THE AVATAR STONE (Part 2)
“If I could have your
attention, please, this is Captain Collins,” his voice crackled over the 1MC a
few moments later. “There is a large,
amphibious creature of unknown origin loose onboard the ship. All we really know about it is that it has
tentacles and teeth and likes to use both.
If anyone thinks I’m joking, come take a long look at what’s left of
Ensign Landry and Lieutenant Harris.
This thing killed them both – and it is extremely dangerous! If you see it, report its location to the
bridge immediately.” He paused for
effect, then continued. “I’m not even sure if bullets will hurt it, but I want
all weapons qualified personnel to report to the small arms locker and the
landing force locker immediately for weapons issue. This is for your defense only – if you spot
the thing before it spots you, don’t be John Wayne! Report its location and
stay clear. Again, this is not a joke
and this is not a drill. Mister Thompson
or I will be on the bridge at all times.
This thing must be stopped, men, or it will kill again. That is all.”
Thus began the most
difficult twelve hours of my life.
Nothing was seen or heard of the creature, but the men remained on
alert. A few still persisted in thinking
of the whole thing as a joke, but the Captain made sure the two corpses were
available for viewing by anyone who didn’t believe him. Shortly before sunset,
another was added to their number. A
lone radioman, shredding classified materials in an auxiliary space, was found
dead, his severed hand still grasping the hatch-handle of the space.
As night drew on
towards dawn, I suddenly turned to the Captain as he sat, a stern colossus, in
his deck chair.
“Sir, did you send that
message to Professor MacDonald at the Miskatonic?” I asked him.
“Yes, I did,” he
replied. “Let me make sure it was
transmitted.” He leaned forward and hit
the button on the ‘bitch-box’ that connected the bridge with the major
workspaces on the ship.
“Radio, bridge,” he
said. “This is the Captain. Did that
long flash message go out yet?”
There was no reply, so
he pressed the button again.
“Radio, bridge, did my
message go out yet?” he asked.
Still nothing. I knew my radiomen were competent enough to
answer the CO if he called, and I turned pale at the next thought that entered
my mind.
“Good God, Captain, do
you know how many AC vents there are in the radio shack?” I said.
His eyes widened in
horror.
“Shit!” he
exclaimed. “XO, take the conn!”
We pounded down the
ladder from the bridge to the second deck, and then raced down the portside
passageway, he with his .45 and me clutching my saber in one hand, praying we
wouldn’t be too late. The CO pressed the
cypherlock combo on the door, and it opened with an electronic buzz and
click. I pushed it wide and gagged at
the sight that met my eyes. Four men had
been on watch in the space, and not one of them was left alive – or in one
piece. At my feet lay the corpse of RM3
Gates, an amiable young man who was always there with a joke to cheer me out of
a foul temper. His arms were both gone,
ripped from their sockets with nightmarish strength. Beyond him lay the headless body of Chief
Reid, recognizable only by his khaki uniform, amid the dungaree-clad bodies.
Then we heard it. As long as I live, I shall never be able to
shut out the sound of that bubbling, gurgling, obscene laughter from my
memory. I hear it in my nightmares to
this day. Advancing into the radio
shack, we saw the monster we had been seeking.
How can I describe
it? A good five feet tall, it looked
like an unholy mixture of squid, dragon, and ape created by a mad
sorcerer. A single leering eye glared at
us above a mouth lined with row after row of needle-sharp teeth, and tentacles
or feelers wriggled from its monstrous face.
It was a nightmare, an abomination, something that had no place in a
sane world – and yet, in every detail, it was a living duplicate of the
monstrous statue I had picked up at the little shop in Kowloon.
It regarded us
silently, with a terrible sentience, its feelers waving gently about its face,
its rubbery claws clenching and unclenching.
I advanced until I was between it and the ventilation shaft it had
entered through, cutting off its escape.
I tightened my grip on the saber, praying that some arcane power from
the Elder Sign had rubbed off on it. Was the avatar able to sense it? If so, it gave no indication that it felt
endangered. Instead, it burbled forth
its obscene laughter again, and spoke those hideous words that I recognized from my dreams of the
titanic underwater city: “Ph’nglui
mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah-agl fhtagn!”
Then it lowered its nightmare head and charged at me.
