The Innswich Horror (17 page)

Where the modest lake had earlier gleamed in
sunlight, now it shimmered in the light of the moon. I glimpsed
figures along the lake’s shore.

Zalen held me back behind some trees before
I had chance to blunder forth. “Not a sound,” Zalen warned.

Verbosity couldn’t have
been further from my mind; instead, it was
witness.
Several dozen women stood
in a semi-circle just at the water’s edge, and I must say, this
first glimpse of them made me think singularly of occultism. The
late hour, the moonlight, and the location only exacerbated a
namelessly sinister provocation in my mind…

The women wore primal
robes whose color was indistinguishable in the intense moonlight,
but what
could
be
distinguished were fringed panels of fabric segmented by
lighter-colored stitch-work. Within these segments more elaborate
embroidery could be seen: symbols quite glyph-like and the oddest
designations of geometry that, when looked upon to stridently,
caused my head to ache. Were the angles of the horrific geometrics
actually
moving?
Each woman, too, held a candle before her—a candle whose
flame burned
green
—and I thought I could hear the faintest chimes, the notes of
which instilled in me, to the core of my very guts, a feeling of
uncontemplatable dread via the idea of utter
absence.
Absence of light, absence
of benevolence, absence of morality, absence of all things
sane.
Even more softly
than the sourceless chimes there came to my ears a vocal diaphony
that made me want to fall to my knees and be sick: a discordant and
cacodaemonically unstructured sequence of words which sounded
like:

“Ei…”

“Cf’ayak vulgtuum…”

“Ei…”

“Vugtlagln, sjulnu…”

“Ei, ph’nglui, hkcthtul’ei…”

“Wgah’nagl fhtagen—ei…”

“Ei, ei, ei…”

The perverse chants seemed
to grow lighter rather than louder, but for some reason the more
difficult this evil song was to hear, the more impact it had on my
mind, a veritable
pressure,
a
tactuality
against my face. Yet as sick as I felt, I felt
something else concurrently: a most powerful carnal
arousal.

“Keep back,” Zalen whispered. He forced me
to crouch lower. “This lake empties into the bay…”

The solemnity of that information didn’t at
first occur to me. My vision, instead, remained hijacked to these
macabre, robed women. The chorus was chanted again when all the
women at once dropped their robes and stood nude.

Nude,
I had no choice but to observe,
and
pregnant.

All the while, the chant seemed to compress
my brain within the confines of my skull. It was sordid and erotic,
seeing this in such a manner that I could not look away—indeed, it
was evil. Most of the women appeared in their twenties, but I did
make out Mrs. Nowry and some others more middle-aged. All of them,
then, one by one, tossed their queerly green candles into the
water, and I could take an oath that as each stick of wax sunk
beneath the surface, the green flame was not extinguished, and at
the same time my eyes seemed to acclimate more intensely to this
tinseled night: the moonlight grew sharper, brighter, and with
this, my vision grew more acute. Even from this considerable
distance, I could make out refined details of each gravid woman. I
could see the pores on their white skin, the minute line between
each iris and the whites of their eyes, the papillae of each and
every nipple, and the fine traceries of venousity within each
milk-soused breast. Eventually all of them lowered to the muck of
the lake shore, and what took place then I’ll only distinguish as
an obscene bacchanal of the flesh, a libertine debauch intent on
mutual satiation akin to the Isle of Lesbos. I shouldn’t have to
specify, either, that one of these concupiscent attendants was Mary
herself…

My eyes held rapt on the orgiastic scene,
and for a time I thought that even a gun to my head couldn’t make
me look away even in the self-knowledge averting my eyes was the
only Godly thing to do. But it was Zalen, not God, who urged my
surcease.

“It’s coming out now—”

“It?” I questioned in the slightest
whisper.

“We’re not going to be
here to see it. Believe me, Morley, you
don’t want to see it…
”

He hauled me back into the woods just at the
same moment a figure began to rise from the lake.

My head thankfully cleared
with proximity. “What—what
was
that, Zalen?”

