The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1 (7 page)

“I tell you, Farley, these are a new form of the bacteria. Magnetosomes always face the Pole because of Earth’s geomagnetic field lines. They’re found in ancient rocks and fossils. So why shouldn’t they be in an ancient subterranean lake? Look at these bricks. They all face the Pole, Farley.”

“
No
. We’ve never seen bacteria massed into wobbling bricks and walls. Never. This is something else.”

“Sammy’s dead, isn’t he?” interjected Iris.

“If he’s alive, he’s part of this magnetosome structure,” said Dad. “I believe he’s in there, in those blocks, still alive in some weird new form. That’s what
I
believe.” He glared at Farley.

Why was he arguing with Farley about science? Didn’t it matter more that Sammy was dead?

Her tears welled, then froze. She would find Sammy, even if he was part of this magnetosome thing. Sammy was her only friend, and he was lost.

She jumped out of the tractor.

Dad yelled, “No, it’s too dangerous!” and grabbed her sleeve, but she wrenched free and he leapt after her. Farley stayed behind, too feeble to follow.

She’d swear the wind was hissing her name. She’d swear the wind was bellowing something that sounded like
shoggoth
. But it had to be her imagination,
right
?

All around her, globules popped. They spewed black tendrils that suckered to the ice and puffed up like snakes gorged on meat.

No, Iris wasn’t imagining this, definitely not.

A hiss of her name and now a bellow—

shoggoth
—

and fists of wind grabbed her hair and yanked her toward the bricks, and her mind filled with a searing shriek. Bullets of ice clattered against her parka and snow pants. She struggled against the storm, but the ice sheet slammed up and down, and she lost her footing and almost fell into a crevasse rimmed in sludge and foam. She gripped the sludge, her left cheek suctioned to the glue of foam, and it was like the fat on a cheap cut of beef. She recoiled, but her feet and ankles hung over the crevasse and she had to hold tight. Her cheek was inflamed as if by fire,

and as her skin ripped off the left side of her head,

and as the wind and the sludge stripped off her hair,

she screamed, “Daddy! Daddy!” but the wind snatched the words and whipped her around in circles. Spinning like a top right over the crevasse, and she could see way down below, the swarm of creatures—some round with horns, some that looked like skeletal fish, some elongated with too many eyes, and all of them, translucent and flickering in colors she didn’t know.

Could these be Farley’s demons? Were Dad’s magnetosomes and Farley’s demons the same?

The storm twirled her until she was dizzy, and still she cried “Daddy! Daddy!” but when she looked for him, he was gone. She lay, crumpled, upon the stack of blocks. The tractor wavered in the distance, outlined in charcoal against the white sheet of sky.

Her bones rattled and crunched, and oh yes, she
should
be dead, but here she was, a limp sack of skin filled with the debris of bones and organs and muscle.

What had happened to her? What
was
she?

She should still be scared, but she wasn’t. Instead, a calm settled over her. And still, the storm raged.

Farley couldn’t survive a storm like this, not on his own. He must be gone, and
this
made her sad.

The black bricks jiggled beneath her and swung her body so her face pointed toward the South Pole. She looked down. Saw bright blue eyes, the whites huge around tiny irises. Stark terror. Dad. But he wasn’t really there. Only his eyes, and they were plugged into the sides of the wall like light bulbs. She sensed him within the wall, and yes, he was alive but he was something different. Bricks, jelly, ooze, the froth of bacteria? Magnetosomes, that’s what she and Dad were now, hinged bricks, millions of magnetic bacteria all pointing south.

Dad had been a very good scientist. He was always right.

But Farley had been right, too. It could be said that these magnetic bacteria were demons of a sort. They infected and took over.

Iris rested gently at the top of the wall, her body composed of a hundred or more black bricks etched with foam. She smelled like rotting meat. It was pleasant. Almost relaxing. But for how long would she be amused? Eventually, this would grow tiresome.

At the bottom of the wall, something whimpered.

Sammy?

Iris struggled and finally wrenched her body from the top of the wall, and her hundred bricks ratcheted together by hinges fell to the ice surrounding the South Pole. As they hit, they instantly swung so all the bricks faced the Pole.

Sammy’s bricks were on the other side of the Pole, also facing it. She and Sammy stared at each other.

His eyes, brown velvet, soft and loving.

