Edward Lee - The Innswich Horror

“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—

ssssssssssnap!

—out shot a sickly pink cord which could only suffice for its tongue. Immediately I recalled the details of my glimpse through this window earlier in the day, where the same deformed and disjointed figure that Walter referred to as his “gramps” vollied the same cord that I’d then mistaken for a whip. But now I saw that it was no whip; it was a narrow yet heavily veined tentacle, rife with minute suckers which pulsed beneath a repugnant glisten. The appalling, boneless appendage was deftly forestalled by Lovecraft’s wrist, whereupon he sliced the tentacle off with his knife.

Its pain was readily apparent as arms only vaguely human sprang up in protest. The lopsided head shuddered, the great rimmed mouth locked open in order to release a vociferation that could only have been born in hell: a whistle like a tea kettle interlaced by the slopping, wet spattery scream I’d heard a facsimile of earlier. When it tried to rise on joints that flexed backwards, Lovecraft came more definitely forward with his fileting knife…

I trotted away, unable to bear any more of this dismal execution. When the tenor and volume of the crossbreed’s scream quadrupled, I knew the grim task had been done.

With a blank mind, then, I started the rickety vehicle and pulled off. Smoke gusted and springs creaked, but now the truck was barreling down the road away from the awful house that Mary would never again have to enter.

The road south seemed the most direct shot, and its first quarter mile stood miraculously clear. Around a bend, though—

Mary and I screamed in unison.

It was a veritable barricade of monsters which occluded the pass. Fifty of them? A hundred? The logistics scarcely mattered. The sweep of our headlights compounded the sight to an utter vision of chaos: green-glistening skin pocked by brown, toadlike bumps, eyes jutting from compressed, earless heads like balls of black glass. Though they all stood upright, they showed white, runneled underbellies and legs corded with strange muscles. Dangling, horrific genitals told me they were predominantly male. Their height fluctuated between five to seven feet, though even in their upright stances, most were half-hunched over, so God knew their true height. Dare I barrel forward in an attempt to mow them down? Were I alone I may have risked this, but with Mary and her children in my charge, I knew I couldn’t.

The sight froze, maximizing the horror of what we beheld. The mass of abominations stood there, flexed on corded muscles, and as the headlamps blared, they all leaned back, tilted their heads upward, and then, as if on psychic command, their hideous rimmed mouths all opened at once and they began to shriek.

The sound caused the very woods to vibrate: a phlegmatic keening blended with the sound of a thousand men marching quickly through muck. If sound could cause physical impact, this was surely the case for the cacophony, now, made the truck visibly rock. I’m sure I was screaming myself as I threw the decrepit vehicle into reverse, but even at the top of my lungs my own utterance of fear could not be heard over the unearthly mudslide of sound which was being vaulted at us. Mary had already passed out so she did not have to see what I glimpsed in that last half-second before I could turn fully around…