A Lonely and Curious Country (8 page)

I rounded a bend and then suddenly there was a curious taste, metallic and electric at the same time, and my skin began to itch. I passed by a cavernous industrial pipe and could somehow sense the lingering accumulation of lye and other chemical wastes that still leached into the waters. Irritated I kicked my thick legs and sped away from the area as fast as I could. Another bend in the river and suddenly my speed was increasing without any effort on my part. There was an odd sound in the water like a thousand tiny drums being beaten. It took me a moment but only that to realize I was approaching the falls, the three-tiered water fall that was the heart of Innsmouth. Slowing my movement I caught sight of a bridge pillar and latched on to it. Instinctively I had no fear of going over the falls, my body was resilient enough to resist the pressure of the deepest of seas, but consciously I was still just a man, one who needed to prepare himself for what was to come next.

I don’t know what possessed me to rise to the surface and observe my surroundings, but I did, and I immediately regretted it. There were soldiers on the bridge above me, and the one further down the river, and along the roads that ran on both sides. In the bright morning sun, the shadows of the bridges were all in the wrong places and offered no protection. They saw me just after I broke the surface. Guns went from shoulders to hands and took a bead on my position. There was a rifle crack, and then another. Something whizzed past my head and smashed into the stones beside me exploding fragments into the river around me. One grazed my shoulder, cutting deep and sending a wave of burning pain through my arm. I didn’t scream but instead reflexively sought the refuge of the deep water. They were yelling as I dove back under, and more rounds sped through the water around me.

I was immediately caught up in the current and whisked downstream. I hit a rock, and then something that wasn’t a rock, but rather a mesh of rope. There was a net across the river and I was suddenly caught in it, but not yet tangled. More gunfire. Even through the water I could hear the rifles cracking. I suppose they were shooting at the bulge I made in the net. I crawled my way across the webbing, searching for a way through. Suddenly the lines tensed and the net was being reeled in, with me in it. I was like a fish in a seine, but unlike a fish I knew how to escape from this trap, and had the strength and tools to do so. I slashed at the ropes and felt them cut beneath my claws. I slashed again, and again, desperate to escape the closing trap. Then with another cut the ropes broke and I tumbled out of the enclosure. As I fell into the water, bullets whizzing past me, I hit a submerged rock worn smooth from ages of rushing water and sand, but my wounded arm throbbed from the impact. I rolled over the edge and down the falls. The pool below caught me and swirled my wounded body around before shooting me out and down over a second plunge. I barely had time to recover before I was caught in the speeding waters and shot down the river over a third drop. This time I was able to avoid any rocks and regain my bearings. I pushed off the hard bottom of the pool and sped down river.

In the lower part of the river I could taste the freshwater of the Manuxet mixing with the brine of the harbor. I swam forward and with each stroke I could sense more of the open sea and less of the river. I cleared the river mouth and moved quickly through the harbor. The small bay tasted of diesel and rotted wood and dead fish and something else, something chemical that reminded me of gunpowder and dynamite. It only took a few strokes to propel myself across the harbor and out of the inlet. In the open ocean all the smells and tastes of the Manuxet faded, and soon all I was left with was the feeling of the sea as it passed through my gills, and the voice in my head calling me, urging me forward, louder than ever.

I swam east towards the rocks that marked Devil Reef. The sun was bright and flooded the surface layers of the sea with light. Around me small fish, cod and blues, swam gracefully in the clear green waters. A bull shark, presumably drawn by my blood, stalked me from a distance, circling, looking for a weakness it could exploit. When it finally decided to move off and leave me alone I felt a wave of relief pass through me. Not that I couldn’t have taken the animal, he was no match for me, but I had no desire for a confrontation. I had had enough of conflict, of doctors, of nurses, of soldiers, and of boats that suddenly were coming for me. I could hear their engines and the men screaming orders. Soldiers were searching the waters for me. I slipped under the surface and dove deep, leaving the sunlit world of soldiers behind.

