Red Sargasso Memories

Hello, my name is Colin Germenhauer and I am a professor of biology at Miskatonic University in Arkham, with a specialty in the marine life close to our shores. If anyone should ever read this, it is quite possible that I am dead, mercy be, or admitted to an asylum. I cannot rightly say or explain why I am writing this down, for it brings troubling memories and experiences bubbling to the surface, but even so I feel it must be done. 

All my life I have been fascinated by living creatures. What they do, how they do it and, most importantly, why they do it. The life in our oceans has always held the majority of that fascination, and when I was a very young child, my most precious possessions were a book on identifying the fish in the rivers of Massachusetts, and a goldfish. Even now I remember how we had decorated its little bowl with colourful pebbles from the beach and a tiny castle. It is a happy memory, I suppose, but it brings a shudder to me now, thinking of a fish lording over a castle of human design. I attribute this enduring fascination to a dream I had many times during my childhood. I understand that my siblings, all 4 of them grown women now, experienced this dream as well, but it quickly became evident, both to me and to my parents, that the visions in that dream had had a much more profound effect on my mind than those of my sisters. 

In the dream I would find myself on a hill overlooking a vast stretch of coastline. The sky is cloudy with no rain and the day is cold but clammy. I was always alone, even on nights when all my siblings experienced the dream as well. With a sense of urgency I would hurry down that hill, running full pelt and almost falling many times, until my bare feet touch upon the sand. Seagulls begin arriving, first one then two, then ever-increasing numbers until the dream’s end. They cry out and I understand what they are trying to communicate. I can never remember their meaning when I wake, but I remember understanding. I approach the waters as the seagulls begin filling the sky, and as I arrive at the water’s edge, the ocean begins to fill as well. First, leafy kelp begins to surface. Individual fronds at first, then larger and larger patches, until the surface of the ocean is dark-green. Then come fish, splashing or outright leaping up between the gaps in the kelp. It was in the hope of learning about these that I asked for the river book from my parents. Then larger fish and ocean-going mammals come up, until the water-plumes of majestic whales shoot towards the grey sky. All the majestic life pushes for the shoreline, and the dream ends as they begin to beach themselves. I have had this dream scores of times throughout my life and I have always considered it a boon in my life. Now, I wish it was gone and that it would never trouble my sleep again.

The reason for this change is perhaps the primary driver behind me writing this all down. It came during the course of my research-work at Miskatonic.

I had been reading and taking notes in my office all day, and was about to head for home when a man knocked on the door to my office. He looked a commoner, with a coarse beard and heavy boots. A yellow rain-coat hung over his arm, dripping rainwater onto the floorboards. I was about to ask his business when one of the secretaries of the biology department poked her head past him.

The man, a Mr. Holm Davies, had asked to see a professor from my department and, since I was the only one on campus that particular day, Lucy had brought him to me. In retrospect, if only it had been anyone else. Mr. Davies ran a family fishery in a smaller town to the north of Arkham, a town I will not name in these documents so that others would not share in my tragedy, if at all possible. 

In the course of the Davies fishery work, a catch of fish came in. Now, you might, surely that is quite usual at a fishery, otherwise they'd have no business. Well, this catch was far from usual, and Mr. Davies showed me an object from this catch that he had kept bundled up in that raincoat, with his assurance that the rest of the fish were not dissimilar. At first, I thought the man was trying to fool me or to make fun of our department, for the creature Mr. Davies called a ‘fish’ was so abnormal. Only after looking closer did I assure myself that it was, at least, a creature that had not been altered for Mr. Davies’s benefit. 

It had all the elements that one would consider ‘iconic’ for a fish to have. Gills, fins, scales and those peculiar fish-eyes. But their arrangement was peculiar, like the creature had been made of foam and then shaken about. I will attach copies of my department’s copies of drawings rather than attempt to describe it here in greater detail. One of these would be an interesting find, but a net full of them implied that it was a species or an isolated group that had found its way back to our world, rather than a singular unfortunate creature. My initial annoyance at Mr. Davies and Lucy’s interruption evaporated in the face of incredible fascination and curiosity. I remember leaning back from the table and my examination feeling overwhelmed by the possibilities of it. At the peak of my daydreaming I imagined a Galapagos Island of the oceans, all carrying my name as the one who had discovered it. 

