Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

I loaded the revolver and put it in my pocket, then tucked the torch into my belt. The Dean helped me over the parapet and onto the rope ladder. So I began the descent into the well yet again. The cries from below had not stopped, but they seemed muffled and more distant than before.

I reached the steps and began to hurry down them far more rapidly than I would have wished. Once or twice I tripped and nearly fell into the black abyss. I reached the bottom and flashed my torch about. There was nobody, nothing.

I stood quite still, trying not to breathe too hard, the blood pounding in my head. Bertie—or whoever it was—must have gone through one of the two tunnels, but which one?

I decided to try the one where my flash photography had surprised something. I switched off my torch and entered the Stygian blackness of the narrow tunnel. Darkness and silence enveloped me. I felt my way, along smooth, slimed walls.

Then I began to hear something. It was like a chant, but the tune and the language were alien to me. I could see something red flicker against the glistening black walls of the tunnel. It was no more than a whisper of light, but it spoke terror to me.

The tunnel bent slightly, then suddenly debouched into a vast cavern, over a hundred feet high. Naphtha flares, spurting naturally from the rock, lit the space with a pinkish glare from a thousand crevices. I was in an area at least as vast as the Cathedral somewhere far above me. Parts of the rock vault had been carved into strange shapes, parts had been left in their natural state, rugged and glistening.

Again I heard the chanting and, though clearer, it was still alien to my ears:

“Iä-R’lyeh! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä!”

About fifty feet from me across a smooth Cyclopean pavement stood a naked man, his back to me. His hands were raised in the air, his almost hairless head thrown back in an ecstasy of adoration. At his feet lay a crumpled form in black. As I approached them across the pavement I recognised the fallen figure. It was Bertie Winship, still in his clerical cassock.

These two were between me and a third figure who stood, or crouched, some yards in front of them. Even now I cannot, or will not describe it fully. Its colour was a greyish-green and its form was stooped with a vast elephantine head on which reposed the coronet that Bertie had discovered at the bottom of the well. Its superabundant flesh, which seemed to disintegrate into a thousand liquid limbs, quivered with infernal energy. It appeared to sway and stoop to the naked man’s chant—or was it the chant that swayed to its movement?

I drew and cocked the Dean’s service revolver. The naked man must have heard this or my footsteps approaching, because he turned and saw me.

“Get out, you damned fool!” he shrieked. “How dare you interfere?” It was Cutbirth, his evil baby features contorted with rage.

“I have come to take Bertie back,” I said.

“You cannot have him! He is already given to the gods. Go back, I tell you!”

At this, the creature let out a groaning screech which filled the cathedral cavern with hellish sound. Cutbirth turned his back on me and again addressed the monster:

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh, wgah-nagl fhtagn—”

Having uttered his cry, he stooped and picked up from the ground something shining and curved like an oriental knife. Then, with his other hand, he gathered up the unconscious form of Bertie by the collar. Bertie’s head lolled back, unwittingly presenting his white throat to Cutbirth’s blade.

“Put him down or I shoot,” I said.

Cutbirth laughed. “You wouldn’t dare, you damned sandal-wearing, psalm-singing socialist!”

I pulled the trigger, but the wretched gun jammed. It was a heavy, clumsy old thing. I pulled the trigger again and the gun fired, but the shot went wide and the recoil nearly threw me onto my back. The echoes of the shot filled the cavern with a clatter like machine-gun fire.

Then, gripping the gun in both hands, I steadied myself and took aim at Cutbirth’s head. I fired again. The bullet missed Cutbirth by quite a margin, but it hit the creature which loomed before him. It went into one of its huge, milky eyes. The eye seemed to explode with the impact, spraying out torrents of green bile in the process. A hideous shriek filled the cavern.

Cutbirth dropped the knife and turned again towards me with rage and hatred in every knotted vein of his face. It was a fatal mistake. The beast, assuming that Cutbirth had been the perpetrator of the outrage against its eye, launched one of its great tentacle limbs against him, lashing him to the ground. Cutbirth scrambled to his feet and tried to make a run for it, but the beast was onto him with more of his limbs. A terrible unequal struggle ensued.