Edward Lee: The Innswich Horror

There she sat, bearing an exhausted smile as she sat upright among makeshift pillows. In her arms, pressed to her swelling bosom, was a newly born babe, swaddled in linens.

“I went into labor just after you left,” she said, rosy-cheeked. “And then it happened only minutes later.” She turned the infant for me to see.

A miracle, I thought. It was as perfect as any babe I’d ever beheld. The moment it took notice of me, it quieted, and looked at me wide-eyed.

“See, he likes you, Foster. Just the sight of you calms him.” Mary rocked him as best she could.

“What a wonder,” I whispered. “I’m only sorry I wasn’t here to assist when the time came.”

“Each time it’s easier,” she informed. “There was barely any pain with this one.” She glanced hopefully to me, eyes aglint in the candlelight. “But we must name him right away, in case—”

In case we die trying to leave, I finished for her.

“I’m going to name him Foster,” she said.

I went speechless, a tear beading in my eye.

Then her hopeful glance turned hard as granite. “And they’re not going to get this one. Only over my dead body…”

The joy of this notice crested in my heart, but then crashed to the most stygian depths.

She still didn’t know that Walter was gone.

“Mary, I… I…”

“I love you so much, Foster,” she interrupted, teary-eyed herself. “I want you to marry me. I want to spend the rest of my life with you, and raise this child with you… and make love to you every single night…”

The words, greater than any gift I’d ever been given, only dragged my spirit deeper into the abyss of black verity.

“You, me, and Walter,” she mused on, breast-feeding now. “We’ll be such a happy family.”

Sorrow sealed my throat like a strangler’s gasp. I could barely hack out, “Mary, you don’t understand. It’s about—”

“I know what it’s about,” her placid voice came to me. “It’s about Walter.”

I stared.

“I never got the chance to explain earlier,” she went on, modestly covering enough of her bosom to forestall my view. “Earlier, you said that you’d witnessed Cyrus Zalen at the waterfront, delivering sacks of newborns to the fullbloods.”

“But-but… but Mary, what—”

“Don’t worry, sweetheart. You were simply mistaken.”

“Mistaken?” I asked but by now my mind was thoroughly disarranged. “No, no, Mary, I saw him, it was Zalen.”

“You saw a man in a black raincoat is what you saw, Foster. Right?”

“Why… yes.”

She looked right at me. “Foster, the man stalking you in the woods earlier today wasn’t Zalen.”

The comment took me aback. “But… I thought sure.”

“And the man you saw out on the sandbar tonight wasn’t Zalen, either.”

“Who, then?” I demanded.

Mary squirmed in her seat, candlelight pale on her face. “It was Walter’s father—”

“What!”

“Foster… turn around.”

The cryptic command reversed my position, and my eyes blossomed at the surreal sight.

It was a man tall and gaunt who stood in the opposite corner. The black raincoat seemed several sizes too large, and its hood draped most of his face. More important was the minor burden in his arms: it was Walter. At first I feared the boy was dead but then I noted the rise and fall of his young chest.

“This is Walter’s father,” Mary told me in the struggling light. “Those times you mistook him as Zalen stalking you, he was actually coming here, to catch a glimpse of his son.”

I suppose I already knew via some blackly ethereal portent, even before the figure retracted the hood to reveal the face of Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

I stood, lax-jawed, dizzy—staring at the icon as if beholding a vision from the highest precipice of the earth…

The voice which issued from the thin lips sounded high but parched, an exerted whisper. He hefted the living weight. “My son is in no danger, sir; he’s merely fainted from the shock of his abduction by several of the town’s 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.