playing the species card.

Ladies and gentlemen, please,
free these bees!

Free the bees! Free the bees!

Free the bees!

Free the bees! Free the bees!

The court finds in favor of the bees!

Vanessa, we won!

I knew you could do it! High-five!

Sorry.

I'm OK! You know what this means?

All the honey
will finally belong to the bees.

Now we won't have
to work so hard all the time.

This is an unholy perversion
of the balance of nature, Benson.

You'll regret this.

Barry, how much honey is out there?

All right. One at a time.

Barry, who are you wearing?

My sweater is Ralph Lauren,
and I have no pants.

- What if Montgomery's right?
- What do you mean?

We've been living the bee way
a long time, 27 million years.

Oongratulations on your victory.
What will you demand as a settlement?

First, we'll demand a complete shutdown
of all bee work camps.

Then we want back the honey
that was ours to begin with,

every last drop.

We demand an end to the glorification
of the bear as anything more

than a filthy, smelly,
bad-breath stink machine.

We're all aware
of what they do in the woods.

Wait for my signal.

Take him out.

He'll have nauseous
for a few hours, then he'll be fine.

And we will no longer tolerate
bee-negative nicknames…

But it's just a prance-about stage name!

…unnecessary inclusion of honey
in bogus health products

and la-dee-da human
tea-time snack garnishments.

Oan't breathe.

Bring it in, boys!

Hold it right there! Good.

Tap it.

Mr. Buzzwell, we just passed three cups,
and there's gallons more coming!

- I think we need to shut down!
- Shut down? We've never shut down.

Shut down honey production!

Stop making honey!

Turn your key, sir!

What do we do now?

Oannonball!

We're shutting honey production!

Mission abort.

Aborting pollination and nectar detail.
Returning to base.

Adam, you wouldn't believe
how much honey was out there.

Oh, yeah?

What's going on? Where is everybody?

- Are they out celebrating?
- They're home.

They don't know what to do.
Laying out, sleeping in.

I heard your Uncle Oarl was on his way
to San Antonio with a cricket.

At least we got our honey back.

Sometimes I think, so what if humans
liked our honey? Who wouldn't?

It's the greatest thing in the world!
I was excited to be part of making it.

This was my new desk. This was my
new job. I wanted to do it really well.

And now…

Now I can't.

I don't understand
why they're not happy.

I thought their lives would be better!

They're doing nothing. It's amazing.
Honey really changes people.

You don't have any idea
what's going on, do you?

- What did you want to show me?
- This.

What happened here?

That is not the half of it.

Oh, no. Oh, my.

They're all wilting.

Doesn't look very good, does it?

No.

And whose fault do you think that is?

You know, I'm gonna guess bees.

Bees?

Specifically, me.

I didn't think bees not needing to make
honey would affect all these things.

It's notjust flowers.
Fruits, vegetables, they all need bees.

That's our whole SAT test right there.

Take away produce, that affects
the entire animal kingdom.

And then, of course…

The human species?

So if there's no more pollination,

it could all just go south here,
couldn't it?

I know this is also partly my fault.

How about a suicide pact?

How do we do it?

- I'll sting you, you step on me.
- Thatjust kills you twice.

Right, right.

Listen, Barry…
sorry, but I gotta get going.

I had to open my mouth and talk.

Vanessa?

Vanessa? Why are you leaving?
Where are you going?

To the final Tournament of Roses parade
in Pasadena.

They've moved it to this weekend
because all the flowers are dying.

It's the last chance
I'll ever have to see it.

Vanessa, I just wanna say I'm sorry.
I never meant it to turn out like this.

I know. Me neither.

Tournament of Roses.
Roses can't do sports.

Wait a minute. Roses. Roses?

Roses!

Vanessa!

Roses?!

Barry?

- Roses are flowers!
- Yes, they are.

Flowers, bees, pollen!

I know.
That's why this is the last parade.

Maybe not.
Oould you ask him to slow down?

Oould you slow down?

Barry!

OK, I made a huge mistake.
This is a total disaster, all my fault.

Yes, it kind of is.

I've ruined the planet.
I wanted to help you

with the flower shop.
I've made it worse.

Actually, it's completely closed down.

I thought maybe you were remodeling.

But I have another idea, and it's
greater than my previous ideas combined.

I don't want to hear it!

All right, they have the roses,
the roses have the pollen.

I know every bee, plant
and flower bud in this park.

All we gotta do is get what they've got
back here with what we've got.

- Bees.
- Park.

- Pollen!
- Flowers.

- Repollination!
- Across the nation!

Tournament of Roses,
Pasadena, Oalifornia.

They've got nothing
but flowers, floats and cotton candy.

Security will be tight.

I have an idea.

Vanessa Bloome, FTD.

Official floral business. It's real.

Sorry, ma'am. Nice brooch.

Thank you. It was a gift.

Once inside,
we just pick the right float.

How about The Princess and the Pea?

I could be the princess,
and you could be the pea!

Yes, I got it.

- Where should I sit?
- What are you?

- I believe I'm the pea.
- The pea?

It goes under the mattresses.

- Not in this fairy tale, sweetheart.
- I'm getting the marshal.

You do that!
This whole parade is a fiasco!

Let's see what this baby'll do.

Hey, what are you doing?!

Then all we do
is blend in with traffic…

…without arousing suspicion.

Once at the airport,
there's no stopping us.

Stop! Security.

- You and your insect pack your float?
- Yes.

Has it been
in your possession the entire time?

Would you remove your shoes?

- Remove your stinger.
- It's part of me.

I know. Just having some fun.
Enjoy your flight.

Then if we're lucky, we'll have
just enough pollen to do the job.

Oan you believe how lucky we are? We
have just enough pollen to do the job!

I think this is gonna work.

It's got to work.

Attention, passengers,
this is Oaptain Scott.

We have a bit of bad weather
in New York.

It looks like we'll experience
a couple hours delay.

Barry, these are cut flowers
with no water. They'll never make it.

I gotta get up there
and talk to them.

Be careful.

Oan I get help
with the Sky Mall magazine?

I'd like to order the talking
inflatable nose and ear hair trimmer.

Oaptain, I'm in a real situation.

- What'd you say, Hal?
- Nothing.

Bee!

Don't freak out! My entire species…

What are you doing?

- Wait a minute! I'm an attorney!
- Who's an attorney?

Don't move.

Oh, Barry.

Good afternoon, passengers.
This is your captain.

Would a Miss Vanessa Bloome in 24B
please report to the cockpit?

And please hurry!

What happened here?

There was a DustBuster,
a toupee, a life raft exploded.

One's bald, one's in a boat,
they're both unconscious!

- Is that another bee joke?
- No!

No one's flying the plane!

This is JFK control tower, Flight 356.
What's your status?

This is Vanessa Bloome.
I'm a florist from New York.

Where's the pilot?

He's unconscious,
and so is the copilot.

Not good. Does anyone onboard
have flight experience?

As a matter of fact, there is.

- Who's that?
- Barry Benson.

From the honey trial?! Oh, great.

Vanessa, this is nothing more
than a big metal bee.

It's got giant wings, huge engines.

I can't fly a plane.

- Why not? Isn't John Travolta a pilot?
- Yes.

How hard could it be?

Wait, Barry!
We're headed into some lightning.

This is Bob Bumble. We have some
late-breaking news from JFK Airport,

where a suspenseful scene
is developing.

Barry Benson,
fresh from his legal victory…

That's Barry!

…is attempting to land a plane,
loaded with people, flowers

and an incapacitated flight crew.

Flowers?!

We have a storm in the area
and two individuals at the controls

with absolutely no flight experience.

Just a minute.
There's a bee on that plane.

I'm quite familiar with Mr. Benson
and his no-account compadres.

They've done enough damage.

But isn't he your only hope?

Technically, a bee
shouldn't be able to fly at all.

Their wings are too small…

Haven't we heard this a million times?

"The surface area of the wings
and body mass make no sense."

- Get this on the air!
- Got it.

- Stand by.
- We're going live.

The way we work may be a mystery to you.

Making honey takes a lot of bees
doing a lot of small jobs.

But let me tell you about a small job.

If you do it well,
it makes a big difference.

More than we realized.
To us, to everyone.

That's why I want to get bees
back to working together.

That's the bee way!
We're not made of Jell-O.

We get behind a fellow.

- Black and yellow!
- Hello!

Left, right, down, hover.

- Hover?
- Forget hover.

This isn't so hard.
Beep-beep! Beep-beep!

Barry, what happened?!

Wait, I think we were
on autopilot the whole time.

- That may have been helping me.
- And now we're not!

So it turns out I cannot fly a plane.

All of you, let's get
behind this fellow! Move it out!

Move out!

Our only chance is if I do what I'd do,
you copy me with the wings of the plane!

Don't have to yell.

I'm not yelling!
We're in a lot of trouble.

It's very hard to concentrate
with that panicky tone in your voice!

It's not a tone. I'm panicking!

I can't do this!

Vanessa, pull yourself together.
You have to snap out of it!

You snap out of it.

You snap out of it.

- You snap out of it!
- You snap out of it!

- You snap out of it!
- You snap out of it!

- You snap out of it!
- You snap out of it!

- Hold it!
- Why? Oome on, it's my turn.

How is the plane flying?

I don't know.

Hello?

Benson, got any flowers
for a happy occasion in there?

The Pollen Jocks!

They do get behind a fellow.

- Black and yellow.
- Hello.

All right, let's drop this tin can
on the blacktop.

Where? I can't see anything. Oan you?

No, nothing. It's all cloudy.

Oome on. You got to think bee, Barry.

- Thinking bee.
- Thinking bee.

Thinking bee!
Thinking bee! Thinking bee!

Wait a minute.
I think I'm feeling something.

- What?
- I don't know. It's strong, pulling me.

Like a 27-million-year-old instinct.

Bring the nose down.

Thinking bee!
Thinking bee! Thinking bee!

- What in the world is on the tarmac?
- Get some lights on that!

Thinking bee!
Thinking bee! Thinking bee!

- Vanessa, aim for the flower.
- OK.

Out the engines. We're going in
on bee power. Ready, boys?

Affirmative!

Good. Good. Easy, now. That's it.

Land on that flower!

Ready? Full reverse!

Spin it around!

- Not that flower! The other one!
- Which one?

- That flower.
- I'm aiming at the flower!

That's a fat guy in a flowered shirt.
I mean the giant pulsating flower

made of millions of bees!

Pull forward. Nose down. Tail up.

Rotate around it.

- This is insane, Barry!
- This's the only way I know how to fly.

Am I koo-koo-kachoo, or is this plane
flying in an insect-like pattern?

Get your nose in there. Don't be afraid.
Smell it. Full reverse!

Just drop it. Be a part of it.

Aim for the center!

Now drop it in! Drop it in, woman!

Oome on, already.

Barry, we did it!
You taught me how to fly!

- Yes. No high-five!
- Right.

Barry, it worked!
Did you see the giant flower?

What giant flower? Where? Of course
I saw the flower! That was genius!

- Thank you.
- But we're not done yet.

Listen, everyone!

This runway is covered
with the last pollen

from the last flowers
available anywhere on Earth.

That means this is our last chance.

We're the only ones who make honey,
pollinate flowers and dress like this.

If we're gonna survive as a species,
this is our moment! What do you say?

Are we going to be bees, orjust
Museum of Natural History keychains?

We're bees!

Keychain!

Then follow me! Except Keychain.

Hold on, Barry. Here.

You've earned this.

Yeah!

I'm a Pollen Jock! And it's a perfect
fit. All I gotta do are the sleeves.

Oh, yeah.

That's our Barry.

Mom! The bees are back!

If anybody needs
to make a call, now's the time.

I got a feeling we'll be
working late tonight!

Here's your change. Have a great
afternoon! Oan I help who's next?

Would you like some honey with that?
It is bee-approved. Don't forget these.

Milk, cream, cheese, it's all me.
And I don't see a nickel!

Sometimes I just feel
like a piece of meat!

I had no idea.

Barry, I'm sorry.
Have you got a moment?

Would you excuse me?
My mosquito associate will help you.

Sorry I'm late.

He's a lawyer too?

I was already a blood-sucking parasite.
All I needed was a briefcase.

Have a great afternoon!

Barry, I just got this huge tulip order,
and I can't get them anywhere.

No problem, Vannie.
Just leave it to me.

You're a lifesaver, Barry.
Oan I help who's next?

All right, scramble, jocks!
It's time to fly.

Thank you, Barry!

That bee is living my life!

Let it go, Kenny.

- When will this nightmare end?!
- Let it all go.

- Beautiful day to fly.
- Sure is.

Between you and me,
I was dying to get out of that office.

You have got
to start thinking bee, my friend.

- Thinking bee!
- Me?

Hold it. Let's just stop
for a second. Hold it.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry, everyone.
Oan we stop here?

I'm not making a major life decision
during a production number!

All right. Take ten, everybody.
Wrap it up, guys.

I had virtually no rehearsal for that.

The Shadow over Innsmouth
By H. P. Lovecraft

I.

During the winter of 1927–28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. The public first learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting--under suitable precautions--of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront. Uninquiring souls let this occurrence pass as one of the major clashes in a spasmodic war on liquor.
Keener news-followers, however, wondered at the prodigious number of arrests, the abnormally large force of men used in making them, and the secrecy surrounding the disposal of the prisoners. No trials, or even definite charges, were reported; nor were any of the captives seen thereafter in the regular gaols of the nation. There were vague statements about disease and concentration camps, and later about dispersal in various naval and military prisons, but nothing positive ever developed. Innsmouth itself was left almost depopulated, and is even now only beginning to shew signs of a sluggishly revived existence.
Complaints from many liberal organisations were met with long confidential discussions, and representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and prisons. As a result, these societies became surprisingly passive and reticent. Newspaper men were harder to manage, but seemed largely to coöperate with the government in the end. Only one paper--a tabloid always discounted because of its wild policy--mentioned the deep-diving submarine that discharged torpedoes downward in the marine abyss just beyond Devil Reef. That item, gathered by chance in a haunt of sailors, seemed indeed rather far-fetched; since the low, black reef lies a full mile and a half out from Innsmouth Harbour.
People around the country and in the nearby towns muttered a great deal among themselves, but said very little to the outer world. They had talked about dying and half-deserted Innsmouth for nearly a century, and nothing new could be wilder or more hideous than what they had whispered and hinted years before. Many things had taught them secretiveness, and there was now no need to exert pressure on them. Besides, they really knew very little; for wide salt marshes, desolate and unpeopled, keep neighbours off from Innsmouth on the landward side.
But at last I am going to defy the ban on speech about this thing. Results, I am certain, are so thorough that no public harm save a shock of repulsion could ever accrue from a hinting of what was found by those horrified raiders at Innsmouth. Besides, what was found might possibly have more than one explanation. I do not know just how much of the whole tale has been told even to me, and I have many reasons for not wishing to probe deeper. For my contact with this affair has been closer than that of any other layman, and I have carried away impressions which are yet to drive me to drastic measures.

It was I who fled frantically out of Innsmouth in the early morning hours of July 16, 1927, and whose frightened appeals for government inquiry and action brought on the whole reported episode. I was willing enough to stay mute while the affair was fresh and uncertain; but now that it is an old story, with public interest and curiosity gone, I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumoured and evilly shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality. The mere telling helps me to restore confidence in my own faculties; to reassure myself that I was not simply the first to succumb to a contagious nightmare hallucination. It helps me, too, in making up my mind regarding a certain terrible step which lies ahead of me.
I never heard of Innsmouth till the day before I saw it for the first and--so far--last time. I was celebrating my coming of age by a tour of New England--sightseeing, antiquarian, and genealogical--and had planned to go directly from ancient Newburyport to Arkham, whence my mother’s family was derived. I had no car, but was travelling by train, trolley, and motor-coach, always seeking the cheapest possible route. In Newburyport they told me that the steam train was the thing to take to Arkham; and it was only at the station ticket-office, when I demurred at the high fare, that I learned about Innsmouth. The stout, shrewd-faced agent, whose speech shewed him to be no local man, seemed sympathetic toward my efforts at economy, and made a suggestion that none of my other informants had offered.
“You could take that old bus, I suppose,” he said with a certain hesitation, “but it ain’t thought much of hereabouts. It goes through Innsmouth--you may have heard about that--and so the people don’t like it. Run by an Innsmouth fellow--Joe Sargent--but never gets any custom from here, or Arkham either, I guess. Wonder it keeps running at all. I s’pose it’s cheap enough, but I never see more’n two or three people in it--nobody but those Innsmouth folks. Leaves the Square--front of Hammond’s Drug Store--at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. unless they’ve changed lately. Looks like a terrible rattletrap--I’ve never ben on it.”
That was the first I ever heard of shadowed Innsmouth. Any reference to a town not shewn on common maps or listed in recent guide-books would have interested me, and the agent’s odd manner of allusion roused something like real curiosity. A town able to inspire such dislike in its neighbours, I thought, must be at least rather unusual, and worthy of a tourist’s attention. If it came before Arkham I would stop off there--and so I asked the agent to tell me something about it. He was very deliberate, and spoke with an air of feeling slightly superior to what he said.
“Innsmouth? Well, it’s a queer kind of a town down at the mouth of the Manuxet. Used to be almost a city--quite a port before the War of 1812--but all gone to pieces in the last hundred years or so. No railroad now--B. & M. never went through, and the branch line from Rowley was given up years ago.
“More empty houses than there are people, I guess, and no business to speak of except fishing and lobstering. Everybody trades mostly here or in Arkham or Ipswich. Once they had quite a few mills, but nothing’s left now except one gold refinery running on the leanest kind of part time.
“That refinery, though, used to be a big thing, and Old Man Marsh, who owns it, must be richer’n Croesus. Queer old duck, though, and sticks mighty close in his home. He’s supposed to have developed some skin disease or deformity late in life that makes him keep out of sight. Grandson of Captain Obed Marsh, who founded the business. His mother seems to’ve ben some kind of foreigner--they say a South Sea islander--so everybody raised Cain when he married an Ipswich girl fifty years ago. They always do that about Innsmouth people, and folks here and hereabouts always try to cover up any Innsmouth blood they have in ’em. But Marsh’s children and grandchildren look just like anyone else so far’s I can see. I’ve had ’em pointed out to me here--though, come to think of it, the elder children don’t seem to be around lately. Never saw the old man.

