The Innswich Horror (14 page)

The surgery-shocked and
now toothless William Garret blabbered, “Look what you’ve done to
me! Yuh-yuh-you’re a
monster!
”

Anstruther smiled
sedately. “No, Mr. Garret. You’re fortunate in that you will never
have to see the
real
monsters…”

When I forced my eye away from that
Tartarean hole in the wall, I felt like a 100-year-old man. I
staggered wide-eyed back the way I came, to the climb-way, where I
had every intention of ascending back up to my room, securing my
personal effects, and leaving this God-forsaken place posthaste.
But when I got to the aperture which housed the ladder—

My heart slammed in my chest.

I heard footsteps. Climbing up.

Trying to cut the intruder
off and make it up to my room undetected possessed no probability
at all. A subconscious directive, instead, took me back across the
near lightless channel, to its opposite end, where I guessed—or
prayed—that there might be an identical climb-way.
Please, Lord,
I
beseeched in a mental groan.

Either my prayer had been answered or simple
luck was with me, for, yes, there was another climb-way. I stepped
in, grabbed the rungs, but before I could proceed upward—

“You, there,” a voice called from the other
end.

I didn’t turn to look but instead tried to
hide within the climbing-way’s murk.

“Who is that? Nowry? Peters?”

I did not waste mental
time considering why the male voice might be calling the name of a
dead man, but it would be easy to suppose Nowry had other clan in
town. Instead, I made my move. I did not climb up, I climbed down,
for to return upstairs might sever any chance of escape. A similar
hidden passage paralleled the first floor; I knew I needn’t bother
examining any of the peeping-holes here.
But there must be a way out, and I’ve got to find
it!

No door, though, or any other passage,
became visible in the light of my pocket-flash…

Then I heard the footsteps coming down the
ladder I’d just quitted.

To the passageway’s opposite end I hastened,
for where else could I go? I reasoned there had to exist some
exterior access to these hidden crannies. For instance, how had my
current pursuer gained the climbing-ways?

A door!
I prayed.
There must be
a door!

But when I’d made this opposite end, I found
no door; meanwhile, the footsteps echoed more loudly.

It was the sole of my shoe that found it:
not a standing door, nor access panel, but a hinged plate-metal
hatch. I opened it in relief but then gasped as my flash-lamp
revealed details of the ungainly egression—a climb-way of ancient
brick, fitted with a slime-coated iron ladder, leading straight
down. It was with the staunchest resolve that I lowered myself down
into its methanous depths, closed the hatch above me, and
descended. My position forced a procession in total darkness; I
half-expected at any moment to be lowering myself into an open
sewer and the stercoraceous smells and matter that companioned
them, but when my feet settled on solidity, I relighted my
flash-lamp to find myself in still another passageway. My panic had
skewed my bearings but an instinct told me the brick lined access
proceeded north and south. For a reason unbeknownst to me, I took
the southward way.

Flash in the lead, I
walked for at least one hundred yards in the ill-smelling murk. I
knew now, however, that this passage was not an out-of-service
sewer line; no signs were extant of the expected residuum.
It’s a tunnel,
 
I knew then, and as surely as
if the words had been spoken aloud,
Zalen’s
words seemed to echo in my
head:
And my grandfather wasn’t lying when
he told Lovecraft about the network of tunnels under the old
waterfront…

I needn’t define the
extent of the chill that moved caterpillar-like up my spine. And of
the hellish scene I’d witnessed back at the hotel, I could only
assume that virile men with suitably favorable looks were being
forced to inseminate local women, whose newborns were then sold to
some illicit adoptive initiative. Why, though, was I more perturbed
by what Zalen had told me, especially his cryptic final
monologue:
In the story, what happened to
outsiders who did too much nosing around?

Now, it seemed, the most dreadful of
circumstances had transposed my very self into Lovecraft’s
fictitious Robert Olmstead, the out-of-towner hellbent to escape
the horrors of Innsmouth.

