As he descended, the turmoil above faded, and he began to discern something happening below. There were bodies down there, but they were blurred, indistinct. Had they all simply jumped to their deaths? No, they couldn't be killed that easily. Keyes had a reason for everything. Certainly, there was a reason for this.
He reached his foot out for another hold, and touched the floor. Something soft and hot brushed against him, and he retreated back up the wall, blinking, willing his eyes to grow and make sense out of the sea of heat, below.
They were all here, right below him. Twisted, broken limbs stretched out of the mass of bodies piled ten or twenty deep on the narrow floor of the pit. They had fallen a long way down, but not far enough to account for this. They looked smashed together as if by a steamroller—but no. They were melting together, flesh liquefying and fusing with the mass. Limbs and senses migrated and coalesced into great siege-engine weapons and unblinking compound eyes. The mob became a black ocean of protoplasm, quivering and bubbling with the potential to become anything, everything. It gathered itself together and rose up before him like a tsunami in the gloom. Slowly, but with horrifying vitality, it rose and became something worse than the sum of its hundreds of parts.
Storch tried not to cower.
In the small space, its massed voice was crushingly loud. "YOU LIVE IN US, ZANE," it said. "YOU ARE REDUNDANT. YOU ARE HOSTILE."
"Goddamn right I'm hostile, motherfucker."
Between them, now, he saw the gate. It was a circular portal of unidentifiable metal, like an enormous manhole cover, set into the floor. So scarred and burned by chemicals and force and the teeth of eons that it looked like a single piece of raw ore, or the chastity-belted womb of a mummified woman, and in the truest sense, it was.
"YOU ARE OBSOLETE," it said, and fell on the gate
Though it smothered the portal, Storch could hear and feel it prying at the frame, feel the stone flex under him, and begin to crack. It still had more than enough flesh left over to engulf him. Storch waded into the mass and tore at it with his bare hands, but it was like trying to beat back a wave. The viscous protoplasm ran through his fingers. He fought to drive it back, but the mass extruded a looming battering ram, which slammed him into the wall. It wove a cocoon around him that became a stomach. Acid burned his skin. Teeth and lamprey-fanged suckers gouged him, tentacles paralyzed him, and this had all happened before, would always happen, because he never, ever learned.
When he was eaten this time, he swore, no more coming back.
Please, God, whatever you really are…
All around him, Keyes's body shook, tremors running through it, and it just split open and fell away.
Storch sank to the ground and contracted into a fetal ball. He didn't even care enough to see what had answered his prayers, not yet. He'd seen too much, already.
Presently, he opened his eyes. It wasn't dark down here, anymore. A frigid blue phosphorescence poured up the pitted, eons-old walls. It came from the gaping hole in the floor of the pit. Of Keyes, there was no sign.
Storch looked up at the disk of night, at the clouds rended to shreds on the raging wind that brought him here. Stars peered down the shaft at him, stealing their first glimpse down the hole beside him in over a million years.
Storch remembered his Bible. He didn't expect to see any Cher'ubims, or any flaming swords, and he didn't get any. There was just him alone. There was always, it seemed, one more hole to climb down, one more impossible thing to be done by him, alone. Just to keep the shitty, fucked-up world the way it was. Because he was the only one, it seemed, who didn't seem to know better.
His stomach gurgled, the first he noticed that he had one, again. Without looking down the hole, Storch held his breath and dove into Eden.
The Bible got it all so fucking
wrong
.
Storch knew how it was. You lied to yourself about home. It was always the good times, the best years of our lives, but getting through it was night terrors and wet beds with monsters under them, if you were very lucky, as few kids really were. His Daddy lied to him about the Army, made every day in the infantry sound like a frat party in Valhalla. All mankind was the same, apparently. He lied about the Garden of Eden, because one step over the threshold, Storch wanted to get out and never come back.
There were no trees pleasant to the sight and good for food, no river out of Eden parted into four heads, and the beasts of the field here were of a type Adam never got around to naming. Adam must have lied to his children about this place, because it was nothing like the pastoral paradise under glass that men were meant to weep for. It was a crucible, a bottle where life had been tested to destruction for hundreds of millions of years, a runaway killing jar experiment to make a better beast of burden. And every so often, it had boiled over and infested the world. Once, the ancestor of all human beings had escaped from this place, but it must have changed a lot since then.
