* * * * *
Up in the chamber of the dome, Luke and the old man paused outside the door to the lower chamber they had quitted.
“I don’t intend to shoot you,” said Luke with a tired smile. “But we’d better wait here.”
Lupescu seemed to have recovered himself. “They have no idea what they are doing. Mannerton thinks I am joking. Hiding the truth behind mad stories of gods and a time that never existed. You probably think so, too.”
Luke shrugged. “Down there, I could believe anything. I reckon Mannerton believes something of what you say. Part of him doesn’t want to face it.”
“Man’s curiosity has been a useful tool to dark forces over the centuries,” said the old man. He was about to say more, but from below them, carrying up to them as clearly as gunfire, the terrible screaming had begun.
* * * * *
The first thing that Luke was aware of as he reached the top of the stair was the smell. It was a frightful combination of ozone, as though a bolt of electricity had seared through the huge chamber, and scorched flesh. The whole place was glowing, the walls throbbing as if charged by a hidden dynamo. Sigils and glyphs stood out on them like pulsing veins. Shapes writhed, as though an army of creatures heaved at a thin fabric, urgently trying to tear through it. Spread out around the circumference of the chamber, tossed aside like dolls, five bodies lay inert, faint wisps of steam or smoke rising from them. They were crumpled and charred: Luke knew instantly that they were dead. They seemed to have been electrocuted.
“They opened the sarcophagus,” the old man breathed at his shoulder. “I told them it was protected.”
“Yeah, wired up by some bright bastard,” Luke growled. “Someone who already found this place.” He motioned for silence. He could hear something, an incoherent mumbling.
The lid of the sarcophagus had indeed been lifted. It was at the foot of the dais. A faint glow from within the opened stone block flickered. But the sounds came from beyond it. Luke led their way down the steps, his weapon raised, ready for instant use. He and the old man eased around the dais, neither eager to look into it. Luke pulled up short with an indrawn gasp as he saw what was beyond.
Mannerton was squatting on his haunches, a grotesque batrachian figure, his back to the dais, gazing up at what should have been the wall before him. But, although it was pitch black, it was like a cosmic window, open onto the vastness of a starless space. Framed by a thirty-foot span, the columns riddled with bizarre glyphs, it gaped on to the maw of infinity, a well of darkness that seethed with a suggestion of living energy. How was this possible, here deep under the earth?
Lupescu’s lips moved as he read those glyphs to himself. Luke went to Mannerton, where another shock awaited him. His arms ended at his elbows in two globular lumps, as though they had been made of plastic, melted down by the heat of a white hot fire. Mannerton’s eyes were bulging, as if he were gazing upon the face of some monumental horror in that abyss before him. His mutterings were incomprehensible, as though not spoken in any human tongue.
“Mannerton! What the hell happened?” Luke said, gripping the professor’s shoulder and shaking him. Even through the jacket, the man felt intensely hot. Luke released him. There was no response. Mannerton went on quietly raving to himself.
The old man had drawn back from the archway, staring now at Mannerton. “His mind has been blasted away, scorched as badly as his arms.”
“What the hell did this?” Luke snapped, backing away from the portal cautiously, gun trained on it.
“The thing in the sarcophagus,” said the old man. “Go and look.”
Luke swung the muzzle of the gun round on him. “You look. I’ll see if any of the others are alive.”
“They won’t be!” the old man hissed. “Don’t go near them.” Reluctantly, his face a mask of panic, he crept up the steps of the dais, deeply wary of the open sarcophagus. When he finally reached it, he leaned forward infinitely slowly, until he could see what was within, his face bathed in a red glow from below. Almost at once he recoiled, as though a nest of serpents writhed there.
“Who is it?” called Luke. “Is it your so-called Wielder of the Sword? Or is it a bloody generator? Booby trap?”
Old Lupescu started backing down the steps, face dripping with perspiration. He seemed to have lost all his composure, his years piling up on him, his very body shrivelling. Luke snorted with impatience and climbed to the dais, though equally as wary as the old man had been. But he put the gun down before he went to the open sarcophagus. He didn’t want to be welded to it.
