Ten: The New Blood (2016-2021)
I am writing this entry in March, which means I have been at this document for just over a year now, and I find that the writing has changed me in ways I did not anticipate when I picked up the pen in February of 2025. I thought I was writing a history. I thought I was setting down what I knew for the ones who came after, a record, an accounting, the kind of document that a very old man produces when he has decided that what is in his head is too important to remain only there.
I did not expect to find, in the writing of it, that the history was not finished.
I did not expect what the last several years have brought to this river, and I have been in this river for nearly ninety-eight years and I had thought, foolishly, that surprise was something that happened to younger people.
Dagon has a sense of humour. I have suspected this for some time. The events of the last several years have confirmed it to my complete satisfaction.
Amelia came to us through the bay in the spring of 2019.
I will not tell her story in full because it is hers and not mine, and she has told it herself with the directness and the lack of sentimentality that I have come to regard as her most characteristic qualities. What I will tell you is what I observed, which is this:
She did not arrive the way most of the returning blood arrives, tentatively and confused, drawn by something they cannot name to a city they have no obvious reason to choose, standing at the water’s edge with the look of someone who has been hearing a sound just below the threshold of hearing for so long that they have stopped trusting their own ears. She arrived the way the tide arrives. With intention. With the quiet certainty of something that has been building for a long time and has finally reached the shore it was always moving toward.
She had been changing before she came to us. The transformation is not always sudden, not always the dramatic revelation of a particular night or a particular body of water. Sometimes it is slow, a gradual becoming, the body moving toward what the blood has always known it was while the mind catches up at whatever pace it can manage. Amelia’s mind, by all accounts, caught up faster than most. She understood what was happening to her before she had the words for it, which is the best possible relationship to have with a truth that does not have easy words.
She left the life she had been living cleanly and without prolonged explanation. This caused pain, the kind of pain that the leaving of any life causes to the people who were in it, and I will not minimise that. But she did not half-leave. She did not keep one foot on the shore and one in the deep water, which is the most uncomfortable position available to someone in her situation and the one that causes the most damage to everyone involved. She chose, and she went, and she came to the water with nothing held back.
I find this admirable. I find it, if I am being entirely honest, slightly humbling in someone so recently arrived at what she is, given how many decades it took some of the rest of us to commit to our nature with equivalent completeness.
She found us in the way that Dagon’s people find each other in the water, without needing to be directed, without needing the community’s network or the surface watchers or any of the careful infrastructure we had built for exactly this kind of arrival. She simply followed the current to where the current led and the current, as it always does when Dagon’s mark is in the blood, led here.
She was not complete in her transformation when she arrived. The transformation does not complete itself on anyone’s schedule but its own, and Amelia’s is proceeding at the pace that is right for her, which is not something I am in a position to hurry or judge. What I can tell you is that she is further along than most who have come to us in recent years, and that the direction of travel is not in question, and that she has brought to this community something that I did not know we were missing until she arrived.
Certainty. Not the grim certainty of someone who has run out of alternatives, but the active certainty of someone who has looked at what they are and decided that what they are is exactly what they intend to be.
We needed that. We had been tentative for too long, careful for too long, hiding for too long. Amelia does not hide. She is learning, with what I can only describe as impatient grace, the practical necessities of a community that must remain invisible to the surface world, but she learns them as tactics rather than as conditions of her existence, and the distinction matters more than it might appear.
She asked me, within her first week, about the community’s plans. Not what we were doing. What we were planning to do.
I told her we were gathering.
She looked at me with those dark eyes that were already more deep water than surface world and said, with the particular economy of someone who does not waste words, “Good. Then let’s gather.”
I have been taking her advice ever since.
The disturbance in the genealogical record that I noted toward the end of the previous entry sharpened considerably in 2019 and 2020.
