Waiting

by Stephen Jones

  How far could he creep past the craters and shattered trees of the no-man’s-land between sides? How easily could he thwart the barbed wire fences? How deep into the German front line could he go? How quietly could he cut the throat of a drowsy sentry, then slip back unseen? Could he leave them gutted, strewn along the ground? Could he manage two? Three? Could he take souvenirs?

  He’d never known if the Hun had a name for him, this phantom butcher who for six weeks came in the night and opened them steaming in the cold autumn air, then returned to his own lines with blood on his face.

  Why in God’s name do you keep doing this? His buddies grew nearly as frightened of him as the Germans must’ve been.

  Can’t sleep. It was the best answer he had. Might as well keep busy.

  The scrape of his boots drowned out by the rain and the surf, Dobbs scrambled down a shallow embankment to the wharves and warehouses ringing the harbor. Stone quays and timber docks jutted into the water, the gunwales of a few moored boats thudding gently against them.

  He crept along the wharf, hugging walls when he could, advancing piling to piling when he couldn’t. Whenever he found a door, he eased it open and slipped inside—nobody kept anything locked here—then listened for movement. Once he was satisfied he was alone, he slipped his Nassau lighter from its oilskin pouch and used the flame to see what might’ve been stashed away.

  In hovel after hovel it was the same story: a lot of nothing, only accumulations of seafaring debris left by grandfathers who’d lived through more prosperous times. They didn’t even look disturbed, as if recent loads had been moved in and out. But there was a lot more to search, and the night would be long.

  Too long, maybe. However relentless the rain, it wasn’t enough to tamp down the pervasive smell of fish and worse. Innsmouth was saturated with it, stewed in it. Only stone seemed immune. Every wooden surface—railings and stairs, the planks of walls and walkways—felt slick to the point of loathsomeness, so spongy with the rain and sea that grinding a hand against it sloughed off a wad of soggy splinters.

  As Dobbs lingered in a shed’s doorway and rubbed warmth into his hands, he stared out across the harbor, past a row of empty pilings, and finally put a finger on one thing that had bothered him about the October afternoon they’d driven through. Birds should have been perched on places like those pilings. Birds should’ve lined the peaks of roofs. The lower sky should have wheeled with gulls and terns and shearwaters, yet he’d neither seen them nor heard their keening.

  What kind of a port was this when even seabirds shunned it?

  He worked his way around toward the town’s centerline, to a cluster of wormy storage buildings just north of the Manuxet. Visibility was better here, light filtering down from the last working gas lamps along Water Street.

  Here, for the first time, he picked up a sound he couldn’t dismiss as wind or rain or waves. A sharp sound of cracking—that he could hear it at all, so near to where the river’s mouth spilled into the sea, meant it was close, very close.

  Stepping lightly along the stones of the wharf, Dobbs followed the sound to its source. Somebody was out there, squatting on the soft wood of a dock, next to a piling that looked bristly—like others he’d passed, crusted to the top with barnacles. A man? Sure, why not. Women had better sense than to be out in weather like this.

  Seen from behind, the man was an indistinct shape, broad-backed and thick, hunkered down next to a bucket. Every so often he reached in to dredge something out and fumble it to his mouth. After a few crunches and a sound of guttural slurping, he’d sling something into the water, except for when his throw fell short and pieces clattered to the dock.

  Shell fragments and legs.

  This couldn’t be what it looked like. No. Dobbs didn’t care how dumb they grew them here in Innsmouth. A man couldn’t be out there eating raw crabs by cracking them open with his teeth.

  He heard a splash, then a series of wet grunts, and moments later another one heaved into view, up a ladder Dobbs hadn’t noticed next to the piling. A second man? Sure, why not. But a man misshapen, plopping onto the dock with a squelch and a splat, banging down a mesh-bottomed bucket that rattled and streamed water.

  The newcomer raised his slippery-looking head into the light, facing inland.

  How, Dobbs wanted to know. How did rain and dim light distort a face so badly it looked like that? Masks, he’d thought since Danvers. They wore masks here, to scare away unwelcome visitors. But under no circumstances could he imagine rumrunners so committed they would maintain the charade while diving for shellfish on a rainy night.

