What stood thus illumined before me nearly drove me insane with God-forsaken fright and nausea, and I was torn between fleeing with a shriek, swooning in a faint, and standing in mute, frozen paralysis – this last winning out. A wave of unbearable stench wafted over me as from a thousand opened corpses, and yet this prodigious miasma of fecal proportions could not but hint at the greater horrors which assailed my eyes in that face to face confrontation I had so ignorantly sought.
The creature looming in that room of doom was more frightful and hideous than words can describe...no language or pen of man could hope or would even attempt to portray its unholy vision, so utterly beyond description was it in its hideousness. It was nine feet tall at the least, and all made of some rubbery stuff I hesitate to call flesh, with nineteen swimming tentacled appendages, each ending in four jointed, insect-like arms tipped in multiphallic protrusions. The seven legs were as those of an elephant stripped to the bone, and the waist was encircled with red glaring eyes with swimming black lashes as profoundly luxuriant as the underarm hair of a hirsute foreign female. And the face – God help me – was that of a skull with its flesh ripped off and crumpled up into two balls and crammed back into the sockets instead of eyes, the tongue like the lashing tail of a fly- maddened horse. It was like the most hideous, nightmarish thing that could have been shown to the eyes of man...the ultimate zenith of horror, unparalleled and insurmountable – only worse.
The crystal for which I had searched must have been what I had heard fumbled and shattered, for now this otherworldly demon was juggling the remaining pieces in its nineteen branching, tentacled arms with a fiendish and boastful skill. As it leered at me triumphantly I finally broke free of my vocal paralysis and screamed. But it was strange words from the book in my pocket that came from my mouth inexplicably. Yog-Sothoth! Ia! Xqyrhe! Rhrhszj!
Even now as I stand in the threshold of that damned room of doom, frantically typing out this last frenzied message and warning to all mankind, that leering and juggling horror bears inexorably toward me! God save me! That stench of open crypts, of the very septic system of other dimensions! Its breath is now upon me...those phallic projections! Ia! Yog-Sothoth! Ouch!
Out of the Belly of Sheol
The clouds crashed one atop the other and boomed like an angry surf. The ocean roared like thunder and churned as black as rain clouds. It seemed one had become the other -- that the world had been turned on its head.
Jonah was glad for the men who held his arms; otherwise -- looking straight up beyond the sails that thrashed like tortured ghosts -- he had the vertiginous terror that he would fall upwards into that vortex of sky. Sucked up into the maw of the God he had failed.
They had found him lying in the hold of the ship bound for Tarshish, and knowing that he was said to be a holy man had bellowed at him to awaken and talk to his God...but he had not been sleeping. He was a prophet, and he couldn’t describe to these simple sailors, who were fortunate not to be prophets, how the mind could become filled until the body fell helpless with the weight of the cosmos inside it.
He thought of the sensation of an encroaching prophecy as being like the tendrils of a strange plant snaking inside his skull, growing at an accelerated rate, winding into the very fissures of his brain, embracing and interweaving, suffocating and transfiguring. Out at sea, the sensation had appropriately felt like a serpentine invasion of squirming, choking seaweed. Whereas his bouts with prophecy usually seemed to drag him up into the ether, this time he had felt he was being dragged down into a dark liquid abyss.
He still shook with the blurred tatters of his visions. Rain shattered against his craggy face, dripped from his sodden beard, collected in the folds of his robes. The deck veered sharply; he heard men cry out, scrabble for purchase. They cried out to God to spare them, and to Jonah to pray as well if God were willing to listen to him alone.
They thought God was one voice, one form, one being who looked much like Jonah did. Like a parent a child could appeal to, converse with. They would kill Jonah if he told them the truth. Their poor minds, small clumps of earthly cells, could not contain the truth: that there were many Gods, and Jonah did not always know which one he listened to.