The Captain’s .45
roared in my ear as he emptied his clip into the monster with no visible
effect. Why I stood my ground I do not
know to this day. Rage at the deaths of
my friends, paralyzing fear, fascination, courage – I think I felt them all in
the second it took the avatar of Cthulhu to reach me. As its bloodstained claws
reached for me, I cried out in revulsion and swung the saber with all my
strength. There was a flash of light, an
inhuman wail of agony, and the sharp smell of ozone filled the air, as though
lightning had struck in the crowded space. To my amazement, I saw the monster
retreating across the compartment, stinking green fluid spurting from the stump
of its claw, which lay on the deck flopping and wriggling like a wounded
spider. I crushed it beneath my heel and
advanced, barely noticing that my blade was glowing with an unearthly light and
colors that were not part of any normal spectrum.
Reaching into my
pocket, I pulled out the Elder Sign we’d found in Waite’s safe. The starstone shone like a small sun, bathing
the room in its radiance. The creature
shrieked and raved, but I was between it and the nearest vent, and it could not
get past me. I found myself crying out
loud in a tongue I did not know as I swung the blade again. Two of the waving tentacles fell to the
deck. The bizarre, bubbling scream
sounded again. I lunged forward, plunging
my saber deep into that burning red eye.
The light brightened and intensified, blinding the Captain and I for a moment. The scream echoed from the monstrous maw
again, and I could make out the words “Cthulhu” and “Yog-Sothoth” in that
dreadful cry or prayer, whatever it was.
Then the hideous thing slumped to the deck, its life ended. Very little of it must have been solid matter
at all, as we understand it, for in moments all that remained of it was a
foul-smelling green ichor that mingled with the blood of the men on the deck.
I wiped the blade clean
on the sleeve of an old jacket and slid it back into my belt. Then I looked at Captain Collins and smiled.
“It’s over,” I
said.
If only I had known the
horror was just beginning!
The next day we held a
burial at sea for the men who had been killed, and swore the crew to secrecy
about what had happened. I spent the day
compiling all the evidence I could gather in order to convince higher
authorities that the event had actually happened, but I was troubled and
nauseous all day. That night, the
nightmare came to me again, stronger and more troubling than before. A titanic underwater city, its inhuman
architecture wrapped in seaweed, the building blocks too huge to have ever been
moved or shaped by human hands. I was
aware of an upheaval, a rising of this submarine ruin, until the tip of its highest peak stood above the
waves, as it had done before down through the ages when the stars were
right. As I drew nearer, I saw that the
largest structure of all was on top of this mountain. I stood at its base and tried to make out the
inscription at the top of the massive door – and when I succeeded, it drove me
screaming back to consciousness.
Relieved as I had been to destroy the avatar, I realized then that it
was just an image of a greater evil that still lived on.
The next night I had
the same dream again, but this time I saw the thing that had driven me to
wakefulness the night before. On the door, hundreds of feet high, was the image
of the mighty squid-dragon himself, Great Cthulhu. Rumbling from inside the depths of this tomb
or temple was a deep and blasphemous incantation, of which I could make out
only two words: “Cthulhu ftaghn!”
When I woke the next
morning, exhausted and covered in sweat, I found that two men had gone insane
during the night. One of them, a dreamy
Yeoman named Carroll, had screamed something about the gates of hell opening
up, and had run down the passageways of the ship for a half hour before he
could be subdued, screaming of watery demons coming to devour him. The other, a second class signalman named
Jameson who wrote poetry in his spare time, had calmly sat down at the mess
table, taken a fork, and plunged it first into one eye, then into the
other. He was not expected to live.
I noticed when I got to
the bridge that our heading was changed, and when I turned to the Captain he
handed me a long message, then returned his gaze to the waters ahead. I relieved the Officer of the Deck, and then
settled into the command chair to read the long paper; it had come in over
fleet broadcast the night before and was addressed exclusively to our
ship. It was from Professor MacDonald at
Miskatonic University.
Captain,
it
read, It was wise of you to contact
me. I realize that the creature running
loose on your ship is your chief concern at the moment, but let me assure you
that the danger it poses is minor compared to the hideous menace to all human
life which I greatly fear has awakened.
The so-called ‘Cthulhu cult,’ although very secretive and difficult to
trace, has been exceptionally active this year.
