Godzilla vs. Cthulhu
By C. L. Werner
V
The operator of the sonic transmitter looked over his shoulder at the pilot and co-pilot of the helicopter.
"The big guy's following us like a trained dog", he remarked. Away and behind them the titan known as Godzilla continued to tread water, his reptilian face upturned toward the helicopter.
"That 'trained dog' just leveled Hokkaido and destroyed everything we could throw at it. Don't get cocky", snapped the pilot.
Suddenly, Godzilla stopped. The call had changed, no longer driving him irresistibly forward. Angered, the leviathan turned his eyes to the hovering helicopter.
"What's wrong?" cried the pilot. Behind him the sonic transmitter crew desperately tried to repair their machine.
"The damn thing just changed frequencies!" howled the machine's operator.
"Well, get it fixed before we lose Godzilla!" ordered the pilot. The co-pilot looked ahead and screamed.
"We're not going to lose him! He's coming to us!"
The crew of the sonic transmitter looked at the approaching monster and joined the co-pilot in his terror.
"Get us out of here!" one of them commanded the pilot. The pilot shook his head.
"No time."
"What do we do?" demanded a hysterical soldier. The pilot stared into the gaping maw of Godzilla as a glowing point of light grew in the back of the monster's throat.
"We die."
*****
I hugged the dumpster's trash-stained side, trying to become one with the metal. All about me I could hear the sounds of my pursuers. The entire cult was scouring the waterfront searching for me. No, more than the cult. Inhuman shapes had joined them, horrors from the sea. I watched the shadowy shapes of my hunters as they passed my hiding place in the darkness and cringed every time one of them hopped instead of running. The stench of fish filled my lungs even as the croaking voices of the cultists' allies filled my ears with the blasphemy of inhuman words from inhuman tongues.
I stole from the dumpster, making my way down a muddy alley from which a party of my hunters had already emerged. I hoped that my pursuers would not check areas that they had already searched, that by going where they had already been I could make my way to a nearby station house and escape. As I fled into the darkness, my eyes fell upon the mud and the tracks of my foes. I stared in horror at the single perfect print that found my gaze, the footprint of a mammoth frog.
My sudden horror nearly proved my undoing and it was only with seconds to spare that I came to my senses and ducked into the alley. Returning up the street, near enough that I could smell their torches over the icthyithic stench, was a group of cultists. I forced myself to look away as they passed lest I spy one of their inhuman allies and be overcome by fear. They passed without investigating my alley and I beat a hasty retreat out the alley's opposite end.
By degrees, creeping from darkened doorways and shadowy alleys, I made my way to a deserted fish market. A wide street lay before me, lit by the flickering neon of a bar sign. Music and laughter came from the building and I nearly laughed myself at the prospect of salvation among my fellow men.
Behind me came a bestial, gurgling snarl. Spinning about like a beast myself, I found the dwarfish form of the Goblin loping towards me with short hops punctuated by awkward and infrequent steps. His fishlike face glared at me, its green scales shining in the neon light. Its hands were uncovered now and I found them to be broad and fat with prodigious webbing between the fingers and in one was clutched either the Goblin's previous weapon or else its mate. The Goblin grinned a shark's smile at me, revealing rows of triangular teeth within its immense mouth. Fear seized me and I fled from the demonic apparition, a scream rising from my lips, unmindful of the other hunters my fright might draw to the chase.
I ran down alleyways, across streets and bridges, praying that I might escape this nighted, silent, sleeping labyrinth to enter the wholesome din and clatter of the living Tokyo. But the only sound that found my ears was the horrible plopping sound of the Goblin's feet as it hopped after me. At last, as my breath came hot and my lungs were infernos, I made a wrong turn and found myself in a blind alley. I heard the Goblin laugh as it beheld my situation.
Turning, I prepared to inflict as much damage upon my foe as I might when new sounds filled the night air. Shouts, gunshots and sirens! Somehow, in some way, as the American cinema would have it, the cavalry had arrived.
I saw the thought of flight enter the Goblin's batrachian eyes and saw that thought quickly pass. Nothing mattered to Natanaka's shadow now except the kill. The monster lunged at me, its knife biting into my leg. I stumbled backwards and struck the wall of the alley. I shook my head to fend off the darkness that threatened to overtake me, though even conscious I could not fend off the Goblin's next attack.
The Goblin grinned once more and seemed to coil its body like a lion preparing to pounce. As the batrachian dwarf launched itself at me, I managed to dodge to the side. The Goblin struck the wall with a sickening impact. As I sank to the litter-strewn mud at the creature's side, exhausted from my flight, I could see that the Goblin was dead, its gilled neck broken by its impact with the brick wall.
*****
I was soon found by a group of police officers, their first intention being to arrest me. I swiftly identified myself, however, and this changed their tone. They had been told to look for me. Several of the residents of the district had taken alarm at the large numbers of men racing through the streets in the dead of night and shouting in a strange language. One woman even said that she thought the Red Chinese had landed. But headquarters knew it had to be the Watchers on the Shore and that meant I was in trouble, so they dispatched every available man to the district. They were raiding the temple even as we were speaking.
