The Wild Adventures of Cthulhu, Volume 3, page 23
The watery battlefield was partially obscured by upflung sea sediment. Only glimpses of Dagon and his consort could be made out of the hazy waters. The latter showed only five intact heads. Three other visible long necks were ragged stumps bleeding profusely. The blood being expelled was not red, but black and thick as syrup….
Dagon and his finny force had not yet reached the battlements of R’lyeh. The counterattack appeared to be holding.
So much sediment and ichor filled that war zone in the Pacific deep that the three men had to study still images in order to piece together a clear picture of the battlespace.
“Well,” decided Cranston, “there’s some good news here.”
“What is that?”
“I don’t see the Big C himself. He doesn’t appear to have gotten out of his damnable dolmen.”
They watched the images again and concluded that Fortress R’lyeh was holding.
The Navy Secretary announced, “I have ordered the Manta Ray to make an emergency reconnaissance run against R’lyeh. We should have more telemetry in the next 48 hours. Until then, gentlemen, I suggest you return to your duties. And if any of you gentlemen are praying men, I would pray intensively.”
There was nothing left to say. Despite having access to advanced underwater technology, they were stuck awaiting intelligence that was at least 24 hours behind unfolding events. In an age of spy satellites and nearly instantaneous communication, this was galling.
* * *
Returning to his office, Director Cranston briefed Van Christo in terse, succinct sentences.
At the end of it, the Deputy Director remarked, “I would normally not be rooting for Cthulhu in any situation. But here, I’m hoping his damned fortalice holds. Otherwise, all bets are off.”
“All bets may be off, regardless,” countered Cranston. “I’m going to have one of our remote viewers look at this.”
“Rules are meant to be broken, I suppose.”
“This won’t be an ERV mission. I’ll have one of the CRV viewers do it.”
Van Christo nodded. “The viewer remains in his body. That would be safer all the way around.”
An hour later, Cranston was briefing the remote viewing program manager on the tasking. He was careful not to reveal too much. Even though the program manager would assign non-local coordinates to the target and give them to the tasking officer running the remote viewing session, there was always a risk of telepathic leakage, which would taint the coordinate remote viewing session.
“I want this accomplished today,” Cranston said in closing.
The remote viewer tasked with the target took a seat in a soundproof room shaped like the interior of an egg. It was furnished with only a desk and chair. Everything was a shade of gray. Except the sheets of paper on which he intended to write his perceptions.
After getting into his zone, Operational Remote Viewer 013 said, “I’m ready.”
In response, the tasking officer—now functioning as the session monitor—announced over the loudspeaker. “Your coordinates are 7845-8632.”
ORV 013 wrote down the coordinates and let his pen continue writing reflexively. His unconscious produced an ideogram suggesting a dynamic energy event. Essentially, he drew a series of interlocking spirals.
Going to the next page and on to Stage II of the session, he tapped the paper in a downward series of pen marks. This communicated to him impressions of the target, as if he were touching the real thing with some type of receiving rod and not an ordinary pen.
Periodically, Viewer 013 wrote brief impressions in the margins as a way to record them, but also release them so they didn’t drive the session. This served to avoid prematurely identifying the target. The viewer’s job was to record his perceptions objectively, not analyze them. Analysis belonged to his superiors.
For more than two hours, he probed the target and made sketches, producing a session summary of eight paragraphs in length. This he duly surrendered to the monitor, who handed it to the program manager without first reviewing it.
“I kept receiving images of an immense black octopus,” he reported. “I declared them as analytic overlay, but they persisted.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he was told.
After the program manager had read the report thoroughly, he took it into the office of Director Cranston.
“I have the CRV report, sir.”
“Can you summarize it?”
“It boils down to this: The attacking force is highly motivated by an unknown outside agency, which appears to have some power or influence over them.”
“What do we have on this outside agency?”
