Return of the Deep Ones: And Other Mythos Tales

by Brian Lumley

  “That there’s an awful lot of water?”

  She frowned impatiently. “Well, you’ll begin to take me seriously in a moment—I hope! No, what I’m trying to say is this: that while man has explored almost all of the surface of this planet, and while he has even walked on the moon and looked hungrily at the other worlds of the Solar system, he knows hardly anything about the deep oceans.”

  “And what would you have him know?”

  “Nothing, just yet, but I’ll tell you what we’ve discovered … in a moment. First, though, answer me this: why should intelligent life in this world have confined itself to Man the Land-Dweller, when in fact life began in the waters which form by far the greatest habitable mass in the world as a whole? Why should Man, trapped in the two dimensions of dry land, be the dominant species?”

  I shrugged again, trying to play down my increasing interest in her subject. I had suspected her high intelligence, but already my estimate seemed in need of drastic upward adjustment. “I suppose it just happened that way,” I eventually answered. “There is, of course, the dolphin …”

  “The dolphin? His brain is large but he has no hands. Thus he’s limited in his use of tools. No, he befriends the Deep Ones just as he occasionally befriends Man, but in no way can he be considered of the same high order.”

  “The Deep Ones!” I immediately sat up and took hold of her arm, facing her squarely. “I keep hearing mention of them, keep seeing them named in print, but who or what on earth are the Deep Ones? And what is it that you’re driving at, Sarah? Can’t you explain yourself more clearly?”

  She climbed to her knees on her chair and threw an arm about my neck, her face close to mine, more serious than I had ever seen her before, but at the same time more childlike. “All right, I’ll tell you about … about the Deep Ones. The difficulty lies in knowing where to begin.”

  “Try the beginning,” I advised.

  “The beginning? I doubt if anyone could ever really fathom the beginning. But I can make a few educated guesses…

  “In the beginning there was a wonderful godlike being. His name was Cthulhu and he came down from the stars in Earth’s prehistoric youth, when this world was the merest infant among worlds. He was old even then, but immortal—or very nearly so—and he built vast cities for his own kind in the steaming fens of pre-dawn Earth.

  “Of his species, Cthulhu was the Father, the Great Old One, but many others came down out of the void with him. Among them there were Ithaqua the Wind-Walker; and Yog-Sothoth, the all-in-one and one-in-all; and Shudde-M'ell, the huge and subterranean burrower beneath; and many, many more. All of them were mighty in ‘magic’, the magic of wonderful sciences which made their aeon-long voyage down countless light years possible, and they fled from the tyranny of other beings whose abhorrent laws they could never bring themselves to obey.

  “Their oppressors followed them, and because they could not kill them imprisoned them here on Earth and in dim dimensions adjacent or parallel to this star system. Cthulhu was trapped in the vaults of R'lyeh and sent down beneath the deepest oceans to dream forever and yearn for the freedom which once was his.”

  She paused, and I took the opportunity to ask: Then this Cthulhu—is that how you say it?—was a Deep One, as were all of the others trapped in the sea with him?”

  “No, no. Cthulhu is the greatest of the Great Old Ones. The Deep Ones are merely his Earthly minions, his followers, his worshippers. He is the basis of their religion. They themselves are man’s watery brothers, man’s aquatic counterparts, the intelligent lords of the seas. They are a race of subaqueous beings for the large part unsuspected by Man. That is to say, they have in the main kept themselves to themselves. Only very occasionally, more often than not accidentally, has their existence been suspected.”

  Again she paused, and once more, somewhat incredulously, I took the opportunity to put a question to her. At least, I tried:

  “Are you seriously asking me to believe that—”

  “That Man is not the sole master of this world?—that there are mermen and maids?—that in the countless millions of cubic miles of water surrounding this planet there is an intelligent manlike species whose origin, science, art, and religion predates Man? Yes, I am.” She paused briefly, then continued:

  “Is it so hard to believe? Can you so easily discount all of the countless sightings of mermaids reported through the centuries? As long as Man has recorded curious stories and legends—which is to say since the first man learned how to write—he has been aware of the people that live in the sea. It’s only recently, in the modern, so-called ‘enlightened’ world, that explanations have had to be devised to put aside what Man has chosen to consider a myth, a pipe dream of drunken old sea captains.