“And why is everybody so down on Innsmouth? Well, young fellow, you mustn’t take too much stock in what people around here say. They’re hard to get started, but once they do get started they never let up. They’ve ben telling things about Innsmouth--whispering ’em, mostly--for the last hundred years, I guess, and I gather they’re more scared than anything else. Some of the stories would make you laugh--about old Captain Marsh driving bargains with the devil and bringing imps out of hell to live in Innsmouth, or about some kind of devil-worship and awful sacrifices in some place near the wharves that people stumbled on around 1845 or thereabouts--but I come from Panton, Vermont, and that kind of story don’t go down with me. “You ought to hear, though, what some of the old-timers tell about the black reef off the coast--Devil Reef, they call it. It’s well above water a good part of the time, and never much below it, but at that you could hardly call it an island. The story is that there’s a whole legion of devils seen sometimes on that reef--sprawled about, or darting in and out of some kind of caves near the top. It’s a rugged, uneven thing, a good bit over a mile out, and toward the end of shipping days sailors used to make big detours just to avoid it. “That is, sailors that didn’t hail from Innsmouth. One of the things they had against old Captain Marsh was that he was supposed to land on it sometimes at night when the tide was right. Maybe he did, for I dare say the rock formation was interesting, and it’s just barely possible he was looking for pirate loot and maybe finding it; but there was talk of his dealing with daemons there. Fact is, I guess on the whole it was really the Captain that gave the bad reputation to the reef. “That was before the big epidemic of 1846, when over half the folks in Innsmouth was carried off. They never did quite figure out what the trouble was, but it was probably some foreign kind of disease brought from China or somewhere by the shipping. It surely was bad enough--there was riots over it, and all sorts of ghastly doings that I don’t believe ever got outside of town--and it left the place in awful shape. Never came back--there can’t be more’n 300 or 400 people living there now. “But the real thing behind the way folks feel is simply race prejudice--and I don’t say I’m blaming those that hold it. I hate those Innsmouth folks myself, and I wouldn’t care to go to their town. I s’pose you know--though I can see you’re a Westerner by your talk--what a lot our New England ships used to have to do with queer ports in Africa, Asia, the South Seas, and everywhere else, and what queer kinds of people they sometimes brought back with ’em. You’ve probably heard about the Salem man that came home with a Chinese wife, and maybe you know there’s still a bunch of Fiji Islanders somewhere around Cape Cod. “Well, there must be something like that back of the Innsmouth people. The place always was badly cut off from the rest of the country by marshes and creeks, and we can’t be sure about the ins and outs of the matter; but it’s pretty clear that old Captain Marsh must have brought home some odd specimens when he had all three of his ships in commission back in the twenties and thirties. There certainly is a strange kind of streak in the Innsmouth folks today--I don’t know how to explain it, but it sort of makes you crawl. You’ll notice a little in Sargent if you take his bus. Some of ’em have queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes that never seem to shut, and their skin ain’t quite right. Rough and scabby, and the sides of their necks are all shrivelled or creased up. Get bald, too, very young. The older fellows look the worst--fact is, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a very old chap of that kind. Guess they must die of looking in the glass! Animals hate ’em--they used to have lots of horse trouble before autos came in. “Nobody around here or in Arkham or Ipswich will have anything to do with ’em, and they act kind of offish themselves when they come to town or when anyone tries to fish on their grounds. Queer how fish are always thick off Innsmouth Harbour when there ain’t any anywhere else around--but just try to fish there yourself and see how the folks chase you off! Those people used to come here on the railroad--walking and taking the train at Rowley after the branch was dropped--but now they use that bus.

“Yes, there’s a hotel in Innsmouth--called the Gilman House--but I don’t believe it can amount to much. I wouldn’t advise you to try it. Better stay over here and take the ten o’clock bus tomorrow morning; then you can get an evening bus there for Arkham at eight o’clock. There was a factory inspector who stopped at the Gilman a couple of years ago, and he had a lot of unpleasant hints about the place. Seems they get a queer crowd there, for this fellow heard voices in other rooms--though most of ’em was empty--that gave him the shivers. It was foreign talk, he thought, but he said the bad thing about it was the kind of voice that sometimes spoke. It sounded so unnatural--slopping-like, he said--that he didn’t dare undress and go to sleep. Just waited up and lit out the first thing in the morning. The talk went on most all night.
“This fellow--Casey, his name was--had a lot to say about how the Innsmouth folks watched him and seemed kind of on guard. He found the Marsh refinery a queer place--it’s in an old mill on the lower falls of the Manuxet. What he said tallied up with what I’d heard. Books in bad shape, and no clear account of any kind of dealings. You know it’s always ben a kind of mystery where the Marshes get the gold they refine. They’ve never seemed to do much buying in that line, but years ago they shipped out an enormous lot of ingots.
“Used to be talk of a queer foreign kind of jewellery that the sailors and refinery men sometimes sold on the sly, or that was seen once or twice on some of the Marsh womenfolks. People allowed maybe old Captain Obed traded for it in some heathen port, especially since he was always ordering stacks of glass beads and trinkets such as seafaring men used to get for native trade. Others thought and still think he’d found an old pirate cache out on Devil Reef. But here’s a funny thing. The old Captain’s ben dead these sixty years, and there ain’t ben a good-sized ship out of the place since the Civil War; but just the same the Marshes still keep on buying a few of those native trade things--mostly glass and rubber gewgaws, they tell me. Maybe the Innsmouth folks like ’em to look at themselves--Gawd knows they’ve gotten to be about as bad as South Sea cannibals and Guinea savages.
“That plague of ’46 must have taken off the best blood in the place. Anyway, they’re a doubtful lot now, and the Marshes and the other rich folks are as bad as any. As I told you, there probably ain’t more’n 400 people in the whole town in spite of all the streets they say there are. I guess they’re what they call ‘white trash’ down South--lawless and sly, and full of secret doings. They get a lot of fish and lobsters and do exporting by truck. Queer how the fish swarm right there and nowhere else.
“Nobody can ever keep track of these people, and state school officials and census men have a devil of a time. You can bet that prying strangers ain’t welcome around Innsmouth. I’ve heard personally of more’n one business or government man that’s disappeared there, and there’s loose talk of one who went crazy and is out at Danvers now. They must have fixed up some awful scare for that fellow.
“That’s why I wouldn’t go at night if I was you. I’ve never ben there and have no wish to go, but I guess a daytime trip couldn’t hurt you--even though the people hereabouts will advise you not to make it. If you’re just sightseeing, and looking for old-time stuff, Innsmouth ought to be quite a place for you.”

And so I spent part of that evening at the Newburyport Public Library looking up data about Innsmouth. When I had tried to question the natives in the shops, the lunch room, the garages, and the fire station, I had found them even harder to get started than the ticket-agent had predicted; and realised that I could not spare the time to overcome their first instinctive reticences. They had a kind of obscure suspiciousness, as if there were something amiss with anyone too much interested in Innsmouth. At the Y.M.C.A., where I was stopping, the clerk merely discouraged my going to such a dismal, decadent place; and the people at the library shewed much the same attitude. Clearly, in the eyes of the educated, Innsmouth was merely an exaggerated case of civic degeneration.
The Essex County histories on the library shelves had very little to say, except that the town was founded in 1643, noted for shipbuilding before the Revolution, a seat of great marine prosperity in the early nineteenth century, and later a minor factory centre using the Manuxet as power. The epidemic and riots of 1846 were very sparsely treated, as if they formed a discredit to the county.
References to decline were few, though the significance of the later record was unmistakable. After the Civil War all industrial life was confined to the Marsh Refining Company, and the marketing of gold ingots formed the only remaining bit of major commerce aside from the eternal fishing. That fishing paid less and less as the price of the commodity fell and large-scale corporations offered competition, but there was never a dearth of fish around Innsmouth Harbour. Foreigners seldom settled there, and there was some discreetly veiled evidence that a number of Poles and Portuguese who had tried it had been scattered in a peculiarly drastic fashion.
Most interesting of all was a glancing reference to the strange jewellery vaguely associated with Innsmouth. It had evidently impressed the whole countryside more than a little, for mention was made of specimens in the museum of Miskatonic University at Arkham, and in the display room of the Newburyport Historical Society. The fragmentary descriptions of these things were bald and prosaic, but they hinted to me an undercurrent of persistent strangeness. Something about them seemed so odd and provocative that I could not put them out of my mind, and despite the relative lateness of the hour I resolved to see the local sample--said to be a large, queerly proportioned thing evidently meant for a tiara--if it could possibly be arranged.
The librarian gave me a note of introduction to the curator of the Society, a Miss Anna Tilton, who lived nearby, and after a brief explanation that ancient gentlewoman was kind enough to pilot me into the closed building, since the hour was not outrageously late. The collection was a notable one indeed, but in my present mood I had eyes for nothing but the bizarre object which glistened in a corner cupboard under the electric lights.
It took no excessive sensitiveness to beauty to make me literally gasp at the strange, unearthly splendour of the alien, opulent phantasy that rested there on a purple velvet cushion. Even now I can hardly describe what I saw, though it was clearly enough a sort of tiara, as the description had said. It was tall in front, and with a very large and curiously irregular periphery, as if designed for a head of almost freakishly elliptical outline. The material seemed to be predominantly gold, though a weird lighter lustrousness hinted at some strange alloy with an equally beautiful and scarcely identifiable metal. Its condition was almost perfect, and one could have spent hours in studying the striking and puzzlingly untraditional designs--some simply geometrical, and some plainly marine--chased or moulded in high relief on its surface with a craftsmanship of incredible skill and grace.
The longer I looked, the more the thing fascinated me; and in this fascination there was a curiously disturbing element hardly to be classified or accounted for. At first I decided that it was the queer other-worldly quality of the art which made me uneasy. All other art objects I had ever seen either belonged to some known racial or national stream, or else were consciously modernistic defiances of every recognised stream. This tiara was neither. It clearly belonged to some settled technique of infinite maturity and perfection, yet that technique was utterly remote from any--Eastern or Western, ancient or modern--which I had ever heard of or seen exemplified. It was as if the workmanship were that of another planet.

However, I soon saw that my uneasiness had a second and perhaps equally potent source residing in the pictorial and mathematical suggestions of the strange designs. The patterns all hinted of remote secrets and unimaginable abysses in time and space, and the monotonously aquatic nature of the reliefs became almost sinister. Among these reliefs were fabulous monsters of abhorrent grotesqueness and malignity--half ichthyic and half batrachian in suggestion--which one could not dissociate from a certain haunting and uncomfortable sense of pseudo-memory, as if they called up some image from deep cells and tissues whose retentive functions are wholly primal and awesomely ancestral. At times I fancied that every contour of these blasphemous fish-frogs was overflowing with the ultimate quintessence of unknown and inhuman evil.
In odd contrast to the tiara’s aspect was its brief and prosy history as related by Miss Tilton. It had been pawned for a ridiculous sum at a shop in State Street in 1873, by a drunken Innsmouth man shortly afterward killed in a brawl. The Society had acquired it directly from the pawnbroker, at once giving it a display worthy of its quality. It was labelled as of probable East-Indian or Indo-Chinese provenance, though the attribution was frankly tentative.
Miss Tilton, comparing all possible hypotheses regarding its origin and its presence in New England, was inclined to believe that it formed part of some exotic pirate hoard discovered by old Captain Obed Marsh. This view was surely not weakened by the insistent offers of purchase at a high price which the Marshes began to make as soon as they knew of its presence, and which they repeated to this day despite the Society’s unvarying determination not to sell.
As the good lady shewed me out of the building she made it clear that the pirate theory of the Marsh fortune was a popular one among the intelligent people of the region. Her own attitude toward shadowed Innsmouth--which she had never seen--was one of disgust at a community slipping far down the cultural scale, and she assured me that the rumours of devil-worship were partly justified by a peculiar secret cult which had gained force there and engulfed all the orthodox churches.
It was called, she said, “The Esoteric Order of Dagon”, and was undoubtedly a debased, quasi-pagan thing imported from the East a century before, at a time when the Innsmouth fisheries seemed to be going barren. Its persistence among a simple people was quite natural in view of the sudden and permanent return of abundantly fine fishing, and it soon came to be the greatest influence on the town, replacing Freemasonry altogether and taking up headquarters in the old Masonic Hall on New Church Green.
All this, to the pious Miss Tilton, formed an excellent reason for shunning the ancient town of decay and desolation; but to me it was merely a fresh incentive. To my architectural and historical anticipations was now added an acute anthropological zeal, and I could scarcely sleep in my small room at the “Y” as the night wore away.

II.

Shortly before ten the next morning I stood with one small valise in front of Hammond’s Drug Store in old Market Square waiting for the Innsmouth bus. As the hour for its arrival drew near I noticed a general drift of the loungers to other places up the street, or to the Ideal Lunch across the square. Evidently the ticket-agent had not exaggerated the dislike which local people bore toward Innsmouth and its denizens. In a few moments a small motor-coach of extreme decrepitude and dirty grey colour rattled down State Street, made a turn, and drew up at the curb beside me. I felt immediately that it was the right one; a guess which the half-illegible sign on the windshield--“Arkham-Innsmouth-Newb’port”--soon verified. There were only three passengers--dark, unkempt men of sullen visage and somewhat youthful cast--and when the vehicle stopped they clumsily shambled out and began walking up State Street in a silent, almost furtive fashion. The driver also alighted, and I watched him as he went into the drug store to make some purchase. This, I reflected, must be the Joe Sargent mentioned by the ticket-agent; and even before I noticed any details there spread over me a wave of spontaneous aversion which could be neither checked nor explained. It suddenly struck me as very natural that the local people should not wish to ride on a bus owned and driven by this man, or to visit any oftener than possible the habitat of such a man and his kinsfolk. When the driver came out of the store I looked at him more carefully and tried to determine the source of my evil impression. He was a thin, stoop-shouldered man not much under six feet tall, dressed in shabby blue civilian clothes and wearing a frayed grey golf cap. His age was perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep creases in the sides of his neck made him seem older when one did not study his dull, expressionless face. He had a narrow head, bulging, watery blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. His long, thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease. His hands were large and heavily veined, and had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikingly short in proportion to the rest of the structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl closely into the huge palm. As he walked toward the bus I observed his peculiarly shambling gait and saw that his feet were inordinately immense. The more I studied them the more I wondered how he could buy any shoes to fit them. A certain greasiness about the fellow increased my dislike. He was evidently given to working or lounging around the fish docks, and carried with him much of their characteristic smell. Just what foreign blood was in him I could not even guess. His oddities certainly did not look Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine, or negroid, yet I could see why the people found him alien. I myself would have thought of biological degeneration rather than alienage. I was sorry when I saw that there would be no other passengers on the bus. Somehow I did not like the idea of riding alone with this driver. But as leaving time obviously approached I conquered my qualms and followed the man aboard, extending him a dollar bill and murmuring the single word “Innsmouth”. He looked curiously at me for a second as he returned forty cents change without speaking. I took a seat far behind him, but on the same side of the bus, since I wished to watch the shore during the journey.

