The Thing in the Pit
THE PIT WAS SEVEN FEET IN DIAMETER AND TWICE as deep. Its sides were bare, smooth rock. It was a perfect cylindrical shaft bored into the earth. And it was not empty. At the bottom, occupying almost the entirety of the circular base area, sat a mounded jet-black mass, the surface of which was adorned with lumps, offshoots and protrusions. This object – its contours just visible by the faint daylight filtering in from the chamber entrance – lay completely unmoving, which prevented one readily discerning whether it was animal, vegetable or mineral. Its outer casing appeared flexible, and I thought I spied openings, feasibly part of some kind of respiratory system, like pores in skin perhaps, but perhaps also akin to the stomata in the underside of a leaf or the spiracles in the chitinous exoskeleton of an insect. Then, too, there were superficial appendages, some like cysts and others like the cilia on a bacterium, still others possibly pseudopodal or tentacular.
Above all, beyond being roughly spherical, the thing seemed to be of no fixed, defined shape. Though it was static, I had the impression of flux. It was as if what Nate and I were gazing at was a photograph of something in motion, like the spume of a wave cresting or the mane of a horse at full gallop, a moment in time frozen. If alive, this nameless whatever-it-was would be a fleshly black cloud, roiling with unseen pressures.
After a couple of minutes I regained the ability to speak, but I do not recall that I said anything especially meaningful or coherent. Nate stemmed my babble by placing a hand upon my shoulder. “At last,” he said. “We’ve done it, Zach. We’ve got something. A prize that makes all the others that slipped through our grasp irrelevant. We have found ourselves a shoggoth.”
That was what it was called, this bulbous, knotty blob: shoggoth. So said the Necronomicon, that bible of the profane, by whose providence we had come to the lost ancient town.
But was it alive or dead, the shoggoth? It certainly looked lifeless. Nothing could remain so still and be considered animate. Perhaps the shoggoth had lain in the pit as long as the town had lain deserted. But in which case it ought to have rotted to nothingness by now. There was no way it could have remained so well preserved, exhibiting not a hint of decay, unless it were somehow living.
Might it be petrified? I posed the question to Nate. Petrification would explain the appearance of intactness. Some action of the air within the chamber, maybe, working in concert with minerals in the ground, had induced gradual silicification or pyritisation.
Nate replied that he could observe in the shoggoth’s condition none of the coarse dullness and rigidity that invariably accompanied that process. His own view was that the creature was in a dormant state, an advanced form of hibernation. Its every life function had been reduced to the slowest conceivable rate, such that a single heartbeat might last a year. (If, that was, a shoggoth even had a heart. He was speaking metaphorically, of course.) The thing sat suspended between life and death, embracing neither the one nor the other fully.
What interested him more, however, was the reason for its being in the pit. The depression seemed purpose-built. The entire chamber, for that matter, seemed designed expressly to house the shoggoth. He wondered aloud whether this was a place of imprisonment or a place of worship, or both. The two things, after all, were not mutually exclusive. The plinth behind us, overlooking the pit, certainly had much in common with the traditional church altar. Could the inhabitants of the town have once venerated the shoggoth? Worshipped it as a god?
A thought hideous in its blasphemousness, and I felt a weird shiver as he expressed it. I longed to dismiss the notion but it carried a horrible plausibility. The R’lyehian script on the plinth might well have yielded the truth of the matter, had we been able to read it. Its very presence nonetheless seemed to lend weight to Nate’s supposition, for seldom are words inscribed into stone except for ritualistic purposes or to enshrine some official doctrine.
Feeling all at once faint, I exited the chamber to seek fresh air. Nate hastened out after me to check that I was well, and I soon recovered my mental equilibrium, but then vowed that I would never set foot in that damnable chamber again, not for any reason. The sheer oppressiveness of it was beyond enduring.
Nate replied that that was a pity but he understood. He could manage without me, he reckoned. Recovering the shoggoth looked like a four-man job, but he knew of three more or less able-bodied workers whose services he could enlist.
