Innsmouth Nightmares

  Something in the other woman’s voice stopped the questions Ruth might have asked. She got dressed quickly while the other waited with her arms crossed, tapping her toe on the floor. They hurried downstairs and out the front door.

  “Will you tell me what’s going on?”

  “Some of the patients got out. We need to round them up and bring them back.”

  “Got out? Isn’t the outer door locked at night? How could they get out?”

  “Some of them are brighter than they look,” Eunice said grimly.

  “Does this happen often?”

  The big woman grabbed her arm and stopped her on the gravel path they were following through the trees.

  “Listen. Do you hear that?”

  Ruth listened. The rhythmic sound of waves breaking on the sands of a beach reached her ears. Mingled with it was the murmur of many voices.

  “If the wind is just right, it carries the sound of the waves into the Facility at night, when it’s dead quiet. The patients hear them.”

  “Hear what? You mean the waves?”

  “The waves draw them outside and down to the beach. That’s where they’ll be. Don’t worry, the rest of us know what to do. This happens three or four times a year.”

  The nearly full moon made walking easy as they descended the winding path. The beach lay outside the claustrophobic bounds of Innsmouth Harbor. Waves ran in freely from the open ocean, turning to white foam as they tumbled across the broad crescent of sand.

  Ruth paused at the top of the sand dune in horror. The scene was like something out of Dante. Dozens of patients who possessed the power of locomotion stood or knelt or rolled in the waves as they curled across the sand. The patients were all naked. Their hospital gowns and Johnny shirts lay scattered around them or floated in the sea foam. The patients danced or flopped up and down, some standing as deep as their chests, and chanted in a rhythmic but inarticulate way, as though calling out to the waves that rolled to greet them.

  Several of the staff were already on the beach, trying to get the more severely disabled out of the water, but the patients resisted their efforts with aggressive determination. They grunted like animals and struck out with their fists, or bit the hands that touched them.

  “Someone’s going to drown if we don’t get them out,” Ruth said.

  She and Eunice hurried down the sloping sand as more staff arrived.

  They managed to drag the less violent out of the water a few at a time and led them back to the Facility in relays. Then they concentrated on the more difficult patients one by one, pulling them from the clinging waves as they fought and chanted their wordless chant. Some of the deformed men were enormously strong in the upper body. Ruth managed to avoid getting bitten, but a flailing fist caught her above the eye and made her see stars for a few moments.

  “Are you all right?” Eunice demanded.

  “It’s nothing,” Ruth said. “It’s not the first time.”

  Eunice laughed and nodded. Those who cared for the mentally disabled or demented became accustomed to watching out for stray fists, but it was impossible to avoid them all. It was a hazard that went with the job.

  “Be glad he missed your nose,” Eunice said, wrestling the grunting, gulping man down with her thick arm around his neck. A male nurse helped her drag him out of the water.

  When Ruth was helping another male nurse lift a patient from Ward Three into a wheel chair, she noticed a head with white hair bobbing in the waves some distance out from the beach, watching her. She called to Eunice.

  “That man is going to drown unless someone goes in and gets him.”

  Eunice looked, then smiled.

  “That’s Lucas Crowley. Don’t worry about him. He’s real good in the water.”

  The white-haired man turned lazily and swam further out with slow strokes of his arms. He swam as though he were swimming toward something, but there was nothing in front of him except waves. As Ruth watched in mounting alarm, unable to turn away, she saw a hand lift from one of those waves and beckon to the swimmer. Its unnaturally elongated fingers were webbed. She blinked and it was gone.

  “Did you see that?”

  “See what?” Eunice asked, turning from a woman she had just wrapped in a dry towel.

  “There was something in the water. It looked like a hand.”

  The big nurse squinted and shook her head.

  “I don’t see anything but Lucas.”

  The white head began to bob up and down, then disappeared beneath the waves.

  “He went under,” Ruth said frantically. She could not swim, but even so she had to resist the insane urge to run into the water. “Someone, please, get him out.”

  The rest of the staff glanced at her but made no move to enter the sea. They seemed amused by her concern.

  “Lucas will come out when he’s good and ready. He’s done this before,” Eunice told her. “You just see that the others get dried off and back to their beds.”

  Ruth could not turn away. She stood staring out to sea, waiting for the swimmer’s head to come up, but it never did.

  “I’ll pray for your soul, Lucas,” she murmured. It was all she could do for him.

  5.

  The next morning when she came down to work, she was assigned to Ward Three for the first time. As she entered the ward, she saw Lucas Crowley sitting on one of the beds. He wore a kind of tent-like garment of white cotton that looked handmade. No store-bought article of clothing would have fitted over his squat, broad body. His shoulders were massive, but his legs were so short, they disappeared under his prominent belly. She recognized him by the shock of snow-white hair that covered his misshapen skull, which was elongated and flattened. His eyes projected from his head like ping-pong balls, but his nose was so flat it was almost absent, and the broad slash of his mouth had no lips.

  He felt her gaze upon him and turned to look at her with a vacant expression. The flaps of skin on either side of his neck moved up and down.

  “I thought you were drowned for sure, Lucas,” she said to him.

