by Byron Craft
A labyrinth of tunnels and colossal chambers unfolded before Alan. Seemingly endless corridors extended into the impenetrable darkness. Other tunnels branched off from the main artery in regular patterns forming large galleries. He would have easily gotten lost if, again, it wasn’t for the journal. The nineteenth-century scientist and his two Narragansett Indians, back in their day, had marked their way by arrows painted with white wash upon the tiled walls. In stark certainty, he was wandering amidst a death, which had reigned thousands of years ago, and in all probability even longer. Alan was certain that Morley had discovered its origin. But, what it was and what purpose it served in the scheme of that ancient civilization had yet to be unraveled. Morley had written that he had established an unprecedented and almost blasphemous link with forgotten eons normally closed to the human species. To most, those would appear as the writings of a madman, but to Alan Ward, they made all the sense in the world.
***
Alan thought he was in a dream. He saw the tendrils at the end of a massive tentacle working furiously, penning long lines onto metallic pages and turning them into script. The script was English. The tendrils didn’t stop or rest for even a few seconds, and the stack of pages kept growing. Alan had halted his progress when he came upon the entrance to a subterranean room. The painted arrows left by his age-old predecessors had ceased. He was at his destination. A ramp led downward. He was at the entrance to a very large circular chamber. The ramp spiraled along the interior of the curved wall. He knew where he was going. He had been here many times before. Memory-access to the events that had been lost to him years ago rushed in on him. Everything Alan could see was gigantic, towering and colossal, insanely so. Portions of an alien city with spiraling towers in night black masonry sprang into being. Narrow cylindrical structures shot up between the buildings into a steamy gray sky. In the past, these dream visions of his would shimmer briefly and then fold in on themselves leaving only a faint memory of their existence. Now they were clear, very clear. They were a memory. Repressed memories or retrograde amnesia no longer blocked his recollection.
Many a time he had taken this same journey, and many times he tried with a great force of will to look down at his feet. Always when his eyes would slowly move the distance towards the floor and before afforded a view of his feet, he would wake up in a cold sweat. Recycling the past and walking along the solid perceptible surface of the ramp Alan was able, for the first time since he had regained consciousness in Arkham several years ago, to lift that veil. Instead of legs was a massive conical form. Sunken veins with elevated spaces between covered the lower portion of his body. The shock was almost overwhelming. He staggered down to the bottom of the ramp barely keeping his footing. His feet. He did have feet and legs. The memory vision gave way to the moment at hand. Alan now knew what he had expected all along but was always too afraid to confront. He was or was at one time, one of them. One of those monstrous and bizarre cone-shaped beings of eons past that he had seen many times in his dreams as well as carved into the tunnel walls. Morley had referred to them as Elder Beings. Creatures of immense intelligence that he believed inhabited our planet before the dawn of man. Things with vast intellects whose devices touched the entire solar system, and whose life spans could ride out a thousand apocalypses. Alan knew, at that moment, that in all probability Morley’s theory was indeed fact.
Alan wondered if Morley’s driving force was more than just an illuminating discovery, more than the insatiable thirst for knowledge, a quest to unlock the unknown? Maybe Isaac Morley was plagued by the same demons as he. Could that nineteenth-century scientist also have been inflicted by an out of body transference via the Elder Beings? Had Morley been searching for similar answers to his dreams?
Exploring the room with his 300 lumen light, Alan became familiar with his surroundings. No longer was he riddled with only bits and pieces of faint, bizarre memories. He recognized the row upon row of coffin size charcoal metal boxes, each one engraved with its curvilinear hieroglyphs. The metal boxes, or file drawers, were stacked at a great height and each continuous row was separated by narrow tables running parallel to them. The tops of the tables were as high as a man is tall. It was at one of these tables where he once stood and wrote. The pain of solitude and loneliness he felt back then saddened his heart.
