Edited from Searching for Cryptonbury, the cryptozoological blog of Douglas Oudemans Ormsham (searchingforcryptonbury.blogspot.com.au). The relevant entries have since been removed from public viewing on this site for unexplained reasons, but are reproduced here with permission of the original author.
January 10, 2018, Mollymook, NSW, Australia
It began innocuously enough, a mere taint on the crisp sea-air. Now, two days later, the stench has become so unpleasant some residents have taken to wearing bacterial masks, even indoors. Tourists stay away. Outrage that the local authorities seem unable to locate the source of the strange smell has become a common topic of conversation, as the putrescent foulness of it is beginning to affect business, not to mention its impact on the township’s oft-touted quality-of-life.
The main beach remains completely deserted. Once again, I walked down there this morning and as always saw only the pristine curve of the sand and the placid motion of the tide. Many have speculated that the beach must be, one way or another, the source of the trouble: some dead thing washed ashore. Yet the open vista offers no sign as to where it might be harbouring the offending carcass. The rocky headland at the southern end has been thoroughly searched by now, several times, as has nearby bushland, even though the strongest concentration is right in the middle of the beach itself. Breathing is unbearable in that spot, making it impossible to remain for longer than it takes to inhale once or twice, no matter how shallowly. Yet there’s nothing there—nothing except a clean stretch of unblemished sand. The tangible sense of rancid presence is oppressive.
Heading away from the central focus of the smell, head down and dizzy with the foul odour, I found myself entangled with someone’s fishing gear—the someone being a large slightly threatening shape named, I later discovered, Ezra Zabriskie.
“Careful, lad,” he muttered, words issuing from his bearded face with apparent reluctance.
‘Lad’ is not an epithet that accurately describes me, but underneath his broad, cloth hat and straggling hair, Ezra could be aged anywhere from 30 to 80.
I apologised then queried the fact that, against the odds, he appeared to be planning to do some beach fishing.
“I’ve come here to fish every day for the past 40 years,” he growled. “Won’t be put off by no bloody fish-fart.”
Good luck to him, I say. He’s made of sterner stuff than I.
The circumstances of my coming to Mollymook presaged the possibility that I would find something strange in the vicinity, but a bad smell from nowhere wasn’t what I’d anticipated. The surviving notebooks and activity logs of my great-grandfather, Dr Hugo Drakenswode, are filled with myriad accounts of his interaction with the unexpected and the strange, even the impossible. I peruse them constantly in my ongoing attempt to unravel the Mystery he spent his life seeking to expose. Generally, his writings are personal but distant in tone, rarely directed toward a specific audience. Therefore, I was surprised when I came upon the following note, hand-written, as is typical, but on a paper-scrap ripped carelessly from one of his notebooks. The note was remarkable in that it must have been penned when I was a child of 8 years or less—or even more likely, before I was born. Hugo Drakenswode died in 1981, at age 106, after a long debilitating illness. Yet the words contained an immediacy that suggested the letter had been composed much more recently than that.
Douglas,
Pardon my interference in your current activities—and forgive me too if receiving this missive comes as a sharp surprise. I do confess to having trouble keeping up with our temporal interactions, so it perchance may be that you have not as yet had occasion to speak with me since my passing.
None of that matters. You will come to learn more as time goes by. Right now, it is imperative you travel to the colonies, specifically to New South Wales in Australia, which I assume is still under British Imperial influence—I can’t recall its exact status. What I do know is that in a place called Mollymook something of grave consequence is about to happen. I believe the town is situated on the south coast some 140 miles from Sydney and is to be developed some time around 1990 as a retirement-cum-holiday area. If nothing else, you might find it a pleasant break. Go there. Now. A reality loop or temporal break may soon be activated there. If so, you must use your insight to assess the situation and to end it. You should be on site by the 8th of January in the year 2018 at the latest.
In preparation, I suggest that you find and read my Journal entries for January 1913. They will explain the nature of my suspicions. I think it would also be prudent at this juncture to obtain, if possible, a copy of the fiction of an American pulp writer by the name of H.P. Lovecraft. I assume you have not heard of the man. He is something of a penny-dreadful sensationalist, but his view of reality contains more truth, I am beginning to believe, than at first appears plausible.
Above all else, however, take great care. I need you to give me a full report. Much depends on your judgement.
Yours
HD
Receiving such a message was not in itself as profound a surprise as you might assume. For one thing, I have indeed spoken to my great-grandfather since his death, under circumstances that put a considerable strain on both my credulity and my general state-of-mind. But that’s a story for another time.
Enough to say that I took heed of what he wrote and immediately prepared to travel from Gate’s Way in Queensland, Australia, where I was living at that time, to Sydney and thence to Mollymook. Unfortunately, I had no immediate access to the journal entry Drakenswode was referring to. Much of his vast archive had been lost a few years ago when his family estate in Britain, which I had inherited, was completely destroyed by “unknown causes”—though I believe it was some monstrous entity that was to blame, even if the official history says otherwise…But never mind what I think of that incident. The point is, all that remains of his writings is whatever I had with me at the time of the “accident”, as well as the contents of a number of boxes I had re-located to New Zealand in a futile attempt to save my then floundering matrimonial situation.
