The Innswich Horror

Mary’s sudden downcast expression instantly made me regret volunteering this information. But I plainly didn’t like the idea of keeping it from her.

“He’s a bad man, Foster,” she implored. “And it’s a filthy area he lives in. He’s a drug addict and a con man.”

“I’ve no doubt, now that I’ve met him.”

“And he preys on people—on women, Foster. Poor women.”

“I can imagine,” I said.

Now she gulped. “And I’m sure… he told you about me.”

Here I had no choice but to lie, to spare her feelings. “Why do you say that? He had nothing at all to say of you.”

She reached across and touched my hand again. “Foster, I have to be honest with you—because I like you so much—”

The sudden comment rocked me…

“—but a long time ago I was one of the women he preyed upon,” she finished and then looked right at me.

There was no hesitation in my response, nor with my smile. “Mary, there are times when we all take an erroneous path in life, and when we do unethical deeds out of desperation, we’re only being human. These are not grievous sins, and what you must believe is that God forgives all.”

Her eyes were a blink away from tearing up. “Does He really?”

“Yes,” I assured her, and now it was my hand that took hers. “The entails of motherhood are burdensome indeed. The past is behind you now, and any of your past misgivings are behind you as well. The same goes for all of us, Mary. The same goes for me. You’re doing the right thing now, and you have a wonderful future that awaits you.”

She was choking up, squeezing my hand. “I’ll just have out with it then, because I can’t lie to you,” and then she croaked, “before the town collective admitted me, there were times, in the past, when I’d had to resort to acts of prostitution.”

“But that doesn’t matter,” I replied, unfazed—for this I already knew. “You’re a moral, honest, and very hardworking woman now. That’s all that matters, Mary.”

She looked at me so strangely then. “I can tell by your eyes—it really doesn’t bother you, does it—I mean, what I was in the past.”

“It bothers me not in the least,” I told her with all my heart. “I’m only interested in what you are now: a wonderful, beautiful person.”

She hitched on a few sobs as a bell rang, and someone yelled “Order up!”

She wiped her eyes, smiling. “Foster, the first time in years I’ve felt good about myself is right now—thanks to you.”

“You have every reason to feel good about yourself, and I hope you always do.”

“I better get your dinner before I start on a full-blown bawling spell,” and then she was up and rushing into the back.

I sat, now, in a platonic ecstasy. This lovely woman seemed to be genuinely fond of me, something rare in my life of indulgent seclusion. What made me happiest was knowing that my words and earnestness had helped give her a more positive conception of herself.

When my dinner was brought, it was an aproned cook and not Mary who’d brought it. “Sorry, sir, but your waitress is indisposed for a moment. All tearing up about something.”

“Allergies, I’m sure,” I said. “And thus far she’s done a marvelous job in attending to me.”

“Enjoy your dinner, sir.”

“I’m certain I will, thank you.”

As I dined on this sumptuous feast, I noted varnished plaques mounted on the walls—they were name-planks for old ships. HETTY, one read, and the others: SUMATRY QUEEN and COLUMBY. I couldn’t be sure why—and perhaps it was the diversion of the ambrosial meal, but… did those names ring a bell.

The chowder proved superior to the standard Providence recipe, and the striped bass may have been the best I’d ever sampled. Toward the meal’s end, I felt like the most sinful of gluttons, especially in times when food was scarce for so many.

Mary returned—freshened up now, and recomposed—and after she cleared the table, she sat down again opposite me. I couldn’t have complimented the meal more. But her look told me something still troubled her.

“What you said earlier, Foster,” she began, “about Cyrus Zalen? You said you’re seeing him again?”

“Yes, tomorrow at four.” I knew she wasn’t comfortable about me being in this cad’s proximity, so I meant to assure her. “It’s purely to purchase a copy of the Lovecraft photo, so that your brother won’t be deprived of his. Zalen needed some time to process the negative. But after that, I give you my guarantee, it will be the last time I ever cross paths with the man.”

“That’s good, Foster. He has a bad way about him—he’s a conniver.”

And also the father of one of your children, the darker thought flashed in my head. But he’ll never connive you anymore, Mary. I’ll see to it. “A conniver and then some,” I went on, in a more light-hearted voice. “I caught the man actually stalking me twice today, once before I met him and once after.”

“Stalking you?”

“Slinking about from the woods, tailing me. I’m sure robbery was what he was considering. I’d walked up to the Onderdonk’s stand for a sandwich, and it was on my way back that Zalen began to follow me more overtly. I went in the woods after him, to show him I wasn’t afraid of his kind.”

“Foster, you shouldn’t have!”

“The man knows I have some means, so I guess he figured robbing me might yield more profit than my purchase of the Lovecraft photo. But I made it quite plain to him that I was well-able to defend myself. He’ll not be doing that again, I’m sure. But this unpleasant incident occurred not too far from where young Walter was engaged in his archery session—that’s how I came to meet him. Zalen was long gone by then.” Naturally I neglected to add that it was Zalen who revealed the rough location of Mary’s ramshackle house.

“The man’s like a blight,” she bemoaned. “It’s rare that I see much of him but when I do… all it does… it reminds me—”

I squeezed her hand in reassurance. “You must disregard any negative memories that are triggered by Zalen. He counts for nothing. Revel, instead, in the promise of your future. I assure you, it will be a bright one.”

She looked sullenly at me. “Oh, how I wish that were true, Foster.”

My only response was a smile, for I’d decided to say no more. It wasn’t necessary because at that moment, I already knew what I was going to do…

After a bit more small talk, I rose and prepared to excuse myself. “Well, by now it’s certain that Mr. Garret won’t be making an appearance, and I’m a bit fatigued from a day of travel. But please know, Mary, that spending this little bit of time with you was the highlight of my day. You’re a lovely person.”

She blushed and blinked another tear away. Then she glanced about to see that no one was looking, and kissed me quickly on the lips. I shivered in a sweet shock.

Her lips came right to my ear. “Please come and see me at the store tomorrow. I’m off at twelve.”

“I’ll be there. We’ll have a fabulous lunch somewhere.”

Then she hugged me in something like desperation. “Please, don’t forget.”

I chuckled. “Mary. No force on earth could make me forget.”

Another quick kiss and she pulled away, then picked up the fifty-dollar bill I’d left on the table. “I’ll be right back with your change.” When she hustled away into the back, I quietly left the restaurant.

The sky was darkening in a spectacular fashion as I made the main street. The sinking sun painted wisps of clouds with impossible light over the waterfront. The street’s quaint cobblestones seemed to shine in a glaze; neatly dressed passersby strolled gaily along, the perfect human accouterment to an evening rife with tranquil charm. At that moment, it occurred to me: I’d never felt more content.

It was a shrill siren that ripped the evening’s placidity. I turned the corner and noticed a long red and white ambulance pulled right up on the sidewalk, with several uniformed attendants bustling about. Several residents stood aside, looking on with concern.

What’s this all about? I thought, then felt my spirit plummet when I noticed that the commotion was centered around the bargain store I’d visited previously. At the same moment a stretcher was borne out from the shop, and on it was a very still and very blanch-faced Mr. Nowry. In the doorway, the man’s expectant wife sobbed openly.

Oh, no…

“Poor Mr. Nowry,” a small voice announced to my side. “He was such a nice man.”

I turned to see an attractive red-haired woman standing next to me. “I-I hope he hasn’t expired. He was as congenial a man as you could ever hope to meet; why, I spoke to him just hours ago.”

“Probably another coronary attack,” she ventured.

“I’ll go and see,” I said, and made my way to the receding commotion. “Sir? I’m sorry to intrude,” I asked of one of the ambulance men, “but could you confide in me as to the status of Mr. Nowry?”

The younger man looked bleary-eyed from a long day. “I’m afraid he died a few minutes ago. There was nothing we could do this time—his ticker finally went out.”

I bowed my head. “I scarcely knew him, but he was a good man from what I could see.”

“Oh, sure, an Olmsteader through and through.” He forearmed his brow. “But it’s been a strange day, I’ll tell ya.”

“In what way?”

“Small town like this, we don’t get more than two of three deaths a year, but today? We’ve had two now.”

“Two? How tragic.”

Now the stretcher bearing the decedent was loaded into the rear compartment of the vehicle. The man to whom I was speaking pointed inside. “A young girl, too, not a half-hour ago. One of those not in with a decent crowd, but still… She died in childbirth.”

I looked to where he was pointing and noticed a second stretcher.

Instantly, my throat thickened.

It was a thin, lank-haired girl in her twenties who lay dead next to Mr. Nowry, a sheet covering her to the chin. Even in the pallor of death, though, I recognized her face.

It was Candace—one of Zalen’s ill-reputed photo models and prostitutes. But the great, swollen belly was gone now, only swollen breasts showing beneath the white sheet.

“Please, tell me her baby survived,” I implored.

“The baby’s fine,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Praise God…”

The man looked at me in the oddest way, then closed the long back door of the hospital coach, and went on his way.

I returned to the woman I’d been talking to. “I’m afraid Mr. Nowry has passed away. We should be sure to remember him in our prayers.” I took a doleful glance to his poor widow, still sobbing in the shop doorway. “I pity his wife, though.”

“She’s expecting any day now,” the woman told me with something hopeful in her tone. “You needn’t worry; the Nowrys are long-term town-members. The collective will provide for his widow.”

Another reference to this collective. My initial impression had been less than positive due to unavoidable insinuations but now, it seemed, I may have been hasty. The initiative, instead, sounded like a very serviceable system of social/fiscal management and profit-sharing. It was heartening to know that Mrs. Nowry wouldn’t be left on her own. As for Candace’s newborn… well, I could only assume it would be cared for by family members or placed in a fosterage program.

“You’re new in town,” said the redhead with the most traceable smile. Then she sighed. “Just passing through, I fear.”

“Why, yes, but why do you put it that way?”

“The handsome men never stay long.”

The flattering comment took me off guard. “That’s, uh, very nice of you to say, Miss, but I must bid you a good evening now.” I walked away quickly. Being complimented so abruptly by women always left me tongue-tied. At least it left me, however selfishly, with a good feeling. I’d certainly never thought of myself as handsome. I smiled, then, when I recalled Mary making similar comment.

The desk shift had changed when I was back at the Hilman House; a stoop-shouldered older woman tended the desk.

“Ma’am, I’d like to write a note to one of your guests, a Mr. William Garret,” I told her. “Would you be so kind as to pass it on to him?”

A moment of fuddlement crossed her eyes. She glanced at a ledger. “Oh, dear, I’m afraid Mr. Garret checked out several hours ago, along with another associate of his.”

“Would that be Mr. Poynter?”

“Why, yes, sir, that’s correct. They caught the motor-coach to the transfer station. Headed back to Boston, I believe.”

“I see. Well thank you for your time.”

That explained that, though I regretted not seeing Garret again, if only to bid him good luck in the future. At least he’d re-found his friend Poynter. It was too bad they hadn’t secured positions here.

Back upstairs, I passed a cart-pushing maid in the hall. She smiled and said hello. It took a moment to recognize her.

It was the maid I’d spoken to upon checking in, the pregnant one, though now…

She no longer displayed any signs of gravidness.

“Why, my dear girl!” I exclaimed. “I see you’ve borne your child…”

“Yes, sir,” she said rather flatly. “A boy.”

“Well, congratulations are in order but—really!—you should be resting, not working!”

She stared at me, head atilt, mulling her thoughts. “I’m just picking up a bit, sir, then I can go home.”

“But it’s unacceptable for an employer to insist you work so soon after—”

“Really, sir, I appreciate your concern but I’m feeling all right. I’ll be to bed very soon.”

“I should hope so.” This was mortifying. And with all the new labor laws in place to protect against such exploitation. “Where’s the baby?”

An odd pause stalled her. “Home, sir. With my mother…” She gave a meek smile that struck me as forced, and went on with her cart.

Off all the things, I thought. All the more reason for Mary to be out of here. Town collective or not, workers—most especially pregnant women—shouldn’t be used as an objective resource. Certain medical conditions must always be given leeway.

I’d already decided that I was going to take Mary and her entire family back to Providence with me. Should it turn out to be a mistake, then so be it. At least I will have tried. My only fret was how and when to make my desires known. It was of the utmost importance that she know nothing was expected of her in return, which might be difficult to convince her of, given the darker aspects of her past.

I will remove her from her burdens, I determined, and give her the life she deserves. And maybe, just maybe…

One day I’d have the privilege of marrying her.

So much for my “platonic” intents, but it was imperative that I be honest with myself. Of course, my idealism was strong, and I knew that things didn’t always germinate into what we truly wanted.

But I knew what I wanted. I wanted her. And I will make every effort to be the man she longs for but has thus far never had.