The curious red light from within etched the contents clearly. Luke’s jaw dropped. There wasn’t a body in there at all, or any bones. Stretched out like a corpse, on a bed of white sand, was a single object. A sword.
Luke swung round to the old man, but he had moved, spider-like, to the foot of the steps. Luke could smell the fear on him, even above the stench of the charred corpses.
“You knew this was here?”
The old man nodded. “The Chaos Blade. Mannerton tried to lift it. No man can. Only one being can raise that weapon. The Wielder himself. But the Elder Gods will prevent it if they can. Eternal pain awaits him who tries. So says the lid.”
Luke swore impatiently. “I’m going to need help. Go and get some of the other guards. I’ll try and sort Mannerton out.” He’d had enough of this mumbo-jumbo. Somebody was screwing about here. They didn’t need archaeologists to sort things out, they needed sappers. He re-slung his weapon over his shoulder and went back to Mannerton, trying to rouse him again. If he wasn’t treated soon, he’d likely die. But there was no response; the professor was lost in a world of his own, a world of total madness, eyes locked on that abyss. God alone knew what he saw there. Luke couldn’t bring himself to look at it, as though he might see an immense, malign face scrutinizing him.
A new sound snapped his head up. Peering into the shadows of the far wall, Luke saw short, swift movements. One of the bodies twitched. But the sounds came from beyond the dais. Luke went cautiously towards the body: it rolled over. Jeeze, the man was still alive! But Luke stopped, swinging round to the stairs.
Lupescu had adopted a new pose, eyes closed in concentration, mouth forming the words of what appeared to be an incantation. What the hell was he playing at? Praying? His voice, very low, unnaturally deep, croaked, his hands lifting and falling slowly, as though in supplication. Then he turned to another of the bodies and directed his speech at it. It moved. In answer to the old man’s murmurings.
In total disbelief, Luke watched as the old scholar restored each of the five fallen archaeologists to movement. They satup, the terrible extent of the fire-damage only too plain to see.They could not possibly have survived such a blaze of energy.But plainly they had, for each of them struggled to his feet,clumsy, half-falling, groping his way forward. Two of them hadno faces left to speak of, yet still they staggered on, forming asemi-circle around the dais. Something else was happening tothem, as though the old man was moulding them, like a potter shaping his clay, his deep, unearthly voice the instrument ofhis power. They were no longer men, their shapes alien, theirfeatures distorted, their bulk spreading so that their bodies were slug-like, their arms elongating into bloated tentacles.Their mouths flapped, fish-like, new eyes replacing what hadbeen scorched away. Creatures from the dawn of time, fromthe primal ooze, from cities where no man had ever walked.
Luke felt his bowels clenching. He was powerless to move.
Lupescu opened his eyes. “The Old Ones have heard me across the aeons. Out in that gulf beyond space and time. They give me their power. Through me, their servants live again, within these vessels of human flesh. And with their resurrection comes the key.” He walked forward, towards the dais, all his old dignity restored, and far more than that. He breathed new power.
Beyond, framed by the arch, the huge area of darkness rippled. Within it, gi
gantic shapes coalesced, as if seen behind a thick film of shadows. From them there welled a distinct wave of evil power, a malefic force that filled Luke with rising dread, like nothing he had experienced before. The old man was speaking to them, genuflecting before them. They were his blasphemous gods, though in what nether hell they dwelled was beyond reason itself.
Yet there were other forces within that grim universe, forces that clashed with the burgeoning terrors. A titanic struggle was taking place, a war that had resounded down the millennia. Mesmerised, Luke half-glimpsed the cosmic conflict, fought out so far away, yet so close, silent but suggestive of deafening fury.
The old man had gone up again to the sarcophagus. “I have waited a thousand lifetimes for this moment. I am no longer denied my destiny,” he called to Luke. “The Old Ones shield me.” As he said this, the five monstrous hybrids turned as one to the abyss, forming a line across its mouth, the slumped, impotent figure of Mannerton beyond them. He, too, had undergone a vile transmogrification, his head a bulbous extension of his shoulders.
