“Holy communion?” enquired Carla, pulling on the woolly hat she was glad to discover still in her coat pocket.
“Communion. With Y’ha-nthlei.”
“Who’s Y’ha-nthlei?”
“It’s not a person, it’s a place. Come on, let’s move.”
They crossed the street cautiously and moved through a warren of dark, deserted alleyways towards the seafront, picking their way past overflowing bins and discarded furniture. The crumbling tenements were too close together to admit cars here, and at least gave them some shelter from the storm-driven rain.
“Gary” hissed Carla. “Gary! When you say communion, do you mean –“
“Look, it’s complicated” interrupted the teenager. “You need to know the history or it doesn’t make sense.”
“So, tell me the history” demanded Carla. “I really think it’s the least you can do.”
Gary sighed. “Well, look, it all started way back in, like, the 1920s or something. I mean, it started earlier than then, but that’s when the old temple got destroyed. The way the Rev tells it, it was like the whole town were all worshippers back then, and the people from Y’ha-nthlei were still coming back up to the surface and into the town.”
“Where is this `Y’ha-nthlei’ you keep talking about?” interrupted Carla.
“Under the sea. It’s a city under the sea. The entrance used to be out by Devil’s Reef.”
“A city under the sea? That’s ridiculous!”
“Yeah, well, that’s what they say. I’m just telling it like they told me. An undersea city that’s the home of Lord Dagon.”
“Lord Dagon? Like in the Bible? The Philistine god from the Bible?”
“Dunno about that. He’s, like, the leader of Y’ha-nthlei. There are these two voices from Y’ha-nthlei, him and the Hydra. Anyway, the point is that back in the 1920s or 1930s or something, the FBI, like, totally shut them down. Arrested everyone, and burned down the temple, and locked all the top temple people up somewhere. Then they got a submarine and torpedoed the reef, totally collapsed the way to Y’ha-nthlei. Closed it off completely. Yeah?”
“If you say so.”
“Right, so then in the 1960s ol’ Esgrith comes to town. Dunno where he came from, but he arrives here with all this money. Buys up all these burnt-out warehouses, and in the basement of one of them he finds this tiny piece that survived.”
“Piece of what?”
Gary began to sound evasive. “I don’t rightly know, OK? Esgrith calls it `the First Flesh’. The voices from below call it `shoggoth’. It’s like this weird stuff, like a living creature, but not any particular living creature. It’s hard to explain, but the thing is that the Deep Ones can, like, totally control it. They make it do whatever they want, yeah? And once it gets into you, you can hear the voices. From down there. You can hear Dagon and Hydra. And they can make the shoggoth force you to do whatever they want.”
“So, wait, let me get this straight –“
“Hang on, let me finish! You wanted me to explain, right? Just let me finish telling it. OK, so Esgrith finds like a tiny scrap of this shoggoth thing, still alive after all those years - survived all the fire, and the dynamite and whatever, but only this tiny piece. So he starts taking care of it, growing it and feeding it however the voices tell him to, and he reopens the temple. Only he has to change the name in case the Feds are going to come back and tear it all down again. So he’s clever, he picks a new name, and then he goes around finding all the families who used to be in the old temple. Talks `em into joining, tricks `em maybe, I don’t know. Once they’re in, they have communion and the voices from below start telling them who to, you know, have sex with.”
Gary seemed slightly embarrassed by the direction the conversation was taking, and waited until they’d turned the next corner before continuing. “Yeah, so Esgrith called all that `strengthening the old blood’. This is like back in my grandparent’s time, the old Innsmouth blood, trying to make sure that those old bloodlines were kept pure. Anyone who was an outsider, who didn’t have any of the Y’ha-nthlei blood, I think they just got returned to the Flesh.”
“Returned to the Flesh? What does that mean?”
“Recycled.” Gary stared at her, looking for some sign of comprehension. “Fed to the shoggoth”, he clarified.
