Innsmouth Nightmares

  Either way, the end result was the same.

  When I met with her that night, I did so with a very nice diamond ring for her left hand and with a promise that we would be together till death do we part.

  She wants to have the wedding and reception alike at The Sea Hag. I can’t think of a better place. All of my memories of that silly little restaurant are pleasant ones and the staff practically feels like family.

  Lianne and I have discussed it. Golden Cove is the place for us. There’s a Cape Cod I’ve been looking at along the shore, and the price is right. The advantage of working for the company is the price is always right. They have an amazing incentive package.

  Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you get the girl.

  The wedding is set for June.

  We could have waited, but we both agree that we want kids. Lots of kids. We want to share our paradise with our children, and live happily ever after.

  James A. Moore is the award-winning author of over twenty-five novels, thrillers, dark fantasy and horror alike, including the critically acclaimed Fireworks, Under The Overtree, Blood Red, the Serenity Falls trilogy (featuring his recurring anti-hero, Jonathan Crowley) and his most recent novels, Seven Forges and The Blasted. In addition to writing multiple short stories, he has also edited, with Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon, The British Invasion anthology for Cemetery Dance Publications. Moore’s first short story collection, Slices, sold out before ever seeing print. He is currently at work on several additional projects, including the forthcoming City of Wonders.

  BROOD

  Jason V Brock

  1.

  This is a bad sign…The surf hissed into the sand, depositing lacy foam on the tideline. Sheriff Allen looked from the twisted body on the shore to the sea; the sun had just vanished below the gray horizon, touching the stark early October air with orange as gulls weaved and bobbed in the chilly, cloudless sky. Normally he loved this time of year on the coast but today, the thing that had washed ashore filled him with a dread he had not experienced since … Since—

  “Sheriff Allen?” The man’s voice was gruff, deep, yet distant. The fishy smell of the body mingling with the briny sea mist was strong in the officer’s nose as he snapped out of his thoughts. Overhead, seagulls cried in response, ready to swoop in on the carcass being tended to by the crime scene technicians.

  “Yeah?” Allen turned away from the creature on the strand to the voice of the man approaching him—tall, fifties, in a gray felt hat and black duster.

  “T. K. Potter, WMTE news.” The reporter was out of breath as he struggled against the wind in the fiery afterglow of sunset.

  Sheriff Allen resisted the urge to grimace or roll his eyes. “Yes, Mr. Potter.

  We have no official statement at this—”

  “Is it another shark attack?”

  “Now just hold on, Potter. No one’s concluded anything yet. You’ll know what I know when we convene the press con—”

  “So you think it is, I take it.” Potter glanced over to where the crime lab was working. Though cordoned off, the body was clearly visible: small, with a strange iridescence on the patches of visible skin; the thing’s face was vaguely human in its cluster of features—eyes, mouth, nose—but flatter. The teeth and hairless skull were exposed in part; one of the eyes was missing, the other was shriveled and seemed to stare at the technicians. The body was swathed in a dark covering, not unlike a robe, which covered the legs, though one skeletonized foot was visible. The arms appeared unusually long and thin, the flesh rough and a ghastly pale blue-green hue; likely this was due to the process of decay, and the change of soft tissues into adipocere, but the appearance was freakish and strange.

  Sheriff Allen pulled his collar together as the wind gusted again; the water was getting choppier as daylight faded into darkness. “I don’t know what’s happening.”

  Potter looked at the sheriff once more. “Looks bad. When do you expect to release any details? Can I get an exclusive with you?”

  One of the technicians waved a rubber-gloved hand at the sheriff, motioning him over.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Potter.” Turning his back on the reporter, Allen switched on his flashlight and trudged several yards toward the scene, ducking under the tape barrier. As he converged on the body, the smell was more pungent, causing his eyes to water. He nodded a greeting to the two technicians, Randy Searles and Christy Wright. “Don’t talk to that guy. He’s that damned newscaster from WMTE. What’s the situation?”