  He tilted back his grotesque head and made a gulping noise in his throat. After a while she realized it was a kind of laughter. He was laughing at her.

  “I’m your new nurse,” she said, controlling her annoyance. “My name’s Ruth Bowers. I’ll be taking care of you.”

  He raised his hand and flicked his long fingers in a dismissive gesture of contempt. There was a web of skin between them.

  “Can you speak? Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

  He began to grunt and bob his head at her, glaring at her with his strange eyes, until at last she moved away from him to the next bed. Almost at once he went back to staring at the blank wall in front of him, like some monstrous caricature of the Buddha.

  Ward Three was a difficult ward. All of the patients were severely deformed, and most of them were retarded as well. They couldn’t use the toilet on their own, or wash themselves, or even feed themselves. A few, like Lucas, could move around on their deformed limbs. He could not walk, but he could hop. Fortunately for the nurses, he seldom left his bed.

  As she bathed him and fed him day after day, she began to feel an irrational aversion. Her skin crawled when she was forced to roll him over to apply the ointment that prevented bed sores. Handling his bed pans was particularly disgusting.

  She knew she should not feel this way, that it was both unprofessional and un-Christian of her, and she tried to be pleasant toward him when she attended to his needs, but the trollish creature seemed to sense how she really felt and showed his dislike for her in subtle ways. He would mock her with his gulping laugh and stare at her with an almost palpable malice in his froglike eyes.

  At night, Ruth knelt at the side of her bed and prayed for guidance.

  “What am I to do to help Lucas Crowley, O Lord?” she asked.

  For several weeks, God did not answer her. Then one night he laid his hand on her head, and she knew his will. It was to be the same
blessing she had administered at Arkham Hospital. Lucas Crowley was to be the first who received it at the Marsh Care Facility. Her heart filled with pure joy.

  “Yes, Lord, I understand. Thy will be done.”

  She kissed the cross around her neck and went to bed content that once again she was to become God’s instrument.

  Because of his broadness, Lucas could not fit into a conventional shower stall. It was necessary to lower him into a special stainless steel bathtub to bathe him, which was much wider and deeper than an ordinary tub. He seemed to enjoy the water, to judge by the mewling sounds he made in his throat. Ruth hated washing him. It forced her to put both her arms deep into the tub, which brought her face down until it almost touched his.

  The day after her revelation in prayer, when she was lowering Lucas into the tub using the special electric hoist with its lifting harness, she deliberately tipped the machine into the tub. Lucas went under the water with the full weight of the heavy machine pressing down on him, and the harness around his body prevented him from working himself loose. To be certain, Ruth leaned her full weight on the tipped machine. This brought her over the tub, where she was able to watch Lucas drown. She remained on top of the lifting hoist for a full ten minutes. At the end of this period, she studied the grotesque face under the water.

  His eyes were still open, which was to be expected. They seemed to stare at her with hatred, but she knew this was only an illusion. He did not move. He was dead, and she had fulfilled the will of God to release his tortured soul from its prison of deformed flesh. Now he could know peace. She unbuckled the lifting harness from around his body and replaced the hoist in its usual upright position, then left the tub room with a happy heart. Someone else would find him in the tub and assume his death to be an accident.

  She was always very clever when she liberated the souls of those who suffered. She made certain there were no witnesses, and no evidence that could be turned against her. Any accusations were circumstantial and easy to deny. Too many of them had accumulated at Arkham Hospital, forcing her to resign her job, but before she left she had managed to help dozens of suffering souls find peace. With the divine grace of Jesus resting on her head, she knew she would have equal success at Innsmouth. So many of these poor tormented monsters needed her blessing.

  It was almost lunch time when she left the tub room. She took her lunch break with a happy heart. When she returned to Ward Three with the insulin injections needed by two of the patients, the first thing she saw was Lucas Crowley, sitting on his bed in his white tent of a gown, staring at the blank wall. The shock was so great, she dropped the plastic tray with the empty syringes.

  “Clean up your mess, Nurse Bowers,” Head Nurse Sarah Cork said tartly from behind her.

  Ruth felt the blood leave her face. She turned and nodded, avoiding eye contact with the other woman. Several of the patients laughed mindlessly at her mishap, but Lucas did not even turn his head.

  6.

  Ruth’s failed attempt to give Lucas Crowley peace with the Lord took place on a Friday. After her shift, she went to her little apartment and settled down for a quiet night of Scripture study and prayer. Just after nine o’clock, a rap sounded on her door.

  “The Director wants to see you downstairs,” Sarah Cork said to her when she opened the door.

  “The Director?”

  “The Director of the Facility. He wants to see you in Conference Room B.”

  Ruth stared at the head nurse with surprise. This was the first time the Director had ever been mentioned.

  “You said we were never to go downstairs on visiting night.”

  “The Director wants to see you now. Immediately.” Her voice held the snap of authority.

  Ruth left her apartment and shut the door behind her.

  “What do you suppose he wants?” she asked in a nervous voice.

  The shorter woman stared up at her with bright eyes.

  “I’m sure he’ll tell you himself, when you talk to him.”

