by JG Faherty
The cliff wasn’t as high as I’d anticipated, perhaps twenty or thirty feet. At the bottom, a flat area bordered an underground river easily as large as the Manuxet, which I gathered flowed somewhere above us and somehow fed into this one. Or perhaps both shared a common source. Wide enough so that the feeble light failed to illuminate the other shore, it appeared from darkness to our left and disappeared into the stygian depths to our right, with only a section of a few hundred feet visible to my eyes.
The lamplight reflected off the smooth, unbroken surface, except in one place where the dark, vaguely round shape of a sandbar or large rock jutted from the water not far from shore. The stench of rotten fish and stagnant swamp was much stronger here, bold enough to overpower the lingering taint of death in my nose.
Alert for any movement, I peered down. I believed my father when he said he’d discovered a demon. The very changes to his form spoke of some supernatural experience. I certainly had no desire to suffer a similar fate. If something from the depths of hell lurked below, I intended to stay as far from it as possible.
Except all I saw was shoreline and river.
I stared harder, seeking any signs of life. A glimpse of hellfire-red eyes, perhaps, or a shadow moving within the murky grays and blacks. After all, a demon would most assuredly be lurking in the gloom. The guttering of the lamp made every ripple, every protuberance, shift and writhe, creating ghostly images that had my eyes darting in all directions on wild goose chases.
Finally, exasperation won over fear and I turned to Silas.
“I see nothing. Where is this demon?”
“Sometimes that which we seek is hidden in plain sight. You’re as I once was, blinded by a perception of the world that imposes limits on itself. You must learn to open both your eyes and your mind. Behold.”
Silas stepped right to the edge and raised his voice.
“Show yourself, ’Fhalma.”
The river flowed on, its surface black ice highlighted by glimmers of yellow torchlight that—
A hint of movement? Yes, something had changed. Ripples, barely noticeable, marred the smooth surface. I sought their origin but found nothing amiss, just the shore and sandbar the same as they’d been.
No, not the same.
The sandbar seemed…larger. Before it had been barely long enough for two people to lie on; now it was easily twice that size and still growing, an island where there hadn’t been one before. Perhaps the river’s level was sinking...but no, nothing anywhere else had changed.
Irregular shapes broke the surface around the dark mass, the arched roots of some long-buried tropical tree suddenly sprouting from the soil.
“Behold.”
I glanced at my father, whose attention remained focused on the island, his grotesquely transformed face even more horrific for the smile pulling his peculiar lips tighter. Unable to contemplate those alien features for more than a moment, I turned back to the scene below.
A giant eye stared up at me.
Wide as a man’s spread arms, a black orb floated in a sea of orange fire tainted with streaks of bile yellow. Filled with cold hatred for all that was good, it regarded me in the same soulless manner a bestial sea creature, a great leviathan or kraken possessed of less emotion than a reptile, might eye its next meal.
“Jesus God!” My heart gave a painful shudder. One hand clutching my chest, I fell to my knees as my legs gave out. Silas grabbed my arm, held me steady while the world tipped and spun around me.
I wanted to flee, to cry, to scream for God to save me. But I had no strength; I could only kneel there at the edge of the abyss, gripped by one demon while another waited below to drag me to Hades. For surely that was its intent. The end of times was upon us, the gates of Hell open and the Apocalypse about to begin. And me at the edge of the River Styx, about to undertake a nightmare journey to the netherworld.
Unable to move, to even look away, I remained captured by the thing’s vile gaze. Worse than uncaring, it was malevolent, immoral even. Its very presence degraded the soul, cast a beam of wicked sin and corruption wherever it turned.
The beast rose farther from the river, exposing more of its dreadful form, and some of the roots it lay nestled among twisted and writhed, perhaps the nerves and filaments of that giant eye, squirming and wriggling in the waters of that unnamed river. Then I saw the circular shapes on their undersides and everything became terribly clear.
