Night of the Shoggoth
I WAS SO PHYSICALLY DRAINED BY THE DAY’S exertions that I dropped off as soon as head touched pillow, but only a few fitful hours passed before I was suddenly wide awake. Something had roused me, some sound. It had seemed to belong in a dream – a scream of terror. When it came again, I knew it was real. Somewhere nearby, a man let out a howl of such anguish, such soul-seared horror, that my entire body quailed.
I was torn between leaping out of bed to investigate and pulling the covers over my head. A third time the scream arose, now with a hoarse, pleading tenor to it, as though he who voiced it was begging inarticulately for clemency. I heard footfalls too, the soft beat of stockinged feet running past my cabin door. I could not determine in which direction they were headed, but it seemed that someone was going to the screaming man’s aid, and I felt emboldened. I poked my head out of the door.
The first thing I saw was Nate. He was poised in the doorway of his cabin, looking inquisitive but showing, too, a singular composure. I asked if he knew what the matter was, and he shook his head. Together in single file, Nate leading the way, we went aft, towards the screams.
Would that I could forget the sight that greeted us as we reached the stern of the Innsmouth Belle. Would that there existed some sort of mental India-rubber eraser that could efface the memory wholly from my brain.
Moonlight bathed the scene. At first, I could scarcely comprehend what I beheld. Junior lay prone upon the deck, under assault by a dark, pulsating shape that engulfed his legs up to the thighs. It was as though a dense swarm of flies had descended upon him. Then I perceived that actually it was pulling him, this dark shape, dragging the first mate helplessly towards the side of the boat adjacent to the shore. Its progress – a kind of slithering, rolling, oozing motion – was laborious but inexorable. Junior was clinging onto anything within reach to thwart his abduction, but to no avail. The dark shape was stronger than he, and remorseless.
On the riverbank, ropes lay upon the grass in an empty tangle. The shoggoth had awoken, escaped its bonds, and clambered aboard the Belle to claim a victim. After those initial panic-wracked screams, Junior was concentrating his efforts on resisting. His teeth were clenched in grim fixity. He would not go gently.
I knew I should help him somehow, yet I hesitated. The disgust engendered in me by the sight of the active shoggoth – the sheer wrongness of it, as its gelatinous body rippled and purled like black curdled cream – had me shrinking away. Every fibre of my being was repelled. Yet somehow I summoned up the courage to take a step forward.
A hand seized my arm, and Nate hissed in my ear, “No, Zach. Don’t. Not if you value your life or your sanity.” I retorted that somebody must do something, to which he said, “Not you. Not my good friend. I would not have you risk your neck for an insignificant wretch such as Junior Brenneman. I have an idea what to do. But you must wait here. Do not go near that thing. Swear?” I nodded, feeling guiltily relieved. Nate had given me permission not to get involved. My inaction was therefore not cowardice; it was duty.
As Nate hurried off back towards his cabin, a figure appeared from the other side of the steamer’s superstructure. It was Charley, and he took in Junior Brenneman’s plight at a glance and, seemingly without a second thought, snatched up a boathook and launched himself at the shoggoth, brandishing the implement above his head. I cried out to him, hoping to warn him against this rash impetuosity, but Charley must not have heard.
At that same moment, the shoggoth gained the side of the boat and dropped straight over, still hauling Junior. The first mate grasped hold of the rail, but was pulled overboard with alarming swiftness, losing several fingernails in the process. The shoggoth hit the riverbank with a lumpen, dispersed thud, unscathed, whereas Junior landed altogether more sharply, his body snapping like a whip. There was a splintering crack, as of bones breaking, and the scream that the impact elicited from him was, unlike its predecessors, one of pure pain.
