*Tape static*
…Those of us who reached shore were pretty beat-dog tired, shell shocked from the crash. My senses must have been rusty. Only explanation. God never made nothing like what I saw. What I heard.
The other gal who survived - the stewardess, Ms. Azani - did you talk to her? She might've seen something when she got left alone. I heard she's gone full kooky since. Shame. She seemed like a good egg.
Sorry. It ain't your guys' job to listen to me ramble. I get sidetracked easy. The missus says I'm like gravel stone. Unaffected. Scattered. She calls me 'Lumpy Bumpy'. It's true, I'm not easily riled by the blows which fortune-
*Tape static*
…and the clerks screwed our tickets up either at Des Moines or when we hit San Francisco. I got put on a straight 20-hour slog to Melbourne. That's in Australia. Guess you probably knew. Meanwhile Joanne and the boys got laid over in Tokyo. Joanne kept rubbing my elbow cause I was near blowing a gasket. "Lumpy, settle," she kept saying. "We'll jot right down from Japan. We'll probably meet you at the autowalk." I sure am thankful now that they weren't on my plane. Don't know how-
What? Oh yeah, sorry. The flight.
I've never been that high. Just ocean and clouds and night as far as the eye could stretch. Boring after a couple hours.
At least it was boring, until we heard the pilot announce, "Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Captain Gerard. It's 11:14 p.m. P.S.T. We're currently cruising over the mid-Pacific at 35,000 feet, heading into a small storm system. There may-"
I missed what he said next because the plane started rattling louder than Marley's Ghost. That's from Dickens. I read a few books back in high school. Ain't it peculiar how a brain'll remember a name on a page thirty years ago, but forgets a fella five seconds after he introduces himself?
Anyway, when the plane started shaking the lady sitting beside me started to unravel. Late middle age, about sixty. She said her name was Ann Mason - or something similar - and that she'd never flown before. I mumbled something. I wanted to think and talk as little as possible, the flight would pass faster. She started fidgeting about with her hands and legs (I was glad for the open seat between us, let me tell you) and that stewardess Azani came over and had to tell her everything was fine. I guess everything was fine at that moment.
I had the window seat. I pushed the curtain and peeked outside.
I tell you, I've never seen no storm to compare. It was as if mother nature got herself tangled up, and was jerking at the knots. The clouds were black and purple, like a bruise on heaven. There seemed to be more ice in the sky than air. I was sitting by the airplane wing - the left wing - and I could see hail exploding off the flaps like bullets.
Normally a captain would steer his bird around a squall so messy.
How'd I know that? I don't for sure. Never been a pilot if that's what you're getting at. There isn't much call for a pilot in Millerstown, Montana - pop. 1,523. But I've done plenty of jobs: roofing, corn pollination, roadworking, dairy farmhanding (that was a fun one - farmers normally have a couple kids for that purpose). Right about then I was wishing that I'd never added Quickmart to that list, and thinking I should have declined their vacation, and wondering if I ought to start praying.
One of the overhead bins burst open near the front. I watched a suitcase explode on the floor, boxers and mini-shampoos scattering like glitter. Stewardess Azani started picking it up. Mrs. Anna Mason was breathing like a sprinter. The missus gets anxious like that too. Figured I'd try comforting words, they're what work for Joanne. I started giving Mrs. Mason some of my dad's advice: "It's only a seasoning. We must all be seasoned."
The airplane Rumbled. Shuddered. Rattled louder than ever, like glaciers in a sea-sized pitcher of lemonade.
Then, all heaven paused; as if the lowering clouds inhaled as one. We passengers, as a unit, seemed to hiccup and stop. From the silent gulf came-
*Tape static*
Then we heard one huge clap. The window flashed raw and white through the curtain. Lightning. Then a boom; not thunder, more mechanical. The plane tilted sharp to the side. 'Roll', that's the flying jargon. The right wing dipped oceanward, the left pointed to outer space. I leaned in my seat. I caught Mrs. Mason by the shoulder as she seemed about to faint. "Get me out. Get me out." I heard her saying in a shriek so high it was a whisper. Dunno where she wanted out to.
