cepuenegn nnn Eger.
CLIENT: Professor Lake
NATIONALITY: American
LOCATION: Antarctica, west of the Transantarctic Mountains
DESCRIPTION: A prehistoric man-eating beast, no clear description
INFO: Client wants us to hunt down the man-eater that killed him and other eleven American scientists of the Dyer expedition.
For being a biologist the Professor really sucks at describing a fucking animal. He just keeps saying it's a radial being with a star-shaped head, tentacles and five wings- a whole bunch of nonsense.
Loona must borrow the grimoire from Stolas- just in case the monster turns out to be supernatural and we have to blast it with some magic.
Also, the client says his team had found fourteen bodies of those beasts in a freezing cave full of fossils and then took them out of said cave in the Antarctic sun in the middle of summer. Personally, I'd tell him and his entire crew to go fuck themselves, I mean who's so stupid they travel all the way to Antarctica only to free a prehistoric monster from the fucking ice? But the client is paying, so... why are you still typing? Are you writing this all down? Moxx, I swear to fucking Satan you are beyond stupi
76° 15' S, 113° 10' E, January 25, 1924
The three imps fell through the pink, crystalline portal and tumbled goofily in the snow, while Loona landed gracefully on her feet.
They were fully dressed in heavy fur suits with the I.M.P. logo on them- and still they were shivering in the middle of the day, under the midnight sun. Loona, on the other hand, was doing fine with her natural fur.
As they walked toward the destroyed campbase, a sudden freezing wind rose from beyond the foothills, from the forbidding chain of snowless black stone peaks ahead of them...
Loona instantly fell to her knees, her hands on her mouth like she was about to throw up...
"FUCK..."
"Loonie! What's going on!?"
"That stench..."
...
By the 1920's, Antarctica was one of the last unexplored regions of the Earth in which large stretches of territory had never seen the tread of human feet.
The discovery of Hitleropolis by an Austrian expedition in 1921 had started a new era in the history of polar explorations, less than a decade after Amundsen's historic journey to the South Pole. It was the time when airplanes and radio technology were first used in the Antarctic, when archeologists and geologists first found solid evidence of the continent's tropical past...
In the early hours of January 24, 1924, the main campbase of the Dyer expedition located at the McMurdo Sound lost all radio contact with Professor Lake and his team. The rescue mission was delayed by a serious snowstorm- the flight would have been dangerous even with favourable weather...
...therefore I.M.P. was the first team to arrive on the scene of one of the worst tragedies in the annals of Antarctic exploration...
...
...It is a fact that the wind had brought dreadful havoc. Whether all could have lived throgh it, even without the other thing, is gravely open to doubt.
The storm, with its fury of madly driven ice-particles, must have been beyond anything our expedition had encountered before. One aeroplane shelter... was nearly pulverized; and the derrick at the distant boring was entirely shaken to pieces. The exposed metal of the grounded planes and drilling machinery was bruised into a high polish, and two of the small tents were flattened despite their snow banking. Wooden surfaces left out in the blast were pitted and denuded of paint, and all signs of tracks in the snow were completely obliterated...
...None of the dogs survived, their hurriedly built snow enclosure near the camp being almost wholly destroyed...
...All three sledges were gone, and we have tried to explain that the wind may have blown them off into the unknown...
...
"Oh, crumbs, that can't be good."
Then they spotted the dead bodies- scattered all over the camp...
Millie started examining a mangled, frozen carcass...
"These guys were torn to shreds. I've seen Wrath b-b-beasts less brutal than this..."
"Where are the b-bite marks?" asked Moxxie.
"There... there aren't any!"
Blitz entered the tent where Professor Lake had started dissecting the prehistoric specimens...
"Christ on a stick..."
...
...The crowning abnormality, of course, was the condition of the bodies- men and dogs alike. They had all been in some terrible kind of conflict, and they were torn and mangled in fiendish and altogether inexplicable ways. Death, so far as we could judge, had in each case come from strangulation or laceration...