“It’s from Outside. Not of this Earth. All the viewer was able to pick up was a sense of deep space, but with an utter absence of stars. A coldness. Like a void. A void that seemed to be self-aware. He also kept picking up a black cephalopod-type of creature. It felt stuck in place, but was straining to escape its limiting confines.”
Cranston nodded. “Anything else?”
“According to this, the core inhabitant or ruler of the undersea redoubt is aware of this attack, but is also stuck in a state of hibernation. His mind is both asleep and awake at the same time.”
“Schrödinger’s brain,” commented Cranston.
“That’s about the size of it, sir.”
“Anything else?”
“The rest are details. I’ll leave the report with you.”
Cranston stayed late that night to review the report. It fascinated him, yet its details produced no more insight than the program manager’s verbal summary.
* * *
Two days later, Cranston was back at Naval Intelligence headquarters where he reviewed the latest telemetry from the Manta Ray drone.
The battle still raged. The forces of Dagon and Mother Hydra had gained ground, but still fell short of breaching the Cyclopean battlements of R’lyeh.
Their army—the superhuman-sized Deep Ones—had been severely depleted. Corpses lay strewn along the seafloor, their skulls crushed by the tremendous tentacles of the greenish defenders. Grotesquely impaled and deflated bodies of the Star-spawn also were visible. Cranston noticed that they possessed sufficient physicality that they could be transfixed by hurled spears. The force with which those spears had been thrust against the crushing underwater depths made him shiver.
But nothing made him shiver like the sight of the gigantic head of Dagon that the Manta Ray sensors had captured. It was glancing upward, signifying that it was aware of the UUV passing at a higher underwater altitude. The expression on its stupendous fishlike features suggested an angry disdain.
The face was sufficiently manlike not to be entirely repulsive. But the eyes were those of whales. Where ears would be expected, finny, fan-like appendages sprouted. Gill vents pulsed on either side of its columnar throat, spilling air bubbles. Webbed ridges crisscrossed various points on his iridescent-scaled body.
In one stupendous hand could be seen a metal tool of some kind. Not quite a spear. it looked to be some manner of breaching tool. Cranston decided it must be meant to pry open one of the gigantic tomb doors or separate the massive stone blocks that comprised R’lyeh for breaching purposes.
At the conclusion of the viewing, the Secretary of the Navy said, “The army of Dagon is gaining ground. It appears to be only a matter of time before the attacking force reaches its objective.”
There ensued a heated discussion over countermeasures. It went nowhere. Arguments for the United States Navy entering the battle crashed on the rocks of common sense. Any method available to the Navy, whether underwater mines delivered by unmanned underwater drones or submarine-launched torpedoes, risked rupturing the corpse-crypt that contained somnambulant Cthulhu, leading to unknown and unimaginable consequences.
To Director Cranston’s immense relief, no suggested plan survived counter argument. All were deemed too risky to implement.
In frustration, the Secretary of the Navy said, “We are reduced to waiting for the next set of images like damned couch potatoes.”
No one argued that point.
As he got up to go, Director Cranston said, “As long as R’lyeh stands, a global emergency need not be declared.”
“Can I quote you to the President?” the secretary asked tartly.
“Feel free,” retorted Cranston. “Just don’t mention my name. Officially, my department doesn’t exist. So neither do I.”
That ended the meeting.
On the shared ride back to Virginia, the Director of the National Reconnaissance Office told Cranston, “This could be our heads if the situation goes south.”
“If the situation goes south,” returned Cranston grimly, “the planet might not survive. At least the human component of earthly life.”
“I’d like to know what motivates this madness.”
“My people are working on that. The problem is, we’re not dealing with Earthly minds or Earthly motivations. We lack scope, scale, as well as appropriate frames of reference.”
“I appreciate your candor,” said the NRO director.
Cranston nodded. “Thank you.”
“That doesn’t mean that I like it,” snapped the other.