Mostly I'm just a fool. But I saw I was handling crashing better than just about anybody else. That's the old Lumps and Bumps in me. Even Old Captain Gerard sounded pitchy on the mic. Everybody else was hollering, standing up when they should've sat, waving their hands for Ms. Stewardess Azani. She'd given up on the suitcase - about three more bins had broken open anyway and puked their own luggage. Now she was busy fanning some granddad at the front.
I stood up. I know I just said we were all supposed to be sitting, but Ann Mason was lolling and swaying as the plane tipped. "My migraine," she whimpered. She pointed weakly overhead. So I pulled my haunches out of the armrests, pushed past her knees, patting her shoulder and all, and reached up to pull it down.
By then the plane had stopped rattling. I kind of knew it would. I guess now would be a good time to mention I've always had what I call 'early deja-vu'. I had this whole vision in my head of the plane leveling out for a minute before things got really bad.
Ms. Azani saw me and said, "Please sir, return to your seat." but she was still trying to revive that old grandpa, and I was already stood. I got Anne's suitcase down alright. It was one of those expensive designer affairs - the ones that look like the case Iron Man uses to spawn his suit in those superhero movies, all eggshell and chimney red. Anyway I found her meds in an inside fold behind some pricey-looking creams.
I stuffed her suitcase back in a hurry. My early deja-vu was telling me that the stewardess was right; I needed to sit down. From where I was standing though, I could see out one of the open windows on the other side of the airplane.
It looked like we were crossing an armistice zone in the middle of a battlefield. All around the clouds roiled with lightning and hail. We were coasting right towards them. Also our starboard flank was smoking. Smoke's never good on an airplane. It streamed by the back windows in one long laminar sheet. It must have been coming from the air intake of one of the turbines and sliding back over the wings.
I sat down fast. I passed two of the migraine pills to Mrs. Mason. I fanned her too, and she thanked me. She seemed to revive a little. I'd've felt like we were in the clear, if I hadn't seen the grimacing storm we were hurtling for.
A half a second later, another bolt struck. Just like I knew it would. The lightning on metal sounded like a sheet of lake ice cracking all at once. Didn't change our course much though, cause we were already dipping, diving, falling down. The backs of all our heads pressed against the seats.
Welp, wouldn't you guess it - some potato opened the emergency exit.
The air suddenly screamed like a hundred cattle in a barn on fire. Hail too. One ball whacked me good on the eyebrow and my lid started swelling shut. People hollered, but I could hardly hear over the gale.
Those little air masks dropped loose. They fluttered and whisked our faces. Because I was by the window I was wrestling with the curtain too. It kept whipping all around my ear like a tentacle.
"Lumpy," I told myself, "you might not see Joanne and the boys after all." Even so I helped Mrs. Hanna Mason with her own mask and her belt before I did mine. The emergency lights started flashing red and gold. The plane was bucking like a truck with a shot suspension on a B-maintenance road.
Azani had sat too - no one was tidying up the mess we were in except God himself. I couldn't see how the grandad she'd been leaning over was doing. I could see through the window, between the curtains stutter, so that it was like watching a film reel. The clouds and the hail seemed to be thinning out as we dove.
That was when we saw the island.
Slowly the roiling curtains of hailstone and white electricity parted. Below, in an Atlantic starless and with sharper crests than any mountain of hell, I saw a mark of deeper black, like a hole on the surface of the ocean, like an oilspill amidst the waves. It was a rotten scar amidst the waves which crashed around it. And completing the wound was a single white pustule at its sickly center.
*Tape static*
-gale screaming felt like it had left me deaf. My senses seemed filled by the island. The island, and a groan. Must have been the bending airplane metal. It had to be. What else could groan like that?
One of Mrs. Mason's pale arms thwapped me. Brought me by the straight road back to screaming reality. My seat partner lay limp in her chair. Fainted or dead. The g-force of our drop was lifting those skinny arms like she was on a rollercoaster. I felt it acting on me too. I put on my own oxygen like I had hers.