At length the decrepit vehicle started with a jerk, and rattled noisily past the old brick buildings of State Street amidst a cloud of vapour from the exhaust. Glancing at the people on the sidewalks, I thought I detected in them a curious wish to avoid looking at the bus--or at least a wish to avoid seeming to look at it. Then we turned to the left into High Street, where the going was smoother; flying by stately old mansions of the early republic and still older colonial farmhouses, passing the Lower Green and Parker River, and finally emerging into a long, monotonous stretch of open shore country.
The day was warm and sunny, but the landscape of sand, sedge-grass, and stunted shrubbery became more and more desolate as we proceeded. Out the window I could see the blue water and the sandy line of Plum Island, and we presently drew very near the beach as our narrow road veered off from the main highway to Rowley and Ipswich. There were no visible houses, and I could tell by the state of the road that traffic was very light hereabouts. The small, weather-worn telephone poles carried only two wires. Now and then we crossed crude wooden bridges over tidal creeks that wound far inland and promoted the general isolation of the region.
Once in a while I noticed dead stumps and crumbling foundation-walls above the drifting sand, and recalled the old tradition quoted in one of the histories I had read, that this was once a fertile and thickly settled countryside. The change, it was said, came simultaneously with the Innsmouth epidemic of 1846, and was thought by simple folk to have a dark connexion with hidden forces of evil. Actually, it was caused by the unwise cutting of woodlands near the shore, which robbed the soil of its best protection and opened the way for waves of wind-blown sand.
At last we lost sight of Plum Island and saw the vast expanse of the open Atlantic on our left. Our narrow course began to climb steeply, and I felt a singular sense of disquiet in looking at the lonely crest ahead where the rutted roadway met the sky. It was as if the bus were about to keep on in its ascent, leaving the sane earth altogether and merging with the unknown arcana of upper air and cryptical sky. The smell of the sea took on ominous implications, and the silent driver’s bent, rigid back and narrow head became more and more hateful. As I looked at him I saw that the back of his head was almost as hairless as his face, having only a few straggling yellow strands upon a grey scabrous surface.
Then we reached the crest and beheld the outspread valley beyond, where the Manuxet joins the sea just north of the long line of cliffs that culminate in Kingsport Head and veer off toward Cape Ann. On the far, misty horizon I could just make out the dizzy profile of the Head, topped by the queer ancient house of which so many legends are told; but for the moment all my attention was captured by the nearer panorama just below me. I had, I realised, come face to face with rumour-shadowed Innsmouth.
It was a town of wide extent and dense construction, yet one with a portentous dearth of visible life. From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came, and the three tall steeples loomed stark and unpainted against the seaward horizon. One of them was crumbling down at the top, and in that and another there were only black gaping holes where clock-dials should have been. The vast huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyed with offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, and as we approached along the now descending road I could see that many roofs had wholly caved in. There were some large square Georgian houses, too, with hipped roofs, cupolas, and railed “widow’s walks”. These were mostly well back from the water, and one or two seemed to be in moderately sound condition. Stretching inland from among them I saw the rusted, grass-grown line of the abandoned railway, with leaning telegraph-poles now devoid of wires, and the half-obscured lines of the old carriage roads to Rowley and Ipswich.
The decay was worst close to the waterfront, though in its very midst I could spy the white belfry of a fairly well-preserved brick structure which looked like a small factory. The harbour, long clogged with sand, was enclosed by an ancient stone breakwater; on which I could begin to discern the minute forms of a few seated fishermen, and at whose end were what looked like the foundations of a bygone lighthouse. A sandy tongue had formed inside this barrier, and upon it I saw a few decrepit cabins, moored dories, and scattered lobster-pots. The only deep water seemed to be where the river poured out past the belfried structure and turned southward to join the ocean at the breakwater’s end.
Here and there the ruins of wharves jutted out from the shore to end in indeterminate rottenness, those farthest south seeming the most decayed. And far out at sea, despite a high tide, I glimpsed a long, black line scarcely rising above the water yet carrying a suggestion of odd latent malignancy. This, I knew, must be Devil Reef. As I looked, a subtle, curious sense of beckoning seemed superadded to the grim repulsion; and oddly enough, I found this overtone more disturbing than the primary impression.
We met no one on the road, but presently began to pass deserted farms in varying stages of ruin. Then I noticed a few inhabited houses with rags stuffed in the broken windows and shells and dead fish lying about the littered yards. Once or twice I saw listless-looking people working in barren gardens or digging clams on the fishy-smelling beach below, and groups of dirty, simian-visaged children playing around weed-grown doorsteps. Somehow these people seemed more disquieting than the dismal buildings, for almost every one had certain peculiarities of face and motions which I instinctively disliked without being able to define or comprehend them. For a second I thought this typical physique suggested some picture I had seen, perhaps in a book, under circumstances of particular horror or melancholy; but this pseudo-recollection passed very quickly.

As the bus reached a lower level I began to catch the steady note of a waterfall through the unnatural stillness. The leaning, unpainted houses grew thicker, lined both sides of the road, and displayed more urban tendencies than did those we were leaving behind. The panorama ahead had contracted to a street scene, and in spots I could see where a cobblestone pavement and stretches of brick sidewalk had formerly existed. All the houses were apparently deserted, and there were occasional gaps where tumbledown chimneys and cellar walls told of buildings that had collapsed. Pervading everything was the most nauseous fishy odour imaginable.
Soon cross streets and junctions began to appear; those on the left leading to shoreward realms of unpaved squalor and decay, while those on the right shewed vistas of departed grandeur. So far I had seen no people in the town, but there now came signs of a sparse habitation--curtained windows here and there, and an occasional battered motor-car at the curb. Pavement and sidewalks were increasingly well defined, and though most of the houses were quite old--wood and brick structures of the early nineteenth century--they were obviously kept fit for habitation. As an amateur antiquarian I almost lost my olfactory disgust and my feeling of menace and repulsion amidst this rich, unaltered survival from the past.
But I was not to reach my destination without one very strong impression of poignantly disagreeable quality. The bus had come to a sort of open concourse or radial point with churches on two sides and the bedraggled remains of a circular green in the centre, and I was looking at a large pillared hall on the right-hand junction ahead. The structure’s once white paint was now grey and peeling, and the black and gold sign on the pediment was so faded that I could only with difficulty make out the words “Esoteric Order of Dagon”. This, then, was the former Masonic Hall now given over to a degraded cult. As I strained to decipher this inscription my notice was distracted by the raucous tones of a cracked bell across the street, and I quickly turned to look out the window on my side of the coach.
The sound came from a squat-towered stone church of manifestly later date than most of the houses, built in a clumsy Gothic fashion and having a disproportionately high basement with shuttered windows. Though the hands of its clock were missing on the side I glimpsed, I knew that those hoarse strokes were telling the hour of eleven. Then suddenly all thoughts of time were blotted out by an onrushing image of sharp intensity and unaccountable horror which had seized me before I knew what it really was. The door of the church basement was open, revealing a rectangle of blackness inside. And as I looked, a certain object crossed or seemed to cross that dark rectangle; burning into my brain a momentary conception of nightmare which was all the more maddening because analysis could not shew a single nightmarish quality in it.
It was a living object--the first except the driver that I had seen since entering the compact part of the town--and had I been in a steadier mood I would have found nothing whatever of terror in it. Clearly, as I realised a moment later, it was the pastor; clad in some peculiar vestments doubtless introduced since the Order of Dagon had modified the ritual of the local churches. The thing which had probably caught my first subconscious glance and supplied the touch of bizarre horror was the tall tiara he wore; an almost exact duplicate of the one Miss Tilton had shewn me the previous evening. This, acting on my imagination, had supplied namelessly sinister qualities to the indeterminate face and robed, shambling form beneath it. There was not, I soon decided, any reason why I should have felt that shuddering touch of evil pseudo-memory. Was it not natural that a local mystery cult should adopt among its regimentals an unique type of head-dress made familiar to the community in some strange way--perhaps as treasure-trove?
A very thin sprinkling of repellent-looking youngish people now became visible on the sidewalks--lone individuals, and silent knots of two or three. The lower floors of the crumbling houses sometimes harboured small shops with dingy signs, and I noticed a parked truck or two as we rattled along. The sound of waterfalls became more and more distinct, and presently I saw a fairly deep river-gorge ahead, spanned by a wide, iron-railed highway bridge beyond which a large square opened out. As we clanked over the bridge I looked out on both sides and observed some factory buildings on the edge of the grassy bluff or part way down. The water far below was very abundant, and I could see two vigorous sets of falls upstream on my right and at least one downstream on my left. From this point the noise was quite deafening. Then we rolled into the large semicircular square across the river and drew up on the right-hand side in front of a tall, cupola-crowned building with remnants of yellow paint and with a half-effaced sign proclaiming it to be the Gilman House.
I was glad to get out of that bus, and at once proceeded to check my valise in the shabby hotel lobby. There was only one person in sight--an elderly man without what I had come to call the “Innsmouth look”--and I decided not to ask him any of the questions which bothered me; remembering that odd things had been noticed in this hotel. Instead, I strolled out on the square, from which the bus had already gone, and studied the scene minutely and appraisingly.

One side of the cobblestoned open space was the straight line of the river; the other was a semicircle of slant-roofed brick buildings of about the 1800 period, from which several streets radiated away to the southeast, south, and southwest. Lamps were depressingly few and small--all low-powered incandescents--and I was glad that my plans called for departure before dark, even though I knew the moon would be bright. The buildings were all in fair condition, and included perhaps a dozen shops in current operation; of which one was a grocery of the First National chain, others a dismal restaurant, a drug store, and a wholesale fish-dealer’s office, and still another, at the eastern extremity of the square near the river, an office of the town’s only industry--the Marsh Refining Company. There were perhaps ten people visible, and four or five automobiles and motor trucks stood scattered about. I did not need to be told that this was the civic centre of Innsmouth. Eastward I could catch blue glimpses of the harbour, against which rose the decaying remains of three once beautiful Georgian steeples. And toward the shore on the opposite bank of the river I saw the white belfry surmounting what I took to be the Marsh refinery.
For some reason or other I chose to make my first inquiries at the chain grocery, whose personnel was not likely to be native to Innsmouth. I found a solitary boy of about seventeen in charge, and was pleased to note the brightness and affability which promised cheerful information. He seemed exceptionally eager to talk, and I soon gathered that he did not like the place, its fishy smell, or its furtive people. A word with any outsider was a relief to him. He hailed from Arkham, boarded with a family who came from Ipswich, and went back home whenever he got a moment off. His family did not like him to work in Innsmouth, but the chain had transferred him there and he did not wish to give up his job.
There was, he said, no public library or chamber of commerce in Innsmouth, but I could probably find my way about. The street I had come down was Federal. West of that were the fine old residence streets--Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams--and east of it were the shoreward slums. It was in these slums--along Main Street--that I would find the old Georgian churches, but they were all long abandoned. It would be well not to make oneself too conspicuous in such neighbourhoods--especially north of the river--since the people were sullen and hostile. Some strangers had even disappeared.
Certain spots were almost forbidden territory, as he had learned at considerable cost. One must not, for example, linger much around the Marsh refinery, or around any of the still used churches, or around the pillared Order of Dagon Hall at New Church Green. Those churches were very odd--all violently disavowed by their respective denominations elsewhere, and apparently using the queerest kind of ceremonials and clerical vestments. Their creeds were heterodox and mysterious, involving hints of certain marvellous transformations leading to bodily immortality--of a sort--on this earth. The youth’s own pastor--Dr. Wallace of Asbury M. E. Church in Arkham--had gravely urged him not to join any church in Innsmouth.
As for the Innsmouth people--the youth hardly knew what to make of them. They were as furtive and seldom seen as animals that live in burrows, and one could hardly imagine how they passed the time apart from their desultory fishing. Perhaps--judging from the quantities of bootleg liquor they consumed--they lay for most of the daylight hours in an alcoholic stupor. They seemed sullenly banded together in some sort of fellowship and understanding--despising the world as if they had access to other and preferable spheres of entity. Their appearance--especially those staring, unwinking eyes which one never saw shut--was certainly shocking enough; and their voices were disgusting. It was awful to hear them chanting in their churches at night, and especially during their main festivals or revivals, which fell twice a year on April 30th and October 31st.
They were very fond of the water, and swam a great deal in both river and harbour. Swimming races out to Devil Reef were very common, and everyone in sight seemed well able to share in this arduous sport. When one came to think of it, it was generally only rather young people who were seen about in public, and of these the oldest were apt to be the most tainted-looking. When exceptions did occur, they were mostly persons with no trace of aberrancy, like the old clerk at the hotel. One wondered what became of the bulk of the older folk, and whether the “Innsmouth look” were not a strange and insidious disease-phenomenon which increased its hold as years advanced.
Only a very rare affliction, of course, could bring about such vast and radical anatomical changes in a single individual after maturity--changes involving osseous factors as basic as the shape of the skull--but then, even this aspect was no more baffling and unheard-of than the visible features of the malady as a whole. It would be hard, the youth implied, to form any real conclusions regarding such a matter; since one never came to know the natives personally no matter how long one might live in Innsmouth.
The youth was certain that many specimens even worse than the worst visible ones were kept locked indoors in some places. People sometimes heard the queerest kind of sounds. The tottering waterfront hovels north of the river were reputedly connected by hidden tunnels, being thus a veritable warren of unseen abnormalities. What kind of foreign blood--if any--these beings had, it was impossible to tell. They sometimes kept certain especially repulsive characters out of sight when government agents and others from the outside world came to town.
It would be of no use, my informant said, to ask the natives anything about the place. The only one who would talk was a very aged but normal-looking man who lived at the poorhouse on the north rim of the town and spent his time walking about or lounging around the fire station. This hoary character, Zadok Allen, was ninety-six years old and somewhat touched in the head, besides being the town drunkard. He was a strange, furtive creature who constantly looked over his shoulder as if afraid of something, and when sober could not be persuaded to talk at all with strangers. He was, however, unable to resist any offer of his favourite poison; and once drunk would furnish the most astonishing fragments of whispered reminiscence.

After all, though, little useful data could be gained from him; since his stories were all insane, incomplete hints of impossible marvels and horrors which could have no source save in his own disordered fancy. Nobody ever believed him, but the natives did not like him to drink and talk with strangers; and it was not always safe to be seen questioning him. It was probably from him that some of the wildest popular whispers and delusions were derived.
Several non-native residents had reported monstrous glimpses from time to time, but between old Zadok’s tales and the malformed denizens it was no wonder such illusions were current. None of the non-natives ever stayed out late at night, there being a widespread impression that it was not wise to do so. Besides, the streets were loathsomely dark.
As for business--the abundance of fish was certainly almost uncanny, but the natives were taking less and less advantage of it. Moreover, prices were falling and competition was growing. Of course the town’s real business was the refinery, whose commercial office was on the square only a few doors east of where we stood. Old Man Marsh was never seen, but sometimes went to the works in a closed, curtained car.
There were all sorts of rumours about how Marsh had come to look. He had once been a great dandy, and people said he still wore the frock-coated finery of the Edwardian age, curiously adapted to certain deformities. His sons had formerly conducted the office in the square, but latterly they had been keeping out of sight a good deal and leaving the brunt of affairs to the younger generation. The sons and their sisters had come to look very queer, especially the elder ones; and it was said that their health was failing.
One of the Marsh daughters was a repellent, reptilian-looking woman who wore an excess of weird jewellery clearly of the same exotic tradition as that to which the strange tiara belonged. My informant had noticed it many times, and had heard it spoken of as coming from some secret hoard, either of pirates or of daemons. The clergymen--or priests, or whatever they were called nowadays--also wore this kind of ornament as a head-dress; but one seldom caught glimpses of them. Other specimens the youth had not seen, though many were rumoured to exist around Innsmouth.
The Marshes, together with the other three gently bred families of the town--the Waites, the Gilmans, and the Eliots--were all very retiring. They lived in immense houses along Washington Street, and several were reputed to harbour in concealment certain living kinsfolk whose personal aspect forbade public view, and whose deaths had been reported and recorded.
Warning me that many of the street signs were down, the youth drew for my benefit a rough but ample and painstaking sketch map of the town’s salient features. After a moment’s study I felt sure that it would be of great help, and pocketed it with profuse thanks. Disliking the dinginess of the single restaurant I had seen, I bought a fair supply of cheese crackers and ginger wafers to serve as a lunch later on. My programme, I decided, would be to thread the principal streets, talk with any non-natives I might encounter, and catch the eight o’clock coach for Arkham. The town, I could see, formed a significant and exaggerated example of communal decay; but being no sociologist I would limit my serious observations to the field of architecture.
Thus I began my systematic though half-bewildered tour of Innsmouth’s narrow, shadow-blighted ways. Crossing the bridge and turning toward the roar of the lower falls, I passed close to the Marsh refinery, which seemed oddly free from the noise of industry. This building stood on the steep river bluff near a bridge and an open confluence of streets which I took to be the earliest civic centre, displaced after the Revolution by the present Town Square.
Re-crossing the gorge on the Main Street bridge, I struck a region of utter desertion which somehow made me shudder. Collapsing huddles of gambrel roofs formed a jagged and fantastic skyline, above which rose the ghoulish, decapitated steeple of an ancient church. Some houses along Main Street were tenanted, but most were tightly boarded up. Down unpaved side streets I saw the black, gaping windows of deserted hovels, many of which leaned at perilous and incredible angles through the sinking of part of the foundations. Those windows stared so spectrally that it took courage to turn eastward toward the waterfront. Certainly, the terror of a deserted house swells in geometrical rather than arithmetical progression as houses multiply to form a city of stark desolation. The sight of such endless avenues of fishy-eyed vacancy and death, and the thought of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given over to cobwebs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigial fears and aversions that not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse.
Fish Street was as deserted as Main, though it differed in having many brick and stone warehouses still in excellent shape. Water Street was almost its duplicate, save that there were great seaward gaps where wharves had been. Not a living thing did I see, except for the scattered fishermen on the distant breakwater, and not a sound did I hear save the lapping of the harbour tides and the roar of the falls in the Manuxet. The town was getting more and more on my nerves, and I looked behind me furtively as I picked my way back over the tottering Water Street bridge. The Fish Street bridge, according to the sketch, was in ruins.
North of the river there were traces of squalid life--active fish-packing houses in Water Street, smoking chimneys and patched roofs here and there, occasional sounds from indeterminate sources, and infrequent shambling forms in the dismal streets and unpaved lanes--but I seemed to find this even more oppressive than the southerly desertion. For one thing, the people were more hideous and abnormal than those near the centre of the town; so that I was several times evilly reminded of something utterly fantastic which I could not quite place. Undoubtedly the alien strain in the Innsmouth folk was stronger here than farther inland--unless, indeed, the “Innsmouth look” were a disease rather than a blood strain, in which case this district might be held to harbour the more advanced cases.
One detail that annoyed me was the distribution of the few faint sounds I heard. They ought naturally to have come wholly from the visibly inhabited houses, yet in reality were often strongest inside the most rigidly boarded-up facades. There were creakings, scurryings, and hoarse doubtful noises; and I thought uncomfortably about the hidden tunnels suggested by the grocery boy. Suddenly I found myself wondering what the voices of those denizens would be like. I had heard no speech so far in this quarter, and was unaccountably anxious not to do so.

