The Innsmouth Syndrome Read online

  The Innsmouth Syndrome

  by

  Philip Hemplow

  The Innsmouth Syndrome

  ©Philip Hemplow (2011)

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission of the Author. Your support of author’s rights is appreciated.

  All characters in this story are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  cover art by Jordan Saia http://www.jordansaia.com/

  It was only when the indicator light of the car in front began to blink that Carla realised how dark it was getting. The sky beyond the left side windows was still purple with sunset, but on the right it was already black and studded with stars. The other vehicle began to climb the sliproad, leaving her alone on the narrow two-lane. Carla flipped on the main beams and pressed her foot down, coaxing another ten miles per hour from the rented Honda.

  It was almost seven pm and she was supposed to be at the hotel already, but her plane had spent an extra hour in a holding pattern over Logan International because of some security scare. A missing pilot’s uniform or something. She hadn’t bothered to seek out the details. All she knew was that it meant she was going to arrive late; and she was tired, and she was hungry.

  The GPS chimed, interrupting the Handel concerto she’d found on one of the Boston stations. “In – two - hundred - yards, turn right.” It was the first thing it had said for ten minutes. Carla slowed down.

  She was driving past houses now. They had been spaced well apart at first but were now almost continuous. They were modern and shabby, set well back from the street. Half of them looked derelict, with flaking paint or boarded-up windows; but the flickering light of television sets, and the mouldering cars beached at the side of the road, pointed to some degree of inhabitation.

  “In - one - hundred - yards, turn right.”

  Carla hunched forwards, peering through the windscreen for any sign of the road she was meant to take. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a flash of movement to her left. Her foot shot instinctively to the brake pedal, and only just in time.

  With a squeal of tyres, a white pick-up roared out of a side street at speed, swinging across the road just a couple of feet in front of the Honda. It looked for one sickening moment as though it would turn completely over, before it lurched heavily back towards its center of gravity. Two young men clung on in the back, yelling and waving cans of Budweiser in drunken approval. A pale arse was hanging out of the passenger-side window, mooning the shutters and unlit windows of a row of impoverished-looking shops. Reaching the end of the street the pick-up screeched to the left, taking the wing mirror of a parked car with it, and disappeared from sight.

  Carla remained frozen in her seat as the delinquent whooping faded into the distance and Handel reasserted himself. The first flush of adrenaline quickly ebbed, but her hands were unsteady on the wheel. The fight-or-flight jumpiness would take a few minutes to subside now.

  She found that she had been mentally reciting a prayer, and interrupted it immediately. It was a bad habit. The Jesuits had nothing on Carla’s mother when it came to making prayer instinctive, but this time she was going to attribute her deliverance to anti-lock brakes - not to a miracle by some nebulous and inconsistent deity.

  Only one building in the street was spilling light into the evening gloom. It looked like a diner. Across the road from it was a car park surrounded by a high, wire mesh fence. Carla put the Honda in drive and headed for it. She needed a break from driving, and coffee would be welcome too.

  It was a cool evening - uncomfortably so for Carla, raised as she had been in near-perpetual, Southern sunshine. She drew the jacket of her suit close about her with one hand, clutching her laptop and handbag in the other. It was eerily quiet now, only the low buzzing of the diner’s neon sign breaking the silence. The chirrup when she thumbed the Honda’s remote locking seemed positively raucous, and the hoof-like clopping of her heels made her feel self-conscious as she hurried back towards the street.

  A bell tinkled as she opened the door of the diner. Desperation for caffeine while travelling had driven Carla into some fairly basic and utilitarian establishments in the past, but looking around she decided that this had to rank among the least impressive of them. Baleful, fluorescent lighting and a floor of black and white tiles made it immediately hard on the eyes, while the buzzing from the sign outside joined with the humming lights, the refrigerators, and a resonating Insect-o-cutor in a headache-inducing, symphonic drone that was impossible to ignore.

  Behind the grimy, laminate counter stood a teenage girl who would have been rail thin if she wasn’t heavily pregnant. She glared at Carla with evident hostility, drawing on a Marlboro and making no effort to move as her new and only customer crossed the room.

  “Good evening” began Carla. No response. “Can I get a cup of coffee, please?”

  The girl’s pasty, acne-mottled features curled in a sneer. “Ain’t no hot water” she spat back, venting smoke. Her tone was challenging and surly. Carla was not sure which part of having to serve a smartly-dressed, educated and professional black woman had antagonised the girl, and she didn’t much care. She had learned to pick her battles.

  “Okay then, can I have a Coke please?”

  The girl waited an unnecessary couple of seconds before fishing a luke-warm bottle out of the chiller behind her, and prising off the lid.

  “And a glass” added Carla as she began to turn back. The girl sighed pointedly, but pulled one down from the shelf. She put bottle and glass on the counter with unnecessary force and glowered at Carla, defying her to ask for ice.

