The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack (40 Modern and Classic Lovecraftian Tales) (64 page)

Accordingly, I gave the order to raise the bathysphere and bring us back over the shelf where we soon succeeded in lifting one of the marble columns from the mud where it had lain for countless centuries.

Back on board the vessel we supervised the unloading of the pillar and the films from the cameras. While Brown developed the latter, Dorman, Conlon and I examined the remains of the pillar that bore curious resemblances to the classical early Greek style. Indeed, many of the fluted carvings were almost identical to those seen in the Athenian ruins. But the material from which it had been fashioned was a mystery. Certainly it was unlike any other form of marble known to us and as to the quarry from whence it had originally come, none of us could hazard a guess.

It was when we came to describe what we had seen in the much deeper water off the shelf, however, that Dorman evinced scepticism. While he was quite prepared to believe that some civilization had existed at this spot perhaps four thousand years ago, he could not accept that the curious structures we had seen later were anything but natural rock formations probably thrust up from the seabed by minor volcanic activity during some past geological age.

Even after the films had been developed and we watched them in a darkened room, he refused to alter his opinion. There was no doubt that seeing them as mere flickering shadows on a white screen, in the relative comfort of the room, they lost some of their air of menace and mystery and it was possible to attach any explanation one wished to their nature and origin. Even Conlon appeared swayed by Dorman’s persuasive arguments, agreeing that vulcanism could produce weird and wonderfully shaped forms, particularly when it occurred underwater when there were both pressure and cooling effects to be taken into account.

But I remained unconvinced for nothing could shake my conclusion that out there, only forty miles from where we lay at anchor, was that Cyclopean city of gray stone, Yuth, built by artificially bred creatures that had come from the very rim of the solar system when the Earth was young, bearing a hideous, amorphous thing with them which they had worshipped as a god. Tsathoggua, one of that incredibly ancient race which had been flung down from the ethereal abysses onto the cooling magma of newly-formed planets.

That night, as I stood on deck, leaning against the rail and looking towards the north, I thought I saw vague, flickering lights on the distant horizon and a pallid gleam of glittering radiance, barely visible, which rose from the ocean towards the clear heavens. I drew the attention of one of the crew to it, but he maintained it was simply the glow of phosphorescence, which one often saw at sea.

The following day, a sudden squall blew up with the wind gusting from the northwest and the sea became too choppy for any underwater exploration to be attempted. Driving sheets of rain forced us to remain undercover and I spent much of my time with Brown in the small cabin, which had been fitted out as a darkroom. Here, we enlarged a number of the frames from the films, blowing them up as far as possible to bring out minute details of the grotesque spires. Two of these were of particular significance, for to me they clearly showed that no force of blind nature could have shaped such regular features.

There were also disturbing markings on one of the towers, less shattered and eroded than the others; markings which were oddly arranged in wide spirals which began at the top and descended into the unguessable depths of unplumbed blackness below. With the aid of a magnifying glass I was able to pick out curves and symbols, mostly incomplete, which tended to form such unnatural and terrifying patterns that I almost cried out aloud at the discovery and made Brown verify them.

When we showed them to Dorman he was forced to agree that, in spite of his initial scepticism, there was
something
pertaining to this region of monolithic spires, which warranted further investigation although he still refused to commit himself to my way of thinking.

By the next day, the wind had abated and the skies had cleared and with a calm, unruffled sea, it was agreed that a second descent of the bathysphere would be made. By now, my imagination had reached fever pitch and when the decision was made for Dorman and myself to make the descent, I was beset by odd, irrational fears in the face of Dorman’s determination to proceed to the bottom of the deep trough which lay forty miles distant.

My sense of fearful expectancy as I climbed inside the bathysphere some two hours later can scarcely be described on paper for I knew that soon we would be touching a world that had been untrodden for close on thirty thousand years. Since we would be going deeper than before we made our preparations with undue care, checking and rechecking all of the apparatus. This time, we each carried a pair of powerful binoculars in order to make out more detail in that black world wherein slumbered the unknown secrets of an alien, elder race.

