Beneath the Moors and Darker Places [SSC]

by Brian Lumley

  Down again, ever deeper, to where it seemed the very netherpits must he, and there in the darkness my fantastic journey came to an abrupt end. I felt myself bundled into a container of sorts, like a basket, and, with a slight swinging motion, there followed the sensation of being lowered into grotesque and even greater depths.

  For some time the descent continued, and by groping around I discovered that I was indeed in a kind of basket, with two thick ropes connecting the vehicle to what could only be some sort of pulley system above. Stretching my arms over the side of the basket, I could feel the upward slide of a rough rock wall, and looking down I could make out a red glow not too far below.

  Soon the basket swung down into a cave, passing through a ring of flaring, bracketed torches set in the ceiling around the opening of the shaft, so that for a moment I felt their heat on my face. From ceiling to floor the cave was all of fifty feet in height, and from wall to dimly lit wall about twice that distance.

  As soon as I saw the place I was filled with a terrible foreboding. Somewhere in my severely damaged mind I dimly remembered having seen this cavern before. But there was something out of place, an awful silence which, unremembered from that previous vision, seemed somehow ghastly in its intensity. It was a silence that screamed.

  With a grating crunch the basket settled, and though my first thought was to stay exactly where I was, those above had decided that events were to take a different course. One of the supporting ropes began to slacken, coiling as it fell, but at the same time the other rope tightened, turning the basket violently on its side and pitching me out. Before I could scramble to my feet in the shadow-flickered cave, the basket was withdrawn, quickly ascending and disappearing through the circle of torches into the hole in the ceiling.

  Then for the first time I noticed the cave’s monstrous flooring. I have said that the basket crunched when it came to rest. The reason, when I came to look closer, soon became hideously apparent. The place was littered with bones. Indeed, the whole cave seemed a veritable ossuary, in which I could hardly have hazarded a guess at the depth of the skeletal debris beneath me.

  The vast majority of the bones were very similar to the skeletons of large monkeys or chimpanzees, and I quickly related their characteristics and proportions to the Thuun’ha. Was this then a burial ground of sorts? Then, seeing a skull far larger than the others and picking the thing up in shaking fingers, I saw that this time my find was indeed human. There were, too, certain other large bones of a not quite human nature, and I reckoned them to be the scattered remains of long-dead lizard-things. So, the place did serve as a mortuary—both for the water-lizard gods and their servitors—and, remembering the human skull, occasionally for others! When certain softer remains beneath my feet crumbled, causing me to stagger, I saw something in the grim white expanse that caused the hair of my neck to bristle sharply erect. It was simply a black rubber flipper—of the type used by frogmen—and I thought again of the aqualung in its rotting harness and of those cavers lost in unknown subterranean dimensions. . . .

  With only the flickering fire of the high torches to light the place, I had difficulty in making out its more remote corners, and, the better to acquaint myself with my new surroundings, I stumbled flounderingly in the direction of the sheer wall, sometimes sinking to my knees as the bones gave and settled to my step. The feeling that I knew this place and the dreadful fear inside me grew by leaps and bounds, and when suddenly a great, rock-carven statue with magnificent cave-pearl eyes appeared in a momentary flare of bright torchlight, I shrieked aloud and bounded backwards as I finally recognized my location. For I was inside that cave of the nightmare—the place I had seen in mad dreams within dreams following Bokrug’s story of the origin of the light-tissues—the place of the bones and the reptilian statue and ... the ...

  Madly I stumbled away from the towering figure of stone, across the crackling remains, towards the opposite wall. I had to know for sure ... I had to know!

  I pulled up short, my jaw falling to hang slack, my hands going up before me to prevent a sight too monstrous for reasoned thought. For there, looming blackly in the flickering shadows of the wall, a jagged hole led downwards into utter darkness—and those bones nearer to the opening were covered with a blackly shining film of vile-smelling slime the origin of which only a diseased mind like mine could envisage!

  And with a thrill of ultimate horror I knew that I could and already had envisaged just such an origin. This filth clinging to the bony debris was nothing less than the mark of a Shoggoth’s passing, and this place was where that “other form” as mentioned by Bokrug was kept imprisoned to serve its “necessary function”—the elimination of the carcasses of deceased members of the Thuun’ha, their gods, and, rarely, those of inquisitive wanderers from the surface world! And no doubt the Thuun’ha were not above the occasional live sacrifice! For to them, surely, the Shoggoth would have been explained away as a death-deity, an avatar of their Bokrug gods!

  Scientifically the thing was no more horrifying than cremation, as applied to the destruction of wasted and useless tissues—but as a means of sacrifice ... ? And especially since it seemed I myself was destined to serve just such a purpose ...