  Carla picked up her drink and carried it to a table in the farthest corner of the room, aware of the girl’s eyes boring into her back. She couldn’t deny that she felt annoyed. Her own background was vastly more impoverished than that of anyone in this (admittedly pretty dilapidated) town. She’d done nothing to earn this ugly little girl’s contempt.

  Carla decanted her drink and then powered up her laptop, partly to give her something to do and partly to aggravate the teenager. Unsurprisingly, there was no wireless service here - but she didn’t need that to access her case files. She opened the Innsmouth folder.

  She’d glanced at them before setting off and had a rough idea of what was ahead of her, but hadn’t had chance to read the details. She knew that the assignment was a punishment, retribution for applying for a promotion without telling the boss. Carla had been unofficially pushed down a rung. Now the boss was attending a bioterrorism conference in Florence, everyone else of her grade was at a Legionnaire’s outbreak in a Colorado ski resort, and she was on this godforsaken nothing-enquiry that the EPA had managed to foist on them.

  Carla skipped past the usual expenses claim forms, hotel bookings and letters, and opened a .pdf of the police report. It was littered with spelling errors and typos that hardly inspired confidence but was otherwise routine enough, describing a road traffic accident seven weeks before. A stolen car containing four dead teenagers, two boys and two girls, had been found crashed into a tidal creek.

  The crash had happened at night, in driving rain, on the two-lane road from Innsmouth to Rowley. The Rowley police hypothesized that the joyriders had been speeding, gone too fast into a bend and just lost control of the vehicle. If their driving was anything like that of the kids Carla had just seen rallying through the streets in their pick-up, she found that easy enough to believe.

  The next few documents related to the theft of the vehicle and the disposal of the wreck. It looked as t
hough the oldest boy in the car, Wayne Ramsgate, was the next-door neighbour of its rightful owner. Pool Street, Innsmouth. He was found behind the wheel with his girlfriend next to him. His stepbrother and stepsister were riding in the back.

  Other files documented an impressive history of shoplifting, vandalism and truancy on the part of the foursome. Breaking windows, shouting in the street, suspicion of arson, suspicion of theft, underage drinking ... it seemed that Wayne had spent three months in juvenile detention when he was fourteen. He had just turned fifteen when he died.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed that the surly waitress was flapping a filthy-looking cloth rather unconvincingly at the coffee rings and dried ketchup splatters on the next table, nonchalantly trying to catch a look at her screen. Carla sighed, and closed the laptop. Draining her glass, she made to leave, fishing in her handbag for her purse.

  The sound of breaking glass made her jump, spilling coins everywhere. A sudden, strident blaring from outside made her jump again. Lights flashed against the diner window. The car!

  Carla hurried to the door, just in time to see three figures silhouetted by the pulsing lights of the Honda. One of them was groping through the passenger-side window. The others saw Carla framed in the doorway of the diner and tapped him on the shoulder. He ducked back out of the vehicle, and all three of them took off at a run.

  Carla shouted after them. “God damn it, that’s my car!”, but could only watch as they swarmed noisily up the chain-link fence at the back of the car park, dropping over the wall behind it and out of sight. “God damn it!”

  Adrenaline was saturating her nervous system for the second time in ten minutes. Was everyone in this place some kind of hoodlum? Behind her, the door of the diner slammed shut. She turned around, incredulous, as the lock turned as well. Furious, Carla kicked at it and shouted. “Oh, thanks! Thanks for nothing, you little cow!”

  There was no response, just the scraping of the blinds being turned down, and a pop as the sign above her head was switched off.

  The car alarm was still blaring away on the other side of the road. Fuming with anger, Carla stabbed the button that deactivated it, and stormed over to look at the damage. The passenger-side window had been smashed, and there was glass all over the seat. The GPS was on the floor. She guessed that the would-be thief had fumbled it when he started running. Nothing seemed to be missing.

  She swept as much of the glass out onto the ground as she could, using her handbag in the absence of anything more appropriate, but rueing the scratches to the expensive Italian leather. A church clock somewhere began to strike the half hour. She ought to report the incident to the police, get a crime number. Hertz would be expecting one. On the other hand, the car was booked on a CDC credit card, she was already late and it was freezing. She’d be damned if she was going to wait around for the local cops to show up. She just wanted to get out of this dump, and find Innsmouth and her hotel.

  She had calmed down somewhat by the time she was back behind the wheel. Anticipating the bitter draught through the shattered window, she had unpacked her overcoat from the trunk. On the plus side, she supposed, the constant fresh air would help to keep her alert at the wheel.

  The GPS was working, at least. After a couple of turns she found herself on the main road out of Newburyport. A mile or so later it directed her to take a much smaller fork that branched off towards the coast.

  The Handel on the radio had finished and been replaced by Bartok, but violent bursts of static began to interrupt it as the channel faded. The auto-tuner eventually lost its lock on the signal altogether and began helplessly cycling through the frequencies. Carla turned it off.

