In Deep - 4: Rodney

Of course, I had no intention of cooling my heels until the following morning. Watching the stranger tapping the map in the Gilman House lobby rang a few undersea bells in the octopus’s garden of my brain, so I hot-footed it over to where I parked my car and roared off into the night. My tyres squelched on the blacktop as I slammed through the gears on the column shift, while the wipers slapped ineffectually at the rain blattering off the windshield. In no time I had crossed the Manuxet River falls and was heading to the salt marshes outside of town.

This is an unsavoury-looking stretch of territory at the best of times, but it forms a useful kind of bulwark against the inquisitive prying of Outsiders. The landscape, once you’re up above the falls, is flat, boggy and dangerous clear almost to Newburyport, by which point it’s completely dried out. Meanwhile, it’s a maze of winding creeks, streams and pools that drain eventually at the coast north of Innsmouth. Dead white grass, dense thickets of thornbush and the occasional struggling tree are the only things to see. If not for the main road, built upon its own steadfast levee, no-one would ever make it into Innsmouth at all. That being said, local knowledge in this kind of landscape is everything, and I had more than enough of that to see me through.

About four miles out of town, there’s a barely highlighted turn-off that leads to a dirt trail along a creek; this in turn takes you to a gate, beyond which is a tumble-down shed of corrugated iron with a big old chimney rising up behind it. Painted on the side of this ruin, in flaking letters, are the words “Rodney’s Rubber Worx! (It Does!)”.

Rodney Parker moved to Innsmouth about three decades ago. A washed-up movie technician and special-effects artist, he had heard that the folk around here were, shall we say, of a “different aesthetic”. He came and he marvelled, and set up a small factory which made rubber Halloween masks, some of them truly terrifying, based on sculpts and casts which he took of the locals. Unfortunately, success was Rodney’s worst enemy: everything he made on the masks, he inhaled through his bong and so he missed out on many opportunities to expand his enterprise. Nowadays, he does a small mail-order business with very realistic rubber squid lures for open-sea fishing, but his main efforts lie in mending inflatable rafts, tyres and wetsuits. I hauled on my handbrake and looked up at the cartoon-y sign on the wall, ill-lit by a hooded bulb rocking in the wind and rain. In and of itself, this meant little as to whether Rodney would be at home or not, but I took it as a good omen.

Outside the car, the sounding of dreary rain pelting the landscape prickled all around in the moody silence. The car door slammed shut with a thunk and I squelched through the gate and over to the shack. As I got closer, the noise of water gurgling in the gutters and downspouts made a ruckus like a Temple meeting in full swing and I had a sudden flash of the three intertwined crescent moons that comprised the Order’s emblem. For some reason, I visualised it in sparkling silver and it seemed to mean something significant to imagine it that way... but then I was at Rodney’s factory door and pounding for admittance.

No answer came the stern reply. I tried the handle and the door opened up like a rummy offered a pint of bourbon. There were no lights and no noise inside.

Stepping through into the darkness, the sound of wind and rain outside became muted, although the drops panging off the corrugated roof were sharper in their delivery. The hovering light from outside waved through the flyspecked and grimy windows: as it beamed in, it illuminated rows of severed heads hanging from the wall. After my initial start, I realised this was the wall display of Rodney’s Halloween masks. There were the usual run of bygone presidents, film monsters and movie stars, but also masks that bore a distinct likeness to some of my high school buddies. A few were scattered around the floor, as if someone had had a hurried browse through the stock on offer.

A bright flash of light cut short my poking about.

‘Don’t make a move!’ barked a voice made tinny by electronic transmission. ‘I’ve got cameras wired throughout this joint and – who knows? – maybe some other surprises as well. Put your hands up and turn around slowly.’

I complied with this request and, as I pivoted slowly, I saw that the light was coming from a laptop screen, angled to face into the room. Rodney’s face peered out into the darkness, a grainy and garishly-coloured image. He squinted at me.

‘Benson? Is that you?’ he said.

‘A very good copy if it isn’t,’ I replied. ‘Can I drop the pose?’

‘Sure, sure buddy,’ Rodney’s menacing tone fell away at once. ‘Hey! Long time, no see!’

‘What’s with the hi-tech security, Rodney? You been having trouble with burglars?’

‘Naw,’ he said, ‘only aliens.’

I paused in the middle of lighting my cigarette. ‘Aliens? You serious?’

‘Sure,’ he said, ‘just the other night there were these big lights outside in the swamp and then this weird-lookin’ critter drifted on down and said they were going to give me the whole abduction treatment, probes an’ all.’

‘Seriously?’

‘No joke!’ he grinned, ‘I said yeah baby – sign me up!’

As Rodney started to go into details, I stepped forward and looked at the laptop. It was plugged in to the wall as per usual, but there was a lumpy, odd-looking cable that emerged from a USB port and headed towards a gunmetal grey cylinder standing on the bench to one side.

‘...And the hallucinations! Man, what a rush!’ Rodney’s enthusiasm rolled onwards.

I cut him off. ‘So Rodney, if you’re broadcasting through the computer here, where are you transmitting from? The mother ship?’

‘No,’ he replied, ‘the alien said that he was going to put my body into a state of suspended hibernation to protect it while my mind was elsewhere. He said he’d be back in a few days to reverse the process.’

‘Uh-huh,’ I said, ‘and where did he do this exactly?’

‘In the back office, I think,’ he said.

I pushed open the door to the office and stuck my head inside. Rodney was sitting in there on a short stool. The top of his head had been chopped off roughly like a boiled egg. The contents had been scooped out taking his eyeballs along with them, leaving his eyeholes and eyebrows jaunting up like those little triangular hangers that Franklin Mint plates are supposed to be hooked up by. His jaw hung slackly beneath the mess. I backed out slowly and turned around the cylinder next to the laptop: through a yellowish square of glass on the back, I could see Rodney’s brain slopping around in some thick liquid. I patted the metallic container and walked over to the display of masks.

The hooks from which the rubber heads hung were mostly full. I picked up the masks from the floor and stuck them on empty hooks until I ran out of latex faces. Two hooks remained empty.

‘Tell me Rodney, did you ever make masks of Roy Orbison or Lionel Ritchie?’

‘Sure,’ Rodney enthused, ‘The Orbison is very popular amongst a certain crowd, but the Ritchie only sells when I run out of Michael Jacksons...’

‘Can you think of a reason why your alien friend might have wanted to take one of each?’

‘No,’ mused Rodney, ‘we didn’t talk about masks at all.’

‘Well, it looks like he’s taken ‘em’ I said. There was silence.

‘That bastard!’ spat Rodney’s tinny voice, ‘he owes me $69.95!’

To Be Continued...