The Madness of Cthulhu Volume 2

by Joshi, S. T

  “No,” Mooney finally said. “All indications are that the interstellar crinoids have been thoroughly neutralized. We believe that the crinoids’ Artificial Utility Entities are behind these actions.”

  Tom was rubbing his temples and in a low voice he said, “‘Neutralize,’ ‘Artificial Utility Gizmos’—Christ, why can’t you just speak the fucking language?” In a louder voice he said, “Shoggoths, you mean?”

  Mooney looked at Dubchenko, who gave him the tiniest of nods.

  “Yes,” the colonel said, “shoggoths. And to judge from Dyer’s report, shoggoths of a greatly increased mental capacity.”

  “D’you know what you’re saying?” Tom said. “A fifteen-foot blob of protoplasm, able to sprout any number of limbs and organs at will? It sounds like an amoeba to me, Colonel. Do you know what an amoeba is, then? It’s a single-cell organism—single cell. You can’t have a fifteen-foot single-cell, Colonel, I’m sorry. It just doesn’t work.”

  “I beg to differ with you, Mr. Spratt—”

  “Professor Spratt,” Tom interrupted, “Colonel.”

  “At any rate,” Mooney sighed heavily, “the AUEs exist, whether you believe in them or not.”

  “You’ve seen them, then.”

  “Myself personally, no.”

  “Others, perhaps?”

  “Others, most certainly. We have sent several recon as well as combat units into their tunnels.”

  “And?”

  “They never came back.”

  Silence descended.

  “We do, however,” Colonel Mooney continued after a pause that seemed to stretch for days, “have this clip extracted from a remote motion detector-activated video camera, installed in Tunnel G-12. It is an older tape, so I apologize in advance for the poor quality. Still, I think you will find it instructive.”

  Mooney took his turn at the laptop. The ozone hole-blighted Earth vanished and was replaced by a grainy image of a stone-walled space. It was filmed at an angle from some high point with the exaggerated perspective of a fish-eye lens. At the lower right corner was the date 20 AUG 85, and a digital clock ticked away from 02:20:06. The floor and the stone wall opposite stretched back into the darkness at the upper right of the picture and, just discernible along the wall’s length, a carven band. A chill ran up my back as I realized that I was looking at one of the reliefs created by the Old Ones—or by their rebellious creatures, the shoggoths. Even as I thought this Something came up out of the darkness at the right of the image, swept up with incredible speed, and filled the screen. The image suddenly turned to static.

  People around me cried out in alarm. I probably did, too—it all happened so quickly that it was only in retrospect that I recalled the flashing lights in the Thing, and the awful hand that sprouted out of nothing to envelop the video camera. It was all the more terrible for being utterly silent.

  Mooney turned from the screen toward us.

  “Over the past forty years,” he intoned, “we have lost one hundred and seventy-eight men to these things. I know damned well they exist and you had better, too. Since Dyer’s time they have extended their network of tunnels into the foothills—at least. From these the AUEs have dug vertical wells to the surface. At first we thought these wells were fumaroles, gas-vents of volcanic origin. But,” he added quickly as several geologists poised to argue, “we quickly recognized that this region is sedimentary in origin. That was, in fact, what clued us in to the vents’ provenance. It is from these wells that they are propelling halocarbons into the atmosphere.”

  “Then why don’t you just block them up?” cried a bespectacled man who looked close to hysterics.

  “That we have,” said Mooney, “and bombed them. But as soon as one is taken care of, two more appear elsewhere. Some are easy to detect. The big ones can be fifty, sixty feet across and lined with masonry stolen from the Old Ones’ city—‘cauldrons’ we call these. But we didn’t catch on to the false fumaroles until many were established. Even with our best detection equipment and echo-sounding they succeed in creating more.”

  I thought of the plumes of moisture Dyer had seen coming off the mountains in ’31. How far had they gotten since then?

  “And how are they effecting this pollution?” asked an engineer in heavy horn-rims.

  “We don’t know,” said Mooney. “Mics put down the holes get what might be the sound of machinery, but probes have never found the bottom of these pits.”

  The hole too deep for any line to sound, Lovecraft whispered in my mind.