  “Ah, but in the days of the old clippers, in the days of the Pacific and East Indies trading ships, then there were captains who discovered the truth! They discovered that the Deep Ones were real—that mermen and maids really did exist, and that mutually beneficial co-existence was possible with these their brothers in the sea.

  “For make no mistake, John Vollister, the Deep Ones are our brothers and sisters. Indeed, in certain of their own legends they have it that land-going Man descended from them, that Man’s ‘missing link’ was in fact a Deep One. And who is to say that they are wrong?

  “Is it so very inconceivable that long ago, when the first lungfishes were floundering on the muddy shores of shrinking oceans, Man was already exploring the land? Amphibian, yes, but naturally bipedal. And perhaps when those primal Deep Ones returned to the sea some of them stayed behind, at the edge of the waters, later to lose their gills and evolve into true men.

  “True men! Is there any such thing as a true man? The first men, the original men, were Deep Ones. And I for one am glad that my forebears came up from the deeps rather than swinging down from the trees! … But now, John, let’s have it right out in the open:

  “My father and his friends at the club are at present negotiating with just such beings, are actually in contact with the Atlantic Deep Ones, whose cousins in their Pacific cities—where still they worship Cthulhu, dreaming in his crypt in R’lyeh—were known to the old sea captains of Innsmouth in the first decades of the 19th Century.”

  She paused again and looked me straight in the eye, defying me to laugh, willing me to believe that what she had told me was true; and in her own eyes—which were huge, dark, and liquidly hypnotic—I could discern no spark of humour, no sign that she was anything other than deadly serious. When I said nothing, she asked, “Well? What have you to say now?”

  “What have I to say? What can I possibly say to all that?” I finally answered, starting to feel more than a little exasperated. “Sarah, I like you—in the very short time I’ve known you I’ve come to like you very much—so much so that I really don’t care to see you being made a fool of, or for that matter making a fool of yourself.

  “Now, if as I believe you’re one hundred per cent serious about all this, then it can only be that someone else is pulling your leg, having a laugh at your expense. Why, the theories you’re proposing are downright ludicrous! Mermaids; intelligent manlike amphibians; submarine cities and shrines to immemorial gods old as the Earth itself—utterly ludicrous!”

  “Ludicrous?” she exploded, white with anger. “Let me tell you something, Mr. Marine Biologist—”

  “No,” I sharply interrupted, angry in my turn, “you listen to me. Why, you’ll be asking me to believe in flying saucers next! Have these crackpots who’ve been filling your head with all this rubbish produced one single shred of evidence to support their crazy ideas?”

  “Blind!” she spat the word at me. “Completely blind—and probably deaf, too, if this conversation is anything to go by.” Then her anger melted away in a moment and she broke into a peal of laughter. “Oh, John Vollister, you fool! What an opportunity you’ve been given. You, a professional marine biologist—for which reason you were chosen to be their intermediary, their ambassado
r—and all you can do is ridicule what should by now be obvious to you.”

  “Obvious to me? I don’t see that anything is—”

  “No, you don’t see. But today you actually have seen. You’ve seen Deep Ones! You ask for evidence? Wasn’t that evidence enough?”

  At her words I found myself assailed by sudden, incredible doubts. “I saw them? I saw Deep Ones? I don’t

  “You sat down at the same table with them!”

  Something of the nausea I had experienced at the yacht club returned along with the memory of those repulsive people I had seen eating what I had taken to be raw fish, so that I could hardly restrain a grimace as I said: “But those people were completely degenerate, or at least they looked so to me.”

