“No offense was intended,” Professor Armitage said, reacting to the surrounding experiments as if they were no more interesting than a child playing with building blocks. “The offer is genuine, though.”
“What about Booth?” Mercury asked.
Professor Armitage wrinkled his nose. “I do not think his destiny lies with us.”
It was strange, but as foul and disturbing as I found the University to be, the rejection made me want to reach over and crush Professor Armitage’s throat. The hate and fury in my stomach was uncharacteristic, and I knew it to be a mark of the beast within. Suppressing it took a great exertion of will. My feelings must have shown on my face because Mercury reached over and pressed her hand against my shoulder, touching it despite it being covered in a horrifying substance.
“It’s all right, Booth. I wouldn’t belong to any group that would have me as a member anyway.”
“You misunderstand my meaning,” Professor Armitage said, taking us to the end of the hall where a freight elevator awaited. There were no doors to the elevator and it looked like it’d been stripped for metal, except for the bottom half and cage.
“And what is your meaning?” I said, coming in with Mercury. She took position beside me.
“What I said,” Professor Armitage replied. “Time is a river. One can sail up and down it, but it only flows one way.”
Now he was just pissing me off. “I’m sick of your riddles and half-answers.”
Professor Armitage just smiled. “Then you’re going to hate this.”
Professor Armitage pushed down a knife switch built into the bottom of the elevator next to a dozen half-broken buttons, all of them going down. The elevator continued descending for twelve levels and then started passing bare rock.
Continuing our descent, we hit what would have been the sixteenth level and found ourselves in a cave. The air was no longer freezing, but I felt the wind from what looked to be a vast underground network of tunnels. The central chamber we were in was the size of an old Pre-Rising stadium.
It was not the size of the caverns or the tunnels leading out of them, of which there were at least fifty, that caught my attention. No, that was mere dross to the truly breathtaking sights that lay within. Spinning around the top of the cavern were glowing iridescent balls of blue light exchanging great bolts of electricity They whirled and twisted with a weird defiance of gravity that captured the imagination.
Around them floated images of other times, places, and dimensions. I saw the Earth when it was young, when the first humans came to this continent, when Europeans stole their land, and when Cthulhu washed human civilization clean. Somehow, I sensed that these bizarre rifts were the source of the humming in the back of my mind.
Great octagonal arches filled the chamber alongside canine teeth-like stalactites that built a pathway through an alien temple. The tiles on the ground were all octagonal, forming a weird pattern. Machines were set up throughout the cavern, cobbled together with wires and aged computers and connected to devices that seemed to have no moving parts at all but free-floated in the air beside them.
More robed figures worked at the machinery, all possessing dull, lifeless eyes and faces devoid of emotion. The number of mutants among them was considerable. Some possessed deformed mouths, tentacle-like appendages ending in claws, and even trumpet-like horns where their nose should be like the now-extinct elephant.
I wanted to throw up again. Just looking at them triggered my gag reflex. Mercury covered her face in a mixture of pity and incredulity. As if she could not believe individuals would allow themselves to be changed like this without taking their own lives. Even more so, that they would work alongside the being that had so clearly inspired their deformities.
In the center of this wondrous and corrosive place was something the mutants at least partially resembled. It was an immense rugose cone, ten feet high, its head and other organs attached to foot-thick distensible limbs on its axis. Claws rested on two of these limbs, clicking together like an insect communicating with its fellows.
To my eyes, which occasionally saw more than a human’s, this was but a mere shell for a vaster intelligence that wore the body encompassing it as you or I might wear a suit. I could not understand the full shape of the thing, but only perceived the barest edges of its multi-spatial, multi-temporal psychic presence.
Indeed, it was a member of the Great Race.
A Yithian.
Then it spoke to me, its words like a shout in the back of my mind rising up through my brain and shoving me a step backwards. Mercury, whose own psychic traits were just now developing, jumped three inches in the air. Professor Armitage, already a man of many mysteries, seemed unaffected.
“I have brought John Booth the Half-Human Gunslinger and Mercury the Sawbones Witch,” Armitage proclaimed.
Mercury and I both shot him a nasty glare.
Greetings and welcome travelers, its words echoed in our head. You have come just in time.
“For what?” I whispered.
It still heard me.
For what? To save the world!
Chapter Four
It is to Mercury’s credit that, even in the face of something beyond human comprehension, she kept her sense of humor. “You might want to look outside, Chief. I think you missed saving this world by about a hundred years.”
“Forgive her, Great One,” Professor Armitage said, clapping his hands and bowing his head.
The Great One gave a movement of his body that I assumed to be equivalent to a shrug or a laugh.
I am not much concerned by her pessimistic observation. I have possessed many humans over the centuries and know what it is to feel like one. In her position, I too would feel the planet was doomed.
The creature’s psychic words were so powerful that they hard to listen to, but I listened anyway. “The human race, at least, is doomed. I heard from an avatar of Nyarl—”
“Do not speak that name!” Professor Armitage shouted. His voice took on a shrill, panicked quality which contrasted to his earlier smooth confidence.
