It nodded at the pages Jonah still gripped in his trembling hands. At this moment, he feared this other man more than he did the awesome monster whose belly he was trapped in.
“This is my Lord,” the man said, sweeping his arm toward the ceiling. “Those are my prayers, and my tribute, and my testament to my Lord.”
Jonah realized he still held the pages, and replaced them on the table. He said, “Is there a way out?” Suddenly he didn’t want to die here. Not in the presence of this ghastly apparition.
“Out? Why would you want to leave?” Its croaking voice was disappointed. “Did you not come, as I did? To serve the Great One? To recite the words of power, within His belly? So we can keep Him strong, keep Him awake?”
“Awake?”
“The Elder Gods would see Him sleep. Sleep for all time, in the city under the sea. But I saw the Great One in dreams, and He instructed me to venture out on the sea in a boat.” That horrid festering grin grew wider, in pride. “I am a prophet, you see. And my Lord needed me. He honored me, as He honored you. He swallowed me, so that I could say the words of power within Him. So He will never succumb to the prison of sleep again!”
“I was not called here,” Jonah told him. “I know nothing about your God...”
Now, the grin was replaced by a frown, equally unpleasant. “You are not from the Elder Gods, are you? Did you come to cast the Great One back into His prison of dreams?”
“I know nothing about these Elder Gods, either,” Jonah said...though perhaps he had indeed heard the thoughts of both the Great Old Ones and the Elder Gods before. But if they had a conflict, like giant squid battling monstrous whales, he intended to take no sides in it. “I will leave you to your writing, my friend, and...and continue my search for a way out of this place.”
But the blind man advanced toward Jonah again, and with him brought a wave of that same stench of decay the white patches gave off. “But why should you not remain? Serve the Lord with me – the great Lord Cthulhu!” It was the name that had entered Jonah’s head earlier. “We have fish to eat, and shelter above our heads, and now we will have each other for companions. With our prayers combined, the Lord will fully awaken, and the earth shall know His tread once more and always!”
Jonah turned and bolted back down the narrow tunnel, his bare feet kicking up splashes. He heard the blind man’s voice calling distantly as he shuffled in pursuit. If only there were a weapon about! He couldn’t bear the thought of strangling the naked priest with his bare hands – touching that bleached, infected flesh.
He reentered the large chamber, and raced to its opposite wall, where he found several more doorway-like openings he hadn’t chanced upon before. He chose one more or less at random, and plunged into it.
Soon, the voice was lost to silence behind him. The tunnel took various turns, and at one point it became so narrow that Jonah had to crawl on hands and knees to squeeze through it into another chamber, where he could stand erect again.
A pale white fire burned above a fleshy mound in the center of the room. At first Jonah took it to be an altar made by the priest, but then he realized the fire was the result of ignited gas passing through a funnel-like growth in the center of the chamber. As he got close to it, he found that the flame was cool in this stifling air. He put his hand close to it, finally touched the colorless flame itself and found it almost frigid. By its light, he saw strange hieroglyphs etched into the flesh of the walls, evidently by the madman. There were crude images that seemed to show the Lord Cthulhu being imprisoned by some other powerful beings in a temple beneath the sea.
“We did imprison him,” a flat voice seemed to speak directly to his brain, bypassing his ear. “In the city of R’lyeh.”
Jonah looked about him, startled, as if this were the first time a God had spoken to him, though of course it was not.
“The Elder Gods,” he muttered under his breath, and he headed away from the cold flame, toward the entrance to yet another passageway in this living maze.
And he saw more strange things, in the three days and three nights he was lost in that maze. He might have slept for a minute here or an hour there – he had no way to measure the time. He ate raw fish several times. Once he tried cooking one over another of those pallid flames, but it seemed to freeze its flesh instead.
One time the blind man came through a room in which Jonah had been dozing, but he kept close to the wall and held his breath and the blind man groped past him without discovering him. Jonah relaxed his hands, which had been clenched into fists.
And in those three days and nights, the Elder Gods continued to whisper to him in their flat, dead voices.
“He must not awaken...”
“He must return to R’lyeh...”
“You must return him to his dreams...”
Finally, with these voices clamoring louder in his thoughts, Jonah stopped his lost wandering, stooped, and found the bones of a fish in the water he waded through. He clenched a single needle-like rib as if it were a stylus and turned to etch figures and symbols in the flesh of the wall...as the mad priest himself had done in some of these chambers.
Jonah did not understand the inscriptions he was compelled to set down. He let the Gods fill him with their ink, as if he himself were merely some tool of transcription.
But whatever he wrote, he knew it was potent. The floor suddenly heaved under him, and he fell, dropping the bone. Was it his imagination, or did the world around him seem to be moving, rushing madly upward? He had experienced no sense of motion inside the creature previously...but yes, it did seem to be moving now...very rapidly...
There was a rushing sound, as of water. Yes, a growing roar of water, a flood, drawing closer...
Jonah looked up from the floor to see a gush of water – no, a liquid like bile – explode into the chamber violently. Jonah just had time to catch his breath and hold it as the wave of bile washed over him, and swept him from the chamber into a narrow rubbery chute...
