XI
Still another time have I come
to a place where it is very difficult to proceed. I ought to be hardened
by this stage; but there are some experiences and intimations which scar
too deeply to permit of healing, and leave only such an added sensitiveness
that memory reinspires all the original horror. We saw, as I have
said, certain obstructions on the polished floor ahead; and I may add that
our nostrils were assailed almost simultaneously by a very curious intensification
of the strange prevailing fetor, now quite plainly mixed with the nameless
stench of those others which had gone before. The light of the second
torch left no doubt of what the obstructions were, and we dared approach
them only because we could see, even from a distance, that they were quite
as past all harming power as had been the six similar specimens unearthed
frm the monstrous star-mounded graves at poor Lake's camp.
They
were, indeed, as lacking in completeness as most of those we had unearthed--though
it grew plain from the thick, dark green pool gathering around them that
their incompleteness was of infinitely greater recency. There seemed
to be only four of them, whereas Lake's bulletins would have suggested
no less than eight as forming the group which had preceded us. To
find them in this state was wholly unexpected, and we wondered what sort
of monstrous struggle had occurred down here in the dark.
Penguins,
attacked in a body, retaliate savagely with their beaks and our ears now
made certain the existence of a rookery far beyond. Had those others
disturbed such a place and aroused murderous pursuit? The obstructions
did not suggest it, for penguin's beaks against the tough tissues Lake
had dissected could hardly account for the terrible damage our approaching
glance was beginning to make out. Besides, the huge birds we had
seen appeared to be singularly peaceful.
Had
there, then, been a struggle among those others, and were the absent four
responsible? If so, where were they? Were they close at hand
and likely to form an immediate menace to us? We glanced anxiously
at some of the smooth-floored lateral passages as we continued our slow
and frankly reluctant approach. Whatever the conflict was, it had
clearly been that which had frightened the penguins into their unaccustomed
wandering. It must, then, have arisen near that faintly heard rookery
in the incalculable gulf beyond, since there were no signs that any birds
had normally dwelt here. Perhaps, we reflected, there had been a
hideous running fight, with the weaker party seeking to get back to the
cached sledges when their pursuers finished them. One could picture
the demoniac fray between namelessly monstrous entities as it surged out
of the black abyss with great clouds of frantic penguins squawking and
scurrying ahead.
I say
that we approached those sprawling and incomplete obstructions slowly and
reluctantly. Would to Heaven we had never approached them at all,
but had run back at top speed out of that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily
smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they
had superseded--run back, before we had seen what we did see, and before
our minds were burned with something which will never let us breathe easily
again!
Both
our torches were turned on the prostrate objects, so that we soon realized
the dominant factor in their incompleteness. Mauled, compressed,
twisted, and ruptured as they were, their chief common injury was total
decapitation. From each one the tentacled starfish head had been
removed; and as we drew near we saw that the manner of removal looked more
like some hellish tearing or suction than like any ordinary form of cleavage.
Their noisome dark-green ichor formed a large, spreading pool; but its
stench was half overshadowed by the newer and stranger stench, here more
pungent than at any other point along our route. Only when we had
come very close to the sprawling obstructions could we trace that second,
unexplainable fetor to any immediate source--and the instant we did so
Danforth, remembering certain very vivid sculptures of the Old Ones' history
in the Permian Age one hundred and fifty million years ago, gave vent to
a nerve-tortured cry which echoed hysterically through that vaulted and
archaic passage with the evil,
palimpsest carvings. I came only just short of echoing his cry myself;
for I had seen those primal sculptures, too, and had shudderingly admired
the way the nameless artist had suggested that hideous slime coating found
on certain incomplete and prostrate Old Ones--those whom the frightful
Shoggoths had characteristically slain and sucked to a ghastly headlessness
in the great war of resubjugation. They were infamous, nightmare
sculptures even when telling of age-old, bygone things; for Shoggoths and
their work ought not to be seen by human beings or portrayed by any beings.
The mad author of the Necronomicon had nervously tried to swear
that none had been bred on this planet, and that only drugged dreamers
had even conceived them. Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect
all forms and organs and processes--viscous agglutinations of bubbling
cells--rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile--slaves
of suggestion, builders of cities--more and more sullen, more and more
intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative! Great
God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to
use and carve such things?
And
now, when Danforth and I saw the freshly glistening and reflectively iridescent
black slime which clung thickly to those headless bodies and stank obscenely
with that new, unknown odor whose cause only a diseased fancy could envisage--clung
to those bodies and sparkled less voluminously on a smooth part of the
accursedly resculptured wall in a series of grouped dots--we understood
the quality of cosmic fear to its uttermost depths. It was not fear
of those four missing others--for all too well did we suspect they would
do no harm again. Poor devils! After all, there were not evil
things of their kind. They were the men of another age and another
order of being. Nature had played a hellish jest on them--as it will
on any others that human madness, callousness, or cruelty may hereafter
dig up in that hideously dead or sleeping polar waste--and this was their
tragic homecoming. They had not been even savages--for what indeed
had they done? That awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch--perhaps
an attack by the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defense
against them and the equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings
and paraphernalia . . poor Lake, poor Gedney . . . and poor Old Ones!
