The Innswich Horror (12 page)

It was a shrill siren that ripped the
evening’s placidity. I turned the corner and noticed a long red and
white ambulance pulled right up on the sidewalk, with several
uniformed attendants bustling about. Several residents stood aside,
looking on with concern.

What’s this all
about?
I thought, then felt my spirit
plummet when I noticed that the commotion was centered around the
bargain store I’d visited previously. At the same moment a
stretcher was borne out from the shop, and on it was a very still
and very blanch-faced Mr. Nowry. In the doorway, the man’s
expectant wife sobbed openly.

Oh, no…

“Poor Mr. Nowry,” a small voice announced to
my side. “He was such a nice man.”

I turned to see an attractive red-haired
woman standing next to me. “I-I hope he hasn’t expired. He was as
congenial a man as you could ever hope to meet; why, I spoke to him
just hours ago.”

“Probably another coronary attack,” she
ventured.

“I’ll go and see,” I said, and made my way
to the receding commotion. “Sir? I’m sorry to intrude,” I asked of
one of the ambulance men, “but could you confide in me as to the
status of Mr. Nowry?”

The younger man looked bleary-eyed from a
long day. “I’m afraid he died a few minutes ago. There was nothing
we could do this time—his ticker finally went out.”

I bowed my head. “I scarcely knew him, but
he was a good man from what I could see.”

“Oh, sure, an Olmsteader through and
through.” He forearmed his brow. “But it’s been a strange day, I’ll
tell ya.”

“In what way?”

“Small town like this, we
don’t get more than two of three deaths a year, but today? We’ve
had
two
now.”

“Two? How tragic.”

Now the stretcher bearing the decedent was
loaded into the rear compartment of the vehicle. The man to whom I
was speaking pointed inside. “A young girl, too, not a half-hour
ago. One of those not in with a decent crowd, but still… She died
in childbirth.”

I looked to where he was pointing and
noticed a second stretcher.

Instantly, my throat thickened.

It was a thin, lank-haired girl in her
twenties who lay dead next to Mr. Nowry, a sheet covering her to
the chin. Even in the pallor of death, though, I recognized her
face.

It was Candace—one of Zalen’s ill-reputed
photo models and prostitutes. But the great, swollen belly was gone
now, only swollen breasts showing beneath the white sheet.

“Please, tell me her baby survived,” I
implored.

“The baby’s fine,” he said
matter-of-factly.

“Praise God…”

The man looked at me in the oddest way, then
closed the long back door of the hospital coach, and went on his
way.

I returned to the woman I’d been talking to.
“I’m afraid Mr. Nowry has passed away. We should be sure to
remember him in our prayers.” I took a doleful glance to his poor
widow, still sobbing in the shop doorway. “I pity his wife,
though.”

“She’s expecting any day now,” the woman
told me with something hopeful in her tone. “You needn’t worry; the
Nowrys are long-term town-members. The collective will provide for
his widow.”

Another reference to this collective. My
initial impression had been less than positive due to unavoidable
insinuations but now, it seemed, I may have been hasty. The
initiative, instead, sounded like a very serviceable system of
social/fiscal management and profit-sharing. It was heartening to
know that Mrs. Nowry wouldn’t be left on her own. As for Candace’s
newborn… well, I could only assume it would be cared for by family
members or placed in a fosterage program.

“You’re new in town,” said the redhead with
the most traceable smile. Then she sighed. “Just passing through, I
fear.”

“Why, yes, but why do you put it that
way?”

“The handsome men
never
stay
long.”

The flattering comment
took me off guard. “That’s, uh, very nice of you to say, Miss, but
I must bid you a good evening now.” I walked away quickly. Being
complimented so abruptly by women always left me tongue-tied. At
least it left me, however selfishly, with a good feeling. I’d
certainly never thought of myself as
handsome.
I smiled, then, when I
recalled Mary making similar comment.

The desk shift had changed when I was back
at the Hilman House; a stoop-shouldered older woman tended the
desk.

“Ma’am, I’d like to write a note to one of
your guests, a Mr. William Garret,” I told her. “Would you be so
kind as to pass it on to him?”