“It was one of them—what did you think?” the
long haired, greasy-coated man chided.

One of them,
I thought.
A
fullblood…

“One of the hierarchs, but there could be
others about too.”

I winced at the madness. “That was an occult
rite we just witnessed, Zalen. After all I’ve learned, and
everything you told me that happens to be true, there has to be
more…”

“Of course there is,” the
spindly vagabond retorted. “But all that shit out there by the
lake?” He seemed amused. “It’s just tradition, Morley, it’s just
ritual; it means nothing. All it proves is how much
lower
mankind’s
mentality is; the only way we could ever really relate to the
fullbloods—even back in Obed Larsh’s time—is through ignorant
ritualism like this…”

“Just a veneer,” I speculated, for so much
occultism in the Master’s work was just that. “Is that what you’re
saying?”

“You hit it right on the head. What looks
like devil-worship and simple paganism is just the icing on a very
different kind of cake.”

The analogy, trite as it
may have been, validated my assurances now. I followed Zalen
unknowingly for a time, my mind too active with a plethora of
conjectures. “But all societal systems ultimately have a defined
purpose,” I insisted. “If this occultism is veneer—or ‘icing’ used
to cover something else up… what
is
the something else?”

“You ask too many questions. I warned you
about that,” he said. “We have to get out of here, that’s all.
You’ve got money and a gun, and I’ve got the way out. If we’re
lucky, we might make it.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve got a motor-car,” I
nearly exclaimed.

“Sure, I do—er, I should say, I know where
we can get one,” he supplemented with a chuckle. “The Onderdonks
have a truck. That’s where your gun comes in.”

For whatever reason, this
decidedly promising news did not reduce the regard of more of my
questions. “You could’ve stolen their truck anytime in the past.
Why is escape on your mind
now?
”

“I told you,” he smirked back in spattered
moonlight. “Because they’re onto us now. Someone overheard me
talking to you earlier—”

“So that’s it, a breach of the secrecy
everyone here must adhere to,” I surmised. “More, more of the
story.”

“Because Lovecraft’s story wasn’t really a
story. I told you that too. Most of it’s true. And now we’ve got to
live with it—or die.”

I continued to follow his footsteps, still
confounded and—why, I’m not sure—enraged more than terrified. The
smell of slow-cooking meat waxed dominant; it sifted down the
narrow trail to tell me that Onderdonk’s property drew near. I was
appalled to admit that the aroma—even in knowing as I did the
origin of the meat—was delectable. It also appalled me that Zalen,
an inveterate thief, criminal, and, worse, one who was a willing
party to infanticide, represented my greatest chance of escaping
with Mary.

“Mary,” I said next. “She must go with
us.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” he
snapped.

“I insist. I have a great deal of money,
Zalen. It would behoove you to accommodate my indulgence. Mary, her
son, her brother, and her stepfather will be joining our
escape.”

At this he actually laughed. “Her and the
kid, maybe. But Paul’s deadweight; he’s a Sire who went impotent.
Only reason he wasn’t killed and taken to the tunnels is ‘cos she
begged the hierarch.” His next chuckle could’ve passed for a
death-rattle. “And the stepfather? Haven’t you been listening?”

“I can’t fathom you, Zalen. Mary’s
stepfather is aged and rife with infirmities. It would be
un-Christian of us to abandoned the old man.”

“The stepfather is a crossbreed!”

I gawped at words as though they were
fragments of shrapnel. “But-but, I thought—”

“Crossbreeding between the two species was
made illegal by the new hierarchs, so—”

“So all the existing crossbreeds were
exterminated in the concerted genocide,” I’d already gathered.
“Which doesn’t explain why Mary’s stepfather is still alive.”

Zalen stopped to face me, with that
nihilistic grin I was now all-too-accustomed to. “You’ll love this
part, Morley… but are you sure you wanna hear it?”

“Don’t toy with me, Zalen.
Your psychological parlor tricks are quite juvenile if you’d like
to know the truth. So kindly tell me that—the
truth
.”

