Deep Waters - Night Terrors!

For the second time in one evening I was headed out of Innsmouth across the salt marshes towards Newburyport. At a certain point though, the road diverged and I took the left hand path, down deep into the night-fog, along a dirt track that was more potholes than pathway. A few miles of this, then the road fell into thick swamp and we were forced to stop and proceed on foot.

Barney loped off into the dark ahead of me and I winced, looking down at my trainers. Around us the carolling of bull-frogs filled the emptiness and Barney’s voice joined them.

‘You comin’?’ he barked.

‘Sure,’ I answered, ‘let me just grab a torch from the trunk.’

Barney muttered something deprecating under his breath at that, probably along the lines of me being an unevolved loser. I heard him splashing away.

Torch in hand, I tip-toed gingerly through the ooze. I focussed on tussocks of wiry marsh grass and occasionally Barney’s boot-prints, to try and minimise the destruction of my sneakers, but the damage was soon done regardless. After awhile, the ground began to slope upwards and dry out, and we were soon heading up a steep, round-topped hill. There are a bunch of these throughout Essex County, especially out towards Dunwich, but this was a tiddler compared to most of them. Still, it was a hefty barrier to a train-line out to Rowley and it had seemed preferable to those building the line to punch through it rather than go around. Off to my left, towards the coast, I could just see the dark, overgrown line of the old rail tracks heading directly towards the hill from Innsmouth.

I stopped next to Barney and played the beam of my torch around the area.

‘So,’ I said, ‘any idea how we’re gonna access the tunnel?’

Barney flicked a luminous gaze towards me. ‘Yep,’ he said, ‘we head upwards. There’s a ventilation shaft over the tunnel – that’s how we get in.’ He shuffled off upwards into the dark.

‘Figures,’ I muttered, and started slogging up towards the crown of the hill. It wasn’t easy – being dome-shaped, these tumescences were very steep at their bases and took a long time to flatten out. I embarked upon activity more suited to a billy-goat and I was concentrating so hard on not falling that I lost track of where Barney had gotten to.

‘Hey!’ he hissed from one side, ‘where’re you goin’ y’idjit? It’s over here.’

His voice was coming from a patch of something probably green in the light of day and quite possibly thorny, off to my left and somewhat below my current position. I muttered something unfriendly under my breath and began slowly descending and angling sideways. Soon I was next to the thorn brake and trying not to get too intimate with it.

‘Hey! Barney!’ I called in a strangled voice, trying to keep noise to a minimum, ‘where’d you get to?’

‘Here,’ he responded. His voice came from the ground just above the bushes, and I scrabbled up and around towards him.

Behind the thorns, shielding it from anyone looking up from below, was a stone-lined tunnel that angled down into the heart of the hill, barred by a solid-looking steel grille. As I swung into the start of the passage, Barney gripped the latch which held it shut and leant on it with all his force. It initially refused to yield but, after a few seconds and with a complaining screech, it slowly gave way and slid open. Like I said, Barney and I are the local heavy-weights.

‘Right,’ Barney’s eyes glowed at me in the dark, ‘I’ll take it from here.’ The tunnel sloped straight downwards at a less than 45-degree angle from the hill’s summit, straight into the dark, and Barney slid headfirst into the opening, clinging to the sides like a gecko. There was a good reason that he’d been chosen for this job; I could hear his hands going ‘slap-pock, slap-pock, slap-pock’ into the darkness. I got comfortable at the lip of the passageway and lit up a cigarette, enjoying the view across the misty swamplands out towards the far Atlantic…

My solitary contemplation became disrupted by a distant sound borne on the high winds coming from somewhere above me. At first I thought I was imagining things but then, after I homed in on it, I distinctly heard the tones of someone laughing in an amused, and somewhat cracked, high-pitched cadence. Tittering, I guess you’d call it.

I stuck my head out into the night and angled my ears to try and trace the source of it. The sound was definitely coming from above me, towards the crown of the hill. I pulled my head back in and listened for sounds of Barney coming back up the passageway, but there was nothing.

‘Dammit!’ I spat. I stubbed out my cigarette on the stonework and crawled out onto the hillside once more.

The slope was almost vertical and I lay belly-first on the turf, trying to gain purchase and haul myself upwards. A wind had picked up and it had fun whipping around me and blowing grass and dirt into my face. I growled and re-doubled my efforts, cursing the fates for being parsimonious with the sort of gecko-hands Barney was blessed with.