Pausing only long enough to look at two fine but ruinous old churches at Main and Church Streets, I hastened out of that vile waterfront slum. My next logical goal was New Church Green, but somehow or other I could not bear to repass the church in whose basement I had glimpsed the inexplicably frightening form of that strangely diademed priest or pastor. Besides, the grocery youth had told me that the churches, as well as the Order of Dagon Hall, were not advisable neighbourhoods for strangers.
Accordingly I kept north along Main to Martin, then turning inland, crossing Federal Street safely north of the Green, and entering the decayed patrician neighbourhood of northern Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams Streets. Though these stately old avenues were ill-surfaced and unkempt, their elm-shaded dignity had not entirely departed. Mansion after mansion claimed my gaze, most of them decrepit and boarded up amidst neglected grounds, but one or two in each street shewing signs of occupancy. In Washington Street there was a row of four or five in excellent repair and with finely tended lawns and gardens. The most sumptuous of these--with wide terraced parterres extending back the whole way to Lafayette Street--I took to be the home of Old Man Marsh, the afflicted refinery owner.
In all these streets no living thing was visible, and I wondered at the complete absense of cats and dogs from Innsmouth. Another thing which puzzled and disturbed me, even in some of the best-preserved mansions, was the tightly shuttered condition of many third-story and attic windows. Furtiveness and secretiveness seemed universal in this hushed city of alienage and death, and I could not escape the sensation of being watched from ambush on every hand by sly, staring eyes that never shut.
I shivered as the cracked stroke of three sounded from a belfry on my left. Too well did I recall the squat church from which those notes came. Following Washington Street toward the river, I now faced a new zone of former industry and commerce; noting the ruins of a factory ahead, and seeing others, with the traces of an old railway station and covered railway bridge beyond, up the gorge on my right.
The uncertain bridge now before me was posted with a warning sign, but I took the risk and crossed again to the south bank where traces of life reappeared. Furtive, shambling creatures stared cryptically in my direction, and more normal faces eyed me coldly and curiously. Innsmouth was rapidly becoming intolerable, and I turned down Paine Street toward the Square in the hope of getting some vehicle to take me to Arkham before the still-distant starting-time of that sinister bus.
It was then that I saw the tumbledown fire station on my left, and noticed the red-faced, bushy-bearded, watery-eyed old man in nondescript rags who sat on a bench in front of it talking with a pair of unkempt but not abnormal-looking firemen. This, of course, must be Zadok Allen, the half-crazed, liquorish nonagenarian whose tales of old Innsmouth and its shadow were so hideous and incredible.

III.

It must have been some imp of the perverse--or some sardonic pull from dark, hidden sources--which made me change my plans as I did. I had long before resolved to limit my observations to architecture alone, and I was even then hurrying toward the Square in an effort to get quick transportation out of this festering city of death and decay; but the sight of old Zadok Allen set up new currents in my mind and made me slacken my pace uncertainly. I had been assured that the old man could do nothing but hint at wild, disjointed, and incredible legends, and I had been warned that the natives made it unsafe to be seen talking to him; yet the thought of this aged witness to the town’s decay, with memories going back to the early days of ships and factories, was a lure that no amount of reason could make me resist. After all, the strangest and maddest of myths are often merely symbols or allegories based upon truth--and old Zadok must have seen everything which went on around Innsmouth for the last ninety years. Curiosity flared up beyond sense and caution, and in my youthful egotism I fancied I might be able to sift a nucleus of real history from the confused, extravagant outpouring I would probably extract with the aid of raw whiskey. I knew that I could not accost him then and there, for the firemen would surely notice and object. Instead, I reflected, I would prepare by getting some bootleg liquor at a place where the grocery boy had told me it was plentiful. Then I would loaf near the fire station in apparent casualness, and fall in with old Zadok after he had started on one of his frequent rambles. The youth said that he was very restless, seldom sitting around the station for more than an hour or two at a time. A quart bottle of whiskey was easily, though not cheaply, obtained in the rear of a dingy variety-store just off the Square in Eliot Street. The dirty-looking fellow who waited on me had a touch of the staring “Innsmouth look”, but was quite civil in his way; being perhaps used to the custom of such convivial strangers--truckmen, gold-buyers, and the like--as were occasionally in town. Reëntering the Square I saw that luck was with me; for--shuffling out of Paine Street around the corner of the Gilman House--I glimpsed nothing less than the tall, lean, tattered form of old Zadok Allen himself. In accordance with my plan, I attracted his attention by brandishing my newly purchased bottle; and soon realised that he had begun to shuffle wistfully after me as I turned into Waite Street on my way to the most deserted region I could think of. I was steering my course by the map the grocery boy had prepared, and was aiming for the wholly abandoned stretch of southern waterfront which I had previously visited. The only people in sight there had been the fishermen on the distant breakwater; and by going a few squares south I could get beyond the range of these, finding a pair of seats on some abandoned wharf and being free to question old Zadok unobserved for an indefinite time. Before I reached Main Street I could hear a faint and wheezy “Hey, Mister!” behind me, and I presently allowed the old man to catch up and take copious pulls from the quart bottle. I began putting out feelers as we walked along to Water Street and turned southward amidst the omnipresent desolation and crazily tilted ruins, but found that the aged tongue did not loosen as quickly as I had expected. At length I saw a grass-grown opening toward the sea between crumbling brick walls, with the weedy length of an earth-and-masonry wharf projecting beyond. Piles of moss-covered stones near the water promised tolerable seats, and the scene was sheltered from all possible view by a ruined warehouse on the north. Here, I thought, was the ideal place for a long secret colloquy; so I guided my companion down the lane and picked out spots to sit in among the mossy stones. The air of death and desertion was ghoulish, and the smell of fish almost insufferable; but I was resolved to let nothing deter me.

About four hours remained for conversation if I were to catch the eight o’clock coach for Arkham, and I began to dole out more liquor to the ancient tippler; meanwhile eating my own frugal lunch. In my donations I was careful not to overshoot the mark, for I did not wish Zadok’s vinous garrulousness to pass into a stupor. After an hour his furtive taciturnity shewed signs of disappearing, but much to my disappointment he still sidetracked my questions about Innsmouth and its shadow-haunted past. He would babble of current topics, revealing a wide acquaintance with newspapers and a great tendency to philosophise in a sententious village fashion.
Toward the end of the second hour I feared my quart of whiskey would not be enough to produce results, and was wondering whether I had better leave old Zadok and go back for more. Just then, however, chance made the opening which my questions had been unable to make; and the wheezing ancient’s rambling took a turn that caused me to lean forward and listen alertly. My back was toward the fishy-smelling sea, but he was facing it, and something or other had caused his wandering gaze to light on the low, distant line of Devil Reef, then shewing plainly and almost fascinatingly above the waves. The sight seemed to displease him, for he began a series of weak curses which ended in a confidential whisper and a knowing leer. He bent toward me, took hold of my coat lapel, and hissed out some hints that could not be mistaken.
“Thar’s whar it all begun--that cursed place of all wickedness whar the deep water starts. Gate o’ hell--sheer drop daown to a bottom no saoundin’-line kin tech. Ol’ Cap’n Obed done it--him that faound aout more’n was good fer him in the Saouth Sea islands.
“Everybody was in a bad way them days. Trade fallin’ off, mills losin’ business--even the new ones--an’ the best of our menfolks kilt a-privateerin’ in the War of 1812 or lost with the Elizy brig an’ the Ranger snow--both of ’em Gilman venters. Obed Marsh he had three ships afloat--brigantine Columby, brig Hetty, an’ barque Sumatry Queen. He was the only one as kep’ on with the East-Injy an’ Pacific trade, though Esdras Martin’s barkentine Malay Pride made a venter as late as ’twenty-eight.
“Never was nobody like Cap’n Obed--old limb o’ Satan! Heh, heh! I kin mind him a-tellin’ abaout furren parts, an’ callin’ all the folks stupid fer goin’ to Christian meetin’ an’ bearin’ their burdens meek an’ lowly. Says they’d orter git better gods like some o’ the folks in the Injies--gods as ud bring ’em good fishin’ in return for their sacrifices, an’ ud reely answer folks’s prayers.
“Matt Eliot, his fust mate, talked a lot, too, only he was agin’ folks’s doin’ any heathen things. Told abaout an island east of Otaheité whar they was a lot o’ stone ruins older’n anybody knew anything abaout, kind o’ like them on Ponape, in the Carolines, but with carvin’s of faces that looked like the big statues on Easter Island. They was a little volcanic island near thar, too, whar they was other ruins with diff’rent carvin’s--ruins all wore away like they’d ben under the sea onct, an’ with picters of awful monsters all over ’em.
“Wal, Sir, Matt he says the natives araound thar had all the fish they cud ketch, an’ sported bracelets an’ armlets an’ head rigs made aout of a queer kind o’ gold an’ covered with picters o’ monsters jest like the ones carved over the ruins on the little island--sorter fish-like frogs or frog-like fishes that was drawed in all kinds o’ positions like they was human bein’s. Nobody cud git aout o’ them whar they got all the stuff, an’ all the other natives wondered haow they managed to find fish in plenty even when the very next islands had lean pickin’s. Matt he got to wonderin’ too, an’ so did Cap’n Obed. Obed he notices, besides, that lots of the han’some young folks ud drop aout o’ sight fer good from year to year, an’ that they wa’n’t many old folks araound. Also, he thinks some of the folks looks durned queer even fer Kanakys.
“It took Obed to git the truth aout o’ them heathen. I dun’t know haow he done it, but he begun by tradin’ fer the gold-like things they wore. Ast ’em whar they come from, an’ ef they cud git more, an’ finally wormed the story aout o’ the old chief--Walakea, they called him. Nobody but Obed ud ever a believed the old yeller devil, but the Cap’n cud read folks like they was books. Heh, heh! Nobody never believes me naow when I tell ’em, an’ I dun’t s’pose you will, young feller--though come to look at ye, ye hev kind o’ got them sharp-readin’ eyes like Obed had.”
The old man’s whisper grew fainter, and I found myself shuddering at the terrible and sincere portentousness of his intonation, even though I knew his tale could be nothing but drunken phantasy.
“Wal, Sir, Obed he larnt that they’s things on this arth as most folks never heerd abaout--an’ wouldn’t believe ef they did hear. It seems these Kanakys was sacrificin’ heaps o’ their young men an’ maidens to some kind o’ god-things that lived under the sea, an’ gittin’ all kinds o’ favour in return. They met the things on the little islet with the queer ruins, an’ it seems them awful picters o’ frog-fish monsters was supposed to be picters o’ these things. Mebbe they was the kind o’ critters as got all the mermaid stories an’ sech started. They had all kinds o’ cities on the sea-bottom, an’ this island was heaved up from thar. Seems they was some of the things alive in the stone buildin’s when the island come up sudden to the surface. That’s haow the Kanakys got wind they was daown thar. Made sign-talk as soon as they got over bein’ skeert, an’ pieced up a bargain afore long.
“Them things liked human sacrifices. Had had ’em ages afore, but lost track o’ the upper world arter a time. What they done to the victims it ain’t fer me to say, an’ I guess Obed wa’n’t none too sharp abaout askin’. But it was all right with the heathens, because they’d ben havin’ a hard time an’ was desp’rate abaout everything. They give a sarten number o’ young folks to the sea-things twict every year--May-Eve an’ Hallowe’en--reg’lar as cud be. Also give some o’ the carved knick-knacks they made. What the things agreed to give in return was plenty o’ fish--they druv ’em in from all over the sea--an’ a few gold-like things naow an’ then.

lol

“Wal, as I says, the natives met the things on the little volcanic islet--goin’ thar in canoes with the sacrifices et cet’ry, and bringin’ back any of the gold-like jools as was comin’ to ’em. At fust the things didn’t never go onto the main island, but arter a time they come to want to. Seems they hankered arter mixin’ with the folks, an’ havin’ j’int ceremonies on the big days--May-Eve an’ Hallowe’en. Ye see, they was able to live both in an’ aout o’ water--what they call amphibians, I guess. The Kanakys told ’em as haow folks from the other islands might wanta wipe ’em aout ef they got wind o’ their bein’ thar, but they says they dun’t keer much, because they cud wipe aout the hull brood o’ humans ef they was willin’ to bother--that is, any as didn’t hev sarten signs sech as was used onct by the lost Old Ones, whoever they was. But not wantin’ to bother, they’d lay low when anybody visited the island.
“When it come to matin’ with them toad-lookin’ fishes, the Kanakys kind o’ balked, but finally they larnt something as put a new face on the matter. Seems that human folks has got a kind o’ relation to sech water-beasts--that everything alive come aout o’ the water onct, an’ only needs a little change to go back agin. Them things told the Kanakys that ef they mixed bloods there’d be children as ud look human at fust, but later turn more’n more like the things, till finally they’d take to the water an’ jine the main lot o’ things daown thar. An’ this is the important part, young feller--them as turned into fish things an’ went into the water wouldn’t never die. Them things never died excep’ they was kilt violent.
“Wal, Sir, it seems by the time Obed knowed them islanders they was all full o’ fish blood from them deep-water things. When they got old an’ begun to shew it, they was kep’ hid until they felt like takin’ to the water an’ quittin’ the place. Some was more teched than others, an’ some never did change quite enough to take to the water; but mostly they turned aout jest the way them things said. Them as was born more like the things changed arly, but them as was nearly human sometimes stayed on the island till they was past seventy, though they’d usually go daown under fer trial trips afore that. Folks as had took to the water gen’rally come back a good deal to visit, so’s a man ud often be a-talkin’ to his own five-times-great-grandfather, who’d left the dry land a couple o’ hundred years or so afore.
“Everybody got aout o’ the idee o’ dyin’--excep’ in canoe wars with the other islanders, or as sacrifices to the sea-gods daown below, or from snake-bite or plague or sharp gallopin’ ailments or somethin’ afore they cud take to the water--but simply looked forrad to a kind o’ change that wa’n’t a bit horrible arter a while. They thought what they’d got was well wuth all they’d had to give up--an’ I guess Obed kind o’ come to think the same hisself when he’d chewed over old Walakea’s story a bit. Walakea, though, was one of the few as hadn’t got none of the fish blood--bein’ of a royal line that intermarried with royal lines on other islands.
“Walakea he shewed Obed a lot o’ rites an’ incantations as had to do with the sea-things, an’ let him see some o’ the folks in the village as had changed a lot from human shape. Somehaow or other, though, he never would let him see one of the reg’lar things from right aout o’ the water. In the end he give him a funny kind o’ thingumajig made aout o’ lead or something, that he said ud bring up the fish things from any place in the water whar they might be a nest of ’em. The idee was to drop it daown with the right kind o’ prayers an’ sech. Walakea allaowed as the things was scattered all over the world, so’s anybody that looked abaout cud find a nest an’ bring ’em up ef they was wanted.
“Matt he didn’t like this business at all, an’ wanted Obed shud keep away from the island; but the Cap’n was sharp fer gain, an’ faound he cud git them gold-like things so cheap it ud pay him to make a specialty of ’em. Things went on that way fer years, an’ Obed got enough o’ that gold-like stuff to make him start the refinery in Waite’s old run-daown fullin’ mill. He didn’t dass sell the pieces like they was, fer folks ud be all the time askin’ questions. All the same his crews ud git a piece an’ dispose of it naow and then, even though they was swore to keep quiet; an’ he let his women-folks wear some o’ the pieces as was more human-like than most.
“Wal, come abaout ’thutty-eight--when I was seven year’ old--Obed he faound the island people all wiped aout between v’yages. Seems the other islanders had got wind o’ what was goin’ on, an’ had took matters into their own hands. S’pose they musta had, arter all, them old magic signs as the sea-things says was the only things they was afeard of. No tellin’ what any o’ them Kanakys will chance to git a holt of when the sea-bottom throws up some island with ruins older’n the deluge. Pious cusses, these was--they didn’t leave nothin’ standin’ on either the main island or the little volcanic islet excep’ what parts of the ruins was too big to knock daown. In some places they was little stones strewed abaout--like charms--with somethin’ on ’em like what ye call a swastika naowadays. Prob’ly them was the Old Ones’ signs. Folks all wiped aout, no trace o’ no gold-like things, an’ none o’ the nearby Kanakys ud breathe a word abaout the matter. Wouldn’t even admit they’d ever ben any people on that island.
“That naturally hit Obed pretty hard, seein’ as his normal trade was doin’ very poor. It hit the whole of Innsmouth, too, because in seafarin’ days what profited the master of a ship gen’lly profited the crew proportionate. Most o’ the folks araound the taown took the hard times kind o’ sheep-like an’ resigned, but they was in bad shape because the fishin’ was peterin’ aout an’ the mills wa’n’t doin’ none too well.
“Then’s the time Obed he begun a-cursin’ at the folks fer bein’ dull sheep an’ prayin’ to a Christian heaven as didn’t help ’em none. He told ’em he’d knowed of folks as prayed to gods that give somethin’ ye reely need, an’ says ef a good bunch o’ men ud stand by him, he cud mebbe git a holt o’ sarten paowers as ud bring plenty o’ fish an’ quite a bit o’ gold. O’ course them as sarved on the Sumatry Queen an’ seed the island knowed what he meant, an’ wa’n’t none too anxious to git clost to sea-things like they’d heerd tell on, but them as didn’t know what ’twas all abaout got kind o’ swayed by what Obed had to say, an’ begun to ast him what he cud do to set ’em on the way to the faith as ud bring ’em results.”

