Waiting

by Stephen Jones

  And finally, one day, when the bruises have faded from Howard’s shoulder, the tiny cut on his throat has healed, on that day Whipple Van Buren Phillips appears at the door of the boy’s room and announces, “Now, m’boy, it’s time to begin your true education.”

  And Howard Phillips Lovecraft picks up his pen and begins to write . . .

  ONE

  Shadows Over Innsmouth

  IT WAS A CHUMP’S assignment from the start, the sort of goose-chase the Bureau might send an agent on to keep him earning his kale before they showed him the exit.

  Dobbs understood that. He’d grasped it the moment the special agent in charge of the Boston field office laid it out for them. Hewlitt, now, he didn’t get it. He didn’t yet know how these things worked. Hadn’t learned enough about the shifting politics of the situation to recognize the warning signs. Ridley Hewlitt was a bright fella, quick on the uptake, but he was green. He hadn’t been privy to the bloodbaths of the past three years, since J. Edgar Hoover took over as director of the Bureau of Investigation. The agents who’d been fired, maybe they hadn’t been the best, but jumping Jesus, they’d been axed with all the care a sawbones might show a gangrenous limb.

  Dobbs could only imagine the discussion in Washington, the chain of decisions to even take this report seriously and how to scratch it off somebody’s checklist.

  We need somebody from the Boston office to go up to Danvers and interview a patient who’s been in the asylum therefor the past six years. See what he has to say, if there’s anything sensible to come out of him. And if there is, if any of it squares up with the report from this Robert Olmstead. He’s the one who went sightseeing to a town in the northeast corner of Massachusetts and came out telling the wildest tales you’ve ever listened to. A place called Innsmouth.

  Innsmouth? Never heard of it.

  No reason you should have. Hardly anybody has. It’s this wormy little run-down seaport that fell on hard times before the Civil War, and times there have only gotten harder since. It’s hanging on up there like a barnacle.

  What’s our interest? Isn’t this something a state agency should look into?

  You know the director. He just wants to be thorough. Doesn’t want anything slipping past him while his eye’s on Capone. It’s probably nothing. But, say somebody in that town thinks they have a good reason to put on crazy masks and run off outsiders. Better we know about it than we don’t, right? But, ifyou ask me, it’s a bunch of bushwa from a couple of hop-heads.

  In that case, send Agent Dobbs, why don’t you? Archie Dobbs. It’ll keep him out of trouble before the hammer comes down.

  It must have gone about that way, more or less. Dobbs was as glum about the prospect of the day as Hewlitt was sunny, the kid seeing this as a chance to get paid for spending a couple hours enjoying the scenery between Boston and Danvers. Trees were fiery with October glory, and after a miserable summer the air was nippy enough outside the Studebaker to make a fella glad to be alive, if he was lucky enough to have gotten out of bed that morning without worries.

  But good luck trying to hang onto that in Danvers.

  The state asylum loomed over everything, an architectural monstrosity on a hilltop. Its central building alone looked grim enough to throw a bruise-black cloud over anyone’s day, a gentleman despot’s idea of a castle, the last façade a person might see before his life went down a hole . . . but the place just kept going. He’d never seen anything like it. On either side of the central building, a series of wings receded back, one after the other, set corner to corner.

  “They say, from the air, it looks like a bat,” Hewlitt told him.

  That figured. Even without knowing this, there was no missing that it looked like a place ready to suck the life out of anyone who got close. Had he ever seen anything as demoralizing? Not on these shores. Not in this decade. He’d have to go back ten years, to France, to the kind of ruins left after a day of artillery.

  This place was intact, but it oozed the same hopelessness. As if your world were ending, and tomorrow was already gone, and your head was up too high while you listened for the whistle of that one last shell coming down to finish the job.

  The loony’s name was Mayhew. One of the doctors ushered them down a series of hallways to go meet him, and Dobbs spent every step tuning out the moaning and the babble. For as enormous as the place looked from outside, it felt too close within. He had the kind of hulking frame that filled doorways, shoulder to shoulder, and often had to duck through even when he wasn’t wearing a hat.

