by Edward Lee
The farthest edge of my vantage point showed me a third mattressed victim, and perched vigorously on his groin was another thin, young woman with her skirt hoisted to make her privates accessible. “Hurry, you stinking bastard,” she muttered.
“This one shits himself, too,” added the pregnant woman in her disdain. “He does it on purpose.”
“I do not!” blabbered the victim she was bathing. He seemed stricken with a vocal impediment. “I can’t help it—”
“You know where the pans are!” the woman shrieked. “Maybe we’ll stop feeding you for a while! See how you like that!”
“Leave him alone, Joanie,” suggested the young woman with the hoisted skirt. “I have to do him next, and if he’s upset he won’t be able to. He’ll wind up like Paul.”
Like Paul, my mind droned.
I watched in the utter horror of it all, surely a scene from the Abyss. When this Joanie had finished with her congress, she grunted and rose, glaring down at her crippled purveyor. This poor man, after a minute or so, grotesquely rolled off the stained mattress, belly to floor, then hopped up onto the savaged ends of his limbs, after which he awkwardly ambled—doglike, on all fours—to one of the metal trays, to urinate. Meanwhile, the blond man began to gasp in something akin to tortured bliss while his unwilling partner, Monica, looked at him in a meld of bitter hatred and nausea. Indeed, it seemed some carnal warren in Hell that my eye had happened upon. Incalculable, I thought in the deepest despair. Monstrous… , for the intent, macabre as it seemed, shone all too clearly.
It must have been some imp of the perverse which forestalled my immediate desire to extricate myself from this evil chasm—and from the very building itself—and just simply flee, when, next, I found myself looking instead into more of the appalling peeping-holes. Similar scenes of incomprehensible obscenity were my reward for this effort: men reduced to naked torsos, either lying inert on sullied mattresses or traversing the room on their butchered limb-ends. One lapped water from a bowl, again, like a dog. Room after room glared with these unfathomable scenes of grotesquerie. But in the next peeping-hole…
God, deliver me, I prayed.
This was no chamber of forced-conception. Instead, I spied a room clinically adorned: medical supplies, IV bottles on stands, several elevated beds. Unconscious men with bandaged limbs occupied two such beds: one jibbered, drooling, in the clutches of nightmare, the other lay open-mouthed and utterly still. The man appeared youthful, yet I could clearly discern he had no teeth.
But the forward bed concerned me most.
On it lay Mr. William Garret, limb-ends similarly bandaged from his recent amputations. A tray of bloody surgical instruments, including a bone-saw, occupied a nearby tray, plus bottles clearly labeled CHLOROFORM. This is a surgery suite, I knew now, hidden in the hotel on this floor which is always locked. Cotton clogged Garret’s mouth, and when suddenly he began to blink and shudder on the bed, a pregnant attendant came to his side, to comfortingly pat his shoulder. “There, there, you’ll be all right,” she calmly regarded him. “It’s all for a reason that’s more important than any of us.” She tried to sound chipper. “And just think of all the pretty girls you’ll be enjoying!”
Garret mewled beneath the cotton in his mouth. The cotton had tinged scarlet, and it was then I noticed a smaller stainless steel tray full of recently extracted teeth.
“He’s coming to, doctor,” claimed the pregnant nurse. “He’ll need more pain antidote soon.”
“Prepare the injection, please, Lucy.”
The voice had arrived out of view, but next, I was not surprised to see a lab-coated Dr. Anstruther step up to the surgery bed. “It’s best not to struggle, Mr. Garret, and far better to accept your new fate. Discard any yearnings of your former life. You’ll get by much better, I assure you.” He took a hypodermic from the nurse and eventually emptied it into an isolated vein. “The morphine sulphate is quite effective, and it will be administered regularly until no longer necessary—only a matter of days, really.” With forceps, then, he removed the cotton from Garret’s mouth. “And, as you’ve already deduced, I’ve extracted all of your teeth.”
Garret’s wasted expression turned to the doctor. “Whuh-whuh… why?”
“In time, you’ll come to understand. Oh, and I’m happy to relate that I’ve examined your semen under the microscope and found an impressively high sperm-count and excellent motility. You’re a preeminent candidate for sirehood.”
