by Byron Craft
Skidding the Jeepster to a stop in front of the old house, Ironwood kept the motor running and the headlights on in hopes of a quick getaway. Pausing briefly, he removed the .38 from the car’s glove box, slipped the gun into his waistband and sprinted indoors.
The fifty-year old Professor dropped through the manhole opening in the cellar floor and swiftly down the length of the cast iron ladder as agile as a man half his age. Clutching the revolver in one hand and the flashlight in the other he retraced his steps back to Isaac Morley’s underground study. He knew deep down inside his Smith & Wesson Police Special would be an ineffectual weapon against a shoggoth. Still it gave him comfort to point it in front of him.
A light still burned in the circular room. Alan sat at one of the tables. His head leaned back and even under the yellow glow of the kerosene lamp; he looked pale. “Alan,” Ironwood called out.
Alan Ward stared at his professor friend with eyes that looked into another world. His threadbare sports jacket was now tattered and heavily soiled beyond recognition. His face was grimy, there were small clumps of dirt in his hair, and there was a bloodstain on his forehead. Ward’s right leg was resting on a short wooden stool. The pant leg was torn up to the knee. Focusing his light onto the exposed limb Ironwood could make out a number of circular welts about an inch in diameter. Red scars inside the circles glistened with fresh blood. It reminded him of the suction marks giant squids leave on their prey. The bleeding looked as if there had been tiny teeth or minute curved claws within the suckers. Then he thought about the video and the tentacles that lashed out at the other two seabees. The Professor was dismayed. He felt useless. He didn’t have anything to treat the wounds. Not even a handkerchief to wrap the leg. He was contemplating tearing the sleeves off his shirt to use as bandages when Alan spoke.
“It almost got me,” he said coming out of his daze.
“What almost got you.”
“It was a shoggoth.”
“My God, where is it now,” Ironwood asked holding his gun in a defensive posture.
“We are safe Thomas, at least for the time being. Unless . . .” he sighed looking up at the ceiling. “Unless it finds another route out of this place. There was a cave in, I caused it. Isaac Morley left a well-preserved explosive device in one of the tunnel sections, and I was able to use it. The thing is sealed up behind hundreds of tons of dirt and rock.”
“And you Alan, how are you doing?”
Alan clutched his chest with his left hand and winced slightly. Short of breath, he answered, “I’ve been better. I can’t seem to move my right arm though. There are some pills in my pocket.”
Ironwood reached into the right side pocket of Alan’s jacket and produced a small metal tin. Taking out a tablet, he placed it under his friend’s tongue. “Nitro?” he asked.
Alan shook his head, “yes.”
Thomas Ironwood was aware that nitroglycerin sublingual tablets are used to treat episodes of angina in people who have coronary artery disease. He also recognized an emergency when he saw one. “Alan we’ve got to get you out of here.”
“No. Movement by me is the worst thing we could do right now.”
“I’ll get help.”
“What are you going to do? Call road service? Does Triple-A come out this far? No, what I need is to rest and let the nitro take its effect.”
“How long have you had this condition?”
“It was a gift left to me by my other self. When I woke up after my five-year coma, I had a seizure, almost died then. They tell me that the only cure for my condition is a heart transplant, but that costs a million dollars. You don’t have a million bucks on you do you?” he laughed followed by a harsh cough. “Go ahead and call 911 and maybe they’ll send a chopper out here with some medical personnel if they don’t get lost first, but you are not going to wrestle me up that ladder and out of that sewer. That would definitely kill me.”
“I will go topside, get a cell signal and call the base.”
“Stay and listen,” Alan Ward commanded as if lecturing one of his students back at the university. He pointed to another chair and motioned Ironwood to sit down. Taking a deep breath Ward slumped further into his chair. “Everything you see here was once part of a great race of beings that occupied this planet millions of years ago. Although highly advanced, they became a civilization void of any instrumentalities. No machines. They synthesized life forms that became the structures that they lived in and the infrastructures that they traveled on. These tunnels were once alive as well. The five-sided notched tiles on the walls and floors were formerly a cell structure that held everything together. If it were damaged, in some way, it would simply grow replacement parts and repair itself because that is the how it was programmed to perform. Remember the remains of what we thought were light fixtures hanging from the tunnel ceilings?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“They were, in a sense, ancient chandeliers. Conductors of light, not producers of it. At one time, they were part of giant trumpet shaped organisms that sprouted through the tunnel ceilings at regular intervals towering hundreds of feet into the sky. They collected sunlight and transmitted it to those fixtures below. Why and what for, I am not sure, maybe they simply lit up the passageways. Maybe there was another purpose that has been lost to us. I doubt we’ll ever know.”
Getting animated and acting a bit like his old self the English teacher turned amateur archaeologist continued, “Either way, after a period everything died off. The Elder Being’s living structures crumbled back into the earth and the tunnels, in desert areas like the Mojave, became mummified. We are privileged to be in a part of our country, possibly the world, which still contains these relics.”
“But some ‘thing’ did survive?” inquired the Professor.