  With all these hideous thoughts running through my head, even as I peered in nameless dread into the threatening hole, there came a rush of greenish water from somewhere above. Again I started horribly from the shock of this unexpected deluge, shrieking and flinging myself backwards away from the hole. For a moment I cowered there, digging myself into the bones, then, looking up, I saw that a pipe had been lowered down the entrance shaft, and that the green liquid was rushing from that source. The bony floor had a slight slope in the direction of the black hole, and the water rushed and tumbled over the deeply heaped remains to pour in a swirling flood down that charnel channel.

  For perhaps ten minutes the gushing flood continued, while I got myself under a semblance of control and backed away to drier quarters. Shortly the rush turned to a trickle that quickly petered out. The pipe was withdrawn.

  It was not long after this that I began to hear again the strange songs of praise of the Thuun’ha. Those ethereal stirrings in my brain had of course been with me all through my nightmare, captive rush through the sub-terrene labyrinths, but after I had been lowered into the cave of the bones they had faded away and ceased. These fresh songs were altered somehow, different from any I had “heard” before, and they seemed no longer telepathic but actually physical. I found myself for the first time listening to rather than feeling the weird vibrations. With this realization came another—one that caused me to recoil and almost faint at its implications. It was simply this: that those newer, more real songs I was hearing were issuing from the black and reeking hole!

  Frantically I searched my memory for the things told me by my Bokrug archetype of the Shoggoth menace, and as I did so I noticed how harsh those previously harmonious rhythms had become. In a little while there came another sound, a rushing as of a great wind, and in the space of a few seconds the loathsome vent began issuing a continuous blast of the most awfully offensive gasses imaginable.

  I could picture the Shoggoth down there in the earth, a great black viscous mass, pushing before it its own pressured stench as it rushed upwards in answer to the summons of the lately vanished water from the pipe. And then I remembered what Bokrug had told me of the Shoggoths—how in the old days they had grown ever more imitative—and I knew then why those new, physical songs, issuing along with the monstrous stench from below, were harsher and unharmonious! Down there, with nothing but the occasional mind-songs of the Thuun’ha to keep it company, this last survivor of the Shoggoth cultures had learned those sepulchral sounds parrot fashion, and was even now “singing” them to itself as it surged upwards to perform its “necessary function!”

  I completely lost whatever little remained of my mind then, throwing myself madly about the skeleton-floored cavern in a vain attempt to find an exit hole or tunnel of escape.
Before I knew it the whole cave had started to tremble like a log cabin in an avalanche. The Thing was almost upon me, rumbling up through the poisoned earth in semiplastic horror. Ever denser the hellish gasses rushed from the hole into the sacrificial chamber, and with every other second I expected the monstrosity itself to put in an appearance at the mouth of that vile pit... which eventually it did!

  I was scrabbling wildly over a heap of bones with my back to the hole when the Shoggoth arrived, but even before I turned I knew that it was there. The loathsome exhalations ceased and in an instant the trembling of the walls and fragile floor, too, stopped short. Once more silence breathed in the cave—hellishly expectant silence in which I slowly turned to face my doom.

  Great God...! Huge, lidless eyes forming by the dozen in a semisolid wall of blackly glistening, thickly mobile sludge—eyes that quickly fastened on me! And no sooner had the thing spotted me than it began to form mouths—great slobbering mouths that dripped a fetid coating of slime onto the already shiny-black bones in the mouth of the terrible shaft—that same coating which, in a hardened form, already covered so many of the cavern’s skeletal remains!

  Man and monster face to face, and then, even as I sensed that the horror was about to surge forward to engulf me, there came the tremendous blast that brought down the roof of the cave in great chunks, completely sealing off the pit of the Shoggoth—the blast that hurled me face down into the scattering bones, that cracked the cave’s very walls with its fury.

  I was instantly deafened, my eardrums rupturing as the brute roar of that inexplicable explosion slammed me senseless into the skeletal fragments. It was as if an enormous charge of dynamite had been set off nearby in the pressured rock, and even the huge statue had been brought down and broken up by the blast. I found myself clawing at the shattered pieces of the great stone head, at the bulging, pearly eyes in that starkly impassive face. Then the torches above were extinguished as even greater sections of the ceiling continued to rain down, and the wonder is that I was not crushed in that avalanche of rock from the roof.

  Deaf, blasted, and dazed, blind in the inky blackness of the shuddering, crashing cave, I found myself picked up in a sudden titanic rush of icy water and swirled around and about amidst black and bony debris.

  The rest of my memories are fragmentary and very dim. They are composed in the main of half-remembered sensations: the sensation of heaving, frantically rushing waters; the horrible sensation of drowning; the sensation of hearing, as if from a great distance, the fear-filled mind-songs of the Thuun’ha, awful now in their intense bewilderment and almost childlike disbelief; and finally, the sensation of a wildly erratic ascent through leagues of labyrinthine resurgences on the crest of a frothing deluge...

  ~ * ~

  XIX

  LETTER A HARLEY STREET PSYCHIATRIST

  63(a) Harley Street

  London

  8 September 1959

  Mr. Jason Masters

  25 Yoden Ave,

  Harden.

