Waiting Page 7

  “Make no mistake, Agent Dobbs,” Hoover said. “My intention is that, in ten years’ time, this Bureau will reach the point where we’ll no longer need men like you. But that day has not yet arrived. You’ve proved useful here. I’m sure you won’t mind being at the front of the column when we go back in.”

  Dobbs shook his head no. “I wouldn’t mind that at all, sir.”

  Thinking if the brass couldn’t get rid of him one way, they’d get rid of him another. Throw him in the grinder and hope for the best.

  Had it been up to Dobbs, they would’ve back gone into Innsmouth right away, before its residents, denizens, muck-dwellers, whatever they were, had much chance to react to the havoc he’d caused.

  But it didn’t happen that way. Which probably explained why he’d never made higher than corporal in the army, and was now facing a future with the Bureau that got shorter all the time.

  The domestic invasion of a town in New England, cradle of the country’s founding . . . that took time to plan. The war on rumrunners provided a cover story, but everything else had to spin off that to hold together. Which limited the personnel they could use.

  Just as well. Because nobody, not J. Edgar Hoover, not even President Coolidge, could call up a battalion of the army and turn them loose on U.S. soil. Washington would be full of screaming congressmen before the smoke cleared. It had to be an in-house job, and the smaller the house, the better. Those heads in the icebox . . . matters like that needed a tight lid.

  Through December, over Christmas, and into January, the task force gelled, agents handpicked from within the Bureau and Treasury—heavy on the Prohibition boys, plus the Secret Service, who knew a thing or two about discretion.

  When in mid-February it was time to rendezvous in Boston, they came up from New York, and in from Chicago and Kansas City, and from half a dozen other places. The fellas from Miami may have been a mistake, because they spent most of their time bitching about the cold.

  Numbering upwards of 140, they set up a final staging ground on the field beside a dilapidated barracks north of Arkham, unused since the Civil War. It was a frosty February morning when they gathered, an army in every sense but official, in uniforms of trench coats and fedoras, stamping their feet and blowing into their hands for warmth.

  Not a one of them knew why they were really here. They still thought they’d been brought in because they were the best of the best, gathered for some high-level bootlegging raid nobody else could be trusted with.

  The briefing set them straight. There were words from Bureau and Treasury brass, off the back of a truck, then they turned it over to Dobbs himself, because nobody else could speak with the same authority of experience. That was how they’d sold him on it, anyway. More like he was so goddamn big and mean-looking that he compelled the kind of attention it took to put the gravity across.

  “Once we get inside this town, you’re going to see things you never knew could be alive,” Dobbs boomed out to them. “You’ll wish they weren’t. You’re going to have to get used to that idea really quick. Some of you are starting to laugh already, I know, because I would too. But that’s what’s waiting for us. I’ve seen them up close. I’ve tangled with them and I’ve got the scars to prove it.”

  They passed out photos next, shots taken in late November of the meat trays and what they held, and things got sober fast. Dobbs heard the murmurs: That can’t be real.

  Better yet if they’d still had the heads to show, but Hoover had taken charge of those in early December, passing them along for study and analysis. The man was on a mission to quietly set up a new department in some laboratory somewhere, answerable only to him, and preparing for whatever came out of this raid: prisoners, corpses, things they couldn’t yet anticipate.

  “Innsmouth isn’t supposed to have more than four hundred people in it, but there may be hundreds more like these in hiding,” Dobbs went on. “I don’t know what they are or what they’re up to. That’s what we’re here to find out, instead of one day wishing we had. All I know is you don’t want to underestimate them. A couple months ago, while you were tucking into Thanksgiving dinner with your families, I was out here instead of with my wife, getting stitched up from what two of these things did to me. Just two.”

  The faces out there, hard-looking men one and all . . . they were shaken. He’d never seen expressions like this during his years with the Bureau. For this kind of dread, he had to go back to the war. Waiting for the shelling to begin again, or the clouds of mustard gas. Waiting for the Hun to charge. Waiting to go over the top and leave the trenches behind.

