by Pete Rawlik
“THAT IS QUITE ENOUGH! WARD AM NA TAK!” A strange voice boomed out of the cavern. “You go too far my dear doctor, you seek after things you weren’t meant to have.” The source of these statements was a young man whose approach had gone unnoticed. As he moved closer I noticed that one side of his neck was covered with a thick bandage which had at one point been white, but had since grown the yellow-brown color of dried blood. Beneath his open parka, he was a thin but muscular young man with a sharp aquiline nose and unkempt tawny hair that transitioned into a scraggily beard and mustache. As the parka fell away, I noticed that the jacket beneath was emblazoned with a cloth patch that said Miskatonic University, and beneath that, a stitched label that said GEDNEY.
“You will forgive us sir our rudeness,” offered Asenath, “but I must ask who you are and what you are doing here in this desolate place.”
The young man made a gesture of supplication with his hands. “My apologies Kamog, you may call me Gedney.” Asenath’s face turned into a scowl. “My apologies I should not have used your secret name, the one you once used amongst the covens. As for what I am doing here, I thought it would be obvious that I am here to help you and your Weird Company.”
The thing that was Randolph Carter clicked its mandibles oddly. “You will pardon my interruption, but I have followed at length the radio reports of the Miskatonic University Antarctic Expedition. The latest reports have the ships heading home having suffered a most horrible tragedy. Half the expedition is lost, and Thomas Gedney has been reported missing, presumed dead.”
The young man gestured toward his bandaged neck. “Thomas Gedney was mortally wounded, but shortly after the attack he was found, his wounds were bandaged and he underwent a radical treatment that restored him to near perfect physical health. Unfortunately, the treatment failed to repair his mind. As thus, he was a perfect receptacle for a transfer of consciousness, a relatively simple process.” He stared hard at Asenath, “Isn’t that right Kamog?”
There was a deep uncomfortable silence that Waite finally broke. “You seem to know who I am.” She starred at the figure coldly. “So if you’re not Gedney who exactly are you?”
Gedney smiled. “Surely Dr. Hartwell recognizes me?”
There was a look of confusion on Hartwell’s face. “I don’t recognize the face, but those words, the way you speak, so familiar, so terribly familiar.” There was a sudden recognition. “You’re Peaslee, or at least the thing that pretended to be him!”
The young man raised an index finger and tapped his nose. Hartwell was suddenly deflated and slumped down onto a rock.
“So you are the strange mind that once supplanted Professor Peaslee’s, but that tells us little. Who and what are you?” I demanded.
Asenath looked away with an odd sad expression. “He is of the Yith, bodiless minds from the dawn of the universe. They travel, leapfrogging through space and time, preserving themselves and their civilization at the expense of others. Millions of years ago the Progenitors of Earth had developed a species of cone-shaped invertebrates to use as semi-intelligent labor, an alternative to the shoggoths. The Yith came through time and possessed the cones, and violently established themselves as a new power on the planet. The Progenitors and the Yith fought a protracted war that only ended when a common enemy filtered down out of space and established itself in the Pacific. They may be our allies, but they cannot be trusted, not fully. Whatever they do, it is only to their benefit. They were, they are, and they will be. It is said that they rule the future Earth, an Earth without men, in a future more suited to cooler intelligences, a future engineered by the subtle interference of agents provocateur, such as the thing that stands before us.”
“Who are you to judge Kamog?”
Asenath’s hidden anger exploded, “You dare to compare us! How many species have you driven to extinction in your endless quest to preserve your own insubstantial lives? We tolerated your repeated programs of culling and breeding the humans because the deep ocean protected us. Don’t think we don’t know about Tunguska. Your latest effort places all of us at risk if you falter, our wrath will be unforgiving.”
