The Key (Patreon)

Ok. Sure. First. Ok. Listen. Innsmouth. It began in Innsmouth Massachusetts nineteen hundred and twenty eight—write that down—it began there but it didn’t end there. Fuck. It’s still going on now. Right now. No doubt.

Ok. Sure. You’ve heard rumors. That fucking silver hubcap in the desert in forty-whatever—true. The things the Nazis were calling at the bottom of the ocean? Also true. That city beneath the ice in the antarctic. Fucking take three guesses. It’s a big goddamn world, and we don’t know shit.

How do I know? Me? How?

I worked in this place. This was in the fifties, so, you know, you wouldn’t understand. We had our shit strapped down. We knew what was what. I worked there filing. Just a kid who worked in a library and then joined right on up to go fight some fucking commies with the Marines. Left in 1954 short about half my nerve. Got a job in Naval intelligence because I pulled some geezer up off the line and got him back to a field hospital, and that guy—well—he was fucking connected. Me? Well, that job was just about heaven.

I’d file. I’d file in the day and I’d file at night. “Do this, Don,” and so you know, I’d do it. Sometimes, I’d go in after dark to finish up, and read. I read a lot of the files. I shouldn't have.

Then one day my boss comes in the dry room where we keep all the old stuff. I’m filing. He’s holding a fire axe. The fire axe is covered in stuff that looks like Hershey’s syrup, but which I figure out right quick is blood. I’m fast that way. He says to me “Don,” I say “yessir”. He had the axe, right?

“You want to know a secret?”

“Ok.”

“Something owns us.”

He holds the door for me, like, nice, and so I go. And when the door shuts then I hear him just open up. I mean just screaming and smashing the shit out of everything in there. He was a clever guy, my boss. Not prone to any kind of violence. Not an unkind word in years. But he read everything. Every file that crossed that threshold. Knowledge is power, he’d say to me. Knowledge, Don, that’s the key.

And you know what else? He was fucking goddamn right. 

But a key to what?