“But-but… but Mary, what—”
“Don’t worry, sweetheart. You were simply mistaken.”
“Mistaken?” I asked but by now my mind was thoroughly disarranged. “No, no, Mary, I saw him, it was Zalen.”
“You saw a man in a black raincoat is what you saw, Foster. Right?”
“Why… yes.”
She looked right at me. “Foster, the man stalking you in the woods earlier today wasn’t Zalen.”
The comment took me aback. “But… I thought sure.”
“And the man you saw out on the sandbar tonight wasn’t Zalen, either.”
“Who, then?” I demanded.
Mary squirmed in her seat, candlelight pale on her face. “It was Walter’s father—”
“What!”
“Foster… turn around.”
The cryptic command reversed my position, and my eyes blossomed at the surreal sight.
It was a man tall and gaunt who stood in the opposite corner. The black raincoat seemed several sizes too large, and its hood draped most of his face. More important was the minor burden in his arms: it was Walter. At first I feared the boy was dead but then I noted the rise and fall of his young chest.
“This is Walter’s father,” Mary told me in the struggling light. “Those times you mistook him as Zalen stalking you, he was actually coming here, to catch a glimpse of his son.”
I suppose I already knew via some blackly ethereal portent, even before the figure retracted the hood to reveal the face of Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
I stood, lax-jawed, dizzy—staring at the icon as if beholding a vision from the highest precipice of the earth…
The voice which issued from the thin lips sounded high but parched, an exerted whisper. He hefted the living weight. “My son is in no danger, sir; he’s merely fainted from the shock of his abduction by several of the town’s collective members. Please rest assured that these self-same abductors are no longer among the living.”
“You killed them?”
The thin face nodded. “Just as I killed the fullblood that was after you at the Onderdonk’s. And as Mary has informed you, I was the ferryman you glimpsed on the sandbar tonight.” The voice teetered now between cracking and high-pitchedness, hollow yet somehow exhibiting depth at the same time. “In the amalgam of my damnable onus. This nefarious deed has been my province alone, since the sixteenth of March, nineteen hundred and thirty-seven.”
The day after his death, I knew. The Master’s words sounded ruined, like thin-membraned things blown through fence-slats in the wind. The obscene circumvention of death left his narrow visage pallored as if old mortician’s wax had been applied to a skull. This semi-translucence caused me to shudder, as did his eye-whites which more resembled dirt-flecked snowcrust.
“And as you’ve already been partially apprized,” he grated on, “the detestable creatures which I fictionalized as ‘the Deep Ones’ are in possession of aggressive philtres which re-synthesize nucleotide activity within a certain helical infrastructure that exists in every human cell. This ingenious—and diabolic—process has the power to, among other things, reconstitute life in the dead. Hence, sir, my damnation and the recompense for my sins.”
“Your… sins?” I questioned. “But you’ve been known throughout your natural life as an atheist. The concept of sin is one you don’t believe in.”
“Not my conception,” the haunted man intoned, “but their conception.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“I penned The Shadow Over Innsmouth close to a decade ago, but, lo, in its flaw, it was never published, and in its not being published, word never traced back to the fullbloods of its existence…”
“But that all changed,” I hazarded, “in late-1936, when the Visionary Publications copy became available to the public. And word got back—”
“—back to the eternal monstrosities who hold sway over this place, yes. But they didn’t endeavor to pursue me then—it was already known that I was suffering from a terminal affliction. Several months later, however, when I died, word of my decease riposted back to them as well. The night after I was buried, a troop of the accurst things came up out of Narragansett Bay, exhumed me, and re-enlivened my pitiable corpse. Since then I’ve been forced to serve them, in a number of abominable fashions whose details I’ll spare you. The nexus of my punishment, though, and I should think it quite perceptible now, is the delivery of all newborns to the fullbloods’ soul-dead machinations.”
My throat suddenly shriveled. “They brought you back for that. To be a servitor for them.”
“That and far, far worse, sir. But an unwilling traitor to my race, and the devil’s package boy. The only way to protect the life of my son was to perform as I’m commanded, and deliver the innocent newborns into their appalling clutches.” The dead eyes looked to Mary and her now-sleeping baby. “It is a task I shall never discharge again.” He placed Walter down alongside Mary, then returned his attention to me. “And of you, sir, I must beg a favor.”
“But I owe you my life,” I exclaimed. “The beast at Onderdonk’s was only moments away from killing me before you intervened—”
“Do as you have promised,” the ghost-voice quavered, “and deliver Mary and my son to safety.”
“I will. This I pledge—”
But in my own hesitation, I recalled something crucial while on the same hand Mary’s attitude seemed suddenly crestfallen.
“Your brother, Mary. And your stepfather,” I commenced with the dark implication.
“I know,” she acknowledged. “Paul’s not here. He sleeps in the backroom at the store.”
The looks we all shared told all.
“We’ll have no choice but to leave him. A rescue attempt would grossly reduce our chances of safe escape with Walter and the baby…”
“I’ll see to the task of relieving him of his misery myself,” Lovecraft offered. “The fullbloods will kill him once they learn that Mary has fled the collective, and they’ll do so in a manner most grueling and torturous. I’ll be certain to get to him before they have occasion to. He’ll suffer not an iota of pain.”
“My stepfather, though,” Mary half-sobbed. “He’s in the next room, and I’m afraid…”
She needn’t finish. He would have to be euthanized, and since I was the one with the gun— “This room here?” I asked of the crude and slightly tilted wooden door to the side.
She gulped and nodded.
“All right then.” I withdrew my handgun, edged toward the door.
Mary struggled to her feet to come near me. “But, Foster, you must understand. My stepfather—he’s almost completely gone over by now.”
“Gone over?”
Lovecraft picked up the explanation, “The metamorphosis which afflicts the crossbreeds not only taints their physical features but, I regret to impart, also their mental faculties. It’s a certain eventuality that such hybrids in advanced age such as Mary’s stepfather become hostile with time and adopt aspects of the mentality, attitudes, and sentiments of the fullbloods.”
“It’s true, Foster,” Mary added. “He’s worse now than ever. If you go in there, he’ll attack you.”
Then so be it, I thought, but as I approached the door Lovecraft stopped me with a hand to my shoulder. “You are not expendable, sir, but I am. It’s a much more difficult event to kill a dead man than one who’s still living.”
“But I feel it’s my responsibility,” I uttered.
“You mustn’t take the chance,” he insisted. “You’re Mary and Walter’s only hope. Save your ammunition.” He took the gun and returned it to my pocket, then from his own extracted a razor-sharp fileting knife. “When I’m not detained for other, more monstrous duties, the fullbloods force me to filet fish in the workhouses, and it just so happens”—he shuddered at the thought—“I hate fish.” His ruined eyes addressed me more directly. “Go now. Take them out of here now… and fulfill your pledge to me.”