Garret just stared, as if into an unreckonable cosmic gulf.
Anstruther turned to the nurse while jotting something on a board. “Lucy, the gentleman in Bed Number Two has unfortunately expired. He’ll need to be disposed of, along with Mr. Garret’s limbs.”
“Yes, doctor.”
“In a few days you’ll be feeling much better,” the doctor re-addressed Garret. “And like Lucy has already said, for some time to come, you’ll be enjoying the company of many, many woman, most of whom are possessed of some considerable desirability. Such is the lot of a Sire, Mr. Garret. Do yourself a service and maintain the proper mental perspective. For so long as you remain virile you will remain alive, and in your quiet times, I’d advise you to solicit whatever god you may believe in.”
The surgery-shocked and now toothless William Garret blabbered, “Look what you’ve done to me! Yuh-yuh-you’re a monster!”
Anstruther smiled sedately. “No, Mr. Garret. You’re fortunate in that you will never have to see the real monsters…”
When I forced my eye away from that Tartarean hole in the wall, I felt like a 100-year-old man. I staggered wide-eyed back the way I came, to the climb-way, where I had every intention of ascending back up to my room, securing my personal effects, and leaving this God-forsaken place posthaste. But when I got to the aperture which housed the ladder—
My heart slammed in my chest.
I heard footsteps. Climbing up.
Trying to cut the intruder off and make it up to my room undetected possessed no probability at all. A subconscious directive, instead, took me back across the near lightless channel, to its opposite end, where I guessed—or prayed—that there might be an identical climb-way. Please, Lord, I beseeched in a mental groan.
Either my prayer had been answered or simple luck was with me, for, yes, there was another climb-way. I stepped in, grabbed the rungs, but before I could proceed upward—
“You, there,” a voice called from the other end.
I didn’t turn to look but instead tried to hide within the climbing-way’s murk.
“Who is that? Nowry? Peters?”
I did not waste mental time considering why the male voice might be calling the name of a dead man, but it would be easy to suppose Nowry had other clan in town. Instead, I made my move. I did not climb up, I climbed down, for to return upstairs might sever any chance of escape. A similar hidden passage paralleled the first floor; I knew I needn’t bother examining any of the peeping-holes here. But there must be a way out, and I’ve got to find it!
No door, though, or any other passage, became visible in the light of my pocket-flash…
Then I heard the footsteps coming down the ladder I’d just quitted.
To the passageway’s opposite end I hastened, for where else could I go? I reasoned there had to exist some exterior access to these hidden crannies. For instance, how had my current pursuer gained the climbing-ways?
A door! I prayed. There must be a door!
But when I’d made this opposite end, I found no door; meanwhile, the footsteps echoed more loudly.
It was the sole of my shoe that found it: not a standing door, nor access panel, but a hinged plate-metal hatch. I opened it in relief but then gasped as my flash-lamp revealed details of the ungainly egression—a climb-way of ancient brick, fitted with a slime-coated iron ladder, leading straight down. It was with the staunchest resolve that I lowered myself down into its methanous depths, closed the hatch above me, and descended. My position forced a procession in tota
l darkness; I half-expected at any moment to be lowering myself into an open sewer and the stercoraceous smells and matter that companioned them, but when my feet settled on solidity, I relighted my flash-lamp to find myself in still another passageway. My panic had skewed my bearings but an instinct told me the brick lined access proceeded north and south. For a reason unbeknownst to me, I took the southward way.
Flash in the lead, I walked for at least one hundred yards in the ill-smelling murk. I knew now, however, that this passage was not an out-of-service sewer line; no signs were extant of the expected residuum. It’s a tunnel, I knew then, and as surely as if the words had been spoken aloud, Zalen’s words seemed to echo in my head: And my grandfather wasn’t lying when he told Lovecraft about the network of tunnels under the old waterfront…
I needn’t define the extent of the chill that moved caterpillar-like up my spine. And of the hellish scene I’d witnessed back at the hotel, I could only assume that virile men with suitably favorable looks were being forced to inseminate local women, whose newborns were then sold to some illicit adoptive initiative. Why, though, was I more perturbed by what Zalen had told me, especially his cryptic final monologue: In the story, what happened to outsiders who did too much nosing around?
