Look at him. Go on, look at the poor fellow — the eyes gone glassy and set too wide, the neck creased where no neck creases, the ear coming to a point it did not have last year. He knows. That's what you're looking at. That's a man who went and did the genealogy and found the marriage in the parish register and understands now exactly what his grandmother was.
This is the ending nobody sees coming, and it is the cruellest and the kindest thing he ever wrote. The narrator escapes the town. He gets out, he tells the authorities, the government dynamites the waterfront and depth-charges the reef, the whole horror is closed down and filed away and he wins — and then his face begins to change.
And here is the turn: he stops fighting it. He stops. First it's a horror, and then it's a diagnosis, and then, quietly, over a few months, it becomes a homecoming. The dreams stop being nightmares. His cousin is down there. His grandmother is down there, and she has been waiting, and she is glorious.
The cellar is empty and the stone is only stone. The city under the water was never the horror at all. It was the address.
They will not be dying down there. They will swim out to that black city in the deep and dwell amid wonder and glory forever.
