The
rumbling had stopped. People were out in
the street with flashlights checking on damage.
It was classified as a minor earthquake, and the news was assuring
everyone that it wasn’t the “big one,” even though the epicenter was off the
coast. Still, there was a sense of
tension in the air, as everyone checked on their emergency supply kits and
finally investigated earthquake insurance.
“Why’d
it stop?” I asked Dr. Crane. We were walking to the building site where
the original stone talisman had been found.
Dr. Crane’s instruments, the function of which I did not understand, but
which whirred and beeped and had flashing lights and looked kind of like the
thing the Ghostbusters used to detect paranormal activity, were pointing him to
the building site as a potential source where we might find other eldritch
souvenirs.
“That
was just Cthulhu rolling over in His sleep, so to speak. Come, we must get to the building site.”
“Ok,
that brings up another question. Why’d you decide to teleport us six blocks
from the building site?”
“To
avoid suspicion,” Dr. Crane responded as we crossed the intersection of 60th
and Belmont. An easy answer, but I
nodded and went with it, because having to walk five blocks was so far down the
list of our concerns that it wasn’t actually on the list.
Patients
milled outside the medical center on the south side of the street while a crew
checked the old brick structure for damage from the tremor. There were small cracks in the sidewalk that
I wasn’t entirely sure had been there before.
Then again, my mind wasn’t really focused on what was around me right
now. My mind was worried about what was
coming.
The
building site was a gaping hole where old trees and a few houses had been
razed. At 65th, Belmont was a winding tree-lined path up Mount
Tabor, that dormant, forested volcano in the middle of the city that nobody was
afraid of. Yet.
Wait, why’d I think that? I shook it
off. My brain came up with the strangest
things sometimes.
“You’re
wondering if you should be afraid of Mount Tabor,” said Dr. Crane.
“What? How?”
“I’m
telepathic. A little. Sometimes.
It comes and goes. Anyway, you
should. But not for a good...oh…I’d say
thousand years or so. Ghatanothoa is
still quite asleep.”
“The…volcano
god? Is here?? Under one of the most inconsequential
calderas in the world?”
“Where
would you hide if you wanted to be inconspicuous?”
“Good
point,” I said. Then I shivered, despite
the warm weather. The Pacific Northwest
was apparently crawling with Elder Gods who would one day destroy everything. Madness crawled at the edges of my vision,
full of worms, full of terror. I pushed
it away. I wondered how long I had left
before it consumed me.
It
was after 9:00 pm and the building site looked deserted. A long, rectangular hole had been dug into
the hillside, and piers poked out at regular intervals. Dr. Crane cut a hole in the fence with a
knife he pulled out of his satchel. I
wondered why he didn’t just teleport us in there.
“Do
you want me to teleport you into one of those piers by accident? It’s not a precise science.”
He
was a rather inconsistent person, I thought, but still, we were in.
Dr.
Crane’s device pointed us to the southwest corner of the site. Dr. Crane donned a flashlight headband which
he turned on, but it didn’t illuminate anything.
“Battery
dead?” I said, like an idiot.
“No
indeed, Mr. James. This device is
working perfectly. It illuminates things
beyond dimensions that you can see. I have been trained in its use. You have not.
Thus, you see darkness where I see a whole world.”
The
earth shook again. I dropped into a
crouch and held on. One of the
construction piers screeched and started to fall, headed directly for Dr.
Crane. I leaped and tackled him out of
the way, just like the movies. The pier
crashed to the ground inches from my head.
The
earth rolled and cracked. A fissure opened nearby, and we scrambled to avoid
falling into it. Above the rumbling, a
dread keening could be heard, a wail, somehow beyond hearing but in it, like
the crying of the dead. The wailing
became a chant, a warbling call, Ia! Ia!
Ia!
Dr.
Crane chanted back at the darkness, words I cannot even begin to transcribe,
words in an ancient and terrible language, the tongue of the Elder Gods. He chanted while the Earth shook, while the
keening wail of Ia! Ia! wrapped
tentacles around my mind once more.
The
shaking slowed, then stopped. The ground
was fissured and cracked, the distant sound of car alarms, the beginnings of
smoke sharp in my nose.
“What
did you do?” I managed, after catching my breath.
“Hit
the snooze button, so to speak,” said Dr. Crane. “It won’t last. Quick, we need to find that other stone.”
His
device pointed us toward a fissure that had opened in the ground, from which a
strange light was emanating, a light made of darkness yet fully visible.
“It’s
activated,” said Dr. Crane. He crouched
near the fissure and put a hand in, reaching.
