The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1

by The Madness of Cthulhu (epub)

  As we neared the halfway point of our dive, however, the creaks became, to say the least, quite alarming, and Paul used the controls to bring our vertical motion to a halt. But it was not the sounds that had prompted his action, for after he had extinguished the cabin lights, leaving us suspended above the abyss, floating, untethered, without anything more than technology and our faith in physical law keeping us alive, he put a hand on my shoulder and turned me toward the left view port, showing me what he had noticed: a dim glow off in the distance that, unlike the deep-dwelling fish that lit the blackness only fitfully, was continuous, faint, unmoving.

  Lateral thrusters took us slowly toward it, and after some minutes we turned on the floodlights and were rewarded with a view of a rock wall. No plants. No algae. The abyssal fish, startled by our starburst of light in their stygian domain, had fled.

  But there was a cave.

  We maneuvered our way to the entrance, which, though markedly smaller than our little craft, looked large enough to admit the bathysuits.

  Despite my reluctance to embrace the depths so personally and intimately, we set the ship’s autopilot and entered the suits, sealing ourselves into humanoid, articulated motility. We flooded, gritted our teeth, and thrashed as the oxygenated perfluorocarbons filled our lungs, but thanks to our previous experience, the sense of drowning was short-lived, and we detached from the submersible, solemnly shook hands—or, rather, touched articulated claws—and floated toward the beckoning aperture.

  Its glow was lost in the glare of the floodlights, but beyond the entrance the presence of an internal, yellowish-green illumination was obvious, and we supplemented it with our plentiful supply of glow sticks.

  The small entrance belied what lay beyond: no simple, cramped cave here, but rather a cavern; and as we trod where human beings had never trod before, the walls widened and the ceiling, thick with stalactites that hung down like the inverted columns of some impossible Gothic cathedral, rose quickly, forming a vast grotto whose ultimate length and breadth, though obviously enormous, were hidden both by distance and by a strange, half-haze of yellowish particles that floated and danced in the fluid twilight.

  Moving clumsily in the bathysuit, I swept a small net through the haze and brought the catch up to one of the magnifiers ground into my faceplate. Organic, I estimated, but not alive. Shed particles: cells, bits of membranous tissue, strands of cilia. I mouthed this information to Paul, who examined the specimens with his own magnifier before nodding and motioning me to follow him further in.

  Now we were really, to outward appearances, lost: hemmed in alike by depth, pressure, and miles of rock, entombed in a Hades of peril in which the slightest miscalculation or malfunction would be fatal. Stalagmites rose from the floor, joining with the columns dropped from the ceiling, and the sense of an enormous cathedral was complete. Our steps took us deeper and deeper into a vast, silent sanctuary illuminated by what we now saw were some kind of phosphorescent organisms, half-algae, half-animal, their patchwork colonies blending into a yellow-green chiaroscuro that left some areas in profound darkness while contributing to others a sense of the sacred, of veiled, hidden mysteries that lifted a finger of profound warning while simultaneously beckoning us forward.

  Forward we went, and a sense of mingled wonder and curiosity had almost—almost—eclipsed my feeling of dread when a faint, nearly subliminal current of what I can only describe as pure thought began to make itself felt even through the whine of my bathysuit’s servos and the faint rushing of the perfluorocarbons. Its import—skillfully manipulated and focused beyond anything I could conceive of as human—was unmistakable.

  You shall not come … you shall not come …

  And yet, the thoughts were not directed at us, for Paul and I both, after a hurried, silent conversation, elected to continue forward into the sanctuary.

  Sanctuary? No.

  It was a crypt.

  A final turning around an immense column that stretched up toward a ceiling so lofty that even the glow from the luminous organisms was lost in the distance, and we found a clear space of white sand. But scattered around it were huddled forms whose postures, though inhuman and as impossible as their very existence, spoke all too eloquently of the triumph of eternal lifelessness in this place.