...some were incised and subtracted from in the most curious, cold-blooded and inhuman fashion. It was the same with dogs and men. All the healthier, fatter bodies, quadrupedal or bipedal, had had their most solid masses of tissue cut out and removed, as by a careful butcher; and around them was a strange sprinkling of salt- taken from the ravaged provision-chests on the planes- which conjured up the most horrible associations...
...the fairly unharmed dissecting tent... was not as Lake had left it, for the covered parts of the primal monstrosity had been removed from the improvised table... On and around the laboratory table were strown other things, and it did not take long for us to guess that those things were the carefully though oddly and inexpertly dissected parts of one man and one dog... Lake's anatomical instruments were missing, but there were evidences of their careful cleansing...
...
The dogs at Lake's camp, thirty-seven Alaskan sledge dogs, were all dead.
Loona took the severed, ghastly contorted head of one of the dogs in her shaking hands...
She was crying... And she was mad, she felt angrier than she had ever been in her life...
She howled. One, long howl of anguish, reverberating for miles on the barren snowless gorges and black peaks of the Mountains of Madness...
...
Loona started walking away, toward the mountains.
"LOONA! Where do you think you are going!?"
"To KILL THEM! I can smell them from here- I'm following them to the South Pole if I have to!"
"Loona, stop! We don't know what we're up against, not yet! We need a plan!"
"BLITZ, LOONA!" Moxxie called...
"COME OVER- QUICK- WE FOUND SOMETHING!"
...
Outside the camp, someone had built a snow mound in the shape of a five-pointed star. Each of the five parts of the structure had been carefully punched over with dots in a geometric pattern...
"What in the..."
Millie had found some shovels in the ruined camp, and was already digging...
They uncovered six graves in the snow (upright graves- like someone was trying to bury a plant), each nine feet deep. The foul stench Loona alone could smell was getting unbearable...
Then they pulled something out of the snow...
"Oh, crumbs!"
"Dear Satan..."
"Christ on a stick!"
The middle part of the radial monstrosity was already damaged before its burial. The body was like a segmented, five-ridged barrel that was largest in the middle (over three feet) and grew smaller near the ends. Seen from the top, the whole blasphemous structure had roughly the shape of a starfish, its five-pointed head having five bulbous eyes and a sort of mouth in the middle. In the equatorial section there were ten appendices, five membranous wings and five systems of tentacles, with five tentacles each. At the bottom, an array of muscular limbs terminated in five triangular pseudopods.
With its massive wings, the whole thing would have had a span of about six meters...
"Okay, I'm a fucking demon from Hell and I say this thing doesn't belong on this fucking planet!"
"It doesn't belong in this time, Sir..." Moxxie elaborated, "...these monsters must have been frozen in that cave for a very long time, perhaps millions of years! But this one was too damaged to make it..."
"There are only six here..." Millie said.
"What?"
"The Professor said six of the beasties were damaged, and eight were in pristine conditions..."
"Oh, for fuck's sake! There are eight of these fuckers running around!? This is a much bigger job that I thought..."
"At least they cannot hide from us, Blitz!" Millie said, "The client also said that the dogs were like crazy just being near these things. Loona, you can smell them even better than they could..."
"They went that way. Look," Loona said, pointing to a glacier amidst the black mountain peaks, "there's a mountain pass right over there. There's nothing on the mountains, so they must be headed to the other side."
"Are you suggesting we venture into uncharted territory across the highest, coldest mountains on the planet to find a place that may or may not be home to monsters from the dawn of time!?"
"Yes."
...
...As we drew near the forbidding peaks, dark and sinister above the line of crevasse-riven snow and interstitial glaciers, we noticed... curiously regular formations clinging to the slopes...
...it was the mountainside tangle of regular cubes, ramparts and cave-mouths which fascinated and disturbed us most... their edges were crumbled and rounded from untold aeons of savage weathering; but their preternatural solidity and tough material had saved them from obliteration. Many parts, especially those closest to the slopes, seemed identical in substance to the surrounding rock surface. The whole arrangement looked like the ruins of Machu Picchu in the Andes...
