The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1 (8 page)

Still, our capital city, nestled amongst the world’s steepest peaks, was the materialization of our shared inner worlds, a reverberant revisiting of the galleries of our ancestors—and too, it spoke of our response to the world you call “Earth”; the entire city was the hallmark stamp of our collective identity. It sang of our nature, of course, as well as standing for it, for the fluting hollows and tubes we introduced, with exactitude, within the high faces of the mountains, caught the furious perpetual breath of the wind and turned it into the traditional melodies we’d brought with us from the homeworld: the wind itself intoned our time-honored tunes, as if the very atmosphere of this world was chorusing its submission to the greatness of our culture. We often sang along with it, of course, fluting with exquisite harmony; even now the mountains sing, with a melancholic sadness in their voicings … of what might have been.

Now all is crumbled; all has become mere ruins.

It was vanity, and an illusion of invulnerability—these were our undoing. Certainly the shift of the planetary axis, the subsequent coming of the Ice Age, contributed. Yet we’d have adapted well enough to the encroaching cold were it not for the war with the rebellious shoggoths….

Later, we suffered further attrition in the conflict with the Cthulhuites, those ancient competitors from the stars whom at last we trapped in the glaring asymmetry of R’lyeh beneath the polar seas. For a time the spawn of Cthulhu allied itself with the Mi-Go, further eroding our power, until we drove the vicious, buzzing Mi-Go back to their outpost on that icy world at the outer fringe of this solar system; there they doubtless crouch and murmur still, in subzero, fungally furred warrens under the frozen surface.

But damaged as we were, many of us half mad with privation and desperation, with the loss of loved ones to the depredations of rebel shoggoths, we failed to prepare properly for the age of ice. Some of our technology was destroyed in a particularly vicious Cthulhuian battle: technology we had no clear memory of having created, after so many long millennia. We could no longer effectively reproduce it, since much was corroded. Those of us who knew the secret of travel between the stars were among the first killed when the shoggoths overran our city—leaving us no escape. In our own dogged time we defeated the shoggoths, but we made the mistake of keeping several rebels for study, to try to understand how the beasts had gone awry. The captive shoggoths pretended to a simplicity that deceived their keepers—and one of them worked out the combination of its energy-prison. The rebels broke free and went on a rampage. There were few of us left to resist….

The memory of that rampage and massacre remains vividly within me—sometimes it seems to cut me from within as the pink primate cut me from without. I had been meditating on the looping mosaics in the great gallery of remembrance, in the 13th-degree trance, when the breakout happened. I was ecstatically intoxicated by the history panels, seeing them in all five dimensions, including the animated segments hidden from eyes as simple as those of the pink primates, and thus did not hear the first concussions of the latest attack….

And then a shriek of pain penetrated my dreamy musings—and another. I tore myself from my entrancement and turned to the entrance of the great gallery. An overwhelming wave of sheer
reek
swept in first—the rage of the shoggoths expressing itself in malodorous venting—and then a ragged column of my people scurried into the gallery: refugees from the shoggoths, who fumed through the tunnels in pursuit, eye-sprouts flailing as they hooted their mocking cry,
Tekeli-li!
First one shoggoth, then another, squeezed its gelatinous bulk through the entrance—extending plasmic tentacles as they entwined their victims, combining acid secretions with ripples of inner force to rip my fellows limb from limb.

The refugees wailed in poignant despair as the shoggoths dismembered them. Once-beautiful eyes bounced after being torn from five-pointed heads, and souls splashed like oceanic ooze, green and sparkling with dying life, oozing across the stone floors….

It was this vision, seared into memory, that drove me into the sleeping trance of hibernation, in the depths of the cavern where, ages later, I was found by the pink primates; for there I fled, a coward but not a fool. Before the shoggoths could reach me I slipped into a narrow side passage and into the depths, slipping away with a few others. We had impregnated the walls of the hibernation cavern with prickly energies to keep the shoggoths away—but they had no overt effect on the insensitive pink primates, ages after.