Now, it seemed, the most dreadful of circumstances had transposed my very self into Lovecraft’s fictitious Robert Olmstead, the out-of-towner hellbent to escape the horrors of Innsmouth.
I could go to Zalen now, tonight, it came to me, if I could only find the exit to this blasted catacomb…
Minutes later, fate or God handed me said exit as a gift.
The tunnel emptied me near a rock jetty along the harbor’s edge. A spectacular, frost-white moon hung behind intermittent clouds; the water in the harbor sat still as glass. Gazing out over the twilit port, beneath the violet night, proved a supernal sight, but all else I’d witnessed was anything but supernal. More phantasmal than anything else, or more iniquitous. The very-normal appearing harbor, after closer scrutiny, was flecked by arcane maws. Mouths of rock-hidden grottos, and tunnel-exits exuding strange smells. No human instinct could prevent me from entering of such a maw…
More lichen and niter-crusted catacombs awaited me, several branching off from the main. I had to harness my sharpest sense of awareness, lest I easily be lost here. The leftmost tine in the fork was the one I chose. I kept my footing sure, only turning on the flash in brief increments in order to conserve its batteries. I didn’t have to proceed far before the most hideous death-stench assailed me; a handkerchief to my face barely stifled its sickening noxiousness. Eventually, the tunnel emptied into vast cavern, the first glimpse of which nearly caused me to shriek and flee.
But how could I? I had to find out what this was…
A charnel house, I thought. A makeshift sepulcher…
It was mostly skeletons that heaped the obscene, dripping cavern, piles of them, some still dressed in scraps that had surpassed the effects of human decomposition. The bone-piles at the farthest end seemed the oldest, while those making their way—I believe—northwest, had been more recently deposited. Mid-heap, I found fewer skeletons and more bodies mummified. This was a hillock of human corpses that providence had seen fit to show me; hundreds, easily, had been left in here rather than in proper burying-grounds. Why? I choked on the question. Who could be responsible for this? The time-emptied eyes of skulls seemed to hollowly watch as I moved along the wretched boundaries of the mound, and when eventually I’d staggered to its end, I could’ve collapsed amid the stench and the unholy insinuation.
These—dozens of them—were obviously the sepulcher’s most recently contributed corpses, and while most of the previous had been more or less “whole,” the state of the constituents of the rotting, gas-bloated pile needed little conjecture as to their origins.
What primarily composed the ghastly heap of rot-covered bones, flesh-peeling skulls, and worm-rilled half-flesh were the evidence of dismembered human beings, each missing arms from the elbows and legs from the knees. Scraps of clothing lay among the human stacks like haphazardly tossed flags. I glimpsed too many suitcases and valises. A smaller pestiferous aggregation of severed arms and legs lay in vicinity.
An undercroft of corpses, a murder repository, I realized. And how long it had been here, I couldn’t guess… and would never want to guess.
The sound of distant scuffling locked open my eyes and snapped off my flash. I back-stepped, praying I didn’t fall, for the unmistakable sound of footsteps—and a more arcane unbroken grinding sound—seemed to be making its way toward the sepulcher. But from where! my thoughts demanded. My own path of entry lay behind me, while this sound came to my front. I ducked down behind a bunker of half-mummified cadavers just as a bobbing light could be seen.
Another entrance, I realized, from yet another of the stygian tunnels. I hid myself as still as the dead bodies about me, when eventually the light from an oil lantern bloomed, and the interloper appeared from an egress unseen till now. The figure pushed a wooden wheelbarrow whose contents was to be expected: the nude, stump-bandaged torso of the unfortunate post-surgery victim who’d expired in Dr. Anstruther’s suite of horrors. Its half-limbs jiggled as the barrow made its way, and stacked upon its dead belly were several sets of other severed limbs, plus several suitcases. Then the barrow stopped and the lantern was set on the ground. The suitcases, first, were flung onto the pile, then the limbs, and then, with a flat grunt, the torso. Of the interloper himself I could only discern the frame of a man, and I could see he held no handkerchief over his mouth and nose. How he tolerated the charnel stench I couldn’t imagine… until he raised the lantern once more, and the sizzling light revealed his face.