Eden lay in a cavern, the far wall of which was lost in tumbling mists. The weird blue glow came from the mist itself, which must be spores from the bizarre flora that covered the floor and stretched to a height that dwarfed any earthly rain forest. The "trees" were cyclopean cathedrals of fungus, huge edifices of pearly gray flesh, the gills and fruiting bodies of which exhaled the deep sea witch-glow, which attracted clouds of flying and crawling pollination suitors, and all their predators, scavengers and parasites.
The roof was festooned with fungal vegetation that dangled down to the uppermost caps of the forest, and hosted a thriving ecosystem of its own. Everywhere he looked, things ate each other and spawned offspring that bore little more than a passing resemblance to their parents.
In a perverse sort of way, it all made perfect sense. It was almost funny. Down here, the future of the world was being perfected and built. Whatever had become man might have lingered in Eden, and those left behind had ruined it, just as those above were ruining the earth, now. What came to take their place was what could survive in an exhausted, dead, ecosystem, with the sun blocked out and only carrion on which to feed. The lower life forms, the decomposers, fungi and insects, had exploded to fill the gaps, because if there was one thing about Nature he knew, it was that She hated a vacuum.
Even in the teeming madness of the sunless garden, Keyes's trail wasn't hard to follow. Fungal trees were trampled flat in a vast swath, a carpet of bioluminescent ooze like a bridal path of crushed flowers leading deeper into Eden. The infernal din of the forest almost masked the sound of Keyes stampeding through Eden like a avalanche, voices raised in a chant that no longer sounded like human speech.
"Tekeli-Li! Tekeli-Li! Iå Shoggot!"
Storch limped down the trampled path, casting sideways glances into the shadows. Things stirred and stalked, a few even skulked out into the open to feast on the crushed trees and the fleeing colonies of hive insects abandoning their nests. The air was foggy with spores. Storch's skin prickled and scaled as his immune system repelled millions of fungal invaders. Sounds got trapped in pockets inside the clouds, smothering him in silence one minute, then bombarding him with odd echoes of Keyes's hymn of self-worship.
That was how he almost walked into it. Out of the fog came a black tentacle the thickness of a telephone pole. Every inch of it was alive with insects, whirring, feasting, laying eggs in the flailing limb. Storch dropped and rolled away. It passed overhead and smashed down a sixty-foot fungus that looked like a pagoda made of Godzilla cocks. Things too quick to see spilled out of it and were eaten by bigger, quicker things.
Storch ran after Keyes with his eyes wide open, but he had to dodge and duck through a shield-wall of thrashing limbs to stay within sight of it as it spastically fought off the relentless children of Eden.
Keyes had made his human colony into a Shoggoth, his "slave-form," but Storch could still make out whole and partial human bodies swimming in the black protean tide as it rolled by. The mammoth mass sprouted an array of alien appendages and organs, trumpeting horns that now took up the chant in tones that strained the range of his hearing.
"Tekeli-Li! Iå Shoggot! Iå Keyes!"
The insects descended on Keyes in clouds and tornado-swarms. Stuck fast in its shifting ooze, they were so swift, so fierce, so charged with the vitality of the source of all life, that Keyes was almost overwhelmed trying to absorb them all. Storch stayed well back and just watched. The jungle was hurting it more than he could ever hope to. Already, things were starting to grow on the rolling mountain, so that every minute, it looked more and more like the forest itself come to life.
Keyes reared up and shook off its parasites. Storch cowered behind a tree as it rained insects the size of cats and Komodo dragons. He smelled his own sweat. He smelled like everything else in this place, like moldy bread and rancid meat jammed up your nose. To the things in here, he was invisible, or maybe Keyes just tasted better.
When he looked around the tree, he saw that Keyes must have found what it was looking for. In the middle of a clearing, the Shoggoth had adopted a vaguely humanoid shape, and stood more or less on two legs, head and shoulders above the tallest trees in Eden. It knelt before a lone column of rock that rose up out of the furred ground to meet the roof of the cavern. Nothing grew on it. It seemed to have been carved out of the native basalt, like the outer walls of the pit, and was marked with the same regimented patterns of circular holes, a colossal history in Braille for blind, idiot gods.
