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. My 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…