Philip Hemplow - The Innsmouth Syndrome

It was only when the indicator light of the car in front began to blink that Carla realised how dark it was getting. The sky beyond the left side windows was still purple with sunset, but on the right it was already black and studded with stars. The other vehicle began to climb the sliproad, leaving her alone on the narrow two-lane. Carla flipped on the main beams and pressed her foot down, coaxing another ten miles per hour from the rented Honda.

It was almost seven pm and she was supposed to be at the hotel already, but her plane had spent an extra hour in a holding pattern over Logan International because of some security scare. A missing pilot’s uniform or something. She hadn’t bothered to seek out the details. All she knew was that it meant she was going to arrive late; and she was tired, and she was hungry.

The GPS chimed, interrupting the Handel concerto she’d found on one of the Boston stations. “In – two – hundred – yards, turn right.” It was the first thing it had said for ten minutes. Carla slowed down.

She was driving past houses now. They had been spaced well apart at first but were now almost continuous. They were modern and shabby, set well back from the street. Half of them looked derelict, with flaking paint or boarded-up windows; but the flickering light of television sets, and the mouldering cars beached at the side of the road, pointed to some degree of inhabitation.

“In – one – hundred – yards, turn right.”

Carla hunched forwards, peering through the windscreen for any sign of the road she was meant to take. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a flash of movement to her left. Her foot shot instinctively to the brake pedal, and only just in time.

With a squeal of tyres, a white pick-up roared out of a side street at speed, swinging across the road just a couple of feet in front of the Honda. It looked for one sickening moment as though it would turn completely over, before it lurched heavily back towards its center of gravity. Two young men clung on in the back, yelling and waving cans of Budweiser in drunken approval. A pale arse was hanging out of the passenger-side window, mooning the shutters and unlit windows of a row of impoverished-looking shops. Reaching the end of the street the pick-up screeched to the left, taking the wing mirror of a parked car with it, and disappeared from sight.

Carla remained frozen in her seat as the delinquent whooping faded into the distance and Handel reasserted himself. The first flush of adrenaline quickly ebbed, but her hands were unsteady on the wheel. The fight-or-flight jumpiness would take a few minutes to subside now.

She found that she had been mentally reciting a prayer, and interrupted it immediately. It was a bad habit. The Jesuits had nothing on Carla’s mother when it came to making prayer instinctive, but this time she was going to attribute her deliverance to anti-lock brakes – not to a miracle by some nebulous and inconsistent deity.

Only one building in the street was spilling light into the evening gloom. It looked like a diner. Across the road from it was a car park surrounded by a high, wire mesh fence. Carla put the Honda in drive and headed for it. She needed a break from driving, and coffee would be welcome too.

It was a cool evening – uncomfortably so for Carla, raised as she had been in near-perpetual, Southern sunshine. She drew the jacket of her suit close about her with one hand, clutching her laptop and handbag in the other. It was eerily quiet now, only the low buzzing of the diner’s neon sign breaking the silence. The chirrup when she thumbed the Honda’s remote locking seemed positively raucous, and the hoof-like clopping of her heels made her feel self-conscious as she hurried back towards the street.

A bell tinkled as she opened the door of the diner. Desperation for caffeine while travelling had driven Carla into some fairly basic and utilitarian establishments in the past, but looking around she decided that this had to rank among the least impressive of them. Baleful, fluorescent lighting and a floor of black and white tiles made it immediately hard on the eyes, while the buzzing from the sign outside joined with the humming lights, the refrigerators, and a resonating Insect-o-cutor in a headache-inducing, symphonic drone that was impossible to ignore.

Behind the grimy, laminate counter stood a teenage girl who would have been rail thin if she wasn’t heavily pregnant. She glared at Carla with evident hostility, drawing on a Marlboro and making no effort to move as her new and only customer crossed the room.

“Good evening” began Carla. No response. “Can I get a cup of coffee, please?”

The girl’s pasty, acne-mottled features curled in a sneer. “Ain’t no hot water” she spat back, venting smoke. Her tone was challenging and surly. Carla was not sure which part of having to serve a smartly-dressed, educated and professional black woman had antagonised the girl, and she didn’t much care. She had learned to pick her battles.

“Okay then, can I have a Coke please?”

The girl waited an unnecessary couple of seconds before fishing a luke-warm bottle out of the chiller behind her, and prising off the lid.

“And a glass” added Carla as she began to turn back. The girl sighed pointedly, but pulled one down from the shelf. She put bottle and glass on the counter with unnecessary force and glowered at Carla, defying her to ask for ice.

Carla picked up her drink and carried it to a table in the farthest corner of the room, aware of the girl’s eyes boring into her back. She couldn’t deny that she felt annoyed. Her own background was vastly more impoverished than that of anyone in this (admittedly pretty dilapidated) town. She’d done nothing to earn this ugly little girl’s contempt.

Carla decanted her drink and then powered up her laptop, partly to give her something to do and partly to aggravate the teenager. Unsurprisingly, there was no wireless service here – but she didn’t need that to access her case files. She opened the Innsmouth folder.

She’d glanced at them before setting off and had a rough idea of what was ahead of her, but hadn’t had chance to read the details. She knew that the assignment was a punishment, retribution for applying for a promotion without telling the boss. Carla had been unofficially pushed down a rung. Now the boss was attending a bioterrorism conference in Florence, everyone else of her grade was at a Legionnaire’s outbreak in a Colorado ski resort, and she was on this godforsaken nothing-enquiry that the EPA had managed to foist on them.

Carla skipped past the usual expenses claim forms, hotel bookings and letters, and opened a .pdf of the police report. It was littered with spelling errors and typos that hardly inspired confidence but was otherwise routine enough, describing a road traffic accident seven weeks before. A stolen car containing four dead teenagers, two boys and two girls, had been found crashed into a tidal creek.

The crash had happened at night, in driving rain, on the two-lane road from Innsmouth to Rowley. The Rowley police hypothesized that the joyriders had been speeding, gone too fast into a bend and just lost control of the vehicle. If their driving was anything like that of the kids Carla had just seen rallying through the streets in their pick-up, she found that easy enough to believe.

The next few documents related to the theft of the vehicle and the disposal of the wreck. It looked as though the oldest boy in the car, Wayne Ramsgate, was the next-door neighbour of its rightful owner. Pool Street, Innsmouth. He was found behind the wheel with his girlfriend next to him. His stepbrother and stepsister were riding in the back.