The first part of our descent was uneventful. There were two wide portholes facing in opposite directions and Dorman sat in front of one while I peered through the other, my gaze constantly fixed on what lay below us, taking little notice of the marine life which clustered abundantly all around us. As we went deeper, however, the number of fish I saw diminished rapidly until, when I judged we were below the level of the island shelf, they were curiously conspicuous by their complete absence.

Dorman had switched on the searchlights and I stared through the porthole, watching for the first indication of the vast gray stone city. And then I saw them for the second time, rising out of the slime of the ocean, clawing upward for hundreds of feet; row upon seemingly endless row of fantastically symmetrical columns; the nearer one blindingly clear in the harsh actinic light, with countless others stretching away into the black immensity. Dorman must have had some rational theory at the forefront of his mind. Yet, even so, he uttered a sudden exclamation of awed surprise and disbelief at what he saw.

For several seconds, he seemed stunned. Then he pulled himself together and gave rapid instructions for the bathysphere to be lowered very slowly. We were some fifty yards from the nearest spire but there seemed no doubt these buildings widened out towards the base and we did not wish to run the risk of striking one on our way down. We felt the unmistakable tug on the steel vessel almost at once as our rate of descent slowed appreciably.

The effect of that monstrous labyrinth which stretched away from us into inconceivable distances was indescribable for it was apparent at once that whatever stood on this undersea plateau had never been fashioned by nature, even in her wildest and most capricious moments. And it was equally obvious that whatever hands had erected these edifices had been far from human.

As we progressed downward, we saw there were other ruins, smaller than the towers, yet equally alien. Squat, flat-topped buildings with openings in them that were roughly semicircular in outline. If they were doors, as I had immediately assumed, I shuddered at the thought of the shape and size their occupants must have possessed.

After what seemed aeons, but could only have been a few minutes, the bathysphere came to rest on the massive stone slabs of an enormous swathe, extending so far into the darkness on either side that we could not see its furthermost limits. Above us, the tops of the lofty towers were likewise lost. Now we were able to discern the prodigious size of these archaic stone piles. The cavernous openings gaped in a menacing and sinister fashion and I had the unshakable feeling that, at any moment, something monstrous would come wriggling out of them, huge beyond all our comprehension, intent upon our destruction.

I remember yelling at Dorman, “Now do you believe me?”

I saw him nod his head in stupefied acquiescence. “It’s utterly fantastic. I’d never have believed it possible.”

“It must be twenty or thirty thousand years old,” I said. “There’s no geological evidence for any inundation of this region later than that.”

Many of the ruins were, of course, almost completely flattened by whatever titanic catastrophe had overtaken the city in that past age. But by switching off the interior lights, we were able to use the binoculars, sweeping the entire viewable scene with their enhanced vision.

There was no doubt now that the gray stonework was incised with the outlines of maddening cryptographs that made no sense to our purely terrestrial senses. Monstrous and suggestive of extraneous dimensions, they leered at us across a distance of a hundred feet and thousands of years as if mocking our futile efforts to unravel their secrets.

Many were representative of pre-human species neither of us could recognize but here were pictures of creatures familiar to us; terrestrial animals and marine life belonging to that bygone age.

How many miles in every direction the city stretched, it was impossible to estimate. Inwardly, I knew that our discovery totally verified everything that had been written in that book I had picked up and the letters that had belonged to Jethro Haworth. In spite of my sense of awe and bewilderment, I wondered what the old recluse’s reactions would have been if he had been there with Dorman and I at that moment; sitting there in a tiny vessel which seemed miniscule and fragile in the face of the boundless metropolis which loomed all around us.

