Nine: The Gathering (2000-2015)
The new century arrived with considerably less drama than the humans had been anticipating.
I watched the millennium celebrations from the water with the detached interest of someone for whom the turning of a century is not a remarkable event, having lived through two of them and being well into a third. The humans had spent the better part of a year in a state of escalating anxiety about what their computers would do when the date changed, which struck me as a very particular kind of problem to have, the fear that the machines you have built to remember things for you will forget the most important thing at the most inconvenient moment. I found this both amusing and instructive. It is very human to build something to hold your memory and then discover that the thing you built has limitations you did not anticipate.
I have kept my own memory in my own head for one hundred and sixty three years. It is imperfect. It is partial. It forgets things I would prefer to keep and keeps things I would prefer to forget. But it has never once failed to turn over correctly at midnight on the first of January, which is more than could be said for a significant portion of the world’s computing infrastructure in the winter of 1999.
Providence celebrated with fireworks over the river. I watched the reflections from below, the colours breaking and reforming on the current, bright against dark, never settling. It was, I will admit, beautiful in the way that fire on water is always beautiful, which is to say in the way of something that should not work and does anyway.
We were still few. But we were fewer no longer getting fewer, which was the most important thing, and the distinction between those two states is not a small one when you have been watching the numbers go in one direction for thirty years.
Something had shifted. Something was, slowly and without announcement, beginning to shift back.
The early years of the new century were, for Providence, years of cautious reinvention.
The restaurant culture that had begun to establish itself in the late 1990s deepened and broadened, Federal Hill completing its transformation from Patriarca’s territory into something that appeared in travel magazines, the old neighbourhood now described in the kind of breathless prose that food writers deploy when they have discovered somewhere they feel they are the first to discover, which is never true and is always flattering to the place regardless. The waterfront continued its development, new buildings going up along the river, the old industrial spaces converting to the apartments and galleries and small offices of a post-industrial economy trying on new clothes.
By now even the rhythm of Brown’s expansion felt familiar. The university continued its serene, centuries-old advance, graduate programs, the medical school, arts buildings, the annual infusion of the young and clever and temporarily confused, while the city absorbed them with the practiced ease of long habit. I had been watching the same tide since 1928; only the faces changed.
I watched all of this with the particular attention of someone who has learned that cities, like water, move in currents that are not always visible from the surface. The visible Providence of the early 2000s, the charming small city with the good restaurants and the colonial architecture and the thriving arts scene, was real enough. But underneath it, as underneath everything in this city, something older was moving.
The blood was coming back to the water.
Not quickly. Not in numbers that would have been visible to anyone who was not specifically watching for it. But watching for it was precisely what I had been doing for twenty years, and I saw it.
They came the way the first ones had come in 1928, by ones and twos, drawn by something they could not name to a city they often had no obvious reason to choose. A young woman from coastal Connecticut who had spent her whole life standing at the water’s edge while everyone around her pointed firmly inland, and who found in Providence’s river the first thing that had ever pulled back. A man from the New Jersey shore who had taken a job in Providence almost arbitrarily and discovered that the arbitrariness had not been arbitrary at all. A family from further up the coast who had been moving south for a generation, each move bringing them closer to the bay, as though the bay were a destination they had always been navigating toward without a map.
They did not know what they were. Most of them did not. The blood had been diluted by generations of surface living, the mark of Dagon present but quiet, more instinct than knowledge, more pull than understanding. They felt the water. They felt the current. They felt, standing on the riverwalk during WaterFire with the flames reflected in their too-dark eyes, that they had arrived somewhere they had always been going.
They did not know why.
We did.
The question of what to do with that knowledge, how to approach people who carry Dagon’s mark without knowing it, how to introduce them to what they are without frightening them into running in the opposite direction, is one I had been thinking about since the 1990s and had not entirely resolved by the early 2000s. It requires a delicacy that does not come naturally to a people who have spent eighty years in hiding, and a patience that, while not foreign to us, is easier to maintain when you are not watching someone struggle with something you could simply explain.
