The Cthulhu Casebooks--Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities

by James Lovegrove

  That walk through the woods, then, saw me looking askance at Nate many a time and asking myself whether the thoroughbred to which I had hitched my wagon was actually an out-of-control bronco. Did this “terrifying apparition” he had talked of even exist? Might it be just some figment of a fevered imagination? Were we embarking on a last-ditch effort to wrest victory from the jaws of defeat, chasing some chimera of nebulous provenance? My faith in Nate was at breaking point. My friend, my hero, my surrogate older brother, was turning out to be as flawed and compromised as anybody else. Why this should come as a shock I do not know, but it did.

  Within an hour we had come to a dark part of the forest. I use “dark” both in the literal sense and the figurative. The trees clustered close together, screening out much of the daylight, but there was more to it than that. There was a feeling, an atmosphere. It is hard to describe but I had come to recognise it over the course of our previous expeditions. Whenever we neared the spot where lurked one of those creatures of questionable classification, my hackles would begin to rise and my nerves would be set on edge. Possibly some primordial instinct within me was coming to the fore; some ancient, deep-buried sense of alarm was being triggered. To put it plainly, I always knew when we were verging on one of those forbidden places of which Amos Russell had spoken, but I knew without knowing quite how I knew.

  The darkness – of both varieties – deepened, even as the forest grew hushed around us. Birdcalls faded and the rustling of branches was stilled. Then we arrived at the clearing.

  It was an almost perfectly semicircular area, some half a mile in radius, where no trees grew. It backed onto a crag, a sheer granite bluff that towered against the sky and, being as it was oriented east to west and had a north-facing aspect, shrouded the clearing in shadow. Even in midsummer, I doubted whether much solar illumination reached the ground here. This was a zone of perpetual eclipse, a realm of twilight. The only plant life that burgeoned was weeds, and these there were in abundance, covering everything in such thick profusion that it was not immediately apparent – not until after Nate and I had surveyed the scene for two full minutes or more – that beneath lay ruins. What at first glance one might take for a knoll or a bushy outcrop were, it turned out, the remains of buildings. Here rose the broken spar of a stone column; here the corner of what must have been a house; here the collapsed husk of some sort of temple or hall. We moved amidst the vegetation-wreathed masonry with bemusement and a tinge of awe. This was – had been – a town. A town in the middle of nowhere, reached by no road, surrounded by barely penetrable forest, and of some antiquity.

  The town’s age, indeed, was almost impossible to determine. From what we could see of the stonework through the dense greenery, it was composed of granite, the selfsame stuff as the crag. The construction, moreover, had been of some quality, for the crevices between the individual blocks were tight and mortar-less, so thin one could not have slid a sheet of paper into them, although the outer edges of the blocks had been eroded by weathering.It was not the handiwork of any Indian, that much we could determine, for the redskin in the States, although known to build stone walls, does not go in for construction on a megalithic scale. Nate hazarded that the architecture bore the mark of Mayan or Aztec craftsmanship, yet none of the great Mesoamerican empires is known to have extended as far north as New England. I wondered whether the builders hailed from some forgotten Stone Age civilisation, a primordial race with stoneworking skills unrivalled at the time and access to tools available nowhere else in the world. I was not entirely serious in this conjecture, but not entirely facetious either. “It is a marvel,” Nate concluded, and although he was talking about what was effectively rubble, he was right.

  We could discern long gaps between the tumbledown rocks; these once must have been streets. They radiated outwards like spokes from a central point on the straight edge of the semicircle, which of course was the crag. The town had had a hub, and Nate and I picked our way towards it, wrestling through swathes of ivy and creeper, compelled by an unspoken curiosity. The feeling of “darkness” was strong in this place, stronger than I had ever felt it before, like an intangible wintry breeze blowing over my skin and raising gooseflesh. All the same, a fire of fascination burned within me, an intellectual heat.