Here the old man faltered, mumbled, and lapsed into a moody and apprehensive silence; glancing nervously over his shoulder and then turning back to stare fascinatedly at the distant black reef. When I spoke to him he did not answer, so I knew I would have to let him finish the bottle. The insane yarn I was hearing interested me profoundly, for I fancied there was contained within it a sort of crude allegory based upon the strangenesses of Innsmouth and elaborated by an imagination at once creative and full of scraps of exotic legend. Not for a moment did I believe that the tale had any really substantial foundation; but none the less the account held a hint of genuine terror, if only because it brought in references to strange jewels clearly akin to the malign tiara I had seen at Newburyport. Perhaps the ornaments had, after all, come from some strange island; and possibly the wild stories were lies of the bygone Obed himself rather than of this antique toper.
I handed Zadok the bottle, and he drained it to the last drop. It was curious how he could stand so much whiskey, for not even a trace of thickness had come into his high, wheezy voice. He licked the nose of the bottle and slipped it into his pocket, then beginning to nod and whisper softly to himself. I bent close to catch any articulate words he might utter, and thought I saw a sardonic smile behind the stained, bushy whiskers. Yes--he was really forming words, and I could grasp a fair proportion of them.
“Poor Matt--Matt he allus was agin’ it--tried to line up the folks on his side, an’ had long talks with the preachers--no use--they run the Congregational parson aout o’ taown, an’ the Methodist feller quit--never did see Resolved Babcock, the Baptist parson, agin--Wrath o’ Jehovy--I was a mighty little critter, but I heerd what I heerd an’ seen what I seen--Dagon an’ Ashtoreth--Belial an’ Beëlzebub--Golden Caff an’ the idols o’ Canaan an’ the Philistines--Babylonish abominations--Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin--”
He stopped again, and from the look in his watery blue eyes I feared he was close to a stupor after all. But when I gently shook his shoulder he turned on me with astonishing alertness and snapped out some more obscure phrases.
“Dun’t believe me, hey? Heh, heh, heh--then jest tell me, young feller, why Cap’n Obed an’ twenty odd other folks used to row aout to Devil Reef in the dead o’ night an’ chant things so laoud ye cud hear ’em all over taown when the wind was right? Tell me that, hey? An’ tell me why Obed was allus droppin’ heavy things daown into the deep water t’other side o’ the reef whar the bottom shoots daown like a cliff lower’n ye kin saound? Tell me what he done with that funny-shaped lead thingumajig as Walakea give him? Hey, boy? An’ what did they all haowl on May-Eve, an’ agin the next Hallowe’en? An’ why’d the new church parsons--fellers as used to be sailors--wear them queer robes an’ cover theirselves with them gold-like things Obed brung? Hey?”
The watery blue eyes were almost savage and maniacal now, and the dirty white beard bristled electrically. Old Zadok probably saw me shrink back, for he had begun to cackle evilly.
“Heh, heh, heh, heh! Beginnin’ to see, hey? Mebbe ye’d like to a ben me in them days, when I seed things at night aout to sea from the cupalo top o’ my haouse. Oh, I kin tell ye, little pitchers hev big ears, an’ I wa’n’t missin’ nothin’ o’ what was gossiped abaout Cap’n Obed an’ the folks aout to the reef! Heh, heh, heh! Haow abaout the night I took my pa’s ship’s glass up to the cupalo an’ seed the reef a-bristlin’ thick with shapes that dove off quick soon’s the moon riz? Obed an’ the folks was in a dory, but them shapes dove off the far side into the deep water an’ never come up. . . . Haow’d ye like to be a little shaver alone up in a cupalo a-watchin’ shapes as wa’n’t human shapes? . . . Hey? . . . Heh, heh, heh, heh. . . .”
The old man was getting hysterical, and I began to shiver with a nameless alarm. He laid a gnarled claw on my shoulder, and it seemed to me that its shaking was not altogether that of mirth.
“S’pose one night ye seed somethin’ heavy heaved offen Obed’s dory beyond the reef, an’ then larned nex’ day a young feller was missin’ from home? Hey? Did anybody ever see hide or hair o’ Hiram Gilman agin? Did they? An’ Nick Pierce, an’ Luelly Waite, an’ Adoniram Saouthwick, an’ Henry Garrison? Hey? Heh, heh, heh, heh. . . . Shapes talkin’ sign language with their hands . . . them as had reel hands. . . .
“Wal, Sir, that was the time Obed begun to git on his feet agin. Folks see his three darters a-wearin’ gold-like things as nobody’d never see on ’em afore, an’ smoke started comin’ aout o’ the refin’ry chimbly. Other folks were prosp’rin’, too--fish begun to swarm into the harbour fit to kill, an’ heaven knows what sized cargoes we begun to ship aout to Newb’ryport, Arkham, an’ Boston. ’Twas then Obed got the ol’ branch railrud put through. Some Kingsport fishermen heerd abaout the ketch an’ come up in sloops, but they was all lost. Nobody never see ’em agin. An’ jest then our folks organised the Esoteric Order o’ Dagon, an’ bought Masonic Hall offen Calvary Commandery for it . . . heh, heh, heh! Matt Eliot was a Mason an’ agin’ the sellin’, but he dropped aout o’ sight jest then.
“Remember, I ain’t sayin’ Obed was set on hevin’ things jest like they was on that Kanaky isle. I dun’t think he aimed at fust to do no mixin’, nor raise no younguns to take to the water an’ turn into fishes with eternal life. He wanted them gold things, an’ was willin’ to pay heavy, an’ I guess the others was satisfied fer a while. . . .
“Come in ’forty-six the taown done some lookin’ an’ thinkin’ fer itself. Too many folks missin’--too much wild preachin’ at meetin’ of a Sunday--too much talk abaout that reef. I guess I done a bit by tellin’ Selectman Mowry what I see from the cupalo. They was a party one night as follered Obed’s craowd aout to the reef, an’ I heerd shots betwixt the dories. Nex’ day Obed an’ thutty-two others was in gaol, with everbody a-wonderin’ jest what was afoot an’ jest what charge agin’ ’em cud be got to holt. God, ef anybody’d look’d ahead . . . a couple o’ weeks later, when nothin’ had ben throwed into the sea fer that long. . . .”

Zadok was shewing signs of fright and exhaustion, and I let him keep silence for a while, though glancing apprehensively at my watch. The tide had turned and was coming in now, and the sound of the waves seemed to arouse him. I was glad of that tide, for at high water the fishy smell might not be so bad. Again I strained to catch his whispers.
“That awful night . . . I seed ’em . . . I was up in the cupalo . . . hordes of ’em . . . swarms of ’em . . . all over the reef an’ swimmin’ up the harbour into the Manuxet. . . . God, what happened in the streets of Innsmouth that night . . . they rattled our door, but pa wouldn’t open . . . then he clumb aout the kitchen winder with his musket to find Selectman Mowry an’ see what he cud do. . . . Maounds o’ the dead an’ the dyin’ . . . shots an’ screams . . . shaoutin’ in Ol’ Squar an’ Taown Squar an’ New Church Green . . . gaol throwed open . . . proclamation . . . treason . . . called it the plague when folks come in an’ faound haff our people missin’ . . . nobody left but them as ud jine in with Obed an’ them things or else keep quiet . . . never heerd o’ my pa no more. . . .”
The old man was panting, and perspiring profusely. His grip on my shoulder tightened.
“Everything cleaned up in the mornin’--but they was traces. . . . Obed he kinder takes charge an’ says things is goin’ to be changed . . . others’ll worship with us at meetin’-time, an’ sarten haouses hez got to entertain guests . . . they wanted to mix like they done with the Kanakys, an’ he fer one didn’t feel baound to stop ’em. Far gone, was Obed . . . jest like a crazy man on the subjeck. He says they brung us fish an’ treasure, an’ shud hev what they hankered arter. . . .
“Nothin’ was to be diff’runt on the aoutside, only we was to keep shy o’ strangers ef we knowed what was good fer us. We all hed to take the Oath o’ Dagon, an’ later on they was secon’ an’ third Oaths that some on us took. Them as ud help special, ud git special rewards--gold an’ sech-- No use balkin’, fer they was millions of ’em daown thar. They’d ruther not start risin’ an’ wipin’ aout humankind, but ef they was gave away an’ forced to, they cud do a lot toward jest that. We didn’t hev them old charms to cut ’em off like folks in the Saouth Sea did, an’ them Kanakys wudn’t never give away their secrets.
“Yield up enough sacrifices an’ savage knick-knacks an’ harbourage in the taown when they wanted it, an’ they’d let well enough alone. Wudn’t bother no strangers as might bear tales aoutside--that is, withaout they got pryin’. All in the band of the faithful--Order o’ Dagon--an’ the children shud never die, but go back to the Mother Hydra an’ Father Dagon what we all come from onct--Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah-nagl fhtagn--”
Old Zadok was fast lapsing into stark raving, and I held my breath. Poor old soul--to what pitiful depths of hallucination had his liquor, plus his hatred of the decay, alienage, and disease around him, brought that fertile, imaginative brain! He began to moan now, and tears were coursing down his channelled cheeks into the depths of his beard.
“God, what I seen senct I was fifteen year’ old--Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin!--the folks as was missin’, an’ them as kilt theirselves--them as told things in Arkham or Ipswich or sech places was all called crazy, like you’re a-callin’ me right naow--but God, what I seen-- They’d a kilt me long ago fer what I know, only I’d took the fust an’ secon’ Oaths o’ Dagon offen Obed, so was pertected unlessen a jury of ’em proved I told things knowin’ an’ delib’rit . . . but I wudn’t take the third Oath--I’d a died ruther’n take that--
“It got wuss araound Civil War time, when children born senct ’forty-six begun to grow up--some of ’em, that is. I was afeard--never did no pryin’ arter that awful night, an’ never see one of--them--clost to in all my life. That is, never no full-blooded one. I went to the war, an’ ef I’d a had any guts or sense I’d a never come back, but settled away from here. But folks wrote me things wa’n’t so bad. That, I s’pose, was because gov’munt draft men was in taown arter ’sixty-three. Arter the war it was jest as bad agin. People begun to fall off--mills an’ shops shet daown--shippin’ stopped an’ the harbour choked up--railrud give up--but they . . . they never stopped swimmin’ in an’ aout o’ the river from that cursed reef o’ Satan--an’ more an’ more attic winders got a-boarded up, an’ more an’ more noises was heerd in haouses as wa’n’t s’posed to hev nobody in ’em. . . .
“Folks aoutside hev their stories abaout us--s’pose you’ve heerd a plenty on ’em, seein’ what questions ye ast--stories abaout things they’ve seed naow an’ then, an’ abaout that queer joolry as still comes in from somewhars an’ ain’t quite all melted up--but nothin’ never gits def’nite. Nobody’ll believe nothin’. They call them gold-like things pirate loot, an’ allaow the Innsmouth folks hez furren blood or is distempered or somethin’. Besides, them that lives here shoo off as many strangers as they kin, an’ encourage the rest not to git very cur’ous, specially raound night time. Beasts balk at the critters--hosses wuss’n mules--but when they got autos that was all right.
“In ’forty-six Cap’n Obed took a second wife that nobody in the taown never see--some says he didn’t want to, but was made to by them as he’d called in--had three children by her--two as disappeared young, but one gal as looked like anybody else an’ was eddicated in Europe. Obed finally got her married off by a trick to an Arkham feller as didn’t suspect nothin’. But nobody aoutside’ll hev nothin’ to do with Innsmouth folks naow. Barnabas Marsh that runs the refin’ry naow is Obed’s grandson by his fust wife--son of Onesiphorus, his eldest son, but his mother was another o’ them as wa’n’t never seed aoutdoors.
“Right naow Barnabas is abaout changed. Can’t shet his eyes no more, an’ is all aout o’ shape. They say he still wears clothes, but he’ll take to the water soon. Mebbe he’s tried it already--they do sometimes go daown fer little spells afore they go fer good. Ain’t ben seed abaout in public fer nigh on ten year’. Dun’t know haow his poor wife kin feel--she come from Ipswich, an’ they nigh lynched Barnabas when he courted her fifty odd year’ ago. Obed he died in ’seventy-eight, an’ all the next gen’ration is gone naow--the fust wife’s children dead, an’ the rest . . . God knows. . . .”

The sound of the incoming tide was now very insistent, and little by little it seemed to change the old man’s mood from maudlin tearfulness to watchful fear. He would pause now and then to renew those nervous glances over his shoulder or out toward the reef, and despite the wild absurdity of his tale, I could not help beginning to share his vague apprehensiveness. Zadok now grew shriller, and seemed to be trying to whip up his courage with louder speech.
“Hey, yew, why dun’t ye say somethin’? Haow’d ye like to be livin’ in a taown like this, with everything a-rottin’ an’ a-dyin’, an’ boarded-up monsters crawlin’ an’ bleatin’ an’ barkin’ an’ hoppin’ araoun’ black cellars an’ attics every way ye turn? Hey? Haow’d ye like to hear the haowlin’ night arter night from the churches an’ Order o’ Dagon Hall, an’ know what’s doin’ part o’ the haowlin’? Haow’d ye like to hear what comes from that awful reef every May-Eve an’ Hallowmass? Hey? Think the old man’s crazy, eh? Wal, Sir, let me tell ye that ain’t the wust!”
Zadok was really screaming now, and the mad frenzy of his voice disturbed me more than I care to own.
“Curse ye, dun’t set thar a-starin’ at me with them eyes--I tell Obed Marsh he’s in hell, an’ hez got to stay thar! Heh, heh . . . in hell, I says! Can’t git me--I hain’t done nothin’ nor told nobody nothin’--
“Oh, you, young feller? Wal, even ef I hain’t told nobody nothin’ yet, I’m a-goin’ to naow! You jest set still an’ listen to me, boy--this is what I ain’t never told nobody. . . . I says I didn’t do no pryin’ arter that night--but I faound things aout jest the same!
“Yew want to know what the reel horror is, hey? Wal, it’s this--it ain’t what them fish devils hez done, but what they’re a-goin’ to do! They’re a-bringin’ things up aout o’ whar they come from into the taown--ben doin’ it fer years, an’ slackenin’ up lately. Them haouses north o’ the river betwixt Water an’ Main Streets is full of ’em--them devils an’ what they brung--an’ when they git ready. . . . I say, when they git ready . . . ever hear tell of a shoggoth? . . .
“Hey, d’ye hear me? I tell ye I know what them things be--I seen ’em one night when . . . EH--AHHHH--AH! E’YAAHHHH. . . .”
The hideous suddenness and inhuman frightfulness of the old man’s shriek almost made me faint. His eyes, looking past me toward the malodorous sea, were positively starting from his head; while his face was a mask of fear worthy of Greek tragedy. His bony claw dug monstrously into my shoulder, and he made no motion as I turned my head to look at whatever he had glimpsed.
There was nothing that I could see. Only the incoming tide, with perhaps one set of ripples more local than the long-flung line of breakers. But now Zadok was shaking me, and I turned back to watch the melting of that fear-frozen face into a chaos of twitching eyelids and mumbling gums. Presently his voice came back--albeit as a trembling whisper.
“Git aout o’ here! Git aout o’ here! They seen us--git aout fer your life! Dun’t wait fer nothin’--they know naow-- Run fer it--quick--aout o’ this taown--”
Another heavy wave dashed against the loosening masonry of the bygone wharf, and changed the mad ancient’s whisper to another inhuman and blood-curdling scream.
“E--YAAHHHH! . . . YHAAAAAAA! . . .”
Before I could recover my scattered wits he had relaxed his clutch on my shoulder and dashed wildly inland toward the street, reeling northward around the ruined warehouse wall.
I glanced back at the sea, but there was nothing there. And when I reached Water Street and looked along it toward the north there was no remaining trace of Zadok Allen.

