Innsmouth Nightmares Read online

  Speaking of, mind if I have a cigarette? Judging from your expression, it’ll be my last.

  Okay, let’s start with last night and go from there.

  Last evening went much the same as most of my nocturnal expeditions among the locals do: Cocktails and appetizers at the Harpy’s Nest. Bucket of blood on the Innsmouth docks and the closest thing to a lounge within fifty miles. Lobster entrée, ice cream dessert cake. Karaoke night with the locals, oh Jesus. I totally abhor karaoke. I made fat ass Mantooth get up on the dais and sweat his way through “Dang Me.” Not bad, not bad. Andi told me that Mantooth graduated from Juilliard’s drama division before he got into the muscle business. Huh. That goon has opened doors and twisted the arms of my stalkers since I escaped college. Surprising that I never knew.

  My dress, a Dior original, cut low as sin. Better believe I danced with a whole bevy of rustic lads. The clodhoppers stood in line. Before the bar closed, my ass was bruised from all those clutching oafs and I got a rash from the beards rubbing my neck and tits.

  For an encore, I balled a sailor in a shanty. A grizzled character actor named Zed whom the project team recruited from a St. Francis shelter and planted here in 2003. We shared a smoke and he recited the lore of this hapless burg and its doomed inhabitants.

  “That’s not the script I gave you.” I stroked his dead white chest hair in warning. My nails alternated between red and black.

  “It’s the truth, missy. The devil’s own.” His tone made it evident he hadn’t a clue with whom he conversed. Not a shocker—I eschew the public eye like nobody’s business. It’s also possible the drunken fool believed that theater had become life.

  Zed’s perversion of the project script offended me. Granted, I’d done the equivalent of visiting Disney World, fucking Mickey Mouse and getting offended when the dude in the costume refused to break character. Call me fickle. I whistled and the boys waltzed in and beat him with a pipe. Got bored watching him crawl around like a crab with three legs broken. They pinned his arms while I exorcised a few of my demons with a stiletto heel. The actor gurgled and cussed, but he won’t tell. Know why? Because I stuffed a personal check covered in my bloody fingerprints into his shirt pocket. What was on that check? Plenty, although not nearly as much as you’d think.

  That’s it for last night. Oh, oh, I had a Technicolor dream. Dream may be the wrong word—I seldom do and anyway, I was awake at the time and staring at the motel ceiling, trying to connect the water stain dots and I closed my eyes for a few seconds and had a vision. I got shrunk to three inches or so tall and Dad’s head loomed above me with the enormity of a Mount Rushmore bust. Icicles dangled from his ears and his flesh cycled from blinding white, to crimson, to midnight blue as the filament sun downshifted through the color spectrum. Dad said I made him proud and to keep on with the project. The seas will swallow the earth! And All the lights are going out! Beware the ants! His lips were frozen in place. He boomed his visions telepathically. Reminded me of my childhood.

  Oh, Daddy.

  Unless you’re a well-connected investor or an F.B.I. special agent, you probably haven’t heard of my father. His personal wealth exceeded eighty billion before I got my hooks into it as sole beneficiary. Super!

  Most of his projects weren’t glamorous, and the sexy radio-ready ones have always operated through charismatic figureheads. Tooms? What etymological pedigree does that connote? We’ve got relatives all over the place, from East India to Alaska—don’t get me started on those North Pole, hillbilly assholes, my idiot cousin Zane especially. Anyway, he’s dead. The Mexican Army shot him full of holes and good riddance, says I.

  Daddy dwelt in an exalted state that transcended mere wealth; he was supreme. He created worlds: futuristic amusement parks, intercontinental ballistic missile systems, and designer panties. He also destroyed worlds: rival companies and rivals; he hunted tame lions in special preserves for dudes too smart to let it all hang out on safari. He aced a few hookers and possibly his first wife, I am convinced. The earth trembled when he walked. Cancer ate him up. All the money in the world couldn’t, etcetera, etcetera. Per his request, the board froze his head and stored it in a vault at a Tooms-owned cryogenics lab—like Ted Williams and Walt Disney! Everybody thinks it’s an urban legend. Joke’s on them; I’ve seen that Folger’s freeze-dried melon with my own two eyes—the hazel and the brown. What’s more, he’s merely the ninth severed cranium to adorn the techno ice cave. Every Tooms patriarch has gotten the treatment since the 1890s.