For the first time in over forty years, the stars have aligned
themselves again to wake the blasphemous being who slumbers in the cursed city
of R’lyeh. The last time Cthulhu woke, in 1926, it was a very brave Norwegian
seaman who stopped him from destroying the world by striking him with his own
ship while Cthulhu was still weak from his slumber. This did not destroy the monster, but
weakened him enough that when the city sank again beneath the waves it carried
Cthulhu with it before any of the other great Elder Beings sleeping there could
be revived. Now I fear it is once more
the duty of a God-fearing, seagoing man to quell this threat. You must make all speed for the following
coordinates –
I stopped reading for a
moment and asked the duty quartermaster if that were indeed our heading, and he
nodded that it was. I continued reading
MacDonald’s message.
“As
young Waite’s will may have told you, his family has been under the Innsmouth
curse ever since Captain Obadiah Marsh brought the secret of the Deep Ones back
to Innsmouth with him a hundred years ago.
I gave him the Elder Sign he wore, and it alone kept him from answering
the call of the Deep Ones before now.
All the Innsmouth folks feel it, once they learn of their heritage. I am glad he left the other Elder Sign for
you, for it alone is guaranteed to be effective against Great Cthulhu himself,
if he has indeed woken and recalled his full power.
Listen! There is a great door at the peak of the
mountain which has risen above the waves at these coordinates. Ask any of your more imaginative crewmen;
they will have dreamed of it. He always
reaches for the minds of artists, poets, writers, and madmen. This is how the cult has been preserved from
the dawn of time.
There
is one other thing that might help. I
have delved deeply into the Necronomicon, and I did find the command in the
sixth chapter which Waite referred to. It is in the tongue of the Great Old
Ones, and it may or may not have some power over Cthulhu once he wakes up. It is what they said when they imprisoned him
long eons ago. The Deep Ones worshipped
Cthulhu in the days of his power, but in the time of his slumber they have come
to hate and fear him. They have kept
vigil over R’lyeh for long centuries, but they are powerless now, for they have
lost their Elder Signs, and I fear they may revert to Cthulhu worship when he
has fully returned to life. Here is the
command:
“Tsaggith ngai R’lyeh ftaghn
Cthulhu gwdlka Ashrothin!”
Loosely
translated, it means: “To dead R’lyeh Great Cthulhu returns to slumber.” There
is little else I can tell you, Captain.
Be strong and courageous; my prayers are with you.
Walking over to the
navigation console, I checked our position.
“We are still three
hundred miles or more away,” I said.
“How do you propose to destroy this thing once we arrive?”
Captain Collins smiled
at me grimly.
“Any way I can,
Mister,” he said. “Be he god or devil,
he’ll find a five inch shell hard to deal with!”
I stayed at the bridge
for the next day and a half by the Captain’s side, doing my best to ignore the
rumors that were sweeping the ship. Some
of the crew thought we had gone mad – the XO fell into this category, and we
had to physically subdue him to prevent him from taking the ship away from
us. Others said we were on our way to
destroy a secret Soviet installation that was producing monsters like the one
that killed half our radiomen. One
persistent Bosun’s Mate insisted we were on our way to Subic Bay for a surprise
port call! But those who had seen the
avatar and the bodies of its victims knew that we were on our way to destroy a
similar evil.
Well into the second
day, we came across a mighty stone pillar which stood up high out of the
ocean. It was carved of deep black
basalt, and dripped with green slime.
Its geometry was all off – no matter how hard I stared at it, or from
what angle, I could not tell if it was cubic, cylindrical, or many-sided. It seemed to somehow be all three at
once. The Captain ordered the ship to
General Quarters as we slowly steamed in the rapidly shallowing waters towards
an island peak looming in the distance.
By evening we were five
hundred yards offshore, and the CO and I stood on the signal bridge, studying
the long-sunken city through the high powered binoculars. Titanic monoliths reared their heads
everywhere; statues and effigies of bizarre and evil things no man had ever
seen alive dominated most of the buildings.
The angles were outlandish; reflecting no earthly geometric pattern –
one minute obtuse, the next acute, it hurt the eyes to stare at them for too
long. The captain had one ship’s
photographer busily snapping pictures of the dead city, and I asked why.
“The brass in
Washington will be anxious to know the reason why I took my ship hundreds of
miles off course and lost ten lives.
Maybe this will show them why,” he explained.
