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 added sensitiveness that memory re-inspired 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 us.
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 from 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 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
blind 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 demonic 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 of 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 that 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 ever 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 Heaven! What madness made even those blasphemous
Old Ones willing to use and to 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, they 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 drag 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? Lord, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the
incredible, just as those carven 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 had 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 through later
conversations that we have learned of the complete identity of our
thoughts at that moment.
It seemed æons that we stood there, 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.
[Illustration: _And then came a sound--a horrible sound--which enabled
us to run like mad for the sane outer air_----]
The new sound, as I have intimated, upset much that we had decided;
because it was what poor Lake's dissection had led us to attribute
to those we had just 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 above 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 impression 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-roused 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 a 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 occurred
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 sent 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 we had passed them.
Once more came that sinister, wide-ranged 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 beings 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 our 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 senses 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 honeycombings would be unthinkable.
The fact that we survived and emerged 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 saved us, but in
conjunction with the mist they seem to 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 its pursuer; or perhaps it was an automatic attempt to answer a
subconscious question raised by one of our senses.
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 coincident 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 others. This it had not done--for instead, the newer and less
bearable smell was now virtually undiluted, and growing more and more
poisonously insistent each 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 came that shocking, wide-ranged
piping--"_Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!_"
Danforth was totally unstrung, and the first thing I remember of the
rest of the journey was hearing him light-headedly chant a 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 vaulting ahead,
and--thank Heaven--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, nefandous analogy that
had suggested it.
We had expected, upon looking back, to see a terrible and incredible
moving entity if the mists were thin enough; but of that 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 subterraneous distance, constellated with strangely
colored lights and filling the prodigious burrow.
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 the pallid abyss
vapor.
It was a terrible, indescribable thing, vaster 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 upon
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 demonic Shoggoths--given life, though, 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.