The Innswich Horror (15 page)

I was too waylaid by this most monstrous and
unbelievable sight to ponder any further. I had no choice but to
hold my sanity in grave doubt but, next, just as in the first
chamber of death, I heard the sounds of someone encroaching…

Again I doused my light and ducked behind a
flank of piled half-human corpses when a light—no, several—were
discernible. But voices as well, this time, two at least; and from
the chamber’s farthest cranny, the coming light enabled me to
detect another rearward egress. By now I had to reason that the
tunnelworks were extensive indeed. Two figures, then, one short,
one taller, emerged, each bearing a candlefish torch. The
sputtering, smoky flames threw cragged shadows everywhere, like a
grim, kaleidoscopic nightmare.

“Gotta make it quick, son, like we’se always
do,” came a roughened, accent-tinted adult voice. “Ya never know
when one’a their sentinels is liable to be snoopin’ around.”

“I know, dad,” replied the obvious voice of
a young boy.

“You cut out the biceps’n calves, like I
taught ya, and I’ll hack out the ribs’n bellies. Let’s try’n get a
whole lot in a little time, heh, son?”

“Sure, dad.”

The smoky light easily revealed these new
interlopers: Onderdonk and his young son. They must have discovered
a tunnel of their own that gained them access without being visible
to the town proper, where they clearly were not welcome. With a
considerable skill, the boy flopped several corpses off the pile
and within seconds was deftly butchering the meat off their arms
and legs. Meanwhile, the father, with cleavers in each hand,
systematically hacked lengths of ribs off more corpses and neatly
cleaved out the abdominal walls. After they’d each administered to
half a dozen or so of the dead half-human, half-batrachian
monstrosities, they switched. Minutes later, they’d loaded the
butchered wares into burlaps sacks.

“Good job, son,” Onderdonk praised the lad.
“Bet we got here more’n a week’s worth’a meat for the smoker.”

“I hope we make a lot of money, dad.”

“That’s my boy,” the adult proudly smiled
and patted his son’s head. “It’s God’s way’a lookin’ after
God-fearin’ folk like us, seein’ to it that these half-blooders got
the taste of fish’n good pork together. What choice we got seein’
how them devil-lovin’ Olmsteaders won’t let us fish proper in their
waters?”

“Yeah, dad. I’m glad God looks after us like
this.”

“We’se quite fortunate, son, and can’t never
forget it. Times’re tougher for so many.”

“But, dad?” The boy looked quizzical through
a pause. “How come they don’t rot and get to stinkin’, you know,
like in that other place?”

“It’s ‘cos them bodies in that other place
is all pure-blood humans like us, but these here?” Onderdonk patted
the slick greenish belly of a dead female whose face and bosom
looked more toadlike, complete with warts. “All’a these here are
‘least half-full’a the fish blood, like this splittail,” and he
callously cradled a wart-sheened breast. “This ‘un here is likely
fourth generation along with a whole lot of ‘em—the one’s ud
already turned. But even first generation, boy, is enough to keep
‘em from rotting proper, and bugs’n varmints don’t go near ‘em.
It’s their fish blood, see? That’s what makes ‘em never go to rot
‘cos they cain’t die, not unless they’se kilt deliberate or by
accident.”

“Oh,” the boy replied. “That’s kind’a…
neat.”

“Um-hmm. Now, help me fling these leavin’s
back.”

With a drooping spirit, I watched from my
discreted location as the pair heaved the butchered remnants up and
over the mainstay of the piles, evidently to prevent any
“sentinels” from ascertaining what had been done here.

“There,” Onderdonk’s whisper echoed. “Let’s
skedaddle…”

In the fluttering light, I watched them
leave, sacks of pilfered meat flung over their shoulders.

But the sickness in my gut
had long-since seized me: the stealings from this preternatural
corpse-vault were clearly what Onderdonk passed off to unsuspecting
customers as “fish-fed pork,” a small portion of which now occupied
my digestive tract. When safe to do so, I staggered away, all too
aware that this was
not
the effect of hallucinotic gasses, and after
retracing several yards back through the tunnel I’d entered in, I
regurgitated the entire contents of my stomach.

