Shoggoth 2- Rise of the Elders

by Byron Craft

  Gideon removed a flare gun from the truck’s cab and shot it straight up. Once launched the phosphorus ball hung in the air for several seconds illuminating the interior. All distinguished, right then, that the four walls angled upward and met at a central point no less than ten-stories high. They were standing within the interior of a mammoth pyramid. At its zenith, dropping down midway, hung an enormous white globe. “Elder IMAX, Professor?” proposed Gideon as he sidled up to Ironwood.

  Peering aloft, Ironwood smiled and replied, “Probably an excellent hypothesis.”

  “What do we do now, gentlemen,” asked the Sergeant.

  “The way I see it,” offered Gideon, “is we can either retrace our steps or go that away,” pointing toward the opening on the far side of the chamber.

  All six stood in a circle as the slowly arcing flare above extinguished, and the ground flares continued to give off light. “The thought of moving ahead is unsettling,” confessed Pemba. “But I don’t see that we have any other choice.”

  “It’s a race now, to see who gets to the vault first,” added Corporal Faber.

  “I’ve got a feeling that I am out of the loop,” Gideon argued. “This is more than an expedition to authenticate my brother’s legacy, to find some ancient artifacts locked in an old vault isn’t it? I thought you were bringing along the two troopers, in case we run into one of your shoggoths, but there is more?”

  “Are you familiar with Congressman Neville Stream, Gideon?” asked Ironwood.

  “Yeah, the slimeball politician. He made mincemeat out of General Petraeus during those congressional hearings. Not on my Christmas card list.”

  “He’s south of here,” inserted the Professor, “he has a tunnel boring machine, and it’s headed for the vault. He’s probably aware of our plans as well. The Congressman has spies everywhere.”

  “But why?”

  “He’s after power, ancient God-awful power. Locked away in the Elder’s realm are the tools that Stream believes he needs to overthrow the U.S. Government. He has the drive of a madman, a control freak that will stop at nothing to take over the reins of the country.”

  “We have orders to stop him . . . unofficially,” interjected the Sergeant.

  “Then what are we waiting for!”

  ***

  Gideon and Ironwood disagreed whether knowledge of the Elders should become public. Ironwood told him that Alan Parker Ward, on his deathbed, beseeched him, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of the earth’s dark dead corners and unplumbed depths should be left alone. It was the reason, before removing Alan's body from the tunnels, that Ironwood destroyed all the evidence they had accumulated about the Elder Race. Skeptical, Gideon came around, though, after he explained the Congressman's intentions.

  The Oshkosh Joint Light Tactical Vehicle left the colossal cavern and cruised thirty-minutes more before reaching another breach in the tunnel. Half the size of the amphitheater the reflected glare of their headlamps momentarily blinded them. Gideon dimmed the lights and braked to a screeching halt. A massive metallic door stood blocking their way.

  “Good Lord,” declared Ironwood. “I had no idea it would be so huge.”

  A five-sided door, of heroic size, shined with the brilliance of highly polished steel, mirroring the JLTV’s lights. The surface was spotless as if kept clean from the defiling ages by some self-maintenance, Ironwood speculated. He was the first to exit the truck. Up close, he craned his neck and contemplated the top of the doorframe. “The damn thing must be thirty-feet high . . . I had no idea.”

  “You said that before, Professor,” Gideon softly commented coming up from behind, equally dumbfounded.

  “It is that perfect pentagon shape again, everything in fives,” a similarly bewildered Pemba remarked, linking up.

  Dutch and the Marines joined them also taken aback by the metallic barricade.

  Ironwood observed Pemba approach out of the corner of his eye, cautious uncertainty in her every step. Pemba slowly raised her right arm pressing four-fingers and a thumb against the shiny metal. To everyone’s surprise, the alleged steel bulged inward at her touch. “It is soft,” she exclaimed and pushed harder. The material recoiled and sprung her hand away.

  Gideon and Ironwood took up positions on either side of Pemba and proceeded to mimic her actions. Gideon balled up a fist and struck the barrier. His hand bounced back.

  “There appears to be a limit to its resiliency,” suggested Ironwood.

