As the wind grabs handfuls of Kezia’s hair, I photograph her against the backdrop of the open ocean. Devil’s Reef is clearer now, the suggestion of land upon the horizon. If we drew closer to it, we’d be able to see it is jagged and deadly.
The Deep Ones come from below, it’s said, to cavort upon the sharp rocks, to take the sacrifices offered to them. Here is the sea priestess, ready to preside over the festival of death. She’s disguised in dingy clothes, but her eyes are on fire and her smile fierce. She gives herself to the air, at one point throwing out her arms, her head flung back, a laugh pealing from her. Robert stands behind her, some distance off, a thin black shape amid the dune grass.
In Kezia’s moments of joy, it’s hard to credit she’s a native of this place. Surliness is a documented accessory to the Innsmouth Look. She’s in love with the town and its landscape certainly, fascinated by it, perhaps obsessed, but is she that different to me? Has she moved here to live or, when she told me Innsmouth was her home, was that only her dream?
“Have you ever seen the ocean glow?” I ask her.
She glances at me suspiciously, then answers guardedly, dropping back to sullenness. “Sometimes it does.”
There’s a silence, then I say, “This place is precious. We should be glad people are taking care of it, even if they don’t fully realise what it is they’re looking after.”
“Shouldn’t be this way,” Kezia snaps angrily, loudly. Her sudden mood change is unsettling. “One man killed old Innsmouth… just one man. Couldn’t leave it alone.”
I glance somewhat nervously at Robert and say gently, “If it hadn’t been him, then it would have been someone else, Kezia. Innsmouth couldn’t have stayed hidden for ever. The modern world doesn’t allow that. If Innsmouth had—or has—an enemy it is time, the changes in society, not merely the word of one man.”
“He was bitter,” Kezia says, in a voice craving for vengeance. “He wanted to be here, he was one of them, but he ruined it. They chased him out and then, like a mean little boy, he told tales.”
Her impassioned words make her sound more ordinary—rooted in the mundane world—and yet at the same time more credible as the opposite. I realised her summary is accurate. In no single account did anyone ever wonder if the people of Innsmouth had been frightened, could perceive the potential of their own fate in this meddling, damaged man.
“She’s right, isn’t she?” I say to Robert, not even sure if I’ve bothered to keep the words silent.
He stares at me mulishly. “I want to go home.”
The crossing is easy, of course, at this time of year.
Kezia has also fixed me with a stare. “Can you take him?” I ask her. “He was never quite himself, you know.”
Her eyes are fathomless, and she is so still, like a picture. Then she turns to where Robert is standing. I raise the camera before my face but close my eyes as I take the shot.
I remain like that for some time, and when I lower the camera, I’m alone. I leave fifty dollars on the grass and hold down the notes with a stone.
The War on Halloween
Cody Goodfellow
When they were ready to open the doors, the Devil took a velvet knee and led them in prayer.
“Lord,” he prayed, “we beseech thee, help us to touch the hearts of both sinners and saved who come to us on this unhallowed night, when the forces of darkness are at their most potent. Let our humble show be the hand on the shoulder that turns lost souls to the light of your divine countenance… And grant us the strength to forgive whoever wantonly vandalized our frontage with spraypaint and, uh… excrement today… I know they know not what they do, but they also know not whom they’re messing with… Amen. To Hell with the Devil!”
“To hell with the devil,” replied the assemblage of the damned, just before All Souls Southern Baptist Church of Shafter’s Devil’s Dungeon attraction opened its doors on Halloween night.
The attraction was Pastor Gary Horton’s brainchild, and he’d run it for six years out of the abandoned Wal Mart on Main Street with the devoted if not capable support of Leah Dupar, Wenda Orlick and Burt Coughlin. While the other pastors begged for pennies from their aging, underemployed flock, Gary summoned the whole county’s godless masses and shoved the wages of sin in their faces every weekend of October, the unholiest month on the calendar, at ten bucks a head. He was the reason the church’s youth group was so successful, and God-fearing families with theatrically-minded teens from up and down the state moved to the dying agricultural town to work the annual event.
Though they tried to take it from him every year, Horton had clung to the Devil’s Dungeon as his family left him and his middle school teaching job was ripped away for ministering to students in danger of turning to the gay lifestyle, and as servants of Satan throughout the county targeted him for advocating a ban on trick-or-treating and secular “Satanic entertainments.”
Pastor Gary was a Christian warrior, and Halloween night his annual battlefield for the souls of the youth of his town. But he had never stepped into an acting role himself, choosing to watch from on high and sometimes ambush teens making out in the dead-end corridors of the house.
Dane Duncan was their regular Satan. Waiting at the end of the maze, he judged the pie-eyed rubes as they stumbled out of the last of the five major rooms and were shoved down a spiral slide to the exit.
When Dane missed his call time and didn’t pick up his phone, Pastor Horton suspected it had something to do with Trisha, the young ingénue anchoring the abortion room this year. Eating all the snacks in the break room and crying a lot was expected. The role called for nonstop hysterics, but Gary had a director’s sixth sense for when it wasn’t just acting.
Gary was looking for a substitute when the spirit suddenly came upon him, and he sat down in the chair himself and told Wenda to get busy.
Acting was a dangerous art, but that was exactly why they used it to reach the sinners. They had to scrap the gay rave torture chamber, because the pressure of living such a role for two weeks plus rehearsals put ideas in one’s head that never washed out.
They were getting ready to open when Gary did the final walk-through. Every inch of the Cutting Room, a gallery of teen suicide and self-destruction, dripped pop and rap lyrics, scrawled in stage blood. The Rumpus Room reeked of fake vomit and stale beer, but the old drunk driver’s Honda Civic was replaced at great expense this year with a Burning Man scene, where wild-eyed hipster savages in day-glo warpaint put the torch to a screaming Christian family.
The Chat Room was a labyrinth of mirrors and old monitors streaming sexy ads, youtube vids and sexting messages, the screens dazzling you while depraved sex offenders and werewolf child molesters leapt out to ambush and drag you back to their blacklight suicide booths.
The Sacred Grove was set for its endless pagan ritual, where gay satyrs and lesbian centaurs frolicked to New Age Muzak and hooded acolytes chanted blasphemous factoids about evolution.
He skipped the Black Chapel, where he would judge the damned, turned for the exit when he heard voices, felt approaching footsteps through the plywood floor.
His pulse doubled, teeth gritted until he tasted flakes of enamel. Did he hear that rasp and thud, like shuffling, dragging feet? If those darned vandals came back—Did he smell that stink of ammonia, of mothballs and dead animal musk?