Scientists to the last--what had they done that we would not have done
in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What
a facing of the incredible, just as those kinsmen and forbears had faced
things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities,
star spawn--whatever they had been, they were men!
They
had crossed the icy peaks on whose templed slopes they had once worshiped
and roamed among the tree ferns. they had found their dead city brooding
under its curse, and had read its carven latter days as we had done. They
tried to reach their living fellows in fabled depths of blackness they
had never seen--and what had they found? All this flashed in unison
through the thoughts of Danforth and me as we looked from those headless,
slime-coated shapes to the loathsome palimpsest sculptures and the diabolical
dot groups of fresh slime on the wall beside them--looked and understood
what must have triumphed and survived down there in the Cyclopean water
city of that nighted, penguin-fringed abyss, whence even now a sinister
curling mist had begun to belch pallidly as if in answer to Danforth's
hysterical scream.
The
shock of recognizing that monstrous slime and headlessness had frozen us
into mute, motionless statues, and it is only though later conversations
that we have learned of the complete identity of our thoughts at that moment.
It seemed aeons that we stood thee, but actually it could not have been
more than ten or fifteen seconds. That hateful, pallid mist curled
forward as if veritably driven by some remoter advancing bulk--and then
came a sound which upset much of what we had just decided, and in so doing
broke the spell and enabled us to run like mad past squawking, confused
penguins over our former trail back to the city, along ice-sunken megalithic
corridors to the great open circle, and up that archaic spiral ramp in
a frenzied, automatic plunge for the sane outer air and light of day.
The new sound, as I have
intimated, upset much that we have decided; because it was what poor Lake's
dissection had led us to attribute to those we had judged dead. it
was, Danforth later told me, precisely what he had caught in infinitely
muffled form when at that spot beyond the alley corner about the glacial
level; and it certainly had a shocking resemblance to the wind pipings
we had both heard around the lofty mountain caves. At the risk of
seeming puerile I will add another thing, too, if only because of the surprising
way Danforth's impressions chimed with mine. Of course common reading
is what prepared us both to make the interpretation, though Danforth has
hinted at queer notions about unsuspected and forbidden sources to which
Poe may have had access when writing his Arthur Gordon Pym a century
ago. It will be remembered that in that fantastic tale there is a
word of unknown but terrible and prodigious significance connected with
the antarctic and screamed eternally by the gigantic spectrally snowy birds
of that malign region's core. "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"
That, I may admit, is exactly what we thought we heard conveyed by that
sudden sound behind the advancing white mist--that insidious musical piping
over a singularly wide range.
We were
in full flight before three notes or syllables had been uttered, though
we knew that the swiftness of the Old Ones would enable any scream-aroused
and pursuing survivor of the slaughter to overtake us in a moment if it
really wished to do so. We had a vague hope, however, that nonaggressive
conduct and a display of kindred reason might cause such a being to spare
us in case of capture, if only from scientific curiosity. After all,
if such an one had nothing to fear for itself it would have no motive in
harming us. Concealment being futile at this juncture, we used our
torch for a running glance behind, and perceived that the mist was thinning.
Would we see, at last, a complete and living specimen of those others?
Again came that insidious musical piping--"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"
Then,
noting that we were actually gaining on our pursuer, it occured to us that
the entity might be wounded. We could take no chances, however, since
it was very obviously approaching in answer to Danforth's scream, rather
than in flight from any other entity. The timing was too close to
admit of doubt. Of the whereabouts of that less conceivable and less
mentionable nightmare--that fetid, unglimpsed mountain of slime-spewing
protoplasm whose race had conquered the abyss and send land pioneers to
recarve and squirm through the burrows of the hills--we could form no guess;
and it cost us a genuine pang to leave this probably crippled Old One--perhaps
a lone survivor--to the peril of recapture and a nameless fate.
Thank
Heaven we did not slacken our run. The curling mist had thickened
again, and was driving ahead with increased speed; whilst the straying
penguins in our rear were squawking and screaming and displaying signs
of a panic really surprising in view of their relatively minor confusion
when he had passed them. Once more came that sinister, wide-ranging
piping--"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" We had been wrong. The
thing was not wounded, but had merely paused on encountering the bodies
of its fallen kindred and the hellish slime inscription above them.
We could never know what that demon message was--but those burials at Lake's
camp had shown how much importance the being attached to their dead.
Our recklessly used torch now revealed ahead of us the large open cavern
where various ways converged, and we were glad to be leaving those morbid
palimpsest sculptures--almost felt even when scarcely seen--behind.
Another
thought which the advent of the cave inspired was the possibility of losing
the pursuer at this bewildering focus of large galleries. There were
several of the blind albino penguins in the open space, and it seemed clear
that their fear of the oncoming entity was extreme to the point of unaccountability.
