Shoggoth 2- Rise of the Elders Read online

  “Both,” she replied.

  Several minutes elapsed, taking them deeper into the cave. A blotch of white came into view, reflected by the vehicle’s headlamps. “It is an opening,” predicted Pemba in an outburst of emotion. “This is different. I can sense it!”

  “She’s right, Professor, look!” Gideon hollered, caught up in Pemba’s reaction. “We are entering an adjoining tunnel. The walls, they look like the old lady’s painting,” he exclaimed.

  A hole, as wide as the cave they were traveling in, had been roughly cut into the side of an adjacent passageway, probably done by a miner’s pick. Gideon cautiously piloted the military truck through the breach. He had to make a hard-left turn to avoid glancing off the sidewalls. To the right, a one-time molten mass of rock that had cooled and become hard blocked all access. Gideon navigated the truck toward the unblocked end, and Ironwood ordered, “Stop.”

  Gideon turned off the engine, leaving the headlights on, they all gaped in astonishment, all except Professor Ironwood, Pemba noticed. A five-sided tunnel of perfect construction stretched to infinity. The flawless design only equaled by the flawless white of the tiled walls. The seamless floor, unspoiled excluding eons of dust, extended unobstructed as far as they could see. The walls leaned out and upward at a forty-five-degree angle and then halfway up assuming an opposing projection at the identical incline, met at an apex, the ceiling.

  “Everyone out,” said the Professor, giving another command. Ironwood removed a bundle of white cotton work gloves from his backpack and handed out a pair to each as they filed out of the vehicle.

  “Put them on. Touching the wall and floor tiles with your bare hands will result in a symptom of frostbite.”

  “All of a sudden, Prof, you are spilling the beans. Care to tell us why the change of heart?” Gideon egged on, displaying frustration with all the mystery.

  “Admiral Hawkins shredded my non-disclosure agreement,” he answered back.

  “Then tell us more,” he urged.

  “In good time, Gideon, in good time.”

  Pemba sensed something dreadful.

  ***

  Gideon recognized that he and Dutch were dressed for action, so were the two Marines. They wore desert tan camo while Moses Jones and Stanley Faber attired in U.S. Marine Desert Sand Combat Utility uniforms had all their insignias removed. Minus any identification patches on the pair established that this was, beyond doubt, a civilian operation.

  On the other hand, Gideon got a kick out of the old Professor’s outfit. It was the same as when they first met. Light blue denim from head to foot, western style work boots and a straw cowboy hat. The personal carry supplemented the comedy, the Prof’s sidearm. A leather holster, K-frame style, with a snap down flap hung off a western gun belt. In the holster was the .38 caliber revolver, that was almost certainly older than he and Dutch’s combined ages.

  Pemba, however, looked like she was ready for a jog in the park. A pair of Taos running shoes, skinny jeans, a white tee and cotton jacket. Impractical, but beautiful. The white top was stunning up against her dark chocolate skin. I must focus, Gideon told himself, shake free of her spell. Was he reacting to her empathic emotions, or was it something else? He had to concentrate on the Op. If this shoggoth story was spot-on, then he had to be single-minded, the mission would be crucial. Focus on that alone.

  Since they entered the tunnel, Pemba directed her attention at the gun-toting Professor, not Gideon. That bothered him too. Both were examining the wall tiles, talking quietly to each other. What were Ironwood’s intentions? Amy waited for him back home. Suspicion drove him closer.

  Ironwood had a gloved hand against the tiles. “What is it, Professor? Do you sense something? Are you in communication?” asked Pemba.

  “No,” he answered back, looking troubled. “I felt a vibration. It was faint, only momentary. It’s gone now.”

  “Do you think that walls can talk?” challenged Gideon as he approached.

  “It probably seems crazy, Gideon, but shoggoths are more than just one creature. To the Elder Beings, that created them, millions of years ago, they were everything. They were fashioned to supply every single facet of their life-sustaining culture.”

  “The walls you mean?”

  “That is only a small part of it. Follow me,” Ironwood suggested.

  Skeptical as well as quizzical, Gideon trailed behind the Professor and Pemba.

