The Innswich Horror

by Edward Lee

  “Gotta make it quick, son, like we’se always do,” came a roughened, accent-tinted adult voice. “Ya never know when one’a their sentinels is liable to be snoopin’ around.”

  “I know, dad,” replied the obvious voice of a young boy.

  “You cut out the biceps’n calves, like I taught ya, and I’ll hack out the ribs’n bellies. Let’s try’n get a whole lot in a little time, heh, son?”

  “Sure, dad.”

  The smoky light easily revealed these new interlopers: Onderdonk and his young son. They must have discovered a tunnel of their own that gained them access without being visible to the town proper, where they clearly were not welcome. With a considerable skill, the boy flopped several corpses off the pile and within seconds was deftly butchering the meat off their arms and legs. Meanwhile, the father, with cleavers in each hand, systematically hacked lengths of ribs off more corpses and neatly cleaved out the abdominal walls. After they’d each administered to half a dozen or so of the dead half-human, half-batrachian monstrosities, they switched. Minutes later, they’d loaded the butchered wares into burlaps sacks.

  “Good job, son,” Onderdonk praised the lad. “Bet we got here more’n a week’s worth’a meat for the smoker.”

  “I hope we make a lot of money, dad.”

  “That’s my boy,” the adult proudly smiled and patted his son’s head. “It’s God’s way’a lookin’ after God-fearin’ folk like us, seein’ to it that these half-blooders got the taste of fish’n good pork together. What choice we got seein’ how them devil-lovin’ Olmsteaders won’t let us fish proper in their waters?”

  “Yeah, dad. I’m glad God looks after us like this.”

  “We’se quite fortunate, son, and can’t never forget it. Times’re tougher for so many.”

  “But, dad?” The boy looked quizzical through a pause. “How come they don’t rot and get to stinkin’, you know, like in that other place?”

  “It’s ‘cos them bodies in that other place is all pure-blood humans like us, but these here?” Onderdonk patted the slick greenish belly of a dead female whose face and bosom looked more toadlike, complete with warts. “All’a these here are ‘least half-full’a the fish blood, like this splittail,” and he callously cradled a wart-sheened breast. “This ‘un here is likely fourth generation along with a whole lot of ‘em—the one’s ud already turned. But even first generation, boy, is enough to keep ‘em from rotting proper, and bugs’n varmints don’t go near ‘em. It’s their fish blood, see? That’s what makes ‘em never go to rot ‘cos they cain’t die, not unless they’se kilt deliberate or by accident.”

  “Oh,” the boy replied. “That’s kind’a… neat.”

  “Um-hmm. Now, help me fling these leavin’s back.”

  With a drooping spirit, I watched from my discreted location as the pair heaved the butchered remnants up and over the mainstay of the piles, evidently to prevent any “sentinels” from ascertaining what had been done here.

  “There,” Onderdonk’s whisper echoed. “Let’s skedaddle…”

  In the fluttering light, I watched them leave, sacks of pilfered meat flung over their shoulders.

  But the sickness in my gut had long-since seized me: the stealings from this preternatural corpse-vault were clearly what Onderdonk passed off to unsuspecting customers as “fish-fed pork,” a small portion of which now occupied my digestive tract. When safe to do so, I staggered away, all too aware that this was not the effect of hallucinotic gasses, and after retracing several yards back through the tunnel I’d entered in, I regurgitated the entire contents of my stomach.

  Back on the rocky crags where the tunnel emptied, I fell to my knees in the relief of the fresh air and the simple sight of the normal world: the moonlight, the harbor, the boat docks and waterfront buildings. The normal world, yes, I thanked God, for I knew now how thin the veil was between that normality and utter, unnameable malignity. Who knew what other aberrant atrociousness the world hid just below its surface? I sat against the rock, listening to the water lapping against pier posts and shore—part of me quite paralyzed by my witness, not just what I’d seen but what it all meant.

  I let the salt air flutter against my face and fill my lungs; I knew my body and my mind needed a few moments’ rest before I could calculate the entails of my next move. I stared dumbly out into the pier-ringed inlet, watching silent boats rock gently in their slips, when my eyes found the barely noticeable rise of the sand bar…

  Lovecraft’s Devil’s Reef, I mused. At least that had been pure invention. But who would believe the rest? And did I believe it?

