by Byron Craft
A dim light from above began to illuminate the area gradually getting brighter with each passing second. I stood in a colossal four-sided chamber, hundreds of yards in length and breadth. Under the prevailing light, I spied numerous ebony megaliths, scattered across the interior, equally spaced apart. Sculpted with smooth precision, they stood no less than a dozen feet tall, maintaining a slight tilt. The angle, in addition to their placement, elicited the mental image of a lecture hall for titans. All four walls slanted at equal angles ceilingward joining to a central apex at least ten-stories in height. I was within the interior of a titanic pyramid. At its zenith, suspended midway, hung an epic-sized globe of the purest white, the source of the ever-increasing brightness.
I could now observe that the robed figures had preceded me, and slowly encircled my presence. They were extremely tall, and stood maybe nine or ten feet, of this I was not certain for their garments only served to obscure their stature. Their wraps billowed like a woman’s skirt and dragged on the stone floor making it impossible to detect the existence of any legs. I could not help but notice a moist trail left in their passing. Each, most assuredly, secreted a thin layer of liquid, the result of some foreign method of locomotion.
Once the mysterious group’s circling was complete, they disrobed. As if by some invisible signal they discarded their clothing in unison. When their garments dropped to the stone, I saw them for the first time. I am able now to trace their monstrous outlines with uncomfortable ease. I began to experience the feeling of parasomnia, a terror that causes the sufferer to move or scream to escape a waking dream physically, but this was no hallucination, a delusionary reverie, it was as genuine as anything could be. Because they were bizarre looking upside-down cones that had the scent of gardenias. All my senses were active, sight, sound, smell and the touch of the cold stone floor.
Plant? Animal? Were the questions that fell in on me, precisely due to these beings leathery green, almost elastic flesh. The base of each conical-shaped thing was fringed with a flexible substance that propelled them in a slithering lubricated motion, like a monstrous slug or snail, across the floor through a series of expansions and contractions. Their heads mounted on thick stalks peered at me through the alien light source with three eyes that glowed red. This great race of beings had three arms, of a sort, more like tentacles, two terminated with nippers comparable to an earthly lobster’s, only massive in size while the stub of the third appendage displayed trumpet-shaped fingers that I conjectured were for grasping tools and objects.
The cone-creatures appeared to communicate with one another through a series of whistles from spinal openings, intermittent with clicks made by their crustacean claws. I believe it was because of the action of these sounds they made the pure white globe that hung from the inside point of the pyramid’s ceiling erupt with lights of every colour. Objects, which still puzzle me now, quickly projected over the entire spherical surface. I had a singular feeling that something was attempting to get possession of my thoughts. At first, both on that image sphere and in my mind, brief glimmering visions took shape. Chaotic visions which in the beginning greatly disturbed me. They were fragmentary glimpses of a time long ago, in chronological order.
I became a disembodied consciousness with a wide range of vision, wider than normal, floating freely, while in another spatial dimension still inside the pyramid. Hovering motionlessly in my weird ethereal flight, I studied the spectacle. I soon learned that these creatures were incapable of human speech because they employed an alien mechanism on which frightening sounds, resembling the English language, played. A face appeared on the orb, a face that was a grotesque alien caricature of a human, hairless, earless and with skin the colour and texture of tree bark. It spoke, in the beginning, with a peculiar tongue of guttural thickness by a thing whose vocal organs were not like man’s. Thus, it had no relation to the human speech equipment. Their physiological equipment wholly unlike ours determined the syllables, hence could never be reproduced by human throats. First terrifying rarified ululations, totally incomprehensible, then as the seconds and minutes progressed, they either metamorphosed into more recognizable human speech or it simply, cerebrally, became understandable to me.
The artificial voice droned musically and began to have a calming effect speaking directly to me, telling me not to be afraid, that to watch and listen. Straightaway it formed a narrative, the contents of which unfolded as an account of the race that surrounded me. A succession of madcap images spread-out in such a visual quality that I soon lost all awareness of the pyramid’s interior.
I was transported back through immeasurable distances of time and space. Directly I was overcome by a feeling of depression more severe than the rumination of my ill health and looming death. A wave of inferiority swept over me, and I saw how minutely tiny each is in comparison with total existence. I was taken back to the beginning, beyond numerous dimensions to the very creation of the universe. Human laws, interests, and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos. There was nothing in which the human form, the passions of humanity as well as its conditions and standards were depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. I was forced to purge and cleanse my mind of such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind.
Before the creation of our solar system, the alien race within the pyramid dwelt on another world, not the physical semblances I was in the company of, rather their mental heritage, for the mind of this Great Race, I was told, was older than its bodily form. The beings of that elder world, wise with the ultimate mysteries of the universe, looked ahead for a new world to explore and a species to inhabit. They were probably the greatest race of all because they alone had conquered the secret of time. They could project their consciousnesses across time, inhabiting the bodies of individuals of other species and swapping their minds with their own. Thus, it was the minds of the Great Race that sped across the void from an obscure trans-galactic world known as Yith and sent their intellects into a future race best adapted to house them, the cone-shaped, prehistoric Terran beings.