  “Are you coming with me?”

  “I haven’t been summoned.”

  “I hope no one’s filed a complaint against me?”

  Sarah stopped beside the open door to the nurse’s lounge.

  “Do you remember what I told you when I gave you this job?”

  “What?”

  “You don’t get a second chance.”

  With this cryptic remark, she left Ruth in the hall and went into the lounge, from which emanated the laugh track of some television sitcom.

  The conference rooms were at the end of the hall. She was able to reach them from the stairwell without passing the three wards. This was a relief. She had no wish to confront any members of the visiting families. She felt an instinctive aversion to them that was almost a phobia. Her palms began to sweat when she imagined meeting them.

  She hesitated outside the conference room door, wiped her palms on the sides of her dress, and went in. The overhead spot lights were turned low on the dimmer and shed a reddish glow over the long conference table. All the chairs along both sides of the table were occupied. As they turned their faces to look at her, she gasped with surprise. All of them had the Innsmouth Look in its most advanced stages. The women wore broad hats with black lace veils that partially obscured their features, but the faces of the men were plainly visible. They stared at her with their protruding eyes. They were dressed in suits of an archaic cut that must have been tailor-fitted to their squat, broad bodies. The sides of their thick necks rippled.

  The man at the head of the table stood on his short legs, leaning forward so that the weight of his massive torso was supported on his powerful arms. His hands were enormous, their long fingers webbed. He had no neck, and his elongated skull was hairless. His mouth was grotesquely broad, like the mouth of a frog. He wore a three-piece suit, with a gold watch chain across his striped vest.

  “Come in, Nurse Bowers. Take a seat,” he said in a voice both deep and wet.

  She advanced timidly and sat on the edge of the chair at the foot of the table. There was a strange smell in the air, a kind of fishy odor. She resisted the impulse to wrinkle her nose in disgust.

  “The town council has just been discussing your case.”

  Ruth realized these antique horrors must be the leaders of Innsmouth.

  “Are you the Director?”

  “Forgive me for not introducing myself. I am Jonah Pyke, the Director of the Marsh Care Facility.”

  “Why have you called me here?”

  “Isn’t that self-evident? You tried to murder one of our patients today.”

  “Nonsense. I did no such thing,” she replied tartly.

  He turned his head and said something in a gulping language she did not understand. A door opened behind him, and an orderly who also had the Innsmouth Look, though not to any advanced degree, wheeled in a metal table on which sat Lucas Crowley. The Director made gulping noises at him, and Lucas responded with similar wet sounds in his throat.

  “My nephew tells me that you held his head under the water of the bath tub for ten minutes in an effort to drown him.”

  The men and women seated at the table laughed, as though Pyke had made some extremely funny joke.

  “Lucas can’t talk,” Ruth said.

  “There you are wrong, Nurse Bowers,” Pyke told her. “He cannot form the words of English because his vocal apparatus has evolved beyond it, but he can speak very well in the language of the Deep Ones.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she sniffed. “This is a trick. You’re trying to make me betray myself.”

  Lucas stared at her with his bulbous eyes, and she felt his mockery.

  “It doesn’t matter what you believe, Nurse Bowers. My nephew never lies. He may be handicapped, but he is perfectly capable of describing what you did to him.”

  “If I had held him under the water for ten minutes, he would be dead.”

  Again those seated at the table laughed, and Lucas joined in with his gulping.


  “You can’t drown a man with gills, Nurse Bowers,” Pyke said.

  Lucas leaned forward and caused the flaps of skin at the sides of his neck to expand and collapse rhythmically.

  “You’re all insane. I don’t have to listen to any more of this.”

  She felt strong hands on her shoulders, forcing her back down into her chair. A male attendant had crept up behind her unseen.

  “We’ve already come to our decision,” Pyke said. “We can’t allow you to continue to work here. Nor can we release you, now that you know so much about our town. You will have to remain as a ward of the Facility.”

  She stared at him, unable to believe that she had heard him correctly.

  “You want to keep me here as a patient?”

  “To make you more accepting of your new circumstances, a small operation will be performed on the frontal lobe of your brain. Don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe.”

  “A lobotomy,” she said in a weak voice. “You’re talking about a lobotomy.”

  “That’s correct. I’m told that after you’ve had the operation you will be happy living at the Facility.”

  “You’re insane.” She looked around the table, and the room seemed to spin under her chair. “You’re all insane.”

  “Naturally we will have to modify your body so that you will blend in with the other patients,” Pyke told her.

  Ruth didn’t hear the rest of what he said. She was too busy screaming.

  7.

  She woke up lying in a bed in Ward Three, but it was some time before she realized where she was. A white gauze bandage wrapped around her head and over her face. Her face felt as though it were on fire. She lifted her arms to touch the bandages and saw that similar bandages covered the ends of her wrists, which terminated in stumps. She pressed the stump of her right arm to her cheek, and it left blood on the bandage. This caused her no great distress. It seemed unimportant.

  Across the ward, Lucas Crowley watched her from his Buddha posture. When he saw that she was awake, he squirmed off his bed and dropped to the floor on his long arms, then hopped across to the side of her bed.