“What do you think he’s not telling us?” Marlecroft asked.
“Good question.” Chantal perched on the arm of a chair, idly swinging a foot, unmindful of both the disapproving glance her stocking-clad shapely calf earned from Miss Philips and the appreciative ones it earned from the others.
“He did seem to be somewhat less than fully forthcoming with his tale,” said Arthur.
“You mean there’s more to the story?” Reggie strolled over from the depleted buffet table, having scrounged up more sugared dates. “And that grump of a professor tossed us out on our ears before we got to the exciting conclusion?”
“The man said he could not remember,” Miss Philips said. “Do you suspect he was insincere?”
“Perhaps his lack of memory is for a reason,” Marlecroft said. “Something else must have happened. Perhaps he was made to forget.”
“It was a traumatic experience,” said Chantal.
“Not traumatic enough to explain the way he looked. You saw it too, I know you did.”
“The way he looked?” Miss Philips fussed at her collar and adjusted her bun. “What has that to do with it?”
“His was the look of one who’d witnessed that which is far outside our understanding,” Marlecroft said. “Things man—”
“Is not meant to know?” finished Chantal. “That reminds me. My card.”
The two of them settled in for a comfortable session of talking shop, or as comfortable as could be what with Reggie Wilmott’s frequent interruptions and anecdotes. Miss Philips, after a final distrustful squint at them all, went to attend to Lord Smedley where he sat with the banker and general.
It proved the start of what was to become a routine over the next few days…although the very term ‘days’ was of dubious use with the sun absent from their lives and only the ship’s clocks marking the passage of hours.
The Thetis cruised onward and downward, bringing occasional recurrences of discomfort to their ears. Apart from that, and the oppressive nature of being confined so far from the world they knew, the voyage went by tolerably enough, with meals and reading and games to occupy their waking time.
More conferences were held, more plans made, for when they located their objective. The engineers and machinists in particular were kept busy, preparing and readying their equipment, under the gruff but efficient supervision of Professor Edison.
They had brought along several kinds of submersible automations, each with its specific purpose. The narwhals, pint-sized aquatic cousins to the more familiar enormous mole-machines, sported thin brass drills to bore into the rock. The crabs, a nickname given a type of propeller-powered scuttler, would break off and scoop up samples.
And the deep sea was, as Captain Burnham had promised, not so empty after all. Bizarre denizens of these lightless waters visited the Thetis, drawn by her illuminaries like moths to a streetlamp.
Many were clear and gelatinous, graceful, fragile-looking, oddly beautiful, displaying their own glowing rainbow hues as they moved with the effortless flex of long hairlike filaments. Others were so grotesque as to be the stuff of nightmares, revolting of countenance, spidery of leg, obscene of tentacle, sporting oversized jaws bristling with spiny teeth.
“Think that one’s taken a fancy to you, Miss Philips,” Reggie said, as a particularly hideous monstrosity that could have been some unnatural mingling of fish, frog, and squat-bodied gargoyle fixed its bulging gaze on the woman.
The creature went so far as to follow her around the entire windowed dome. A pendulous bulb at the end of a long fleshy protuberance above its snout blinked firefly radiance, as if signaling by some strange code. It persisted until she ultimately left the observatorium, to Reggie’s great amusement.
“To them, I wonder, do we look as odd?” asked Arthur. He took extensive notes, and even tried his hand at sketching.
“I’d expect so, if not odder,” Chantal said. She had brought, at her brother’s behest, a photofilmographoscope. Whether any of the images captured by its wide lens would be useful remained to be seen, but, she was diligent in her attempts.
By the time the nautilus reached the outermost edge of the recalculated target perimeter, they’d all become so accustomed to her smooth speed that the slowing of motion was perceptible, as were the gliding arcs as they commenced a sweeping search pattern.
The terrain was as astonishing as the captain had promised – jagged mountains, fuming volcanic pillars, expanses of kelp waving in the current like cornfields in a breeze. In the midst of a vast silty plain, they saw the colossal carcass of a whale sunk to the sea bed. Scavengers picked the bones clean of every last shred of meat.
