I.
I CAN SEE already by the prejudice gleaming in your Puritan eyes that coming here was a mistake. Have you never been to Innsmouth? Have you never seen people who are different from you? Of course you have and you tend to not give them the last word, either. But, given your station in life, Officer, I would wager your people were persecuted, too, during the burning days — for the judges looked down upon all that were disposable: not only those who were different, but those who were poor.
I see I have offended you. Good. Maybe you will better listen to me.
My name is Eunice Babson, and I was a servant to Mr. and Mrs. Edward Pickman Derby of Crowinshield House. Before that, I served Mrs. Derby and her father, Ephraim Waite in Innsmouth. I am aware that I and the Gilmans are under suspicion for blackmail, among other things. On that point, I want to make one thing clear: I was never with the Gilmans but against them. They jailed Mr. Derby in the library, and assisted Ephraim in all of his experiments and exploits. True, I uncovered his crime in the cellar and he paid me a fee for silence. But I neither laughed at him when he withdrew his checkbook from his coat pocket, nor could I be heard swearing revenge. I already had my requital years back, before Derby had ever laid eyes on Asenath’s young form.
Every woman’s body is a story, you see. This was a rare wisdom bestowed on me by my mother, whose body suffered unwanted attentions and abuse — a sacrificial trade for a notion of comfort and propriety. That was the story of her body and it ended miserably, as everything in the Ephraim Waite household was neither comforting nor appropriate. Each body that stepped foot inside became his body. Except mine. But that is not my body’s story. My story is of servitude. My body has been nothing but a tool for others to employ. It has served those I’ve loathed equally as those I’ve loved, including my sister Asenath.
That’s right. It has been one of many well-kept family secrets, but I am Mrs. Derby’s half-sister. I was the one who discovered Asenath’s body and also the one to save her glow from complete diminishment. However, those two incidents occurred several years apart. To fully comprehend my testimony, I must begin even further back than last Hallowmas past.
I was born in Innsmouth Harbor, in a damp, dry rot shack that was littered with fish scales and fried cod stink. My yard was the sea. In and around it, I discovered as much death as life. My pets were the turtles and crabs I caught while accompanying Mother on her fishmongering up by the pier.
When I grew weary of her haggling, I would wander away from her skirts and walk the shore, watching the fishermen empty their nets on the docks and see how the desperate fish flapped to find the edge back into life. When their struggle stopped, a strange ringing would toll in my ears and an aural soft focus would invade my vision as I found myself staring at the creature, its jaw awry, until it began to gnash and convulse again with a second gulp at life. This happened on several occasions and a town man lurking in the harbor noticed. It was Ephraim Waite, who was fascinated with the wharf and its inhabitants.
He circled me, sinister like a shark, all teeth and menace and rock-hard flesh of an ancient fossil. He spoke through a strained smile, which wavered when he realized I could not comprehend. He picked up my resurrected fish, slapped it against the deck, and shook it at me. Blood splattered my face. Terrified, I cried out and tried to run away, but he grabbed my arm. When Mother came to my rescue, she swiped his arm away from me and lashed him in his own tongue.
They argued back and forth. Sometimes, Mother would slip back into our tongue and I heard the words, “It’s in the blood.” Every time I heard the phrase, the argument seemed to abate. Next thing I know, I am standing in his library being instructed to call the Harbor Haunt Master by the Gilmans, who would tutor me until I adequately learned Yank. Mother became the cook.
I immediately took to reading and languages. I escaped into books and therefore, stayed out of Master Ephraim’s way. Mother, however, became a servant to suffering. She had acted desperately in gaining his employ.
We were but specimens to him. While he was fascinated in uncovering the secrets of our blood, it bothered him to have us roam about in his home. He said we stank up the place with our Harbor essence and would espouse phrenological theories of our features out loud as though we weren’t in the room. When aroused into a spiritual fervor by a concoction he’d made in his library, he’d roar about Devil Reef and stupid old Obed Marsh.
