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how they must have looked in the old days before the shadow feIl. 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 undu-lated 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.
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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 Innsmonth.
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
here? And if such a column of them was scouring the Ipswich road, would the patrols on the other
roads be likewise augmented?
I had entered the brush-grown cut and was struggling along at a very slow pace when that damnable
fishy 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 unpleas-antly 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 lnnsmouth. 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 sound receded toward the west. The horde was very close
now - - 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.
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My other pursuers had been accursedly abnormal - - so should I not have been ready to face a
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