The Innswich Horror

by Edward Lee

  The suddenness—and unearthliness—of the man’s vociferous objection affected me almost physically, akin to a ball bat across the chest. I lurched backward, yet my eyes remained on that partial window-view and all I can say about what I think I saw is this:

  Something shot forward from the haggard mass of shadows that comprised this infirm man. What that something was I cannot accurately delimitate. It was either a length of rope, or a whip, flung forward with a clearly stated maliciousness toward the boy. That’s all I can say: it reminded me of a whip.

  This whip, then, snapped out with a moist but resolute crack! and seemed to take the ten-dollar bill from Walter’s hand, then draw it back to the afflicted oldster.

  An attendant gush of a mix of those dreadfully low suboctaves, and the squeal, and then that awful phlegmatic splatter followed this action, after which the boy, paling before my eyes, turned and dashed from the room.

  A tremendous malady, indeed, had accursed this poor elderly man, not just in body but also in mind.

  I could witness it no longer, and then I fled myself to the clearing behind the house, fairly bursting into sunlight and a flurry of butterflies, and ran outright until—half-crazed—I spotted the nature trail the boy had apprised me of.

  Of congenital defects and progressive disease mechanisms I knew precious little, and though my sense of pity and empathy was sound, I had to forcibly banish the image of this demented and inauspicious man from my mind…

  As I tramped down the lad’s path, I was scarcely aware of its features for several minutes. My heart seemed to hammer in the aftermath of my witness, and my breath grew short. Eventually I slowed to regain my senses, then stooped, hands on knees, to rest.

  The rapid exodus from the maledict house left me in a dirt-scratch of a trail lined by man-tall grasses. Insects chirruped and the sun blazed.

  It was the darkness of the huddled house, I thought, and the potency of suggestion that so grotesquely appended what I saw.

  Of all people, I thought again of Cyrus Zalen and his all-too-true implications regarding my status in life. A rich pud. My unearned station of privilege had shielded me from such tragic realities heaped upon the less fortunate, and this, simply, wasn’t right. I needed to know these direful realities—and their consequences—to be the better man that I’m sure God wanted me to be. My empathy must not be staged, nor my pity manufactured. I fancied myself a philanthropist—a willful contributor to those who had sorely less than me.

  I knew that I must contribute more, and more, too, than simply money.

  Soft voices severed my thoughts. When I turned my head, a great glimmer flashed in my eyes; through the tall grass, I saw a modest lake full of floating sunlight. But the voices…

  It was necessary to shield my eyes to annul the glare. There, sitting at a short pier’s end, were two women, one honey-blond and the other obsidian-haired. Both were naked, chatting animatedly as they rowed their feet in the water. I saw a small bottle serving as a buoy farther out in the lake.

  The girls’ bare white backs gleamed in the sun, but the tranquil scene did not parallel the apparent mood of the coal-haired one, who snapped, “I just hate it, Cassandra! It sickens me—their condition, I mean. And I have to go again tonight. Oh, God, I dread it so much.”

  “So you’re not in the way yet?” queried the other.

  “No, I don’t think so. They make me go—every night—until they’re sure.” The girl seemed to hack. “And I have to be with several of them! One’s not enough! It’s got to be at least two each night, and I heard they’ve gotten two more. What’s that now, seven all together?”

  “Six, I think. Remember, the one died, and that curly-haired man couldn’t… you know. You never know when one might not be any good all of a sudden. Sometimes they wind up like Paul.”

  Paul! the name immediately struck me. A common name, yes, but could they be referring to Mary’s invalid brother?

  “Well, shit!” exclaimed the black-haired waif with a surprising profanity. “One per night should be enough!”

  “It’s like the doctor said, Monica. The more you do it with, the better chance of success…”

  What on earth are they talking about? I wondered, puzzled. And… the doctor? Did they mean Dr. Anstruther?

  “That’s why he tests them every so often,” the honey-blonde continued. “To make sure they haven’t lost their… I forgot the word. Portense? Er—no, potency!”