He had likened his situation to standing in a bustling marketplace, where the confusion of voices was the voices of the Gods. And not only did he hear the voices, but the thoughts of all these hordes of people. Therefore, he could not always separate one voice or thought from another. He might catch a moment of this message, a snatch of that one. They were seldom meant for -- directed at -- him. He simply had this ability to hear the cacophony of the Gods.
Some of these beings were dead, and the words that his mind intercepted had been spoken thousands of years earlier, to float out into the heavens aimlessly. Some of the words he overheard, like an eavesdropper at a keyhole, drifted to him from the future. Certain Gods had sympathy for the animal called man, and others despised him – while most couldn’t have cared much either way. The heavens were as filled with the creatures his kind had labeled Gods as the land teemed with animals, and the seas with fish. One could not always see the fish that swarmed beneath the waves; the most that could be hoped for was a brief flash of bright scales. But Jonah could see beneath the waves of the heavens, so to speak.
The people who knew of his ability believed it to be a gift from Heaven. But Jonah was more inclined to think of it, many days, as a curse from Sheol – the Hebrew word for “cave”...and the Underworld.
By the time the men had found Jonah is his trance below, and then taken him above, they had already thrown overboard as much of the cargo they transported as they could to lighten the vessel’s weight. Now with Jonah on deck, in desperation, they cast lots in an attempt to determine who amongst them was responsible for the evil of this unnatural storm. The result of their ritual, however primitive in its superstition, indicated Jonah.
The captain of the ship got close in his face and shouted through gritted teeth, “Our ship is soon to break up, man! Why has this evil come amongst us? What is your business going to Tarshish? What is your occupation? Where are you from?”
Jonah replied with a calm born of fatalistic weariness, “I am a Hebrew, named Jonah, son of Amit’tai of Gath-he’pher. I go to Tarshish to escape an errand I was commanded to attend to.”
“And what errand was that?”
“I was to go to the city of Nineveh, and deliver a message there.”
“A message from whom?”
Jonah hesitated, but then made his explanation simple for the simple man. “A message from the Lord.”
The mariners ringed around the bearded man gasped, either stepped back from him or closer to him in horror. The captain snarled, “The Lord commanded you, and you fled from Him? And now we suffer because of it! Why did you not do as He instructed?”
How could he tell this man that he was tired of listening to voices, tired of sifting through them for meanings that might be of benefit for his fellow creatures? That he wished he could flee to some deep, dark and silent cave where he would never have to hear another voice again?
Some being, angered at the imagined wickedness of the vast city of Nineveh, capital of Assyria – and recognizing Jonah’s gift of receptiveness – had ordered him to go to the city and denounce it, threaten it. But he had wanted no part of it. He had not wanted to risk that the citizens might doubt him, perhaps kill him. He had not wanted to witness their mass panic, if they believed him. And he had not wanted to be the instrument of yet another petty, furious God casting His judgments on the behavior of creatures whose lives, however puny, were none of His business.
He could only tell the captain, “I thought to flee, but now I understand I cannot flee this wrath. I am sorry I have endangered any of you.”
“Well, old man, what can you do to appease the Lord so this tempest will cease? This is your fault – you must save the rest of us!”
The ship rose like a toy upon a titanic wave, and the men seized each oth
er in their efforts to remain on their feet. Jonah heard the howl of a man who was pitched overboard, but several others grasped hold of him at the last moment and hauled him back. Yes, they would all die. And yes, it was his fault. Why should these men suffer because of his curse...and his cowardice? They had families, children back home. He had none. He was just a wandering madman, with the gibberish of mad Gods in his skull. He wanted it to be over. Blessed silence. Even if it could only be found in death...
He said to the captain, “Throw me into the sea, man. My life should satisfy this crea–” He amended his words. “Our angry Lord.”
“What? I’ll have no innocent blood on my hands!” He turned to roar to his crew, “Row! Row for all you are worth! Turn the ship back toward Joppa!”