At first I hunched in the hibernation cavern, trembling in the darkness, shaking with horror at what I’d seen. It was as if the arrogance of my people had taken physical shape, had materialized and come in person to kill us. In memory, I watched the massacre again and again, in excruciating detail, as each elegantly columnar, fluted, five-pointed body of the shoggoth’s victims was torn asunder; I saw the viscous tentacles plucking off wings out of sheer cruelty, before the crunching decapitation … I could not bear it. I writhed at the recollection.

So I extruded my vestigial roots and took hold of the cavern’s fundament, drawing my nutrient—as the most ancient of the ancients did—directly from soil; in this case, from well-aged bat guano. And rooting myself first in loam and then in slumber, I escaped into an endless procession of glorious ancestral memories….

* * *

I might have slumbered there—my body muted to survive in the cold, my pulse so slow it barely pulsed at all—until, perhaps, the bloated sun expanded to engulf this world with fire, a billion years hence.

But my trance was weakened by the invasion of the pink primates; by “men” like you; by their uprooting of me, and by the unbidden transport. My dream was stabbed, slashed by a knife blade. And I took command of the blade, returning slash for slash ten times over, in my mind somehow slashing at shoggoths as well as the pink primate. When the creature lay still, I called out a sub-vocal vibratory alarum to my fellows—for others had been transported to the primate’s camp.

Spurred by my call, those who had survived this atrocity woke. And we might have made our way peacefully back to our cavern. After all, the other pink primates had withdrawn, seeing that I and the others were moving about. One of them carried a weapon and seemed to argue with his companions. There was time to depart….

But then one of us discovered other bodies, the mangled corpses of my people, who’d been sliced open, and who hadn’t survived the vivisection, so weakened were they by the ages. One was sliced into sections. Clearly, our dead had suffered hideously in the process—the contortion of agony was there to see in their twisted limbs as they were vivisected, cut apart while alive and paralyzed, till the loss of emerald-tinted lifeblood set them free at last.

That’s when the shaggy four-legged ones broke loose from their corral of ice: the furred, raucous creatures you call dogs. Driven mad by some primal response to our smell, they came at us snapping and snarling….

The remains of old friends who’d been tortured to death, and the onslaught of the dogs—it was all too much. In fury, and perhaps addled by disorientation, the others went on a rampage. I could not restrain them. They rushed the group of pink primates and dogs, tentacles whipping. A primate used a tubular weapon to fire a lead projectile, injuring one of my fellows, but that was the only damage done, and it was not mortal.

Most of the dogs, then the remaining pink primates—all but one—were torn limb from limb, shrieking and gasping, then left to bleed out their lives upon the snowy ground….

It all seemed a terrible waste to me. Clearly the pink primates had evolved a rudimentary intelligence. They had developed scientific curiosity of a crude sort, the ability to command lower species, some fairly impressive technology—I discovered a device that transmitted radio waves, probably for messages, in one of the structures of cloth you call tents. We should have been able to communicate with them.

After the attack, I did some dissecting of my own and examined many of the instruments in the tent; I experimented with their primitive devices for making fire and created some heat in the operating tent for other investigations.

Then it was discovered that one of the primates had escaped on a sled, with a surviving dog. (Gedney, the creature means Gedney!) [
Note: this naming of Gedney is the only expostulation from William Dyer himself in this account, the remainder seems to be the “Elder One” using Dyer’s voice.
] But one dog pulling his sled could not get him far, certainly not rapidly—he was forced to help push the sled, piled with his supplies—and we had no difficulty in overtaking him. By this time I was able to persuade the others to allow him to live, for a time. He and the dog were returned to the camp for examination, just as a fierce blizzard commenced. We had to break the dog’s neck—it would not be restrained—but the primate did not die immediately. He made some rather loud noises when we allowed him to personally experience vivisection. We bandaged his remains, to preserve him for later dissection.

