by Donald Tyson
The thing in the cage watches the approach of those who enter the dome, motionless and subdued, almost appearing to be a great sculpture of hazy rock crystal shot through with clouds of various dull colors, for such is the appearance of its otherworldly body, which is not composed of flesh similar to the flesh of common living creatures. It watches and waits, but the terrible power of its will can be felt as a touch upon the skin, like the crawling legs of countless insects, and more sharply on the forehead between the eyebrows. With its mind it seeks to compel those who gaze upon it to wander nearer, until they are beneath the sphere and it is able to reach down with its taloned hand as with the striking head of a serpent and snatch out their lives.
Its will can be resisted by a strong mind, for the pentacles on the walls weaken and contain it; however, the traveler is advised not to allow his attention to wander even for a matter of minutes, or he will find himself standing beneath the sphere and may not have the quickness of limb to save himself. Its six small eyes exert a compelling force, and through them the creature may choose to communicate its thoughts, which reach the human mind as a sort of articulate intention or surmise, and also in the form of mental images. That it is one of the spawn of great Cthulhu there can be no doubt, for its shape is much the same as the carved and painted images of its creator, though there are minor differences in form of little importance or interest, since they cannot be turned to any useful account. Great leathern wings lie folded upon its back, its feet bear talons like those of the hawk, and its face is a mass of writhing protuberances resembling the bodies of headless serpents.
If the traveler falls to his knees before the sphere and makes the recognized gestures of obeisance and worship before the thing, placing his hands over his face and bowing his head to touch the stone floor, its indifference will quicken to an intense interest, for it will perceive that the traveler is not merely another of the magi come to further torture it with their colored rays of light and other weapons, but a servant of dreaming Cthulhu. Two emotions will surge within it and be felt by the mind of the traveler as palpable blows; the first is hope, and the second is a blind rage and lust for vengeance so potent it is all but overwhelming, and gives rise to the urge to scream or run from the chamber.
If the traveler can master his emotions, the thing in the cage will quickly perceive that it cannot control his mind with force, and it will be amenable to bargain for its freedom. The only currency it can offer in its captive state is knowledge, but its knowledge is vast, although much of it lies beyond the comprehension of the human mind or the scope of human use, it is of so alien a nature. The offer of freedom is not difficult to justify, for it would only be necessary for the pentacles on the walls of the chamber to be covered over with pigment or otherwise defaced, and those that remain on the dome and the floor would be unable to contain the creature, who would then burst its iron bands with ease; so the creature itself will instruct in the form of images sent into the mind that appear in the imagination like the moving pictures of dreams.
Among the most useful of its instructions is the manner of compelling other men or women to perform whatever action you desire. This is not like the spell of glamour that deceives the senses into seeing or hearing what is not present to see or hear, but a way of projecting the will into the minds of others so that they are made to move and speak against their own inclination. The compulsion is not absolute, for when it is perceived by a person of strong will, it can be resisted. It is most effective when used in such a way that the one enslaved by its power does not realize that his actions are directed from beyond his own mind. It is natural for us to assume that when we do a thing, we have a reason for doing it, and provided the action is not too outrageous, we seldom question its source.
The creature in the iron sphere has the power to hear within its mind the thoughts that are sent to it, making it possible to ask questions, though it is necessary to articulate the thoughts with the clarity of spoken speech; it cannot discern thoughts that are less clearly expressed, and the traveler will take great care to conceal his true intentions until he has achieved his ends, for if the thing perceives his treachery it will resist disclosing its secrets. After the traveler has inquired of the creature and has received from it the teachings he most desires, it is best that he withdraw from the chamber quickly, before the thing realizes that he does not intend to release it, for its rage will be great, and it may yet find a way to use the power of its thoughts to induce the traveler to commit some careless error that will bring him within reach of its claws.
It is perhaps needless to add that it would be foolhardy in the extreme degree to actually fulfill the bargain and release the thing from its iron prison, for without question it would immediately slay everything within the walls of the monastery, including the traveler himself. He need not fear that the creature will betray his loyalties to the magi, on two counts; first, that the thing hates the monks too deeply to ever give them any benefit, and second, that it will cling to the hope that the traveler may at some future time be induced to aid its purposes. In this way his trespasses in the lower chamber of the library will pass unnoticed, unless he is the victim of ill fortune, for what man can control the vagaries of the fates?
he spawn of Cthulhu held captive beneath the monastery of the magi asserts that the lords of the Old Ones cannot die, for the simple cause that they do not truly live, as other beasts live. Their bodies are not bred upon the earth, but are sent as a pattern from the outer spaces that lie beyond the zones of the four elements, and this pattern or ideal shape is then made tangible by the accretion of matter, which is organized and held together solely by the will of the lord whose body it becomes. By gathering the moist humors from the air and the fine particles of dust that float upon the wind, the Old Ones make themselves a physical presence through which to project their designs, but these bodies are little more than suits of clothing which they put on or cast off at their pleasure; only Cthulhu, having formed his vast bulk in a form of his liking, was loath to put it aside, and so sought to preserve it intact in his house in R’lyeh from the poison of colors from the stars.
