"Innsmouth Clay"

by August Derleth
originally published Dark Things, Arkham House 1971

1927.  Sculptor Jeff Corey (not the actor) has been screwing around (apparently quite literally) in Paris for a while.  Now he comes back to rent a cottage near the family's ancestral home - in Innsmouth!!!

Ken, our otherwise nameless narrator, and also an artist, visits Corey and finds him getting a little strange.  He tells Ken about the raid described in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", and of a weird glob of pliable blue clay he found washed ashore, and from which he is sculpting a female figure he calls "Sea Goddess".  Did I mention the figure has gills and webbed feet?

Corey starts recording weird dreams in his journal - of swimming deep under the sea, of sunken cities - of having sex with a woman(!!!!)

Ken and Corey go into the surprisingly operational Innsmouth (remember this is not long after the raid), and stop in a bar (wasn't this the prohibition era?).  There they buy a local yokel a drink, and he dribbles off a mightily condensed version of Zadok Allen's tale.

Corey stars complaining about pains in his neck.  One night he apparently walks out into the ocean, and is never seen again. 

Or is he?  One night, Ken rows out to Devil's Reef and encounters what is apparently a whole school of Deep Ones.  Two of them swim close to the boat.  One is a woman who seems to be made of clay.  The other is Corey.  He calls Ken's name before sinking back beneath the waves.

A pretty much forgettable story, with a central sequence literally knocked off from HPL.  Derleth was definitely phoning it in with this one.