Category: Science Fiction / Fantasy

Roger’s sleep was haunted by dreams where he was chased by shoggoths that seemed to mock him by matching his speed and keeping within reach of their tentacles that flicked at the back of his neck and his flailing hands.  Their cries echoed in his ears and when one finally gripped his wrist and spun him to face his pursuer the raw panic woke him from this nightmare.

After assuring himself that no real danger was imminent, he consciously steadied his breathing and formulated his plan for getting back to the tunnel leading to Dunwich.  Rather than chance a sprint back to where he believed it was, he decided on the painstaking but “safe” option of stopping at each tunnel and waiting for a shoggoth to activate the “shoggoth exclusion principle” before proceeding to the next step.  And he congratulated himself.  And not just mentally.  His calm had been so thoroughly cracked that he found himself muttering his thoughts out loud, “That’s smart Roger, that’s right, that’s how we’ll do it!”

So, employing this smeagolian dialectic technique he steeled himself for the return trek.  And after a few minutes a protective shoggoth appeared and as soon as it exited the open circle Roger stepped into the open and tensed for his dash.  And barely avoided running into the side of a shoggoth emerging from his destination.  The screeching monster shot past him heading to his left.  Roger froze and held his breath.  Unsurprisingly there was no hint of annoyance at the collapse of his exclusion principle theory.  But fifty feet beyond him the living nightmare stopped its forward motion and let out a new sound, a rumbling roar that split the air.  It spun around.  Shivering from head to toe, Roger swallowed his fear and took off as fast as his legs would carry him to where he imagined the Dunwich tunnel opened.  He could hear the shoggoth bellow again but all he could do was aim for the tunnel entrance and pump his legs.  Maybe it took fifteen seconds.  Roger reached the entrance and made the turn.  And what he saw was a window.  He had guessed wrong.  This wasn’t the Dunwich tunnel.  What he could see was dying red light and mountain walls.  He hesitated at the brink.  But just then the shoggoth slammed into the tunnel behind him and Roger leaped through the looking glass.  He rolled onto sandy ground and started running again as fast as his heart and lungs could provide.  And right behind him came the shoggoth trumpeting its chase.  It was only a few feet behind Roger when it shot out a tentacle and snagged his wrist.  As in his dream he was spun around by the pull on his arm and crashed to the suddenly hard ground facing his pursuer.  He felt none of the pain in his back from the crash but stared in horror as the monster formed a gaping mouth full of teeth.  He heard the triumphant bellow of the creature.  But then he heard another bellow.  It was familiar but he couldn’t place it in the desperate scene he currently inhabited but it got steadily louder.  And then he remembered.  It was an air horn.  The tractor-trailer hit the shoggoth broad side at about eighty-five miles an hour.  The driver hadn’t seen the creature because an outcrop of Nevadan red rock obstructed his view at a curve of the road.  His truck was filled with a shipment of refrigerated beef and the vehicle punched a pretty convincing hole right through the gelatinous protoplasm of the unsuspecting hell-spawn.  On impact, the tentacle holding Roger released him so he was still facing the mouth of the shoggoth but it seemed to have lost interest in him after its evisceration.  And as he watched, the flesh of the beast began to steam in the air and evaporate before his eyes.  It was sunset and, in the distance, he could see the lights of Las Vegas brightening an otherwise darkening sky.  He staggered away from the blacktop of the highway and slowly trudged toward the now stopped truck.

He could hear himself saying, “Now, how am I going to explain all this?”  And then he started laughing hysterically.

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.

Roger stood there staring at the door for about thirty seconds.  Everything about this talk had been confusing and troubling.  The man’s appearance and speech seemed like something from a century before.  And the claim that there were no roads anywhere near seemed outlandish.  And claiming never to have heard of Route 20 was ridiculous.  “Could he have been putting me on for spite?  But what sense did that make?  He’s never met me before.  Was it just because I trespassed on his property and bothered him?”  These were the thoughts that raced through Roger’s mind standing in front of the closed door.  Then walking back to his car, he decided the only sane thing to do was to ride back down the path till he got to Becket.  So, he turned around and headed back.  And he saw how the road narrowed again and sank below the level of the surrounding land.  But after less than twenty minutes he could see the sky ahead darken and eventually the path reached the promised mountain and ended in a boggy stream bed.

“Should I go back to the farmhouse?  Should I leave the car and walk till I find a house here?”  Looking at his gas gage he saw that the answer had already been made for him.  So, he got out of the car and decided to head up the incline toward where he thought the summit was.  It was somewhat steep but even in the dark he could see the path by the light of the rising moon.  And as he hiked, about every few minutes he thought he could hear stray noises like footfalls somewhere behind him.  But when he looked around, he could never see anyone there.  An hour later he reached the summit.  But the environs didn’t look like where he thought he was.  There were low hills and fields and forested land but no major roads or the lights of suburban or even rural New England.  The darkness was profound.  As if electricity and automobiles didn’t even exist here.  And this realization cracked something in him.  It wasn’t exactly panic.  It was an icy hopelessness in the pit of his stomach.  He knew he was impossibly far from home.  And by home he meant a universe where everything he knew about the world existed.  That world had disappeared without a trace.