A shield, Luke thought. These abominations are Lupescu’s shield.
The old man bent down and reached inside the sarcophagus. His hands gripped the haft of the Chaos Blade, lifting it with a shout of triumph. “I have crossed the prison of time for this moment! The Sword and its Wielder are reunited!”
As he ranted, bolts of light tore from the heart of the gateway. Like the jagged prongs of an electric storm, each of them struck the shambling figures before the arch. They were more than a shield, they were conductors, deflecting the wrath of the Elder Gods and their crackling protection. And while the deformed beings bore devastating blasts far surpassing in power what they had already absorbed, the old man raised higher the Chaos Blade.
He held it before him like a huge standard. The Wielder and the Blade were indeed bound together again, their centuries of separation sloughed away. Those bolts that by-passed the row of ghastly figures struck the sword, but it simply flung them back on themselves out in the chasm, their puissance diminished.
For a moment, Luke tore himself from the numbing torpor that gripped him. With a demonic howl that broke the dam holding back his own wave of primeval terror, he squeezed the trigger of the automatic weapon and unleashed a withering hail of lead blindly into the cavern. The old man, no longer bent and slumped, but tall, powerful, swung round instantly, the Chaos Blade before him. Like a magnet, it drew every bullet to it. They smacked up against the steel, winging away instantly as the hail was redirected, fanning out in a blanket. As they did so, their arcs curled around the rim of the dais.
Like a cloud of maddened hornets, they ripped into the bloated bodies of the five shapes, spattering the floor with gobbets of blood and freshly reformed flesh. The creatures lurched back, danced like puppets as the lead tore through them. One by one, they were torn apart and once again flung across the chamber floor, though with a nauseating finality this time. The sudden cutting off of the noise wrenched Luke out of his frenzy as he realised he had run out of ammunition. He fumbled with the gun, emptying it and groping in his pocket for another clip. As the five amorphous shapes disintegrated, another bolt of light crackled from the chasm: there was nothing now to reduce its energy or the speed with which it struck the old man between the shoulder blades. Before he could spin round to defend himself with the blade, the white-hot bolt caught him, smashing him aside with the power of a hurricane.
The Chaos Blade tumbled from his grip, clattering down the steps of the dais. Rolling aside, screaming in fury and pain, the Wielder, no longer demonic, but an old man once more, scuttled like a broken spider down the steps, hand grabbing air as he tried to regain the fallen weapon. It skidded across the polished floor, stopping inches from the lip of the dark gateway. A figure shambled between it and the old man, blocking his way forward.
Lupescu got to his knees with a huge effort. Luke could see the smouldering ruin that was his back, where the bolt had caught him. His spine was exposed, bent like wax. But something forced him up on to his feet, some deathless force as old as time itself. The revolting thing that Mannerton had become lurched forward, a dreadful Nemesis to the bitter end, distorted arms lifting for a nightmare embrace. The old man tried to evade it, but could hardly move for the agonies that speared him.
Luke watched as the two figures, limned by the black glow of the hungry vault beyond them, grappled. Mannerton’s shortened arms yet clamped the old man, seemingly burning into his flesh, leaching on to him in an unbreakable hold. Above and beyond them, a cyclopean head rose in the darkness, baleful and Satanic, as if by its presence it could prise apart the grisly protagonists. Lupescu made a last attempt to grope for the fallen Chaos Blade, but something pseudopodic flowed from the Mannerton figure and engulfed the arm. The old man began to scream, but the sound was choked off as both figures reached the lip of the precipice. Writhing and twisting, somehow merging into a travesty of humanity, a single, self-destructive organism, they toppled out into those frightful depths. Beyond them the demonic gaze sank back to the space beyond the outer gulfs.
Luke swung his weapon up and fired another long burst. Whether the bullets had any effect on anything, he could not tell, but the gateway was a black, impenetrable curtain once more. As he finished, the chamber was plunged into silence, total and utter. And on the lip of the abyss, something hummed, as if charged with electricity. It was the Chaos Blade. It was waiting, like a living entity. Luke’s chest heaved, his body shaking. He lowered the gun.