...The pass loomed directly before us, smooth and windswept between its jagged and malignly frowning pylons. Beyond it was a sky fretted with swirling vapours and lighted by the low polar sun- the sky of that mysterious farther realm upon which we felt no human eye had ever gazed...
And then, having gained those last few feet, we did indeed stare across the momentous divide and over the unsampled secret of an elder and utterly alien earth.
...
The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable, for some fiendish violation of known natural law seemed certain at the outset. Here, on a hellishly ancient table-land... in a climate deadly to habitation since a pre-human age not less than 500.000 years ago, there stretched nearly to the vision's limit a tangle of orderly stone which only the desperation of mental self-defence could possibly attribute to any but a conscious and artificial cause.
...Only the incredible, unhuman massiveness of these vast stone towers and ramparts had saved the frightful thing from utter annihilation in the hundreds of thousands- perhaps millions- of years it had brooded there amidst the blasts of a bleak upland...
...Walking cautiously downhill over the crusted snow toward the stupendous stone labyrinth that loomed against the opalescent west, we felt almost as keen a sense of imminent marvels as we had felt on approaching the unfathomed mountain pass... It took only a few steps to bring us to a shapeless ruin worn level with the snow, while ten or fifteen rods farther on there was a huge roofless rampart still complete in its gigantic five-pointed outline and rising to an irregular height of ten or eleven feet...
...The half-mile walk downhill to the actual city, with the upper wind shrieking vainly and savagely through the skyward peaks... was something whose smallest details will always remain engraved in my mind... Between us and the churning vapours of the west lay that monstrous tangle of dark stone towers; its outrè and incredible forms impressing us afresh at every new angle of vision...
...When at last we plunged into the labyrinthine town itself, clambering over fallen masonry and shrinking from the oppressive nearness and dwarfing height of omnipresent crumbling and pitted walls, our sensations again became such that I marvel at the amount of self-control we retained...
...The building which we had entered was one of great size and elaborateness, and gave us an impressive notion of the architecture of that nameless geologic past. The inner partitions were less massive than the outer walls, but on the lower levels were excellently preserved...
...The rooms... were wholly bare of all portable contents, a circumstance which sustained our belief in the city's deliberate desertion. The prime decorative feature was the almost universal system of mural sculpture; which tended to run in continuous horizontal bands three feet wide and arranged from floor to ceiling in alternation with bands of equal width given over to geometrical arabesques... The technique... was mature, accomplished, and aesthetically evolved to the highest degree of civilized mastery; though utterly alien in every detail to any known art tradition of the human race. In delicacy of execution no sculpture I have ever seen could approach it. The minutest details of elaborate vegetation, or of animal life, were rendered with astonishing vividness despite the bold scale of the carvings; whilst the conventional designs were marvels of skillful intricacy...
...
"Are you sure they went this way, Loona?" asked Blitz, "It's a fucking maze down here..."
"I am sure. There's some fresh air coming that way- it must be an exit..."
"But why would anyone come down here?" Moxxie wondered.
"Maybe to see the carvings?" Millie suggested.
"The carvings..." Moxxie pointed his torch at the sculptures, looking closely...
"Millie, you're a genius! Look!"
Everyone gathered near Moxxie, who was pointing at a vast array of buildings, a primeval cityscape preserved in stone...
"We have seen these towers! And this five-pointed plaza- this is how the city must have looked like when it was inhabited!"
"You mean they carved a record of their history?" asked Loona.
"Exactly! Look- these animals have been extinct on Earth for millions of years," he said, pointing to an engraving of a large winged reptile, like the one Blitz had fed Robo-Fizz to, "and I've never seen plants like these either..."
"Christ on a stick, you're onto something, Moxx! If only we could understand any of this ancient tom-fuckery we would know what we're dealing with..."
"Hold that thought." said Loona.
She took the grimoire from her bag and started searching for a spell...