The giant eye. The black dome behind it. A body immersed in water. Snakelike appendages. Taken together, an unmistakable impression formed in my brain. An enormous squid languishing in the shallows, perfectly disguised as it waited for unwary prey to happen by. Tentacles whipping out to snare the unlucky beast.
Here was the root of all the evil plaguing Innsmouth of late. How, I could not yet say, for without doubt the behemoth below was far too large to stalk the streets unseen, even on the foggiest of nights. But I remembered all too well the squid-like things bursting from the chests of the corpses in the morgue. Offspring of this monster, hatched within the bodies like maggots in a dead animal? Or perhaps invaders, parasites that attached to their hosts like repulsive, many-armed leeches. Did more of the creatures lie within the waters of the poisoned river, just waiting to enter an innocent victim…?
Like my father?
I turned toward Silas, found him already staring down at me with eyes frighteningly similar to that of the demon in the river.
“In God’s name—”
He cut me off with a wicked grin.
“A god, yes, but not one you or I ever dreamed of.”
“What have you done?”
“It is not what I’ve done, Henry. It’s what I’ve become.”
Faster than my eyes could follow, a sinuous limb whipped out and wrapped around my arm. The rubbery tentacle tightened with bone-crushing strength. My heart nearly stopped when what I’d thought a cloak draped over my father’s shoulders suddenly spread wide, revealing itself as a pair of membranous wings.
The tip of the pseudopod rose up, regarding me with a blind, eyeless gaze. A sucker on its underside opened, exposing a circular mouth with a translucent, fleshy tongue from which protruded a needlelike stinger.
“No, please….” The words seemed to come from somewhere else other than me. A gray cloud had descended over me, muffling sound and vision. The loathsome thing before me grew blurry and the ground tilted. I reeled at the edge of sanity, everything I’d ever believed in shattered and tumbling into the darkness. I closed my eyes, gave up. I wanted no more of this world, this life. Let them take me away, lock me in a cell forever. Just like—
“Join me, Henry. Together we can rule the world.”
Join him? Never! Did I say that aloud? I tried again. Better to die than—
“Goodbye, Henry.”
Chapter Fifteen
I woke to the horrific stench of the demon’s lair, rotten fish and decomposing human flesh thick and heavy with each heaving breath I took. I sat up with a hoarse cry, convinced I still lay in the cave, a prisoner of the abomination my father had become. Or worse, its next victim.
Frantic, I looked in all directions, alert for any movement. Dim light illuminated the room, which I belatedly noticed was my own. The familiar outlines of my furniture alleviated my terror slightly. I calmed even further when I saw I was alone, the lingering stench of death and demon on my clothes my only companion.
I made to push myself up and a sharp throbbing in my wrist reminded me of the repulsive tentacle that had held me in its grasp. My dread came rushing back. Had my father injected me with his deadly venom? Was I even now harboring some parasitic creature within me, pregnant with his foul offspring?
I jumped from the bed and ran to the window, pushed aside the curtains to examine my arm in the grayish light of another dreary morning. Mottled bruises wound across my skin. To the untrained eye it would ap
pear I’d been tied with ropes and struggled, but I knew better. I opened the drawers of my dresser in panic-fueled haste, casting combs and jewelry to the floor until I found what I needed: a personal magnifying glass.
My hand shook like a victim of palsy as I moved the glass over my injured flesh. Halfway along, I spotted a black dot in the middle of a purplish-green band.
A puncture!
The glass dropped from my hand and I gripped the windowsill as my heart stuttered in my chest and blood pounded in my temples. The room closed in around me and I fought to keep from fainting.
Infected! My own father, bastard creature that he was, had delivered a death sentence to me.
I stumbled toward the door, my only thought to find him, beg him for an antidote, plead for his master to remove the thing inside me and—
I barked my shin against the nightstand and cursed. The stand tumbled over, spilling an assortment of objects to the floor. A book, my reading glasses, my gun….