So Drakenswode’s admonition to read his January 1913 records could not be honoured, though I did locate a rather large tome of tales by Lovecraft. I had already heard of his work, of course, as he had certainly not fallen into the obscurity to which my great-grandfather would have consigned him. What to make of it was another matter. Surely Drakenswode did not suspect that Cthulhu himself had retired to Mollymook?
Though part of my mind whispered: “Stranger things have happened”, I smiled ironically at the thought—and looked at my fellow occupants of the township with a suspicious eye.
January 13, 2018
I have no idea how long this can continue. I’m a stoic man, but even I cannot tolerate much longer the acrid putrescence tainting the atmosphere. The inside of my nostrils and throat feel as though they have been scoured with sandpaper and I have to force my lungs to work, as the body’s subconscious reluctance to inhale grows stronger daily.
Today began unexpectedly cold and drizzly and got gloomier as the hours passed. Despite the tightly closed windows, the Bad Smell was more oppressive than it had ever been, having escalated over the past few days. I hunkered down, blankets over my head, breathing in short, shallow gasps. By the time I staggered into the kitchen of my rented cottage this morning, I did not feel at all like eating breakfast. I forced myself to do so. A warm shower helped to revitalise my spirits.
As a result of this languid approach to the day, I got to the beach later than usual and found it taped off as for a crime scene. Police were searching the area. Activity was concentrated on a part of the beach I estimated was in the general vicinity of the Bad Smell’s strongest concentration. A lengthy, gently flapping canvas enclosure had been erected there. That piqued my interest. Obviously, there was now something to see.
Curiosity impelled me onto the sand, oblivious to the situation, at which juncture I was bailed up by a policeman set to stop sightseers from contaminating the scene. I asked him what had happened.
“A death, sir,” he said.
“An accident?”
“I couldn’t say, sir.”
“Who was it?”
“I’m sorry, but I cannot discuss a matter under investigation. I’m sure you understand.” His tone suggested it didn’t matter whether I did or not.
“Do you have some personal interest in this?” he asked, granting me a distrustful stare.
I smiled as though he’d made a rather quizzical joke and retreated from the beach back onto the grassed area. The usual group of idle residents had begun to gather. One was Tangerine Harken, a woman who lives a few houses along from my cottage. She wore her usual handmade hippy dress—colourful, with a loose weave—and tie-dyed smock. On her feet were sandals made of hemp. Her hair was black, long and loose, with a few streaks of grey, often lying on her shoulders like a shawl, as it was now.
Her surname—Harken—suits her well. She “harkens” to everything that’s going on thereabouts and is very keen to talk about any topic that might arise. She blames the foul-smelling atmosphere on our “wantonly cannibalistic” society—all animals being equal to humans, aquatic life included—and our failure to pay proper attention to the world around us.
We first met when I found a letter addressed to her had been erroneously sent to my rented cottage. I took it to the correct address and when she answered the door said: “I think this was meant for you, Ms Harken. It was left on my—”
“I’m a married woman,” she snapped.
“Sorry. Mrs Harken, then.”
She took the letter and studied it with an ambivalent stare that might have been meant to convey anything from curiosity to disgust. “Yes, it’s for me.”
“Good then. Well, it was nice to meet you. No doubt we’ll run into each other again.”
I was about to leave when she stopped me by saying:
“Would you like to come in for some tea? My husband’s not here. He died a few years ago…seven, to be exact.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“I’m fairly sure it wasn’t your fault. He ate too many hamburgers and took too many sea-lives—anything he could catch. When we take others’ lives into ourselves, we eventually transform our soul into a spiritual wasteland.” She paused for me to digest her words. Then added: “A shark took him when he was scuba-diving.” She waved her hand in the direction of the ocean. “It’s not a shark-infested area, so they claim it was just bad luck. I think it was revenge.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.
“Anyway,” she continued, “Tea?”
“Um, I—”
“I can’t offer you dairy milk with the tea, though I have some soy.”
“I always have my tea without milk, Mrs Harken.“
“I hate being referred to as Mrs Harken, too. Call me Tange.”
“Tange?”
“Short for Tangerine. That’s my name. Everyone calls me Tange.”
“Right.”
“It rhymes with Ange as in Angelina. A few idiots persistently call me just that. Come on in! I’m not after a replacement husband, so you’re safe enough.”
I followed her in. Tange is the only person in Mollymook I’ve come to know at any depth. Our meeting was wonderfully fortuitous, in fact, as she proved to be a useful source of local knowledge—snippets she tosses in my direction when she isn’t berating whoever it was had most recently committed some unforgivable crime against the Earth Mother.
Today, she waved to me as I returned from the sand, patting the wall on which she was ensconced. I sat next to her. For a while, we both stared across the beach toward the police activity, saying nothing. I eventually gave in.
“What’s going on, Tange? Have you heard whispers?”
“Some.” A sudden gust of wind swept over us, laden with a noisome reek so potent that everyone there gasped and turned aside, hands to mouth. All except Tange, who kept talking, oblivious to the potency of the stink and the shrieks of complaint. “I heard the dead person is Old Ezra.”
“Ezra Zabriskie?”