"Here it is..."
As Loona recited the Solomonic incantation, the mysterious cartouches with their patterned groups of dots were like reshaped, transfigured into iridescent demonic glyphs of purple, ethereal magic...
"We should be able to read some of their inscriptions now..."
...
...the sculptures told of the coming of those star-headed things to the nascent, lifeless earth out of cosmic space- their coming, and the coming of many other alien entities such as at certain times embark upon spatial pioneering...
...They had lived under the sea a good deal, building fantastic cities and fighting terrific battles with nameless adversaries by means of intricate devices employing unknown principles of energy. Evidently their scientific and mechanical knowledge far surpassed man's today...
...It was under the sea, at first for food and later for other purposes, that they first created earth-life... having manufactured not only necessary foods, but certain multicellular protoplasmic masses capable of moulding their tissues into all sorts of temporary organs under hypnotic influence and thereby forming ideal slaves to perform the heavy work of the community. These viscous masses were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred whispered about as the "shoggoths" in his frightful Necronomicon...
...With the aid of the shoggoths, whose expansions could be made to lift prodigious weights, the small, low cities under the sea grew to vast and imposing labyrinths of stone not unlike those which later rose on land...
...Though able, like vegetables, to derive nourishment from inorganic substances, they vastly preferred organic and especially animal food. They ate uncooked marine life under the sea, but cooked their viands on land. They hunted game and raised meat herds... They resisted all ordinary temperatures marvellously; and in their natural state could live in water down to freezing...
...in land, air and water movement alike the Old Ones seemed to possess excessively vast capacities for speed. Loads, however, were drawn by beasts of burden- shoggoths under the sea, and a curious variety of primitive vertebrates in the later years of land existence.
These vertebrates, as well as an infinity of other life-forms... were the products of unguided evolution acting on life-cells made by the Old Ones but escaping beyond their radius of attention. They had been suffered to develop unchecked because they had not come in conflict with the dominant beings. Bothersome forms, of course, were mechanically exterminated. It interested us to see in some of the very last and most decadent sculptures a shambling primitive mammal, used sometimes for food and sometimes as an amusing buffoon by the land-dwellers, whose vaguely simian and human foreshadowings were unmistakable.
In the building of land cities the huge stone blocks of the high towers were generally lifted by vast-winged pterodactyls of a species heretofore unknown to palaeontology...
...Their original place of advent to the planet was the Antarctic Ocean... Some of the marine cities were hopelessly shattered, yet that was not the worst misfortune. Another race- a land race of beings shaped like octopi... the fabulous pre-human spawn of Cthulhu- soon began filtering down from cosmic infinity and precipitated a monstrous war which for a time drove the Old Ones wholly back to the sea- a colossal blow in view of the increasing land settlements (Late Devonian). Later peace was made, and the new lands were given to the Cthulhu spawn whilst the Old Ones held the sea and older lands...
The steady trend down the ages was from water to land... the great reptiles proved highly tractable, but the shoggoths of the sea, reproducing by fission and acquiring a dangerous degree of accidental intelligence, presented for a time a formidable problem.
They had always been controlled by the hypnotic suggestion of the Old Ones... but now their self-modelling powers were sometimes exercised independently... The had developed... a semi-stable brain whose separate and occasionally stubborn volition echoed the will of the Old Ones without always obeying it...
...They seem to have become peculiarly intractable... (at the end of the Permian) ...when a veritable war of re-subjugation was waged upon them... Pictures of this war, and of the headless, slime-coated fashion in which the shoggoths typically left their slain victims, held a marvellously fearsome quality despite the intervening abyss of untold ages. The Old Ones had used curious weapons of molecular disturbance against the rebel entities...
...(at the end of the Triassic) the Old Ones met fresh adversity in the form of a new invasion from outer space- this time by half-fungous, half-crustacean creatures... In the end the Mi-Go drove the Old Ones out of all the northern lands... Little by little the slow retreat of the elder race to their original antarctic habitat was beginning...
...
