Beneath the Moors and Darker Places

  After what seemed a long while, when the light from the cloud still receding into the depths had become nothing more than a dim glow far, far down, I was on the point of calling a mental halt to my experiment when I was taken by an idea. I held the cloud stationary, where it was, while I groped with my hands around the lip of the chasm until I found a sharply projecting knob of stone. I managed to prise the stone free, letting it fall vertically from my fingers into the abysmal shaft. I began to count, but stopped to hold my breath in astonishment when I reached a score; yet it was not until some seconds after I stopped counting that the glowing speck below suddenly flew apart as the falling stone hurtled through its members!

  I listened then, cupping my hand to my ear, and eventually a sound came to me. But it was not the sound of solid striking solid; it was a rush, a roar, a rising growl echoing up to me from regions undreamed of. It was the magnified sound of the passage of that small stone... fleeing ever faster down the limitless depths ... to the pits at Earth’s very core!

  Shaken, in awe of immensities I had never before imagined as existing, oppressed, crushed, and defeated in the recognition of my own insignificance, I let my neon nimbus drift slowly back to its appointment above my head, and then I wandered listlessly back along the way I had come.

  It took me a very long time to find the first chalk mark in a tunnel entrance, and almost as long after that to make my way wearily back to my cave ...

  ~ * ~

  XIV

  THE CAVE OF WHITE GRASS: DREAM-PHASE EIGHT

  [The Masters Case: from the Recordings of Dr. Eugene T. Thappon]

  On another occasion, wandering down yet another of those corridors pointed out to me by the lizard-thing as being forbidden to me, I eventually came out of a cavern-complex onto a vista so unnatural as to be hideous.

  I had emerged into a large cave with a high ceiling, a ceiling spotted with glowing splotches of light, and the floor beneath my feet had turned from one of centuried dust to loam-rooted grass— grass which, excluded from any source of natural sunlight, had yet grown lush and thick ... but white as death itself!

  I had read somewhere of the existence of just such a monstrosity in the chasms of the Moroccan Atlas, deep below the surface, but here, observing the phenomenon for myself, I was appalled. Here was a small field—but growing in no wise as God had intended—trapped down here since seeded, reaching blindly through moist, dripstone-filtered loam towards a light devoid of the chlorophyll of the sane upper world—growing in monstrous lushness and ripening in pallid horror!

  The white blades were soft beneath my feet, with the pliancy of fields remembered from years gone by; yet I shuddered inwardly as I walked silently across that alien terrain, forced against my will to recall a fragment from one of Clark Ashton Smith’s poems:

  What clammy blossoms,

  blanch’d and cavern-grown ... ?

  Then, at a place where the ceiling came down to only a foot or so above my head, I paused to scrape at one of the eerie patches of light, discovering the source of that luminescence to be a crust of lichen, a mass of tiny fronds, strangely cross-hatched and intricately threaded. Even as I examined that odd scrap of dream-cave life, I felt the fall of a spot of moisture, quickly followed by a second and then a third, upon my head. I stepped back to peer upward in wonderment at the wounded lichen—apparently “bleeding” from the area where I had scraped—and saw the reason for the stuff’s peculiar composition. The tightly intertwined fronds and rootlets formed a trap to catch the seeping water on which the plant fed.

  I thought of the mushrooms; of the lizard-thing and the unseen, unknown Thuun’ha; of the fireflies above my head; of the etiolated heather beds in my cave; and finally of this hideous cavern of white grass and the luminous lichens on its ceiling, and was awed. This underworld, dream or hallucination though it must be, was nonetheless full of unending wonders and strange cycles of life ...

  I was still thinking on these bizarre things when I heard the noise. It was a ... a rippling, as of corn in a breeze-driven field, a languorous swishing of foliage, but at the sound my hair stood on end and I lowered my eyes to stare in rising terror at the awful grass.

