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.\u00a0 But just as he was about to bolt across, the screech of a shoggoth assaulted his ears and sent him scurrying back.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And as soon as the monster vanished, he made his move.<\/p>\n
The short run was barely a few seconds and when no screech immediately followed, he felt almost giddy with relief.\u00a0 Now he began to explore the new space he had reached.\u00a0 Just as for his original tunnel the passage made a ninety-degree bend but there the resemblance ended.\u00a0 After about three feet the tunnel reached a glass wall.\u00a0 At least that\u2019s what it looked like.\u00a0 It was a ten-foot circle that looked like a window into a black void.\u00a0 Roger stared at this anomaly, slightly afraid to get too close.\u00a0 But eventually impatience drove him closer and he gingerly tried to touch its surface with the tip of the cudgel he still held.\u00a0 The surface provided a slight resistance but eventually the wooden rod began to penetrate the surface.\u00a0 He could see it protruding into the void but the view didn\u2019t provide any hint about what the other side of the window contained.\u00a0 Finally, he pulled the cudgel out again and looked at it.\u00a0 Nothing much seemed to have happened to it.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t much colder or warmer and there wasn\u2019t any residue on it.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That convinced him this wasn\u2019t his escape route.<\/p>\n
So now by the same methodology, he reached and explored a series of these tunnels and their associated \u201cwindows\u201d one after the other.\u00a0 Each time he waited for a shoggoth to transit and then he rushed to the next tunnel.\u00a0 Somehow, he had convinced himself that each shoggoth transit precluded any other shoggoth intrusion.\u00a0 He tentatively named it the \u201cshoggoth exclusion principle\u201d 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.\u00a0 Perhaps, Nature or Scientific American or maybe the National Enquirer.<\/p>\n
Each window looked out on a vista that was equally unsuitable for his escape.\u00a0 Sometimes he could see a celestial disaster like a black hole surrounded by an accretion disk formed from the corpse of a stellar companion.\u00a0 Once he saw a tropical jungle filled with crocodile-sized insects and arachnids chasing amphibians through the watery forest floor.\u00a0 And one view showed him a desert world under a dying red sun.\u00a0 The ruins of a megalithic city were visible in the distance but no life was apparent.<\/p>\n
After this last failure Roger sat down on the tunnel floor and closed his eyes to rest.\u00a0 He was starting to feel the effects of hunger, exhaustion and lack of sleep.\u00a0 He was also starting to despair.\u00a0 Reasoning about what he should do he decided that he would give up and head back to Dunwich.\u00a0 As bad as it was, at least it was Earth.\u00a0 It was even New England in a creepy way.\u00a0 Having come to this decision he closed his eyes and quickly fell asleep.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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<\/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-37984","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