by Brian Lumley
Transfixed with horror, clutching at the balcony to maintain my balance, I could only watch. God help me, I could not turn away as the thing happened!
Graham’s form, stumbling down the old path, hands tied behind him, had just started to topple forward into a second fall as the shoggoth enveloped him. One moment he was there—and in the next there was only the pulsing, blackly glistening distorted shape of the monstrosity from the sea. Gagged, he had not even been able to scream as the thing took him …
And now there came that subdued roar I remembered so well—the firing of the shoggoth’s internal engines—and the opening of its vile exhaust orifice, and then … then.
That fine, black jet of stinking mist that shot upward high into the air—a spray of human debris—the atomized essence of Graham Lane!
Finally, sufficient strength and movement returned to my nerveless fingers to enable me to switch off the beam from my flashlight, and then for a long while I tottered in dumb oblivion high above the scene of Graham’s awful murder. Slowly, very slowly, my senses returned to me, by which time all was silent and the shoggoth stench had disappeared. The whole episode had been like a nightmare which was now ended, except that I knew it was no nightmare.
Staggering back inside and locking the windows, I felt a weird and utterly unnatural excitement rising in me: the crazy urge to tear down my sturdily erected defences, throw back the bolts, and rush outside to do battle with those who sought me. Rapidly, the wildest of schemes occurred to my fevered brain, insane urges that sent me raging through the house until, at the last, I recognized the source of this new threat and began to combat it.
This was surely a manifestation of my emerging madness, no doubt brought on by Graham Lane's hideous death, proof that my drug-damaged psyche was rapidly deteriorating. In just such a fury I had crushed the life out of Semple; and, when escaping from the place on the beach, I had also felt a lunatic urge to swim out to sea and give myself into the hands of the eternal tides. A similar madness had crept over me when I had spoken to Sarah on the telephone, which had made me lust after her life in a murderous fury. In short, the mad emotions I felt within me were a direct result of my metamorphosis—and of my failure to take the pills which alone might have saved my sanity.
When the truth dawned on me, I went straight to the bathroom and doused my throbbing head. And a few minutes later I was myself again. Then, putting to the back of my mind as best I might the death of the youth who had tried to help me, I returned to this, my manuscript, and scribbled frantically until well after midnight.
It was then, just as I was beginning to nod once more over my work, that I heard a peculiar sound issuing from somewhere below. My ears were, of course, attuned to the house, to each familiar creak of settling timbers and every quiet gurgle of the plumbing, so that any extraneous sound was immediately apparent to me. Quickly, I went down into the darkness of the ground floor, silently inspecting all my fortifications and listening for any repetition of the sound. I was in the library, checking my interior work on its tall, narrow-framed windows, when I was shocked into immobility by a recurrence of the sound, this time from close at hand. Someone was working on one of the windows beyond the barricade with a glass-cutter!
Silently I made my way to the kitchen, found a meat cleaver, and returned to the library. Knowing the house intimately, I had not once resorted to the use of lights. Only the light in my study continued to burn, and doubtless my adversaries believed me to be up there right now, fast asleep. Well, they were in for an unpleasant surprise. I seated myself, placed the cleaver in my lap, and waited.
The luminous dial of the library clock showed the hour to be just after 1 a.m. when the first board was sufficiently loose to be carefully removed out into the night. I stood up then and moved to one side, careful to keep out of sight as a light was flashed into the library from the darkness outside. A breeze was coming off the sea, and with it a powerful smell of deep ocean that was far from right. There were Deep Ones out there, for a certainty, and to prove the matter beyond dispute there came into view the hand that galvanized me into action. It was mottled and webbed, that hand, with a webbing far more pronounced than my own meagre growth, so that I knew its owner to be a fully developed Deep One.
In the hour or so that I had sat there in silence, the rage within me had once again reached terrifying proportions, so that I was no longer wholly in control of myself when I made my move. The hand had just commenced to explore the edge of the gap formed by the missing board, was groping and pushing here and there, when I chopped at the fingers with my cleaver. Immediately, there came an agonized howl of pain as the hand was withdrawn—but three fingers and the tip of the thumb stayed inside the house with me!
Then, laughing demoniacally and almost dancing with crazed glee, I tossed the grisly digits out after their owner before taking up an even stouter board and nailing it into place. This time I used long spikes of nails which nothing less than a large hammer would be able to dislodge. I had no fear that the Deep Ones would use a shoggoth’s great strength to break in: that would have caused a great deal of damage which might not be too easy to explain away should anyone stumble upon the house in the near future, before repairs could be effected.
Finished at last with the work on my breached barricade, I put on the lights and spent a further hour nailing up more boards in the other lower-level rooms. Whatever else happened, I didn’t intend the Deep Ones to take me until my work on my manuscript was done.
At some time during these frantic physical exertions of mine, the madness went out of me, so that as I finished I discovered myself sane once more and weary from exhaustion. But finally, satisfied at last that the house was once again as secure as I could make it, I left the ground floor lights on and returned silently to my study. Let them believe that I was still downstairs; perhaps it would keep them away from the house.
