The Innswich Horror (21 page)

“And as you’ve already been partially
apprized,” he grated on, “the detestable creatures which I
fictionalized as ‘the Deep Ones’ are in possession of aggressive
philtres which re-synthesize nucleotide activity within a certain
helical infrastructure that exists in every human cell. This
ingenious—and diabolic—process has the power to, among other
things, reconstitute life in the dead. Hence, sir, my damnation and
the recompense for my sins.”

“Your…
sins?
” I questioned. “But you’ve
been known throughout your natural life as an atheist. The concept
of sin is one you don’t believe in.”

“Not
my
conception,” the haunted man
intoned, “but
their
conception.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“I penned
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
close to a decade ago, but, lo, in its flaw, it was never
published, and in its not being published, word never traced back
to the fullbloods of its existence…”

“But that all changed,” I hazarded, “in
late-1936, when the Visionary Publications copy became available to
the public. And word got back—”

“—back to the eternal monstrosities who hold
sway over this place, yes. But they didn’t endeavor to pursue me
then—it was already known that I was suffering from a terminal
affliction. Several months later, however, when I died, word of my
decease riposted back to them as well. The night after I was
buried, a troop of the accurst things came up out of Narragansett
Bay, exhumed me, and re-enlivened my pitiable corpse. Since then
I’ve been forced to serve them, in a number of abominable fashions
whose details I’ll spare you. The nexus of my punishment, though,
and I should think it quite perceptible now, is the delivery of all
newborns to the fullbloods’ soul-dead machinations.”

My throat suddenly shriveled. “They brought
you back for that. To be a servitor for them.”

“That and far, far worse,
sir. But an unwilling traitor to my race, and the devil’s package
boy. The only way to protect the life of my son was to perform as
I’m commanded, and deliver the innocent newborns into
their
appalling
clutches.” The dead eyes looked to Mary and her now-sleeping baby.
“It is a task I shall never discharge again.” He placed Walter down
alongside Mary, then returned his attention to me. “And of you,
sir, I must beg a favor.”

“But I owe you my life,” I exclaimed. “The
beast at Onderdonk’s was only moments away from killing me before
you intervened—”

“Do as you have promised,” the ghost-voice
quavered, “and deliver Mary and my son to safety.”

“I will. This I pledge—”

But in my own hesitation, I recalled
something crucial while on the same hand Mary’s attitude seemed
suddenly crestfallen.

“Your brother, Mary. And your stepfather,” I
commenced with the dark implication.

“I know,” she acknowledged. “Paul’s not
here. He sleeps in the backroom at the store.”

The looks we all shared told all.

“We’ll have no choice but to leave him. A
rescue attempt would grossly reduce our chances of safe escape with
Walter and the baby…”

“I’ll see to the task of relieving him of
his misery myself,” Lovecraft offered. “The fullbloods will kill
him once they learn that Mary has fled the collective, and they’ll
do so in a manner most grueling and torturous. I’ll be certain to
get to him before they have occasion to. He’ll suffer not an iota
of pain.”

“My stepfather, though,” Mary half-sobbed.
“He’s in the next room, and I’m afraid…”

She needn’t finish. He would have to be
euthanized, and since I was the one with the gun— “This room here?”
I asked of the crude and slightly tilted wooden door to the
side.

She gulped and nodded.

“All right then.” I withdrew my handgun,
edged toward the door.

Mary struggled to her feet to come near me.
“But, Foster, you must understand. My stepfather—he’s almost
completely gone over by now.”

“Gone over?”

Lovecraft picked up the
explanation, “The metamorphosis which afflicts the crossbreeds not
only taints their physical features but, I regret to impart, also
their
mental
faculties. It’s a certain eventuality that such hybrids in
advanced age such as Mary’s stepfather become hostile with time and
adopt aspects of the mentality, attitudes, and sentiments of the
fullbloods.”

“It’s true, Foster,” Mary added. “He’s worse
now than ever. If you go in there, he’ll attack you.”

Then so be it,
I thought, but as I approached the door Lovecraft
stopped me with a hand to my shoulder. “You are not expendable,
sir, but I am. It’s a much more difficult event to kill a dead man
than one who’s still living.”