I dismissed Lucy and talked to Mr. Davies concerning where his fishery had found this catch. Before I moved on with this information, I thanked Mr. Davies for the visit and promised the man I would get in touch when I had more information. Next I ensured that the creature, for i hesitated to call it a fish just yet, was kept properly in a freezer and dove into the maps of the waters off our eastern coast. Using the location given to me by Mr. Davies, I examined the currents so that I would have some idea of where to start looking. Needless to say, to list all the possible sources close to the surface alone would take many, many pages and I see no reason to undertake that work, for the first place I looked was also the last. 

The vast majority of the possible sources were out in the ocean or by islands close to our coast, but there was one place where the currents bend to pass close by the land. It was also quite close to Mr. Davies’s indicated location, so I imagined that a primordial cave had been opened by some happenstance and these unique creatures had ventured from their usual habitat into foreign waters, been caught by the ocean currents of which they would have been unknowing, then dragged into the nets of the Davies fishery. As with before, I will not name the town. Caught up in my daydreams of oceanic glory, I wrote letters to my immediate colleagues informing them of the situation along with my theories and suspicions before hurrying home to pack. I left for the coastal town the next morning intending to scope out the place before what I imagined would be a grand project. 

Of my train ride, there is little to say. Well, that is not strictly true. Of the sights there is little to say. But I met a fellow gentleman on the train, purely by happenstance, though perhaps in retrospect, there was some sinister significance to that event. In deference to his privacy, I will simply call him Mr. Derre in this text. Mr. Derre is not an employed professor, but my impression of him is of a man enamoured with knowledge and learning, but where life took him in a different direction. Had things been different, he would surely have been an esteemed professor at Miskatonic. We fell to talking and when I told Mr. Derre my destination, he became animated. Apparently it was no stranger to mysterious finds; just a few years ago, a viking longship had been discovered a few hundred metres off the coast, on the seabed as it sloped towards the ocean. A friend of Mr. Derre’s is a professor in such fields and helped work on the find, which they discovered was a few decades younger than the proposed viking discovery of America. Despite the wear and tear of several centuries, the ship had clearly been laden with loot, both with gold and with treasures of the native Indians, when it had left America’s coast and headed east, before sinking barely out of ‘port’. After a moment of silence, Mr. Derre told me of a peculiar aspect of the sunken ship; there were no bodies to be found anywhere on the vessel. A theory had been aired that it had been a funerial vessel, but Mr. Derre’s friend had argued that, surely, that would have left at least one body, but there were none. Either the ship had been sent out crewless, laden with loot as perhaps an offering to their savage gods, or the entire crew had evacuated the vessel as it had been stricken. A few weapons had been found, but not enough to arm the amount of crew that such a vessel required. All in all, the sunken ship was a mystery that still occupied the researchers involved, and as such they had not published their findings yet, so I had not heard of it before talking to Mr. Derre. He had further to go than I did, and he expressed his excitement on my part for visiting the township and its stretch of coast.