At this moment the
mists that shrouded the peak of the island lifted, and we gasped as we beheld
it – the massive door, hundreds of yards high, that held the image of the
monstrous squid/dragon/ape that we had learned to despise. The photographer snapped another picture, and
then the captain pressed the button on the intercom connecting him to Gunnery
Plotting.
“Focus your fire on
that massive door on the side of the mountain,” he said. “I want it down!”
The sleek barrel of our
five-inch gun mount adjusted itself and settled into position with a series of
mechanical clicks that seemed extremely loud in the still waters.
“Ear protection on!”
barked the Captain, and everyone up topside donned the heavy metal ear covers
that never could completely block out the roar of the guns.
“Stand by for the first
round,” called the CO. Then he pressed
the mike button again. “You may fire at
will, Mister Langley,” he said.
There was a moment of
hesitation, and then an orange blossom of fire shot from the barrel of the gun,
and the signal bridge shook with the recoil.
Watching the great portal through the binoculars, I saw the massive
stone slab shatter, huge shards falling as the top half of the door was broken
to rubble by the shell’s impact.
The Captain spoke
again.
“Lower the angle point
five degrees and give it another round,” he said. Once more the gun roared, and the lower
portion of the great door exploded into huge chunks of broken rubble. The Captain stood immobile on the deck, feet
planted apart, his eyes narrowing as he glared at the massive cavern we’d
uncovered.
“All right, Cthulhu,
you bastard,” he said. “Come and take
your medicine!”
And Great Cthulhu
came. Merciful God, it came!
The XO, who had escaped
the confinement we’d placed him under when he tried to take the ship from
Captain Collins, had made his way up to the signal bridge at just that
moment. He went utterly mad at the
sight, collapsing to the deck gibbering and weeping. A signalman who had been staring through a
pair of binoculars screamed and threw himself fifty feet into the sea, which
was suddenly teaming with fishlike creatures that swam like men. They latched on him and dragged him under
right away.
Collins stood his
ground as the blasphemous shape heaved itself up out of the cavern, towering
hundreds of feet high. It was inconceivable that anything could be so big! The massive tentacles about the head waved in
horrible unison as the Elder God, member of a race that filtered down from the
stars when the earth was young, saw the source of the attack on his lair. Then with a roar that blasted the hearing
from my ears for a few seconds, it lumbered down the side of the mountain
towards the shoreline – and us.
“Gunplot, Bridge,” the
Captain said. “Hit that thing, and keep
hitting it! Everything we have – HE, incendiary, white phosphorous, the
works! Kill it!”
The gun roared, and
Great Cthulhu roared back. When the
shell hit, a huge chunk of his upper body splattered across the island like
foul green rain, but almost immediately the liquid ran up those titan legs, and
reformed itself into the missing flesh, so that Cthulhu stood before us just as
he was.
“Keep firing!” snapped
the Captain as it advanced again.
I was paralyzed with
fear for a moment. The horror of the
avatar was nothing, a child’s copy at best, of the monstrosity it
represented. Insanity yawned in my mind
like a black pit, hungry for my mind and soul.
But then my sense of duty and self-preservation kicked in, and the
beginnings of an idea formed in my mind.
“It’s too powerful,
sir!” I shouted. “Listen! You speak the
command over the bullhorn, and I’ll attach the Elder Sign to one of our HE
shells. If that doesn’t stop him,
nothing will. I’m headed for the ammo
magazine now. Give me a minute, and then
read the spell.”
His eyes lit up with a
fierce hope.
“Go!” he said. “It’s already advancing again!”
So it was, taking fifty
yards at a stride, raving and gibbering like Azathoth, the blind god of
Chaos. I opened the hatch and pounded
down the ladder three decks and ran to the magazine as quickly as my legs would
take me, missing what happened next.
Captain Collins picked up the bullhorn, and shouted as loud as he could
the words from the Necronomicon: “Tsaggith ngai R’lyeh ftaghn Cthulhu gwdlka
Ashrothin!”
The massive beast
stopped, as if its unearthly mind were registering astonishment for perhaps the
first time in its long existence. The
command still had some power of compulsion, for the huge form remained still,
there in the shallow water that still covered most of the ancient city.
Meanwhile, I had made
it down to the magazine and explained to the chief Gunner’s Mate what it was I
wanted him to do. He looked at me
strangely, and then took another look at the behemoth through his scope, as it
stood like a statue in the shallows.
