A year and a half ago I made a single post describing the “interstitial tales” that I wrote for “War With The Deep Ones.” WWTDO is a book filled with short-ish stories about the first day of an invasion of H.P. Lovecrafts “Deep Ones,” waging a war to wipe out humanity. These stories, set all over the globe, were to be separated by little-bitty sub-stories set in the more than a century from the time of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” to the start of WWTDO. These little tales string together to give a basic history of one organizations efforts to understand and prepare for the threat.
As I said, I made one post, and promptly didn’t make another. Because follow-through is for suckers, I guess. But what the heck, I’ll try again. I’ll post one a day till I’m through them. They will be in simple blog-text after the break, not EPUB or PDF or any such. As always, comments, critiques and large sums of cash welcomed.
Insight
By Scott Lowther
Copyright 2019
1928, March: D.C.
Agent James Healy closed the office door and stepped out into the hallway. “Well, shit,” he mumbled to himself.
“Went that good, did it?” Agent Leon Parker, Healy’s partner, said with a lopsided and half-hearted grin. He had been sitting on an uncomfortable wooden bench in the hallway, waiting for his partner to finish the meeting. Now that Healy was done, Parker stood and handed him his hat.
Healy scowled. He took Parker by the elbow and started walking towards the exit. “Chief Moran thinks I’m insane,” Healy said. “He wants the Secret Service to have nothing to do with this.”
Parker snorted. “Who the hell else is going to want this? The BoI? The Army or Navy? Don’t make me laugh.”
Healy shook his head. “I honestly don’t know that anybody would want responsibility for this. It’s too big and bizarre.”
As the two Secret Service Agents stepped out of the Treasury Building into the Washington, D.C., afternoon sun, Healy made up his mind. “That’s it, let’s go see Hoover at the BoI.” Healy, standing on the sidewalk with his partner by his side as a steady stream of humanity walked past them, looked in the direction of the Bureau of Investigations.
Parker shrugged his heavy shoulders, pulled a sour face and spoke quietly so as to not be overheard. “That kid? He’s ambitious, but that’ll probably work against us. No way in hell the Bureau of Investigations will want to be involved with this. Hoover’s still trying to prove himself, and taking charge of a camp full of freaks is the fast road to getting laughed out of town.”
It was a beautiful spring day in D.C., with a sunny sky and a cool breeze, the scent of grass, flowers and incompletely burned gasoline in the air. To those walking past Healy and Parker, it seemed like there could be nothing wrong with the world. Those walking by took no notice of the two Agents; if anyone had, they would have hardly suspected the thoughts that weighed heavily upon them.
“You never know,” Agent Healy replied, thinking back to those days in that horrible rotten town, Innsmouth. He and Agent Parker had been sent in by the Boston office based on a private citizens frantic claims. The claims had been bizarre and unbelievable, but enough of his story held together for the Boston office to conclude that they might have a den of white slavers on their hands. It had turned out to be something much bigger and infinitely more bizarre. Healy and Parker had arrived in Innsmouth in December of 1927 and spent nearly two months quietly investigating the place. Healy had gone in under cover as a bootlegger; Parker followed a week later as a travelling salesman hawking womens fashions. Hackneyed as those cover stories were, they worked, and the two Secret Service agents soon had covered nearly the whole town. Difficult as it was for them to believe, it seemed that the most outrageous of the claims about Innsmouth might just be right. The people of Innsmouth were, in the best of instances, quite bizarre; but both soon had furtive glimpses of examples of human degeneration that shocked them to their cores. But unlike the original witness, they were professional investigators and maintained the placid and believable appearance of ignorance. By January, however, they’d both had, and found, enough.
The Boston office found them both to be laughably insane when they presented their initial reports, but then the film from their hidden cameras was developed. The decision was made to raid the town, using the war on liquor as a convenient – and believable – cover story. It had been a mess, with more dead than the press would ever hear about and bizarre occurrences that nobody involved could quite believe. In the end the Army had packed up more than two thousand “people” to a temporary detention facility in the back woods of Massachusetts. The Army currently had charge of them, but certainly didn’t want them. They could not stay there forever in cheap tents surrounded by barbed wire, and they sure as hell couldn’t be released.
Healy started walking away from the Treasury Building. With luck he’d be able to talk Hoover into taking over this little problem, and then he’d never have to worry about it again.