I knew that I had to buff not only the edges of my outrage over the young maid’s exploitation, but also the sad mishap of Mr. Nowry’s coronary attack—I needed to let my mind stray elsewhere. I decided to relax, then, in the clean room’s quietude, so I sat up in my bed and opened my most cherished book: The Shadow Over Innsmouth. It would not be a concerted re-reading, I’d decided; that would come tomorrow when I found the perfect place, perhaps in view of the harbor. Though the buildings were different, the inlet itself and the mysterious sea beyond was the same that Lovecraft spied when the korms of his masterpiece were first coming to mind, a brilliant amalgamation of atmosphere, concept, character, and, ultimately, horror. Evidently, Lovecraft had been so irrevocably impacted by Irwin Cobb’s sophomoric yet deeply macabre “Fishhead,” and also Robert Chambers’ flawed but image-steeped “The Harbour Master” that he’d seized the basic seeds of these stories and taken them into ingenious new directions, to weave very much his own superior tale of symbolic—and wholly monstrous—miscegenation. In it, when narrator Robert Olmstead accidentally stumbles upon the crumbling and legend-haunted Innsmouth seaport, he discovers, first, that the townsfolks have long-since assumed a pact of sorts with a race of horrid amphibious sea creatures first discovered by one Captain Obed Marsh, a sea-trader, while venturing through the East Indies; and, second and worst, that this monstrous and greed-driven pact involved not only human sacrifice but also the rampant crossbreeding of the creatures—the Deep Ones—and the human populace of Innsmouth. Any page I turned to led to an image or a line that I could easily deem my favorite.

Here was one, a line of dialogue spoken by none other than the “ancient toper” Zadok Allen, whose real-life model had been Zalen’s grandfather, Adok. The line read as thus: “Never was nobody like Cap’n Obed—old limb o’ Satan! Heh, heh! I kin mind him a-tellin’ abaout furren parts, an’ callin’ all the folks stupid fer goin’ to Christian meetin’ an’ bearin’ their burdens meek an’ lowly. Say they’d orter git better gods like some o’ the folks in the Injies—gods as ud bring ‘em good fishin’ in return for their sacrifices, an’ ud reely answer folks’s prayers.”

Naturally I was amused by the convenient parallel: the “good fishing” that the Deep Ones brought to Innsmouth in exchange for bloody oblations. I had to chuckle at this very real town’s own abundance of local fish. I nearly laughed aloud!

Something that I suspect as being subconscious caused my errant page-flipping to stop, and next my eyes were locked down strangely on another line of Zadok Allen’s drunken ramble: “Obed Marsh he had three ships afloat—brigantine Columby, brig Hetty, an’ bark Sumatry Queen…”

A vertigo accosted me as I stared at the words. Then: Of course! I knew I’d seen those names before! They were right here all along… , for now I recalled these same names from the decorative ship plaques in the restaurant.

So not only did the town of “Innsmouth” exist, though under its true and none-too-different name Innswich, but so did these trading vessels exist somewhere in the town’s dim past. I couldn’t help but admire the assiduousness of Lovecraft’s research efforts—something he was quite known for—to plumb such minute details of reality and infuse them into his fictional landscape.

I re-read parts of several more scenes, all with much chilling delight, then put the book up with the heated anticipation of re-reading cover to cover tomorrow. But there was one more even greater anticipation regarding tomorrow…

I must make every effort to look my best, I realized, then shuddered when I opened my suitcase and found my best suit in a crumpled state. There’d be no place open this hour to get them freshly pressed; hence, I could only hope…

When I glanced into the closet, I saw I was in luck! There, leaning, stood a collapsible pressing board, and atop the high shelf sat a steam-iron. I knew next to nothing of such procedures, but how difficult could it be? I took out the pressing board, looking for some sort of locking pin in order to extend its legs, when—

“Drat!”

—it slipped from my fingers and banged against the back wall of the closet.

“Oh, for pity’s sake!” I complained aloud when I saw that the meager board had struck the wall with such impact that it actually left a hole. The management will be none-too-pleased over this, I thought. Until I pay them double the repair fee. I stepped inside to retrieve the board, then lowered to a knee to inspect the damage. Bits of plaster lay about, while the insult to the plaster-board looked a foot long and several inches wide. This was flimsy construction to say the least, yet of the bungling accident I could only blame my own carelessness.

Before I could pull away, though—

When I put my eye to the rent, the tiniest thread of light seemed to hang in the darkness beyond the plasterboard. Quick calculation told me there must be a small hole in the sidewall, which could only be the wall to my bathroom. When I hastily got up and went to the bathroom I saw that I’d inadvertently left the light on earlier.

A hole, came the plodding thought. In the wall…

A peephole?

The notion seemed absurd but I could not forget my earlier impression: when I’d been bathing, I not only could’ve sworn I heard a human gust of breath from behind the wall, but I’d also been filled with the suspicion that I was being spied on…

No true logic could explain my next endeavor. Careful as ever—while back in the closet—I pulled chunks of the plasterboard away. The damage was already done, so damaging the wall further mattered little; I’d be paying for it regardless of the size of the hole. I suppose my motives at this earlier point were subconscious, but after I pulled away several more pieces of the wall, and shined into the hole the beam of my pocket-flashlight, I detected an area of space beyond that could easily be taken for a narrow walkway. Of course, it must be only a service passage, for access to pipes, electrical wires, and what not. Still…

I pulled away some more pieces until the hole was sizable enough to admit me, and then I crawled in.

Back on my feet, inside now, I approached the threadlike beam. Instinct, of course, put my eye to it posthaste.

I was looking directly into my bathroom.

It IS a peephole, came my first thought but then, No, that’s ridiculous! The Hilman was obviously a respectable lodging-house. The hole could be explained by a number of circumstances: a simple construction flaw, or a nail-hole where a picture had been hung.

Deeper in the murk, though, I noticed another thread of light.

Taking every precaution not to misstep, I proceeded to this next light-beam and found, to my dismay, another hole, which looked directly into the bedroom of the suite next to mine.

I was at a loss for what to think just yet. A modest clatter came to my ears and, with my eye pressed to the hole, I noticed movement.

It was the maid I’d just spoken too, who’d only just this morning been pregnant. Solemn faced and dull-eyed she lethargically went about the task of making the bed and picking up. On a chair by the door, however, I noticed a small valise, which sat opened and showed that it was full of clothes. And on the dresser?

There sat a neat, beige Koko-Kooler hat, identical to that which William Garret had been wearing just this morn when I met him. Near the door, too, sat a briefcase that appeared all-too-similar to his.

But Garrett and his friend already checked out, I remembered.

Once the housekeeper had finished with the bed, she jammed the hat into the suitcase, close dit, then took it and the briefcase out of the room…

Only the baldest, most objective pondering occupied my mind now. I believed there were two more rooms on this side of the floor, and when I peered down—sure enough—I spotted two more of the tiny beams of light, signaling the existence of two more peepholes. Then, in the opposite direction of this hidden walkway, several more such beams could be discerned…

I kept my pocket-flash aimed down, on the floor. If this walkway did indeed exist for some ill intent—either for perversity, or remotely gaining knowledge of a lodger’s potential valuables—there must be some mode of unobservable access. At the very end of the passage, on the floor, lay what could only be a trapdoor.

I opened it, spotted a rail-ladder, and without much conscious volition, found myself next taking the ladder down to the hotel’s third floor…

Black as hackneyed pitch, this climbing-way was; I thought of the esophagus of some Mesozoic creature into whose belly I was venturing. A doorless aperture signaled the hidden passage paralleling the third floor, and it was through that I stepped to face a similarly dark hidden passage. A thread of light marked each of the floor’s rooms but when I quickly looked into them, I noted only untenanted hotel rooms.

So—to the next floor I descended upon the ladder. The second floor. At the aperture I stepped into another hallway clogged with darkness made incomplete only by more intermittent threads of light. Here, though, I vaguely detected voices.

I let my shoes take me as slowly—and quietly—as possible to the first of the peeping-holes.

My vantage point only allowed me to view a wedge of the bland, clean room within, where I saw shelves of canned goods, sponges, buckets, towels, and other such items. The voices were distinctly female and seemed nonchalant. Several young women sat in the room, while I could only see slices of them; they appeared to be sitting on several couches. All were in some stage of pregnancy.

“—from Providence, I think, and he’s quite handsome,” one said.

“Oh, I know the one—he’s kind of shy,” observed another.

“And kind of rich! That’s what I heard. That’s why they won’t take him.”

My mind stalled as my eye remained to the hole. Could they… be talking about me?

A third, barely visible, contributed, “Oh, I know who you mean.” A giggle. “I was upstairs looking in the peep-holes and saw him—you know—playing with himself!”

“No!”

“He pulled himself right off! In the bathtub—”

The other cackled while I, as might be expected, felt my spirit wilt. It could only be me they were talking about…

“—and you’re right, he’s quite a handsome one, but I liked the two others much better.”

“The Boston men?”

“Yeah. I wouldn’t have minded being made in the way from one of them.”

“But, Lisa! Neither of them are very handsome now!” and then more giggling broke out.

I could only stare, more at my own bewildered thoughts than the scene within. This was outrageous, women who were more than likely maids spying on hotel customers. It was certainly actionable and I most certainly had a solicitor who’d be more than happy to sue, but…

What’s the reason for all this? I had to wonder through my embarrassment and shock. Women weren’t known to be peeping toms; that was an aberrancy reserved for men alone. And the reference to two Boston men could only mean Mr. Garret and Mr. Poynter. Neither of them are very handsome now?

“God, it’s just so depressing having to do it when they’re like that,” came another observation. “I’m happy to be pregnant.”

“Yeah. And they’re not going to keep the Providence man.”

“Why?”

“I told you, he’s rich. The others are always fly-by-nights—no one knows they’re here—but the Providence man—”

“He’s no fly-by-night if he’s rich. Someone would come looking…”

Even to contort my imagination to its maximum could not account for the words I was hearing, nor the outrageous evidence my curiosity had led me to uncover.

I moved to the next hole…

God in Heaven…

… and found myself looking at the most macabre scene I’d ever witnessed in my thirty-three years of existence…

Several bed mattresses lay on the floor, and in the corners were a few metal pans. “God, I hate this,” snapped a woman’s complaint. It was yet one more pregnant woman, this one rather dowdy and older. She’d perched herself on her knees, to tend to a man who lay on one of the mattresses.

Or, I should hasten to correct: the remnant of a man…

He lay dismembered, naked, scars at the bald nubs where his arms had been removed at the elbows and his legs at the knees. He was lean, pallid-skinned, and bearded, and what the pregnant woman was doing was crudely washing his groinal area with a sopping sponge. Her expression of distaste could not have been more vivid. “They just stink so! And, oh, the lice! I just hate this so much!”

“You hate it!” complained a second woman. “You don’t have to do it!”

This objection had come from the forward-most mattress, on which lay a man in an identical state as the first, only he was clean shaven and blond-headed. I saw stitches showing at the nubs of his injuries. But the woman was not washing this one—she was engaged in an act of overt sexual congress, a look of loath on her face…

But this was a face I recognized:

Monica, I realized, from the pier. I’d just seen her a short time ago, in the stairwell and entering the perpetually locked door to the second floor.

Now I knew why that door was always locked.

What form of madness could explain what I was viewing? These unfortunate men had clearly been made into invalids. For them to have suffered identical accidents? Impossible. And their symptoms of amputation mirrored exactly those of Mary’s brother, Paul. What foul auspication urged me to believe that these men had been purposely and premeditatedly invalidized for this obscene purpose?

The farthest edge of my vantage point showed me a third mattressed victim, and perched vigorously on his groin was another thin, young woman with her skirt hoisted to make her privates accessible. “Hurry, you stinking bastard,” she muttered.

“This one shits himself, too,” added the pregnant woman in her disdain. “He does it on purpose.”

“I do not!” blabbered the victim she was bathing. He seemed stricken with a vocal impediment. “I can’t help it—”

“You know where the pans are!” the woman shrieked. “Maybe we’ll stop feeding you for a while! See how you like that!”

“Leave him alone, Joanie,” suggested the young woman with the hoisted skirt. “I have to do him next, and if he’s upset he won’t be able to. He’ll wind up like Paul.”

Like Paul, my mind droned.

I watched in the utter horror of it all, surely a scene from the Abyss. When this Joanie had finished with her congress, she grunted and rose, glaring down at her crippled purveyor. This poor man, after a minute or so, grotesquely rolled off the stained mattress, belly to floor, then hopped up onto the savaged ends of his limbs, after which he awkwardly ambled—doglike, on all fours—to one of the metal trays, to urinate. Meanwhile, the blond man began to gasp in something akin to tortured bliss while his unwilling partner, Monica, looked at him in a meld of bitter hatred and nausea. Indeed, it seemed some carnal warren in Hell that my eye had happened upon. Incalculable, I thought in the deepest despair. Monstrous… , for the intent, macabre as it seemed, shone all too clearly.

It must have been some imp of the perverse which forestalled my immediate desire to extricate myself from this evil chasm—and from the very building itself—and just simply flee, when, next, I found myself looking instead into more of the appalling peeping-holes. Similar scenes of incomprehensible obscenity were my reward for this effort: men reduced to naked torsos, either lying inert on sullied mattresses or traversing the room on their butchered limb-ends. One lapped water from a bowl, again, like a dog. Room after room glared with these unfathomable scenes of grotesquerie. But in the next peeping-hole…

God, deliver me, I prayed.

This was no chamber of forced-conception. Instead, I spied a room clinically adorned: medical supplies, IV bottles on stands, several elevated beds. Unconscious men with bandaged limbs occupied two such beds: one jibbered, drooling, in the clutches of nightmare, the other lay open-mouthed and utterly still. The man appeared youthful, yet I could clearly discern he had no teeth.

But the forward bed concerned me most.

On it lay Mr. William Garret, limb-ends similarly bandaged from his recent amputations. A tray of bloody surgical instruments, including a bone-saw, occupied a nearby tray, plus bottles clearly labeled CHLOROFORM. This is a surgery suite, I knew now, hidden in the hotel on this floor which is always locked. Cotton clogged Garret’s mouth, and when suddenly he began to blink and shudder on the bed, a pregnant attendant came to his side, to comfortingly pat his shoulder. “There, there, you’ll be all right,” she calmly regarded him. “It’s all for a reason that’s more important than any of us.” She tried to sound chipper. “And just think of all the pretty girls you’ll be enjoying!”

