by Brian Lumley
“But—”
She shook her head, releasing my hand and standing up. “My time’s up, John. I’ll be back—you know I will—but now it’s David’s turn.” The pleading look returned to her eyes. “Only please, please try to help him as much as you can. Don’t give us any more trouble. It will only rebound on you, and I couldn’t bear that. Now I have to go …”
She turned away and went to the door, lifting her hand as if to rap upon its metal oval. Then she paused and turned to face me. She seemed about to say something, but no words came.
“Sarah,” I prompted her, “what is it you want with me?”
She answered. “You … remember, don’t you, John?”
And at once I knew her meaning. Our eyes met, and it flashed between us like a spark of some weird energy, so that I immediately felt a longing in me. “I thought it must be a dream,” I told her, then paused before asking: “And before—at my house?”
She nodded. “Then, too, yes.”
“Not that I’m not flattered,” I said, “but why? I mean, I’m old enough to be your father.”
She gave me that curious look of hers yet again, and shook her head. “That doesn’t matter,” she answered. “It doesn’t matter now, and it will have no importance at all … later.”
“Oh? There’s to be a ‘later’, is there?”
“Yes, plenty of time later,” she answered with a strange little laugh. “Years and years of it. Hundreds of them!” Then she rapped on the door, and when it opened she stepped through and was gone.
A moment later, Semple entered. In his arms he bore a dozen thick loose-leaf binders. Sargent came after him with a light folding table which he opened up before leaving, closing the door behind him. Placing his binders on the table, Semple drew up the chair and sat down. He nodded an almost perfunctory greeting, selected a binder, opened it, and began …
And so, without any further objection or resistance, I listened and learned. Before he began to instruct me in his main subject, however, Semple—whose presence now aroused in me an even greater revulsion—“put my mind at rest” by advising me in respect of one or two things which he suspected might have been bothering me.
Six days had gone by, he told me, since my lone and utterly stupid return to the place on the beach. That was where I was now, in one of three great tanks whose bases were buried in the rocks and sand of the beach, situated beneath and behind the concrete legs that supported the front of the building. Eventually, a channel would be cut from the pool—like basin in front of the club to the permanent natural pool at the mouth of the bay. At each tide, the huge containers would automatically flush and refill themselves with fresh sea water (a process whose purpose Semple did not see fit to explain, except to say that the tanks were ‘storage and transfer chambers’, and that they had not been designed as prisons, though plainly they were ideally suited to such a use) which at present could only be accomplished by the use of pumps.
During my six days of captivity I had been kept sedated, washed, shaved, and fed, the latter minimally—only sufficient food and water to keep me alive, which explained my somewhat dehydrated condition—and I had undergone a series of “tests”. Again, Semple did not attempt to explain the nature of these tests, nor did he mention the injections I had been given. I might have questioned him on these points, but Sarah had begged me not to hinder him or place any obstruction in his way … for my own sake. For the time being, I thought, it might be as well to follow her advice.
Semple had noted my interest when he mentioned how long I had been a prisoner at the club—the ‘headquarters”, as he referred to it—and he had smiled as if he could read my thoughts. No, he assured me, I would not be notified as missing, no matter how long I remained away from the house. Notes had been left and telephone calls had been made explaining my ‘temporary absence’, messages which could later be modified to meet any situation as it arose. My newspaper had been cancelled, and even a finished manuscript had been sent off on my behalf to a publisher in London. I was simply holidaying somewhere in the north. Certain ‘friends’ in the village would obligingly put it about that I was considering a move to Scotland, so that even in the event of my complete vanishment only a modicum of curiosity would be aroused.
