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At the Mountains of Magnates

by Geoffrey Hart

Previously published as: Hart, G. 2019. At the Mountains of Magnates. p. 269-287 In: D. Schweitzer (ed.) The Mountains of Madness Revealed. PS Publishing.

“Visit the infamous and terrifying Mountains of Madness accompanied by the finest docents from Miskatonic University. Gasp at the ruins of the oldest known civilization in the galaxy! Thrill to alien vistas that will send your mind realing! Pose beside Earth’s last glaciers! Educational tax credits available. For more information, please visit <www.miskatonic-tours.com>.

I hated the ad, particularly the breathless exclamation marks. And no matter how often I told them, increasingly exasperated, the correct word was reeling, they refused to correct the error. I increasingly hated the wealthy ignoramuses who came on such tours for the bragging rights and treated me as their personal stewardess. But xenoanthropology was a dying field, and research funding was as dead and gone as Professor Lovecraft. Faculty who wanted to remain faculty needed to find their own funds.

Hotel Lake lay in the glacial outwash plain below the Mountains of Madness, where the remains of the doomed Lake expedition were found nearly a century ago. A surprisingly tasteful memorial stood beside the original tents, which had been restored to their original wind-shredded and bloodstained glory. The remains of Lake and his students had been carefully reassembled and preserved under refrigerated glass as close as possible to where records suggested they’d been found—all except the sled dogs, as too many visitors had protested the display of butchered puppies—never mind they were savage, half-wild malamutes. Archeologists—archeology grad students, more likely—had dug a trench beside the vertical graves of the Elder Things who’d been buried by their kin once the slaughter was done, to provide tourists with a first glimpse of the presumably extinct race. (Protests about cultural expropriation from Romany displaced by climate change had fallen on deaf ears.)

With a wheezing gasp, the hotel shuttle arrived at my plane and staggered to a halt. A gaggle of overfed tourists emerged and waddled to the aircraft, iDrones perched on their caps. I stood by the ramp, and with a fixed grin, welcomed them aboard. Several paused to take selfies with me, propellers whining as their iDrones shifted position, seeking an optimal angle. I carefully and maliciously closed my eyes just before each flash.

Once they were aboard, I clambered past, belted myself in, and ran through the preflight checklist while my assistant did a roll call and checked names off her list. Lee was a Chinese geology grad student working summers to pay down her student debt. Both checklists were pro forma; the hotel’s mechanics had already checked the plane multiple times, and each tourist’s phone had already registered with Lee’s phone. Still, live pilots remained live because they didn’t make assumptions, and ditto for tour guides; it wouldn’t do to leave anyone behind due to a software glitch. Lee slammed the cabin door, and ears popped as I started the compressor. Lee pinged my phone to give me the all-clear, then belted herself into the rearward-facing crew seat by the exit. I didn’t waste my breath repeating the safety drill; nobody ever listened, and every tourist signed elaborate legal disclaimers long before they reached the hotel, and again after they’d acclimated to the altitude.

I toggled the cabin mike and cleared my throat. “Welcome to today’s tour of the Mountains of Madness and Plateau of Leng. I’m Melanie Danforth, a professor at Miskatonic University, and I’ll be your docent today. We’ll be flying at a height of 20,000 feet initially, gradually increasing to about 25,000 feet as we climb through the Mountains of Madness to reach the plateau. Don’t worry if you feel the cabin pressure drop. That’s perfectly normal. If you have any difficulty, supplemental oxygen is available through the straw in your seat’s armrest. We encourage you to take photographs, but please ground your iDrones and don’t leave your seat until the plane comes to a complete halt after we land.”

I released the brakes and taxied towards the runway. No other plane was in sight—it was still early in the season—but from habit, I awaited the tower’s clearance before moving onto the runway. Once on the runway, I pushed both throttles forward. The engines roared, pressing us into our seats, and the plane accelerated smoothly. When the wheels were tapping lightly at the tarmac, I pulled back on the yoke. Despite the plane’s enormous wings, necessary to gain lift in the thin air, the engines labored to find purchase. The plane climbed stolidly to cruising altitude.

Below, a line of trekkers crawled up the slope exposed by the retreating glaciers like ants climbing the flanks of a rotting Pleistocene mammoth. I toggled the cabin mike again. “If you look out the left window, you’ll see bolder tourists making the journey on foot. Personally, I’m with you: I don’t see the attraction of slogging for days up to your ankles in muck and up to your ears in biting flies. Anyway... let me tell you a bit about our destination.”

Through the cabin-cam, I saw the usual assortment of passengers napping, playing video games on their phone, or texting. I sighed and began my monologue for the few who were paying attention.

