by Michael Shea
We had preestablished that any error in our calculation should be downslope of our objective, so now we followed the rise of the land, and by this tactic learned very shortly that our surmise was correct. The misshapen barrier of forest trees came to a ragged hiatus, beyond which stretched a tract of smaller and more orderly corpse-trees: the Simes's orchard. And, horribly, those trees, though long dead, were not now barren of fruit. It was strange fruit indeed that they bore, webbed into their branches with filaments of lurid slime, a crop of contorted forms that sprawled within the prison of the naked boughs. From that grisly carnival of twisted monkey-shapes decorating the branches—not to be sanely viewed for long by anyone—we looked away to find, tethered to the silty bottom by the same lambent integuments, five broken boats. They were secured in a bunch, like a hunter’s or angler’s catch. Beyond the orchard and the boats were the ruins of several buildings.
It appeared Lovecraft had exaggerated the destruction of the Simes farm. Of the house large, jagged patches of the first-story wall remained, a corral for the mossy wooden shards of the rest of the structure. Less remained of the barn. Equidistant between the two was a gaping vent in the lakefloor. A feature of this vent seized my attention just as Ernst began signaling to apprise me of it: a highly tenuous shaft of color twisted and ribboned its way up into the water from the mouth of that fissure, a color which, though vanishingly faint, showed through—in defiance of— the light of our beams.
We turned our lights away from the well- mouth—for, clearly, this it was—and saw the dancing energy-cable yet more plainly, rippling skywards from the black socket of its unearthly root. We began to make toward the vent.
At the same moment we sensed, just above us, a stir and a pressure of something huge, which then nudged our cable just overhead. We wrenched backward to throw our light- beams vertically. A vast, heart-stopping vision settled down upon us, a great flock of sodden, blackened cadavers, all bound loosely in rags of phosphorescent spider-silk. And in the searching glare of those lights, we saw how those whitened eyes rolled, and the cleft, bulging lips still stiffly mouthed the mindless,
repeated utterance of agony—this though they should by all natural laws be drowned and blessedly dead at such a depth. Beyond rational thought, I hoisted the rifle and fired.
It was well I did. Due to the impact of the shot, the whole cloud gave a silken jolt, and paused in its subsidence. We both thrust ourselves desperately back out of the mass' line of descent. As it sank near again I fired into it a second time, from the side, and the fall of those helpless wretches was deflected. Sluggishly they settled, and wobbled down out of view into a fog of silt their impact raised.
When I had sufficiently recovered to signal to Ernst that we must continue, he signed to me that he had dropped his talisman—the one he carried to cast into the well. No doubt the shock we had both just sustained had loosened his grip on it. We brought ourselves a fathom deeper and aimed our beams against the seething muck. Forty years of plant decay presented us with a stratum of gelatinous ooze into which a massy object like the talisman might sink for yards. And just then, because of this deflection of our lights, something was revealed to us.
The entire farm was now ablaze with the alien luminescence which, just moments before, had been confined to the webbing that anchored the prey. Now the trees, the broken buildings, and the earth itself they stood on— all burned and flickered with it, and every feature of the drowned and accursed property, though sunk in crushing darkness, was now starkly visible, etched in diseased flame.
But it was not this alone which unseated us from our lights, and set us swimming madly toward the well-mouth. For the umbilicus of alien light that snaked up from that fissure burned now ten times as bright as anything else in that uncanny landscape and—more—it writhed powerfully, like a python whose head was, far above, fiercely embattled.