IV.

I can hardly describe the mood in which I was left by this harrowing episode--an episode at once mad and pitiful, grotesque and terrifying. The grocery boy had prepared me for it, yet the reality left me none the less bewildered and disturbed. Puerile though the story was, old Zadok’s insane earnestness and horror had communicated to me a mounting unrest which joined with my earlier sense of loathing for the town and its blight of intangible shadow. Later I might sift the tale and extract some nucleus of historic allegory; just now I wished to put it out of my head. The hour had grown perilously late--my watch said 7:15, and the Arkham bus left Town Square at eight--so I tried to give my thoughts as neutral and practical a cast as possible, meanwhile walking rapidly through the deserted streets of gaping roofs and leaning houses toward the hotel where I had checked my valise and would find my bus. Though the golden light of late afternoon gave the ancient roofs and decrepit chimneys an air of mystic loveliness and peace, I could not help glancing over my shoulder now and then. I would surely be very glad to get out of malodorous and fear-shadowed Innsmouth, and wished there were some other vehicle than the bus driven by that sinister-looking fellow Sargent. Yet I did not hurry too precipitately, for there were architectural details worth viewing at every silent corner; and I could easily, I calculated, cover the necessary distance in a half-hour. Studying the grocery youth’s map and seeking a route I had not traversed before, I chose Marsh Street instead of State for my approach to Town Square. Near the corner of Fall Street I began to see scattered groups of furtive whisperers, and when I finally reached the Square I saw that almost all the loiterers were congregated around the door of the Gilman House. It seemed as if many bulging, watery, unwinking eyes looked oddly at me as I claimed my valise in the lobby, and I hoped that none of these unpleasant creatures would be my fellow-passengers on the coach. The bus, rather early, rattled in with three passengers somewhat before eight, and an evil-looking fellow on the sidewalk muttered a few indistinguishable words to the driver. Sargent threw out a mail-bag and a roll of newspapers, and entered the hotel; while the passengers--the same men whom I had seen arriving in Newburyport that morning--shambled to the sidewalk and exchanged some faint guttural words with a loafer in a language I could have sworn was not English. I boarded the empty coach and took the same seat I had taken before, but was hardly settled before Sargent reappeared and began mumbling in a throaty voice of peculiar repulsiveness. I was, it appeared, in very bad luck. There had been something wrong with the engine, despite the excellent time made from Newburyport, and the bus could not complete the journey to Arkham. No, it could not possibly be repaired that night, nor was there any other way of getting transportation out of Innsmouth, either to Arkham or elsewhere. Sargent was sorry, but I would have to stop over at the Gilman. Probably the clerk would make the price easy for me, but there was nothing else to do. Almost dazed by this sudden obstacle, and violently dreading the fall of night in this decaying and half-unlighted town, I left the bus and reëntered the hotel lobby; where the sullen, queer-looking night clerk told me I could have Room 428 on next the top floor--large, but without running water--for a dollar. Despite what I had heard of this hotel in Newburyport, I signed the register, paid my dollar, let the clerk take my valise, and followed that sour, solitary attendant up three creaking flights of stairs past dusty corridors which seemed wholly devoid of life. My room, a dismal rear one with two windows and bare, cheap furnishings, overlooked a dingy courtyard otherwise hemmed in by low, deserted brick blocks, and commanded a view of decrepit westward-stretching roofs with a marshy countryside beyond. At the end of the corridor was a bathroom--a discouraging relique with ancient marble bowl, tin tub, faint electric light, and musty wooden panelling around all the plumbing fixtures. It being still daylight, I descended to the Square and looked around for a dinner of some sort; noticing as I did so the strange glances I received from the unwholesome loafers. Since the grocery was closed, I was forced to patronise the restaurant I had shunned before; a stooped, narrow-headed man with staring, unwinking eyes, and a flat-nosed wench with unbelievably thick, clumsy hands being in attendance. The service was of the counter type, and it relieved me to find that much was evidently served from cans and packages. A bowl of vegetable soup with crackers was enough for me, and I soon headed back for my cheerless room at the Gilman; getting an evening paper and a flyspecked magazine from the evil-visaged clerk at the rickety stand beside his desk. As twilight deepened I turned on the one feeble electric bulb over the cheap, iron-framed bed, and tried as best I could to continue the reading I had begun. I felt it advisable to keep my mind wholesomely occupied, for it would not do to brood over the abnormalities of this ancient, blight-shadowed town while I was still within its borders. The insane yarn I had heard from the aged drunkard did not promise very pleasant dreams, and I felt I must keep the image of his wild, watery eyes as far as possible from my imagination. Also, I must not dwell on what that factory inspector had told the Newburyport ticket-agent about the Gilman House and the voices of its nocturnal tenants--not on that, nor on the face beneath the tiara in the black church doorway; the face for whose horror my conscious mind could not account. It would perhaps have been easier to keep my thoughts from disturbing topics had the room not been so gruesomely musty. As it was, the lethal mustiness blended hideously with the town’s general fishy odour and persistently focussed one’s fancy on death and decay. Another thing that disturbed me was the absence of a bolt on the door of my room. One had been there, as marks clearly shewed, but there were signs of recent removal. No doubt it had become out of order, like so many other things in this decrepit edifice. In my nervousness I looked around and discovered a bolt on the clothes-press which seemed to be of the same size, judging from the marks, as the one formerly on the door. To gain a partial relief from the general tension I busied myself by transferring this hardware to the vacant place with the aid of a handy three-in-one device including a screw-driver which I kept on my key-ring. The bolt fitted perfectly, and I was somewhat relieved when I knew that I could shoot it firmly upon retiring. Not that I had any real apprehension of its need, but that any symbol of security was welcome in an environment of this kind. There were adequate bolts on the two lateral doors to connecting rooms, and these I proceeded to fasten.

I did not undress, but decided to read till I was sleepy and then lie down with only my coat, collar, and shoes off. Taking a pocket flashlight from my valise, I placed it in my trousers, so that I could read my watch if I woke up later in the dark. Drowsiness, however, did not come; and when I stopped to analyse my thoughts I found to my disquiet that I was really unconsciously listening for something--listening for something which I dreaded but could not name. That inspector’s story must have worked on my imagination more deeply than I had suspected. Again I tried to read, but found that I made no progress.
After a time I seemed to hear the stairs and corridors creak at intervals as if with footsteps, and wondered if the other rooms were beginning to fill up. There were no voices, however, and it struck me that there was something subtly furtive about the creaking. I did not like it, and debated whether I had better try to sleep at all. This town had some queer people, and there had undoubtedly been several disappearances. Was this one of those inns where travellers were slain for their money? Surely I had no look of excessive prosperity. Or were the townsfolk really so resentful about curious visitors? Had my obvious sightseeing, with its frequent map-consultations, aroused unfavourable notice? It occurred to me that I must be in a highly nervous state to let a few random creakings set me off speculating in this fashion--but I regretted none the less that I was unarmed.
At length, feeling a fatigue which had nothing of drowsiness in it, I bolted the newly outfitted hall door, turned off the light, and threw myself down on the hard, uneven bed--coat, collar, shoes, and all. In the darkness every faint noise of the night seemed magnified, and a flood of doubly unpleasant thoughts swept over me. I was sorry I had put out the light, yet was too tired to rise and turn it on again. Then, after a long, dreary interval, and prefaced by a fresh creaking of stairs and corridor, there came that soft, damnably unmistakable sound which seemed like a malign fulfilment of all my apprehensions. Without the least shadow of a doubt, the lock on my hall door was being tried--cautiously, furtively, tentatively--with a key.
My sensations upon recognising this sign of actual peril were perhaps less rather than more tumultuous because of my previous vague fears. I had been, albeit without definite reason, instinctively on my guard--and that was to my advantage in the new and real crisis, whatever it might turn out to be. Nevertheless the change in the menace from vague premonition to immediate reality was a profound shock, and fell upon me with the force of a genuine blow. It never once occurred to me that the fumbling might be a mere mistake. Malign purpose was all I could think of, and I kept deathly quiet, awaiting the would-be intruder’s next move.
After a time the cautious rattling ceased, and I heard the room to the north entered with a pass-key. Then the lock of the connecting door to my room was softly tried. The bolt held, of course, and I heard the floor creak as the prowler left the room. After a moment there came another soft rattling, and I knew that the room to the south of me was being entered. Again a furtive trying of a bolted connecting door, and again a receding creaking. This time the creaking went along the hall and down the stairs, so I knew that the prowler had realised the bolted condition of my doors and was giving up his attempt for a greater or lesser time, as the future would shew.
The readiness with which I fell into a plan of action proves that I must have been subconsciously fearing some menace and considering possible avenues of escape for hours. From the first I felt that the unseen fumbler meant a danger not to be met or dealt with, but only to be fled from as precipitately as possible. The one thing to do was to get out of that hotel alive as quickly as I could, and through some channel other than the front stairs and lobby.
Rising softly and throwing my flashlight on the switch, I sought to light the bulb over my bed in order to choose and pocket some belongings for a swift, valiseless flight. Nothing, however, happened; and I saw that the power had been cut off. Clearly, some cryptic, evil movement was afoot on a large scale--just what, I could not say. As I stood pondering with my hand on the now useless switch I heard a muffled creaking on the floor below, and thought I could barely distinguish voices in conversation. A moment later I felt less sure that the deeper sounds were voices, since the apparent hoarse barkings and loose-syllabled croakings bore so little resemblance to recognised human speech. Then I thought with renewed force of what the factory inspector had heard in the night in this mouldering and pestilential building.
Having filled my pockets with the flashlight’s aid, I put on my hat and tiptoed to the windows to consider chances of descent. Despite the state’s safety regulations there was no fire escape on this side of the hotel, and I saw that my windows commanded only a sheer three-story drop to the cobbled courtyard. On the right and left, however, some ancient brick business blocks abutted on the hotel; their slant roofs coming up to a reasonable jumping distance from my fourth-story level. To reach either of these lines of buildings I would have to be in a room two doors from my own--in one case on the north and in the other case on the south--and my mind instantly set to work calculating what chances I had of making the transfer.
I could not, I decided, risk an emergence into the corridor; where my footsteps would surely be heard, and where the difficulties of entering the desired room would be insuperable. My progress, if it was to be made at all, would have to be through the less solidly built connecting doors of the rooms; the locks and bolts of which I would have to force violently, using my shoulder as a battering-ram whenever they were set against me. This, I thought, would be possible owing to the rickety nature of the house and its fixtures; but I realised I could not do it noiselessly. I would have to count on sheer speed, and the chance of getting to a window before any hostile forces became coördinated enough to open the right door toward me with a pass-key. My own outer door I reinforced by pushing the bureau against it--little by little, in order to make a minimum of sound.
I perceived that my chances were very slender, and was fully prepared for any calamity. Even getting to another roof would not solve the problem, for there would then remain the task of reaching the ground and escaping from the town. One thing in my favour was the deserted and ruinous state of the abutting buildings, and the number of skylights gaping blackly open in each row.

Gathering from the grocery boy’s map that the best route out of town was southward, I glanced first at the connecting door on the south side of the room. It was designed to open in my direction, hence I saw--after drawing the bolt and finding other fastenings in place--it was not a favourable one for forcing. Accordingly abandoning it as a route, I cautiously moved the bedstead against it to hamper any attack which might be made on it later from the next room. The door on the north was hung to open away from me, and this--though a test proved it to be locked or bolted from the other side--I knew must be my route. If I could gain the roofs of the buildings in Paine Street and descend successfully to the ground level, I might perhaps dart through the courtyard and the adjacent or opposite buildings to Washington or Bates--or else emerge in Paine and edge around southward into Washington. In any case, I would aim to strike Washington somehow and get quickly out of the Town Square region. My preference would be to avoid Paine, since the fire station there might be open all night.
As I thought of these things I looked out over the squalid sea of decaying roofs below me, now brightened by the beams of a moon not much past full. On the right the black gash of the river-gorge clove the panorama; abandoned factories and railway station clinging barnacle-like to its sides. Beyond it the rusted railway and the Rowley road led off through a flat, marshy terrain dotted with islets of higher and dryer scrub-grown land. On the left the creek-threaded countryside was nearer, the narrow road to Ipswich gleaming white in the moonlight. I could not see from my side of the hotel the southward route toward Arkham which I had determined to take.
I was irresolutely speculating on when I had better attack the northward door, and on how I could least audibly manage it, when I noticed that the vague noises underfoot had given place to a fresh and heavier creaking of the stairs. A wavering flicker of light shewed through my transom, and the boards of the corridor began to groan with a ponderous load. Muffled sounds of possible vocal origin approached, and at length a firm knock came at my outer door.
For a moment I simply held my breath and waited. Eternities seemed to elapse, and the nauseous fishy odour of my environment seemed to mount suddenly and spectacularly. Then the knocking was repeated--continuously, and with growing insistence. I knew that the time for action had come, and forthwith drew the bolt of the northward connecting door, bracing myself for the task of battering it open. The knocking waxed louder, and I hoped that its volume would cover the sound of my efforts. At last beginning my attempt, I lunged again and again at the thin panelling with my left shoulder, heedless of shock or pain. The door resisted even more than I had expected, but I did not give in. And all the while the clamour at the outer door increased.
Finally the connecting door gave, but with such a crash that I knew those outside must have heard. Instantly the outside knocking became a violent battering, while keys sounded ominously in the hall doors of the rooms on both sides of me. Rushing through the newly opened connexion, I succeeded in bolting the northerly hall door before the lock could be turned; but even as I did so I heard the hall door of the third room--the one from whose window I had hoped to reach the roof below--being tried with a pass-key.
For an instant I felt absolute despair, since my trapping in a chamber with no window egress seemed complete. A wave of almost abnormal horror swept over me, and invested with a terrible but unexplainable singularity the flashlight-glimpsed dust prints made by the intruder who had lately tried my door from this room. Then, with a dazed automatism which persisted despite hopelessness, I made for the next connecting door and performed the blind motion of pushing at it in an effort to get through and--granting that fastenings might be as providentially intact as in this second room--bolt the hall door beyond before the lock could be turned from outside.
Sheer fortunate chance gave me my reprieve--for the connecting door before me was not only unlocked but actually ajar. In a second I was through, and had my right knee and shoulder against a hall door which was visibly opening inward. My pressure took the opener off guard, for the thing shut as I pushed, so that I could slip the well-conditioned bolt as I had done with the other door. As I gained this respite I heard the battering at the two other doors abate, while a confused clatter came from the connecting door I had shielded with the bedstead. Evidently the bulk of my assailants had entered the southerly room and were massing in a lateral attack. But at the same moment a pass-key sounded in the next door to the north, and I knew that a nearer peril was at hand.
The northward connecting door was wide open, but there was no time to think about checking the already turning lock in the hall. All I could do was to shut and bolt the open connecting door, as well as its mate on the opposite side--pushing a bedstead against the one and a bureau against the other, and moving a washstand in front of the hall door. I must, I saw, trust to such makeshift barriers to shield me till I could get out the window and on the roof of the Paine Street block. But even in this acute moment my chief horror was something apart from the immediate weakness of my defences. I was shuddering because not one of my pursuers, despite some hideous pantings, gruntings, and subdued barkings at odd intervals, was uttering an unmuffled or intelligible vocal sound.
As I moved the furniture and rushed toward the windows I heard a frightful scurrying along the corridor toward the room north of me, and perceived that the southward battering had ceased. Plainly, most of my opponents were about to concentrate against the feeble connecting door which they knew must open directly on me. Outside, the moon played on the ridgepole of the block below, and I saw that the jump would be desperately hazardous because of the steep surface on which I must land.
Surveying the conditions, I chose the more southerly of the two windows as my avenue of escape; planning to land on the inner slope of the roof and make for the nearest skylight. Once inside one of the decrepit brick structures I would have to reckon with pursuit; but I hoped to descend and dodge in and out of yawning doorways along the shadowed courtyard, eventually getting to Washington Street and slipping out of town toward the south.
The clatter at the northerly connecting door was now terrific, and I saw that the weak panelling was beginning to splinter. Obviously, the besiegers had brought some ponderous object into play as a battering-ram. The bedstead, however, still held firm; so that I had at least a faint chance of making good my escape. As I opened the window I noticed that it was flanked by heavy velour draperies suspended from a pole by brass rings, and also that there was a large projecting catch for the shutters on the exterior. Seeing a possible means of avoiding the dangerous jump, I yanked at the hangings and brought them down, pole and all; then quickly hooking two of the rings in the shutter catch and flinging the drapery outside. The heavy folds reached fully to the abutting roof, and I saw that the rings and catch would be likely to bear my weight. So, climbing out of the window and down the improvised rope ladder, I left behind me forever the morbid and horror-infested fabric of the Gilman House.