  “What happens today stays between us,” Dobbs told them, going beyond what he’d prepared to say. He didn’t know where it was coming from. “Whatever you see, whatever you do, you lock that down in a place inside you and don’t speak about it to anyone who wasn’t here with you, and you carry it to your grave. Live with it. Live with it the way some of us do with what we saw and did in the war.

  “You’re here because you’re good at your job and somebody thinks you can be trusted to keep secrets. So keep them. Remember that, if you get an itch to beat your gums about it. Ask yourself if the things in these pictures are something you want people out there knowing about. Your neighbors, your friends. Your mothers. Ask yourself if it’s something you want to explain to your wives. If you want to sit with your kids after they wake up dreaming about what’s out here, and try telling them with a straight face that the monsters aren’t real.”

  They loaded up and set off on the final miles, a convoy of two dozen trucks and automobiles bouncing along the ruts of the winter-bogged roads to the coast. They came into Innsmouth from the south, one direction only, not bothering to split up and converge from the roads from Ipswich and Rowley and Newburyport.

  Whatever was hiding under the surface of Innsmouth, it wasn’t going to flee inland.

  As they rolled through in a roar of motors, under a sunless gray sky, Innsmouth coiled still and silent around them. Arkham Road turned to Federal Street, taking them to the town square that Dobbs and Hewlitt had traversed on their first visit here. They paused long enough to drop off a dozen agents to remain in the heart of town and question the residents who still showed themselves by day.

  When they continued, half the vehicles took the south side of the river down to the harbor, the other half crossing the bridge to the north bank. At the bottom of the slope, they fanned out along Water Street, the bulk of the task force bailing out of their vehicles to hit the ground running. Most bristled with shotguns and BARs and drum-fed Thompson submachine guns, while a handful of sharpshooters clambered up to the tops of the trucks, ready to train their rifles on anything that moved.

  They broke into units of ten and began the search. Four teams took the homes and businesses on the west side of Water Street. The rest split above and below the river, to clear the warehouses along the wharves, their plumes of breath following them in from outside. The cold kept down the worst of the smell permeating the waterfront, but every building felt like an icebox, their rotting timbers rimed with salt and frost. As chilled and quiet as stone tombs, their lonely inner silence was made more manifest by the constant surging wash of the sea.

  On the wharf, Dobbs took point with the first team and had Hewlitt stick close behind him. From structure to structure, they advanced north, toward the worst of the decay, the stretch of sheds where in November he’d skirmished tooth-and-claw. Same as the rest of the teams, Dobbs and his agents poked and prodded through the leavings of the years— crates and barrels cracked open by age, upended rowboats abandoned untold seasons ago, and pieces of bigger vessels left in states of disrepair. Ignoring it all, looking for more recent signs of life.

  They’d been at it for more than two hours when the attack came.

  The spot seemed safe, as deserted as everywhere else they’d been, a corridor leading out of one of the more cavernous warehouses, whose floor space was divided into a warren of passages and rooms left open to the
rafters.

  Dobbs heard a thud and a scream from behind, and whirled in time to see one of the Treasury agents rush headlong into the wall as if he had no will of his own. Jutting from the man’s spine were the last inches of the barbed head of some sort of iron spike—there one moment, then withdrawn back through him with a cracking of bone as the man crumpled to the rotted boards. An instant later, another spear punched through the planks of the wall into empty space, then a third from the other side, this one slashing a gash across another agent’s thigh.

  Harpoons.

  They were attacking with harpoons that hadn’t seen a whale in generations.

  Dobbs swung up his Browning Automatic Rifle, the same as he’d used in the war, and fired a burst of rounds through the wall on one side, then swiveled to target its opposite. Behind him, agents backtracked through the corridor’s entryway, or dropped to the floor, below the level of the harpoons, and fumbled to engage their weapons. The planking disintegrated under fire, rotten slabs of wall falling away to uncover hidden corridors that ran parallel to them.