“Shipwrecked sailor, my eye! If you want to find your father, child, just grow some gills and go for a swim. I bet you can call on him at Devil Reef anytime, demon!”
When he was at a loss for words, he would beat us. In these instances, Mother would throw herself between us. With his fist in the air and a salacious grin, he would fall upon her and become excited by conquering things weaker than him, and fill the vessel with the only function he felt it and she and we served.
It was in this manner that Asenath was conceived. His interest in my blood-talent waned until he saw the power it had over his only golden child.
Master Ephraim had reluctantly desired access to the Marsh collection at one of the Esoteric churches. Since he now had fathered a child, he saw Asenath as an incidental excuse to take the Order oaths. He married Mother and made her lady of the house. The Gilmans took on all of the household matters, leaving my education in hiatus.
Mother was pleased with her elevated status at first, but after Asenath’s delivery, she slowly descended into a catatonic madness. Eventually, she boarded herself up in the attic and affected a black veil. She was going through the Great Change. In accepting that, she entered an extreme zealotry in which she neglected her children to prepare herself for going back to the water. Despite her baby’s wails, Mrs. Gilman had to prompt her to feed. Although I was only five years old, I changed her diapers and put bourbon-soaked pacifiers in her mouth when she teethed.
Everyone cooed to Asenath in Yank, but when we were alone, I would teach her the Deep language. It was through me she spoke her first word: “‘Fhalma.” This embarrassed Mother when she was still sane, while Master Ephraim was greatly impressed. He decided to resume my education and gave me free reign of his forbidden library, thinking that everything I absorbed I would squeeze back into Asenath infused with traces of our innate abilities.
Even so, he assumed I only comprehended a third of what was there and I never let on otherwise. I realized that it was better for him to think I was mostly stupid and beneath him, because Asenath’s precociousness won all of his affection and his attentions were more horrid than his despise.
II.
As we grew older, my love for my sister evolved from unconditional to concerned. Once she grew out of the sweetness of infancy, she became a little shoggoth, especially after she was told Mother had died.
When you said yes, she shouted no, and would destroy whatever porcelain bauble or glass beaker happened to be in reach. Toilet training was a farce and would begin with her running through the house, diaper flapping, and end in the library, where she’d micturate and defecate on whatever ancient manuscript was open on the table. This is how we lost the Pnakotic Manuscripts, a first edition of Remnants of Lost Empires, and Livre d’Eibon (Comte Saint-Germain’s personal copy), while Asenath earned many whippings.
Despite my own rage, I would try to protect her as Mother had protected me. Despite my myriad disfiguring lacerations, she was an ungrateful child. She would thank me by stealing a goldfish — Mother had given me a dozen or so before she left — out of the tank and lay it to dry on Mr. Gilman’s secretaire to go unnoticed for hours. After discovering my 12th fish in this manner, I had had enough.
I found her outside throwing acorns against a tree and I yanked her up to standing by her arm.
“How about I bury you back here? Would you like that?” She twisted under my grip and I only squeezed her wrist tighter. “You are so careless with life; why should anyone let you have your own?”
“But they don’t glow. Only humans have it. Father said.”
“And he says I and mother aren’t human. You think we don’t have the glow?” She stopped her sobbing and looked up at me wide-eyed.
“All living things have a glow.” I continued. “It’s the spark of life. You have it. I have it. The goldfish have it.”
“Says who?”
“Says I. Dig them all up. Now!” I pointed at the impressive pet cemetery that had been plotted in the corner of the garden.
She cupped the earth in her hands until all 11 goldfish in their various stages of decomposition were revealed. I made her take the 12th fish out of my palm and place him with his kin. I hadn’t done it since I walked the docks, and I was unsure I could do it still, but I stared at the corpses until I heard the toll in my ears and my vision blurred. One by one, they began to flap until the shallow grave became an earthen sea of hopping fish. Her latest victim moved towards Asenath, each hiccough like an accusation to the child. When its tail-fin brushed her foot, she ran screaming into the house.