  I stared at these strange words, my face lengthening.

  “But they’re just so ugly like that!” the dark-haired one, Monica, nearly squealed in objection. “It gives me nightmares.”

  The honey-blonde, Cassandra, took Monica’s hand to offer a consolation. “It’s like they say, you’ve got to get the right frame of mind. It’s not about pleasure, it’s about something much more important. To think like you’re thinking is to be selfish. And they have to be the way they are—for safety’s sake…”

  “Ugh! It’s just awful…”

  “You don’t have to tell me, Monica. I’ve had six babies so far. It’s just the way it is here. It’s better for the future.”

  “I don’t know how you could’ve done it six times!”

  Cassandra answered dreamily. “You just close your eyes and think nice things, Monica. You pretend you’re with someone else, someone handsome and strong and sweet and—”

  “Someone normal!” Monica upheld her complaints. “Not all girls do it their way.”

  “No, but their way keeps us in their favor, like the doctor says.”

  Monica seemed to be near tears. “God, why can’t I have a real man just once? Sometimes I’m tempted to leave.”

  “Shh! Don’t talk like that!” chided Cassandra. “We both know what happens to girls who try to leave…”

  I couldn’t have been more bewildered as I listened to the arcane discourse…

  “I better check the trap,” said Cassandra, and she hopped down into chest-deep water. She was wading out toward the makeshift buoy. Meanwhile, Monica stood up to stretch, hands behind her back. She did so turning, which afforded me a side-glance of her physique. She bore a stunning, willowy beauty in her youth, and couldn’t have been more than eighteen. Next she turned more, and was facing me as she continued to stretch. The shining black hair rose in a brief breeze off the water. She was an exotic sight, petite-breasted, long-legged, and flat-stomached. I meant to turn away, for my inadvertent glimpse of her seemed invasive, but then Cassandra returned. She climbed up the pier’s ladder to the deck, hoisting with her a small wire trap filled with crayfish. Unlike Monica, Cassandra was nine months pregnant if she was a day.

  “Look, it’s full!” she enthused over the trap full of skittering things.

  Monica came over. “Wow, that is a lot.” She tested the trap’s weight. “It must be ten pounds! We’ll have chowder for days!”

  As I listened further, my closer attentions lapsed… and my hand slipped. I dropped my briefcase…

  The sound was all too obvious; both girls snapped their inquisitive gazes in my direction. Could they see me? I didn’t move a muscle.

  “I think someone’s there,” Cassandra suspected, then she brought a fretful finger to her lips. “God, I hope it’s not them…”

  “Look! There!” Monica pointed directly at the stand of grass I hid behind.

  “Is it…”

  “No, it’s a man! A real man!” She strode naked off the pier. “Hey, wait! Come here!”

  I grabbed my case, and slipped out.

  “No!” wailed Monica. “Don’t go! Please! We can make you real happy! COME BACK!”

  I had no intention of complying. My feet took me swiftly down the close path, and I could only hope that neither girl had seen enough of my face to recognize it later. In the distance, I heard Monica’s final grievance. “Oh, SHIT! He ran away!”

  My pace did not abate until I was back at the Town Center and gratefully entering the Hilman House…

  Secure in my roo
m, I sat on the bed to regain my breath. I turned the RCA on, for music would remind me of normalcy, and I immediately relaxed to “Our Love,” by Tommy Dorsey. But this would be followed by the hourly news broadcast: a labor strike is ruled illegal by the Supreme Court, General Francisco Franco conquers Madrid with his fascist troops, a scientist named Fermi warns allied governments that a process now exists which can split atoms and thus harness a terrible destructive force. None of this news sounded hopeful; I switched it off.

  The distraction I hoped for was sabotaged. What exactly HAPPENED today? I queried myself in some disillusionment. I tried with diligence to find a common logic in what I’d seen and heard but in the end failed. I could make no sense of it, but I considered that in my current expended and excited state, it would do me good to calm down to resort my thoughts. The day’s heat as well as the mad sprint had left me grimy and saturated with perspiration, so I had a cool bath in the private tub. I tried to clear my thoughts…

  But a sudden fatigue left me drowsy even in the cool water. I drifted in and out of a half-sleep. Snippets of dreams harassed me: images of not only perplexity but also repugnance.

