We Were Innsmouth Twelve: The Reckoning (2024-2026) and Epilogue
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Twelve: The Reckoning (2024-2026)
Have I mentioned that I have lived one hundred and sixty-three years?
I ask because I have apparently mentioned it quite frequently in this document, frequently enough that I notice it myself, which suggests either that the fact bears repeating or that I have become one of those very old people who returns to the same observations with the regularity of a tide that has forgotten it has already come in. I prefer the first explanation. I am aware that the second is equally plausible.
What I will say, in my defence, is that one hundred and sixty-three years is a long time to have been paying attention, and the things you notice after that length of attention are different in quality from the things you notice after twenty years or fifty or even a hundred. There is a texture to the long view that the short view cannot replicate, a sense of pattern that only becomes visible when you have enough of the pattern in front of you to see its shape.
I have enough of the pattern now.
I have had enough of it since last autumn, which is when the current changed in the way I have been trying to describe since the first entry of this document, the pressure change, deep and slow, the thing that feels of 1938 and darker, the thing I have been writing around for over a year because naming it too early gives it ideas and I am not yet ready for it to have ideas.
I am getting closer to ready.
But first, the reckoning.
Providence in 2024 and 2025 has been, by most human measures, a city in the middle of something it has not yet finished becoming.
The Industrial Trust Building, dark since 2013, remains dark, its future the subject of the kind of prolonged civic negotiation that Providence conducts with the weary expertise of a city that has been negotiating with its own contradictions since before the Revolution. There are plans. There are always plans. Whether the plans become anything other than plans is a question that Providence has been answering in the negative for long enough that I have stopped expecting a different answer and started simply watching to see if I am wrong.
I would not mind being wrong about this. The building was new when I arrived in this city. I have watched it for ninety-eight years from the water and I find that I have, against my better judgement, developed something that is not quite fondness for it but is close enough to fondness that the distinction may not matter. A city that can bring its buried rivers back to the surface can perhaps bring its darkened buildings back to the light.
Perhaps.
Brown University continues its eternal cycling of the young and the clever and the temporarily confused, indifferent to everything that has happened in the city around it with the magnificent self-absorption of an institution that has still been doing exactly what it pleases since 1764 and sees no reason to reconsider. I find this, at this point in my long relationship with College Hill, more comforting than irritating. Some things should be permanent. Brown’s certainty about its own importance is, if nothing else, consistent.
WaterFire runs on its appointed evenings and the city gathers around the fire on the water with that instinctive reverence that has not diminished in thirty years of repetition. If anything it has deepened, the ritual accumulating its own gravity with each passing season, the crowds larger and quieter and more attentive than they were in the early years. I watch from the water and I feel Mother Hydra’s fire on Father Dagon’s surface and I feel the city doing the thing it has always done without knowing it is doing it, and I find that after thirty years I am no longer bemused by the not-knowing.
They are worshipping correctly. They have always worshipped correctly. The name of the thing being worshipped is, in the end, between the worshipper and the worshipped, and I am not the keeper of that particular gate.
Scott is adjusting.
I use that word with the full awareness of its inadequacy, because adjusting is what you do to a hem or a thermostat, not what you do when you have been pulled into a river by your own ancestral heritage and discovered that the river has opinions about you specifically. But it is the word he uses, adjusting, with the particular flat humour of someone who has survived enough strange things to have developed a policy of describing them in the most neutral language available, and I have come to respect that policy even when I find it slightly maddening.
He is here. He is in the water. He is learning what he is with the stubborn incremental patience of someone who needs to come to things himself rather than being brought to them, which I have already noted is a Zotykiv quality and which I take a certain complicated pride in even when it slows things down considerably.
He thinks about Erika. I have said this before and I say it again because it is still true and because I think it will be true for a long time and because I want the record to reflect that I am not unaware of what the gathering cost him personally. He does not talk about her constantly. He is not a man who talks about his losses constantly, which is another Zotykiv quality, the particular stoicism of people who carry their grief the way you carry a stone in a coat pocket, present always, not displayed. But it is there in the current when he is near, a specific frequency of loss that the water carries the way it carries everything, faithfully and without editorial comment.
I have thought about whether to tell him about the prayers I said for her in the deep water. I have not yet decided. It may be the kind of thing that helps. It may be the kind of thing that makes the stone in the pocket heavier rather than lighter. I am one hundred and sixty-three years old and I have still not developed a reliable sense of which kind of truth helps and which kind does not, which is perhaps the most humbling admission in this entire document.