  They stood revealed, creatures made wholly for neither the land nor the sea, that skulked beneath the surface of the town. Twenty or more, they ran a gamut from those who looked almost like men, to cousins of the wolf-eel whose head he’d taken. Some were dead, some were dying, some continued their assault. In the chaos, an agent was skewered where he lay, while another was felled by a rusty cargo hook swung into the base of his neck, then wrenched down to rip him open from throat to breastbone.

  Beside him, Hewlitt was screaming, firing his shotgun repeatedly into the same malformed and bulbous creature, dead already but not dead enough to suit him.

  It left Hewlitt distracted enough that he didn’t see the next one, vaulting over the bodies of its comrades with neither hook nor harpoon. But it had jaws. It grappled onto his shoulders and bore him down before he could react, lunging and snapping as they fell. Hewlitt dodged by instinct, but his attacker’s lantern jaws, brimming with needle teeth, clamped shut over his collarbone.

  Dobbs took his finger off the trigger; couldn’t fire downward without shooting through the thing’s body into Hewlitt as well. He flipped the BAR’s muzzle toward the ceiling and spiked the butt into the back of the creature’s skull. It relaxed its bite long enough for Dobbs to snatch it by the straps of its filthy overalls and hoist it up and off Hewlitt, heave it away, and gun it down while it staggered.

  Did these things even care about their own lives? Undoubtedly they did . . . but they cared about Innsmouth more, perhaps, or the others of their kind that were left. If Dobbs had thought them inhuman before, he found it a worse shock to think they were at least human enough to sacrifice themselves for the rest. To strike a blow they knew they might not survive, that their targets would never forget.

  He pulled Hewlitt onto his feet again, wild-eyed and shrieking. The wound was a bleeder, as ragged as whatever remained of his nerves. Dobbs slapped a handkerchief over it, got Hewlitt to hold the compress in place, then was back in the fight again.

  From outside came the sounds of distant gunfire, south along the wharf, as other teams either came under assault, or rushed forward, drawn by the noise of this one.

  Their surviving attackers, wounded and untouched alike, fell away in retreat, ducking deeper into the warehouse, losing themselves amid the maze of crates and makeshift walls. Dobbs chose not to follow, and instead charged the rest of the way through the corridor, into daylight and under open skies, the freezing wet wind a revivifying jolt.

  The wharf was swarming with them now. Some plunged into the icy waters of the harbor. Others straggled along in their peculiar gaits and made for the buildings ahead.

  Dobbs was wearing a bandolier stuffed with box magazines for the BAR, twenty rounds apiece. He ejected the spent one onto the stones and reloaded, then leveled the rifle from his hip and held it steady by the wooden handle mounted on the barrel. It all came back as though he’d never left it, firing the way he’d been trained a decade ago, to clear the way for his squad: advance and fire, short bursts, advance and fire, target wisely, advance and fire, eject and reload, advance and fire. The crack of it rolled like thunder along the wharf and over the tranquil waters of the harbor.

  He zeroed in on one of the sheds where he’d seen them converge, chewing away at its walls and supports, churning up a blizzard of splinters and shards until the structure collapsed into a pile of rotten wood. He took down another, leaving a trail of empty magazines behind him, and let up only when he realized he hadn’t seen any of them moving for at least a minute. The last of his volley of fire echoed off the sea-cliffs to the north and died away beneath the surf.

  Strange—he was certain he’d seen more of these monstrosities scurry into these sheds than they looked capable of holding.

  Stranger yet—when the survivors of his team rejoined him and dragged aside the wreckage of roof and walls, they didn’t find a single body.

  Once they dismantled the site a little further it became clear enough, a vital detail he hadn’t seen, or even considered, when he’d poked around that rainy November night.

  Tunnels. Some of these shacks were merely fronts for tunnels, concealed beneath the crates.

  As the sea-wind whipped them and the cold bit for their bones, Dobbs and the others stood around the opening, staring into it, ancient brick and shaped stone, with a ladder affixed to one side, rungs worn smooth by generations of inhuman hands.

