Deep Ones

The smell reaches the traveller before the town does. A battered bus rattles out of Newburyport in the summer of 1927, crosses miles of salt marsh, and drops toward a harbour of sagging roofs and fallen steeples, and the air that comes in through the windows is thick with fish. That is Innsmouth, Massachusetts, a town that appears on no real map, and the things responsible for the smell are waiting a mile and a half offshore, under a low black line of rock called Devil Reef.

The Deep Ones do not come out of any old sailor’s lore. They were made up by one man, the American writer H. P. Lovecraft, in a novella called The Shadow over Innsmouth, which he wrote in November and December of 1931. He did not think much of it and did not mean to send it anywhere. His friend August Derleth quietly submitted it to the magazine Weird Tales in 1933, and the editor turned it down as too long to print whole and too awkward to split. It finally appeared in 1936 as a small, badly printed book from the Visionary Publishing Company of Pennsylvania, with about two hundred copies bound. It was the only book of his fiction to reach readers while he was alive.

Inside the story, the history is told by a ninety-six-year-old drunk named Zadok Allen, who will talk for the price of a bottle. He says a sea captain, Obed Marsh, found an island in the South Seas where the people had more fish than they could eat and wore strange pale gold. The islanders had made an arrangement with a race that lived under the water. They gave up some of their young people twice a year, on May Eve and at Hallowe’en, and received fish and gold in return. In time the two peoples began to marry. Marsh traded there for years, and when neighbouring islanders wiped the community out around 1838, he took the idea home to a port whose fishing and shipping were dying.

A crowd kneels on a wharf at night, facing the water, while a man in a tall gold headpiece leads a chant, and out past the breakers something answers with lights. That is the ordinary business of the Deep Ones in Innsmouth: they come to the reef, the town comes to the shore, and goods and promises change hands. Marsh built a church for it, the Esoteric Order of Dagon, which swallowed the town’s older congregations and its Masonic hall. Its worshippers call on Father Dagon and Mother Hydra and swear a series of oaths, and the last oath is the one that binds a family to take a mate from the sea.

Not everyone agreed. In 1846 the townspeople who objected had Marsh and his followers locked up, and the offerings stopped. Two weeks later, by Zadok’s account, the harbour filled with swimmers. Shapes poured over the reef and up the river mouth in the dark, there was shooting and screaming in the streets, and by morning half of Innsmouth was dead. The outside world was told it had been an epidemic. After that night nobody in town refused anything.

Lovecraft holds the creatures back for most of the story and then shows them all at once. His narrator, fleeing along an abandoned railway line by moonlight, looks down at the road and sees a column of them going past. They are grey-green with white bellies, shiny and slippery, with scaly ridges down their backs. Their heads are the heads of fish, with huge bulging eyes that never shut, and gills flutter at the sides of their necks. Their hands are long and webbed. They do not walk so much as hop, some upright and some on all fours, and they croak and bay to each other as they go. Some wear the same pale gold as the priest. The narrator faints. It is hard to blame him.

Their children are stranger, because they start out as people. A child of mixed blood looks human enough in youth. With age the skull narrows, the eyes swell and stop blinking, the skin roughens, the neck creases into folds, and the hair goes. Outsiders call this the Innsmouth look and put it down to disease or bad breeding. The oldest families keep their most changed members shut indoors behind boarded windows until they are ready to slip into the harbour and not come back. A few never finish changing and live out their lives stuck halfway.

What the Deep Ones can do follows from what they are. They live in cities on the sea bed, one of them, Y’ha-nthlei, in the deep water just beyond Devil Reef. They do not age and do not die of anything but violence; one of them in the story is said to have lived there for eighty thousand years. They command the fish, which is why Innsmouth’s nets stay full when every other port goes hungry. They work a soft, whitish gold into tiaras and armlets covered in sea designs, made for heads and limbs that are not human. Zadok says they could wipe out mankind if they cared to take the trouble, and that they keep something worse in reserve, the shapeless servant creatures known as shoggoths.

Their limits are few but real. They can be killed. They need the land for breeding and for worship, so they need people to cooperate. And there are certain old carved signs, left by the beings the story calls the Old Ones, which they cannot pass; the Pacific islanders who destroyed the first colony are said to have used them. Governments have cruder tools. After the narrator escapes and talks, federal agents raid the town in the winter of 1927 to 1928, dynamite the empty waterfront, take away prisoners who are never seen in an ordinary jail, and send a submarine to fire torpedoes into the trench past the reef. Y’ha-nthlei is damaged. It is not destroyed.

Then the story turns on its teller. Tracing his family tree afterwards, he finds that his own great-grandmother was a Marsh. An uncle who made the same discovery shot himself, and a cousin sits in an asylum, changing. The narrator buys a pistol, and does not use it. He begins to dream of terraced gardens under the sea and of a grandmother who never died, and the mirror starts to show him the look. By the last page he is planning to break his cousin out and swim down with him to the city under the reef.

Lovecraft had been circling the idea for years. His short tale Dagon, written in 1917, already has a shipwrecked sailor glimpsing a huge fish-man on a risen sea bed. Two older American stories about solitary fish-like men, Irvin S. Cobb’s Fishhead and Robert W. Chambers’s The Harbor-Master, are usually named as models, along with H. G. Wells’s In the Abyss, which imagines a whole people on the ocean floor. What Lovecraft added was the bloodline. His biographer L. Sprague de Camp read the story as driven by its author’s fear of mixed ancestry, and that reading has stuck. It is an ugly root for a famous monster.

Other writers took the Deep Ones up almost at once, Derleth first among them, and they have since swum through decades of stories, films and games. In those later hands they are usually a tribe of sea monsters to be fought. In the book that made them they are relatives, and the horror is the moment a man checks the mirror and decides he would rather go home.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Deep Ones?

The Deep Ones are a fictional race of immortal fish-frog people created by the American writer H. P. Lovecraft. They live in cities on the sea floor and trade fish and gold to coastal communities in exchange for worship, sacrifices and human mates. They first appear in his novella The Shadow over Innsmouth.

Who created the Deep Ones and when?

H. P. Lovecraft created the Deep Ones in The Shadow over Innsmouth, which he wrote in November and December 1931. The novella was rejected by Weird Tales in 1933 and was published as a small book by the Visionary Publishing Company in 1936. The Deep Ones are a literary invention and do not come from older folklore.

What do the Deep Ones look like?

Lovecraft describes the Deep Ones as grey-green with white bellies, with slick skin and scaly ridges along their backs. They have the heads of fish, bulging eyes that never close, gills on their necks and long webbed hands. They move by hopping, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four, and they make croaking and baying sounds.

What is the Innsmouth look?

The Innsmouth look is the set of features that appear in people descended from both humans and Deep Ones. Such a person looks human when young, then develops a narrow skull, bulging unblinking eyes, rough skin, a creased neck and hair loss. When the change is complete the person leaves the land and joins the Deep Ones in the sea.

Can the Deep Ones be killed?

The Deep Ones do not die of old age, but they can be killed by violence. In the story they also cannot pass certain carved signs left by the Old Ones, which Pacific islanders once used against them. A federal raid on Innsmouth in the winter of 1927 to 1928 and a submarine attack damage their city of Y’ha-nthlei without destroying it.

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