“Who else? He’s here every morning, fishing. Has been for…as long as anyone remembers.”
“I spoke to him just the other day.”
“He arrived early this morning, as usual, before everyone else. They say he discovered the empty beach wasn’t empty any more. He went to investigate, bent to touch whatever was there, and now he’s dead. Or so they say.”
“Do you have any idea what exactly it was killed him?”
She scowled at me. “Maybe all those dead fish he’s slaughtered. The spirits of the ocean are increasingly vengeful.”
“Do you really believe that?”
She gave an impatient smile and turned away.
We sat for a while after that, in silence, while a miasma of complaint, gossip and general chatter from the other bystanders thickened around us. Out across the beach, behind the “crime-site” enclosure, the policeman I’d spoken to earlier stood guard, looking rather unimpressed and uncomfortable. He was, after all, closer to the probable source of the stench. I wondered if there was anyone on the other side of the canvas wall. No doubt Zabriskie’s body was still there, along with whatever had killed him.
Tange started weaving theories about what this was about, all of which, unsurprisingly, involved the spectre of environmental catastrophe. Sadly, most sounded less like the ravings of a crazy person than they might have just a few years ago.
After ten minutes or thereabouts, three figures emerged from the Ulladulla District police incident van, which was parked on a fenced-off area of grass on the other side of the public carpark. One was a female police officer, from what I could see from this distance. Of what rank, I don’t know, as I remain unfamiliar with Australian police organisational structures. The others were wearing archetypal lab coats: a man and a woman. All three had white anti-pollution face masks that covered their nose and mouth.
We watched them as they headed toward the canvas barrier. The hum of chatter, which had died off somewhat, was re-ignited. After five minutes or so, one of the scientists, the woman, staggered out from behind the canvas, pushing the flap aside in what amounted to panic. She staggered about five or six metres, collapsed onto her knees, tore off the mask and vomited. The others followed, obviously affected as well, but holding it in better. The police woman helped the first scientist up, while the other spoke loudly and earnestly. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but there was a definite edge of hysteria. Suddenly, he glanced back, yelled “Just stay away from it ‘til we can get some hazmat suits!” Then he staggered toward the incident van. The policeman who’d been on guard came over and talked to the senior officer. She pointed toward the scientists. He nodded and went to help the other scientist, who looked worse than he had at first, off the beach. When the policeman returned, he took up a station much further away from the site. The senior officer came toward the crowd. During all this, the noise from the onlookers had fallen away to a low hum. Now they were completely quiet, obviously anxious to hear what she had to say. I noticed a tall, thin man push to the front, along with a photographer.
“Sergeant Sandros!” he yelled. “What on earth is over there?” He jumped down onto the sand to get closer to her. “Can you take us to it?”
She gestured him away. “Stay off the beach!” She spoke with some force and the man backed against the wall.
“The fact is,” she said, talking to the thirty or so people that constituted the crowd, “some sort of toxic matter has appeared on the beach. It’s killed one man, through contact we believe, and, as you have seen, seriously affects anyone who goes near it.”
“Just what is ‘it’ exactly, Katherine?” the man interrupted.
“I’m sure you meant Sergeant, Mr Waldmar. Can we please manage some journalistic professionalism for once?”
He huffed.
“What it is, we don’t know as yet.” She spoke to the crowd. “It appears to be biological material, in an advanced state of decomposition. It’s about ten metres in length, but appears to be part of a long-dead carcass. Of what, is hard to tell. How it came to be here, we don’t know. It would all be very straightforward if not for the strangeness of its appearance and the unfortunate death of Mr Zabriskie—not to mention the reaction that affects anyone who goes near it.” She paused. Waldmar began a question, as did a few others, but she cut them all off. “A formal statement will be made once we have something to report. A Hazmat team is on the way. In the meantime, everyone is ordered to stay off the beach, along the whole stretch, from here to Bannisters Point and further both ways. The Coast Guard has been alerted and will check the waters up and down the coast. More of this carcass may be anywhere, and accidentally treading on it could be fatal. We will be checking the beaches and the rock platforms, but until an all-clear is given, you must stay away. Thank you.”
Questions swept toward her, bursting from Waldmar and others like a plague of locusts. The officer waved them off and headed back to the police van. Gradually the crowd began to wander away, especially when a police team proceeded to distribute themselves along the foreshore, erecting BEACH CLOSED and WARNING: HEALTH HAZARD signs at key points, and suggesting less than politely that the bystanders should disperse. Another sudden gust of wind coming off the sea, carrying the appalling stench with it, further encouraged a general exodus.
“I guess we might as well go,” I said to Tange. I was beginning to feel nauseous.
Without looking at me, eyes on the flapping enclosure, she whispered to herself, “This isn’t right.”
“What isn’t right?” I asked.
She looked at me, making her face into a comment on my obtuseness. With a toss of her hair, she stood and turned as though to proceed along the walkway. “I can’t take the foul odour any more right now. I’ll catch you later.”
I said goodbye as she headed off. After a few long paces, however, she stopped and looked back. She stared at me, frowning, then came closer again. Very close. Her green eyes dug into my brain with the force of a migraine.