His body, hundreds of black bricks, jiggling happily as he saw her.

Did she see a tail wag there in the bricks? Did she?

She looked from Sammy to Dad and back again. They were together now, all three of them, as a family, the way things were supposed to be, right? Dad would have to pay attention to her. What else
could
he do?

She’d been able to split herself off the top of the wall. Perhaps the three of them could chink off and wander away together across the ice. But no, they always shifted south, didn’t they? They had no choice. They would always move toward the Pole.

Iris was still wondering what they would all do when the glacier lurched. A wide crack yawned in the ice, and now it was an open mouth with icicle teeth. Iris felt herself tumbling, and her bricks fell straight down through the ice sheet leading to Lake Vostok. It was like the crashing of a skyscraper, except all the bricks were alive, and hers were among thousands. She felt nothing, really, other than the grazing of icicles across her bricks and the cool swish of the air.

Iris splashed into the water. And there were creatures here she never could have imagined. It was lovely. And beside her was Sammy, and this was their new home. Her larger bricks split into millions of microscopic ones, hinged and swimming smoothly through the water. Sammy did the same, and together, they swam south.

But over there, a third creature flailed in horror, thrashed against its brethren, and tried desperately to swim north against the pack. It had the Habberstam eyes. Poor Dad, he just wasn’t a family man.

F
ROM THE
D
IVISION OF
S
TEALTH
A
RCHAEOLOGY TO
D
R
. K
YU
K
IM
, Your Eyes Only, Class. Top Secret:

On October 20, 2011, a roughly cylindrical artifact of unknown metal, pentagonally five-sided in cross section, its outer surfaces imprinted with the dot-cluster writing of the Elder Culture, was found by DSA classification team 23, in the Eastern Quadrant Elder Ruins, Antarctica. Retro-analysis hypothesizes that the artifact is an electronic telepathy device, enhanced by sound recording and playback. Attached to the artifact by rubber band was a scribbled note in a handwriting thought to belong to the geologist William Dyer, who returned to the Antarctic on one additional occasion after his second visit to the so-called “Mountains of Madness.”

The legible part of the note reads, “Final return to Antarctic ruins, encounter with Elder One—the creature applied this device from earlier phase of civilization. You’ll hear my voice but it is not, ultimately, I speaking; the Elder One has simply used my mind for telepathic translation so as to [water damage has erased the remainder].”

The artifact, when activated by a flow of electricity, produced sound, a playback that seems to be a recording, transcribed here. The recording gives the listener the distinct impression that William Dyer is telepathically channeling a narrative provided by an Elder Thing, a.k.a. a “Great Old One”:

* * *

I never anticipated being wakened by a blade—by vivisection. Even after my body had been shifted, transported, and exposed to much colder temperatures, I continued my trance. Reluctant to emerge from my trance of suspension, in which I’d been immured for immemorial ages, I slept onward despite the interference of the pink primates—until the blade wielded by the intruder began to saw away at my skin. We evolved to be not only beautiful, but tough as tree bark, our people; still he persisted, and broke through, digging ever deeper into my flesh with his cold, unrelenting knife-edge, gouging and probing. The exquisite agony, the sheer unthinkable intrusion of it, burst the bubble of my dream. When I opened my eyes he made a pathetic squalling noise and backed away. My tentacles lashed about his forelimb, and I snatched the edged probe from him and gave him a taste of his own vivisection. He did not survive it.

If he’d only left me in slumber! Had I awakened in my own good time I would have treated him more kindly. He was descended from some of our creations, after all. Abandoned, the primates developed without guidance, and he knew no better. Tragedy upon tragedy might have been averted if he’d left me to my limitless contemplation in the dark place where I lay rooted, tranced in dormancy, deep under the polar crust of this world….

I know now that this world has circled the sun millions of times since first my people came here. I should explain that I did not come to this world with our pioneers—I was spored here, gestated on this world, after the wars reduced our numbers, the diminution making reproduction necessary. I long to see the homeworld—but it seems unlikely now. The art of traveling between worlds has been lost to those of us who survive on this outpost. It’s true that we can
prepare
ourselves to travel in the great void; we can increase the density of our inward pockets of hydrogen and helium, so that we rise up and up; we can unfurl our dazzling wings and take the energies of the sky within them and so move on into space. But to open the portals through which we travel the interstellar gulfs—to enter the tunnels through space itself, wending between star systems—that method is lost to us. Nor do any live, to my knowledge, who can locate the homeworld—who know clearly where it lies. Still, the history-murals give hints. Perhaps someday I will try to find that storied paradise….