  The whole field, over an area as far as I could see, was alive with motion—with the grass bending over in regular waves like the surface of a small sea but impelled by no wind!—and in that same instant of time I knew that those grass blades were somehow drawn to lean towards the fresh moisture dripping from the ceiling. Obviously the cave was not normally as moist as I had thought; this awful grass bent toward water as flowers lift their heads to the sun in the green fields above!

  Suddenly a horror burst over me the like of none I had ever known before. I only knew I had to be out of that loathsome place, and I turned and ran for the archway of my entry. Then, glancing back over my shoulder as I left the field and entered the complex of caves, I saw a sight that froze the blood in my veins. For disturbed or alerted by my panic-flight, I knew not which, that entire monstrosity of inner earth, that whole etiolated—meadow?—had swished into a new position, a position in which every tip of every blade of grass now pointed in my direction!

  It required no more than a second’s thought to discover the reason for this freakish and frightening activity: that hellish herbage had “sensed,” by some means I could never hope to understand, the presence of the little rivers of cold sweat springing in spontaneous solicitude from my body’s pores!

  I was still running when I reached my friendly little cave, and there I collapsed in shivering terror on my bed ...

  ~ * ~

  XV

  THE FROGS: DREAM PHASE NINE

  [The Masters Case: from the Recordings of Dr. Eugene T. Thappon]

  It was not until a long time after my adventure in the cave of white grass—or so it seemed to my shattered time-sense—that I dared put foot outside my rightful appointments again. I did it after many “sleep” periods, after as many repetitious sessions with the lizard-creature, and after heaven-only-knows how many boring, almost ritualistic meals of fish and fungi.

  It was, of course, monotony that drove me out. In my more lucid moments (I mean at those times when my mental images, my dreams, were sharpest and most clearly defined), I had even attempted a little physical exercise in my cave, by the light of my ever-attendant fireflies, but even in this I had discovered ennui, so that in the end I determined to brave the cave of white grass again, and to go on from that place deeper into the calcium labyrinth.

  I experienced no difficulty in rediscovering the cave of the morbid meadow, for I simply followed the marks on the walls as I recalled making them from my chamber to that awful place, but once there I knew many moments of dread and indecision before again committing myself to walk over that sea of leper-sprouting loam. In the end I decided simply to skirt the cavern, to move along the walls where the grass grew thinnest, until I found an exit place; there to take up my wanderings and markings again, until either hunger or weariness should drive me back to the boredom of my cave. This, not without much trepidation, I did, but not once did I notice any abnormal motion in that field of pallid grass, a fact that heartened me greatly and strengthened my resolve to explore further.

  I left the lichen-ceilinged cavern at a spot, by my judging, roughly one-third of the distance round its irregular perimeter from the cave of entry, choosing an archway of greater dimensions than the norm and finding the tunnel beyond it to be of corresponding spaciousness. I struck out, in a fairly straight line but yet on a course which after some time I decided must be a gradual descent into the deeper bowels of Earth. At first this declivity was barely recognizable as such, but in a little while I noticed a slight pressure on my toes which told of my almost unconscious “braking” of stride against an increasing steepness of descent.

  As I went lower I found that the rock floor beneath my feet (here there was no dust) grew damper and almost slimy; indeed, as the distance I covered increased, the way became slippery to the point of treachero
us. Shortly I passed a series of small bore-holes, varying from the size of rabbit burrows to openings into which a man might easily crawl, joining into the tunnel from a direction to my rear as I walked. Here then was the explanation for the sudden dampness of the place. Seepage, from somewhere far above, was making its way down these subtunnels into this main passage. Sure enough, when I touched the mouth of one of the smaller burrows, drops of water gathered into a tiny pool round my fingers before flowing in a visible trickle down to the damp floor of the passage. I moved on.