Raising her right index finger, she poked it at me without actually touching me. “I don’t know why you’re here, Mr Douglas, but I suspect…well, never mind what I suspect. But I strongly suggest you ignore that thing.” Her poking finger left me and pointed toward the hidden secret on the beach. “Leave it be! You understand me?”
“Um, not really. And how did you know my name is Douglas?” Douglas is not the name I’ve been giving out.
“You look like a Douglas.” She huffed. “Just forget the whole thing. It’ll come to no good.”
Then she strode away, turning right along the road and disappearing into the nearby streets.
January 16, 2018
The past few days have seen a gradual escalation in the adverse conditions plaguing the area. The smell is unbearable. I kept the usual fruitless vigil at the beach, sometimes accompanied by Tange, sometimes not. She seems increasingly edgy. Nothing much was happening, though the police appeared more and more agitated. I was told the promised Hazmat team had finally arrived by midday of the 15th, but nothing had been reported. I spoke to Waldmar the journalist at one point, but he knew little—and was extremely vocal in expressing his disdain for the police and their “blatant disregard for the sacred role of the Press in a so-called democracy”. At one point, he let slip a rumour that one of the Hazmat team members had fallen terminally ill as a result of Whatever It Was on the beach, but he hadn’t been able to confirm it.
“Someone’s head’s gonna roll over this,” he muttered.
By mid-afternoon, I gave up, no longer able to withstand such direct exposure to the foul atmospheric conditions—in fact, feeling weak and nauseous, my mind a jumble of meaningless, unformed theories—and simply locked myself away in the cottage. As the evening engulfed the town like a sickly fog, I ate an unenthusiastic meal and went to bed. Sickened by the stench, I slept poorly, tossing and turning in a sort of shallow delirium. After waking from one vague but particularly grotesque nightmare for the third time, I gave up trying and headed into the lounge area. The house seemed darker than usual. I felt around for the light switch, found it and clicked it. Nothing. I flicked it up and down a few times, to no avail.
Suddenly a wave of burning nausea, like a gross tsunami, swept over me, so violently I staggered and collapsed onto my knees. As I did, my stomach heaved. I had no hope of holding it in; the masticated and partially digested remains of my meagre dinner burst out across the carpet. Again. And again. Once I had it under control, I glanced up. In that instant, I was struck by a sight so grossly weird it threw me back against the lounge. A huge eye stared at me through the window, even though I was sure I’d closed the blinds for the night. The eye was so large it took up more than the entire available space. It blinked once in the second I’d had to take it in before shock tossed me back onto the floor.
By the time I recovered and glanced toward the window again, the grotesque vision was gone. The curtains of the window concerned were closed, though I swear they quivered, as though they had been rapidly pulled shut a moment before and had not yet settled.
I must have dreamed it, of course. Yet that phantasmal vision had been extremely detailed. One thing had been clear: it hadn’t been a human eye. The shape was wrong, more ovoid, with what looked like multiple, and different-coloured, pupils. Parts of it were moving, as though the cornea was full of snakes.
I pulled myself together and slowly shuffled toward the window, less tentatively with each step. Though I was somewhat conditioned to accept weirdness thanks to my great-grandfather’s notebooks, my actual interaction with the monstrous encounters he wrote about was minor, and I wasn’t inclined to believe what I’d seen was real. It had to have been a dream, a mental eidolon. I reached the window and peered out between the two sides of the curtain. It was not completely dark out there; the street lights were on, providing patches of luminance, and from the vigorous movement of the foliage a decent wind was blowing—luckily from the west toward the coast rather than coming off the beach with its stink of rot. Needless to say, there was no sign of a monster. An unusual number of houses visible from that window had their lights on. And it was only about three in the morning.
As I stepped back, I realised the lights in my own lounge-room had come on without me noticing. I turned them off and went back to bed.
January 17, 2018, Mid-morning
In daylight, it all seemed even less likely.
With an eye the size of the one I thought I’d seen, any lurking creature would have been a Godzilla-sized colossus, and surely I would have heard its footsteps as it moved off. By the same token it would have left footprints (if it had feet) or scrape-marks (if it was some kind of serpent or giant cephalopod). In fact, it had left not a trace. The experience must have been delusory.
Confirmation of this came as the morning struggled on through the almost overpowering foulness polluting the air. Tange told me she’d suffered from terrible dreams as well, nightmare visions of grotesque creatures, some of which seemed so real she had for a while been convinced she was awake the whole time. Demonic horrors, sometimes monstrosities tearing each other to pieces or skinning human-like beings and ripping off their limbs. She wasn’t the only one. Many of the usual crowd I talked to when we made our way to the beach had had the same experience—an uncomfortable, terror-wracked night full of unspeakable terrors. Some of them could barely find the vocabulary to describe what they saw, and several broke down almost at once, overcome by the memory.
“It’s that bloody thing,” one old bloke declared, with astute conviction, gesturing toward the quarantined area the police had expanded overnight. The canvas walls had doubled and now stretched some 80 metres along the beach. Moreover, it was no longer possible to get anywhere near the actual sand. All the amenities—the Beach Hut Café, the Surf Life Savers Club, the public toilets, and the kids’ play area—were closed down. Crime-scene tape fluttered about everywhere, guarded with grim vigour by assorted sick-looking policemen. I later discovered that even the nearby motels had been abandoned, no vacationers having remained after several weeks of the Great Stench (as some wag had christened it). Mollymook was dying.
