The Innswich Horror

Smashwords
Edition

Necro
Publications

2012

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THE INNSWICH
HORROR

© 2010 by Edward Lee

This digital edition © 2012
Necro Publications

ISBN:
9781452417097

Cover, Book Design &
Typesetting:

David G. Barnett

Fat Cat Graphic
Design

http://www.fatcatgraphicdesign.com

a Necro
Publication

5139 Maxon Terrace •
Sanford, FL 32771

http://www.necropublications.com

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Foremost, the author must thank the
late, great H. P. Lovecraft for providing thirty years of horrific
wonder and demented influence. I must also thank the late Brian
McNaughton for early influences. Also Tim McGinnis, Bob Strauss,
Richard Chizmar, and Ian Levy. I am further in debt to authors S.
T. Joshi, Darrell Schweitzer, and Anthony Pearsall for their
various preeminent books on the life and works of HPL. Please
forgive any misrepresentations and/or errors.

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For Wendy Brewer. Be my Cthulheena.

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1.

The motor-coach noise provided an aural
mental backdrop: I imagined myself as the Master, and fancied I
could see what
he
would
see beyond the drab window. Not common fields, unremarkable
treelines, and a typical New England summer sky but scenes much
more sinister. Blasted heaths pocking malnourished meadows and
dying scrubland, trees twisted and lightning-scarred, and a sky
onerous and swollen with menace. And there—yes!—over the rusted
iron railing-work of a decades-old bridge, my gaze was commandeered
by the sluggish Miskatonic, in whose depths God knew what lurked or
lay bloated in death or states
worse
than death. The prosaic bus
window was no longer a simple transparent pane but a prism-obscura,
a looking-glass to eldritch sights, nether-chasms, and leaky rives
betwixt dimensions and inconteplatable horrors. Then I
blinked—

—and slumped with a smile. It was just the
rushing and very healthy Essex River below and, to either side, an
endless rise of pine and oak. No, though God had possessed me with
an ample grasp for learning, I was not so possessed by even an
irreducible fraction of the Master’s imagination. I suppose that’s
why I delighted so in his tales. Imagination, indeed, was a gift
better reveled in by true scribes of the fantastical.

Scribes such as Howard Phillips
Lovecraft.

I shared the bus with but
a half-dozen other fellows, men of hard labor, judging by their
appearance; and I dared wonder if Lovecraft himself had ever ridden
this same bus. If so:
Which seat? Which
window did he gaze past to titillate his muse?
It was a funny thing, such reverence to this manner of
fiction. Just as HPL was obsessed with everything from the cosmos
to colonial architecture, I, it seems, am obsessed with his
work.

My name is Foster Morley, thirty-three years
of age, brown-haired and brown-eyed. I suppose Lovecraft might
describe me as nondescript and unobtrusive, but he would likely be
amused by a certain parallel. Like so many of his protagonists, I
come from solid English gentry and family means, wealthy by legacy,
and hold an unutilized degree from Brown University. I occupy a
180-year-old manse in stately Providence, near the Athenaeum, where
my family bloodline migrated to before the Revolution. That family
is now deceased, I the only offspring. Hence, by the grace of my
Creator, my days are dreams in which I want for nothing, and when I
am not philanthrophising… I read. I read Lovecraft, over and over
again, for never have mere words on paper been able to transport me
to other, more interesting worlds. Worlds not akin to this one at
all—with its financial depression and its unfathomable wars. No,
but instead worlds of dreadful wonder and daedalic terror.

Oddly, I was never aware
of Lovecraft until I read an obituary in the
Providence Evening Bulletin
over two
years ago, in March of 1937, commenting on the local academic
fantasist’s passing and strange career. Curiosity piqued, then, I
lucked upon the June, 1936, issue of the magazine
Weird Tales
and pored
over “Shadow Out of Time.” From that point, I was duly habituated,
after which I expended minor sums but fastidious effort in making
everything the Master wrote a constituent of my library. My
obsession was at hand, and more than that—perhaps my salvation.
Though content in my companionless solitude, I now had something
bereft to me for so long: mental substance, a trip to lost
terrascapes every night, rather than counting tedious hours of
vacuity.

I took to re-reading his
work at the tree by his grave at Swan Point Cemetery; I strolled
weekly past his rooming-house in College Street and would always
stop to peer out upon Federal Hill and spy St. John’s Catholic
Church, his model for his last tale in earnest, the brilliant
“Haunter of the Dark”; I’d prowl Angell Street and Benefit, hoping
that some psychic lingering of the icon might brush by me—or
somehow bestow a macabre, ethereal blessing; I’d even shop weekly
at the Weybosset’s Store where he so often spent his pittance on
food. More than once, too, I railed to New York, to stare up in awe
at the squalid Flatbush rowhouse where the Master lived off and on
with his wife; most recently I lit a votive at St. Paul’s Chapel on
Broadway, where they married. I took to traveling where
he
traveled: from
Marblehead to the District of Columbia to New Orleans, from
Wilbraham, Massachusetts, to Dunedin, Florida—and exclusively by
steam-train or motor coach, for this afforded me to see what he saw
on the same long and clattering jaunts. That
process—
seeing
—was most crucial to me, seeing and being where he had been.
I once stood at the foot of Poe’s grave in Baltimore, only because
I knew that Lovecraft had stood there once as well. I even tried to
purchase the looming gable-manse at 135 Benefit Street but the
owners would not sell, even for the preposterous price I offered,
this being, of course, the nefarious, lichen-enslimed “shunned”
house.