  That out there? He stood like a man . . . sort of . . . but wore no man’s face. Bug-eyed and bullet-headed, his big hands didn’t look right either, with sharp-tipped fingers and flanges at the wrist as if he wore blades.

  And he was looking right this way. Dobbs didn’t move, didn’t breathe, did all he could to knit himself into the shadows. But whoever, whatever, was out there, had eyes that seemed made for the murkiness of water and low light, and found him. He pointed and bellowed with an airy, hissing screech.

  The other, still hunkered next to his bucket, spun around to face inland, and this one looked even worse. His skull peaked with an absurdly narrow crown, then flared down and outward into a brutal, underslung jaw jutting with teeth like spikes. If he was ever a man at all, that part was all but gone. His face looked more like that of a wolf-eel than anything human. His eyes were as sharp as his companion’s, and his reactions frightfully quick. He seized his bucket by the handle and flung it through the rain.

  Before Dobbs could react, it crashed into his right shoulder and his arm went numb. When the bucket clattered to the dock, it scattered crabs that scuttled around him. Staggered already, he slipped on them in his retreat, trying to buy time to get some feeling back into his arm.

  They were after him in a heartbeat, moving as unlike men as they looked. One hopped like an enormous toad, the other waddled with great, strenuous strides—exactly as Mayhew and Olmstead had claimed about the people here. To his advantage, they seemed better suited for water than for land, but were relentless and croaked for help in their ghastly voices.

  Dobbs had always liked to believe he never ran from anyone or anything, but no more. Whenever he’d stood his ground before, he knew what he faced. There was no shame in running when you had no idea what to even call what was after you.

  He raced north up the wharves, careful to keep his footing on the rain-slick stones. From behind, and to his left, came the sound of doors opening, of others joining the chase, with ungainly bodies and huge slapping feet and a wet slopping mimicry of human voices. He drew the pigsticker knife with his left hand, and when one of them lurched from behind a shack to bar his way, he slashed the heavy blade across its throat before he even registered that his assailant’s neck rippled with what looked like the beginnings of gills.

  As he was reeling from that, another came at him before he could draw back the knife to slash again. This was the most like a man of the lot, but with a mouth so freakishly wide he could’ve worked a carnival circuit. Dobbs seized him by one arm and went with his momentum, spinning across the stones and flinging him off the wharf into the harbor.

  He got far enough north to lose himself in the deeper shadows, where maybe they could still see him and maybe they couldn’t. He was betting if he could reach the embankment where he’d come in, he could climb better, faster, than they could.

  Feeling was returning to his arm, and if it felt clumsy he could at least use it again. When another pair came at him, he swung his right as stiff as a tree limb, the meat of his fist bashing into the side of the nearest head. The impact was unexpectedly painful, the heel of his hand jabbed as if by the spines of a fish’s fin. It came away bleeding as he staggered into the second of the pair, and slammed the knife into its belly and yanked up toward its ribcage. He smelled its entrails and its burst of breath, an odor of fish and water, of seaweed and slimy mud.

  Bu
t by the time he reached the sheds along the harbor’s northern rim, he knew it wouldn’t be enough to escape with nothing more than the same story that had brought him here. Where’s the proof, Agent Dobbs? They’d ship him to Danvers and lock him in a room next to Mayhew until he started drawing his own do-not-cross lines on the floor.

  It was his incursions against the Hun all over again. He’d have to take souvenirs.

  Dobbs pressed close to the waterlogged walls, slowing the thud of his heart and listening through the rain. In his head, he retraced his steps from where he’d first come in, the buildings he’d searched and the detritus that filled them. He broke cover and, at a scurry, by the flame of his Nassau, searched the most likely shacks until he found the pieces of the past he’d seen earlier, reminders of when the town had taken from the sea in the usual ways, and grabbed what he needed.

  Then he found a barrel sturdy enough to support his weight so he could clamber up onto one of the roofs. He lay flattened out, peering south through the gloom, pelted by the rain and assailed by the smell of sodden wood. He’d never been this wet. He’d never been this cold. He’d never cared less about either.