I tried to find someone in authority to get an idea of exactly what was happening on the beach. No one would talk to me, except to warn me away in no uncertain terms. Clearly, whatever this was about, it was escalating out of control. I knew I had to find out what it all meant, at whatever cost.
That night the nightmares were worse than ever.
January 19, 2018
Two days passed with little apparent change in the situation, apart from further escalation in the foulness of the stench and in the unbearable terror provoked by our own minds at night. It was almost impossible to spend any time near the beach. Even wearing masks and drawing breath from oxygen tanks strapped to their backs, few of the police could stand it for long. It was becoming clear, at least to me, that the smell was as much in our minds as it was in the air. I theorised to Tange that there might be some sort of sub-matter carrier of the smell, a quantum-level disturbance in the atomic structure of normal reality that simply by-passed what we perceive as solid matter. I expected her to laugh at me, to accuse me of insane fantasising. But she didn’t. She became unnaturally quiet and visibly worried. Saying nothing, she strode away in the direction of her home, as was her wont.
Toward the end of the second day, nearly all of the residents that normally gathered in the vicinity of the beach, if only for a short time, had left town, unable to withstand the poisonous stink any longer. I understood why and suspected that Tange would follow suit. I hadn’t seen her for more than a day. Did she even have a car in order to make her getaway? I didn’t know. I determined to go see her at home tomorrow morning and find out.
From where I stood, across the park from the beach, I could see the police had mostly abandoned their vigil. A couple of uniformed figures stumbled about on patrol, enough to keep the curious away, if anyone might display the insane gumption to approach the sealed-off area. A dusky light lay across the grass and the sand, catching on the canvas walls of the enclosure, now perhaps 100 metres long. And what was that amorphous mass just visible over the top of it? I didn’t recall noticing anything like it before. It was barely discernible, but it piqued my interest.
A sudden urge to run across the beach took hold of me. I began to breathe more deeply, pulses racing. The large forensic police wagon parked prominently to my left in the otherwise empty parking area seemed deserted, abandoned. I looked up and down the promenade and the beach, to check where the patrolling police were at that moment. One was some distance off, on my left with his back to me, walking slowly northward. On the right, if there was a patrolman, he was hidden from me by a clump of barely alive trees. Long shadows from buildings and a clump of taller trees lay across the sand. Should I try for it?
Before I knew what I was doing I’d wrapped another handkerchief over my nose and mouth, and was across the road and grassy foreshore, ducking under the police tape that silently and ineffectually blocked my way. I leapt down onto the sand. From behind me someone shouted, but I was so intent on fighting back against the rapidly worsening nausea that I couldn’t, or perhaps simply didn’t, register what they were saying. As I neared the closest entrance slit in the canvas walls, the pressure of the stench and the grotesque flashes of demonic terror that had been filling my dreams overcame me. I tripped and fell. Desperately scrambling to re-gain my feet, I crawled closer. I could hear someone shouting from behind me: “Stay back! For god’s sake, mate!” and almost felt the vibrations generated by their rapidly approaching footsteps.
I pulled the flap of the canvas entrance aside…and saw it, saw what had appeared on the beach. It was huge. Alien. Demonic. That single momentary glimpse was too much for me. A wave of overarching dread, of cosmic insignificance and helplessness swept me out of myself. For a moment, a long agonising moment, I was somewhere else, floating in a vast, poisonous void and feeling the life being drained from me. I tried to scream, but couldn’t get my lungs to work. Helplessly, I spiralled toward a seething pit of indescribable monstrosities…
I woke, trembling violently, screaming in terror. Faces without bodies hovered around me. I swore, threatened to attack them.
“Mr Whateley! Mr Whateley! You’re okay. Safe. Please be calm.”
Mr Whateley? For a moment, I didn’t recognise the name, but regardless I reacted to the human voice. A woman’s voice. The disembodied hands holding me steady loosened somewhat as I calmed, and I remembered that Whateley was the false name I had adopted when I came to Mollymook, in order to keep my real identity secret.
“Where am I?” I forced the words from the aching wasteland of my lungs.
“In the forensic van. You’ll be fine. At least you didn’t touch the biohazard and we got you out in time.”
“What is that thing?” I asked.
The woman glanced up at the doctor and attending policeman, and waved them away. I realised then that she was the officer who had addressed the crowd a few days ago: Sergeant Katherine Sandros. Without her cap, her reddish-brown hair fell loosely around her ears. She looked exhausted. “That was very stupid of you, Mr. Whateley,” she said. “You could have been killed. Nearly were. So far I have lost two men to that…that carcass. Several others are gravely ill.”
“Two dead?” I repeated numbly.
“Yes. Federal experts have finally been assigned to look after the problem, as I’ve convinced them it represents a significant danger to the public. And it’s not too soon.” Her voice lowered and she spoke the following words introspectively, talking to herself rather than me. “… though I don’t see what they can possibly do.”
“But what is it?”
She studied me for a moment. “More to the point, who are you, Mr Whateley? A journalist?”
