The Innswich Horror (20 page)

My heart fell like a stone.

What my flash illumined was a cylindrical
keyway mounted in the dash.

“Here’s the key, Mr. Morley,” the small but
sudden voice whispered just outside the open truck window. Where my
heart had just sunk in the worst despair it nearly jettisoned from
my mouth in the coming shock.

It was young Walter who stood beside the
vehicle.

“In Heaven’s name, son!” I snapped a whisper
back to him. “You nearly stopped my heart!” but then my eyes
flicked to his adolescent hand and proved what he claimed was true.
“How… How on earth did you—”

A modest smile of pride touched his face.
“Mr. Onderdonk would always keep the key beneath his door mat; I’ve
seen him put it there a lot, sir, during my hikes through the
woods.”

“Not only a lad of proper manners,” I
gushed, “but one of industriousness.” I blinked. “But you were
asleep only a short time ago.”

“I woke up and heard you and my mom talking,
so I came out on my own, to get the key for you.”

This was certainly a gift I could never have
anticipated. “You’re a fine boy, Walter, and a very brave one. But
it’s unduly dangerous out here. Do you know about… ,” but then the
sentence deteriorated.

“I know all about the fullbloods, sir. I’ve
seen them a few times, but tonight, I’ve seen a whole lot of
them.”

And it’s my fault,
I reminded myself. Walter’s courage was
commendable but it did indeed put him in great danger. “Get in next
to me, Walter. We’re going to pick up your mother so I can take you
both to live with me.”

“But you’ll need help, sir,” he added. “It
would be best if I position myself in the back of the truck. I
can’t get a good aim if I’m inside with you.”

“A good
aim?
Walter, whatever
are you talking about?”

He raised his handmade bow. “They may try to
block the road back to the house, but I’m a pretty good shot.”

I smiled in spite of myself. “Lad, you’re
surely the bravest boy to ever walk these parts but I’m afraid that
suction-cup arrows will do little good against the fullbloods.”

Then he showed me a
handful of
real
arrows.

“See, Mr. Morley? We better go, before they
come.”

What could I say to such youthful ingenuity
and unhesitant bravado? “All right, Walter. Get in back and be
vigilant… And keep your fingers crossed that this old vehicle
starts.”

The boy hopped in back. With wide eyes,
then, and a trembling lip, I inserted the key into the cylinder,
uttered a prayer that seemed dismally anemic, and turned the
key.

The rusted hulk hitched, gave off a loud
metallic whine that made the tendons in my neck stand out, then
rumbled to a start. I ground gears in my attempt to get it in
first, gritted my teeth at a long grind, then we were finally
moving. The vehicle was indeed roadworthy, but in that evidence,
the noise its starting had made could surely be heard from here to
town.

I pulled out and turned
posthaste, gravel and oyster shells popping beneath worn tires.
“Keep a sharp eye!” I called to Walter when I considered the
necessity to leave the headlamps off. “Yes, Mr. Morley!” he
replied, and when I glanced back through the hole which had once
housed glass, I saw the lad positioned in back, his crude bow at
the ready. I knew that at an identical age, I’d have been in
possession of not one-tenth of the boy’s courage.
I’ll raise him as though he were my own,
I vowed,
and be the
father he’d never had, and the same for Mary’s baby…
Rusted springs ground when I throttled the
archaic vehicle across the rutted road to town. The moon seemed to
spray its light upon us for the few seconds that the road exposed
us, such that the road itself and the trees and vegetation lining
it seemed iridescent, and this made me think of Lovecraft’s
masterpiece, “The Color Out of Space,” said to be his personal
favorite. Though my fear levels jumped from this brief exposure, it
enabled me to view the road both ways. Where I expected to glimpse
enemies, I saw, again, virtually nothing in the way of
detractors.

Strange,
I thought.
Unless
they’re lying in wait…

The enfeebled truck rocked when I traversed
the wheel and navigated into the long, heavily wooded dirt-scratch
lane which would lead us to the house. Suddenly darkness swallowed
us, only minutely dappled by the moon, for the boughs of overhead
trees nearly connected with one another from either side,
transposing our route into that of a tunnel. I had to retard speed
considerably now, for the reduced visibility.