The DNA testing services that had been growing through the previous decade had by then accumulated databases large enough to begin producing results that the earlier, smaller databases could not. People who had tested years before and received no useful matches were suddenly finding connections, distant and strange and in some cases deeply confusing connections, to bloodlines they had not known they shared. The genealogical walls that had protected the Innsmouth erasure for ninety years were not coming down, the official record was still the official record and the government’s thoroughness in 1928 had not diminished with time. But the walls were developing, if not cracks, then at least shadows. Outlines of what was on the other side, visible to anyone who knew how to read the shape of an absence.
We had been watching this development with the careful attention of people who understand that being found is not always the same as being safe. The community had long discussions, some of them heated in the particular way of people who have been frightened for a very long time and are not entirely certain that the thing approaching is not another reason to be frightened. The younger ones, Amelia among them, argued for engagement, for turning toward the disturbance rather than away from it, for trusting that Dagon’s mark in the blood of the returning ones would protect the community better than continued hiding. The older ones, those of us who remembered Innsmouth or who had grown up in the shadow of its memory, argued for caution.
I argued for both, which satisfied no one and was probably correct.
What I knew, in the current, was that the disturbance was not random. It had a shape. It was moving in a direction. The bloodlines that were generating the most significant genealogical noise were not scattered evenly along the coastline. They were concentrated in specific places, specific family lines, specific people who were pulling on specific threads with a persistence that suggested they were not going to stop simply because the thread led somewhere uncomfortable.
One thread in particular had been pulling with a steadiness and a skill that I had been feeling in the current for two years by the time 2020 arrived. Not the person themselves, not yet, but the quality of the pulling, careful and patient and motivated by something stronger than mere curiosity.
I did not yet know the name attached to that thread. I did not yet know whose thread it was or where it led or what it would find when it found what it was looking for.
I knew only that it was pulling, and that whatever was at the other end of it was getting closer, and that the current around it felt of Dagon’s mark in a way that made the hairs on the back of my neck, such as they are at this stage of my transformation, stand up in a way they had not stood since March of 1928 when I came ashore at India Point and the water knew me before I knew it.
Then the world stopped.
I am aware that this is a dramatic way to describe what happened in the spring of 2020, and I am aware that Stanislas Zotykiv is not generally given to dramatic descriptions. But I have been writing this document for over a year now and I find that the accumulated weight of all these entries has loosened something in me, some long-maintained reserve, and the spring of 2020 was, from where I was watching it, as close to the world stopping as anything I have witnessed in one hundred and sixty-three years, with the exception of 1918.
The Spanish Flu tore through the Massachusetts coast like a current through a broken hull, taking the human population of the fishing towns around us in numbers that were staggering even by the standards of people accustomed to losing men to the sea. Innsmouth was largely spared the worst of it, our particular biology being what it is, but the towns around us were not, and watching your neighbours die of something that cannot touch you is its own particular kind of suffering, one that leaves a mark even on those of us who are not built the way they are built.
In 2020, Providence went quiet.
Not the quiet of a late winter night or an early morning before the foot traffic begins. A deeper quiet, a held-breath quiet, the quiet of a place that has been told to stay inside and has, with varying degrees of willingness, complied. The streets above the river emptied. The restaurants closed. The university sent its students home and the hill went quiet in a way I had never heard it go quiet in ninety-two years of listening. The waterfront, my waterfront, the riverwalk that had been busy with tourists and joggers and WaterFire crowds since the 1990s, was empty for months at a time in a way that it had not been empty since the Depression.
I found this, if I am being honest, deeply unsettling in a way I had not anticipated.
I had spent ninety years managing our community’s visibility around the rhythms of human activity above the waterline. The presence of humans on the waterfront was a constraint, a complication, something to be worked around and accommodated and occasionally, when necessary, discouraged. I had not known, until it was gone, that I had come to find it reassuring. The footsteps on the riverwalk. The voices carrying over the water. The particular quality of a city at full human capacity, loud and warm and completely unaware of what was moving in its river.
Its absence felt wrong in a way I could not immediately account for and eventually identified as loneliness, which is not an emotion I have significant experience with and which I found considerably less dignified than I would have preferred.
WaterFire did not run in 2020.