The bile sucked him along through this pipeline and that tunnel, and his lungs burned with the agony of holding his breath. Just as he thought he must open his mouth and let the horrid fluid drown him, the flood propelled him up, up, up, until he burst into the shocking white explosion of daylight.
Whether he was flung from a blow spout like that of a whale, or vomited out some other orifice, he couldn’t say, but the geyser cast him clear of the monster’s vast body. Jonah arched through the air, and hit the water’s hard surface with a bone-jarring crash. He nearly lost consciousness. But as his arms and legs began to stir to keep him afloat, he glanced back and saw two things. There was a great bubbling and churning of the water, where the terrible beast had vanished beneath the surface. And beyond that, like a hallucination too taunting to believe in, were the dark humps and slopes of dry land.
Slowly, his body aching, he began paddling toward it. But he was smiling. He was happy to be alive.
“Thank you, Gods,” he mumbled to himself, again and again, like a man who has had his faith restored. “Thank you, Gods...”
And he would be looking forward to that dry land, however desolate it was, however scorching the desert. He looked forward to the long, arduous trek ahead of him.
For he was going to Nineveh.
Ascending To Hell
In the weed-encroached house his dead uncle willed him
Dan Virgil noted an odd thing in a closet
Behind musty coats, a small door plastered up
He uncovered the door, a chill gust did erupt
And beyond was a stairwell, narrow and dim.
There were no switches so he brought up a flashlight
The warped wooden steps creaked at his tread
Another way into the attic, thought he
But the stairs did not end at that level three
Continued on up past a point that seemed right.
On and on he mounted, as if climbing a skyscraper
His heart beat madly from the strain and
the fear
His mind reeling madly at what was amiss
Ascending into an inverted abyss
His pale beam a ghost across rotting wallpaper.
At last he reached a landing, densely shrouded in web
He pushed timidly through into a place strangely lit
A cliff edge plummeted in front of his shoe
Far below there was nothing but a fog blocking view
And high above him a sea of living flow and live ebb.
It was a forest of kelp, black and impossibly long
Swaying and flowing as if stirred by deep currents
Like tentacles hanging down from a jellyfish bell
And the wind wailing through this vision of hell
Was as eerie and maddening as a banshee troupe's song.
And snared in the tendrils of this black sky of limbs
Were clipper ships and whalers, cradled like toys
Old airplanes entwined as if caught in a pass
Were those figures moving behind the cracked glass?
The wind through torn hulls sang dead sailors' hymns.
Dan had lost track of the time, and also of space
But now spun and darted back through the door
Back down the many stairs he did flee
His sanity scorched by what he did see
When the kelp parted to reveal its vast staring face.
The Third Eye
My father was a policeman in the town of Arkham, Massachusetts for twelve years, but he never spoke openly of his work. Not, in any case, in my presence. But on rare occasion I overheard him confiding to my mother in a low voice, late at night when I was out of my bed to creep to the bathroom. Sometimes I would steal nearer to their door, to listen more closely. Even then, I heard only snatches, but these fragments of stories were all the more frightening to me for floating free of any kind of context that might help me comprehend and accept them. Father would allude to, "those books stolen from the college," or refer to, "the fires in the woods." There was something about a "baboon, or dog maybe, but walking on two legs" that someone had seen somewhere, and could that have been connected to the hunter or fisherman, apparently, who had been found with, "his face all scooped out"?
Mother died when I was eleven, and within a year my father was no longer a policeman. He suffered a breakdown upon her death, and took to drinking, and when I lay in bed at night I listened to new mysteries, but these recited loudly, and to no one, in a drunken rant. It seemed my father blamed someone or some group for mother's death, though she had died of cancer. He would rumble about, "their rays", and claim that this mysterious enemy had, "set their eyes on her." But was he really blaming himself? For other times he would sob, "It's my fault...it was me they wanted...they want to punish me..." Neither source of guilt seemed likely to me. I was afraid of my father by then, though he was not cruel to me, and never ventured from my bed to comfort him. But then, he was too lost in his own pain to tend to mine. We both suffered; he loudly, me in silence.
Which isn't to say that he was not entirely without concern for me. One evening he drew me into his little study or office, into which he had never allowed me before. In fact, he had kept it locked at all times when he wasn't inside it himself. Mother had told me it was because of his gun collection, but I saw only one gun in there that night: a heavy revolver, resting by father's elbow on his desk blotter. I tried to take in the forbidden room as best I could without openly gawking, but father pulled me close to his chair. Around my neck he looped a rawhide cord, on which was strung a small stone disk. This crude amulet was etched with a design like a star with an eye in its center, though the pupil of the eye looked like a flame.