The weather cleared, and soon we were able to perform the rituals of burial. Digging through the hard snow with tools left by the primates, we buried our dead companions as well as we could. In keeping with the right afterlife preparation, we buried them with their feet pointed to the center of the world, and their heads pointed toward the stars. Over them we inscribed, in ice and snow, the sacred five-pointed symbol, and their names. Some of us left a few traditional artifacts there, to remember them by.

Then, having eaten of the flesh of the dog creatures, and having tasted the primates—we found them less palatable—we hurried back to the city, drawing the sled with us and carrying a few pink primate artifacts for later examination.

It was an arduous journey. We were glad when we arrived—little did we know what awaited us. We had thought the shoggoths long gone, passed away or departed….

Most have gone. Not all.

We rested in one of the great chambers, and there I examined the primate artifacts. I meant to return to the bodies of the pink primate on the sled, and the dog, and continue my research—I was very curious to see how advanced the primate’s brain might be—but in the event it was not to be.

We attempted an assessment of the city, to see if it might be rebuilt, in the event we chose to spore offspring, but the more we looked at the ruins the more a restoration seemed an unappealing, discouraging task—quite depressing. And of course it had been defiled….

My own plan was to return to the deep sea—for we are more than an amphibious race, our gills can become operative as needed—and there we could spore freely, build up our population, and construct a new city, a homeland to compete with the society of the pink primates. But before we could reach an accord one of us probed the depths under the old city too deeply. For there, in an underground sea, lurked the remaining shoggoth, feeding on the enormous, lumbering, eyeless penguins peculiar to that place.

When I heard the screams and the mocking
Tekeli-li!
, I thought, at first, it was a traumatic memory resurfacing; then I saw body parts strewn before the furious, oncoming shoggoth—a particularly bloated specimen, its huge gelatinous mass heaving and quivering as it came, its sprouting eyes goggling madly about.

But then I perceived the truth: this was no trauma-spawned memory, but a quivering rebirth of the old horror, a true return of the terror of the rogue shoggoths, as it raked serrated tentacles among us, and came implacably on toward me….

A few of us were able to escape, just as before—

But this time, I vowed I would not hide in the caverns—this time I would have my revenge.

My companions retreated into the hibernation cavern, where, so far, the shoggoth dared not go, but at my urging they taunted it, hissing and vibrating on many levels and calling out,
Tekeli-li!

Enraged, the bloated, ancient shoggoth ranged back and forth near the entrance to the hibernation cavern, depositing a great trail of slime—the gleaming muck reeking horribly of its rage. Like a mad sentry it paced, afraid to enter the chamber, kept at bay by the stinging energies we’d impregnated into the rocky walls, restrained by the ancient hypnotic suggestion that made such energies an effective shoggoth repellent.

It continued its stalking, shrugging its heaving body this way and that, slobbering furiously about the entrance—as I busied myself back at the pit it had climbed from.

It was about this time I became aware that two pink primates had found the city, that they were exploring it—I observed them ogling the history displays in the gallery of remembrance—and watched them from the shadows as they probed more deeply.

Meanwhile, the shoggoth was becoming hungry … and at last it put off its vigil and grudgingly returned to the pit for food, seeking after a quick dinner of blind penguins—reaching its den soon before the primates found it. It was not far down in its lair when their muttering and flickering lights caught its attention. It swarmed from the depths and pursued them, doubtless driven to mad rapacity at the thought of pink primates to feast on, a delicious novelty after countless centuries of fish and penguin.

The primates escaped—with a little help from me, of which they were unaware. I had an intuition that I would one day communicate with one of these primates. I had seen their respectful fascination as they viewed the history panels in the gallery of remembrance. I thought that perhaps one of these “men” might be worth speaking to … if a means could be found.

And so it was I who distracted the shoggoth—I called out to it as it pursued them, confusing it, making it turn toward me long enough for the men to find a branching tunnel for escape.

I myself then slipped away, withdrawing up a winding ramp too small for the shoggoth, barely large enough for my own bulk. I had taken the same ramp earlier, preparing certain devices in the maintenance passages over the vast chamber that contained the entrance to the pit.