  No more than fifty paces further along the tunnel, Ironwood stopped and pointed upward. The remains of a brown fragmented mechanism hung from the juncture in the ceiling. “As we travel through here you will notice what looks like the vestiges of chandeliers spaced at regular intervals. Above here, back when dinosaurs were prevalent, our desert terrain was once tropical, and these devices in the ceiling connected to carbon-based giants. Vast tubular synthetic plant life that grew out of the tunnel roof and soared several stories into the sky eventually fanning out to collect solar energy. You see, Gideon, these tunnels were not constructed, they were grown. They were a manufactured imitation of life, an artificial lifeform, spawned by the will of an ancient race to shape and grow into any structure imaginable. Made by a race that had become void of all instrumentalities and fed by the power of the sun. That is why I had you wear these,” he illustrated holding up his gloved hands. “Our planet radically evolved when an asteroid struck over fifty-million-years ago, blotting out the sun. The food source for all shoggoths. What we are witnessing here is the last remains of that ancient civilization, mummified by the heat and dry climate of the desert. If you touch these once living walls, its shoggoth subconscious programmed resolve to survive will suck the lifeforce out of any living thing to reanimate itself.”

  The two Marines and Dutch had shadowed Gideon. They stared in disbelief. Sergeant Jones broke the silence that had followed, “This ain’t some legend, a fairytale, Professor?”

  “I wish it were, Sergeant.”

  Gideon removed the glove on his left hand and pressed his palm against one of the five-sided tiles. After a few seconds, the tile began to glow a faint amber color. Gideon jerked his hand away as if held over a bed of hot coals. He gazed at his palm. The surface skin was dry and peeling. “There was tingling, then it felt like a bunch of needles sticking me,” he managed to sputter. Gideon slipped the glove back on and inquired, “My brother knew of these shoggoths?”

  “Yes Gideon,” replied Ironwood sadly. “He knew more about them than I.”

  “Then what was that thing we held off, last year, with the fire sticks until you and the Seabees blew it to hell?” demanded the Sergeant.

  Ironwood glanced at Gideon and then directed his answer toward Sergeant Jones, “I suspect that Alan Ward probably knew, but his life was cut short before the answer could be had. I didn’t figure it out until the last minute. Before the explosives were detonated opening a volcanic vent, I observed the shoggoth through the hole the Seabees had made in the tunnel’s ceiling. It had every opportunity to escape, but instead, it stayed down there basking in the sunlight streaming through.”

  Gideon was the first to pose the obvious question, “Why didn’t it escape?”

  “Because it was programmed never to leave the tunnel.”

  “I do not understand?” Pemba questioned.

  “The creature was a living breathing subway train that once its solar food source was no longer available absorbed the life of other beings for its sustenance. That particular shoggoth’s job, millions of years ago, was to carry its ancient passengers to their destinations by way of a network of tunnels. An underground network that probably spanned our entire planet. These tunnels are a relic of that time.”

  “Have you lost your marbles, Professor?” Gideon contended.

  “If Corporal Faber and I hadn’t seen your shoggoth with our own eyes, Professor, we wouldn’t believe it either. But the train part does sound a bit cracked, Sir.”

  “Insane? In our day and age? Definitely! But not to this Great Race. Alan Ward to
ld of great cities that covered the globe. Originally constructed with gigantic blocks of granite by shoggoth slave labor, until they realized that their structures could be synthesized as well. A plastic protoplasm coded to be their buildings, roads, and bridges. A living infrastructure. Alan believed that they were additionally used as fodder. The Elder Beings, the Great Race lived, ate and slept within their shoggoth cities.”

  The Sergeant and the Corporal shook their heads in disbelief as they all walked back to the JLTV. Pemba sided up to Ironwood, they were both silent, until reaching the truck. “Professor,” asked Pemba, “is that molten mass we saw when first entering the tunnel the results of your explosive charge a year ago?”

  “Possibly, Pemba. Gwendolyn Gilhooley had a large supply of dynamite gel for geodetic seismic surveys. We placed it all in the tunnel opening and set it off remotely. As luck would have it, the explosion opened a volcanic vent in the earth flooding the tunnel with lava and consuming the shoggoth. I had no idea that the lava flow would reach this far.”