I told her I wasn’t. Just fatally curious.
“And very foolish.”
I nodded, but then thought it might be better to tell her at least part of the truth. “Actually I’m a cryptozoologist.” I paused. “I study reports of unnatural creatures.”
She sighed. ”Oh, I see.”
I shrugged. “I know what you’re thinking. I’m just another crazy nutter, on the hunt for UFOs. Well, I can tell you this: I’ve never found any evidence of extraterrestials. But heteromorphic creatures such as the Loch Ness monster, yetis, snakes so overgrown they could eat an elephant in one mouthful…That sort of anomaly is another matter entirely.”
She was not appeased by my confession. But at least it gave her something more concrete to hold on to.
“Well, you’ll have to satisfy your crypto-curiosity elsewhere.” She spoke in a stern tone, hardened further by an undercurrent of fear. “This carcass is virulently toxic. It appears to be some kind of sea-creature, natural perhaps but so decayed it is still only vaguely recognisable. We’re thinking it’s a giant squid, as it appears to have tentacles. But it is unusually toxic, and even wearing hazard suits gives no protection.” Realising what she was doing—that is, actually talking to me—she reined herself in. “Stay right away from it. If I see you here again, even thinking of taking a run across the sand, I’ll arrest you and lock you away for the duration. You’ll just have to wait like the rest of us to find out what it becomes.”
“Becomes? What do you mean by that?”
She frowned. “Go before I change my mind!”
So, I went back to my cottage, where I flicked through some of the reference books I’d brought with me, without further revelation, until night fell and, once again, the nightmares galloped screeching through my sleep.
January 20, 2018
I woke with a strong sense of impending doom, a feeling that whatever was going on here was finally reaching a climax.
A violent storm had broken out overnight and though my clock claimed it was 10:04 am., it looked more like midnight. I peered out the window, the one in which I’d imagined seeing a giant eye. The trees thrashed about as though a wave of sentience had overtaken them and, in the thrill of this evolutionary high-point, they were determined to pull themselves from the restraining soil and high-tail it away. The sky boiled with anaemic clouds moving in every direction, also desperate to escape this dying part of the world in which they’d suddenly found themselves. I could almost smell their panic. But what I could no longer smell was the diabolical stench that had plagued the area for weeks.
Something had changed then, for the worse, I feared. Filled with a sudden urgency, I dressed and headed out the front door. Fighting my way against the storm, the predominant force of which, despite the seething clouds, was coming from the direction of the beach, I inched my way along the empty streets. Despite the unnatural darkness, there were no lights on—not surprising in this weather. I came across no-one living, only the figure of a man sprawled half hidden in a bush. I rushed over to him, and checked for a pulse. He was lifeless, with a look on his face that spoke to me of horror and utter terror. I left him where he lay.
As I approached the park area of Mollymook beach, I could see the police incident van, overturned and partially crushed under a fallen tree. Were any of the police personnel still here? I couldn’t see any. Fighting against the wind, I staggered in the direction of the beach, seawater swirling through the air like rain, battering on me with an unnatural fury. Momentarily blinded, I tripped on something—one of the policeman, as it happened—and staggered to regain my balance. I checked his pulse, but he too was dead. What had happened here?
The air was thick with sand and water, and the winds became fiercer and more erratic as I approached the sea. However, once I’d cleared the surf-club building, I could make out the epicentre of the violent winds: it was where the police enclosure walls had been erected and the monstrous, once-hidden carcass had lain. The latter was so much bigger now—a gigantic amorphous mass, with multiple tentacle-like appendages, and a hideous mass of corrugated flesh that looked to be its head. It did not move except as it was tossed about by the winds and was clearly not alive. But the very sight of it, and the psychic emanations that sprung from it, made me falter and collapse to my knees on the grass. I remained curled into myself, eyes closed and unable to move.
I felt something grab my arm. Startled, I glanced around, for a moment afraid the monstrous creature had reached out to drag me into its maw.
“Mr. Whateley! What are you doing here?” The words were broken and the voice struggling to be heard, but I recognised it at once. “Get out of here! Now!”
“You’re still alive. And still on the job,” I managed, stating the obvious.
“Not for long.” She had to shout over the fury of the wind. “It’s going to get worse, and I can’t take much more. I’ve sent my people away, those still living.” She dragged me up. “Pull yourself together. Go!” She leaned in. “You were right. This is some preternatural phenomenon. But there’s nothing you or anyone can do.”
I could barely think. I just did what she told me to do, staggering forward, pushed by the winds. Debris torn from the trees flew around me, as though urging me along. When I glanced back, Sergeant Sandros was out-of-sight, hopefully as safe as anyone in the vicinity, so I kept going, my mind a whirlpool of questions: should I leave? Isn’t this what my great-grandfather wanted me to witness? Surely it’s why he sent me here? Did he expect me to make a difference against whatever forces were behind this chaos?
I’d reached the main road when a car screeched to a stop beside me—an old, light-blue Volkswagen Beetle. It says much about my state-of-mind that I didn’t even cringe at its unexpected presence.
“Get in!” cried a barely heard voice. I bent to peer through the passenger-side window, wiping away the water still splattering down on the area. Tangerine Harken was in the driver’s seat. Why was she still here? She should have left long ago. I opened the door and scrambled in.
