by Byron Craft
It was probably the most repulsive living thing I had ever seen. Most of its slimy flesh was a mottled gray-green except for its, or should I say her, breasts. It lacked color, a dirty white, like the belly of a fish, and the upper body was a long steamer trunk shape. The most startling thing was the number of teats on her exposed torso. There was no less than a couple of dozen nipples. The she-creature was probably capable of having one hell of a litter, I thought. Robber was barking ferociously but held his ground, and I was occupied with counting the number of teats when she tipped over the tank. Her movements were still awkward, and when attempting to scramble over the edge, the creature knocked the cistern on its side. A wave of water spread rapidly across the room soaking my shoes and socks. Bell and Robber jumped back but not in time to avoid a wetting.
The horror and revulsion that took place next were beyond compare. The she-creature fell to what should have been her knees, only she didn’t have any. Rising quickly, we could see that she had no legs. From where a pair of hips ought to have been were two thick clusters of tentacles several feet long. The members in each grouping were bulkier than a healthy man’s bicep. The writhing organs easily kept her upright. Her full height exceeded seven-feet. The dual collection of tentacles began rotating rapidly and drove her towards us at an alarming speed. With her one fully intact arm she tossed the operating table aside as if it was made of paper. It crashed against a stack of tires sending them cascading about the room. Robber was the first to get the hell out of there. Smart dog. Pointing behind me as I ran, I let loose with a continual barrage of .45 caliber slugs from the Thompson. Bell pumped three rounds from his shot gun at the thing before he started to run. His delay cost him though. With lightning speed, the arm of the she-creature lashed out and grabbed him by the neck with sausage length fingers. By means of little effort, she would have probably crushed his windpipe, if it hadn’t been for Robber. The dog returned grabbing a mouthful of leg tentacle, twisting and tearing the gray-green fleshy tissue. She let loose with a blood-curdling screech and tossed Robber aside. He bounced off the rubber wall and spat out a chunk of meat. Robber’s action bought me a few seconds. Pointing the Trench Broom at the she-creature’s one good arm, I amputated it with a continual spray of slugs. She/it screamed louder than before. The mitt of the abomination still held fast. Bell, almost to his knees, pried the oversized fingers lose and chucked the arm to the dirt floor.
The amputation didn’t slow the monstrosity down hardly at all. It came at us flailing its tentacles like lariats. Stepping to one side, I grabbed a segment of tire tread that stuck out from the wall and gave it a yank. A mass of truck tires tumbled down momentarily separating us from the beast. This time Bell ran ahead while I made like a caboose continually firing at the monster. The stream of .45 caliber slugs from the Thompson didn’t seem to slow her oncoming rush. The shots tore into the the creature's torso with little or no effect. I pulled the pin on my gas grenade and tossed it into her puss. Then I ran like hell.
I squeezed through the narrow portion of the passageway and could make out the faint light issuing from the barn door ahead. Turning to look back I was gratified to observe that I had left a cloud of tear gas behind me. I hadn’t breathed in any of the nasty fumes. There was no sign of the approaching atrocity. The gas must have done the trick I surmised. No sooner than I had made the connection, that she was no longer in pursuit, then a shower of snakes burst through the mist. The screams were ungodly. Some of them were mine. I pointed the Tommy Gun at its approach and kept the trigger pulled until all the ammo had been fired. The entire one-hundred round drum magazine had been exhausted. I ran towards the barn door. Bell was on guard, standing in the sunlight, pointing his twelve-gauge beyond my retreat. “Thank you, Sir,” he said expressing gratitude. I assumed it was for cutting the thing’s arm off.
“Think nothing of it,” I offered completely out of breath. It was very quiet again. Out of ammo for the Thompson, I drew the Colt from my shoulder holster. We stood ready to shoot some more or if the opportunity warranted it, close the door keeping the thing inside if it loomed ahead again. There was no sign of movement in the dark corridor. The tear gas was subsiding. I held a handkerchief over my nose and mouth and crept forward. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Sir,” pleaded my companion.
