Shoggoth 2- Rise of the Elders

by Byron Craft

  The red ember of Gideon Ward’s cigar plunged downward with a sizzle, cremating the last trace of the shoggoth bubble. “Opus X marks the spot,” he declared.

  ***

  Corporal Faber’s remains rested zipped-up in a body bag. Moses Jones mourned over his fallen comrade, “He was a fine soldier, a good Marine.”

  Gideon Ward came up from behind and laid a hand on the Sergeant’s shoulder, “That’s a good epitaph for any man.”

  “Thanks, Lieutenant.” Jones turned and eyed the Professor, “It wasn’t like the one we encountered last year. This shoggoth thingamajig was different.” The Sergeant’s features wavered between anger and remorse.

  “Yes, Sergeant, I am sorry, my meddling is responsible for the death of Stanley Faber. My attempts to unlock the door probably triggered a latent security device, a shoggoth warrior.”

  He has big cojones to accept the responsibility, thought Gideon. His respect for the middle-aged Professor grew to admiration. “We were all for opening the thing, Professor Ironwood, the blame rests on all our shoulders.”

  “I don’t know if we should proceed any further,” Ironwood suggested. “Will a renewed attempt spark an additional response?”

  “We were caught off-guard this time, we’ll be prepared if it happens again and we will burn the next one to a crisp without endangering any more lives,” Moses asserted.

  “It was unusual how the shoggoth burned with all the spectral colors. It must have been its chemical makeup that caused the colorful effect,” Pemba speculated.

  “Could it be that simple!” shouted Gideon overcome by a revelation. “If it is, oh boy, could I kiss you Pemba! Come with me.” He took her hand, and they approached the mammoth doorway. Gideon reached up to the alien control panel and pushed the “red” button, then the “orange” one, followed by the “yellow” icon, the “green” and last . . .

  “Wait, Gideon!” Warned Ironwood; “You could set off an internal alarm.”

  Gideon looked over his shoulder at Dutch and Jones. They shouldered their firesticks and smiled.

  “Do not worry, Professor,” implored Pemba, “I know what he is doing.”

  Gideon gazed at Pemba lovingly, their faces only inches apart. “Everything in fives, like you said sweetheart.” He shouted over his shoulder, “Roy G. Biv, Prof, the colors as they appear in the spectrum. I learned that one in the eighth grade.”

  “The Elder Beings optics,” added Pemba, “may have only been able to detect the first five colors.”

  Gideon pushed the “blue” button.

  Foreign music filled the chamber. A high-pitched chorus singing no words, uttering no syllables, warbled and intoned a bizarre harmonic resonance. A ring-shaped membrane materialized in the center of the sealed door spiraling outward, becoming larger with each rotation. Invisible ciliary muscles revolved a gigantic iris open, exposing a dark interior.

  Gideon and Pemba, still holding hands, stepped across the threshold. A blinding light encircled the two. The iris opening slammed shut behind them.

  ***

  Madison eyed the motley crew that called themselves the Tunnel Archeologists. Stitch had lashed a CO2 air rifle to the handlebar of his motorbike with a bungee cord. Junky Beast was armed with a baseball bat, and Dudette had a pink dispenser, filled with pepper spray, hanging from her belt. E-Monkey didn’t have a weapon. “I didn’t know we were supposed to bring one,” he complained in a melancholy tone. “Nobody told me.” They were all laughable, but Madison managed to keep a straight face. She thought Stitch, the showoff, was the funniest. Besides his “You’ll shoot your eye out” BB gun, he had an army helmet on his head like the Nazis wore in those old movies.

  On the other hand, Noah impressed Madison. He was the only one genuinely weaponized. He was carrying a heavy-duty stun gun equipped with a LED flashlight and an ear-piercing police siren alarm. It had a long reach, over fourteen-inches long; long enough to keep you a safe distance away from an attacker, but short enough to easily carry. Madison had no idea how he acquired such an imposing piece. Even so, she worried at its lack of effectiveness against an adversary carrying an automatic rifle.