But when I arrived, I stepped out of the carriage to find that the train station had been built some distance from town. A wind-blasted heath surrounded the station, the only nod to civilisation being a sign pointing towards the coast, bearing the town’s name. I could make out the tops of houses in that direction, and so I set out. As I neared, the ground became swampier, which I assumed was the reason for the station’s remoteness. A bridge took me across a narrow brook and after that I found much more solid ground, as well as the start of the township. The houses of the township followed a central path that wound its way down towards the sandy coast in the distance. The houses were all built of wood, darkened with age, and with windows looking into gloomy interiors. Here and there I saw curtains on the inside, and even in the houses where I could look inside, any occupants I did see shied away from their windows. I greeted one pair sitting on their porch, but they simply glared at me without a word of reply. Their stony silence continued when I inquired whether their village had seen any peculiar fish lately, and so I continued. It occurred to me as I walked that I had only seen elderly people. Certainly not a soul that I saw looked to be under 40 years of age, and considering my experiences in that town, considering the possibilities fills me with dread. There was one old woman who actually answered when I asked a question, though she was hurried inside by her husband before I could get much more than a cryptic phrase. “The seagulls remember.” That was what she said. I was so stunned by the recollection of my childhood dream that by the time I had recovered my sense and thought to ask her further questions, she was already being ushered inside. As I explained earlier, the dream always involved great flocks of seagulls, and during the dream I understood their words, only to inevitably forget their meaning upon waking. In a moment of fancy, I wondered whether the seagulls would remember the meaning I had forgotten, but I pushed the thought from my mind. 

Figuring the townsfolk to be a dead end, I pushed onwards towards the beach. The day was overcast and windy, but I did not think it would rain. Sand stretched until the last few metres to the water where pebbles took over. Here and there I spied boats, but they were row-boats rather than the fishing-trawlers of an industrial fishery. One boat had a fishing rod lying over the side, but the rod looked to have been out of use for many years. I stood there for a moment, wondering how to proceed. I had hurried here from Arkham hoping to find some initial clues or quick discoveries, but on foot and without any help from the local town, I found myself at a seeming dead end. I thought then of Mr. Derre’s sunken ship, and I wondered where it had been relative to where I was standing. 

As I was pondering this, I heard a seagull. In itself not extraordinary, I was by the water and I had seen seagulls hovering as I walked down the hill to the coastline. But still its cry stopped me and I looked up. In the sky I could just see one seagull. Then it was joined by a second, and a third. As I watched, speechless, the trio became a flock of cawing ocean-birds circling over the water, and the flock kept growing. My hair stood on end as I realised their cawing was gaining meaning in my ears, turning from raw bestial noises to foul language, language not of this manly world. 

Draugr, draugr, draugr!

Next I saw a disturbance among the waves rolling onto the shore. For a moment I thought it was a lump of flesh, but I saw that I was wrong when yet more matter washed up onto the sand in front of me. It was kelp, but not like the wholesome stuff of my dreams. This was blood-red, thin and reedy as if a great creature had had its sinews cut from its body and cast into the ocean. I bent down and lifted some of it, finding it interconnected with hair-thin plant fibres. More and more rose to the surface, until the ocean from horizon to horizon was blood-red with the stuff. I could feel my body wanting to escape, to flee this visage, but another impulse, one born from a lifetime of seeing this scene with my dreaming eyes, compelled me to stay, for I thought I knew what would come next. If only I had ignored that impulse. 

The cries of the seagulls intensified as clumps of the red kelp began to shift and move independent of the waves. My thoughts returned to what Mr. Derre had said of the viking ship’s missing crew as a shape rose through the kelp, the blood-red fibres draping over its form like a shawl. It was a mockery of the human form, revealing all our pretenses and pride as simple jokes against truths hidden in the very world we call home and thought under our dominion. I will not describe the creatures in further detail here, for this is bringing up horrible memories that I wish only to escape from. As more shapes rose from the kelp, staring at me across centuries of age and uncountable fathoms of ocean, I ran screaming from that beach, the seagulls screaming at me. They had known of this far longer than any living creature, the horror etched onto their very essence, a memory delivered to the next generation of ocean birds as a precaution against what lurked beneath the waves.

Draugr, draugr, draugr!

I fled from that beach and from that town, and shut myself off from the world. I know not what happened after my departure, if what I saw was a horrible vision or a precursor of things to come, and I cannot say that I dare to find out. I am back to my office for the first time in months, simply to write this letter and to gather my most precious belongings before I depart from Arkham for good.

I still experience the dream, but now it is red kelp that fills the horizon and it is not marine life that rises from the ocean to meet me. I cannot forget the meaning of the cries of the gulls.

Draugr, draugr, draugr!