The Weird Company (31 page)

I accepted that, but still had trouble with other things we had been told. “Do you think they really were as stupid as Ys said? That before the arrival of the expedition they were little more than immortal animals roaming the city, carrying out menial tasks like robots? That it was only after they devoured human brains that they became aware of the outside world? Can you imagine being trapped here for millions of years?”

“Makes sense to me. You certainly don’t want your slaves to be particularly smart or versatile, and if they absorb memories and information as we’ve been told then yes I believe it. There are shoggoths in the outer world, but they are at best proto-shoggoths, barely capable of lumbering along and devouring organic matter, let alone forming complex tools or organs. Ys called these hyper-shoggoths. Supposedly these things can reason and even produce semi-autonomous fragments, whatever that means.”

From the far corner of the assembly floor there arose a deep rumbling that shook the air itself and caused many of the shoggoths to suddenly cease their activities and move to new locations. The sound was that of two immense hunched things, black bulks of curved metal that were being rolled across the floor toward the body of the squid-like transport. They moved slowly but deliberately, being pulled and pushed by a number of gelatinous shoggoths which were using their own bodies as lubricants to grease the way for the things. The weight of the machines was so great that the jellied bodies would leak out from the sides in great gouts and squirts, scattering blobs of shoggoth material to and fro.

This material, no matter what size or shape, did not remain inert or still. Instead it would twitch and shake, form itself into a tear-shaped glob and then go streaming back to the front of the massive component where it would rejoin the larger shoggoth body. “I think that is what Ys meant by semi-autonomous fragments,” said Asenath, and I had to agree as the horrific process repeated itself again and again. It was a slow, monotonous routine, but in the end the two titanic bulks slide into the rear of the ship and were quickly connected up to other components.

Within moments the two black machines began to hum. The air grew electric, my skin began to itch, and Asenath’s hair stood on end. The hum grew louder and began to pulse with an inhuman, unnatural rhythm that made me cringe. I felt it in my bones and my blood. Asenath grabbed her head and clamped her hands over her ears, but this wasn’t a noise one could shut out. It was a change in the air. The machines were drawing something, some kind of energy out of the very air, the walls, even our bodies. It came with pain, and Asenath seemed to be getting the worst of it, and then the woman simply crumpled to the floor and began to moan. Blood was leaking out between her lips.

It was then that I felt something tug at my coat. I looked down and saw that the buttons, the grommets, and the zippers, all the tiny bits of metal that were part of my winter gear, were moving in time with the pulsing vibration. The machines, I realized, were affecting the magnetic fields of the room, and anything metal was responding to the waves of electromagnetic energy, even the iron in my blood and the fillings in Asenath’s teeth. The buttons were straining against the fabric and I clamped down to try and hold them in place. Asenath was holding her mouth trying to find some relief from the pain, but at the same time I could see that she was trying to muffle her excruciating pain. She tried but she couldn’t and she eventually let loose an unearthly howl of agony.

The shoggoths working in the room ceased their labors and seemed to focus their attentions in our direction. Eyes swiveled into place, or were suddenly formed in place, as were ears, and trunks of other sensory organs that I did not recognize. It took them seconds to find us and then they began to move forward. The room was suddenly filled with the sound of mouthless voices muttering the same words over and over again. ‘Teke-li-li. Teke-Li-Li! TEKE-LI-LI!’ And then they surged.

We ran. We thought we could escape through the titanic corridors of black basalt that were filled with the detritus of forgotten ages but those things, those horrible nightmarish things cut us off. They were six to our two and though we launched makeshift missiles, mostly rocks and odd pieces of piping or strut, nothing seemed to slow their advance. Slowly we were backed into a corner by the creeping blobs that had given up any pretense of being anything else. They rolled toward us and great gaping maws filled with crystalline teeth broke open and slithered forward, propelled by massive trunks of coiled flesh. They seemed to be taunting us, for those horrific tentacles with their snapping mouths seemed to sway back and forth, offering us an opening only to suddenly dart back and cut us off once more. To them we were trapped playthings, inhabitants of this world whose flesh and knowledge would soon be devoured and assimilated into their own.