  There was something else about Noah that impressed Madison. It was their third time together, she enjoyed his company, and he was a good talker. Not a chatterbox, on the contrary, he spoke well and always seemed to say the right thing, well almost. He chose his words carefully as if caught up in thought, careful about what he would say next. He certainly was different from what a lot of the girls in school said about him. She had heard that he was shy and afraid to talk to girls. That was not the Noah Riggs that Madison had come to know after three dates. He was Gucci.

  ***

  Gideon abruptly turned and faced the barrier that had once been an opened doorway. On their side, no longer constructed of a shiny material, the five-sided door was black covered with a patina of dullness. And it wasn’t soft either. He banged on it with a closed fist, greeted by a hollow echo.

  Pemba was still at his side. He took hold of her hand again and felt her shake with fear. “Don’t fret, Pemba. They’ll have us out of here in no time. The Professor now knows the combination.”

  ***

  “How come it’s not opening, Professor?” asked Sergeant Jones, fear rising in every word.

  “I don’t know, Sergeant,” he answered frustrated by Jones’s continual pestering. I wish he’d shut up, so I can concentrate, he stewed. Ironwood made a stab at the combination a third time. Nothing happened.

  “What was that Roy G. Biv crap?”

  Annoyed, he replied, “it’s an abbreviation, for the colors as they appear in a spectrum. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Pemba said that the sequence was the first five colors.”

  “Then why ain’t it working?” he demanded.

  Ironwood turned from the titanic keyboard and heaved a sigh. He was taking his frustration out on Moses Jones and if truth be told he was dissatisfied with himself. Why won’t the damn thing respond! “I wish I knew, Moses,” changing to a conciliatory manner. “Possibly, the system that operates the locking mechanism needs to recharge before another attempt.” That was probably a fairytale, he realized. Although he hoped it was true because if he didn’t find a way to open that door, they would never see Pemba and Gideon again.

  ***

  Still holding hands, Pemba and Gideon moved with the slow sweeping of his tactical flashlight. It had been clipped to his belt. Gideon wished that he had a sidearm hanging from there as well. He had left his M16A Colt leaning against the truck, and the only weapon he possessed was a pocket knife with, unfortunately, a very short blade. He hoped to God that they wouldn’t run into anything alive in here. And where the hell was “here?” To Gideon’s surprise, the air tasted fresh.

  The circle of light not generated by Gideon’s LED torch still surrounded them. The luminosity had instantly appeared the moment they crossed the threshold with no source apparent. Pemba removed the flashlight from her belt and began to scan the area as well. At each sweep of their lights, the disk of illumination around them increased in diameter.

  “Look!” announced Pemba. “I see a wall.” To their right, at a great distance, was a dark obstruction. Their footfalls, when crossing the area, drove tiny clouds of dust particles before them resembling the action of dry ice in water. “It is a stone wall,” she observed getting closer. “Not like the shoggoth walls the Professor told us about.”

  “He did say that at one time their culture constructed buildings by conventional means and then later grew them,” Gideon reminded her. The thought of tunnels, buildings, even roads existing as living things gave him the willies. “It must mean that this area is probably one of the older structures.”

  They stood a few feet from the wall and by the ambient alien light scrutinized horizontal bands of pictoglyphs. Each glyph drawn with the utmost precision, carefully and exactingly engraved into a wall of polished granite. Each granite block had a concave bottom perfec
tly mating with a convex top. Some of the depictions were pictorial displays of different creatures, not just writing symbols. They appeared as distant evolutionary relatives of frogs and fish, great, pop-eyed, piscine beings. Several were short stubby anthropological entities with bulbous heads as high as Gideon’s waist; others were of human size. A series of images portrayed a terrible war of massive destruction between cone-shaped beings and giant mollusks brandishing tentacles tipped with horrid mouths and rows of teeth resembling those of monstrous, extinct sharks. The cone-creatures emerged triumphant, driving a cephalopod nightmare into an earthly prison and the rest off the surface of the planet.

  “I wonder what they say?” Gideon raised.

