Whispers From The Abyss (6 page)

He started filling up the Impala.  He blinked once, craned his neck, and then gibbered in broken English.  “Why you coming this way?”

It wasn’t so much a friendly question, but an accusation.  I simply smiled putting on my best harmless face.  “Visiting some friends.”

“What friends?”  Gilman demanded.

“This is a free country, Man.”  Rooster opened his door and slid out.  He towered over Gilman by half a foot, but the gas attendant merely sniffed contemptuously.  The biker continued letting menace drip from every word.  “Why are you hassling us?”

Gilman sneered with the grace of eel.  “Go away.  Visitors aren’t welcome.”

Rooster shook his head and tossed me his sunglasses.  It was a universal signal of rough shit is coming and therefore cowards and writers should hide.  The biker laughed with wild abandoned and then pushed Gilman back with two hands.  Gilman was unmoved.  By that I mean Rooster couldn’t budge him an inch as though the very laws of physics did not affect Gilman.  He tilted his fat head confused.  “You should have left.”

The gas attendant’s eyes budged like a wild frog and flashed red.  He growled and then hissed aggressively while drool dripped from his lips like a rabid dog.  Rooster stepped back, raising his fists, but was unprepared for the brutal savagery of this beast.  Two giants battled like the classic Rumble in the Jungle; George Foreman versus Muhammad Ali.  Rooster landed several blows, but like George, he was tiring quickly and losing to the faster opponent that moved with blinding speed. 

To be fair, as an aside, I was paid to cover that fight, but I didn’t actually see it live.  I was sleeping off eight hits of high powered blotter acid while floating in a pool at the hotel. 

The outcome was never in doubt and finally Gilman landed a final, solid blow to Rooster’s jaw that knocked him flat onto the gravel road.  He leapt on top of the biker and began to choke the life from him.  Gilman glanced up at me, trying not to soil my pants in the Impala, and hissed as though to warn me that I was next. 

It was then at the moment my life was truly in danger that I finally remembered the .357 Magnum.  I opened the glove box and fished around through the papers until I found the pistol, cocked it, and then aimed it at the beast.  “Don’t make me do it!”

Gilman coiled his muscles as though to strike.  I didn’t have a choice.  Or at least that’s what tell myself to help sleep at night without too many nightmares.

Five times I squeezed the trigger.  Each shot struck true with an explosion of black blood and foul-smelling flesh.  He dropped to the ground next to Rooster.  The beast was dead. 

Rooster slowly stirred and then sat up from the gravel road and coughed.  His eyes were dilated as a result of going ten rounds with a monster.  He bled profusely from his neck and chest where the monster had struck him with those savaging claws.

I checked his wrist and sure enough his pulse was weak.  His lips trembled and his hands shook; classic signs of some sort of terrible overdose.  Had Gilman’s claws been poisoned with some sort of paralytic? 

We couldn’t stay there long.  Who knew how many of these bastards were skulking about?  Rooster needed to stay awake.  If passed out, he might never wake.  If that poison shut down his heart, he would die.  There was only one option and that could kill him.  Opening the trunk, I pulled out my doctor’s bag.  We had thee bags of Pineapple Express Marijuana, two vials of pure cocaine, thirteen hits of blotter acid, mescaline, and two shots of epinephrine.  I needed to start his heart and the best method was epinephrine commonly known as adrenaline.

“Please don’t die.”  I checked the needle, marked the location of his heart, and then jammed it into his flesh as hard as I could.  Rooster opened his eyes and screamed.  “Please don’t kill me!”

Rooster plucked out the needle that had gotten stuck in his chest and then noted the blood.  “What the Hell was that?”

Marsh’s warning came back to my ears.  Phrases like the Esoteric Order of Dagon returned to the forefront of my brain.  “This is one of the Deep Ones, if Marsh wasn’t baked out of his brain.  The bastard was a son of a creature that lives far, far below the surface in a city called Y'ha-nthlei.”  I kept talking to district the brute while I bandaged his wounds.  He might be able to ignore the pain for a while, but if he died I was fairly certain I’d follow.  “If this is where Nixon’s really getting his money, the world needs to know.”

“What if the whole town is like this?”  Rooster asked, dejected.  “We won’t stand a chance.”

We needed a plan.  We pushed our luck as far as it was bound to go against supernatural creatures spawned from the dawn of human history.  I pondered this question endlessly while Rooster went through the gross necessity of robbing the beast and riling through the office to make this death appear to be a typically robbery. 

Rooster exited the dirty office wealthier and wiser.  He showed me a calendar with the night’s date circled.  There were two words written in red ink under the date. 
Waite Transportation
.

