Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

I did as he advised and reached down to help him up. He wasn’t much more than a bundle of bones and couldn’t be very strong, but he didn’t for a second offer that small suitcase to me or release his grip on it. And with him in front we moved ahead again; until eventually, this time without my urging, he continued telling me his story from where he’d left off. His story, along with that of the alien invasion or take-over—or walk-over—which seemed to come a little easier to him now. So maybe he’d needed to get it off his chest.

“It was those Esoteric Order freaks. At least, that was how everyone thought of them: as folks with too few screws, and what few they had with crossed threads! But no, they weren’t crazy—except maybe in what they were trying to do. And actually, that even got into the newspapers: how the Esoteric Order was trying to call up powerful creatures—god-things, they called them—from parallel dimensions and the beginning of time; beings that had come here once before, even before the evolution of true or modern man, only to be trapped and imprisoned by yet more mysterious beings and banished back to their original universes, or to forgotten, forbidden places here on Earth and under the sea…

“Well, that was a laugh, wasn’t it? As daft as all those UFO stories from more than fifty years ago, and those tales of prehistoric monsters in a Scottish loch, and hairy ape men on Himalayan mountains; oh, and lots of other myths and legends of that sort. But daft? Oh, really? And if those oh-so-bloody-clever newspaper reporters, the ones who infiltrated the church and saw them at their worship and listened to their sermons—along with the other religious groups that scoffed at their ‘idiotic beliefs’—if they had been right, then all well and good. But they weren’t!

“And when should it happen—when did it happen?—but at Hallowmas: the feast of All Hallows, All Saints!

“And oh, what an awful feast that was—Them feasting on us, I mean—when those monstrous beings answered the call and came forth from strange dimensions, bringing their thralls, servitors and adherents with them. Up from the oceans, down from the weird skies of parallel universes, erupting from the earth and bringing all of the planet’s supposedly dead volcanoes back to life, these minions of madness came; and what of humanity then, eh? What but food for their tables, fodder for their stables.”

That last wasn’t a question but a simple fact, and the old man was sobbing again, openly now, as he turned and grasped my arm. “My wife…” He almost choked on the word. “That poor, poor woman… she was taken at first pass! Taken, as the city reeled and the buildings crumbled, as the earth broke open and darkness ruled…!

“Ah, but according to rumour the very first to go was that blasphemous, evil old church! For the so-called ‘priests’ of the Esoteric Order had been fatally mistaken in calling up that which they couldn’t put down again: a mighty octopus god-thing who rose in his house somewhere in the Pacific, while others of his spawn surfaced in their manses from various far-flung deeps. Not the least of these emerged in the Antarctic—along with an entire plateau! That was a massive upheaval, causing earthquakes and tsunamis around the world! Another rose up from the Mariana Trench, and one far closer to home from a lesser-known abyss somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. He was the one—damn him to Hell!—who built his Twisted Tower house here in the Zone. In fact the Bgg’ha Zone is named after him, for he was—he is—Bgg’ha!

“And there’s a chant, a song, a liturgy of sorts that human worshippers—oh yes, there are such people!—sing of a night as they wander aimlessly through the rubble streets. And having heard it so often, far too often, dinning repeatedly in my ears while I lay as if in a coma, hardly daring to breathe until they had moved on, I learned those alien words and could even repeat them. What’s more, when the SSR trapped and caught one of these madmen, these sycophants, to learn whatever they could from him, he offered them a translation. And those chanted words which I had learned, they were these:

“‘Ph’nglui gwlihu’nath, Bgg’ha Im’ykh I’ihu’nagl fhtagn.’ A single mad sentence which translates into this:

“‘From his house at Im’ykh, Bgg’ha at last is risen!’

“And do you know, those words still ring in my ears, blocking almost everything else out? If I don’t concentrate on what I’m doing, on what I’m saying, it all slips away and all I can hear is that damned chanting: Bgg’ha at last is risen! Ah, but since he was able to rise, maybe he can be sent back down again! And perhaps I even have… even have the means with which to do it…”

It was far more than he had ever told me before; but there he fell silent again, possibly wondering if he had said too much…