The bodies of tangible substance adopted by the Old Ones cannot be called their true forms, which are so monstrous and uncouth that the mind of man cannot hold them without madness, yet in their shapes they express in matter and on a level that can be fathomed by thoughts bound to flesh their essential natures, which transcend both flesh and form itself as we understand these things. When their bodies are broken apart, they immediately reshape themselves, for the will that projects the pattern upon which they are based is able to draw together the bits and fumes of matter even as they are scattered, so that a wound at once closes and is made smooth, and a limb struck off by a sword is regrown.
In this peculiarity the Old Ones differ from the Elder Things, who are indeed beings of flesh, although their bodies are unlike any that arose from the clay of our world. Similarly, the meegoh of Yuggoth are flesh, however strange it may appear to human eyes. By contrast, the bodies of the Old Ones are more thought than flesh, for although they go about clothed in form, it is their minds that sustain their shapes, not their shapes that sustain their minds, as is true of all earthly life. And this is proven by the process of death, since when the body of a living creature is destroyed, its mind is darkened and loses power to affect the world, yet when the body of one of the Old Ones or their spawn, which is at unity with their nature, is broken up, its mind remains and exerts its will to reform its shape.
The mind of a man dwells within his house of flesh after the manner of a householder, and his house protects him from the harshness of storms and cold and permits him to raise his children, which are the thoughts of the body; yet the minds of the Old Ones are as merchants who remain in their own land and send forth ships across the sea to accomplish their purposes, and control the doings of these ships by means of letters dispatched without the necessity of going forth themselves. If a man loses his house that is his only pr
otection, he will surely perish, but if a merchant loses a ship to mischance at sea, he has others to take its place and carry on his plans without hindrance.
So it is that the Old Ones can never be killed, for they do not live; such is their dreadful majesty, before which all the greatness of our world is but the plaything of a child. What recourse has any sane man other than to worship them? The Sons of Sirius know this truth, yet in their arrogance they think to find a way to disperse the bodies of the Old Ones in a manner that will prevent their reformation. They are fools, for if an artist draws a portrait in charcoal on a sheet of parchment, and the wind strips it from his hand and tears it to bits, shall he not simply draw another image to replace the first, and yet another if that is lost, and ever onward until the end of time itself?
It is due to this property of reformation that the body of Cthulhu can be both dead yet merely asleep. With the mind of the lord withdrawn, his flesh lies inert and cold, and is comparable to the hardened flesh of a corpse, but with the return of his mind his flesh quickens and becomes warm and soft and once more animate with the semblance of life. Because the Old Ones never truly live in our world, they have no fear of death and, in truth, no comprehension of its mysteries and terrors. The body is a vessel of convenience to be filled or emptied as it suits their purposes. Our fear of death amuses them, and they delight to watch us die so that they may find varied entertainment in our efforts to avoid our fate, and the terrors with which we confront our mortality.
he only creatures feared by the spawn of Cthulhu are the shoggoths. Since the spawn cannot be killed in the ordinary manner of death, it is interesting to consider why they should fear anything in this world. It is their belief that the shoggoth has the power of causing not merely the dissolution of their composited bodies but of their essence as well; for they hold that the shoggoth consumes heat and vitality as well as flesh, making them a part of its own substance. In the words of our own race, a shoggoth is an eater of souls. The star spawn of Cthulhu assert that once consumed by a shoggoth, they are unable to reshape their forms and are forever lost in oblivion.
These terrible monsters, which no man and no other intelligent creature in this world has ever seen, are supposed to have been created by the Elder Things as their laborers during their early history on the earth, when they constructed their great cities. Later they served as the warriors who defended the cities against the coming of the Old Ones, and had it not been for the vast numbers of the spawn of Cthulhu and the other creatures created by the Old Ones for the sole purpose of making war, they would surely have prevailed with their limitless strength and imperviousness to injury. They are fabled to be deathless and self-renewing, so that no matter how many aeons a shoggoth has lived, it is as strong and fierce as it was at its creation; nor do they ever forget, but store all the events of their ageless lives within their substance. It is said by the spawn beneath the library that a shoggoth never makes the same mistake twice.
How is it possible to describe a creature that has no form of its own, but which takes on whatever shape or texture or color it requires for its purposes of the moment? The spawn says it is like a clear bladder filled with water in which float sparkling flecks that resembling swirling stars and other bodies that are more cloudy and indistinct. It moves by sliding itself forward on its belly after the manner of a snail, for it has no permanent limbs. However, if it wishes it can in a matter of moments grow legs and arms, and can even walk upright like a man when it suits its whim. To conceal itself, it can transform its watery hide into the rough darkness of stone and merge itself into the boulders or rocky cliffs around it.
