The Innswich Horror (16 page)

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…