  Come Doomsday, Daddy and his cohort will return with a vengeance, heads bolted atop weaponized fifteen-story robot bodies to make the Antichrist wee his pants. For now, he dreams upon a baking rack throne beneath a filament that blazes frozen white light. This private sun blazes cold and emits fear. His favorite drug of them all.

  Yes, Daddy was a true mogul.

  Mother came from Laos. A firebrand. Nobody ever copped to how she hooked up with Daddy. Some say ambitious courtesan and those some may be as correct as they are eviscerated and scattered fish food. Not sure if she was one hundred percent Laotian, but I’m a gorgeous purée of whatever plus whatever else. She hated English, hated Daddy, and virulently hated my older brother Increase (the get of the mysteriously late first Mrs. Tooms). She called him Decrease. Doted on yours truly. Taught me how to be an all-pro bitch. Love ya, Moms. Mr. Tooms passed when I was sixteen. Mom died in a mysterious limo fire that same winter. Very traumatic for me, although splitting a fortune with my brothers eased the pain.

  The family business putters on under the tyrannical thumb of Increase. He knows what’s good for him and leaves me to do as I please. No business woman am I.

  My talents lie elsewhere. I revel with the merciless ferocity of a blood goddess. I settle for filthy rich, impossibly rich, which means anything is possible. Rich enough to buy a tropical island is rich enough to get a hold of a bag of Moon rocks on the black market is rich enough to turn this dying (dead) Massachusetts port town that time forgot into whatever I want. The people: sailors, peasants, moribund gentry, and their slothful cops, alder persons, zoning commissions, and chamber of commerce bureaucrats, mini moguls who measure up to Dad’s shoe laces, if I’m generous. I own them too.

  Let’s step farther back to my vorpal teens.

  Time was I aspired to be better than I am. Kinder, if not cleaner. Were I in the mood to justify a career of evil, I’d cite the head games (snicker) Daddy played with me and Increase, and that other one, the one who got away, the one we never speak of. I’d tell you about the Alsatian, Cheops, my best and only friend during adolescence, and how he drowned himself in the swan pond in a fit of despair. Took him three tries. I fished that waterlogged doggy corpse out myself because the gardener got shitfaced and fell asleep in the shed.

  Mostly, though, I’m the way I am because I like it, love it, can’t get enough of it. Nature versus nurture? Why not some of both? It’s impossible to ever truly know the truth. You have to dig extra deep to churn the real muck. You have to afford a person an opportunity to sell her soul. Gods above and below, did I have opportunity to aggrandize an overheated imagination!

  The idea for the Innsmouth Project has incubated in my brain since I was laid up with pneumonia at age twelve and somebody left a stack of moldy-oldies by the bed. The pinch-lipped ghost of HPL and his genteel madness made a new girl of me.

  Great Granddad put ships in bottles. Dad made exquisite dioramas and model cities. Increase enjoyed ant farms. I read Lovecraft and a lot of history. Marie Antoinette’s little fake villages captivated me. It all coalesced in my imagination. A vast fortune helped make the dream someone else’s nightmare. Frankly, the U.S. government, or a shady subdivision of the government, deserves most of the credit.

  Six months after my father passed away I graduated from high school, with honors, and treated myself to a weekend at a Catskill resort that had been a favorite of the Toomses since the Empire State came into existence. No ID required for booze; handsome servants kept
the margaritas coming all the livelong day for me and a half-dozen girlfriends I’d flown in for company. Andromeda kept a watch on us. With Daddy out of the picture, there was no telling if Increase or some other wolf might try to erase me from the equation. Ahem, Andrew. Andromeda was Andrew then, and not too far removed from his own youth. I read his, her, dossier on a whim. She’d majored in paleontology. When I asked why she’d thrown away the chance to unearth dino bones for a security gig, she smiled and told me to mind my business. Most intelligent bodyguard I’ve ever had, although not necessarily smart.

  A guy approached me in the salon and Andi almost broke his arm before I signaled. The dude, nondescript in a polo shirt and cargo pants, introduced himself as Rembrandt Tallen. He bought me a drink. I should have known from the ramrod posture and buzz cut that he was military. The next morning, upon coming to in a dungeon, blindfolded, chained to a wall, I also deduced that he was a spook. He removed the blindfold and made me an omelet. Pretty snazzy dungeon—it had a wet bar, plasma television, and the walls and ceiling were covered in crimson leather cushions.