  “The thing is this,” Dubchenko said, stepping forward. “The ozone crisis is not wholly the shoggoths’ doing. We don’t get off the hook that easily. But the shoggoths have recognized the long-term effects of ultraviolet radiation on the planet and have been exploiting and exacerbating it for years.”

  “To what end?” This from Professor Del Rio. She pronounced the last word like ind.

  Mooney, Dubchenko, and their three companions traded weary looks. Finally Dubchenko faced us again.

  “We don’t know that either,” he said slowly. “But we can guess. You have all probably heard the term ‘terraforming.’”

  “Bloody science fiction,” Tom muttered none too quietly.

  “Yes,” Dubchenko answered, “maybe for us but maybe not for them. All we can think of is that the AUEs are trying to—to get rid of us, all of us, humans, birds, and beasts. To make a tabula rasa, a clean slate upon which to start anew.”

  In the humming quiet that followed, the words of poor, doomed Lake—the same Lake for whom this outpost of humanity was named—came back to me: “ … Elder Things supposed to have created all earth-life as jest or mistake.” And now the shoggoths were attempting to rectify that mistake.

  4

  IN THE FOLLOWING DAYS WE WERE SPLIT UP INTO GROUPS according to our disciplines. I was fortunate in that we climatologists and meteorologists were given the top floor of the Silo attached to Lake Central, as the main building was called. I believe the thinking was to get us closer to the weather we were to predict and, it was hoped, prevent. Poor Spratt and his fellow biologists were consigned to an odiferous lab one level below the ground, which they promptly dubbed “the Dungeon” (only the geologists were buried deeper—appropriately enough). I liked my co-workers and we worked well together. Still, I sought out Spratt’s company as often as I could. The man made me laugh, and laughter was at a premium in that place.

  One day, after a week’s worth of hard work, we managed to rendezvous at the cafeteria. Unlike the labs, this room had no popular nickname. It was officially “The William P. Dyer Memorial Refectory,” probably the only place outside of Miskatonic University that still honored his name. Tom, however, in his inimitable fashion, had dubbed it “The Crinoid Arms,” and such it has remained in my memory.

  We were sitting there over two glasses of “homer,” the homebrew our Aussie soldiers concocted in the barracks and called “beer.” I had arrived late and had found Tom already keeping company with two empty glasses. After a preliminary sip of my first I turned to him.

  “So how goes it in the Dungeon?” I asked.

  “Just peachy, Carnahan. Living cheek by jowl with a mob of geologists is a never-ending source of wonder.” He suddenly cradled his beer glass in both hands, gawped at it round-eyed, and said, in his best American accent, “Look, guys, it’s a ROCK!”

  I was halfway through my next sip and I snorted a laugh that brought beer into my nose. I set the glass down and, wiping my face with a napkin, said, “I’m so glad you’re fitting in, Tom. But I really meant about your work.”

  Tom Spratt always had the good grace never to laugh at his own jokes. In addition, his normal expression was one of thin-lipped annoyance at the world; but the gloom that clouded his face now was something I had not yet seen. It brought age into his face, and I suddenly noticed the shadows under his eyes. He looked down at his glass.

  “Bad,” he said, “bad. And the science is sound. Some of my BAS mates at Halle
y sent some of it. The ultraviolet let in by the ozone hole is hitting the wildlife hard.”

  “I remember reports from the ’80s of penguins and sheep in Patagonia blinded by overexposure,” I said.

  “Well, this is a tad more serious than seeing-eye penguins in Ray-Bans and white canes,” he said after another pull at the homer. “We’re sorting reports now of mass die-offs of phytoplankton in the Ross and Weddell Seas, even up into the South Atlantic as far as South Georgia, and that is serious, mate. If you and I and all our big-brained friends disappeared it’d be a quiet couple Sundays in the park. But phytoplankton … Jesus, where do I begin? They’re a major consumer of carbon dioxide, so without them we’re further along the road to a steamy new Jurassic. Never mind the fact they’re at the base of one of the bigger food-chains in the neighborhood—no phytoplankton, no prawns. No prawns, no little fish. No little fish, no big fish, la de da de da, and eventually, no us.”