* * *
Five days later, the Ghost Shark made another pass at R’lyeh. In less than 24 hours, the images were being screened for all parties connected to the monitoring of this underwater war unsuspected by humankind.
The Secretary of the Navy announced, “Given the urgency of the situation, I have not taken the time to review this latest footage myself. So let’s get to it without further ado.”
This time, the shadowy images showed the aftermath of a great conflict. Cloudy chemocline sediment was still settling back onto the sea bottom. Not everything on the expanse of the Pacific floor was fully visible as yet.
When the sensors encountered a clear patch, abyssal predators—cusk eels and unknown transparent fish—could be seen nibbling at the corpses of myriad fallen Deep Ones.
The only other movement was the polypus Cthulhu spawn, who were dragging the denuded skulls of their vanquished enemies to the western approach to R’lyeh, there mounting them in piles and pylons with their squirming tentacles. These were carefully set so that they faced to the west, as before, their hollow eye-sockets radiating an eerie blue.
The Secretary of the Navy announced, “It appears that Cthulhu has survived and R’lyeh holds. I suppose we should be grateful for this fact. But I remain disturbed by it all.”
Director Cranston stated, “As long as R’lyeh remains submerged with Cthulhu safely immured, the human race has some unmeasurable span of a future. But no one can say if that future can be reckoned in weeks, months, years, or centuries.”
On that somber note, the meeting was adjourned.
* * *
Long months of waiting and watching followed. The regularity of the underwater drone patrols never varied.
Over time, the corpses strewn about the western verge of R’lyeh were picked clean by scavenger fish, the chemocline haziness cleared up, and the denuded skulls of the defeated were claimed as trophies and mounted as phosphorescent-eyed warnings against further incursions.
From time to time, vacant-eyed Star-spawn were seen jetting about, doing the work of Great Cthulhu, who slumbered on but remained aware of all that transpired around his megalithic metropolis.
Eventually, the last of these Star-spawn retreated, oozing back into the gigantic fortress to reclaim their individual tombs, presumably once again to sleep the sleep of the dead who were not dead.
* * *
Each time Nodens was tasked to decode the inexplicable activities during the lull after the second assault against R’lyeh, it came back with the heading, Insufficient Results.
“I would call this a classic case of paralysis of analysis,” said Van Christo when he reported to his superior.
“I don’t think Nodens is working the problem as efficiently as it might,” Cranston stated.
“How so?”
“Essentially, it repeats a variation on the concept of the Great Old Ones’ mentation as being unknowable. It’s almost as if it was blocked or stymied, and unable to process or extrapolate beyond that single logical point. While this may be so, there’s a failure to draw a clear correspondence with certain known mythological parallels.”
“Such as?”
Cranston leaned forward, his chair creaking in response. “Previous generations of human scholars have observed that many mythologies appear to be survivals of the reality of the Great Old Ones in their advent on this planet during a primordial time roughly equivalent to when crinoids were the dominant lifeforms. However, the humans who told the stories they received from God knows where distorted and corrupted them, making them more palatable to their followers. Consequently, many of the surviving myth cycles are inversions or reversals of the semi-comprehensible prehuman reality.
“Take the Norwegian Kraken as an example. This octopod monster is supposed to arise from the ocean at the end of the world. By contrast, Cthulhu’s emergence from the Pacific abyss will herald the end of the world. Atlantis sank, drowning one civilization. R’lyeh will rise, ending all civilizations at once. There are other parallels. I don’t need to enumerate them.”
“I follow you,” said Van Christo. “The Egyptian god Thoth echoes both Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth, but we don’t understand the significance of the correspondence. And the Greco-Roman Hydra we know exists in modern times.”