A great and terrible plan occurred to me then and there.  It was devious, underhanded, and worthy of the devil Nixon himself.  I ventured into the office and scrounged for a working telephone and then made a few calls to
Chicago and hoped that rotten bastard attorney still had a working secretary.

Rooster nodded approvingly.  The devil would get his due and then some.

*     *     *

Innsmouth was a town thick with decaying brick builds with stark steeples looming over the dark horizon of the ocean.  Fong-Torres warned us that the town had been the subject of a military raid at the end of Prohibition that had destroyed the waterfront and it appeared that the residents had only recently begun to bother with the actual reconstruction of the burg instead of nesting like rats content with the rubble and flotsam.  The waterfront was the only section of town that had seen recent construction and there was a small factory near the piers that seemed to have the most activity. 

We ventured quietly by foot through the cobblestone street named Obed Avenue and crept to the edge of the gated factory that bore the flickering sign
Waite Transportation
.  Dozens of rusted cars and shabby trucks lined the parking lot and the whirl of engines and machines could be heard even at a great distance.  Rooster was quite practiced in the art of absconding with other people’s property.  He found an easy egress into the parking lot and then a fire escape to peer into the building.

We managed to find a spot in the upper balcony and listened to them for ten minutes.  It was a savage mixture of a
Hollywood snuff party hosted by the Charlie Manson Cult, a proper orgy hosted by Ron Jeremy, and a political fundraiser for Tricky Dick.  Young girls wearing gossamer white robes served drinks and other pleasures to laughing men that had more in common with Gilman than either Rooster or myself.  They spoke of going into the deep and escaping the world of men until the Old Ones returned;  an unfamiliar riff on a familiar tune that a wild-eyed hippie might have laid down to his ladies before disappearing into the desert forever.

I waited impatiently hoping that they would reveal their connections to that rat-bastard Nixon.  Rooster’s ears still rung from that beating Gilman delivered to his skull, but he had the tenacity and fight of the glorious beast that the good Lord made him.  Neither of us noticed the men in black robes wielding knives and guns until it was too late.  They brought us before an altar of gold of a hideous beast with dozens of limbs that seemed to move out of the corner of my eyes.  The chorus chanted with delight.  “Hail Mother Hydra!  Hail Father Dagon!”

The crowd formed a path without a word and a tall man cloaked in shadow emerged.  He pulled back his hood to reveal a wolfish, stern face with an iron-gray beard. “I am Ephraim Waite.  You think you can dare to fight the Order of Dagon?”

I shook my head.  “We just wanted the scoop.  We know you are supplying Nixon with cash.”

Waite laughed.  Clearly I missed the punch line.  Apparently being surrounded by a pack of sadist cultists ready to Manson us with their pig-stickers does that to a man, who knew?  “What did you hope to gain?”

The best you can do when surrounded by the crazy is show that you belong.  If you have to be stuck in the asylum, you might as well run it.  “We’re a distraction.”

Waite turned dramatically like he was the villain in one of those old black and white serials featuring Flash Gordon.  “What?”

The familiar ring of sirens rang in the distance.  “Turns out my attorney informed the government that you have tons of hash and coke.  They might not believe in monsters from the deep, but they know junkies.”

“Give them the draught and hide them.  The government must never know that they were here.”

They forced spiced wine down our throats.  It tasted like bitter almonds.  The edges of my vision burred and shimmered.  Time dilated.  A mere breath felt an eternity.  Fingers gripped the pavement trying to take hold as gravity upended least I be hurled from the very planet and become lost in the black of the universe.  Would I ever wake if I finally succumbed to the sleep that beckoned? 

As ways to die, this somehow how seemed appropriate and certainly predictable…

*     *     *

I woke in a pool of my own piss and vomit.  My only thought was a bitter one.  This again?  How long had I been passed out in this shithole of a hotel?  Rooster lay next to me on the bed, his massive arms wrapped over my chest as though I were his bride. 

Somehow, I managed to crawl out from his limbering grip and make it to the bathroom to wash my face.  Memories of the experience had mercifully started to fade, but the exception of the occasional flash of a long, twisted tentacle that felt cold as ice, yet soft and almost inviting.  What manner of beast would have such an appendage?  Why did my arms ache?  I ran my fingers over the blotchy disc-shaped rashes that had crept over my arms while we were out.   What torture did they inflict on us?  I quickly decided that I was better off not knowing and let the nightmare fade from my thoughts.

There was only one answer that would let me sleep at night.  The cult must have dosed us with that acid Marsh used to sell.  Drug induced lunacy was an answer that I could handle.  The other options were too horrific to consider.  The truth had become too painful to consider. 

It was then that I realized someone had left us a note scrawled on the mirror in red.  I told myself it was lipstick, not blood.  Dear Lord, please let it have been lipstick.

You live because to kill you would draw attention.  Do not be more trouble than it would be worth to horribly murder you.