  The hub was a piazza hard by the base of the crag, and Nate and I speculated whether it might have served as marketplace, meeting place, or something else. Our gazes were drawn to the crag itself, in whose beetling flank we descried an aperture all but engulfed by the strangling tide of undergrowth. We might neither of us have noticed it at all were it not for the carved lintel surmounting it, which sported runic symbols that to some degree resembled Sanskrit but struck me as cruder, more jagged, lacking that script’s elegant curvaceousness. Nate stated that the writing was likely a language called R’lyehian, to which the Necronomicon made plentiful reference. R’lyehian, he said, predated even the oldest of known tongues such as Sumerian and Akkadian. Its origins were shrouded in mystery but the general assumption was that it was spoken by the very earliest of Earth’s inhabitants: beings who may or may not have travelled here from the stars.

  I made some expostulation, albeit in a muted fashion. Certainly, if the ruined town’s residents had been a star-borne race, it would account for their ability to work stone in a way no other contemporary human could. If they had had the technological wherewithal to traverse the interstellar gulfs, then hewing granite with remarkable precision would surely have presented them no problem.

  Even as I digested Nate’s remarkable and perhaps preposterous assertion, he had begun wading through the weeds to the aperture. He ducked under the lintel, peering in. The dim daylight did not penetrate far, but he said he was able to make out a chamber within. I joined him, and saw a chamber far larger than the rather meagre aperture might have led one to infer. Just about visible were the rear wall and the ceiling, each approximately a hundred feet distant. Visible, too, was a plinth or some similar structure near the chamber’s epicentre, an oblong chunk of stone ornamented with R’lyehian glyphs.

  I had no intention of crossing the threshold. Nate, on the other hand, had no compunction about doing so. In he went, tiptoeing around the tendrils of creeper that infiltrated the chamber from outside and splayed out to form a leafy, tapering delta. He might well have been the first man to set foot within that spacious cavity for several thousand years, since whenever the town was abandoned and lapsed into decay – the first man to disturb its solemn, archaic pristineness. He approached the plinth and, circumnavigating it, halted the other side. In a quiet, clear voice he said, “Zach? Come. You have to see this.”

  Loath though I was to comply, I did so. Tentatively I joined Nate on the far side of the plinth, and there he, with an elaborate swaggering sweep of the arm, like a prestidigitator concluding a conjuring trick, showed me what he had discovered.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The Thing in the Pit

  THE PIT WAS SEVEN FEET IN DIAMETER AND TWICE as deep. Its sides were bare, smooth rock. It was a perfect cylindrical shaft bored into the earth. And it was not empty. At the bottom, occupying almost the entirety of the circular base area, sat a mounded jet-black mass, the surface of which was adorned with lumps, offshoots and protrusions. This object – its contours just visible by the faint daylight filtering in from the chamber entrance – lay completely unmoving, which prevented one readily discerning whether it was animal, vegetable or mineral. Its outer casing appeared flexible, and I thought I spied openings, feasibly part of some kind of respiratory system, like pores in skin perhaps, but perhaps also akin to the stomata in the underside of a leaf or the spiracles in the chitinous exoskeleton of an insect. Then, too, there were superficial appendages, some like cysts and others like the cilia on a bacterium, still others possibly pseudopodal or tentacular.

  Above all, beyond being roughly spherical, the thing seemed to be of no fixed, defined shape. Though it was static, I had the impression of flux. It was as if what
Nate and I were gazing at was a photograph of something in motion, like the spume of a wave cresting or the mane of a horse at full gallop, a moment in time frozen. If alive, this nameless whatever-it-was would be a fleshly black cloud, roiling with unseen pressures.

  After a couple of minutes I regained the ability to speak, but I do not recall that I said anything especially meaningful or coherent. Nate stemmed my babble by placing a hand upon my shoulder. “At last,” he said. “We’ve done it, Zach. We’ve got something. A prize that makes all the others that slipped through our grasp irrelevant. We have found ourselves a shoggoth.”

  That was what it was called, this bulbous, knotty blob: shoggoth. So said the Necronomicon, that bible of the profane, by whose providence we had come to the lost ancient town.