“We don’t know exactly how their political
system works but we think it’s several of them in charge and
there’s one who’s more powerful than the others.”

“It’s called an oligarchical monarchy,
Zalen. The senior hierarch would suffice as the sovereign, akin to
the Soviet Union of today, or this man in Germany, Hitler.”

“Yeah. The sovereign. The
sovereign’s hot to trot for your wonderful little Mary. How do you
like that? He’s got kind of a
thing
for her. That was probably him back there at the
lake. Don’t worry, it won’t fuck her—it’s not allowed to… but it’ll
probably do everything else.”

The information sickened me but also made me
feel haunted. Thoughtlessly, I seized my handgun and turned to head
back to the lake.

“You really are an idiot,
Morley,” I was told amid more laughter. He’d grabbed my arm and
thrust me back. “Even if you did get a clear shot at it, there’d be
a hundred more after you in two minutes. They’d
sniff
us out. We wouldn’t stand a
chance”

I leaned against a tree, gripped by a
harrowing despair. “You’re telling me that Mary’s stepfather was
spared from the genocide because—”

“—because Mary begged the
hierarch not to kill him. She agreed to keep the old stick in
hiding, at her house.” Zalen nodded. “Hate to think what she had to
do to get
that
favor.”

I could’ve killed him on the spot for saying
such a thing, but I knew there was truth behind it; desperation led
to desperate acts. Instead, I collected my senses and continued to
follow him. “What about those who aren’t in Olmstead’s town
collective?”

“Rejects, like me, are left alone as long as
we don’t tell outsiders what’s going on here, and as long as we
don’t leave.”

“Those things can’t possibly be everywhere,”
I declared. “With a modicum of forethought, I’d suspect that escape
would be easily achievable.”

“Sure, you’d
think
so,” he counted,
“but why do you think nobody does? Why do you think Mary’s still
here? It’s not because she wants to be, I can tell you that. None
of us do.”

“Fear, then?”

“Uh-huh. In the past people—mostly
women—have tried to escape. They just can’t handle giving up their
babies. But every single one has been brought back”—now Zalen’s
expression turned cold—“and made an example of. There are a whole
lot more of those things than anyone can guess. If you leave,
they’ll track you down the way a bloodhound catches a scent,
Morley. They travel along any existing waterway, and they’re very
fast.”

I had no choice but to postulate, “So even
if we do manage to get out of here, you don’t deem our chances of
success to be very high.”

“No, but when they’re on a
rampage like they are now, if we
don’t
try, we’re dead by morning for
sure.”

Waterways, hunting a
scent,
I thought. If we made it back to
Providence, I’d install Pinkerton’s men round the clock. Either
that or I’d relocate to a place so far removed from any
waterways.

“There’s the truck,” Zalen whispered just as
the trail had navigated us to an opening in the woods just behind
Onderdonk’s property. The aroma of slow-cooking meat hung dense.
Several shacks sat teetering in shadows; betwixt two of them I
spied a pickup truck that looked as dilapidated as everything else.
The only sound that came to my ears was that of pigs chortling.

“Onderdonk’s had those same pigs for years,”
came Zalen’s next snide remark, “but they’re just for show. I’ll
bet that hillbilly and his kid haven’t really cooked pork for a
decade.”

“But where is he?” I queried. “The place
looks abandoned.”

“They probably went to bed after they put
the meat in the smoker,” he suspected, and pointed to the rows of
propped-up metal barrels which sufficed for the cooking apparatus.
“That’s good for us… but get your gun out just in case.”

I obeyed the instruction and followed him
into the overgrown perimeter. We ambled forth with great care, so
not to snap a single twig. Moonlight and shadows diced the various
shacks into wedges of light and dark; several sets of small eyes
glittered at us when the pigs in the sty took note of us. An owl
hooted, then went silent.

“That seems irregular,” I commented of the
burlap sacks near the smokers. “Those sacks appear to be full. I
saw Onderdonk with my own eyes, carrying the sacks out of the
cavern after he and his boy butchered a number of the crossbred
corpses.”