Then, with the preliminaries over and any hopes I might have entertained of outside intervention dashed, Semple got down to business; and his business was to convince me, completely and irrevocably, of the actuality of the Deep Ones and all Sarah Bishop had told me of them. His method was simple, direct, and comparatively undramatic, though the same could never be said of the effects of his disclosures on me. As for proof: he had photographs, documents—literature I could study with him or on my own—and, most convincing of all, he had himself, his own body, his own person. The last, however, together with my final acceptance of all I was to be told, did not come until the very end of my period of instruction, and that was not to be for at least a further three weeks. During that time I was to learn—and learn to believe—many things.
Right from the start of my schooling my days were divided in the following manner:
I would sleep (invariably under the influence of a combination of drugs) and on waking would be given food. This was usually fish of one sort or another, with water or occasionally wine to wash it down. Now and then, Sarah would come and take the odd meal with me, but she never stayed for long. Very infrequently I would wake to find her about to take her departure, having obviously been to bed with me. Sargent would also visit me periodically, presumably to ensure that all was well. But for all this visiting, I did have a degree of privacy. After each period of sleeping, and between visits, I would be left for several hours on my own to read and study the literature Semple left for me, and to exercise as best I might in the small space available. Later, Semple himself would come in for two or three hours to continue with my instruction. And the more I listened to him, the more sure I was that this thing I was somehow involved in was more than merely some vast, crazy fantasy.
And so I began to learn of the Deep Ones: those amphibian dwellers in the deeps whose existence has always been suspected by men, hinted at in myths and legends of mermen and maids come down the centuries, but never proven. I learned how their race existed yet, in teeming thousands where their greatest cities stood, mere pockets or small submarine communities in other places, and discovered how, if only men knew exactly where to look, proof of their primordial existence as a high order of elder intellect predating Man could still be found.
I was told of sunken altars beneath the deep slime of Titicaca’s inner cone where the batrachian Priests of Yatta-Uc once worshipped the Great Old Ones five hundred thousand years ago; and it was explained to me how, though the Deep Ones of Yatta-Uc are no more, still their small cousins the frogs swarm as of old in the great lake's marshy fringes. I learned of an ages-extinct branch of the Deep Ones in which alien reptilian strains had spread to bring about the final decay and doom of that branch; and of the buried Nameless City in the desert, wherein the sundered remains of their primal sarcophagi may still be found. It was explained to me why, long aeons ago, in the Nan-Matal of the Carolines, the Deep Ones built their greatest cities and raised towering submarine shrines to the mighty gods of a fantastic pantheon; and I was told the location of a place where even now a secret door leads down to subterranean lakes unsuspected, where near-blind cavernicolous Deep Ones live out their spans in a dedicated priesthood whose bleakness would seem hellish even to the most austere of Man’s monkish orders.
All of this and much more, documented wherever possible and illustrated with incredibly detailed photographs, was made known to me; and as the days passed, I became heir to a veritable fund of lore lost to humanity for aeons—or, in the majority of cases, never even guessed at by the race of Man. I learned of R’lyeh, the mightiest fortress of indestructible stone whose drowned houses and temples were raised by neither men nor Deep Ones but by a race of beings come down from the stars when Earth was sti
ll partly plastic, and I gasped in awe of certain pictures of that massive necropolis from which, it was perfectly obvious, Mr. Bishop’s model had been constructed.
I saw immensely carved doors of fantastic proportions and dimensions, embossed with piscine and octopoid bas-reliefs and crusted with the oceanic debris of ages. I grew dizzy at elusive angles of architecture which formed surfaces at one and the same time convex and concave, or which changed from one to the other before one's eyes in the manner of optical illusions, from which I deduced that such photographs must in fact be real, for no ordinary photographic equipment could fake visual effects such as these. But over and above all else the most striking thing about R’lyeh—even more astounding and awesome than its utterly alien, non-Euclidean architecture—was its sheer size, which, even without a scale of comparison, must surely have been megalithic to dwarf the pyramids. And this, Semple told me without a trace of humour in his voice, in his most matter-of-fact manner, was the merest tip of the actual city, the peak of a sunken mountain range that went down thousands of fathoms to the roots of the Pacific—Antarctic Ridge itself—all of which was R’lyeh!