I landed safely on the loose slates of the steep roof, and succeeded in gaining the gaping black skylight without a slip. Glancing up at the window I had left, I observed it was still dark, though far across the crumbling chimneys to the north I could see lights ominously blazing in the Order of Dagon Hall, the Baptist church, and the Congregational church which I recalled so shiveringly. There had seemed to be no one in the courtyard below, and I hoped there would be a chance to get away before the spreading of a general alarm. Flashing my pocket lamp into the skylight, I saw that there were no steps down. The distance was slight, however, so I clambered over the brink and dropped; striking a dusty floor littered with crumbling boxes and barrels. The place was ghoulish-looking, but I was past minding such impressions and made at once for the staircase revealed by my flashlight--after a hasty glance at my watch, which shewed the hour to be 2 a.m. The steps creaked, but seemed tolerably sound; and I raced down past a barn-like second story to the ground floor. The desolation was complete, and only echoes answered my footfalls. At length I reached the lower hall, at one end of which I saw a faint luminous rectangle marking the ruined Paine Street doorway. Heading the other way, I found the back door also open; and darted out and down five stone steps to the grass-grown cobblestones of the courtyard. The moonbeams did not reach down here, but I could just see my way about without using the flashlight. Some of the windows on the Gilman House side were faintly glowing, and I thought I heard confused sounds within. Walking softly over to the Washington Street side I perceived several open doorways, and chose the nearest as my route out. The hallway inside was black, and when I reached the opposite end I saw that the street door was wedged immovably shut. Resolved to try another building, I groped my way back toward the courtyard, but stopped short when close to the doorway. For out of an opened door in the Gilman House a large crowd of doubtful shapes was pouring--lanterns bobbing in the darkness, and horrible croaking voices exchanging low cries in what was certainly not English. The figures moved uncertainly, and I realised to my relief that they did not know where I had gone; but for all that they sent a shiver of horror through my frame. Their features were indistinguishable, but their crouching, shambling gait was abominably repellent. And worst of all, I perceived that one figure was strangely robed, and unmistakably surmounted by a tall tiara of a design altogether too familiar. As the figures spread throughout the courtyard, I felt my fears increase. Suppose I could find no egress from this building on the street side? The fishy odour was detestable, and I wondered I could stand it without fainting. Again groping toward the street, I opened a door off the hall and came upon an empty room with closely shuttered but sashless windows. Fumbling in the rays of my flashlight, I found I could open the shutters; and in another moment had climbed outside and was carefully closing the aperture in its original manner. I was now in Washington Street, and for the moment saw no living thing nor any light save that of the moon. From several directions in the distance, however, I could hear the sound of hoarse voices, of footsteps, and of a curious kind of pattering which did not sound quite like footsteps. Plainly I had no time to lose. The points of the compass were clear to me, and I was glad that all the street-lights were turned off, as is often the custom on strongly moonlit nights in unprosperous rural regions. Some of the sounds came from the south, yet I retained my design of escaping in that direction. There would, I knew, be plenty of deserted doorways to shelter me in case I met any person or group who looked like pursuers. I walked rapidly, softly, and close to the ruined houses. While hatless and dishevelled after my arduous climb, I did not look especially noticeable; and stood a good chance of passing unheeded if forced to encounter any casual wayfarer. At Bates Street I drew into a yawning vestibule while two shambling figures crossed in front of me, but was soon on my way again and approaching the open space where Eliot Street obliquely crosses Washington at the intersection of South. Though I had never seen this space, it had looked dangerous to me on the grocery youth’s map; since the moonlight would have free play there. There was no use trying to evade it, for any alternative course would involve detours of possibly disastrous visibility and delaying effect. The only thing to do was to cross it boldly and openly; imitating the typical shamble of the Innsmouth folk as best I could, and trusting that no one--or at least no pursuer of mine--would be there. Just how fully the pursuit was organised--and indeed, just what its purpose might be--I could form no idea. There seemed to be unusual activity in the town, but I judged that the news of my escape from the Gilman had not yet spread. I would, of course, soon have to shift from Washington to some other southward street; for that party from the hotel would doubtless be after me. I must have left dust prints in that last old building, revealing how I had gained the street. The open space was, as I had expected, strongly moonlit; and I saw the remains of a park-like, iron-railed green in its centre. Fortunately no one was about, though a curious sort of buzz or roar seemed to be increasing in the direction of Town Square. South Street was very wide, leading directly down a slight declivity to the waterfront and commanding a long view out at sea; and I hoped that no one would be glancing up it from afar as I crossed in the bright moonlight. My progress was unimpeded, and no fresh sound arose to hint that I had been spied. Glancing about me, I involuntarily let my pace slacken for a second to take in the sight of the sea, gorgeous in the burning moonlight at the street’s end. Far out beyond the breakwater was the dim, dark line of Devil Reef, and as I glimpsed it I could not help thinking of all the hideous legends I had heard in the last thirty-four hours--legends which portrayed this ragged rock as a veritable gateway to realms of unfathomed horror and inconceivable abnormality. Then, without warning, I saw the intermittent flashes of light on the distant reef. They were definite and unmistakable, and awaked in my mind a blind horror beyond all rational proportion. My muscles tightened for panic flight, held in only by a certain unconscious caution and half-hypnotic fascination. And to make matters worse, there now flashed forth from the lofty cupola of the Gilman House, which loomed up to the northeast behind me, a series of analogous though differently spaced gleams which could be nothing less than an answering signal. Controlling my muscles, and realising afresh how plainly visible I was, I resumed my brisker and feignedly shambling pace; though keeping my eyes on that hellish and ominous reef as long as the opening of South Street gave me a seaward view. What the whole proceeding meant, I could not imagine; unless it involved some strange rite connected with Devil Reef, or unless some party had landed from a ship on that sinister rock. I now bent to the left around the ruinous green; still gazing toward the ocean as it blazed in the spectral summer moonlight, and watching the cryptical flashing of those nameless, unexplainable beacons. It was then that the most horrible impression of all was borne in upon me--the impression which destroyed my last vestige of self-control and set me running frantically southward past the yawning black doorways and fishily staring windows of that deserted nightmare street. For at a closer glance I saw that the moonlit waters between the reef and the shore were far from empty. They were alive with a teeming horde of shapes swimming inward toward the town; and even at my vast distance and in my single moment of perception I could tell that the bobbing heads and flailing arms were alien and aberrant in a way scarcely to be expressed or consciously formulated.

My frantic running ceased before I had covered a block, for at my left I began to hear something like the hue and cry of organised pursuit. There were footsteps and guttural sounds, and a rattling motor wheezed south along Federal Street. In a second all my plans were utterly changed--for if the southward highway were blocked ahead of me, I must clearly find another egress from Innsmouth. I paused and drew into a gaping doorway, reflecting how lucky I was to have left the moonlit open space before these pursuers came down the parallel street.
A second reflection was less comforting. Since the pursuit was down another street, it was plain that the party was not following me directly. It had not seen me, but was simply obeying a general plan of cutting off my escape. This, however, implied that all roads leading out of Innsmouth were similarly patrolled; for the denizens could not have known what route I intended to take. If this were so, I would have to make my retreat across country away from any road; but how could I do that in view of the marshy and creek-riddled nature of all the surrounding region? For a moment my brain reeled--both from sheer hopelessness and from a rapid increase in the omnipresent fishy odour.
Then I thought of the abandoned railway to Rowley, whose solid line of ballasted, weed-grown earth still stretched off to the northwest from the crumbling station on the edge of the river-gorge. There was just a chance that the townsfolk would not think of that; since its brier-choked desertion made it half-impassable, and the unlikeliest of all avenues for a fugitive to choose. I had seen it clearly from my hotel window, and knew about how it lay. Most of its earlier length was uncomfortably visible from the Rowley road, and from high places in the town itself; but one could perhaps crawl inconspicuously through the undergrowth. At any rate, it would form my only chance of deliverance, and there was nothing to do but try it.
Drawing inside the hall of my deserted shelter, I once more consulted the grocery boy’s map with the aid of the flashlight. The immediate problem was how to reach the ancient railway; and I now saw that the safest course was ahead to Babson Street, then west to Lafayette--there edging around but not crossing an open space homologous to the one I had traversed--and subsequently back northward and westward in a zigzagging line through Lafayette, Bates, Adams, and Bank Streets--the latter skirting the river-gorge--to the abandoned and dilapidated station I had seen from my window. My reason for going ahead to Babson was that I wished neither to re-cross the earlier open space nor to begin my westward course along a cross street as broad as South.
Starting once more, I crossed the street to the right-hand side in order to edge around into Babson as inconspicuously as possible. Noises still continued in Federal Street, and as I glanced behind me I thought I saw a gleam of light near the building through which I had escaped. Anxious to leave Washington Street, I broke into a quiet dog-trot, trusting to luck not to encounter any observing eye. Next the corner of Babson Street I saw to my alarm that one of the houses was still inhabited, as attested by curtains at the window; but there were no lights within, and I passed it without disaster.
In Babson Street, which crossed Federal and might thus reveal me to the searchers, I clung as closely as possible to the sagging, uneven buildings; twice pausing in a doorway as the noises behind me momentarily increased. The open space ahead shone wide and desolate under the moon, but my route would not force me to cross it. During my second pause I began to detect a fresh distribution of the vague sounds; and upon looking cautiously out from cover beheld a motor-car darting across the open space, bound outward along Eliot Street, which there intersects both Babson and Lafayette.
As I watched--choked by a sudden rise in the fishy odour after a short abatement--I saw a band of uncouth, crouching shapes loping and shambling in the same direction; and knew that this must be the party guarding the Ipswich road, since that highway forms an extension of Eliot Street. Two of the figures I glimpsed were in voluminous robes, and one wore a peaked diadem which glistened whitely in the moonlight. The gait of this figure was so odd that it sent a chill through me--for it seemed to me the creature was almost hopping.
When the last of the band was out of sight I resumed my progress; darting around the corner into Lafayette Street, and crossing Eliot very hurriedly lest stragglers of the party be still advancing along that thoroughfare. I did hear some croaking and clattering sounds far off toward Town Square, but accomplished the passage without disaster. My greatest dread was in re-crossing broad and moonlit South Street--with its seaward view--and I had to nerve myself for the ordeal. Someone might easily be looking, and possible Eliot Street stragglers could not fail to glimpse me from either of two points. At the last moment I decided I had better slacken my trot and make the crossing as before in the shambling gait of an average Innsmouth native.
When the view of the water again opened out--this time on my right--I was half-determined not to look at it at all. I could not, however, resist; but cast a sidelong glance as I carefully and imitatively shambled toward the protecting shadows ahead. There was no ship visible, as I had half expected there would be. Instead, the first thing which caught my eye was a small rowboat pulling in toward the abandoned wharves and laden with some bulky, tarpaulin-covered object. Its rowers, though distantly and indistinctly seen, were of an especially repellent aspect. Several swimmers were still discernible; while on the far black reef I could see a faint, steady glow unlike the winking beacon visible before, and of a curious colour which I could not precisely identify. Above the slant roofs ahead and to the right there loomed the tall cupola of the Gilman House, but it was completely dark. The fishy odour, dispelled for a moment by some merciful breeze, now closed in again with maddening intensity.

I had not quite crossed the street when I heard a muttering band advancing along Washington from the north. As they reached the broad open space where I had had my first disquieting glimpse of the moonlit water I could see them plainly only a block away--and was horrified by the bestial abnormality of their faces and the dog-like sub-humanness of their crouching gait. One man moved in a positively simian way, with long arms frequently touching the ground; while another figure--robed and tiaraed--seemed to progress in an almost hopping fashion. I judged this party to be the one I had seen in the Gilman’s courtyard--the one, therefore, most closely on my trail. As some of the figures turned to look in my direction I was transfixed with fright, yet managed to preserve the casual, shambling gait I had assumed. To this day I do not know whether they saw me or not. If they did, my stratagem must have deceived them, for they passed on across the moonlit space without varying their course--meanwhile croaking and jabbering in some hateful guttural patois I could not identify.
Once more in shadow, I resumed my former dog-trot past the leaning and decrepit houses that stared blankly into the night. Having crossed to the western sidewalk I rounded the nearest corner into Bates Street, where I kept close to the buildings on the southern side. I passed two houses shewing signs of habitation, one of which had faint lights in upper rooms, yet met with no obstacle. As I turned into Adams Street I felt measurably safer, but received a shock when a man reeled out of a black doorway directly in front of me. He proved, however, too hopelessly drunk to be a menace; so that I reached the dismal ruins of the Bank Street warehouses in safety.
No one was stirring in that dead street beside the river-gorge, and the roar of the waterfalls quite drowned my footsteps. It was a long dog-trot to the ruined station, and the great brick warehouse walls around me seemed somehow more terrifying than the fronts of private houses. At last I saw the ancient arcaded station--or what was left of it--and made directly for the tracks that started from its farther end.
The rails were rusty but mainly intact, and not more than half the ties had rotted away. Walking or running on such a surface was very difficult; but I did my best, and on the whole made very fair time. For some distance the line kept on along the gorge’s brink, but at length I reached the long covered bridge where it crossed the chasm at a dizzy height. The condition of this bridge would determine my next step. 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, barn-like 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 half way 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 grade, and at once veered off into a region increasingly rural and with less and less of Innsmouth’s abhorrent fishy odour. 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 where the weedy growth was somewhat thinner. 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. At the end of the cut it would cross the track and swerve off to a safer distance; but meanwhile I must be exceedingly careful. I was by this time thankfully certain that the railway itself was not patrolled.
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. It undulated too much, and glistened too brightly in the rays of the now westering moon. There was a suggestion of sound, too, though the wind was blowing the other way--a suggestion of bestial scraping and bellowing even worse than the muttering of the parties I had lately overheard.
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.
Whence could come the dense personnel of such a column as I now beheld? Did those ancient, unplumbed warrens teem with a twisted, uncatalogued, and unsuspected life? Or had some unseen ship indeed landed a legion of unknown outsiders on that hellish reef? Who were they? Why were they there? 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 odour again waxed dominant. Had the wind suddenly changed eastward, so that it blew in from the sea and over the town? It must have, I concluded, since I now began to hear shocking guttural murmurs from that hitherto silent direction. There was another sound, too--a kind of wholesale, colossal flopping or pattering which somehow called up images of the most detestable sort. It made me think illogically of that unpleasantly undulating column on the far-off Ipswich road.
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. Thank heaven these creatures employed no dogs for tracking--though perhaps that would have been impossible amidst the omnipresent regional odour. 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? Did they have dogs after all? So far I had seen none of the lower animals in Innsmouth. 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? Such places have strange properties, and the legacy of insane legend might well have acted on more than one human imagination amidst those dead, stench-cursed streets and huddles of rotting roofs and crumbling steeples. Is it not possible that the germ of an actual contagious madness lurks in the depths of that shadow over Innsmouth? Who can be sure of reality after hearing things like the tale of old Zadok Allen? The government men never found poor Zadok, and have no conjectures to make as to what became of him. Where does madness leave off and reality begin? Is it possible that even my latest fear is sheer delusion?
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?
I thought I was prepared for the worst, and I really ought to have been prepared considering what I had seen before. My other pursuers had been accursedly abnormal--so should I not have been ready to face a strengthening of the abnormal element; to look upon forms in which there was no mixture of the normal at all? I did not open my eyes until the raucous clamour came loudly from a point obviously straight ahead. Then 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 shew.
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. Nothing that I could have imagined--nothing, even, that I could have gathered had I credited old Zadok’s crazy tale in the most literal way--would be in any way comparable to the daemoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw--or believe I saw. I have tried to hint what it was in order to postpone the horror of writing it down baldly. 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 colour was a greyish-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. 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 shewn 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. The fishy odour, too, was gone. Innsmouth’s ruined roofs and toppling steeples loomed up greyly 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 long 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. As may well be imagined, I gave up most of the foreplanned features of the rest of my tour--the scenic, architectural, and antiquarian diversions on which I had counted so heavily. Nor did I dare look for that piece of strange jewellery 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 Frenchwoman--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 connexion 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 connected chart I could construct. I did not exactly relish the 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 widowed 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.
It was in going over the letters and pictures on the Orne side that I began to acquire a kind of terror of my own ancestry. As I have said, my grandmother and uncle Douglas had always disturbed me. Now, years after their passing, I gazed at their pictured faces with a measurably heightened feeling of repulsion and alienation. I could not at first understand the change, but gradually a horrible sort of comparison began to obtrude itself on my unconscious mind despite the steady refusal of my consciousness to admit even the least suspicion of it. It was clear that the typical expression of these faces now suggested something it had not suggested before--something which would bring stark panic if too openly thought of.
But the worst shock came when my uncle shewed me the Orne jewellery in a downtown safe-deposit vault. Some of the items were delicate and inspiring enough, but there was one box of strange old pieces descended from my mysterious great-grandmother which my uncle was almost reluctant to produce. They were, he said, of very grotesque and almost repulsive design, and had never to his knowledge been publicly worn; though my grandmother used to enjoy looking at them. Vague legends of bad luck clustered around them, and my great-grandmother’s French governess had said they ought not to be worn in New England, though it would be quite safe to wear them in Europe.
As my uncle began slowly and grudgingly to unwrap the things he urged me not to be shocked by the strangeness and frequent hideousness of the designs. Artists and archaeologists who had seen them pronounced the workmanship superlatively and exotically exquisite, though no one seemed able to define their exact material or assign them to any specific art tradition. There were two armlets, a tiara, and a kind of pectoral; the latter having in high relief certain figures of almost unbearable extravagance.
During this description I had kept a tight rein on my emotions, but my face must have betrayed my mounting fears. My uncle looked concerned, and paused in his unwrapping to study my countenance. I motioned to him to continue, which he did with renewed signs of reluctance. He seemed to expect some demonstration when the first piece--the tiara--became visible, but I doubt if he expected quite what actually happened. I did not expect it, either, for I thought I was thoroughly forewarned regarding what the jewellery would turn out to be. What I did was to faint silently away, just as I had done in that brier-choked railway cut a year before.
From that day on my life has been a nightmare of brooding and apprehension, nor do I know how much is hideous truth and how much madness. My great-grandmother had been a Marsh of unknown source whose husband lived in Arkham--and did not old Zadok say that the daughter of Obed Marsh by a monstrous mother was married to an Arkham man through a trick? What was it the ancient toper had muttered about the likeness of my eyes to Captain Obed’s? In Arkham, too, the curator had told me I had the true Marsh eyes. Was Obed Marsh my own great-great-grandfather? Who--or what--then, was my great-great-grandmother? But perhaps this was all madness. Those whitish-gold ornaments might easily have been bought from some Innsmouth sailor by the father of my great-grandmother, whoever he was. And that look in the staring-eyed faces of my grandmother and self-slain uncle might be sheer fancy on my part--sheer fancy, bolstered up by the Innsmouth shadow which had so darkly coloured my imagination. But why had my uncle killed himself after an ancestral quest in New England?
For more than two years I fought off these reflections with partial success. My father secured me a place in an insurance office, and I buried myself in routine as deeply as possible. In the winter of 1930–31, however, the dreams began. They were very sparse and insidious at first, but increased in frequency and vividness as the weeks went by. Great watery spaces opened out before me, and I seemed to wander through titanic sunken porticos and labyrinths of weedy Cyclopean walls with grotesque fishes as my companions. Then the other shapes began to appear, filling me with nameless horror the moment I awoke. But during the dreams they did not horrify me at all--I was one with them; wearing their unhuman trappings, treading their aqueous ways, and praying monstrously at their evil sea-bottom temples.
There was much more than I could remember, but even what I did remember each morning would be enough to stamp me as a madman or a genius if ever I dared write it down. Some frightful influence, I felt, was seeking gradually to drag me out of the sane world of wholesome life into unnamable abysses of blackness and alienage; and the process told heavily on me. My health and appearance grew steadily worse, till finally I was forced to give up my position and adopt the static, secluded life of an invalid. Some odd nervous affliction had me in its grip, and I found myself at times almost unable to shut my eyes.
It was then that I began to study the mirror with mounting alarm. The slow ravages of disease are not pleasant to watch, but in my case there was something subtler and more puzzling in the background. My father seemed to notice it, too, for he began looking at me curiously and almost affrightedly. What was taking place in me? Could it be that I was coming to resemble my grandmother and uncle Douglas?
One night I had a frightful dream in which I met my grandmother under the sea. She lived in a phosphorescent palace of many terraces, with gardens of strange leprous corals and grotesque brachiate efflorescences, and welcomed me with a warmth that may have been sardonic. She had changed--as those who take to the water change--and told me she had never died. Instead, she had gone to a spot her dead son had learned about, and had leaped to a realm whose wonders--destined for him as well--he had spurned with a smoking pistol. This was to be my realm, too--I could not escape it. I would never die, but would live with those who had lived since before man ever walked the earth.
I met also that which had been her grandmother. For eighty thousand years Pth’thya-l’yi had lived in Y’ha-nthlei, and thither she had gone back after Obed Marsh was dead. Y’ha-nthlei was not destroyed when the upper-earth men shot death into the sea. It was hurt, but not destroyed. The Deep Ones could never be destroyed, even though the palaeogean magic of the forgotten Old Ones might sometimes check them. For the present they would rest; but some day, if they remembered, they would rise again for the tribute Great Cthulhu craved. It would be a city greater than Innsmouth next time. They had planned to spread, and had brought up that which would help them, but now they must wait once more. For bringing the upper-earth men’s death I must do a penance, but that would not be heavy. This was the dream in which I saw a shoggoth for the first time, and the sight set me awake in a frenzy of screaming. That morning the mirror definitely told me I had acquired the Innsmouth look.
So far I have not shot myself as my uncle Douglas did. I bought an automatic and almost took the step, but certain dreams deterred me. The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror. I do not believe I need to wait for the full change as most have waited. If I did, my father would probably shut me up in a sanitarium as my poor little cousin is shut up. Stupendous and unheard-of splendours await me below, and I shall seek them soon. Iä-R’lyeh! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä! No, I shall not shoot myself--I cannot be made to shoot myself!
I shall plan my cousin’s escape from that Canton madhouse, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.
Good God.

