The Innswich Horror (22 page)

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.

— | — | —

EDWARD LEE has had more than 40
books published in the horror and suspense field, including CITY
INFERNAL, THE GOLEM, and BLACK TRAIN. His movie, HEADER was
released on DVD by Synapse Films, in June, 2009. Recent releases
include the stories, “You Are My Everything” and “The
Cyesologniac,” the Lovecraftian novella “Trolley No. 1852,” and the
hardcore novel HEADER 2. Currently, Lee is working on HEADER 3. Lee
lives on Florida’s St. Pete Beach. Visit him online at:

http://www.edwardleeonline.com