“I don’t know what good
that thing will do when an HE shell doesn’t even slow that monster down,” he
said, “but I’ll still attach it!”
He lifted a seventy
pound shell as easily as if it were a small child and unscrewed the nose,
placing the star securely in next to the detonator.
“Hurry, man, that thing
won’t hold forever!” I snapped, looking through the scope. Already I could see Cthulhu’s massive
tentacles beginning to squirm again.
“Go on back to the
bridge, sir,” the Chief said sharply.
“I’ll have this thing attached and ready to fire by the time you’re
there.”
Reluctantly I left and
scrambled up the ladders to the signal bridge.
Great Cthulhu had not advanced, but he was swaying on his mighty legs,
obviously fighting the power of the spell, his huge feelers waving the air
around his gaping maw. Suddenly the
spell broke and with a roar that shook the entire ship, he surged forward. I screamed then, I think. What man wouldn’t, at the sight of that
mountain of obscene flesh bearing down on him.
“Fire now or we’re all
dead!” the Captain shouted into the mike, and in response, the gun roared. I saw Great Cthulhu draw himself up to his
full, hideous height as the shell struck in the center of his enormous
three-lobed eye.
There was a second
scream, a wail that reached to the stars and beyond, where the blind idiot god
Azathoth himself must have heard it. The
entire form of Cthulhu dissolved into fine green droplets, which in turn were
caught up into the sky in an unearthly beam of light that came, not from the
setting sun, but from the darkling east, where a single red star shone like a
burning eye near the horizon. In a
moment, all the remnants of Cthulhu shot skyward, towards the outside whence he
came, never to return to earth again, I prayed.
Then I heard a sound
that chilled my blood – echoing up from the waters all around us, from
underneath the waters all around us, as the Deep Ones witnessed the departure
of their hated god, and the other imprisoned Elder Beings beneath the city
shrieked in horrible empathy. Then the
peak of dead R’lyeh burst into fiery lava, and with a rumble the ancient city
began to sink beneath the waves.
“Main control, Bridge!”
the Captain barked into the intercom.
“Get us out of here! Full
reverse!” He then turned and looked at
me with a grim smile. “Well, Thompson, either
you and I will get a medal out of this, or we’ll wind up in the loony bin. I hope those pictures turned out!”
After
a lengthy inquiry before a board of Admirals and the Secretary of the Navy, the
entire crew of the Davison was reassigned under the strictest warnings of
secrecy. Those who broke their oath
spent the rest of their careers at postings like Diego Garcia and McMurdo Naval
Air Station in Antarctica, while those who kept their silence were rewarded
with choice duty stations and early promotions.
Eventually both Captain Collins and myself were awarded a letter of commendation
from the Chief of Naval Operations, after we each spent a year at remote duty
stations. Until now, the only other
person I revealed these events to was Professor MacDonald at Miskatonic
University. I had only one question for
him after he finished grilling me for every detail I could recall of the whole
episode.
“Did
we really kill it?” I asked.
“No,”
he said. “But you destroyed Cthulhu’s earthly form, and he can never return
here again, unless certain rites are performed when the barriers that separate
his world and ours are at their weakest. Even then, he will be but a shadow of
his former power and terror. But there
are other Elder Gods out there, buried in the deeps and deserts, and there will
always be wild and evil men who worship them and try to release them from their
prisons. ‘As a foulness shall you know
them,’ said the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.
Men like you and I must always be on the lookout for them.”
Years
passed. MacDonald died on the job, in
his beloved Miskatonic library, of natural causes. Captain Collins and I went our separate
ways. He attained three star rank and
held the office of Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, before his career
ended. I also was promoted to three
stars shortly before I retired. But a little over a year after the “Avatar
Incident,” which remained classified until last month, we met in Arkham by
chance and went together to the old cemetery at Federal Hill, where the new
marble monument we had raised in memory of Daryl Waite stood like a proud icon.
“He’s
not really dead, you know,” I said after we had stood there awhile.
“I
know,” said Collins. “And – as repulsive
to our eyes as the Deep Ones are, I can’t help but be a little comforted that
he is out there with them. Maybe,
someday, their world and ours will meet, and we can dwell together in peace,
now that they are freed from the tyranny of Cthulhu’s hold on them.”
Then
we turned, arm in arm, and went down the hill into misty and legend-shrouded
Arkham, and there this story ends.