The wind turned up my collar. Whipped the curtain around. Screamed beside me. I started praying, "O God, my times are in your hand." I heard the fella in front of me praying too, but not the exact words cause of the air boxing my ears. It sounded like no prayer I ever heard.
The plane leveled. We sank to the seats. Then it yawed hard right and my face seemed magnetized to the window. The island had disappeared. Only the ocean remained in sight, near black as the sky itself, broken only by crests and ridges lit by the flashes of lighting. The broken surface of the water, coming closer and closer, as we dropped down, down, down. Gibbering like the dateless corpses-
*Tape static*
-details get fuzzy. Adrenaline I think. We didn't blow up anyway. Lots of knocking about when Captain Gerard hit the choppy surface. Water flooding in. A scramble at the seatbelts. An inflatable life raft. Rain. The ocean waves, all around, like skyscrapers. Paddling, yelling, someone knocked their head on mine. Helping Ms. Azani - soaked, maybe a hundred and ten pounds total - out of the raft. Land.
Fourteen of us made it to that island. Fourteen of a hundred reached that mark on the ocean seen from the air. There were a pair of twin sisters in their thirties. Old Hannah had somehow made it, but she was shivering bad in the wet night. Azani was there, and the captain. Both were a far cry from dapper. We were all soaked; hair plastered to pale, wrinkled skin; eyes bloodshot from the saltwater.
We dragged the plastic raft up a beachhead of silt and greasy plant matter, halfway between oil and peat. That shore felt somehow damper than the sea. The waves seemed to follow us inland, dogging us, slithering cold around our thighs.
No one seemed sure what to do. Lord knows I'm no leader. I'll say this, I underestimated Ana Mason though. Old gal might've been a wet mop in a plane crash, but it was she who suggested seeking drier and higher ground. I mentioned seeing white cliffs from the window (and what else could I think they were but cliffs at that time?). We all kind of huddled close and started trudging.
I remember someone crying nonstop, every third or fourth sobs came with a little hiccup. Probably lost somebody. Poor thing, but blessed that they wouldn't suffer long. Ann was still shaking like an aspen leaf, and she had a bad hitch in her stride. I had her drape an arm over me. Lumpy helping Limpy, ain't that poetical?
God, the marsh never ended. We squelched through waist-high slime for what felt like miles - frigid, grasping slime. I lost my left shoe. I'd lost my glasses too, not that there was much to read. Small bunches of cattails grew out of the murk. They were hideous plants, shaped like the swishers of no cats I've ever seen.
I checked my phone. No coverage, but it told me the time was 2:12 a.m., March 2nd. I looked up at the stars. There seemed to be a single hole in the storm. The clouds swirled all around the island, but overhead the sky was clear. Not even rain. Only stars. But they looked like the wrong stars to me - too cold, as if they were burning farther away. Dark stars, they seemed.
We never saw no cliffs, nor anything even close to dry land.
Instead we stumbled on the carcass of a city.
I tell you, half of me thinks I dreamed that whole city and everything that happened in it. I felt like an ant in a cemetery. Monoliths of stone reached toward the black stars, impossibly tall over our heads. The builders who put 'em up must've had crooked eyes, because every enormous slab seemed somehow to curl away when you looked at it. You guys ever read about how those old Greek philosophers who built The Parthenon made some of the pillars curvy? So that the whole thing looked straight from far away? Dunno where I heard that, but whoever raised those stained and slime-covered crypts must've taken that notion another step. It was like looking through a fish-eyed lens. And the stone itself? White as a ghost. Definitely not marble though, nor granite, nor soapstone, nor any other palish rock I ever saw on earth.
Something had drawn our little huddle right into the middle of this dripping city. That was when I first heard the chanting, or thought I did. What I heard sounded like this (and if you can put letters on this, more power to ya): "Ph’nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh, wgah’nagl fhtagn."
We climbed up a set of steps - or rather, too-flat ledges - of solid stone no drier than the marsh. Each slab was carved in shapes like those of fish. Fish that live in the heavy water at the very bottom of the darkness of the ocean. It felt like the whole island must've come from there, for surely the sun never shone on such a place. All the while we heard that chant, "Cthulhu R'lyeh", and felt the cold dark stars glaring on our necks.