  Dutch tapped both on the shoulders and motioned them to step aside. Retrieving, once again, his trusty crowbar from the companion trailer and signaling all to move for the second time, he threw it with all his might. The steel bar rebounded with a resounding, “plunk!” It narrowly missed Dutch’s head flying back over him.

  “That thing looks like it would hold up to a direct hit from a bazooka,” predicted Moses Jones.

  A square panel, just above eye level, protruded on the left side of the massive door. Within its perimeter were five fist-sized squares with rounded corners, each a different color. One fiery orange, one deep red, another a bright green square, followed by a solitary shade of blue and a brilliant yellow cube. Gideon touched the red one, with an index finger and it instantly warmed to his touch. “It’s soft too, feels like Jell-O.”

  Above the square panel and the large colorful icons were two rows of characters:

  “What are those symbols?” he asked.

  “Don’t they look familiar to you, Gideon?” the Professor threw down.

  “Yeah, they look like what was in the Necronomicon. Did you happen to bring that page with you, Prof, for comparison?”

  “No, I thought you did.” Ironwood glanced at Gideon Ward suspiciously. “Because the page is missing from the book.”

  “Honest Injun, Prof, I didn’t take it.”

  Ironwood turned to the remaining group. “Did either one of you remove the page?”

  They all took turns saying, “no.”

  “Interesting,” Professor Ironwood frowned. “We were looking at it last night. Was there anytime, after, when we all left the house unattended?”

  “Sure, Professor,” piped up the Sergeant. “You all came outside when the Corporal and me pulled up in our Humvee.”

  The only one left to question, thought Ironwood, would be Amy. She, obviously, was at home. Besides, he decided, he was fairly certain that Amy was not aware of the existence of the page, let alone its significance. “I hope it didn’t fall into the wrong hands,” voicing concern.

  “The markings are very clear, this time, Prof. Is this the rhyme you thought it was?” tested Gideon.

  “Yes, only it is the context that we are now faced with, that bothers me. It was a much-discussed couplet by the celebrated antiquarian Howard Phillips Lovecraft in the early part of the twentieth century.”

  “What is the translation, Professor?” posed Pemba uneasily.

  “That is not dead which can eternal lie.

  And with strange aeons even death may die,” he replied.

  “Sounds like it’s saying that there is something immortal that can ‘lie’ or sleep forever. That they’re not actually dead and they’ll outlast death.” Gideon snickered, “I met a vampire that thought that once.”

  "The concept is daunting, Gideon, not laughable. It suggests that man is not the oldest surviving master of earth, or that we walked alone. I am worried at what we might find beyond that door.”

  “My brother did call it a doomsday vault.”

  Ironwood recalled another quote from Mr. Lovecraft: “The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be.” Scholars thought that he was referring to Cthulhu and its hordes. Demon-like, fourth dimensional beings; legends from a time long forgotten. Maybe he inferred something else?

  “This is dreadful!” claimed Pemba in an outburst of emotion.

  “You perceive danger?” Ironwood gently intoned.

  “Yes, we need to leave this place. I sense something awful.”r />
  “We can’t Pemba,” her employer cajoled, speaking to her as if to a child he cautioned, “There is a man, near here, that may be as evil as anything we could find in this place and he wants what is inside there. We don’t have an alternative. We must be first inside, possibly destroying whatever we uncover, and hopefully stop him from implementing his plans.”

  “How are we going to unlock this big door?” inquired the Sergeant.

  There was a great sadness on Pemba’s face, and Ironwood watched her walk away with her head down and take a seat in the truck’s cab. Turning to Jones, he answered, “Permutations, Sergeant, it is a strong probability that the five different colored buttons on this panel represent a combination lock. If so, then we need to come up with the proper order to arrange them. It may be a long shot, and there are several possible variations, in which the buttons could be pushed if they are true controls to an age-old keycode.”

  “How many sets, alternatives are there, Professor? The number of times the buttons can be arranged?” asked Gideon.

  “A five-button lock has 1,082 possible combinations.”

  “Great!” he said to himself, “this will take forever.” Gideon sauntered over to the JLTV, opened the driver’s side door, and grabbed his travel humidor. Pemba was sitting passenger side staring out the windshield. “How are you doing, kiddo?” he asked lightheartedly. Pemba returned a faint smile.