Sun-bronzed, rain-spattered muscles and tendons pulled taut with effort, but their straining efforts were useless. The rains slashed the ship, the mast creaked as if it might snap like the sapling it had once been, the whipping sails cracked like lightning. At last, the captain grabbed Jonah by the arm again and called to the churning sky, “We beg you, Lord, to spare us! We have no desire to kill this man – but if it is Your will, then so be it!” He returned his attention to Jonah. “I am sorry, old man.”
Jonah nodded, and held out his arms to be taken. “It is for the best, my son. Take me, you men. Cast me into the sea.”
And so now, with the ship tossing, the men walked Jonah unsteadily to the side. He gazed up one last time at the skies. He hoped this would make the being happy – make all the Gods happy. Though his heart crashed like the waves, he smiled bitterly. Maybe this wasn’t what the God wanted, after all. But it was what he wanted.
The men took Jonah to the edge of the deck...and he did not resist them, as they shoved him over the side.
An explosion of cold, all around him. An enveloping blackness. It snatched the breath from his lungs, and he thought he would die in that very instant. But though his mind wanted to die, his body’s blind instincts for survival took over, and he waved his limbs frantically in an effort to break the surface again.
Jonah threw his head above the water with a desperate gasp – and then he stared in amazement at the ocean around him.
The ship bobbed on calm waters. Though the sky was still heavy with black clouds, the rains had stopped. Already, then, the angry God had been satisfied by his sacrifice?
As he tread water, he heard the voices of the men aboard the ship crying out to the Lord in thanks and in awed terror at His powers. And then he heard a man – the captain, he realized – shout out loudly in horror. He was pointing out to sea, at something behind Jonah. Jonah stirred the waters with his arms in order to turn about and look, even as more voices were raised in fear.
His heart stopped in his chest, then shuddered back to life reluctantly, at what he saw sharing the cold waters with him.
At first, he thought the vast, gray creature he saw rising to the surface might be a whale. Though he had never seen one, by his reckoning it must be a whale larger than any ever encountered. But no – it was more than that. He saw a long serpent’s neck break the surface. It raised itself, seemed to peer about, then crashed under the waves again. Then, it rose again. And a second serpent rose with it. A third. They wavered at the sky, coiling around each other. Now he knew what he was seeing! He had heard legends told of immense squid that would do battle with whales. This great creature he saw must be a whale in the embrace of such a tentacled nightmare.
Despite his previous wishes for oblivion, Jonah suddenly began calling out to the men on the ship to hoist him back aboard. He could not bear the thought of occupying the same ocean with these battling titans, so close at hand and growing closer. He tried to turn and swim away, back toward the ship.
Beneath the surface, he felt something grab onto his leg firmly. It nearly drew him under. He screamed, and redoubled his efforts at swimming.
His other leg was gripped.
Jonah looked over his shoulder, and now he saw the creatures more clearly as they began to rise more fully above the waves.
They were not two animals after all. One creature. One great being...
It was a God. Not the one he had angered, but another. They knew his gift, the Gods. They always knew how to sniff him out, for whatever whims they might entertain. This one’s name now came into his head – though he would have found it hard to bring to his tongue.
Gibberish filled his brain – bizarre chanting. It had a human quality. Somewhere, either elsewhere on this world or elsewhere in time, men prayed to this God, to awaken it from its slumber. And here it was – awake. Perhaps not so much roused by the chanting, but by the proximity of this hapless prophet.
As he suspected, two tentacles had taken hold of his legs. But they had no rows of suckers, and appeared to be striped in alternating bands of black and a nearly metallic silver. And these tentacles did not extend from the body of a squid, but from – a face.
The face had no visible eyes, or any other feature...just a mass of squirming tendrils where a mouth should be. The head of the beast alone, now fully risen from the sea, was as large as a whale. Water streamed down its gray, translucent flesh. Behind the head, two gigantic fins had also broken the surface. Larger than any sail, they loomed impossibly high. But they weren’t fins after all, Jonah realized. They were the tops of immense, folded wings something like those of a bat.