  Co. Durham

  My dear Mr. Masters,

  Further to my last report of the 1st: it is with the greatest regret that I now bring myself to inform you of my complete failure in bringing the Professor’s condition under control. As you suggested should such prove to be the ease, I am now prepared to place your uncle back in your care—though I feel it only fair that certain facts should be made quite clear to you before you agree to any such undertaking. His delusions and hallucinations are quite the most fantastic I have ever had to deal with, possibly unique in the annals of psychiatric complaints.

  For instance: your uncle—even under sedation, hypnosis, the influence of the most modern drugs, or any combination of these devices—refuses to address any person in any term or by any name other than “Bokrug!” He will not stay in any brightly lighted room without the application of the greatest restraint, and therefore any attempt to work or reason with him must he carried out by candlelight—and even then he is given to grabbing at the candle flame and snuffing it out! I believe he is quite genuinely suffering from a severe form of photophobia, which, is only to be expected if indeed he has spent a year underground. In any case, following such an irrational action (candle-snuffing and so on), he explains that he has only “destroyed another of those damned Shoggoths!“

  His personal hygiene until recently left much to be desired—due entirely to his condition of course—and unless he was forcibly bathed he would refuse to take anything other than the merest dab of a wash in barely tepid water. Unless he was watched continuously he would relieve himself in the corner of any room in which he happened to be! Even now lie will only sleep on a bare mattress, and I still have not quite managed to wean him off fish and/or mushrooms—still the only food he will, readily accept. He will only clothe himself when reminded that he has clothes to wear, and then reluctantly. He is, too, apparently almost stone deaf—and all these are but a few of the complications of his disorder. I will supply you with a complete list of these psycho-idiosyncrasies at your request.

  At best, the Professor is erudite but eccentric in his “logic,” and barring his hallucinations and other fancies his mind’s processes move in quite ordered cycles. The trouble is that these cycles are not acceptable to us, for he believes that everything about him is part and parcel of a great dream or nightmare of which he is the author! At its worst (while he never becomes physically dangerous in the sense of a homicidal maniac) his is a horrible condition.

  As you requested, during our telephone conversation of 23 August, I here enclose a complete typescript of your uncle’s recorded “story” as related little by little to me since you placed him under my care a month ago. A letter to Inspector Blaysden at Radcar provided me with the copy of the statement of Robert Krug, which I have incorporated into the typescript in place of the less enlightening version of your uncle as he remembered and related it. The typescript as it stands is of course incomplete; there were many recorded sessions which were so garbled, as to be meaningless, and no successful translation could be made.

  Should the naturally congenial atmosphere of your home, with which your uncle should be well acquainted, prove of little or no benefit to his condition, then I fear there will remain but one alternate course of action left open to you. There are a number of highly specialized private sanatoriums…I can recommend at least four.

  In the hope (though admittedly a small one), that at some time in the near future your uncle may be fully returned to you in every respect, I remain…

  Yours very sincerely,

  Dr. Eugene T. Thappon

  ~ * ~

  XX

  IN CONCLUSION

  [From the Notebook of Jason Masters]

  It is difficult to know where to begin. I am left, after all my investigations, with such a collection of bits and pieces, facts and figures and dates, incidents and occurrences and coincidences, that their correlation seems near impossible. I know that it should be beyond my capability to write of the thing coldly and without feeling—love of my uncle should dictate a version coloured by emotion—yet I feel that this is the only way to properly present the facts as I know them. I will only present facts, a chronological list of events which I know definitely have taken place, and in this way I hope to avoid voicing too many of my personal opinions; for such as my opinions are they might well cause me to be considered as having inherited my uncle’s “madness” ...

  On 12 August 1958 Professor Ewart Masters vanished into the Yorkshire moors. His condition some months prior to his disappearance (he had suffered rather bad head injuries earlier in a car accident) had been unstable to say the least, but his improvement over the month or so immediately preceding that vanishment had almost completely disarmed me—so much so in fact that with hardly an argument I had loaned him my car to drive from Harden down to Bleakstone in Yorkshire. At first all seemed to be going well with his fossil-hunting trip, and he called me daily on the telephone; but then, after a period of three days of silen
ce, when I contacted The George, the inn at Bleakstone where I knew he had been staying, his disappearance was discovered. On the 15th of the month my car was found in a Dilham side street, and attempts were commenced to trace my uncle’s movements. He had last been seen on the 12th at about noon, heading across the moors on foot in the direction of Devil’s Pool.

  For five days search parties covered the moors from Eeley to Dendhope and from Marske to Lee-Hill. I say “covered the moors,” but that is of course a gross overstatement, for ten thousand policemen could not have covered the moors, let alone the two hundred that tried! There are so very many nooks, crevices, and other unexplored places on the great heath. But the police did their best, and for some six months I periodically received copies of further progress reports, all to no avail. Finally, in late February 1969, Ewart Masters was posted as being a “missing person”…