Thus it was that, a day later, Nate and I were back at the forgotten town, with Charley and the Brennemans in train. Every coil of rope on the Innsmouth Belle had been commandeered, along with a number of lanterns and some planks, nails, a saw and a hammer. I watched from the chamber entrance as the four of them gathered around the pit. The previous night, Nate had spent some time preparing the crewmen for what they were about to encounter. The shoggoth, he had said, was unhazardous, no more than an inert lump of protoplasm. He did not believe that manhandling it out of the pit would disturb its slumber. He had made this claim with such certitude that no one had seen fit to question it, and even after the three men were accorded their first view of the creature by the glare of the lanterns, they did not offer any quibbles, so carefully had Nate laid the groundwork beforehand. Junior Brenneman gave vent to several oaths, while his father made the sign of the cross and took a draught from his hipflask, but there was on both their faces, and to a lesser extent on Charley’s too, an amazed stupefaction that seemed to override all other considerations. Scratching the back of his head, the skipper said, “My Gawd. When you told me all those weeks ago, Mr Whateley, that you were plannin’ on bringin’ haome some biological curios an’ oddities, well, I’ll admit ter bein’ on the dubious side. I thought it was just so much bunkum, but then your coin was good so whut did I care? An’ naow, naow that I’m seein’ what I’m seein’ with my own eyes… This here is suthin’ as P.T. Barnum would have give his eyeteeth for.”
The crewmen then set about rigging a makeshift pulley system, fashioning the planks we had brought into a sturdy tripodal scaffold, Charley holding the lengths of wood in position while Junior hammered in the nails and the skipper himself supervised. It was the work of a day getting this contraption finished, and we repaired to the boat for the night and returned to the town in the morning to commence the next stage of the operation, which was the lowering of a man into the pit to attach ropes to the shoggoth.
Junior, as the lightest of us, and as someone who knew about tying knots, was “volunteered” for the role. Down he went, with a rope about his waist being paid out, hand over hand, by Charley. It struck me that here was an ideal opportunity for the Negro to get his own back on the man; all he had to do was pretend to lose his grip and Junior would plunge to the pit floor and, at best, break a limb or crack his skull. The temptation, however, if it was there, was resisted. Junior made it safely to the bottom, whereupon he set about fastening ropes around the shoggoth’s bulk. He let everyone know in no uncertain terms that he did not relish being in such close proximity to the creature. He announced, too, that its body was warm to the touch, and weirdly soft, like taffy. To his credit, though, he persevered. Much as I disliked Junior, I cannot deny it took guts to descend into the pit and secure the shoggoth the way he did. I could never have done it myself. I would never have dared.
Another length of rope was lowered into the pit, and Junior attached the end of it to the cat’s cradle of ropes in which he had swathed the shoggoth. Then Charley hauled him out, and all three crewmen applied themselves to hoisting up the shoggoth. Inch by inch the insensate creature rose from its resting place, the three men heaving as one in time to exhortations from the skipper, while the wooden scaffold creaked and quivered under the strain as the supporting rope slid tautly over its apex. At last the shoggoth dangled free above the pit. Nate leaned over to steer it onto solid ground as the crewmen released the supporting rope slowly. By this means did the shoggoth come to rest gently upon the chamber floor.
There it lay, parts of it bulging around the ropes entwining it, like a pudding in a string bag. I estimated the creature to be seven feet across and more or less the same in height, although the effect of gravity on its gelatinous mass flattened it somewhat at the top, making it an oblate spheroid rather than a full sphere. Any concerns I had had that manhandling it might awaken it were allayed. Even after the inelegant treatment it had just received, the shoggoth remained torpid, and that boded well for the third phase of our undertaking: getting it to the boat.
* * *
When I say that the process of transporting the shoggoth through the forest was uneventful, I do not mean that it was easy. I mean that nothing undesirable happened, aside from us flogging ourselves to the point of exhaustion. To carry the creature, the scaffold was dismantled and the planks reconfigured into a crude sledge, onto which we rolled the shoggoth. Then, with Charley lashed to the front of the sledge and pulling like a carthorse and the rest of us shoving at the rear, we began strenuously moving our prize through the town. Yard by toilsome yard the sledge ploughed across the weeds and then across the forest floor. It was painfully slow going, interspersed with frequent pauses, primarily for Junior to rest his bad leg and for me to catch my breath. Were it not for Charley and his terrific strength, we might never have accomplished our goal; we undoubtedly would not have done it within the course of that same day. Assisting us too was the fact that the land began to slope downward as we neared the river, so that the shoggoth’s bulk began to work in our favour instead of against us. For all that, night was falling when we reached the Belle, and it was agreed that we should delay transfer of the shoggoth to the steamer’s hold until daybreak.
So the creature was left on the bank, still trussed up, while we ate a weary supper and trudged to our cabins to sleep.
