In 1926, the wealthy industrialist and shipping magnate James Harrington summoned several friends and acquaintances to a dinner party sponsored by the American Businessmen’s League. From that night forward, their fate became bound together. They were:
- Count Nikolai Rostov, an ex-patriate Russian nobleman and staunch anti-Communist. He was the keynote speaker at the dinner, warning against the dangers of worker’s unions.
- Dr. Virgil Rutherford, Professor of Linguistics at Harvard. Harrington had earlier asked his help in translating a hand-copied fragment of an occult text from German.
- Dr. Robert Harger, M.D., a prominent local physician.
- Lucas Huxley, a struggling writer. Huxley’s complex allegorical tales of societal decay had failed to spark much interest from the public or publishers. To date, his only success was the short story “Lifeboat Massacre,” a pulp story about the horrible fate that greets the survivors of a sunken luxury liner. This story aroused the interest of Harrington and earned the admiration of fellow writer, Buck Martin.
- Buck Martin, a former lawman and writer of Western dime novels. Martin was a celebrity guest at the dinner.
- Spencer Thompson, an occasional piano player and frequent thief. He knew Buck from a stint as the saloon player in the All-American Wild West Show. Buck invited Thompson to the party.
At the party, Harrington suddenly grew frightened. He begged his guests to protect his wife from a mysterious threat, and to keep safe the strange amulet he kept hidden beneath his shirt. All at once he collapsed, vomiting enormous quantities of seawater. Moments later, he died, his lungs filled with water as if he had drowned. His dying words were a choked warning about söhne des meeres – the “sons of the sea”.
The Depths of the PastBound by their promise to the dead man, Harrington’s guests began to investigate his death and the mysterious threat to his wife. Suspicion fell on a Harrington family friend, the unctuous Captain De Roca, skipper of the Brazilian tramp steamer Oscar, but Mrs. Harrington insisted that he had been a loyal friend to her and her husband.
Clues appeared in Harrington’s past, linked to a chain of events begun in 1917 when the Olympia, an ocean liner on which he was a passenger, was sunk by a German U-boat. Some survivors were taken aboard the U-boat, only to be trapped when the submarine struck a mine and plunged to the bottom of the sea. Incredibly, Harrington and two other men, Tom Barnes and George Wilson, survived.
None of the survivors could shed any light on their miraculous escape. But as the investigators dug deeper, they discovered that all three men were afterwards changed in some strange and awful way. There were hints of a horrible, hidden deformity, and terrible urges. One of the survivors, George Wilson, was arrested multiple times for assault and attempted rape, and finally committed suicide in prison by castrating himself.
The other, Tom Barnes, had become a morphine addict. Like Harrington and Wilson, he wore a strange, greenish-gold amulet of bizarre workmanship. They were wearing them when they were rescued at sea, but none could say where they had come from. They could not bear to remove them, and the few times Barnes had tried, it had always returned inexplicably as he slept. This fate was now shared by Dr. Harger, who had donned Harrington’s amulet.
Barnes warned against the machinations of De Roca, whose designs appeared to be centered on Mrs. Harrington. They seemed connected with Harrington’s insistence that his wife never bear a child; the doctor who supplied Barnes with morphine, Lohmann, had performed more than one secret abortion for Mrs. Harrington. Barnes feared that De Roca wished to use a Harrington child in some horrible occult ritual.
Troubled Dreams and Troubled WatersA midnight raid on the Oscar provided several tantalizing clues, including the complete hand-copied text of an occult tome, Unaussprechlichen Kulten. Dr. Rutherford studied this intently, and found himself immersed in strange and horrible rituals he did not dare to practice. But one night he awoke to find his hands covered in cat's blood, the book open before him, and he realized the decision was no longer his. Strange, prophetic dreams haunted him. He heard warnings of disaster, gurgling from the lips of drowned men. And he saw the figure of Captain Cook, the 18th century South Seas explorer, who insisted cryptically that, “They were plainly the jawbones of fish, and not of men.”
Soon after the Oscar raid, the investigators were attacked at Rutherford’s home. Water gushed from the faucets, moving as if alive, trying to engulf and drown the men. Fleeing outdoors for safety, they were attacked by shotgun-wielding sailors from the Oscar, aided by a mysterious figure that lurked in the shadows and showed hints of a shape that was only partly human. The investigators managed to drive off their attackers and badly wounded the shadowy figure.
The next day, Barnes was kidnapped by De Roca’s minions. De Roca proposed an exchange: Barnes for the amulet now worn by Dr. Harger. Fearing for Mrs. Harrington’s safety, the investigators persuaded her to proceed with a planned sea cruise and escorted her safely aboard ship. That night, they drove to the seaside rendezvous to meet with De Roca.
Lost at SeaDe Roca’s treachery was immediately evident; Barnes’ mutilated corpse was found by the shoreline. Then the sea suddenly surged and rushed inland, flooding the small beach. The investigators remained safe on high ground, but then De Roca appeared, rising from the waves. Moonlight gleamed on the grayish-green things that came with him, slipping through the water like fish but then rising to walk like men. A pitched battle followed. Some were driven mad by the horrible half-human fish things, others were stricken with terror by De Roca's supernatural gaze. But even De Roca's occult powers could not save him from the withering hail of bullets that were turned against him. He sank at last beneath the waves as the investigators fled from the amphibious horde.
It was not until the following day that they found the letter from Mrs. Harrington to DeRoca, telling him of her pregnancy and pleading with him for help. "I love my husband, but I love my unborn child more," she wrote. "Please help me, Captain - do you what you must to protect the life of my child." A few days later, Mrs. Harrington was reported lost at sea after falling overboard. Her body was never found, and she was presumed drowned.
Of the many unanswered questions that remain, some clues may lurk in the strange poem found in De Roca's cabin:
The Other Messiah
Up rose that scourge, the fishers of the deep,
But savage minds hearkened to ancient fears;
With timeless runes upon their stony spears,
They sent the god-king to his endless sleep.
His Titan corpse rotted upon the earth,
While his children beneath the haunted seas
Hissed evil curses and croaked blasphemies
And prayed to sunken gods for his rebirth.
In unknown depths His monstrous seed was spawned,
To be born of woman but not of man.
They looked upon His bloated face and ran.
Darkness oozed in His wake, and no day dawned.
Cities trembled and fell, as all around
The world quaked with horror, in madness drowned.
(from People of the Monolith by Justin Geoffrey)