Garret mewled beneath the cotton in his mouth. The cotton had tinged scarlet, and it was then I noticed a smaller stainless steel tray full of recently extracted teeth.

“He’s coming to, doctor,” claimed the pregnant nurse. “He’ll need more pain antidote soon.”

“Prepare the injection, please, Lucy.”

The voice had arrived out of view, but next, I was not surprised to see a lab-coated Dr. Anstruther step up to the surgery bed. “It’s best not to struggle, Mr. Garret, and far better to accept your new fate. Discard any yearnings of your former life. You’ll get by much better, I assure you.” He took a hypodermic from the nurse and eventually emptied it into an isolated vein. “The morphine sulphate is quite effective, and it will be administered regularly until no longer necessary—only a matter of days, really.” With forceps, then, he removed the cotton from Garret’s mouth. “And, as you’ve already deduced, I’ve extracted all of your teeth.”

Garret’s wasted expression turned to the doctor. “Whuh-whuh… why?”

“In time, you’ll come to understand. Oh, and I’m happy to relate that I’ve examined your semen under the microscope and found an impressively high sperm-count and excellent motility. You’re a preeminent candidate for sirehood.”

Garret just stared, as if into an unreckonable cosmic gulf.

Anstruther turned to the nurse while jotting something on a board. “Lucy, the gentleman in Bed Number Two has unfortunately expired. He’ll need to be disposed of, along with Mr. Garret’s limbs.”

“Yes, doctor.”

“In a few days you’ll be feeling much better,” the doctor re-addressed Garret. “And like Lucy has already said, for some time to come, you’ll be enjoying the company of many, many woman, most of whom are possessed of some considerable desirability. Such is the lot of a Sire, Mr. Garret. Do yourself a service and maintain the proper mental perspective. For so long as you remain virile you will remain alive, and in your quiet times, I’d advise you to solicit whatever god you may believe in.”

The surgery-shocked and now toothless William Garret blabbered, “Look what you’ve done to me! Yuh-yuh-you’re a monster!”

Anstruther smiled sedately. “No, Mr. Garret. You’re fortunate in that you will never have to see the real monsters…”

When I forced my eye away from that Tartarean hole in the wall, I felt like a 100-year-old man. I staggered wide-eyed back the way I came, to the climb-way, where I had every intention of ascending back up to my room, securing my personal effects, and leaving this God-forsaken place posthaste. But when I got to the aperture which housed the ladder—

My heart slammed in my chest.

I heard footsteps. Climbing up.

Trying to cut the intruder off and make it up to my room undetected possessed no probability at all. A subconscious directive, instead, took me back across the near lightless channel, to its opposite end, where I guessed—or prayed—that there might be an identical climb-way. Please, Lord, I beseeched in a mental groan.

Either my prayer had been answered or simple luck was with me, for, yes, there was another climb-way. I stepped in, grabbed the rungs, but before I could proceed upward—

“You, there,” a voice called from the other end.

I didn’t turn to look but instead tried to hide within the climbing-way’s murk.

“Who is that? Nowry? Peters?”

I did not waste mental time considering why the male voice might be calling the name of a dead man, but it would be easy to suppose Nowry had other clan in town. Instead, I made my move. I did not climb up, I climbed down, for to return upstairs might sever any chance of escape. A similar hidden passage paralleled the first floor; I knew I needn’t bother examining any of the peeping-holes here. But there must be a way out, and I’ve got to find it!

No door, though, or any other passage, became visible in the light of my pocket-flash…

Then I heard the footsteps coming down the ladder I’d just quitted.

To the passageway’s opposite end I hastened, for where else could I go? I reasoned there had to exist some exterior access to these hidden crannies. For instance, how had my current pursuer gained the climbing-ways?

A door! I prayed. There must be a door!

But when I’d made this opposite end, I found no door; meanwhile, the footsteps echoed more loudly.

It was the sole of my shoe that found it: not a standing door, nor access panel, but a hinged plate-metal hatch. I opened it in relief but then gasped as my flash-lamp revealed details of the ungainly egression—a climb-way of ancient brick, fitted with a slime-coated iron ladder, leading straight down. It was with the staunchest resolve that I lowered myself down into its methanous depths, closed the hatch above me, and descended. My position forced a procession in total darkness; I half-expected at any moment to be lowering myself into an open sewer and the stercoraceous smells and matter that companioned them, but when my feet settled on solidity, I relighted my flash-lamp to find myself in still another passageway. My panic had skewed my bearings but an instinct told me the brick lined access proceeded north and south. For a reason unbeknownst to me, I took the southward way.

Flash in the lead, I walked for at least one hundred yards in the ill-smelling murk. I knew now, however, that this passage was not an out-of-service sewer line; no signs were extant of the expected residuum. It’s a tunnel, I knew then, and as surely as if the words had been spoken aloud, Zalen’s words seemed to echo in my head: And my grandfather wasn’t lying when he told Lovecraft about the network of tunnels under the old waterfront…

I needn’t define the extent of the chill that moved caterpillar-like up my spine. And of the hellish scene I’d witnessed back at the hotel, I could only assume that virile men with suitably favorable looks were being forced to inseminate local women, whose newborns were then sold to some illicit adoptive initiative. Why, though, was I more perturbed by what Zalen had told me, especially his cryptic final monologue: In the story, what happened to outsiders who did too much nosing around?

Now, it seemed, the most dreadful of circumstances had transposed my very self into Lovecraft’s fictitious Robert Olmstead, the out-of-towner hellbent to escape the horrors of Innsmouth.

I could go to Zalen now, tonight, it came to me, if I could only find the exit to this blasted catacomb…

Minutes later, fate or God handed me said exit as a gift.

The tunnel emptied me near a rock jetty along the harbor’s edge. A spectacular, frost-white moon hung behind intermittent clouds; the water in the harbor sat still as glass. Gazing out over the twilit port, beneath the violet night, proved a supernal sight, but all else I’d witnessed was anything but supernal. More phantasmal than anything else, or more iniquitous. The very-normal appearing harbor, after closer scrutiny, was flecked by arcane maws. Mouths of rock-hidden grottos, and tunnel-exits exuding strange smells. No human instinct could prevent me from entering of such a maw…

More lichen and niter-crusted catacombs awaited me, several branching off from the main. I had to harness my sharpest sense of awareness, lest I easily be lost here. The leftmost tine in the fork was the one I chose. I kept my footing sure, only turning on the flash in brief increments in order to conserve its batteries. I didn’t have to proceed far before the most hideous death-stench assailed me; a handkerchief to my face barely stifled its sickening noxiousness. Eventually, the tunnel emptied into vast cavern, the first glimpse of which nearly caused me to shriek and flee.

But how could I? I had to find out what this was…

A charnel house, I thought. A makeshift sepulcher…

It was mostly skeletons that heaped the obscene, dripping cavern, piles of them, some still dressed in scraps that had surpassed the effects of human decomposition. The bone-piles at the farthest end seemed the oldest, while those making their way—I believe—northwest, had been more recently deposited. Mid-heap, I found fewer skeletons and more bodies mummified. This was a hillock of human corpses that providence had seen fit to show me; hundreds, easily, had been left in here rather than in proper burying-grounds. Why? I choked on the question. Who could be responsible for this? The time-emptied eyes of skulls seemed to hollowly watch as I moved along the wretched boundaries of the mound, and when eventually I’d staggered to its end, I could’ve collapsed amid the stench and the unholy insinuation.

These—dozens of them—were obviously the sepulcher’s most recently contributed corpses, and while most of the previous had been more or less “whole,” the state of the constituents of the rotting, gas-bloated pile needed little conjecture as to their origins.

What primarily composed the ghastly heap of rot-covered bones, flesh-peeling skulls, and worm-rilled half-flesh were the evidence of dismembered human beings, each missing arms from the elbows and legs from the knees. Scraps of clothing lay among the human stacks like haphazardly tossed flags. I glimpsed too many suitcases and valises. A smaller pestiferous aggregation of severed arms and legs lay in vicinity.

An undercroft of corpses, a murder repository, I realized. And how long it had been here, I couldn’t guess… and would never want to guess.

The sound of distant scuffling locked open my eyes and snapped off my flash. I back-stepped, praying I didn’t fall, for the unmistakable sound of footsteps—and a more arcane unbroken grinding sound—seemed to be making its way toward the sepulcher. But from where! my thoughts demanded. My own path of entry lay behind me, while this sound came to my front. I ducked down behind a bunker of half-mummified cadavers just as a bobbing light could be seen.

Another entrance, I realized, from yet another of the stygian tunnels. I hid myself as still as the dead bodies about me, when eventually the light from an oil lantern bloomed, and the interloper appeared from an egress unseen till now. The figure pushed a wooden wheelbarrow whose contents was to be expected: the nude, stump-bandaged torso of the unfortunate post-surgery victim who’d expired in Dr. Anstruther’s suite of horrors. Its half-limbs jiggled as the barrow made its way, and stacked upon its dead belly were several sets of other severed limbs, plus several suitcases. Then the barrow stopped and the lantern was set on the ground. The suitcases, first, were flung onto the pile, then the limbs, and then, with a flat grunt, the torso. Of the interloper himself I could only discern the frame of a man, and I could see he held no handkerchief over his mouth and nose. How he tolerated the charnel stench I couldn’t imagine… until he raised the lantern once more, and the sizzling light revealed his face.

It was Mr. Nowry, whom just hours ago I’d glimpsed dead in an ambulance.

What ruse might explain this I didn’t care to ponder, but when I first saw his pallid face in the light, I did, however minutely, gasp.

The figure froze, then turned. I froze as well, praying, and preparing to reach for my pistol…

The lantern swept this way and that, and by the grace of God its rays did not reveal my crouch. Eventually, Nowry returned to his wheelbarrow and exited the way he came.

I waited a full five minutes before even budging, then I rose and turned, snapped on my flash, and briskly marched for my own exit, but as I did so, I couldn’t help but notice another oblong maw along the rockface. Yes, another tunnel.

Under no circumstance will I allow myself allow enter, I made the self-command but even before I was consciously aware, my feet were deputing me into this next rock-hewn entry. In spite of the grievousness of all I’d thus far seen, I had to wonder if Lovecraft himself had ventured into any of these tunnels, and then realized that he must have, for from where else could he have derived similar subterrene networks in masterpieces such as not only Innsmouth but “The Festival,” “The Outsider,” “The Rats in the Walls,” and so on. I was now walking in the midst of a Lovecraft story, but knew that the obscene butchery taking place at the Hilman, and the cavern of horrors I’d just exited was no “story.” Nevertheless, the indulgence of my curiosity outranked my capacity for reason.

I had to see what was at the end of this tunnel…

As my intermittent flash led me on, another odor assailed me but, thankfully, it was not one of death nor noxiousness. It was a strong odor with a distinct heft. The more deeply I traversed the tunnel, the more familiar the odor became:

The unquestionable odor of fish.

I lost my breath when the tunnel opened into a subterrestrial chamber many times the length and depth of the previous, and herein were many times the number of corpses.

These, though, were different…

Why no stench of rot and natural corruption? I pondered. Why only the smell of fresh fish? But when my eyes registered the details of what my retinas were registering, I felt sicker here than in the previous sepulcher.

The body mound stood huge—fifteen, twenty feet high and a hundred long. My sense of perception began to bend, though, as I squinted at the morass of bodies. They-they… they’re not altogether human, I realized. Some more, some less… Almost all had been stripped of clothing, and their dead, nude skin seemed wax-white with tinges of an unwholesome green veined beneath the pallored translucence. Grievous physical deformities had twisted the lion’s share of the corpses into outrageous misshapes; most were balding but all were possessed of wide-open and mostly blue-irised over-protuberant eyes. Closer inspection, then, showed me hands and feet in various states of elongation, while fingers and toes were clearly—

My God…

—webbed.

To the touch—and what compelled me to touch one of the things I can’t imagine—the skin felt strangely moist, enslimed, and rubbery, semblant to the tactility of frog-skin. But the most chilling verification came next: at least half of these transfigured decedents had rows of slits along their throats. Like gills.

Just like the story, my thoughts grated. Could this possibly be true? Madness, I thought instead. Surely subterranean gasses known to accumulate in caverns and tunnelworks such as these could germinate hallucinations. It was my subconscious brain, tainted now by such leakages, that had me believing Lovecraft’s greatest work was based on some fashion of biological fact. I stepped back from the gruesome heap of agape mouths; unblinking glassy orbicular eyes; pale, bone-bowed limbs; and ears that seemed to have partially or fully shrunk on hairless, semi-human skulls. Injuries, clearly, had been the cause of death for these malformed victims: wounds almost exclusively to the head and chest, and there was suggestion that a predominance of the wounds had been inflicted via gouges and punctures via talons and teeth.

I was too waylaid by this most monstrous and unbelievable sight to ponder any further. I had no choice but to hold my sanity in grave doubt but, next, just as in the first chamber of death, I heard the sounds of someone encroaching…

Again I doused my light and ducked behind a flank of piled half-human corpses when a light—no, several—were discernible. But voices as well, this time, two at least; and from the chamber’s farthest cranny, the coming light enabled me to detect another rearward egress. By now I had to reason that the tunnelworks were extensive indeed. Two figures, then, one short, one taller, emerged, each bearing a candlefish torch. The sputtering, smoky flames threw cragged shadows everywhere, like a grim, kaleidoscopic nightmare.

