The Innswich Horror

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