It was Mr. Nowry, whom just hours ago I’d glimpsed dead in an ambulance.
What ruse might explain this I didn’t care to ponder, but when I first saw his pallid face in the light, I did, however minutely, gasp.
The figure froze, then turned. I froze as well, praying, and preparing to reach for my pistol…
The lantern swept this way and that, and by the grace of God its rays did not reveal my crouch. Eventually, Nowry returned to his wheelbarrow and exited the way he came.
I waited a full five minutes before even budging, then I rose and turned, snapped on my flash, and briskly marched for my own exit, but as I did so, I couldn’t help but notice another oblong maw along the rockface. Yes, another tunnel.
Under no circumstance will I allow myself allow enter, I made the self-command but even before I was consciously aware, my feet were deputing me into this next rock-hewn entry. In spite of the grievousness of all I’d thus far seen, I had to wonder if Lovecraft himself had ventured into any of these tunnels, and then realized that he must have, for from where else could he have derived similar subterrene networks in masterpieces such as not only Innsmouth but “The Festival,” “The Outsider,” “The Rats in the Walls,” and so on. I was now walking in the midst of a Lovecraft story, but knew that the obscene butchery taking place at the Hilman, and the cavern of horrors I’d just exited was no “story.” Nevertheless, the indulgence of my curiosity outranked my capacity for reason.
I had to see what was at the end of this tunnel…
As my intermittent flash led me on, another odor assailed me but, thankfully, it was not one of death nor noxiousness. It was a strong odor with a distinct heft. The more deeply I traversed the tunnel, the more familiar the odor became:
The unquestionable odor of fish.
I lost my breath when the tunnel opened into a subterrestrial chamber many times the length and depth of the previous, and herein were many times the number of corpses.
These, though, were different…
Why no stench of rot and natural corruption? I pondered. Why only the smell of fresh fish? But when my eyes registered the details of what my retinas were registering, I felt sicker here than in the previous sepulcher.
The body mound stood huge—fifteen, twenty feet high and a hundred long. M
y sense of perception began to bend, though, as I squinted at the morass of bodies. They-they… they’re not altogether human, I realized. Some more, some less… Almost all had been stripped of clothing, and their dead, nude skin seemed wax-white with tinges of an unwholesome green veined beneath the pallored translucence. Grievous physical deformities had twisted the lion’s share of the corpses into outrageous misshapes; most were balding but all were possessed of wide-open and mostly blue-irised over-protuberant eyes. Closer inspection, then, showed me hands and feet in various states of elongation, while fingers and toes were clearly—
My God…
—webbed.
To the touch—and what compelled me to touch one of the things I can’t imagine—the skin felt strangely moist, enslimed, and rubbery, semblant to the tactility of frog-skin. But the most chilling verification came next: at least half of these transfigured decedents had rows of slits along their throats. Like gills.
Just like the story, my thoughts grated. Could this possibly be true? Madness, I thought instead. Surely subterranean gasses known to accumulate in caverns and tunnelworks such as these could germinate hallucinations. It was my subconscious brain, tainted now by such leakages, that had me believing Lovecraft’s greatest work was based on some fashion of biological fact. I stepped back from the gruesome heap of agape mouths; unblinking glassy orbicular eyes; pale, bone-bowed limbs; and ears that seemed to have partially or fully shrunk on hairless, semi-human skulls. Injuries, clearly, had been the cause of death for these malformed victims: wounds almost exclusively to the head and chest, and there was suggestion that a predominance of the wounds had been inflicted via gouges and punctures via talons and teeth.
I was too waylaid by this most monstrous and unbelievable sight to ponder any further. I had no choice but to hold my sanity in grave doubt but, next, just as in the first chamber of death, I heard the sounds of someone encroaching…
Again I doused my light and ducked behind a flank of piled half-human corpses when a light—no, several—were discernible. But voices as well, this time, two at least; and from the chamber’s farthest cranny, the coming light enabled me to detect another rearward egress. By now I had to reason that the tunnelworks were extensive indeed. Two figures, then, one short, one taller, emerged, each bearing a candlefish torch. The sputtering, smoky flames threw cragged shadows everywhere, like a grim, kaleidoscopic nightmare.