Back on the rocky crags
where the tunnel emptied, I fell to my knees in the relief of the
fresh air and the simple sight of the normal world: the moonlight,
the harbor, the boat docks and waterfront buildings.
The normal world, yes,
I
thanked God, for I knew now how thin the veil was between that
normality and utter, unnameable malignity. Who knew what other
aberrant atrociousness the world hid just below its surface? I sat
against the rock, listening to the water lapping against pier posts
and shore—part of me quite paralyzed by my witness, not just
what
I’d seen but what
it all
meant.

I let the salt air flutter against my face
and fill my lungs; I knew my body and my mind needed a few moments’
rest before I could calculate the entails of my next move. I stared
dumbly out into the pier-ringed inlet, watching silent boats rock
gently in their slips, when my eyes found the barely noticeable
rise of the sand bar…

Lovecraft’s Devil’s
Reef,
 
I
mused. At least
that
had been pure invention. But who would believe the rest? And
did
I
believe
it?

At first I thought it must be a fleck of
something in my eye but the more I stared the more convinced I
became of something minuscule disturbing the late-night harbor’s
stillness.

A boat,
I thought.

It was merely a small rowboat, and there
appeared to be but one person aboard, oaring silently into the
inlet. For several moments I profaned beneath my breath when some
clouds of deeper depths roved across the moon to darken the cryptic
scene. It was likely only a crabber, or someone checking buoys, but
I couldn’t fight the temptation that it was more than that. When
the clouds moved off, I saw that the meager skiff had been rowed
deliberately aground on the longest finger of the sandbar, and its
one-man crew had already debarked…

He’s walking along the
sandbar,
I saw at once.
And… what’s that he’s carrying?

Indeed, the distant figure was belabored by
what seemed to be a sack that he was dragging along behind him. At
that point, the veils of clouds moved fully away from the moon’s
radiant face, and suddenly the entirety of the harbor glowed in
crisp, ghostly white light.

Even this far off, I could now see enough.
The trudging figure wore what I was very sure had to be a long,
greasy black raincoat and hood…

Zalen.

His progress halted when he came to the
bar’s point of greatest girth. Then he just stood there for many
minutes, his head tilted down as if—

As if he’s waiting for
something,
 
it morbidly occurred to me.
Waiting
for something in the water…

And then, from that same water, something
did indeed emerge.

A figure, yes, but one
unclothed and gleaming in a bump-ridden off-green hue. It stood
lanky and lean, but long-limbed and with a head almost flattened
and a face angled forward to a sharp point. Even from this distant
vantage point I could fully detect the
hugeness
of its unblinking eyes;
like crystalline globes, they were, aglitter from some stolid
menace beneath. Eventually two more primeval faces rose slowly from
the water, to reveal their full physiques to the moon, one
decidedly female for it was well-breasted and much more widely
hipped than the other two, whose maleness hung bumped and long at
their groins. I was grateful that the distance did not afford me
any further clarity of physical details.

The first one reached forward and took the
proffered sack from Zalen…

I didn’t need to be properly informed of the
sack’s contents for when the thing opened it up and looked in, the
tiniest sounds eddied out, tiny, yes, but all-determinant.

The anguished wails of newborn babes.

More and more it was all coming true. How
could I deny what my eyes were seeing? In all this ghastly
insanity, what sane explanation could be winnowed out? On the
sandbar the three monstrosities took their human booty and returned
to the watery depths, while Zalen reboarded his small skiff and
rowed away, and next—

thump!

