“Someone’s head’s gonna roll over this,” he muttered.
By mid-afternoon, I gave up, no longer able to withstand such direct exposure to the foul atmospheric conditions—in fact, feeling weak and nauseous, my mind a jumble of meaningless, unformed theories—and simply locked myself away in the cottage. As the evening engulfed the town like a sickly fog, I ate an unenthusiastic meal and went to bed. Sickened by the stench, I slept poorly, tossing and turning in a sort of shallow delirium. After waking from one vague but particularly grotesque nightmare for the third time, I gave up trying and headed into the lounge area. The house seemed darker than usual. I felt around for the light switch, found it and clicked it. Nothing. I flicked it up and down a few times, to no avail.
Suddenly a wave of burning nausea, like a gross tsunami, swept over me, so violently I staggered and collapsed onto my knees. As I did, my stomach heaved. I had no hope of holding it in; the masticated and partially digested remains of my meagre dinner burst out across the carpet. Again. And again. Once I had it under control, I glanced up. In that instant, I was struck by a sight so grossly weird it threw me back against the lounge. A huge eye stared at me through the window, even though I was sure I’d closed the blinds for the night. The eye was so large it took up more than the entire available space. It blinked once in the second I’d had to take it in before shock tossed me back onto the floor.
By the time I recovered and glanced toward the window again, the grotesque vision was gone. The curtains of the window concerned were closed, though I swear they quivered, as though they had been rapidly pulled shut a moment before and had not yet settled.
I must have dreamed it, of course. Yet that phantasmal vision had been extremely detailed. One thing had been clear: it hadn’t been a human eye. The shape was wrong, more ovoid, with what looked like multiple, and different-coloured, pupils. Parts of it were moving, as though the cornea was full of snakes.
I pulled myself together and slowly shuffled toward the window, less tentatively with each step. Though I was somewhat conditioned to accept weirdness thanks to my great-grandfather’s notebooks, my actual interaction with the monstrous encounters he wrote about was minor, and I wasn’t inclined to believe what I’d seen was real. It had to have been a dream, a mental eidolon. I reached the window and peered out between the two sides of the curtain. It was not completely dark out there; the street lights were on, providing patches of luminance, and from the vigorous movement of the foliage a decent wind was blowing—luckily from the west toward the coast rather than coming off the beach with its stink of rot. Needless to say, there was no sign of a monster. An unusual number of houses visible from that window had their lights on. And it was only about three in the morning.
As I stepped back, I realised the lights in my own lounge-room had come on without me noticing. I turned them off and went back to bed.
January 17, 2018, Mid-morning
In daylight, it all seemed even less likely.
With an eye the size of the one I thought I’d seen, any lurking creature would have been a Godzilla-sized colossus, and surely I would have heard its footsteps as it moved off. By the same token it would have left footprints (if it had feet) or scrape-marks (if it was some kind of serpent or giant cephalopod). In fact, it had left not a trace. The experience must have been delusory.
Confirmation of this came as the morning struggled on through the almost overpowering foulness polluting the air. Tange told me she’d suffered from terrible dreams as well, nightmare visions of grotesque creatures, some of which seemed so real she had for a while been convinced she was awake the whole time. Demonic horrors, sometimes monstrosities tearing each other to pieces or skinning human-like beings and ripping off their limbs. She wasn’t the only one. Many of the usual crowd I talked to when we made our way to the beach had had the same experience—an uncomfortable, terror-wracked night full of unspeakable terrors. Some of them could barely find the vocabulary to describe what they saw, and several broke down almost at once, overcome by the memory.
“It’s that bloody thing,” one old bloke declared, with astute conviction, gesturing toward the quarantined area the police had expanded overnight. The canvas walls had doubled and now stretched some 80 metres along the beach. Moreover, it was no longer possible to get anywhere near the actual sand. All the amenities—the Beach Hut Café, the Surf Life Savers Club, the public toilets, and the kids’ play area—were closed down. Crime-scene tape fluttered about everywhere, guarded with grim vigour by assorted sick-looking policemen. I later discovered that even the nearby motels had been abandoned, no vacationers having remained after several weeks of the Great Stench (as some wag had christened it). Mollymook was dying.
I tried to find someone in authority to get an idea of exactly what was happening on the beach. No one would talk to me, except to warn me away in no uncertain terms. Clearly, whatever this was about, it was escalating out of control. I knew I had to find out what it all meant, at whatever cost.
That night the nightmares were worse than ever.
January 19, 2018
Two days passed with little apparent change in the situation, apart from further escalation in the foulness of the stench and in the unbearable terror provoked by our own minds at night. It was almost impossible to spend any time near the beach. Even wearing masks and drawing breath from oxygen tanks strapped to their backs, few of the police could stand it for long. It was becoming clear, at least to me, that the smell was as much in our minds as it was in the air. I theorised to Tange that there might be some sort of sub-matter carrier of the smell, a quantum-level disturbance in the atomic structure of normal reality that simply bypassed what we perceive as solid matter. I expected her to laugh at me, to accuse me of insane fantasising. But she didn’t. She became unnaturally quiet and visibly worried. Saying nothing, she strode away in the direction of her home, as was her wont.