The Gedney thing sneered back at her. “We have wandered this universe for longer than your species has existed. We have seen worlds and life that you couldn’t even comprehend. Your actions here make us allies but we know that you and your lords have acted against our interests. We will brook no such interference, Men will find their place in the universe, the singularity is unavoidable, and we shall inherit this world. Iä Ygg!” He swore angrily. “You and yours should know your place Kamog. You call us the Yith, and that is what we have been called for millions of years, but we were something else before we took our first desperate leap through time. Do you know why your precious Progenitors hated us so much? Why they battled against us, and why we were so capable of defending ourselves against them? You think of the Progenitors as a single group, with uniform motivations and movements. The truth is quite different. They are a vast and varied species; they occupy millions of worlds throughout the galaxy, and while there is some communication between colonies, each world is essentially independent. The only thing that unites them is their desire for dominance in the universe. They will do anything to gain superiority. You know of the library at Celeano, and the great machines around Altair and Epsilon Eridani. Some Progenitors supported Keziah Mason and Shub-Niggurath. Would it surprise you to learn that once a colony of Progenitors discovered the secrets of time travel?”
Carter shifted nervously. “You’re saying that the Great Race and the Elder Things are one in the same?”
The thing that was not Gedney but resided in his body showed no sign of emotion as he nodded in response to Carter’s question. “We were once, but through attrition and assimilation we have become something else, and like those we sprang from, we too are becoming what you would call Balkanized.”
It was Asenath’s turn to question the Yithian. “And what of the whistling, flying polyps, what did you do to earn their enmity?”
“I thought that was obvious. The polyps that have pursued us across time and space, who have hunted us on every world we have sought refuge on, they are our own strain of shoggoths, abandoned when we fled the destruction of our colony so many epochs ago. You really are a most obtuse species.”
Asenath rose and took a step forward. There was malice and menace in her movements, and Gedney took a defensive posture as she closed the distance between them. Whatever she was going to do, and how the Yithian would have responded never came to fruition. Instead she sat down, almost as deflated as Hartwell.
“I apologize if I have upset your plans Miss Waite, but truth be told they were my plans to begin with. You and yours have been doing my bidding for more than a century, and while the Whateleys are no longer an immediate threat, and I am sure that you are more than capable of handling the shoggoth problem, I can leave nothing to chance. I have worked for too long, and come too close to let you blunder about like children. I’m seizing control of this little team you’ve assembled. I hope you don’t mind.”
A dejected silence lingered for a moment, until finally Hartwell spoke up, “As always you seem to have all the cards, but I will not call you Peaslee or Gedney. What name would you have us refer to you by?”
“Fair enough, I agree calling me Peaslee, Mentzel or even Thomas Felix Gedney would probably be inappropriate in your minds. If you must call me something, call me Mister Ys.”
As I looked around I realized that in an instant our group had inexplicably changed, we were no longer being led my Asenath Waite, and the change in leadership had made us something of a pathetic menagerie. The Weird Company consisted of an undying wizard named Asenath Waite, the mad Doctor Stuart Hartwell, an alien possessed by the mind of author Randolph Carter, Frank Elwood who could walk in the spaces in between, myself, a monstrous hybrid named Robert Olmstead, and the time-traveling parasite Mister Ys. Was it possible that what Asenath and Ys said was true? Were we all that stood
between the shoggoths and the destruction of the world? Could we stand against the horrors that had inadvertently been released? In this desolate place at the bottom of the world would our lives finally have meaning? If we failed, who would know?
The questions themselves seemed impossible, and perhaps they were impossible for any one of us to ask, let alone answer. Perhaps they could only be asked and answered by us all, working together.
CHAPTER 16
From the Account of Robert Martin Olmstead
“The Thing Above and Beyond the City”
Hartwell and Elwood had not spent their time confined to the depths of the city. They had instead climbed one of the great spiraling ramps and established themselves a kind of base of operations in one of the peak-like towers that strained skyward. Hartwell had found the mechanism that controlled the interior of the edifice and thus they had not only light but heat as well. They had a cache of equipment stored there, and some weapons. They also had access to what they called an observational map, a kind of interactive tracking system that showed where things were moving within the city. Unfortunately, the map could only be focused on a single area at a time, and thus it had taken them weeks just to map and explore only a small fraction of the city. It had been sheer dumb luck that they had been focused on the section that Carter had fled into and thus came to investigate. Of course they had been looking for weeks without a trace save for the occasional shoggoth, the map symbol which they had learned to avoid, so it came as no surprise to Mister Ys that they had found us so quickly.