I could go to Zalen now,
tonight,
it came to me,
if I could only find the exit to this blasted
catacomb…

Minutes later, fate or God handed me said
exit as a gift.

The tunnel emptied me near
a rock jetty along the harbor’s edge. A spectacular, frost-white
moon hung behind intermittent clouds; the water in the harbor sat
still as glass. Gazing out over the twilit port, beneath the violet
night, proved a supernal sight, but all else I’d witnessed was
anything
but
supernal. More
phantasmal
than anything else, or more
iniquitous.
The very-normal
appearing harbor, after closer scrutiny, was flecked by arcane
maws. Mouths of rock-hidden grottos, and tunnel-exits exuding
strange smells. No human instinct could prevent me from entering of
such a maw…

More lichen and niter-crusted catacombs
awaited me, several branching off from the main. I had to harness
my sharpest sense of awareness, lest I easily be lost here. The
leftmost tine in the fork was the one I chose. I kept my footing
sure, only turning on the flash in brief increments in order to
conserve its batteries. I didn’t have to proceed far before the
most hideous death-stench assailed me; a handkerchief to my face
barely stifled its sickening noxiousness. Eventually, the tunnel
emptied into vast cavern, the first glimpse of which nearly caused
me to shriek and flee.

But how could I? I had to
find out what
this
was…

A charnel house,
I thought.
A makeshift
sepulcher…

It was mostly skeletons
that heaped the obscene, dripping cavern, piles of them, some still
dressed in scraps that had surpassed the effects of human
decomposition. The bone-piles at the farthest end seemed the
oldest, while those making their way—I believe—northwest, had been
more recently deposited. Mid-heap, I found fewer skeletons and more
bodies mummified. This was a
hillock
of human corpses that
providence had seen fit to show me; hundreds, easily, had been left
in here rather than in proper burying-grounds.
Why?
I choked on the question. Who
could be responsible for this? The time-emptied eyes of skulls
seemed to hollowly watch as I moved along the wretched boundaries
of the mound, and when eventually I’d staggered to its end, I
could’ve collapsed amid the stench and the unholy
insinuation.

These—dozens of them—were obviously the
sepulcher’s most recently contributed corpses, and while most of
the previous had been more or less “whole,” the state of the
constituents of the rotting, gas-bloated pile needed little
conjecture as to their origins.

What primarily composed
the ghastly heap of rot-covered bones, flesh-peeling skulls, and
worm-rilled half-flesh were the evidence of
dismembered
human beings, each
missing arms from the elbows and legs from the knees. Scraps of
clothing lay among the human stacks like haphazardly tossed flags.
I glimpsed too many suitcases and valises. A smaller pestiferous
aggregation of severed arms and legs lay in vicinity.

An undercroft of corpses,
a murder repository,
I realized. And how
long it had been here, I couldn’t guess… and would never
want
to
guess.

The sound of distant
scuffling locked open my eyes and snapped off my flash. I
back-stepped, praying I didn’t fall, for the unmistakable sound of
footsteps—and a more arcane unbroken grinding sound—seemed to be
making its way toward the sepulcher.
But
from where!
my thoughts demanded. My own
path of entry lay behind me, while this sound came to my front. I
ducked down behind a bunker of half-mummified cadavers just as a
bobbing light could be seen.

Another entrance,
I realized, from yet another of the stygian
tunnels. I hid myself as still as the dead bodies about me, when
eventually the light from an oil lantern bloomed, and the
interloper appeared from an egress unseen till now. The figure
pushed a wooden wheelbarrow whose contents was to be expected: the
nude, stump-bandaged torso of the unfortunate post-surgery victim
who’d expired in Dr. Anstruther’s suite of horrors. Its half-limbs
jiggled as the barrow made its way, and stacked upon its dead belly
were several sets of other severed limbs, plus several suitcases.
Then the barrow stopped and the lantern was set on the ground. The
suitcases, first, were flung onto the pile, then the limbs, and
then, with a flat grunt, the torso. Of the interloper himself I
could only discern the frame of a man, and I could see he held no
handkerchief over his mouth and nose. How he tolerated the charnel
stench I couldn’t imagine… until he raised the lantern once more,
and the sizzling light revealed his face.

