Author: photog

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.

The cave was rough-hewn granite that had no man-made supports or reinforcements showing but did not strike Roger as a natural object.  The smell, which seemed of an animal nature grew progressively more oppressive as he moved forward.  Eventually he also heard or felt a “power hum” that also increased in strength.  After about a half hour of walking the tunnel ahead grew lighter.  But there was no light source, or rather, the cave walls began to glow to such an extent that he was willing to turn off his flashlight.  And now he could see symbols of some sort carved into the rocks.  They seemed to be hieroglyphs of some sort, but with outlandish creatures pictured.  There were winged dragons with squid-like heads and amorphous blobs covered with eyes and tentacles.  These recalled Lovecraft’s nightmare stories and once again got him thinking that this was all some elaborate cosplay event.  But this comforting idea was short-lived.  Because the tunnel took a sudden ninety degree turn and then opened into a tremendous circular shaped space surrounded by hundreds of tunnel entrances just like the one, he had just emerged from.  And here the power hum and smell increased markedly again.

This turn of events had a complicated effect on Roger.  The scope of the tunnel system made Roger very nervous but it also let him hope that he was halfway out of the mountain now.  He was just about decided that the best course of action was to leave the shelter of his entrance way and walk across the open area to enter the opening that was diametrically across from him.  But suddenly the power hum reached a crescendo and from one of the caves to his left something streaked across the ground and disappeared into another cave entrance.  It was only visible for about ten seconds but Roger was pretty sure it was what the picture of the amorphous blob with all the eyes and tentacles was supposed to represent.  It was about ten feet in diameter and while it traversed the opening it had made a horrible screeching noise that forced Roger to cover his ears with both hands.  He ran back into his tunnel entrance and cowered against the wall.  Thinking back to the Lovecraft stories he had read, he recalled the name shoggoth.  But the name didn’t help him process what he had just seen.  His whole mind was suffused with a paralyzing horror of the thing that had flashed by in front of him.  Fear and revulsion gripped him and even the idea of going back into the open threatened to throw him into a blind panic and force him to run back down the tunnel.

Slowly Roger got himself under control and faced the fact that he needed to take one of the tunnels to escape the place he was in.  But he decided that crossing the whole circle was too risky and instead he would go to the nearest entrance to his right and proceed from there until he found the most likely tunnel to get him back to the sane word he came from.  But what if the tunnel had a shoggoth?

When the large man with the cudgel said that last line, “Or maybe you won’t be nowhere at all,” something snapped in Roger’s head.  He launched himself at his tormentor and knocked him to the ground.  Wrenching the weapon from the fallen man he proceeded to pummel him to head and body until the victim was curled up in a fetal posture trying to protect his head.

“Not so funny now, is it, Jethro Bodine.  If you don’t want your head splattered over this ground you better start telling me how I can get the hell out of this Twilight Zone episode.”  With the attack suspended, the man on the ground looked up in terror and said, “Mistah, you’ve got me mixed up with someone else.  My name ain’t Jethro.  I’m Josiah Whateley.  Your troubles are caused by the Great Old Ones and their control of the door to the abyss.”  With this Josiah squinted and tried to look knowing.  So, Roger started wailing on him again saying, “Yeah well whatever your name is you better start thinking of a way out of here before I run out of new places to hit you on the head.”

The wounded wizard begged mercy and promised to help Roger find his escape route.  With Whateley hobbling along, holding the side of his head with his left hand, Roger followed closely along as they descended the mount.  All around them the woods were alive with batrachian trills and croaks and the howls of unspecified creatures.  But Roger paid no heed.  He just nudged Josiah in the back with the club if the pace slowed too much.

When they reached the foot of the hillside Roger asked which way was the road and Whateley said, “It’s not a road.  There’s a cave that runs through Round Mountain.  Nobody who went in evah came back out.  But the story runs that it leads to the Great Old Ones’ doors.  If you go theah, you might find a way home.  But I won’t come with yah.  You can kill me but all I’ll do is show you the entrance to the cave.”

Roger looked with confusion and nervousness at the clearly frightened man and said, “Show me the way, now!”  After about a half hour of walking in the bog they came to a crack in the hill that exhaled a faint phosphorescent green mist.  Whateley pointed to the crack but would not approach the opening.  As Roger sized up the tight opening Whateley ran off at surprising speed and was gone before Roger could respond.

The mist coming from the opening was sickly sweet and made Roger light-headed.  He feared that it might be toxic or at least an asphyxiant and was paralyzed by indecision.  But when the noises around him began to grow louder and more menacing, he took a deep breath and entered the cave.  For the first fifty feet it was barely wide enough for him to slip his body sideways through the crack.  But then it began to widen until he could barely touch both walls with his arms extended straight out.  The phosphorescence was almost useless to see by so he crawled along a foot at a time.  But then he laughed nervously and remembered he had his flashlight in his pocket.  So, with a nervous smile on his face, he switched on the light and headed into the lair of the Great Old Ones.