by Byron Craft
SHOGGOTH
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. Rev. 4
Copyright © 2016, United States Library of Congress; Shoggoth
www.ByronCraftBooks.com
Artwork by Eric Lofgren; www.ericlofgren.net
ISBN-13: 978-1533451309
ISBN-10: 1533451303
DEDICATION
To my lovely wife, Marcia and my devoted dog Sherlock for putting up with me during my days of seclusion while writing this book
SHOGGOTH
CHAPTER 1
CONSCRIPTION
Trihl’s long green tendril inched along the shelf. The slender appendage wormed its way past stacks of bulky file drawers. After carefully selecting the correct bio-number in one stack, a stud moved, and a ready light winked. The lower lobe of Trihl’s third brain projected the combination, and the fluid lock in one of the drawers gurgled briefly, raising and lowering the levels in its five chambers to their prescribed heights. Within the span of a few seconds a shiny metal box slid out of a narrow recess, unlatched, and noiselessly swung its top open.
Trihl would have smiled if Trihl had something to smile with, but the wooden expression on the big Kroog’s face was indigenous to their race. While Kroogs had an advanced level of multiple brains, colossal size, and strength, unparalleled dexterity of tentacles, tendrils, and antennae, they lacked any facial muscles. Nevertheless, there was a warmth inside the huge conical body that radiated joy because Trihl was about to come full circle.
Trihl had completed the Kroog conscription that all of their species must commit to and now the journey of millenniums lies ahead.
Excitement shot through Trihl like a bolt of electricity. It was doubly exciting because not only was Trihl now free to travel through time visiting the lives of future ages, but Trihl’s contribution to the Kroogian race had been equally as magnificent.
Trihl had spent three-fifths of a pentad developing the new life form, and Trihl knew that the outcome of this discovery would radically change the lives of all Kroogs in the galaxy, this was Trihl’s conscription.
Trihl placed the fifteen sealed tubes of proto-cells in the box where they would be preserved, if need be, for centuries. If ever there was a need to call up any one of these original formulas they would be here, safe in stasis.
Enthusiastic about the adventure that lay ahead, Trihl quickly gave the locking command. The lid snapped shut from a heavy, invisible force and the stasis box slammed back into its recess. The noise echoed within the library chamber and down the granite hallway. That echo, Trihl thought, with a touch of cosmic irony, may reach farther than my travels; only time will tell.
CHAPTER 2
FEEDING TIME
Isaac looked around the damp room; it was almost time. Charlie Youngblood will be here soon. That Narraganset had an uncanny sense of time. Although he never carried a watch, he can tell you the time of day within a couple of minutes of accuracy.
Isaac was nervous. He allowed his mind to wander, anything rather than to think of feeding that thing behind the door. More and more its ingesting of its food became repulsive to him.
He recalled when he first came to the area. The desolation was unbearable. It still was. It took almost eleven months to travel the distance by wagon train, and he had almost died that first year of influenza. Another year followed in which the tunnels were located, and his house could be built over the site.
Isaac’s eyes followed the hieroglyphics along the curved walls of the subterranean room. And here I have been these past seven years; he brooded, painfully deciphering the history of a lost age.
Isaac forced his attention to a ledger on the writing desk, dipping a feather-quill pen in an ink well he made an entry on page fifty-seven. Printed across the top of the page in bold letters was the word LIVESTOCK. Below, written in longhand, were the words: 6 cows, 2 sheep. Below this, Isaac wrote “the amount of food needed increases with each feeding.”
It would not be so bad if it ate like any one of God’s creatures, but it did not. It . . . absorbed its food, he decided. It drank its painfully mewling prey slowly, savoring each moment of the animal’s agony.
Isaac was sure the thing savored its food. He had a sickening feeling in his stomach. He always felt that way when it neared feeding time. He remembered when they first started to feed it. It was small then.
Isaac used to observe the terrible process with a mixture of horror and scientific curiosity. Then it started to grow, it got bigger, and its needs grew along with it. It would only feed on living things; nothing else would satisfy its lust. Small game was enough at first; jackrabbits, squirrels, prairie dogs, even lizards, and mice. It did not discriminate as long as its dinner was alive.
Soon its needs outgrew prairie dogs and mice. It ate much larger animals now, mainly cattle and sheep, occasionally an old Mustang if one could be caught, and on one occasion, a pig. Isaac cursed God for that day. The agonized ululations emanating from that pig were blood curdling and unforgettable.
He had bought it that morning from a Yuma Indian on the outskirts of Darwin. He had paid an exorbitant price for the two-hundred-fifty-pound sow, but livestock was scarce that spring. An early and harsh winter the previous year had delayed the cattle drives from west Texas and New Mexico, and the surrounding desert offered very little. He could have purchased a dairy cow from one of the locals, but they were beginning to get suspicious.
Charlie Youngblood had told Isaac that he had heard talk in Darwin centering on the abnormal amounts of livestock they required for a household that consisted of only Isaac and two servants. The last thing Isaac needed was a group of superstitious and excitable townspeople bursting in on his studies.