And so I spent the rest of the night writing—and often as not nodding—at my desk, until the early morning sun crept into my study to tell me that I had survived to face another day. I threw some water on my face to freshen up, then went out on to the balcony. They were still there: the big car, the picnickers, the watcher at the top of the steps. But none of them was near the house. That suited my purposes perfectly, and I made a quick breakfast before preparing to take a shower.
Then it was that I discovered a further development of the siege, one which would have very serious consequences for me. It was simply this: that the water from the shower was flowing with much less than its usual force.
I shut the water off at once, put on my dressing-gown, and went up into the attic. It was as I had feared: the Deep Ones had somehow contrived to shut off my water supply; no water was reaching the house from the outside. How long, then, before they also interfered with the electricity supply? My answer came at midday when I tried to make coffee. The game was over; now they were in earnest. And yet … if I could only make it through one more night, I knew I could finish my work. And indeed that work had now become an obsession with me, so that as the afternoon grew towards evening I worked ever faster.
I could not possibly hope to keep this up without sleep, however, and I found myself snatching the old half hour now and then, always jerking into wakefulness at the slightest sound. Then I would get up from my desk, go to the bathroom, and thoroughly douse my face and gills, always carefully turning off my rapidly diminishing water supply when I was finished.
At about 6 p.m., I was startled from fitful sleep by the persistent ringing of my telephone. Not only that, but my study light was on. For some reason, the Deep Ones had temporarily restored my power—but not, I later discovered, my water. Before answering the phone, I had sufficient wit to dash downstairs and switch on my electric kettle. It had dawned on me that when the call was finished it might also signal the end of my electricity. So, if I could only keep the caller busy on the wire for a few minutes, I should have some coffee!
It was Sarah on the telephone, and her
voice was now almost unrecognizable: “John listen—and please don’t put the phone down—you must listen to me. The Deep Ones are very angry, John, and unless you’ll see sense they intend to take you by force. Surely you must know by now that you can’t win?”
“I can try,” I answered.
“John, don’t be a fool! There’s nothing left for you now among ordinary men. You’re finished with all that. Now it's you and I—both of us together—and the Deep Ones forever!”
“I'll kill myself first,” I told her, fighting back the rage that was rapidly building in me.
“But why? We’ll have each other, John, and even now it’s not too late for—”
“Sarah,” I cut her off, forcing myself to maintain a semblance of sanity, “it is too late. Much too late. I didn’t take the pills.”
There was a long pause, then: “Pills?” Her voice was hushed, a cracked whisper. “What pills? Not the—”
“Yes, those pills—the ones that stop your poor damned victims from going mad. The ones that help them keep their mental equilibrium as the change accelerates. Semple told me all about them—but too late. I didn’t take them.”
“John—I’ll come to you,” she said, her altered voice full of desperation. “I'll come!”
“Not now, Sarah,” I told her. “Don’t come tonight. Not in the dark—not with the lights out—with the stench of the Deep Ones on you! If you do, I'll kill you! I’ll kill every damn one of you who puts his damn nose anywhere near me! Do you hear? Do you hear?” And I slammed the handset back into its cradle. Damn every last one of the stinking, hell-spawned devils!
I went stumblingly to the bathroom, my rage seething within me, caught my reflection in the mirror as I splashed my face with water—then ripped the mirror from the wall! And that was the signal for me to go on a rampage of destruction right through the house. I overturned chairs and tables, brought down shelves of cut crystal which had taken me years to collect, ripped pictures from walls, and tore down curtains until at last, as the mental fever began to burn itself out (at least for the moment), I found myself in the kitchen. The water in the kettle was still hot. Shaking like a leaf in a gale, dizzy and weak from my uncontrollable excesses, I made coffee and shakily carried the jug and a cup back upstairs to my study.
Then, as dusk began to settle in and the light started to grow dim, I remembered a box of candles long ago pushed to the back of a drawer in the kitchen. I had bought them in the village months ago when a fault had developed in the house's wiring. I went back downstairs and found them, eight of them, lighting two and placing them strategically in my study to give a maximum of light. At the same time, I primed and brought up a blowtorch I'd once used in paint—stripping; it might come in useful, if only as another source of light.
Having made what preparations I could before the onset of night, I decided to trust to luck and snatch an hour’s sleep. I set the alarm clock and stretched out on my bed, where exhaustion soon overtook me …
Something woke me from a nightmare of sinking endlessly into black waters. Sweating profusely, remembering what had gone before, I started up and stared at the luminous dial of the alarm clock. 11.35? What had happened? I couldn't believe my eyes!
Snatching up the clock, I shook it angrily before noting that the alarm mechanism had jammed. Obviously, the fault was mine: I had over wound the thing! I tossed it down and went through to my study where one of the candles still guttered in its saucer. The tiny wick was floating in a little pool of wax. Immediately, I lit another candle, then sat down nervously to wait for a recurrence of whatever it was that had awakened me.
I didn’t have long to wait.
No sooner was I seated than there came fumbling sounds from outside, small furtive noises that only just reached me from the other side of the house. I went to the bathroom, which is on that side, and carefully, quietly opened the window a few inches. An almost overpowering odour at once wafted up from below, driving me back from the window in horror and disgust! There must be an entire gang of Deep Ones out there to create a stench like that—but what were they up to?
