The Cthulhu Encryption by Brian Stableford

Author:Brian Stableford [Stableford, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: mythos, cthulhu, horror, lovecraft, shoggoths
ISBN: 9781434446343
Publisher: Borgo Press
Published: 2013-04-30T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

THE SHOGGOTHS

The first time, when they had come in search of me—or, more probably, of the medallion—the shoggoths had used human carriers, and their actual presence had been removed in another dimension, perhaps to some neighboring universe or, more likely, to the encrypted borderlands that separate the universes. Those desert regions are haunted by the Dwellers of the Thresholds, but I doubt that the Dwellers ever try to scavenge that kind of carrion.

This time, the shoggoths arrived directly, not by moving through the intangible walls of the universe or the perfectly solid walls of my house, but rather by perverting space in such a way as to make the room in which our mesmeric séance was taking place ambiguous. They—or whatever was guiding them—twisted our reality, encrypting it in such a way that the loathsome predators could reach us without any intermediary of earthly space and time, let alone any vehicle of flesh and bone.

They had been so horrible before that I dare not say that they were any more horrible when they came again, but their presence was certainly more visible and more tangible, if no less easily describable. They were still unspeakable, still unthinkable—but whether I could speak or think of them or not, they were here.

Oddly enough, the most overwhelming accompaniment of their presence was the smell, whose faint preliminary echo I had earlier described, in the privacy of my mind, as “rotting seaweed.” The impression of rotting remained, but if there was seaweed in the decaying morass, it was far from being alone; it was as if the life of an entire ocean had fallen into rapid putrefaction, concentrated by the lens of their advent.

If the stink made its impact more swiftly than any other sensory response, however, it did not hit harder. What I saw was what I had seen before: something like a cross between a squid and a sea-anemone, with more avid tentacles than I could ever hope to count, all possessed of a strangely intense viscosity that far was far beyond mere stickiness or sliminess, but seemed to be a partial liquefaction of space itself: a dissolution into some kind of primeval urschleim…which was, alas, far from being the worst of it.

The first time, I had only had a slight impression of the other aspect of the monster: the dragon behind the cephalopod; the thing with claws and wings and fiery breath. This time, I understood clearly enough that it was some kind of censor in my mind that had made me see the reaching entities as claws, the fluttering entities as wings, the fire as breath and the whole as a draconian worm. This time, the censor’s kindly magic failed. This time, I realized how unrealizable the creature was, how lacking in anything authentically parallel to earthly substance it was.

The most fundamental aspect of the shoggoth that moved to possess me was not made of matter at all, even alien matter; it was made of something more akin to sound:

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