The Innswich Horror

collective members. Please rest assured that these self-same abductors are no longer among the living.”

“You killed them?”

The thin face nodded. “Just as I killed the fullblood that was after you at the Onderdonk’s. And as Mary has informed you, I was the ferryman you glimpsed on the sandbar tonight.” The voice teetered now between cracking and high-pitchedness, hollow yet somehow exhibiting depth at the same time. “In the amalgam of my damnable onus. This nefarious deed has been my province alone, since the sixteenth of March, nineteen hundred and thirty-seven.”

The day after his death, I knew. The Master’s words sounded ruined, like thin- membraned things blown through fence-slats in the wind. The obscene circumvention of death left his narrow visage pallored as if old mortician’s wax had been applied to a skull. This semi-translucence caused me to shudder, as did his eye-whites which more resembled dirt-flecked snowcrust.

“And as you’ve already been partially apprized,” he grated on, “the detestable creatures which I fictionalized as ‘the Deep Ones’ are in possession of aggressive philtres which re-synthesize nucleotide activity within a certain helical infrastructure that exists in every human cell. This ingenious—and diabolic—process has the power to, among other things, reconstitute life in the dead. Hence, sir, my damnation and the recompense for my sins.”

“Your… sins?” I questioned. “But you’ve been known throughout your natural life as an atheist. The concept of sin is one you don’t believe in.”

“Not my conception,” the haunted man intoned, “but their conception.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“I penned The Shadow Over Innsmouth close to a decade ago, but, lo, in its flaw, it was never published, and in its not being published, word never traced back to the fullbloods of its existence…”

“But that all changed,” I hazarded, “in late-1936, when the Visionary Publications copy became available to the public. And word got back—”

“—back to the eternal monstrosities who hold sway over this place, yes. But they didn’t endeavor to pursue me then—it was already known that I was suffering from a terminal affliction. Several months later, however, when I died, word of my decease riposted back to them as well. The night after I was buried, a troop of the accurst things came up out of Narragansett Bay, exhumed me, and re-enlivened my pitiable corpse. Since then I’ve been forced to serve them, in a number of abominable fashions whose details I’ll spare you. The nexus of my punishment, though, and I should think it quite perceptible now, is the delivery of all newborns to the fullbloods’ soul-dead machinations.”

My throat suddenly shriveled. “They brought you back for that. To be a servitor for them.”

“That and far, far worse, sir. But an unwilling traitor to my race, and the devil’s package boy. The only way to protect the life of my son was to perform as I’m commanded, and deliver the innocent newborns into their appalling clutches.” The dead eyes looked to Mary and her now-sleeping baby. “It is a task I shall never discharge again.” He placed Walter down alongside Mary, then returned his attention to me. “And of you, sir, I must beg a favor.”

“But I owe you my life,” I exclaimed. “The beast at Onderdonk’s was only moments away from killing me before you intervened—”

“Do as you have promised,” the ghost-voice quavered, “and deliver Mary and my son to safety.”

“I will. This I pledge—”

But in my own hesitation, I recalled something crucial while on the same hand Mary’s attitude seemed suddenly crestfallen.

“Your brother, Mary. And your stepfather,” I commenced with the dark implication.

“I know,” she acknowledged. “Paul’s not here. He sleeps in the backroom at the store.”

The looks we all shared told all.

“We’ll have no choice but to leave him. A rescue attempt would grossly reduce our chances of safe escape with Walter and the baby…”

“I’ll see to the task of relieving him of his misery myself,” Lovecraft offered. “The fullbloods will kill him once they learn that Mary has fled the collective, and they’ll do so in a manner most grueling and torturous. I’ll be certain to get to him before they have occasion to. He’ll suffer not an iota of pain.”

“My stepfather, though,” Mary half-sobbed. “He’s in the next room, and I’m afraid…”

She needn’t finish. He would have to be euthanized, and since I was the one with the gun— “This room here?” I asked of the crude and slightly tilted wooden door to the side.

She gulped and nodded.

“All right then.” I withdrew my handgun, edged toward the door.

Mary struggled to her feet to come near me. “But, Foster, you must understand. My stepfather—he’s almost completely gone over by now.”

“Gone over?”

Lovecraft picked up the explanation, “The metamorphosis which afflicts the crossbreeds not only taints their physical features but, I regret to impart, also their mental faculties. It’s a certain eventuality that such hybrids in advanced age such as Mary’s stepfather become hostile with time and adopt aspects of the mentality, attitudes, and sentiments of the fullbloods.”

“It’s true, Foster,” Mary added. “He’s worse now than ever. If you go in there, he’ll attack you.”

Then so be it, I thought, but as I approached the door Lovecraft stopped me with a hand to my shoulder. “You are not expendable, sir, but I am. It’s a much more difficult event to kill a dead man than one who’s still living.”

“But I feel it’s my responsibility,” I uttered.

“You mustn’t take the chance,” he insisted. “You’re Mary and Walter’s only hope. Save your ammunition.” He took the gun and returned it to my pocket, then from his own extracted a razor-sharp fileting knife. “When I’m not detained for other, more monstrous duties, the fullbloods force me to filet fish in the workhouses, and it just so happens”—he shuddered at the thought—“I hate fish.” His ruined eyes addressed me more directly. “Go now. Take them out of here now… and fulfill your pledge to me.”

“But-but,” I stammered, still not quite reckoning the fact that it was Lovecraft in my actual midst, maloccluded jaw and all. “You could come with us.”

“No, it’s time for nature to take its true course,” his voice wisped. “My existence has perverted death for too long. Tonight—I’ll see to it—I shall be dead for good,” and then he picked up the still-unconscious Walter, placed him in my arms, then assisted Mary and the baby toward the door.

Mary tried all she could to stifle her sobs as we stepped back out into the teeming night. Lovecraft bid nothing more as an adieu; he merely cast a final glance at the boy in my arms, then quietly closed the door.

I stowed my passengers all in the front of the vehicle but was stalled by a sudden and very grotesque coercion. “Foster!” shot Mary’s diminutive whisper. “Where are you going?”

“Just… one moment,” I told her, and then it was this coercion that prompted me back to the hovel of a house.

To the back window…

I had to look in, for earlier in the afternoon I’d only glimpsed the fringes of Mary’s stepfather as it sat back in shadow. My eyes, now, held wide on the drab glass pane when the room’s utter darkness was broken by the inner door opening, and Lovecraft undiscouragedly entered the room, candlestick in hand. That is when I saw Mary’s stepfather in detail…

The thing lay sidled over on the floor, breathing with a sound like bubbles being blown under water. When it noticed Lovecraft’s presence, a head that looked squashed down flinched. Mary had said that her stepfather had now fully “gone over,” but I could see that the metamorphosis was not yet totally complete. One eye was indeed froglike in that it existed half out of its socket, with a glistening green-black lid. A gold iris glittered amid the great, peach-sized orb; however its other eye appeared far more human, and the amalgamation of these opposites only heightened the grotesquerie of this living result of breeding between two separate species. Two mere holes functioned as the nose; fissures that could only be gills pulsed at its throat, and overall the skin seemed a queer combination of toad and man.

Then the wide rim of the creature’s mouth snapped open and—