  Lionel Mayhew didn’t like to leave his room any more than he liked to go five minutes without a ciggy. His fingertips were yellow with them, and his teeth brown. He had a smile fit to frighten the Devil himself, as if he’d forgotten what a smile was and when it was appropriate, so the best he could manage was a random, jerky skinning of his lips back from his teeth like his next trick would be to bite the head off a lizard.

  They’d driven all morning for this.

  Mayhew had been a life insurance man for Metropolitan. Before he ended up locked away, he’d been under the pressure of a company-wide squeeze to bring in new policies, fresh premiums. MetLife had taken it in the balls at the close of the last decade, paying out over $8 million in claims from the Great War, and nearly $28 million more in the wake of the Spanish Flu.

  Which was how Mayhew had found himself in Innsmouth. Nobody for miles around had anything good to say about the place, but folks there should need life insurance the same as anywhere, right?

  “No!” he said, a fierce rebuttal to his own question.

  All of this was verified, and so far Mayhew seemed lucid enough, if twitchy, in recounting it.

  “No, they do not need life insurance there. They do not need my services at all. What they need, what they demand, is everything else, my life my soul my skin my bones my organs my seed. The greediest ones are the greenest ones, the ones with the widest mouths and the sharpest choppers. That’s how you know. As if the look of any one of them isn’t enough to tell you you’re in the wrong place when you stick your pushy little foot in the wrong door.”

  He flashed his ghastly brown smile, his teeth a row of slimy brown Chiclets.

  “They’re the ones who hop. Are you following me? A pair of fine fit specimens such as yourselves should have no trouble getting approved for a double indemnity clause. So you should be able to run faster than they can hop. And you’d have to. Life soul skin bones organs seed—you have them too.”

  Mayhew fumed like a smokehouse chimney and grew agitated as he spoke. And he paced. At some point during his years here, he’d used some tool to score a ragged line in the floor tiles, wall to wall, six feet from the barred windows. He seemed careful to not cross it.

  “I was a godly man, sir,” he said. “Me and mine in the fucking pews every Sunday, sir. Do you know how to tell us Christers from the rest?”

  Dobbs wagged his head as though maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. “I’d like to know how you do it, Lionel.”

  Mayhew appeared gratified to share his expertise. “We’re the ones with the broken knees from all the groveling. That’s our reward. A lifetime of broken knees. And cricks in our necks from looking up up up.” He spat toward the window. “Wrong direction. In Innsmouth, their roots are the same as their gods. They run deep there. Deeeeep.”

  Mayhew found this privately amusing. As readily as he snickered, he scowled.

  “How could he let it happen there? Anywhere?” Mayhew whispered now, the hushed disbelief of a man still trying to work through the worst betrayal of his life. “In this world he told us he made. How could he let things like this take root and grow?”

  Mayhew flashed his pearly browns.

  “Do you know how much of the world is water and how much is land? Neither do I, exactly, but there’s far more room for them than there is for us. And every Sunday I took us to the pews and fell to my poor sore knees and I thanked that wretched God of mine for making it that way. Because I use
d to love a good swim! What do you think of that? What do you think cows and pigs would say about God if somebody told them he’d made them for our teeth?”

  He skinned back his lips again, this time to grind his teeth back and forth, and side to side. They made a most unnerving click.

  “Show me the face of my old God, is all I ask. Half a chance, that’s all I want. Let me see him, and I’ll chew the nose from his face and spit it into the abyss.”

  The best they could tell, separating the fragments of his recounting from his interjections, and piecing them together on the fly, Mayhew had spent a long, fruitless day in Innsmouth with nothing but red knuckles to show for it. He’d knocked on a lot of doors. Most remained shut, even when he could hear the bumps of something shifting on the other side. A few places opened up, usually just wide enough for a face to fill the gap, but there was more disappointment waiting when they did.

