Cthulhu Deep Down Under Volume 2

by Various Authors

  Ken pushed Sarah ahead of him towards the door; then he heard, quite clearly, the pfhutt of some kind of an air rifle, and the smack of a projectile hitting flesh. It repeated twice. Hart and his lawyer lay on the floor, their humanity oozing away into things with grey flesh and short stubby tentacles that didn’t fit into the clothing they wore. Deputy Commissioner Livings pushed them ahead of him out of the boardroom and locked the door behind him.

  “My apologies, I’m sorry you had to see that.”

  The helicopter banked and followed the artificial mountain range circling the southern side of the pit.

  It had taken more than one match. The air force didn’t have napalm anymore, so they used incendiary bombs and gelled ethanol with gasoline mixed in. The pit burned for a month. The media called it a volcano, and ‘Hart’s folly.’

  Nothing survived. Even the giant mining trucks melted to slag.

  Soon, the media would call it ‘Hart’s Lake.’ Somehow, Ken didn’t think Ray the Suit would mind.

  The Island in the Swamp

  J Scherpenhuizen

  Frank awoke to a nightmare. The thing remained out of sight, its presence forever around the bend. Chanting filled the air, urging that monstrous being on. That thing he could only guess at by the shadows it threw upon the wall, like some unholy parody of Plato’s metaphor of the cave, which was all man could know of reality. Now Frank knew more, more of reality—which was unreality—than he had ever hoped to know, or known enough to fear. He sank back in a faint. Momentarily he sought escape from this unending torture in the past.

  That damn radio show was where it had all began, that damn stupid radio show, though maybe it wasn’t so stupid after all…

  Hi, and welcome to Purplevoid Studio, internet radio. An island of intelligence in the ocean of stupidity that is our blue planet. Maybe all of this spinning in space is bound to drive us crazy after a while, as we see the joke that was Obamacare unravel, while false flag operations facilitate the move to take away the guns that are our only guarantee of freedom from tyranny, and the masses remain distracted by the Hegelian antipathies of Left and Right and the illusion of choice they provide. Or could it be it’s the fluoridation of the water, calcifying our pineal glands that blinds our ability to see? Or maybe you figure everything is A-okay. We’re not here to tell you what to think, we’re just here to present some ‘alternate’ views to what you’ll get from the bought—sorry—I mean mainstream media. I’m your host, Ernie Oakley, and we’re coming to you from the West Coast of Hawaii.

  Today we have a real treat for you. Vernon Strang has an engineering degree from the University of New South Wales in Australia, which he took out after abandoning his studies in archaeology, due to what he describes as the ‘blinkered approach’ of the academic establishment in that field. Nonetheless, he has continued to study strange and anomalous findings in his homeland, aided by his daughter, Stephanie, who has a degree in linguistics. Vernon has just released his first book, Beyond the Blindfold, which summarises over thirty years of study. In it he challenges much of what is believed about the original inhabitants of The Great Southern Land and the earth itself. Things that would amaze the average person but which our listeners here at Purplevoid will, perhaps, be more than ready to contemplate as true.

  Welcome, Vernon, let’s start off with a bit of background about you.

  Thanks, Arnie. Well, I’ve always felt an incredible connection to the Original Australian people. We used to call them ‘Aboriginals’ but a lot of them aren’t happy with that description so I’ll be referring to them as the ‘Original People’. They believe in reincarnation, like me, and I’m sure I’ve been one of them before, and a number of Elders have told me this is so. I’ve been accepted into the society of a number of different groups and been initiated. I’ve also been a frequent contributor of articles in publications run by them and usually written by them. So I’m about as embedded in their society as a white feller can be.

  So what is the key to this acceptance?

  Well, basically it’s reversing what is, I’m sad to say, the common attitude to the Original Australians, and probably all indigenous groups that have come under European rule. That attitude is that white people have brought civilization and a better way of life to the ‘natives’. They’ve brought education, knowledge and medicine to them, and their resistance to this enlightenment is where all their current problems stem from. They refuse to give up their superstitions, put on a suit and tie and become wage slaves like good Australian citizens.