  He poured the rest of his homer down his gulping throat, licked his lips, and pointed at me. “I’ll give ’em this,” he said, his Cockney coming out as the alcohol took effect. “Bleeding shoggoths, man, thought of everything. This is like burning the foundations of the House of Life.”

  Then his expression brightened. “Now the shog’s masters,” he said, “there’s another story. Talk about smart … did you know they still have a couple Old Ones here, I mean here?” He tapped the table for emphasis.

  “No, I didn’t,” I replied.

  “Yes they do, and they let us take a swipe at ’em with the scalpel.” He shook his head slowly, his eyes focused on something wonderful in his memory. “Amazing. They could out-think us, outrun us, and out-fart us, even wiv all five tentacles tied behind their backs—if they had backs, that is. I still don’t know why they’re not still running the show. They make the zoologists run around on the ceiling—‘Are they animal? Are they vegetable?’ Who the Christ cares? Make us look like the apes we are. Just amazing.”

  He sighed. “So what about you, mate? What’re you lot going to do about the weather?”

  I took a long breath. “There’s talk,” I began, “of reseeding the stratosphere with ozone.”

  “Oh, that’s great. And how d’you keep it from falling back to earth where we don’t want it? That’s right brilliant, that is.”

  “It’s better than what Smith from Harvard proposed. He wants to set off a bomb in the ozone hole to ‘re-encourage ozone propagation.’”

  Tom scrunched up his face and stared at me. “And he’s from Harvard?” he said. “God help us.” It came out like gorelpas.

  Before we could settle into an inescapable funk, McCracken, an Aussie sergeant we had befriended, bustled up to our table. He scraped over a chair, sat, and leaned cross-armed on the table.

  “‘Release McCracken!’” quoted Tom and raised his glass.

  “Evenin’, gents,” McCracken said, his big face grinning closely at us. “Fancy a jolly up to Spookytown?”

  “Spookytown” was what the locals had taken to calling the Old Ones’ city. In all the panic over the environment we had nearly forgotten it. In those brief moments when we could gaze out the windows at the mountains there had been scant time even to consider a trip there. Now we huddled close to McCracken, eager for what he had to tell.

  “I have here,” he almost whispered, looking around the room, “the list for a flight to take place in two days.” He pulled a folded sheet from his fatigues and palmed it flat on the table. “Brass are limiting it to twenty, and I thought you blokes …”

  “Where do we sign?” Tom pulled a pen from his pocket.

  5

  THE NEXT TWO DAYS PASSED SLOWLY. IT’S FUNNY HOW THE MIXED dread and excitement over seeing the Old Ones’ city made time drag, when previous days had all seemed too short for the tasks at hand.

  But there was plenty yet to fill them. We busied ourselves creating computer models of present and future climates based upon 10%, 50%, and 75% reductions in the ozone layer, and they were all depressingly consistent. Projected increases of UV-B and the far more harmful UV-C ultraviolet radiations were off the charts; and in collaboration with Tom’s biology crew we predicted widespread incidences—pandemics—of blindness and skin cancer, massive phytoplankton die-offs, and destruction of coral reefs across the globe. The sequel to this list of disasters hardly bore thinking about: the ripples through the food chains Tom had mentioned, crop failures, long-term DNA damage … We now understood why the WGS had insisted we wear those sunglasses.

  So suffice it to say that we were more than ready for our little holiday in the mountains. One of the Ice Shadow Army’s camo Hägglunds—odd two-car tractors—came to bear us to the plane; and by nine A.M. we were airborne. While we had been at work the Antarctic day had shrunk. The sun now scraped along the southern horizon for only a couple of hours, so we had to take what advantage of it we could.

  What words can describe that flight? I could resort to Dyer/Lovecraft’s logorrhea, but to me the very massiveness of the landscape demanded sparseness, simplicity. Stark. Colossal. Barren. White of snow and black of bare rock. Seared by rays from the hollow sky, the mountains heaved their titan shoulders to bar our way.

  McCracken was there, of course, the one smiling face in all Lake City. He squatted down by Tom’s and my seats, and we chatted about his army. When we asked about the army’s efforts to fight the shoggoths, he shook his head. No one knew for sure, but it certainly appeared that conventional weapons, and even such things as flamethrowers, were ineffectual against the “shogs,” as he called them.