I ignored the kid. Sometimes I can be pig headed, stupid as well, but I had to see for myself. Through the settling mist, I could make out a lone tentacle feebly swiping at the air. It whacked once against the rubber tire wall, then fell limp to the ground. Nothing else appeared to move. I got closer, the she-creature was down and out, or what was left of her. Her face had caved into her head resembling a melon that had rotted and collapsed in upon itself. The body of the thing sizzled and melted, the ooze merging with the dirt floor.
The thing from the cistern had bought it. What was the ultimate cause that made it drop dead, I was a bit flummoxed. Was it the gas or did one of my slugs eventually find a vital organ? Something told me that it was vital too that I find out. No time for an autopsy even if I knew how to do one. Had to find Francisco.
***
The three of us slowly nosed around the building searching for clues to Francisco’s whereabouts. I thought about torching the place, but there was evidence to Sayter’s activities inside and maybe even clues that could lead me to Ian Woodhead. It was a very large structure, as I said before, and we took our time examining every piece of debris and blade of grass. A large wooden crate stuck out of the side of the structure. I smelled carbon monoxide. We could feel the rumbling of an engine beneath the soles of our shoes. There was an access door with a brass handle and latch on the face of it. Opening it revealed the generator that powered the equipment and the light inside. I turned off the gasoline motor. Now the interior of that ghastly building would be cloaked in darkness, a tomb for its dead occupant.
I stopped dead in my tracks after we came around to the front of the building, my back to the barn door. Next to our car was parked a Model T pickup truck. The driver’s side door had been left open, and the cab was empty. I intuitively surmised that upon approaching the property and seeing our car, the driver of the truck exited the vehicle in a hurry and ran into the building while Bell, Robber and I were around back. It had to be Francisco.
I can't begin to explain how dreadful it is to observe such rage in a single person or should I say, “creature.” The person that we once knew as Francisco Sayter crowded all our images of what was sane or normal. I had turned in time to observe him overflowing and exiting the opened barn door crazed with anger. He was anthropomorphic. I learned the term from my conversations with Otto Meldinger. It was the mixing of human characteristics with a nonhuman thing. Besides his head, arms and a portion of his upper torso the rest of human resemblance left off and sheer fantasy began.
I backed away several feet. Francisco no longer wore dark leather gloves. His abnormally long fingers terminated in the black pointed spikes. His slacks had parted into shreds and tatters and what I took, upon our first encounter, as irregularly fat legs were uncovered exposing tentacles. Like the she-creature there were two massive stalks where hips should have been, each trailing a cluster of lengthy rope-like tentacles, the source of his immense height. Both groupings of aquatic limbs had been stuffed into an oversized pair of pant legs to give the impression of legs, albeit deformed.
Sayter carried a long instrument over his shoulder, something like a scythe. He looked at us as though we were food, like the fish he sold. “You have destroyed any chance for the survival of my kind,” he bellowed and bawled. His voice was reminiscent of the thunder often heard emanating from the hills. Instead of tears, a greenish-yellow ichor trickled down his cheeks.
“Fancy that, just think of us as your local exterminator,” I answered back pulling my 1911 Colt from my shoulder holster, expecting him to charge us any minute. I had tossed the Thompson to the ground. It was empty, and there was no more ammo in the car.
“We ruled the eart
h before your mammalian ancestors arose,” he hollered. “In time, your kind replaced our forefathers. I hate you for it.” There was a dreadful purpose in Sayter’s hateful yellow eyes and from the guttural sounds that emanated from his moving lips. My soul recoiled with revulsion; the purpose was butchery.
“You are utterly alien to our species, nothing but vicious, and you reek of an unholy stench,” still the loud-mouthed.
I almost laughed at that one, “Speak for yourself pal.” To Bell and me he was the one with the frightful smell. I shouldn’t have said that because . . .