As if we would have been that foolish. Asenath asked me if I had had enough, and I reluctantly nodded. I had hoped that we would have been able to discern some sort of weakness, some flaw that we could take advantage of, but in the end there was little that we could do but watch and run.

Asenath however had seen the door I had not, and faster than I would have thought possible I was through one of those strange irising portals watching as the panels swirled back together separating us from the shoggoths. Unbalanced by Asenath’s push I hit the rock floor hard, on the right side of a wall that separated me from the shoggoths.

I could hear them screaming. They knew where we were and they scratched and battered at the wall between us. I recovered quickly, and scanned the room, it was small, confined, the confluence of other more important architectural features. There were no doors, only a small gap in one corner let any light in, but it was no way out. We were trapped. Frustrated, I fell back to the floor. Asenath joined me and we listened as the wall that kept us safe was eaten away by the slow attentions of a shoggoth.

As the time passed. We could hear the shoggoth scrapping away at the rock wall. The sound was louder than it had been before, not from any increase in their activity, nor a sudden influx of assistance to gain quicker access. The sound was growing louder because the walls were getting thinner, and we still had nowhere to go, and nothing to defend ourselves with. My only hope was that the others would arrive in time to save us. It was a slim hope but the only thing I had to cling to. We had no weapons, not even a club. Not that it would make much of a difference against the shoggoths. Fire might help, or something that generated cold, some sort of acid might work, but Asenath and I had none of these things, and the shoggoth was only moments away from breaking through.

That moment came sooner than I thought.

One second the entire wall was there, the next it was gone, replaced by a smooth mass of shoggoth flesh, pulsating and throbbing with alien chemistries and life. Something viscous dripped from some sort of gland. The glistening glob fell to the floor which immediately began to hiss and smoke. No wonder they had gotten to us quicker than I thought possible. The shoggoth hadn’t just dug us out, he had used an acid to aid in the process. I suddenly understood how this immense alien city had been constructed.

The mass of flesh bulged and then exploded, sending tentacles like a net through the room. Eyes and suckers, rasping mouths and tendrils searched for us. I was on the floor scrambling for some kind of cover, but there wasn’t any. Dodging the tendrils and slashing at the sensory organs was the best I could do. It was futile, for every piece I cut, more of the monster swelled in through the hole. If I had been human I would have been dead, but my alien ancestry gave me speed and agility that kept me one step ahead of the beast’s grasping reach. But even that wasn’t enough to prevent the inevitable.

The tentacle wrapped around my left arm. It was a small thing really, little more than a tendril. There were spines, thorns that hooked into my skin. The scales prevented them from penetrating my flesh, but the thing had a grip and I was snapped forward and jerked toward the bigger mass. I slashed with the claws on my other hand and cut myself free, but the damage was done. The mass wrapped around my arm shuddered and lost cohesion. The suddenly fluid material bloated and then swelled. Where a length of vine-like shoggoth had once been there was now a giant black centipede with wicked looking mandibles. It reared up and plunged its jaws into my shoulder. The pain was excruciating and as fast as I could I ripped the thing off my arm. My flesh tore and I screamed as the thing squirmed in my hand. Its jaws snapped at my face, while the lower portion wrapped around my hand. I brought my injured arm up, grabbed the beast around the throat and then with all my strength pulled the thing apart.

I only made things worse.

In seconds the two pieces of the dismembered centipede were suddenly squirming worms that wrapped around both my hands. I rushed to the wall and slammed both arms against a wall. The worms squealed, but they didn’t let go. I slammed my arms again and then scraped them around the corner of a wall. They popped off and flew away, hitting the floor with a sickening thud. I threw myself back and scrambled back into a corner. The tentacles were still searching for me, but so were the two masses that I had scraped off my arms.

They were spiders now, with short, thick legs that ended in fat claws. They marched toward me slowly, cautiously. Why this was the case I don’t know, but perhaps there was some sense of self-preservation amongst these things, and even these small parts could reason enough to want to protect themselves from harm. They still wanted to kill me, but they were wary of being hurt themselves. That didn’t make them any less dangerous. As they stalked forward their front most claws rose up and waved ominously, clicking open and closed with tremendous force.