“Right. Right. So this “shoggoth”, this is meant to be an actual monster of some sort?” asked Carla, skeptically.
“It’s more than that” answered Gary. “It’s what they reckon can reopen the way to Y’ha-nthlei, once it’s big enough. They take, like, ages to grow though. The Rev reckons it’s nearly there, but then he would say that. Once the way is reopened the Deep Ones will be able to come up again, and we’ll be able to go down.”
“Go down?”
“Those of us with the old bloodlines, the Y’ha-nthlei blood. We’re meant to swim down into the city and be, like, slaves or something. Fuck it, who knows. Here. This is it. We need to go up this fire escape.”
Carla followed carefully up the rain-slick, iron steps, trying to construct a coherent narrative from the various articles of faith and bizarre, cult dogma the teenager was regurgitating. The EOD was clearly far more psychotic than even the most irrational of the cults her mother had dragged her through as a child. Psychotic and dangerous. She wished again that she had her phone.
“Gary!” she hissed as he disappeared out of sight, pulling himself up onto the eaves of the warehouse. “Gary!”
He reappeared and extended his hand. “Come on, I’ll pull you up.”
“I don’t want to go up, I want to go down! We need to call the police. Where’s the nearest phone?”
“Oh, yeah” retorted Gary, sarcastically. “Good luck finding a working payphone around here. Look, I’ll get us out of town, right out of here, I promise. First you have to come and see this. Hurry up, it’s already gone half one.”
“You must be out of your mind!” insisted Carla. “You want me to climb over a wet roof, at night, in this wind? With a gang of maniacs out looking for me? Forget it!”
“It’s safe, I’m telling you. I’ll go first, it’ll be fine. Hurry up! Give me your hand!”
Muttering uneasily, Carla reached up and took hold of his hand, climbing onto the handrail and then up onto the roof as he pulled. Far from a panorama, it was hard to see anything beyond the nearest streetlights, glowing sullenly through the berserk squall. She hoped they were as hard to see from the ground as the ground was to see from up there.
Gary picked a path across the corrugated roof to the far end, and she followed, cursing nervously every time she was buffeted by the wind. When she caught up with the teenager he was levering a stout-looking plank into position, grunting with effort. He and his friends had obviously stashed it up here for just this purpose. The near end of it wedged snugly under a loose length of ridge flashing while he swung the far end out into the darkness, finally bringing it gently to rest under the lip of a rusting air conditioning unit on the opposite roof.
Carla backed away slowly, hands raised in protest. “That cannot be safe!”
“It’s cool, really, I’ve done it loads.” Gary assured her, sitting down on the plank and beckoning to her. It’s, like, ten feet, that’s all.”
“More like twenty. And more than that down, if we fall off.”
“Which we won’t. Come on, it’s really easy. You just sit on it and scooch along, and you’re on the other side in no time. When we get there though, you’ve got to creep along. No footsteps at all or they’ll hear it inside. OK?”
Carla played for time. “And then?”
“So, we crawl over to the skylight. They’ll open the hidden trapdoor. You can see right down into it when they open it. Come on.”
So saying, he straddled the plank and began to leapfrog his way across it. Carla watched him go, shielding her eyes against the rain with one arm. She’d be crazy to follow him. She didn’t even care what they were doing in the warehouse. That was for the p
olice to deal with now. She could tell them about the trapdoor, they could look for it. Though it might help if she could tell them why, give them a reason to do so. So far she was just a victim of an assault. Her attacker was already dead too, why would they risk raiding a church because of that? It would be easier to just arrest Gary for patricide. Besides, what was in there? What was this `shoggoth’?
Gary had reached the other side now and was beckoning to her with impatient swats of his hand. Reluctantly, Carla muted her doubts, sat down on the plank and pulled herself forwards, feet dangling in space.