Not everything was as Alan remembered. The ancient library was deserted. A collection of bulbous eyes mounted on thick fleshy stalks attached to their colossal bodies no longer turned and looked at him. The nightmares out of time and space hadn’t occupied the place for centuries. There was no hustle and bustle of alien seekers of cosmic knowledge. Alan’s heart grew heavier when he noticed that several of the drawers had been pried open. Much of their contents were strewn across the room. Was this Morley’s doing? Was this a clumsy attempt at archeology? Was this how the fool obtained his research? He felt violated. Somehow, through mysterious means or by way of an advanced form of science he had become one of those Elder Beings, and he was, at present, sharing their racial memory, their anger for the vandalism that had been committed. His heart beat heavily in his chest. He took a deep breath, told himself to calm down and realized, as he forced himself to relax, that he had hands with fingers, not tentacles and tendrils.
Alan noticed several oversized, foot and a half long glass test tubes, scattered amongst the litter left by the previous human intruders. All were emptied of their contents. Were the contents at one-time chemical, biological? He had no way of knowing. Picking one up, he saw a light blue disc-like cap covering its mouth. It was completely flat; there was no securing rim to fasten it down and no threading around the opening of the glass tube to facilitate the fastening. Touching the center of the disc, it flipped open on an unseen, invisible hinge. Consequently, swinging it shut, it became firmly attached to a seemingly invisible latch until the center of the lid was touched once again.
Alan looked to his left and recognized the glyphs on one of the large file drawers. It was the identifying symbol given to him by the Elder Beings. As Alan’s memory of events became more focused, it came to mind that he never had knowledge of their language or alphabet. Nonetheless, he was, over time, able to identify his mark. Staring at the symbol the combination to unlock the drawer appeared in his mind. It wasn’t a series of numbers or letters; rather they were geometric shapes, three-dimensional images that warped and twisted collapsing into one another so quickly that it was impossible to recognize one from another. As rapidly as the “combination” appeared in his consciousness, it disappeared. Were those images in his head placed there by the Elder Beings? Alan had a sense of accomplishment. Something gurgled within the large drawer followed by a loud metallic click. The face of the file cabinet swung open, and the drawer, with all its contents, slid out, floated across the vacant space and landed softly on the table where Alan whence stood, in another form, ages ago.
Amazement, followed by a tremendous sense of purpose, filled every pore of Alan Ward’s body. He no longer questioned his sanity. His dreams, his amnesia was not the results of a deficiency on his part. It was the outcome of a grand scheme where he was just the pawn. A plot that he was about to discover the why’s and wherefores. There was a problem though. The large metal file drawer rested on the tall table almost out of reach. Standing on his tiptoes and stretching every portion of his body upward he took hold of the lower edge of the drawer. Alan inched it slowly off the table and was caught off guard by the tremendous weight of the container. The metal box came crashing down spilling its contents.
Clamoring to sort through the clutter he had created, Alan got down on his hands and knees and tried to bring some order to the mess. In all the clutter were of numerous sheets of the metallic paper plus an odd-looking device. It was a rod of some sort about an inch and a half in diameter and as long as a crowbar. Then it struck him. He was holding the writing instrument he used in his other, alien body. He shuffled through the pile of metal papers and came face to face with his own handwriting.
It was a looking glass moment. His heart raced again. There was no longer any doubt that he had been here in another time and another body. He was going to have to show all this to Ironwood. He has been a loyal comrade, but he also treated Alan as a sick person that needed constant supervision.
Spreading the papers out he caught sight of passages about the history of the elder race that once occupied these premises. A race of beings as old as time itself because they were able to traverse it. Not in a physical function but in an ethereal capacity. These beings of higher learning were capable of projecting their minds both into the past and the future. Maybe it wasn’t their actual consciousness, Alan pondered, maybe it was just a memory, he was never quite sure but given the proper set of circumstances along with the equipment they used, one of them would ping off a solid slab of emptiness and shoot backwards or forwards into another time, embedding itself in a brain where it could live, have meaning, and learn about the host’s culture. The mind of the host was propelled to the waiting Elder Being where it was trapped in the sender’s empty vessel until the two identities were returned to their bodies. Before the host’s mind was sent back, all memory of its time with the Elder Beings, their cyclopean cities, and their alien science was erased.