“All right,” I said, more confused than anything else. It wasn’t as if Nyarlathotep were a secret god. Thousands of people across the Wasteland prayed to him nightly. Then again, perhaps I had merely grown used to the attention the Crawling Chaos paid me. I was one of his favorite playthings.
The Herald of Azathoth is not a being we need to invoke here, the Great One said, sloshing up to less than a yard away from us. As for your belief that humanity is doomed, I believe that is a matter of perspective.
“How so?” I asked. I would do anything, commit any atrocity, and break every creed I swore by, to prevent humanity’s destruction. I wanted us to last longer than the three generations and was willing to murder, torture, or steal if I could achieve it.
Your species has gone through countless changes over its history with some branches going extinct while others thrived, the Great One explained. If the Herald of Azathoth told you your race was doomed, it is possible he meant it other than how he spoke. That being has doomed whole civilizations by telling them nothing but truth designed to mislead.
I found myself intrigued by the creature’s almost human manner. While ghouls, Deep Ones, and Serpent Men were capable of something similar, they were, after a fashion, humans themselves. All had been artificially evolved by the Elder Things from humankind’s simian ancestors. The Great Race of Yith, though, was as wholly removed from man as the dinosaurs they’d once lived beside.
“I do not believe it is such an easy thing to avoid human extinction by saying it’s all a matter of semantics.”
Mercury did not share my skepticism. “How do we survive?”
Change, the Great One intoned. Adapting to this environment you have found yourself in is the only way to survive. Evolution can allow species to become different in profound ways, but I fear the hand of natural selection will not help you. Instead, humanity must change through its own hand.
Mercu
ry slumped her shoulders and lowered her head. “You sound like Alan Ward.”
“A stopped clock is right twice a day,” Professor Armitage said, surprising me by defending the madman. “Doctor Ward was an evil monster and an enemy of this world, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t right about some things.”
The Great Race was doomed by its wars with hostile alien powers. The Great One conjured images of hideous flying polyps in our minds, tearing at thousands of creatures just like him (it?) in bizarre organic crystal cities. With so few of our species remaining and the environment of the world turning hostile in the early days of your planet’s ecology, we chose to send ourselves forward in time to possess a less-developed species after the danger had passed. This is our manner of survival.
“You possess…people?” Mercury paled, perhaps realizing what we might have been brought here for.
Yes, the Great One said, gesturing with a clawed hand to the mutated robed figures nearby. Though it is more a type of body-exchange. As my fellows work here, experiencing this world, their host bodies’ minds are back in our time doing the reverse. Someday, we will exchange bodies again and return with our findings.
“Why return?” I asked. “I thought your people were dying in the past.”
Humanity’s time on Earth is not long enough for our needs nor much safer than the time we were under siege by the Flying Polyps. Which is as good a name as any for them, John Henry Booth, as they have no name in a language you would understand. No, instead, we are merely studying this time. We shall project ourselves much further in the future, millions of years after now in fact, to possess a non-sentient species which inhabits the world after humanity’s extinction.
“Our extinction,” I said. “Which is confirmed.”
In the current timeline, yes, the Great One said. Though definitions of extinction and survival depend greatly on one’s perspective.
“If you possess people, why are you here physically?” I asked, looking up and down the alien being before me.
The technology of the mind or magic as your race refers to it, the Great One made a noise which sounded like a snort of derision. Humans are limited in their capacity to use it. Therefore, my people decided to physically send me forward so I could conduct advanced experiments in this time. You live in an age of wonders, even if I understand you can’t appreciate them.
Mercury narrowed her eyes. “Yes, it’s rather hard to appreciate the Great Old Ones after they’ve killed billions.”
Agreed, the Great One said. When my work is done, I will abandon my body in this time period and join my fellows in the distant future.
It was a surreal idea that took some time getting used to, even in a world where monsters and alien gods walked among us. The Yithians lived in the ancient past, experiencing linear time but choosing to psychically venture back and forth along its flow to study the cosmos. It was an enviably form of immortality but one with a cost. I could not help but think of the hundreds of humans they must have ripped from their lives to throw into horrific bodies in a long dead age. Were the Yith the source of legends about demonic possession? I could not say but it disturbed me to the core. I was dealing with a race that did not hesitate to disregard the rights of individual humans in the pursuit of knowledge. Not that humans, themselves, displayed much concern for such.
“And what about all the changes some of these guys have undergone?” Mercury asked, looking among the mutants surrounding us.
“There is always a price for knowledge,” Professor Armitage said, behind us. “The volunteers knew the risks.”
That was a distinctly unsatisfying answer.
We used to be able to possess a body for decades without affecting the host. Sometimes, we’d inhabit it for the duration of the host’s natural life, but something has changed in the world and our consciousness now influences the more malleable parts of the human frame, the Great One said, making clicking noises with its claws. It is unfortunate, but has provided us many insights into the new laws of physics that currently govern this dimension.