  The man in the squalid house, deformed by some catastrophic arthritic symptom, unleashing wet, gushing invectives in no way intelligible, and then lashing at young Walter with that whip, or whatever it might have been.

  And the two nude girls on the pier, one pregnant and then one evidently fearing pregnancy with an appalled resignation… Their cryptic words slipped in and out of my half-dreaming mind:

  —it sickens me—their condition, I mean—

  —so you’re not in the way yet?—

  —they make me go—every night—until they’re sure!—

  —sometimes they wind up like Paul… —

  The words blended, then, with a razor-crisp recollection of their physical bodies, their gleaming nude beauty, their shimmering white skin, and their private feminine features so forbidden—and so wrong for me to have willingly looked upon—yet so exotic…

  I may have slipped into a deep doze when these vivid images were singularly banished… by the image of Mary…

  First, the loveliness of her face and simple honest manner, and even some of her remarks:

  —a handsome, well-mannered gentleman like you? Never married?—

  And then a devilish meld: my first captivating image of her working at Baxter’s slowly contorting itself into the image on the nefarious and wholly exploitative photograph I’d bought from the despicable Cyrus Zalen: Mary, laid out bare and pregnant and thrust-bosomed as the visual photographic fodder of degenerates…

  The finality of that image shocked me from my doze, and I’m sure I audibly groaned. The sudden anxiety was one—I’m ashamed to say—of unquenched physical desire of the most sinful sort. It left me carnally evoked, and though in the past I’d always done better than a fair job of abstaining, the primal necessity, now, could not be extinguished. I need not go on in detail save to say that my frenzy forced me to do what solitary men are known to do in such moments of weakness, after which—steeped in shame—I prayed God’s forgiveness for this venal and most insolent offense to His grace…

  Embarrassed after the fact, I languished in the claw-footed tub, but then my eyes shot wide—

  I’d heard, with some distinction, a sudden and undeniable sound: the desperate hitching of a single breath into one’s chest. It was a lush, wanton sound, more than likely female.

  I stared at the opposing wall to at once be inundated by the notion that I was being observed remotely. But if so…

  From where exactly?

  I jumped from the bath, donned a robe, and, like a paranoiac, actually began to examine the opposing wall and the ceiling over the tub. But no “peepholes” were chanced upon; minutes later, I frowned at myself for the foolish overreaction. The sound I thought I’d heard was most certainly a remnant from the dream-fragments and a fatigued body and mind. For goodness sake! I mocked. Who would be spying on me, of all people?

  My new Pierce Chronograph wristwatch showed me my dinner appointment was fast approaching. I talced myself, brushed my teeth with a new product called Listerine Tooth-Cleaning Paste, then dressed in my evening suit. Though I was looking forward to dining with Mr. Garret, most of my thoughts focused on a different appointment: my luncheon date with Mary tomorrow. I oddly felt that I’d sullied her by my previous act of debasement and self-abusiveness, an absurd abstraction, but such was me. Nevertheless, I would not leave until I’d done one simple thing.

  I sat at the small writing table the room provided, and opened my briefcase. From it I withdrew the folder I’d purchased from Zalen, and from the bottom of the assortment of old photos within, I slipped out the shot of Mary. It was with a plummeting grimness that I allowed myself to look at it…

  The photo’s sharpness, contrast, and overall clarity seemed even more precise than before, and again I was stifled by the sense of fusion that joined Mary’s objective physical beauty with a revoltingly exploitative design: that graceful and exuberant pose, all for the visual consumption of unholy men given to perversity. Every element of the photograph seemed to beckon me to lust—Mary’s bottomless, sparkling eyes; her sighing smile; the high, dark-nippled breasts burgeoning with milk; the toned, shapely legs. I noticed now that every inch of her impeccable nudity either shined in profuse sweat or had been deliberately glazed by some kind of oil, the effect of which caused the entirety of her image to shimmer as if alive within the borders of the photographic paper. But I would not succumb to the lust that this image tried to seduce.