Charley had arrived at the rail a fraction of a second too late to bring the boathook to bear upon the shoggoth. Still, he did not relent. He vaulted one-handed over the side of the boat, and no sooner had he alighted on the bank than he swung the boathook down hard onto the shoggoth’s carapace (or hide, or whatever name one might give its integument). This had little discernible effect on the creature, yet he persisted, pursuing the shoggoth even as it continued to slither across the ground with a glutinous, peristaltic motion like some huge spherical maggot, bearing the still-screaming Junior with it. The vile thing withstood the offensive, absorbing the blows with its soft, doughy resilience, until all of a sudden it seemed to decide it had had enough. Halting, it extruded a dozen tentacles simultaneously. These fleshy strands lashed outward, seizing the boathook and wresting it from Charley’s clutches as easily as though taking a lollipop from an infant. Not content with disarming its adversary, however, the shoggoth then generated more tentacles, wrapping these around Charley’s limbs. For a moment I thought it was going to start dragging the Negro away too, but the shoggoth appeared to have another fate in mind for him. It reeled Charley in until his face was mere inches from its flank. He strained and flailed, but the creature’s grasp was ineluctable.
Then something in its side opened up, like a sphincter dilating. It was one of those pores that I had hypothesised was a stoma or a spiracle. Now I reckoned it to serve an altogether different function. It was some kind of portal, a means of interface between the shoggoth and the world around it, a breach allowing access from its environment to its inmost self and vice versa. One might term it mouth or eye or ear, or even nostril, but one would be wrong. It was all of those at once and more besides, and it gaped in front of Charley and he stared deep into its hollowness, and then he began to shriek, a high-pitched, quavering wail quite at odds with the low rumble of his normal speaking voice. It was an aria of horror, as though his very spirit was escaping like steam from a boiling kettle. His body shuddered, his eyes rolled up until only the whites showed, and even Junior, for all his abject distress, fell silent, rendered dumbstruck by the greater, more heartfelt torment of another.
How long Charley shrieked like that, cutting the night air with his stark threnody, I cannot state with any accuracy. All I know is that the hideous, ear-splitting keen ended only when Nate reappeared. With him he had the Necronomicon, and he began reading aloud. The words were unintelligible to me, all viscous syllables and glottal stops, and I presumed them – a presumption Nate would later verify – to be R’lyehian that had been transliterated phonetically on the page into the Roman alphabet. They constituted a chant – indeed, as again Nate later verified, a spell – which had a profound effect on the shoggoth. As Nate uttered it over and over, so the creature relinquished its hold on both Charley and Junior. It seemed to flinch and shrivel, as though in discomfort. Gradually, with palpable reluctance, the shoggoth began to squirm away, leaving Junior lying broken on the ground and Charley next to him, on his knees, arms dangling limp by his sides. In short order the creature had reached the treeline, and then it was gone into the blackness of the forest, swallowed up by nocturnal shadow.
In the hush that ensued, the only sound was Junior Brenneman’s whimpering, until a loud curse emanated from beside me and I turned to find that the skipper had at last stumbled from his bed. How he had managed to sleep through all the commotion I do not know, although the reek of liquor emanating from him was a clue. He stared blearily at his injured son and incapacitated deckhand, then looked at Nate and said, “You, Mr Whateley, are a-havin’ some questions ter answer. Help me fetch those two back onto the board, an’ then we’re settin’ sail, an’ never mind the haour. I ain’t spendin’ one minute longer here.”
The skipper got up steam and turned the Belle hard about, leaving Nate and me to care for the injured. Junior was in bad shape. His pelvis was fractured, one shoulder was dislocated, but worst of all several of his ribs were shattered and, to judge by the gobbets of blood he kept coughing up, the splintered end of one of them had been driven inward and pierced a lung. Charley, meanwhile, was in good physical condition, as far as I could tell. His mind, however, was a different matter. He lay on his bunk where we had deposited him, staring blankly up at the ceiling. Now and then he might move his mouth as though attempting to speak, but no words came out, only meaningless wet clicks. His eyes were as vacant and glassy as a porcelain doll’s.
Come daybreak, we were several miles downstream from the scene of the shoggoth’s attack, and the skipper was steaming as fast as he dared along that winding, obstacle-strewn stretch of the river, halting the boat every now and then to go down to the engine room and re-stoke the furnace. Charley’s condition remained unchanged, but Junior was ailing. I dosed him with morphia to ease his pain but he was coughing up increasing quantities of blood. Though not a doctor, I was sure he would die within hours if he did not receive proper medical attention, and even if by some miracle a hospital suddenly appeared on the horizon, I would not have rated his chances highly. In short, because we were several days’ travel from the nearest civilisation, Junior was doomed.
That was when Nate aired his proposition.