I want to say something more about this than the bare fact of it but I find I am not entirely certain what to say. Those of you who were here know what it meant. The braziers dark on the river. Mother Hydra’s fire absent from Father Dagon’s water for the first time in twenty-six years. The ritual interrupted, the sacrament suspended, the city’s oldest instinct silenced by a virus so small it could not be seen and so large it stopped everything.
I said the old prayers. I tended the current. I kept Dagon’s presence in the river as well as I could manage alone, which was less well than I would have liked.
The deep water was fine. The deep water is always fine. Whatever moves in the deep places was not inconvenienced by the pandemic in any way that I could detect, which is either reassuring or alarming depending on how you think about it. Lord Dagon does not catch human illnesses. Lord Dagon does not close for lockdown. Lord Dagon does not, as far as I have been able to determine in one hundred and sixty-three years of devotion, notice the difference between a pandemic year and any other year, which is either the most comforting or the most humbling thing I know about him, and I have gone back and forth on which for the better part of two years.
What the pandemic did do, and this I noticed with considerable interest from my position in the river, was drive people toward water.
Not our water specifically. Water generally. The coast. The shore. The rivers and the bays and the ocean edges of a country that had suddenly been told it could not go to the places it usually went and had discovered, in the absence of those places, that what it most wanted was to stand at the edge of something large and open and breathe. The coastal towns along Narragansett Bay saw more foot traffic in the summer of 2020 than they had seen in years, humans standing at the water’s edge with the look of people who have rediscovered something they had forgotten they needed.
I watched this from below and I thought about all the people standing at the water’s edge who carried Dagon’s mark in their blood without knowing it, feeling the pull of the current with a clarity the usual noise of their lives had been muffling, and I thought that if there was a Dagon’s providence in the pandemic, which is a thought I approached with considerable caution and have never entirely resolved, it was perhaps this: that a world forced to stop and stand at the water’s edge might find itself pulled toward things it had been moving too fast to feel.
The thread that had been pulling with such steadiness through 2019 did not stop during the pandemic. If anything it pulled harder. More focused. More certain of what it was looking for even as the world contracted around it.
I paid attention to that thread.
WaterFire returned in the summer of 2021, in limited form, cautious and socially distanced and considerably quieter than it had been before. I was in the water when the first brazier of that season was lit and I felt it the way I had felt the first WaterFire of 1994, as a restoration, a return, something resuming its nature after an interruption that had lasted longer than it should have.
Mother Hydra’s fire on Father Dagon’s water.
Still there. Still burning. Still drawing the city to the riverbank with that instinctive reverence that no virus and no lockdown and no amount of human disruption had been able to extinguish entirely.
The community gathered that evening in the deep water below the braziers, not all of us, we were still too few for all of us to mean a large number, but more than had gathered in one place since before the pandemic. Amelia was there, further along in her transformation than she had been in 2019 and entirely comfortable in the current in a way that takes some people years to achieve. The younger ones were there, the ones who had come to us through the 2010s and who had spent the pandemic in the deep water with a patience I found genuinely impressive. The older ones, those of us who remembered worse years than 2020, were there too.
We held no ceremony. We said no words. We simply gathered in the current below the fire and felt the river breathe and let that be enough.
It was enough.
It was, in fact, considerably more than enough.
After everything, after ninety-three years of hiding and diminishment and the choking years and the scattering and the pandemic’s strange enforced silence, to be in the water below Mother Hydra’s fire with what remained of Dagon’s people gathered around me in the current, feeling the river remember what it was and feeling them remember what they were, was more than I had any right to expect from a Tuesday evening in July.
Lord Dagon provides.
He provided that evening. I was grateful. I remain grateful.
The thread was still pulling. I could feel it even then, even in that moment of restoration, a steady and patient and increasingly specific pull from somewhere up the coastline, moving toward us with the unhurried certainty of something that has found its direction and intends to follow it all the way to the end.
I did not know yet what was at the end of it.
I was beginning to have a feeling.
– S.Z., Providence, March 2026