“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 of 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 boats 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.”

As I put my frantic thoughts to words, they seemed to grind out of my throat. “The first cavern I found via the tunnelworks you told me of, it was full of rotting, dismembered corpses. Rotting, I tell you; it was pestiferous. The air was nearly toxic.”

“That cavern is for the Sires that die.”

“Sires?”

“The guys they dismember and hole up on the second floor. Every woman in the collective comes in there every night until they’re pregnant, but you’ve already figured that out. Well, they don’t live forever, you know, or sometimes a Sire becomes impotent. There’s no use for them so the town elders kill them and let their bodies rot with all the others.”

More and more things were making a revolting sense. “And the largest of the grottoes, full of so many more bodies, are the crossbred victims of the genocide in 1930?”

“That’s right. They don’t rot because their flesh is pretty much immortal. Even if you kill them by violence, they never decompose. Where do you think that weirdo Onderdonk and his kid get all that fresh meat?” and then he, ever-so-faintly, laughed. “Come on,” he whispered next. “Let’s get out of here.”

Why I suddenly felt allied to this man—this baby-killer—I had no clue. It was all circumstantial, I suppose. Through dapples of moonlight, I followed him well away from the back of the apartment row, until he came to a barely perceivable trail. I had no choice but to follow. It occurred to me that Zalen’s primitive interpretations reflected some of the most recent scientific breakthroughs all too chillingly. Certainly the last decade had trumpeted the works of the Darwinist Englander William Bateson, who’d founded and named this remarkable new science called genetics: the idea that microscopic cellular constituents pass on hereditary traits within a species, and other constituents known as mutagens, be they accidental or deliberate, can alter said traits. In addition, famed laureate microbiologist Hattie Alexander had just this month proven the viability of a miraculous anti-pneumonia serum through the manipulation of what she calls a genetic-code found within the viral cells themselves. If the fund of human knowledge was only now making such discoveries, how much superior might Zelan’s things be with regard to similar sciences?

I was too afraid to contemplate the notion further.

We appeared to be veering northwest now, and for the first time, the woods felt safe. But in Lovecraft’s story, there was no safe, and his own version of Sentinels could be hiding anywhere, ready to overhear forbidden talk—

And ready to report back…

“How many were killed all told?” morbidity forced me to ask.

“The crossbreeds? About a thousand, I think,” Zalen said. “Lots of them were fourth and fifth generation. They were living in the ruins along Innswich Point—the old waterfront. When the government did come, the whole town was squeaky clean. No riff-raff, ya know? That’s how we came to qualify for the federal rebuild.”

Something even more morbid spidered along my awareness. “Where,” I dared to ask, “are Mary’s children? She told me she’s had eight—and expectant of a ninth—but I only witnessed one child around her property.”

Zalen huffed as he proceeded. “No women in the collective are allowed to keep all their children. They’re only allowed to keep one—their first.”

“I already know what happens to the others,” I all but choked. “But I need to know specifically.”

“Oh, do you, now?”

“You called me dense for assuming the newborns are sacrificed in an occult rite. If that’s not the case then what exactly are these things doing with all those newborns?”

“How do I know, man?” he smirked back at me. “I’m not one of them, remember? I was never allowed into the town collective—I’m considered an outcast.”

But not so much an outcast to be excluded from serving these things, I reasoned. I loathed this man—for what he was and what I’d seen him do—but I knew I mustn’t rile him. His information was too valuable, and it may well serve to help assist my escape. An escape I was determined to make with Mary…

“The babies that don’t come out right,” he went on in grave monotone, “I guess they use for food. Candace’s kid, for instance. She had it today, and it was all messed up from the horse she was shooting—I warned the bitch—but she lucked out in the end. She died while she was having it.”

“Only in a manner of speaking,” I begged to differ. “That dead girl almost killed me on the waterfront tonight.”

“Oh, so that explains the shot I heard—”

“Indeed, it does. I killed her, but she was already dead. I also saw Mr. Nowry disposing of bodies in the first cavern. He was dead in the same ambulance with Candace only hours before.”

Zalen shrugged. “They don’t do it much, only when they need extra workers—”

“You’re talking about raising the dead!” I exclaimed.

“Keep your voice down!” he sneered back at me. “And I’m talking about a lot more than that. You better pray you never have to see one of the fullbloods, but don’t be fooled. They may look primitive but they’re superior to humans in every way. And, yeah, they have some sort of reagent that can restore life to people who’ve died under certain circumstances. They’ve always had it. It’s more of that cellular stuff…”

More genetic science, I realized but my thoughts kept deflecting. I simply couldn’t get her off my mind. “How long… has Mary been part of this town collective?”

“Five years, maybe, six years. Who cares? And speaking of your precious Mary…” Zalen slowed amid the woods, and urged me westerly. Suddenly my eyes bloomed in frosty moonlight; I was looking at something I’d already seen…

Where the modest lake had earlier gleamed in sunlight, now it shimmered in the light of the moon. I glimpsed figures along the lake’s shore.

Zalen held me back behind some trees before I had chance to blunder forth. “Not a sound,” Zalen warned.

Verbosity couldn’t have been further from my mind; instead, it was witness. Several dozen women stood in a semi-circle just at the water’s edge, and I must say, this first glimpse of them made me think singularly of occultism. The late hour, the moonlight, and the location only exacerbated a namelessly sinister provocation in my mind…

The women wore primal robes whose color was indistinguishable in the intense moonlight, but what could be distinguished were fringed panels of fabric segmented by lighter-colored stitch-work. Within these segments more elaborate embroidery could be seen: symbols quite glyph-like and the oddest designations of geometry that, when looked upon to stridently, caused my head to ache. Were the angles of the horrific geometrics actually moving? Each woman, too, held a candle before her—a candle whose flame burned green—and I thought I could hear the faintest chimes, the notes of which instilled in me, to the core of my very guts, a feeling of uncontemplatable dread via the idea of utter absence. Absence of light, absence of benevolence, absence of morality, absence of all things sane. Even more softly than the sourceless chimes there came to my ears a vocal diaphony that made me want to fall to my knees and be sick: a discordant and cacodaemonically unstructured sequence of words which sounded like:

“Ei…”

“Cf’ayak vulgtuum…”

“Ei…”

“Vugtlagln, sjulnu…”

“Ei, ph’nglui, hkcthtul’ei…”

“Wgah’nagl fhtagen—ei…”

“Ei, ei, ei…”

The perverse chants seemed to grow lighter rather than louder, but for some reason the more difficult this evil song was to hear, the more impact it had on my mind, a veritable pressure, a tactuality against my face. Yet as sick as I felt, I felt something else concurrently: a most powerful carnal arousal.

“Keep back,” Zalen whispered. He forced me to crouch lower. “This lake empties into the bay…”

The solemnity of that information didn’t at first occur to me. My vision, instead, remained hijacked to these macabre, robed women. The chorus was chanted again when all the women at once dropped their robes and stood nude.

Nude, I had no choice but to observe, and pregnant.

All the while, the chant seemed to compress my brain within the confines of my skull. It was sordid and erotic, seeing this in such a manner that I could not look away—indeed, it was evil. Most of the women appeared in their twenties, but I did make out Mrs. Nowry and some others more middle-aged. All of them, then, one by one, tossed their queerly green candles into the water, and I could take an oath that as each stick of wax sunk beneath the surface, the green flame was not extinguished, and at the same time my eyes seemed to acclimate more intensely to this tinseled night: the moonlight grew sharper, brighter, and with this, my vision grew more acute. Even from this considerable distance, I could make out refined details of each gravid woman. I could see the pores on their white skin, the minute line between each iris and the whites of their eyes, the papillae of each and every nipple, and the fine traceries of venousity within each milk-soused breast. Eventually all of them lowered to the muck of the lake shore, and what took place then I’ll only distinguish as an obscene bacchanal of the flesh, a libertine debauch intent on mutual satiation akin to the Isle of Lesbos. I shouldn’t have to specify, either, that one of these concupiscent attendants was Mary herself…

My eyes held rapt on the orgiastic scene, and for a time I thought that even a gun to my head couldn’t make me look away even in the self-knowledge averting my eyes was the only Godly thing to do. But it was Zalen, not God, who urged my surcease.

“It’s coming out now—”

“It?” I questioned in the slightest whisper.

“We’re not going to be here to see it. Believe me, Morley, you don’t want to see it…”

He hauled me back into the woods just at the same moment a figure began to rise from the lake.

My head thankfully cleared with proximity. “What—what was that, Zalen?”

“It was one of them—what did you think?” the long haired, greasy-coated man chided.

One of them, I thought. A fullblood…

“One of the hierarchs, but there could be others about too.”

I winced at the madness. “That was an occult rite we just witnessed, Zalen. After all I’ve learned, and everything you told me that happens to be true, there has to be more…”

“Of course there is,” the spindly vagabond retorted. “But all that shit out there by the lake?” He seemed amused. “It’s just tradition, Morley, it’s just ritual; it means nothing. All it proves is how much lower mankind’s mentality is; the only way we could ever really relate to the fullbloods—even back in Obed Larsh’s time—is through ignorant ritualism like this…”

“Just a veneer,” I speculated, for so much occultism in the Master’s work was just that. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“You hit it right on the head. What looks like devil-worship and simple paganism is just the icing on a very different kind of cake.”

The analogy, trite as it may have been, validated my assurances now. I followed Zalen unknowingly for a time, my mind too active with a plethora of conjectures. “But all societal systems ultimately have a defined purpose,” I insisted. “If this occultism is veneer—or ‘icing’ used to cover something else up… what is the something else?”

“You ask too many questions. I warned you about that,” he said. “We have to get out of here, that’s all. You’ve got money and a gun, and I’ve got the way out. If we’re lucky, we might make it.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve got a motor-car,” I nearly exclaimed.

“Sure, I do—er, I should say, I know where we can get one,” he supplemented with a chuckle. “The Onderdonks have a truck. That’s where your gun comes in.”

For whatever reason, this decidedly promising news did not reduce the regard of more of my questions. “You could’ve stolen their truck anytime in the past. Why is escape on your mind now?”

“I told you,” he smirked back in spattered moonlight. “Because they’re onto us now. Someone overheard me talking to you earlier—”

“So that’s it, a breach of the secrecy everyone here must adhere to,” I surmised. “More, more of the story.”

“Because Lovecraft’s story wasn’t really a story. I told you that too. Most of it’s true. And now we’ve got to live with it—or die.”

I continued to follow his footsteps, still confounded and—why, I’m not sure—enraged more than terrified. The smell of slow-cooking meat waxed dominant; it sifted down the narrow trail to tell me that Onderdonk’s property drew near. I was appalled to admit that the aroma—even in knowing as I did the origin of the meat—was delectable. It also appalled me that Zalen, an inveterate thief, criminal, and, worse, one who was a willing party to infanticide, represented my greatest chance of escaping with Mary.

“Mary,” I said next. “She must go with us.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” he snapped.

“I insist. I have a great deal of money, Zalen. It would behoove you to accommodate my indulgence. Mary, her son, her brother, and her stepfather will be joining our escape.”

At this he actually laughed. “Her and the kid, maybe. But Paul’s deadweight; he’s a Sire who went impotent. Only reason he wasn’t killed and taken to the tunnels is ‘cos she begged the hierarch.” His next chuckle could’ve passed for a death-rattle. “And the stepfather? Haven’t you been listening?”

“I can’t fathom you, Zalen. Mary’s stepfather is aged and rife with infirmities. It would be un-Christian of us to abandoned the old man.”

“The stepfather is a crossbreed!”

I gawped at words as though they were fragments of shrapnel. “But-but, I thought—”

“Crossbreeding between the two species was made illegal by the new hierarchs, so—”

“So all the existing crossbreeds were exterminated in the concerted genocide,” I’d already gathered. “Which doesn’t explain why Mary’s stepfather is still alive.”

Zalen stopped to face me, with that nihilistic grin I was now all-too-accustomed to. “You’ll love this part, Morley… but are you sure you wanna hear it?”

“Don’t toy with me, Zalen. Your psychological parlor tricks are quite juvenile if you’d like to know the truth. So kindly tell me that—the truth.”

“We don’t know exactly how their political system works but we think it’s several of them in charge and there’s one who’s more powerful than the others.”

“It’s called an oligarchical monarchy, Zalen. The senior hierarch would suffice as the sovereign, akin to the Soviet Union of today, or this man in Germany, Hitler.”

“Yeah. The sovereign. The sovereign’s hot to trot for your wonderful little Mary. How do you like that? He’s got kind of a thing for her. That was probably him back there at the lake. Don’t worry, it won’t fuck her—it’s not allowed to… but it’ll probably do everything else.”

The information sickened me but also made me feel haunted. Thoughtlessly, I seized my handgun and turned to head back to the lake.

“You really are an idiot, Morley,” I was told amid more laughter. He’d grabbed my arm and thrust me back. “Even if you did get a clear shot at it, there’d be a hundred more after you in two minutes. They’d sniff us out. We wouldn’t stand a chance”

I leaned against a tree, gripped by a harrowing despair. “You’re telling me that Mary’s stepfather was spared from the genocide because—”

“—because Mary begged the hierarch not to kill him. She agreed to keep the old stick in hiding, at her house.” Zalen nodded. “Hate to think what she had to do to get that favor.”