As Alan read, his mind threw off the shackles of the black veil that had been forced on him by the Elder things. A story developed by his hand, written centuries previously. It flowed smoothly as a poem of beauty and horror, dictated to him by the beings that were long dead, or maybe never dead at all. The circular room, the ancient alien library, that he now occupied was once the base of a huge tower that stood in the center of a vast plaza. This maze of catacombs was all that was left of a vast metropolis that covered the entire planet both above and below ground. It was spawned by intelligence far beyond human ken and scope. They inhabited the earth in its pre-human age traveling to our world from the outer most reaches of the galaxy. They built the global city and called it Kadath. All this occurred during the early Cretaceous age. Alan was no geologist, but he knew that the Cretaceous period was over fifty-million years ago. The numbers were staggering. He had surmised that the artifacts that he had been examining were thousands not millions of years old. The enormous amount of time was astounding but there was something about it that he couldn't quite put his finger on and it troubled him.
After eons of progress, the Elder Beings stopped erecting their structures out of metal and stone. They fell upon a new art of building. They were eventually able to produce a synthetic life form from a type of plastic protoplasm. These were, at first, reared as slaves, beasts of burden to perform the heavy work of the community and ultimately this living matter was willed by the powerful minds of their creators to be the buildings, the dwellings, the roadways, the entire infrastructure of their civilization. In due course, everything these creatures of the Cretaceous age touched, walked on, lived in and slept on was alive in every sense of the word. They were surrounded, every day, by the living matter of their own creation.
Alan read on and reacquainted himself, after untold millions of years away from his alien writing desk, with the numerous achievements, secrets, and horrors of his long ago captors. Some of it amazed him, some of it sickened him, and some made him depressed. It was when he came across a passage that contained the words “the coming of the meteor” that he grasped what had troubled him about the period of the Cretaceous age. Most archaeologists accepted the theory that a large meteor fell on the earth, during that era, destroying most of the life on the planet. Had the coming of the meteor been forecast, and had this outlandish extra-terrestrial population left en masse to seek a less doomed planet? Or, was he simply reading the results of their ability to look into the future and to foresee their impending doom?
Without warning, a piercing bird-like cry screeched from somewhere within the tunnels. Alan froze momentarily as if a malevolent force had passed through his body, making its presence known. "Eeeeeeee! Eeeeeeee! Wawk Wawk Wawk Wawk!” echoed through the passageways.
A rattling noise trailed the shriek. Fright and panic overcame Alan. Isaac Morley’s belief in his monster behind the door could be attributed to a lack of rationalism, compounded by superstition owing to his being cooped up in these tunnels for so many years. Could one of those synthetic life forms still be alive and roaming the subways of a forgotten time? His common sense told him that it couldn’t be, but Alan’s reasoning faculties were overcome by his alarm.
"Eeeeeeee! Eeeeeeee! Wawk Wawk Wawk Wawk!” it resonated, growing in volume.
Dread and anxiety permeated Alan’s every fiber. “Run!” conquered all desire for further exploration. Gathering up a handful of his metallic papers he scooped up the large glass tube, rolled up the ancient essays and slipped them inside, snapping the lid shut afterward. Now it was time to run.
Taking long strides and sprinting up the ramp left him exceptionally winded when he reached the top. He was in lousy physical shape, and he knew it. He had to leave that behind him just now. Mind over body. He was a long distance runner when he was in high school. He would be again. The deafening cry swelled in volume. “God help me,” he prayed as he took flight like a teenager. He gripped the glass tube tightly as if it was a baton in a relay race. His breathing became heavily labored. He could hear it slithering at an insane speed, still screeching, "Eeeeeeee! Eeeeeeee! Wawk Wawk Wawk Wawk! Coming closer. He knew he couldn’t keep up this pace much longer. He didn’t dare look over his shoulder. Just run damn it! Run until you drop and then crawl.
The tunnel was filled by the body of the creature bearing down on him, slithering over the glistening floor that it had swept so free of debris. And still came the ancient mocking cry, "Eeeeeeee! Eeeeeeee! Wawk Wawk Wawk Wawk!”
