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something which will never let us breathe easily again!
Both of our torches were turned on the prostrate objects, so that we soon
realized the dominant factor in their incompleteness. Mauled, compressed,
twisted, and ruptured as they were, their chief common injury was total
decapitation. From each one the tentacled starfish head had been removed; and as
we drew near we saw that the manner of removal looked more like some hellish
tearing or suction than like any ordinary form of cleavage. Their noisome
dark-green ichor formed a large, spreading pOOl; but its stench was half
overshadowed by the newer and stranger stench, here more pungent than at any
other point along our route. Only when we had come very close to the sprawling
obstructions could we trace that second, unexplainable fetor to any immediate
source - and the instant we did so Danforth, remembering certain very vivid
sculptures of the Old Ones history in the Permian Age one hundred and fifty
million years ago, gave vent to a nerve-tortured cry which echoed hysterically
through that vaulted and archaic passage with the evil, palimpsest carvings.
I came only just short of echoing his cry myself; for I had seen those primal
sculptures, too, and had shudderingly admired the way the nameless artist had
suggested that hideous slime coating found on certain incomplete and prostrate
Old Ones - those whom the frightful Shoggoths had characteristically slain and
sucked to a ghastly headlessness in the great war of resubjugation. They were
infamous, nightmare sculptures even when telling of age-old, bygone things; for
Shoggoths and their work ought not to be seen by human beings or portrayed by
any beings. The mad author of the Necronomicon had nervously tried to swear that
none had been bred on this planet, and that only drugged dreamers had even
conceived them. Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and
organs and processes - viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells - rubbery
fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile - slaves of suggestion,
builders of cities - more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and
more amphibious, more and more imitative! Great God! What madness made even
those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and carve such things?
And now, when Danforth and I saw the freshly glistening and reflectively
iridescent black slime which clung thickly to those headless bodies and stank
obscenely with that new, unknown odor whose cause only a diseased fancy could
envisage - clung to those bodies and sparkled less voluminously on a smooth part
of the accursedly resculptured wall in a series of grouped dots - we understood
the quality of cosmic fear to its uttermost depths. It was not fear of those
four missing others - for all too well did we suspect they would do no harm
again. Poor devils! Alter all, they were not evil things of their kind. They
were the men of another age and another order of being. Nature had played a
hellish jest on them - as it will on any others that human madness, callousness,
or cruelty may hereafter dig up in that hideously dead or sleeping polar waste -
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and this was their tragic homecoming. They had not been even savages-for what
indeed had they done? That awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch -
perhaps an attack by the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed
defense against them and the equally frantic white simians with the queer
wrappings and paraphernalia ... poor Lake, poor Gedney... and poor Old Ones!
Scientists to the last - what had they done that we would not have done in their
place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible,
just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less
incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn - whatever they had
been, they were men!
They had crossed the icy peaks on whose templed slopes they had once worshipped
and roamed among the tree ferns. They had found their dead city brooding under
its curse, and had read its carven latter days as we had done. They had tried to
reach their living fellows in fabled depths of blackness they had never seen -
and what had they found? All this flashed in unison through the thoughts of
Danforth and me as we looked from those headless, slime-coated shapes to the
loathsome palimpsest sculptures and the diabolical dot groups of fresh slime on
the wall beside them - looked and understood what must have triumphed and
survived down there in the Cyclopean water city of that nighted, penguin-fringed
abyss, whence even now a sinister curling mist had begun to belch pallidly as if
in answer to Danforth s hysterical scream.
The shock of recognizing that monstrous slime and headlessness had frozen us
into mute, motionless statues, and it is only through later conversations that
we have learned of the complete identity of our thoughts at that moment. It
seemed aeons that we stood there, but actually it could not have been more than
ten or fifteen seconds. That hateful, pallid mist curled forward as if veritably
driven by some remoter advancing bulk-and then came a sound which upset much of
what we had just decided, and in so doing broke the spell and enabled us to run
like mad past squawking, confused penguins over our former trail back to the
city, along ice-sunken megalithic corridors to the great open circle, and up
that archaic spiral ramp in a frenzied, automatic plunge for the sane outer air
and light of day.
The new sound, as I have intimated, upset much that we had decided; because it
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