Innsmouth Clay

"Innsmouth Clay" is a 1971 short story by August Derleth, one of his "posthumous collaborations" with H. P. Lovecraft. It first appeared in the Arkham House anthology Dark Things in 1971.
== Synopsis==
The story involves a sculptor named Jeffrey Corey who, upon returning from Paris in the fall of 1927, rents a cottage on the Massachusetts coast south of Innsmouth, a town where his distant relatives live. (The story mentions a great-grandfather named Jethro Marsh.) Corey, in his late 30s, is described by his old friend Ken, this story's narrator, as "not ill-favored in looks": six feet tall with "fine, fresh skin", and "very strong blue eyes" with a "piercing quality". He is clean-shaven with long hair and has a lantern jaw. Overall, there was "a queer quality, almost hypnotic, that informed his fine-featured face". Readers familiar with Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" will not be puzzled by the one discordant feature in his appearance: "There is a strange, wattled appearance of the skin back from his jaws, under his ears and down his neck a little way below his ears."
The artist spends only a few days in Innsmouth, where he finds "a considerable amount of talk, however guarded", about his Marsh relatives that "suggested all manner of arcane horror" before the events related in the Lovecraft story, which Corey sums up by writing that "a large band of federal officers of some kind descended upon the town and spirited away some of the citizens". He notes that the Navy dropped depth charges off the coast "in the vicinity of what is known as Devil's Reef [sic]" and how "a subsequent storm washed ashore all manner of debris", including "a peculiar blue clay [that] came in along the water’s edge". Seeing this as a potential medium for sculpting, Corey gathers up as much of the Innsmouth Clay as he can and brings it back to his cottage. 
He uses this clay to create a sculpture he calls the "Sea Goddess", which our narrator declares himself as "oddly repelled" by when he first sees it. He describes it as a "lissome" figure with "rather heavier pelvic structure than I thought fitting", and "webbing between the toes". Corey confesses to working on the sculpture in his sleep, ultimately adding gill-like slits onto the statue's neck during one such session. 
In his journal, Corey describes several dreams involving "swimming accompanied by shadowy men and women", which he attributes to from hearing a story at Hammond's Drug Store "of Great-grandfather Jethro living in the sea. Gilled!" Later, he dreams of swimming in the ocean depths and seeing a "sort of city far below. Ryeh or R’lyeh? Something named ‘Great Thooloo’?”
He also dreams that "a woman, naked, slipped into my bed after I had gone to sleep, and remained there all night." "Nothing like it since Paris!" remarks Corey.
After a series of more bizarre dreams, both the "Sea Goddess" sculpture and then Corey himself disappear. His last letter to the narrator refers to pain "in the disfigured area of skin—wattled or wart-like or fissured, whatever you prefer to call it—beneath my ears", as if his own skin were about to break outward. His final words are:
I cannot rid myself of the conviction that something is about to happen—something I both dread and look forward to, and all manner of ancestral awareness, however badly I put it, obsess me!
Corey leaves no explanation, just "prints of his bare feet" heading toward the sea "in what remained of that odd clay thrown up by the sea in February". However, he does name Ken as the administrator of his estate. Returning to the cottage to dispose of Corey's belongings, the narrator sees a "kind of sea-dweller" in the water off Devil's Reef; "Swimmers [who] looked both fish-like and squamously human." He notes two of them in particular: "one clearly a female creature of an oddly claylike color," the other a male "gilled sea-thing [that] wore the face of Jeffrey Corey!"
== References==
*H.P. Lovecraft; August Derleth. The Watchers Out of Time (p. 277). Random House Worlds. Kindle Edition.
*H.P. Lovecraft; August Derleth. The Watchers Out of Time (p. 277). Random House Worlds. Kindle Edition.
*H.P. Lovecraft; August Derleth. The Watchers Out of Time (p. 276). Random House Worlds. Kindle Edition.
Category:August Derleth works
Category:Lovecraft Circle Works