Obsessed? Without doubt. An alienist, I’m
certain, would label me with some syndrome close to clinical,
something analytically Jungian. Through Lovecraft’s words I know
that I was desperately in search of something, and I’ll only know
what that something is when I find it.

Er, pardon me. I should say that I’ve
already found it—in Innswich—perhaps to my eternal turmoil.

I’d left the servants in
charge—they were quite used to my junkets of inexplicable travel by
now—and had decided to retrace the fictive journey of one of his
characters, that character being the unnamed protagonist of my very
favorite tale,
The Shadow Over
Innsmouth.
HPL’s own notes, according to
his confidant August Derleth, name the hapless fictional character
as
Robert Olmstead,
though the name never appears in the actual story. It is not
difficult to see, however, Mr. Olmstead’s mirror-image to Lovecraft
himself: an antiquary and architectural aficionado, traveling the
depths of New England always by the least costly mode possible, to
pursue his own obsessions.

This, then, would serve as
my summer outing. Robert Olmstead departed Newburysport for Arkham
on July 15, 1927, with the intention of perusing the witch-haunted
town’s archives and Colonial structure. Hence, my own desire to
duplicate Olmstead’s trip, again, to
see
what Lovecraft saw. Therefore,
ever the stickler for detail, I commenced with my own sojourn on
July, 15, 1939, leaving Newburysport from the same bus stop in
front of the very real Hammond’s Drug Store for the town of Salem,
which was HPL’s blueprint for Arkham.

I’d selected the
forward-most seat on the coach, on the right-hand side, which
afforded a spacious view through the windscreen. Several miles past
the Essex now, the scenery seemed to denigrate in a manner that
eludes sensible description; suddenly, the woods looked
impoverished,
the
vegetation lost its summer luster, and even the road, paved only by
crushed oyster shells, elicited the word
sallow,
though I know this sounds
preposterously non-schematic. It was something, however, that
existed beyond that month’s record-breaking drought. An unchecked
darkness settled in my spirit for reasons I cannot
define.

Finally, through the windscreen, I took
refreshing note of some sign of humanity: a rundown wood-slat
shack—obviously a domicile—next to what appeared to be a
smokehouse. A hog-pen, too, caught my eye, bounded by crude chicken
wire and surrounding less than half a dozen swine. Something
smelled appetizing, though, which I thought could only be from the
smokehouse. Lastly a sign and roadside vending stand came into
view. The sign read: ONDERDONK & SON. SMOKEHOUSE — FISH-FED
PORK. At the same instant we passed, the driver seemed to
grunt.

“Fish-fed pork?” I queried the driver. “I’ve
never heard of that. Have you ever happened to try it?”

The driver’s face remained
forward, and at first I thought he had no intention of answering.
“T’ain’t nothin’ I’ve ever et nor ever will. Same five hogs in that
pen damn near year-long. More like fish-fed
skunk,
knowin’ the Onderdonks. He
and his kid—they’se furren. Don’t like ‘em, an’ they’se don’t like
us.”

A second of cogitation
translated
furren
as foreign. I couldn’t resist: “Us as in whom?”

“Don’t matter!” the driver snapped. “Me, I’m
just doin’ my job. But them Onderdonks don’t dare try to sell past
the loop.”

By now I had no conceivable idea what
founded the driver’s displeasure. “The loop?” I said more to
myself.

“They sell that slop you call barbeque to
migrants and plain folk who happen to be travelin’ from New’bry to
Salem, but they never take the loop in to town.”

The perplexion steeped. I thought I’d best
keep my queries to myself yet I also knew that the map showed no
other town between Newburyport and Salem. “The town? You must mean
Salem, but surely we’re still an hour off at the least.”

“No,” he grumbled. Only now did I take
notice of the driver’s features—first recounting Lovecraft’s story
and the motor-man named Joe Sargent, cursed by that “Innsmouth
look”: narrow-headed, flat-nosed, crease-necked, with unblinking,
over-protuberant eyes. Sargent’s appearance causes in the mind of
Robert Olmstead a spontaneous aversion. This fellow here, however,
though surly in demeanor, was just a commonplace workingman.

“Olmstead,” he said, “and here’s the loop
now.” He veered aside and took a fork in the road, past a sign that
read OLMSTEAD - 2 MILES - POP. 361. “This the only bus that goes
there’n it’s a fifteen-minute time-point.”

It wasn’t the fact that we
were suddenly embarking toward a town I’d not heard of (not to
mention a town not displayed on the map) but something else
altogether. “
Olmstead?
” I pressed the word. “You’re telling me there’s an uncharted
town called
Olmstead?
”

The question perturbed
him. “It’s on the time-table. We had a devil of a time tryin’ to
get the county to let us put in a bus stop; they made us
incorporate,
whatever
that means ‘sides havin’ to pay a fee. Had to do the same to get
mail delivery. T’ain’t right that Olmsteaders shouldn’t have no way
to get to the bigger towns, especially the economy bein’ the way it
is,” and then an abrupt thumb jerked over his shoulder to gesture
the six other passengers sharing the coach with me. “Weren’t for
the fishin’,” he added, “we’d be sunk.”