As he looked down at the rolling waters, he noticed a couple walking on the moonlit beach. The fact that they were down there at eleven-thirty didn’t surprise him. People always seemed to be walking down there, no matter what the hour.
Did Toadface ever walk the beach? As he though about it, it occurred to him that he’d noticed other funny-looking folks around town. Some of them even had that same bulgy-eyed, puffy face—though most were not as extreme as Toadface’s. Maybe it was some sort of disease or hereditary condition.
He went to bed and drifted off to sleep. He dreamed about following a cat through the mall—for some reason it was very important for him to catch that cat. Then the cat was gone, and he found himself speeding through murky ocean depths, teeming with purple and black eels.
He ended up in the corner of an underwater coffeehouse, where instead of mugs filled with java, the bulbous-eyed clerks gave their customers large shells filled with squirming chunks of freshly minced sea-worms. And really, the business wasn’t set in a house—it was in a cave, lit by ropy growths of luminous seaweed festooned upon the walls.
Everyone there was humanoid, and that was the most normal adjective anyone could apply to them. They were all naked, and covered with a variety of aquatic adornments—warts, gills, fleshy fringes, even tentacles. Some had hair, but most were bald, and a few heads were topped with finlike crests.
From out of a side corridor drifted Toadface, grinning hugely. He too was naked, revealing flapping gills in his armpits. The space between his legs held a bizarre cluster of pulsing, elongated lumps.
“Okay,” Masters said. “I’m ready to wake up. I’m willing myself to wake up right now. Right now. Right now. So how come I’m not waking up?” His words sounded impossibly clear—but then, this was a dream, wasn’t it?
Toadface laughed. “You’ll never wake up. Your soul is down in Innsmouth’s most prestigious suburb. Lucky you!” The creature’s mouth didn’t move as he talked. The words seemed to be sounding in Master’s mind.
“What are you telling me?” Masters said.
“I’m telling you that this is no dream.” Toadface drifted closer. “The body loosens its grip on the soul during sleep. It was quite easy for me to draw your soul down to our lovely little grotto. It is a special talent of mine.” His bulging eyes grew even wider with insane glee. “And you shall remain forever in this sunken realm, where the Silent Ones rest in eternal slumber.”
“Hell, no!” Masters said. “I’m not staying down here! I’ll just go back into my body.”
“Not likely!” Toadface cried. “Your body is dead now. It has no soul. You are a ghost, a phantom, a spectre! I shall go and eat that delightful high-protein body of yours. I’ve decided to try out your diet.” The creature winked at him. “How do you like this little adventure? Much more exciting than any movie. Of course, you made up that whole movie excuse, didn’t you?” He waggled his fingers at Masters. “Time to go—dinner time!” Cackling uproariously, he turned and drifted down another corridor.
“Wait!” Masters shouted. Suddenly an eel swam near him, and he raised his hand to shield his face. He screamed with shock when he saw that his hand was composed of shimmering blue motes. He looked down—his body was now a man-shaped cluster of tiny lights.
He suddenly realized that Toadface was getting away. He flung himself forward through the water, and found that he could move quite fast. He zipped down the corridor and saw the flabby weirdo a short distance ahead of him. He followed him out onto the ocean floor. “Get your fat toad-ass back here!” he cried. “You think you can just drag me to this underwater freakshow, laugh in my face, tell me you’re going to eat my body, and then just leave me stranded at the bottom of the sea? Is that the deal, Toadface?”
The bug-eyed man stared back over his plump shoulder. “Don’t call me that! Go away! I don’t want you following me!”
“Oh, that’s rich!” Masters said. “So now I’m bothering you? You sure didn’t think this thing through!” He surged forward and leaped onto Toadface. But as soon as he touched the freak’s skin, a curious sensation rippled through him. It felt like a sort of cold tingle—and it seemed to convey a message. It was like jiggling the handle of a locked restroom door: the message clearly indicated that the space in question was OCCUPIED.
“Give it up!” Toadface crowed. “I’m awake, so you can’t get into me!” He flapped his arms and swam away.