  Dressed in bulky overcoats and jeans, both of them regarded one another, unsure of what to say at first. Christy pushed a straggle of dirty-blonde hair behind her ear. “Well, not sure what’s going on, not exactly. I mean, it appears to be human. Sort of.” Playing her torch over the remains, she looked from the sheriff to Randy, the scene supervisor.

  “I think what Christy means is that we looked it over, and it’s too decayed to really know who—or what—it might be. No ID on the body, either. Hard to tell if it’s human, or maybe a hoax, sort of like that thing in New York from a few years ago—the Montauk Monster.” The senior technician paused as the sheriff nodded in recollection, stroking his mustache. Randy continued: “Seems to have trauma from fish bites and weather, so I’d say it’s been around awhile…but there’s no way to definitively figure out if it’s a prank or something, especially out here. We need to take the garments off, maybe do X-rays and stuff. We did take a bunch of samples for the Massachusetts State Crime Lab. They have better facilities than we do in Marsh-by-the-Sea.”

  Sheriff Allen nodded his comprehension. It was nearly dark and the temperature was dropping rapidly. “You got all the pictures and video you need?” The technicians nodded, their flashlights creating nightmarish shadows against the hollows and planes of the corpse. “Okay. Call Niels and let’s get the M.E. here to pick up the body. Doc’ll need to do the autopsy in the morning. I want to see if we can rule out another shark attack.” He looked out to the ocean, which was now just a great stretch of empty bleakness. In the distance, the flash of Annisquam Harbor Lighthouse brought momentary comfort to the scene of starless and bible black horror which Sheriff Allen always felt when he contemplated the bottomless depths at night. He breathed the frigid air in deeply, causing his lungs to ache as he tried to release the foreboding celestial irrelevance that crept past his subconscious and into his waking mind when he considered how powerless humans were against the immense, alien, powerful sea. And, beyond that, the trivial Earth as it spins around an insignificant star in an inconsequential galaxy…All of this in turn engulfed by the claustrophobic vastness of an indifferent universe…

  “One thing that’s a bit odd, Sheriff Allen,” Christy said as she stripped off a glove and brought her camera up to show him the digital display. “We found some strange…glyphs, I might call them, on the clothing.” She swiped through several images before finding the shots in question. “See here?”

  Allen studied the picture on the camera’s monitor, not sure what it meant. Very strange indeed. The image was of the black material enrobing the torso, but there was an odd symbol in red stitched into the threadbare fabric. It reminded him of something…something from his childhood perhaps: an oblong circle with a trident bifurcating it. Underneath this were parts of more symbols in yellow—hieroglyphic in style—but which, like the rest of the embroidery, had frayed and begun to unravel from the garment due to exposure. “Weird. Reminds me of something I can’t quite place.”

  “Me, too, Sheriff,” Randy said. “You know, a lot of strange stuff has been washing up since Hurricane Sandy rolled through the area around us in 2012. Even though we were spared a direct hit, it changed some of the currents, I read. The fishermen have told me that in town, too—weird bycatch, animals they’ve never seen before swimming around out there. Big animals.”

  Sheriff Allen nodded, recalling the increase in shark sightings over the summer. “Yeah, a few of those old salts told me the same thing. Not just that, either. More fi
sh, especially up north near the old plant.” The bellow of the foghorn at the lighthouse floated toward them; the tide was beginning to come in.

  “Great work, you two. Button it up here. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  2.

  The following day, as he waited on hold with the Medical Examiner’s office, Sheriff Allen sat back in his office chair at the station, observing dust motes as they floated in the morning rays of sun slanting though the blinds. It occurred to him that the unsettling display from the previous night had unearthed some long-forgotten uneasiness about the history of the area.

  He’d seen it all, at least as far as recent local changes were concerned. Some had been good, others less successful.

  As a kid, he had not understood the realities faced by his parents before their divorce. Marsh-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts then was more like a failed nation-state than a town; it was communal, an enclave for proto-hippies and hipsters seeking refuge from the conformity and size of late-1950s Boston, and a break from the horror and shock of a post-Holocaust, Cold War world. In the ensuing years, the place’s fortunes had waxed and waned based largely on climate, both meteorological and political.