  But that’s not how you see it.

  No. I see a nation of sovereign people who lived an idyllic lifestyle and, basically, had everything worked out. The ‘working day’ of a person living their traditional lifestyle was four hours. They didn’t suffer any existential crisis. There was plenty of time and opportunity to express yourself creatively. There was no war, no disease, no theft and no fear of death.

  Woah, woah, woah. No disease?

  That’s right! Disease was imported by the Europeans. Original Australians had a diet that was perfectly suited to their metabolism. They had an extensive herbal pharmacopeia but that was usually only for infants and the elderly because the adults’ immune systems functioned perfectly. And if they did get an infection, they had penicillin.

  Penicillin!

  Yep. Everyone thinks of Fleming as being the discoverer of penicillin, but it was Australian Nobel Laureate Walter Florey who contributed most to its development for use in medicine, and he found out about it from the Original Australians who used a mold that grew on one side of a certain tree to cure infections!

  So why don’t more people know about this?

  Well, it doesn’t fit in with the perception of Original Australians as being primitives. They have to be portrayed as inferior to justify the destruction of their lifestyle and culture.

  So, it’s a conspiracy!

  If you like.

  Hmmm, interesting. It reminds me of Michael Tsarion’s description of how the British denigrated the Irish and destroyed their ancient monuments and culture as part of their justification for ruling that ‘primitive race’.

  Yeah, interesting isn’t it. The British had a long history of this tactic by the time they got to Australia. My family’s background is Irish, actually, and I have this sort of intuition that a lot of the ‘transported felons’ were actually Original Australian souls, reincarnated, being brought back to their homeland. We have to remember that the original inhabitants of Ireland and Scotland were also ‘Aboriginals’ who were displaced by Romans, Anglo Saxons and Normans. We meet these original people in Robert E Howard’s stories of Bran Mac Morn, for instance, and I think, probably, at least some of those people’s ancestors came from Australia, and certainly they had trade links with Ancient Australia.

  Right, and this is among some of the more startling claims made in your book, that the Original People were a seafaring people with links to places like Egypt. Can you tell the listeners a little about that?

  Well, there’s a lot of archaeological evidence of an Egyptian presence in Australia. There’s the Gympie Pyramid and the Gosford Glyphs. All of which are challenged, of course.

  We don’t worry about that at Purplevoid. We’ve had Michael Cremo on talking about forbidden archaeology. There’s dozens of these anomalies out there.

  Yeah, and there’s also signs of a connection with Australia in Egypt. They’ve found marsupial bones buried around the Sphinx and eucalyptus resin is used in Egyptian mummies, and mummification is also found in Australia. And then there are the linguistic connections between Egyptian and Original Australian dialects, which my daughter Stephanie can tell you all about.

  But none of this is officially recognised?

  Well, we’re getting there. The evidence keeps mounting and more and more people are coming on board, even within academia. We haven’t reached the tipping point yet. Not that it bothers us. We’ve been pooh-poohed for twenty years, but what kept us going is tha
t the Elders kept giving us more and more information, the longer we worked with them and showed them our respect and sincerity. They told us all these finds were genuine, so we just had to find a way to prove it.

  Of course skeptics say, well if they know all this stuff and they want it known, why haven’t they done more to publicise it? The fact is, too much of what they have said has been met with disrespect. And they don’t give up their sacred secrets and hidden history easily. You have to prove yourself sincere. They give you a bit, and then a bit more as you prove yourself, and it can take a long time.

  Anyway, I’ve just been shown something that will blow everything wide open, if I’m allowed to share it. This place is amazing. It shows a kind of construction that has never been seen in Australia before. It’s going to rewrite history. But we have to be careful about revealing its whereabouts. These places are sacred and we don’t want people stomping all over them and turning them into a tourist attraction. The Elders have said that if the wrong people go to this place, something bad is going to happen…to them.