A moment of fuddlement crossed her eyes. She
glanced at a ledger. “Oh, dear, I’m afraid Mr. Garret checked out
several hours ago, along with another associate of his.”

“Would that be Mr. Poynter?”

“Why, yes, sir, that’s correct. They caught
the motor-coach to the transfer station. Headed back to Boston, I
believe.”

“I see. Well thank you for your time.”

That explained that, though I regretted not
seeing Garret again, if only to bid him good luck in the future. At
least he’d re-found his friend Poynter. It was too bad they hadn’t
secured positions here.

Back upstairs, I passed a cart-pushing maid
in the hall. She smiled and said hello. It took a moment to
recognize her.

It was the maid I’d spoken to upon checking
in, the pregnant one, though now…

She no longer displayed any signs of
gravidness.

“Why, my dear girl!” I exclaimed. “I see
you’ve borne your child…”

“Yes, sir,” she said rather flatly. “A
boy.”

“Well, congratulations are in order
but—really!—you should be resting, not working!”

She stared at me, head atilt, mulling her
thoughts. “I’m just picking up a bit, sir, then I can go home.”

“But it’s unacceptable for an employer to
insist you work so soon after—”

“Really, sir, I appreciate your concern but
I’m feeling all right. I’ll be to bed very soon.”

“I should hope so.” This was mortifying. And
with all the new labor laws in place to protect against such
exploitation. “Where’s the baby?”

An odd pause stalled her. “Home, sir. With
my mother…” She gave a meek smile that struck me as forced, and
went on with her cart.

Off all the things,
I thought. All the more reason for Mary to be out
of here. Town collective or not, workers—most especially
pregnant women
—shouldn’t
be used as an objective resource. Certain medical conditions must
always be given leeway.

I’d already decided that I was going to take
Mary and her entire family back to Providence with me. Should it
turn out to be a mistake, then so be it. At least I will have
tried. My only fret was how and when to make my desires known. It
was of the utmost importance that she know nothing was expected of
her in return, which might be difficult to convince her of, given
the darker aspects of her past.

I will remove her from her
burdens,
I determined,
and give her the life she deserves. And maybe, just
maybe…

One day I’d have the privilege of marrying
her.

So much for my “platonic” intents, but it
was imperative that I be honest with myself. Of course, my idealism
was strong, and I knew that things didn’t always germinate into
what we truly wanted.

But I knew what
I
wanted. I
wanted
her.
And I
will make every effort to be the man she longs for but has thus far
never had.

I knew that I had to buff
not only the edges of my outrage over the young maid’s
exploitation, but also the sad mishap of Mr. Nowry’s coronary
attack—I needed to let my mind stray elsewhere. I decided to relax,
then, in the clean room’s quietude, so I sat up in my bed and
opened my most cherished book:
The Shadow
Over Innsmouth.
It would not be a
concerted re-reading, I’d decided; that would come tomorrow when I
found the perfect place, perhaps in view of the harbor. Though the
buildings were different, the inlet itself and the mysterious sea
beyond was the same that Lovecraft spied when the korms of his
masterpiece were first coming to mind, a brilliant amalgamation of
atmosphere, concept, character, and, ultimately, horror. Evidently,
Lovecraft had been so irrevocably impacted by Irwin Cobb’s
sophomoric yet deeply macabre “Fishhead,” and also Robert Chambers’
flawed but image-steeped “The Harbour Master” that he’d seized the
basic seeds of these stories and taken them into ingenious new
directions, to weave very much his own superior tale of
symbolic—and wholly monstrous—miscegenation. In it, when narrator
Robert Olmstead accidentally stumbles upon the crumbling and
legend-haunted Innsmouth seaport, he discovers, first, that the
townsfolks have long-since assumed a pact of sorts with a race of
horrid amphibious sea creatures first discovered by one Captain
Obed Marsh, a sea-trader, while venturing through the East Indies;
and, second and worst, that this monstrous and greed-driven pact
involved not only human sacrifice but also the rampant
crossbreeding of the creatures—the Deep Ones—and the human populace
of Innsmouth. Any page I turned to led to an image or a line that I
could easily deem my favorite.

