Orion's Cold Fire

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?