“What the hell, Tange?” I spluttered. “Haven’t you noticed what’s happening?”
“Of course I have. We need to talk.” Before I could answer, she accelerated the car away from the beach.
“I don’t know how,” said Tange, “but I think I caused all this.”
We were ensconced in her lounge-room, an old-fashioned, rather fussy space, with odd statuary more reminiscent of Morgan le Fay than Queen Victoria. Despite the chaos outside the house, she made us a cup of tea, and I had been quietly sipping away, while waiting for her to get to the point. So far, she’d been evasive.
“What? That’s ridiculous,” I said. “How could you be behind this?”
She ignored my question and instead asked her own. “Tell me, Mr Douglas Ormsham, cryptozoologist, what do you think is happening here?”
I was gobsmacked. “How do you know—?” I began.
“Don’t ask questions! Just answer mine!”
“What’s happening? Well, the obvious answer is: some unknown creature, washed onto the beach, is creating a toxic plague as it decays.”
“Really? Is that the best you can do?”
“Well, I mean…” I stopped trying to gainsay her and made an effort to work through the confusion in my head, which was replicating the chaos outside the house. I remembered what Sergeant Sandros had said. You’ll just have to wait like the rest of us to find…
“…what it becomes.” I completed the thought out loud, filled with a sudden insight. “That thing on the beach is growing into something. It’s becoming something, something bigger. It’s not decaying. This is the opposite of decaying. It began decayed and is getting less so. I guess that means—”
“It’s about to reach its true form, a living form.”
“Yes, possibly, but what’s that got to do with you?”
She hesitated and I saw that the unreflective energy that usually drove her had become suffocated by a deep uncertainty. When she answered, there was reserve, a sense of self-doubt, something I’d never seen in her before. “Like you,” she continued, not looking me in the eyes, “I have a deep interest in strange phenomena.”
“How do you know about my interests?”
“From your website and that one by the other bloke…the author. Stop interrupting me! I suspect we’re running out of time.”
I gestured compliance and she began her heart-felt story of anguish and frustration, of deep and deepening research, of a burgeoning belief in the sanctity of life, all life, and disgust at the way humanity insisted on wantonly working against the planet and its long-term well-being. Scientists and their well-founded warnings were stupidly being ignored by self-interested corporations and corrupt governments. Species were dying rapidly. Everything was being bent out of alignment. In every way, the future seemed bleak, not just for the guilty party—humanity itself—but for all life on Earth. Her anger grew so fierce she began to delve into less orthodox systems of thought. And that’s when she found “The Book”.
“What book?” I asked, feeling some urgency. She’d already fetched it in anticipation of this tête-à-tête, and now held it out for me. I took it. It was called The Benevolent Deities: A New Hope by someone with a name I couldn’t begin to pronounce without having my mouth and vocal chords replaced by something less human. Clearly a pseudonym, yet the name seemed familiar in its construction, especially as I’d been reading Lovecraft’s stories over the past weeks and the names of his fictional “Old Ones” were constructed of very similar groupings of consonants. The text itself was hand-written, though bound as a printed book. Quite possibly—hopefully as it happens—it was a one-off. While I flicked through the pages, Tange gave me her take on its contents. It quickly became clear to me that the author of the would-be grimoire had been familiar with Lovecraft’s fiction, and had worked to re-tool that author’s Cthulhuan monstrosities into something much more benevolent, something he called the E’ashalsinir—infused with a strain of universal good-will never evident in the pages of the Necronomicon itself.
“Have you read H.P. Lovecraft’s stories, Tange?” I asked, interrupting her monologue.
“No,” she growled. “Who’s that?”
“He’s a writer. He wrote about…oh, never mind. Keep going!”
According to her story, she became so desperate she began to practice reciting one particular summoning spell, a spell designed to draw into our reality an ocean deity from its own universe or sub-space hide-away or whatever it is they live in, believing it would help right the wrongs being perpetrated by humanity.
“I wasn’t really serious,” she said. “It was just a letting-off of steam, as it were. At heart, I didn’t believe in it. It’s ridiculous. But look at what’s happened! Look at that thing on the beach! It can’t be a coincidence. And there’s nothing good to be had from its involvement in our problems. What am I going to do, Mr Ormsham?”
“I doubt you could have caused this.” I held up the book. “This book is just plagiarised clap-trap, driven by the ignorant notion that Lovecraft—who originally invented all this stuff—was more than just an imaginative popular writer.”
Disgust squirmed over her features. “From what your great-grandfather told me, I thought you were more open-minded.”
That startled me. How did she know of Hugo Drakenswode? Chance? Then I remembered; she’d looked up the website.
Tange seemed to read my thoughts. “The website. But not only that. Remember the letter you brought to me, when we met? Well, it was from Professor Hugo Drakenswode, who apparently died several decades ago, as I discovered when I Googled him. I thought it was a scam. I only read on because he remarked that the person who brought the letter to me was in fact his nephew, Douglas Ormsham. He claimed to have detected a potentially dangerous temporal anomaly focused somehow around me. Though the Professor had no idea what form it would take, he’d sent you to investigate. He wanted to stress to me that I should trust you. That’s when I looked you up online.”