  At first I thought it must be a fleck of something in my eye but the more I stared the more convinced I became of something minuscule disturbing the late-night harbor’s stillness.

  A boat, I thought.

  It was merely a small rowboat, and there appeared to be but one person aboard, oaring silently into the inlet. For several moments I profaned beneath my breath when some clouds of deeper depths roved across the moon to darken the cryptic scene. It was likely only a crabber, or someone checking buoys, but I couldn’t fight the temptation that it was more than that. When the clouds moved off, I saw that the meager skiff had been rowed deliberately aground on the longest finger of the sandbar, and its one-man crew had already debarked…

  He’s walking along the sandbar, I saw at once. And… what’s that he’s carrying?

  Indeed, the distant figure was belabored by what seemed to be a sack that he was dragging along behind him. At that point, the veils of clouds moved fully away from the moon’s radiant face, and suddenly the entirety of the harbor glowed in crisp, ghostly white light.

  Even this far off, I could now see enough. The trudging figure wore what I was very sure had to be a long, greasy black raincoat and hood…

  Zalen.

  His progress halted when he came to the bar’s point of greatest girth. Then he just stood there for many minutes, his head tilted down as if—

  As if he’s waiting for something, it morbidly occurred to me. Waiting for something in the water…

  And then, from that same water, something did indeed emerge.

  A figure, yes, but one unclothed and gleaming in a bump-ridden off-green hue. It stood lanky and lean, but long-limbed and with a head almost flattened and a face angled forward to a sharp point. Even from this distant vantage point I could fully detect the hugeness of its unblinking eyes; like crystalline globes, they were, aglitter from some stolid menace beneath. Eventually two more primeval faces rose slowly from the water, to reveal their full physiques to the moon, one decidedly female for it was well-breasted and much more widely hipped than the other two, whose maleness hung bumped and long at their groins. I was grateful that the distance did not afford me any further clarity of physical details.

  The first one reached forward and took the proffered sack from Zalen…

  I didn’t need to be properly informed of the sack’s contents for when the thing opened it up and looked in, the tiniest sounds eddied out, tiny, yes, but all-determinant.

  The anguished wails of newborn babes.

  More and more it was all coming true. How could I deny what my eyes were seeing? In all this ghastly insanity, what sane explanation could be winnowed out? On the sandbar the three monstrosities took their human booty and returned to the watery depths, while Zalen reboarded his small skiff and rowed away, and next—

  thump!

  I’m sure the sudden shock forced me to shout out. It was a spindly yet aggressive weight that landed on my person from above the outcropping where I sat: all blanched-white skin and a thin vicious face but strangely dead-eyed and veiled by an aura of long, dark, wispy hair. A thin hand snapped at once to my throat and began to squeeze with a strength greater than my own. It was the horror of the assault’s suddenness in flux with my previous revelations that diced my thoughts. Instinct more than decisive mental computation triggered my own defensive maneuvers, feeble as they may have been. Only the merest sliver o
f volition registered, but I was able to discern that my banshee-like attacker was neither one of things I’d seen soliciting Zalen on the moonlit bar nor a living example of any of the part-human, part-monster hybrids I’d found in the earthworks. This instead was a hostile and purely human woman tearing at my throat with one hand and gouging at my eyes with the other. White teeth snapped open and closed an inch before my appalled face, but when I took closer note of her face, I screamed again, all that much more loudly. Surely the scream had been heard by anyone in proximity to the waterfront; it echoed cannon-like across the dark water.

  The naked, feral thing clambering over me was Candace, the formerly pregnant prostitute who served as one of Zalen’s obscene photo models. Divorced now of the bloated belly, her milk-swollen breasts looked too large for so thin a woman. Her post-childbirth death had darkened streaks under her eyes like tar-smears, and left her distended nipples the color of bruises.

  “I saw you,” I choked, “in the ambulance! You’re dead!”

  “Am I?” came a dry and strangely hacking reply. No gust of breath vented from her mouth when she’d said this, but worse was her facsimile of a laugh when she squeezed my throat even harder and reached back with her other hand to molest my groin.

