The Innswich Horror

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