Despite my wounds, I demanded to be taken to the temple and none of the officers dared to refuse me in this. Soon, I stood before Chief Inspector Minzo, my superior, in front of the temple of the cult. He was supervising the loading of several hundred prisoners into a number of police buses. Scores of wounded cultists were moaning in pain where they lay in the street. Dozens more were covered by tarps. Behind us, firefighters tried to douse the flames that threatened to engulf the temple. It looked like a war zone.
"Natanaka?" I asked as I saluted my superior. Minzo shook his head.
"Got away," he declared in anger.
"What about a Miss Kumi Odaka?" Inspector Minzo looked at me, puzzled. I was about to explain the question when I saw three bodies being removed from the temple. I knew each face. Take Hidemasa, Kenji Odaka, and, her face frozen in agony, Kumi Odaka, her throat slit ear to ear.
VI
We learned from eyewitnesses that Natanaka and a handful of his cultists had escaped out to sea. Though it was difficult to believe, their escape had been facilitated by means of a hydrofoil, the ship having been secreted in a hidden dock beneath the waterfront temple. Inspector Minzo immediately ordered the harbor patrol to intercept Natanaka's vessel while a police launch was dispatched to pick him and his men up. Again, no one dared to refuse my demands to pursue Natanaka.
The chill sea breeze was a contrast to the flames of rage that burned inside me. Natanaka had murdered Kumi Odaka, the girl I loved, and I would not rest until I knew that his withered heart beat no more.
I was mad with the lust for revenge. I hurled curses upon the crew of the launch for not spurring the boat to greater speeds. I spat anethemas upon the dark waters which I fancied clutched at our ship to slow it, as though the very sea were conspiring with Natanaka. I checked the revolver Minzo had handed me, counting the bullets and snapping the cylinder back in place only to open it again and recount the bullets. That each would find a home in Natanaka's skeletal frame was a vow I repeated over and over to myself.
Up ahead there were lights upon the dark waters. I could see the harbor patrol boats. They had blocked Natanaka's hydrofoil, kept it from reaching the open sea. I wept tears of joy as the launches slowly advanced upon the high priest's ship.
But the fiend still had cards he had not played. I could see Natanaka standing upon the deck of his ship, his green robes whipping about him in a breeze that had become a wind. In his clawlike hands was an orb of jet black, a tarlike substance which writhed in his hands with a life of its own and borne upon us by the sea wind was the wizard's incantation, his appeal to unwholesome forces of prehistoric aeons:
"Ia, ia, Cthulhu nafl'fhtgn! Nafl'fhtgn mg R'lyeh! Ia, ia, Cthulhu fhtgn! Shoggoth mgllfwig!"
Then the wind died and there was perfect silence, a spine-chilling, mind-numbing silence of expectancy - the quiet before the storm.
The waters did not boil or churn, they simply slipped away as the thing broke the surface. God! To think such a thing lie unknown and unguessed in the very shadow of Tokyo, sleeping in waters where the very fish we ate were caught!
It was enormous! A great black expanse of formlessness struggling to take shape, a jet black usurper of the very waters about the ships of Natanaka and the harbor patrol. The ship lights lent illumination to the horror which the sorcerer had summoned and upon its black surface I saw eyes and mouths of all sizes opening and closing, their movements altering their very shapes. I watched as the black horror grew hands and claws and tentacles of darkness only to absorb them back into its chaotic substance! It was a protean nightmare, a blob of madness as large as several city blocks! But worst of all, from its ever-changing legion of mouths came a hideous, liquid, sloshing choir which repeated the guttural incantation of Akira Natanaka!
I have since learned that the monster was a shoggoth, a horror so foul that even the accursed author of the thrice-damned Necronomicon, the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, desperately insisted that their kind had been exterminated from the Earth. They had been created in Earth's prehistory by the alien Elder Things as a race of slaves. But their creations evolved past their expectations and the shoggoths destroyed their masters' empire when they sloughed the chains of servitude. Now, one of these things had answered the Unclosing Eye's call.
The shoggoth attacked the launches in silence, only the screams of its victims scarred the night air. Some boats it sucked into itself, as though a great hand had grabbed the ship from below and pulled it beneath the black surface. Others it surrounded with great waves of its substance only to bring all the waves crashing inward at the last instant, obliterating the trapped ship. Still others it pulled apart with tentacles of blackness laden with eyes and mouths, dragging screaming men into its black mass. One boat it devoured with a titanic mouth that was many yards across. But Natanaka's hydrofoil it bore across its seething form to lie unharmed upon the waters beyond the perishing police ships. As the last of the launches was absorbed into the shoggoth's squamous body, Natanaka's ship sped into the limitless horizon of the Pacific. I was still watching his retreating ship when a frenzied voice screamed in my ear. I still don't know who said it, perhaps I did, but the observation had been made - the shoggoth was coming for us!
Suddenly our launch was swamped by a tremendous wave as a gargantuan form emerged from the deep waters off our starboard. Our cheers were drowned out by the monster's mighty roar as the reptilian titan glared in disapproval at the shoggoth, even as the horror slithered across the waves. We cheered as Godzilla swam forwards to engage the formless abomination of prehistoric blasphemy. Before the alien horror of the shoggoth, Godzilla was the lesser of evils and we prayed for his victory.
That is, those whom sight of the shoggoth had left sane.