Edward Lee: The Innswich Horror

The information sickened me but also made me feel haunted. Thoughtlessly, I seized my handgun and turned to head back to the lake.

“You really are an idiot, Morley,” I was told amid more laughter. He’d grabbed my arm and thrust me back. “Even if you did get a clear shot at it, there’d be a hundred more after you in two minutes. They’d sniff us out. We wouldn’t stand a chance”

I leaned against a tree, gripped by a harrowing despair. “You’re telling me that Mary’s stepfather was spared from the genocide because—”

“—because Mary begged the hierarch not to kill him. She agreed to keep the old stick in hiding, at her house.” Zalen nodded. “Hate to think what she had to do to get that favor.”

I could’ve killed him on the spot for saying such a thing, but I knew there was truth behind it; desperation led to desperate acts. Instead, I collected my senses and continued to follow him. “What about those who aren’t in Olmstead’s town collective?”

“Rejects, like me, are left alone as long as we don’t tell outsiders what’s going on here, and as long as we don’t leave.”

“Those things can’t possibly be everywhere,” I declared. “With a modicum of forethought, I’d suspect that escape would be easily achievable.”

“Sure, you’d think so,” he counted, “but why do you think nobody does? Why do you think Mary’s still here? It’s not because she wants to be, I can tell you that. None of us do.”

“Fear, then?”

“Uh-huh. In the past people—mostly women—have tried to escape. They just can’t handle giving up their babies. But every single one has been brought back”—now Zalen’s expression turned cold—“and made an example of. There are a whole lot more of those things than anyone can guess. If you leave, they’ll track you down the way a bloodhound catches a scent, Morley. They travel along any existing waterway, and they’re very fast.”

I had no choice but to postulate, “So even if we do manage to get out of here, you don’t deem our chances of success to be very high.”

“No, but when they’re on a rampage like they are now, if we don’t try, we’re dead by morning for sure.”

Waterways, hunting a scent, I thought. If we made it back to Providence, I’d install Pinkerton’s men round the clock. Either that or I’d relocate to a place so far removed from any waterways.

“There’s the truck,” Zalen whispered just as the trail had navigated us to an opening in the woods just behind Onderdonk’s property. The aroma of slow-cooking meat hung dense. Several shacks sat teetering in shadows; betwixt two of them I spied a pickup truck that looked as dilapidated as everything else. The only sound that came to my ears was that of pigs chortling.

“Onderdonk’s had those same pigs for years,” came Zalen’s next snide remark, “but they’re just for show. I’ll bet that hillbilly and his kid haven’t really cooked pork for a decade.”

“But where is he?” I queried. “The place looks abandoned.”

“They probably went to bed after they put the meat in the smoker,” he suspected, and pointed to the rows of propped-up metal barrels which sufficed for the cooking apparatus. “That’s good for us… but get your gun out just in case.”

I obeyed the instruction and followed him into the overgrown perimeter. We ambled forth with great care, so not to snap a single twig. Moonlight and shadows diced the various shacks into wedges of light and dark; several sets of small eyes glittered at us when the pigs in the sty took note of us. An owl hooted, then went silent.

“That seems irregular,” I commented of the burlap sacks near the smokers. “Those sacks appear to be full. I saw Onderdonk with my own eyes, carrying the sacks out of the cavern after he and his boy butchered a number of the crossbred corpses.”

Zalen opened a sack; in it were hanks of freshly butchered meat. “Yeah, and if the meat’s still in the bags, then what the hell is…”

The question didn’t necessitate completion. I suppose, deep down, I already knew before we raised the lids of the smokers. I shined my flash inside, then we both recoiled.

Smoke billowed up from Onderdonk’s pink-blistered face, while tendrils of it hung off the hair on his scalp. More smoke, as well, issued from the mouth agape in horrific death; the eyes had curdled cloudy white. A powerful, pork-like aroma spread a ground fog throughout hodgepodge of shacks. Another smoker sealed the fate of Onderdonk’s boy—a pitiable sight, indeed. The lower body-weight, and the probability that the boy had been “cooking” longer than his father, was demonstrated by the fact his eyesockets were filled with bubbling humors. Steam from the poor lad’s poached brain keened from his sinuses and ears.

“God save us,” I croaked.

“The fullbloods got to them,” came Zalen’s hopeless appraisal, “which means they may still be here.”

The prospect seized my heart like a vulturine claw and squeezed. We all but slithered in the direction of the motor, eyes never blinking. But, still, my questions remained in a maelstrom. “Previously, you told me that women made pregnant were allowed to keep their firstborn, but the others must be relinquished to the fullbloods.”

“Yeah? So what?”

“But you also told me that you yourself fathered Mary’s third or fourth child. What kind of a treacherous cretin could deliver his own child to those things in the water?”

“I didn’t have anything to say about it, Morley. We don’t have a choice here—don’t you get that? If I’m ‘treacherous,’ then so is your beloved Mary.”

I wouldn’t hear of it. I knew, I knew to the marrow of my soul, that Mary’s misgivings were levered upon her; if she did not comply, her son, brother, and stepfather would be made fodder for the fullbloods.

“And the kid we had was an accident,” he went on. “I suppose back then I actually loved her—before she joined the collective.”

I winced at the excuse. “Only the unGodliest of men could proclaim to love a woman he was prostituting out like a commodity.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” and then came a snicker. “And I don’t believe in God anyway.”

“I should say that’s obvious—”

“So if your God really exists, you’re gonna have to do a lot of praying to get us out of this.” We both arrived at the truck; in the back bed stood two cans of petrol. Ducking down, Zalen took one and carefully emptied it into the vehicle’s fuel tank. “And,” he went on, “you can pray that this hunk of junk starts…”

“One last question first,” I importuned and gripped his shoulder. My curiosity burned like a brand-iron. “Answer what you refused to answer before.”

“Come on, Morley, we have to—”

“I insist! You said that the ritualism is just veneer founded in ignorant traditions of old: occultism used as ‘icing’ to cover something else.”

“Yes!”

“So what about the babies? What about the sacrifices? If the sacrifice of newborns isn’t an occult oblation, then what else can it be?”

“It’s not sacrifice, for God’s sake. They want the newborns to study them—to study us. Their brains, their cells, their blood—everything, to see how they grow. Like what I said before—the microscopic things in every cell that make us what we are… that’s what they study, that’s what they experiment with.”

“Their understanding of the genetic sciences must outweigh ours a thousandfold,” I said. “So that’s it.”

“Yeah. Sacrifices to the devil? Black magic? It’s just a bunch of what my grandfather used to call codswallop. Ornamentation, Morley, to fool the ignorant masses: us. ”