The Road Less Travelled – Part 6

Peeking out of the tunnel entrance, Roger, tried to convince himself that his sensory organs were telling him that it was safe to dash the ten feet to the next entrance.  But just as he was about to bolt across, the screech of a shoggoth assaulted his ears and sent him scurrying back.  Once again, he forced himself forward in the tunnel and this time he resolved to wait for a shoggoth to transit before he made the dash.  Of course, nothing showed up for what seemed an eternity allowing his nerves to slowly tighten but this time when the screech happened Roger steeled himself for the run.  And as soon as the monster vanished, he made his move.

The short run was barely a few seconds and when no screech immediately followed, he felt almost giddy with relief.  Now he began to explore the new space he had reached.  Just as for his original tunnel the passage made a ninety-degree bend but there the resemblance ended.  After about three feet the tunnel reached a glass wall.  At least that’s what it looked like.  It was a ten-foot circle that looked like a window into a black void.  Roger stared at this anomaly, slightly afraid to get too close.  But eventually impatience drove him closer and he gingerly tried to touch its surface with the tip of the cudgel he still held.  The surface provided a slight resistance but eventually the wooden rod began to penetrate the surface.  He could see it protruding into the void but the view didn’t provide any hint about what the other side of the window contained.  Finally, he pulled the cudgel out again and looked at it.  Nothing much seemed to have happened to it.  It wasn’t much colder or warmer and there wasn’t any residue on it.  So, he very carefully pushed his hand through the wall but almost immediately he felt a throbbing pain in his hand and he pulled it out.  That convinced him this wasn’t his escape route.

So now by the same methodology, he reached and explored a series of these tunnels and their associated “windows” one after the other.  Each time he waited for a shoggoth to transit and then he rushed to the next tunnel.  Somehow, he had convinced himself that each shoggoth transit precluded any other shoggoth intrusion.  He tentatively named it the “shoggoth exclusion principle” and promised himself to announce it in a scientific paper in whatever was the proper scientific journal in which to record details of shoggoth natural history.  Perhaps, Nature or Scientific American or maybe the National Enquirer.

Each window looked out on a vista that was equally unsuitable for his escape.  Sometimes he could see a celestial disaster like a black hole surrounded by an accretion disk formed from the corpse of a stellar companion.  Once he saw a tropical jungle filled with crocodile-sized insects and arachnids chasing amphibians through the watery forest floor.  And one view showed him a desert world under a dying red sun.  The ruins of a megalithic city were visible in the distance but no life was apparent.

After this last failure Roger sat down on the tunnel floor and closed his eyes to rest.  He was starting to feel the effects of hunger, exhaustion and lack of sleep.  He was also starting to despair.  Reasoning about what he should do he decided that he would give up and head back to Dunwich.  As bad as it was, at least it was Earth.  It was even New England in a creepy way.  Having come to this decision he closed his eyes and quickly fell asleep.