The Innswich Horror (13 page)

I pulled away some more pieces until the
hole was sizable enough to admit me, and then I crawled in.

Back on my feet, inside now, I approached
the threadlike beam. Instinct, of course, put my eye to it
posthaste.

I was looking directly into my bathroom.

It IS a peephole,
came my first thought but then,
No, that’s ridiculous!
The Hilman was obviously a respectable lodging-house. The
hole could be explained by a number of circumstances: a simple
construction flaw, or a nail-hole where a picture had been
hung.

Deeper in the murk,
though, I noticed
another
thread of light.

Taking every precaution not to misstep, I
proceeded to this next light-beam and found, to my dismay, another
hole, which looked directly into the bedroom of the suite next to
mine.

I was at a loss for what to think just yet.
A modest clatter came to my ears and, with my eye pressed to the
hole, I noticed movement.

It was the maid I’d just spoken too, who’d
only just this morning been pregnant. Solemn faced and dull-eyed
she lethargically went about the task of making the bed and picking
up. On a chair by the door, however, I noticed a small valise,
which sat opened and showed that it was full of clothes. And on the
dresser?

There sat a neat, beige Koko-Kooler hat,
identical to that which William Garret had been wearing just this
morn when I met him. Near the door, too, sat a briefcase that
appeared all-too-similar to his.

But Garrett and his friend
already checked out,
I
remembered.

Once the housekeeper had finished with the
bed, she jammed the hat into the suitcase, close dit, then took it
and the briefcase out of the room…

Only the baldest, most objective pondering
occupied my mind now. I believed there were two more rooms on this
side of the floor, and when I peered down—sure enough—I spotted two
more of the tiny beams of light, signaling the existence of two
more peepholes. Then, in the opposite direction of this hidden
walkway, several more such beams could be discerned…

I kept my pocket-flash aimed down, on the
floor. If this walkway did indeed exist for some ill intent—either
for perversity, or remotely gaining knowledge of a lodger’s
potential valuables—there must be some mode of unobservable access.
At the very end of the passage, on the floor, lay what could only
be a trapdoor.

I opened it, spotted a rail-ladder, and
without much conscious volition, found myself next taking the
ladder down to the hotel’s third floor…

Black as hackneyed pitch, this climbing-way
was; I thought of the esophagus of some Mesozoic creature into
whose belly I was venturing. A doorless aperture signaled the
hidden passage paralleling the third floor, and it was through that
I stepped to face a similarly dark hidden passage. A thread of
light marked each of the floor’s rooms but when I quickly looked
into them, I noted only untenanted hotel rooms.

So—to the next floor I
descended upon the ladder. The
second
floor. At the aperture I
stepped into another hallway clogged with darkness made incomplete
only by more intermittent threads of light. Here, though, I vaguely
detected voices.

I let my shoes take me as slowly—and
quietly—as possible to the first of the peeping-holes.

My vantage point only allowed me to view a
wedge of the bland, clean room within, where I saw shelves of
canned goods, sponges, buckets, towels, and other such items. The
voices were distinctly female and seemed nonchalant. Several young
women sat in the room, while I could only see slices of them; they
appeared to be sitting on several couches. All were in some stage
of pregnancy.

“—from Providence, I think, and he’s quite
handsome,” one said.

“Oh, I know the one—he’s kind of shy,”
observed another.

“And kind of rich! That’s what I heard.
That’s why they won’t take him.”

My mind stalled as my eye
remained to the hole. Could they… be talking about
me?

A third, barely visible, contributed, “Oh, I
know who you mean.” A giggle. “I was upstairs looking in the
peep-holes and saw him—you know—playing with himself!”

“No!”

“He pulled himself right off! In the
bathtub—”

The other cackled while I,
as might be expected, felt my spirit wilt. It could
only
be me they were
talking about…

“—and you’re right, he’s quite a handsome
one, but I liked the two others much better.”

“The Boston men?”

“Yeah. I wouldn’t have minded being made in
the way from one of them.”