  I could not deny it to myself anymore: here were William Dyer’s star-headed monstrosities—five staved, barrel-shaped bodies surmounted by starfish heads that mirrored the tough pentad of antipodal limbs. Membranous wings. Tubes, eyes, mouths … and a branching assemblage of tentacles sprouting from the center of each linear body segment.

  The Old Ones. And whether they had filtered down from the endless void before our planet had scarcely cooled or had arisen of their own in some teeming, Paleozoic sea, building their stone cities and constructing for themselves—much like the Native American tribes that hotly insist upon their descent from the buffalo or the raven—a mythology of lofty stellar origins; whether they had created the life that eventually became human or merely stood in mute witness to its halting evolution; whether they used our distant ancestors for food or for entertainment, they were, without a doubt, here.

  And they were dead.

  Rotting wings. Limp tentacles. Bodies patchy and eroded—eroding even as we watched—by a motley collection of corrosive green and yellow slimes. Blankets of once-sensitive cilia reduced to a sparse, threadbare mat.

  Worst of all were the red-irised eyes. Glazed now, their supporting protuberances turned limp, undulating softly in the faint currents of the cavern.

  But the atmosphere of forbidding thought continued—You shall not come—and some vestigial sense allowed us both to recognize that it was emanating from some place nearby, almost at our feet. It was a terrible twist of chance and happenstance that had both of us holding our glow tubes over the same body—one of the least affected by the encompassing rot—when it suddenly stirred.

  I am sure that I cried out at the sight, but my voice was, fortunately, lost in the perfluorocarbons, and in any case the creature’s ability to offer even the slightest threat was long past, for it could do no more than lift one or two half-blind eyes toward us, and one branching stalk of manipulative tentacles managed a faint writhing.

  Paul was always a compassionate man. I had seen and felt that in him from the day he accepted that longhand paper from me, and so it did not surprise me when he did not hesitate to approach the dying creature. What the Old One’s thoughts were when it saw the helmeted form hovering over it I cannot imagine, but when Paul knelt beside it and took one of its manipulative stalks in his gauntleted hands, it seemed to understand, and the tension in its eye-stalks relaxed, though their gaze remained fixed on his face.

  And still that thought, resonating in the vast chamber, but growing fainter with the ebbing of life in the creature. You shall not come.

  What should not come? What was the telepathy of this ageless entity holding back?

  I could not help but think of the old man’s words: They came. Something had come over that second range of mountains, and something else had wormed its way out of the rubble-strewn ground to meet it, and together they had writhed and debauched until the wind and snow had buried all beneath a mantle of innocent white.

  The other things the Old Ones had created. Their servants. Their servants who had turned on them and slaughtered them without mercy.

  Paul remained with the Old One. I bent to inform him of what I intended, met, for one chilling moment, the gaze of those red-irised eyes, then pulled myself away and continued into the cavern, the ground rising now, turning upward in a slope that would have been daunting were it not for the servo-assisted movement provided by my suit.

  I climbed, painfully conscious of the idiocy of my actions at this depth and in these alien waters. But I felt I knew what the Old One’s thoughts meant, and what they were holding back; and when I reached the wall of fallen rock and debris completely sealing the passage ahead and felt the hot wave of stubborn hate that glow
ed from behind it like the blaze of some huge, half-sentient furnace, my uncertainties fled.

  The Old Ones had, as per William Dyer’s manuscript, descended into the earth and possibly kept their civilization alive in the dark warmth to be found there. And as their nemesis had been buried and sealed in from above by Kalpaxia’s arrogance, so the Old Ones themselves had safeguarded their abyssal redoubt by sealing this passage from below, blocking the escape of those terrible things. Perhaps, laved in the warmth of the hydrothermal vent, a city flourished at unimaginable depths in the impenetrable blackness of the sea floor. Perhaps these half dozen or so Old Ones—all dead save one—were guards set upon the one egress from the Antarctic. Or perhaps they were the last of their kind, bravely facing the ravages brought on by pollution, parasites, and fungus even as they continued their task of holding back the terror.