  The residents, more often than not, looked peculiar and smelled worse, like fishermen who’d given up on washing when they came in from their boats. To a man, they were as churlish as convicts, even the women, deadeyed and unfriendly, plagued with baldness and rashes on their wattled necks, and skin so sallow they seemed to have spent their entire lives under a scum of clouds.

  Mayhew had expected a seaside town full of rubes, and rubes they were, but his advantage ended there. A man who knew how to close a sale could handle rubes, as long as he could talk long enough, but in Inns-mouth he never got going with them. Not a one. They couldn’t even be bothered to speak properly. They slurred and grunted and gurgled like they’d been blotto from bathtub hootch for so long they were no longer capable of holding a respectable conversation.

  The normals weren’t much better, urging him to go peddle his papers elsewhere.

  After a thankless day of this, Mayhew confessed that he’d been ready to indulge in a little rudeness himself. If these clods were going to give him the bum’s rush out of town, then he might as well earn it. He always wore the shoes for it, fit to wedge open a door until he’d had his say, given his spiel.

  Mayhew ground out another shit-colored smile.

  “I only wanted to see how they lived. On the inside. So I could inform my idiot sales manager why I’d wasted an entire day. That was when I saw the ones they must have been trying to hide. And there’s so many more of them than the ones they let outside.”

  He jutted his lower jaw into a grotesque underbite and chomped at the air.

  “They came for me then. A flood of them spilling out of one house, then another, and another. I’d had my fill of them and they’d had their fill of me. Or would have, if they’d gotten their scaly paws on me. Their webbed fingers. Tongues the size of shoe soles, some of them. Life soul skin bones organs seed . . . they would’ve had them all from me if I’d been any slower.”

  According to Mayhew, he stood rooted in shock from the spectacle, and they were almost upon him when he bashed one across the skull with his briefcase and ran. He feared there was no time to start his Model T, from ’18, the year before the change to electric starters. These monstrous townsfolk would catch up to him as he labored over the engine crank.

  So he left everything behind—briefcase, flivver, and all. Career, too, and at some point, everyone agreed, his mind. He abandoned everything and ran. For miles. He found the road he’d taken into town and followed it back up to Newburyport.

  Next day, an Essex County sheriff’s deputy had taken a run up, to check things out. There had been no sign of his car, no one to admit they’d seen him, no evidence he’d been there at all.

  “To you, they look like something you’d drag up from the bottom of a pond and throw back. Only bigger. That’s enough fishing for today,” Mayhew said. “But at you . . . they look at you with the arrogance of men. You wouldn’t know it from their eyes. But they’re haughty, and how. Royalty, is what they think they are. They rise up before you like they’re kings of the world, because the world is wet. I read people, is what I do. There’s triumphant men and there’s beaten men, and I know the difference in the way they stand. Two of them, I saw, they were even wearing shiny goldlike crowns on what passes for their heads. That’s how I know. They’ve already crowned themselves the new kings of this world.”

  Look for details that square up—that was the assignment, and here was one of them. Queer headgear. Robert Olmstead, the latest fella to come raving out of the place, said the same. This wasn’t some random fluff anyone might pick out of the air. It was specific. With Olmstead, there was even a trail he’d picked up on, just such a piece kept on display at the Newburyport Historical Society. It had been around long enough to be regarded as an odd bit of jewelry whose origins were unlikely to ever be known. Some mysteries didn’t want to be solved.

  “Let’s hear about these shiny gold crowns, Lionel,” Dobbs said.

  Mayhew glanced about as if he’d never broken himself of the habit of looking for something to write on, draw with. He settled for his tobacco-tat-tooed hands. Pressing the tips of his thumbs and pinkies together, he made a circle—squashed a little, but rounder than not—then mimed setting it atop his own noggin, the rest of his fingers splayed up and out like rays.

  “There. That’s a proper crown, see. Any king would be proud to wear it and the fit would be perfect.”

