Edward Lee: The Innswich Horror

Mary and I were wed very shortly after relocating, and the life I’ve always dreamed of is now at hand. Live-in tutors educate young Walter, and I couldn’t be more delighted to relate that he’s taken on a similar academic and creative bent to his father. A nanny, too, was hired on, to assist Mary with the rearing of the infant that she’d so complimentarily named Foster. Whichever Sire consigned to that accursed and evil-saturated second floor of the Hilman House had actually fathered the child, it mattered not. I was now the infant’s father, and it was a station in life I felt blessed to have.

Hence…

Happily ever after, as the old cliche goes. Except, perhaps, for the nights, where I sleep less than soundly with my Colt Hammerless beneath my pillow and find myself rising at odd hours to scan the all-encompassing scrubland with my field glasses and to check on the night-guards to satisfy myself than no unmentionable marauders had surprised them under the cover of darkness…

Mary is pregnant again, in her sixth month, the doctor estimates. My celibacy had ended quite passionately on our wedding night, and her zeal for my body as well as my love only gives me cause to thank God all the more for such a blessing. But this, dear reader, subsumes my only potential calamity.

You’ll likely be asking yourself what could possibly be deemed calamitous about wedlock in the eyes of God and the sequent wonder of the miraculous union which brings forth new life.

At the very least, I’m reckoning it quite well, I believe. You see, it wasn’t until after our marriage that Mary, with quite a bit of trepidation, admitted that only minutes after having given birth to Foster—and whilst Walter and I were out fetching Onderdonk’s truck—her genetically deranged stepfather had raped her quite fastidiously. But whether it was my own seed that impregnated her or the tainted seed of that crossbred thing…

Only time will tell.

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About the Author

EDWARD LEE has had more than 40 books published in the horror and suspense field, including CITY INFERNAL, THE GOLEM, and BLACK TRAIN. His movie, HEADER was released on DVD by Synapse Films, in June, 2009. Recent releases include the stories, “You Are My Everything” and “The Cyesologniac,” the Lovecraftian novella “Trolley No. 1852,” and the hardcore novel HEADER 2. Currently, Lee is working on HEADER 3. Lee lives on Florida’s St. Pete Beach. Visit him online at:

http://www.edwardleeonline.com