The anguished wails of newborn babes.
More and more it was all coming true. How could I deny what my eyes were seeing? In all this ghastly insanity, what sane explanation could be winnowed out? On the sandbar the three monstrosities took their human booty and returned to the watery depths, while Zalen reboarded his small skiff and rowed away, and next—
thump!
I’m sure the sudden shock forced me to shout out. It was a spindly yet aggressive weight that landed on my person from above the outcropping where I sat: all blanched-white skin and a thin vicious face but strangely dead-eyed and veiled by an aura of long, dark, wispy hair. A thin hand snapped at once to my throat and began to squeeze with a strength greater than my own. It was the horror of the assault’s suddenness in flux with my previous revelations that diced my thoughts. Instinct more than decisive mental computation triggered my own defensive maneuvers, feeble as they may have been. Only the merest sliver of volition registered, but I was able to discern that my banshee-like attacker was neither one of things I’d seen soliciting Zalen on the moonlit bar nor a living example of any of the part-human, part-monster hybrids I’d found in the earthworks. This instead was a hostile and purely human woman tearing at my throat with one hand and gouging at my eyes with the other. White teeth snapped open and closed an inch before my appalled face, but when I took closer note of her face, I screamed again, all that much more loudly. Surely the scream had been heard by anyone in proximity to the waterfront; it echoed cannon-like across the dark water.
The naked, feral thing clambering over me was Candace, the formerly pregnant prostitute who served as one of Zalen’s obscene photo models. Divorced now of the bloated belly, her milk-swollen breasts looked too large for so thin a woman. Her post-childbirth death had darkened streaks under her eyes like tar-smears, and left her distended nipples the color of bruises.
“I saw you,” I choked, “in the ambulance! You’re dead!”
“Am I?” came a dry and strangely hacking reply. No gust of breath vented from her mouth when she’d said this, but worse was her facsimile of a laugh when she squeezed my throat even harder and reached back with her other hand to molest my groin.
“We-we could have a nice time together, sir…”
Of all the abominable things: she gently caressed my crotch with the gentleness of a lover, while the fingers of the other hand dug so deeply into my throat, I feared at any moment she’d be unseating my trachea and fully yanking it, adam’s apple and all, out of my neck. It was obvious to me that death had enlisted her into the role of the aforementioned “sentinel.”
If my screams had not alerted the whole of the waterfront’s population, the ensuant pistol-shot most certainly did. This rejuvenated cadaver that had not too long ago been a wayward young woman named Candace was fully thrashed aside against the rocks. It had been a death-impulse that had unconsciously supervened my terror and slipped my hand into my pocket to withdraw the small Colt .32 repeater. The blind shot had struck at the vicinity of her left ear and took out a fair section of the right side of her cranial vault. I gasped in lungfuls of air as I watched the nude corpse impact the wall of rocks to our side. The report left me spattered with cool hanks of her convoluted gray matter bathed in ill-smelling blood which appeared blackish, not red, but traced faintly with threads of some alien constituent that glowed in the faintest pale green. In all, it smelled like heavy motor oil and fish.
The reckoning to make exit came immediately, for lights were snapping on along the waterfront edifices. Yet even having been divorced of a moderate portion of her brain, Candace falteringly rose and began to stumble after me but not before I’d gained enough ground to render her chase futile.
I hastened along the rock line, hoping for camouflage amongst dingy boulders and irregular light. Eventually I crossed the service road, slipped between a pair of drab-brick fish processors, and escaped that eldritch waterfront into the woods.
God, protect me, God, protect me, the vain prayer spun round my head. Only patches of moonlight managed to filter in to the fringe of woods; I daren’t slip in too deeply lest I be blind—I didn’t want to potentially reveal my position by having to rely on my flashlight, whose batteries were already growing dim. But as disoriented as my experiences had left me, I felt reasonably sure that my stilted progress was northerly—the direction necessary to lead me, first, to Mary’s, and then, ultimately, out of town. I knew it would be miles of desperate walking to get to the next, safer, town. If only I could find a telegraph office—some were known to be operational twenty-four hours—or a rare telephone. But as I wended between stout trees, sometimes only inching along for lack of light, I knew there was a place I must go before any of that…
I should be getting close, it came to me after a half an hour’s progress, and when I squinted between a pair of shabby buildings, I think I spotted to the cobbled lane before the fire station. Yes! There it was with its opened bay yet, oddly enough, not a soul could be seen in proximity. Just another twenty yards, then, and I knew I was collimating the unlighted rear wall of the building which housed Cyrus Zalen and his penurious neighbors. In fact, I could even smell the despair-compressed apartment row from the woods.
Dare I advance to the front door, or would it be better to tap on a rear window? Neither prospect enlightened me, but I knew that I had to confront this man. Zalen’s apartment occupied the age-stained building’s end; I crept ever-so-slowly around the side but then froze as if turned to a pillar of salt like Lot’s wife Edith…
Behind several twisted, century-old trees out front, I could see the shadowed edges of men.
My heart could’ve burst when, from behind, a hand rough as sandpaper clamped over my mouth and I was yanked back into the woods as if jerked by a tether. One of their “sentinels,” no doubt, had espied my encroachment. Smothering, I wrestled in vain against a wiry yet ferociously strong shadow. All my breath jettisoned from my chest when I was slammed to the ground.
“Don’t make a sound, you fool!” shot a sharp, desperate whisper. I managed to extract my pistol, pointing it upward, but then the faceless shadow continued, “You pull that trigger, we’re both dead.”
I knew at once, from the voice, it was Zalen.
“Shhh!”
The shabbily-raincoated form didn’t fear my weapon at all; instead, he left me where I lay, to peek stealthily past the tree we were both, in essence, hiding behind. When he returned, his whisper seemed calmed.
“You’re lucky they didn’t see you. Shit, we both are.”
“What are you—”
Quiet anger. “They’re staking out my room, man! They’re waiting for me, and they’re after you too, you idiot. You almost gave us away, and by now I probably don’t have to tell you what they’d do to us. You wouldn’t be hiding in the woods yourself if you didn’t know.”
The frantic slugging of my heart began to abate. “Sentinels. That’s what Onderdonk called them.”
“Anyone part of the town collective is in on it,” Zalen whispered. “They serve them.”
“I saw you!” I whispered back as fiercely. “You’re telling me that Lovecraft’s story is all true! What’s more—now—is I believe that!”
“How could you not?” Did the slinky figure chuckle? “You must be coming from the waterfront, where I told you not to go after dark. Between your snooping around and my big mouth…”