The journey to their base took about an hour and led us through a labyrinth of pentagonal-shaped tunnels that looked like they had been bored through solid rock. Ys confirmed this was indeed the process, and suggested that the peaks themselves had been originally deposited by swarms of shoggoths excreting minerals in fantastically thick layers in imitation of the same geological processes that created sedimentary rocks, though in this case the shoggoths also applied a measure of pressure and heat, transforming the stone into a granite-like substance. By design it resisted the natural weathering that occurred through the ages as climate changed and the very continents shifted position. The cities of the Q’Hrell could last for millions of years, for indeed it was common for them to be inhabited for such spans of time.
As we walked I noticed that not only were the tunnels pentagonal, but so were the columns, and various other bits of architecture and what I had to assume were incidental decorative patterns. The number five seemed to be the basis for the entire city, from the simplest motif to the most complex of interlocking structures. The use seemed to border on a kind of mania, and almost by accident I commented that only a madman could have been so obsessive.
“It’s not a tkrt obsession,” commented Carter. “It’s a kind of biological tkrt imperative. Their entire way of thinking revolves around tkrt five. Their bodies are pentaradial, as are their tkrt brains. A family unit, a cohort tkrt consists of five individuals and higher tkrt levels of organization are tkrt all at multiples of five. It takes a supreme effort for them to break that pattern, they were highly tkrt successful when they created the Nug Soth. As for mankind, not tkrt so much.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
It was Asenath that responded. “You’ve never noticed that the number five runs through our biology and culture? We have five senses, five fingers and toes on each hand or foot. If you count our heads we have five appendages, and this is true for most higher life forms, mammals, reptiles and amphibians. It is even more prevalent in religion: five wounds of Christ, the Five Pillars of Islam, the Pentateuch, and the Panj Kakars of the Sikhs. Medieval alchemists sought to discover the quintessence, fifth element of the universe. The pentagon, the pentagram, the cross are almost universal symbols of mystical power, and all of them are representations of the number five.”
“I thought the cross only had four points?”
Asenath smiled. “Four points and the intersection make five. A sacred symbol.”
After about an hour of walking and traveling the spiraling ramps gently upward we finally came to the place that Hartwell and Elwood called home. It was a large open floor filled with artifacts and equipment that the two had scavenged from throughout the city. There were buckets and poles made out of strange ceramics. Poles tipped with a metal spikes none of us recognized. There were also belts of tools with odd handles and even stranger working tips. Most of the equipment was unidentifiable. It was as if an ape had been let loose inside a machine shop and been allowed to collect whatever struck his fancy, regardless of what it actually did.
One whole wall of the room was devoted to the so-called interactive map, which did indeed seem to allow one to scroll through a representation of the city. As we played with the controls the area of the city shown changed and we quickly came to learn the symbols that identified shoggoths and what Elwood said were giant, blind penguins. On one sector we saw nothing but a large single room, a kind of cavernous hall, and within a massive number of symbols suggesting a huge gathering of some sort. We queried Elwood and Hartwell about it but were told that it was on the far side of the city, easily more than a day’s journey. We all looked at Elwood, because as we understood it his ability made such considerations unimportant.
“I haven’t stepped out of the world since we got here. I’m afraid. The hounds could be waiting. More importantly, I don’t have any desire to either. There is something about this place, something wrong, it makes me want to stay in the real world, or at least out of the in-between.”