  “Degenerate?” She seemed hardly able to believe her own ears, and when next she spoke the anger was back in her voice with a vengeance. “Would a visitor from another world be degenerate because he was different? Is the Chinaman, the pygmy, the Eskimo degenerate? Is ‘different’ degenerate?” Suddenly blazing with fury, she sprang to her feet. Her small clenched fists trembled at her sides. “Of all the pig-headed—”

  “Now wait a minute,” I cut in, standing up and taking hold of her arms. “A joke’s a joke, but—”

  “Joke!” she choked out the word. “There’s only one joke here, John Vollister, and you’re it!” She pulled her arms free. “Well, you’ll know where to find me when you want to apologize.”

  And with that she was gone, storming out of my study, down the stairs, slamming the door of the house behind her to make me wince at the sound, and so out into the night. A moment later, I heard the clatter of her machine’s tiny engine, but even then I was too astonished at her exit to make a move.

  Finally I thought to step out on to the balcony, from which I could see her in the beam of her headlight below. Half in shadow, she was putting on her crash-helmet. “Sarah,” I called down. “Sarah, listen to me.”

  “Listen, nothing!” she shouted up at me. “I’m different from your English women, John Vollister. I don’t simply stand still and accept insults. Especially insults to my intelligence. Oh, yes, I’m different all right—“different", do you hear? Does that make me degenerate, too?”

  And away she went, her headlight’s beam cutting an erratic white swath through the darkness. I watched that shaky beam go out of sight, then went back inside and sat down. After cursing myself for a fool—and Sarah for a bigger fool, for it certainly appeared that she believed all the rubbish she’d been spouting—I poured myself a drink, then a second, and later a third …

  After that, and after consuming a further half-bottle of whisky in extremely short order, I was too drunk to think at all (a condition I had not experienced since the frustrations of my courting years) and so put the whole thing out of my mind. I would deal with it in the morning. Fumblingly, I locked the French windows and made my way to the bedroom where I collapsed upon my bed.

  For a while, the darkness was soothing, then the room began to spin, reminding me how much alcohol I had consumed. Mercifully I was not sick, but the day’s events had hardly been such that I could hope to sleep peacefully on them. I remember cursing myself again for a fool before drifting into sleep …

  And, of course, I dreamed.

  It was the same dream as before: at first the gentle water-sounds, gradually building to a storm, a tempest—and the sensation of nameless aeons of time passing in a chaos of primal ocean, geologic ages concentrated into mere moments, and the sepulchral sounds of alien prayers, of monstrous worship, throbbing hideously as a background to the storm's fury—until once more I was crushed in pounding surf, tossed unresisting from one giant wave-crest to the next, and gyrated madly on the glassy walls of dizzy whirlpools.

  At this point, as in that other dream of mine, a week old now, I started awake. I awoke—but there came no surcease, no abatement of the crashing of waves and the hiss of flung spray. For a moment only, I thought myself still dreaming; then, leaving my bed, I went shakily into the study and steadied myself at my desk.

  There the storm sounded even louder, as though the waters dashed about the very feet of the cliffs below the house, and I knew then that the tide was in and the sea must be in an absolute tumult. A glance at my watch told me the time was 3.15—an unthinkable hour to be awake and suffering from a hangover in the middle of a storm!—and I had slept for only an hour or two.

  I went unsteadily to the French windows and unlocked them, bracing my shoulder against them to stop them from flying open. The effort was wasted, for as I carefully drew the windows inward and stepped through them on to the balcony the pounding of the sea subsided, died away in a moment, and I gazed out upon a scene of unbelievable calm!

  I frankly could not believe my eyes, and the shock of the sight beyond the balcony the near-distant sea, flat and silvery in clear moonlight, the rippled sands stretching away beneath a night sky across which, diaphanous and eerily silent, scattered wisps of cloud slowly drifted—caused me to reel with its almost physical intensity following, as it did, so rapidly in the wake of the imagined storm.

  For of course that tempest of my dreams had existed purely in my imagination, had carried over like an echo from the subconscious caverns of my mind into the waking world during the transitory phase between sleeping and waking proper. I had not been fully awake, even though I had left my bed to go into my study, and only the cold night air of the balcony had brought me to my senses.

  It was the whisky, of course, only the whisky. That could be the only possible explanation. But following so closely on the events of the last 24 hours, and despite all rationalizations, the alcohol-inspired nightmare had left me utterly shaken. Trembling in every limb, I went back inside and began automatically to close the windows; and it was then that a terrifying thought came to me.