  By the time he was a young man in the 1970s, the proximity to Boston and New York City had changed the place from a backwater with crumbling infrastructure and countercultural ties to a kind of New England Riviera, albeit colder. Most of the natives had been priced out by the boom created from inexpensive property, which was promptly demolished and refashioned into McMansions. Marsh-by-the-Sea had exploded from a sleepy village of less than 1,100 when Sheriff Allen was a boy to a bustling tourist destination of more than 10,000 full-time residents—a mecca and playground for the idle wealthy from the megalopolises of the Eastern Seaboard.

  Of course, prosperity like that always comes with a price. Nearby Portsmouth had been prosperous once, too, but after its power station—the Manuxet River Nuclear Complex—and the surrounding working-class community had been decommissioned due to an accident, the place dried up. The Feds had imposed the terrifying perimeter of an Exclusion Zone to seal off the area from permanent habitation, which was part of the reason for the improved fortunes of Marsh-by-the-Sea. There was still occasional trouble—squatters, religious cults, people attracted to the deserted old town of Portsmouth, not Newburyport, as the possible site of inspiration by the pulpsmith H. P. Lovecraft for his tale The Shadow over Innsmouth—but nothing too major.

  “Doctor Heidegger,” said a voice on the phone.

  Sheriff Allen sat forward, turning his attention to the notes on his desk. “Hi, Doc, it’s Ed Allen.”

  “Hi, Ed. Glad you called. I was going to give you a ring after I closed up this car accident—”

  “Do you need to go?”

  “No, I’ve got Randy covering. Listen, that body from last night—”

  “That’s why I’m calling, Doc. Have you had a chance to take a look?” The doctor cleared his throat. “I have. Pretty interesting specimen.”

  “I thought so, too. Sort of creepy. What do you make of it? Think it’s a hoax, or—”

  “Oh, no. It’s real all right. It’s an animal, and it has some peculiar qualities.

  The techs said it washed up?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, it’s been dead a long time. The tissue has turned into adipocere— corpse wax. Another strange thing: under the scope, some of the tissues are still active, at least microscopically. They’re alive, dividing, but barely.”

  Sheriff Allen’s brow furrowed. “Is that…is that normal?“

  “Definitely not. Another thing: the composition of tissues that hadn’t solidified are non-human and human. Randy made a good call forwarding those samples to the State Lab. In fact, we added more from the viscera, which was all well-preserved as a result of the adipocere. Even stranger, however, was the fact that the heart had only three chambers, like a reptile or amphibian, but was much larger—the size of a six or seven year-old child.”

  Allen scribbled notes onto his writing tablet. “That’s really bizarre.”

  “I’ll say it is. And the way the arms, legs, and head are proportioned is interesting. If this is a hoax, it’s the damnest one I’ve seen in twenty-seven years as a pathologist. And the X-rays? Oh, boy.”

  Allen leaned back in his chair again and stroked his mustache as he considered the doctor’s assessment. “Okay. Weird.” He ran a calloused hand through his shock of curly brown hair. “So, what do we do now?”

  After a pause, Doctor Heidegger replied: “Well, I say we wait on the State Lab. That’ll take a few days. It might take longer if they have trouble or they decide to forward anything to the DNA Casework Unit at the F.B.I.. We’ll have to see.”

  “Got it. I appreciate the update, Doc. Any idea if this could have been another shark situation?” Over the summer, tourists were spooked by a series of minor attacks just off the shore, and even two in a brackish creek feeding into the sea. After a period of intense searching, the attacks dissipated; the local fishermen suspected a rogue Bull Shark, not unlike the 1916 attacks in New Jersey, the inspiration for the book and film Jaws.

  “Hard to say, Sheriff. Could be. Quite a bit of damage to the cadaver. It’s possible.”