  Tallen kept mum regarding his team. The game was for me to assume C.I.A. or N.S.A., and that’s what I figured at first since our family was frenemies with those organizations. Black holes in the ocean was a topic I vaguely recalled. R&D at one of Daddy’s lesser known companies looked into this decades before it became kinda-sorta news on a backwater science scuttlebutt site. The military and commercial implications were astounding.

  My captor turned on the TV and played a highlight reel of various improbable atrocities that no citizen, plump and secure in his or her suburban nest, had the first inkling of.

  “Oh, my, goodness,” I said as in crystal clear wide-screen glory, a giant hydrocephalic baby jammed a man in a suit into its mouth and chewed. Tiny rifles popped and tinier bullets made scarcely a pinprick on the kid’s spongey hide. The action shifted to a satellite image of a village in a jungle. Streams of blackness surrounded the village as its inhabitants huddled at the center or atop the roofs of huts. The camera zoomed in as the flood poured over the buildings and the figures dispersed in apparent panic. Not that panicking or fleeing helped—the black rivulets pursued everywhere, into huts, onto roofs, up trees, and engulfed them.

  “Beetles of an Ur species unknown to our entomologists until 2006. Vicious bastards. Although they refer to themselves as preservationists.” Tallen smiled and his ordinary, bland face transfigured in the jittery blue glow. “Bad things are happening out there, Skylark. How would you like to help us make them worse?”

  Would I!

  The seduction progressed over the course of a couple of years and numerous clandestine rendezvouses. He quizzed me about Majestic 12, MKULTRA, and Project Tallhat. Had I ever met Toshi Ryoko or Howard Campbell? Amanda Bole? No, no, and no, I’d never even heard of any of these persons or things. That pleased Tallen, and seemed to relax him. He confided his secrets.

  “It’s not important, kiddo. Ryoko and Campbell are flakes. I’d love to see them erased, zero-one, zero-one. They have powerful friends, unfortunately. Forget I mentioned them. Servants of our enemies. Ms. Bole is open to an introduction, assuming you and I reach an accord. We think you’re exactly the person to help us with a project.”

  “You mean my money can help with your project.”

  “Money, honey. You funnel the cash, we supply the technical know-how and the cannon fodder. You have a vision. We have a vision. It’s a can’t miss proposition.”

  Tallen was so smooth and charming. I crushed on him. That cornfed blandness really grew on me, or the Satan-light dancing in his eyes grew on me, or the fact he believed in elaborate conspiracies excited me (he claimed insects were poised to overrun civilization and that the Apollo explorers found a cairn of bones on the Moon). At any rate, he broke out the maps, diagrams, and the slideshow prospectus. My jaw hit the floor.

  His organization (I never did learn its name) had, sometime during the winter of 1975, allegedly established contact with an intelligence residing in a trench off the Atlantic shelf. As in an extraterrestrial intelligence that burrowed into the sediment around the time trilobites were the voting majority.

  He laughed when I, unabashed Lovecraft enthusiast, blurted Dagon! Mother Hydra! and told me not to be stupid, this verged on Clark Ashton Smith weirdness. His associate in the deep requested some Grand Guignol theater in return for certain considerations that only an immortal terror of unconscionable power can offer.

  Tallen, having researched my various childish predilections, proposed that we build and staff a life-model replica of Lovecraft’s Innsmouth. Inscrutable alien intelligences enjoy ant farms and aquariums too. Some of them also quite enjoy our trashiest dead white pulp authors. He claimed that this sort of behind the scenes activity was nothing new. In fact, his superiors had been in frequent contact with my father regarding unrelated, yet similar, undertakings.

  “Let me consider your proposition,” I said. “Who is Bole? Why do I dislike her already?”

  His smile thinned. “Mandy is the devil we know. It’s tricky, you see. She came to us from across the street, on loan from her people. Her people are overseas, so she’s here for the duration.” Later, I learned that across the street was code for a foreigner who hailed from an extraordinarily far-flung location. Off-planet, say, but within a few dozen light years. Overseas meant something else that I decided was best left unclear.

  I did ask once if Bole bore some familial relationship with the “intelligence.” I was high on endorphins and bud.

  So was Tallen. That didn’t keep him from slapping my mouth. “Are you trying to be funny? That’s asinine.” He relaxed and kissed away the bits of blood on my lip. “Let’s not do that again, eh?”