  Wasn’t there some sort of disease that started off with symptoms like mine? With wild imaginings and hallucinations? With fainting spells and giddy bouts, and periods of awful whirling and rushing sensations? Where the victim’s sense of hearing becomes so acute that in the end he dies or goes mad from the sheer pressure of supposed or imagined noise? Or was this merely some theory I had read or heard of somewhere or other? It was all very worrying.

  So worrying, indeed, that my sleeping was done with for the rest of that night. Instead I prowled the house through all the remaining dark hours, putting on the lights as I went pale and sickly from room to room, until dawn found me near-exhausted from a sort of frustrated fretting and the recounting over and over of all that had passed since first the New England conch came into my possession.

  It was then that something Sarah had said came back to me, what she had reported some doctor or other as remarking of my condition: that I was close to being in a state of nervous exhaustion. Well, possibly, but frankly that was the only thing she said that had made any sort of sense. Nervous exhaustion? Much more of this and I might well begin to consider myself a candidate for the local asylum.

  … Asylum?

  I frowned as a new thought occurred to me. An asylum!

  Could it possibly be that the club on the beach was some sort of sanatorium? Now, with dawn spreading bright fingers over the sky and the fears of the night receding along with my mood of alcoholic depression, it seemed to me that I might well have stumbled across the truth.

  Was it possible that the ‘club’ was no club at all but a retreat from the rigours of a world too harsh for the delicate minds of certain persons—certain extremely well-to-do persons—whose ‘eccentricities’ had carried them over the edge? If so, then naturally the place would have its staff of attendants, one of whom had tended me when I had been taken ill on the premises.

  The more I thought about it in the clear light of day, the more logically the pieces of the puzzle seemed to slip into place. The location of the refuge was certainly out of the way, as one might expect; its ‘residents’ patently were the owners and had a hand in the running of the place; but at the same
time the staff—doubtless well-qualified and highly paid—must always be there in the background to ensure the safety of their charges, their employers.

  How then would Sarah Bishop fit into this conjectural jigsaw I was constructing? Thinking of her father and what I had seen of him, I was more convinced than ever that I was on the right track, that indeed the Bishops fit in extremely well. The old man’s case was plainly advanced, and doubtless complicated by an extreme physical disorder; but worse by far from my point of view was the fact that his mental condition must be hereditary. For surely Sarah, too, suffered those same delusions that obsessed her father, had absorbed and adopted his harmless but deranged opinions and concepts.

  As for David Semple: had not my old friend Ian Carling warned me that Semple was “a queer sort of chap”, however likeable he was in his own way? On the man’s own admission he was a collector of all sorts of weird and wonderful books, specializing in volumes dealing with the occult and esoteric. And without a shadow of a doubt those books that he had showed me were strange enough.

  Moreover (and as is often the case with deranged people), Semple had been remarkably quick off the mark to point out old man Bishop's much more obvious deterioration; the fact that he was ‘not quite right’, and that it had to do with his ‘age and condition’. But I knew that Mr Bishop was only sixty-seven years old; hardly an age at which advanced senility might normally be expected to take over or exact so drastic a toll…

  Oh, to be sure, there were ambiguities and inconsistencies in my reasoning. There was, for instance, the question of the Innsmouth Marshes and their obscure connection with the club; and the fact that Semple had found a genuine reference to the New England conch in one of his many books; and the odd circumstance of my meeting with Sarah Bishop in the first place. But here I must surely make allowance for pure coincidence.

  By this time I had convinced myself that I was right, and as additional proof I thought again of those strange and emotionless faces I had seen grouped about the great table where I had sat down to lunch with Sarah Bishop and the other members of … no, the other inmates. I thought of those faces and how similar they had seemed, as of a single family, the way the features of sufferers from mongolism appear similar, as self-identifying as any retarded group when seen against a normal background—as I had often seen them myself on outings in the streets of London and other cities, carefully shepherded and conducted by their attendants.