The Innswich Horror

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