  Frank came alert again, jerked out of his memory, or dream, or wherever he had gone to escape his misery and terror. The stench of the sea was in his nostrils, seaweed and brine and the stomach-churning stink of sea creatures in a state of putrefaction. He was on his hands and knees, crawling toward the chanting, the smell and the glow where those sinuous shadows writhed. Aghast, he stopped in his tracks. What could possess him to draw toward such horror? Possess indeed. It was something unholy, or beyond any concept of good and evil, at least.

  Though his mind recoiled from the idea of further advance, he had no energy to retreat and for the moment contented himself to simply halt his progress and rest; rest his body, and rest his mind with distraction. The present was too terrifying. He had been thinking of the radio show, that that was where it had all started. But it had really begun with Janine looking at him over the dinner table with that look in her eye.

  Frank knew she was getting ready to bait him. His brother’s wife had become easy to read in the five years he’d come to know her. He didn’t entirely mind being baited by her, it was as close to flirting with her as he was comfortable to get, and who wouldn’t want to flirt with Janine? She had the body of a swimsuit model and the face of a film star. She was also smart, if you discounted her penchant for mysticism. His brother Gerome certainly managed to do so, despite the fact that Frank was positively a New Ager in comparison. He guessed opposites attracted, though a guy would overlook a lot for a woman as hot as Janine.

  “Did you listen to the podcast I mentioned?” she asked casually.

  “Yeah,” Frank grinned back.

  “And?”

  “It’s bullshit!”

  “You think?”

  “What’s this?” Gerome butted in.

  “Vernon Strang. You know, I told you I listened to it on Purplevoid.”

  “What, the guy who thinks homo sapiens evolved in Australia? Not that it matters, as soon as you mention Purplevoid I know it’s bullshit. I don’t know why you waste your time with that rubbish.”

  “Well, it gives me something to listen to while I’m potting.”

  “Yeah, like you couldn’t listen to the ABC instead of that right-wing idiocy.”

  “They’re not right wing, they’re libertarians, I think. It’s not as if they tell you what to think.”

  “No, but the fact that they seem to favour right-wing flakes as interviewees is a bit of a tip.”

  “Strang is as left-wing as they come.”

  “Yeah, but did they get him on to talk about politics?”

  “Not exactly…”

  Gerome threw up his hands. “Of course not. As long as he’s talking about the flat earth or aliens from the Pleiades giving the Aborigines their knowledge they’ll like him. That’s their bag.”

  “He doesn’t propose the earth is flat.”

  “No it’s a carrot shape,” Frank smirked. “Long and pointy and flat on top.” The brothers laughed together.

  “What’s so funny?” Janine said.

  “It’s from the Illuminatus Trilogy,” Gerome said. “I keep telling you, you have to read it. Then you’ll see there’s nothing new about these guys and the nuts they get on. They’re just recycling the same kinda nonsense Shea and Wilson lampooned back in the 70s.”

  “Yeah,” Frank agreed. “If you want something to entertain yourself with while you pot, get that on CD.”

  “Okay,” Janine said, cheerily. “I’m not a true believer you know, but I think it’s entertaining and I like to keep an open mind.”

  “Yeah, well,” Gerome said, “just so long as you don’t keep your mind so open that your brain slips out.”

  “Which it would have to have done to believe these guys,” Frank said. He sounded angry.

  “Why does it bother you so much?” Janine asked. She looked like an angel in the candlelight. It was hard to feel anything negative looking at her, except for the fact that she could never be his.

  “Because there’s too much shit going down in the world and people should be doing something about it rather than being diverted by this sort of nonsense,” Frank said. “People like Strang are just attention seekers. They thrive on the controversy and sucker people in to get them buying their books and going on tours to look at their phony ‘finds’, while honest researchers doing serious work are ignored.”

  “You’re not a little jealous, are you?” Janine said, leaning forward, her cleavage rising up on her folded arms.

  Frank raised his eyes to the ceiling, trying to focus his thoughts.

  “What for? The guy is a laughing stock in intellectual circles.”

  “Yeah, but who cares about them, Frank? Who wants to be part of respectable circles? Copernicus wasn’t, or Giordano Bruno, or Galileo. You want to just spout the wisdom of the day and preach to the choir and you’re fine, but heaven help you if you’re a pioneer.”