These possessed Elder Beings became searchers of knowledge. They eventually learned all that had been known or would ever be known through the power of their keener minds to project themselves into the past and the future to study the lore of every age. On Earth, they built a flourishing civilization in their new bodies. The Terran lifeforms the Yithans occupied had no sexes and reproduced by spores instead, though rarely because of their species' longevity unless more of their kind desired to migrate to Earth, then the conical beings were induced to multiply in greater numbers. I learned that at the height of the Cretaceous Period eight-hundred billion of the cone-shaped giants occupied our planet.
Then I experienced a sensation. A sensation one might have walking across a room where you thought you kicked something and there was nothing there. The feeling signaled a revolution in time, and I witnessed the Elder Beings erecting mighty granite cities of windowless towers. Then, with a passing interval, they threw off the shackles of conventional construction exhibiting buildings of organic architectural quality, so were their worker machines within, a synthesized labor force, and all seemed to be, in some incomprehensible way, alive. Their cities grew to join together in a hideous amalgamation covering the planet as one corporeal metropolis accompanied by a multitude of synthetic slaves to service the Elder Beings ever-increasing population.
The images slowed, and there was a flutter of fear. The artificial voice fell silent, and gloom spread across the ancient horizon. Fear? How could it be? I could not begin to fathom it. The Elder Beings had to be the most evolved and advanced race of intelligent creatures since the dawn of creation. In all their greatness could they have one fear?
There was a war! There were shadows, shadows out of time of a horrible and utterly alien presence. I was not able to gain a vivid hint as to the invaders’ appearance. They were only partly material
, as we understand matter, the rest gave them a shadowy manifestation. They had the power of aerial motion and came through space, from where I never learned, settling at both polar regions, preying horribly upon the beings they found.
The Yithans waged a fearful war against the dark forces. Enormous armies utilizing the knowledge and fantastic devices their researchers had drawn together. They employed unknown principles of energy, using weapons that produced incredible electrical effects. The dark armies battled across the brooding landscapes for ages. I do not know how long the war persisted, nonetheless by the lapses in the images, the gradual variations in landscapes and the shifting of star patterns it must have continued hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. My understanding of the heavens is fairly acute, awarding me the knowledge of charting heavenly bodies. I am an amateur astronomer and have spent many an hour at the Ladd Observatory studying celestial objects. In some periods they left the planet surface to fight amongst the stars where countless worlds were engaged in the combat. The war destroyed whole planetary systems.
The dark ones appeared to be virtually indestructible. At the point in the fighting, when I thought the conical people would give in and fall prey before the black science of the dark ones, a modernistic weapon was produced. The mechanism was small, probably less than three feet in height and appeared to be glass and highly polished steel. I believe that the device called upon the very power of the universe itself, for in one sequence of images in the heat of a great battle, a gap appeared in the fabric of space swallowing the dark ones, imprisoning them. A war that lasted centuries was over in the blink of an eye. One moment whole planets were devoured, in a hellish struggle, and the next second the heavens were at peace.
The dark ones in full battle rage disappeared when a hole appeared, blacker than space itself and they were swept inside. A solitary few, immune to the power of the machine, escaped. The largest was a misshapen bulk, a gigantic mollusk with tentacles and the maw the size of a great whale. The rest, few in number, were small hairy creatures that clung like parasites to the great thing for protection. Horrible they all were if there had been cause for the Great Race to comprehend horror and loathsome if they had any feelings of loathing. Quickly and methodically they surrounded them and in a blinding flash of electrical fire drove them all into the depths of a planet. With the instrument they created, they found it easy to subdue the predatory entity and drive it along with its daemons down into those caverns of the inner earth. Thenceforth they sealed the entrances and left them to their fate. The only exit from the cavity was made impenetrable by a mighty star quarried stone. Gigantic bolts were driven miles into the surface of the planet securing the huge rock. As if this wasn’t enough, the stone door was then hinged to the planet’s surface and further secured by metal straps as thick as a man is wide and welded into place by the alien weapon. Later, the trap door was surrounded by five-sided flagstones, and a temple constructed around it so that a constant vigil remained over the spot. A feeling, no an impression, was suddenly conveyed to me. Not with words, rather imagery of sorts was impressed upon my consciousness, that the continual watch over the barred cavity in the Earth was to prevent the creature and its throng from ever escaping their prison. If released it would call forth its masters, known as the Old Ones, to return and wreak havoc.
When the dimensional void slammed shut, trapping the Old Ones, the mechanical voice uttered one word, it was a name. A shudder passed through my very soul when I heard the utterance of that horrible appellation. A name that by the very voicing of it can bring nightmarish visions, it was Cthulhu!
The entire cosmology was complete with a war between the good Elder Gods and the evil Outer Gods, and their ilk. The forces of good were supposed to have won, locking the Old Ones in a dimensional prison and the others beneath the earth was, in truth, unsettling enough, but the mention of that eldritch name became a release, and I was instantly catapulted back to my parlour at number 10 Barnes Street.