“So, are you going to take over all of us?” Mercury asked.
That would be a poor means of survival given your world’s present state! The Great One made a noise like the one before, but louder. No, our plans will take us several hundred million years into your future. By then, your planet will have cooled and become inhospitable to human life. Mankind will be gone by that time, whether by travel or extinction. No, we are here in this time because of curiosity—a chance to learn about another race born of this planet.
I felt lightheaded. “What do you want us for? Armitage killed dozens of people and kidnapped us. What could be so important? You mentioned saving the world, but—”
I couldn’t even save myself.
The Great One clicked its claws rapidly. Kidnapped? Student, is this true?
“Yes,” Professor Armitage said. “I do not want to see this world end.”
“Again, it’s hard to see how that’s going to happen,” Mercury said, looking around. “What would a double-ended world even look like?”
The total extinction of every plant, animal, in-between, and microorganism on this planet, the Great One said. With the remainder of the world reduced to a lifeless, atmosphere-less ball before it is driven around the universe like a vehicle.
It conjured images of just that to help its case.
“Yeah, that would be worse,” Mercury said, blinking. “How?”
The Unimaginable Horror, the Great One said, its psychic shouts softening. It is a being that travels the cosmos and inhabits worlds capable of sustaining life, warps them to its service, and then feasts upon them before using the shell to travel to new ones.
The Unimaginable Horror proved quite imaginable as we saw images of a living blackness crossing space and time in thickets of telekinetically-linked comets before striking worlds and slithering out onto them. We saw an accelerated depiction of the Earth’s creation when several hundred such “comets” came to our planet during its earliest days. The leaking process involved a medium of melting fluid flowing from the crashed asteroid’s surface onto the primordial Earth below.
I knew what was being depicted. “Wait, the Unimaginable Horror is the ocean?”
“Inside it,” Professor Armitage said. “Much of the water that covers our planet came from comets. Its foul psychic presence was contained within the venerable ice forming them. The Unimaginable Horror would forever taint our waters and lead to who knows what strange mutations that became part of the races evolved on our planet.”
I was too stunned to reply. Even our water was tainted?
Was nothing sacred?
Mercury stared at the Great One.
The Unimaginable Horror lay dormant until other terrors came from beyond the stars to the primordial Earth. Whether they were drawn by the Unimaginable Horror or found the world by chance, I cannot say. The Great One clicked its claws. However, they soon discovered the terrible presence lurking inside and combined their powers against it.
“What happened next?” I said, trying to distract myself from the immense hatred bubbling in my chest.
The Unimaginable Horror was destroyed, the Great One said, surprising me. As much as such a creature can be destroyed.
“Kind of lame for a guy named the Unimaginable Horror,” Mercury said. “I thought you said this thing was dangerous.”
Nice, Mercury. Go ahead, tempt fate.
We are not the Great Old Ones. They are as far above the Yithians as— The Great One paused. Well, I’m sure you can imagine.
“The Yithians are above us,” is what he wanted to say. Amazing, the Great One was an eldritch creature with manners.
“I take it didn’t stay dead?” I had a funny feeling that was where this story was going.
“That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die,” Professor Armitage quoted the Necronomicon.
I was getting sick of that quote. “Go on.”
The Yithians were once not so unlike humanity in its foolishness. The Great One clicked its claws several times, referring to its own race by their formal name as opposed to the title he’d been using this entire time. Scientists seeking to master the technology of the mind came to worship the Unimaginable Horror’s remains and sought their power. Driven insane by what they saw, their debased rituals helped restore the creature to life. We were forced to fight it.
I grimaced, realizing the Yithians had experienced their own version of the Rising. “Did you defeat it?”
The Great One was silent.
Professor Armitage answered for him. “No, they did not.”
We were already weakened by war with another species. The Unimaginable Horror earned its name by destroying much of what was left of our civilization. Even its short period of consciousness warped the climate of our world to the point that most species went extinct. The Great One depicted a cataclysm the likes of which is difficult to put into words. Sixty-five million years ago as it was to me, it was yesterday to the Yithians. The stars were not right, though, and the weakened Unimaginable Horror fell into a fitful slumber.
“I’m sorry,” I said, surprised how much I meant it. It seemed both our races had been cursed by the Great Old Ones.
The Unimaginable Horror had a great tower built around it by our greatest psionic engineer, Zhaal the Dreamer. We sealed his tower with our strongest technology, even turning to older forbidden technologies taught to us by the Great Old Ones’ minion species. We could not destroy the Unimaginable Horror or even contain it, but we could imprison it. The Tower of Zhaal would remain outside time and space in a place that was nowhere and everywhere at once. The stars would never be right around it, and with the rising of the other Great Old Ones, it remained asleep.
I was confused now. “If you could do that, why not do it to all the Great Old Ones?”
Tower of Zhaal Page 4