I could’ve killed him on the spot for saying such a thing, but I knew there was truth behind it; desperation led to desperate acts. Instead, I collected my senses and continued to follow him. “What about those who aren’t in Olmstead’s town collective?”

“Rejects, like me, are left alone as long as we don’t tell outsiders what’s going on here, and as long as we don’t leave.”

“Those things can’t possibly be everywhere,” I declared. “With a modicum of forethought, I’d suspect that escape would be easily achievable.”

“Sure, you’d think so,” he counted, “but why do you think nobody does? Why do you think Mary’s still here? It’s not because she wants to be, I can tell you that. None of us do.”

“Fear, then?”

“Uh-huh. In the past people—mostly women—have tried to escape. They just can’t handle giving up their babies. But every single one has been brought back”—now Zalen’s expression turned cold—“and made an example of. There are a whole lot more of those things than anyone can guess. If you leave, they’ll track you down the way a bloodhound catches a scent, Morley. They travel along any existing waterway, and they’re very fast.”

I had no choice but to postulate, “So even if we do manage to get out of here, you don’t deem our chances of success to be very high.”

“No, but when they’re on a rampage like they are now, if we don’t try, we’re dead by morning for sure.”

Waterways, hunting a scent, I thought. If we made it back to Providence, I’d install Pinkerton’s men round the clock. Either that or I’d relocate to a place so far removed from any waterways.

“There’s the truck,” Zalen whispered just as the trail had navigated us to an opening in the woods just behind Onderdonk’s property. The aroma of slow-cooking meat hung dense. Several shacks sat teetering in shadows; betwixt two of them I spied a pickup truck that looked as dilapidated as everything else. The only sound that came to my ears was that of pigs chortling.

“Onderdonk’s had those same pigs for years,” came Zalen’s next snide remark, “but they’re just for show. I’ll bet that hillbilly and his kid haven’t really cooked pork for a decade.”

“But where is he?” I queried. “The place looks abandoned.”

“They probably went to bed after they put the meat in the smoker,” he suspected, and pointed to the rows of propped-up metal barrels which sufficed for the cooking apparatus. “That’s good for us… but get your gun out just in case.”

I obeyed the instruction and followed him into the overgrown perimeter. We ambled forth with great care, so not to snap a single twig. Moonlight and shadows diced the various shacks into wedges of light and dark; several sets of small eyes glittered at us when the pigs in the sty took note of us. An owl hooted, then went silent.

“That seems irregular,” I commented of the burlap sacks near the smokers. “Those sacks appear to be full. I saw Onderdonk with my own eyes, carrying the sacks out of the cavern after he and his boy butchered a number of the crossbred corpses.”

Zalen opened a sack; in it were hanks of freshly butchered meat. “Yeah, and if the meat’s still in the bags, then what the hell is…”

The question didn’t necessitate completion. I suppose, deep down, I already knew before we raised the lids of the smokers. I shined my flash inside, then we both recoiled.

Smoke billowed up from Onderdonk’s pink-blistered face, while tendrils of it hung off the hair on his scalp. More smoke, as well, issued from the mouth agape in horrific death; the eyes had curdled cloudy white. A powerful, pork-like aroma spread a ground fog throughout hodgepodge of shacks. Another smoker sealed the fate of Onderdonk’s boy—a pitiable sight, indeed. The lower body-weight, and the probability that the boy had been “cooking” longer than his father, was demonstrated by the fact his eyesockets were filled with bubbling humors. Steam from the poor lad’s poached brain keened from his sinuses and ears.

“God save us,” I croaked.

“The fullbloods got to them,” came Zalen’s hopeless appraisal, “which means they may still be here.”

The prospect seized my heart like a vulturine claw and squeezed. We all but slithered in the direction of the motor, eyes never blinking. But, still, my questions remained in a maelstrom. “Previously, you told me that women made pregnant were allowed to keep their firstborn, but the others must be relinquished to the fullbloods.”

“Yeah? So what?”

“But you also told me that you yourself fathered Mary’s third or fourth child. What kind of a treacherous cretin could deliver his own child to those things in the water?”

“I didn’t have anything to say about it, Morley. We don’t have a choice here—don’t you get that? If I’m ‘treacherous,’ then so is your beloved Mary.”

I wouldn’t hear of it. I knew, I knew to the marrow of my soul, that Mary’s misgivings were levered upon her; if she did not comply, her son, brother, and stepfather would be made fodder for the fullbloods.

“And the kid we had was an accident,” he went on. “I suppose back then I actually loved her—before she joined the collective.”

I winced at the excuse. “Only the unGodliest of men could proclaim to love a woman he was prostituting out like a commodity.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” and then came a snicker. “And I don’t believe in God anyway.”

“I should say that’s obvious—”

“So if your God really exists, you’re gonna have to do a lot of praying to get us out of this.” We both arrived at the truck; in the back bed stood two cans of petrol. Ducking down, Zalen took one and carefully emptied it into the vehicle’s fuel tank. “And,” he went on, “you can pray that this hunk of junk starts…”

“One last question first,” I importuned and gripped his shoulder. My curiosity burned like a brand-iron. “Answer what you refused to answer before.”

“Come on, Morley, we have to—”

“I insist! You said that the ritualism is just veneer founded in ignorant traditions of old: occultism used as ‘icing’ to cover something else.”

“Yes!”

“So what about the babies? What about the sacrifices? If the sacrifice of newborns isn’t an occult oblation, then what else can it be?”

“It’s not sacrifice, for God’s sake. They want the newborns to study them—to study us. Their brains, their cells, their blood—everything, to see how they grow. Like what I said before—the microscopic things in every cell that make us what we are… that’s what they study, that’s what they experiment with.”

“Their understanding of the genetic sciences must outweigh ours a thousandfold,” I said. “So that’s it.”

“Yeah. Sacrifices to the devil? Black magic? It’s just a bunch of what my grandfather used to call codswallop. Ornamentation, Morley, to fool the ignorant masses: us.”

It was with little positivity that I contemplated the potential of his explanation. Based on the little I’d read I knew that, in theory, the study of human genes (particularly human genes still in developmental stages such as infancy) could not only enhance understanding of human life but could alter human life. I was forced, next, to ask, “What is the purpose of their studying us on a genetic level, Zalen?”

“That’s the worst part,” he said. “They hate us, Morley. They want to wipe us out, but not by brute force.”

“With what, then?”

“With disease, deformity, sterility.”

“Of course,” I croaked, aware now of the ramifications. “Via research and experimentation on the newborns, the fullbloods could identify our biological vulnerabilities and produce viruses, malignancies, and contagious disease mechanisms that could lay waste to the human race from a multitude of angles.”

“That’s right. That’s what they want to do eventually—”

“And you’re helping them!” I snapped.

He frowned in the moonlight. “I thought I was helping you. I’m helping you and your precious Mary escape. Remember that.” He turned then to the bedraggled vehicle. “Start praying, Morley. Pray to your God that this has a starter button instead of a keyed ignition…”

I actually did pray for that, but before the prayer was done, I’d leapt back, yelling in fright, for when Zalen opened the truck’s dented and paint-faded door, he didn’t lean in, he was pulled in—

—by a pair of long, thin, bizarrely jointed and musculatured arms with hands more resembling the forepaws of a frog, but with slick, webbed digits nearly a foot in length. I never saw its face, though I clearly understand what it was by the pungent smell which gusted from the truck when Zalen opened the rusted-patched door. It was the smell of a fish-pile tinged by the earthy stench of creek scum. Creek scum, too, was what the thing’s skin looked like. It took moments in these wedges of shadow for me to compose reactive thought. I did seem to see its bump-pocked sickly green skin shine as if wet, and as the commotion ensued within the truck I also heard wet sounds, slopping sounds, and then sounds which were more refined and more ghastly.

Only the word evil could describe what I heard next, though to make direct simile I’d have to say it sounded like someone dislocating the joints of a raw chicken, only the “chicken,” in this case, was Zalen. A heftier tearing sound followed, after which came a great, wet splat as all of the long-haired malcontent’s internal organs were tossed out of the truck, and after that came the addict’s destitution-worn black rain jacket.

Then came the arms, uprooted at the shoulder sockets.

Then the legs.

It’s taking him apart, piece by piece, I realized.

And last came the torso, though Zalen’s genitals appeared to be absent from the groin. I could only hope that the chewing sound I heard from the truck was my imagination.

I do not consider myself a coward, however, for not attempting to intercede with my pistol, for what you must understand is that the above dismantling of Cyrus Zalen expended only a matter of a few seconds. Instead, I rolled behind a rotted tree stump of considerable breadth. Reflex more than my conscious brain directed my positioning; I lay on my belly, both hands outstretched gripping my weapon, doing my best to establish a firing lane over the area I knew the creature must venture into if it were to pursue me. Shooting eye lined up over the weapon’s small sights, I waited.

And waited.

Come out! I pleaded.

No significant movement could be detected within the truck, though I believe I noticed minor movement. A moment later—and for only a moment—the faintest greenish luminescence seemed to fluoresce within, and I could only judge that it was coming from the passenger side of the vehicle’s interior. A second later, it was gone.

What guided me to re-examine Zalen’s torso I can’t imagine, but as I did so I made the sickening revelation that the cad’s head was no longer in connection with his neck. Why had the batrachian monstrosity within ejected everything but the head?

Something arched in the darkness, thumped, then rolled to answer my question.

Zalen’s head.

The head grinned in a manner that mirrored Zalen’s snideness to perfection. The whites of its eyes, in a faintness that was less than minute, glowed with the same greenish ghost-light I’d noticed in the truck. “Think about what you’re doing, Morley,” came Zalen’s corroded voice, yet a wet, slushy titter now companioned the words. “You don’t have enough bullets to take them on, but you do have choices.”

The dead words wracked me in a near-paralysis. Zalen’s head chuckled when I shakingly aimed the gun at its brow. I noticed, too, that the torn and bloody stump of the neck glowed phosphorically with the thinnest tendrils of whatever netherworld-elixir had been administered into it—the reagent, I presumed, that had also reanimated Mr. Nowry, Candace, and Lord knew how many others.

“What… choices?” I finally managed.

“Join Olmstead’s town collective—”

“Bombast,” I said in spite of my revulsion and fear. “I will not be a party to infanticide, nor will I aid and abet the enemies of my race.”

“Jesus, man. If you don’t join them, you’re dead. Oh, sure, you might take down a few of them with that peashooter of yours, but they’ll get you eventually.” The severed head winked. “And when they do, it won’t be a pretty sight.”

“I’d sooner shoot myself.”

“Well, that’s the only other choice you have. If you’re not gonna join them then you better do yourself a big favor and put that gun to your head right now and pull the trigger, Morley. That thing in the truck just pulled me apart in less time than it takes to bat an eye. You have any idea how much that hurt?” and then the dead mouth bayed wet, mushy laughter.

When I looked up, I spotted the silhouette of the thing standing just outside the truck now, staring at me in great attendance. The eyes which shined in the darkness were gold-irised and seemed the size of adult fists. Its evilly webbed hands hung down well below the joints that sufficed for its knees.

“Of course,” the wretched head continued, “if you’re gonna kill yourself, you’ll need to kill Mary first—”

“Mary?” I exclaimed.

“If you don’t join the collective, they’ll do things to her that will make the Holy Inquisition look like a couple of kids playing in a sandbox. They’ll torture the daylights out of her, Morley, with their chemicals and their tools, and then they’ll kill her, and then? They’ll bring her back just to do it all over again.”

“Shut up!” I yelled and put the gun to the head’s eye.

“But none of that’ll happen if you join the collective. You’ll have your Mary, happily ever after.”

Tempting as they may have been, I knew that I could not fall prey to his promises. If I agreed, they would kill me just the same, for what I knew. I prevaricated, biding time—there was still the fullblood at the truck to deal with—“Let me think about this,” I delayed—but then I looked back to the truck and saw that the heinous, scum-skinned creature was no longer there.

“Too late,” Zalen intoned with a chuckle.

If was from behind that the slime-gloved hand came round and encompassed my entire face; I was hauled back, unable to breathe, and my pistol fell out of my hand. The foot-long fingers encased the full of my head, and thin as they may have been they exerted such force that I knew only seconds would be required before my skull burst like a pressured gourd. Zalen’s execrable head continued to cackle as my struggles grew more enfeebled; worse, the aberration’s other flagitious hand was slipping its way beneath my belt and into my trousers. What I suspected is had used Zalen’s genitals for were about to be duplicated with my own.

“Looks like your God hit the road, Morley,” hacked another splattering laugh of the evil head. “Can’t say that I blame Him…”

It was almost merciful the way my consciousness dimmed just as the marauding hand clasped my genitals and began to twist. Would my skull erupt before I ultimately smothered? I felt the thin, boney fingers tightening, slickened by frog-slime. It seemed to temper itself then, as though it would uproot my privates and collapse my head simultaneously; but as I felt what I was certain were my last heartbeats, the abomination released me as if electrically shocked, leapt upright onto its hideous feet, and released a bellow so cacophonous and inhuman I thought I’d go mad merely from the sound.

A sound like a rising and falling shriek intertwined a wet, slopping-like splatter.

I thudded to my side, desperate to recover breath. Moving clouds over the woods unmercifully afforded more moonlight at the same instant I looked up…

The awkward-jointed, shuddering thing had somehow been staked to a tree via one of Onderdonk’s iron stoking rods rammed into one of its orbicular eyeballs. As the impossible vocal protest wound down, it convulsed with an added sound akin to wet leather flapping.