  But was it alive or dead, the shoggoth? It certainly looked lifeless. Nothing could remain so still and be considered animate. Perhaps the shoggoth had lain in the pit as long as the town had lain deserted. But in which case it ought to have rotted to nothingness by now. There was no way it could have remained so well preserved, exhibiting not a hint of decay, unless it were somehow living.

  Might it be petrified? I posed the question to Nate. Petrification would explain the appearance of intactness. Some action of the air within the chamber, maybe, working in concert with minerals in the ground, had induced gradual silicification or pyritisation.

  Nate replied that he could observe in the shoggoth’s condition none of the coarse dullness and rigidity that invariably accompanied that process. His own view was that the creature was in a dormant state, an advanced form of hibernation. Its every life function had been reduced to the slowest conceivable rate, such that a single heartbeat might last a year. (If, that was, a shoggoth even had a heart. He was speaking metaphorically, of course.) The thing sat suspended between life and death, embracing neither the one nor the other fully.

  What interested him more, however, was the reason for its being in the pit. The depression seemed purpose-built. The entire chamber, for that matter, seemed designed expressly to house the shoggoth. He wondered aloud whether this was a place of imprisonment or a place of worship, or both. The two things, after all, were not mutually exclusive. The plinth behind us, overlooking the pit, certainly had much in common with the traditional church altar. Could the inhabitants of the town have once venerated the shoggoth? Worshipped it as a god?

  A thought hideous in its blasphemousness, and I felt a weird shiver as he expressed it. I longed to dismiss the notion but it carried a horrible plausibility. The R’lyehian script on the plinth might well have yielded the truth of the matter, had we been able to read it. Its very presence nonetheless seemed to lend weight to Nate’s supposition, for seldom are words inscribed into stone except for ritualistic purposes or to enshrine some official doctrine.

  Feeling all at once faint, I exited the chamber to seek fresh air. Nate hastened out after me to check that I was well, and I soon recovered my mental equilibrium, but then vowed that I would never set foot in that damnable chamber again, not for any reason. The sheer oppressiveness of it was beyond enduring.

  Nate replied that that was a pity but he understood. He could manage without me, he reckoned. Recovering the shoggoth looked like a four-man job, but he knew of three more or less able-bodied workers whose services he could enlist.

  * * *

  Thus it was that, a day later, Nate and I were back at the forgotten town, with Charley and the Brennemans in train. Every coil of rope on the Innsmouth Belle had been commandeered, along with a number of lanterns and some planks, nails, a saw and a hammer. I watched from the chamber entrance as the four of them gathered around the pit. The previous night, Nate had spent some time preparing the crewmen for what they were about to encounter. The shoggoth, he had said, was unhazardous, no more than an inert lump of protoplasm. He did not believe that manhandling it out of the pit would disturb its slumber. He had made this claim with such certitude that no one had seen fit to question it, and even after the three men were accorded their first view of the creature by the glare of the lanterns, they did not offer any quibbles, so carefully had Nate laid the groundwork beforehand. Junior Brenneman gave vent to several oaths, while his father made the sign of the cross and took a draught from his hipflask, but there was on both their faces, and to a lesser extent on Charley’s too, an amazed stupefaction that seemed to override all other considerations. Scratching the back of his head, the skipper said, “My Gawd. When you told me all those weeks ago, Mr Whateley, that you were plannin’ on bringin’ haome some biological curios an’ oddities, well, I’ll admit ter bein’ on the dubious side. I thought it was just so much bunkum, but then your coin was good so whut did I care? An’ naow, naow that I’m seein’ what I’m seein’ with my own eyes… This here is suthin’ as P.T. Barnum would have give his eyeteeth for.”

  The crewmen then set about rigging a makeshift pulley system, fashioning the planks we had brought into a sturdy tripodal scaffold, Charley holding the lengths of wood in position while Junior hammered in the nails and the skipper himself supervised. It was the work of a day getting this contraption finished, and we repaired to the boat for the night and returned to the town in the morning to commence the next stage of the operation, which was the lowering of a man into the pit to attach ropes to the shoggoth.