“Oh, is that the deal?” Master said, right behind him. “So I can get into somebody who’s sleeping, right? You really are stupid, Toadface—you told me too much!”
“Maybe I did—but I’m still going to eat your body! And it’s dead, so even if you follow me to it, you can’t get back in!”
“Then I’ll haunt you forever, you ugly bastard!” He continued to pursue Toadface, past slime-covered rocks and huge, pinkish-gray stone pillars etched with images of fish-headed people with tentacles for arms.
“Hey, what is this place?” Masters said.
Toadface didn’t say anything, but he turned his head to shoot a frantic glance to the left. Masters followed his gaze, and saw that the freak had looked toward a ruined building made from pillars and cracked slabs of that pinkish-gray stone. It looked like some sort of temple from an old gladiator movie. Except the temples in those movies weren’t covered with carvings of fish-people.
Then he remembered Toadface’s words from that bizarre underwater coffeehouse: this sunken realm where the Silent Ones rest in eternal slumber.
He turned to the left and rushed toward the temple.
“Where are you going?” Toadface screamed. “Get away from there!”
“Not a chance!” Masters said. He entered the seaweed-shrouded maw that was the temple’s entrance. He rushed through the curving halls of a strange stone maze, and was surprised to find that he could tell where he was going, even though he had to be in utter darkness. Apparently this new form of his didn’t need light to see. It seemed to sense the contours of the world around him.
And he was able to sense something else: some being was indeed sleeping in this deep-sea maze. If what Toadface had said was correct, he could slip into a sleeping body. There might be someone or something else in that body, but so what? He wouldn’t bother waking it up.
Toadface had said these Silent Ones were slumbering for eternity. Maybe he’d be able to borrow one of their bodies. It would be like driving a car with the owner sleeping in the backseat.
Suddenly he heard Toadface, not too far behind him. “You don’t know what you’re doing! Get out of here now! I’ll find you a different body, I promise!”
Masters laughed. “Oh, yeah—like I’m going to make a deal with you!” He rounded a corner and suddenly found himself within a large chamber with a high vaulted ceiling. In the center of the chamber stood an enormous altar, upon which rested—
Hell, what were those things? There were three of them, each about eighty feet long, with flat-topped, snakelike heads, fishy faces, blubbery lips, lacy gills, bloated bodies, sinewy tentacles for arms, and legs like those of a giant iguana on super-steroids.
Masters felt dizzy with an emotion that was hard to place. Exhilaration? Horror? A little of both? He used to think his old human body was too fat and unattractive. Now he was about to climb into something definitely worse—and yet infinitely better, because it was clearly powerful and quite alive. He could feel the life-force pulsing forth from it, like heatwaves from a glorious summer sun.
He looked over the selection of bodies, picked the biggest one, and slipped in with a tingle of delight.
Almost instantly he could sense the presence of another soul—the body’s true inhabitant. But that soul was asleep, and as he studied that strange, cold entity, gently prodding it, he realized that it was lost in dreams, embedded in some sort of cosmic coma, far deeper than any ocean.
“Get out of there!” Toadface shouted. “That is the hallowed body of G’hlaballa—you are perpetrating an unforgivable blasphemy!�
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Masters willed the tentacles of his new body to move—he pictured them rising from the slab, swirling and flexing.
And they did. Some force or spell was compelling the body’s true soul to sleep, but apparently that power only held sway over the soul—not the body. The driver was indeed asleep in the backseat. But the motor was still running.
He wrapped one of the tentacles tightly around Toadface.
“No! Stop!” the flabby pest squealed. “What are you going to do?”
Masters rose off of the slab. He battered at the wall with his free tentacle, pounding until he’d created a hole large enough to serve as an exit. He stepped out of the temple and began to walk across the ocean floor.
He walked aimlessly, carrying Toadface like a child toting a filthy old doll. He lost track of time as he admired the beautiful plants and interesting creatures of this strange realm. He felt remarkably at peace now that he had such a strong body. There was nothing in the world that could hurt him.