A dark blur, then, and rapid footfalls, snagged my gaze, as I plainly saw a figure gliding away into the woods.

Who had saved me? Mary? I wondered, but, no, if so she’d have said something, and no woman in her stage of pregnancy could’ve moved so nimbly. Or perhaps a townsperson in conscientious objection to the collective’s ghastly initiatives. Or…

Could it have been young Walter?

The madness of the previous minutes released my senses. I was still on a mission: to save Mary and her son, to see to their escape from this macabre, clandestine netherocracy. Distant thrashing in the woods told me my savior was heading west, across the road…

Towards Mary’s house.

Recovered now, I reclaimed my pistol.

“Kill her,” Zalen’s head said. “Then kill yourself.”

With more than a little loathe I picked the head up by its greasy hair and—

“Don’t you dare, Morley!”

—dropped it into the smoker which was slow-cooking Mr. Onderdonk. Reclosing the lid, I could still hear its muffled remonstrance. “Ain’t nothing but a rich pud…”

“But a rich pud still in possession of his head,” I replied. Then I ran off—after the shape that had spared my life.

It was chiefly blind faith that guided me through the night-shrouded thicket and labyrinth of gnarled trees. Fireflies constellated the darkness. Eventually, I sighed in relief to see the squat, dark form of Mary’s overgrown abode, the faintest candles glowing in the tiny windows. And—

There he is!

It was before one such window that I spied the obscure figure, the person who’d saved my life. But before I could take even a single step forward, the figure whirled, and it whisked away into the trees deft as a wood-sprite. My first impulse was to call out but then I remembered the necessity of inconspicuousness. Who knew how many other fullbloods lurked near? Nor did I run after the figure, for that would result in complete diversion to my goal. Instead, I peeked into the wanly lit pane that the figure had just quitted, and there I saw, on a pitiful sack filled with leaves and dead grass, Mary’s young son Walter, asleep. It was the candle-stub and holder sitting on the crude dirt floor that gave the room its diminutive light.

I had no time for contemplations; softer and more erratic footfalls alarmed me from the southward side of the house. Pistol at the ready, I covered myself behind a tree, holding my breath…

The figure that stepped into a sprawl of moonlight was Mary.

She trudged forward with difficulty, obviously returning from the forced bacchanal at the lake. Wearied, then, she gasped, then buckled over and was sick. I rushed to her as she retched in misery.

“Oh, Foster!” she sobbed. “I prayed that you’d still be alive—”

“Your prayers have been answered,” I said and took her up in an embrace. But we’ll need more than prayer, I’m afraid, came an amending thought. She wore the esoteric robe of earlier, with the confounding configurations embroidered within its fringes. Her warm, heavy body trembled in my arms. “I’ve come for you, and your son—”

She bolted from the comfort my embrace had given her. “We must get inside, and we must keep out voices very low.”

“Mary, I—”

“Shhh! You don’t understand!” and she took my hand and pulled me into the squalor-embalmed house through a narrow, uneven door. Total dark and a dense mustiness suddenly cocooned me; it was only her warm hand I had as a guide.

She piloted me to another low-ceilinged room lit by one candle alone, make-shift furniture in evidence. I helped her sit on a milk crate-turned-chair, and when she finally caught her breath, she looked up at me with the saddest eyes. “Oh, Foster, I’m so sorry. You’ve jeopardized your life by coming here.”

“I’ve come here, Mary,” I asserted, “for you and your son.”

Her flushed face fell into her hands. “There’s so much you don’t know.”

“Calm yourself. I know everything now.”

Astonishment forced her gaze upward. “You’ve-you’ve seen the things?”

“Yes, earlier at the lake, during the regrettable ritual that your circumstances have forced upon you, and also minutes ago, at the Onderdonk’s. One of the fullbloods nearly killed me.”

“So… you know about the fullbloods?”

“I know everything. I know what’s going on at the second floor of the Hilman House, I know about the dual corpse repositories in the caverns beneath the waterfront. I know why your brother Paul is infirm, and I also know that your stepfather is a crossbreed between their race and ours and that he’s the only one of his kind allowed to live after the mandated genocide of years ago.” I took her hand. “And, Mary, I know why they’re forcing the collective’s women to remain perpetually pregnant. The newborns aren’t sacrificed, they’re utilized for research intended to lead to the demise of humankind. Several hours ago I witnessed Zalen handing over several such newborns to the fullbloods, out on the sandbar.”

She hitched on another sob. “Zalen? But, my God, you must think I’m a fiend for allowing my babies to be used like this.”

“I think nothing of the sort,” I snapped, “for I also know that you are forced into this perverse servitude. Should you refuse to comply, you and your family would all be slaughtered.” I quieted, and gripped her hand more tightly, to assure her. “Mary, I know also of the servile tasks you were pressured to perform in the past, out of desperation, under Cyrus Zalen’s pandering influence and pornographic endeavors.”

She nearly gagged, tears now literally plipping from her eyes onto the dirt floor. “Then how can a moral man like you even stand to be in the same room with me?”

My verity left no margin for hesitation. “I’m in love with you, Mary. It would wound my heart forever for you to not believe this.”

Her face went back to her hands. “That just makes it worse…”

“Why!” I demanded, perhaps too loudly. “I don’t expect you to love me in return, but I can pray and live in the hope that one day you will, and should that never happen, then I will still love you just as much.”

Now she hugged me quite suddenly, “Oh, Foster, but I do love you; I have since you came into the restaurant today—”

I could’ve collapsed in the rush ebullience that inundated my spirit. At that moment I knew that in my life of plenty I actually had nothing—until now.

Now, I had everything.

“Then why on earth do you say our love makes us worse?” I pleaded.

“Foster! Think about it! Lovecraft’s story is true, and I’m living right in the middle of it.”

“What Zalen didn’t tell me I found out for myself.”

“But, Foster—Zalen is the reason that the fullbloods are on the hunt. They’re on the hunt… for you.”

“When I was at the old Innswich Point tonight, I was forced to shoot one of their reanimants, a prostitute of Zalen’s,” I told her, then remembered the most disturbing point. “I didn’t really kill her, for she was already dead. But my shot detained her long enough to broker my escape. It’s quite possible that one or more of the fullbloods saw or heard this, and even more possible that Candace informed them directly after I’d fled.”

“That’s not the reason, Foster,” she went on, a hand to her belly as if discomfited. “It’s because of Zalen, much earlier today. Sentinels are everywhere. Every single townsperson reports back to them. And some of them, like Candace, are already physically dead. One of them overheard Zalen telling you about the tunnels beneath the waterfront of Innswich Point. No one can know about that, Foster. It’s one of their greatest secrets, so anyone who learns of it… is hunted down.”

This was moot, though I should’ve recalled Lovecraft’s story with more exploit. Even the most guarded whispers were overheard, if not by the degraded townsfolk, then by the Deep Ones themselves, whose auditory faculties were super-normal. But a paramount point collided with my deductive processes now that I’d gleaned this data. “I take it, then, we’re not safe in your house. We must leave at once.”

“They won’t come here, Foster,” she said with downcast eyes. “One of their leaders… has taken a fancy to me.”

“You needn’t be ashamed,” I assured her. “Zalen mentioned this. He called them ‘sovereigns’; but he also mentioned that sexual intercourse, even among these hierarchs, is banned via their new laws. I also know that the reason your brother and stepfather have been spared is due to this same sovereign’s fondness for you. ”

She began to speak, but then bowed forward with a grimace.

“Mary! You’re in pain.”

“No, no, I’m all right. I just need a short rest”—she reached up. “Help me, Foster, to the bed.”

I took great caution assisting her; she appeared exhausted, worn, and aching all at once. A glance to the “bed” forced a grimace on my part, for it existed as no more than the most primitive of straw mattresses. With a little luck, she’ll be sleeping in a REAL bed tomorrow, likely for the first time in her horrendously burdened life.

A happy sigh escaped her lips. “That’s much better, Foster. Thank you. Dr. Anstruther says I’ll be due in another week or so.”

“Anstruther,” I sputtered the name with venom. “I’ve seen his handiwork. I take it he’s a senior member of Olmstead’s collective.”

She nodded. “He’s the one who runs everything here—for them.”

“I should’ve known.”

She lay back, sedate now, and—I pray God—banishing the profane foray at the lake from her tired mind. “Here, Foster,” she murmured; she took my hand and placed it at the center of her swollen belly. “Feel the life inside.”

It did so with great wonder. A blessing, I mused. Each and every life is a blessing…

“I’d like so much to keep it,” came her next murmuration. Tears welled. “I’d give anything…”

“You will keep it, Mary—this I vow.” The great bolus of flesh beneath the occult robe seemed to beat with heat. “You stay here and rest while I return to the Onderdonk’s to retrieve their motor. In less than an hour’s time, I’ll be transporting you and Walter away from here, to the security of my estate in Providence—”

“You just don’t understand,” she moaned in frustration. “If I try to leave, they’ll come after me. No one in the collective can ever leave.”

“We’ll see about that,” I replied but still mindful of what Zalen had implied of the fates of those who had tried. “Leave it to me. I will drive you to safety or die trying.”

When she looked at me, I noted something behind her eyes that could only be the desperate joy of hope.

“It just makes me love you more for wanting to do this for us. But I can’t let you. We would never make it out; we’d all die.”

“I’m willing to take that chance,” I told her with no hesitancy whatsoever. “Are you? Would you take that chance, for Walter to finally have a good life and attend good schools like other boys? Would you take that chance”—I gave the gravid belly a momentary caress—“to give this unborn child the chance to live and to behold the beauty of the world, and to save it from the blasphemous death that awaits it otherwise?”

She sobbed, gulped, and nodded. “Yes! I will take the chance! Even if we all die, then at least I’ll get to die with you…”

“Wait here,” I told her, choking up. “I’ll return presently,” and next I was out of the house and back out into the moon-spattered night.

I did not allow myself to entertain thoughts which might divert my focus, but what a luxury that would have been. I wended back toward the Onderdonk’s, eyes proverbially peeled, my Colt pistol slippery in my sweating hand. The woods were profuse with night-sounds now, where they hadn’t been before. It made me wonder. If these fullblooded monstrosities were indeed on the hunt for me, I saw no hint of them all the way back to Onderdonk’s ramshackle compound.

The smokers were gusting; I ignored the rich, savory—and unmentionable—aroma. Only from the corner of my eye did I allow myself a glance at the dead creature staked to the tree. The prospect of seeing one of these abominations in detail did not incite my curiosity. Closer to the truck, I had to step around Zalen’s innards and body parts, a fairly daunting task in itself, though I did spare myself one mental levity: It couldn’t have happened to a finer and more forthright gentleman.

Good Lord! came my next distasteful thought, for when I slipped into the time-weathered vehicle, my buttocks grew immediately sopped from the deposit of Zalen’s blood which had been let during his evisceration and dismemberment. I sat still a moment, to slowly survey my immediate surroundings through the windscreen, and saw nothing—absolutely nothing—out of the ordinary. If these fullbloods are hunting me, they’re exhibiting a less-than-fair effort thus far. A grim reminder assailed me next, however: Zalen’s earlier concern about the truck’s starting mechanism. I was an antiquarian and philanthropist, not a car thief. If it’s a keyed ignition, then I’ll have no choice but to drag Onderdonk’s half-cooked corpse from the smoker and search his pockets for the key… I withdrew my pocket-flash, closed my shooting eye to preserve its night-vision, then, for just a split-second, turned on the flash before the dashboard.

My heart fell like a stone.

What my flash illumined was a cylindrical keyway mounted in the dash.

“Here’s the key, Mr. Morley,” the small but sudden voice whispered just outside the open truck window. Where my heart had just sunk in the worst despair it nearly jettisoned from my mouth in the coming shock.

It was young Walter who stood beside the vehicle.

“In Heaven’s name, son!” I snapped a whisper back to him. “You nearly stopped my heart!” but then my eyes flicked to his adolescent hand and proved what he claimed was true. “How… How on earth did you—”

A modest smile of pride touched his face. “Mr. Onderdonk would always keep the key beneath his door mat; I’ve seen him put it there a lot, sir, during my hikes through the woods.”

“Not only a lad of proper manners,” I gushed, “but one of industriousness.” I blinked. “But you were asleep only a short time ago.”

“I woke up and heard you and my mom talking, so I came out on my own, to get the key for you.”

This was certainly a gift I could never have anticipated. “You’re a fine boy, Walter, and a very brave one. But it’s unduly dangerous out here. Do you know about… ,” but then the sentence deteriorated.

“I know all about the fullbloods, sir. I’ve seen them a few times, but tonight, I’ve seen a whole lot of them.”

And it’s my fault, I reminded myself. Walter’s courage was commendable but it did indeed put him in great danger. “Get in next to me, Walter. We’re going to pick up your mother so I can take you both to live with me.”

“But you’ll need help, sir,” he added. “It would be best if I position myself in the back of the truck. I can’t get a good aim if I’m inside with you.”

“A good aim? Walter, whatever are you talking about?”

He raised his handmade bow. “They may try to block the road back to the house, but I’m a pretty good shot.”

I smiled in spite of myself. “Lad, you’re surely the bravest boy to ever walk these parts but I’m afraid that suction-cup arrows will do little good against the fullbloods.”

Then he showed me a handful of real arrows.

“See, Mr. Morley? We better go, before they come.”