Hoary eons have I lived already—and re-lived, in my dormancy. The dreams of my people are not the fancies that I perceive yours to be; instead, they are the revisiting of our lives and the lives of our ancestors, an exploration of the genetic wisdom hidden within our birthing spores.

So vast an account kept me amazed, hypnotized with its epic intricacy. It is an inspiring odyssey to contemplate, from the seas to the swamps of that far-away homeworld; to the grand heights of the mountains and then to the skies, as we developed flight—and thence, when instinct told my ancestors it was time to move on to new worlds, to the Great Migration: soaring through intricate tunnels in space, past networks of effulgence, followed by the anticlimactic descent into the primeval seas of the world you now call “Earth.”

Our first residence was in the great, warm oceans of “Earth.” Only the most primitive organisms had developed, in those far-off days—my people took those simple one-celled organisms into engineering-skeins and shaped them, nudging their evolution. Over many millennia, we created a variety of creatures; we then let evolution have its head for a time until, judging that primitive primates would be the best clay from which we might sculpt simple servants, we created the ancestors of mankind. Some we allowed to roam, as part of our sprawling scientific experiment; others were turned to simple tasks. Who knew that one day, one of the descendants of those primitive primates would wrench me from sacred sleep with a cutting blade?

For the great tasks my people created the shoggoths [
note: approximate transcription of term
]. They were misbegotten, though we didn’t know it then. We made them too facile, too adaptable, and too swift. We used hypnotic suggestion to control them—which was too uncertain. Even so, they served us well for millennia—gorgeous creatures they were, fascinatingly odoriferous, their gelatinous bodies capable of startling speed. A most impressive sight with their splendid display of protoplasmic bubbles, their self-luminosity, their myriad eyes capable of forming and unforming as needed. But even then some of us, gazing in the infrared and ultraviolet, saw the emotional desperation of the shoggoths; we could see the plangent hunger of their desire to pervade, to dominate, to infuse themselves in all they saw.

Radiated in many spectra, our hypnotic beam bent their will to conform to ours. And so they constructed the great undersea galleries at our behest and later emerged from the depths to erect the façades and beetling walls, the soaring towers and ramparts of our city upon the crags at the southern pole of this world; exuding acids, the shoggoths shaped the stone of the mountains themselves, in any contour that pleased us; they lifted great blocks of hollowed-out stone into place on the shoulders of snowy peaks; they dug hallways and chambers, stacked blocks of stone to our specification. We fed them with the abundant creatures feverishly arising within the warm incubator of the nascent world; we praised our servants and perhaps spoiled them, for they forever wanted more—ever more, of everything.

I was there, a part of it all, for the erecting of that Cyclopean splendor, our five-sided metropolis—I myself, though alive for less than a half a million turns about the sun, at the time, was thought gifted enough to design a great deal of it. We called the great colony [
name sounds like a dying man’s cough, quite untranscribable
] and we took unspeakable pleasure in its creation. I myself insisted on the five-sidedness, in honor of our ancestors, of the city itself, and in praise of the Five-Sided Eye at the center of the cosmos. Fiveness is consciously replicated in many of the city’s structures—and indeed, in other creations, as in our design of a creature you call the “starfish,” and in the five fingers we placed on our primates. This motif does more than echo the five-pointedness of our bodily head and basal forms, the perfect, starlike extremities of our physical beings; it was also a statement about the five-sidedness of our worship of the creative principle emanated by the Five-Sided Eye, the Law of Five in vibratory repetition throughout the universe: Step One, the active vibration pulses forth; Step Two, the passive reflects it back; Step Three, the reconciling force arises from the two—thesis, antithesis, synthesis, as your human philosopher had it—and then the reconciling force spins and splits into the active, the passive; Steps Four and Five … which again generate the third force, which in turn gives birth to the fourth and fifth—and on,
ad infinitum
, ultimately creating all cosmic phenomena. We hoped to cover much of the surface of this world with five-sided paeans to the Law of Five—but it was not to be.