Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

The rag pile gurgles and then makes a hollow, gulping noise. Lacey thinks it’s laughing, as close as it can ever come to laughing, and she wonders how long it’s going to be before it touches her again, wonders if they’ll kill her first, and which would be worse.

“Yeah, this is sure some real goddamn funny shit,” the man grumbles.

Lacey presses her face against the soggy carpeting, eyes open but nothing there to see, rough fabric against her eyeballs, and she tries to wipe its touch from her skin. Nothing she’ll ever be able to scrub off, though, she knows that, something that’s stained straight through to her soul.

“Is it the fossil?” she asks. “Is this about the goddamn fossil?”

“Now you startin’ to use that big ol’ brain of yours, missy,” the woman says. “You tell us where it’s hid, who you gave it to, and maybe you gonna get to live just a little bit longer.”

“She ain’t gonna tell you jack shit,” the man sneers.

The rag pile makes a fluttering, anxious sound, and Lacey tries to sit up, but the van swerves and bounces over something, a pothole or a speed bump, a fucking old lady crossing the street for all she knows, and she tumbles over on her face again.

“It’s in the box,” she snarls, rolling onto her back and she kicks out with her left foot and hits nothing but the metal side wall. The rag pile gurgles and sputters wildly and so Lacey kicks the van again, harder than before. “Haven’t you even opened the goddamn box?”

“Bitch, ain’t nothin’ we want in that box,” the woman says. “You already handed it off to Monalisa, didn’t you?”

“Of course she fucking gave it to him. Jesus, what the fuck else do you think she did with it?”

“I told you to shut up and drive.”

“Fuck you,” and then a car horn blares and everything dissolves into the banshee wail of squealing brakes, tyres burning themselves down to naked, steelbelt bones, the impact hardly half a heartbeat later, and Lacey is thrown backwards into the gurgling rag pile. Something soft, at least, she thinks, wondering if she’s dead already and just hasn’t figured it all out yet, and the man in the sunglasses screams like a woman.

And there’s light, a flood of clean, warm sunlight across her face before the gunfire—three shots—blam, blam, blam. The rag pile abruptly stops gurgling and someone takes her by the arm, someone pulling her out of the van, out of hell and back into the world again.

“I can’t see,” she says, and the blindfold falls away to leave her squinting and blinking at the rough brick walls of an alleyway, a sagging fire escape, the stink of a garbage dumpster but even that smells good after the van.

“Wow,” the old man says, grinning scarecrow of an old man in a blue fedora and a shiny, gabardine suit, blue bow tie to match his hat. “I saw someone do that in a movie once. I never imagined it would actually work.”

There’s a huge revolver clutched in his bony right hand, the blindfold dangling from the fingers of his left, and his violet-grey eyes sparkle like amethysts and spring water.

“Professor Solomon Monalisa, at your service,” he says, lets the blindfold fall to the ground and holds one twig-thin hand out to Lacey. “You had us all worried, Miss Morrow. You shouldn’t have run like that.”

Lacey stares at his outstretched hand, and there are sirens now.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot about the handcuffs. I’m afraid we’ll have to attend to those elsewhere, though. I don’t think we should be here when the police show up and start asking questions, do you?”

“No,” she says, and the old man takes her arm again and starts to lead her away from the wrecked van.

“Wait. The box,” she says and tries to turn around, but he stops her and puts a hand across her eyes.

“What’s back there, Miss Morrow, you don’t want to see it.”

“They have the box. The Innsmouth fossil—”

“I have the fossil,” he says. “And it’s quite safe, I assure you. Come now, Miss Morrow. We don’t have much time.”

And he leads her away from the van, down the long, narrow alley and there’s a door back there, a tall wooden door with peeling red paint and he opens it with a silver key.

EXCERPT FROM

NEW AMERICAN MONSTERS: MORE THAN MYTH?

BY GERALD DURRELL (HILL AND WANG, NEW YORK, 1959]

...which is certainly enough to make us pause and wonder about the possibility of a connection between at least some of these sightings and the celluloid fantasies being churned out by Hollywood film-makers. If we insist upon objectivity and are willing to entertain the notion of unknown animals, we must also, it seems, be equally willing to entertain the possibility that a few of these beasts may exist as much in the realm of the psychologist as that of the biologist. I can think of no better example of what I mean than the strange and frightening reports from Massachusetts proceeding the release of Creature from the Black Lagoon six years ago.