Mister Ys took this as his cue to join the conversation. “Mr. Elwood, the time will come when we will need you to step outside, and you will do so without hesitation. Is that understood?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “As for the massive gathering let us see what the markers say.” He drew a deep breath, the first sign of emotion he had ever displayed. “A shoggoth pit. Not entirely unexpected, but the size of it is unprecedented.” He mumbled some numbers out loud, performing calculations at an alarming rate. “Yes, at that density a gestalt is possible, probable even. All they need is a catalyst consciousness and then . . .”
Carter interrupted. “A gestalt, what tkrt is that?”
Ys looked annoyed, Elwood stepped back and slowly moved away from the center of the conversation. “The Progenitors were at war with those from Xoth. They endowed the shoggoths with the ability to merge themselves together into a single, massive organism. It was a kind of weapon of last resort. Something they created and planned to unleash to battle against Cthulhu and his ilk if needed. I didn’t think . . . my research places this pit somewhere else, not here. He’s supposed to be in Ogasawara.”
Asenath saw an opportunity and took it. “Are you afraid?”
The monstrous Mister Ys stared at Asenath with hate in his eyes. He seemed ready to lash out, but then was able to reassert control. He turned away and walked toward the window and stared out at the landscape beyond the city. It was a bleak, grey expanse made hazy by a wind that had whipped up ice and debris. “You people are so blissfully unaware of what dangers you are treading around. Even this window, if it were facing the other direction, if it were looking out over the city and beyond it . . . what a sight you would behold.”
It was Hartwell’s turn to enter the fray of conversation. “There’s a window like that on the next level, Elwood’s private room so to say.” We all scanned the room for Elwood, who had been present but a moment earlier but now was suddenly dashing up the ramp.
Ys made to follow him. “Have you ever been up there? Have you looked out the window?” There was speed in his step.
“No, just once,” Hartwell stuttered an answer. “Like I said, they’re his private rooms.”
We followed Ys up the ramp and burst onto the second floor like a pack of wolves swarming after a wounded doe. What we found waiting for us was completely unexpected. In the far corner was Elwood, naked and trussed up with some copper wire. By the state of him and his surroundings he had been li
ke this for days. His skin had that thin fragile look that comes from lack of food and water, and the wire had bit into his flesh. He was conscious but his eyes were unfocused and cloudy, like he had been drugged.
In front of the window stood the other Elwood, the one we had been speaking with just moments before, his arms were raised as if in supplication. He was chanting something, something that I couldn’t understand over the howling wind that tore through the massive window. As we raced toward him he turned and began laughing maniacally. Hartwell went to tend to the naked figure on the floor while I and Carter attempted to grab the other one. I am preternaturally strong, as is Carter’s alien body, but the thing we called Elwood shrugged us off like we were rag dolls, and tossed us across the room.
As I recovered I set my sights on the man who was still laughing and then quite by accident caught a glimpse of what hung in the air beyond the window and above the city. It floated there in the sky, a latticework of blue energies that formed a geometric shape, an icosidodecahedron, a polyhedron with pentagonal faces flanked by triangular ones. It was a kind of cage, and what it held inside was enough to bring me to my knees. It was a monstrous thing, cyclopean in size and proportions. There was some semblance to portions of a squid, and an anemone, and a centipede. The tentacles ended in gnashing snapping mouths full of needle-like teeth, but each of these teeth was easily the size of a man. Eyes, multi-faceted things that glinted in the sun ringed the body. Above all this was a head of sorts, a starfish-like thing that seemed as if it had been transplanted from one of the Q’Hrell itself.
There on my knees I fell back on my parochial upbringing and let some words slip through my lips, “My God!”
The cackling thing that was Elwood leered at me and in a malicious tone screamed over the winds. “No Mr. Olmstead this is not your pale, whimpering, crucified Messiah. This is my God!” His mouth opened wide as he began to cackle once more. It opened wide, stretched down past his neck, past his chest. Then he melted. The thing pretending to be Elwood became little more than an amorphous blob whipping tentacles and tendrils like some monstrous jellyfish.