The wind tore at her hair and clothes, threatening to disorientate her. A thick splinter drove into her thumb as she dragged herself forward, but she didn’t dare let go for long enough to remove it. By the time she was halfway across, the plank was beginning to flex alarmingly under her weight. Thirty feet down onto waste ground studded with rocks and industrial shrapnel. Better not to think about it. Better not to think at all.
Gary gripped her arm and pulled her to safety at the far side, pre-empting her expressions of relief with a stern `shhh!’ and a finger to his lips. He pointed to the far end of the roof, where a large skylight was glowing softly in the darkness. Moving slowly, he led her towards it.
Carla could hear voices now, rumbling indistinctly beneath them. The sound grew louder as they approached the skylight, resolving into a chorus of guttural chanting. Gary raised his head and risked a quick look through the glass. Apparently satisfied, he beckoned Carla closer and urged her to do the same.
She looked.
Myriad rivulets of rainwater trickled down the pane, distorting the view, but she could easily identify Reverend Esgrith almost directly below her. He had exchanged his tracksuit for a crumpled shirt and an unconvincing bowtie with a pair of shapeless jeans. He was striding around the stage in front of the altar, fixing the congregation with his cataract-smeared eyes and fervently endorsing something-or-other, Carla couldn’t make out what.
His audience listened with rapt attention, swaying gently on their feet. Carla scanned the rows with growing horror, unable to believe the evidence of her eyes.
One or two of the participants she recognized – there was Mrs Taub, near the back – but there was no way that half of them could walk the streets, even the streets of Innsmouth, in daylight. Bulbous, jet-black eyes, atrophied extremities and seeping mucilage were everywhere. One woman perched unsteadily in a wheelchair, her bare legs coiled repeatedly around each other like mating snakes, her eyes almost fused in the centre of her face. Leaning on the handles of her chair was a man; his mouth lined with a profusion of needle-like teeth, the lower jaw colossal and gaping like that of some abyssal predator. The man at his side had horrific, translucent skin that glistened with ooze. He had no eyes or nose and only a tiny, pulsating hole for a mouth. Carla could clearly see the shadow of his disintegrating skull below the ectoplasmic flesh of his face.
And so it went throughout the hall. There, a woman with the bulging eyes of a trilobite, her fingers fused into two sets of blunt pincers. A man in the front row pouted back at Esgrith from a mouth ringed by obscene, quivering tendrils. Another figure’s head was mercifully hidden under the hood of her coat, the only thing visible a protruding snout, like that of a seahorse.
But it got worse. In the shadows by the sides of the stage lurked even more appalling things. Things, perhaps two dozen of them – had they once been people? – which were so degenerate that the other occupants of the room looked almost normal by comparison.
Some had characteristics that were reminiscent of some type of prehistoric shark. Others resembled ghastly, slobbering hybrids of mammal and octopus, or ray, or amphibian. None retained any traits of clearly, unambiguously human behavior or biology. Their movements, their snaking appendages blindly tasting the air, their palpitations and gasping breaths were those of deep-sea creatures dying on the deck of a trawler, ill-suited to their environment and barely able even to comprehend it.
Carla rolled away from the skylight in shock. Rain drenched her face as she stared up at the hulking clouds overhead. She wanted to evaporate and float away with them, just leave forever a biology that was capable of that kind of degradation, that kind of loathsomeness. She thought of her mother, standing in church, speaking in tongues and celebrating the wisdom and mercy of an all-powerful God, while elsewhere there were people eagerly subjecting themselves to such monstrous and appalling transformations. In the world Carla believed in, things like this weren’t possible, people like this just weren’t possible. She thought again of the heaving, debased atrocities lining the stage, their eyes so useless in the upper air, their tentacles and fans writhing autonomically. There was no individual left there, no trace left of a human mind. They had surrendered that. It had been obliterated.
There was a grinding noise from below. “Here we go, quick, look at this!” hissed Gary, still watching what was going on inside.