“Yes,” Alan replied his voice becoming almost a whisper. “These life forms were also shaped into beasts of burden so that even all physical labor by their race was eliminated.”
“And the shoggoth?” Ironwood pressured.
“One of their slave labor force as far as I can tell.”
“The one that tried to attack you, what did it look like?”
“I won’t describe what I saw. It was only a glimpse that sent me rushing out of that place. That cave in gave us a shoggoth sample that will probably produce years of scientific study and position papers in academia.”
Ironwood looked befuddled.
“Over there,” Alan said pointing at the table next to him.
Ironwood realized that he had indicated a large glass tube lying amongst a stack of papers. Standing, he picked it up. There was something inside. Was it a salamander? It was the wrong color. Then it moved. Not a slow slither, rather it jumped as if it was trying to break through the glass. He dropped the tube and hollered, “Damn, it’s a tentacle.” Ironwood watched as the glass tube bounced off the table and on to the stone floor without breaking. It evoked the passages in Hayward Phillip’s top-secret report about the unbreakable oversized test tubes.
“A piece of a tentacle,” Alan said brusquely applying humor, trying to salve his discomfort. “A severed tentacle, to be precise. Guillotined by the roof falling in just when the little bastard tried to grab me.”
Alan started to laugh, “The boys at your Michelson Lab will have fun trying to reverse engineer that abortion. If they ever figure the thing out it will mean to biology what Einstein meant to mathematics and physics. There is a good chance that Isaac Morley’s meddling may have activated a once forgotten experiment in environmental science. He never mentioned in his journal how he came across it only that it was very small when they first found it. I discovered many opened and empty tubes like that one littering a tunnel chamber. Possibly that was the source of their discovery. Whenever Morley and his helpers fed it, and it grew, it became enormous, but surely, it must have atrophied, becoming dormant after their demise and when the feeding stopped. I haven’t been able to figure out how it regained its bulk after so many years of
stagnation.”
Ironwood thought about the electrical voltage that the Chief Petty Officer had plugged into the thing. Did the shoggoth also thrive on pure energy? Did it consume other organisms only for their life force energy? The idea was too fantastic. “Alan, how big was the creature you encountered?” he urged.
“The size of a freight train,” he shot back holding his chest again momentarily gasping for air.
“Isn’t the nitro taking effect yet?”
“I think so; strange, it feels like a cheap vodka hangover.” Taking a deep breath again, he smiled at his old friend and calmly said, “There is something else you should know. After the Elder Beings bred an adequate supply of shoggoths, they experimented with developing other cell groups. One of these was a shambling primitive sometimes used for food and at times as an amusing buffoon. You’ll find its likeness carved into that wall over there,” nodding towards an area opposite the entryway.
Walking in the direction Alan indicated, Ironwood shined his light on a section of wall to the left of the bookcase. Just a couple of feet above eye level was a picture symbol of a two-legged creature whose vaguely simian and human foreshadowing’s were unmistakable, Man!
“Writings in the Necronomicon claim that certain elder things created all life on earth as a jest or a mistake. Perhaps those writings were not a myth.” Alan coughed severely but continued to drive his point home. “I suppose beliefs about a supreme being who created us in his image are as much of a joke as our ancestral buffoons were to the Elder Beings.”
Ironwood wasn’t about to disturb his fellow academician, especially considering his condition. He felt sorry for him. Poor Alan, his pessimism was so deeply ingrained that, for him, every silver lining had a cloud in it. It was no wonder after all the life altering and devastating events he had experienced. Losing five years of his life, his wife and child gone from him as a family unit and a serious health condition. Pitiable Alan not only had become a pawn in the power of those Elder Beings, but he had also become a victim of the scheme of Congressman Neville Stream.
Professor Thomas Ironwood had his own convictions about creationism that until his friend’s health recovered he would remain mute. What he remained aware of though, was the recent studies of the human genome and ancient DNA that have produced conclusive evidence that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, modern man, were two completely different species. The pictoglyph, like all the others they had observed, was highly detailed and it was obvious to him that it was depicting a hunched over Neanderthal man, not Homo erectus.
Alan must have trusted that his and Ironwood’s beliefs, when it came to other fields of understanding, were not so dissimilar. When Alan shouted out, “I am certain that you can appreciate that it is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be left alone. That fool Eastwater is digging a tunnel several miles from here. The shoggoth may be heading that way now. He must be stopped.”
“It was our job,” answered Ironwood, pleased that they had found some common ground, “when I was with the Mythos Department, to keep arcane secrets out of the hands of those that would use it to their own selfish and destructive ends. I will leave you here and send detailed information as to your whereabouts while I go and stop the ‘fool’ as you say.” Turning around to face Alan, he noticed that he was not moving.
Rushing over to his old friend, he placed two fingers against his neck. “Alan!” he shouted. There was no pulse.