  “We-we could have a nice time together, sir…”

  Of all the abominable things: she gently caressed my crotch with the gentleness of a lover, while the fingers of the other hand dug so deeply into my throat, I feared at any moment she’d be unseating my trachea and fully yanking it, adam’s apple and all, out of my neck. It was obvious to me that death had enlisted her into the role of the aforementioned “sentinel.”

  If my screams had not alerted the whole of the waterfront’s population, the ensuant pistol-shot most certainly did. This rejuvenated cadaver that had not too long ago been a wayward young woman named Candace was fully thrashed aside against the rocks. It had been a death-impulse that had unconsciously supervened my terror and slipped my hand into my pocket to withdraw the small Colt .32 repeater. The blind shot had struck at the vicinity of her left ear and took out a fair section of the right side of her cranial vault. I gasped in lungfuls of air as I watched the nude corpse impact the wall of rocks to our side. The report left me spattered with cool hanks of her convoluted gray matter bathed in ill-smelling blood which appeared blackish, not red, but traced faintly with threads of some alien constituent that glowed in the faintest pale green. In all, it smelled like heavy motor oil and fish.

  The reckoning to make exit came immediately, for lights were snapping on along the waterfront edifices. Yet even having been divorced of a moderate portion of her brain, Candace falteringly rose and began to stumble after me but not before I’d gained enough ground to render her chase futile.

  I hastened along the rock line, hoping for camouflage amongst dingy boulders and irregular light. Eventually I crossed the service road, slipped between a pair of drab-brick fish processors, and escaped that eldritch waterfront into the woods.

  God, protect me, God, protect me, the vain prayer spun round my head. Only patches of moonlight managed to filter in to the fringe of woods; I daren’t slip in too deeply lest I be blind—I didn’t want to potentially reveal my position by having to rely on my flashlight, whose batteries were already growing dim. But as disoriented as my experiences had left me, I felt reasonably sure that my stilted progress was northerly—the direction necessary to lead me, first, to Mary’s, and then, ultimately, out of town. I knew it would be miles of desperate walking to get to the next, safer, town. If only I could find a telegraph office—some were known to be operational twenty-four hours—or a rare telephone. But as I wended between stout trees, sometimes only inching along for lack of light, I knew there was a place I must go before any of that…

  I should be getting close, it came to me after a half an hour’s progress, and when I squinted between a pair of shabby buildings, I think I spotted to the cobbled lane before the fire station. Yes! There it was with its opened bay yet, oddly enough, not a soul could be seen in proximity. Just another twenty yards, then, and I knew I was collimating the unlighted rear wall of the building which housed Cyrus Zalen and his penurious neighbors. In fact, I could even smell the despair-compressed apartment row from the woods.

  Dare I advance to the front door, or would it be better to tap on a rear window? Neither prospect enlightened me, but I knew that I had to confront this man. Zalen’s apartment occupied the age-stained building’s end; I crept ever-so-slowly around the side but then froze as if turned to a pillar of salt like Lot’s wife Edith…

  Behind several twisted, century-old trees out front, I could see the shadowed edges of men.

  My heart could’ve burst when, from behind, a hand rough as sandpaper clamped over my mouth and I was yanked back into the woods as if jerked by a tether. One of their “sentinels,” no doubt, had espied my encroachment. Smothering, I wrestled in vain against a wiry yet ferociously strong shadow. All my breath jettisoned from my chest when I was slammed to the ground.

  “Don’t make a sound, you fool!” shot a sharp, desperate whisper. I managed to extract my pistol, pointing it upward, but then the faceless shadow continued, “You pull that trigger, we’re both dead.”

  I knew at once, from the voice, it was Zalen.

  “Shhh!”

  The shabbily-raincoated form didn’t fear my weapon at all; instead, he left me where I lay, to peek stealthily past the tree we were both, in essence, hiding behind. When he returned, his whisper seemed calmed.

  “You’re lucky they didn’t see you. Shit, we both are.”

  “What are you—”

  Quiet anger. “They’re staking out my room, man! They’re waiting for me, and they’re after you too, you idiot. You almost gave us away, and by now I probably don’t have to tell you what they’d do to us. You wouldn’t be hiding in the woods yourself if you didn’t know.”

  The frantic slugging of my heart began to abate. “Sentinels. That’s what Onderdonk called them.”

  “Anyone part of the town collective is in on it,” Zalen whispered. “They serve them.”

