The cave was rough-hewn granite that had no man-made supports or reinforcements showing but did not strike Roger as a natural object.\u00a0 The smell, which seemed of an animal nature grew progressively more oppressive as he moved forward.\u00a0 Eventually he also heard or felt a \u201cpower hum\u201d that also increased in strength.\u00a0 After about a half hour of walking the tunnel ahead grew lighter.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And now he could see symbols of some sort carved into the rocks.\u00a0 They seemed to be hieroglyphs of some sort, but with outlandish creatures pictured.\u00a0 There were winged dragons with squid-like heads and amorphous blobs covered with eyes and tentacles.\u00a0 These recalled Lovecraft\u2019s nightmare stories and once again got him thinking that this was all some elaborate cosplay event.\u00a0 But this comforting idea was short-lived.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And here the power hum and smell increased markedly again.<\/p>\n
This turn of events had a complicated effect on Roger.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He ran back into his tunnel entrance and cowered against the wall.\u00a0 Thinking back to the Lovecraft stories he had read, he recalled the name shoggoth.\u00a0 But the name didn\u2019t help him process what he had just seen.\u00a0 His whole mind was suffused with a paralyzing horror of the thing that had flashed by in front of him.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But what if the tunnel had a shoggoth?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The cave was rough-hewn granite that had no man-made supports or reinforcements showing but did not strike Roger as a natural object.\u00a0 The smell, which<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1289,1263,4],"tags":[3341,200,354,1290],"class_list":["post-37981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction-by-me","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","category-sff","tag-dunwich","tag-fantasy","tag-horror","tag-my-fiction"],"yoast_head":"\n