Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

No one takes too much interest in the comings and goings of a mortuary at 6:00 a.m., not unless something really big has gone down, so when I got there, it was quiet. Zeitsheim’s suicide would have been no great shakes here. I knew the guy on the desk, Raglo. I won’t say I’m a regular, but we’d played poker together a few times. He’s the worst poker player I know, but I let him win more than lose. That way I don’t always have to pry information out of him with a crowbar.

“Much happenin’?” I asked him.

“Quiet night, Nick. Three or four heart attacks, one drunk fished out the Hudson, brawl victim. Usual intake. What’s your angle?”

I flashed him a glimpse of Zeitsheim. “Fresh off the night boat from Odessa.”

He knew the case, of course, but his face clouded and he pulled back. “No, I don’t think so. You got the wrong morgue.”

“Don’t go cold on me, Raglo. He’s here.”

My man was sweating. “I don’t know nothin’.”

I smiled my horrible smile and leaned over the counter. “I know that. But tell me anyway.”

He knew what I was like when someone upset me. “Three guys came in, flashing badges at me.”

“Let me guess. FBI?”

He looked appalled. “You know about them?”

“A little. So what did they want, apart from a peek at Zeitsheim?”

He looked even worse, like he had acute guts ache. His face was like chalk. “They wanted more than that. They wanted his corpse. I mean, they wanted to take it away.”

I started sliding notes across the counter, lots of them.

“Listen, I saw the guy when we unzipped his bag and put him in the locker,” said Raglo, face even whiter.

“A mess, right?”

“You got that right. Nick. Used a long knife on himself. You know I ain’t squeamish, but this was about as bad as it gets. The guy was dead, right. You don’t get no deader. Think I don’t know a stiff when I seen one? Jimmy and me slid him home into a locker and turned the key.”

I straightened up. “So?”

“When I took the three suits back there and Jimmy unlocked it—jeeze, it was crazy. The smell was like nothin’ I ever smelled before. I tell ya, I’ve known every kind of horror in this place, Nick. Makes you thick-skinned and you can take anything, sights, smells, whatever. But this was one stench. Like a drain outta Hell itself.”

“The body?”

“Body? Shit, there was no body. Just a pool of… what the hell can I call it? Green slime. Yeah, slime. Inch deep in the locker.”

“You’re telling me that the body had decomposed that quickly? Turned into a pool of green slime in—what, minutes?”

He shook his head. “No. Weirder than that, pal. Jimmy spotted the rest of it. You want to see? Only you betta be quick. The dicks’ll be here in a minute.”

“Lead on.” I followed him out through the back into the cold room.

Jimmy, his attendant, was slumped at a desk, head down, snoring. We didn’t wake him. Sounded like he’d had enough for one night.

“This is the locker. But look, that’s what Jimmy noticed.” He pointed to the polished floor. Going across it was a kind of trail. I went over to look at it and bent down. Green slime was right. Like some big fat slug had dragged itself across the room. I got up and walked through an open door to a small washroom out back.

“I haven’t touched anything,” avowed Raglo. “The Feds told me not to. They said they’d be back.”

I nodded. “I haven’t been here, okay? And you were right about the stink.” It made me cough. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, vile. But if you guys have been down there, you’ll know that.

Raglo pointed to the window. It was busted, like something far too bulky had been shoved through it, hard. More slime.

“Nick, what in hell is goin’ on? Who’s done this? Jimmy says no one could have got in here. No one could have gotten that body out of the locker without him knowin’.”

I shoved some more dollar notes into his shaking hand. “I guess you’re right. So we have to consider the other possibility. Well, you don’t, but I do.”

He gaped at me like a beached guppy.

“The guy was alive,” I said. “He crawled out. Where does the window lead to?”

* * *

I left him to it and none too soon. Minutes after I quit the morgue, a couple of police wagons drew up. At least I had a short head start on them.

Round the back of the building I found the alley system that was fed by the window from which Stefan Zeitsheim (or whatever had consumed him) had made his escape. I was beginning to see the attraction this guy had for his various pursuers. My current employers had told me that Stefan was hunted. No wonder. FBI? I had no contacts there. My guess was that they wanted him alive, while my employers wanted him dead. Maybe he had the dirt on them.

I picked up the slime trail, but it wound its way through a dozen alleys and petered out. After that there was nothing much to go on. So what was I looking for now? The mother of all maggots, or Houdini’s older brother? If this was a trick, a fake suicide and a weird escape to follow, it had taken some pulling off.