He had done his best to keep a low profile, staying at home as much as possible, only venturing out when it was absolutely necessary. When he did go into town, he was always cordial to everyone he met, but never lingered. If asked, he said he was an archeologist studying the Indian artifacts and petroglyphs that could be found in and around the Coso Range.
He had also done his best to keep the noise down when it was hungry. At these times, they would blanket the door to the tunnel with bags filled with sand to muffle the sounds it made followed by a careful search above ground for any fissures or old volcanic vents that may have opened on the desert floor with the shifting of sand. A vent, if opened into one of the tunnels below, could allow the noise to be heard for miles.
He was afraid that they would be discovered when the pig started to squeal; that was, he recalled with a shudder, the worst day of his life. The poor animal uttered a sharp, shrill, prolonged cry when the thing latched on to it. The sow did not see the creature at first. It grabbed the pig from behind and pulled her squealing and screaming into its jelly-like mass. The creature made sucking, slurping sounds. It was quick, deadly quick. The sow was stuck fast, rooted to the flesh of the thing.
Inside the dark, gelatinous layers of flesh, Isaac noticed something glowing with a golden light and parts of the thing briefly became translucent. He had seen this before when it fed. It would happen to lesser or greater degrees depending on the size of the animal it was devouring. He wondered if it was the spark of life that ignited that golden light. Perhaps the spirit of the animal it absorbed?
The female pig was still conscious after several minutes. Her squealing rose in volume until it became an ear-splitting shriek. The creature held the tortured animal off the floor of the cave. The sow’s legs kicked and her body wriggled and squirmed, only to be drawn deeper into the thing.
Isaac had never been more repulsed at feeding time than
he was at that moment. For the first time, he questioned the morality of his studies. It was worse than being in a slaughterhouse. His stomach knotted, and his skin crawled in tight folds along the back of his neck.
Within the dark, cavernous vault, the torturous murder of this poor, dumb animal seemed to Isaac, the work of the devil. The deadliest of sins, a sacrifice made deep in the bowels of hell.
Isaac abruptly turned from the squealing horror and ordered Charlie and his brother, John, to stop it.
“Stop it,” he shouted. “Kill it now!”
Charlie and his brother, mesmerized by the spectacle, jumped when Isaac issued the command. Charlie was the first to regain his composure.
Stepping forward, he dutifully cocked the hammer on his Springfield. John Youngblood was close behind, imitating his brother. The sound of the two muzzleloaders firing was deafening, but not as ear splitting, thought Isaac, as the cries of that sow. The small section of the tunnel filled with smoke and the smell of burnt sulfur.
Isaac saw the lead balls from the two Springfield rifles strike the gelatin side of the thing. It reminded him of stones striking the surface of water. The two projectiles penetrated the flesh of the thing causing a mild turbulence within, a rippling effect.
The creature, unaffected by the two bullet wounds, continued with its feeding. Isaac watched helplessly as the sow, already three-quarters enveloped in a gooey slime; strained her vocal cords to their limits. He saw the flesh on her back, and one side slowly blister, then melt.
The pig’s prolonged cry faltered and broke into a shrill staccato echoing off the tunnel walls like maniacal laughter.
Isaac stepped forward and moved to draw his pistol. It kept screaming, he thought, it no longer sounded like the squeal of a tortured animal; it was more human. The sow looked past Isaac with eyes that gazed into another world.
He meant to put the poor creature out of its misery, but he stopped before he had his gun half drawn from his belt. He knew what the outcome would be. It would be simple to put a musket ball in the sow’s head, silencing her forever, but then they would have to cope with “it.” He was certain that if he had killed the sow, the creature would have nothing to do with her. It only fed on living things. Then, they would be plagued by its cries of hunger again.
Aching inside, Isaac realized that the cries of the tortured sow, no matter how heart-wrenching and murderous they were, were not as bad as the shrieks of hunger from this creature of the tunnels.
As if in answer to his decision to do nothing, the pig gagged suddenly followed by a rattling in her throat and the tunnel gave way to an eerie silence. The sow’s eyes were glassy. Blood and white foam oozed from her snout. Her sides heaved in and out with the force of labored breathing. Respiration is still functioning, as always, he reminded himself. She was still alive, just unconscious. He was familiar with the entire, grotesque procedure by then. She’ll stay that way for weeks while it draws on her, feeds on her, until there is nothing left but a dried out husk.
Isaac remembered the sickening details that followed with painful clarity. He had run from the tunnel’s end to his house above, staggered through the parlor, out the front door, and into the desert. The sizzling heat of mid-day slapped his face. Isaac’s knees gave out, and he fell, face forward, into the sand only a few steps from his front porch, raising himself to his knees, he began to vomit. He kept vomiting until his sides hurt and there was nothing left in him but air.
The memory of that afternoon always haunted him when it neared feeding time. He was glad that the creature only craved sustenance every three or four weeks. If he had to feed it daily, he would have gone mad a long time ago. Isaac leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes with closed fists. He was pale, and there were dark circles under his eyes. His black, scraggly beard and hair hadn’t been washed in weeks. He had increased his study schedule constantly working during the day and through most of the night only breaking from the routine for a late supper. After eating he would crawl, exhausted, to a cot he kept alongside his writing desk where he would sleep until a little before dawn when Charlie Youngblood would come and wake him, and the process would begin all over again.
