William Meikle - The Creeping Kelp

Sometime later, Lieutenant Mitchell’s voice came over the intercom.

“We’re approaching the co-ordinates we were given. We need the experts up front here.”

Noble got up gingerly. He was used to walking around on boats tossing on strong seas, but just the knowledge that there were hundreds of feet of air beneath him made him more circumspect. Suzie had no such qualms and was already ahead of him and into the cramped cockpit, so he heard her reaction before he saw the sight for himself.

Bloody hell.

He heard Mitchell’s laugh.

“My thoughts, exactly.”

He saw why seconds later as he pushed past the Lieutenant and looked out the front windscreen. He knew they were out over the open ocean, a long way from the mainland, but below them was what looked, at first glance, to be a modern city of glass and plastic, tall skyscrapers rising in canyons along a grid of streets laid out in chequer board fashion. There were several blank areas, like municipal parks, dotted throughout, all a deep shade of green. as if planted with trees.

But those are no trees and that is no city I recognise.

The chopper descended slowly, the pilot taking no risks. Sleek black things shuttled to and from in the street, but this wasn’t traffic, not in any sense Noble knew it. Shoggoths, some grown to the size of trucks, went about some unknown business. The city stretched almost from horizon to horizon and must have been more than twenty miles on each side.

How in hell did they do this without anyone noticing?

He saw why when the helicopter turned and banked around one edge of a street that looked like it was under construction. The scene below was no less regimented than the marines’ preparations earlier. A line of Shoggoths carried plastic and Perspex materials across the kelp, while another group of the beasts seemed to mould and build, a small building going up even as they watched. They worked as one, as if with a single purpose.

Like an ant colony. I wonder what’ll happen if we kill the Queen?

Another thought struck him.

This is all new. It’s only taken them a matter of days, built during the growing panic on shore. What in God’s name will they be able to do if we don’t stop them?

“Over to you,” Suzie said in his ear. “Where’s this boat of yours?”

Noble looked down over the expanse of the city.

I was asking myself the same thing.

He could see no reference points he remembered from his vision and had no idea where to start. Then a thought struck him.

I’ve touched its mind once. Why not again?

He reached out with his mind and pushed .

Something below responded and once again, Noble went away, for a time.

He felt the grip in his mind, much stronger now, and was given a mental picture of the rusted keel, lying parallel to the edge of the largest of the parkland areas. At almost the same instant, the tide took him again, and he was floating, lost, in a luminescent sea, dancing to a rhythm he could feel pounding in his chest, lost with the Dreaming God.

This time he was brought out of it, not by a slap in the face, but by Lieutenant Mitchell shouting in his ear.

“For God’s sake, man, pull up!”

As Noble disengaged from the hold on his mind he felt a pang of disappointment, then a sudden burst of adrenaline and fear as he looked forward.

The chopper spun wildly. The pilot tried to right it, but he looked dazed, almost sleepy. Blood dripped from both his nostrils, but he did not have time to wipe it away, having to focus his whole attention on the bucking craft.

“Hold on to something,” the pilot said. “I’ll have to put her down and it’s not going to be pretty.”

Suzie grabbed Noble by the arm and dragged him back to his seat, where they tried frantically to buckle themselves in. The soldiers opposite didn’t look quite so sanguine about the situation now, but there was still no panic and one young marine even managed to give Noble a thumbs-up when he finally clicked the buckle in place.

And not a second too soon. The chopper bucked and spun and Noble felt like a sock in a tumble dryer.

But only for two seconds.

“We’re going in,” the pilot screamed in his ear.

There was a shattering crash and everything went away again. This time there were no dreams, no visions, just a deep, unending blackness.

He came back out of it into a chaotic world of screaming and gunfire. Someone had him by the shoulders and he was being dragged bodily across cold metal. He tried to stand.

“Stay down,” somebody shouted at him, a tone that brooked no argument.

More shots were fired, almost deafening. His back hit what felt like a lip, then he fell into open air, arms flailing.

The fall was short and his landing, surprisingly soft. He found out why when he finally got his legs under him and stood. He was on a sheet of what felt like soft plastic. In some places it was clear, with dark water visible many feet below, and in other places the plastic was punctuated with pictures, or pieces of paper, labels from whatever piece of refuse had been used in the construction. The closest piece to his feet advertised a well-known brand of lemonade. But he had little time for study. The gunfire started up again and when he turned towards it, he saw what had happened. The chopper had crashed, embedding itself partially in the plastic material of the ground . It looked like the crew were all out safely, but even now, they were being forced to back away from the crashed craft as the black forms of the kelp-covered Shoggoths tried to crawl over it, intent on assimilating whatever pieces of it they could eat.

The soldiers poured volley after volley into the vegetation, to no effect.

“Break out the acid,” Noble heard Mitchell shout.

He felt a hand on his shoulder. Suzie stood there, her face pale, which only accentuated the redness of the line of blood that ran from her hairline down the left side as far as her earlobe.

Three of the marines strapped on what looked like oxygen tanks attached to short, almost pistol-like hand-held hoses.

“Fire at will,” Mitchell shouted.

Like firemen hosing flames, the marines sent a spray of acid over the Shoggoths nearest the chopper. The result was immediate. The vegetation retreated fast, pulling away from the falling fluid, leaving bubbling and hissing fragments behind where the acid hit its target.

Noble let out a small involuntary yelp of triumph, but he had celebrated too soon. The ground buckled beneath them, like a beast in the throes of pain. The marine nearest Noble, one with an acid tank on his back, fell heavily. The plastic beneath him opened like a mouth and closed again, tight, around the soldier’s waist. The man immediately started to scream. That, too, was short lived. Blood ran from his lips. He coughed, once, and the blood became a fountain. The plastic snipped – and the marine’s upper torso fell forward, cleanly cut away from the part that was embedded in the surface underfoot.

Suzie stepped forward. At first, Noble thought she was intent on trying to help the man, but he soon saw what she meant to do.

She means to take the acid tank.

Noble moved to get there first. The ground buckled again as he tried to un-strap the tank from the dead weight of the torso. Suzie steadied him and helped him strap the tank on, the weight of it threatening to overbalance him until he found the trick of redistributing his centre of balance by leaning slightly forward.

The ground bucked again, a series of mouths appearing around them, as if something was fishing—fishing for men.