by Michael Shea
“Cutting his furrow…”
“Yes. Noon is at hand, and we must watch him begin his work. We have to face this horror at once my friends, or we will not dare to do what we must do.”
They moved in file, as if they had become a kind of platoon. Came out along the northern face of the Battery. They looked down along their promontory’s flank, and Estella said quietly, “There he is.”
Neighboring their eminence was a sandy cove. Mr. Ginunga was descending the bluff of this cove, headed down toward its little beach. They watched his descent of the bluff. Though this was of crumbled stone, and steep, yet that narrow black shape, face eclipsed by his hat’s brim, stepped so easily down it that he seemed as weightless as a shadow.
He walked straight across the sand—did his tread mark it at all?—till he stood at the fringe of the sea. His figure, though small, was sharply distinct, and his garb was of the densest black they’d ever seen.
And suddenly he collapsed. His black coat and hat fluttered empty down to the sand. From these heaped garments, a little black runnel sprouted, cutting a fine black line across the sand, and into the in-rushing foam.
And as the sea came boiling in on the runnel, its rush divided along that slender black axis, forming two little liquid walls to either side of it—forming them still as the wave paused, and then streamed back into the sea.
“Look at the sun,” Adrienne said. It was halfway down from the zenith, growing oranger already.
Estella said, “We must go back to the shaft and stand ready.” As they returned to the excavation, Nolo and Adrienne traded a glance of fear at the minor magic Mr. Ginunga had just worked. They knew what it was the beginning of.
One hour, two hours, they watched the shoggoths’ labors. Eruptions of subterranean flesh, its shedding, the monster’s plunge for ever deeper earth-meat. Nolo and Adrienne had learned that it was no more than a mighty tool, and the power by which Ray and Estella wielded it came from a vastly mightier monster who lay deep beneath them. And they had learned as well that this Being—immune to their race’s annihilation—might view Ginunga’s work with indifference, and when at length they laid their petition before It, might prove to be no ally at all…
“Oh God!” cried Adrienne, pointing. The sun was not three diameters above the horizon. She took a stride away, stopped, and looked back. “I have to take another look.”
“Yes,” said Estella. “Face it. Know our enemy! We’ll call you if our time here comes.”
Nolo went with her, the wind rising against them as they trudged seaward, beginning to come onshore in gale-force gusts, but what truly rocked them was what they beheld when they reached the cove, the spinal punch of what they saw—a terrifying cleavage now thrust a quarter mile into the sea. A hundred feet across was its knife-sharp gulf, the water that flanked it shivering in two perfect vertical walls above the utter black that thrust between. The wind-roused ocean rolled ashore, its rhythm undisturbed to either side, save for this slice where it was not.
“Come back!” they heard. “The time is now!” They staggered in their return, the terror of the descent they faced dwarfed by the terror they had just turned their backs upon.
Estella and Ray were strapping on gear, and the younger couple followed suit—headlamps, clip-lights on their clothes, gloves. “The shoggoths,” Ray said, “hang behind us, to hold the shaft open, in case the shifting earth should close it. The sun is almost setting. Down now! Underground!” Ray went first, and Nolo took the rear.
Their constellated lights picked out a pointillist sketch of the crooked sinus they descended. Thirty feet down they began to feel slow concussions through the promontory’s bones. The wind-roused surf was thundering on the shore.
The passage angled and steepened, their hands worked as hard as their feet now. Nolo gripped the broken shoulder of a half-sunk statue…deeper, the rusted flank of what might have been buried ordnance. Impacting surf sent ever stronger tremors until, quite soon, they had sunk below the surf-line. Here they felt a vaster pressure, the wide sea’s restless encumbrance of the continental shelf, and strange echoes now came worming up to meet their descent, rumors of some great emptiness below.
Descending fault lines of clean stone now, the passage for a while grew frighteningly tight…then leveled, broadened, toward…an aperture. A ragged polygon of empty air, faintly glowing greenish blue.
“Slow now,” said Ray. “Slow to the edge.”