Amelia is well. Amelia is, by any reasonable measure, thriving, which is not a word I use lightly about anyone and which I use about her with the particular respect of someone who has watched a great many people navigate the transformation and has rarely seen it navigated with this much conscious intention. She is further along than most. She is patient with the ones who are not as far along. She is, without having been asked or appointed, exactly the kind of presence this community needed and did not know it needed until she arrived.
She does not mention her past. I do not ask. The bay has its secrets and I have learned, over nearly a century in this city, that the secrets the bay keeps are kept for reasons and that prying at them rarely improves anything.
The current around that particular question has a quality to it that I have felt before, specifically in the 1943 passage that I have returned to more than once in this document. Not the same quality. But the same category of quality. Something unresolved. Something still in motion beneath the surface, moving with a direction and a patience that suggests it knows where it is going and intends to get there in its own time.
I leave it there.
The community is larger than it has been since the 1930s.
I want to put that plainly, without qualification or caveat, because I have spent so many entries of this document writing about diminishment and loss and the arithmetic of a people who were not replacing themselves fast enough that I think the plain fact of growth deserves a sentence of its own without anything attached to it.
We are larger than we have been since the 1930s.
The gathering that began, in its tentative early form, with the opening of the rivers in 1994, and that deepened through the WaterFire years and the genealogical disturbances of the 2010s and the pandemic’s strange enforced proximity to the water, has brought people to this river in numbers that I had stopped believing I would see in my lifetime, which admittedly is a longer lifetime than most, but still.
They come as they have always come, by ones and twos, drawn by something they cannot always name to a city they often have no obvious reason to choose. The young woman from coastal Connecticut who found in Providence’s river the first thing that had ever pulled back. The man from the New Jersey shore whose arbitrariness turned out not to be arbitrary. The family moving south for a generation, each move closer to the bay. Scott, who moved to Providence in early 2024 without knowing why Providence specifically, and found out on a Waterfire evening in May why Providence specifically. Amelia, who came through the bay in the early spring of 2019 with the tide’s own certainty and has not looked back since.
And others, ones I have not named in this document because their stories are theirs and not mine, who have found their way to this water through paths as various as the paths that lead to any river. Each of them carrying Dagon’s mark. Each of them, in their own time and their own way, answering the pull they had been feeling for years without knowing what it was.
We are not what we were in Innsmouth. I want to be honest about that too, in the same breath as the growth, because honesty has been the intention of this document from the first entry and I am not going to abandon it in the final one. We are not the community that stood on Devil Reef and knew ourselves completely and lived in the freedom of being exactly what we were in a place built for what we were. We are a community in recovery, scattered and regathering, learning again what it means to be together in the water after nearly a century of hiding and loss.
But we are here. We are growing. We are tending Dagon’s presence in this river with more hands than we have had in eighty years, and the river, I can tell you from direct and daily experience, is responding.
The current is strong. The gold has been coming up from the deep with a regularity and a richness that I have not seen since before the choking years. The fish are back in the upper reaches in numbers that the human fishermen find inexplicable and that I find deeply satisfying. Dagon’s presence in the Providence River is, as of this April of 2026, the strongest it has been since I arrived in March of 1928 and the water knew me before I knew it.
We are as ready as we are going to be.
Which brings me to the thing I have been writing around.
I am going to write around it one more time, not from avoidance but from precision, because I have learned that the most important things are best approached from the side rather than directly, and because what I am about to say deserves the care of an oblique approach.
In the autumn of 1938, in the weeks after the hurricane, something came through the lower bay that was not one of us. It moved through the lower bay with a purpose I could feel from half a mile away and it left without incident and I told myself for many years that it was simply passing through. I no longer believe that. I believe it was noting a position. I believe it was taking the measure of what was here, what had gathered, what the waters of this bay contained. I believe it reported back to whatever sent it, in whatever way such things report, and I believe what it reported was: not yet. Not enough. Wait.
I believe the waiting is ending.
What I felt in the current last autumn was not the same thing I felt in 1938. It was larger. Slower. More patient in the way that the movement of something very large is always slower and more patient than the movement of something small. It did not come into the bay. It did not need to come into the bay. It simply made its presence known in the way that very large things make their presence known, by the change they cause in everything around them without themselves being visible.
I do not know what it wants. I want to be honest about that because I have been implying throughout this document that the gathering I have been working toward is a response to this thing and I should acknowledge that I do not know with certainty that I am right about that. I have been here nearly a century and I have been feeling this pressure in the current for two years and I have been writing this document for over a year and I believe, in the way that you believe things after long enough in the water, that what is coming will require us to be together in ways that we have not been together since Innsmouth.