Walter’s wan face peered
in to the rear hole. “Mr. Morley? Maybe you should turn on the
headlamps. I can’t see a
thing!
”

The light-discipline of a
soldier surely had tactical exceptions, not to mention that I was
nothing remotely similar to a soldier.
Just a rich pud,
I recalled Zalen’s
slight, but he was right. I fancied I could hear him laughing at me
now, even as his odious head continued to cook. But now I
would
have
to be
a soldier, and I would have to take chances in order to achieve
success. I took the lad’s advice, and switched on the
headlamps.

The boy shrieked, and so did I.

Figures rushed forward out of the
bramble-carpeted woods. Before I could even make transitive
reaction, I saw a queerly robed figure—but one with a clearly human
face—lunge forward but then buckle back, his hand shooting to his
face as an arrow caught him right in his opened mouth.

“Good shot, Walter!”

When a hand—a human hand, not the webbed
extremity I expected—shot into the passenger window, I thrust my
pistol-filled fist toward it, then—

BAM!

The lucky shot caught the marauder right in
the adam’s apple. Bubbly blood shot from the wound as the robed
predator screamed.

And it was a man I
recognized.
Mr. Wraxall, the restaurant
owner…

These were not the monstrous fullbloods I
anticipated to be set for ambush, but townsmen, all dressed in
those same robes with esoteric fringe. More snatches of faces were
revealed: the hotel clerk, the maintenance man, the diner who’d
been lunching with his paramour at the restaurant, and others. When
two more shot out from left and right, Walter struck one in the
shoulder; the aggressor unwisely hesitated where he stood, then was
bellowing as the vehicle’s wheels drubbed him beneath the chassis.
The second assailant tried to climb into my open window where I
easily fired a shot directly into the top of his head. He fell
away, but not before I could recognize the face in the hood’s oval:
Dr. Anstruther.

Sin or not, I chuckled at the cad’s death,
and considered the splotches of his grey matter upon my shirt a
unique badge of honor.

The rest of the road to the house was
clear.

Where I’d expected the opposition to be
formidable, I found only sheepshank weakness in its place. The
squat house now came into view at the end of the headlamps’
beams.

“This was almost too easy, Walter,” I called
out behind me. “And that troubles me quite a bit.” I killed the
motor, hopped out. “We must hurry now and fetch your mother.
Between the engine-noise and my pistol, there’ll be more after
us…”

I sprang to the vehicle’s rear bed to lift
Walter out, but—

Oh, my God in Heaven, no…

The only objects occupying this space were
the boy’s meager bow and the final can of petrol.

I glanced out into the woods but saw and
heard nothing.

How could I have let this
happen?
I condemned myself.
The town collective snatched Walter out of the
back… and have taken him away…

4.

A half-hour’s desperate search in the woods
yielded no positive result, and to search longer would only
jeopardize the possibility of getting Mary and her unborn out
alive. Hence, I trudged back to the brick-and-ivy-netted hovel like
a man on his way to the gallows. What could I tell Mary? Her son
had been abducted and most likely was dead already—all under my
charge…

The very normal sound of crickets followed
me back inside, but then came another sound, one which actually
deflected my all-pervading muse of despair:

The sound of a baby crying.

I plunged out of the foyer’s ink-like murk
into the candle-lit room, where the sound of infantile crying
hijacked my gaze toward the heap of a mattress. “Mary!”

There she sat, bearing an exhausted smile as
she sat upright among makeshift pillows. In her arms, pressed to
her swelling bosom, was a newly born babe, swaddled in linens.

“I went into labor just after you left,” she
said, rosy-cheeked. “And then it happened only minutes later.” She
turned the infant for me to see.

A miracle,
I thought. It was as perfect as any babe I’d ever
beheld. The moment it took notice of me, it quieted, and looked at
me wide-eyed.

“See, he likes you, Foster. Just the sight
of you calms him.” Mary rocked him as best she could.