They stood looking down from a rupture in a great, bizarrely faceted dome of masonry. It roofed a vast pillared plaza far below, and they could see that from that plaza’s circumference black-mouthed adits branched into the continental bedrock.
From their aperture, the collapsed roof’s fall of debris had formed a perilously steep ramp down to the plaza. They went down singly, widely spaced. Very ginger was their grappling down this shifty rubble, which rattled and clattered, breeding echoes that filled the vast dome, while at the same time the subterrene silence was restless, and rumors of its own seemed to murmur from the tunnels that branched from its rim. Was it movement? Was it some alien utterance, deep in those shafts?
A dais of rough stone was centered on the plaza, not quite high enough to be called an altar. Its surface was blackly encrusted. Remains of fire? But disturbingly, that black encrustation spilled down the flanks of the dais in a pattern of liquid overflow.
“Lend me your shoulder, Nolo.” Ray again struck Nolo as recklessly brave, to raise his voice in this great murmurous tomb. He clambered onto the platform. Soles crackling as he trod that crust, he laid on the dais’ center his carven stone. “Draw back,” he said, jumping down. They backed into a semicircle twenty feet from the scabbed platform. “Face our Messenger. He is Tsathoggua. He is our emissary to the Eldest One, who will either save us, or allow our world to end. Do not turn away.”
A strange noise began to be audible. Had they not been so massively roofed, it would have seemed rainfall that they heard, a clustered spattering whose source they could not see. Then, dull glitters from the dais identified it: a crackling was spreading across that platform’s black encrustation. It flexed and gathered, its overflows peeling up from the stone—was a tortured fabric of movement. Its uneven skirts rose and interfolded into a ragged black calyx some fifteen feet high that writhed and worked and laced itself together into a broader, squatter shape.
Great back-jutting knees, short forelegs hugely clawed emerged from this coalescence, a wide and sinewy back, and last, the oblate moon of a toad’s head, turret-eyed. Last to appear were those eyes—huge eyes, black ice eternal.
Nolo’s backbone was cold fire steadily flaming. He found Adrienne’s eyes, and saw in them the same.
Black radiance ensphered this monster. It lifted its neckless visage, and seemed to harken. Cocked its gaze, as brute alarm began to awake in the shifting of its mighty legs. Cocked its gaze anew and seemed to study that which it could not believe.
“Stand fast,” Ray said. “It has to go much deeper yet to reach our Ally.”
“Stand and witness,” Estella said. “That’s our duty here. To know.”
The batrachian giant sprang from the dais and seized its corner in claws that pierced the stone. What Nolo watched recalled to him what the big ‘dozers did, in his days working construction. The monster wrenched the low-slung monolith straight out of the floor and hurled it thundering aside.
The underlying masonry it next attacked, splintering pavement stone to rubble. The great domed plaza brimmed with the brutal echoes, while the deeper the monster dug, the louder grew other echoes, underlying echoes of stone falling away beneath the deep pavement on which they stood. And long before it was revealed to them, the onlookers knew that a far deeper shaft plunged down beneath this plaza.
The monster’s onslaught wrought a broad collapse, and tumbling masonry dwindled into a dim crooked deep of crude archaic stone. Down this far profounder shaft of antiquity, the huge creature plunged.
“Now,” Ray said,
when he had found his voice, “we must get to the surface as fast as we can. For what’s coming. If the Eldest One moves to help us, we dare not be this far underground. We dare not be underground at all.”
Up the steep, unstable debris-ramp, their going must be unbearably slow, and long before they reached the rupture in the dome a reverberation welled from the deep shaft down which their monstrous messenger had gone. A slow, vast stirring could be felt far, far below the plaza.
In the lip of the aperture they gathered. They had to hear it in spite of terror: the echoes of a deep intelligence, gravely murmuring.
Up the angling tunnel they clambered, desperate to be under sky again, their lamp-beams weaving in the gloom what seemed to be the webwork of a frantic spider, scrambling its way up out of the abyss.