My gun? And next to it, several sheets of paper, folded in half.
I went cold at the sight. I’d written no letters to anyone. And the pistol…in my jumbled memories, my father had taken that weapon from me. Yet here it was.
Up to that point, I’d assumed I’d somehow gotten myself home, after…after Silas did whatever he’d done to me, and that I simply didn’t remember any of it. Now, though, the odds of that seemed unlikely. Either he or his minions had carried me home, placed me in my bed like a child.
Aching muscles and a fog clouding my thoughts made it difficult to concentrate but I forced myself to retrieve the papers. I tried to unfold them but my hands wouldn’t obey. A desperate wish formed in my head. If I didn’t read the words contained within those pages, I could almost believe I’d spent the night drinking to excess, that my foray into Old Innsmouth and subsequent encounter with my father were merely an alcohol-fueled delusion.
Except the marks on my arm gave lie to that. No figment of my imagination had injured me.
Despite my nearly uncontrollable desire to crawl back into bed, I opened the papers.
A letter, the pages scrawled in handwriting still as recognizable to me as my own.
Henry,
I trust you slept well? Fear not, you remain as human as you were before you sought me out. I merely rendered you unconscious. The time may come when you ask for the gift of godhood, but first you must know the truth of what happened to me.
I did not seek this metamorphosis, but I welcome it. What you consider an obscene transformation has in reality left me greater than I was. No longer human, but more than human. Had I known of this power when your mother yet lived, things would have turned out so differently for all of us.
My mistake was in trusting traditional science. When your mother became ill, I knew I didn’t have much time to find a cure. The damned cancer would rot her from the inside out, eat her organs until nothing remained but a shell, replacing all that was good with intolerable pain that not even morphine would quell.
I spent every free moment in the library, researching that abominable disease. Only when medical texts yielded no answers did my desperation lead me to places that a man of my training wouldn’t normally consider. I scoured ancient treatises on herbalism and from there I even ventured into alchemy. Things that only months earlier I would have laughed at as superstitious twaddle. No longer, though. Nothing else mattered, not my reputation, not my preconceived notions. Nothing except finding a cure I grew more convinced didn’t exist. I ignored my practice. Ignored you, too, in my quest to keep our family together. For that, I apologize.
Then, on yet another late night, while entrenched in my study surrounded by stacks of useless books, I came across the answer I’d been seeking. It had been staring me right in the face the whole time! A work of fiction that stoked a revelation in my mind.
Those words brought back an unwanted memory, one that had haunted me throughout the years, causing many a nightmare. My mother laid open like a gutted pig, blood staining the bed and floor, my father hands-deep inside her.
I’d played Bluebeard’s wife and opened the forbidden door after my father instructed me to remain downstairs. It had been my screams that brought the police. That hadn’t been my intention. At the time, I thought my father had attempted a desperate surgery. My cries came not from the horror of what he’d done, but that he’d failed to save her. For even I, just a child, could see she was dead.
My father had grabbed me with blood-drenched hands and pushed me into the hallway, then shut the door. I’d stayed there, calling for him, until the police showed up. I was overlooked in the confusion, as they dragged my father kicking and screaming from the house.
“You must let me finish! I can bring her back.”
“You’ve done enough, you bloody Frankenstein,” one of them said. Then someone finally noticed me standing there and ushered me away with an admonition to “Don’t look, sonny.”
I didn’t listen to him any more than I had my father. What child would? I was frightened, confused, but I couldn’t look away. Not even when the police carried my mother out to the waiting morgue wagon, a gruesome package wrapped in bloody sheets. That was the last time I’d seen her. I’d been a doctor’s son long enough to know she wasn’t returning.
So great was my grief that I hardly noticed the other stained, dripping bundles the police removed. In my shock, I mistook them for bloody sheets.
It was only later that I found out the truth. First from the neighborhood children – who heard it from their parents – then from the headlines in the newspapers when the details became public.