After years of research, he was beginning to decipher the hieroglyphics that adorned the walls of the circular room. They had also discovered what he had guessed to be a library of records consisting of over a thousand scrolls.
The scrolls were of a thin and surprisingly flexible metallic substance. They had discovered them in an adjoining tunnel only a month after they had uncovered the subterranean passage. The scrolls yielded the same strange writing.
Bit by bit he had unlocked pieces of the past, unfurling the history of a forgotten age. Isaac learned some things about a once great race, some things about their accomplishments, some things about their dreams, while the creature of the tunnels remained a mystery.
He was certain that he had discovered its origin. But, what it was and what purpose it served in the ecological scheme of that ancient civilization had yet to be answered.
The creature had grown considerably since that afternoon when they had fed it the sow and it started to change its shape. It was becoming elongated, and it looked as if it was growing a flattened head or face at one end. The results, although repulsive and alien, were somehow familiar to Isaac.
What it reminded him of he could not recall. However, as he witnessed its daily growth and change, something knocked and clawed at his subconscious with frightening familiarity.
That was why he had stepped up his research. His desire to leave was greater than ever. Although he had no idea what the result of the creature’s change might be, he felt more comfortable in learning about it from his translations rather than witnessing the metamorphosis.
If he pushed himself, he would have the answers he needed to this age-old puzzle before the next feeding interval. A few weeks, he hoped. No more than a month. Just this one last time, just enough to quiet it so he would not have to listen to its constant wailing to be fed. Just long enough to keep his sanity intact and his will alive so he could gather up the evidence he had accumulated over the years and deliver it to those on the East Coast who once scoffed at his theory.
Isaac signed and dated the bottom page of the ledger. The feather-quill pen made a scratching noise across the paper. He heard footsteps approaching and looked up.
Charlie Youngblood stood quietly in front of the desk. His white cotton shirt looking yellow from the pale cast of his lantern. A long, thin scar down the left side of his face combined with the red bandanna wrapped tightly across the top of his skull gave him a menacing appearance.
“Is it time?” Isaac asked in a solemn tone.
Charlie nodded, and Isaac stood up closing the ledger. Grabbing a lamp off the desk, he followed the Indian servant out of the room through a maze of connecting tunnels.
How many times, he wondered, have I walked these passages over the years? Looking up Isaac noticed, for what he guessed to be at least the hundredth time, the shattered and mangled remains of chandeliers. Spaced at even intervals the branch supports hung from the tunnel ceiling. Every tunnel they had explored in the past seven years had these fixtures hanging from above. All were severely damaged.
Charlie’s brother, John, toward the end of their sixth year, had found one in which half of the lamp’s mechanism was still intact. After careful examination, Isaac was unable to detect anywhere within the broken shell that could have contained a wick or lamp oil. Nor could he find anything that resembled the standard valve and piping common with gas lighting. The one thing he found were fragments of what appeared to be fine brown colored wires.
Isaac had read about experiments conducted in New Jersey with electricity. Maybe these ancient lamps, he theorized, had once been fired by electricity. But, when magnified, they turned out to be thin, hollow tubing; not wires at all. The chandeliers, like the creature of the tunnels, would have to remain a mystery unless a solution could be found in the hieroglyphics.
After crossing an immense cavern, they rounded a corner into a narrow passage. The tunnel was abruptly terminated about thirty feet in where a wooden door stood like a giant sentinel.
The tunnel, like all the other arteries Isaac, Charlie and John had explored over the years, had at one time, opened into the immense cavern. Isaac, Charlie, and John had also constructed the door out of yellow pine timbers, one-foot-thick, using cast iron pegs and strapping to tie all the pieces together into one solid barrier. Constructing a frame for the door and making it fit the unusual shape of the tunnel was a greater task than the making of the door. Isaac knew that the door, no matter how solid they built it, would only be as strong as the frame that held it. So he had Charlie and John fasten timbers the size of railroad ties into the tunnel walls and ceiling by driving heavy wrought iron rods through them into the surrounding masonry and deep into the outer bedrock.
Only when the door was hung securely on the frame could Isaac, Charlie, and John sleep easy again. All three of them had been uneasy about the creature since they had first discovered it. With it successfully contained in a section of tunnel, Isaac felt confident that it was no longer a threat. In those early days, he felt exhilarated about their captive, a survivor from untold ages. A specimen he could safely study and learn from while he deciphered its origin and the history of the tunnel builders.
But it was so much smaller then. The three of them would not have recognized the danger it presented if they had not wandered upon it while it was feeding. It was their first encounter with the creature. The color of bone marrow and no bigger than a prairie dog it had wrapped itself around a sand lizard.
The two Indians and Isaac gaped in astonishment as it surmounted and then engulfed its prey with its ooze. The lizard, every bit alive, wriggled and kicked while its outer hide slowly melted. In a final attempt to protect itself, the lizard curled into a ball resembling a grotesque parody of a fetus in the womb.
