Free The Innswich Horror by Edward Lee Page B

I hope to see
you again.”
    I smiled as he scampered off to the squat
house, entered a barely seen door, and disappeared.
    What harm could there be?
I only hoped I’d made the lad’s day. I set to locate Walter’s path
just behind the house, but again found myself thwarted… as more
questions occurred. Where exactly were the other children? And why had
Walter been so reluctant to answer my inquiry?
    I skirted round the back of the house,
toward the clearing, yet while doing so I deliberately kept an eye
out for windows. The last window that would be available to me
before I made the clearing was almost entirely ivy-covered.
    What could I possibly say for myself should
the stepfather see me peering in?
    Yet peer in I did, unmindful of the very
awkward risk, and why I did this, I’ll never be sure.
    I only know that I wish I hadn’t.
    Through the bleary fragment of available
glass I first spied a close, brick-lined middle room surrounding a
modest fireplace, an additional woodstove, and furniture that I
must describe as makeshift. If anything I was glad that they’d
improved the utility of their poverty by reusing items—such as
boxes, crates, and unattached bricks—for alternate purposes.
Several crates, for instance, formed the foundation for a bed and,
evidently, a great sack of burlap, stuffed with dried leaves,
sufficed for the mattress, over which typical sheets had been lain.
A cupboard housed not drinking glasses but reused tin cans for the
same purpose. A table, whose top was fashioned by wooded wall slats
of irregular length, had legs actually made from stouter tree
branches. This glaring squalor injured me…and in my mind I was
already calculating how much my wealth would be able to help this
destitute but fully functioning family.
    I ducked back, when in the moment previous,
a door within had opened. Young Walter first appeared, and what
followed at his side was a faltering figure and a tap-tap-tapping
sound. It was only the sparest daylight through the minute windows
that afforded any light at all. The figure, as I squinted, seemed
to be using crutches, and though it was through a wedge of darkness
that this figure walked, my detection of long, grey hair told me
that this could only be Mary’s stepfather; Walter was helping him
along, toward the makeshift bed.
    The oddest noises of protestation resounded
when he finally got to the bed and, with great difficulty, managed
to lie down in it. I could make out almost nothing in the way of
details, but the broader scope of his afflictions—some massive form
of arthritis, I presumed—were quite clear by the crookedness of his
limbs. Was the hand that picked up the piece of cardboard to use as
a fan… missing fingers?
    “Here’s some water, gramps,” Walter said and
brought him one of the tin cans. My angle showed me little, only
Walter carefully tilting the can for him to drink out of. The
over-loud chugging sound caused my brow to rise.
    “Um, gramps,” Walter began. “There was this
man, outside. He’s a friend of mom’s and his name is Foster
Morley…”
    The horrendously palsied figure seemed to
lean up, and in doing so I saw a tragically unnatural curve to his
spine. But it was Walter’s words that had caused him to lean
closer.
    “And-and… he gave me this,” the youth
hesitated, then showed the ten-dollar bill. “To buy mom some
flowers.”
    The stepfather’s reaction to this
information is something I’m sure I will never forget.
    He lurched forward, deepening the arch to
his back, shot out a hand that clearly was deformed, and then
emitted a vocal objection in no language I’d ever heard: a high,
almost bearing-like squeal underlain with suboctave grunts and what
I can only call a mad tweaking, rising and lowering, and an
accommodating sound that reminded me of something wet spattering
somewhere.
    The suddenness—and unearthliness —of the
man’s vociferous objection affected me almost physically, akin to a
ball bat across the