The sword. No man could lift it, the Wielder had said. Mannerton had tried. But it would be worth an emperor’s ransom! Take it! whispered a voice in Luke’s head. Sell it! You’ll live like a god.
As he was hesitating, tempted in spite of everything he had seen, the abyss shimmered once more. He could hear a growing murmuring, a mounting sound as though a host gathered. Silhouetted in starlight against the edge of the gateway, rising from the pit beyond it, shapes flowed forward, writhing, slithering. He would have opened fire, but a fresh terror clamped his every muscle. His breath frozen, he watched as those emissaries of chaos leaked around the Chaos Blade, inching it backwards.
A moment more and it had been absorbed. The crawling horrors subsided. With them went the accursed weapon.
Transfixed, Luke felt his head swimming as he, too, was drawn towards the pit. But from behind him, a shout dragged him back from the brink.
“What’s going on down here? Hey, that you, Luke?”
Two of the other security guards had arrived, their guns ready to release new waves of lead. “We heard gunfire. You okay?”
Luke nodded. He couldn’t speak, trying to indicate the fallen corpses of the former archaeologists. But all that was left was the coagulated pools of their remains, nothing to suggest that five living humans had been here.
One of the guards was peering into the sarcophagus. “Empty,” he grunted. “I guess someone got here first after all. Like a lot of the others they found.”
“So what’s behind you, Luke? That another chamber?”
At last Luke was able to move. He twisted round. The gateway was no more. The stone walls of the chamber had closed up like a healed wound. But in the centre of what had been the opening, a huge etching stood out in relief. The Chaos Blade.
“No,” he said, his voice surprisingly loud. “No more chambers. You’re right. We’re too late. Let’s get out of here.”
“So what were you shooting at?” they asked him as they made their way back up towards the dawn.
“Nothing. You go a bit crazy in those places. Crawling with ghosts, or bats. I got a bit edgy. Why don’t we just leave it to the prof. Me, I’ve had it with this desert. I’m for Cairo. Like you guys said, there’s enough in the bank.”
The others laughed. “Now you’re talking.”
Far below them, in the spaces under and beyond the earth, behind the stars, the war went on. The life of
the Chaos Blade and its Wielder had been, for a moment, detained. One story ended. Another struggled to be born.
Will Murray once wrote an article comparing Lovecraft’s final version of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” with some surviving pages of an earlier draft and speculated that HPL had taken seriously the desire of the editor of Strange Tales for a greater “action” element than Lovecraft usually provided, the Old Gent preferring the evocation of mood over character and plot. Will suggested that the escape and pursuit sequences were additions to make the story acceptable for Strange Tales, though it eventually appeared only after his death, and in the accustomed pages of the rival periodical Weird Tales. Reading Will’s own “Evacuation Day,” I cannot but suspect that its author has attempted (and successfully!) to go Lovecraft one better, rewriting “The Shadow over Innsmouth” with a lot more action! And from his description of the decaying seaport town, we know we are right at home! It’s good to be back!
EVACUATION DAY
Will Murray
Iwas juggernauting through upstate New York when I wandered quite unwittingly into the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The Bay State was not in my itinerary. Vermont more appealed to me. But after sampling the charming scenery of the Housatonic River Valley, I pushed east to Springfield, where I found lodgings for the night. Having penetrated this far into the state, I resolved to make my way to the port city Boston the following morning. I suppose that the approach of Saint Patrick’s Day and the pleasant thought of passing that Hibernian holiday in charming Beantown partly motivated me.
To this day, I do not know how I ended up in the coastal fishing village of Innsmouth. Driving north east in quest of the Aylesbury Pike, I skirted Foxfield and elected to bypass the Miskatonic Reservoir district. And there perhaps, I made my first mistake.
For the motorist’s guidebook I had been using was printed before they drowned those old hill towns in order to create the new reservoir. In attempting to extrapolate my way through the blighted area south of the reservoir proper, I wandered afield. Far afield.
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