They believe I’m merely a successful businessman leery of enemies of the trade. Also trucked in weekly are shifts of Pinkerton guards, who live at the house and keep watch round the clock. I bank in Carson City over a hundred miles northwest, and from there fresh water for drinking and bathing is trucked in weekly. Alkaline mud-plains, sand-swept desert, and endless square miles of sagebrush and tumbleweed provide the vista anywhere one might happen to peer. My fortune built us an impregnable adobe house situated in the middle of the region’s most arid land, just south of the state’s dead-center point. Now that God had granted my new standing as a family man, I relocated only days after that night of incogitable horror, to a place where there existed no waterways for fifty miles in any direction, in the 36 th state of the union, Nevada. A dead man’s words-Zalen’s-never left my cognizance: They travel along any existing waterway, and they’re very fast. The sale of my Providence mansion-to a Standard Oil executive, no less-has left me even wealthier than before. The passing of six months has brought me many joyous changes. With a smidgen of luck, we’d be in Providence by dawn. Not too long after that, a sign gave relieving notice that we were about to exit onto State Route Number One.

“One day, Walter, your mother and I will tell you…” “I know I’ve seen him in the woods before, many times, but I never got very close to him. All that followed us now was the most eerie silence. Walter’s fortunate knowledge of the area, due to his nature walks, took us to another narrow trail which emptied us out onto the main road into town in only minutes.

The Innswich Horror by Edward Lee