by Pete Rawlik
As I watched, the tank-like creature lumbered forward, reared up and spread its armored plates, like a cobra getting ready to strike. The great mass of shoggoth matter that had held us at bay quickly withdrew, coiling out of our nearly useless shelter in a matter of moments. Beyond these things the vaguely humanoid thing sped to the side, launched itself into the air and vanished from my line of sight, but I heard the soft thud as it impacted against the wall. Seconds later the massive armored shoggoths fell against the failed door and gap in the wall. In seconds both holes had been sealed, first by flesh, and then quickly by a pale green stone that grew like crystal. Before we could realize what was happening, it was clear that we had been contained while work on the ship continued, without our annoying interruptions.
And yet there was something more. For in the place on the wall where I had heard the other shoggoth hit I could hear the thing drilling a new entryway, and this was much faster than the previous attacks had been. We kept a watch on the place on the wall from which the rapid boring sounds were coming. Hartwell had done what he could for Elwood, and was busy checking his tanks of reagent and the spray guns. More than a quarter of the material had been used already. As we talked and plotted, we were also aware that our time was limited, for we could hear the smaller creature boring away, working its way toward us, much more quickly than the other had. Furthermore, there was now a low vibration filling the air, one that I recognized as being generated by the magnetic engines of the ship. Time was running out.
Across the room Elwood was stirring; whatever Hartwell had done, the young man seemed to have gained some strength back. Cautiously I stepped back toward them and helped the young man to his feet. “How did you get here so fast? It doesn’t seem like you had enough time to gather what you needed.”
“I warped time a little,” confessed Elwood. “Which was probably a mistake. A hound caught my scent and did what came naturally.” He gestured in Hartwell’s direction. “He fought it off, saved both our lives.” Hartwell said nothing in response to this praise, and Elwood let it drop.
As the three of us gathered what we could together and prepared to defend ourselves, the wall suddenly split. A great rent opened up with a tremendous, spine-tingling crack. A spider web spread out from a single point and then powder began to fall. The sandy material was quickly followed by pebbles, and then fist-sized rocks. A round section of wall about four feet in diameter bulged out and then collapsed down, cascading onto the floor like water.
Startled we took a defensive stance and aimed our weapons at the tunnel, prepared for whatever monstrosity that dared to come rushing through, or so we thought. For as we watched and waited there was no attack. No tentacle sprang forth to envelope us, no mass of eyes or weird sensors tried to pinpoint our location. No, what emerged from that hastily dug tunnel was a hand, a human hand, held in a position that suggested that it was surrendering, that we should hold our fire. The rest of the creature crawled forward, and where I had expected a horrific proto-simian thing, there emerged the lithe and naked form of a young woman. She crawled out and slid down the wall. We were both too stunned to react, for it was no stranger that stood before us, it was someone we knew, someone we had watched die moments before. There in front of us, monstrously reborn, stood the woman known as Asenath Waite!
It took us a moment to recover from this profound shock, and another moment to cobble together an outfit with which to cover her naked body. She thanked us, though to be honest I didn’t think she cared much that she was nude, but dressing her made Hartwell and me feel better. Afterwards, as she finished lacing up Elwood’s boots, Hartwell pressed for an explanation on how she survived the shoggoth.
“I didn’t,” she shot back. “The creature devoured me, dissolved my body and brain completely, and absorbed me completely. It assimilated my knowledge, but it also tried to assimilate my mind. And I think this was a conscious decision. I think it made a choice to try and assimilate my mind, my personality, so that it could imitate me. I think they have done this before, or tried to, maybe with members of the Miskatonic Expedition. They’re trying desperately to be us. I caught a flash of memory from the creature, an idea really, that each mind they absorb becomes a facet of the whole, and when needed can become dominant, completely suppressing the other facets.” She cast a quick look in my direction. “When the mass that devoured me decided to assimilate my personality, it assumed it would be just adding my mind to those that were already part of it, or more precisely the greater whole from which it had sprung. It hadn’t expected for my mind, my personality, to be so strong. I overpowered its relatively primitive and rather subservient neural system, and became the dominant mentality. I’m in complete control of this body now, and since this was the only human form it knew how to generate, this is the form it has assumed.”