“Oh, yes,” he had asserted when I was unable to suppress an incredulous expression, “there are many thousands of square miles of cities beneath the silt on the bed of the Pacific. Even the Deep Ones do not know their full extent, or what secrets are still hidden down there. For remember, they are not cities of the Deep Ones but those of the Gods they worship …”
At a later date we spoke of the locations of extant Deep One cities and colonies. There was, of course, Y’ha-Nthlei off the coast of New England; and quite separate from the prehistoric piles of the Pacific already mentioned, there were still several substantial colonies scattered about Ponape. There were, too, certain settlements in the region of the Tongatupo Hole whose origins were immemorial, while six thousand miles to the north there was an expansive outpost even in the frigid deeps of the Aleutian Trench. Another city lay at the edge of the south—eastern Atlantic Basin, and yet another off Sumatra in the Indian Ocean. There hardly existed a body of water on the surface of the entire planet which did not know the presence of the Deep Ones, or had not known it at some time or other in the dim and abyssal past.
Even the comparatively shallow waters of the Mediterranean had their share of Deep Ones, in the form of a colony dwelling at the bottom of a hole unfathomed by men. “Oh. yes,” Semple told me, “and they have been there since the beginning. You may rest assured that when Venus rose up from the waters near Paphos in Cyprus, men gazed upon a Deep One! She was that Aphrodite whose name they applied to the drugs which she distilled from the juices of certain conches, an art in which Deep Ones excel to this very day …”
At about this stage of my ‘education’ (I would guess that a week to ten days had passed since first Semple started working on me), I began to notice a peculiar and disturbing change taking place in the food that I was eating. As I have said, my diet was mainly of fish prepared in a variety of ways, but the quality of the food’s preparation had been gradually declining—or, rather, it was the amount of preparation that was in question. Quite simply, my food was uncooked and reaching me half raw. However much this fact was disguised in presentation, still I could tell from the texture and the taste of the stuff that only the merest pretence of cooking was being made.
When I protested to Semple, he replied: “I shouldn’t make too much fuss, John Vollister. Next week you’ll be catching your own food, right here,” and he pointed to the sunken area of the tank, three—quarters full of sea water. “Fresh from the sea, my friend, rich and sweet and salty—so you’d better get used to the idea now!”
V: The Second Prisoner
When next he came to see me, Semple answered several questions that I had put to him from the first, all of which he had previously ignored. One of these was about the … creature? … I had seen on the nighted beach, which had pursued me like some gigantic, filthy slug on the night of my capture. It was, he told me, a shoggoth, a protomorphic slave of the Deep Ones, like a monstrous amoeba of tremendous strength and incredible adaptability, little more than a multi—purpose “engine” of the sort created in Predawn by the Great Old Ones to construct cities such as R'lyeh. According to Semple, several others of its kind were even now working in the Atlantic, building Ahu-Y’hloa in the depths of the ocean.
And I had been fortunate indeed, Semple further informed me, that the thing had not been given strict instructions in respect of unwanted visitors, for then I would most certainly have died, absorbed into the shoggoth, fuel for whichever alien fires drove the thing. As to why it had been there in the first place: that had been in the nature of an experiment, probably a mistake. Shoggoths did not make good watchdogs where human beings were concerned; they were better at their tasks of guarding R’lyeh’s sunken tombs or labouring beneath the sea under the direction of the Deep Ones.
As for the manlike batrachian who had dragged me into the sea: that had been my first meeting with an almost wholly aquatic Deep One, a being born, bred, and in the main confined to the sea. He was of that sort employed by the more truly amphibious Deep Ones as escorts to ocean—going vessels in their employ. As such and with several others of his kind, he had accompanied the boatload of conches during its voyage from “somewhere off Innsmouth” where the shells had been taken aboard to its destination at the place on the beach. The cargo of conches from Y'ha-Nthlei could not simply be unloaded into the sea near Ahu-Y’hloa (where eventually they were to perform their functions of cementing, polishing, and finishing the new buildings of that city), for they first required a very delicate form of ‘acclimatization’. This would involve their immersion in a special brine solution at a controlled temperature for some three weeks, after which they must be fed for a while with a variety of especially rich nutrients. That was why the shells had been unloaded from the boat to the building on the beach, where they now occupied the sunken area of one of the other tanks.
