by catt dahman
A collection of dark, gnarled trees and tall, slender columns blocked out the view to the left. I ran my hand over the surface of the column to understand the carvings. Had I not been a student of star watching, I would not have understood the grooves and reliefs, but my hand communicated more to me than my eyes, and I had a slight understanding.
“Stars. Planets, but not ours, not ones I know.”
“Other worlds?” Jenny asked, “Who could have designed this? People, like us? No. Not here.”
“Maybe these were carved before the monsters came,” John said.
Mr. Merle spoke, “You speak of monsters and beasts, but those who sail, we have seen creatures that look to be horrid but are usual for the water. A sea louse is a slimy sea version of something like a cockroach. They are disgusting, and the big ones are a little spooky.”
Everyone listened.
“I’ve seen milk-white fish with no eyes, and crabs in groups so large you could not imagine, and they do not look like ones you would think of, but are no different looking than enormous spiders,” Merle finished.
John Morton nodded and said, “He is correct. What we find here may be from a different time or something. The creatures are just unfamiliar.”
Jenny grabbed at my arm, but I walked between them to see what was on the other side.
In seconds, Jenny, John, and a half dozen more stood beside me, curious. They had followed to see what fascinated me. Stairs, carved into the stone, led to a kind of temple. The stairs were uneven, some were small; some were large; none of them alike, and I knew it was not a blunder of sorts but planned just that way.
Chaos was the objective.
Grimes and Merle, and a crewman named Edwards, moved in front of me, protectively, and began to climb the stairs. We followed, telling one another and ourselves that this was a terrible folly and not the plan.
When we reached the top, we heard a noise. At first, I could not discern what I was hearing, but then, I understood that from one side, I heard a sad song, not of words or humming, but of strange syllables and sounds. It was very mournful. To the other side, I heard a slow thumping like that of something huge walking upon stones.
The ground vibrated.
“Quick, hide here.” Edwards ducked behind a boulder, and we followed suit, hiding ourselves away. Jenny pressed her face against John’s shoulder. Lilia grasped my hand. I held her hand tightly; she shook but was warm.
The pounding came closer, and it was like thunder.
Many of the gigantic creatures came our way. They were muscular. Their bodies somewhat resembled the body of an animal called a rhinoceros found on the African continent, but its legs were much longer, and each ended in a sort of hand with claws. The hand curled under so it walked upon its knuckles, like an ape. Each hand had three razor-tipped claws as long as my arm.
I can only describe the head as a bulbous, a lumpy sphere with small, dull eyes, tiny ears, and a small proboscis as a mouth.
Seven of the creatures arrived, walking past us towards the mournful singing. I can only say that they followed the voice. One by one, they walked off the edge of the rocks, and we heard violent splashes. As the last passed and fell away, we ran to see what became of them. It was a sort of cliff with water, no more than twenty feet below.
Without thinking, each had followed the one before. Not a one seemed aware of what was happening.
The giant shark swam there beneath the cliff in the water and in a mad frenzy; he ripped the creatures to pieces and swallowed the chunks. The oddities bellowed like bulls as the shark tore them apart and ate them alive. Within seconds, every trace of the mighty animals, save the dark blood, was gone, and the shark flicked his tail with pleasure.
The singing had stopped, and we saw a woman--only she was not a real woman, of course. Her red-gold hair streamed about her shoulders in long curls, and we could still see her milky white flesh and full, round breasts. She was beautiful, and if she sang to me, I too would want to join her. But she did not sing, but instead, flipped over, and the last we saw of her was a glistening, wide-scaled, tail vanished into the red-stained sea.
The temple was built of columns, but they leaned to the center with round disks carved along the lengths. On top was a roundish shape with two red disks.
“What…what is that? I feel as if it is faintly familiar but….” Jenny began.
“If you know sea anatomy…creatures….” I said
“A squid,” Grimes said, “it is a mockery of one, but see the head there, round, and the disks are the eyes. The columns are tentacles, and those disks are suckers.”
“But it’s not correct,” I added, “the tentacles reach out from its face, see?”
“It is a squid,” Edwards pronounced, “a temple to a squid, how queer.”
We followed Edwards inside. It should have been pitch black inside, but there was a glow from the walls so we could see quite well. The floor, made up of odd shapes, was colorful. I knelt, and my jaw dropped. One square was soft in emeralds; one was made of pinkish rubies. One was pale jade, one bright blue sapphire, and another was deep golden topaz. One large area was open and filled with the stinking ooze, greenish, and slick. Yellowed bones littered the sludge.
To my shock, I realized the portion of noxious mud was just as valued here as the section of rubies.
“The walls….” John Morton said. He was a bit of an astronomer and pointed out the wall décor. The walls were of obsidian and set here and there with bright, shining diamonds, rubies, and light gold topaz. “It’s the night sky, and those are the stars, see, but it isn’t the sky we see when we look up. This is…different. It seems a pictorial of an older sky. An ancient sky of stars.”
“It is odd,” Jenny said.
“It is almost beautiful, but it is also….” He tilted his head with confusion.
“Chaotic,” I said.
Lilia pointed out a particular jewel that was a large, brilliant sapphire, deep blue like water. She gestured to it many times. Not far from it was a red-orange jewel. Right next to the big blue gem was a small opal.
“Earth,” John said.
“What say you?” Merle asked.
“This one is earth, see. It is blue for water. Look there, above the altar, another blue sphere of sapphires and aquamarines. Earth is meaningful here. The water is important.”
“What is this place?”
John shrugged and looked at Jenny, “A place of worship. The one they worship is on earth, perhaps, and maybe it lives in the water.”
“The shark?”
“No. He is a part, but you saw the outside of this temple. They worship that creature. He is their god. The squid, I mean.”
“He is disgusting,” Jenny said, “and who is ‘they’? Who worships him?”
John shrugged, “I am just guessing.”
Edwards, using a small knife, managed to pluck loose several stones, “I am gonna be a rich man now. Do you all want some? We can fill our pockets.” He held up a ruby the size of his eyeball.
“That may not be a good idea,” Jenny said.
Lilia shook her head and frowned.
“Let’s leave,” I said. I had a bad feeling about the place and certainly about what Edwards had done.
As we left, Edwards suddenly screamed. I can honestly say it did not surprise me very much. I expected something bad to happen when he stole from the temple.
Thin, curd-colored arms or tentacles, I could not say which, rose from the muck in the one area. There were five of them, each ending in three fingers with sucker pads on the tips. They wrapped about him, entrapping him in the blink of an eye. He flew off his feet, soared through the air and plopped into the slimy mess.
Oh, how he screamed. His flesh dissolved in acid, it seemed, making a fatty scum on top of the slime.
In seconds, he vanished below the nasty surface, and there was not a ripple or disruption again as he and the thin arms disappeared.
We ran.
We planned to go
back to the lifeboat and get away, but as we fled the temple, we saw a cave in the trees, and it called to us, drew us close. It was huge, the opening lined with terribly sharp, triangular rocks. My gut told me to flee, but I stepped over the rows of sharp rocks and onto a smooth surface.
“I feel this is important here,” I said, “I cannot imagine what amazing secrets this place holds.”
“The ceiling…it is like a boat with a beam…and beams to the sides….” Grimes said.
I did not agree with Grimes. It reminded me of something else I could not place. We should have run, but we were drawn inside and walked carefully down around corridor, like a tunnel. It opened into a great room that we stared at, confused.
Again, we had no light but could see well.
Here was a man in a lifebelt, his lower half snipped away and beside him. There was a woman. Several men in lifebelts. A steward I had seen often aboard Titanic.
“Hundreds. Some are …in half…and some are whole, but they have on life belts. I know some of these men. I knew them, I mean.”
Jenny listened to John and screamed, sinking to the ground. She understood what we saw.
Lilia latched onto my arm.
I knelt to examine one of the men from the ship. He was ice cold, bluish, and quite dead. His hand still gripped a tiny bit of wood, a table leg, maybe. All of them were soaked: their hair in wet strands and clothing salt-stained. I motioned everyone to follow me out and pointed above to the curious ceiling.
“Not beams,” I said, “but a spine, and those are bones that grow out…do you see? Like ribs?”
I led them out to the opening. “Look here, and tell me what you see.”
“Sharp rocks. In rows,” John said
“More.”
“Triangles,” Grimes added.
“And above?” I asked.
“The same. Like….”
“Like a maw. A gigantic mouth with rows of teeth top and bottom, a spine inside, and a stomach full of men that it picked up as it swam about the lifeboats and people in the water.” I sighed, exhausted.
“Oh, God have mercy. It is a stone version of the shark,” Jenny said.
“But how can the victims be here? It was over there and ate the creatures.”
I shrugged. I could no more explain it than anything, but it was true. I knew that. “There is a terrible power here. It is not active, or we would all be dead, but it is there, asleep, maybe dreaming. The dreams are what attack us. I do not know how I know that, but it sounds right to me. I feel the power beneath us.”
“Howard, you are insane. That’s impossible,” Grimes said.
“Help us….” We heard someone scream.
To the left of the path, others explored, and several stood in a circle, wringing their hands. Before them was a pit, rock-lined and not very deep. One of the women had fallen in, and all about her were the brown, horrid segmented worms that had hard shells and stood erect.
“Get up,” John demanded.
The woman did not move but lay on the floor of the pit.
“They stung her when she fell…many times. She screamed as they did it. How shall we get her out?”
Merle picked up a stone and threw it at one of the creatures, smacking it hard. It shrieked with pain, but the things, besides becoming more agitated, did not seem affected. The woman below swelled with poison; her arms and legs were bloated, and her face bulged.
“Her legs. My God….” John gasped, pulling Jenny away so she did not see.
The bloated legs burst with poisonous fluids and fused, the skin knitting quickly as it covered the space between her legs. The woman’s arms jerked close to her body as they, too, burst open and began to fuse.
Grimes ordered everyone away from the pit. He said it was too late to help the woman and they should go back to the boat quickly.
Lilia, who had seen something similar, shook her head sadly and looked at me, wondering if now I could imagine the horror; she had been unable to share the misery it caused. I hugged her quickly, letting her know I was sorry she had seen it twice now.