We reached the top of the ledges. There, a long, flat surface ran like a risen highway betwixt the monoliths. These ancient towers cast a shade darker than the night over our group. The air felt clammy and poisonous to breath. Some of the others had turned on the lights on their phones, those who still had phones. I had my Garmin on and was using the flashlight on that. Sturdy old piece of circuits.
We passed under the greatest acre of stone I have ever seen. So vast and crooked was its shape that it seemed not only to sprawl at our side but to engulf and surround us entirely - to loom overhead and blot out the hostile stars. We set our little lights on the place where its perverse surface should have manifested wetly under its towering shade.
But our lights didn't reflect. Nor fall on stone. The lights were swallowed in a mouth of hell.
And then the chant boomed from this depthless hollow. "Cthulhu R’lyeh. Cthulhu R’lyeh." The sopping earth began to shudder. And the long dead city twisted, the risen road groaned and bucked, the stained monoliths stretched. And far beneath us, some vast thing stirred.
*Tape static*
And then… And…
Heaven, I ain't stoic after all. I can hardly fit my words around that bulbous pollution of nature, that slobbering un-God which clawed forth from the pit. Nor can I describe the sound, the awful sound. I still hear it in the quiet night, when I lay my head on the pillow. All thoughts of shelter on land vanished. Better to brave the ocean - better drowned - than face that sea-churning Thing.
We ran. We fled back along the slimy, rumbling streets of the dead city. Terror made us blind. I stumbled. Broke my fat wrist in the fall. But I got back up and kept running. The other survivors ran with me. As that awful sound faded behind me I realized old Ann Mason was still stumbling by my hip. I'd been so scared, I hadn't noticed her clinging onto my arm.
Somebody screamed. Maybe me, maybe someone else. I won't remember; the mind refuses.
We tumbled over the white and slimy stone until our feet felt the cold suck of the bog again. Then, as one, we stopped.
Every one of us was breathing like a shaggy dog in summer. Our mouths were filled with the mixed taste of sweat and rotting fish-air.
We'd stopped in some nameless stretch of the swamp. No glimpse of the ocean.
I dared a backward peek. I could still hear the distant chant. I saw the outlines of the monoliths juddering in the dark, but no sign of the creature.
Beside me Mrs. Mason looked gassed. Her mouth was shaped like a big O, sucking air, with her eyes bugging out. I looked at the other survivors too.
I saw then - and it made me shudder - that the stewardess was gone.
I knew at once Ms. Azani must've got turned around when we helter-skeltered along those roads. No wonder, with the earth all rumbling and the paths wriggling. I knew she hadn't been grabbed right when It seeped from the pit. I'd seen her running ahead of me at some point.
I caught my breath and told the others. We looked upon the city. I remembered somebody saying, "Does anyone know where we left the raft?" She was dead; they'd decided already.
I told you I'd been spooked pretty bad when we saw the open vault. To be frank I was still spooked at that time. But it ain't right, leaving someone behind like that, not even looking.
So I climbed back up the slimy slabs alone.
The earth continued to tremble as I walked. It made my shivering worse, for I was covered tip-to-toe in that ooze which laminated the otherworldly corpse-stone. My teeth were chattering so bad I couldn't hold my jaw shut to keep 'em quiet. Finally I took off my other shoe (it felt odd walking one foot bare anyway), undid the lacing, and looped it twice around my jaw. Must've looked like a lug, but it stopped me making noise. I crept silent as a snake. I could still hear the chanting, and I definitely wanted to steer clear of the Thing.
I seemed to round twists without end. It bears repeating: there was never any architecture on earth with fewer straight lines in its making. It was… anti-Euclidean. That's a math term for geometry that's all perfectly ordinary. This geometry was not.
I started to get real scared again. The stars, the chanting, the shadows of those vaults - and on top of it all I was starting to feel another spell of early deja vu. I was pre-remembering screams. Death-screams, not screams of terror. And a shadow that moved against a black sky.
My eyes were so fixed on imagined shapes beside the road that I missed the shape right in front of me until my Garmin's light fell on it. It turned on me in a flash, not two yards away. Black skin covered in slime. Two white eyes.