The decadent carvings of the final sequence ended abruptly with one last, cataclysmic scene...
The stone megalopolis was already, for the most part, deserted; it was built on a great river that had long since changed course and now, instead of flowing northward to a tropical ocean, reverberated through dark caves beneath the mountains, down to a sunless sea...
Vast tunnels had been built, connecting the surface city to a new metropolis built at the bottom of the underground abyss, where the frigid stygian waters might have been uninhabitable even for the Elder Things were it not for the heat rising from much deeper within the earth...
Long before the encroaching Ice Age ended all life in Antarctica, the decadent Elder Things were driven further and further back during many Aeons of grueling wars with the other monstrous races of the Great Old Ones, all vying for control of the planet: the armies of Cthulhu, the Mi-Go, the rebellious shoggoths...
When a new race of invaders descended from the stars, they found the Great Old Ones divided and weakened...
Earth was theirs for the taking.
...
The final mural depicted an aerial assault on the city; its last defenders, armed with ancient energy-weapons, fought an army of many-winged monsters clad in glittering silver and golden armors...
"ANGELS!"
"Those motherfuckers!"
"It all makes sense now!" Loona exclaimed, "According to the grimoire, the Angels came to Earth from distant stars..."
"Look!" Millie said, pointing to a map of the city's ruins, "These two must be the entrances of the tunnels, the places they were defending from the Angels! And they're not far from here..."
"BINGO! That's where our targets are going!"
...
As they arrived at the base of an immense ruined pyramid, they found the three sledges that were missing from Lake's camp. They were carefully packed and strapped, containing all sorts of objects the Elder Things had taken from Lake's equipment... Except on one sledge were the wrapped, frozen and perfectly preserved bodies of a human and a dog.
Carefully collected, intact specimens...
Loona rushed onto the stone ramp going downward to the abyss- only to stop immediately.
"Shit..."
Frozen, skeletal carcasses of warrior Angels were strewn all around. Their otherworldly shapes- horrendously mangled and mutilated- had been unnaturally preserved for untold millennia by the bitter cold and rarefied mountain air of this remote world of death. Their armors and swords were still glittering, covered in ice crystals...
"That can't be good..."
Suddenly, a sound came from somewhere deeper down the ramp in the utterly still, dead city. It was not the fabulous note af any buried blasphemy of primeval Earth, but a mockingly normal noise...
...the raucous squawking of a bird.
They kept going, undeterred, until a bulky white shape stepped into the light of the torches-
"GIANT MURDER PENGUINS! RUN!"
"WHAT?!"
"DAD! Where did you take that riddiculous notion!?"
"They are not giant murder penguins, Sir! They are regular giant penguins."
"And they're blind..." added Millie.
The raucous things were six feet high, much bigger than the largest known penguins. Their bodies were pearly white and their eyes utterly atrophied- fully adapted to life in complete darkness. They did not seem alarmed- not even by Loona's scent- because they had never met any predators, canine or otherwise, on dry land.
From this point onward, one only had to follow the penguin tracks to find the way to the abyss...
...
...Entering the tunnel, we saw that its outline was- at least at the start- about fifteen feet each way; sides, floor and arched roof composed of the usual megalithic masonry. The sides were sparsely decorated with cartouches of conventional design in the late, decadent style; and all the construction and carving were marvellously well preserved. The floor was quite clear, except for a slight detritus bearing outgoing penguin tracks... The farther one advanced, the warmer it became...
...Then, quite unexpectedly, we saw certain obstructions on the polished floor ahead...
...
The eight Elder Things were there. Their bodies were mauled, compressed, twisted. Dead.
They were covered in a foul dark-green ichor- and their heads, which were nowhere to be seen, had been tore off their radial necks with tremendous force...
For a moment, everyone just stood there, petrified...
Was it terror at the realization that some unfathomed horror had just transpired- things no mortal or demonic eye was meant to see? Or blasphemous curiosity, the unconfessed desire to know what hitherto unseen monstrosities lurked near the center of the Earth? Or disappointment, since it appeared they had travelled all this way for nothing? Maybe it was all of that, and more...
