The Aquarium

"The Aquarium" is a short story by Carl Jacobi that first appeared in the Arkham House collection Dark Mind, Dark Heart (1962). It is notable for its introduction of several marine-themed eldritch tomes.
==Synopsis==
In the story, a painter named Emily Rhodes and her friend, Edith Halbin, lease a house in the Knightsbridge section of London. The house contains a large aquarium, which houses a collection of rare shellfish that belonged to Horatio Lear, a conchologist who had some unorthodox opinions about mollusks. Halbin develops an unwholesome fascination with the aquarium—an obsession that ends with Halbin having her face eaten off by one of the conchs in Lear's collection.
==Characters==
*Emily Rhodes: A 32-year-old painter who had lived in London a year before leasing the house in Knightsbridge. She is described as a "tall angular woman with black hair and metal grey eyes."
*Edith Halbin: Rhodes' friend from Bristol, who moves into the Knightsbridge house with her. Described as "a gaunt, prematurely grey woman." She has a Siamese cat name Kuching with four kittens.
*Horatio Lear: A conchologist who was "famous for his deep sea work", particularly for "exploring the Senarbin Deep off the coast of Haiti". Lear, who dies about a year before the story begins, believed that
somewhere in the unplumbed ocean depths there exists a highly developed kind of mollusk capable of emulating certain characteristics of those life forms it devours.... He believed that these super undersea species are the incarnation of those Elder Gods who ruled the antediluvian deep.... [C]ommanded by the great Cthulhu, they have lain dormant these eons in the sunken city of Flann, awaiting the time they would rise again to feed and rule.
*Edmund Lear: Lear's hated brother, who "publicly accused Horatio of falsifying reports as to the depths he had reached in the diving bell". He disappears and it's suggested that he became food for Horatio's collection. "Edmund’s refusal to accept Horatio’s theory concerning some forms of deep marine life" seems to have been at the root of the animosity between the brothers. They lived together for years, though there was "bad feeling between the two men"; one day Edmund "left", supposedly to pursue "interests in Haiti."
*Talbot Longeway: Senior partner in the firm Longeway & Longeway, which leases the house to Rhodes. Described as "a thin, cadaverous-looking individual with a completely bald pate."
*Lucius Bates: Rhodes and Halbin's neighbor.
==Mythos Tomes==
"The Aquarium" introduces a handful of eldritch tomes with an aquatic theme. Lear's library contains, among other works,a copy of Gantley’s Hydrophinnae, containing some of the most hideous and horrible illustrations [Rhodes] had ever seen. There was a first edition of Dwellers in the Depths by Gaston Le Fe who, the foreword stated quite blandly, had died insane. And there was a pirated manuscript of the German Unter Zee Kulten, all copies of which had supposedly been destroyed in the seventeenth century.These titles are repeatedly included by Brian Lumley in catalogues of books dealing with forbidden sea lore, in stories like "Rising with Surtsey", "Dagon's Bell", "De Marigny's Clock", "Lord of the Worms", and "The House of the Temple".
==Publication History==
When "The Aquarium" first appeared in Dark Mind, Dark Heart, passages that explicitly linked the story to Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos were edited out by August Derleth. Horror scholar Robert M. Price speculates that "Derleth did not care for Jacobi’s independent variations on items of Mythos lore and wanted to keep things orthodox!"Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos, "Introduction", by Robert M. Price (Fedogan & Bremer, 1992). The edited version later appeared in Disclosures in Scarlet, an Arkham House collection of Jacobi's work.
When Price reprinted the story, first in Crypt of Cthulhu #59 (Michaelmas 1988) and then in Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos (Fedogan & Bremer, 1992), he restored the Mythos references. Jacobi's piece has also appeared in two recent collections of his work, Masters of the Weird Tale: Carl Jacobi (Centipede Press, 2014) and Witches in the Cornfield (Weird House Press, 2021), as well as in The Century's Best Horror Fiction 1951-2000 (Cemetery Dance Publications, 2012). Internet Speculative Fiction Database, "Title: The Aquarium".
==References==
Category:Carl Jacobi works
Category:Expanded Mythos Works