What could I say to such youthful ingenuity and unhesitant bravado? “All right, Walter. Get in back and be vigilant… And keep your fingers crossed that this old vehicle starts.”

The boy hopped in back. With wide eyes, then, and a trembling lip, I inserted the key into the cylinder, uttered a prayer that seemed dismally anemic, and turned the key.

The rusted hulk hitched, gave off a loud metallic whine that made the tendons in my neck stand out, then rumbled to a start. I ground gears in my attempt to get it in first, gritted my teeth at a long grind, then we were finally moving. The vehicle was indeed roadworthy, but in that evidence, the noise its starting had made could surely be heard from here to town.

I pulled out and turned posthaste, gravel and oyster shells popping beneath worn tires. “Keep a sharp eye!” I called to Walter when I considered the necessity to leave the headlamps off. “Yes, Mr. Morley!” he replied, and when I glanced back through the hole which had once housed glass, I saw the lad positioned in back, his crude bow at the ready. I knew that at an identical age, I’d have been in possession of not one-tenth of the boy’s courage. I’ll raise him as though he were my own, I vowed, and be the father he’d never had, and the same for Mary’s baby… Rusted springs ground when I throttled the archaic vehicle across the rutted road to town. The moon seemed to spray its light upon us for the few seconds that the road exposed us, such that the road itself and the trees and vegetation lining it seemed iridescent, and this made me think of Lovecraft’s masterpiece, “The Color Out of Space,” said to be his personal favorite. Though my fear levels jumped from this brief exposure, it enabled me to view the road both ways. Where I expected to glimpse enemies, I saw, again, virtually nothing in the way of detractors.

Strange, I thought. Unless they’re lying in wait…

The enfeebled truck rocked when I traversed the wheel and navigated into the long, heavily wooded dirt-scratch lane which would lead us to the house. Suddenly darkness swallowed us, only minutely dappled by the moon, for the boughs of overhead trees nearly connected with one another from either side, transposing our route into that of a tunnel. I had to retard speed considerably now, for the reduced visibility.

Walter’s wan face peered in to the rear hole. “Mr. Morley? Maybe you should turn on the headlamps. I can’t see a thing!”

The light-discipline of a soldier surely had tactical exceptions, not to mention that I was nothing remotely similar to a soldier. Just a rich pud, I recalled Zalen’s slight, but he was right. I fancied I could hear him laughing at me now, even as his odious head continued to cook. But now I would have to be a soldier, and I would have to take chances in order to achieve success. I took the lad’s advice, and switched on the headlamps.

The boy shrieked, and so did I.

Figures rushed forward out of the bramble-carpeted woods. Before I could even make transitive reaction, I saw a queerly robed figure—but one with a clearly human face—lunge forward but then buckle back, his hand shooting to his face as an arrow caught him right in his opened mouth.

“Good shot, Walter!”

When a hand—a human hand, not the webbed extremity I expected—shot into the passenger window, I thrust my pistol-filled fist toward it, then—

BAM!

The lucky shot caught the marauder right in the adam’s apple. Bubbly blood shot from the wound as the robed predator screamed.

And it was a man I recognized. Mr. Wraxall, the restaurant owner…

These were not the monstrous fullbloods I anticipated to be set for ambush, but townsmen, all dressed in those same robes with esoteric fringe. More snatches of faces were revealed: the hotel clerk, the maintenance man, the diner who’d been lunching with his paramour at the restaurant, and others. When two more shot out from left and right, Walter struck one in the shoulder; the aggressor unwisely hesitated where he stood, then was bellowing as the vehicle’s wheels drubbed him beneath the chassis. The second assailant tried to climb into my open window where I easily fired a shot directly into the top of his head. He fell away, but not before I could recognize the face in the hood’s oval: Dr. Anstruther.

Sin or not, I chuckled at the cad’s death, and considered the splotches of his grey matter upon my shirt a unique badge of honor.

The rest of the road to the house was clear.

Where I’d expected the opposition to be formidable, I found only sheepshank weakness in its place. The squat house now came into view at the end of the headlamps’ beams.

“This was almost too easy, Walter,” I called out behind me. “And that troubles me quite a bit.” I killed the motor, hopped out. “We must hurry now and fetch your mother. Between the engine-noise and my pistol, there’ll be more after us…”

I sprang to the vehicle’s rear bed to lift Walter out, but—

Oh, my God in Heaven, no…

The only objects occupying this space were the boy’s meager bow and the final can of petrol.

I glanced out into the woods but saw and heard nothing.

How could I have let this happen? I condemned myself. The town collective snatched Walter out of the back… and have taken him away…

4.

A half-hour’s desperate search in the woods yielded no positive result, and to search longer would only jeopardize the possibility of getting Mary and her unborn out alive. Hence, I trudged back to the brick-and-ivy-netted hovel like a man on his way to the gallows. What could I tell Mary? Her son had been abducted and most likely was dead already—all under my charge…

The very normal sound of crickets followed me back inside, but then came another sound, one which actually deflected my all-pervading muse of despair:

The sound of a baby crying.

I plunged out of the foyer’s ink-like murk into the candle-lit room, where the sound of infantile crying hijacked my gaze toward the heap of a mattress. “Mary!”

There she sat, bearing an exhausted smile as she sat upright among makeshift pillows. In her arms, pressed to her swelling bosom, was a newly born babe, swaddled in linens.

“I went into labor just after you left,” she said, rosy-cheeked. “And then it happened only minutes later.” She turned the infant for me to see.

A miracle, I thought. It was as perfect as any babe I’d ever beheld. The moment it took notice of me, it quieted, and looked at me wide-eyed.

“See, he likes you, Foster. Just the sight of you calms him.” Mary rocked him as best she could.

“What a wonder,” I whispered. “I’m only sorry I wasn’t here to assist when the time came.”

“Each time it’s easier,” she informed. “There was barely any pain with this one.” She glanced hopefully to me, eyes aglint in the candlelight. “But we must name him right away, in case—”

In case we die trying to leave, I finished for her.

“I’m going to name him Foster,” she said.

I went speechless, a tear beading in my eye.

Then her hopeful glance turned hard as granite. “And they’re not going to get this one. Only over my dead body…”

The joy of this notice crested in my heart, but then crashed to the most stygian depths.

She still didn’t know that Walter was gone.

“Mary, I… I…”

“I love you so much, Foster,” she interrupted, teary-eyed herself. “I want you to marry me. I want to spend the rest of my life with you, and raise this child with you… and make love to you every single night…”

The words, greater than any gift I’d ever been given, only dragged my spirit deeper into the abyss of black verity.

“You, me, and Walter,” she mused on, breast-feeding now. “We’ll be such a happy family.”

Sorrow sealed my throat like a strangler’s gasp. I could barely hack out, “Mary, you don’t understand. It’s about—”

“I know what it’s about,” her placid voice came to me. “It’s about Walter.”

I stared.

“I never got the chance to explain earlier,” she went on, modestly covering enough of her bosom to forestall my view. “Earlier, you said that you’d witnessed Cyrus Zalen at the waterfront, delivering sacks of newborns to the fullbloods.”

“But-but… but Mary, what—”

“Don’t worry, sweetheart. You were simply mistaken.”

“Mistaken?” I asked but by now my mind was thoroughly disarranged. “No, no, Mary, I saw him, it was Zalen.”

“You saw a man in a black raincoat is what you saw, Foster. Right?”

“Why… yes.”

She looked right at me. “Foster, the man stalking you in the woods earlier today wasn’t Zalen.”

The comment took me aback. “But… I thought sure.”

“And the man you saw out on the sandbar tonight wasn’t Zalen, either.”

“Who, then?” I demanded.

Mary squirmed in her seat, candlelight pale on her face. “It was Walter’s father—”

“What!”

“Foster… turn around.”

The cryptic command reversed my position, and my eyes blossomed at the surreal sight.

It was a man tall and gaunt who stood in the opposite corner. The black raincoat seemed several sizes too large, and its hood draped most of his face. More important was the minor burden in his arms: it was Walter. At first I feared the boy was dead but then I noted the rise and fall of his young chest.

“This is Walter’s father,” Mary told me in the struggling light. “Those times you mistook him as Zalen stalking you, he was actually coming here, to catch a glimpse of his son.”

I suppose I already knew via some blackly ethereal portent, even before the figure retracted the hood to reveal the face of Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

I stood, lax-jawed, dizzy—staring at the icon as if beholding a vision from the highest precipice of the earth…

The voice which issued from the thin lips sounded high but parched, an exerted whisper. He hefted the living weight. “My son is in no danger, sir; he’s merely fainted from the shock of his abduction by several of the town’s collective members. Please rest assured that these self-same abductors are no longer among the living.”

“You killed them?”

The thin face nodded. “Just as I killed the fullblood that was after you at the Onderdonk’s. And as Mary has informed you, I was the ferryman you glimpsed on the sandbar tonight.” The voice teetered now between cracking and high-pitchedness, hollow yet somehow exhibiting depth at the same time. “In the amalgam of my damnable onus. This nefarious deed has been my province alone, since the sixteenth of March, nineteen hundred and thirty-seven.”

The day after his death, I knew. The Master’s words sounded ruined, like thin-membraned things blown through fence-slats in the wind. The obscene circumvention of death left his narrow visage pallored as if old mortician’s wax had been applied to a skull. This semi-translucence caused me to shudder, as did his eye-whites which more resembled dirt-flecked snowcrust.

“And as you’ve already been partially apprized,” he grated on, “the detestable creatures which I fictionalized as ‘the Deep Ones’ are in possession of aggressive philtres which re-synthesize nucleotide activity within a certain helical infrastructure that exists in every human cell. This ingenious—and diabolic—process has the power to, among other things, reconstitute life in the dead. Hence, sir, my damnation and the recompense for my sins.”

“Your… sins?” I questioned. “But you’ve been known throughout your natural life as an atheist. The concept of sin is one you don’t believe in.”

“Not my conception,” the haunted man intoned, “but their conception.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“I penned The Shadow Over Innsmouth close to a decade ago, but, lo, in its flaw, it was never published, and in its not being published, word never traced back to the fullbloods of its existence…”

“But that all changed,” I hazarded, “in late-1936, when the Visionary Publications copy became available to the public. And word got back—”

“—back to the eternal monstrosities who hold sway over this place, yes. But they didn’t endeavor to pursue me then—it was already known that I was suffering from a terminal affliction. Several months later, however, when I died, word of my decease riposted back to them as well. The night after I was buried, a troop of the accurst things came up out of Narragansett Bay, exhumed me, and re-enlivened my pitiable corpse. Since then I’ve been forced to serve them, in a number of abominable fashions whose details I’ll spare you. The nexus of my punishment, though, and I should think it quite perceptible now, is the delivery of all newborns to the fullbloods’ soul-dead machinations.”

My throat suddenly shriveled. “They brought you back for that. To be a servitor for them.”

“That and far, far worse, sir. But an unwilling traitor to my race, and the devil’s package boy. The only way to protect the life of my son was to perform as I’m commanded, and deliver the innocent newborns into their appalling clutches.” The dead eyes looked to Mary and her now-sleeping baby. “It is a task I shall never discharge again.” He placed Walter down alongside Mary, then returned his attention to me. “And of you, sir, I must beg a favor.”

“But I owe you my life,” I exclaimed. “The beast at Onderdonk’s was only moments away from killing me before you intervened—”

“Do as you have promised,” the ghost-voice quavered, “and deliver Mary and my son to safety.”

“I will. This I pledge—”

But in my own hesitation, I recalled something crucial while on the same hand Mary’s attitude seemed suddenly crestfallen.

“Your brother, Mary. And your stepfather,” I commenced with the dark implication.

“I know,” she acknowledged. “Paul’s not here. He sleeps in the backroom at the store.”

The looks we all shared told all.

“We’ll have no choice but to leave him. A rescue attempt would grossly reduce our chances of safe escape with Walter and the baby…”

“I’ll see to the task of relieving him of his misery myself,” Lovecraft offered. “The fullbloods will kill him once they learn that Mary has fled the collective, and they’ll do so in a manner most grueling and torturous. I’ll be certain to get to him before they have occasion to. He’ll suffer not an iota of pain.”

“My stepfather, though,” Mary half-sobbed. “He’s in the next room, and I’m afraid…”

She needn’t finish. He would have to be euthanized, and since I was the one with the gun— “This room here?” I asked of the crude and slightly tilted wooden door to the side.

She gulped and nodded.

“All right then.” I withdrew my handgun, edged toward the door.

Mary struggled to her feet to come near me. “But, Foster, you must understand. My stepfather—he’s almost completely gone over by now.”

“Gone over?”

Lovecraft picked up the explanation, “The metamorphosis which afflicts the crossbreeds not only taints their physical features but, I regret to impart, also their mental faculties. It’s a certain eventuality that such hybrids in advanced age such as Mary’s stepfather become hostile with time and adopt aspects of the mentality, attitudes, and sentiments of the fullbloods.”

“It’s true, Foster,” Mary added. “He’s worse now than ever. If you go in there, he’ll attack you.”

Then so be it, I thought, but as I approached the door Lovecraft stopped me with a hand to my shoulder. “You are not expendable, sir, but I am. It’s a much more difficult event to kill a dead man than one who’s still living.”

“But I feel it’s my responsibility,” I uttered.