  They returned to their seats, and before starting the engine, Gideon turned off the JLTV’s headlamps. Total darkness enveloped them. Modern day humans very seldom experienced the complete dark. There was always something to illuminate their whereabouts. Street lights, ambient light from nearby buildings and houses, even the appliances in their residences shed some luminosity. The six of them were blind to their surroundings. “If we ever lose the capability to light our way with this vehicle, as you can see or as you can’t see, is why we must have our flashlights and spare batteries with us always,” Gideon instructed.

  ***

  Amy was worried sick. She tried calling Thomas's cell phone, but it went straight to voicemail. She didn't leave a message. Amy felt stupid. She knew that his phone couldn't receive a signal beneath the earth. Oh God, beneath the earth! Why did she have to think that? It scared the hell out of her. She longed to hear his voice, but the outgoing recorded message didn't assuage her fears.

  After they all left, Amy sat for a while at the Professor's desk in the trailer. She wanted to be near his things. She was in the habit of cleaning the office and straightening up after him, but it gave her little comfort. She stared at that horrible book of Alan Ward’s. Amy dreaded the day it, and Alan ever came into their lives. She, more than ever, desired the earlier times. Things were a lot simpler then. Amy flipped through the pages of foreign writing and symbols and noticed that a page had been cut out of the book. It looked done with a razor blade or a very sharp knife. Amy wondered if Thomas knew it had been removed? If not, then who took it? After an hour of toil, she went back to the house.

  Amy removed a Lean Cuisine chicken dinner from the deep freeze and tossed it onto the kitchen counter. Winner, winner chicken dinner, she taunted herself. "No winner here," she proclaimed out loud. “I'm the loser." And if he never comes back, I'll be the biggest loser.

  ***

  A limitless tunnel of eternal night brooded below the desert was disrupted by the high beams of the military vehicle. The exiles from the upper world traveled deeper into the recesses of the earth. The tunnel floor, like that of the entry cave, maintained its downward slant.

  “How far do these tunnels reach, Professor?” asked Gideon.

  “Miles, probably. I explored a large section with the Seabees and another with your brother. In both locales, we never discovered termination points. Unfortunately, our timetables were cut short. It would have taken a squad of Marines months, if not longer, to survey them and the connecting tunnels.”

  “There were connection tunnels?”

  “Several, many intersections, we encountered, branching off to Lord knows where.”

  “Do you think we’ll run into any down here?” Gideon raised, a trace of uneasiness in his voice.

  “Straight ahead,” Ironwood responded, pointing. “I think that answers your question.”

  Emerging on the left was a shadowy space. The five-sided primordial tunnels were fifteen-feet wide. Warped wall space of equal width was on both sides of the gloomy opening, turning radiuses. Curves in a road where another intersected!

  Gideon applied the brakes to the JLTV. “What now?” he asked.

  “To go straight or turn, that is the question of the moment. What do you ‘feel’ we should do, Pemba?” asked the Professor.

  She gazed at the darkness ahead and then to the left. Ironwood guessed that she was searching for impressions. Lost impressions from eons ago? Was there any residue, traces left by the Elders, that once traveled these corridors, that Pemba would be able to read? She seemed troubled. Driving to greater depths probably didn’t improve her mood either.

  Hesitation fluctuated in Pemba’s voice as she spoke, “Turn to the left.”

  Gideon slowly released the clutch and rotated the steering wheel in the direction indicated. He increased the speed slightly and shifted into second gear. Pemba and Ironwood looked on as Gideon tapped an icon on the LED screen in the dashboard activating the vehicle’s sidelights; vision had now become clear in three directions.

  Ironwood removed a plastic grocery bag from his backpack. When opened they could all see that it bulged with torn strips of newspaper.

  “What’s that for,” asked Gideon, keeping one eye on the Professor and the other on the road ahead.