***
Alan couldn’t hear his friend talking to him, the ticking of his watch or even feel the soft beating of his own heart. It was as if he had stepped into a vacuum. He no longer felt any pain. He was certain that he had attained full use again of his right arm and the injuries on his leg no longer throbbed. The lighting in the circular room, for some reason, increased. He was standing, and every essence in his body experienced peace. There was no more internal turmoil.
Alan Parker Ward observed his death from a quiet place, as every bit of himself expanded into the ether.
***
Grief stricken, Ironwood stood over the body of his friend. The pain and angst he felt over the loss of his colleague were unbearable. He felt useless; he felt old and foolish, a decrepit old fool that should have been more cognizant to Alan’s malady. Maybe he could have gotten him proper medical attention. He shouldn’t have brought him out to this harsh desert environment. He shouldn’t have left him alone in the tunnels. Anger overcame his grief and turned into rage. The real culprit was Congressman Neville Stream. He had lured Alan Ward to these bizarre burrows and ultimately lured him to his death. The Elder Being’s rampaging shoggoths were not necessarily malevolent. They just rolled over and assimilated you. It was simply what they did. They were probably oblivious to the existence of puny creatures like us, he decided. We are just a source of food to them, the energy needed to drive their internal engine. They are indifferent, inimical. But the Congressman was of a different ilk. He didn’t think like a normal person. He didn’t have the ingrained moral codes that define our species; likewise, our perceptions of “good” and “evil.” Stream has an excessive if not, erotic interest in himself, he thought, he is narcissistic, and a powerful narcissist can be more dangerous than a shoggoth. Was it hopeless to oppose Congressman Stream? His ego was so huge; his self-interest so overpowering that he was incapable of recognizing his machinations as evil. Interesting, Ironwood mused, that the words “ego” and “evil” sounded so similar.
Intently conscious of his complete isolation within the catacombs, Ironwood stared at the ceiling contemplating his next move. What do I do now he wondered? An idea tickled Ironwoods brain like the tiny scuttling legs of a spider, Alan’s idea of reverse engineering didn’t seem so comical by comparison, he decided. He bent over he picked up the king-size test tube with its gruesome contents. The detached tentacle wriggled within its transparent prison. He stared at the grotesquerie and almost smiled. “Perhaps there is hope for mankind after all,” he proclaimed. The tube fit snugly into the left pocket of his trousers. Moving the wooden table up against the large oak barrel, containing kerosene, he picked up a circular tin that was used as a waste basket. Ironwood looked at the body of Alan Ward and again at the simian carving on the curved wall. From the table, he scooped up all the notes of Isaac Morley’s along with his journal and tossed them into the basket. Years ago, a colleague at Miskatonic University told him that, “once a member of the Mythos Department, always a member of the Mythos Department.” Grabbing the oil lamp, and using both hands, he threw it forcefully into the wastebasket. The glass chimney broke; oil leaked out and became liquid fire consuming the papers.
“To keep secrets out of the hands of those damn fools that would use them for their egocentric means!” he roared to no one in the room. Ironwood no longer felt like a decrepit old man, he was an angry Jehovah. With a swift and deliberate move, he kicked the waste bin causing it to slide across the room and under the table. The flames ignited the brittle, dry wood almost instantly. The table burned rapidly. It would be only a matter of minutes before the barrel of kerosene would catch on fire. Taking hold of his dead comrade, he eased the frail lifeless body over his right shoulder. “Poor old Alan,” he said to himself, “he couldn’t weigh more than ninety-pounds.”
Balancing the load on his shoulder, Ironwood left the room, his shadow momentarily eclipsing the carved image of the Neanderthal that stood out orange amongst the reflected flames.
***
Getting out of that hell-hole and up the ladder to the cellar floor above was a cumbersome task for the fifty-year old professor that made him grateful for all the years of weight training he underwent to slow down the onslaught of middle age. His energy level increased when he came outdoors and saw the warm, friendly glare of his Jeepster’s headlights.
Gently setting Alan’s body down in the backseat of the opened convertible, he removed his cowboy hat and wiped his brow with the back of his hand
. He leaned against the rear fender to catch his breath. He wished at that moment that he had a cold beer at hand. A frosty brew would be just what the doctor ordered. He solemnly wished that Alan was alive and well and tipping a few with him.
Overhead he heard the whir of chopper blades. The Morley house and the surrounding area became floodlit. A voice boomed out of a megaphone, “Professor Ironwood stand down. We are directed to escort you to the base.” At that instant, the roof of the Morley house blew off. It wasn’t proceeded by a thunderous roar or even a brief rumble. The entire rooftop suddenly went straight up propelled by an ear-splitting explosion. Flaming shingles and rafters plummeted back to earth, fortunately, landing behind the house. Ironwood was in front and out of harm’s way. The helicopter was also at a safe distance.
It was a dust explosion. The kerosene barrel must have ignited causing the rapid combustion of fine particles suspended in the air. Ironwood once read that dust explosions are a frequent hazard in underground coal mines. The detonations normally occur in enclosed locations. They happen where any powdered combustible material is present in high enough concentrations mixed with oxygen and a suitable flame. Millions of years of filthy Elder Being dust just went up in smoke.