“No!” Ezra glared at his daughter. “I ain’t havin’ m’daughter tainted with no fish man! Now git that outta yur head, girl!”
Angry, Martha Jean slammed a closed fist on the kitchen table, jumped to her feet, and stormed out the back door into the Hallowe’en night.
“Now you, fish man,” old Ezra growled after Martha Jean had gone. He prodded Billy off the kitchen chair with the barrel of the shotgun. “You git outside t’the back of the house. We gonna have us a fish fry in the mornin’! Y’all make for good eatin’!”
Martha Jean had wandered around to the east side of the house and to the stone wall with the black wrought iron fence and railing. She leaned against the wall, mad and brooding, gazing across the open field. She was sick and tired of Pa MaGee telling her what to do. Her eyes narrowed and she frowned. I’m nineteen, an adult, she thought. I can do whatever I want.
The back door of the house suddenly slammed open, interrupting her thoughts. She glanced back over a shoulder. Under the dim yellow glow of the pole light, she saw Pa MaGee and the Deep One that called itself Billy leaving the house, saw Pa MaGee force that Deep One to its knees, saw Pa MaGee put the money end of the shotgun against the back of the Deep One’s head and pull the trigger. The gunshot echoed through the night as the Deep One toppled over, Pa MaGee howling and laughing and waving the shotgun in the air before picking up an ax to cut off the Deep One’s head before gutting the poor fish man.
She shook her head and turned her eyes away. It was cold and the jacket Martha Jean wore was thin. She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. It didn’t matter. Nothing much mattered to Martha Jean anymore. The dim street light in the distance caught her attention. It was nigh on a mile across the open field at the Bates and Garrison Streets intersection.
Innsmouth, Martha Jean thought.
On a whim, she suddenly climbed the stone wall, hopped over the wrought iron fence and railing, and jumped to the open field on the other side. She started across the field, heading for the corner of Bates and Garrison Streets.
As she neared the intersection, she spotted five male Deep Ones, early to mid-twenties, nearly transformed, nigh on tadpoles to a toad, standing on the corner under the street light. They were young and rebellious, dressed in jeans, jean jackets, cowboy hats and boots, their cowboy hats pulled down low over their brows.
And they were bored, looking for fun. It was Hallowe’en, but the holiday was foreign to them. They didn’t celebrate; even the humans that lived in Innsmouth didn’t celebrate. The humans were mostly an older lot, their kind dying out. The sooner the better as far as Innsmouth’s Deep One populace was concerned.
Martha Jean suddenly appeared out of the shadows. The five Deep Ones turned, stared, gurgled and grunted, their big round watery eyes glistening in the street light. Here was a human female, young, blonde, stacked, and grinning. She approached the young Deep Ones and ran a hand over an arm. It was cold, clammy, and slick, like slime.
“Happy Hallowe’en boys,” Martha Jean said, a sensuous taunt to her voice. “Any plans for the night?”
Well, it looked like fun had just arrived.
The young Deep Ones, all five of them, grinned and gurgled and grunted with excitement as they gathered around her, tugging at her jacket, toying with her hair, running cold and clammy webbed fingers over her face.
Fun had indeed arrived.
It was a small abandoned shack just off Elliot Street on Innsmouth’s southwest side. The wood was rotting, some roof tiles stripped away by Atlantic storms, some wall slats missing. The place contained a scattering of dust and cobwebs. A four legged table was pushed up against a wall. An oil lamp rested on the table; a small flickering flame cast dancing and writhing shadows on the walls.
Martha Jean lay on her back, her jacket and clothing piled in a corner of the shack while boots, cowboy hats, and jeans and jackets were scattered about. She smiled up into the large round watery eyes of a Deep One that was hovering over her. Her time had come, she had decided. The old man wasn’t going to tell her what to do anymore.
Pa ain’t gonna like it, she thought as she reached up for the Deep One, but it serves him right.
When the sun rose on All Saints Day, Martha Jean MaGee would be tainted.
Across the bay, all was quiet again in Falcon Point. It was late, nigh on midnight, and Hallowe’en had ended for the night. Jack o’Lanterns were dark, TP fluttered on a slight breeze, some windows were waxed. The Jaycee’s haunted house had been a success. The streets were now deserted but for a few straglers shuffling along the Falcon Point wharf.
The little tikes and early teens had all gone home, prodded by their parents. Fat and happy, they had sampled their hordes of candy before slipping off to sleep the night away, eager to wake on All Saints Day to sample more.
Somewhere in town a lonely bell chimmed the mightnight hour while out on the Point a mist was rising off the ocean. Something was there, something dark in the mist, briefly returning to the old Enoch Conger place. It would be gone back to the ocean by morning.
Spider Wasp
Tim Curran
Moss pulled into town at 4:15, his anxiety spiking as he stepped from the car, a tall knife blade of a man with a face scraped hard by life. His flinty eyes sat in craggy draws, taking in the town, the festivities, the throngs of people that wriggled in the streets like spawning salmon. Place was called Possum Crawl, of all things, a lick of spit set in a bowl-like hollow high above Two-Finger Creek in the very shadow of Castle Mountain. Lots of pastures and trees, hicks towing hay wagons outside town.
This was where The Preacher had gone to ground and Moss was going to find him, drag him kicking and screaming out into the light.
Sighing, he stepped out on the board sidewalk, checking his watch and lighting a cigarette. He carried only a heavy silver case. What was inside it, would be for later.
“Festival,” he muttered under his breath as he stepped down into the street and merged with the mulling crowds of the town. “Festival.”
That’s what they called Halloween up here in the yellow and gold hills of Appalachia. Maybe it was about tricks and treats other places, but here in this dead-end mountain town, it was serious business. Festival was not only a harvest celebration, but a time of seeding and renewal, a time of death and resurrection.
The streets were a whirlwind of people, a scattering of autumn leaves blowing down avenues and filling lanes and clogging cul-de-sacs with thronging bodies, conflicting currents, human riptides of chaos. No one sat still. It was almost as if no one dared to.
Moss could feel all those bodies and minds interlocking out there with grim purpose, a rising electrical field of negativity. One thing owned them, one thing drove them like cattle in a stockyard, and tonight they would meet it.
He walked down the main thoroughfare, beneath spreading striped awnings. Blank faces with sinister dark eyes watched him, studied him, burned holes through him. It made something inside him writhe with hate and he wanted to open the briefcase, show them what was inside it.
“No,” he said under his breath. “Not yet, not just yet.”
Not until they were gathered and not until he saw the face of The Preacher.
He avoided the herds as best as possible, taking in Festival. Vines of dangling electrical cords drooped down like snares to capture the unwary. Orange-and-black cardboard decorations leered in every window. Corn shocks and wheat sheaves smelled dry, crisp, and yellow like pages in ancient books. And the pumpkins. Oh yes, like a million decapitated heads, orange and waxy and grinning with dark pagan secrets.