  “I’m going to sit right here and watch you guys,” Gideon hollered to the group gathered around the locking panel and plopped his backside down on the running board of the JLTV.

  Ironwood kept trying one combination after another while the Corporal jotted down each attempt on a pad of paper. Sergeant Jones looked lost for something to do with himself. Gideon held up an Opus X, and the Sergeant shook his head “no” turning down the offered cigar. Dutch didn’t smoke so Gideon didn’t tender one to him.

  “I thought you said that this place was once fed by the power of the sun, Professor,” asked Sergeant Jones. “But here’s this big door, it appears to be still active and if we turned off the JLTV’s lights it would be as black as coal in here.”

  “A good observation, Sergeant. I’d be a liar if I said I knew for sure. Perhaps the Elder Race that built this shelter against time realized that it would need an alternate energy source for it to endure. The very core of our planet could fuel a thing like this.”

  Gideon clipped the pointed end of the Opus X and lit it with a triple torch butane lighter. Savoring a mouthful of smoke, he shouted again, “My favorite pastime.” As if struck by another thought, he looked over his shoulder into the truck’s cab at Pemba, “Well maybe not my most favorite,” he said to himself.

  ***

  Neville Stream’s language would have made a sailor blush. He hurled one profanity after another. The TBM had come up against a solid barrier wearing down its steel cutting teeth. The digging end of the machine consisted of a rotating cutting wheel, called a cutter head, revolving on a main bearing system. The powerful disc cutter created compressive stress fractures in the rock, causing it to chip away. The mechanism’s burrowing ability seemed to have met its match. The tunnel boring machine had been backed up allowing an operator to inspect the wheel.

  The barrier was shiny metal. One of the men was applying the heat of an oxyacetylene torch to the obstruction. Normally, the stream of the oxygen fed flame, trained on metal, would burn it into metal oxide causing slag to flow out, but this also had no affect.

  The operator turned down the torch, lifted his welder’s mask and removed his left, sleeve length, protective glove. He held his bare hand against the place where the flame had been directed and exclaimed, “I don’t understand it! I held the torch on this spot a full five minutes, and it is not even warm.”

  The two guards, although heavily armed, stood quaking in their boots. Congressman Neville Stream, when angered, scared the crap out of them. A bullet straight through the Congressman’s heart would not save them from his wrath. He had systems in place, that if anything happened to him, forces from the Deep State would snuff them out. The risks they took were worth it though because the compensation would set each up for life. Once the tunneling machine reached their objective, they were employed to eliminate the two equipment operators. The desert was an excellent place to conceal bodies. With that behind them, they would return the TBM spotless to its storage facility, appearing unused, and disappear with their new identities. Only right now things were looking bleak.

  “How long, damn it!” roared red-faced Stream.

  The other equipment operator, at the front of the machine, got up off his knees, from inspecting the mammoth disc and nervously responded, “We are fortunate to have spares, Sir. We will be able to change out the cutting teeth and resume channeling. The teeth had become pretty worn before reaching this barrier. They should hold up longer, but I don’t know if they will be able to break through. We have no idea how thick it is.”

  Operator number two had turned off the cutting torch and walked over holding up a carpenter’s rule. “The damn stuff has a mind of its own,” he declared.

  “What in the hell do you mean?” Stream shouted.

  “Well, Sir,” he replied fretfully. “About twenty minutes ago I measured the depth of our abrasion after the cutters gave out,” pointing to the metal barrier. A ten-foot diameter circle had been milled into its surface. “The cutting depth was exactly two-inches.” He altered his weight from his right foot to his left exposing his reluctance to proceed.

  “Speak up, man or I’ll have you shot where you stand!”

  The equipment operator stole a glance at one of the guards, swallowed hard and continued, “Well, Sir, the depth of the cut is now only one-inch. I swear to you, Sir that my first measurement was accurate. I couldn’t’ve made a mistake, Sir. It’s as if the metal is healing itself, growing.”

  “Nonsense!” shouted Stream. “How long will it take you to change out the parts?”

  “A half-a-day, Sir.”

  “You have two-hours, make it happen!” Congressman Neville Stream knew that it wasn’t ‘nonsense.’ Shoggoths were known to repair themselves. Why not this wall? The workman was low on his food chain. He was not on a need to know basis.