“You didn’t think to tell me this?”
“He suggested I should keep it to myself until it became obvious something was wrong. All things considered, I decided to wait and see. That’s why I know I caused this—and I know that thing out there is one of the E’ashalsinir.” She scowled at me. “How can this Drakenswode write to me so long after his death?”
I said I had no idea, but he’d done the same with me. “He was…is, a remarkable man.”
“So can you help?”
“I don’t know.” For a few minutes, I listened to the winds outside, aware at that moment they were calming down and that the Demon Stench, the smell of decay, was little more than a background ambience. Once again, I had to ask myself: how could the creature go from non-existence and gradually work its way up to life, going through a process of backward decay? Such an idea is rendered impossible by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which dictates that everything moves from an ordered state to a disordered state, thus restricting Time’s Arrow (as they call it) to a relentless entropic movement forward.
But—
What if, I theorised, when Tange spoke the enchantment that summoned it, little expecting it would work, the entity that entered our universe was not attuned to its physics, dying on entry, but bringing with it its own time stream, one moving in the opposite direction to our own. Is it possible the summoning of the creature created an intermingling of the two worlds’ temporal states, though the incoming state maintained its integrity like a drop of oil in water? The creature then rotted away, doing so (from our point-of-view) backward in time as it drifted toward nothingness? Perhaps this phenomenon changed the stability of our Time’s Arrow, from that moment of entry back to when the creature disappeared completely—a sort of unresolved temporal bubble. At this point, from our perspective, Time within the anomaly began moving forward again.
What if, unaware of these temporal shifts, and instead interpreting the “decaying” process as the gradual arrival of the E’ashalsinir that she summoned, Tange tried to send it back to where it came from, using an incantation from the book?
“Is there such a spell?” I asked her.
“Yes, yes, there is.” I could see the mingled terror and confusion in her eyes. “So, should I try it?”
“I think you’ve already tried it,” I replied, “but all it did was create another loop. I suspect you’ve been doing this over and over again for quite a while, never being aware you’d already cast the return spell—thus creating the escalating temporal anomaly that Drakenswode detected.”
She frowned. “Sounds ridiculous—and the idea’s full of scientific absurdities.”
“Says the person who tried summoning a Dark God using a book written by some madman with an absurd name. Good motive, poor judgement.”
Outside, through the raging winds, the gloom was rent asunder by a violent flash of lightning, instantly accompanied by a thunderclap that made Tange’s house shake.
“So what do we do about it?”
I didn’t reply, but moved toward the window and pulled the blinds open. The sight of what was out there chilled me to the bone. It was several streets away, yet visible even over the intervening trees and houses: a raging mass of tentacles taller than the tallest trees, eyes like exploding nebulae, winds and incessant lightning bursts sweeping around it. The carcass was no carcass now. It was alive.
“Now’s the time,” I said.
“What time?”
“The moment when you actually made the very first incantation, the one that brought the creature into our universe. See?”
I gestured toward the window, but she wouldn’t approach.
“I should read the words before it’s too late and force it back.”
“You should do nothing.”
“But if I don’t send it away —“
“If you do, it will all just repeat.”
“Are you sure?”
Before I could answer, the night filled with a roar, whether of anger or pain it was hard to say. It shook the house. A number of large trees along the street tore apart and fell.
“Do nothing,” I said, hoping it was the right thing to do. “Come! Watch! You’ll see what I mean.”
We stood side-by-side. I could feel her tremble, reacting to the awesome, and profoundly terrifying, sight of the monstrous creature highlighted against a tumultuous sky. A swirling burst of light followed, causing pain right through my head, from my eyes to the back of my skull. Tange squealed. She grabbed me and I grabbed her, huddling together like scared rabbits under the hunter’s spotlights.
Suddenly everything went quiet. Looking out the window, we watched as a whirlpool of dark clouds retreated into a pristine light-blue sky.
“Has it gone back to its own world?” Tange said.
“What we were looking at was its initial arrival, Tange, seen in reverse. After that it died—in some agony, I believe—and over the previous few weeks rotted away.”
“So are you saying it’s all over?”
“From our normal point-of-view, yes.”
She had a look of desperate sorrow on her face. “But all the people who died…can’t I bring them back? How can I live with the guilt of what I’ve done?”
“Give it time,” I said.
I left soon after, aware much of her memory of the event was fading, as is usually the case in the aftermath of such otherworldly occurrences—or so Hugo Drakenswode reports in his journals. As I left her house, Tangerine Harken handed me The Book. I’d been hoping she would. “Don’t forget this,” she said.
“Thank you. Hopefully, this is the only one in existence. I’ll keep it safe.”
She looked at me with a quizzical frown. “Keep what safe?”
That took me by surprise.
“The Book,” I replied, holding it up. “You just gave it to me.”
Again, she regarded me with earnest puzzlement. “The Book? I haven’t seen it before. Didn’t you bring it with you?”
I smiled. “Never mind. Of course, I did. I meant, thank you for your hospitality.”
“It’s been a pleasure, Mr Whateley,” she replied. “I’m glad the weather has improved.”
Sometimes the universe can be kind.