  I smiled, wanting him to believe I liked it, no hard feelings while I privately reviewed all the ways to kill him slowly.

  Surviving to majority as a Tooms heiress tempered my enthusiasm with a grain or two of skepticism. I hired world-class detectives—the best of the best. My bloodhounds tracked down scientists and sources within and without the government and from foreign countries. Results from this intelligence gathering dragnet convinced me of Tallen’s sincerity. Numerous reports indicated covert activity of unparalleled secrecy off the New England coast. The veracity of his most staggering claim would require personal investigation.

  Meanwhile, my detectives and the scores of unfortunate people they contacted died in mysterious accidents or vanished. I did the math one day. Okay, Mantooth did it on the back of a napkin. Four hundred and sixty-three. That’s how many went poof because I asked the wrong questions. The number might be bigger; we were in the car on the way to a stockholder meeting.

  “You gonna do it?” Only Andi would dare to ask.

  Pointless question. She knew my capabilities. She knew I had to do it, because beneath the caviar slurping, bubblegum popping, jet setting façade throbbed a black hole that didn’t want to eat the light; it needed to.

  This town had a different name when Protestant fisherman Jedidiah Marshal founded it in 1809. Always off the beaten path, always cloistered and clannish, even by New England standards, afflicted by economic vagaries and the consolidation of the fishing industry into mega corporations, this town proved easy to divide and conquer. I retain an army of lackeys to orchestrate these sorts of stunts. Corporate raiders, lawyers, feds on the take, blackmail specialists and assassins.

  First, we drove out the monied and the learned. The peasants were re-educated, or, as Tallen preferred, made to vanish. Gradually more actors were introduced and the infrastructure perfected. Necessary elements within the U.S. government made the paperwork right. All it required was a nudge here and a bribe there from Tallen’s operatives. The town was wiped from road signs, maps, from the very record. With the groundwork laid, Innsmouth, my own private economy-sized diorama, raised its curtain.

  Assuming you’re a casual observer, it’s a humdrum routine on the surface.

  Children ride the
bus to school. Housewives tidy and cook while soap operas numb the pain. Husbands toil in the factories or seek their fortune aboard fishing boats. Come dusk, men in suits, or coveralls or raincoats and galoshes, trudge into the taverns and lounges and slap down a goodly portion of the day’s wages on booze. At the lone strip club on the waterfront on the north edge of town, bored college girls and older women from trailer parks dance sluggishly. The House of the Revived Lord sees brisk trade Wednesday, Black Mass Friday, and by the numbers kiddie-friendly Sunday. I cherish the reactions of the occasional lost soul who accidentally detours through town: Some bluff day trader or officer worker tooling along Main Street with his uptight wife riding shotgun, her face scrunched in annoyance as she comes to grips with the lies the pocket map has fed her; and two point five kids in the back, overheated and embroiled in child warfare.

  Annoyance gives way to confusion, which yields to revulsion at the decrepitude of the architecture and physiognomy of the locals, and ultimately, if the visitors prove sufficiently unwise as to partake of the diner, or gods help them, layover at one of Innsmouth’s fine hotels, horror will engulf the remainder of their brief existence.

  Even I, maestro and chief benefactor, can see but the tip of this iceberg. Scientists and men in black lurk behind the grimy façades of Victorian row houses—the scientists’ purpose is to experiment upon the civilian populace as they might lab rats. Green lights flash through the murky windows, screams drift with the wind off the Atlantic. Ships and submarines come and go in the foggy dark. Andromeda and Mantooth worry about what they can’t detect. I don’t bother to order them to relax. Worrying is in their job description.

  I acquired an estate in the hills. Fifteen minutes leisurely drive from town square. The gates are electrified, the house is locked tight, and guys with automatic weapons pace the grounds.

  My first encounter with Miss Bole came when she wandered into my rec room unannounced. I sprawled across a giant beanbag while the news anchor recited his nightly soporific. I knew Bole to the core at first sight—kind of tall, black hair in a bob from the ‘50s, narrow shoulders, wide hips and thunder thighs. Pale and sickly, yet morbidly robust. Eyebrows too heavy, face too basic, too plastic, yet grotesquely alluring like a Celt fertility goddess cast from lumpen clay. She wore a green smock, yoga pants, and sandals. Sweat dripped from her, although she seemed relaxed.