If at that point we dimmed our torch to the very lowest limit of traveling
need, keeping it strictly in front of us, the frightened squawking motions
of the huge birds in the mist might muffle our footfalls, screen our true
course, and somehow set up a false lead. Amidst the churning, spiraling
fog the littered and unglistening floor of the main tunnel beyond this
point, as differing from the other morbidly polished burrows, could hardly
form a highly distinguishing feature; even, so far as we could conjecture,
for those indicated special sense which made the Old Ones partly, though
imperfectly, independent of light in emergencies. In fact, we were
somewhat apprehensive lest we go astray ourselves in our haste. For
we had, of course, decided to keep straight on toward the dead city; since
the consequences of loss in those unknown foothill honycombings would be
unthinkable.
The
fact that we survived and merged is sufficient proof that the thing did
take a wrong gallery whilst we providentially hit on the right one.
The penguins alone could not have done so. Only a benign fate kept
the curling vapors thick enough at the right moment, for they were constantly
shifting and threatening to vanish. Indeed, they did lift for a second
just before we emerged from the nauseously resculptured tunnel into the
cave; so that we actually caught one first and only half glimpse of the
oncoming entity as we cast a final, desperately fearful glance backward
before dimming the torch and mixing with the penguins in the hope of dodging
pursuit. If the fate which screened us was benign, that which gave
us the half glimpse was infinitely the opposite; for to that flash of semivision
can be traced a full half of the horror which has ever since haunted us.
Our
exact motive in looking back again was perhaps no more than the immemorial
instinct of the pursued to gauge the nature and course of it pursuer; or
perhaps it was an automatic attempt to answer a subconscious question raised
by one of our sense. In the midst of our flight, with all our faculties
centered on the problem of escape, we were in no condition to observe and
analyze details; yet even so our latent brain cells must have wondered
at the message brought them by our nostrils. Afterward we realized
what it was--that our retreat from the fetid slime coating on those headless
obstructions, and the coincidental approach of the pursuing entity had
not brought us the exchange of stenches which logic called for. In
the neighborhood of the prostrate things that new and lately unexplainable
fetor had been wholly dominant; but by this time it ought to have largely
given place to the nameless stench associated with those other. This
it had not done--for instead, the newer and less bearable smell was now
virtually undiluted, and growing more and more poisonously insistent every
second.
So we
glanced back simultaneously, it would appear; though no doubt the incipient
motion of one prompted the imitation of the other. As we did so we
flashed both torches full strength at the momentarily thinned mist; either
from sheer primitive anxiety to see all we could, or in a less primitive
but equally unconscious effort to dazzle the entity before we dimmed our
light and dodged among the penguins of the labyrinth center ahead.
Unhappy act! Not Orpheus himself, or Lot's wife, paid much more dearly
for a backward glance. And again game that shocking, wide-ranged
piping--"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"
I might
as well be frank--even if I cannot bear to be quite direct--in stating
what we say; though at the time we felt that it was not to be admitted
even to each other. The words reaching the reader can never even
suggest the awfulness of the sight itself. It crippled our consciousness
so completely that I wonder we had the residual sense to dim our torches
as planned, and to strike the right tunnel toward the dead city.
Instinct alone must have carried us through--perhaps better than reason
could have done; though if that was what saved us, we paid a high price.
Of reason we certainly had little enough left.
Danforth
was totally unstrung, and the first thing I remember of the rest of the
journey was hearing him light-headedly chant an hysterical formula in which
I alone of mankind could have found anything but insane irrelevance.
It reverberated in falsetto echoes among the squawks of the penguins; reverberated
through the vaultings ahead, and--thank God--through the now empty vaultings
behind. He could not have begun it at once--else we would not have
been alive and blindly racing. I shudder to think of what a shade
of difference in his nervous reactions might have brought.
"South
Station Under-- Washington Under-- Park Street under-- Kendall-- Central--
Harvard--" The poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations of
the Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through our peaceful native soil
thousands of miles away in New England, yet to me the ritual had neither
irrelevance nor home feeling. It had only horror, because I knew
unerringly the monstrous, nefarious analogy that had suggested it.
We had expected, upon looking back, to see a terrible and incredible moving
entity we had formed a clear idea. What we did see--for the mists
were indeed all too malignly thinned--was something altogether different,
and immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective
embodiment of the fantastic novelist's "thing that should not be"; and
its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as
one sees it from a station platform--the great black front looming colossally
out of infinite subterranean distance, constellated with strangely colored
lights and filling the prodigious burrow as a piston fills a cylinder.
But
we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as
the nightmare, plastic column of fetid black iridescence oozed tightly
onward through its fifteen-foot sinus, gathering unholy speed and driving
before it a spiral, rethickening cloud of pallid abyss vapor. It
was a terrible, indescribable thing waster than any subway train--a shapeless
congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads
of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all
over the tunnel-filling front that bore down on us, crushing the frantic
penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind
had swept so evilly free of all litter. Still came that eldritch, mocking
cry--"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" and at last we remembered that the
demoniac Shoggoths--given life, thought, and plastic organ patterns solely
by the Old Ones, and having no language save that which the dot groups
expressed--had likewise no voice save the imitated accents of their bygone
masters.
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