Loona just looked at the Things. She had wanted them dead with every fiber of her being and now that they were gone...
She thought of the history they had recorded in stone during untold ages of this world, their lost Genesis... and how she felt differently about them now, just by having beheld scattered fragments of their side of the story...
Their own history showed them in their callousness and cruelty, as the doomed creators of a race of monsters that would toil for them as slaves...
...but so vast and so wondrous was their history that something beautiful could still shine through after so many millions of years...
For a time, in the warm days of the Jurassic and the Cretaceous and even later, their Antarctic empire had been a veritable dinotopia; where creatures born of distant worlds, Elder Things and Dinosaurs, lived in harmony...
...
At the first they heard the sound of the approaching thing. An insidious musical piping over a singularly wide range...
Then they saw it.
"RUN!"
...
...a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor...
...
"We need the portal, NOW!"
"It's not working- we must get closer to the surface!"
They glimpsed the dim light of the outside world ahead. They could not have foreseen how happy they were of feeling the hellish Antarctic cold now...
Blitz was opening the portal. "Almost there..."
"MILLIE!"
Moxxie was dragged back and fell forward. He instinctly grabbed the nearest thing- Millie's leg- while a long slimy tentacle was wrapped around his own leg and pulling with unnatural strength...
"MOXX!"
With one immense downward swing, Millie's gigantic battle-axe crashed into the stone floor and sunk with a mighty THUK.
The approaching monstrosity kept pulling both of them, pulling stronger...
Blitz was screaming, his guns blazing...
"EAT SHIT, MOTHERFUCKER!"
The bullets plopped harmlessly into the protoplasmic mass.
"FUCK!"
Suddenly, the thing was engulfed in a faint, purple luminescence and started writhing in pain, its countless bubbling eyes bulging with agony, its piping sound distorted into an unholy screech...
Blitz turned around to see...
Loona.
Grimoire in hand, she was reciting a spell and drawing magic circles in the air...
She glared at the monster, her eyes shining, pulsing with purple magic...
"IN THE NAME OF CTHULHU I COMMAND THEE, SHOGGOTH!"
The fiend kept writhing and screeching, resisting the spell...
Blitz saw the frozen corpse of one of the warrior Angels from earlier. He took the Angel's mighty sword in his hand...
...and the ancient blade instantly fell to pieces.
"SHIT!"
Now he had only a broken sword with ultra-sharp edges of Angelic Steel...
He started cutting the viscous tentacle with frantic, rapid slashes...
The sheer might of Loona's spell was rapidly draining her energy and causing the whole ruined pyramid to tremble! Suddenlly, a distant booming sound was heard from outside, growing ever closer...
"DONE!"
The tentacle wasn't cut a moment too soon.
Loona was about to faint, the spell vanished, stone blocks were falling from the cracked ceiling...
Blitz and Millie carried Loona and Moxxie through the pink, crystalline portal- with an enraged shoggoth on their heels!
A deafening CRACK-
The massive avalanche had hit the temple!
The stone ceiling came crashing down.
As the portal closed, the last thing anyone glimpsed through it was the age-old corridor collapsing- imprisoning forever the daemoniac shoggoth, the vilest creature ever to tread the Earth.
...
Back to the safety of the I.M.P. office, an exhausted Loona immediatly collapsed to the floor. Moxxie was screaming, like a raging madman...
"WE MUST TAKE THEM TO SLOTH, NOW!"
As Blitz quickly opened another portal- hoping it would lead straight to the hospital- Moxxie curled up in a corner, shaking, eyes widened in unblinking terror...
He had seen something in the shoggoth's myriads of eyes...
...he kept repeating a single mad word from forgotten pre-human Aeons- a word that the living monstrosity, perhaps in blasphemous imitation of its bygone masters, had once been piping in the waters of the dark abyss beneath the roof of the world:
TEKELI-LI! TEKELI-LI!