I do not know if together will be sufficient.
I know that scattered would not be.
I know that Dagon’s gold has been coming up from the deep in quantities I have not seen in a generation, which is either a provision or a payment, and I have been trying to determine which for two years without success.
I know that the old prayers have been feeling, lately, less like something sent into the dark and more like something answered.
I know that my great-grandson is in the water and Amelia is in the water and the community is larger than it has been since the 1930s and the river is strong and the current is good and Mother Hydra’s fire will be on Father Dagon’s water again when the season turns and the city will gather around it without knowing what it is gathering around.
I know that Providence began its revolution by burning a government ship in this bay, fire on water, defiance by flame, and that whatever comes for this city and this community will find both the fire and the water waiting for it.
I know that we are still here.
I know that we are not finished.
I know that Dagon provides.
It is enough to know these things. It will have to be.
– S.Z., Providence, April 2026
Epilogue
I have set this document aside three times in the writing of this final section, which tells you something about my relationship with endings. I am considerably better with middles. I have said this before. It remains true.
The document is complete, or as complete as a document written by someone who is still in the middle of the thing he is documenting can be. I have written down what I remember. I have written down what I know. I have written down what I believe, which is not always the same as what I know, and I have tried, with varying success, to be clear about which is which. The squid ink has held. The pages smell of the sea.
I do not know who will read this. I hope it is you, the ones I have been writing toward through all these entries. I hope it finds the ones who have not yet come, the ones still standing at the water’s edge while everyone around them points firmly inland. I hope it finds them and tells them what they need to know, which is that the water knows their name and has been waiting and that there are others in it who have been waiting too.
I hope it finds Scott.
I have been in this river for ninety-eight years as of this March just past. I did not plan this. You simply stay because the staying is right and the current is good and the water knows your name and the people in it are yours, and one day you look up and ninety-eight years have passed and the city above you has changed entirely and the water beneath you has not changed at all.
You are not a visitor anymore. You were not a refugee, though you arrived as one. You are not hiding, though you move carefully and the coat is large and the hat is pulled low and the rain is always available when you need it.
You are home.
I have been home for ninety-eight years and I did not let myself know it until I wrote it down just now.
This is the history as I saw it in Providence. Not the interactions with the people, the normal humans, nor the abnormal ones. Not the cultists, the zealots, or the odd ones that fetishize us, or the ones who say they identify as one of us, whom we laugh at and call the Shallow Ones. Nothing about the other things, the old things in the woods, under the stones, the things that were here before this place had the name Providence. Nothing about the ghouls that travel in dreams, nor the witches or the rat demons, for there are many, and nothing about the purging of Block Canyon, for we claimed that place from some things that would not coexist with us.
Those are all other stories for later telling.
We were Innsmouth once.
It still means loss. I will not pretend the writing has dissolved the grief of it. But it means something else now too. It means that we were Innsmouth the way a river is its source, carrying something of where it came from even when it is running through the heart of a city that has never seen that place. We carried Innsmouth with us when we fled it. We carry it still.
And Innsmouth is there.
Out past Point Judith, past the lighthouses and the fishing grounds and the last of the Rhode Island coast, the canyon drops away into a darkness that the surface world has no instruments sensitive enough to fully measure.
We have been building in that darkness.
We call it Y’ha-Tukhet.
It is not Y’ha-nthlei. It is a beginning. A foundation. The first courses of a thing that will take generations to become what it is meant to be. We were Innsmouth. We are Providence. We are becoming something that does not yet have its full name.
Dagon provides. He provided in Innsmouth and on the cold coast between there and here and in the Fox Point kitchen on that first night and when the rivers came back and when Erika followed a thread all the way to the truth of it and when Scott went into the river and heard his name and answered it.
He is providing now, in the canyon, in the dark.
We were Innsmouth.
We are something new.
The deep water is the same.
I am setting this document aside now.
There is something I need to do.
The current is good and the water is cold and whatever is coming will find us here. I have said the old prayers. I have felt them answered.
Not the way prayers are usually answered.
The way a pressure change feels in deep water.
Something very large.
Getting closer.
— S.Z., Providence, April 2026
Here ends the memoir of Stanislas Zotykiv, written by hand in squid ink provided by local Longfin Squid between February 2025 and April 2026, in and beneath the city of Providence, Rhode Island, where he has lived since March of 1928 and where, Dagon willing, he intends to remain.
