The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1 (29 page)

But when I asked what
they
were, he ranged off into incoherency, his voice fading into a whisper so soft I had to lean forward to catch his words—a nearly inaudible
“tek … li … tek … li … tek … li …”
—before his manner abruptly changed and, blind eyes wide, he began screaming. Stunned, deafened, I fell back as orderlies crowded into the room. But it was too late for either restraints or sedatives. He was well into his eighties, and the recounting of the tale to one who knew what questions to ask had proven too much for his heart.

But I knew the rest of the story already. The mining endeavor was a complete failure. Of several thousand men who had approached the mountains, perhaps a dozen had returned to the waiting ships, half-mad from cold, hunger, and frostbite. They had scrambled aboard, babbling half-sentences and lapsing into periodic catatonia, the silence of which was broken only by the same spasmodic syllables I had heard from the final survivor’s lips.

The rest … lost. Crushed. Frozen. Driven mad. Kalpaxia collapsed, all traces of its grandiose adventure buried, like the mountains, under ice and snow. Only chance had allowed me words with an eyewitness before death silenced him forever.

Brooding, I drove home … to be met at the door by Paul, who seemed utterly lighthearted. “Alf!” he exclaimed. “Core samples just in from that smoker in that new Peabody-Gustaf Deep! Amazing! Soapstone fragments …
with dots!
We are going down to have a look: young Pabodie has a submersible and some suits that will keep us in the pink even at ten thousand meters! All the Young Turks in oceanography got cold feet, so we old fogies will be taking the plunge. We will be breathing water, of course, though that should be second nature to you, coming from up Innsmouth way and all.” He paused, noticing my expression. “Why, what is wrong, Alf? You look like you have seen a ghost.”

* * *

The door of possibility had swung wide, but I found myself less than enthusiastic about crossing its threshold. Though I could hardly give complete credence to the ravings of a senile derelict, neither could I ignore the sense of conviction with which he had spoken … nor put down to simple physical law the madness and destruction of several thousand men.

I told Paul of my methods, my discoveries, and my concerns as preparations for the second Miskatonic University expedition to Antarctic waters went forward, and he, in turn, explained his own efforts. Far from being frozen into helpless inaction by inescapable contradictions, he had made his inquiries subtly, reading papers published in scientific journals and examining those sent to him for peer review, searching for signs that might point toward the lingering presence of his father’s discoveries. For where I had broken my möbius on the mountains, Paul had, rather, started off by assuming the reality of the Old Ones and their civilization, focusing on the part of their chronicles, as explicated by the cartouches documented by his father, that pointed to their continued existence amid scattered instances of geothermal warmth in the deep oceans.

Before and during our southward voyage on the research vessel
Okeanos Explorer
, graciously lent to us by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, we compared our notes and, for the first time, openly discussed William Dyer’s manuscript; doing so, however, in silence for the most part, not only for the sake of privacy, but also because Pabodie’s bathysuits, designed as they were around the breathing of oxygenated perfluorocarbons—the only practicable way to keep the human body alive at the immense depths we contemplated—would not allow for speech, and therefore, so as to be able to dispense with slates and keypads and other clumsy methods of communication, we trained ourselves in lip-reading, using our conversations as practice.

Pabodie’s microprocessor-controlled pumps worked admirably, taking upon themselves the unaccustomed effort of moving fluid in and out of our lungs in perfect synchronization with our diaphragms (though I confess that the initial liquid “breath” usually precipitated a certain panicked thrashing about), and our test dives, performed first in the safety of Boston harbor, and then again once our ship had reached the chill waters hiding the belching, hydrothermal vent located in the Peabody-Gustaf Deep a few hundred miles off the icebound coast of Antarctica, were a complete success. There seemed to be nothing that might impede our ten-thousand-meter descent for a firsthand look at the source of the warm water plume that, confined as it was by the narrowness of the deep, accounted for a rise in temperature of nearly three degrees centigrade at the ocean’s surface.

Ostensibly, our expedition was meant to “put Miskatonic back on the map” as a vibrant center of scientific research, not to mention going some way toward expunging the stain left by that very inconvenient episode of the 1930s. And publicly, at least, Paul Dyer was in this matter an enthusiastic supporter and participant. Privately, however, he had another agenda … as did I. But where mine was simple—proof or disproof—Paul’s was, I was certain, more complex, and possibly not one to be easily explicated. Was he intent upon clearing his father’s name? Did anybody even care about his father’s name anymore? After all, it had been almost eight decades by now: we all lived in a different world, and though Dyer père’s scandal might have shaken Miskatonic’s reputation down to the bedrock in the years before the Second World War, the twenty-first century had much more pressing concerns.

Paul could easily have let the matter go, dismissing, as had other scientists, the soapstone fragments with their curiously arranged dot patterns as mere chance juxtapositions of mineral debris and random pitting. But he had not let it go, and he, quite obviously, had pressing reasons for not letting it go. Reasons that (I realized as we prepared the deep-diving submersible and bathysuits for their first real trial at extreme depths) led to the addition, to the hull’s external equipment, of two high-explosive devices.

Paul followed my gaze to the mines. “I think they are down there,” was all he said.

They
again. What they? The star-headed monstrosities that had first tantalized and then disgraced his father? Perhaps. But my thoughts continually returned to what the old man in the locked ward had said about what had appeared when the mountains had fallen. Delusion, perhaps. The effect of combined shock and hypoxia … maybe.

Though we were packed into the tiny pilots’ sphere like a pair of potted shrimp, our descent proceeded uneventfully, and our navigation, following the upwelling plume of warm water, proved effortless. Within half an hour, the darkness outside the viewing ports was complete, and since we left our external lights switched off to conserve battery power, we could easily note the presence and at times disconcerting appearance of the more phosphorescent Abyssal Zone inhabitants.

Somewhat more disturbing, despite our absolute confidence in Pabodie’s designs, were the occasional creaks and groans as the syntactic-foam hull of the submersible adjusted to the steadily increasing pressure, responding to the growing stress by becoming all the stronger. The same adaptive material comprised much of the bathysuits as well, but I confess I still had qualms about venturing into the vast darkness and unimaginable pressures of ten thousand meters in what I could only consider to be a glorified set of fishing waders.

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.