“What a wonder,” I whispered. “I’m only
sorry I wasn’t here to assist when the time came.”

“Each time it’s easier,” she informed.
“There was barely any pain with this one.” She glanced hopefully to
me, eyes aglint in the candlelight. “But we must name him right
away, in case—”

In case we die trying to
leave,
I finished for her.

“I’m going to name him Foster,” she
said.

I went speechless, a tear beading in my
eye.

Then her hopeful glance
turned hard as granite. “And they’re
not
going to get this one. Only over
my dead body…”

The joy of this notice crested in my heart,
but then crashed to the most stygian depths.

She still didn’t know that Walter was
gone.

“Mary, I… I…”

“I love you so much, Foster,” she
interrupted, teary-eyed herself. “I want you to marry me. I want to
spend the rest of my life with you, and raise this child with you…
and make love to you every single night…”

The words, greater than any gift I’d ever
been given, only dragged my spirit deeper into the abyss of black
verity.

“You, me, and Walter,” she mused on,
breast-feeding now. “We’ll be such a happy family.”

Sorrow sealed my throat like a strangler’s
gasp. I could barely hack out, “Mary, you don’t understand. It’s
about—”

“I know what it’s about,” her placid voice
came to me. “It’s about Walter.”

I stared.

“I never got the chance to explain earlier,”
she went on, modestly covering enough of her bosom to forestall my
view. “Earlier, you said that you’d witnessed Cyrus Zalen at the
waterfront, delivering sacks of newborns to the fullbloods.”

“But-but… but Mary, what—”

“Don’t
worry,
sweetheart. You were simply
mistaken.”

“Mistaken?” I asked but by now my mind was
thoroughly disarranged. “No, no, Mary, I saw him, it was
Zalen.”

“You saw a man in a black raincoat is what
you saw, Foster. Right?”

“Why… yes.”

She looked right at me. “Foster, the man
stalking you in the woods earlier today wasn’t Zalen.”

The comment took me aback. “But… I thought
sure.”

“And the man you saw out on the sandbar
tonight wasn’t Zalen, either.”

“Who, then?” I demanded.

Mary squirmed in her seat, candlelight pale
on her face. “It was Walter’s father—”

“What!”

“Foster… turn around.”

The cryptic command reversed my position,
and my eyes blossomed at the surreal sight.

It was a man tall and gaunt who stood in the
opposite corner. The black raincoat seemed several sizes too large,
and its hood draped most of his face. More important was the minor
burden in his arms: it was Walter. At first I feared the boy was
dead but then I noted the rise and fall of his young chest.

“This is Walter’s father,” Mary told me in
the struggling light. “Those times you mistook him as Zalen
stalking you, he was actually coming here, to catch a glimpse of
his son.”

I suppose I already knew via some blackly
ethereal portent, even before the figure retracted the hood to
reveal the face of Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

I stood, lax-jawed, dizzy—staring at the
icon as if beholding a vision from the highest precipice of the
earth…

The voice which issued from the thin lips
sounded high but parched, an exerted whisper. He hefted the living
weight. “My son is in no danger, sir; he’s merely fainted from the
shock of his abduction by several of the town’s collective members.
Please rest assured that these self-same abductors are no longer
among the living.”

“You killed them?”

The thin face nodded.
“Just as I killed the fullblood that was after you at the
Onderdonk’s. And as Mary has informed you,
I
was the ferryman you glimpsed on
the sandbar tonight.” The voice teetered now between cracking and
high-pitchedness, hollow yet somehow exhibiting depth at the same
time. “In the amalgam of my damnable onus. This nefarious deed has
been my province alone, since the sixteenth of March, nineteen
hundred and thirty-seven.”

The day after his
death,
I knew. The Master’s words sounded
ruined, like thin-membraned things blown through fence-slats in the
wind. The obscene circumvention of death left his narrow visage
pallored as if old mortician’s wax had been applied to a skull.
This semi-translucence caused me to shudder, as did his eye-whites
which more resembled dirt-flecked snowcrust.