  Junior, as the lightest of us, and as someone who knew about tying knots, was “volunteered” for the role. Down he went, with a rope about his waist being paid out, hand over hand, by Charley. It struck me that here was an ideal opportunity for the Negro to get his own back on the man; all he had to do was pretend to lose his grip and Junior would plunge to the pit floor and, at best, break a limb or crack his skull. The temptation, however, if it was there, was resisted. Junior made it safely to the bottom, whereupon he set about fastening ropes around the shoggoth’s bulk. He let everyone know in no uncertain terms that he did not relish being in such close proximity to the creature. He announced, too, that its body was warm to the touch, and weirdly soft, like taffy. To his credit, though, he persevered. Much as I disliked Junior, I cannot deny it took guts to descend into the pit and secure the shoggoth the way he did. I could never have done it myself. I would never have dared.

  Another length of rope was lowered into the pit, and Junior attached the end of it to the cat’s cradle of ropes in which he had swathed the shoggoth. Then Charley hauled him out, and all three crewmen applied themselves to hoisting up the shoggoth. Inch by inch the insensate creature rose from its resting place, the three men heaving as one in time to exhortations from the skipper, while the wooden scaffold creaked and quivered under the strain as the supporting rope slid tautly over its apex. At last the shoggoth dangled free above the pit. Nate leaned over to steer it onto solid ground as the crewmen released the supporting rope slowly. By this means did the shoggoth come to rest gently upon the chamber floor.

  There it lay, parts of it bulging around the ropes entwining it, like a pudding in a string bag. I estimated the creature to be seven feet across and more or less the same in height, although the effect of gravity on its gelatinous mass flattened it somewhat at the top, making it an oblate spheroid rather than a full sphere. Any concerns I had had that manhandling it might awaken it were allayed. Even after the inelegant treatment it had just received, the shoggoth remained torpid, and that boded well for the third phase of our undertaking: getting it to the boat.

  * * *

  When I say that the process of transporting the shoggoth through the forest was uneventful, I do not mean that it was easy. I mean that nothing undesirable happened, aside from us flogging ourselves to the point of exhaustion. To carry the creature, the scaffold was dismantled and the planks reconfigured into a crude sledge, onto which we rolled the shoggoth. Then, with Charley lashed to the front of the sledge and pulling like a carthorse and the rest of us shoving at the rear, we began strenuously moving our prize through the town. Yard by toilsome yard the sledge ploughed across the weeds and then across t
he forest floor. It was painfully slow going, interspersed with frequent pauses, primarily for Junior to rest his bad leg and for me to catch my breath. Were it not for Charley and his terrific strength, we might never have accomplished our goal; we undoubtedly would not have done it within the course of that same day. Assisting us too was the fact that the land began to slope downward as we neared the river, so that the shoggoth’s bulk began to work in our favour instead of against us. For all that, night was falling when we reached the Belle, and it was agreed that we should delay transfer of the shoggoth to the steamer’s hold until daybreak.

  So the creature was left on the bank, still trussed up, while we ate a weary supper and trudged to our cabins to sleep.

  But there would not be much sleeping done that night.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Night of the Shoggoth

  I WAS SO PHYSICALLY DRAINED BY THE DAY’S exertions that I dropped off as soon as head touched pillow, but only a few fitful hours passed before I was suddenly wide awake. Something had roused me, some sound. It had seemed to belong in a dream – a scream of terror. When it came again, I knew it was real. Somewhere nearby, a man let out a howl of such anguish, such soul-seared horror, that my entire body quailed.

  I was torn between leaping out of bed to investigate and pulling the covers over my head. A third time the scream arose, now with a hoarse, pleading tenor to it, as though he who voiced it was begging inarticulately for clemency. I heard footfalls too, the soft beat of stockinged feet running past my cabin door. I could not determine in which direction they were headed, but it seemed that someone was going to the screaming man’s aid, and I felt emboldened. I poked my head out of the door.