Even during his trial, my father maintained that if the police hadn’t stopped him he’d have brought my mother back to life, using electricity and tonics. It was that insistence that earned him a lifetime sentence to the loony bin instead of prison.
Was this letter, then, a confession of sorts? Or an explanation for how he’d come to be…whatever he was? I continued reading, despite the unwanted funereal memories his words stirred up.
Sadly, my revelation ended in failure. At the time, I was convinced the fault was not in the process, but rather my own lack of skill. Truly, to attempt something on such a grand scale without prior practice…my crime was not one of malice or evil, just a lack of training. If I’d had more time….
Or perhaps it was destined all along, Fate pulling her strings even that far back, contriving to set me on a path that landed me in Arkham.
Sitting in that appalling place, locked away forever from you, from the world, surrounded by madmen, pestilence, and sadistic workers, my anger at the fools who’d put me there festered inside me, became my own cancer. How dare they? I made a vow to escape, to make them all pay, and although it took longer to carry out than I’d planned, in the end I managed to take my leave. Although not in the manner I’d intended.
Not in the manner he’d intended? To say the least. The events of that day remained firmly rooted in my memories as well. Why shouldn’t they? His actions at Arkham had prompted my rapid dismissal from medical school, added another layer of tarnish to the family name and, in a convoluted way, led me to my present unwelcome situation.
I’d been asleep, like most good people in the hours between two and three in the morning, when the explosion occurred. A thunderous roar that shook the ground for more than twenty miles in every direction, with Arkham at the epicenter. Buildings trembled hard enough to tumble shelves and set dogs to howling. Wrenched from my dreams, I’d stumbled to the window of my dormitory room and seen an orange glow painting the sky.
At the time, I assumed a factory had exploded. It took several hours before I learned the truth.
The tremendous blast had destroyed almost half of Arkham Sanitarium.
I expected to feel remorse at the idea my father was most likely dead, yet all I felt was an empty kind of relief, as if a great weight had b
een removed from my shoulders and I still wasn’t used to its absence.
My sense of losing my long-suffered burden was short-lived. The following day the police showed up at my room to inform me my father had caused the explosion that sent half the building into the Manuxet River, and in doing so took the lives of more than one hundred doctors, nurses, and patients along with his own.
I had no words for them; had I not been inured to receiving terrible news by the events of my childhood, I might have fainted right there. Instead, all I could do was collapse into my chair and shake my head in disbelief. Even in my shock, it wasn’t lost on me how the officers cast disgusted looks my way before taking their leave. In their minds, Silas and I were two of a kind, the depraved son already following the father’s despicable path. No doubt I’d end up using my medical training for something even more atrocious, more deviant. It’s in the blood, I could almost hear them say. I held back my sobs in their presence, for fear they’d think I cried for him. It was only after they left that I buried my face in my pillow, staining the starched fabric with snot and tears as I wept for all those innocent people sent to horrible deaths by the bastard who’d sired me.
A week later, the Gilman name still held sway in the newspaper headlines and I was heading back to Innsmouth, once again a pariah through no fault of my own. Expelled from school because of the poisoned legacy attached to my name.
My hands clenched around my father’s letter as all my old resentment rose up again. I threw the papers onto the bed, kicked over the nightstand, and pounded my hands against the wall. Not content to ruin my life twice, he’d now returned to do it a third time, to….
Cold dread washed over me, dousing my anger. He’d returned, yes. A vile beast, a thing that shouldn’t exist. A hell-spawn roaming the streets, committing murders…for what purpose?
“I hadn’t planned on revealing myself to you. Not until I was ready.”
Did his dreadful plans involve me somehow? To what end? I’d thought to go to the police, tell them everything, let them deal with him and his army of the walking dead. But now? Would they misconstrue his intentions for consensual association on my part? Would they even believe my tale, as farfetched as it was?