“But, Lisa! Neither of them are very
handsome now!” and then more giggling broke out.

I could only stare, more at my own
bewildered thoughts than the scene within. This was outrageous,
women who were more than likely maids spying on hotel customers. It
was certainly actionable and I most certainly had a solicitor who’d
be more than happy to sue, but…

What’s the reason for all
this?
I had to wonder through my
embarrassment and shock. Women weren’t known to be peeping toms;
that was an aberrancy reserved for men alone. And the reference to
two
Boston
men
could only mean Mr. Garret and Mr. Poynter.
Neither of them are very handsome now?

“God, it’s just so depressing having to do
it when they’re like that,” came another observation. “I’m happy to
be pregnant.”

“Yeah. And they’re not going to keep the
Providence man.”

“Why?”

“I told you, he’s rich. The others are
always fly-by-nights—no one knows they’re here—but the Providence
man—”

“He’s no fly-by-night if he’s rich. Someone
would come looking…”

Even to contort my imagination to its
maximum could not account for the words I was hearing, nor the
outrageous evidence my curiosity had led me to uncover.

I moved to the next hole…

God in Heaven…

… and found myself looking at the most
macabre scene I’d ever witnessed in my thirty-three years of
existence…

Several bed mattresses lay on the floor, and
in the corners were a few metal pans. “God, I hate this,” snapped a
woman’s complaint. It was yet one more pregnant woman, this one
rather dowdy and older. She’d perched herself on her knees, to tend
to a man who lay on one of the mattresses.

Or, I should hasten to
correct: the
remnant
of a man…

He lay dismembered, naked,
scars at the bald nubs where his arms had been removed at the
elbows and his legs at the knees. He was lean, pallid-skinned, and
bearded, and what the pregnant woman was doing was crudely washing
his groinal area with a sopping sponge. Her expression of distaste
could not have been more vivid. “They just stink so! And, oh, the
lice! I just hate this
so
much!
”

“
You
hate it!” complained a second
woman. “You don’t have to
do
it!”

This objection had come from the
forward-most mattress, on which lay a man in an identical state as
the first, only he was clean shaven and blond-headed. I saw
stitches showing at the nubs of his injuries. But the woman was not
washing this one—she was engaged in an act of overt sexual
congress, a look of loath on her face…

But this was a face I recognized:

Monica,
I realized,
from the
pier.
 
I’d
just seen her a short time ago, in the stairwell and entering the
perpetually locked door to the second floor.

Now I knew why that door was always
locked.

What form of madness could
explain what I was viewing? These unfortunate men had clearly
been
made
into
invalids. For them to have suffered
identical accidents?
Impossible. And
their symptoms of amputation mirrored exactly those of Mary’s
brother, Paul. What foul auspication urged me to believe that these
men had been
purposely
and
premeditatedly
invalidized for this obscene purpose?

The farthest edge of my vantage point showed
me a third mattressed victim, and perched vigorously on his groin
was another thin, young woman with her skirt hoisted to make her
privates accessible. “Hurry, you stinking bastard,” she
muttered.

“This one shits himself,
too,” added the pregnant woman in her disdain. “He does it
on
purpose.
”

“I do not!” blabbered the victim she was
bathing. He seemed stricken with a vocal impediment. “I can’t help
it—”

“You know where the pans are!” the woman
shrieked. “Maybe we’ll stop feeding you for a while! See how you
like that!”

“Leave him alone, Joanie,” suggested the
young woman with the hoisted skirt. “I have to do him next, and if
he’s upset he won’t be able to. He’ll wind up like Paul.”

Like Paul,
my mind droned.

