William Meikle - The Creeping Kelp

Suzie chose that moment to speak up.

“I may be able to help with that.”

The Colonel saw her and gave her a thin smile.

“Our expert, Ms Jukes, is just lately returned from London where she was briefing the Minister. Maybe she can give us a report on her meeting.”

And maybe she can’t. Noble thought, but kept his mouth shut as Suzie moved to the front beside the Colonel.

What followed was as clever a piece of misdirection as Noble had ever seen. She didn’t lie to them. Not quite. Neither did she quite tell the truth. But by the end of half an hour she had them convinced that she had a possible answer at hand, and that, if she could be given a chopper and a backup team of marines, she might be able to find and halt the source of the menace. When she finished, the room was quiet, but Noble felt like giving her a round of applause.

The Colonel looked like a man with a renewed mission.

“It’ll take a couple of hours to get a crew prepped and supplied,” he said. “Will you be in the lab?”

She nodded.

“I have one last experiment I want to perform on the sample, then we’ll be ready to go.”

One last experiment?

Noble’s heart sank.

That can’t be good news.

When they returned to the lab and she told him what she intended to do, he was even more concerned.

“But I have to,” she said. “I believe there’s some kind of psychic link between this sample and the main— brain , if that’s what we call it. If I can put it under enough stress, I may be able to piggyback on that link, to dream its dreams and trace the source back. Don’t you see? We can find out exactly where to hit it.”

Noble nodded.

“Yes. I see. What’s that?” he asked and pointed into the corner of the room. As she moved to look, he turned and focussed on the sample jar.

“You idiot,” Suzie shouted, but her voice was pulled away, as if by a strong wind. The grip in his mind took hold again . A tide took him, a swell that lifted and transported him, faster than thought.

Massive towers and turrets rose high above the sea and gargantuan black shapes rolled through cavernous streets.

The grip on his mind tightened.

He pushed back, hard, and strained to see inside the buildings. His gaze seemed to be drawn to a spot where the dark Shoggoths were at their most numerous, slithering and rolling over sheets of plastic, melting and forming it into new strange and wondrous shapes that towered high above the ocean. And there was something else, just visible beneath many layers of material, something long and red… the rusted keel of an old cargo ship.

He probed, seeking to look deeper.

Deep in the rusted keep, something stirred and Noble suddenly felt fear, a loosening of the bowels and weakening of the knees.

He pushed one last time and thought of the warmth of the lab, of Suzie’s smile.

When he opened his eyes he was looking into her concerned face. The sample in the jar smoked and bubbled and Suzie had a jug in her hand, emptying acid over the material.

“I had to destroy it,” she said softly. “It was taking you.”

At first, her voice sounded soft, as if coming from a great distance. Someone started pounding a hammer inside his skull. But slowly, the lab started to fill in around him. There was an acrid tickling at his nostrils caused by the acid eating away at the sample in the jar.

“Was it worth it?” Suzie asked.

He nodded.

“I know what we’re looking for.”

The Colonel arrived soon after.

“Your ride is waiting, folks. I hope you’re ready.”

He led them back up through the fort to the esplanade. The chopper was there already. When they got in, they were given lifejackets and headsets, the wearing of which made Noble feel like an extra from a war movie.

“The team’s carrying enough ordnance to blow away a town,” the Colonel shouted from the doorway, “And we’ve retrofitted some weed-killer backpacks with acid.” His face contorted with something that looked like rage. “Kill this bastard. Wipe it out, before it does the same to us.”

He closed the door on them and they felt the chopper buck and sway as it lifted away from the fort. Suzie wasted no time in unpacking a laptop and firing it up, searching for streaming video news. She was able to use a small set of headphones, but Noble had to rely on the pictures. No sound was needed. The pictures told the story all too well.

Carnage and panic.

Noble looked away, his attention caught by a movement across the chopper. The far side from where he and Suzie sat was occupied by a row of marines, all now engaged in checking equipment and weaponry. They looked calm, deadly, and efficient and gave Noble a feeling of reassurance that they weren’t on a wild goose chase.

The C.O. looked to be a Lieutenant he’d seen around, Mitchell, a Welshman, a man of no more than thirty, who looked too young to be commanding a dozen hardened soldiers. But it looked like the men all knew their officer and respected him, for when it was obvious he was speaking to them in their headsets, they all paid attention and there was no talking back, no shows of bravado.

Suzie nudged him in the ribs, bringing his attention back to the screen. The Minister hadn’t been able to keep a lid on the story about the kelp’s origin. Noble knew that neither he nor Suzie had spoken of it, so either it was the Minister himself or someone in his office. Either way, he’d fallen on his sword and news pictures showed him outside a huge house, looking stern and grim over the headlines that spoke of his dismissal. What Suzie wanted him to see came next. It was grainy, in black and white, but it was obvious what he was looking at.

A tall, studious looking man who could only be Professor Rankin, stood, centre-stage, and waited for the Brass to move into their place along a harbour wall before speaking. Although Noble couldn’t hear what was being said, he could see the defiance and pride in every move Rankin made.

Rankin dragged on a chain. The lid of a box that sat in the harbour started to open, slowly at first. Tentacles found the edges and tore. A chunk of metal flew like a discus, passing less than three feet over the head of the assembled dignitaries. The kelp came out of the box like a greyhound from a trap, expanding as it came into a roiling mass eight feet wide and near again as thick.

It completely ignored a net full of fish. Instead, it threw out a writhing forest of tentacles… straight towards Rankin.

The screen froze, showing a mass of tentacles seemingly suspended in the air, small moist eyes wide open along their length.

“Well, the secret’s out,” Noble said.

Suzie smiled thinly.

“A wee bit too late. Anyway, it makes no difference to our mission. All it means is they’ll have someone apart from us to blame when this is all over.”

If it’s ever going to be over .

Noble was thinking about the presence he’d felt in his mind, the thing that seemed to be inside the rotting keel of the cargo ship. It hadn’t felt like something from the Second World War. It had felt older—far older, a presence that had always been there, dreaming, waiting for the stars to turn in their course for the right time for it to rise and lay claim to its domain.

He laughed at his own bombast, then got embarrassed when he noticed several of the marines were looking at him as if he were mad.

Maybe I am.

He was remembering the Spanish Captain’s words, over four hundred years old, but more pertinent than ever.

There is no pain in the dream, no fear, no hunger, just the sweet forever of the dead god beneath. There is a spot where a dead god lies dreaming. We will find him and join him there.