Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

As mentioned before, that river road was a low-gear thing, especially for a vehicle so heavily loaded. Big man though he was, the paint-factory owner had trouble keeping the station wagon ahead of the yelling, screaming horrors that came lurching after it, brandishing their clubs. Then came the climb out of the gorge, up the steep stretch known as The Devil’s Ladder.

Pointing its nose almost skyward, the old station wagon groaned like a living thing too weary to maintain such an effort. With Lindsay twisting the wheel to avoid boulders that could break an axle, it clawed its way up with the naked things gaining on it. “Faster!” Keith Walker kept yelling at the driver. “For God’s sake, give it some gas before they catch us!”

Just as the machine reached the top of the climb, the first of its pursuers grabbed hold of its rear bumper. But like a marathoner glad to be on level ground after struggling up an exhausting grade, the station wagon suddenly doubled its speed and the creature lost its grip and went sprawling face down in the road. From low gear Lindsay shifted into second, then into third. The pursuit died away. Everyone in the car let out a long sigh of relief.

Then the station wagon clawed its way around a bend and Lindsay had to step hard on the brake pedal because the road was blocked by a truck.

It was not a truck that was coming or going. It only stood there in the road with its doors open and its tailgate down and two men standing nearby at the edge of the gorge, surrounded by rusty metal drums they must have unloaded from it. Even as the vehicle bearing the refugees from the gorge shivered to a stop, one of the men rolled a drum to the canyon’s rim and kicked it off into space.

The truck, Keith Walker noticed, was unmarked. Which was strange because in this part of the state people who owned such vehicles usually painted their names or the names of their businesses on them in pretty big letters. Like Howard Lindsay’s two trucks had LINDSAY PAINT COMPANY, INNSMOUTH, MASS and his phone number on them in letters about a foot high.

So why was Lindsay clawing his way out of the station wagon now and striding toward this truck as if he owned it? Why, after a frantic look behind to see if the naked people were in sight yet, was he yelling at the men as if they worked for him? And why was he shouting, “What do you think you’re doing here? How long have you been coming here with this stuff, for God’s sake?”

“We been comin’ here from the start, boss,” one of the men said. He didn’t look too bright. In fact, neither of them did. “Ain’t that what you told us to do, huh?”

“You bloody idiot, I didn’t say Deeprock! I said Redrock! But never mind now. You’re blocking the road. Get this damned truck out of here! Fast!” And again Lindsay turned to see if the monstrous things from the gorge were in sight.

They were. They had just rounded the bend of the road. And though obviously tired now from their struggle to climb The Devil’s Ladder—or maybe from the condition they were in, with their awful bodies even more misshapen than before—they still brandished their clubs and shouted threats. What was it they wanted, Keith asked himself? Revenge?

The two men ran back to their truck, and Lindsay to the station wagon. As the big vehicle growled into motion and Howard Lindsay sent the station wagon lurching after it, Keith turned for a last look behind.

For the first time he noticed that one of the naked gorge creatures was only a child. A girl about Davey’s age. Then, mercifully, another bend in the road hid them all from sight.

The station wagon was off the gorge road and on a two-lane blacktop before anyone spoke. The truck driver had pulled over to let it pass, and once again Keith had noticed there was no name on the truck. Turning on the seat, he looked hard at Howard Lindsay, who was still driving, and said, “What do you really make at that paint factory of yours, Lindsay?”

Lindsay shot him an angry glance, then concentrated fiercely on the road again. But his mouth tightened.

“Does it have anything to do with that dark-complexioned fellow who was in Innsmouth a while back, saying he wanted to learn the paint business? That fellow from—where was he from now? Iraq? Iran? Somewhere in the Middle East, I seem to remember. Does what you’re making now have anything to do with that fellow, Lindsay?”

Lindsay said nothing.

“But I guess he didn’t really want to learn about paint-making, did he?” Keith persisted. “What he wanted was to teach you how to make something. Those Middle East countries are big on things like germ warfare, aren’t they? Was it something like that he persuaded you to make and ship to him as paint? And have you been dumping the leftovers or by-products into Deeprock Gorge? That’s about the size of it, Lindsay... isn’t it?”