And now he could hear the footsteps behind him clearly and looking down the path he could clearly see the man from the farmhouse walking toward him.  He was walking with a very stout walking stick, really a cudgel.  And he was heading directly toward Roger.  Roger braced himself and faced his pursuer.  He looked around for a weapon and found nothing.

“Well, stranger, do you believe me now?  Where’s your “route twenty” now?  It looks like you aren’t going nowhere.  You’re here and you’ll stay here with the rest of us.”  Then he tapped his stick on the ground and said, “Or maybe you won’t be nowhere at all.”

“Dunwich?”  And then he remembered Lovecraft had that story, “The Dunwich Horror.”  “Are the locals cosplaying cosmic horror in the woods of New England?”  Suddenly he felt a lot less afraid of what he had seen in that few seconds of flash lit forest.

Suddenly he saw a light in the distance and he drove on.  Presently he could see it was a light in a building possibly a farmhouse and now he was starting to feel a little silly about the fear he had surrendered to back in the woods.  Pretty soon the path began to resemble a road again and Roger began to think that he was literally “out of the woods” and back on track.  When he was within a hundred yards of the house, he noticed that the road seemed to become a private driveway and ended at the front of the house.  Roger wondered if there was a real road around the back of the house and he decided to park and ask for directions to his destination.  When he got out of his car, he walked the last fifty feet to the door and not seeing any bell he knocked.

After a few minutes of nothing, he knocked again only louder and four or five times.  This produced results.  He could distinctly hear heavy footsteps on a staircase inside the house. And then the door opened slowly.  There was very little light inside the house but Roger could make out the general appearance of the man who opened the door.  He was quite tall, about six foot three, he had shoulder length hair and his clothing was either a costume or vintage clothing from the early 1900s.  His expression was very odd.  Not exactly threatening but scowling and suspicious, “What ya want heah?  This is private property.  How did you get on my road?”

Roger tried to explain, “Sorry to bother you but I got turned around getting off Route 20 near Becket in the Berkshires and I somehow ended up on a trail that led me to your house.  If you could direct me to the main highway I’ll get out of your hair right now.”  The man’s demeanor seemed to change.  A guarded smile appeared on his face and he looked at Roger and Roger’s car very intently.  He said, “Mistah you’re a lot more lost than you think.  That path you came down doesn’t lead anywhere at all.  It runs smack into the base of Round Mountain.  And there ain’t no automobile road other than my driveway.  There was a plan which it was the beginning of but it was abandoned years ago.  The only way out of here is on foot.”

Now it was Roger’s turn to scowl, “What do you mean that path dead ends at a mountain?  I just got here on it coming from Route 20.”  The man smirked at Roger and said, “What is this “Route 20” you keep goin’ on about.  I never heard of it.  If yer sah sure that path will get you out then turn round and head off my property right now.”  And with that the man slammed the door and Roger could hear his retreating tread.

When Roger had gotten off Route 20 somewhere in the Berkshires his headlights had quickly disappeared into the road fog.  Even his brights didn’t help.  He headed south (as far as he could tell) but the rural roads kept getting less like paved roads and more like cow paths the farther he went.  And the surrounding landscape became an impenetrable forest of old growth trees.  Finally, the path narrowed down to where he couldn’t have turned around on it to go back without performing some kind of K-turn but the path had already sunk below the level of the surrounding landscape and the whole thing looked less and less like something he wanted to back his car into.  About an hour into this no-man’s-land, he shut off the engine and considered his options.

Roger wasn’t a complete city boy and dark country roads weren’t something he normally feared.  But getting out of his car and looking around, he was shocked by just how dark and secluded his present location was.  It was almost the end of August and the noise of the frogs and night insects was almost deafening.  And he began imagining he was hearing other noises that couldn’t be made by smaller critters.  The sound of larger branches being pushed against the underbrush and the cracking of smaller branches under heavy feet seemed to be all around him.  He began to think that driving his car backward down the road for an hour or two might be his smartest option but then he remembered that his headlights weren’t mounted on the rear of his car.

But Roger did decide to get his flashlight out of the glove compartment and for the first time in his life he regretted being the last man in North America without a cell phone or a GPS device.  He sighed with relief when the beam of his light was just as powerful as he remembered it when he used it last and he quickly directed the beam in a circle around his car.

What he saw didn’t comfort him.  In almost every direction he could see creatures running away from his light.  Some were the size of large dogs and on four legs but there were also some larger animals maybe the size of bears shuffling away on two legs.  And they were giving off various howls, grunts and growls.  All this unnerved Roger so much that he got back in the car and began driving forward on the path.

Eventually after another half hour the road opened up a bit and the trees thinned out to a landscape of fields, ponds and swamps.  And then Roger saw the first road sign since he had goten off the beaten path.  On an enormously wide white pine a rough plank of wood was nailed in with the single word “Dunwich” painted in red letters.  Roger was at a loss.  He had lived in the northeast his whole life but he had never heard of a place called Dunwich.  Or had he?  Some memory from his childhood seemed sparked by the name.