I have related these events to my good friend Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee in hopes that he may relate it to some other form of communication. It may be proposed one day that mankind was created as slaves by the Great Race and that life on Earth as we know it evolved from scientific experiments abandoned by the Elder Things. They may rise again, from where would only be conjecture, maybe they sleep somewhere, waiting to return, to once again maintain their vigil over that hellish prison.
The inability of our science to comprehend the power and knowledge of the Elder Beings, if they reappear, could, in a dark and distant future, be the downfall of human opponents, creating such great horrors that would mean insanity for all of mankind, the very cancer of superstition.
Chapter 20
- The Plan -
Ironwood sat in a lawn chair, on his patio, and whittled. A short, narrow piece of pinyon pine taken from his fireplace woodpile in his left hand, a Bowie knife held in his right mechanically carved small slices. Thin slivers of wood littered the flagstones in front of him. He read the Memorandum cover to cover three times. Everything was beginning to sound ominously familiar. You do not need to encounter the same pattern too many times to recognize it, and Ironwood could identify it easily enough. Some of the journal was reminiscent of the dream experiences that Alan Ward had related to him and there was another story, that was alarmingly similar.
The other comparable account was related to him by Faren Church. Ironwood was a young scholar back then and the head of MURP, the Miskatonic University Relocation Program. One of his responsibilities, at that time, was to establish new identities for Faren’s family and relocate them to a different part of the country. Mr. Church provided Scholar Ironwood with a series of chronicles for safekeeping; a journal, a diary and three audio cassette tapes. The diary had been written by Church’s wife, Janet, the journal by an insane quasi-sorcerer, Heinrich Todesfall, and the tapes recorded by Faren. Together they foretold the possibility of our planet threatened by an ageless horror, Cthulhu. Faren Church’s account voiced a dream experience resembling the HPL Memorandum vision as well as Alan Ward’s nightmares.
Years later, Professor Thomas Ironwood, frustrated with his colleagues who he believed became dangerously lax, edited the chronicles into separate narratives, resigned from Miskatonic University and published the accounts under the title, “The Cry of Cthulhu.” The Professor’s motive was rock-solid, “the public needed to know.”
Ironwood looked up in time to observe Amy escorting a visitor through the French doors onto the patio. He was a very tall gentleman that ducked slightly beneath the head jamb. His large feet encased in canvas topped loafers, and he wore beige Dockers and a white polo shirt. The past middle-aged newcomer had a bronze tan accented by a full head of white hair and walked toward the seated Professor with the gait of a twenty-year-old.
It wasn’t until after Amy had closed the door behind the gentleman and he was an arm’s reach away did Ironwood realize that his visitor was Vice Admiral Jack Hawkins. He had never seen the Admiral out of uniform before, and his current attire muddled the familiar.
“Don’t you have anything better to do than to make little pieces of wood out of bigger ones?” challenged Hawkins with a smile and an extended hand. “You’re cluttering the deck.”
“I’m ruminating,” he answered, shaking the Admiral’s hand. “Trying to put the pieces of this alien puzzle into some semblance of order. And what the hell are you doing dressed like that?”
“My wife bought these for me. Says, that I might need to get used to civvies. I’m not due to retire for a year, but that bastard Neville Stream is going to have me in front of a Congressional Committee next week, and I thought I should start getting into the habit of wearing these rags.”
“I am sorry, Jack, I got you into this mess,” answered Ironwood stopping his whittling.
“Nonsense, we were always in this together, this ain’t a social call Tom. I’ve got some interesting info for you,” he shot back looking from side to side. “Your
guy, Ward, did a sweep of your place?”
Ironwood nodded, “Found three bugs; the place should be clean.”
Hawkins slid one of the lawn chairs next to Ironwood’s, sat down, and leaned toward him. “Did a little covert op though the Mike Lab. These towers are more than an alien habitat.”
“You have my attention.”
“They are transmitting, Tom. The damn things are linked together in a network beaming into space.”
“Radio?”
“At first, each shoggoth tower acts as an individual device deploying energy-efficient communications. They are individual components broadcasting, in relays, low band radio frequencies to their fixed points, transmitters, that can communicate with each other over geographic regions ranging in size from single cities to entire states, provinces, and countries. We’ve intercepted their transmissions, but it is all gibberish, and our top code breaker is on a sabbatical. The wireless collective is then shot out of our atmosphere.”
“How and where?” Ironwood asked sitting up straight in his chair amazed by his friend’s claims.
“The how, so far, we are clueless, the where, is the moon.”
“The moon! But for what purpose?” he replied even more astounded.
“From there, I am afraid we are lost. These Elder Beings must have planted some kind of transmitter out there ages ago because one of our satellites detected an energy source on the moon’s surface radiating beyond our solar system.”
The realization of the consequences registered as despair on Ironwood’s features.