  “They tell a story, I can recognize as much, but the exact meaning is foreign to me.” Pemba reached out and touched the alien writing. “How could they write into stone with such exactitude? What tools could they have used?”

  “Lasers maybe, diamonds or a material unknown to us such as when . . .” he stopped mid-sentence abruptly. The moment Pemba touched the wall the circle of alien light began to expand rapidly. Little by little they turned, hesitant to observe the increased awareness of their surroundings. The room they stood in was cavernous. It reminded Gideon of a gigantic convention hall that stretched on forever as the light continued to expand. Massive pillars, at regular intervals, propped up a ceiling that had to be three, no four stories high. The supporting columns were easily ten-feet in diameter.

  ***

  Ironwood gave up after more than a dozen attempts. He sat on the running board of the JLTV and stared at the defiant door. Sergeant Jones plopped himself down next to him and looked at the cavern floor. Dutch stood over Jones and shook his shoulder motioning him to speak. “What if we tried to burn our way through that thing, Professor?”

  “With the flamethrowers?” he answered doubtfully. “I don’t believe it would work. Flamethrowers are not cutting torches and besides the material of that thing could be impregnable to any of our efforts.”

  “I’m not talking about cutting through it, Sir. I’d like to try to melt our way through.”

  “How?”

  “By working in shifts. I’ve got enough fuel stowed away on board the JLTV to keep the firesticks going for three hours tops. Dutch and me would work in shifts, never taking the heat off the door for a second. While one of us is flaming away, the other would be refueling.”

  Ironwood looked over at Moses Jones and then up at Dutch. Dutch nodded his head in agreement. “It’s worth a try,” volunteered the Professor.

  ***

  There were hundreds of the massive supporting pillars, maybe thousands, Gideon decided. They were unable to discern the material used to create them because eons of dust turned them opaque. When the growing light intensified, illuminating the remainder of the area, it revealed that the columns were not holding up the ceiling. They stopped several feet below the upper limit of the structure, with black gaping holes above each. It should have been obvious right off since the large expanse near the doorway had no vertical supports. The roof of the cavernous space must have, in some way, been self-supporting. “An engineering marvel for such a gigantic room,” said Gideon in awe while looking up. “I wonder what’s the purpose of all those columns?”

  Pemba wasn’t listening. Her attention was drawn to a group of objects on the far side of the chamber. A row of bulky containers or bins hung off the wall. Next to it were half-a-dozen chromium devices resting on dark shelves. To Gideon, they looked like power drills for giants. Closely examining one of the bins, Gideon picked a clear quartz crystal dowel, approximately six inches long, from a cache of thousands, and held it under the beam of his flashlight. It emitted a soft blue fluorescence. The crystalline shaft tapered to a fine point. “I’m no gemologist, but it looks to be diamond. Could be your engraving tool, Pemba. Darn thing is about the size of my Opus X cigars. Looks like a 50-ring size.” Gideon glanced to his left and noticed that Pemba smiled uneasily at his comparison and then focused her attention on the second object. She seemed distraught. “What is it, Pemba?”

  Pemba raised a hand slowly and pointed apprehensively at the other article. It was the color of midnight and longer than a locomotive. “I’ve seen this before,” she said guardedly, “in one of my dreams.”

  The object was entirely unnatural in appearance. It was an enormous black cylindrical mechanism with an assortment of bulky glass test tubes sealed at their tops and crystalline lever-like rods protruding from its surface. The rods were different than the one Gideon had handled. They were at least three feet in length and four inches in diameter. Instead of being smooth, like the narrow dowels, they were reticulated, having a pattern of interlacing lines, forming a net or web. It reminded him of the hide of a crocodile or alligator. Pemba and Gideon approached it cautiously. Getting up close, Gideon observed that the collection of glass tubes held different colored liquids at various levels. He touched the body of the colossal cylinder, “It’s warm!” he announced. “Come to mention it; it’s getting warm in here too . . . humid.”

  “Tropical,” Pemba added as an afterthought. “They were making something,” speaking softly, lost in thought.

  “Making what?”