  “I saw you!” I whispered back as fiercely. “You’re telling me that Lovecraft’s story is all true! What’s more—now—is I believe that!”

  “How could you not?” Did the slinky figure chuckle? “You must be coming from the waterfront, where I told you not to go after dark. Between your snooping around and my big mouth…”

  “Now I know why so many women here are pregnant—I saw what they’re doing on the second floor of the Hilman!” I grated. “They’re crippling men and using them to—”

  “Sure, think about it. Anstruther’s one of the bigwheels. He cuts off their legs so they can’t run away, cuts off their arms so they can’t fight, and pulls their teeth so they can’t bite the girls. The initiative is to keep every woman in the collective perpetually pregnant. Whenever some guy’s passing through, if he’s young, from a good bloodline, yeah. That’s what they use ‘em for. That’s what the things want—newborn babies…”

  “For sacrifice! It’s abominable!”

  Zalen rolled his eyes in the moonlight. “Oh, man, you’re really dense. This isn’t some occult witchcraft thing. It’s science. That’s all Lovecraft wrote about when you read between the lines. The more newborns the town can give them, the happier they are. So they reward the collective.”

  “Reward?”

  “This is a fishing town, Morley. They reward us with an abundance of fish. Before the New Way, back in the old days, they’d also give us gold.”

  I stared. “Just like in the story.”

  “Just like the story, man, yeah. They don’t do the gold anymore because it got too conspicuous. The town doesn’t need it. All the gold did was make people lazy. Now it’s all the resource, fish. For the last ten years this little piss-ant fishing village has become the most profitable seafood port in the country. We give them what they want, they give us what we want: prosperity. And anytime out-of-town b
oats try to sneak in and throw nets or drop lines—” Zalen chuckled again. “The boats sink and the people on ‘em are never seen again. Hate to think what they do to the poor bastards…”

  The ramifications now were sinking into the very meat of my soul. “They,” I sputtered in disgust. “Lovecraft’s Deep Ones, the Dagonites.”

  “Naw, that’s just a bunch of names he made up, Morley. We don’t know what they’re called”—he shrugged—“so we just call them fullbloods, or the things. Lovecraft learned enough, though. He was first here in ‘21 but he didn’t find out anything, but in ‘27?” Zalen’s vagabond grin beamed in the dark. “You’re kind of like him, you know? He came here ‘cos he liked the sights, but then he started snooping. They let him leave because they didn’t really know who he was. But that goddamn story.” He sighed futilely. “They’ve been here ever since Obed Larsh brought some of the crossbreeds from the East Indies. And he summoned the fullbloods with some kind of beacon the islanders gave him before they all got wiped out.”

  Beads of cold sweat trickled down my face, like bugs crawling. I could only stare at the horrendous gravity of what he was saying, and what I had no choice but to believe. “In the story federal agents and naval vessels destroyed them, so why—”

  He cut me off with an offended smirk. “That’s about the only part he made up—drama, man. Yeah, I know, they torpedoed the reef but you already know there never was a reef. What Lovecraft got right—too right—was the history. It was a true-life tale of social decadence and moral collapse. They have their own power hierarchies just like us; our leaders change and so do theirs. For the longest time they encouraged crossbreeding between their species and humans, but it was all just for the sake of lust. A human with mixed blood would change over time—things in every cell in their bodies—and eventually they’d become so similar to the things that they wouldn’t die. They had all the poor saps in town believing that after they’d changed over completely, they’d go to the water and live in harmony with them forever, but all the things really did was use the crossbreeds for slavery. But even after they’d changed, they were still part human, and they’d bring their human flaws with them. Addiction, dishonesty, treachery. It got to the point where the part-human crossbreeds began to taint their society. So what did they do? Same thing we did after Herbert Hoover, same thing Russia did after the corrupt Czars. They changed their power hierarchy; they cleaned their own society up by getting rid of the corruptive element—human blood. There were no federal troops that ever came here to wipe out all the crossbreeds. The things did that themselves—it was a wholesale slaughter, about 1930, I guess. They came up out of the water one night and murdered every single person in town who had any of their blood in them.” Zalen paused on a reflection. “Lovecraft would’ve loved it. They were doing what he believed: wiping out the living products of sex between races—or in this case—between species.”