It was Ms. Azani.
In a gasping low hiss she said, "I thought you were caught and swallowed by…" She didn't finish the thought.
I asked her, "Do you know where we landed the raft?" We both scanned the branching paths. Each way seemed suspicious, unfamiliar, and wrong.
As we wondered, a shadow moved. Greater darkness swelled over our heads. In that city where no wind blew I felt a sudden rush of air. I caught Ms. Azani's glance. She threw her small hands against the sides of her short head. Her eyes rolled, like a sacrificial cow as its neck is struck by the axe. Then she started hollering, "Cthulhu fhtagn!" over and over. I went to grab her, just to make her quiet you see, but she spun. My hands slipped on the slime covering her arm. She darted down one of the roads.
I chased her. My bare feet slapped heedless against that rotten foundation. All I could think of was my premonition. Was it her screaming, or me?
I started gasping. Never have I been a runner. Never would I have caught her either, if Ms. Azani hadn't slipped when she hurtled a corner too quick.
I shot over to her, tackled her as she rose. I wrapped her in a bear hug. She hardly struggled, because we again felt the heavy weight of The Shadow. The foreign stars blinked. Azani tried to scream again; I clapped a hand over her mouth.
We watched the black shape slide across the ground. We heard the mass which forced apart the stagnant air. I looked across the marsh. And a scream - the scream - reached my ears.
I spotted the other survivors in the distance. Small shapes. I saw the shadow spread across them, and the winged black shape descend. Then I turned my eyes. I couldn't watch the final moment.
But I couldn't turn my ears away. The scream rose an octave; my vision was fulfilled.
Ms. Azani had gone still as night. We lay there on the slimy stone at the edge of the city, for how long I don't know, quiet and trembling.
When I felt the earth trembling once more I raised my head. I saw that the shadow was gone from the plain of sodden reeds "We have to go," I said. Ms. Azani just nodded.
We stumbled down the side of the road and through the sucking marsh. We beat an unknown path away from that horrible den and its master. By providence we stumbled across the raft - bright yellow, like a beacon. We two fought against the waves which pressed higher and higher through the reeds. We climbed in.
We were the only ones who made it, huh? I never heard of anyone else you picked up. We couldn't push the raft clear of the grasping slime. It didn't matter, because the island seemed to sink lower as it rumbled. Or more accurately, the ratio of liquid to solid in that slimy bog grew larger. After only a few moments, we looked about to find no sign of the island or its hellish city. Only endless ocean waves.
I've got little more to tell you boys. Got picked up two days later by that freight ship. I hear Mrs. Azani has gone full loony since. I doubt anyone else'll turn up. I have to think they sank.
My brain ain't big enough to fathom that such a horror as we saw could ever lurk in any place on this earth. Even in the unexplored marine depths. Nor any such twisted Atlantean acropolis. For what civilization from Sumer onward has ever possessed the abstract eye and perverse neurons to shape that alien white stone to its twisted model? The whole experience shrieks of the extraterrestrial! Those bright cold stars which stared down at our tiny planet from some far away galaxy beyond the border of known space. The nightmare city. The master, half-dragon and half-octopus, massive beyond the scale of known biology, who rules over that dead domain. The chant, the words without precedent, rising and crashing in memory. Ph’nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh, wgah’nagl fhtagn. Cthulhu fhtagn. Cthulhu fhtagn! CTHULHU FHTAGN!
…Sorry bout that. Like I said I'm an easy rambler. Been happening more lately. I get going, and forget what I'm saying. Feels like my brain's stretched. That sound I heard in the city sort of fills up my head. I can't even hear what I'm saying. Just a hiss like the end of a tape.
Thank you for reading. This story was written as part of the Sepulchral Roots worldbuilding project for Macabre Monday. Thanks to everyone on the macabre team for organizing this event:
Terrifyingly and beautifully told!
Hi Sam reading this on the plane and enjoying it tremendously. I haven't made friends with the stewardess yet though. Hail Cthulu Hail Dagon Hail Yog-Sothoth