Ramsey Campbell - The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants

The landscape he glimpsed dimly through the transparent coils was jolting now; the colossus was moving forward, towards the hill. It reached the enormous doorway and passed within. Leakey heard a dull crash of stone, then he was jolted on through half-darkness.

The passage seemed to plunge downward for miles, but at last the creature swayed to a standstill. Leakey sank towards the ground, the prisoning coils oozed away, and hands grabbed him. He was pushed forward towards an immense archway. He glanced round frantically, but had time only to glimpse a gigantic cavern, hexagonal in shape, with droplets of moisture streaming down the walls and gleaming on carvings which stared from the shadows. And the pallid colossus was still swaying after him. Then he was hustled under the archway.

After that he stumbled down an interminable staircase, twilit from some source he could not see. The stairway did not turn from its downward path, but the twilight was too dim to show him the bottom.

'The Romans built this, you know,' said a voice at his ear in a horribly conversational tone. 'They built the lens, too, when they came here and recognised their Magna Mater… But these stairs lead much further down, perhaps to the place he came from originally—'

Leakey had an inkling what sort of place they were approaching when the light began to strengthen and they continued to walk downward though no steps were visible . Terrifying sounds rose from below — bass trumpetings and hollow ululations — but a flickering mist hid the region from above.

Then they were standing on solid ground — at least, it felt like solid ground, but to Leakey it appeared as if they were standing on empty air. The region was no longer hidden, and what he could see was not reassuring. Distances were variable, and he was never sure whether an object was large and far off, or small and close at hand. The more recognizable living bodies were dissociated alarmingly without any noticeable injury, while some others were composed of parts of varying familiarity, together with portions that did not seem to belong at all. A few feet away he noticed an isolated path of glistening metal leading to a distant flight of upward-heading stairs.

'This is where we come to gain immortality,' whispered the priest, 'and now you will become like us—'

They moved back, still encircling him. Above him he heard the monstrosity ululate, and the coils began to descend towards him.

Abruptly Leakey smashed his fist into the priest's throat and leapt for the metal path.

The unnatural properties of the place, for once, aided him. Almost at once he was standing at the foot of the steps, while behind him the pursuers were struggling dissociatedly amid a mass of strangely angled walls which had suddenly appeared. He clattered up the stairs into half-darkness, listening for sounds behind him. A few hundred stairs up, he stumbled over a line of star-shaped bas-reliefs.

A little further up, he heard something huge and ponderous squelching up the stairs after him.

He ran faster, though he was gasping for breath, and his hands were cut from falls. He looked back and whimpered in horror, for a shape was swaying dimly upward not six hundred feet below. He tried to take three steps at a time, slipped — and began to tumble back down the staircase.

He grabbed at the slick stone and managed to check his fall about fifty stairs down. There was no sound from below, but when he turned his head to look, a baffled whistling broke out. The being was swaying back and forth two hundred feet below, as if fighting an invisible opponent. It was, Leakey saw, at the line of bas-reliefs; and he abruptly remembered something the priest had said — about 'star-signs'…

He fled upward again, stopping only five hundred yards up when there was no sign of pursuit. He struggled upward for what seemed — and may have been — hours, and finally reached a high-arched passage which ended, he could see, in the open. He ran down it and emerged in daylight.

Then he looked down at his body.

'And what did you see?' Dr Linwood prompted.

'I'd become like them, you see,' Leakey told him. 'Not altogether, but it was already taking effect — I think I can still die, though. In fact, immortality is the worst thing that could happen to me this way…'

'Well,' the doctor said, 'let me take a look.'

'Are you out of your mind? The only reason I didn't go mad was because my mind must have changed as well!'

'Listen,' Dr Linwood said, 'I've seen a great many horrible things in my time, things that would turn your stomach. I once saw a cyclist whose head had been run over by a lorry and burst open… I'm not easily revolted, and if you don't let me examine you I certainly won't believe your story — you'll admit it's not very credible — and I won't be able to do anything for you.'

Leakey was silent for a long time.

'All right,' he replied at last. 'But first—' And he switched the tape-recorder off.

At 3:17 on April 3, 1961, everybody in Mercy Hill Hospital was startled by a hysterical screaming from the office block. The cries were so shocking that even the patients on the other side of the building were awoken, and all those who heard it were troubled by nightmares long after. Such was the terror in those cries that practically all the nurses ran to find the cause, leaving the wards almost unattended.

When they broke into Dr Linwood's office, he was lying on the floor with his hands over his eyes. He was alone, and there were no signs that he had been attacked. Under sedation he stopped screaming, but said nothing that revealed the cause of his insanity. He seemed to be obsessed with something that had happened in his office, but what he imagined he had seen is not clear. All he could say was that something about the patient he had examined — who, from the tape of the interview, was dangerously obsessed, and has not been caught yet — was 'horribly changed,' and seemed to be connected with the 'Great God Pan,' 'a rebirth in the vagina of Shub-Niggurath,' 'a fluctuation of form,' and something which was 'half a dryad.' The popular opinion is that Dr Linwood had been unbalanced by the strain of his work, together with the stress of preparing his speech for the coming convention, and had been affected by a species of contagious hallucination.

If the testimony of Dr Whitaker, the house surgeon, is to be believed, this hallucination may have had some basis in fact. He had been on his way to consult Dr Linwood over a medical matter when the screams broke out, and thus reached the office before anyone else. As he entered the corridor he saw someone opening the exit door — someone who must have been the patient whom Dr Linwood examined. Dr Whitaker did not see the man's face, but he particularly noticed the hand as the patient opened the door.

'It was black, shiny black,' he told the others, 'covered with lines — shaped like a bird's claw made out of wood. In fact, it didn't look like a human hand at all.'