The passengers and crew walked along the stone path, back to the shoreline. Because I was now so aware of this world and beginning to understand it, I peered into the pit before I left, and instead of five appalling worms, I saw six, one with human-like eyes glaring back at me.
Time stood still for me.
I saw my friends and the others come to a stop in mid-stride. Nothing moved. I was not altogether shocked when a figure came out from the trees and approached me. He wore trousers, boots, and some sort of cowl that covered his face, head, and upper body in draped black wool.
Days ago, I would have fled, but now I faced him.
“Seeker.”
“I am? Or you are?” I asked.
“You are the seeker. You may call this one Droom.”
“Are you here to rip me apart or devour my flesh?”
“No. Droom is here to answer,” he said.
“What are you?”
“A means to an end, and perhaps a way…. “
I had a million questions for him, “Where are we?”
“Ry-leth is as close as your vocal cords could pronounce. You are here in a city that sank eons ago. This is but a memory, for it lies at the bottom of the sea and is lost. You saw the stars in the temple? They were aligned wrong, and the city was lost, and the great lord fell asleep beneath the waters.”
I knew that. “How did I know that?”
“If one is without eyes and blind, he cannot see. You have eyes.”
This would take forever to puzzle out. He spoke English and yet, I felt it was not quite my language he used. “Is this…real?”
“Is anything real? It is a memory. A nightmare. But while He sleeps, he dreams, and this is but one of a billion dreams. Soon, it will pass, and he will dream of something else, somewhere else.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“You are incapable of understanding because of your nature, but you asked me, and I answered, Seeker.”
“Only I can…speak to you or ask questions? Why?”
“You are the Seeker. Only a Seeker may ask and be answered.”
I tried a new tactic, “Who sent you? Who ordered you to answer me?”
“I am Droom. I answer. You are the Seeker, and you ask. It is as it is.”
I knew that although he claimed I could see and understand and was allowed to ask questions, there were just some aspects I could not understand. I did not think Droom had the words to explain any better than he did. It was up to me to ask the correct questions.
“That shark and the other monsters…they attacked and killed people. The woman…she…changed. That happened? It was real?”
“Yes, they were consumed. In a blink of an eye. Their times were most small. They are…no more.”
“But they were…slaughtered.”
Droom said, “And nothing of value was lost.”
“Can you…bring them back?” I felt my temper rise.
“Can you bring them back?” he said back to me.
“Are you a monster, too?”
“In your mind and words, yes, I am a monster, a jester, and a demon. And you are my reflection.”
I felt a chill. “Why do you wear the cowl? Why is your face covered?”
“Your mind could not fathom my physical being. I am so beautiful and hideous, so light and dark, that you would go mad seeing my repugnant beauty.”
Those words alone made my head ache. How he was both, I did not understand, but I believed him, that it was better not to see his face.
“Follow me. You will come to no harm. I am here to answer you.” He turned and went the other way, down the path and towards the tall spirals. When he moved, I caught a whiff of cinnamon-burnt hair and sulfur and too-sweet- roses-dead flesh.
“Why are you showing me?”
“You are the Seeker. We waited for you since time infinite. You are a component of the order, and while your existence
is meaningless, certain…conventions…are followed. I must show you a few oddities, and then we shall detach ourselves.”
“Who made the order?”
“Chaos.”
That was certainly a dead end line of questioning. “What will I do with the knowledge?”
“I cannot answer that. Unlike every other person tonight, who died on the epitome of human arrogance and pomposity, only you will maintain your memories.”
“Why?” I asked.
He shrugged, “It is part of the order. I cannot say.”
“I saw the stone shark and what was inside.”
Droom nodded.
“How can that be possible?” I asked.
“This is a place of corpses. There are no words to explain. It is because it is. Everything is…possible, and nothing is possible.”
I glared sideways at Droom. He made little sense. He pointed to a stone valley below, and there were creatures that slid about on a mucus-slime. Their bodies were fat and loathsome, and they had multiple eyes and snaking tentacles.
“Yog,” Droom said. “Over there is the…forest would be your word. We cannot go there, as even I could not keep you safe, Seeker. Trees might melt the fiber of our being, and I mean that quite literally. Plants consume men whole, and there are flying things of all sorts that would sting you, setting your soul ablaze. On the ground are burrowing things, ones who would mate with humans and reproduce beautiful, horrific things, and crawling, creeping horrors.”
“I should not enjoy meeting any of them,” I said, “will this always be here?”
“All are of the water. The Deep Ones will go back into the water when this place sinks. Again, it is a dream that He is having.”
“Who is he?”
“You could not understand the word or hear it if I said it. You have no word for Him. Your vocal cords could not form the sounds to say His name. You would have to mutilate your own vocal cords to pronounce even the first syllable.”
“And he is the god you worship? Is he the king?”
Droom paused, “Aren’t we all?
I became angry. Why did Droom speak in riddles? How was this of use to me? “I do not know why I am seeing this, Droom. I have no reason to. Go back to your watery world. Sink and be done.”