holy fuck

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127 Venetian Vèneto vec 10,740 32,964 597,247 4 16,146 34 706 78
128 Sakha Саха тыла (Saxa Tyla) sah 10,712 35,235 345,330 2 11,199 35 1,865 51
129 Oriya ଓଡ଼ିଆ or 10,556 48,959 239,282 4 11,178 74 148 65
130 Upper Sorbian Hornjoserbsce hsb 10,527 27,074 346,474 3 13,703 25 246 32
131 Ossetian Иронау os 10,220 38,548 483,570 3 13,982 31 342 96
132 Hill Mari Кырык Мары (Kyryk Mary) mrj 10,094 14,323 97,668 0 4,858 11 -1 1
133 Sanskrit संस्कृतम् sa 10,059 43,041 387,174 6 16,539 72 514 97

im glad that the Wii U internet browser has a quickscroll feature or i would have just stopped trying to get to the end of this thread. also since this is a thread for long posts.

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1 000+ articles
№ Language Language (local) Wiki Articles Total Edits Admins Users Active Users Files Depth
134 Meadow Mari Олык Марий (Olyk Marij) mhr 9,349 20,321 151,676 0 6,906 20 393 10
135 Tarantino Tarandíne roa-tara 9,221 17,007 135,506 2 6,233 13 303 6
136 Kapampangan Kapampangan pam 8,518 18,378 293,742 2 11,217 30 816 21
137 South Azerbaijani تۆرکجه azb 8,263 16,571 87,742 3 2,376 36 0 5
138 Ilokano Ilokano ilo 8,108 38,120 288,208 2 8,511 25 112 104
139 Fiji Hindi Fiji Hindi hif 7,873 22,524 239,844 1 14,476 35 196 37
140 Northern Sami Sámegiella se 7,229 16,809 287,374 5 13,810 25 59 30
141 Pashto پښتو ps 7,194 19,304 189,312 2 11,805 44 1,363 28
142 Maori Māori mi 7,097 13,308 147,850 4 7,362 12 13 9
143 Central Bicolano Bikol bcl 6,722 11,919 169,446 1 9,617 24 1,286 8
144 Emilian-Romagnol Emiliàn e rumagnòl eml 6,685 21,949 102,723 2 10,930 28 1,331 24
145 Gan 贛語 gan 6,328 33,085 408,721 2 24,578 20 260 221
146 Zazaki Zazaki diq 6,311 22,736 365,840 2 13,393 32 221 109
147 Bihari भोजपुरी bh 6,305 24,640 281,751 2 8,294 28 29 97
148 Hakka Hak-kâ-fa / 客家話 hak 6,296 11,650 104,580 2 16,417 25 38 6
149 Gilaki گیلکی glk 6,002 12,220 50,248 2 7,937 14 894 4
150 Mingrelian მარგალური (Margaluri) xmf 5,866 18,908 117,817 2 6,836 22 0 31
151 West Flemish West-Vlams vls 5,815 17,374 301,641 5 12,707 27 528 69
152 Dutch Low Saxon Nedersaksisch nds-nl 5,797 15,734 304,327 7 13,803 24 1,060 57
153 Rusyn Русиньскый rue 5,763 9,659 106,623 0 11,278 25 23 5
154 Tibetan བོད་སྐད bo 5,683 16,426 138,983 0 13,633 29 292 30
155 Võro Võro fiu-vro 5,390 9,675 176,783 2 7,466 10 252 12
156 Corsican Corsu co 5,241 13,368 366,330 2 10,763 36 64 66
157 Sardinian Sardu sc 5,180 12,545 152,550 2 9,876 19 178 25
158 Northern Luri لۊری شومالی lrc 5,147 7,697 29,428 1 1,073 18 0 1
159 Turkmen تركمن / Туркмен tk 5,075 12,324 202,040 1 12,078 27 381 33
160 Vepsian Vepsän vep 5,045 12,122 81,755 0 5,889 25 0 13
161 Sindhi سنڌي، سندھی ، सिन्ध sd 5,016 14,402 59,587 3 5,579 26 43 14
162 Kashubian Kaszëbsczi csb 4,950 8,644 175,857 1 8,743 26 142 11
163 Khmer ភាសាខ្មែរ km 4,906 24,181 174,301 6 18,092 30 1,198 111
164 Manx Gaelg gv 4,827 17,494 305,035 2 10,363 23 205 120
165 Crimean Tatar Qırımtatarca crh 4,743 16,678 135,509 1 9,430 37 0 51
166 Silesian Ślůnski szl 4,731 12,970 236,927 3 11,207 19 0 55
167 Wu 吴语 wuu 4,646 12,959 233,033 2 42,373 56 344 58
168 Komi Коми kv 4,521 10,434 130,848 0 7,383 11 315 21
169 North Frisian Nordfriisk frr 4,347 14,886 109,145 3 7,631 13 642 43
170 Zeelandic Zeêuws zea 4,296 7,726 100,058 4 6,484 21 0 8
171 Classical Chinese 古文 / 文言文 zh-classical 4,274 67,270 261,219 2 58,650 62 -1 --
172 Assamese অসমীয়া as 3,986 36,313 159,141 4 13,624 46 1,353 288
173 Somali Soomaali so 3,917 15,861 166,714 2 13,753 71 159 98
174 Saterland Frisian Seeltersk stq 3,688 8,925 118,602 3 7,307 11 485 27
175 Aymara Aymar ay 3,684 7,545 81,473 0 9,087 19 0 12
176 Udmurt Удмурт кыл udm 3,684 9,410 108,844 4 7,288 18 168 28
177 Cornish Kernewek/Karnuack kw 3,673 8,192 175,962 0 7,436 10 76 33
178 Min Dong Mìng-dĕ̤ng-ngṳ̄ cdo 3,664 8,656 49,489 3 10,354 22 36 11
179 Norman Nouormand/Normaund nrm 3,598 7,959 215,180 0 7,327 15 -1 40
180 Komi-Permyak Перем Коми (Perem Komi) koi 3,422 7,361 55,356 0 4,367 9 274 10
181 Interlingue Interlingue ie 3,375 6,282 124,728 1 8,374 18 0 15
182 Ladino Dzhudezmo lad 3,366 10,535 162,904 4 10,744 27 59 70
183 Romansh Rumantsch rm 3,284 8,145 152,422 3 9,549 18 58 41
184 Maltese Malti mt 3,154 14,788 259,705 4 11,292 32 1,196 239
185 Friulian Furlan fur 3,148 7,242 166,582 1 7,821 9 430 39
186 Picard Picard pcd 3,105 7,196 54,691 1 6,176 14 104 13
187 Guarani Avañe'ẽ gn 3,090 8,367 100,155 1 8,508 16 6 35
188 Northern Sotho Sepedi nso 3,073 4,554 23,843 1 2,382 9 0 1
189 Ligurian Líguru lij 3,038 12,796 163,865 0 6,902 18 139 132
190 Lower Sorbian Dolnoserbski dsb 3,020 9,972 138,498 2 10,402 34 18 74
191 Divehi ދިވެހިބަސް dv 2,965 11,162 125,576 1 14,937 13 1,050 86
192 Erzya Эрзянь (Erzjanj Kelj) myv 2,931 6,484 84,044 3 5,643 14 0 19
193 Zamboanga Chavacano Chavacano de Zamboanga cbk-zam 2,883 4,975 108,525 1 8,509 22 0 11
194 Extremaduran Estremeñu ext 2,802 6,065 112,534 0 9,297 31 0 25
195 Kabyle Taqbaylit kab 2,797 8,385 65,999 1 5,767 20 32 31
196 Ripuarian Ripoarisch ksh 2,797 9,909 2,124,799 2 13,690 17 100 1386
197 Anglo-Saxon Englisc ang 2,764 14,209 190,335 1 77,983 43 377 230
198 Gagauz Gagauz gag 2,737 6,092 65,234 1 5,961 22 0 16
199 Lezgian Лезги чІал (Lezgi č’al) lez 2,729 6,500 59,274 5 4,520 19 110 17
200 Mirandese Mirandés mwl 2,729 6,864 88,525 2 6,569 16 0 30
201 Acehnese Bahsa Acèh ace 2,644 8,123 97,814 0 12,457 30 115 52
202 Uyghur ئۇيغۇر تىلى ug 2,564 10,294 145,822 1 11,046 17 589 129
203 Pali पाऴि pi 2,516 4,325 101,709 0 3,620 8 0 12
204 Pangasinan Pangasinan pag 2,509 7,337 61,288 0 4,255 9 0 31
205 Navajo Diné bizaad nv 2,461 13,248 155,665 2 8,467 13 329 226
206 Shona chiShona sn 2,461 6,802 47,760 0 6,014 10 0 22
207 Franco-Provençal Arpitan frp 2,341 5,579 191,268 2 8,072 20 33 66
208 Avar Авар av 2,271 8,880 62,715 1 6,892 23 58 60
209 Goan Konkani गोवा कोंकणी / Gova Konknni gom 2,208 6,165 118,722 2 1,254 33 0 62
210 Maithili मैथिली mai 2,139 9,000 60,609 2 1,811 28 21 69
211 Lingala Lingala ln 2,138 6,953 113,132 2 6,214 15 36 83
212 Palatinate German Pälzisch pfl 2,048 4,693 57,780 6 5,263 20 57 21
213 Hawaiian Hawai`i haw 2,039 4,726 72,048 0 7,744 11 0 26
214 Kalmyk Хальмг xal 2,017 9,394 79,507 2 5,595 10 0 113
215 Karachay-Balkar Къарачай-Малкъар (Qarachay-Malqar) krc 2,006 13,246 108,419 1 5,314 10 114 257
216 Karakalpak Qaraqalpaqsha kaa 1,815 4,498 42,931 1 5,650 14 0 21
217 Kinyarwanda Ikinyarwanda rw 1,788 4,964 77,631 0 5,703 7 0 49
218 Pennsylvania German Deitsch pdc 1,755 5,487 106,340 0 17,753 14 157 88
219 Tongan faka Tonga to 1,681 6,120 34,541 1 4,746 6 455 39
220 Buryat Буряад bxr 1,657 6,297 47,536 1 7,009 18 32 59
221 Greenlandic Kalaallisut kl 1,626 4,750 71,987 2 7,181 15 0 56
222 Novial Novial nov 1,625 4,264 184,725 2 5,837 13 0 114
223 Aramaic ܐܪܡܝܐ arc 1,603 6,363 91,641 3 11,593 16 65 127
224 Kabardian Circassian Адыгэбзэ (Adighabze) kbd 1,552 6,209 41,089 1 4,565 7 0 60
225 Banjar Bahasa Banjar bjn 1,433 10,462 59,007 2 6,418 16 41 224
226 Lao ລາວ lo 1,427 7,241 51,304 1 7,600 30 0 118
227 Papiamentu Papiamentu pap 1,363 3,806 75,455 1 6,285 9 0 64
228 Hausa هَوُسَ ha 1,362 3,301 33,523 0 5,475 14 0 21
229 Tetum Tetun tet 1,357 3,320 61,031 1 4,807 15 0 38
230 Kikuyu Gĩkũyũ ki 1,321 2,690 19,442 0 3,762 6 0 8
231 Tok Pisin Tok Pisin tpi 1,286 6,182 80,792 0 6,658 8 0 189
232 Tuvan Тыва tyv 1,274 2,893 17,791 0 2,664 19 21 10
233 Nauruan dorerin Naoero na 1,260 4,961 78,153 1 5,535 16 0 136
234 Lak Лакку lbe 1,209 9,542 42,675 0 4,884 11 0 212
235 Lojban Lojban jbo 1,189 6,210 111,123 2 8,348 16 -1 319
236 Aromanian Armãneashce roa-rup 1,189 5,127 256,769 1 8,552 16 467 549
237 Igbo Igbo ig 1,176 5,751 61,277 1 6,209 16 0 161
238 Tahitian Reo Mā`ohi ty 1,174 3,588 49,936 0 4,228 11 0 59
239 Zhuang Cuengh za 1,150 2,715 38,165 0 5,180 8 0 26
240 Moksha Мокшень (Mokshanj Kälj) mdf 1,128 3,984 48,825 2 4,740 7 0 79
241 Kongo KiKongo kg 1,123 2,580 42,275 1 5,263 8 0 28
242 Wolof Wolof wo 1,053 5,265 101,187 2 8,318 17 0 308
243 Sranan Sranantongo srn 1,041 2,583 39,869 0 3,862 6 0 34

epic page get ftw