Eventually, the slope became less intense as I neared the summit. I was soon able to progress from hugging the wall to kneeling and then standing in a half-crouch. Around me, low thickets of the same kind of thorny vegetation had sprung up in patches, providing me a handy type of cover. Ahead of me, the crazy giggling had increased and I had an idea that there must be at least five people sharing some sort of hilarious joke. Not that I could see anything. I decided that not knowing was worse than knowing, so I stood up and flashed my torch at the flat space that formed the top of the hill.

Instantly, my beam was slashed by an explosion of black wings bursting into action and lofting suddenly into the air, along with a whipping of barbed tails and the lashing of rubbery limbs. The tittering vanished to be replaced by a volley of panicked, thin screams. In a second all this blackness soared upwards into the night, leaving me standing by myself on the hill. “By myself”, but not “alone”: around me the air throbbed with flapping leathery wings, the whip-crack of tails and the angry sibilance of thin shrieking, circling malevolently around me. My flailing torchlight caught snippets of wheeling forms - horns; faceless heads; clutching claws.

‘Note to self,’ I muttered, ‘not knowing: definitely better than knowing.’

With a sinister crack, a long black tail snapped out of the night and wrapped sharply around my neck. I dropped my torch and grabbed hold, to try and stop choking. A huge buffet of air shuddered around me and I suspected that the tail’s owner was trying to haul me upwards. In retaliation, I made myself a dead-weight and threw myself onto the ground, rolling over on my back.

Above me, a black and rubbery figure dropped towards me, claws extended. Black horns curved above its forehead and its skin shone dully blue in the dark. What occupied my attention most was the fact that it had no face, just a blank, black oval on the front of its head that, nevertheless, had bones beneath it which were engaged in doing the things that faces usually do. The claws sank into my chest as the wings fluttered around us like a ragged cape ready to loft me up into the night once more.

‘Screw that,’ I gasped and punched the non-face with all I had.

The black shape jetted back from the impact; the long tail arrested its backward flight, and the whole evil form crashed to the turf like a broken umbrella. I stood up sharply, dragging the tail from my neck like an unwanted scarf, and looked quickly around, assessing the situation. I grabbed my fallen torch and wheeled about with it: around me, circling like a pack of deadly ebon birds, the thing’s buddies were taking me in and working on their next move. I noticed with satisfaction that the beam of light seemed to cause them some distress, so I used it to scare them back into the dark.

That didn’t last for long; they soon started to co-ordinate their efforts. As one descended towards me to be driven back, hissing and shrieking from the light, the others swooped in from behind to smack me in the head or back with a clawed hand or a barbed tail. I was getting, quickly, very angry, and I don’t think they realised what kind of trouble they were letting themselves in for.

At the next feint, I spun around and grabbed a handful of horn. I pounded the facelessness a couple of times and then drove it into the dirt, stomping on its neck with my boot: it lashed about like a snake deprived of its head. Without waiting, and tuning it to the despairing squeaks of the others, I looked up in time to see another one reaching its taloned hand towards my face. I ducked, grabbed its arm and smacked it bodily downwards onto its buddy. That gave me an idea.

Reaching down to the creature pinned by my shoe, I felt around for its ankle. This I seized and I stood up again, wheeling quickly about. Whenever I spotted one of his partners closing in for the attack, I belted him with his friend, being rewarded with the sight of the assailant hitting the dirt with a crunch and the satisfying crack of bones snapping. They soon re-grouped above me, hissing in frustration.

Suddenly, one of them jerked downwards, hauled by its tail. As I watched there was a sickening tearing sound and its head bounced into a thorn bush. The rest of its twitching corpus soon followed.

‘Hey,’ said Barney, ‘what are you doing, dicking about up here?’

I gaped at him. Around me the broken black forms flapped rapidly off into the dark in a panicked rout, including the headless one, carrying its hissing skull under one arm.

‘Ward’s intact,’ said Barney, wiping his hand on his leather jacket, ‘but there was this note for you.’

‘What?’ I gaped some more. ‘A note? For me? Down there?’

In reply, Barney just shrugged and held out a folded piece of paper with my name scrawled on it. I took it and opened it up, scanning its contents:

‘Don’t worry,’ it read, ‘your car is in the best of hands. It’s cool.’

Distantly, from the road to Newburyport, hidden by the crawling fog, came the sound of my Pontiac Firebird, gunning off into the night…

To Be Continued...