  This was not what the sheriff wanted to hear, now that the town’s attention had turned to the annual Founders’ Day Festival, which with the more recent celebrations of the area’s burgeoning service industry immigrants in the form of Día de Muertos. It was bad enough to contend with the nor’easter that was due to hit the seaboard around the same week; a body with a mystery attached only added to his stress.

  “Understand, Doc. Keep me in the loop, would you?”

  3.

  Two days before the Founders’ Day Festival, another body washed up.

  An elderly couple out for their morning stroll on the beach had discovered it as they combed for shells. Sheriff Allen was shocked by the appearance of it. Much fresher than the other carcass, it was about the size of a preteen human, but with mixed features. Once again, the figure was wrapped in an embroidered, black cloth with bits of rubbery seaweed still clinging to it. The skin had the same scaly iridescence as the other, but in darker hues of brown and green. Great chunks of flesh had been torn from the thing’s body, as though bitten off by a large animal, and one of its legs had been severed at the knee joint, causing white bone to protrude from the meaty, stringy stump. Even as he watched, the remnant appeared to be pulsing, reshaping—as if the limb were trying to grow back. The flattened, soft face was twisted into a surreal parody of laughter, displaying rows of small, serrated teeth. The bulbous, half-lidded eyes had no whites—they were simply large black orbs with gold flecks. Though the arms were drawn up toward the body in a pugilistic fashion, in one of the clawed, long-fingered hands was wrapped a golden amulet on a frayed cord: an oblong circle with a trident through it.

  Randy, the crime scene technician, walked over to Allen. Standing over the body, the wind whipping their pant legs like flags, they studied the form as it lolled in the gentle ebb and flow of the tide.

  After exhaling a lungful of the salty air, he finally said: “I think I know what’s happening, Randy.”

  That afternoon, Sheriff Allen requested permission to enter the Exclusion Zone.

  4.

  Though still early evening, it was dark by the time Sheriff Allen, two of his best deputies—Rick Mattison and Rob Sterling—and a Zone Guide named Marc entered the Exclusion Zone. As usual, red tape had created multiple delays. While waiting for an official reply from the Massachusetts Exclusion Zone Authority, he was able to follow-up with Doctor Heidegger and the tissue samples from both bodies. Just as Heidegger had predicted, the State Crime Lab had been forced to send the samples on to the F.B.I. labs. The results had been sobering: the tissues were part human, part amphibian—a chimeric hybrid of DNA that they deemed Cryptobranchus dagoni. It was their intention to send other forensic experts to study the cadavers still warehoused at Ma
rsh-by-the-Sea and prepare them for more extensive testing in Washington. The Feds would be arriving shortly after the Festival had concluded.

  As the patrol car jolted along the unkempt asphalt road approaching the boundary fence surrounding the Exclusion Zone, Allen was struck by how rundown the place was. Looming ahead were the huge towers, their lights slowly flashing in syncopated rhythm in the awful nightscape; it was an ominous vision, a real-life version of the Last Redoubt out of William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land. Allen had always been leery of going into the Zone because of the health risks and had never visited the place at night. They would have limited time, as there was still a real possibility of contamination if they remained longer than a few hours. No one spoke.

  Finally the car’s headlights illuminated the main entrance gate. Now it struck Allen why the symbol on the clothing that the bodies had been wrapped in was so familiar. The stitching had been a crude representation of the official logo of the Manuxet River Nuclear Complex—a red, oblong circle with a trident dividing it, except the apparel was missing another part of the image: an otherworldly galactic vortex with a stylized human eye in the center suspended above the tines of the trident.

  The patrol car stopped, and Marc got out to open the gate. Once the car was past the boundary, Marc locked it behind them before leaning into the driver’s side window where the sheriff was seated. “Far as I go. You have a maximum of two hours before you need to return. I’ll be at this guard shack waiting on you. This is the only road in or out, so you won’t miss it. Remember, cell phones might be dodgy in the Zone due to radioactive interference. Know what you’re looking for?” The wind was kicking up. The nor’easter was due to strike near midnight, right during the highpoint of the Festival in Marsh-by-the-Sea.