  And when the last Old One died? What then?

  The hate glowing at my back, I returned to Paul and the Old One and mouthed to my colleague what I had discovered.

  He nodded and bent over the Old One, bringing his face into full view of the blearing, unhuman eyes. I do not know if the creature could read his expression, but I remain convinced to this day that it understood his thoughts … and his intent.

  I saw the tentacles tighten for a moment on his gauntlets, and then the whole being of the Old One shuddered, the eyes clouding, falling back.

  I saw Paul’s lips move in a final parting grace, but the cavern floor was already rumbling, vibrating. Deep within the cave, the blocked passage was now being attacked with sledgehammer blows, and my mind rang with alien screams of vengeance and a thirst for blood.

  Paul stood, then, took my hand, and with that terrible heat of uncorked fury rioting behind us, we made our way back toward the entrance, and so great was my relief at seeing our brightly lit submersible that I all but wept. But when we reached the craft, Paul did not embark. Indeed, he instead began releasing the explosive devices from the outer hull.

  Faceplate to faceplate, I confronted him, but, “I brought these for the shoggoths,” he silently confessed. “From what you told me, I thought it prudent. The pressure has broken the timers, though. I will set them off manually. You go.”

  He must have seen in my eyes my unspoken question, and he patted me on the shoulder, articulated metal tinking on syntactic foam as his lips moved. “I did not do this to prove anything to the world, Alf. I did it to prove it to myself. And so my work is done. Why should I wait for senility and bedpans?”

  And then, trailing the tethered explosives, he was propelling himself toward the mouth of the cave.

  He would detonate the devices when the shoggoths broke through, and my course of action was therefore so constrained as to be inescapable: I had to put as much distance as possible between the craft and the eventual concussion. After frantically docking with the submersible, then, I set the thrusters for lateral motion away from the cave and dropped all ballast for a speedy ascent. After that, there was nothing to do but wait … and trust in Pabodie’s engineering.

  The helicopters eventually found me bobbing some distance from the expected rendezvous point, but that was easily put down to random ocean currents. More difficult to explain was Paul’s absence. Fortunately, deep-sea exploration is a hazardous enough undertaking that my story of a bathysuit excursion and equipment failure—combined with my careful editing of the high-definition videos recorded by the cameras on the submersible and my suit—were taken at face value, all the more so because of the university’s unwillingness to read anything unusual into yet another Antarctic venture … particularly one involving the surname Dyer.

  In mourning, I returned to Arkham to find that Paul, stripped of family by the passing years, had made me his heir, leaving the entirety of his house and finances, his library, his laboratory and researches, to me. But it seems now that I have once more followed in my mentor’s footsteps, for the house is again empty and still, furniture settled in like brown smoke, curtains drawn, the kitchen, the study, the laboratory, and my bedroom the only areas that see use.

  I think often of Paul and of his sacrifice, but my thoughts drift also in a more disturbing direction, toward what now lies caught fast between millions of tons of snow-covered rock and the vast blockage of a collapsed cavern. Are those protoplasmic horrors, free of their telepathic guardians, even now patiently working their way free of their stony prison? And what else might lie entombed under the tons of slate set loose by the greed of Kalpaxia Mining? Sometimes I lie awake at night, considering the unwitting Russian scientists who recently drilled down into the subglacial Lake Vostok—which lies directly between the vanished, once-miles-high ridges—and what might have happened to them during that curious five-day radio blackout that occurred just after their boring reached the strangely unfrozen waters.

  But let that be. The Old Ones’ time has passed, and we ourselves have grown up. Rather pathetic successors to their magnificent and long-lived civilization we might be, but monkeys, whether arising from a warm pool of Pre-Cambrian slime or drawn out of some fabulous Archaean test-tube, are clever things, and we will, one way or another, manage to hold on to our comparatively wretched lives.

