Seventh in the series. Read after the break…
Insight
By Scott Lowther
Copyright 2019
1968, September: off the coast of Massachusetts
The Fred W. Dopplemasse was a Liberian-registered freighter owned by an Italian shipping magnate, operated by a mixed crew of American, Canadian and British ex-cons and deadbeats. It was not a ship that respectable sailors wanted to be on and not one that respectable owners of cargo wanted to hire. Nevertheless, it managed to find cargoes to transport across the Atlantic from time to time, making approximately enough to pay the misanthropic crew and to keep it adequately repaired, though not enough to pay for a new coat of paint.
And now it was bobbing motionless in the water, ten miles offshore from the moldering site of the forgotten town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts. Apparently its elderly diesel engine had died; repairs were underway. The Coast Guard had offered to have it towed in, an offer that was gruffly refused. The Captain of the ship was quite convinced that his engineer would have the engine running again by nightfall, thank-you-very-much-and-piss-off. Considering that the engine was in perfect running order, that the interior of the ship was spotlessly clean, immaculately sturdy and shockingly high tech, it was not a wild speculation on the Captains part.
Nobody ever paid the Dopplemasse much mind. Certainly nobody ever went to the bother of giving the underside of the hull a close examination, or they would have seen the various doors that opened to several bays within the lower portion of the ship. Everything from a prototype Lockheed Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle to an off-the-books Alvin-class mini-sub to a series of remotely operated submarines were carried on board. It was the sort of thing the United States Navy would have killed to have, yet the Navy was unaware of it. It was owned by the Office of Insight and operated in co-operation with several allied organizations, all devoted to the goal of keeping track of doings at the bottom of the sea.
The Office of Insight knew that there was a Deep One city located off the coast of Innsmouth. It was a relatively new city, populated by Deep Ones who had emigrated from Polynesian waters in the 19th century and by human/Deep One hybrids. It was only one of a great many such cities in the deep waters of the world. The Dopplemasse and its sister vessels had examined many of them… quietly, unobtrusively. It was fitted with the very latest in sonar systems, active and passive, and could listen to the Deep Ones mumbling and burbling to each other far below. The Innsmouth city was of special interest, as it had – perhaps unwisely – been struck with US Navy torpedoes in the late 1920s. A lot of people wanted to know what was going on there.
Nobody was fool enough to send a submarine down to the submerged city, nor even to drop a hydrophone on a cable. Best to leave the place alone and hope the Deep Ones think humanity had forgotten them. So the Dopplemasse simply sat on the surface and listened, pretending to be broken down. It had been there a day, and would leave in a few hours. A few preliminary results had already been gathered, and the analysts on board studying the audio data in real-time were disturbed.
“Yes, ma’am,” Captain Shank said over the encrypted radio phone. He was talking with the Director of the Office of Insight, and she was not happy. “The preliminary analysis suggests that the active population of the city numbers in the hundreds, but there is a low-level background hum that the analysts believe is the respiration sound of Deep Ones in a state of deep torpor. It’s difficult to estimate, but they think they number in the tens of thousands, maybe more.
“No, ma’am. Uhhh, yes, ma’am. They’re working on that. Oh, there’s one other thing, another sound they’ve picked up. It’s described as the sound of something large and gelatinous rolling around on the sea floor. A number of them have been detected, always accompanied by one or more Deep Ones making considerable noise. Sounds like giving orders, but we can’t be sure.
“Yes, ma’am, we’ll keep listening, right up until we button up and head out. The tapes should be in the experts hands at Miskatonic by 3 am.
“Yes, ma’am, we’ll certainly try to not upset the locals. I don’t like to think what might happen if those numbers are real.”