A disquieting moment came when the Thetis passed over a trench where sheer cliff walls dropped away into a blackness so deep that the strongest spotlights dwindled into wan, pathetic needles. That chasm served to remind them of the miles of ocean already above…chilling in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature.
“Rather different from chasing down vampires and ghouls,” Arthur remarked to Chantal, while they made their way back to their staterooms one evening after another sumptuous dinner.
“Not to mention murderers and escaped lunatics,” she replied.
“The company’s certainly preferable.”
“Very much so.” She glanced up at him through lowered lashes, twining one ebony ringlet around her fingers.
“Yes…very much so.”
Before the conversation’s flirtatious turn could lead them toward less-charted territory, a tone sounded and the recorded voice issued from the speaking tubes. “All passengers to the observatorium lounge, please, all passengers to the observatorium.”
***
Lars Gunderson was not sleeping, no, for there’d been precious little sleep to be had for him since that fateful night…only lying there in his bunk, stiff as a board, fists clenched, staring at nothing.
He’d skipped dinner as well, having a lack of appetite for food and even less of an appetite for the endless chattering questions. A sympathetic steward had seen fit to provide him a bottle, which was enough to see him through.
At the announcement, he got up, the sour taste in his mouth one that couldn’t be blamed on whiskey. Nor could the gurgle of nausea in his belly.
When he reached the room domed by the great bubble, he was greeted by a crowd of backs. Like urchins at a confectioner’s window, he thought. Overgrown urchins. Some even had their faces pressed, their hands cupped, as they peered where Captain Burnham pointed.
Something in the distance shed a dim yellowish glow through the darkness. It waxed and waned. Irregular. Pulsating. Marked by sporadic sputters of electric blue. Soon the shape of the thing resolved, the rounded mass of it, resting on the ocean’s floor with the sand disturbed by its impact having re-settled around it in a ring.
And there, near it, small, sad, the waterlogged wreckage of the Duck…still tethered by what lines had held…it had fallen over onto her, then dragged her down…down into these depths…
Along with his men, his crew…
They’d already been dead.
He remembered that now. Remembered their screams and how those screams had cut off, and how in his desperate scrambling climb he’d crested a rise and seen what happened to them…why they had screamed, and why they had stopped…
He remembered.
***
The rays from the illuminaries played over the object. Its shot, pocked, porous surface was encrusted with coarse ridges like barnacles where blue sparks sputtered, and embedded with lumpy yellow nodules that burned.
Several of the company started talking at once, the scientists in particular beside themselves with excitement. Lord Smedley went so far as to rub his palms together in a miser’s avid greed.
“The hooks, the pitons, yes,” he said. “They had the right idea, just insufficient power. We can affix towing cables…”
One of the engineers mulled it over. “If we use the scuts…”
&n
bsp; “And bring it to the surface?” asked a scientist. “Be able to do much better experiments there.”
“Mine it,” Lord Smedley said. “Those yellow lumps must be like coal, sulfurous coal, and the ridgelike formations must be natural teslic batteries! Once we harness those energies…”
“Good grief, though!” exclaimed Reggie Wilmott. “Unsightly bugger, isn’t it? Dare say I’d be miffed if I went to a museum and paid to have a gander at that!”
“It isn’t meant to be pretty,” Professor Edison told him.
“Yes, but is it meant to be so damnably ugly?”
It was ugly, Chantal decided, uglier by far than the ugliest of the aquatic denizens who’d inspected them through the glass. Ugly, and worse, somehow, in some way she couldn’t define, than anything she’d encountered before.
Which was –
“Turn about.”
Gunderson’s hoarse words rasped across the babble without much effect. Only she, Gabriel, and Arthur looked at him. He pushed his way past Miss Philips – the secretary stood like one entranced – and seized Captain Burnham’s shoulder.
“Turn about, I’m telling you, we have to turn about and we have to turn about now!” His voice splintered into a hectoring shout, and this time it did have an effect.
Arthur and General Thomsfield took a step toward the two captains as everyone else stepped away in a widening ring.