I found her in the library, huddled under the globe, sucking her dirty, grave-digging thumb.
“Did you learn your lesson, then?” I asked sweetly and gestured for her to come out of hiding.
“Why didn’t you do that for Mother?” she muttered.
We had all been instructed not to tell Asenath the truth. That Mother had died was a white Christian lie like the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, except this truth was painful. She hopped into my arms and began to cry, repeating over and over, “You could do that for Mother! You could! You could! Why don’t you?” At some point, she would have to know and I committed my first of many small defiances against Master Ephraim.
“Because Mother isn’t dead.” Her sobbing stopped. She wiped her snotty nose and considered me.
“What do you mean?”
“She went to sea. Now she’ll never die.”
“Can we go see her?”
“No, I am afraid not. But she is in a better place, I am sure.”
She thought on this for a while.
“Will you go to sea?” she sniffed.
“Hopefully.”
“Will I?”
“I don’t know. We aren’t as pure blood as she. I more than you. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
“I think I would like it. The sea, I mean.”
III.
After that, Asenath channeled her energy into learning, devouring any story I could tell her about our heritage and about the mysterious histories in the neighboring towns. We had made a great discovery in the library: a locked trunk full of esoteric lore that Asenath picked with a bobby pin and insisted I pursue with her. At the bottom, wrapped in one of Mother’s black silk scarves, was a yellowed and worn copy of the Necronomicon, in which we found much missing information about the Old Ones and what it was exactly Master Ephraim sought in our race — the subtle art of transformation and transference of the life-glow. This was how I was able to resurrect the fish and we learned it was only the beginning of a great trick, which we immediately practiced all afternoon until Mrs. Gilman rang the dinner bell.
Before we went our separate ways — I to the kitchen to serve and she to be served — I held Asenath back. Every night, he quizzed her on the day’s lesson and I knew he would not approve of our new curriculum.
“I don’t think you should tell your father about this lesson.”
“Why not? It is very clever. He should be proud!”
“No. I think he’ll be mad we broke into the trunk. Promise me you won’t tell.”
“I promise.”
When Master Ephraim began his usual interrogation, Asenath ignored him, stabbing at the lapin à la cocotte and chasing carrots around her plate. I was in attendance by the sideboard.
“Child, did you hear me?” She nodded.
“‘Fhalma —” He clicked his teeth. “Er, Eunice taught me about ….” Dread rumbled in my stomach.
“History.”
“History, eh?”
“Em-hmm. The Arkham Sisters.”
“I’ve heard of no such sisters. Witches, I bet.” He chewed over this a bit while I refilled his glass with wine. “When did these sisters live? During the Trials?”
“Very recently.” She paused and then smirked at me. “Mistresses of transference. People say they’ve lived for centuries swapping bodies! And people don’t speak of it because they are Deep Ones.” He gestured at me with his forked potato.
“What have I told you about teaching her that drivel? If I wanted her to know about nonsense such as that, I’d throw her into the sea with her mother. See if she’d swim.”
This was the first time Master Ephraim had ever spoken the truth about Mother in front of Asenath.
She dropped her utensils and pushed her plate away, muttering under her breath, “It’s not nonsense. Eunice and I can perform that which you’ve only dreamed of performing.”
His crooked shark teeth jutted over his lips as he smiled.
“You and … that thing there … are talented, I admit. But you are weak, not only by your sex, but from your relations.” He glared at me. “You are both incapable of ruling over the material world. I expect you to resume the curriculum I designed, Eunice, or I will throw you to the sea, as well.”
“Yes, Master Ephraim. I am sorry.”
“Excused.” I curtseyed and turned to retreat into the kitchen.
“‘Fhalma!”
