Overlord by David Wood & Alan Baxter

Author:David Wood & Alan Baxter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: thriller, creature thriller, aquatic monster, horror, adventure, pulp, mystery, cthulu
Publisher: Adrenaline Press
Published: 2018-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

20

The cavern had dropped into a quiet stillness, the entire team asleep or dozing. He had no way to track the passage of time down here, but Dig O’Donnell was fairly certain it must be night in the real world above. They had been exploring, sampling, discovering, for hours. Sol Griffin was right to call a rest period, and it was the perfect opportunity for Dig. While everyone else slept, he had read key passages from At The Mountains Of Madness again. He was convinced these were those mountains. Lovecraft was a master storyteller, no one could argue that, but the man was a prophet, too. It took aesthetes like Dig to see that, to recognize the man’s greatness and his treatises.

Dig looked around again, to ensure that everyone slept. Even Reid and his two armed cronies, Tate and Gates, sat back against the walls of the tunnels they guarded, weapons across their knees, eyes closed. He thought they were only dozing, ready to act in an instant, but if he remained quiet, they wouldn’t notice. He crept unnoticed over to where Jahara Syed lay sleeping. Careful to make no noise, he looked through the biologist’s samples. He found what he was looking for, holding the small jar up into the green glow of the cavern. A small fish, maybe two inches long, swam confused circles around the confined space. Its flesh was pale white, almost translucent, the bones of its tiny skeleton clearly visible. It had a semblance of eyes, that glowed softly green, and a brighter green stripe along each side of its narrow body.

He had been sure from the start that the life down here was connected with what he sought. He’d always known there was a measure of truth to the story Lovecraft penned, facts and real events underlying the fiction. And those facts further revealed by the subsequent stories of other prophets like Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth. These men were aesthetes too, channeling cosmological truths.

Dig had seen Aston and Slater huddled together over something and had sidled into the next alcove of rock, unseen, but close enough to hear Aston’s voice as the Australian quietly read aloud. And that had convinced him. That account had been the final corroboration. All the proof he needed. His fears had melted in the face of evidence. The explorer, Professor Murray Lee, had not been losing his mind. The voice he reported hearing was very real, and still here, Dig was certain of that. It was, after all, eternal. And in order to hear that voice himself, he needed to commune with the life of this magnificent place.

He licked his lips, checked around himself again. Everything still, everyone quiet in slumber. He unscrewed the lid of Syed’s sample jar, took a deep steadying breath, then drank down the contents. He crunched the wriggling fish once between his teeth, tasted a jet of bitterness, then swallowed it all down with the hard, mineral-tasting water. He shuddered, whether from disgust or anticipation he couldn’t honestly say, but a joy thrilled through him nonetheless.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.