Hartwell pointed at the hole. “How were you able to dig through the wall?”
Asenath nodded. “I’m not sure. When I was thinking about reaching the rest of you my hands became something like digging hammers that secreted a kind of acidic compound. As soon as I finished they reverted back. I may have the ability to control my shape, like a shoggoth, but that whole concept makes me nervous. I know you can’t tell, but in my mind I am fighting a battle of my own. The shoggoth personality may be weak, but it is stubborn, and it’s been here for a lot longer than I have. It knows things, tricks, which I don’t. I sequestered it away, locked it up inside a mass of tissue like a cancer. I’m afraid that if I use the metamorphic ability that I’ll lose control and the thing will return. Staying human keeps me in control.”
Suddenly, the engines seemed to power up. The humming air changed pitch, and once more metallic objects began to be impacted by the electromagnetic forces in play. “We have little time, the ship is preparing to launch. It’s drawing energy from the very air itself. If they reach the sea they’ll have won.”
“Where’s Carter and Ys?” Hartwell shouted. “Where’s the help they went to find? Are there any Progenitors left? Will they help us?”
Asenath was scrambling back up the wall trying to see what was happening out in the assembly hall. “I doubt it. Oh for certain there are still dreamers left amongst the Q’Hrell: Lilith, Bast, Voyrvatass, to name but a few, but these are not beings that we should expect to be favorable to our cause. There are others, more inimicable to man and earthly life, but can they find the avatars of such entities, and convince them to aid us?”
Asenath eyes grew wild and she began to babble. “There are cohorts that are even more ancient than this city, those who had come here, to this world when it was barren, and began the seeding of this place. They had retired from the world eons before man was given his current shape, content to let their descendants rule in their sted. These are not the gods men know. These are not the Other Gods that walk the Earthly Dreamlands and play at the games of Mao and Zhen. These are Elder Gods whose avatars stalk the universe in search of sport. Even great Cthulhu trembles at their name. I warned Ys and Carter not to approach them unless it was absolutely necessary. Kept talking about gestalt interferences, and modeling probabilities. May the Progenitors have mercy on us all if he awakens them.”
Hartwell had apparently had enough of Asenath’s vague references. “Who is down there Waite? What titan does Ys attempt to release on our behalf? Tell us so that we at least know what to prepare for.”
She turned and faced us, crouching in the hole she herself had dug just a few moments earlier. “The Grey Hunter!” she screamed. “Ys and Carter go to ask Nodens for help, as if he had any fondness for men.”
CHAPTER 21
From the Dictation of Randolph Carter Who Is Zkauba, Warlock of Yaddith
“Randolph Carter in Ulthar and What He Did There”
Mister Olmstead has taken to writing a tedious account of our adventure in the realm of the Progenitors, and has spent considerable time and effort pestering me for an account of what had happened to myself and Mister Ys when we entered the Dreamlands.
I had refused him. It is not practical for me in my current condition with these earthly writing instruments to take pen to paper, or even use a typewriter, but when he finally offered to let me dictate the story, and set it down word for word, I finally acquiesced. This then is a brief detail of pertinent events.