Sayter screamed a quote from an unknown text, “As a foulness shall ye know them!” He caught me off guard because in the fraction of a second, much too fast for a man of his size with those clumsy hands, he drew a revolver from his waistcoat. It was a big one. It looked like a Dragoon. The kind that cavalry officers holstered on their saddles in the Civil war. The damn thing was over a foot-long. Holding the gun in his left hand, Sayter fanned the hammer with his right. He fired all six-rounds at me in rapid succession. At that instant, I prayed that my life insurance was paid up because that was all the wife and kid would get.
When the smoke from the black powder pistol cleared, I was momentarily stunned. Francisco had missed me, all six times! The whole shebang! The guy couldn't shoot the ocean from a rowboat. That was when he charged. He was swinging that scythe like a madman. He made a hideous series of noises which were nothing approaching English, but whose intent was murder. I leveled my Rosco and emptied every round into his torso. Bell let him have it with the last two-shells from his twelve-gauge in the belly. Neither had any effect. Of genuine blood, there was none; only the putrid body fluid that oozed from his wounds. The injuries didn’t slow him down though. In a fraction of a second, he would be separating my head from my body with that razor-sharp sickle attached to a stout pole. Something overhead cast a shadow over me. It was Déjà vu. Briefly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a darkened silhouette blotting out a portion of the sun’s rays moving across the ground.
Maggot, the turkey buzzard, swooped down on the unsuspecting Francisco plucking at his eyes with his claws and beak. Robber was crouched on a large rock in the yard. Our half-man, half-monster in black, momentarily blinded, staggered next to the rock. As if working in unison with the big bird Robber leaped at Sayter tearing his throat out in one bloody green chunk.
Francisco Sayter fell to the ground motionless. His throat must have been his vital organ. I must have caught the she-creature with a lucky shot and blew out her windpipe. Thus, the same result. I walked over to the dying Sayter. He looked up at me with one good eye; Maggot must have gotten the other one. “Ian Woodhead, where is he?” I demanded of the soon to be corpse.
He stared back at me with an evil grin on his kisser. A look of success I surmised, of someone who thinks they have achieved the final victory. “A mountainous dungeon,” his voice gurgled in triumph. “You will never find him.” His face caved in like an egg-shell. There was a rank odor. It smelled like a fusion of dead sea life and compost.
I shot him with a thumb-and-forefinger pistol, "Gotcha," I exclaimed.
Robber was rubbing his snout in the dirt, probably trying to get the bad taste out of his mouth. Looking toward the horizon, I could see Maggot soaring over the hills of Dunwich. Bell walked up beside me. He looked extremely relieved. “Sayter was scary enough in broad daylight. How would you like to come across that in a dark alley?” he asked visibly shaken.
“Not for all the tea in China.”
***
Still skirting the village of Dunwich we retraced our tracks back up into the hills where we had originally exited the portal. Driving back, I kept replaying the last words of Francisco, the Myskat, Sayter’s in my head. Somewhere within that warped mind of his, there had to be an answer, the thread that had to have a link to the whereabouts of Ian Woodhead.
It was easy to find our way back. There were, now, numerous tread marks to follow. Dusk was soon upon us, and we stared at the blank hillside where a few hours before we had emerged from a dimensional tunnel. Only now the portal was gone. Evidently, the outcome was only temporary.
I got out of the Model A and looked intently at the grassy slopes around us. Remembering the one set of tracks left by Francisco that led perpendicular away from where his truck was parked, I headed in that direction. It had been muddy when he walked in that way. The ground had hardened since then, but his prints had sunk deep like an elephant had been along, making it easy to follow. I had ordered Bell and the dog to stay in the car. They both looked bushed. I was too, but I wasn’t about to let on.
After a few minutes, I came upon a great stone circle with a tall rock alter in its center. At this point, I observed two-sets of tracks. One was obviously Sayter’s both coming and going while the other was by someone with pointed shoes that was much lighter than our Myskat. Their trails led out of the circle towards an outcropping of boulders that were smack dab up against a hillside. “A mountainous dungeon?” I speculated. Was I making too much out of Sayter’s final words?