  “Like sticking pins in Jello,” he said. “How can you kill it if you don’t even know where its heart is?”

  “Or if it even has a heart,” interjected Tom.

  “Or if it can grow a new heart even if you hit the first one,” I added.

  But the engineers were working closely with the linguists to recreate the “curious weapons of molecular disturbance” (Dyer) used by the Old Ones to combat the shoggoths, and McCracken was optimistic.

  “Well, that makes one of us,” Tom said with a thin smile.

  The mountains had grown until they blocked out most of our sky. We could now see the cube-like buildings and snaking fortifications built by the Old Ones on the precipitous slopes, and I felt again that shiver of discovery. To our left was Mt. Gedney, highest of the chain, its 36,000-foot peak razor-sharp against the navy blue sky; to the right, Mt. Carroll. Straight ahead the pass through which we were to fly gradually widened. Everyone was now at a window.

  Dyer was again vindicated. The panorama beyond the mountains burst upon our sight all in a rush, and several of us gasped. There was the Old Ones’ city, Spookytown, the oldest settlement on the planet by a factor of thousands. Just its sheer size, a giant’s labyrinth running to left and right as far as you could see, stopped your breath. The pilot flew us across the city toward those other peaks, invisible in haze, until the city dwindled away in isolated ruins. Banking back, he gave us a heart-stopping vista of the city sprawled along the line of black mountains, silhouetted by the weak glow of dying Antarctic day.

  The plane landed on a cleared stretch between the mountains’ foothills and the city. We synchronized our watches and put on our oxygen masks; then they released us upon the city.

  Again I come to a place where words escape me. Even with all our briefing we were dumbfounded. How must Dyer and Danforth have felt! We have their account—or Lovecraft’s version of it—but having actually been there I find their words pale and inadequate. We staggered down the slight slope to the dark ruins, feeling their dim weight upon our eyes and souls. When at last we could touch the ancient walls, I cried aloud. Tom and I wandered together through room after Cyclopean room, our heads tilted back and staring like the most callow of sightseers. We found one room that still retained its roof and was lit by a row of shaded lights installed by the army. By their soft glow we examined some of the carven bands Dyer had described. The roof had protected these specimens fr
om the worst of weathering, and we thrilled at the skilled depictions of the Old Ones and the contemporary flora and fauna of millions of years ago—done from life. Here were giant Magolodon sharks, eohippi, gigantic Indricotherica, and the humble Moeritherium. And here too were hairy, prognathous Australopithecenes whose descendants we were. At one point I turned to look at Tom and could see through his goggles how his eyes were alight with childlike joy.

  And of course there were the Old Ones themselves. Perhaps one of the most jarring things for me was to see those alien, starfish-headed non-animals doing things once thought the exclusive province of man, and doing them in a natural fashion the ancient artists captured all too well. I am no artist myself, but have no qualms in saying that the unhuman artists who created these reliefs must rank among the finest this planet has ever produced.

  Our time in the ruins felt frightfully short. In fact, it was far shorter than we were supposed to have had. While we pored over the antediluvian artwork a soldier came to get us. His mask and goggles hid his features, but with urgent signs he indicated that we had to go and had to go now. Reluctantly we left the megalithic ruins and trudged after the soldier as fast as our bulky clothing would permit us.

  Inside the plane all was loud confusion. It was all the more disorienting after the eon-long silence of the ruins, but we soon discovered what was happening. McCracken was hunched over the radio set in the cabin. He had one-half of a pair of headphones pressed to his right ear, and his normally cheery face was crumpled with worry and alarm. After a few moments of extreme concentration he set down the headphones and stood up to greet us.

  “Bloody blizz static,” he muttered. “Can’t make out half of what they said, but seems a blow has come off the mountains and they want us back at base ASAP.”

  He slid past us and stalked down the plane’s center aisle.

  “Best buckle up, ladies and gents,” he bellowed. “We’re in for a ride and there’s no mistake.”

  And ride it was. Once we cleared the pass the wind hit us hard and seemingly from every direction. I could have wished for a larger plane as we were buffeted, tossed, rattled, and jolted. Outside our windows the magnificent scenery had faded behind a hellish streaking chaos of flying snow. I wondered how our pilot could tell where we were.