“I don’t want to” answered Carla distantly. “I don’t want to see anymore. I don’t care.”
“Come on, they’re going to open the trapdoor!”
Carla closed her eyes, wiped rain and tears from her face and reluctantly levered herself into a sitting position again. Inside the warehouse, the congregation was pulling the wooden stage away from the altar, revealing an iron trapdoor eight feet across. It was secured with four heavy padlocks. Esgrith passed a bunch of keys to one of his acolytes who removed the locks and tied a length of rope to one of the hasps, flinging the length of it back into the congregation. The crowd fell on it and began to pull.
The door began to open, slowly at first but with increasing speed as it approached the tipping point. It was directly below the skylight, and Carla found herself looking straight down into the chamber under the floor.
At first she could see nothing there, but as Esgrith picked up a candle from the altar and moved closer to the trapdoor its light reflected off still, black water. As she watched, the water level began to rise. It reached the level of the trap and began spilling out across the floor of the warehouse. A spectral, green glow appeared below the surface. It blazed, and grew rapidly brighter until it was shining from the opening, flooding with warehouse with Satanic, auroral light.
Oblivious now to the wind and rain, Carla stared aghast as an amorphous black shape broke the surface and rose into the room. It wavered, and then began peeling open like the petals of a flower, growing thicker as more matter erupted and dribbled back towards the water.
The stuff was as dark as pitch, but it was lit from within by a phosphorescent yellow-green light. The oily bulk completely filled the hatchway now, but still more was streaming volcanically through. Carla clapped a hand to her mouth, stifling a cry as a lopsided orifice began to form in the centre of the mass.
Coiling tongues extruded themselves from somewhere at its core and improvised fingers wormed across the floor, sucking at the concrete for grip. Bright cores of primary green flared into being around the edges of the gaping maw, perhaps two dozen of them, shining with the light of another place, another time. Pupils condensed in the centers and several of them reared up on dripping pseudopodae, surveying the congregation at un-guessable wavelengths. Protoplasmic tracheal tubes spluttered and hissed, spraying great gouts of slimy water onto the floor.
Carla felt dizzy as she watched the sprouting eyes and fingers explore the room. The thing seemed to radiate a dark intelligence. Just looking at it, she could sense its hunger and its capacity for cruelty, could feel the malice of countless ages concentrated in its primordial bulk. As it regarded its willing servitors with those cold, unblinking eyes, Carla was reminded of nothing so much as a cat, toying with the lives of idiot mice.
The congregation withdrew apprehensively as a slithering tentacle roved briefly in their direction. Esgrith shouted to his acolytes, struggling to make himself heard above the splashing and atonal whistling coming from the giant shoggoth. Two of them stepped forwards, pulling with them two terrified goats and a hype
rventilating teenage girl.
“That’s Debbie Trent!” exclaimed Gary. “She was in my class at school. She must have had her birthday if they’re bringing her before the shoggoth!”
“What are they going to do?” asked Carla thickly, unable to tear her eyes away from the gibbering horror below them. She imagined the roof giving way, the two of them plummeting directly down onto those eager, ravenous jaws.
“They’ll offer the goats to it first and then present the girl. It should just infect her, but I’ve heard that sometimes it just kills them for no reason.”
As he spoke, the shoggoth saw the goats cringing before it. Instantly, two new mouths snapped open, new eyes swam to the surface and it lunged forward, engulfing their heads and instantly decapitating them.
Carla turned away and threw up, trying desperately to strangle the sound of retching. The constant percussion of the rain on the PVC roof, and the sinister piping of the feeding shoggoth below must have been enough to drown out any noise she could make though. When she looked back the monster had sucked the headless goats entirely into its biomass. Carla briefly wondered what kind of strange, archaean enzymes the ancient abomination would use to digest the wretched animals. What kind of profane, apocryphal biology could have given rise to such an entity? How did it - could it - live?
The Innsmouth Syndrome Page 8