I’m sure the sudden shock
forced me to shout out. It was a spindly yet aggressive weight that
landed on my person from above the outcropping where I sat: all
blanched-white skin and a thin vicious face but strangely dead-eyed
and veiled by an aura of long, dark, wispy hair. A thin hand
snapped at once to my throat and began to squeeze with a strength
greater than my own. It was the horror of the assault’s suddenness
in flux with my previous revelations that diced my thoughts.
Instinct more than decisive mental computation triggered my own
defensive maneuvers, feeble as they may have been. Only the merest
sliver of volition registered, but I was able to discern that my
banshee-like attacker was neither one of things I’d seen soliciting
Zalen on the moonlit bar nor a living example of any of the
part-human, part-monster hybrids I’d found in the earthworks. This
instead was a hostile and purely human woman tearing at my throat
with one hand and go
uging at my eyes with
the other. White teeth snapped open and closed an inch before my
appalled face, but when I took closer note of
her
face, I screamed again, all that
much more loudly. Surely the scream had been heard by anyone in
proximity to the waterfront; it echoed cannon-like across the dark
water.

The naked, feral thing clambering over me
was Candace, the formerly pregnant prostitute who served as one of
Zalen’s obscene photo models. Divorced now of the bloated belly,
her milk-swollen breasts looked too large for so thin a woman. Her
post-childbirth death had darkened streaks under her eyes like
tar-smears, and left her distended nipples the color of
bruises.

“I saw you,” I choked, “in the ambulance!
You’re dead!”

“Am I?” came a dry and strangely hacking
reply. No gust of breath vented from her mouth when she’d said
this, but worse was her facsimile of a laugh when she squeezed my
throat even harder and reached back with her other hand to molest
my groin.

“We-we could have a nice time together,
sir…”

Of all the abominable things: she gently
caressed my crotch with the gentleness of a lover, while the
fingers of the other hand dug so deeply into my throat, I feared at
any moment she’d be unseating my trachea and fully yanking it,
adam’s apple and all, out of my neck. It was obvious to me that
death had enlisted her into the role of the aforementioned
“sentinel.”

If my screams had not alerted the whole of
the waterfront’s population, the ensuant pistol-shot most certainly
did. This rejuvenated cadaver that had not too long ago been a
wayward young woman named Candace was fully thrashed aside against
the rocks. It had been a death-impulse that had unconsciously
supervened my terror and slipped my hand into my pocket to withdraw
the small Colt .32 repeater. The blind shot had struck at the
vicinity of her left ear and took out a fair section of the right
side of her cranial vault. I gasped in lungfuls of air as I watched
the nude corpse impact the wall of rocks to our side. The report
left me spattered with cool hanks of her convoluted gray matter
bathed in ill-smelling blood which appeared blackish, not red, but
traced faintly with threads of some alien constituent that glowed
in the faintest pale green. In all, it smelled like heavy motor oil
and fish.

The reckoning to make exit came immediately,
for lights were snapping on along the waterfront edifices. Yet even
having been divorced of a moderate portion of her brain, Candace
falteringly rose and began to stumble after me but not before I’d
gained enough ground to render her chase futile.

I hastened along the rock line, hoping for
camouflage amongst dingy boulders and irregular light. Eventually I
crossed the service road, slipped between a pair of drab-brick fish
processors, and escaped that eldritch waterfront into the
woods.

God, protect me, God,
protect me,
the vain prayer spun round my
head. Only patches of moonlight managed to filter in to the fringe
of woods; I daren’t slip in too deeply lest I be blind—I didn’t
want to potentially reveal my position by having to rely on my
flashlight, whose batteries were already growing dim. But as
disoriented as my experiences had left me, I felt reasonably sure
that my stilted progress was northerly—the direction necessary to
lead me, first, to Mary’s, and then, ultimately, out of town. I
knew it would be miles of desperate walking to get to the next,
safer, town. If only I could find a telegraph office—some were
known to be operational twenty-four hours—or a rare telephone. But
as I wended between stout trees, sometimes only inching along for
lack of light, I knew there was a place I
must
go before any of
that…

I should be getting
close,
it came to me after a half an
hour’s progress, and when I squinted between a pair of shabby
buildings, I think I spotted to the cobbled lane before the fire
station.
Yes!
There it was with its opened bay yet, oddly enough, not a
soul could be seen in proximity. Just another twenty yards, then,
and I knew I was collimating the unlighted rear wall of the
building which housed Cyrus Zalen and his penurious neighbors. In
fact, I could even smell the despair-compressed apartment row from
the woods.