  And that we can succeed in doing so, I have no doubt. For though we wage our useless wars and indulge ourselves in petty hate and bigotry, I remember Paul’s final valediction, uttered over the impossible body of an impossible being in a well-nigh impossible place; uttered for the sake of those upon whose existence, like a ship upon the jagged rocks of a lee shore, his father had driven himself, rending his life, his career, and his reputation; given freely, given in spite of their speaker’s hardships, his search, his imminent death; and spoken as one creature to another, hands clasped with tentacles in what I have no doubt was an effort to bring comfort during those final moments of fading consciousness: three simple words, words whose obdurate impossibility of vocalization did not in the slightest detract from their message of profound peace and reconciliation:

  “I forgive you.”

  LITTLE LADY

  J. C. KOCH

  BIG WILLIE SURVEYED THE DAMAGE. “NICE WORK, BOYS. AND A big thank you to the little lady, here.”

  The girl didn’t say anything. She wasn’t even crying. Jim was somewhat impressed. He’d gotten over being surprised she’d helped them a while ago now.

  Big Willie grinned. “C’mon, darlin’. You didn’t love those boys, now, did you?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe I did.”

  Hefé laughed. “You didn’t, señorita. Not as much as you love us.”

  She didn’t answer, just gave Hefé a small, odd smile.

  Shooter shook the hair out of his eyes and then pulled his hat back on. “Look, we got the loot that was rightly ours and we took all these half-breeds had. It’s been a good haul, better than we expected. Now, let’s get out of here before the law or the cavalry comes.”

  “They won’t come,” the girl said with conviction. “They never come here. Not even for our women.”

  “Not even for you, huh?” Big Willie shook his head. “We got nothing against half-breeds when they’re as pretty as you. That’s why we’re taking you with us.”

  “I feel so lucky,” she said. But she didn’t try to pull away from Jim, and he didn’t mind.

  “So what Indian you mixed with?” Big Willie asked her, as he motioned for the others to finish up.

  The girl watched the rest of the boys light what was left of her little town on fire. Jim felt kind of bad for her, but not all that bad. She was prettier than most half-breeds he’d seen, her skin was lighter than Hefé’s though it sure wasn’t white, and she had odd green eyes. Her long black hair was curly, not straight. He was glad to be taking her with them. Big Willie usually let him go second, since he was the leader’s favorite.

  “Apache,” she said finally. “Chiricahua Apache.”

  “And what was your mother?” Big Willie asked, almost politely. Jim figured he must have thought she was pretty, too
. Not that he was going to fight Big Willie for her. Not and expect to live.

  “Apache.”

  “Ah, your father a soldier?”

  Jim wasn’t used to Big Willie asking questions almost like a gentleman, and no one else was, either.

  “Who the hell cares who her daddy was?” Shooter asked, the exasperation clear. “Let’s just get the rest of the stuff and get the hell out of here.”

  Big Willie gave him an evil look. Then he looked back at the girl and put a nicer smile on his face. “Don’t mind Shooter there. He thinks ’cause he had an education it makes him better than other folks.”

  “No, I don’t,” Shooter snarled through gritted teeth. “I just want to get out of here before someone we don’t want to run into comes by.”

  Big Willie laughed. “Bat Masterson’s got better things to do than track us. He won’t be coming. And neither will any of his friends. Like our little lady said, no law comes here.” He seemed to remember something. “What’s your name?”

  She was quiet for a few moments. “Cochalla. But I go by Halla, mostly.”

  “That’s very pretty.” Big Willie looked at her intently for a couple of moments. “So, Halla, who was your father?”

  “My father is still alive,” Halla replied. “My mother died when I was born. That’s why I was here. This is the village for all our children whose mothers have died.”

  “Why aren’t you with your father?” Big Willie pressed.

  “He has an important job. I would have been a distraction he couldn’t afford when I was younger. After that, well, I stayed here because of …” Her voice trailed off and it seemed she was listening to something. Halla looked up and pointed to the sky. “Crows. If you mean to leave, you should do it now. Law doesn’t come here, but as you well know, others do.”