Eventually he found himself near the shore. He could discern the full moon through the water. He surfaced and saw that he was near an empty stretch of beach.
He looked at Toadface. The soggy, ugly thing wasn’t moving. The little man still had a heartbeat, though, so he was simply unconscious. Perhaps Masters had been squeezing too tightly.
He thought about what to do with Toadface. The vicious freak had some kind of strange power over souls, and knew how to separate them from the flesh.
Masters could easily kill Toadface, but he didn’t want that rotten bastard’s soul to part from its corpse and start following him around like a rabid puppy.
He looked around and saw, in the distance, the lights of Innsmouth. He knew of a location on the outskirts of the city where he’d find the answer to his problem. He began walking.
Thirty minutes later, he stood at the edge of a warehouse construction site. He stuck Toadface’s body into the thick, wet concrete of the building’s foundation. He pushed the flabby form down deep, until it could go no further.
And there he left it—body and soul.
Suddenly he felt extremely hungry.
From where he stood, he could see both Innsmouth and the open sea. Both contained plenty of protein. But what sort of meat did he want?
Finally he began to trek back toward the sea. He didn’t want to bother with little bites. That would only frustrate him. He needed real food and plenty of it. He felt utterly starved. Ravenous.
Hungry enough to eat a whale.
THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS (Part 1), by H. P. Lovecraft
I
Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end. To say that a mental shock was the cause of what I inferred—that last straw which sent me racing out of the lonely Akeley farmhouse and through the wild domed hills of Vermont in a commandeered motor at night—is to ignore the plainest facts of my final experience. Notwithstanding the deep extent to which I shared the information and speculations of Henry Akeley, the things I saw and heard, and the admitted vividness of the impression produced on me by these things, I cannot prove even now whether I was right or wrong in my hideous inference. For after all, Akeley’s disappearance establishes nothing. People found nothing amiss in his house despite the bullet-marks on the outside and inside. It was just as though he had walked out casually for a ramble in the hills and failed to return. There was not even a sign that a guest had been there, or that those horrible cylinders and machines had been stored in the study. That he had mortally feared the crowded green hills and endless trickle of brooks among which he had been born and reared, means nothing at all, either; for thousands are subject to just such morbid fears. Eccentricity, moreover, could easily account for his strange acts and apprehensions toward the last.
The whole matter began, so far as I am concerned, with the historic and unprecedented Vermont floods of November 3, 1927. I was then, as now, an instructor of literature at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts, and an enthusiastic amateur student of New England folklore. Shortly after the flood, amidst the varied reports of hardship, suffering, and organised relief which filled the press, there appeared certain odd stories of things found floating in some of the swollen rivers; so that many of my friends embarked on curious discussions and appealed to me to shed what light I could on the subject. I felt flattered at having my folklore study taken so seriously, and did what I could to belittle the wild, vague tales which seemed so clearly an outgrowth of old rustic superstitions. It amused me to find several persons of education who insisted that some stratum of obscure, distorted fact might underlie the rumours.
The tales thus brought to my notice came mostly through newspaper cuttings; though one yarn had an oral source and was repeated to a friend of mine in a letter from his mother in Hardwick, Vermont. The type of thing described was essentially the same in all cases, though there seemed to be three separate instances involved—one connected with the Winooski River near Montpelier, another attached to the West River in Windham County beyond Newfane, and a third centring in the Passumpsic in Caledonia County above Lyndonville. Of course many of the stray items mentioned other instances, but on analysis they all seemed to boil down to these three. In each case country folk reported seeing one or more very bizarre and disturbing objects in the surging waters that poured down from the unfrequented hills, and there was a widespread tendency to connect these sights with a primitive, half-forgotten cycle of whispered legend which old people resurrected for the occasion.