“Aha!” He pulled out his hand. A second stone, the same as the one I had
given to the Shoggoth, radiated pure darkness, a malevolent light made of
colors that weren’t of this world, that didn’t belong here.
“Ok,
but how do I ‘sync’ it with the first one so we can track down the Shoggoth and
stop all this?”
Dr.
Crane handed me the stone. It pulled me
in a direction.
“See? As the one who chanted the incantation, this
talisman is guiding you, and only you, to the place where the final ritual must
occur – the final joining of the stones and sacrifice that will finally awaken
and summon dread Cthulhu.”
“I
thought he was already summoned.”
“Don’t
be thick. Cthulhu has been dreaming his
dead sleep for eons. It takes more than
a gentle prodding to wake Him.”
I
nodded. I was a little suspicious of all
of this – nothing seemed to quite fit together, but Dr. Crane seemed to know what he was talking
about.
“Come,”
said Dr. Crane, and teleported us.
I
found myself staring at a turbulent sea, a strange glow coming from within.
Haystack Rock stood silhouetted by lightning flashes, while thunder rolled at
strange angles to reality. Hooded
creatures stood in a circle, a strange symbol written in the sand in the
middle. The stone in my hand burned and
brightened its terrible colors. It
pulled me toward the circle of hooded figures.
I stumbled in that direction, terror constricting my mind. Dr. Crane followed behind me. I focused on the crunch of his footsteps in
the sand, something concrete and real, a sound that I could use to keep my mind
from flying apart.
One
of the hooded figures turned to me, blackness where his face should be, a
blackness I could only see in flashes of lightning. I stared into the darkness there, petrified,
unable to move. The sea roiled and
crashed, lit from within by a sinister glow.
The
Shoggoth raised a black hand and curled a finger, beckoning me forward. I found myself clutching the second stone in
a tight fist, my hand shaking with the effort.
The stone burned there, burned my hand, and I whimpered. It raised my arm and pulled me forward. I stumbled toward the circle.
“The
sacrifice begins! Ia! Ia! C’thulhu Fhtagn!” It was Dr. Crane’s voice I heard. “Let the great dark lord rise from His City
of R’lyeh, to raze the world and build it anew!”
I
stumbled toward the circle, my mind in tatters, whimpering and mewling, the
skin on my hand burning from the stone talisman. The black hood of the Shoggoth enveloped my
vision, blocking out the world, an impossible void into which I was forever
falling. I could not call out, could not
fight, could not stop myself falling inexorably forward, toward that sinister
circle of Shoggoths, with their arcane and horrible symbols and their hideous
chanting.
The
sea churned and boiled, and I saw something rise from it, a cracking shudder
breaking through arcane dimensions. A
stone tower, its proportions impossible, its angles inconceivable, folding in
and back and through itself in ways that M.C. Escher would call confusing,
pierced the roiling foam. A horrible
noise, like the crashing down of Heaven itself.
Haystack Rock began to shake itself apart, coming down in a massive
rockslide, as the tower rose, breaking through the sea and into the land. The earth shook, and I lurched forward,
pulled by forces I could not understand, kept upright by dark magic. Suddenly I was lifted off the heaving sand,
and I found myself floating toward the circle of Shoggoths.
I
found myself in the middle of the circle, lying prostrate on the sand with my
limbs at angles to the symbol drawn there. The stone rose from my hand and the Shoggoth
took it. I saw the Shoggoth join the two
stones together, and a piercing light blinded me.
I
could not move. I swear, dear reader, if
I could have stopped the ritual, if I could have killed myself or disrupted the
incantations, if I could have destroyed the symbol on the sand, if I could have
taken the stones and flung them into the sea, I would have. You must believe me. I had no control. None.
A
silver knife, curved and jagged, flashed in the lightning, held in a Shoggoth’s
hand. It plunged downward, into me,
through me, into the sand. I
screamed. I died.
And
yet, I live. I live because I am the
Symbol. I am the Symbol and the
Sacrifice. I sit in this impossible
stone parapet, overlooking the ruined city of Portland, in my eternal prison
cell, and I write this story. In my head. Over and over again. I must tell what happened. I must.
I look down at the pentagonal scar on my stomach, where they cut out my
soul, where my humanity bled out of me, and I am numb. Dear reader, dear imaginary reader, out there
in a reality that now exists only in the shreds of my mind, oh how I miss the
world.
Outside
my window, the Old Ones roam streets where once the great and weird people of
Portland lived their tiny lives. I see
the ruined face of Portlandia herself, that once great statue, lying prostrate
on the ground as if in supplication to the Elder Gods, and I weep. I weep for you all. Ia! Ia! How
I weep…
