Goat Mother and Others: The Collected Mythos Fiction of Pierre Comtois by Pierre V. Comtois, Charlie Krank, Nick Nacario Page A

receded, they began to reveal some of the old homes and buildings that had been covered over when the reservoir was first created in the 1930s. Even as he looked out over the shrunken body of water to the ghostly shapes that had once been homes, businesses, and even churches, he wondered what secrets lay behind those moldy walls? He wasn’t quite sure why he’d come, what he expected to find, but what had seemed fantastic in the light of day, didn’t seem so now as the shadows lengthened and darkness fell.
    It all started when he began working on his master’s thesis for the University of Massachusetts. His paper was supposed to trace his family history, but what he soon realized was that what had begun as a purely academic exercise instead became something a little more personal.
    And so, Schulter began following his family’s trail back through the twentieth century. There were blind alleys and false leads of course; Schulter was not too uncommon a name among people of German descent. But a title search at the registry of deeds based on his father’s purchase of a home in Salem enabled him to find the correct line of descent which led to a district courthouse in Arkham. There, he was able to confirm that his great-grandfather had once owned a farmstead in central Massachusetts.
    Excited with his progress, Schulter was bitterly disappointed upon further research to learn that old Micah Schulter’s farmstead, as well as the entire Swift River Valley in which it was located, rested at the bottom of a man-made lake, the Quabbin Reservoir!
    Having grown up in the more populous eastern part of the state, and the last several years in Boston, Schulter had never really given much thought about where his drinking water came from. But as he soon found out, the Quabbin Reservoir had been created in the 1930s to satisfy the state capital’s increasing demand for fresh water. With its steep sides and lightly populated bottom land, the Swift River Valley was judged ideal for the construction of a dam at nearby Belchertown, and soon the local population was bought out of their property and moved to other locations. With the dam and an accompanying tunnel to carry water all the way back to Boston finished by 1939, authorities began flooding the valley and by 1946, the reservoir was filled to its 412 billion gallon capacity. In the process, the rising waters had covered over a half dozen towns and countless homes that locals claimed they could sometimes see when the water was particular clear.
    All of which hadn’t helped him learn any more about his family, but he hadn’t spent years in college without learning how to do research. What he couldn’t discover firsthand from possible relatives still living in the valley, he might be able to find in a local library.
    Or historical society as things turned out.
    A few telephone calls yielded the information that much of the official records and archives of the towns that had been abandoned to make way for the reservoir had been saved and moved to another town called Firthford, located on the opposite side of the north ridge of the Swift Valley. Hoping to find more information about his family history among those records, Schulter had driven out to Firthford earlier in the summer. The first thing he found out about the town was that it was named after somebody named Jonathan Huxley Firth. He knew that because the man’s name was everywhere: on the sign welcoming visitors into town, over the single bay of the town’s only fire station, the public elementary school, even the cemetery! So by the time Schulter arrived at the library, he wasn’t surprised to see “Jonathan Huxley Firth Memorial Public Library” carved over the main entrance.
    “Just who is this Jonathan Huxley Firth?” he asked the librarian as he drew up to her desk. Inside, the library was tiny as most small town libraries are. Bookshelves were overloaded with books and competed for space with outdated computer