  Soon, as the way grew yet steeper, I fancied that I heard ahead an indistinct rushing sound, increasing in volume as I went until the noise was quite audible, clearly recognizable as the rushing and pounding of tumultuous waters. I pressed on eagerly. Here indeed was a diversion! The sight of a subterranean waterfall, or perhaps of a resurgence from some lower level, would be balm to my tired eyes, the nerves of which must, I was sure, be slowly atrophying in the perpetual sameness of my environment.

  Soon the dampness was also in the air, soothing to my dry throat, and the vibrations caused by the as yet unseen surgings somewhere ahead became such as to actually set the walls and floor of my tunnel trembling. A few minutes or so more saw me around a final bend in the descending passage to confront an awe-inspiring spectacle of sub-terrene grandeur.

  A great shining spout of water was literally erupting from a high rock wall some eighty feet above, to cascade out and down into a swirling, rushing pool which in turn emptied itself mightily, in liquid haste, into a great fault in a distance-shadowed wall. Such was the turbulence of the water that the air was full of moisture, and water particles continually spattered against me.

  My vantage point was from a rocky ledge onto which the tunnel had opened, about ten feet above the level of the pool, and there I threw myself belly down to watch in awe the majestic carom of water.

  The sound was literally deafening, an explosion of noise as of a thousand thundering engines, a cacophony such as to put any ten steel-forging mills to shame, but I chanced the ruin of my eardrums gladly to be able to see the stupendous resurgence and to feel on my face the flung spray of this Chthonian cataract.

  It was from this position that I first saw the second ledge at a level some eight feet beneath me, and as my firefly familiars descended to hover above me as I lay there they lit up to a degree the darker surface of that second ledge also. There were shapes down there, and I knew immediately that I was seeing living creatures, though of what species I could not be sure. There were dozens of them, of the general size of large house cats, and they seemed to spend their time darting ferociously, with bounding leaps and dripping, slippery cavortions, in and out of the treacherous pool. Then, as more of them leaped, I saw the sleekly shining extended rear legs, noting the strong webbing between the digits of those hind limbs, and I knew that the creatures were some outsize species of frog; but what on earth were they doing, frenziedly hurtling in and out of the rushing waters like that?

  The answer came in a flash. I saw one of the frogs emerge from the churning surface of the water to leap to the ledge below me, and in his mouth he carried a flapping, shiny-scaled fish! The things were fishing! And of course, this would be the perfect place: a spot where the fish were dazed by the great fall of the water and the buffeting of powerful currents. So far as I could see the creatures were blind (as are many other forms of cavernicolous faunae), eyeless in fact, and it amazed me the powers of perception they must have achieved since their origin to be able to swim and fish so expertly in these unknown and unlit depths. So thinking, I leaned my head out further over the ledge in order to observe their actions more closely.

  I must have disturbed some small, washed pebbles, of which a number littered the floor. Certainly I had felt something slide out from beneath my chest to fall from the ledge, but such was the racket put up by the spouting water and roaring pool that the sound of the dislodged pebbles striking the ledge below was hopelessly lost to me.

  Not so the frogs!

  If I had wondered at the development of their cavern senses before, I was utterly astonished now, for with one accord, as if commanded by a single governing brain or ganglion, the squatting batrachians stopped their feasting, the leapers quit their leaping, and in unison the entire horde turned to stare sightlessly up at me. Then, after a pause of no more than a second or so, they launched themselves en masse towards my position on the high ledge.

  Ghastly terror threw me upright then, sent me flying—shrieking madly, sobbing and gasping between shrieks—up the slippery nightmare corridor of rock. Not merely because of the concerted attack of the giant frogs in their singular unison of monstrous intent nor because of my apparent and shuddersome magnetism for both flora and fauna alike in this awful underworld—no, I fled for another reason, one which unmanned me and terrified me almost beyond endurance. For as those dwellers in the depths had turned to me, the light of my friendly fireflies had been reflected in their faces— not from their eyes, for they had no eyes, but from great, sharp, curving fangs that gleamed whitely and dripped redly in their evil, wide-slit mouths ...!