  He lowered his hands again and studiously adjusted the shape. The distance between his thumbs and his pinkies lengthened; his palms pulled closer; the circle became a narrow oval. His other fingers bunched at the tips to suggest a rising peak or overarching loop. Mayhew shuddered with disgust, then made a show of how ill suited it was to fit his head.

  “It’s not for a human skull anymore. They have heads made like lima beans.”

  He dropped his hands as if he couldn’t bear to hold them this way anymore and gave his fingers a fierce shaking out.

  Mayhew wasn’t good for much else, and it wasn’t clear how much he’d been good for in the first place. What he’d done, though, was tell a remarkably similar story to that of Robert Olmstead, whose trip to Inns-mouth had ended the same way: chased out of town by bogeymen, and desperate to convince anyone who would listen that something rotten was lurking beneath the surface of a busted-up, broken-down seaport that nobody had much reason to visit anymore.

  After an hour with Lionel Mayhew, it was easy to see why people had written him off. If he hadn’t gone to Innsmouth broken, he’d left that way. He wouldn’t have been the first salesman to crack under the pressure of quotas he couldn’t fill. He was fit for cutting out paper dolls with dull scissors, and that was about it. A man like that might beat his gums with all kinds of silly stories not worth the time spent listening to them. He was easy to ignore.

  Olmstead, on the other hand, must have come across as clearheaded enough to impress someone to take him seriously.

  Forget the bogeymen for a minute. Those crowns . . . diadems . . . tiaras . . . that was a singularly consistent detail. Whatever they were, they had to fit something, right?

  Back down at the Studebaker, Dobbs spread his road map over the hood. Hewlitt watched him trace his finger from Boston to Danvers to Innsmouth itself.

  “We’re almost halfway there already,” Dobbs said. “We’ll have to give it a look-see sooner or later. Do you really want to turn around and have to come back this way all over again tomorrow?”

  The farther northeast from Danvers they got, the worse the roads became. It had been a long time since they’d seen fresh gravel and tar. Eventually they dwindled to hard-packed dirt. Farms and pastures sat back from them, winding down for the season, a time for mending fences and culling the herds and turning over the fields one last time before the earth froze. It took a lot of cursing to keep the Studebaker on the move, as its tires caught the ruts and put up a constant fight through the steering wheel.

  By their watches it wasn’t much past midday, but the closer they got to the coast, the more like evening it seemed. The sky grew dark with an unbroken ceiling of clouds, thick and low
and turbulent with snatches of rain that spattered the windshield then let up as if to tease them onward with a promise of something clearer just ahead.

  Finally, Hewlitt uncorked what he’d appeared on the verge of bringing up half a dozen times already.

  “What’s eating you, pal?” he said. “You’ve been a sad sack all day, even before we got anywhere near the bughouse.”

  Dobbs worked his tongue in his cheek and scowled at the day outside awhile. “You’ve never asked for any, but if you want some advice, here it is for free, just the same.”

  Dobbs looked him over, his partner a regular Joe Brooks in that spiffy tailored suit, that herringbone Chesterfield overcoat, the fedora that probably had never once blown off his pretty head. He came from money and looked it, six years out of Yale Law and destined for great things. He hadn’t spoken much about his college years, just enough to give the impression that he’d excelled at every sport he tried out for and studying came just as easy. He couldn’t hide all that, although it was obvious he’d been making an effort to leave behind the fraternity boy inside him. It was easy to imagine Hewlitt and his buddies going ape on weekends, sneaking off to the best juice joints they could get a line on and making time with all the vamps and flappers they could slip their arms around. A regular Rumbleseat Ronnie.

  “If you want to keep this job, do yourself a favor,” Dobbs told him. “Look sharp. Always look sharp. You’ve got the kind of look Hoover likes. Hang onto that as long as you can. Shave twice a day if you have to, and say no to second helpings at the supper table. The last thing you want is to let yourself get to looking anything like me.”