  This was definitely estuary country. What little scenery she could make out in the gathering darkness beyond the headlights consisted mainly of marshy pools and tall tussocks of tough grass. The icy air that roared in through the destroyed window reeked of nitrous, tidal peat. Carla even suspected that, above the bellowing wind and the muted howl of the VTEC, she could hear the distant pounding of the Atlantic.

  After a few miles the road began to rise quite steeply. There was no doubt now, she could definitely hear waves breaking somewhere below. At the top, the road snaked through several sharp corners and then drifted gradually down towards the lights of what could only be Innsmouth.

  Not that there were many lights. Carla could make out a few obvious streets, and a couple of long chains of hanging bulbs that swayed in the breeze along the seafront. Somewhere out to sea she thought she saw a flickering, fiery glow. Too low and too large for a distress flare. It looked more like a bonfire, but by the time she tried to get a fix on its position she had travelled too far down the hill, and it was lost among the wavetops.

  She was on the outskirts of town now. The flat-roofed, boxy bungalows were relatively new - probably sixties vintage - but cheaply made and suffering greatly from exposure to the sea air. Most had been painted white originally, in some laughable pastiche of Mediterranean coastal architecture. They were water-stained and flaking now, with crumbling brickwork and rotting sills.

  The climate didn’t seem to have been any kinder to the cars that were parked haphazardly on the street, some of which looked as though they might be older than the houses. Carla sighed. When she’d read that she was coming to Essex county, she’d fondly hoped that the assignment might have been in a place like one of the absurdly wealthy and picturesque little seaside towns further down the coast. As it was, this made even Newburyport look like the Hamptons.

  The GPS guided her faithfully down increasingly dishevelled streets towards the town centre. The number of houses that were boarded up and completely vacant increased as she progressed, mute testimony to the failure of whichever chipper urban regeneration scheme had led to their construction in the first place - and to the seemingly endless recession which had destroyed property values, businesses and communities throughout the entire region. The entire country, really.

  The town centre was markedly different. Most of the houses loomed to three narrow storeys, and were dark and ancient. In places, newer constructions were sandwiched between them where an intervening structure had finally succumbed and been pulled down. The sagging roofs and subsidence cracks in most of the old buildings suggested that this architectural predation was ongoing, and likely to accelerate. It was just unfortunate that the new houses looked almost as gloomy and uninviting as the old.

  A final turn, past the ruins of a burnt-out church, brought her onto what must have been the main street. It was a broader, U-shaped thoroughfare, with a tattily overgrown stretch of grass running down the middle. Whatever had stood here before had been demolished and replaced with dreary concrete boxes to serve as shops. Carla noticed a pawn shop, a betting shop, a barbers, a liquor store, a couple of charity shops, all protected by locked, steel shutters.

  There was a bar that looked open, its windows streaming light onto the pavement outside. Looking through them as the car sidled past, the only customers that Carla could see were two young men playing pool.

  “Follow the road ahead, and in – twenty – yards pull over.”

  Sure enough, the end of the road was occupied by what looked to be a hotel. She could tell, because it looked like every other `Exec Lodge’ chain hotel she had ever stayed in. Built to format, with a facade of pale, yellow cement and a big, brown porch, with automated sliding doors. God, she hated the places. Unfortunately, they enjoyed the status of official “preferred provider” to CDC employees. Meaning they were cheap.

  A sign directed her through an archway to a small car park at the side of the building. There were three or four cars there already, but no shortage of spaces. Carla lost no time in grabbing her case from the trunk and making her way inside, keen to warm up after her freezing journey.

  She already knew what the clerk was going to say before he opened his mouth. “Good morning / afternoon / evening, sir / madam. Welcome to the [insert branch name] Exec Lodge hotel, [town name]. How may I he
lp you today?” It must be taught by rote to all new employees of the company.

  The clerk was a wide-eyed boy in his late teens, with bowl-cut, sandy hair and halitosis. His name tag identified him as ‘Oliver’. Her parroted the trademark welcome, Carla produced the booking receipt that her boss’s secretary had supplied, and he laboriously keyed the reference number into an unbelievably decrepit computer that Carla was pretty sure was running Windows 95.

  “There you go.” he announced at last. “Your room is on the second floor, to the right of the elevator. Breakfast is from seven `til nine. Enjoy your stay in the Gilman House Exec Lodge Hotel and do please let us know if we can help to make your visit with us more comfortable.”

  “Is the dining room closed?” was all Carla wanted to know.

  “I’m af-f-fraid s-s-so, Miss” he blurted. It seemed that once he left the corporate script Oliver had a wild stammer. “D-d-dinner is from six o’clock `til half past seven.”

  “Is there any way I can get a sandwich or something?”

  “N-n-n-no, Miss. It’s against th-th-the rules. There are some s-s-s-snacks available at the bar. You know. P-p-p-peanuts and th-things” he added helpfully, though not without a light shower of spit.