The Weird Company by Pete Rawlik Read Free Book Online Page A

some sort to come out and arrest me. I was like a child waiting for the boogeyman to come out of the dark. The irony of the situation that I was a monster, and the things that I was afraid of were men, was not lost on me. For the stars and the moon whose light leaked down through the clouds and trees and showed me the way, I was thankful. I was also thankful for the owls and other night birds that called and sang to each other, for they provided an odd comfort, a sense of normalcy that was desperately needed. That hour that I walked seemed to stretch into maddening days, each step, and each heartbeat an eternity. Yet in the end I reached the outskirts of Innsmouth where the road met the river and they both headed east.
    In the village, I furtively followed the river down to the harbor and then back through the refinery before resting at the abandoned train station. Exhausted from my clandestine excursions, I secreted myself on a hill across from the station and watched three soldiers pace back and forth on the platform. They were infantrymen, rifles slung over their shoulders, cigarettes dangling from their mouths and fingers. In traversing the village I had grown to hate these soldiers, and I hated what they had done to the village I had returned to. Homes had been gutted and burned, businesses ransacked, the refinery, once the center of industry for the town, was boarded up and strung with barbed wire. The church . . . the church had been desecrated, its finery stolen or defaced, the sacred scriptures burned or confiscated. The once proud waterfront was in ruins, laid waste by explosives and ensuing fire. The merchant fleet lay stranded in the harbor. The bay was lined with slow lazy warships and rife with noisy gunboats darting back and forth in strange almost random patterns. The empty town reeked of death.
    Suddenly, there was a commotion at the station and beams of light leapt out onto the tracks illuminating a small grey figure that I had not noticed even though it was only yards away from my own position. The man was covered in glistening wet rags and in response to being spotted attempted to run but succeeded only in obtaining a strange lopping gait that was at the time both pathetic and comical. The soldiers yelled warnings and orders but the figure paid them no heed and continued its sad attempt at escape. One final stern warning again went unheeded and then the soldiers unleashed a volley of shots that pierced the eerie stillness of the town and sent the grey figure to the ground.
    The soldiers froze on the platform, guns pointed at the strange figure which now lay unmoving on the tracks. There were frantic questions accompanied by desperate accusations and tentative orders and sheepish refusals. The soldiers seemed genuinely unprepared for the consequences of their actions. That they had fired on a man and brought him down seemed something they simply could not deal with. Slowly, lights shining back and forth across the tracks, rifles jerking wildly from place to place, the soldiers broke from the platform and fled backwards into the town for the safety of empty streets. But the streets were not empty. As the soldiers left the platform, dark shapes burst forth from basements, from closed doors and from shuttered windows and took stand against the soldiers.
    The things numbered less than a dozen, large vaguely anthropoid creatures that stood half bent in the moonlight with long claws, rows of spiny teeth, and great bulging eyes along chinless heads. Strange growths behind the jaw, between the clawed fingers and along the crest of the head, implied an ichthyic or at least amphibious origin. Yet such a conclusion was contradicted by the curious state of the hideous batrachians. Such things, such lopping, bleating things, such things should not wear the tattered and soiled clothes of men.
    As the things lunged at the soldiers, and the soldiers fought back, I left my place on the hill and crept down onto the tracks.