They emerged under the night sky with a near-full moon well risen, and a great gale of wind roaring. But there was something profoundly wrong about this storm of wind—for it sounded to be a strangely divided gale. Here the rush of the atmosphere tugged their hair to the roots, while a simultaneous tumult raged at a slight distance north of them. If this was all one storm…there was a blank zone in its mighty voice.
They ran to the rim of the promontory and, reaching it, felt within the wind’s assault the crawling of their scalps.
A chasm of black, a quarter mile across, split the sea right out to the horizon. The moonlight lavishly bathed this colossal wound. Their four minds had to yield a kind of reverence to a cataclysm so complete. Surreally gorgeous it was, for the sea was as cleanly cloven as stonework, two perfect walls of water, growing—a ways offshore—near a thousand feet high, and shimmering with moonlit life all uninterrupted. Silver fish-schools constellated the sundered deeps, great kelp-forests undulated in cross-section, a pod of whales hung just beneath the swell and seemed to doze, though they were such near neighbors to a yawning black where lay no sea-floor, no planet below, but Void unending.
The gale tore Ray’s words, as if he shouted them across a canyon. “Light…is not! All…is not! It is…Ginungagap!”
The moon-drenched beach below was cloven like the sea, but only to the point where Mr. Ginunga had stood this afternoon. Landwards of this point all was intact, sand and shore arced unbroken northwards, gale-blown but enduring.
But just then, directly beneath them—deep in the promontory’s very root, as it seemed—they felt something stir. Not precisely a movement—more like an awareness. A sentience had awakened in the earth.
All their bodies in this moment felt like single flames to them—blades of naked energy, of awe, flickering so tenuously between this brute Void devouring the sea and this Titan waking in the continent.
As if in answer to that deep awakening, the black gulf broadened, and its blackness fumed up like steam from a cauldron, and within this inky crest it raised, the Atmosphere was not, nor did any of the wide-flung moonlight fall there, but all was utter black.
Earthquake shook them, a stir of deep brute force which they knew was no part of this mute, yawning nullity, but rather an answer to it. Nolo seized Adrienne in his embrace, but it seemed no antidote at all for their annihilation. The gale tore at them as if to undress them of hair, of their skin itself, and great slow bubbles of gravity welled up their legs.
And within the tempest, Nolo remembered Ray’s words last night.
“It may be that our Ally’s strength could cross that void without surrendering to its nullity. Without ceasing to be…” And having said that, Ray had added, in a wondering tone, “Do you two realize that we have occupied our post of vigilance, wherever in the world it took us, for more than thirty years? And generations before us have done likewise, but to us it has been given to discharge our trust and confront the apocalypse. And at the same time it has been given us, near the end of our watch, which is the end of our lives, to find our successors, and to meet at last our dearest friends.”
To find our successors. Within the holocaust, these words kindled along Nolo’s spine, because they seemed to tell him that the cataclysm engulfing them now was not the only one that threatened to assail this fragile colossus, their planet. That generations more, beyond his and Adrienne’s watch, must in their turn keep watch. He remembered the Norse, who saw a band of titans engaged in Earth’s final dismantling…
Then, halfway out to the horizon, from below the southern wall of ocean, a pale something entered Ginunga-gap, thrust into its absolute annihilation, and yet was not annihilated—a pale, snaky mass, sharp-tipped, but thickening as it sprouted. It was…a tentacle, one of colossal size, to loom so large, so far out in the cloven sea. It seemed to freeze as it sprouted, grow frosty and cracked, yet there was a monstrous energy in its growth that shed the fragments of its frozen substance and swell with might and mass renewed—and a second one sprouted beside it, followed by another.
Moments later there were eight in all branching into the void, piercing Nullity like the great roots of Life itself, and writhing, worming, reached across the world’s vast wound. Titanic they were by the end of their crossing, looking like planetary sinew seeking purchase on itself to bind its breach, and an earthquake that dwarfed the first one marked their piercing of the chasm’s farther wall.
All four were flung down, and there was no need of Ray’s shrieked words: “Hug the dirt!”