To see its way as it goes forward on its belly, it extends eyes from its bulk; to hear the approach of its foes, it creates ears for itself. Shoggoths have no need for a mouth, since they consume their food by surrounding it with their soft bodies and absorbing it, after secreting an acidic juice that dissolves their prey and renders it fluid within its own skin. However, at times they project mouths for purposes of communication, and when they speak it is in the piping tones of the Elder Things, which sound like the notes of a flute. In the beginning of time the Elder Race created shoggoths without minds, but over the aeons they became more and more intelligent, until they acquired the ability to speak their thoughts in the Elder tongue. This caused the Elder Race to become afraid of their slaves, and to banish them from their remaining cities. They could no longer control the things they had made, for pain alone is not an effective tool of subjugation against deathless creatures with minds that can think and plan.
The shoggoth is reputed to be the strongest creature that has ever existed upon the earth. By causing its soft and shapeless body to flow under great stone blocks, it was able to lift them and place them with precision in the walls of the cities of the Elder Things. What would take a thousand men days to move could be lifted by a single shoggoth in moments. They never tire or require rest from their labors but toil both beneath the moon and the sun until their task is completed. They fear nothing, but fire causes them discomfort so that they withdraw their soft flesh from flames. Whether fire can kill them, the spawn of Cthulhu beneath the monastery of the magi did not know, since no shoggoth has ever been seen to die in flames. The Elder Race controlled them with the power of their minds until the shoggoths grew minds of their own. They used lightning bolts to punish them, though how these were generated the star spawn does not reveal.
It states that when the Old Ones came through the portals and shaped bodies for themselves from the substance of our world, the shoggoths were few in number, and scattered across the earth, and this alone allowed the armies of Cthulhu to triumph over them, for by surrounding each shoggoth and overwhelming it with numbers it was possible after great toil to destroy it in a way that did not permit it to restore its body. This was done by reducing it to small shreds and scattering these bits far across the land, rendering them incapable of coming together due to the distances of separation and the intervening obstacles. The spawn does not know whether the shoggoths destroyed in this manner were eventually able to reconstitute their bodies, but only that it kept them from reforming long enough for the Old Ones to triumph in their war against the Elder Race.
Anyone hearing this tale and doubting it may be forgiven his suspicions, for how can such a creature ever have existed? Its nature is in monstrous discord with all the laws of heaven, and in defiance of the four elements and their way of mingling. Surely it must be only a fable of the Old Ones and their spawn, passed down from the primal times before our race arose from the clay, even as common men pass down myths of gods and heroes that a scholar knows to be untrue. And for one reason alone is its falsehood certain, that if such a creature as the shoggoth walked the earth and swam the seas in ages past, it would in present times be the lord and ruler of all other creatures, for what living thing could stand to oppose it?
It is true that travelers have spoken over their wine of glimpsing this strange creature in deep caverns beneath the mountains, or in the ruins of vast cities, but it is apparent to the judicious hearer of these tales that they are no more than visions of the hashish pipe or of the black tar of the poppy, the smoke of which makes dreams appear to a man awake. Always the shoggoth is seen by a man alone, and always in the shadows and moving away from view even as it is looked upon. Such visions are no more real than the faces that come before us on the edge of sleep when first the eyes are closed.
It is undeniable that great wonders may be found in the world beyond the imagining of dull merchants and farmers, but that such an abomination as the shoggoth could dwell in the shadows yet not openly reveal its limitless power is an insult to reason that cannot be endured. The very thought of it makes the sweat trickle down the spine and the heart drum with fear, for were such a creature to be, nothing could oppose its malice save mighty Cthulhu himself, and he lies dreaming his own strange dreams in R’lyeh.
he thing trapped within the iron sphere beneath the library has a trick of which the t
raveler must be wary, especially if he is a man of weak will whose mind is accustomed to gaze inward upon memories and scenes of the imagination. In this condition of waking dream, if ever his concentration wanders from the creature, he will be caught as is a fly in the web of a spider, unable to escape. The spawn of Cthulhu has not a hundredth part of the power of the mind of the dreaming god that is its master, yet it is skilled in all forms of thought magic. It knows a formula by which it can transfer the essence of its awareness into the body of another living being, while the mind of that creature is kept within its own vacated translucent bulk.
In this way it has secretly studied the defenses of its enemies by entering the body of a monk weak of will who was set to tend it, then wandering about the compound of the monastery, sampling the books in the library, examining the weapons created to war against the Old Ones, and searching for weaknesses in the defenses of the magi. It attempted the same trick upon a traveler who came in secret to its prison to question it, but he was a necromancer and his will was not weak. The traveler recognized the intrusion of the alien mind and repulsed it with the Elder Sign and the invocation of words of power that set a shield before his mind that the spawn could not pierce.
The solidity of the shield surprised the creature and caused it to lower its guard upon its thoughts. The traveler saw the memories of the possession of the monk, a young Greek named Adrian, who retained no awareness of his expulsion from his own body but merely seemed to sleep all the while the spawn walked inside his shell. He saw the purpose of the spawn, its deep guile and endless patience. Fearless in its immortality, it watches and waits and plans the downfall of the Sons of Sirius. All this he perceived in the moment the monster’s mind lay open, before it slammed and locked the gateway of images.