As I would utter my own last prayer and plunged the accelerator in a feeble attempt to plow through the monstrous blockade, young Walter pointed left and cried out, “Mr. Morley! Who’s that man there?”
Man? my shattered faculties managed, but when I looked I saw the black-raincoated form of Lovecraft waving assertively at us. He was urging me to veer the truck left, into a narrow trail that looked barely able admit the vehicle’s width.
I saw, too, that it was he who’d taken the fuel can from the truck’s rear bed. The can hung from his hand.
When I pulled into the trail, I saw the northward mass of beasts shift into the woods themselves, as if to try to cut me off before I could drive to wherever the road would take us. Shortly thereafter the southern mass poured into the trail behind us. The sound they made caused the forest to tremor: the wet, slopping gush detailed by wave after wave of inhuman caterwauls. At this point, the forest was verminous with the shambling, bump-skinned things.
Then the woods began to shift with crackling light…
“A fire!” Walter shouted.
I could see it all too easily now as I pressed the feeble truck to the extent of its mechanical possibilities. A virtual wall of flame spread through the woods just behind the encroaching ranks, and when I looked desperately south, I saw another wall spreading. Lovecraft had obviously walked a line of petrol on either side of the trail, igniting them only when the dual masses of ichthyic creatures had proceeded deeply enough to be trapped. This month of steadfast drought had turned the forest floor and brambles to a tinder-dry state, and now it was all combusting almost simultaneously. Orange, wavering light pressed us in now, and the sound of crackling woods soon overcame the volume of the fullbloods’ wretched howls, their unearthly battle-cry quickly transposing to sounds of utter consternation. In only a minute or two our entire surroundings were aflame.
Our adversaries were trapped in the woods now by two encroaching walls of fire. The things were trapped, yes.
But so were we.
Each fire-line seemed to follow the truck’s progress. The most stifling heat surged inward, and when glancing to either side I saw mad, inhuman figures thrashing, flopping, convulsing in the ignited woods, dressed in suits of fire. The rearview showed me the narrow trail completely engulfed, with ghost-shapes of blistering things as they were incinerated alive. Just as the fire began to engulf the truck…
I could’ve swooned at the sight.
The trail disgorged us into a moon-lit clearing.
“We’re out!” Walter shouted.
“We made it,” came my own disbelieving whisper. I maintained my headway, though, for fear that some of the fullbloods must have escaped the conflagration, but when at a safe distance, I idled to a halt and looked back on the fiery scene…
Walter’s gaze joined my own. Now the fires were spreading outward, smoke pouring off treetops and billowing in the sky. The macabre, bellicose howls of hundreds of fullbloods now wound down to pathetic and periodic squeals. It was the crackling of massive flames that drowned out all else.
“What… What happened?” Mary asked, bewildered, the baby asleep at her bosom. “It looks like the entire woods are on fire.”
“They will be if we don’t get away from here now,” I realized, and back into gear the truck went, and we were off. Walter’s fortunate knowledge of the area, due to his nature walks, took us to another narrow trail which emptied us out onto the main road into town in only minutes. All that followed us now was the most eerie silence.
“Mr. Morley?” Walter inquired. “That man in the raincoat saved us.”
“Indeed, he did, Walter.”
“I know I’ve seen him in the woods before, many times, but I never got very close to him. Who was that man?”
I took Mary’s hand. “One day, Walter, your mother and I will tell you…”
Not too long after that, a sign gave relieving notice that we were about to exit onto State Route Number One. With a smidgen of luck, we’d be in Providence by dawn.
5.
The passing of six months has brought me many joyous changes. The sale of my Providence mansion—to a Standard Oil executive, no less—has left me even wealthier than before. A dead man’s words—Zalen’s—never left my cognizance: They travel along any existing waterway, and they’re very fast. Now that God had granted my new standing as a family man, I relocated only days after that night of incogitable horror, to a place where there existed no waterways for fifty miles in any direction, in the 36th state of the union, Nevada. My fortune built us an impregnable adobe house situated in the middle of the region’s most arid land, just south of the state’s dead-center point. Alkaline mud-plains, sand-swept desert, and endless square miles of sagebrush and tumbleweed provide the vista anywhere one might happen to peer.
And—to reiterate—there are no waterways.
I bank in Carson City over a hundred miles northwest, and from there fresh water for drinking and bathing is trucked in weekly. Also trucked in weekly are shifts of Pinkerton guards, who live at the house and keep watch round the clock. They believe I’m merely a successful businessman leery of enemies of the trade. Naturally I’ve never told them exactly what it is I fear may one day encroach the house in the middle of the night.
As for Olmstead and its waterfront sector formerly known as Innswich Point, I can only recount what I’d gleaned from the newspapers: the great drought-stoked forest fire had scorched thousands of surrounding acres. Of the 361 registered residents, none were known to have survived, many having been incinerated in ill-fated evacuation attempts, and the rest having died from smoke-inhalation as the fires, as devastating as they’d been, had not actually burned the town’s new block-and-concrete architecture. How had the fires commenced? Lightning, the sources said. But the region could sigh in relief, since a rainstorm the very next day had prevented the conflagration from spreading to even more devastating ambits. Curiously, a final paragraph mentioned federal inspectors examining the town’s remains days later, but no explanation was rendered for such inspections. Nor was any quantity of information offered for the government’s demolitioning of certain sectors of the town’s waterfront. For safety reasons, was all they said. And no mention, of course, was made of any dead person found to be wearing a scrimy black raincoat…
Mary and I were wed very shortly after relocating, and the life I’ve always dreamed of is now at hand. Live-in tutors educate young Walter, and I couldn’t be more delighted to relate that he’s taken on a similar academic and creative bent to his father. A nanny, too, was hired on, to assist Mary with the rearing of the infant that she’d so complimentarily named Foster. Whichever Sire consigned to that accursed and evil-saturated second floor of the Hilman House had actually fathered the child, it mattered not. I was now the infant’s father, and it was a station in life I felt blessed to have.
Hence…
Happily ever after, as the old cliche goes. Except, perhaps, for the nights, where I sleep less than soundly with my Colt Hammerless beneath my pillow and find myself rising at odd hours to scan the all-encompassing scrubland with my field glasses and to check on the night-guards to satisfy myself than no unmentionable marauders had surprised them under the cover of darkness…
Mary is pregnant again, in her sixth month, the doctor estimates. My celibacy had ended quite passionately on our wedding night, and her zeal for my body as well as my love only gives me cause to thank God all the more for such a blessing. But this, dear reader, subsumes my only potential calamity.