  ***

  Two cigar stubs ground into eons of dust laid between Gideon’s boots. As he lit the third one, he heard a metallic grating sound followed by a “gurgle” and a “thump.” Gideon rose from his running board perch and looked around. Ironwood was still pushing buttons on the alien control panel, stopped what he was doing, and sniffed the air. “Dear God,” he said in almost a whisper. “I smell honeysuckle.”

  The three words became a call to action for the Sergeant and the Corporal. They darted to the companion trailer, quickly removed the flamethrowers, and strapped the tanks filled with oil-based flammable liquid to their backs. “Shoggoth!” warned the Sergeant as he and Corporal Faber ran into the connecting tunnel.

  Gideon jumped into the JLTV’s driver’s seat and started the engine. He turned the truck in the direction the two Marines sprinted and switched to the high beams, triggering next the sidelights so the cavern, they occupied, wouldn’t be without illumination. Gideon exited the cab, Dutch held an M16A and handed him another one. They both chambered a round and dashed to the tunnel opening.

  A section of five-sided tiles in the wall slid aside, and a bubbling mass vomited onto the floor. A sweet sickening odor permeated the area. The bulk of the thing grew rapidly in size. Half the width of the tunnel it slithered in both directions. Eyes the diameter of a grapefruit regarded its adversaries. Long knife claws snapped into view below a maw of razor-sharp teeth. The wide opened mouth made a rattling noise spewing enormous globs of yellow spittle. Then they all heard its bone-chilling, wind piping voice, “Eeeeeeee! Wawk! Tekeli-li! Eeeeeeee! Wawk! Tekeli-li!”

  The Sergeant, on the far side of the thing, ignited his firestick and pointed it at the oncoming form. At the other end of the tunnel, closest to Dut
ch and Gideon, Corporal Faber had difficulty firing-up his flamethrower. Once kindled, he looked up in time to see a massive tentacle sprout from the jellied mass. Pointed spikes erupted from the flesh of the elongated appendage. Before Gideon could shout, “look out,” the jagged limb had the Corporal around the neck lifting him several feet into the air. The thorny protrusions severed his jugular; death was instantaneous, but not sufficient for the amoeboid nightmare. The shoggoth slammed the Corporal’s lifeless body against the adjacent wall then releasing its prey, letting the mangled remains drop to the floor. A section of long dead wall material fell crashing to the tunnel bottom.

  Gideon let loose with a long burst from his M16A sending a stream of 5.56 mm ammo into the gelatinous bulk. The bullets had a rippling effect on its mass, like throwing a handful of pebbles into a brook. They also did nothing to slow down the advancing form.

  Dutch ran ahead, scooped up Faber’s fallen flamethrower even though Gideon yelled for him to, “Come back!”

  The big Dutchman triggered his firestick at the same moment that Sergeant Jones activated his. The shoggoth was trapped. Hemmed in between two walls of fire. It bellowed its eldritch cry, “Eeeeeeee! Wawk! Tekeli-li! Eeeeeeee! Wawk! Tekeli-li!” The scent of honeysuckle changed to the smell of burnt plastic. Outlined in a blaze of many colors the synthetic protozoan’s form thrashed and struggled to maintain its existence. The cell structure swellings that defined the shape of the creature popped one after another from the intense heat until it gradually reduced to a small molten blob.

  Gideon chomped on his cigar, anger, and devastation over the loss of the Corporal raged in contrast to the shrinking shoggoth. Once the firesticks were extinguished, he stepped around the fallen form of Stanley Faber and surveyed the devastation. Ironwood told him, before they started this undertaking, that shoggoths could re-grow themselves and any attempt to destroy one must be one-hundred-percent complete. The job looked done to him.

  Unseen by the trio a tiny amoeba, the size of a soap bubble, slithered toward shelter. It crawled, propelling itself with eyelash cilia. Slowly it crept next to the edge where the floor met the wall, its desire for survival programmed centuries ago driving it to take refuge and later to grow. It scuttled and inched its way eventually reaching the mound of fallen masonry, surmounting it on the way to the hole in the wall . . . Escape!