The water was thick with oxygen and my gills felt rich as it ran past them. I sped down with powerful kicks and not a backward glance. I had thought that the descent from the surface to Y’ha-nthlei would be a phantasmagorical transition from one world to another, but the only thing that happened as I fell into the deeper ocean was that the sun slowly died and the darkness grew. I went deep, deep beneath the surface, down past where the fish danced in the last dim light from above. Beyond that there were still fish, but they were no longer joyous creatures of the shining sea, but rather dark brooding things with huge mouths that lumbered through the thick dark waters and menaced each other with long predatory investigations. As I fell, there began a kind of precipitation, not unlike snow in appearance, but entirely unlike it in composition. This strange pale fall was neither rain nor snow, but the accumulated particles from the upper levels which, for one reason or another, had lost their buoyancy and were now slowly falling through the abyss. It was a detrital rain, composed of plankton, algae, plants and even the carcasses and bones of fish. We all fell together, and I hoped that I was more than just another piece of decayed refuse raining down in the dark.

The great flat expanse of the ocean floor, covered with rock and silt was a desolate place, filled with batrachian beasts that could barely be called fish. Huge black shapes that were little more than mouths with fins hunted chimerical horrors that lay on the floor sifting nourishment from the rain of decay. Horned and hungry crabs picked through the carcass of an ancient whale, while great gelatinous worms bored through the bones with grinding teeth. I dared not pause but instead followed that siren call in my head and angled myself to fall below the surface and into the secret trench in the sea floor that seemed to crack the very world itself. I cut through the waters like I belonged there, like I had been made to dwell and sail in the dark and empty depths of the sea.

I was there, floating in an ocean that was both abyssal and subterranean, when I first caught site of the lights of the sub-aquaeous metropolis of Y’ha-nthlei. My cousin described it as many-columned, but more appropriately it would be said to be many-arched, for great sets of arcs rose up from the center line and the outer edges bearing great tattered sails that billowed in the current. Terraced palaces covered in barnacles, corals, and twisting fronds of things that were only semi-vegetative surrounded the central row of arches and flapping tissues. Outside, beyond the fringes of the city, giant shadows moved about, ancient things, that I knew to be kin, descendants of our ancestors Father Dagon and Mother Hydra. These things were old even when my great-great-grandmother Pth’thya-l’yi was young, and I knew she had been born nearly three hundred millennia ago, and had dwelt here in Y’ha-nthlei for the last eighty-thousand years. They were to be feared, these things of age, and avoided, for they were terrible and capricious.

A score of shadows rose up out of the city to greet me, and as they did the voice in my head, that whispering siren call that had haunted me for so many years finally ceased. Instead my mind was filled with information, I was being spoken to, informed, and educated. These were the Daughters of Y’ha-dra, spawned by Pth’thya-l’yi through parthenogenesis. They were sisters, but more than that because they were genetically identical, not only to one another but to their parent as well, one of the primordial Deep Ones Y’ha. It was from her title “dra” meaning “virgin” that men had come to know her as Hydra. Only her daughters perpetuated that name, mostly amongst men, such as those in Innsmouth, they had cultivated as worshippers. Here in her city of Y’ha-nthlei she was known only as Y’ha, and I quickly learned that nthlei was the word for those bound to her service. I found this sudden influx of knowledge invigorating, and was reminded of Greek place names which often were bound to a particular deity, such as Athens and Hermopolis.

Pth’thya-l’yi was amongst the Daughters, and she came to me and took me by the hand and led me down into Y’ha-nthlei. We floated down to a great open space at one end of the city. Around us, many other Deep Ones had gathered, all were female, though how I knew this I can’t explain, but I knew it to be true. There in the floor of the city, located in the center of a slow descending grade, was a great reflecting pool, yards and yards apart, I thought it was glass, but as I stared at the glossy darkness I could see liquid running across its surface. It was strange to see one fluid of a different color and density entrapped in that great circular pool while all about me the waters of the ocean itself flowed.