Keyes read it. Thousands of delicate tendrils caressed the walls of the tomb, for so Storch believed it to be. For worst of all to him, there was underneath all the biological insanity all around him, a bone-deep sense of familiarity about this. He'd seen it in dreams.
Keyes threw more and bigger tentacles against the wall, probing more rudely now, prying at weaknesses. Chips came loose and became boulders. It reared back and slammed into the face of the island. Eden shook. Stalactites of stone and fungi plummeted to the floor, stirring up insect swarms. Storch took cover under a shelf of violet staghorn-like growths blooming on the stalk of a tree. They drooled battery acid on him, sending him scrambling.
Keyes coiled and hit the tomb again. The ground shook. Storch noticed that the insects did not come back. Everything that ran amok in this breeding pit avoided the black basalt tower. Instinct told him it was because whatever was inside it was worse.
But he could not tear his eyes away when Keyes broke through. There was a thunderous boom and a wind shook the trees. The tower had been hermetically sealed. The wall buckled inwards, then split into mammoth blocks that spilled out onto Keyes and buried it, but the black protoplasm only oozed back up around the blocks and crept into the spaces within.
A different sort of mist spilled out of the tomb—frigid, acrid, oily with the musk of something that had not walked the earth since before the age of dinosaurs. Something that had come from the spaces Outside. Keyes emerged from the hole in the tower. In its foremost tentacles, it held something.
In his brains and in his blood, God help him, Storch recognized it. Hiram Hansen had a fossilized specimen in his cave, but it was only a tall, barrel-shaped hunk of stone, with a bewildering crown of flagella and sensory organs that might have been an outrageous sedimentary growth, enfolded in shrouds of limestone that might have been great, bat-like wings. But he'd seen it in dreams too. For all his lies, Keyes had showed him the one unspeakable truth.
Once, about a billion years ago, his ancestors had lived in layered colonies on the rocks beside and within the simmering soup of the young earth. Simple, RNA-based bacteria, they had only just learned to synthesize energy from sunlight, or to prey on one another, when something had come and taken them.
Something vast and terrible and wise, watching him—
It had been an Elder—a looming, proto-vegetable monstrosity, a creature too highly evolved to do its own work or fight its own wars. From stunted terrestrial life, it had created Shoggoths, and viruses, and bacteria, and dinosaurs and men like Christian Keyes and Zane Storch. In its terrible oddness, yet Storch saw the roots of what his genetic memory recognized as devils—or angels.
Now Keyes held it in tentacles quivering with unspeakable, inhuman joy. The body was petrified and encrusted with frost, yet perfectly, hideously intact. Its sensory stalks and locomotive tentacles were curled up in a knot, its leathern wings folded tightly against the ridged body. It was not dead, but only frozen, sleeping. It might come to life at any moment. Storch hoped it would, feared that it would, but the question soon became moot. Keyes ate it.
Eden stood still as Keyes digested its God. "WE ARE ONE," it said. It didn't even try to sound like Christian Keyes, anymore. It had only adopted the scientist's neural network, his consciousness, because it was far more advanced than the Shoggoth's. Now it had something better. Once again, it began to change.
Storch snapped out of his trance. He had somewhere to be, something to do. He had to stop this. He had to start something else that might be, in the end, even worse.
He let his dreams guide him to the pit in the nethermost bowels of Eden. It was right where they said it would be.
There was no clearing around it. The trees crowded each other as densely as possible to get close to it, and their features bore witness to some hidden source of vitality and mutation in their soil. The trees that stooped over this gate were knurled and draped in all manner of parasitic growths outrageous even for this place, and bore organs that belonged on animals, suggesting fundamentally obscene congresses were allowed, even encouraged, in this secret bower. Storch forced his way between them and collapsed on the corroded metal face of the gate, unable to take another step. It looked like nothing so much as a bathtub drain set into the stone, but he could find no seams or hinges. Perhaps it was not a gate, but a barricade, designed never to open. It was better fortified than the one Keyes had so much trouble opening.