What people thought they saw were organic shapes not quite like any they had ever seen before. Naturally, there were many human bodies washed along by the streams in that tragic period; but those who described these strange shapes felt quite sure that they were not human, despite some superficial resemblances in size and general outline. Nor, said the witnesses, could they have been any kind of animal known to Vermont. They were pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be. It was really remarkable how closely the reports from different sources tended to coincide; though the wonder was lessened by the fact that the old legends, shared at one time throughout the hill country, furnished a morbidly vivid picture which might well have coloured the imaginations of all the witnesses concerned. It was my conclusion that such witnesses—in every case naive and simple backwoods folk—had glimpsed the battered and bloated bodies of human beings or farm animals in the whirling currents; and had allowed the half-remembered folklore to invest these pitiful objects with fantastic attributes.
The ancient folklore, while cloudy, evasive, and largely forgotten by the present generation, was of a highly singular character, and obviously reflected the influence of still earlier Indian tales. I knew it well, though I had never been in Vermont, through the exceedingly rare monograph of Eli Davenport, which embraces material orally obtained prior to 1839 among the oldest people of the state. This material, moreover, closely coincided with tales which I had personally heard from elderly rustics in the mountains of New Hampshire. Briefly summarised, it hinted at a hidden race of monstrous beings which lurked somewhere among the remoter hills—in the deep woods of the highest peaks, and the dark valleys where streams trickle from unknown sources. These beings were seldom glimpsed, but evidences of their presence were reported by those who had ventured farther than usual up the slopes of certain mountains or into certain deep, steep-sided gorges that even the wolves shunned.
There were queer footprints or claw-prints in the mud of brook-margins and barren patches, and curious circles of stones, with the grass around them worn away, which did not seem to have been placed or entirely shaped by Nature. There were, too, certain caves of problematical depth in the sides of the hills; with mouths closed by boulders in a manner scarcely accidental, and with more than an average quota of t
he queer prints leading both toward and away from them—if indeed the direction of these prints could be justly estimated. And worst of all, there were the things which adventurous people had seen very rarely in the twilight of the remotest valleys and the dense perpendicular woods above the limits of normal hill-climbing.
It would have been less uncomfortable if the stray accounts of these things had not agreed so well. As it was, nearly all the rumours had several points in common; averring that the creatures were a sort of huge, light-red crab with many pairs of legs and with two great bat-like wings in the middle of the back. They sometimes walked on all their legs, and sometimes on the hindmost pair only, using the others to convey large objects of indeterminate nature. On one occasion they were spied in considerable numbers, a detachment of them wading along a shallow woodland watercourse three abreast in evidently disciplined formation. Once a specimen was seen flying—launching itself from the top of a bald, lonely hill at night and vanishing in the sky after its great flapping wings had been silhouetted an instant against the full moon.
These things seemed content, on the whole, to let mankind alone; though they were at times held responsible for the disappearance of venturesome individuals—especially persons who built houses too close to certain valleys or too high up on certain mountains. Many localities came to be known as inadvisable to settle in, the feeling persisting long after the cause was forgotten. People would look up at some of the neighbouring mountain-precipices with a shudder, even when not recalling how many settlers had been lost, and how many farmhouses burnt to ashes, on the lower slopes of those grim, green sentinels.
But while according to the earliest legends the creatures would appear to have harmed only those trespassing on their privacy; there were later accounts of their curiosity respecting men, and of their attempts to establish secret outposts in the human world. There were tales of the queer claw-prints seen around farmhouse windows in the morning, and of occasional disappearances in regions outside the obviously haunted areas. Tales, besides, of buzzing voices in imitation of human speech which made surprising offers to lone travellers on roads and cart-paths in the deep woods, and of children frightened out of their wits by things seen or heard where the primal forest pressed close upon their dooryards. In the final layer of legends—the layer just preceding the decline of superstition and the abandonment of close contact with the dreaded places—there are shocked references to hermits and remote farmers who at some period of life appeared to have undergone a repellent mental change, and who were shunned and whispered about as mortals who had sold themselves to the strange beings. In one of the northeastern counties it seemed to be a fashion about 1800 to accuse eccentric and unpopular recluses of being allies or representatives of the abhorred things.
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