Toward the end of the second day, nearly all of the residents that normally gathered in the vicinity of the beach, if only for a short time, had left town, unable to withstand the poisonous stink any longer. I understood why and suspected that Tange would follow suit. I hadn’t seen her for more than a day. Did she even have a car in order to make her getaway? I didn’t know. I determined to go see her at home tomorrow morning and find out.
From where I stood, across the park from the beach, I could see the police had mostly abandoned their vigil. A couple of uniformed figures stumbled about on patrol, enough to keep the curious away, if anyone might display the insane gumption to approach the sealed-off area. A dusky light lay across the grass and the sand, catching on the canvas walls of the enclosure, now perhaps 100 metres long. And what was that amorphous mass just visible over the top of it? I didn’t recall noticing anything like it before. It was barely discernible, but it piqued my interest.
A sudden urge to run across the beach took hold of me. I began to breathe more deeply, pulses racing. The large forensic police wagon parked prominently to my left in the otherwise empty parking area seemed deserted, abandoned. I looked up and down the promenade and the beach, to check where the patrolling police were at that moment. One was some distance off, on my left with his back to me, walking slowly northward. On the right, if there was a patrolman, he was hidden from me by a clump of barely alive trees. Long shadows from buildings and a clump of taller trees lay across the sand. Should I try for it?
Before I knew what I was doing I’d wrapped another handkerchief over my nose and mouth, and was across the road and grassy foreshore, ducking under the police tape that silently and ineffectually blocked my way. I leapt down onto the sand. From behind me someone shouted, but I was so intent on fighting back against the rapidly worsening nausea that I couldn’t, or perhaps simply didn’t, register what they were saying. As I neared the closest entrance slit in the canvas walls, the pressure of the stench and the grotesque flashes of demonic terror that had been filling my dreams overcame me. I tripped and fell. Desperately scrambling to re-gain
my feet, I crawled closer. I could hear someone shouting from behind me: “Stay back! For god’s sake, mate!” and almost felt the vibrations generated by their rapidly approaching footsteps.
I pulled the flap of the canvas entrance aside…and saw it, saw what had appeared on the beach. It was huge. Alien. Demonic. That single momentary glimpse was too much for me. A wave of overarching dread, of cosmic insignificance and helplessness swept me out of myself. For a moment, a long agonising moment, I was somewhere else, floating in a vast, poisonous void and feeling the life being drained from me. I tried to scream, but couldn’t get my lungs to work. Helplessly, I spiralled toward a seething pit of indescribable monstrosities…
I woke, trembling violently, screaming in terror. Faces without bodies hovered around me. I swore, threatened to attack them.
“Mr Whateley! Mr Whateley! You’re okay. Safe. Please be calm.”
Mr Whateley? For a moment, I didn’t recognise the name, but regardless I reacted to the human voice. A woman’s voice. The disembodied hands holding me steady loosened somewhat as I calmed, and I remembered that Whateley was the false name I had adopted when I came to Mollymook, in order to keep my real identity secret.
“Where am I?” I forced the words from the aching wasteland of my lungs.
“In the forensic van. You’ll be fine. At least you didn’t touch the biohazard and we got you out in time.”
“What is that thing?” I asked.
The woman glanced up at the doctor and attending policeman, and waved them away. I realised then that she was the officer who had addressed the crowd a few days ago: Sergeant Katherine Sandros. Without her cap, her reddish-brown hair fell loosely around her ears. She looked exhausted. “That was very stupid of you, Mr. Whateley,” she said. “You could have been killed. Nearly were. So far I have lost two men to that…that carcass. Several others are gravely ill.”
“Two dead?” I repeated numbly.
“Yes. Federal experts have finally been assigned to look after the problem, as I’ve convinced them it represents a significant danger to the public. And it’s not too soon.” Her voice lowered and she spoke the following words introspectively, talking to herself rather than me. “… though I don’t see what they can possibly do.”
“But what is it?”
She studied me for a moment. “More to the point, who are you, Mr Whateley? A journalist?”
I told her I wasn’t. Just fatally curious.
“And very foolish.”
I nodded, but then thought it might be better to tell her at least part of the truth. “Actually I’m a cryptozoologist.” I paused. “I study reports of unnatural creatures.”
She sighed. ”Oh, I see.”
I shrugged. “I know what you’re thinking. I’m just another crazy nutter, on the hunt for UFOs. Well, I can tell you this: I’ve never found any evidence of extraterrestials. But heteromorphic creatures such as the Loch Ness monster, yetis, snakes so overgrown they could eat an elephant in one mouthful…That sort of anomaly is another matter entirely.”
She was not appeased by my confession. But at least it gave her something more concrete to hold on to.