Furthermore, the molluscs had provided a delightful diversion in the diets of those at the beach headquarters, for they were indeed ‘a delicacy to the palates of the Deep Ones’, though ‘tainted’ was a word which Semple was no longer willing to use even in a derisory context. And it transpired that I myself had eaten of the flesh of the snail in a number of ‘salads’, but (as Semple pointed out) I had not seen fit to complain until recently, and even now not of the substance of my food but of its degree of preparation.
“Of course,” he had continued, “the conch is what you might like to call ‘a protected species’, for its reproductive cycle is very slow. But, as in the old times, still we ‘crop the slug with care’. You must consider yourself honoured that already you have tasted of its delicate flesh …”
The one thing that Semple would not disclose, no matter how often I might broach the subject, was the nature of the drugs which were still being given to me. Of them he would tell me no more than that they were “tranquillizers”, and that they were “merely a safety measure” under the influence of which I would remain comparatively flexible and incapable of any foolish or violent action against my captors. This was how he explained the purpose of such drugs, but even at that time I had my doubts. I did not believe he told the whole truth.
But in any case, that was all there was of revelations at that time, for on his next visit Semple restricted himself to my instruction in matters concerning the Deep Ones.
This time his subject was the pantheon of their religion, a fascinating rigmarole of myths as fanciful as anything in classical mythology. The basic theme was simply a repetition of what Sarah had already told me, but Semple’s version was so detailed as to preclude any possible suggestion of fakery. The thing had not been created for my benefit, but was obviously a cult of worship ancient as the hills. That is not to say that I was converted to the Cthulhu Mythos—on the contrary, I was not … not then—but while I myself did not believe, it was plain to me that my instructor did.
It is not
my purpose to reproduce all of the details here; I could probably fill an entire book with such information as was made available to me, and time simply will not allow for that. Instead, I shall simply present an abbreviated version of most of what I was told, all of which and more, according to Semple, might be discovered in books written by men of the surface world. They were not books which could readily be found in common public libraries, however, but usually in private collections (such as Semple’s own) or locked away in the more restricted archives of such institutions as the British Museum, the Widener Library, the Moscow State Hall of Antiquities, and the Bibliotheque Nationale.
Among many unlikely titles were several that stuck in my mind with an unshakeable persistence, and it later dawned on me that indeed I had seen one or two of them in Semple’s room. I mean such volumes as the Liber Ivonis, and Le Fe’s Dwellers in the Depths; but there were also many others with titles which were equally fascinating, such as Ludwig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Von Junzt, and the Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules. These books and others like them held the keys to the pantheon of the Great Old Ones myth cycle—that is, to the lists of gods attaching to it—or at least as much of the subject as had ever been known to land-dwelling man. They named Yog-Sothoth, “the all-in-one and one-in-all”, a Supreme Being high in the ranks of the pantheon who was coexistent with all time and conterminous in all space; and Ithaqua the Wind-Walker, a marvellous creature of air and space with the power to walk on the winds that blow forever between the worlds; and Shudde-M’ell, Lord of the Cthonians or Earth-deities, who dwells in the very bowels of the Earth, and many others of equally fantastic attributes.
And here I discovered at least one peculiar parallel with Man's own mythologies; for among lesser gods there was one Dagon, who must surely be that same Dagon or Oannes of the Phoenicians and Philistines, shown on ancient coins and carvings as being half man, half fish! When I mentioned this to Semple he seemed to lose patience with me, saying: