Sins of the Father Page 4

  It didn’t take long for the silence to become more of a torture than my throbbing face. With no companions other than the stench and my pain, I closed my eyes and tried to focus on positive thoughts rather than imagine the vermin that might be sharing my cell. Ben and Flora would surely be working on getting me released. The police had no evidence to back up Flannery’s accusations.

  He could still railroad you.

  Yes, he could. I pictured him meeting with the council, telling them I couldn’t be trusted.

  “He’s got the skills. Almost a doctor, he is. Who’s to say he didn’t decide to get revenge for what happened to his father.”

  That scenario chilled me more than the damp stone. Flannery would most certainly bring up the family history.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time a Gilman decided to play God, now would it? Medicine or witchcraft or both, it has to be him.”

  With those reminders fresh in their heads, the council might decide better safe than sorry. Lock me away same as they did my father. Guilty by bloodline. Let me rot in jail or the asylum until I, too, perished.

  I can’t let that happen. There must be a way to prove my innocence.

  Thoughts and counter-thoughts fought each other in my head, writhing and tangled like a mass of eels. My temples throbbed from their actions and I pressed my hands to my forehead.

  You can’t bring the dead back to life. What my father did only proved that.

  So then how was it done? What were those queer fibers in their bodies, the ones the police seemed happy to ignore? And what about the demon-thing that attacked me in the alley?

  At some point, it all became too much for my mind, which shut down. I drifted off.

  And I dreamed.

  Chapter Six

  “Your mother was dying.”

  My father’s eyes brimmed with tears, his wretched expression one I’d seen far too often in recent months, both on his face and when I looked in the mirror. A far cry from his usual dour countenance. Seeing him like that – Dr. Silas Gilman, the man who never showed any emotion – was almost worse than watching my mother twist and groan from the damned cancer eating at her insides. Because crying signified hopelessness.

  The same hopelessness that had driven my father to commit the most heinous crime in Innsmouth’s history.

  He’d done it to keep his wife alive, and for that I could never fault him. But even as a young boy I understood that my father’s actions went against more than just the laws of the town. They went against the laws of man, nature, and God.

  And now he would be locked away forever because of what he’d done.

  “Listen to me.” Warm, strong hands – the hands of a healer, not a murderer – touched my cheeks. “I broke the law, and I’m being punished for it. But that doesn’t mean I was wrong. I never hurt anyone. People are just afraid of what they don’t understand. Believe in science, Henry. Not superstition. Promise me.”

  I shook my head. At ten years of age, all I knew was that my father had gone crazy, had done unspeakable things, things no doctor should ever do. And he’d done them to my mother.

  Everyone in town hated him, and many of them hated me too. Called me the son of Frankenstein, after the character in Mary Shelley’s book, whenever I went to the store or approached the courthouse. Those who didn’t curse me stared at me with pity in their eyes while they crossed themselves or muttered prayers as I passed by.

  My father tried to draw me close for a final embrace but I pulled away. “Leave me alone.”

  “I love you, Henry. Don’t ever forget that.” He reached out again, but two police officers took him by the arms and yanked him to his feet. “Henry….”

  Anger and fear and sadness waged a war inside me. Tears clouded my vision and blurred my last sight of him, as the officers dragged him from the courtroom to the paddy wagon waiting to take him to his new home: Arkham Sanitarium, where he’d spend the rest of his natural life locked away with the lunatics and mentally feeble.

  The few people remaining in the courtroom, including my maternal grandparents, who would be taking over my care, moved to the windows or doorway to watch. Outside, hundreds of townsfolk had gathered to witness the event. I heard their angry cries as the doors opened. Pictured my father cringing away. He’d helped so many of them and now they’d turned on him.

  Because he deserved it, part of me said. Another, much smaller, part asked, Did he?

  Sitting alone on a wooden bench, I let my tears flow. Things were so confusing! I knew what ‘imprisonment for life’ meant. I’d never see my father again. That didn’t seem right to me. At the same time, I wanted him to go away forever for the awful thing he’d done. That I’d had to witness.

  “People never go away forever, my little one.”

  I turned, my heart soaring at the sound of my mother’s voice. She wasn’t dead! She—

  Stood alone in a foggy graveyard. A black square of soil separated us. I recognized it as her burial plot, where I’d stood just a week before while they interred her. She wore the blue dress she’d been laid to rest in, but unlike that day, her face was healthy and full and she smiled the beautiful smile I remembered so well.

  “Mother.” I took a step forward.

  “Hello, Henry. This is what your father wanted for us. To be a family again.”

  “Mother, I missed you so much. I thought you….” I stopped speaking as she shook her head.

  “You don’t have to be afraid anymore. I’m here now. We’re all here, and we don’t ever have to die.”

  A frigid rain began to fall, making it even harder to see. Shadowy figures appeared behind my mother, gray ghosts moving between the tombstones.

  “We? Who—”

  Her smile drooped, one side dipping more than the other, turning her lips into a crooked frown. Water ran down her cheeks, washing away her rosy glow and exposing gray, lifeless skin that rippled like disturbed water. I wiped rain from my eyes and blinked. I had to be seeing things. The figures in the mist grew closer, larger, distracting me from my mother’s form. Something about them…I glanced at my mother to warn her.

