The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels Read Online Free PDF Page A

much.
“I’m really very sorry, David,” she told me, “but I can’t do it. In a way, I’d like to, very much—I feel so lonely sometimes. But I can’t leave Innsmouth now. I can’t even go to Manchester, let alone back to England, and I know you won’t stay in the States forever.”
“That’s just an excuse,” I contended, in martyred fashion. “I know you own a great deal of real estate here, but you admit that it’s mostly worthless, and you could still collect the rents—the world is full of absentee landlords.”
“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s...something I can’t explain.”
“It’s because you’re an Eliot, isn’t it?” I asked, resentfully. “You feel that you can’t marry for the same reasons that Gideon Sargent felt that he couldn’t. You don’t have a trace of the Innsmouth look about you, but you have the dreams, don’t you? You nearly admitted as much to Gideon, that night when he came to the hotel.”
“Yes,” she said, faintly. “I have the dreams. But I’m not like those poor old mad people who locked themselves away until you came. I know that you won’t find a cure for them, even if you can find an explanation. I understand well enough what can come of your research and what can’t.”
“I’m not sure that you do,” I told her. “In fact, I’m not sure that you understand your own condition. Given that you don’t have a trace of the look, and given that you’re not directly descended from any of the Eliots of Innsmouth, what makes you think that your nightmares are anything more than just that: nightmares? As you said to Gideon when he raised the issue, everyone has dreams. Even I have dreams.” In the circumstances, I nearly said had, but that would have been too obvious a whine.
“You’re a biochemist,” she said. “You think that the physical malformation is the real issue, and that the dreams are peripheral. Innsmouthers don’t see it that way—for them, the dreams are the most important thing, and they’ve always seen the look as an effect rather than a cause. I’m an Innsmouther too.”
“But you’re a educated woman! You may be a historian, but you know enough science to know what the Innsmouth look really is. It’s a genetic disorder.”
“I know that the Esoteric Order of Dagon’s beliefs and Obed Marsh’s adventures in the South Seas are just myths,” she agreed. “They’re stories concocted, as you said to Gideon, to explain and excuse an inexplicable affliction caused by defective genes. But it might as easily have been the Eliots who imported those genes as anyone else, and they might easily have been in the family for many generations—England used to have its inbred populations too, you know. I know that you only took tissue-samples from me for what you called purposes of comparison, but I’ve been expecting all along that you would come to me and tell me that you’d found the rogue gene responsible for the Innsmouth look, and that I have it too.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, plaintively. “It really doesn’t matter. We could still get married.”
“It matters to me,” she said. “And we can’t.”
    * * * *
I suppose that incident with Ann should have redoubled my determination to trace the DNA-complex that was responsible for the Innsmouth syndrome, in order to enable me to prove to her that she wasn’t afflicted, and that her dreams were only dreams. In fact, it didn’t; I was hurt by her rejection, and depressed. I continued to work as hard as I ever had, but I found it increasingly difficult to go to Innsmouth, to stay in the hotel where she lived, and to walk through the streets which she owned.
I began to look for someone else to soothe my emotional bruises, while Ann and I drifted steadily apart. We were no longer good friends in any real sense, though we kept up some kind of a pretense whenever we met.
In the meantime, the members of my experimental sample continued to die. I lost three more in the