Eleven: The Summons (2022-2024)
Her name was Erika.
I learned this in the spring of 2022, when the thread that had been pulling with such steadiness through the pandemic years finally pulled hard enough to have a name attached to it. Not a Deep One. Not of Dagon’s blood. Simply a woman who loved someone enough to spend years following a trail that the official record had done everything in its power to make unfollowable, and who was good enough at her work that the official record’s best efforts were not, in the end, sufficient.
I want to say something about Erika before I say anything else, because this document is addressed to our community and our community will know her name and her role in what happened and I want them to know it correctly.
She did not find us because we were careless. She did not find us because the erasure of Innsmouth was incomplete or because the government’s thoroughness in 1928 had degraded with time. She found us because she was exceptional at what she did and because she was motivated by something that defeats most obstacles eventually, which was love, plain and uncomplicated and entirely directed at a man who had no idea what she was about to find.
I have lived one hundred and sixty-three years and I have seen governments fall and cities change and rivers buried and uncovered and the whole long patient turning of things that seem permanent until they aren’t. I have seen very few forces more persistent than a determined woman who loves someone and has decided that the truth of who they are is something they deserve to know.
The government that erased Innsmouth was thorough. Erika was thorough. In the end, thoroughness won.
His name was Scott.
Scott Attwell. My great-grandson.
I have written that sentence several times now in the margins of this document, in the weeks since I first learned it, and it has not yet lost the particular quality it had the first time I wrote it, something between recognition and vertigo, the feeling of a thing slotting into place that you did not know was missing until the moment it arrived.
I had known, in the abstract, that Henryk’s line continued. I had felt Dagon’s mark in the dispersed bloodlines along the coastline with increasing clarity through the years of the gathering. I had known that someone was pulling on the Zotykiv thread with exceptional skill and exceptional motivation. I had known, in the current, that whatever was at the end of that thread carried the mark in a concentration I had not felt since Henryk himself had sat beside me on the riverbank in 1950 and told me he was leaving for cleaner water.
Knowing his name was different from all of that knowing. Knowing his name made him real in the way that only names can make things real, which is why governments that want to erase people always start with the names, and why I have been writing names into this document with such care from the first entry.
Scott Attwell. Son of an Attwell father and a Zotykiv mother who had looked at what she came from and chosen the surface world, as was her right, and had carried Dagon’s mark in her blood through a surface life and passed it to her son without knowing what she was passing. Scott, who had moved to Providence in early 2024 without knowing why Providence specifically, without knowing that the city had been waiting for him the way it had been waiting for me in March of 1928, without knowing that the water he could see from his apartment window knew his name before he had introduced himself to it.
I came to the surface more times in the months between learning his name and the Waterfire evening than I had in the previous decade. Cloaked as always, the large coat, the hat pulled low, moving through the city in the early hours when the foot traffic was thin. I stood on the riverwalk and I looked at the building where he had taken an apartment and I watched the lit windows with the particular feeling of someone who has been waiting for something for a very long time and can finally see it from where they are standing.
I did not go in. Of course I did not go in. I am one hundred and sixty-three years old and I have learned, at considerable cost over a considerable number of years, that the things which need to happen in their own time cannot be hurried by an old man in a large coat standing in the rain outside someone’s building.
But I stood there, on more than one occasion, in the rain, which in Providence is always available for occasions that require it, and I thought about Henryk and the draft notice and the tired doctor from Cranston and the stone on Lovecraft’s grave and all the things that have come to me sideways in this long life, and I thought about how a name, Scott Attwell, could make ninety-six years of waiting feel like it had been the right length of time after all.
I went back to the water.
I began to prepare.
The preparation was, by the standards of what we were preparing for, modest.
We are not a people who go in for ceremony in the elaborate human sense, the decorations and the speeches and the careful arrangement of symbols that humans deploy when they want an occasion to feel significant. Occasions that are actually significant do not require that kind of assistance. What we did was simpler and older and considerably more difficult to describe to anyone who has not felt it, which is to say that we tended the current, and we deepened Dagon’s presence in the river to something approaching what it had been in the best years, and we gathered in the water below the stretch of river where the Waterfire braziers would burn, and we waited.
There were more of us than there had been in a long time. Not many, by the standards of what we had once been in Innsmouth, not many by the standards of what I hope we will be again. But more than the handful that had huddled in the Fox Point houses in the Depression years, more than the contracted remnant that had gone deeper during the choking years, more than the tired community that had watched WaterFire’s first lighting in 1994 from the dark water below and felt the tide begin to turn.
Amelia was there, as she is always there for the things that matter to this community now, with the focused attention of someone who has chosen her life with complete deliberateness and intends to be present in it. She had known, through whatever the water tells those who are new enough to the deep to still be surprised by what it tells them, that something significant was coming on the Waterfire evening of May fifth. She did not know the details. She did not ask. She simply arrived in the current with the look of someone who has been ready for a while and is glad the waiting is nearly over.
I understood that look. I had been wearing it myself for approximately ninety-six years.
