Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
Despite his previous wishes for oblivion, Jonah suddenly began calling out to the men on the ship to hoist him back aboard. He could not bear the thought of occupying the same ocean with these battling titans, so close at hand and growing closer. He tried to turn and swim away, back toward the ship.
Beneath the surface, he felt something grab onto his leg firmly. It nearly drew him under. He screamed, and redoubled his efforts at swimming.
His other leg was gripped.
Jonah looked over his shoulder, and now he saw the creatures more clearly as they began to rise more fully above the waves.
They were not two animals after all. One creature. One great being...
It was a God. Not the one he had angered, but another. They knew his gift, the Gods. They always knew how to sniff him out, for whatever whims they might entertain. This one’s name now came into his head – though he would have found it hard to bring to his tongue.
Gibberish filled his brain – bizarre chanting. It had a human quality. Somewhere, either elsewhere on this world or elsewhere in time, men prayed to this God, to awaken it from its slumber. And here it was – awake. Perhaps not so much roused by the chanting, but by the proximity of this hapless prophet.
As he suspected, two tentacles had taken hold of his legs. But they had no rows of suckers, and appeared to be striped in alternating bands of black and a nearly metallic silver. And these tentacles did not extend from the body of a squid, but from – a
face
.
The face had no visible eyes, or any other feature...just a mass of squirming tendrils where a mouth should be. The head of the beast alone, now fully risen from the sea, was as large as a whale. Water streamed down its gray, translucent flesh. Behind the head, two gigantic fins had also broken the surface. Larger than any sail, they loomed impossibly high. But they weren’t fins after all, Jonah realized. They were the tops of immense, folded wings something like those of a bat.
He was suddenly drawn by those tentacles, toward that faceless head. He shrieked and beat his arms at the water more feverishly. The head filled his vision: a rearing mountain. Those banded, serpentine tentacles. Hidden in their midst, he thought he saw a black maw opening...
Jonah was engulfed in abrupt darkness. All sight was shut out, and so was the sound of the yelling sailors, and the rustle of the sea.
He was sucked feet-first down a long dark chute, the walls of which were rubbery, the atmosphere of which was steamy and hot. And that terrible silence. More than anything else, Jonah regretted his previous wishes for a dark cave, and utter silence. In their well-known sadism, the Gods were often more than happy to answer the prayers of men.
After what seemed an interminable slide down this twisting and turning rubbery channel, he dropped at last into a shallow pool that covered the floor of a large chamber.
In this chamber there was a dim illumination that seemed to come from white patches here and there on the walls and the curved ceiling. The patches, when he got close to one of them, not only gave off a faint glow but a profound stench of decay, and he assumed they were suppurating ulcers of some kind, perhaps the gas of their rot accounting for the light. Jonah clamped his hand over his nose and mouth but kept close to the white tumescent mass for the comfort of its meager luminosity, as he took in his shadowy surroundings as best he could.
He was in the belly of the giant, that he knew. But was it still lingering at the surface, or had it submerged again – perhaps to depths deeper than the loftiest mountains were tall?
A splashing sound made him flinch. He caught sight of a silvery flopping thing in the puddle of the floor. He then saw another one closer at hand, and relaxed somewhat. He shared his grotto of flesh with a few live fish. Whether they had been swallowed along with him, or whether they were born and died in this environment, he couldn’t say.
The enclosed atmosphere was tropically humid and almost suffocatingly hot. How long would the air last? But the thought of running out of air was Jonah’s only comfort. Better that, than be digested in some bath of gastric acid. His panicked heartbeat slowed to something more like calm. Yes, his prayers had been answered. So be it.
He ventured further into the chamber but stayed close to those fetid patches when he could, sloshing through the water, which was ankle-deep or knee-deep depending on the uneven floor. His sounds echoed off the high ceiling, vaulted like that of some obscene temple.
At one end of the irregularly shaped “room”, he found the opening of a narrow tunnel that branched off like a corridor. Its glistening length was in deep gloom, but there seemed to be more pale light at its end, so gingerly he followed it, trying not to brush the claustrophobic walls of live matter. He heard the distant plop of dripping water or juices falling in another pool. It was the only sound beyond his splashing, and labored breathing. If this thing had a heart, he was too
far from it to hear its great pumping.
Jonah emerged into another chamber, smaller than the one he had been dropped into. It was here that water dripped from the ceiling. And here, in the center of the room, he found a table and chair made of wood.
He went to the rough furniture, marveling that it wasn’t toppled, as if some internal force kept the pieces upright and in place. There were even sheets of papyrus on the table, and a quill in a little bottle of ink.
There was a large patch of white decay directly above the table, and by leaning over it, Jonah could actually read some of the words on the sheets. View some of the illustrations inked there.
He wished he hadn’t looked. The words and images were those of a madman. A madman who worshiped creatures like the one that had swallowed Jonah. They were called the Great Old Ones, according to these scribblings, and they came from the empty black gulfs between the stars. They were not Gods, Jonah knew, any more than any of them were. Creatures. Beings. But they were old, yes...and they were great. And he would be damned if he ever worshiped this one.
“It is good to have company,” said a voice behind him, and he whirled to face it.
A figure stepped forward into the fungous glow. Jonah wished he hadn’t. It had once been a man. Now, this blighted creature had no hair, not even eyebrows, and his skin had been bleached a horrid bone white, either from lack of sun or from the digestive juices of this breathing labyrinth. He was naked, and covered in black sores. His mouth was twisted horribly out of shape by one of these black tumors, but then Jonah realized it was a grin. When the figure shuffled even closer, Jonah gasped to see its eyes. They were entirely white. The creature was blind. How then, how had it managed to write on those sheets?
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.