“But I feel it’s my responsibility,” I
uttered.

“You mustn’t take the
chance,” he insisted. “You’re Mary and Walter’s only hope. Save
your ammunition.” He took the gun and returned it to my pocket,
then from his own extracted a razor-sharp fileting knife. “When I’m
not detained for other, more monstrous duties, the fullbloods force
me to filet fish in the workhouses, and it just so happens”—he
shuddered at the thought—“I
hate
fish.” His ruined eyes addressed me more
directly. “Go now. Take them out of here now… and fulfill your
pledge to me.”

“But-but,” I stammered, still not quite
reckoning the fact that it was Lovecraft in my actual midst,
maloccluded jaw and all. “You could come with us.”

“No, it’s time for nature to take its true
course,” his voice wisped. “My existence has perverted death for
too long. Tonight—I’ll see to it—I shall be dead for good,” and
then he picked up the still-unconscious Walter, placed him in my
arms, then assisted Mary and the baby toward the door.

Mary tried all she could to stifle her sobs
as we stepped back out into the teeming night. Lovecraft bid
nothing more as an adieu; he merely cast a final glance at the boy
in my arms, then quietly closed the door.

I stowed my passengers all in the front of
the vehicle but was stalled by a sudden and very grotesque
coercion. “Foster!” shot Mary’s diminutive whisper. “Where are you
going?”

“Just… one moment,” I told her, and then it
was this coercion that prompted me back to the hovel of a
house.

To the back window…

I
had
to look in, for earlier in the
afternoon I’d only glimpsed the fringes of Mary’s stepfather as it
sat back in shadow. My eyes, now, held wide on the drab glass pane
when the room’s utter darkness was broken by the inner door
opening, and Lovecraft undiscouragedly entered the room,
candlestick in hand. That is when I saw Mary’s stepfather in
detail…

The thing lay sidled over on the floor,
breathing with a sound like bubbles being blown under water. When
it noticed Lovecraft’s presence, a head that looked squashed down
flinched. Mary had said that her stepfather had now fully “gone
over,” but I could see that the metamorphosis was not yet totally
complete. One eye was indeed froglike in that it existed half out
of its socket, with a glistening green-black lid. A gold iris
glittered amid the great, peach-sized orb; however its other eye
appeared far more human, and the amalgamation of these opposites
only heightened the grotesquerie of this living result of breeding
between two separate species. Two mere holes functioned as the
nose; fissures that could only be gills pulsed at its throat, and
overall the skin seemed a queer combination of toad and man.

Then the wide rim of the creature’s mouth
snapped open and—

ssssssssssnap!

—out shot a sickly pink cord which could
only suffice for its tongue. Immediately I recalled the details of
my glimpse through this window earlier in the day, where the same
deformed and disjointed figure that Walter referred to as his
“gramps” vollied the same cord that I’d then mistaken for a whip.
But now I saw that it was no whip; it was a narrow yet heavily
veined tentacle, rife with minute suckers which pulsed beneath a
repugnant glisten. The appalling, boneless appendage was deftly
forestalled by Lovecraft’s wrist, whereupon he sliced the tentacle
off with his knife.

Its pain was readily apparent as arms only
vaguely human sprang up in protest. The lopsided head shuddered,
the great rimmed mouth locked open in order to release a
vociferation that could only have been born in hell: a whistle like
a tea kettle interlaced by the slopping, wet spattery scream I’d
heard a facsimile of earlier. When it tried to rise on joints that
flexed backwards, Lovecraft came more definitely forward with his
fileting knife…

I trotted away, unable to bear any more of
this dismal execution. When the tenor and volume of the
crossbreed’s scream quadrupled, I knew the grim task had been
done.

With a blank mind, then, I started the
rickety vehicle and pulled off. Smoke gusted and springs creaked,
but now the truck was barreling down the road away from the awful
house that Mary would never again have to enter.

The road south seemed the most direct shot,
and its first quarter mile stood miraculously clear. Around a bend,
though—

Mary and I screamed in unison.