We were not always as patient as we should have been. We were not always as delicate. There were approaches made in those years that I am not proud of, too sudden, too strange, too much of what we are presented without sufficient preparation for what the receiving end of that revelation feels like.
I have written in this document about the government’s talent for deciding that a people are a problem requiring administration. I want to be honest that we were not, in those early years of the gathering, entirely free of our own version of that talent. The difference, I hope and believe, is that we were motivated by love rather than fear, by the desire to bring our people home rather than to contain or control them. But motivation does not always determine outcome, and there were people in those years who encountered us and ran, and I do not blame them, and I think about them still.
The Industrial Trust Building went dark in 2013.
Not all at once. I had been watching it dim for thirty years, as I noted at the beginning of the previous entry, floor by floor and tenant by tenant, the light going out in sections as the building emptied of the businesses that had filled it through the postwar decades. By 2013 the last tenants were gone and the building stood on the Providence skyline like a question nobody had yet found the money to answer.
They had been calling it the Superman building for years by then. I never had the heart to tell them there was nothing super about watching a city’s tallest building go dark floor by floor. A city that renames its landmarks after fictional characters is a city that has lost the thread of its own story, and Providence in the early 2010s had lost several threads simultaneously, the building, the ongoing contraction of the manufacturing base, the municipal finances that seemed to find new ways to be dire with each passing year.
I watched the last lights go out from the water and I thought about arriving in this city in 1928, when the Industrial Trust Building was new and the tallest thing in New England and the city below it was loud and busy and had no idea what was living in its rivers. I thought about all the years between then and 2013, all the things that building had watched from its height while I watched from my depth, and I found that I was, unexpectedly, sad.
Not for the building. For the city. For the particular kind of loss that happens when a place forgets what made it worth building in the first place.
Providence had not forgotten entirely. The river still ran. WaterFire still lit the braziers on the appointed evenings and the city still gathered around the fire on the water with that instinctive reverence that never failed to move me regardless of how many times I witnessed it. The restaurants were still good. The university still cycled its young people through their brief transformations on the hill. The blood was still finding its way back to the water, slowly and by ones and twos, the gathering continuing its quiet work.
But the dark building on the skyline was a reminder that cities, like communities, like people, can lose the thread of themselves if they are not careful, and that losing the thread is always easier than finding it again.
I know something about losing threads.
I know something about finding them again too.
The humans had built themselves new tools for finding each other in those years, social platforms and ancestry websites and the various digital mechanisms by which a species that had spent a century engineering the distance between itself and its neighbours now attempted to reverse the damage by staring at pixels arranged as images of strangers and calling it family. I found this, and find it still, a peculiar solution to a problem of their own making. You do not rebuild what has been lost by typing at it. You rebuild it by showing up, by staying, by being present in the same water as the people you belong with until the belonging becomes something neither party has to think about anymore.
But that was not my problem to solve. The humans could tend their own disconnection. I had my own disconnection to attend to.
What these platforms did, incidentally and without intending to, was disturb the genealogical sediment that had been settling undisturbed over the erasure of Innsmouth for seventy years. People were finding walls where their family histories should have been. Names that appeared from nowhere. Towns that no longer existed on any map. Most of them hit the wall and accepted it, filing the silence under the general category of things that cannot be known and moving on with their brief lives. A few kept pulling.
None of them, in those early years, pulled far enough to find us. But we felt the pulling in the way you feel a current change when something upstream has shifted, and we began, for the first time since 1928, to consider that the erasure which had protected us might not protect us indefinitely.
Somewhere in the bloodlines that had scattered from Providence and from Innsmouth before that, Dagon’s mark was stirring in people who did not know what it was. I felt it in the current with increasing clarity as the decade went on. Not one person. Not one line. Several, dispersed along the coastline, carrying the old blood in diluted and half-forgotten configurations, feeling the pull of the water without understanding its source.
One of them, I felt certain, would eventually pull hard enough.
I did not yet know which one. I did not yet know when.
I went back to the water and I tended what needed tending and I let Dagon’s patience be my patience, which is the only sensible approach when you are very old and the thing you are waiting for has not yet shown its face.
– S.Z., Providence, February 2026