It was Mr. Nowry, whom just hours ago I’d
glimpsed dead in an ambulance.

What ruse might explain this I didn’t care
to ponder, but when I first saw his pallid face in the light, I
did, however minutely, gasp.

The figure froze, then turned. I froze as
well, praying, and preparing to reach for my pistol…

The lantern swept this way and that, and by
the grace of God its rays did not reveal my crouch. Eventually,
Nowry returned to his wheelbarrow and exited the way he came.

I waited a full five minutes before even
budging, then I rose and turned, snapped on my flash, and briskly
marched for my own exit, but as I did so, I couldn’t help but
notice another oblong maw along the rockface. Yes, another
tunnel.

Under no circumstance will
I allow myself allow enter,
I made the
self-command but even before I was consciously aware, my feet were
deputing me into this next rock-hewn entry. In spite of the
grievousness of all I’d thus far seen, I had to wonder if Lovecraft
himself had ventured into any of these tunnels, and then realized
that he must have, for from where else could he have derived
similar subterrene networks in masterpieces such as not only
Innsmouth
but “The
Festival,” “The Outsider,” “The Rats in the Walls,” and so on. I
was now walking in the midst of a Lovecraft story, but knew that
the obscene butchery taking place at the Hilman, and the cavern of
horrors I’d just exited was no “story.” Nevertheless, the
indulgence of my curiosity outranked my capacity for
reason.

I had to see what was at
the end of
this
tunnel…

As my intermittent flash led me on, another
odor assailed me but, thankfully, it was not one of death nor
noxiousness. It was a strong odor with a distinct heft. The more
deeply I traversed the tunnel, the more familiar the odor
became:

The unquestionable odor
of
fish.

I lost my breath when the tunnel opened into
a subterrestrial chamber many times the length and depth of the
previous, and herein were many times the number of corpses.

These, though, were different…

Why no stench of rot and
natural corruption?
 
I pondered.
Why only the smell of fresh fish?
But when my eyes registered the
details
of what my
retinas were registering, I felt sicker here than in the previous
sepulcher.

The body mound
stood
huge
—fifteen, twenty feet high and a hundred long. My sense of
perception began to bend, though, as I squinted at the morass of
bodies.
They-they… they’re not altogether
human,
I realized.
Some more, some less…
Almost all had
been stripped of clothing, and their dead, nude skin seemed
wax-white with tinges of an unwholesome green veined beneath the
pallored translucence. Grievous physical deformities had twisted
the lion’s share of the corpses into outrageous misshapes; most
were balding but all were possessed of wide-open and mostly
blue-irised over-protuberant eyes. Closer inspection, then, showed
me hands and feet in various states of elongation, while fingers
and toes were clearly—

My God…

—webbed.

To the touch—and what
compelled me to
touch
one of the things I can’t imagine—the skin felt strangely
moist, enslimed, and rubbery, semblant to the tactility of
frog-skin. But the most chilling verification came next: at least
half of these transfigured decedents had rows of slits along their
throats. Like gills.

Just like the
story,
my thoughts grated. Could this
possibly be true?
Madness,
I thought instead. Surely subterranean gasses
known to accumulate in caverns and tunnelworks such as these could
germinate hallucinations. It was my subconscious brain, tainted now
by such leakages, that had me believing Lovecraft’s greatest work
was based on some fashion of biological fact. I stepped back from
the gruesome heap of agape mouths; unblinking glassy orbicular
eyes; pale, bone-bowed limbs; and ears that seemed to have
partially or fully shrunk on hairless, semi-human skulls. Injuries,
clearly, had been the cause of death for these malformed victims:
wounds almost exclusively to the head and chest, and there was
suggestion that a predominance of the wounds had been inflicted via
gouges and punctures via talons and teeth.