It was a veritable
barricade of monsters which occluded the pass. Fifty of them? A
hundred? The logistics scarcely mattered. The sweep of our
headlights compounded the sight to an utter vision of chaos:
green-glistening skin pocked by brown, toadlike bumps, eyes jutting
from compressed, earless heads like balls of black glass. Though
they all stood upright, they showed white, runneled underbellies
and legs corded with strange muscles. Dangling, horrific genitals
told me they were predominantly male. Their height fluctuated
between five to seven feet, though even in their upright stances,
most were half-hunched over, so God knew their
true
height. Dare I barrel forward
in an attempt to mow them down? Were I alone I may have risked
this, but with Mary and her children in my charge, I knew I
couldn’t.

The sight froze, maximizing the horror of
what we beheld. The mass of abominations stood there, flexed on
corded muscles, and as the headlamps blared, they all leaned back,
tilted their heads upward, and then, as if on psychic command,
their hideous rimmed mouths all opened at once and they began to
shriek.

The sound caused the very woods to vibrate:
a phlegmatic keening blended with the sound of a thousand men
marching quickly through muck. If sound could cause physical
impact, this was surely the case for the cacophony, now, made the
truck visibly rock. I’m sure I was screaming myself as I threw the
decrepit vehicle into reverse, but even at the top of my lungs my
own utterance of fear could not be heard over the unearthly
mudslide of sound which was being vaulted at us. Mary had already
passed out so she did not have to see what I glimpsed in that last
half-second before I could turn fully around…

With the fullbloods’
screams of objection, the tongue of each and every one of them
jettisoned from their mouths. Unlike Mary’s stepfather, whose
hybrid tongue was but a single pink tentacle, each of these
monsters possessed a tongue comprised of at least a dozen of the
same, glistening and sucker-pocked appendages. Each clump of
deranged tongues seemed to twist into a single, fat pulsing column
and shivered there in mid-air throughout the entirety of their
vocal display. These columns of detestable flesh
had
to extend at least
five
feet.

I fully depressed the accelerator pedal when
I’d managed to turn around to a northward heading. Did my eyes
deceive me when I dared to take one glance in the rearward mirror?
I could’ve sworn they were pursuing me now—the entire mass of the
things—and some seemed to be leaping forward at bounds of twenty
feet, which barely afforded the speeding vehicle any distance ahead
of them. It took me a half mile, in fact, to gain any comfortable
ground, but just as I’d realized this—

I screamed again and slammed on the truck’s
brakes.

At least twice as many
fullbloods blocked the northward way out.
My God, what can I do now?
When I
looked over my shoulder through the truck’s former rear window, I
could see the first of the southern detachment coming round the
bend, bringing their vocal storm with them, but I noticed something
else as well…

The can of gasoline that had been in back
previously was no longer there.

Where it had gone to, I hardly had time to
consider. Now, it seemed, I had no choice but to try to plow
through this mass to the north. The baby was wailing now, and
Walter finally roused, too, only to glimpse the horrific sight
before us.

“Say your prayers, Walter,” I urged, and
then the fullbloods ahead of us began to shamble forward. In less
then a minute, I knew, we’d be converged upon from north and
south.

As I would utter my own last prayer and
plunged the accelerator in a feeble attempt to plow through the
monstrous blockade, young Walter pointed left and cried out, “Mr.
Morley! Who’s that man there?”

Man?
my shattered faculties managed, but when I looked I saw the
black-raincoated form of Lovecraft waving assertively at us. He was
urging me to veer the truck left, into a narrow trail that looked
barely able admit the vehicle’s width.

I saw, too, that it
was
he
who’d
taken the fuel can from the truck’s rear bed. The can hung from his
hand.

When I pulled into the trail, I saw the
northward mass of beasts shift into the woods themselves, as if to
try to cut me off before I could drive to wherever the road would
take us. Shortly thereafter the southern mass poured into the trail
behind us. The sound they made caused the forest to tremor: the
wet, slopping gush detailed by wave after wave of inhuman
caterwauls. At this point, the forest was verminous with the
shambling, bump-skinned things.