I looked over my shoulder at Asenath. She widened her eyes and locked me in her gaze. When I blinked, I saw myself standing stiffly against the sideboard. I dropped the gaze with myself and looked down to see Asenath’s navy blue cotton dress. I looked up at Master. He looked between me in Asenath’s body and Asenath in my body. He narrowed his eyes and considered my body and asked incredulously, “Eunice?”
I answered, but my words rang in Asenath’s soprano.
He rolled his eyes to Asenath’s body. “You are Eunice?” The head I looked out from nodded. “And Asenath is there?” Her giggle trickled out of my smile.
“How is this possible?”
“Silly man,” Asenath cackled from my body. “It isn’t always a secret, you know; sometimes, it is simply legacy. You knew this when you chose our mother. You knew being merely human wasn’t enough. Without us, you are nothing.”
“The trunk. You jimmied the trunk! Ungrateful demons, have you no respect!”
He stood up so quickly his chair tumbled under him and in one fell swoop he crossed across the dining room table and struck my body so hard that it knocked Asenath’s body out, too, and we both awoke in our own minds and swollen skulls.
He ordered us separated. He would undertake Asenath’s education, while I was exiled to the attic, only allowed to leave at night.
IV.
I became a living ghost. I would sleep during the day and live during the night. Sometimes, when I awoke, I’d find a smuggled text from the library sans a remorseful message from Asenath. I would strain my eyes reading faded texts about the witches of Arkham, or debates over Mother Hydra’s fecundity. When I grew weary of study, I would venture out of the house to go to the Harbor and night-fish.
The waters at Innsmouth are famous for their plentitude, but my expeditions were never very successful. Perhaps there was a certain vibration in my line, a contamination in my lure, that foretold nothing but ill-will would come to whoever was greedy enough to take a bite. Or, perhaps it was because I was impatient and couldn’t cast the line far enough, or let it sink deep enough, before it seemed like aeons had passed and I reeled it in. Even so, it was peaceful. My mind could wander while I watched the Devil Reef appear and recede with the tide. Lore had it that fish-people moonbathed on its shores. Sometimes, I would fantasize that I would see Mother there. But all that was a long time ago. The reef was abandoned — perhaps they knew it would be destroyed.
My mind would wonder about the household and what was transpiring while I slept during the day, or remember my mother’s transformation during her illness and how, in her sobbing, there was something of a song that I wondered whether I would sing one day, and how she always spoke of taking to the water.
My existence was thus for several years. Then, one April evening, a great struggling awoke me. There was screaming, which at first sounded as if it emitted from Asenath, but, like a dying operatic singer trilling her last scale, it went from soprano to alto to baritone to silence followed by Master’s heavy footfalls up the stairs. When the door unlocked, my mother’s light frame stood in the doorway. After rubbing my eyes, I realized it was Asenath, now 15 and completely grown during my years of confinement. I wondered if my body appeared as changed; she was unconcerned with re-acquaintance.
“Eunice,” she said. “You can come down now. I got rid of him!” And there was an ironic look that took after her father so much it was unbearable.
“We’re rid of his tired, old body. Help me bring it back up here.” She eyed me closely to see if there was any trace of euphoria rising within me. “Well, don’t look so glum. Your kind aren’t that sentimental.” She walked back down the stairs, iron step following iron step, whistling Mother’s song. It was mockery! All mockery! This was not the Asenath I’d known. Adolescence and Ephraim’s supervision had made her bigoted and cruel.
I followed her down the stairs and into the library. It was in shambles. Books were splayed open on the floor, their ancient spines cracked down the middle. The globe had somehow become dislodged from its axis and had rolled, dented, into the corner. Chairs were upturned and on the long, oak table lay Old Ephraim’s crumpled body. Asenath stood before him, her hands on her hips.
“Such a sad sack he was.”
“Are you sure he’s dead?”