  Half her face was gone, exposing gruesome black cavities. Dark, oily fluids dripped from an empty eye socket. Blood stained the front of her dress, where my father’s knife had done its dirty work. The hand she held out to me wasn’t her own; ragged stitches demarked the place where her flesh ended and someone else’s began.

  My mouth opened but no scream emerged, just a whispered moan. The figures came closer and my heart leaped as I recognized them. The two dead men from the pub, their heads magically restored but still decomposing. Behind them were more corpses, the other murder victims. Rotting and bloated, their peeling, sloughing skin colored in shades of gray and purple and green.

  Beneath their putrid flesh, unseen things wriggled and swam, vague outlines somehow familiar and repellent at the same time.

  “No.” I backed away from the advancing creatures. I’d only seen one glimpse of what my father had done before he slammed the door on me, but that single image remained forever burned into my memories. At the time I’d been too young to comprehend everything I witnessed in those few seconds. Over the years, my imagination filled in some of the details, based on my own education and the bits and pieces of things I’d heard from people or read in the papers.

  Now, though, I knew exactly what my father had tried to do. What he’d planned on turning my mother into, in the name of love.

  Why? Why had he done it?

  Why….

  Chapter Seven

  I came awake with a gasp. Cold tears dampened my cheeks and I wiped them away with a hand still trembling from my nightmare. Reliving the day of my father’s sentencing always left me in the same state, depressed and resentful. This time terror had joined in as the dream took on new, frightful dimensions. Never before had my mother appeared in
my sleep. Not in that way. And those other things….

  God, I hope to never see them again.

  Yet at the same time my sojourn into the past had opened my eyes.

  The man I encountered in the alley. He was responsible for those things that attacked us in the pub. Somehow he did what my father never could and brought them back to a semblance of life. But for what purpose? Surely it had to be something far more sinister than to retrieve a lost book.

  I had to discover what he was up to, this demon that lurked along the waterfront. Find him and bring him in to the police. It was the only way to clear my name.

  But how? I couldn’t tell Flannery or anyone else about the stranger. They’d think me a lunatic, more so than they already did. A desperate man spouting fairy tales of demons just to cover up my own insane actions.

  I had to find the creature. The how and where of it could wait. First I needed to get out of jail so I could begin my search. But until I could place some doubt in Flannery’s mind, or Ben arrived with bail money, I was stuck.

  Still, I felt better with my decision made. I crossed the room and relieved myself in the foul chamber pot, then sat back down to wait. This time, I made sure I didn’t fall asleep.

  For the first time since boyhood, I feared my dreams.

  * * *

  In the gray silence of my cell, time became meaningless. I couldn’t say if it was still Sunday or not. My stomach was no help, too knotted with anxiety to feel any hunger.

  So when the clang of a door opening and the thump of someone treading on stairs roused me from my contemplation of my boots, all I anticipated was a guard delivering a meal. The footsteps drew closer and I made out two separate sets. The same surly officers who’d brought me down here? I hoped not, but no matter. Whoever it was, I’d ask to speak to Flannery again, even if I had to beg to see him. I stood and did my best to brush the dirt from my clothes.

  And received a surprise.

  Rather than my guards, Inspector Flannery’s mustachioed face glared through the bars. “Step away from the door, Gilman.”

  I did as I was told, alert for any forthcoming violence.

  The second officer, a skinny fellow in a uniform two sizes too large for his frame, unlocked the door and slid it back.

  “Move it.” Flannery pointed at the hallway. “You’re free to go.” Anger and loathing dripped from his words like rain from a gutter.

  Free? I studied Flannery’s scowling visage. Why would the man suddenly….

  Wait. There’s only one answer.

  “Something happened.”

  Flannery’s eyes narrowed even more. His fury burned like a fire. Even from ten feet away I felt it.

  “Aye. There’s been another murder.”

  Chapter Eight

  The hours since my release had been long ones. I’d arrived home on Tuesday morning with just enough time to bathe and change before heading to Flora’s apartment. The burial had been scheduled for Wednesday morning.

  With no surviving relatives, the burden of Scott’s passing fell squarely on Flora’s shoulders, so Ben and I filled in for family, escorting a weeping Flora to and from the cemetery. Afterward, we readied the house for mourning and stood by her side while acquaintances and neighbors came by to offer condolences. Then we sat with her until she fell asleep, helped along by several fingers of laudanum-spiked whiskey.

  Once she drifted off, I took my leave, envying Ben for his ability to get people to cover his shifts, allowing him to spend more time alone with Flora. No such opportunity for me. Not only were we shorthanded in the best of times, what with only two morgues in the city and one person working each, but focusing on the victims of the ghoulish murderer had left us far behind in our regular work. And with Flannery’s suspicions still aimed in my direction, I needed to make sure I did nothing to upset the city council.