Here was one, a line of dialogue spoken by
none other than the “ancient toper” Zadok Allen, whose real-life
model had been Zalen’s grandfather, Adok. The line read as thus:
“Never was nobody like Cap’n Obed—old limb o’ Satan! Heh, heh! I
kin mind him a-tellin’ abaout furren parts, an’ callin’ all the
folks stupid fer goin’ to Christian meetin’ an’ bearin’ their
burdens meek an’ lowly. Say they’d orter git better gods like some
o’ the folks in the Injies—gods as ud bring ‘em good fishin’ in
return for their sacrifices, an’ ud reely answer folks’s
prayers.”

Naturally I was amused by
the convenient parallel: the “good fishing” that the Deep Ones
brought to Innsmouth in exchange for bloody oblations. I had to
chuckle at this very
real
town’s own abundance of local fish. I nearly
laughed aloud!

Something that I suspect
as being subconscious caused my errant page-flipping to stop, and
next my eyes were locked down strangely on another line of Zadok
Allen’s drunken ramble: “Obed Marsh he had three ships
afloat—brigantine
Columby,
brig
Hetty,
an’ bark
Sumatry
Queen…
”

A vertigo accosted me as I
stared at the words. Then:
Of course! I
knew I’d seen those names before! They were right here all along…
,
for now I recalled these same names from
the decorative ship plaques in the restaurant.

So not only did the town of “Innsmouth”
exist, though under its true and none-too-different name Innswich,
but so did these trading vessels exist somewhere in the town’s dim
past. I couldn’t help but admire the assiduousness of Lovecraft’s
research efforts—something he was quite known for—to plumb such
minute details of reality and infuse them into his fictional
landscape.

I re-read parts of several more scenes, all
with much chilling delight, then put the book up with the heated
anticipation of re-reading cover to cover tomorrow. But there was
one more even greater anticipation regarding tomorrow…

I must make every effort
to look my best,
I realized, then
shuddered when I opened my suitcase and found my best suit in a
crumpled state. There’d be no place open this hour to get them
freshly pressed; hence, I could only hope…

When I glanced into the closet, I saw I was
in luck! There, leaning, stood a collapsible pressing board, and
atop the high shelf sat a steam-iron. I knew next to nothing of
such procedures, but how difficult could it be? I took out the
pressing board, looking for some sort of locking pin in order to
extend its legs, when—

“Drat!”

—it slipped from my fingers and banged
against the back wall of the closet.

“Oh, for pity’s sake!” I
complained aloud when I saw that the meager board had struck the
wall with such impact that it actually left a hole.
The management will be none-too-pleased over
this,
I thought.
Until I pay them double the repair fee.
I stepped inside to retrieve the board, then lowered to a
knee to inspect the damage. Bits of plaster lay about, while the
insult to the plaster-board looked a foot long and several inches
wide. This was flimsy construction to say the least, yet of the
bungling accident I could only blame my own
carelessness.

Before I could pull away, though—

When I put my eye to the rent, the tiniest
thread of light seemed to hang in the darkness beyond the
plasterboard. Quick calculation told me there must be a small hole
in the sidewall, which could only be the wall to my bathroom. When
I hastily got up and went to the bathroom I saw that I’d
inadvertently left the light on earlier.

A hole,
came the plodding thought.
In the wall…

A
peep
hole?

The notion seemed absurd
but I could not forget my earlier impression: when I’d been
bathing, I not only could’ve sworn I heard a human gust of
breath
from behind the wall,
but I’d also been filled with the suspicion that
I was being spied on…

No true logic could explain my next
endeavor. Careful as ever—while back in the closet—I pulled chunks
of the plasterboard away. The damage was already done, so damaging
the wall further mattered little; I’d be paying for it regardless
of the size of the hole. I suppose my motives at this earlier point
were subconscious, but after I pulled away several more pieces of
the wall, and shined into the hole the beam of my
pocket-flashlight, I detected an area of space beyond that could
easily be taken for a narrow walkway. Of course, it must be only a
service passage, for access to pipes, electrical wires, and what
not. Still…