He was suddenly drawn by those tentacles, toward that faceless head. He shrieked and beat his arms at the water more feverishly. The head filled his vision: a rearing mountain. Those banded, serpentine tentacles. Hidden in their midst, he thought he saw a black maw opening...
Jonah was engulfed in abrupt darkness. All sight was shut out, and so was the sound of the yelling sailors, and the rustle of the sea.
He was sucked feet-first down a long dark chute, the walls of which were rubbery, the atmosphere of which was steamy and hot. And that terrible silence. More than anything else, Jonah regretted his previous wishes for a dark cave, and utter silence. In their well-known sadism, the Gods were often more than happy to answer the prayers of men.
After what seemed an interminable slide down this twisting and turning rubbery channel, he dropped at last into a shallow pool that covered the floor of a large chamber.
In this chamber there was a dim illumination that seemed to come from white patches here and there on the walls and the curved ceiling. The patches, when he got close to one of them, not only gave off a faint glow but a profound stench of decay, and he assumed they were suppurating ulcers of some kind, perhaps the gas of their rot accounting for the light. Jonah clamped his hand over his nose and mouth but kept close to the white tumescent mass for the comfort of its meager luminosity, as he took in his shadowy surroundings as best he could.
He was in the belly of the giant, that he knew. But was it still lingering at the surface, or had it submerged again – perhaps to depths deeper than the loftiest mountains were tall?
A splashing sound made him flinch. He caught sight of a silvery flopping thing in the puddle of the floor. He then saw another one closer at hand, and relaxed somewhat. He shared his grotto of flesh with a few live fish. Whether they had been swallowed along with him, or whether they were born and died in this environment, he couldn’t say.
The enclosed atmosphere was tropically humid and almost suffocatingly hot. How long would the air last? But the thought of running out of air was Jonah’s only comfort. Better that, than be digested in some bath of gastric acid. His panicked heartbeat slowed to something more like calm. Yes, his prayers had been answered. So be it.
He ventured further into the chamber but stayed close to those fetid patches when he could, sloshing through the water, which was ankle-deep or knee-deep depending on the uneven floor. His sounds echoed off the high ceiling, vaulted like that of some obscene temple.
At one end of the irregularly shaped “room”, he found the opening of a narrow tunnel that branched off like a corridor. Its glistening len
gth was in deep gloom, but there seemed to be more pale light at its end, so gingerly he followed it, trying not to brush the claustrophobic walls of live matter. He heard the distant plop of dripping water or juices falling in another pool. It was the only sound beyond his splashing, and labored breathing. If this thing had a heart, he was too far from it to hear its great pumping.
Jonah emerged into another chamber, smaller than the one he had been dropped into. It was here that water dripped from the ceiling. And here, in the center of the room, he found a table and chair made of wood.
He went to the rough furniture, marveling that it wasn’t toppled, as if some internal force kept the pieces upright and in place. There were even sheets of papyrus on the table, and a quill in a little bottle of ink.
There was a large patch of white decay directly above the table, and by leaning over it, Jonah could actually read some of the words on the sheets. View some of the illustrations inked there.
He wished he hadn’t looked. The words and images were those of a madman. A madman who worshiped creatures like the one that had swallowed Jonah. They were called the Great Old Ones, according to these scribblings, and they came from the empty black gulfs between the stars. They were not Gods, Jonah knew, any more than any of them were. Creatures. Beings. But they were old, yes...and they were great. And he would be damned if he ever worshiped this one.
“It is good to have company,” said a voice behind him, and he whirled to face it.
A figure stepped forward into the fungous glow. Jonah wished he hadn’t. It had once been a man. Now, this blighted creature had no hair, not even eyebrows, and his skin had been bleached a horrid bone white, either from lack of sun or from the digestive juices of this breathing labyrinth. He was naked, and covered in black sores. His mouth was twisted horribly out of shape by one of these black tumors, but then Jonah realized it was a grin. When the figure shuffled even closer, Jonah gasped to see its eyes. They were entirely white. The creature was blind. How then, how had it managed to write on those sheets?
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