  That was why Wednesday night found me at the morgue well after my workday ended, exhausted but determined to figure out the fiend’s identity. The twin motivations of fear and self-preservation kept me slogging onward when all I wanted to do was collapse into my bed for a week.

  I had a second motive as well. To find the demon who’d made my life, and the lives of my friends, a living hell.

  After I finished my regular duties, I went about preparing the first stage of my investigation.

  I cleared away more space in the room that doubled as a storage area and examination chamber and set up additional electric torches and gas lamps to drive away any shadows. Only then did I lay out the corpses of the two most recent victims, including Officer Stemple. The others had already been claimed by their families.

  Both men died wearing the same expression: bulging eyes and gaping mouths, which the surgeon on police retainer attributed to lack of oxygen from being throttled, most likely with a rope or belt. I conceded that possibility, yet to my practiced eye those poor bastards seemed to have died screaming at the sight of something terrifying.

  Like a deformed man with the face of a monster.

  Forcing my own gruesome memories aside, I arranged the tools of my trade within easy reach: large and small magnifying lenses, scalpels, forceps, and scissors.

  Despite never completing my medical training – thanks to my father’s actions before and after his committal – I nevertheless felt confident that my understanding of basic human anatomy was on par with any physician’s, due to time spent as a boy observing my father and then working in the morgue the past several years. I intended to succeed where others – namely the lazy dullards the police seemed to hire these days – had failed.

  At first glance, I saw nothing not already noted in the official logs. Abrasions and bruising on the arms and hands, indicating a brief struggle. Mottling around the neck, consistent with strangulation.

  Praying I wasn’t giving up a night’s sleep on a wild goose chase, I moved several of the lamps closer and chose a larger hand lens, in hopes the greater magnification would expose something as yet unseen. Bending low, I regarded Officer Stemple’s throat once more.

  And nearly dropped the glass in surprise.

  There, revealed in terrifying detail, was the clue I’d been seeking.

  Enlarged to several times their normal size, the strangulation marks revealed a previously hidden pattern. Within the heavy mottling lay a series of lighter colored, concentric rings, with a tiny dark spot at the very center, like a miniature bull’s-eye.

  My heart sped up and I had to control the urge to shout. Focus, I told myself. I switched to an even larger glass and examined a single, circular bruise. Under the extreme magnification, the black dot revealed itself as a puncture wound, no larger than a needle might make. To the naked eye, the miniature wound would be concealed by the injured skin surrounding it. A scrutiny of the other circular contusions showed the same puncture mark within each one.

  I conducted an inspection of the other body and found the same signs of circular pressure and multiple piercings.

  No, not piercings. Injections.

  The implication of it all hammered at my brain. Poison! Which meant our killer was someone with more than a little knowledge of the human body, and of deadly substances. A medical professional, armed with syringe and knotted rope?

  Or was it a rope? Those circles within circles…my mind went back to the nightmare I’d had in jail. Things squirming under the skin of the dead men…almost like….

  Tentacles.

  The connection formed in my brain. The marks on the victims’ necks reminded me of the wounds left by the suckers found on the limbs of those oddest of sea beasts, the squid and the octopus. But how could one of those creatures strangle a full-grown man? It would have to be a massive creature, like something from a sailor’s tale. And how would it get on dry land? It seemed impossible.

  Still, there was one thing I felt certain of.

  “No rope
did this.” The sound of my own voice in the hushed silence of the room made me twitch. I hadn’t meant to speak aloud. Lips pressed tight so it wouldn’t happen again, I picked up my charcoal stick and paper and sketched the markings, pausing now and then to check the wounds. I wanted to capture everything perfectly.

  Once I finished, I set everything aside and took a deep breath.

  Now came the hard part.

  My hands trembled as I covered the two bodies and wheeled them back to their storage spaces in the cold room. The tremors grew worse when I approached the walking corpses from the pub, to the point where I doubted I’d be able to grip the first cart and move it.

  “Get hold of yourself,” I whispered, my vow to stay silent forgotten. “They’re dead. Just as dead as the others.”

  Jaw clenched, sweat dampening my palms despite the frigid temperature, I grasped the handle and slowly rolled one of the metal tables to the receiving room. Then I stood there, indecision immobilizing me. In order to get the other body, I’d have to turn my back on this one. Either that, or leave the other one unattended in the storage room. Never mind that both of them had been in there the whole time. I hadn’t been thinking about them then. Now all I could picture was one of the evil things sitting up, sheet falling down to reveal the destroyed face, pallid arms reaching out….

  “You’re being an ass.” This time my words lent me courage. I straightened up and forced myself to turn around. “No such thing as demons. Whatever imbued them with life is long gone.”

  I walked back to the storage room for the second body. And I didn’t look behind me, not once, although I did find myself wishing for the old practice of placing bells on the toes of the dead. Of course, I’m quite sure that if I’d heard them ringing I’d have keeled over right there, my heart petrified mid-beat. Despite my fear, I didn’t hesitate or shake, for which I was grateful. I wanted to finish as quickly as possible and leave. A review of my notes and drawings could wait until I sat in the comfort and safety of my own study.