I closed the window, took up my cleaver, and made my way silently downstairs to the kitchen. A side door led from the kitchen into the garage, and by my judgement that was where the Deep Ones had gathered. But what could they be doing? The garage had no windows, and its exterior door was of stout metal. Surely they would not be looking there for a way in?
I opened the door to the garage—and literally staggered in the hideous rush of vile gasses that immediately poured out to fill the kitchen! Although the batteries of my flashlight were almost exhausted, still I had thought to bring it with me. Holding my nose against the stench, I put down my cleaver, took the flashlight from the pocket of my dressing-gown, and flashed it briefly about the untidy interior of the disused room. It was exactly as I had last seen it, and—
No, not exactly the same, for there was a sound: a trickling as of some oily liquid. That monstrous stench—the trickling sound—and a motion! I had seen something move as I flashed my dim beam across the room. Holding the flashlight tightly, trembling so badly that I could barely control my movements, slowly I swung the beam back to the wide metal door. A slow, thickly glutinous trickle of dark—substance—was entering through the keyhole in the door and forming a small pool on the concrete floor.
Silently stepping over old boxes and cartons and skirting a pile of unused boards, I approached the door and knelt to watch this filthy stuff filter into the garage. It was shiny black and full of the same evil smell which so offended me; indeed, it was the source of that smell. Was it inflammable, I wondered? Did the Deep Ones intend to burn me out? I hadn’t thought they would dare anything so extreme. Any subsequent investigation would surely lead to—
A hideous suspicion had entered my mind, and before I could consciously stop myself I had put out a finger to dab it at the edge of the small puddle of goo. It was warm, sticky, and it clung to my finger as if … alive!
I snatched my finger back, saw that the outer layers of skin had been removed from it—dissolved away—and, mouth agape, turning my eyes once more to the pool of noxious matter, I saw … saw that it was forming a little hump, a gelatinous stalagmite that grew up inches from the floor even as I watched, and formed—formed—an eye!
Great God in heaven, it was a shoggoth they had out there, one of their protomorphic “machines”! And it was pouring itself into my garage like pus from some cosmic sore!
For a moment the vile trickling paused as that single eye gazed at me, then the loathsome orb melted back into its elementary slime and the flow continued at a redoubled rate. I fled upstairs, uncaring now of any noise I might make, back to my lighted study where I cast about for a way to drive the shoggoth out into the night.
Almost at once my eyes lighted upon the primed blowtorch. Would that work, I wondered? God!—it must work! If there was one thing that the horror in the garage could not stand against, surely that thing would be heat. Oh, I knew well enough that these monsters could generate tremendous heat within themselves (they would need that facility, for it’s an extremely cold world on the bed of the ocean), but this small pool, this tendril of living matter—it must surely be vulnerable.
I rushed back downstairs, through the kitchen and into the garage, crossing to the door and kneeling beside the now rippling and lumpy pool of loathsomeness. Quickly I struck a match to the blowtorch and pumped the flame to a roaring lance of invisible heat. Faster still the goo poured in, and more purposeful the agitation in the ever—widening pool. Two eyes formed this time, rearing up to peer at me—just as I turned the blowtorch on them!
Instantly a mephitic cloud of steam rose up from the pool, obscuring everything as I covered my nose and mouth with one hand while directing the blowtorch with the other. Suddenly I felt about my legs the whipping lash of something that burned like acid, and through a momentary gap in the shrivelling pool of shoggoth tissue I saw writhing pseudopods of frenziedly thrashing slim
e. Then, accompanied by an utterly unearthly shriek of agony from beyond the door—a sound which neither human nor any animal throat, nor any mechanical device known to man, might make—the remaining thread of tissue was withdrawn through the keyhole and I was left playing the blowtorch on an area of stained, scorched cement.
Once more I had won, and in so doing had given myself the time necessary for the completion of my manuscript. I went back upstairs and splashed myself all over with life-giving water; then, as soon as my nerves were sufficiently calmed, I returned to my desk and to this, my work, which was then well over three-quarters completed …
That was last night, almost twenty-four hours ago, and it was the last attempt of the Deep Ones to drive me from my home. In any case, they had probably known that I could not hold out much longer. My guess is that they were simply attempting to “save me from myself”, from my threat to commit suicide. I had never intended to do so in the first place, but they didn’t know that.
This morning, as the sun came up, I tried to doze a little, only to discover that my nightmares were now so monstrous that sleep was no longer possible. And later, Sarah phoned to tell me that she would come at noon.
She came, bringing with her the conch that had first introduced me to the horror. She brought both the shell and the answers, at last, to those few remaining questions which still baffled me; answers that now fit together to complete the puzzle.
I did not kill her as I had threatened, but instead put away my manuscript, took down the boards that barred her entry, and made her as welcome as I could. The madness was off me, and only a great weariness remained. It was the weariness of defeat, the knowledge that I could not possibly win the whole game, and that my only hope for personal survival lay with the Deep Ones.