Weird Tales #360. Рэй Брэдбери

      “Yes, you did,” I replied, kneeling beside him and, before he could stop me, flipping open the lid of one of the suitcases. “But as you can see, I knew I really didn’t have to leave.”

      His jaw fell; his mouth opened wide; he gurgled for several long seconds, and finally said: “Empty!”

      “All of them,” I nodded. “Even or especially the cylinder—the bomb.”

      But even then the truth hadn’t full sunk in, and he said: “I don’t understand. No one—nothing, not a single damned thing—ever saw me here. Not once!”

      “Not here, no,” I replied with a shake of my head. “But you were seen leaving—just the once, by Deep Ones at Green Park—the last time you made a delivery. You were correct about their telepathy, Henry. Despite the confusion, the fear in your mind, they saw something of what you’d been up to, and Bgg’ha ordered a search made; otherwise no one or nothing might ever have come in here. Anyway, having discovered your secret, Bgg’ha wanted to know more about you … which is why I was send out to look for you. Or to hunt for you, if you prefer.”

      Hearing that and finally, fully aware of the situation, the old man snapped upright. His eyes, however bloodshot, were narrowed now; the dazed expression was gone from his face; his gun was suddenly firm in his hand, its blued-steel muzzle rammed up hard under my chin. I thought he might shoot me there and then, and I wished that I’d called for them sooner.

      “God damn!” Henry said. “But I should pay more attention to my instincts … I knew there was something wrong with you! But I won’t kill you here; I’ll kill you out there in the open—or what used to be the open—so that when you’re found with your face shot off, they’ll know there are still men in the world who aren’t afraid to fight! Now get moving, you treacherous bastard! Let’s get out of here.”

      But as we moved from the drift and slide of the continually mutating wall to the even greater visual nightmare of the twisted tower’s leg’s interior, and when I was beginning to believe I could actually feel the old fellow’s finger tightening on the trigger, then I cried out: “Henry, listen! Do you really intend to waste a bullet on me? I mean, look at what’s coming, Henry … !”

      They were shoggoths, two of them, under the direction of a solitary Deep One. They came into view apparently from nowhere, simply appearing from the suck and the trust to glide towards us. Or at least the shoggoths approached us, while the Deep One held back and kept his watery great eyes on his charges, making sure they carried out their instruction—whatever those might be—to the letter. And, of course, I knew exactly what they had been ordered to do.

      Suddenly gibbering, Henry released me and turned his automatic on the twin pillars of blackly-tossing, undulating filth, slime and alien jelly as each advancing creature formed a half-dozen huge, slithering, soulless and half-vacant eyes in addition to the many it already had, and flowed upon him from both sides. He fired: once, twice, three times … until his hammer clicked metallically on a dead round, and hollowly on an empty chamber; then cursed and hurled the useless automatic directly into the tarry protoplasm of one of the awesome ten-foot monsters. And finally, as if he noticed for the first time just how close the shoggoths were, he turned and made to run or stagger away from … but too late!

      Moving with scarcely believable speed, they were upon him; they towered over him to left and right, putting out ropy pseudopods to trap Henry’s spindly arms. And closing in on his desperately thin vibrating body, slowly but surely they melted him into themselves, burning him as fuel for the biological engines which they were.

      Then, as his agonized shrieking tapered and died along with Henry himself, and as the smoke and gushing steam of his catabolism went spiraling up from the feeding creatures, the loathsome foetor of Henry Chattaway’s demise was almost as sickening as the live smell of his executioners; but in combination, overwhelming the already rancid air to burn like acid in my nostrils, even though I had moved well away, the two taints together were far more than twice as nauseating. And I was glad that it was finally over, for my sake if not for the old man’s …

      In backing away from all this, I had come up against a different kind of body with a smell I could at least tolerate; indeed I even appreciated it. The shoggoth-herder looked at me rather curiously for a moment, his almost chinless face turned a little on one side. But then as he sniffed at me and finally recognized my Innsmouth heritage, my ancestry, he further acknowledged my role in these matters by turning away from me and once more taking command of the shoggoths.

      Left to my own devices, I shrugged off a regretful, perhaps vaguely guilty feeling and set about climbing the stairway with the tall landing-wide treads. This was hard work, indeed, for I was already weary from my journey through the Underground with old man Chattaway and his suitcase full of useless batteries.

      But up there, high overhead, I knew the ovens would also be hard at work. And long or short pig … what difference did it make if I was hungry? Didn’t men eat fish, and in France frogs, too? But I suppose that’s the trouble with changelings like me, changelings who—waiting for their change, when at last they, too, can go to the water—hunt human: sooner or later we’ll begin to sympathize, even empathize with the hunted.

      However, and despite the greater effort, I soon began to climb faster. For also up there were the cages and other habitats … and at least one beautiful girl in her middle teens; a girl called Dawn, who had never known a man; or not until comparatively recently, anyway. A shame that there were others like me up there, but I expected that she would still be very fresh.

      And, so that I wouldn’t fall victim to mistaken identity on the way up, I commenced chanting. “Ph’nglui gwlihu’nath, Bgg’ha Im’ykh I’ihu’ngl fhtagn… !” And surprising me even as I sang, there it was again: that oh-so-faint feeling of guilt!

      But what the hell, and I shrugged it off. For after all, it was like I’d told Henry: certain kinds of men can become accustomed—can get used—to almost anything.

      Yes, and not only men …

      IN SHADOWY INNSMOUTH

       BY DARRELL SCHWEITZER

      Old Zadok’s decidedly odd,

      with the breath and the face of a cod,

      but he’s seen such strange things

      as the midnight tide brings

      and the townspeople worship as god.