In Deep - 8: Abner Gilman

I walked down to the front door and let myself out on to the veranda. Mrs Pettifer had filled my head with things to cogitate upon and I needed a smoke and the sea air to help put them in some kind of order.

There was either some kind of bad miscommunication she’d said, or else someone was setting me up. It was a binary situation – one or the other. Unless, of course, it was both. Whatever it was, it was making me cranky.

Like I said before, here in Innsmouth we take care of our own problems. We don’t have a police force – that suggests county officers, local elections, sheriffs and other legal representation. No: here we take out our own garbage, and the nearest thing to a regional government that we have is the Esoteric Order of Dagon and its Temple leaders. I’ve already mentioned that I didn’t want to get on the wrong side of the E.O.D. and there’s a very simple reason for that: if I crossed them, I would walk alone. I would be out in the dark with my ass in the wind.

With this in mind, I made a rapid decision. I had discovered that the Temple hounds – in the form of Ned Pierce - were on my trail, keeping an eye on me and following my moves. I would therefore cut to the chase: if they wanted to know what I was up to, I would go to them and turn myself in. Let them ask their questions and learn the things that they wanted to know. I would be a dutiful member of the school and tell them anything that they wanted to discover. Then, once they were off my back, hopefully I could get back to the issue at hand – the Stranger and whatever the heck he was up to.

I watched the surf pounding out on Devil Reef, glowing green with phosphorescence as the breakers smashed against the hidden rocks. I flicked my cigarette out into the overgrown lawn and stalked off to my car.

The Gilman estate is part of the antebellum development on the other side of the Manuxet. These houses were built during the height of the Innsmouth gold boom, when local lads returned from the Civil War with medals on their chests and fashionably fecund young fiancées by their sides, sourced from New York, or Philadelphia, or even Atlanta. New wives taken from their home towns need suitably extravagant new houses to accommodate them and their inevitable clutches of offspring. The Gilmans were always a bit more image-conscious than most other Innsmouth families and theirs, of all the grand houses in the town, displayed a marginally more presentable aspect than most.

I drove the car right up the front carriage-way, crunching the white coral gravel with my tyres, and killed the engine at the bottom of the front steps. In the moonlight I could see the widows’ walk railing choked with runaway jasmine; the upper windows were boarded-up – as is typical with houses around here – but the look was neat and lacked the frenzied workmanship of the neighbouring buildings; what windows I could see, given the faint sources of illumination from within, were largely unbroken, or – where panes had met with mishaps – were neatly patched with taped squares of cardboard. Like I said, the Gilmans always went about their business with a touch of class.

Standing at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the veranda, I could hear the sound of a record skipping a groove, the same skirl of violins on a rising swirl over and over again. The front screen door clapped a couple of times in the night breeze. I flicked my cigarette to bounce off a lichen-etched concrete cherub, sitting astride a Classical dolphin in a slime-choked fountain, and then skipped up the stairs and through the front door.

The moment I got inside I knew something was fishy - and not in a good way.

The interior was decorated in the old style: lots of patterned wallpaper over a dado rail, overly-stuffed brocade furnishings and potted palms. The chandeliers pulsed their light, like the fuses were having some surge issues. Old tintype pictures of ancient Gilmans glared down at me from the walls. I slunk across to the phonograph, lifted the needle off the record and locked the spring: as the turntable slowed to a rasping halt, the sound of distant surf washed in through the open front windows. A phalanx of old-style armchairs, crowned with antimacassars, faced me on all sides.

I stepped from the foyer into the front parlour and the scent of copper and cordite in the air made me instinctively reach for the light switch. The globes banked and swelled, obviously affected by the same difficulties the rest of the lights were experiencing, but the glow was enough to show me the horror that awaited me in all its glory:

Abner Gilman sat in his favourite chair, with the daily newspaper opened to the crossword, randomly filled in with green ink from his fountain pen, lying in his lap. His normally ebullient complexion had faded to an asparagus hue and his white shirt front – bordered by his quilted, scarlet smoking jacket – was marred by an ugly black rosette of ichor surrounding the scorched entry-wound of a large calibre bullet. One of his slippers had fallen off his foot, revealing the uncut, horn-like claws on his toes.

I stood transfixed. This was an unbelievable spectacle. Imagine if you’d walked into a room to find Oprah Winfrey, or Paris Hilton, shot dead in a chair before you. Abner Gilman was like royalty for us and royalty doesn’t die like this. This man had a well-deserved eternity of life awaiting him, after the Change and beyond Devil Reef, in the glory of Yha’nthlei; his fate was not a bullet and a grubby death in a decrepit seaside village. As the magnitude of what I was seeing swelled up in front of me, I slumped to my knees on the parlour carpet.

There, on the floor, in the shadow of an occasional table, I saw an automatic pistol. Instinctively, I reached for it...

‘You bastard! What have you done?’

I turned rapidly, stumbling to my feet. There in the doorway was Winston Gilman, pointing an accusing finger. Behind him bobbed the lurking shadows of several E.O.D. enforcers. I glanced down at the gun in my hand with a rueful look.

‘Y’know, this looks bad’ I said, ‘but it’s bad enough without also looking like I had anything to do with it...’

‘You tryin’ to crack wise?’ spat Winston. Although his face was dead-fish passive, the faint pinkish tinge that had suffused the whites of his eyes told me another tale.

‘Trying and evidently failing,’ I said. ‘C’mon Winston, you know I would never do anything like this: Abner was like a second father to me...’

‘Enough!’ Winston slumped against the door frame, running his hand shakily through his hair. His eyes darted around the room, looking everywhere but at the horror in the armchair. ‘Boys!’ he yelled shrilly, ‘take this joker into custody and, if you break him a little, I’ll remember it kindly.’

The shadows in the far room coalesced into trench-coated strong-arm men, amongst them Ned Pierce, still a little smudgy around the gills. As they surged forward, I threw the handgun into the face of the one in front and then launched myself through the nearby window.

I rolled off the front porch amid a shower of ringing crystal fragments, then barrelled off blindly into the night...

To Be Continued...