“Not really. I hit him over the head with the globe, so he may just be world-weary.” She chuckled now, instead of the trickling cackle she had as a child. “But it’s nothing a little arsenic can’t fix. Why don’t you see to that? I have to get my things together. Next week, I am to start school at Kingsport. Father left it in his will that I am to be the ward of Hall School.”
“What about me? The Gilmans?”
“You’ll stay here. Keep the house running. Make sure that thing stays dead, for one. This isn’t one of your goldfish.” She gave me a wink and nodded at the body. “And make an inventory of the library. It appears we’ve had a little thief purloin some important tomes I will need in Arkham.” She leered at me. “I am on the cusp of a great discovery, Eunice. The greatest discovery of my entire life.” Speechless, I stared at the body.
“You will see to it, then?”
I looked at Asenath transformed — a young woman with murder on her hands and mayhem in her heart. She had become her father’s daughter. Or, more like, just her father.
“Well?”
“Yes, Mistress.”
“Mistress. Good, we understand one another,” Asenath outstretched her arms and yawned. “Oh, me! I am due for a nap.”
After dragging Master Ephraim’s body up the stairs and back into the attic, I laid it on my bed and assessed the damage. There was a huge lump on the back of his skull and a few superficial scratches on his face, but there was a faint sieve of breath. I’d seen worse with Mother. I retrieved some smelling salts from the kitchen and waved them under Master’s nose. No response. He was catatonic. I sighed and went fishing.
That night, my line seemed magical. At first, I caught several puny smelt. I decided to cut them up with my knife and use them as bait. By dawn, I had thrown back bluefish and perch until I caught a black gill. In the soft, rosy light, I could see its stripes were a pointillisme of the periwinkle center of each scale. Rather than throw it back like I’d done its brethren, or bash its head against the dock’s edge immediately, I held it up and stared into its flat eyes that flickered with every drowning gulp of air. I could see my body looking back, my harsh, flat face with protruding eyes that now seemed dim and stupid, gulping and hiccoughing and losing its grip. All I sensed was sexlessness, yet a drive to spawn and swim. When I hit against the dock, I was instantly back within myself watching the thrashing fish. That was when Asenath knocked on my skull and I realized what the struggle had really been about.
I strained to block her. While I didn’t think she wished me harm, she was that maniac’s daughter. In my blood was magic; in her blood was madness. What would she do with my body once she occupied it?
But if I am to survive, she tapped into my skull, I need a thriving body.
I muted her with more concentration, but her will had grown stronger over the years.
It’s like drowning on air, ‘Fhalma. I want to go to sea! Help me, ‘Fhalma! Help me go to sea! Help —.
The black gill’s flapping replaced Asenath’s communications. Inspired, I scooped it into my basket and ran up Washington Street.
V.
Then what happened? Why, it’s obvious, isn’t it Officer Shea? My sister is a fish. I trapped her in my body long enough to trap her into the black gill and keep my glow. She swims somewhere deep in Innsmouth Harbor, perhaps around the devastated remnants of Devil Reef. If I am truly romantic, I’d like to think she swims with our mother. For a while, I entertained I could evict Ephraim from her body and return her glow to its rightful place, but on the night that I saw Mr. Derby dragging Asenath’s body down into the cellar, I lost hope for that dream. But I was able to bring her body justice against Ephraim, although at Master Derby’s sacrifice. The despicable and horrid form that justice took only Mr. Upton can attest, but in Master Ephraim’s failure lies the only small success I could aspire to. When a bit of evil is smote from this earth, we’re all avenged. At least, the forgotten people.
How do you know I am not Ephraim? You don’t, but rest-assured, I have no interest in traveling body to body to body. Perhaps I could glow inside a banker, or a pretty schoolteacher, or even Mr. Upton and build beautiful things, if I were a mind. No. I am content in this body, and I welcome its change and its birthright — for whatever happens to my body, it is happening to me. It’s my story.