I walked further on and was taken back when to my surprise I came face to face with a whopping heavy-duty, solid metal door. There was a thick wrought iron hasp the width of a two-by-four strapped across it secured by a padlock the size of my fist. I pounded on the door, and hollered several times, “Hey, anybody in there?” Shortly there followed a soft and weak tapping as if whoever was answering back barely had enough strength to wheel a rock. “Stand back!” I shouted, drawing my Rosco, inserting a fresh clip into the gun.
Positioning myself to one side, I pointed the automatic at the padlock and fired. The slug hit the ground kicking up dirt. I missed. I saw Tom Mix do this several times in the moving pictures and he never missed. The third shot did the trick. The slug struck the base, and the shackle parted from the locking mechanism. I tossed the lock aside and swung the heavy hasp out of the way. The door opened out. Ian Woodhead staggered into the waning sunlight, squinted and fell into my arms. His suit was filthy, and it hung on him like a sack. The poor guy must have dropped twenty or thirty-pounds.
I got him back on his feet, and Ian leaned wearily against the cold stones. “The bag . . . get the bag,” he pleaded softly, barely able to speak. I steadied him by placing my right arm under his, picked up the cloth sack with the other and we ambled over the way I came, back towards the car. It was slow going. The bag was damn heavy and with Ian in tow made the short walk even more arduous.
When I got back to the Ford, I plopped Ian down on the running board. His face was dirty and looked like it hadn’t seen the light of day in a very long time. I reached through the rear window and grabbed my lunch pail. I sat down next to him and opened it handing him a sandwich. He took one long look at it and said, “Ham,” then devoured it in three bites. The guy had really been in a tight fix for food.
I opened the thermos and handed it to Ian. He chugged down half of the milk in one gulp. When Ian started in on the second sandwich he looked up at me with an expression of extreme gratitude, “Open the sack, half of it is yours.”
The bag was on the ground between my feet. I undid the leather tie string. My eyes went wide; then I looked back over at Ian Woodhead. “You’ve got to be kidding. Are these real?”
Chewing, he shook his head “yes.”
“My God Ian this is too much. There’s a fortune here.”
Still sitting on the running board, he sat up straight and leaned his head back against the car door. Ian was slightly winded from his sandwich binge but appeared, to a certain degree, refreshed. “In the Tempest, my friend,” he replied looking at me straight on. “Prospero said ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’”
“I don’t know who this Prospero fella is, but everybody's entitled to their own way of thinking. Part of what he said does make sense though, because,” I said following through with my thought, holding up one of the gold coins and thinking of Allison, Ange
l, old lady Trumble and a Cape Cod with a front and back lawn. Then looking at the gold again, maybe even a two-story colonial, “this is the stuff that dreams are made of.”
At that moment Bell walked around the Model A Deluxe Sedan into Ian’s view. “I guess it will have to be a three-way split,” the OSI agent added with a smile.
Robber came trotting along in the next instant. “Don’t cut him in,” I offered. “The dog is with me.”
***
Ian, even in his weakened condition, was full of questions. His paramount one was, “What happened to Francisco Sayter?”
I bragged that “The late great Francisco's life wasn't worth a plug nickel when he was up against Bell and me.”
“How did he die?” he asked.
“The dog killed him,” I answered reluctantly, but with a grin.
His next one would take a while to explain, “What was he transporting to Dunwich?”
“He was smuggling body parts,” replied Bell. We enlightened him as I drove back to Arkham.
It was a long way home, of course, but we were unable to detect how Francisco had made his return trips. Officer Bell was upset at first when he voiced concern, “But Detective, we can’t just drive back. We don’t know where in time we traveled when we went through that dimensional portal.”
“Sure, do kid,” I told him. “Remember that copy of the Arkham Advertiser we saw in that rubber room?”
“Yes Sir, what about it?”