E

I opened the door and scooped up the day’s paper and checked the date.  We had been out two weeks.  How was that possible? What did they do to us?  The headline almost stopped my heart.

McGovern had won the convention and the Democratic nomination for President, but his running mate, Thomas Eagleton, recently revealed that he had submitted to electroshock therapy in Arkham Asylum for depression. 

Without any proof of Nixon’s ties to illegal contributions, we had nothing to use.  There was a lesser article about a petty drug raid on Innsmouth where federal agents discovered the drugs they were seeking and arrested two men.  I had given them the perfect cover story.

Nixon would win no matter what. 

I know that this manuscript shall never see the light of day -  that corrupt bastard would crush any publication that dared to print this much truth.  I am left with only one question.  How long until those bastards kill us all?

Fishfinger is my bestest friend in the whole world.  And she says I’m her bestest friend too, even though she doesn’t have any other friends, but I’m still the best anyway so that’s okay.

Her name isn’t really Fishfinger, that’s just what everybody at school calls her, because they say she smells like fish and she looks a bit like a fish as well.  And she does too but I still like her and anyway they all smell too so there.  My mommy says it’s mean and I should call her her proper name but Fishfinger says she doesn’t mind, she does when other kids call her it because they’re mean and they don’t like her but I’m nice she says and I’m her bestest friend so it’s okay.  But really her real name is Samantha.

Fishfinger hasn’t lived in my town very long, her and her mom and her dad, who I call them Mr and Mrs Fishfinger but that’s not really their names but I can’t spell their real names, they used to live in another town near the sea and that was called Innsmouth.  Fishfinger says it was nice there and no one was mean to her at her old school because she wasn’t different there, and nobody said she smelled like fish, and but then they had to move but she doesn’t know why they did.

Fishfinger and her mom and her dad don’t ever come to church with us, so I asked her one time, did that mean that she doesn’t believe in the baby Jesus like how we do?  And she said, no, they have their own God who’s different from ours and he isn’t called God his name is D-A-G-O-N, that’s how she spelled it.  And he gives them gold and all sorts of things she said.  And I asked why she doesn’t go to a special church so that she can pray and sing songs and she said they can’t because their God lives in the sea and they had a church at home only it wasn’t called a church but they can’t have one here because there’s no sea.

I thought that was silly, but my teacher says you shouldn’t laugh at people because their religion is different from yours, even when it is silly.

Fishfinger’s mom seems nice even though she doesn’t say much but I don’t like Fishfinger’s dad because he looks at me strange like how people look when they’re hungry.  And one time I saw his neck and he had like what my goldfish his name was Goldie what my goldfish had for breathing, they are called gills.  I thought he had those and I told my mom and she said that was silly because people don’t have gills only fishes do.  But every other time he was wearing a big jumper and so I couldn’t see his neck and my mom said it was a dream maybe or I made it up but I didn’t but maybe it was a dream.  I’ve had lots of funny dreams lately.  One dream I had there was a big fish man, he was as tall as ten houses on top of each other and he wanted to eat me but then I woke up and it was only a dream.  And they can’t hurt you my mom said but they can still be scary I said.

Anyway, I don’t like Fishfinger’s dad much at all.  One day he asked me a funny question, he said, are you a virgin and I said that I didn’t know what one of those is except that the Virgin Mary was one and he said well if I didn’t know then I was.  And Fishfinger’s mom said of course she is, don’t go asking her things like that, you’ll upset the girl she’s only eight (but I’m not I’m seven) and he told me he was very sorry and he hoped I wasn’t upset and I said it was okay but I still don’t like him.

Only I do like him a little bit because him and Mrs Fishfinger said that I can go on vacation with them if I like.  They said, would I like to come and be a little friend for Samantha (that’s Fishfinger her real name) to play with.  And I said that would be lovely because me and mom and dad aren’t going on vacation this year, last year and the year before that we went to stay with grandma and granddad but we can’t this year because grandma is poorly and her legs are gone funny.

And so me and Fishfinger are going to go to Innsmouth which is where she lived before she lived here and she’s going to show me all her favourite places and her old school and all sorts of things.

And Mr Fishfinger says that he will take me to the specialist place there is but it’s a secret so I can’t tell anybody but I can write it down that’s okay.  It’s a big rock in the sea and they do their religion there it’s like how in our church there’s the high up place where the vicar stands only they have a big rock instead and that’s better he says because then their God can come and talk to them properly.  He’s a very hungry God, Mr Fishfinger says, and if I’m extra especially good then maybe they’ll let me feed him.  One time we went to the zoo and I fed the sea lions and they clapped their hands and did a dance.  It’ll be just like that except better.

I am looking forward to it lots and lots and lots.