Without warning the air suddenly parted and from a crack in the very fabric of the universe three figures stepped forth. Elwood came through first, carrying Dr. Hartwell under one arm. It was clear that Hartwell had been injured, his jacket was covered with green stains and I could see he had something strapped to his back, some kind of canister with tubing running down his arms to two makeshift guns that he held in both hands.

Even in the near dark of the room Hartwell seemed to shine like a beacon of hope in a world of horror. He flung Elwood toward me, and the young man crumpled into my arms. There was a stink about him, a blue slime dripped from his back and emitted a wretched stench that turned my stomach. I lowered him to the floor and watched as Hartwell took the battle to the thing that had come after me, shooting the two spider things with his guns, guns that sent sprays of green liquid that drenched their target. The spiders went into an immediate frenzy. They rolled and thrashed as the green reagent seeped into their skin and great foaming gouts of slime. Hartwell took some glee in the destruction and seemed to be chanting as he moved from target to target. His voice was low and fast as he sang: “Behold I have become death!”

He moved through the room cutting and spraying the tentacles that just kept pouring toward him. The shoggoth that had come after me may have been dangerous and monstrous, but it was not the smartest of creatures. Hartwell was cutting through its parts like a reaper through dry grass, it just kept sending tentacle after tentacle into the room until at last the final bit of its body was expended. This last glob of material careened into the room all mouth and fury, screaming as if that would do something to stop us from protecting ourselves and destroying it and its kind. Hartwell casually sprayed it with his chemical concoction and it spiraled out of control and burned up into a ball of melting flesh.

No sooner than we had come to a kind of pause in the action our attentions were interrupted by a familiar and desperate voice. In our desperate fight we had both forgotten Asenath, and she was screaming as a great section of wall suddenly vanished and another shoggoth burst into our refuge. It seethed and pulsated, and the stench was overwhelming. It puckered and ejected a mass of itself, a ball of yellow and green slime that oozed and shifted as it flew through the air. It couldn’t have been less than a hundred pounds, and it slammed into Waite’s back and sent her tumbling across the floor. The mass blossomed into pseudopods and for a moment it looked like there was a giant octopus on Asenath’s back. She struggled but those faux limbs wrapped around her body including her arms and legs, and she fell to the floor.

I screamed as I bounded past Carter, but she was too far away. The mass of shoggoth swallowed her up. For a moment or two it maintained the overall general shape of a small woman, and I still clung to some hope. But that hope dissolved as I reached the spot where she had fallen and the shoggoth condensed itself into a more compact ball of flesh. I stabbed at the thing with the staff, burning it’s surface and immobilizing it within a case of its own burnt self. I screamed in frustration, but the founder and leader of the Weird Company was gone, dissolved into her primal components and devoured by a shoggoth.

Asenath Waite was dead.

CHAPTER 20

From the Account of Robert Martin Olmstead
“The Terror of the Shoggoths”

We had no time to grieve. The shoggothim swelled in through the doorway like a wall of corrupting flesh. After seeing what had happened to our companion, I backed away, moving behind cover until I reached Hartwell and Elwood. It was larger than the other shoggoths we had defeated, and seemed more cautious. Its massive bulk flowed like molasses and as it spread across the room numerous sensory organs including eyes and ears formed and burst open from the greater undifferentiated mass. Ropy tentacles exploded out of the body, but instead of heading across the room, they arched upwards and produced their own sets of eyes providing the creature with multiple perspectives of the room and its adversaries.

Quickly but carefully we regrouped and I followed Hartwell as he pulled Elwood to the farthest corner. The shoggthim hissed and shrieked with each step we took, but it did nothing to stop our slow retreat. As Hartwell tended to Elwood’s wounds, I kept watch on the creature that had forced our retreat. As soon as we had established a kind of stalemate the titan began to shudder and great rents appeared in its body. Limbs appeared, arms and legs and things that were neither and both, they tore through the skin like monsters through a promethean amniotic sac. I counted six such creatures, but none bore any relation in appearance to any of the others. As they strode out of the body of their parent, the wasted flesh of their monstrous womb contracted and formed a seventh wholly remarkable creature.