“Here, what’s all this then?” Burnham glowered. He was shorter than Gunderson but broader, and clearly unused to having someone put their hands on him, let alone take him by both shoulders to give him a wild shake.
“We’ll die, you fool! It wants us!”
“Well, he’s gone daft,” Reggie said. “Psychosis of the deep, hey-what?”
“It killed my crew, destroyed my ship, and it wants more of us to come, to come and die!” Flecks of spittle flew from Gunderson’s raving lips to spatter Burnham’s beard.
“Belay that guff, sailor!” Burnham swatted his arms aside.
“Careful—” began Arthur.
With a screech of sheer madness, Gunderson threw himself upon Burnham. His strength must have been that of sheer madness as well, for he plowed the heavier man backward. Burnham’s head struck the glass, making a sickening crunch. A spreading blotch appeared on the pane. Several people cried out, expecting the dome to shatter in upon them with the full weight of the sea’s fathoms, squishing them like custard pastries. Pandemonium erupted.
The captains slammed to the floor, Burnham dazed on the bottom, Gunderson frenzied on top. His weathered fisherman’s hands clamped around Burnham’s throat.
Chantal moved fast, but Arthur Pearce was closer and faster. There was a zznap! as a spark flashed, and a whiff of ozone filled the air. Gunderson’s spine arched into a bow. He went rigid, then collapsed twitching in a heap. A thin spiral of smoke rose from a smoldering patch on his side.
She looked at Arthur, who’d produced a shockgun from seemingly nowhere, with the speed of a prestidigitator’s trick. He looked at her, gave a slight shrug, and tucked it away again at the small of his back.
As they had not yet been imploded by oceanic pressure, the pandemonium subsided. Reggie Wilmott showed presence of mind to dump the rest of his drink on Gunderson’s sweater before it could ignite.
The blotch on the glass proved to be blood; Burnham’s bald scalp was split and gushing. The glass itself had held, and showed no cracks. A general exhalation of relief went up.
Professor Edison took charge of the captain, wadding a cloth to press against the wound. He directed a bleary, cross-eyed smile at her and called her “Janey my sweet muffin,” before falling unconscious.
“The devil was that about?” someone asked.
“Psychosis of the deep, I told you.” Reggie found a replacement drink. “Pity, really. Such a likeable chap otherwise.”
Thomsfield slung Gunderson into a chair and bound him. “He said it killed his crew.”
“Drowning, obviously, when it sank,” a scientist said.
“He said it wanted more of us to come and die.” Gabriel Marlecroft had gone more pallid than ever, something Chantal wouldn’t have thought possible.
“This isn’t more of your Elder Signs rubbish, I hope,” Lord Smedley said.
“Look!” said Miss Philips.
They looked.
The Thetis continued a slow in-spiral circling in accordance with whatever automation Burnham had set her instruments to, and came around enough to show them a previously unseen side of the object resting on the seabed.
Here, its rocky roughness smoothed into a shallow bowl-valley, divided by a long crevice like a seam of fiery molten gold.
“What is that?” someone asked.
“Looks like a river.”
“Volcanic?”
“Beautiful…”
Then the seam split, and widened. And widened. And gaped. Eldritch yellow spilled out in a wavering toxic glow.
“It’s fracturing,” Professor Edison said. “A geode—”
“It’s a bomb!” said the military man.
“An egg!” Miss Philips clutched at her collar. “A seeding pod! It’s hatching!”
“It’s opening,” said Gabriel Marlecroft. “A gateway.”
The hitherto hush-hush government pair launched into a hysterical duet.
“An eye!”
“A mouth!”
“An eye within a mouth!”
“A mouth within an eye!”
Suspended in it like bugs in amber or chunks of meat in aspic, silhouetted against that terrible luminescence, were bodies…tattered clothes…portions of bodies…flesh sloughing from bone…dissolving…melting…half-digested…the remains of the Duck’s unfortunate crew.
At the innermost core of the burning light throbbed a knot of gristly, glistening tissue held in a net of veins and tendons. An eye, yes, it was an eye, a glaring lidless eye surveying them with measureless malice.