  Pemba gazed at Gideon as if peering into another world, “The people-things that once lived here. They were making something horrible. It came oozing out here,” frightened she pointed to one end of the machine.

  Gideon, as directed, regarded the flared end of a large orifice. The maw was encrusted with a quartz-like residue the color of fossilized amber. A jellied excretion, the same shade, trickled from the cavity. He touched a bit of the dribble with the index finger of his left hand. “Ouch!” he jumped.

  “What happened?” Pemba asked.

  “It burns, like acid,” Gideon exclaimed. He still had the cotton gloves that Ironwood had given him, producing one he wiped away the residue. When the irritation lessened, he tossed the glove aside, and it glanced off one of the long crystal rods. A brief tune emanated from the machine, a portion of the alien music they heard when the five-sided door first opened.

  “Oh, Gideon!” Pemba exclaimed, throwing her arms around him. “I am so frightened; I want to get out of here!”

  Gideon held her tight and gently whispered, “If there is a way in, there has to be a way out. The Professor, the Sarge, and Dutch will be getting us out of here soon.

  ***

  Ironwood was the first to notice a change in the big door. “I think it’s working, Sergeant,” he witnessed. Part of the silvery surface began to alter in color and consistency. When they first applied the heat of the flamethrowers the alien material shimmered and flexed as if in rebellion to the assault. After the third shift of sustained heat a portion of the door darkened with a red tinge at its center.

  Sergeant Jones, in a wide stance ten paces back from his target, projected a long, controllable stream of fire. Dutch, having completed the refueling of the tanks on his incendiary device, stood ready to relieve the Sergeant.

  The reddish area within the circle of heat intensified, Ironwood smiled.

  ***

  Gideon and Pemba kicked up more of the dust fluff walking to the nearest pillar. No longer holding hands, they were snug, side-by-side, with caring arms around each other’s waists. This should be a lovers’ stroll in the park, Gideon reflected, except regrettably his muse was to keep Pemba calm while they hoped and prayed for rescue from their grim prison.

  “I do not know what I would have done without your companionship,” Pemba regarded him tenderly.

  The heat and moisture had become steamy as if some external force had turned up both a furnace and a humidifier. Gideon had unbuttoned his desert tan camo shirt, and Pemba had removed her cotton jacket tying the sleeves belt-like below her waist. The white tank top against her dark skin was erotic. Gideon tried to keep his mind off her and on the problem at hand.

  The purpose of their walk was to inspect a pillar. Gideon stopped in front of
the grand column and turned Pemba to face him. He could no longer resist her. “I wouldn’t want to be locked up with anyone else,” he whispered, pulled her close, and gently kissed her on the lips. Immediate remorse for his actions ensued, holding her at arms lengths, he apologized, “I am sorry, I don’t know what . . . “

  Pemba pulled him back and kissed him hard on the mouth. “I have wanted to do that for a long time too,” she cooed.

  The passion was unlike anything Gideon had ever known. Without question, every fiber of his body told him that the experience was mutual. Caress followed caress, and he pressed her back against the mammoth column. Gideon leaned back only inches from her and peered into the depth of Pemba’s brown eyes. Movement on both sides of her face distracted him. Gray streaks slowly formed in the black hair at her temples. He abruptly pulled Pemba away from the pillar when he noticed something else behind her. The graying of Pemba’s temples ceased, and the pillar was no longer opaque. There was movement inside!

  Pemba screamed!

  Gideon wiped away centuries of dust with his remaining glove; the grand column glowed with a golden radiance. The movement emerged as both reptilian and plant life. Three enormous eyes on a thick gray-green stalk scrutinized malevolently. The outlandish head wore a crown of antennae topped by a scrub of fine cilia. An additional cluster of cilium hung below a chinless face resembling a bizarre caricature of a beard. A cone-shaped body, one-and-one-half the height of a man, twisted and wriggled its ridged and wrinkled flesh revealing a tentacle and bulky pincer claws.

  “What is it?” shouted Pemba as they backed away in fear.

  Anxiety and dread tightened Gideon’s vocal cords, “It’s an Elder Being! Like in those drawings Ironwood showed us.”