I will not bore the reader with the details of our descent and travels in the lands beyond sleep, but I will reveal our failures. Five times did I plead my case before the Other Gods, and five times were my ministrations rejected. The last time, the divinity in question, a blue-skinned youth with three faces on his head, took pause to mock me and the alias I had used, Swami Chandraputra, noting that it was little more than a phonetic anagram of my human name
I
WAS
M
RANDUPH CARTA
Afterwards we left the palace that stood above the peak of Kadath in the Cold Waste and journeyed to the marvelous city of Ulthar where we could drown our sorrows in the beauty of the city, and its curious inhabitants, the cats that roam its streets. Celephais may be more beautiful and more welcoming, but I had no desire for the company of men, or women. Instead the three of us, Mister Ys, myself and the mewling thing that had appeared when we crossed into the Dreamlands, sat in an alleyway drinking wine and commiserating with a multitude of cats and kittens. I was human once more, restored to my dream state by the magics of the reality I and Ys had descended into. Those magics had also separated Zkauba and me, transforming the once mighty wizard of Yaddith into a tiny, larval thing akin to something that combined features of a seal and a beetle. Surprisingly Ys had also been transformed, which was in itself unexpected, but he had assumed a form that was neither human or Q'Hrell, but rather a form that I knew to be that of a species indigenous to Mars.
That Ys had not reverted to something other than what I had expected intrigued me, and in my misery I finally broached the subject. He was reticent at first, but as we had little else to talk about, and it seemed the destruction of our world was imminent, he finally chose to speak of it. It was true that the original Yith had been a branch of the Q’Hrell, but one that had drifted further and further from their nearest neighbor, at last settling on a rogue planet on the outer edge of the galaxy, one that orbited counter to the rotation of the galaxy. As they built their colony, each passing year took them farther from their own kind, as did their exploration of the arcane and eldritch technologies. Until last, they were too far away both physically and philosophically. Their studies led them to discover the secret of moving through time, and when their own shoggoths revolted they fled through time and space. They had found another world with a species with a civilization which could be co-opted for their own purposes. They fled en masse, and in their new home built a society which integrated with that of their host. For a thousand years the two species dwelt together, but when the rebel shoggoths filtered down from the sky seeking revenge, the Yith fled. They did not go alone, they took with them the brightest and most talented of those with whom they had dwelt.
That pattern of moving from world to world and taking with them choice individuals had over the millennia transformed the Yith into a kind of hegemony, and while the original Q’Hrell still held all the positions of leadership, they had long ago passed into a minority status. The Yith were not a single species, but rather a community sharing a single philosophy, one that included species great and small. Ys may have thought of himself as part of the Yithian culture, but his subconscious still remembered that once, millions of years ago, he had been nothing more than one of the globular things that roamed their planet on a myriad of thick, plastic tentacles, and here in this place that memory was all that mattered.
The concept of the Yithian hegemony was not unknown to me, for it had been repeated throughout human history by the Persians, the Romans, the Chinese, the British, and probably many forgotten others. It seems the tendency to build a nation beyond one’s own tribe was not simply a human trait, or perhaps it was one we had inherited from those who had made us. The Deep Ones, Man, the Yith, we were all in one way or another descendants of the Q’Hrell. Even the shoggoths were just distant cousins, which I suppose made the battle we were contemplating a family affair. That may have been why the Other Gods, who were little more than avatars of various cohorts of the Q’Hrell that still dreamed in the ancient city, were reluctant to act.
I looked around the gardened alleyway as a kitten rubbed against my leg demanding attention. As I picked her up and began to stroke her I casually commented on how when the shoggoths invaded the Earth, the Dreamlands would be lost as well, depopulated by the destruction of the human race.
Ys made a weird noise, which I realized was the equivalent of a Martian laugh. “You think that matters to them? You are still under the impression that this place, the Dreamlands as you call them, is yours, that it is something for Men. Have you ever considered that this place was here long before your species, and will be here long after? After all that you have been through, you still think anthropocentrically. The Dreamlands stretch beyond your world and encompass the other realms of the solar system including Yaksh, VarSuwm, L’gy’hx and even the haunted remnants of shattered Thyoph. How arrogant of you to think that this is your playground. The laws of physics and magics that bind this place were written by the Q’Hrell and are that way for a reason. They serve those who wrote them, and those species whom the builders favor. Man is trapped to a single world, and will struggle to move beyond it. Doesn’t that suggest to you that you and yours aren’t a favored race?”
