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.
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.