  “The ancient principle of hare and hounds,” answered Ironwood raising his voice as he rolled down the side window. “Since your GPS doesn’t work down under these are for marking our course within this interior maze.” That said, Ironwood proceeded to toss strips of the paper, one at a time, out the window.

  Gideon laughed, “Damn clever, Prof.”

  “The method will probably gain us immunity from losing our way back since there are no strong air currents to disturb the bits of paper,” he rejoined expressing amusement. Ironwood’s countenance altered abruptly. There was the smell in the air of something familiar that picked at his memory.

  Chapter 15

  - The Vault -

  The hours spent traveling beneath the earth wore on resembling days to Pemba. Since childhood, she had experimented with meditation, old cultural rituals, the ways of psychic channeling. She had experienced no evidence aligned with the conventional theories of telepathy, but she did understand the silent things that are heard when one knows how to listen, methods in tuning the mind to intercept cerebral signals when focusing on a single subject. As a result, her senses agonized from the multiple impressions she was receiving. The reason, apparently, that time dragged.

  Gideon had shifted to a yet a higher speed, the headlights plus the sidelights danced along the tunnel’s walls, ceiling and roadbed generating a strobe effect. It made Pemba’s head ache. Something old, very old traveled these tunnels as far back as time itself. The ancients weren’t evil; they were worse, she perceived, they were “friend” with the negative prefix of “not.” Injurious, detrimental, deleterious without a second thought, without any thought at all toward the outcome of their actions. Ego of a higher sense of self . . . inimical.

  Gideon Ward drove now as if he was in a high-speed chase. The strobe effect blended into a blinding glare. He stopped three times more, earlier, when Professor Ironwood would spy some of the foreign writing, like in that old book of his, embossed into the walls. When the vehicle became stationary, he would photograph the symbols with his cell phone. With each stop, Gideon would lightheartedly ask, “What does it say, Prof?”

  And the Professor would always reply, “I don’t know, Gideon.”

  “I detect a significance, the symbols may have been carved into the walls as instructions, guidelines for those that journeyed this route,” Pemba sheepishly appended.

  “You could be right, Pemba, but I doubt that they had been carved, engraved or even embossed as an afterthought into the walls. They were probably shaped within the genome of the organism during its original construct. Well thought out in the preliminary stages of its inception,” the Professor put forward.

  When Gide
on shifted to a higher speed a thin plastic box, the size of a hardcover book, slid off the dashboard, he caught it one-handed.

  “What is that?” asked Pemba.

  “It’s a travel humidor, for my cigars.”

  “Cigars,” she complained, “yuk!”

  ***

  Ironwood shouted, “Slowdown, Gideon!” They had been traveling the tunnel at a good rate, straight as an arrow, never a bend nor a curve in the passageway and then abruptly the tiled walls around them vanished. The front and sidelights of the military truck no longer filled the blackness surrounding them. The vehicle was at half speed when Gideon slammed on the brakes.

  “What the hell,” cursed the Afghan vet, quickly exiting the vehicle. Gideon removed his flashlight from his belt and shined it to and fro. The rest bailed out of the JLTV imitating him. Back, forth and up they stabbed the dark with their torches resembling the swordplay of Jedi Knights. None were able to detect the end of the gloom. Ironwood heard rustling in the companion trailer, an instant later Dutch walked past the group and at a fair distance from them all, struck a flare, setting it down blazing on the deck. Ironwood held up a hand to visor his eyes. At a great distance, he could faintly make out a stone wall with a dark recess.

  Dutch struck another flare and then another and another. Their retinas adjusted momentarily to the brightness, and under the pyrotechnic light source, they all could see that they stood in a gigantic square room. It had to be several football fields in length and width. A cube, thousands of feet to each side. There was only one ingress and egress, the one they came through and the other that Ironwood had spied when Dutch ignited the first flare.

  Hundreds of black Obsidian monoliths, row upon row of them, narrowly spaced apart, were spread amid the interior. It was a wonder, thought Ironwood that they hadn’t crashed into one of them when they sped into the chamber. The monoliths, sculpted with smooth precision, standing at least twelve feet tall, were tilted back about ten-degrees. The angle along with their placement triggered a vision of an amphitheater for giants.