The setting sun cast long shadows down the streets of Ulthar. All around us we could hear the click-clack of shopkeepers closing up shop and their patrons scurrying home like rats before the last of the sun died. Not long after came the reversing clack-click of a different set of shopkeepers opening up for the night, and the shuffling steps of their clientele came on the cobblestone streets. The lamplighter came by, a song in his heart and a flame in his hand, and with him came the cats, the lords of the city. They called Ulthar the City of Cats, and it was said this was because within its walls no man may harm a cat. While this was a fine title for the city, the legend was mere folklore, conjured up out of the past to explain things that men could not understand. I thought I knew the truth, knew that the old texts had been mistranslated. That Ulthar was not the City of Cats, but the Cat City.
As furry things both large and small, fat and thin, black and white and all the shades and kinds between gathered around my feet, my eyes focused on the calico kitten that had fallen asleep in my lap. I scratched it behind the ears and it stretched and purred in response.
“Ys,” I asked thoughtfully, “are there cats on Mars?”
Ys snorted. “All the planets have cats of a kind. The cats of Saturn are lean, multihued things composed of dust and light. Those of Uranus are thick, craggy beasts who are slow to act, but tenacious once they start. The Cats of Mars are tentacled things, with large eyes, six legs and rasping mouths.” He paused. “Why do you ask Carter?”
I whispered into the ear of the kitten, and it purred and coiled deeper into his lap. “Would you say that cats are a favored species?”
Ys looked at me and at the multitude of cats that had gathered around my feet. “Are you a friend to cats?” There was a touch of panic in his voice. “Do they know you? Are you known to them?” He crossed the space between us purposefully and crouched down in front of me.
I laid the small kitten to the side and watched as it curled up into a ball and purred. I reached out and touched a wall, stroked it gently. Ys watched and his eyes grew wide. I found a depression in the wall and I whispered into it, repeating the plea that I had made to the Gods on Kadath.
“Don’t,” said Ys, but his words fell on deaf ears. He turned and ran, dodging cats as his three legs pounded against the stones of the streets. He was screaming as he ran, but I ignored his pleas to stop. I kept talking, whispering to the city walls telling them my story. It was a long story, but it was the first story th
at the city had heard in a long time. As I spoke the walls of the city began to tremble; towers bent, and ancient buildings twisted. The residents of Ulthar, the human residents, were panicking, but I ignored their plight. I stroked a low wall and watched it bristle and then begin to hum. An ebony minaret, one that had stood for a thousand years, suddenly became soft and laid down on the street. There it writhed and hummed happily.
Ulthar the Cat City was purring as I pleaded my case.
CHAPTER 22
From the Account of Robert Martin Olmstead
“The Hand of Elwood”
As Asenath and I helped Hartwell down the wall, Elwood opened up a door inside one of the shoggoths that had imprisoned us. It crumpled in on itself, wounded but not terribly so, more in shock than anything else. It stirred as Elwood marched through and made a weak attempt to grasp its attacker, but as Hartwell gained his footing he turned and sprayed the creature with the some of his mixture. The poor thing thrashed and screeched as it foamed up and died under the influence of the chemical, leaving nothing but a burning, bubbling mass of sludge.
Our escape had gone unnoticed, and we took a moment and accessed the situation. There were still five shoggoths working on their squid-like craft, and extensive progress had been made. The interior seemed complete, and the last few hull plates were being fitted into place. It would only be a matter of moments before the thing would be complete. I suggested that we wait for Mister Ys and Carter to return, but both Hartwell and Asenath seemed eager to engage the enemy. We already knew that the engines were operational, a launch seemed imminent. Once the thing was airborne it would be impossible to stop. An immediate confrontation was needed to put an end to the work. In the end Elwood agreed that we needed to attack, and so we made preparations to do so.