“You mustn’t take the chance,” he insisted. “You’re Mary and Walter’s only hope. Save your ammunition.” He took the gun and returned it to my pocket, then from his own extracted a razor-sharp fileting knife. “When I’m not detained for other, more monstrous duties, the fullbloods force me to filet fish in the workhouses, and it just so happens”—he shuddered at the thought—“I hate fish.” His ruined eyes addressed me more directly. “Go now. Take them out of here now… and fulfill your pledge to me.”

“But-but,” I stammered, still not quite reckoning the fact that it was Lovecraft in my actual midst, maloccluded jaw and all. “You could come with us.”

“No, it’s time for nature to take its true course,” his voice wisped. “My existence has perverted death for too long. Tonight—I’ll see to it—I shall be dead for good,” and then he picked up the still-unconscious Walter, placed him in my arms, then assisted Mary and the baby toward the door.

Mary tried all she could to stifle her sobs as we stepped back out into the teeming night. Lovecraft bid nothing more as an adieu; he merely cast a final glance at the boy in my arms, then quietly closed the door.

I stowed my passengers all in the front of the vehicle but was stalled by a sudden and very grotesque coercion. “Foster!” shot Mary’s diminutive whisper. “Where are you going?”

“Just… one moment,” I told her, and then it was this coercion that prompted me back to the hovel of a house.

To the back window…

I had to look in, for earlier in the afternoon I’d only glimpsed the fringes of Mary’s stepfather as it sat back in shadow. My eyes, now, held wide on the drab glass pane when the room’s utter darkness was broken by the inner door opening, and Lovecraft undiscouragedly entered the room, candlestick in hand. That is when I saw Mary’s stepfather in detail…

The thing lay sidled over on the floor, breathing with a sound like bubbles being blown under water. When it noticed Lovecraft’s presence, a head that looked squashed down flinched. Mary had said that her stepfather had now fully “gone over,” but I could see that the metamorphosis was not yet totally complete. One eye was indeed froglike in that it existed half out of its socket, with a glistening green-black lid. A gold iris glittered amid the great, peach-sized orb; however its other eye appeared far more human, and the amalgamation of these opposites only heightened the grotesquerie of this living result of breeding between two separate species. Two mere holes functioned as the nose; fissures that could only be gills pulsed at its throat, and overall the skin seemed a queer combination of toad and man.

Then the wide rim of the creature’s mouth snapped open and—

ssssssssssnap!

—out shot a sickly pink cord which could only suffice for its tongue. Immediately I recalled the details of my glimpse through this window earlier in the day, where the same deformed and disjointed figure that Walter referred to as his “gramps” vollied the same cord that I’d then mistaken for a whip. But now I saw that it was no whip; it was a narrow yet heavily veined tentacle, rife with minute suckers which pulsed beneath a repugnant glisten. The appalling, boneless appendage was deftly forestalled by Lovecraft’s wrist, whereupon he sliced the tentacle off with his knife.

Its pain was readily apparent as arms only vaguely human sprang up in protest. The lopsided head shuddered, the great rimmed mouth locked open in order to release a vociferation that could only have been born in hell: a whistle like a tea kettle interlaced by the slopping, wet spattery scream I’d heard a facsimile of earlier. When it tried to rise on joints that flexed backwards, Lovecraft came more definitely forward with his fileting knife…

I trotted away, unable to bear any more of this dismal execution. When the tenor and volume of the crossbreed’s scream quadrupled, I knew the grim task had been done.

With a blank mind, then, I started the rickety vehicle and pulled off. Smoke gusted and springs creaked, but now the truck was barreling down the road away from the awful house that Mary would never again have to enter.

The road south seemed the most direct shot, and its first quarter mile stood miraculously clear. Around a bend, though—

Mary and I screamed in unison.

It was a veritable barricade of monsters which occluded the pass. Fifty of them? A hundred? The logistics scarcely mattered. The sweep of our headlights compounded the sight to an utter vision of chaos: green-glistening skin pocked by brown, toadlike bumps, eyes jutting from compressed, earless heads like balls of black glass. Though they all stood upright, they showed white, runneled underbellies and legs corded with strange muscles. Dangling, horrific genitals told me they were predominantly male. Their height fluctuated between five to seven feet, though even in their upright stances, most were half-hunched over, so God knew their true height. Dare I barrel forward in an attempt to mow them down? Were I alone I may have risked this, but with Mary and her children in my charge, I knew I couldn’t.

The sight froze, maximizing the horror of what we beheld. The mass of abominations stood there, flexed on corded muscles, and as the headlamps blared, they all leaned back, tilted their heads upward, and then, as if on psychic command, their hideous rimmed mouths all opened at once and they began to shriek.

The sound caused the very woods to vibrate: a phlegmatic keening blended with the sound of a thousand men marching quickly through muck. If sound could cause physical impact, this was surely the case for the cacophony, now, made the truck visibly rock. I’m sure I was screaming myself as I threw the decrepit vehicle into reverse, but even at the top of my lungs my own utterance of fear could not be heard over the unearthly mudslide of sound which was being vaulted at us. Mary had already passed out so she did not have to see what I glimpsed in that last half-second before I could turn fully around…

With the fullbloods’ screams of objection, the tongue of each and every one of them jettisoned from their mouths. Unlike Mary’s stepfather, whose hybrid tongue was but a single pink tentacle, each of these monsters possessed a tongue comprised of at least a dozen of the same, glistening and sucker-pocked appendages. Each clump of deranged tongues seemed to twist into a single, fat pulsing column and shivered there in mid-air throughout the entirety of their vocal display. These columns of detestable flesh had to extend at least five feet.

I fully depressed the accelerator pedal when I’d managed to turn around to a northward heading. Did my eyes deceive me when I dared to take one glance in the rearward mirror? I could’ve sworn they were pursuing me now—the entire mass of the things—and some seemed to be leaping forward at bounds of twenty feet, which barely afforded the speeding vehicle any distance ahead of them. It took me a half mile, in fact, to gain any comfortable ground, but just as I’d realized this—

I screamed again and slammed on the truck’s brakes.

At least twice as many fullbloods blocked the northward way out. My God, what can I do now? When I looked over my shoulder through the truck’s former rear window, I could see the first of the southern detachment coming round the bend, bringing their vocal storm with them, but I noticed something else as well…

The can of gasoline that had been in back previously was no longer there.

Where it had gone to, I hardly had time to consider. Now, it seemed, I had no choice but to try to plow through this mass to the north. The baby was wailing now, and Walter finally roused, too, only to glimpse the horrific sight before us.

“Say your prayers, Walter,” I urged, and then the fullbloods ahead of us began to shamble forward. In less then a minute, I knew, we’d be converged upon from north and south.

As I would utter my own last prayer and plunged the accelerator in a feeble attempt to plow through the monstrous blockade, young Walter pointed left and cried out, “Mr. Morley! Who’s that man there?”

Man? my shattered faculties managed, but when I looked I saw the black-raincoated form of Lovecraft waving assertively at us. He was urging me to veer the truck left, into a narrow trail that looked barely able admit the vehicle’s width.

I saw, too, that it was he who’d taken the fuel can from the truck’s rear bed. The can hung from his hand.

When I pulled into the trail, I saw the northward mass of beasts shift into the woods themselves, as if to try to cut me off before I could drive to wherever the road would take us. Shortly thereafter the southern mass poured into the trail behind us. The sound they made caused the forest to tremor: the wet, slopping gush detailed by wave after wave of inhuman caterwauls. At this point, the forest was verminous with the shambling, bump-skinned things.

Then the woods began to shift with crackling light…

“A fire!” Walter shouted.

I could see it all too easily now as I pressed the feeble truck to the extent of its mechanical possibilities. A virtual wall of flame spread through the woods just behind the encroaching ranks, and when I looked desperately south, I saw another wall spreading. Lovecraft had obviously walked a line of petrol on either side of the trail, igniting them only when the dual masses of ichthyic creatures had proceeded deeply enough to be trapped. This month of steadfast drought had turned the forest floor and brambles to a tinder-dry state, and now it was all combusting almost simultaneously. Orange, wavering light pressed us in now, and the sound of crackling woods soon overcame the volume of the fullbloods’ wretched howls, their unearthly battle-cry quickly transposing to sounds of utter consternation. In only a minute or two our entire surroundings were aflame.

Our adversaries were trapped in the woods now by two encroaching walls of fire. The things were trapped, yes.

But so were we.

Each fire-line seemed to follow the truck’s progress. The most stifling heat surged inward, and when glancing to either side I saw mad, inhuman figures thrashing, flopping, convulsing in the ignited woods, dressed in suits of fire. The rearview showed me the narrow trail completely engulfed, with ghost-shapes of blistering things as they were incinerated alive. Just as the fire began to engulf the truck…

I could’ve swooned at the sight.

The trail disgorged us into a moon-lit clearing.

“We’re out!” Walter shouted.

“We made it,” came my own disbelieving whisper. I maintained my headway, though, for fear that some of the fullbloods must have escaped the conflagration, but when at a safe distance, I idled to a halt and looked back on the fiery scene…

Walter’s gaze joined my own. Now the fires were spreading outward, smoke pouring off treetops and billowing in the sky. The macabre, bellicose howls of hundreds of fullbloods now wound down to pathetic and periodic squeals. It was the crackling of massive flames that drowned out all else.

“What… What happened?” Mary asked, bewildered, the baby asleep at her bosom. “It looks like the entire woods are on fire.”

“They will be if we don’t get away from here now,” I realized, and back into gear the truck went, and we were off. Walter’s fortunate knowledge of the area, due to his nature walks, took us to another narrow trail which emptied us out onto the main road into town in only minutes. All that followed us now was the most eerie silence.

“Mr. Morley?” Walter inquired. “That man in the raincoat saved us.”

“Indeed, he did, Walter.”

“I know I’ve seen him in the woods before, many times, but I never got very close to him. Who was that man?”

I took Mary’s hand. “One day, Walter, your mother and I will tell you…”

Not too long after that, a sign gave relieving notice that we were about to exit onto State Route Number One. With a smidgen of luck, we’d be in Providence by dawn.

5.

The passing of six months has brought me many joyous changes. The sale of my Providence mansion—to a Standard Oil executive, no less—has left me even wealthier than before. A dead man’s words—Zalen’s—never left my cognizance: They travel along any existing waterway, and they’re very fast. Now that God had granted my new standing as a family man, I relocated only days after that night of incogitable horror, to a place where there existed no waterways for fifty miles in any direction, in the 36^th state of the union, Nevada. My fortune built us an impregnable adobe house situated in the middle of the region’s most arid land, just south of the state’s dead-center point. Alkaline mud-plains, sand-swept desert, and endless square miles of sagebrush and tumbleweed provide the vista anywhere one might happen to peer.

And—to reiterate—there are no waterways.

I bank in Carson City over a hundred miles northwest, and from there fresh water for drinking and bathing is trucked in weekly. Also trucked in weekly are shifts of Pinkerton guards, who live at the house and keep watch round the clock. They believe I’m merely a successful businessman leery of enemies of the trade. Naturally I’ve never told them exactly what it is I fear may one day encroach the house in the middle of the night.

As for Olmstead and its waterfront sector formerly known as Innswich Point, I can only recount what I’d gleaned from the newspapers: the great drought-stoked forest fire had scorched thousands of surrounding acres. Of the 361 registered residents, none were known to have survived, many having been incinerated in ill-fated evacuation attempts, and the rest having died from smoke-inhalation as the fires, as devastating as they’d been, had not actually burned the town’s new block-and-concrete architecture. How had the fires commenced? Lightning, the sources said. But the region could sigh in relief, since a rainstorm the very next day had prevented the conflagration from spreading to even more devastating ambits. Curiously, a final paragraph mentioned federal inspectors examining the town’s remains days later, but no explanation was rendered for such inspections. Nor was any quantity of information offered for the government’s demolitioning of certain sectors of the town’s waterfront. For safety reasons, was all they said. And no mention, of course, was made of any dead person found to be wearing a scrimy black raincoat…

Mary and I were wed very shortly after relocating, and the life I’ve always dreamed of is now at hand. Live-in tutors educate young Walter, and I couldn’t be more delighted to relate that he’s taken on a similar academic and creative bent to his father. A nanny, too, was hired on, to assist Mary with the rearing of the infant that she’d so complimentarily named Foster. Whichever Sire consigned to that accursed and evil-saturated second floor of the Hilman House had actually fathered the child, it mattered not. I was now the infant’s father, and it was a station in life I felt blessed to have.

Hence…

Happily ever after, as the old cliche goes. Except, perhaps, for the nights, where I sleep less than soundly with my Colt Hammerless beneath my pillow and find myself rising at odd hours to scan the all-encompassing scrubland with my field glasses and to check on the night-guards to satisfy myself than no unmentionable marauders had surprised them under the cover of darkness…

Mary is pregnant again, in her sixth month, the doctor estimates. My celibacy had ended quite passionately on our wedding night, and her zeal for my body as well as my love only gives me cause to thank God all the more for such a blessing. But this, dear reader, subsumes my only potential calamity.

You’ll likely be asking yourself what could possibly be deemed calamitous about wedlock in the eyes of God and the sequent wonder of the miraculous union which brings forth new life.

At the very least, I’m reckoning it quite well, I believe. You see, it wasn’t until after our marriage that Mary, with quite a bit of trepidation, admitted that only minutes after having given birth to Foster—and whilst Walter and I were out fetching Onderdonk’s truck—her genetically deranged stepfather had raped her quite fastidiously. But whether it was my own seed that impregnated her or the tainted seed of that crossbred thing…

Only time will tell.

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