James Palmer - Shadows Through Time

He took aim and fired, hitting it near the center of its abhorrent body. When he hit it again, the Elder Thing fluttered and fell to the ground with a wet thud.

“What did you do that for?” asked Herbert.

“To prove that those things are mortal,” said the explorer. “That means we can kill them.”

“Don’t wound them too badly,” said Challenger. “I want a specimen for my museum.”

The four men tumbled into the fray, their shoggoth savior slumping just behind.

“Don’t shoot the Neanderthals,” said Burton.

“Why the hell not?” said Challenger.

“They are just as much prisoners as we were and slaves just like the shoggoths.”

The Neanderthals didn’t put up much of a fight, being more interested in running for their lives. Burton even saw signs that they had turned against their masters. Atop the ziggurat, he saw an Elder Thing dangling from a Neanderthal’s spear tip. The brute brought the spear down hard on the steps of the ziggurat as the thing tried to fly away, dashing its innards all over the green stone steps.

“Captain Nemo,” said a familiar voice, “Captain Burton. I am glad to see you.”

Elizabeth Marsh appeared from around the corner of one of the strange buildings, garbed in pith helmet, pants and boots, brandishing a rifle. Right behind her were ten men from the Nautilus , all similarly armed.

“Splendid,” said Nemo. “You arrived just in time.”

Challenger harrumphed. “You and I have very different ideas about timing.”

“What are your orders, Captain Nemo?” asked Elizabeth.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Challenger. “And take one of those dead Elder Things with us.”

“No,” said Nemo. “We still haven’t done what we came here to do, which is to learn the secret of this place.”

“You want the secret of this bollocks place?” said Challenger. “It’s bonkers!”

“The Elder Thing said something about awakening Cthulhu from his eons-long slumber,” said Burton.

Captain Nemo nodded. “They know we traveled here through Time. They think our presence here put some sort of kink in their plans.”

“They may try to make good on them, now that they are losing ground to their own slaves,” said Challenger.

“We can’t let that happen,” said Burton.

“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming,” said Herbert with a maniacal giggle.

“What’s that?” said Burton, startled at the Time Traveler’s utterance of words he thought only he knew.

“The shoggoth told me,” said Herbert. He cackled once more, and Burton could see the beginning of madness in his wide, staring blood-shot eyes. He could feel it creeping up on himself too.

“Don’t you see?” said the Time Traveler. “Ry’lyeh is the name of this place, this city. Not the landmass. The landmass became Mu. Lemuria. Atlantis. While this decrepit alien city fell into the domain of myth and nightmare. Oh, would that it had stayed there!”

“None of that helps us now,” said Captain Nemo.

“Wait,” said Challenger. “By Jove! I think I know what the half-mad little blighter is getting at. We can undo it.”

“What?” said Nemo. “That’s preposterous!”

“No,” said Challenger. “Don’t you see? Herbert here has created the ultimate weapon, his Time Machine. What gets us all, in the end? Time itself. What erases entire geologic ages from the earth’s memory? Time!”

“How can we stop an entire landmass from existing?” said Burton.

Challenger shook his head. “I don’t know, but we have to try. These creatures are highly advanced. They must have machines. Where are the machines?”

Every head turned to the shoggoth, who undulated languidly, refracting moonlight like a prism. It extruded a tentacle and pointed to the shadowy outline of a distant building.

“There,” said Herbert.

The large group took off in a mass, the marksmen ready for any creature who attempted to cross their path. As they neared the oblong structure, Burton could feel a great rhythmic rumbling through his boots, and a sense of profound cosmic dread stole over him. He tightened his sweaty grip on his pistol and made for the building’s entrance, wary of what they would find inside.

The large room they entered glowed with its own eerie inner light. Some grand machine rose up through the center of it, consisting primarily of finely milled cylinders composed of some dull white metal. They moved up and down like gigantic pistons in a steam engine, and the group could feel a profound heat coming from below.

“I think these go down deep into the earth,” said Herbert, studying the vast contraption. “Perhaps it is powered by the heat created in the furnace beneath the planet’s crust. How remarkable.”

He shivered, and Burton wondered how he managed to cope, how he was able to defeat his madness to offer glimmers of sanity and insight. The dread he knew they all felt was even stronger here. Nemo’s men looked about fearfully, eyes wide in sweat-covered faces. Glyphs on the wall outlined in the light that shone from the machine. Tentacled creatures writhed, and things not even vaguely anthropomorphic held court. Looming over them all was an impossibly tall being, its head like an octopus, a beard of feelers almost undulating. Its great arms were outstretched, and looming over the shoulders were the outlines of what appeared to be furled wings.

Somehow Burton knew that this was the feared Cthulhu, the Dreamer in R’lyeh.

This is what John Hanning Speke had never shut up about, the blot they were now trying to erase from the collective unconscious of this world.

“It’s artificial,” said Herbert with a mad giggle. “This island. They created it. It’s nothing to them. Like building a bookshelf would be for us. Or a Time Machine.” He cackled.

“Are you saying this machinery keeps the island aloft?” asked Nemo. “How do you know this?”

“The shoggoth.” The Time Traveler pointing to their amorphous companion. “It told me.” He descended into laughter. “The pile of ooze told me.”

Miss Marsh placed a steadying hand on his shoulder. “Herbert, dear, keep yourself together, please.”

The Time Traveler steeled himself. “Yes. Yes. All right.”

Burton knew it wasn’t easy to maintain one’s sanity in such a place. He was having trouble concentrating. He couldn’t even look at the glowing, slowly churning components of the machine for very long without his eyes growing cross, and the horrid glyphs etched into the green walls recalled vestiges of half-remembered nightmares. He concluded that this is what a mouse in the clock tower of Westminster must feel, a tiny, terrified mind standing in the midst of something it could never hope to comprehend, a machine created by a higher-order intellect.

Burton closed his eyes for a second and steadied his breathing, putting into practice the old Sufi meditation technique. It seemed to help, but only a little. But he noticed something when he opened his eyes again, a slime green plinth in the midst of the machine, and embossed upon its surface was a familiar object. It stood out for him in this swirling sea of alien irregularity like a blazing sun, and he moved toward it.

“Captain Burton,” said Nemo. “What are—”

Burton didn’t heed him. He went up to the plinth and studied what had caught his eye. It was the artifact Elizabeth Marsh had shown him back in the meeting place of the Royal Geographic Society scant weeks ago. Or will show them a hundred thousand years from now. Time travel plays hell with the tenses , he thought with a laugh. He touched it, tracing its lines, startled by how sharp and fresh and new it looked. The grotesque imagery was crisp and clear, the patina shiny. Burton didn’t know why, but he flipped his pistol over in his hands until the grip was facing up. Then he began hitting the artifact, striking it like a cudgel.