  Like a throat, it yawned and waited, daring them to enter and sighing with the dank breath of the sea.

  They returned in two days, this time packing in dynamite.

  Every hour, another tunnel or two was discovered. They linked structures to one another, or structures to the sea, beginning in town and terminating in tight caves that perforated the rockier stretches of coastline. They made such a labyrinth that exploring them seemed a job better suited for miners. Some looked wholly natural; others bore chisel marks and utilized support beams. Interrogated residents spoke of them being used since pre-Revolutionary days, when colonial smugglers sought to evade the trade regulations of British rule.

  And now? Now the tunnels appeared to have been utilized much as the trenches of the Great War had—for shelter and safety, as the foundation of an entire unlikely culture whose population wanted most of all to keep their heads low and intact. They were littered with the bones of fish, the shells of crabs and lobsters, oysters and clams, with scraps of clothing and makeshift beds and the crudest of weapons left behind in the haste to evacuate them for good.

  In this much, at least, Dobbs found he could understand them, even grant them a grudging admiration, his disgust at what they were tempered by measures of pity.

  Nobody chose to live that way if they could help it.

  Throughout the second day, into the third, the waterfront boomed with the blasts of demolition. Buildings came down, tunnels collapsed or filled with debris, and little by little the Innsmouth skyline of rooftops and steeples, cupolas and widow’s walks, was reshaped.

  Beginning that second day, they had eyes on them from the seaward side, as well—Hoover’s doing. A pair of Coast Guard cutters idled in the choppy sea past the breakwater, while an O-class submarine, up from Division 8 of the Boston Navy Yard, prowled the deeper waters beyond the grim black line of Devil Reef.

  The refugees had fled there, if the sharpshooters and other high-vantage spotters in town were to be believed. They claimed to have seen numerous swimmers heading toward the reef throughout the first day, surging in and out of the water like seals. If true, it accounted for why no one had encountered any of Innsmouth’s more bestial residents since their initial attack.

  In town, up and down the hills on both sides of the river, the sweeps continued, from the humblest cottages to the once-grand mansions of Washington and Lafayette Streets. Some of the residents they let go, others they took into custody.

  It was easy to weed them out now that it was apparent what to look for, and w
hy. In the neighboring towns here in the northeast corner of Massachusetts, folks had spoken of it for decades, in a hush and often with abhorrence: the “Innsmouth look,” they called it. Townspeople born generations apart, to different families, with no known blood connection, came to look remarkably alike, more so than typical siblings and their parents in decent places.

  In Innsmouth they aged quickly, it was said, and badly, then they were never seen in public again, yet their kindred spoke of them as though they were still alive and well.

  Dobbs didn’t know what Darwin would’ve made of such a thing. But with their balding heads and bulging eyes, their flaking skin and widened mouths, their clomping feet and oversized hands, they looked to be the landlocked forerunners of the ones who’d made their escape to the sea.

  Frightened or sullen, few had anything to say to their interrogators, although one of them turned chatty. A skinny fella in his late teens, with a shock of floppy dark hair, Giles Shapleigh didn’t yet bear the look, and was so full of the cockiness of youth it would have felt good to swat him down a few pegs. Better, though, to let him talk as long as he wanted.

  However hard it was to listen to.

  Giles Shapleigh spoke of heritage, of how he knew where he came from, boasting that his bloodline was older than that of Pilgrims or Indians or the first Christian man in pagan Europe to drop mewling to his knees and beg favors from a nailed-up god dead long before that man was ever born.

  He had come from water, Shapleigh said, and would return to it, no matter how long it took to get there. Years meant nothing. This skin he wore now? It was just a shell, and would molt away the same as any transitory form did when it had outlived its use.

  Deep Ones, was what they were, Shapleigh said. They were in the process of becoming Deep Ones, and in a thousand years he would swim over his captors’ bones after their graves sank beneath the world’s oceans.