The Daughters, my ancestor included, intoned some ancient choral, and soon were joined in by those masses that lurked about the edges. It was a queer thrumming noise, generated from within the bodies of my companions, and filled the space around me with a fantastic, electric vibration. I realized immediately that I was participating in an initiation rite, one that had likely played out repeatedly over the vast epochs the city had existed. Thrilled that I was so quickly accepted, I allowed my limbs to be gripped by the Daughters and paraded above the black semi-translucent pool such that all gathered could see me. Any sense of modesty or shame had been lost, for there was no such concept amongst these things. The fear and humility involved with one’s own body was discarded, left behind on the surface as the human construct and taboo that it was.

At some signal that I did not note, my retinue moved away from the pool, and I, not knowing what else to do, followed. We proceeded down the length of the city moving past the great arches wrapped in billowing material and down along a ridge where similar arches had either been destroyed or never completed. Beyond these, the structure of the city grew thin, though in the distance I could see another set of furled arches, which seemed even larger. I thought perhaps these massive spires were our destination, but instead we floated off to one side and skimming over the surface of the great barnacled city we ducked beneath a huge tubular outcropping that seemed to connect two different lobes of the metropolis.

There in the shadow of this weird bridge I was ushered into a kind of cave or tunnel, which seemed not only artificial, for it was symmetrical, but also natural for the walls seemed to be composed of imperfect layers and veins. The chamber inside was vast and throbbed with a strange rhythmic vibration, the water was strangely warm and carried with it a peculiar scent that reminded me of blood and other bodily fluids. Across the floor a trail of globular cysts lay imbedded in semitransparent, gelatinous ooze that trailed off to the walls of the cavern which were lined with row upon row of telamons, sculpted male figures that functioned as columnar supports.

If only that had been true.

Pth’thya-l’yi pointed at the carvings and I heard the word nthlei. I saw that there was a vacancy amongst those grim statues of amphibious men, and toward it I was ushered. As we drew closer I saw the details on those strange carvings. I saw the fine scales, the muscular arms, the veins that ran beneath, the blood that coursed there. I also saw the queer tendrils that seemed to hold them in place against the wall, the same tendrils that slowly unfurled from the wall and reached out from the vacancy and groped in my direction. In my mind I suddenly understood the true meaning of the word nthlei.

As that terrible realization suddenly dawned on me and I recognized where I was and why. I recognized the horrific position I had been led to and was expected to voluntarily submit. I broke free from the gentle grip of my escort and fled toward the strange cleft that we had passed through. My captors seemed startled and I somehow knew that in the eons that this ceremony had been carried out, that no one had ever rejected the honor. The Daughters of Y’ha-dra had been entombing their male brethren in this place for more than a hundred thousand years, and none had ever rebelled.

Until now. Until me.

They didn’t know what to do. My reaction was unprecedented and so I was allowed to escape. Through the fathoms I sped, desperate to reach the surface and escape the fate I seemed destined to. I looked back only once, and that was enough to drive me to move faster, for what I saw, what I finally comprehended, what I finally understood about Y’ha-nthlei was enough to drive me over the edge. If I wasn’t mad before, surely this revelation was enough to accomplish the task and set me firmly into the mantle of lunacy.

I broke the surface and discovered that the sun had set and the moon now reigned in the sky. That dim light glistened off of the surface and illuminated the rocks of the Devil Reef. In the distance the village of Innsmouth glowed weakly, barely breaking the darkness that marked where the night was eclipsed by the land itself. Hours earlier I had had but one desire, to leave the world of the surface behind, now it beckoned to me and seemed my only salvation. With every effort I struggled against tide and time to lessen the distance between myself and that decayed refuge. I feared that in an instant the sisters would overtake me and drag me back down into the darkness, down through those black abysses.

That was hours ago. It had taken them time, but once the Daughters had recovered from their shock they had no choice but to pursue me. Their voices called to me in my head, searching, pleading, and even commanding me to return. With each passing moment those voices are growing stronger, which I can only assume means that they are getting closer. My time is short. The trail I left from the harbor cannot have gone unnoticed. Either the soldiers or my ancestors will have found it by now. My discovery is inevitable.