Ernst was well ahead of me, for we had been separated by some yards, and he was a very practiced swimmer, with far better technique than my own. As I saw him swoop nearer to the well-mouth I appreciated the latter's size. Set in the vertical plane the shaft would have admitted a tall man walking without stooping. Surely it was bigger than any aperture feasible for the Simes family’s original use, and indeed, the rim of it had a ruptured look. The glowing serpent rooted there was now shuddering and rippling like a web-strand down which a great bulk hastens with murderous speed, and only as Ernst drew within reach of it did I understand what he was going to do. I struggled frenziedly, but uselessly, to overtake him. In an instant he had got the strap of his wrist-stone undone, and held the talisman poised to throw. But first, he did what any man must have felt compelled to do—he looked down into the well, seeking to behold this horror's cradle and earthly lair. He hung for a moment, looking down, hovering mothlike near the well of light. And then he saw something, for his whole body recoiled with spasmodic force. Surely he cried aloud at what he saw, though I cannot know, for I had already heard the last I ever would of my dear friend's voice. With movements eloquent of loathing and horror he back-stroked from the unholy vent, first flinging down into it the amulet his hand held ready. I had now almost reached him, and stretched forth my hands to seize him and hasten his retreat from the vicinity of the now epileptically thrashing python of alien light. Above us, a brilliant blur came plunging down the dancing cable.
Unimaginably fast it came, and the shaft toward which it homed was a roiling hell of light and powerful shockwaves. I caught hold of my dear friend’s hands, and briefly we saw each other's eyes. He smiled, perhaps already understanding his fate. And then the huge blur plunged into the vent—its refuge already mortally mined against its coming. It moved too swiftly to be a clear shape, and it was oblivious to us. Ernst’s doom came not with its assault, but with the tearing force of its death-agony.
For no sooner had it dived to earth than a thunderous concussion clove the lake bottom. A titanic gout of alien light geysered from the well, and its surge snatched up all unanchored forms after it— boats, boards, corpses, all by unearthly adhesion were plucked up in the skirts of its explosive ascension. Ernst's hands were wrenched from mine. All was blindness and agonizing upsurge, and then I hung free in the water, alone in the utter darkness of swirling silt, preserved by some critical gravity that nothing else had possessed, and which I understood that my talisman had given me.
I waited a long time in that boiling murk, hung, it seemed, in the very sepulchre of all sane reality, powerless to ascend too fast for fear of the bends. It seemed an age before, far above, I saw a stub of white light making its wandering way downwards. This would be one of the snatched-up lights come sinking back. The cable had not broken. Perhaps Ernst too had survived the brutal acceleration. I came carefully to meet the light, embraced it at last, and turned it on the scene of the holocaust. Only the well-mouth and the foundation- pits of house and barn remained. The orchard trees had been plucked bare of their grisly crop. And the only light anywhere was that which I played upon the scene. Clinging to the cable, I continued my long, inching ascent, to see what had become of Ernst and Sharon.
XVII
Sharon had hauled Ernst’s body aboard, and covered it, long before I surfaced. I came aboard. We found we could only gape at one another, and speak in hushed fragments of sentences, and at length we did no more than sit on the chairs in the stem and drink bourbon, taking it down in slow, vacant-eyed sips. The sun westered, gilding the waters that were now so clear, having been littered with corpses and shattered timber for some time. Sharon had let it all sink to its proper grave, saving only our friend’s body. At last, she said to me: "As they all rained back—it must have been three or four hundred feet up the Enemy took them—as they all fell back I knew they were dead, released. It made that rain less horrible. Because just as soon as the Enemy’s light began to blur and break, it retreated from all their bodies. The monster was dying then, I know it as sure as I know anything. It didn’t get away. It died up there. The Elder Sign went down
and cauterized the root of it. This earth is free of it at last.”
"We should bury Ernst ashore of here,” I said after a moment. "His proper place is the place of a Watcher, near the threshold.”
We buried him as the sun was setting. I cast the shovel into the lake, and Sharon put her hand in mine.
That hand’s tender strength comforts and inspires me still. Each day I see its work in the progress of her latest picture. The canvas shows that sunlit moment that I did not witness—those shrivelled dead released in the air, sungilt mummies, each plunging like an Icarus toward the lake’s luscious sleep below. Ernst—his flesh alone unblighted by the alien poison—falls among them. His wet-suit is half transmorphed into a fish’s supple, silver mail, and his face is not so much dead as rapt in stern concentration. Each day I see more clearly the work's fine eulogy: in that purified lake, a Watcher’s spirit lives, and patrols the deeps where, for his vigilance, no evil may again take hold.