I watched in the utter
horror of it all, surely a scene from the Abyss. When this Joanie
had finished with her congress, she grunted and rose, glaring down
at her crippled purveyor. This poor man, after a minute or so,
grotesquely rolled off the stained mattress, belly to floor, then
hopped up onto the savaged ends of his limbs, after which he
awkwardly ambled—doglike, on all fours—to one of the metal trays,
to urinate. Meanwhile, the blond man began to gasp in something
akin to tortured bliss while his unwilling partner, Monica, looked
at him in a meld of bitter hatred and nausea. Indeed, it seemed
some carnal warren in Hell that my eye had happened upon.
Incalculable,
I thought
in the deepest despair.
Monstrous…
, for the intent, macabre as it seemed, shone all
too clearly.

It must have been some imp of the perverse
which forestalled my immediate desire to extricate myself from this
evil chasm—and from the very building itself—and just simply flee,
when, next, I found myself looking instead into more of the
appalling peeping-holes. Similar scenes of incomprehensible
obscenity were my reward for this effort: men reduced to naked
torsos, either lying inert on sullied mattresses or traversing the
room on their butchered limb-ends. One lapped water from a bowl,
again, like a dog. Room after room glared with these unfathomable
scenes of grotesquerie. But in the next peeping-hole…

God, deliver me,
I prayed.

This was no chamber of forced-conception.
Instead, I spied a room clinically adorned: medical supplies, IV
bottles on stands, several elevated beds. Unconscious men with
bandaged limbs occupied two such beds: one jibbered, drooling, in
the clutches of nightmare, the other lay open-mouthed and utterly
still. The man appeared youthful, yet I could clearly discern he
had no teeth.

But the forward bed concerned me most.

On it lay Mr. William
Garret, limb-ends similarly bandaged from his recent amputations. A
tray of bloody surgical instruments, including a bone-saw, occupied
a nearby tray, plus bottles clearly labeled CHLOROFORM.
This is a surgery suite,
I knew now,
hidden in the hotel on
this floor which is always locked.
Cotton
clogged Garret’s mouth, and when suddenly he began to blink and
shudder on the bed, a pregnant attendant came to his side, to
comfortingly pat his shoulder. “There, there, you’ll be all right,”
she calmly regarded him. “It’s all for a reason that’s more
important than any of us.” She tried to sound chipper. “And just
think of all the pretty girls you’ll be enjoying!”

Garret mewled beneath the cotton in his
mouth. The cotton had tinged scarlet, and it was then I noticed a
smaller stainless steel tray full of recently extracted teeth.

“He’s coming to, doctor,” claimed the
pregnant nurse. “He’ll need more pain antidote soon.”

“Prepare the injection, please, Lucy.”

The voice had arrived out of view, but next,
I was not surprised to see a lab-coated Dr. Anstruther step up to
the surgery bed. “It’s best not to struggle, Mr. Garret, and far
better to accept your new fate. Discard any yearnings of your
former life. You’ll get by much better, I assure you.” He took a
hypodermic from the nurse and eventually emptied it into an
isolated vein. “The morphine sulphate is quite effective, and it
will be administered regularly until no longer necessary—only a
matter of days, really.” With forceps, then, he removed the cotton
from Garret’s mouth. “And, as you’ve already deduced, I’ve
extracted all of your teeth.”

Garret’s wasted expression turned to the
doctor. “Whuh-whuh… why?”

“In time, you’ll come to understand. Oh, and
I’m happy to relate that I’ve examined your semen under the
microscope and found an impressively high sperm-count and excellent
motility. You’re a preeminent candidate for sirehood.”

Garret just stared, as if into an
unreckonable cosmic gulf.

Anstruther turned to the nurse while jotting
something on a board. “Lucy, the gentleman in Bed Number Two has
unfortunately expired. He’ll need to be disposed of, along with Mr.
Garret’s limbs.”

“Yes, doctor.”

“In a few days you’ll be feeling much
better,” the doctor re-addressed Garret. “And like Lucy has already
said, for some time to come, you’ll be enjoying the company of
many, many woman, most of whom are possessed of some considerable
desirability. Such is the lot of a Sire, Mr. Garret. Do yourself a
service and maintain the proper mental perspective. For so long as
you remain virile you will remain alive, and in your quiet times,
I’d advise you to solicit whatever god you may believe in.”