The Innswich Horror

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,