  Soon, they drifted along, the original hideous pair of townsfolk he’d seen. They’d been the first to give chase and hadn’t given up on him yet. Keeping his head low, Dobbs groaned as if wounded, softly, scarcely loud enough to catch their attention and lure them in. Maybe it was because they looked like such poor climbers that neither of them thought to glance up at the roofs.

  Close enough. He rose and whirled the old fisherman’s net over his head, then cast it over theirs. The pair floundered beneath it, slashing their way through with their sharp-looking claws. Rotten as it was, the net wouldn’t hold, but Dobbs needed them surprised only long enough for him to swing down from the roof and go to work on them with the oar he’d left propped against the side wall.

  He swung it like a club, then like an axe, chopping at them with the blade of the oar until it broke, leaving him with a jagged length of shaft. The bullet-head dropped with a gargling moan, then lashed out to catch Dobbs by the boot and bring him down as well. As he fell, Dobbs bashed the wolf-eel in the knee.

  They wallowed in the rain, man and monstrosities tangled in the shreds of net. He felt something rake his side, a sting of cold fire that ripped through sweater and skin alike. His blood was the first warmth he’d felt in hours. He swung the shard of oar blindly, until he felt it punch into one of them, then traced the same arc again and again, until the wolf-eel quit moving and he couldn’t yank the wood free of its body anymore.

  But he still had the knife, and now it went easier. The bullet-head was half dead already. He just finished the job.

  For a few moments, Dobbs lay motionless, sprawled atop the bodies, sucking air until the cold got him moving again. And the smell. Everything shit when it died. He’d thought nothing was worse than men. He was wrong.

  The others would still be looking for him. He rolled upright again and dragged the corpses into the nearest shack, then cleared away the tatters of net and pieces of oar. Let the rain take care of the blood.

  By the flame of his Nassau, he studied their inhuman faces, then set the lighter aside. This wasn’t the time or place. He could spend years trying to figure them out.

  Where’s your proof, Agent Dobbs?

  Here. Right here, you pencil-pushing shit-for-brains.

  He unsheathed the pigsticker one more time. Two heads, one clawed hand. That should be enough evidence for anybody. He hunted until he turned up a burlap sack, then dropped to his knees and began to saw.

  Severed heads weren’t something to take on the road, certainly not as far as D.C., so J. Edgar Hoover came to them. The director was a traveling man anyway. Scuttlebutt got around, how he and his entourage might show up at a field office unannounced, like a surprise inspection in the army, looking for, hoping for, reasons to send good men packing.

  Like in Denver. Would you like a drink? the SAC had asked one of them. He was out in the street on the spot.

  Dobbs had never seen a more officious-looking man. Hoover was trim and no-nonsense, and kept his oiled hair combed straight back into a tight black ridge over his brow. He’d showed up skeptical, as if he’d listened to everything SAC Swindlehurst had told him over the phone and concluded they couldn’t possibly have this right.

  They’d been stowing the heads and claw on meat trays in the icebox. As soon as the trays came out onto a tabletop, Hoover’s skepticism vanished. Give him credit for one thing: he could roll with the punches and adapt. Whereas everyone else wanted to keep their distance, seemingly fearful the heads might still bite, Hoover got up close, hands on his knees and leaning in eye-to-dead-milky-eye.

  He prodded at them with a pencil, used it to flip the claw over and back again, to push at the webbing between its fingers. He toppled the bullet-head onto its side and poked at the nub of vertebra jutting from the meat of the neck. He knew cut-marks when he saw them, too, distaste flashing across his face before he bolted upright again and dropped the pencil into the wastebasket.

  “And this is your handiwork, Agent Dobbs?”

  “Yes, sir.” It was two days on, and he was all kinds of sore, bruised, bandaged where anyone could see it and stitched up where they couldn’t. He itched, as he might after getting scratched by a cat, only worse.

  “Well,” Hoover said, “I don’t suppose they would’ve posed for photographs.”