“Well, you’ll have to satisfy your crypto-curiosity elsewhere.” She spoke in a stern tone, hardened further by an undercurrent of fear. “This carcass is virulently toxic. It appears to be some kind of sea-creature, natural perhaps but so decayed it is still only vaguely recognisable. We’re thinking it’s a giant squid, as it appears to have tentacles. But it is unusually toxic, and even wearing hazard suits gives no protection.” Realising what she was doing—that is, actually talking to me—she reined herself in. “Stay right away from it. If I see you here again, even thinking of taking a run across the sand, I’ll arrest you and lock you away for the duration. You’ll just have to wait like the rest of us to find out what it becomes.”
“Becomes? What do you mean by that?”
She frowned. “Go before I change my mind!”
So, I went back to my cottage, where I flicked through some of the reference books I’d brought with me, without further revelation, until night fell and, once again, the nightmares galloped screeching through my sleep.
January 20, 2018
I woke with a strong sense of impending doom, a feeling that whatever was going on here was finally reaching a climax.
A violent storm had broken out overnight and though my clock claimed it was 10:04 am., it looked more like midnight. I peered out the window, the one in which I’d imagined seeing a giant eye. The trees thrashed about as though a wave of sentience had overtaken them and, in the thrill of this evolutionary high-point, they were determined to pull themselves from the restraining soil and high-tail it away. The sky boiled with anaemic clouds moving in every direction, also desperate to escape this dying part of the world in which they’d suddenly found themselves. I could almost smell their panic. But what I could no longer smell was the diabolical stench that had plagued the area for weeks.
Something had changed then, for the worse, I feared. Filled with a sudden urgency, I dressed and headed out the front door. Fighting my way against the storm, the predominant force of which, despite the seething clouds, was coming from the direction of the beach, I inched my way along the empty streets. Despite the unnatural darkness, there were no lights on—not surprising in this weather. I came across no-one living, only the figure of a man sprawled half hidden in a bush. I rushed over to him, and checked for a pulse. He was lifeless, with a look on his face that spoke to me of horror and utter terror. I left him where he lay.
As I approached the park area of Mollymook beach, I could see the police incident van, overturned and partially crushed under a fallen tree. Were any of the police personnel still here? I couldn’t see any. Fighting against the wind, I staggered in the direction of the beach, seawater swirling through the air like rain, battering on me with an unnatural fury. Momentarily blinded, I tripped on something—one of the policeman, as it happened—and staggered to regain my balance. I checked his pulse, but he too was dead. What had happened here?
The air was thick with sand and water, and the winds became fiercer and more erratic as I approached the sea. However, once I’d cleared the surf-club building, I could make out the epicentre of the violent winds: it was where the police enclosure walls had been erected and the monstrous, once-hidden carcass had lain. The latter was so much bigger now—a gigantic amorphous mass, with multiple tentacle-like appendages, and a hideous mass of corrugated flesh that looked to be its head. It did not move except as it was tossed about by the winds and was clearly not alive. But the very sight of it, and the psychic emanations that sprung from it, made me falter and collapse to my knees on the grass. I remained curled into myself, eyes closed and unable to move.
I felt something grab my arm. Startled, I glanced around, for a moment afraid the monstrous creature had reached out to drag me into its maw.
“Mr. Whateley! What are you doing here?” The words were broken and the voice struggling to be heard, but I recognised it at once. “Get out of here! Now!”
“You’re still alive. And still on the job,” I managed, stating the obvious.
“Not for long.” She had to shout over the fury of the wind. “It’s going to get worse, and I can’t take much more. I’ve sent my people away, those still living.” She dragged me up. “Pull yourself together. Go!” She leaned in. “You were right. This is some preternatural phenomenon. But there’s nothing you or anyone can do.”
I could barely think. I just did what she told me to do, staggering forward, pushed by the winds. Debris torn from the trees flew around me, as though urging me along. When I glanced back, Sergeant Sandros was out-of-sight, hopefully as safe as anyone in the vicinity, so I kept going, my mind a whirlpool of questions: should I leave? Isn’t this what my great-grandfather wanted me to witness? Surely it’s why he sent me here? Did he expect me to make a difference against whatever forces were behind this chaos?
I’d reached the main road
when a car screeched to a stop beside me—an old, light-blue Volkswagen Beetle. It says much about my state-of-mind that I didn’t even cringe at its unexpected presence.
“Get in!” cried a barely heard voice. I bent to peer through the passenger-side window, wiping away the water still splattering down on the area. Tangerine Harken was in the driver’s seat. Why was she still here? She should have left long ago. I opened the door and scrambled in.
“What the hell, Tange?” I spluttered. “Haven’t you noticed what’s happening?”
“Of course I have. We need to talk.” Before I could answer, she accelerated the car away from the beach.
“I don’t know how,” said Tange, “but I think I caused all this.”
We were ensconced in her lounge-room, an old-fashioned, rather fussy space, with odd statuary more reminiscent of Morgan le Fay than Queen Victoria. Despite the chaos outside the house, she made us a cup of tea, and I had been quietly sipping away, while waiting for her to get to the point. So far, she’d been evasive.
“What? That’s ridiculous,” I said. “How could you be behind this?”
She ignored my question and instead asked her own. “Tell me, Mr Douglas Ormsham, cryptozoologist, what do you think is happening here?”
Cthulhu Deep Down Under Volume 2 Page 5