  The floor being so greasy my progress was nightmarishly slow, a pace with which my fireflies could easily cope as I plunged and slithered up the now seemingly interminable corridor, and having at last traversed that bend leading away from the cataract, I gazed fearfully back to see if the frog-things had managed to gain the ledge and follow me. From behind, above the now lowered din of the waterfall, came such sounds of slithering and hopping that I knew, even before the first of those toothy fishers flopped into sight around the bend, that any hope of mine of the passage being inaccessible to them had been in vain.

  I waited no longer, but flung myself with all my energy up and along the corridor ... and it was then that I found myself in what at first appeared a hopeless situation. For with a sudden rush and a roar, surging down the tunnel came a frothing gush of black water almost knee deep as I judged it, quite sufficient if it hit me in my present position to knock my feet from under me and send me flying back into the chomping fangs of my loathsome pursuers!

  I had reached a point level with the lowest of those small adjoining burrows, and as the racing water rushed closer upon me and the slavering horde squelched and flopped behind, I hurled myself heedlessly, head and shoulders, into the barely adequate hole. My intention was to crawl completely into the cavity, but, horror of horrors, the burrow tapered down to a veritable mouse hole in a distance of only a few feet!

  Then, even as I felt the first slimy snatchings at my legs and winced at a leering mental picture of curving fangs and slavering jaws, the water hit; swirling and threatening to suck me out of the little cave, down to the lower ledge and the great pool below with its fearful, squamous feasters. I hung on for dear life, while the water rushed into my cave and filled it completely, pouring into my mouth and nostrils, ballooning my tattered trousers—my last vestige of clothing—and swilling away, perhaps for ever, my poor drowned fireflies.

  I think I came close to drowning myself—certainly I lost consciousness, though probably only momentarily—for the last thing I remembered before finding myself soaked and coughing, spread-eagled on the floor of the recently flooded shaft, was spreading my elbows and humping my back to jam myself against the sides and roof of my small and doubtful refuge. I had obviously been washed from that place, to be left high but not so dry about twenty yards lower down the tunnel.

  As I climbed unsteadily to my feet there came to my ears a frantic flapping sound that caused me to gasp aloud and spin about, searching for the frogs which I felt sure must be near at hand. In my terror I hardly noticed the fact that my fireflies had not been drowned but were still there above my head as always, and it was by their light that I quickly discovered the source of the flappings which had so startled me—and also, incidentally, the reason my presence had had so disturbing an effect on the brutish batrachians.

  For the corridor was littered with still living fish, stranded n
ow that the subterranean gusher had passed, and I could well understand why the fanged frogs had waited down by the pool for the first sounds of the obviously regular resurgence—sounds heralding the easy pickings of stranded fish! Inadvertently I had triggered that hellish response of theirs, when I knocked down the pebbles from the ledge. They had seen my intrusion as a harbinger of the anticipated feast to come!

  But then I heard a sound other than the agonized flapping of stranded fish—a sound that steadily, nastily grew louder—and this time there could be no mistaking the vicious chomp and snapping of ghoulish gluttony, close and coming closer. It would not be long, I realized, before the great frogs had followed the trail of fish back up the shaft to me!

  I wasted no more time but set off as quietly and quickly as I could back along the way I had come, towards the upper levels and the comparative safety and sanity of the better-known passages above...

  ~ * ~

  XVI

  THE SPAWNING PLACE: DREAM PHASE TEN

  [The Masters Case: from the Recordings of Dr. Eugene T. Thappon]

  There eventually came a time when I had all but used up the various exit tunnels from that great gallery of which my own cave was but a small cul-de-sac. That is, I had explored the great majority of them—most, as told, with terrifying or mind-staggering results! But boredom is a tremendous force to be reckoned with, and the utter boredom of that small cave of mine would have been quite sufficient to drive the most timid soul (even forewarned by past events of possible disaster) out into the unknown underworld.