The evening of May fourth, 2024 was a beautiful night by Providence standards, which is to say it was warm enough to be outside without apology and the river was running well and the WaterFire crowds had gathered along the riverwalk with the particular collective ease of people who are somewhere beautiful and in no hurry to leave.
I was in the water.
I felt him arrive before I saw the disturbance his presence made in the current above me, that particular quality of Dagon’s mark in a bloodline that has been dormant for a generation, present and strong and entirely unaware of itself, moving through the crowd on the riverwalk with the tentative energy of someone who has recently arrived in a city and is still learning its rhythms.
I felt Erika too, beside him, and I felt the particular quality of her presence which was entirely human and entirely without Dagon’s mark and entirely remarkable, the focused warmth of someone who knows what is coming and has been carrying that knowledge alone for longer than anyone should have to carry something like that.
I want to say something about what she did for him, in those months of research and careful revelation, because I think it is important and because this document, for all that it is addressed to our community, is also in some sense addressed to her, the woman who will never read it and who gave us back one of our own at considerable cost to herself.
She could have stopped. At any point in those years of research, she could have decided that the wall was too high or the silence too deep or the thing on the other side of it too strange to be worth finding. She did not stop. She followed the thread all the way to Innsmouth and all the way back to Providence and all the way to a Waterfire evening in May when she stood on the riverwalk and told the man she loved what he was, which is the hardest kind of truth to tell because it is the kind that changes everything and cannot be untold.
She did this because she loved him. She did this knowing that the love was not going to survive what she was telling him, not in the form it had taken, not in the surface world where love of that kind lives. She did this anyway.
I do not have a word for what that is. I have looked for one for two years. The closest I can come is devotion, but devotion implies a continuing relationship and what Erika did was complete in itself, a thing done fully and without reservation and then released, like a current that has carried something as far as it can carry it and then lets it go.
Perhaps I give her too much credit. Perhaps I have let Scott’s longing elevate her to something closer to fable than fact. I did not know her. I felt the quality of her work in the current and I have heard her described by the one person in this community who knew her well, which is not the same as knowing someone yourself, and grief, I have learned in one hundred and sixty-three years, is not a reliable narrator.
Dagon does not require the devotion of humans. Dagon does not ask anything of people who do not carry his mark. But I have said the old prayers for Erika in the months since that evening, in the quiet of the deep water where the prayers go that do not have a standard form, and I have felt them received in the way I always feel such things, distantly and without certainty, and I have chosen to take that as sufficient.
The community made itself known to him gradually, the way you introduce someone to deep water, not all at once, not the full depth immediately, but steadily and with attention to what they can bear. The approach was better than it had been in the early years of the gathering, more patient, more careful, more attentive to the difference between giving someone information and giving someone an experience they can integrate.
Amelia was part of that approach. Her particular quality of directness, which I have mentioned before, turns out to be exactly what is needed when you are introducing someone to the fact of what they are. She does not soften it. She does not apologise for it. She presents it with the matter-of-fact clarity of someone for whom the transformation is not a tragedy or a horror but simply the truth of what a person is, and that clarity, I have found, is more reassuring to the newly arrived than any amount of careful softening would be.
Scott was not easy about it. I want to be honest about that because this document is supposed to be honest and because the ones who come after him deserve to know that difficulty is not failure. He was not easy about it and he is still not entirely easy about it and I do not expect him to be easy about it on any schedule other than his own. He is his mother’s son in that, the Zotykiv stubbornness running in him in the particular direction of needing to come to things himself rather than being brought to them, which is a quality I recognise because it is a quality I share and which I have found, over one hundred and sixty-three years, to be both a significant inconvenience and an absolute necessity.
He thinks about Erika. More than is probably useful, though I am not in a position to tell him what is and is not useful given my own history of carrying things longer than strictly necessary. He is adjusting to what he is with the dark humour of someone who has survived enough strange things to have developed a methodology for surviving strange things, which is, if not the easiest way to come to Dagon’s water, at least a functional one.
He is here. He is ours. He is, whether he has fully understood this yet or not, exactly where he is supposed to be.
That is enough for now. More than enough.
That is, in fact, everything I have been working toward for ninety-six years.
I felt him go in on the evening of May fourth, 2024, and I felt Dagon’s welcome come up from the deep to meet him, and I felt his answer to it, that thing in the blood that recognises what it is when the water finally shows it, and I felt, in that moment, something I have been trying to find the right word for since March of 1928 when I came ashore at India Point in the rain and the water knew me before I knew it.
Not hope. I have already told you I am too old for hope in its uncomplicated form.
Something older than hope. Something that does not have a name in any language I have learned in one hundred and sixty-three years, though I have been looking for it since the beginning.
Something like: we are still here.
Something like: we are not finished.
Something like: Dagon provides.
Welcome, son of Zotykiv. Child of Dagon.
I said it in the current, where only the water could hear it, and the water carried it to him the way water carries everything eventually, and somewhere above me in the dark river my great-grandson heard something that went around language entirely and arrived already understood.
And something in him, something he had not known was there, answered.
– S.Z., Providence, April 2026