It was Dorman who drew my attention to a curious phenomenon in the distance. Far beyond the furthermost point the beam from the searchlight could reach, there appeared to be a faint glow, a curious reddish point of radiance that waxed and waned in a strangely hypnotic manner that was both surprising and frightening. Leaving my seat, I crouched down beside him in the cramped space. It was possible it had been there all the time but was so faint as to be invisible until we had switched off the lights in the bathysphere. Almost simultaneously, we trained our binoculars on it. For a moment, I could make out nothing but a vague blur, but as I adjusted the focus, it suddenly sprang into breathtaking clarity.

We had previously believed this sunken city to be absolutely silent and dead. How could it have been otherwise when it had been destroyed long before man had evolved into a thinking, rational animal?

Yet all reason deserted me as I saw, through the lenses of the binoculars, the dark outlines of the great building with a single wide entrance through which poured that crimson effulgence that clearly had its ghastly origin somewhere far below the level of the ocean floor. We might have put it down to some volcanic activity still going on beneath the sea but for the obvious fact there was no indication whatsoever of any bubbling and seething of steam in the vicinity. The water was just as undisturbed there as it was in our immediate vicinity.

It was impossible for us to put forward any logical explanation for the phenomenon. Dorman’s first instinctive reaction was to call up the ship to move us closer to the building but a single glance was enough to tell us there were far too many obstacles between it and us for that to be a feasible proposition. Reluctantly, he finally decided to return to the surface. We had been down for more than two hours and it soon became apparent that if we wished to examine this curious spectacle more closely we would have to resort to the more dangerous procedure of descending in diving suits which would allow us more freedom of movement.

Once back on board the vessel, we communicated our findings to the other members of the team amid an atmosphere of mounting excitement and puzzlement. That we had made an outstanding discovery was beyond doubt, and before leaving the spot we dropped a marker buoy over the side to ensure our return to the same spot.

That evening we gathered in Dorman’s cabin to discuss and plan our next moves. Brown and Conlon were of the opinion that news of our discovery should be telegraphed at once to the university, reporting a major archaeological find which went far beyond any others made in this area, but Dorman insisted on maintaining radio silence until further confirmatory evidence had been acquired.

We now knew the depth of water we would have to descend and since this was well within the safety limits of the diving suits we had on board, it was agreed that, the weather permitting, three of us should go down to explore the area around that enigmatic edifice we had sighted and, if possible, determine the cause of the peculiar radiance emanating from within it.

That night, I found it difficult to sleep. The nearness of things that properly belonged to an era far in the past, affected me strongly, intruding into my thoughts, forming odd and bizarre images in my mind. When I finally did fall into a restless doze I dreamed of the long-dead city under the sea. But before my dreaming gaze it now stood unbroken and untarnished by time on dry land and there was no ocean in sight. On an incredibly ancient plateau, wreathed in clouds of steam and noxious vapors, the Cyclopean buildings stretched away in all directions as far as the eye could see, and high into the lowering clouds where the topmost spires were lost to sight.

There was something terribly unhuman about the geometry of its massive gray stone walls, and the mind-wrenching alienness of its angles and intermeshing structures went against all reason, all known laws of mathematics, logic and architecture. I knew, by some weird instinct, I was seeing it as it had been perhaps several million years ago when it had been newly built by that race from the stars.

That it was a scene from all those aeons ago was evident from the trees in the foreground, which were huge cycads with monstrous ferns forming a thickly-tangled undergrowth around them. Fortunately for my sanity, the swirling columns of mist shrouded much of the city from full view. But where the vapors thinned occasionally I caught a glimpse of that central temple with its single entrance from the ruins of which that garish light had flared only a few waking hours before.

Yet there were now visible even more shocking exaggerations of nature than the city itself; those hideous and, if the
Book of K’yog
was to be believe, artificially, created abominations that had built it. I saw them as vague shapes in the vast avenues and squares, saw them clinging limpet-like to the sides of the buildings or oozing jelly-like from grotesque apertures and doorways. What insane blasphemy had bred those things I could not conceive, but the mere sight of them woke me, yelling incoherently, from my dream.