  Only love.

  A monstrous world, to allow this, I resolved. To enslave the poor and the desperate for the most jaded of intents. I took up a small pair of folding shears from my travel kit and began to shred the photo, from the borders in, until all that was left was the tiny square of Mary’s beauteous visage. The shreddings I discarded; the square, however, I hid in a pocket of my wallet.

  Down the stairwell, then, I went; as I neared the entry level, though, the door to the atrium opened before I could reach it, and suddenly I was faced by a slim, attractive young woman in a nice but simple frock gown that so many preferred in the warmer months; she was on her way up as I was on my way down. She lent me a meek smile, then nodded as we converged.

  “How do you do?”

  “Hello,” was all she said as if shy. When she passed me, I was stung by a tremulous shock; it had taken me this long for the girl’s willowy figure and obsidian-black hair to register.

  Monica, I felt sure. One of the pier girls…

  She’d obviously not recognized me as the interloper she’d been so ardently pleading with just a few hours ago.

  Certainly she’s not staying here… Perhaps she was employed here with the housekeeping service. But, really, why should I be concerned?

  I heard her quiet footfalls as she mounted the steps, then passed myself into the atrium, but as the door was closing behind me—and I’m not sure why I noticed this but—the aforesaid footfalls seemed to terminate very quickly. Nor was I sure what compelled me to my next gesture…

  I went back into the stairwell and looked upward.

  No evidence of Monica could be discerned, but then—

  click!

  The sound registered quickly enough to bid me to glance up at the door on the second-floor landing. It clicked shut before my eyes.

  The second floor, I thought. The LOCKED floor. Monica, for whatever reason, clearly had access to it.

  My frown returned me to the atrium. Why this addled me I couldn’t guess…

  The congenial bellhop and desk clerk greeted me as I passed. Of the clerk, I had to inquire: “If you don’t mind, sir, I’m curious as to the reason for the second floor being locked.”

  It may have been imaginativeness on my part, but his standard smile and good nature seemed to snap off for a moment. “But, you’re on the fourth floor, Mr. Morley. Why would you…”

  “Of course!” I tried t
o sound dismissive. “I should’ve preambled that I just now mistakenly took the second floor for the first.” I would not quite call this a lie but, say, a modest divergency from the truth.

  But the man’s good-natured expression had already restored itself. “Ah, well, the floor’s being kept locked for the time being. Renovations. The work shouldn’t take more than a month.”

  “I see. Well, thank you, good man, for satisfying my fairly useless curiosity. I should’ve guessed!” and then I bid him a good evening.

  Across the street, then, to Wraxall’s Eatery, where an appetizing aroma awaited. The establishment was spotless, and appointed with simple chairs and tables, plus a none-too-surprising nautical motif: photos of old, rain-slickered waterman proudly displaying sizable fishes, a ship’s wheel and a ship’s glass, fishing nets with floats adorning the corners. I supposed it possible that, before the government renewal, this very eatery may have been the dismal cafeteria in which Robert Olmstead begrudgingly dined as unwholesome loafers cast strange glances.

  Brass lanterns quaintly housing candles ornamented each wooden table. My eyes thinned, though, when I noticed that Mr. Garret was nowhere in sight. Only one table was occupied, by a soft-speaking couple.

  When the hostess turned, bearing a menu, she was struck speechless.

  I couldn’t have been more pleased! It was Mary…

  “Why, Mary, what a pleasant surprise,” I tried to contain my joy.

  “Foster!” She smiled and pressed a hand to my back to urge me to the corner. “Take the window booth. The view’s lovely as the sun sets. I’m so glad you could come.”

  “I had no idea you worked here as well.”

  “Oh, I just fill in sometimes. But the money’s not bad, now that our wonderful president has signed the Minimum Wage Act.”