The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1 Read online

  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.

  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—leav
ing 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!