“It sees us,” someone said.
The pandemonium descended again with a vengeance, plunging the assembled people into a chaos of screaming, fainting, gibbering, and tearing at their own hair. Their voices clashed over one another, passengers and crew alike, but their messages were the same – pleas, prayers, God help them, they didn’t want to die!
More seams split the object’s rocky crust. The rest of it began to uncurl, scabrous shot plating sliding over itself like broken crockery pieces shifting in a sack. Sediment whirled up in a silty cloud not dense enough to obscure the horror as myriad stubby legs emerged from the underside of the thing’s carapace.
It reminded Chantal of a toy her brother once had – a wind-up tin roly-poly, which would scurry along the floor until it bumped into something, then tuck into a ball and roll randomly until it bumped into something else.
How Felix had laughed at its antics!
As she, now, laughed…laughed but it was a shrieking kind of laughter, a bedlam kind of laughter…
She slapped herself across the face and pulled her wits together.
Nearby, huddled with his arms locked ‘round his knees, rocking back and forth, Marlecroft whimpered the same syllables over and over again. “Urzoth…Urzoth…”
Chantal ran past him to Arthur Pearce. He held the shockgun, having drawn it more by reflex than intent, but it dangled at his side as he stared at the loathsome cyclopean orb.
Which crept-scuttled closer, stirring up more clouds of silt, on a path meant to intercept the slow but inexorable programmed course of the Thetis.
“Arthur.” She grasped his sleeve.
He turned to her. “Chantal.”
They looked at each other, and for the moment there was little else to say. Then Professor Edison gave them both a shove.
“Don’t stand about!” she barked. “We’ve got to do something!”
The few of them who’d found a precarious balancing perch between panic and catatonia met up in a group at the rear of the observatorium.
“Dashed eage
r to hear how science will explain this,” Reggie said, joining them with his usual cheerful grin. “Put the paranormalists out of work, didn’t you say?” He jerked a casual thumb at the rocking, muttering Marlecroft. “Did a deuced number on that poor bloke. Blimey, but he’s in a state, isn’t he?”
“Only because he’s read enough, and knows enough, to understand how much trouble we’re in,” Chantal said.
“Scholars, hey?” He laughed. “Has been a right adventure, though. Cheers, chappies and chippies. Couldn’t ask for a better lot to meet my maker with.”
“We’ve not given up hope yet,” said Arthur, who glanced at the shockgun in his hand, tutted in self-reproach, and holstered it. “This craft must have some weaponry.”
The Thetis did indeed have armaments and defenses, an engineer confirmed: deck-guns for surface use, sonic cannons, automotive torpedoes, an electroteslic gridwork through the hull. “If they’d do bugger all against the likes of that monster,” he added.
“Worth a try,” said General Thomsfield. “We’ll throw everything we’ve got at it, and if we might as well be lobbing spitballs at a Class-Nine Behemoth, so be it! We’ll ram it if we have to! At least we’ll die fighting, damn it all!”
“The trench,” said Chantal, thinking again of Felix’s roly-poly and how it would sometimes get stuck. “If we could push it in…”
“But the captain’s out cold,” a steward said, “and with the crew a shambles…why, there’s not a man-jack of us fit to pilot her!”
A leaden weight of silence fell over them.
“General, you were cavalry and artillery, not navy,” Arthur said, neither asking nor guessing, merely stating it as fact. “Chantal? Any pertinent experience?”
“Jack…or Jill…of many trades, but, piloting a nautilus?” She shook her head.
“You, boy!” Professor Edison grabbed Reggie by the shirtfront. “Didn’t you mention racing yachts?”
“Yes, quite, took first in a—”
“Good enough!” She hauled him toward the bridge.
“What-ho! I hardly think—”
“Then don’t try to start now!”
***
Trailing the sunken Duck behind it like a dented can tied to a dog’s tail, the creature approached its gleaming prey. A hard outer shell covered the beings within; they blundered about, disorganized as inhabitants of a disturbed hive.
Steampunk Cthulhu: Mythos Terror in the Age of Steam Page 19