Cranston nodded somberly. “In the so-called pantheon of the Great Old Ones, and the Ultimate Gods above them, we have certain parallels to Greek and Roman cosmology, if not other older legends. Creation emerged from darkness and chaos, out of which came the early Greek gods. Take Zeus. He arose from the mating of the proto-gods, Cronos and Rhea. The equivalent entity among the Outer Gods is Yog-Sothoth. If Abdul Alhazred can be trusted, Yog emerged somehow from the Nameless Mist, which itself was an extrusion of Ultimate Chaos by way of unconscious actions of Azathoth.”
“Almost all recorded cosmologies start with chaos,” Van Christo said somberly. “Can’t be coincidental.”
“Right. Cthulhu is a descendent of Yog-Sothoth by way of Nug or Yeb, I can’t remember which, off the top of my head. We have no inkling how they were spawned. I don’t even want to contemplate it. No matter. At one point in his history, Zeus went to war with the Titans, who belonged to an elder generation of gods that predated him and his fellow Olympians. This war was called the Titanomachy. Zeus’s father, Cronus, was the ruler of the Titans. Cronus had overthrown his father, Uranus, and imprisoned him in a deep part of the Underworld called Tartarus. Cronus and Zeus vied for dominion over the universe. Zeus won. Do you see where I’m going with this?”
Van Christo replied, “You think this is a modern Titanomanchy. But who declared war on whom?”
“One would assume that Cthulhu is the rebellious actor, like Typhon, the serpentine monster who rose up to challenge Zeus after the Titans were vanquished. Maybe that’s why he was originally locked up in that impervious tomb of his. R’lyeh smacks of a watery Tartarus.”
“But he’s supposed to rise up when the stars are right, concurrently when the Great Old Ones return to reclaim dominion over our world.”
“That’s our understanding because that’s what the Necronomicon asserts, but who says the Necronomicon is 100% accurate? It’s a channeled work. Cthulhu is called the high priest of the Great Old Ones. That makes him subordinate to Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, and all the rest of the so-called Elder Gods. Maybe he’s scheming to go his own way once he’s loose.”
“And Yog-Sothoth or somebody has caught telepathic wind of his plans and has ordered a preemptive strike. Hence, the mobilization of Dagon and his forces. It’s a plausible theory.”
“It’s sound,” admitted Cranston. “But it’s the product of human reasoning. Just as Nodens keeps repeating, we’re dealing with foes who don’t think on our level. Their level is so remote and inapprehensible to humans that we might as well be insects trying to figure out what all these towering mammals are doing in our world. Until we see more activity around R’lyeh, we’re forced to stick this in the Suspense file. It might be correct, it might simply be a logical fallacy. Minimally, my theory gives us a context through which we might interpret these activities. At best, it’s a lens to view what transpires next. Maybe it will fit, maybe it won’t. But a clear viewpoint is better than no viewpoint.”
Van Christo’s gaze went to the framed quote on the wall behind his superior.
“When you fear something, learn as much about it as you can. Knowledge conquers fear.”
“ ‘Knowledge is power,’ Jefferson liked to say,” he mused. “But this particular knowledge makes me feel even more powerless.”
“Get over that defeatist thinking,” returned Cranston tersely. “We have a war to fight. The coming Cthulhucracy may be on hold, but it hasn’t been cancelled. Capitulation is not an option—not one humanity can tolerate. Dismissed.”
* * *
More than thirteen additional months passed without incident. The grisly mounds and obelisks of inhuman skulls remained undisturbed, their numbers static, the hollow orbits of the piled relics continued facing the western direction, radiating their uncanny blue phosphorescent warning.
One bleak Monday, Director Cranston summoned his deputy and declared, “By this time, Mother Hydra should have regenerated her lost heads once again—if not doubled their number. But she and her consort don’t seem to have an appetite for renewing the conflict.”
Van Christo nodded soberly. “Beyond doubt, Cthulhu’s minions would be prepared for another attack. Perhaps Dagon is holding off as a strategy. In order to launch an unexpected strike, surprise has to be part of the package. If they go on the attack again, and Dagon is a sound strategist, he’s going to wait longer than a year.”
