Necronomicon: The Wanderings of Alhazred (36 page)

he only creatures feared by the spawn of Cthulhu are the shoggoths. Since the spawn cannot be killed in the ordinary manner of death, it is interesting to consider why they should fear anything in this world. It is their belief that the shoggoth has the power of causing not merely the dissolution of their composited bodies but of their essence as well; for they hold that the shoggoth consumes heat and vitality as well as flesh, making them a part of its own substance. In the words of our own race, a shoggoth is an eater of souls. The star spawn of Cthulhu assert that once consumed by a shoggoth, they are unable to reshape their forms and are forever lost in oblivion.

These terrible monsters, which no man and no other intelligent creature in this world has ever seen, are supposed to have been created by the Elder Things as their laborers during their early history on the earth, when they constructed their great cities. Later they served as the warriors who defended the cities against the coming of the Old Ones, and had it not been for the vast numbers of the spawn of Cthulhu and the other creatures created by the Old Ones for the sole purpose of making war, they would surely have prevailed with their limitless strength and imperviousness to injury. They are fabled to be deathless and self-renewing, so that no matter how many aeons a shoggoth has lived, it is as strong and fierce as it was at its creation; nor do they ever forget, but store all the events of their ageless lives within their substance. It is said by the spawn beneath the library that a shoggoth never makes the same mistake twice.

How is it possible to describe a creature that has no form of its own, but which takes on whatever shape or texture or color it requires for its purposes of the moment? The spawn says it is like a clear bladder filled with water in which float sparkling flecks that resembling swirling stars and other bodies that are more cloudy and indistinct. It moves by sliding itself forward on its belly after the manner of a snail, for it has no permanent limbs. However, if it wishes it can in a matter of moments grow legs and arms, and can even walk upright like a man when it suits its whim. To conceal itself, it can transform its watery hide into the rough darkness of stone and merge itself into the boulders or rocky cliffs around it.

To see its way as it goes forward on its belly, it extends eyes from its bulk; to hear the approach of its foes, it creates ears for itself. Shoggoths have no need for a mouth, since they consume their food by surrounding it with their soft bodies and absorbing it, after secreting an acidic juice that dissolves their prey and renders it fluid within its own skin. However, at times they project mouths for purposes of communication, and when they speak it is in the piping tones of the Elder Things, which sound like the notes of a flute. In the beginning of time the Elder Race created shoggoths without minds, but over the aeons they became more and more intelligent, until they acquired the ability to speak their thoughts in the Elder tongue. This caused the Elder Race to become afraid of their slaves, and to banish them from their remaining cities. They could no longer control the things they had made, for pain alone is not an effective tool of subjugation against deathless creatures with minds that can think and plan.

The shoggoth is reputed to be the strongest creature that has ever existed upon the earth. By causing its soft and shapeless body to flow under great stone blocks, it was able to lift them and place them with precision in the walls of the cities of the Elder Things. What would take a thousand men days to move could be lifted by a single shoggoth in moments. They never tire or require rest from their labors but toil both beneath the moon and the sun until their task is completed. They fear nothing, but fire causes them discomfort so that they withdraw their soft flesh from flames. Whether fire can kill them, the spawn of Cthulhu beneath the monastery of the magi did not know, since no shoggoth has ever been seen to die in flames. The Elder Race controlled them with the power of their minds until the shoggoths grew minds of their own. They used lightning bolts to punish them, though how these were generated the star spawn does not reveal.

It states that when the Old Ones came through the portals and shaped bodies for themselves from the substance of our world, the shoggoths were few in number, and scattered across the earth, and this alone allowed the armies of Cthulhu to triumph over them, for by surrounding each shoggoth and overwhelming it with numbers it was possible after great toil to destroy it in a way that did not permit it to restore its body. This was done by reducing it to small shreds and scattering these bits far across the land, rendering them incapable of coming together due to the distances of separation and the intervening obstacles. The spawn does not know whether the shoggoths destroyed in this manner were eventually able to reconstitute their bodies, but only that it kept them from reforming long enough for the Old Ones to triumph in their war against the Elder Race.

Anyone hearing this tale and doubting it may be forgiven his suspicions, for how can such a creature ever have existed? Its nature is in monstrous discord with all the laws of heaven, and in defiance of the four elements and their way of mingling. Surely it must be only a fable of the Old Ones and their spawn, passed down from the primal times before our race arose from the clay, even as common men pass down myths of gods and heroes that a scholar knows to be untrue. And for one reason alone is its falsehood certain, that if such a creature as the shoggoth walked the earth and swam the seas in ages past, it would in present times be the lord and ruler of all other creatures, for what living thing could stand to oppose it?

It is true that travelers have spoken over their wine of glimpsing this strange creature in deep caverns beneath the mountains, or in the ruins of vast cities, but it is apparent to the judicious hearer of these tales that they are no more than visions of the hashish pipe or of the black tar of the poppy, the smoke of which makes dreams appear to a man awake. Always the shoggoth is seen by a man alone, and always in the shadows and moving away from view even as it is looked upon. Such visions are no more real than the faces that come before us on the edge of sleep when first the eyes are closed.

It is undeniable that great wonders may be found in the world beyond the imagining of dull merchants and farmers, but that such an abomination as the shoggoth could dwell in the shadows yet not openly reveal its limitless power is an insult to reason that cannot be endured. The very thought of it makes the sweat trickle down the spine and the heart drum with fear, for were such a creature to be, nothing could oppose its malice save mighty Cthulhu himself, and he lies dreaming his own strange dreams in R’lyeh.

he thing trapped within the iron sphere beneath the library has a trick of which the traveler must be wary, especially if he is a man of weak will whose mind is accustomed to gaze inward upon memories and scenes of the imagination. In this condition of waking dream, if ever his concentration wanders from the creature, he will be caught as is a fly in the web of a spider, unable to escape. The spawn of Cthulhu has not a hundredth part of the power of the mind of the dreaming god that is its master, yet it is skilled in all forms of thought magic. It knows a formula by which it can transfer the essence of its awareness into the body of another living being, while the mind of that creature is kept within its own vacated translucent bulk.

In this way it has secretly studied the defenses of its enemies by entering the body of a monk weak of will who was set to tend it, then wandering about the compound of the monastery, sampling the books in the library, examining the weapons created to war against the Old Ones, and searching for weaknesses in the defenses of the magi. It attempted the same trick upon a traveler who came in secret to its prison to question it, but he was a necromancer and his will was not weak. The traveler recognized the intrusion of the alien mind and repulsed it with the Elder Sign and the invocation of words of power that set a shield before his mind that the spawn could not pierce.

The solidity of the shield surprised the creature and caused it to lower its guard upon its thoughts. The traveler saw the memories of the possession of the monk, a young Greek named Adrian, who retained no awareness of his expulsion from his own body but merely seemed to sleep all the while the spawn walked inside his shell. He saw the purpose of the spawn, its deep guile and endless patience. Fearless in its immortality, it watches and waits and plans the downfall of the Sons of Sirius. All this he perceived in the moment the monster’s mind lay open, before it slammed and locked the gateway of images.

Sending out his thoughts to the iron sphere, he threatened that he would make known to Rumius, the leader of the order, the possession of the young monk by the Cthulhu spawn unless it taught him the technique of exchanging minds between bodies. Its reluctance was so great, it could be felt as an itching upon the skin, but at last it agreed, perceiving no other way to retain its freedom to wander the monastery compound in the body of the monk.