"Don't take that off, son. Never, ever," he told me grimly, his own eyes with a flame of madness, either dulled or compounded by tears and drink. "If your mother had only been wearing it...if I had only given it to her." He rose from his chair then, walked me from his private place to lead me to bed, but I remember stealing one good look over my shoulder on the way out. Though the room was murky, I saw a pile of very old books on the desk blotter, near the pistol, their spines peeling and page ends gilded. There were shelves on the walls, and the shadowy objects I spied upon them were like those tantalizing, terrifying fragments of stories: images floating like scraps of nightmare, beads unstrung or dinosaur bones in need of assembling to give them meaning. What to make of the glass jars in which pickled organs pushed gray against the glass, and the ratty-looking stuffed creature, moth-eaten and with glass eyes, which might have been a young ape but might also have been a hyena or wild dog, positioned by some taxidermist so that it reared on it hind legs?
As father's drinking worsened, he began to forget to close the door when he went into his study. One evening I peeked in to find him slumped across his desk passed out, by his elbow the solemn still life of whiskey bottle and Smith and Wesson. Though I dared not actually enter the room, I lingered to take in more of the details I hadn't been able to discern before in the gloom. Was it the taxidermist who had so marked the snarling, hideous face of that monkey-thing? I couldn't imagine that in life, the animal's face had been covered in swirling tattoos like those of a Maori tribesman. Also, I noticed that some of the pickled specimens were not organs, but fetuses, though I couldn't imagine them to be human...unless monstrously deformed. One had a huge bulbous head and great black eyes as empty as those of a shark, but its lower face deteriorated into a nest of translucent strands or tendrils that floated motionlessly in its womb of formaldehyde.
A book was open before father, and I craned my neck to look at the odd geometric diagrams worked in with the type. In so doing, I saw an odd object on the other side of him, previously blocked by his head. It was a human skull, or a sculpture of one. I thought it must be the latter because of certain strange characteristics. There was a hole in the side of the skull, of such size and smooth outline that I might have believed it was a third eye socket. It might have been bored in an actual skull, however, I considered. But the color? Was it paint, or stone, that accounted for the black color and obsidian-like glassy polish?
As I leaned forward a bit further, the extra pressure caused the floorboards to creak, as if to sound an alert. And drunk as he was, my father bolted upright in his chair, his left hand clawing for his gun and in so doing, knocking over the bottle of whiskey. The gun whirled in my direction.
When father saw that it was his son he pointed the revolver at, the madness in his eyes lessened. I had clung to the door frame, too frightened to flee. He lowered the pistol to his leg, and gestured to me.
"Come in, son. I'm reading the books we took from them. The one's in English, at least. We have to fight fire with fire, right? Come read with me. We can use it against them. We can make ourselves safe. Come read with me, son..."
But I didn't enter the room. Slowly, I backed away. I turned down the hall, retreated to my own room. And I locked the door. And shortly afterwards, my father gave up on trying to call me back.
My father didn't emerge from his office, its door again shut, for several days, unless he did so while I was at school. But at last, one night as I sat at the kitchen table, eating cereal for my dinner, he appeared. He went straight to the refrigerator, gulped milk from the carton, then turned to face me. Milk dripped from his unshaven chin. His hair was in disarray. And from the right side of his head bulged a lump the size of a hen's egg.
He saw me staring, and rubbed at the growth self-consciously. "It's from the reading, I think. Some of them in the woods and the cellars had tumors like this. It's like...I think it's like a new part of my brain is growing, filling up with the stuff I'm reading, because it doesn't belong anywhere else in there." He fluttered a spasm of a smile. " But with the book, and the skull, and the other things I took from them, I'm just as strong as they are. They can call their gods, and I can call the others..."
"Don't read any more, daddy," I remember pleading to him in a small dry voice. I hadn't uttered a word to him in
weeks.
"It's for your mother," he told me.
My father took the milk back to the study with him. And I didn't see him for another few days after that...not until the night I heard the gunshot.
When I reached the door to his study, I found it unlocked. I had sped to the door in slapping bare feet, but now found myself hesitating, my hand on the knob. At last, I pushed the door open a few inches to peek in. And there sat my father at his desk, slumped across the blotter like that earlier night. The book was there, and the bottle, and the glossy black skull. But this time the pistol was in his fist. This time, a puddle of blood -vivid under the close glow of his desk lamp - spread around his fallen head like some living thing reaching liquid pseudopods toward that book and that skull.
"Daddy," I moaned, and went to his side. I touched his back. Once I had ridden on it, piggy-back. Once his back had been the strongest, broadest wall in the world. Now it was bent, and still.
But it was suddenly not still, abruptly not bent, as father sat up sharply in his seat. He seized me by my wrist, held me, regarded me as I screamed. I could see, now, the gore that had run down his face, making it a wet red mask in which his blue eyes were horribly contrasted. I could see, now, that he had fired the gun point-blank into the growth on the side of his head. Now, in place of it, there was a yawning wound from which blood ran copiously, down his neck and chest. The wound was too large for a bullet's outline; it was as though the growth had burst, and left its outline.
"I should have listened to you, son," he croaked, his voice a gurgle of aspirated blood. "I had to get that stuff out of my head. I was becoming one of them. I had to get it out..."
He let go of me and rose to his feet. Weeping, I backed into the wall. I knew I should run and call the hospital. I also knew that my father should not even be alive. I could see deeply inside his draining skull.
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