Alan turned the corner that had been mapped out by Morley and his men and found himself in the room with the pile of bones. He was amazed that he had made it this far. Gasping for breath, he crushed the rib cage of one of the skeletons with his right foot as he ran towards the exit. The large old wooden door was plainly in view. Dashing through the opened doorway, he grabbed the iron handled on the outside and moved hard against it to slam it shut. The door sprung back and slammed into his forehead. Blood ran down his face from a splinter that the age-old pine barrier had stuck in his brow. The gun, he remembered, as he stumbled backward. The damn old gun, I left it wedged in the jamb! Completely out of breath he summoned what little inner strength was still inside of him and charged the door once more. The charge was more like a stagger, but he was able to reach the old revolver and yank it free. From inside the open doorway, he heard the rustle and clatter of dry bones. Alan threw his body weight against the wood door and pushed with every pound of his force. It sprang back again. For a fleeting instant, he questioned whether he had indeed removed the gun’s barrel from between the door frame and the door or had he hallucinated. A truck load of gray-green tentacles exploded through the opening. The passageway burst with the ear splitting cries of the creature, "Eeeeeeee! Eeeeeeee! Wawk Wawk Wawk Wawk!”
Alan was thrown back into the middle of the short tunnel section. A tentacle lashed around his chest, but he quickly tore himself free. Hr crawled in a mad frenzy and ripped the flesh on the palms of his hands over loose gravel. Another tentacle impacted the ankle of his left leg and tightened; a hundred tiny hungry cups like tiny lampreys bit down and sucked at his flesh trying to draw him closer. Alan beat at it with the indestructible alien glass tube and momentarily freed himself. He regained his footing and dove for the niche located at the opening to the passageway. Setting down the test tube and grabbing the Tee-bar plunger on the static generator Alan pushed it down. Nothing happened. There was no report. Frantically he lifted the generator friction bar up and again pushed down the plunger. Still no explosion. A mass of tentacles and tendrils shot out of the thirty-foot side tunnel. Alan saw everything in slow motion. One tentacle, the longest of the throng, was traveling towards his throat. In a split second, it would have him in its grasp, and he would
end up helplessly dying a slow and painful death like one of Isaac Morley’s animals fed to the thing so long ago.
He pressed the friction bar with his last ounce of strength. An enormous explosion rocked the tunnel.
***
Alan Parker Ward awoke from what felt like centuries later. Some of the five-sided tunnel wall tiles were scattered around him, sand and dirt coated his body. Slowly he rose to his feet. Every muscle in his body ached. His ears rang from the loud report. A million years of silt poured like a waterfall from his hair. His flash light, half-buried in the rubble, gave off a friendly glow. Picking it up, he shook it free of dirt, restoring its brilliance, and looked around. Not all the dust from the explosion had settled, leaving a foggy presence in the air. He coughed repeatedly spitting up a blackish residue. The oversized glass test tube was where he had left it within the niche next to the static generator, that wonderful, fantastic, out of this ever lovin’ world static generator.
Shining his light at his feet, Alan saw something move. It was a piece of the shoggoth. He no longer withheld its name. Everything that Morley had written about in his journal was true. Nothing was delusional. The shoggoth was the given name that he had discovered in his research that belonged to the synthetic lifeforms created by the Elder Beings and written about in the Necronomicon. Outlined in the beam of his light was a severed tentacle. It was about six-inches long, and it was still moving. Writhing was more like it as it tried to wriggle towards the toe of his shoe. It must have been sliced off by the falling rock when Isaac Morley’s “safety device” exploded, he marveled. Alan remembered, with a shudder, that the longest of the shoggoth’s appendage was the one that was reaching for his throat. Removing the rolled up metal papers in the glass tumbler he squatted down within arm’s reach of the thing. With a swift move of his right hand, he scooped up the severed section of the creature’s limb into to the crystal receptacle and snapped the light blue lid shut. "Gotchya," he said with a smile.