  If they’d been nightmarish on the wharves, here they seemed unreal. The heads were green-skinned, mottled, and hairless. As individuals they looked nothing alike, but were the same species. Obviously. What else could they be? There was little human about them, yet he’d seen them walk and give chase, labor together and communicate and fight. Most worrisome of all, they kept themselves hidden in a town of people who themselves were reviled for their peculiar ways and appearance, emerging only when they felt certain no one else would see them. A town that worshipped gods they thought lived deep in the sea, a notion he’d found easy to laugh at.

  Nobody was laughing now.

  “I believe we can conclude that we’re confronted with something other than bootleggers here,” Hoover said. “Given all we know about creation, or think we do, these things shouldn’t exist. But I’m looking at them. Can anyone explain to me how such a thing is possible?”

  It was Hewlitt’s turn. He’d actually enjoyed digging into this.

  “It’s just legend and gossip, sir. People of the neighboring towns have plenty to say once you get them going. I think we might find the truth woven into it somewhere,” he said. “For more than a century, Innsmouth has been under the control of one family, mainly. That would be the Marshes. The first patriarch of note was Obed Marsh, a ship’s captain who spent much of his life at sea. He was an active trader and importer.

  There’s a loose consensus that things in Innsmouth started to change for the worse in the early 1800s, after a trip Captain Marsh made to the East Indies and elsewhere in the South Seas. Cutting through the hooey, it sounds as if he may have brought back some highly unusual people. If not as passengers of their own free will, then we have to consider he may have regarded them as slaves. The town was isolated enough, and they wouldn’t have known any better.”

  At this, Hoover seethed. Slavery was something they still fought now, the worst kind of men running kidnapped women, and people too poor and ignorant to know what hit them after they came through Ellis Island. If a person was helpless enough, there was always someone eager to turn them for a profit.

  “But I suspect Marsh may have brought back something else he didn’t intend,” Hewlitt went on. “Something that got into their bloodlines. A skin disease, maybe.”

  “A skin disease.” Hoover’s voice went flat. He picked up the smallest of the meat trays, the one holding the severed claw, and leveled it before Hewlitt’s nose. Hoover grimaced as if its very existence annoyed him— the lengthened fingers, their razored tips, the webbing, the ridges that s
wept back like rudimentary fins. “Would a skin disease do this? Would a skin disease look so functional? So . . . symmetrical?”

  “It’s just a supposition, sir.” Hewlitt looked cowed. “I came across a quote in the Ipswich newspaper that called Innsmouth ‘an unsavory haven of inbreeding and circus folk.’ I was reminded of rare conditions that leave people no choice but to make a living in the carnival circuits. Alligator-men and the like.”

  Hoover smacked the meat tray back to the tabletop. “Agent Dobbs, you’re the one who’s come into the most direct contact with them. Is it your opinion this is a skin disease?”

  “It’s not for me to say, sir.” Damn right this was no disease. But he wasn’t going to call Hewlitt mistaken, to Hoover least of all. “That could be part of it, but I think whatever’s wrong with them there goes more than skin deep.”

  Hoover saw through it and didn’t respect him for it one bit. “Very diplomatic of you, Dobbs.” He furrowed his brow and jammed his fists against his hips, glaring down at the evidence he’d demanded and now gotten. He had a big hard-on for Al Capone—rooting him out of Chicago’s Metropole Hotel, shutting him down in Cicero—and this was what he had to deal with.

  Although it was, in its way, an echo of a decade ago. While Dobbs was in France, Hoover, barely out of law school, was serving stateside in the War Emergency Division, heading up its Alien Enemy Bureau. A discovery like this had to play to fears he hadn’t had to worry about since Germany signed the armistice.

  “If these are not people as we generally conceive of people as God makes them . . . if their roots aren’t even American . . . if there’s an established history of them being willing to kidnap and kill to keep their existence a secret,” Hoover said, “then I think we have no choice but to take that town apart and see how deep this threat actually goes.”

  He waved for someone to return the heads and claw to the icebox, out of his sight, then stepped closer to Dobbs, more than a head shorter and straining to flex his reach in other ways.