The wide, moon-washed coast groaned and shuddered. The four witnesses lifted their stunned eyes. The tentacles bunched with power and contracted. The black gulf narrowed, narrowed, and Ginunga’s fuming comb towered higher, higher, a thinning blade of blackness cleaving the stars.
“Hold on!” they all howled at once, but this they could not do in the moment of the wound’s titanic closure, for with its impact their bodies bounced and danced like surf-struck flotsam. Long past the earth’s great after-shudder, they lay trembling, hugging their delivered world.
“Look up!” Amanda cried. A long blade of blackness rose through the moonlight but untouched by it, and narrowed as it rose, narrowed, dwindled, and vanished toward the stars.
• THE PRESENTATION •
I
Rick was a compassionate guy, a reasonably compassionate guy, so when he sat astride his ten-speed waiting for the light, and the wino stepped over and said, “Can you spare a quarter, sir?” Rick reached in his fanny pack and scooped out his change—seventy or eighty cents—and dropped it into the callused palm and said, “I wish it was more.” He thought that maybe the guy wasn’t exactly a wino after all because the palm had done a lot of work but was clean, and though the man’s sweatshirt and overalls were shabby they were pretty clean too, and the body inside those clothes seemed taut and balanced, and the man’s bony face had a preoccupied, slightly impatient air.
“I can’t use all this,” said the man—almost certainly not a wino, Rick decided. “I need just one quarter. Thanks.” He gave Rick back the rest of the coins and turned and headed for a nearby alley.
The light changed and Rick pedaled on—glanced back and saw the guy come out of the alley on wheels of his own, an old, heavy, gearless bike. The guy held a little rusty red gas-can in one hand as he pedaled. He just made the same light and, pedaling much harder than Rick, overtook him, giving him a brief nod as he passed.
Rick still had panels to ink on the new issue of Death Groan Comix, and he’d almost reached the South-of-Market loft that Death Groan leased…but he thought he’d encountered a really interesting character. The dramatic bones in his brow and cheeks, the remote, impatient eyes. Look at the guy pump those pedals, the overalls flapping against lean powerful legs! This guy had innate drama. He would draw well. Maybe an inner-city courier, a Mercury of the down-and-out—penniless but strictly proud. The guy was probably trying to start some heap he owned. It would be great to see the car—a battered old smoke-belcher, no doubt, the chariot of an underworld knight-errant. Rick could draw the car as a Mercury, get the theme in that way…
The guy turned down Sixth and headed for the Bayside. Rick followed. They passed
the City Jail…went under the freeway. When the man pulled into a gas station and filled his can, Rick stopped well back. He wanted the guy as Image, not a personal connection.
They turned onto Townsend, toward the stadium. Though he had followed people before for their graphic yield, it began feeling strange to dog the man so tenaciously. But the guy’s car would be picturesque, Rick was sure of it, would have enough trashy character to inspire his own version—something really original, something junkyard-supernatural.
The guy pedalled down Third, into China Basin. Crossing the massive little black drawbridge, Rick began to feel too conspicuously in pursuit, especially when the guy hooked onto the half-deserted frontage road that ran past shipyards, deserted parking lots, and decaying wooden piers.
Sure enough, though he hadn’t seen the man glance behind him, he stopped his bike, straddled it, and turned to look straight back at Rick. Rick couldn’t just ridiculously turn and ride back to the loft. Coasting to a stop beside him, Rick blurted, “I’m sorry. You made me curious.”
The man nodded thoughtfully. His face’s tightness gave him a kind of skinned look, as if he were a taxidermied figure in a museum diorama. He looked so vivid. The sun was declining. Oakland, across the Bay, took on a more golden hue. It was the hour Rick loved best, when things got more luminous. But within this rich light, the man faintly glowed with a light of his own. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Rick Tindal.”
The man smiled. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Tindalos.”
“Tindal.”
“I’m Luke Cipher. Here’s the way it works, Rick. You have contributed, and so you have a right to see. But seeing is a two-edged sword. You can never unsee what you have seen.”