  “Yeah, bro,” Gerome said, his voice dripping irony. “Get on board. Don’t you know the paradigm shift to the flat-earth theory is reaching the tipping point?”

  “Carrot-shaped-earth theory,” Frank quipped back, but the light had gone out of his eyes and he avoided looking at Janine, whose silence seemed to mock his pose of insouciance.

  The carrot-shaped earth, he wished life made that much sense. At least, then, the earth would have had a shape unlike where he found himself now, within the bowels of the accursed mound. He giggled nervously. The mound projecting from the island was a bit like a carrot top in shape, if you trimmed off the green bits, and, proportionally, as much of the structure projected down into the ground as did a carrot into the earth. Inside such a gigantic structure he was no more than a louse that had found itself inside a wormhole.

  It was all a matter of scale, Frank supposed. Once he had felt like most humans, he guessed, a member of the prime predator species on the planet. Of course there were creatures with bigger teeth and even tusked beasts, which dwarfed humans in size, yet with man’s superior brains and their technology all of nature had been tamed. Or so he had thought.

  Now it was as if he had been a mite in a wormhole who had finally made his way to the surface and discovered the world of men, and tigers and elephants, and beings so fabulous and gigantic and powerful that his true nature was finally revealed to him. Except the mite was blessed with too small an intelligence to truly appreciate its own insignificance. Perhaps some higher power had blessed his own race with a similar kind of ignorance, which he had been foolish enough to seek to overcome.

  Yet he had not been wrong about man ruling all of nature, for the beings that ruled here, beneath the mound, were not truly a part of nature. They were outside of it, above it, beyond it…he had neither the words nor the concepts to articulate what whispered in his heart in tones of dread and awe. He had craved a revelation, and now that one had sought him out, Frank cursed it, and he cursed the man who had led him to it.

  Frank hated Vernon Strang. Janine loved
him and he didn’t deserve her love or the admiration of all the idiots who fell for his line; all the bleeding hearts who felt sorry for the Abos who were resisting the 21st century, being dragged into it kicking and screaming. If their culture was so damn fantastic, why had it fallen apart so easily? Even if Strang was sincere he was an idiot. Just because some old black folk who claimed to be Elders told him some stuff, he was going to believe them above all of the academic experts and scientists who said otherwise? The Gympie Pyramid and the Gosford Glyphs had been debunked more often than the Shroud of Turin, not that that deterred the shroudies. These types were impervious to proof.

  Yeah, he was jealous of Strang. Frank had a brain. He had education. He could spin a convincing lie out of half-truths as well as the next guy, but he wouldn’t do it even if it was what the public wanted, because he had integrity. He understood what that ‘public wanted better than most, because he had been down that whole track of mystical searching about as far as one could go. Gerome had teased him endlessly about his gullibility, about the money wasted on visiting tarot readers and Mind-Body-Spirit festivals, reading Nexus and Silver Chord and everything from Alistair Crowley to Erik von Däniken and back. But too many seers had been proven wrong. He had been promised each time that he would discover something amazing, that he would get his glimpse of another world, but now, at the age of forty he had given up those roads. Strang had not.

  And if Strang was not a fraud then he was even more to be envied. What if he really had been inducted by the Elders into some hidden knowledge? What if he had really experienced the amazing things that he claimed; the things Frank had always dreamed of experiencing? And these things were almost on his doorstep, not in Egypt or in the heights of the Andes. Strang had said he was going on another trip and, as usual, a small, select group was going along with him. A trip to explore, more thoroughly, the ‘startling new find’ he claimed the Elders were still holding back from making public. What if he were to call Strang, offer to volunteer, then he could examine the site himself. If it was a hoax he’d expose Strang, and get a bit of airtime for himself. He could picture himself now, masterful, erudite. He could marshal his own facts. Strang’s crackpot ideas were spreading like wildfire, which would automatically create a market for a definitive debunking. Frank had hidden his own light long enough.