“In 1930, Professor Frank Pabodie of Miskatonic University organized an expedition to Antarctica to go prospecting for geological samples to improve our knowledge of Earth’s history. He came with two steamships and half a dozen aircraft, something like 100 sled dogs—this was before Skidoos—and a staff of about 50 professors and grad students from the university. Including my own great-grandfather, who, along with Professor Dyer of the Geology Department, was one of the first two humans to see the plateau we’ll be visiting today... and live.”

A male voice called out from the back. “Wasn’t he the one who went bugfuck crazy?”

I sighed. Asshat. “Yes, he and reality experienced a dramatic divorce. But he eventually recovered enough to flee to the Caribbean, since he’d sworn he’d never again go anywhere cold enough to form ice. There, he married a local woman—my great grandmother. Had he not recovered his sanity, I wouldn’t be here narrating our journey.” Great gran had clearly suffered from severe PTSD, and cold was his trigger.

“How do we know you won’t go bugfuck crazy too, Lady?”

“Doctor. And you don’t.” Nervous laughter from the passengers who were paying attention. “Now if I might continue?” Without awaiting permission, I continued. “They found the geological specimens they’d sought, but also a mystery for the ages. They found the expected geologic strata and fossils, but also complex organisms in the deepest samples. Organisms that couldn’t possibly have existed at that time.”

“Miss?” Asshat again.

“Doctor. Yes?”

“How do they know—?”

I cut him off, already past irritated with the man. “It’s like this: deeper layers are older. The deeper you dig, the more primitive the organisms. At some point, you stop finding anything because there weren’t any older organisms. Yet here, the geologists found intact specimens of what we now call the Elder Things. ETs for short; we academics do love our TLAs.” I waited for a chuckle; got none. “Ahem. Unfortunately, Professor Lake didn’t know what we now know, namely that these ancient beings had survived countless millions of years like Sleeping Beauty”—our host organization insisted on mentioning product tie-ins—"and were merely awaiting enough warmth to thaw and return to life. When Lake brought some indoors to perform a dissection, they woke and slaughtered every last member of the expedition.”

Asshat cleared his throat. “Hadn’t they seen The Thing? Duh!”

I rolled my eyes: Every. Damned. Time. “The film you’re probably thinking of was the 1982 Kurt Russell version, which reimagined the 1951 original. But as the expedition took place in 1930, it would have been hard for the team members to have seen either film.”

He snorted, clearly unconvinced.

“Be that as it may, I’m telling you what happened. The rest of the expedition learned Lake’s fate only after the base camp lost contact with them, and Professor Dyer took my great grandfather and several others to investigate. You undoubtedly saw the remains back at the hotel.” Indeed, the gruesome corpses were the most popular part of the tour, and I was glad I didn’t have to lead the tourists around that site. Scientific objectivity only takes you so far.

“If you visited the museum at Hotel Lake, you saw the expedition’s original notebooks, drawings, and such equipment as survived. That includes the original Pabodie drill, a design that’s still being used today, with minor modifications.” Few ever visited the museum; most just watched the VR cartoons that summarized the expedition’s findings. At some point, I expected the museum to be mothballed or shipped to Miskatonic U for archiving.

“What’s really interesting is what happened next. Now if it were you and me, you’d expect the rescue party to have been horrified by the carnage they found. Indeed, we’d probably flee the site as fast as humanly possible, looking back over our shoulders in case a similar doom was creeping up on us. But these were gentlemen—and there were no gentlewomen—”

Asshat chimed in again. “And no Black gentlewomen in particular, right?” His seatmate tittered, and they did the bro-fist thing. I took a deep, steadying breath, found my calm center. “As I was saying, no gentlewomen, of color or otherwise. The men were raised on the Victorian ethos and imbibed the notions of that era, including no women and no Blacks. They also absorbed the whole ‘stiff upper lip’ thing through their pasty white skins. So unlike me or thee, they decided, what the heck... we’ve come this far already, and mounted an expedition to cross the peaks we’re now crossing.” The same peaks that reached for us like skeletal black hands trying to tear our plane from the sky. It hadn’t happened yet, but this was hardly the kind of place where one could rule out such possibilities.

“They found the lost city of the ETs, which we’ll be visiting in a few minutes. You won’t have to imagine what they saw; you’ll experience it firsthand. Now please ensure your seatbelt’s tight; we’ll be landing soon.” I switched off the mike and did a quick visual check against the heads-up display, which superimposed a moving map on the landscape. We’d drifted slightly to port, towards the peaks on that side, despite the absence of any cross-breeze. Visual navigation let me correct that drift. GPS or inertial navigation didn’t work so well in these mountains.

Speaking of visual... I toggled the mike again. “Part of the special experience of visiting the ruins is the disorientation caused by the city’s non-Euclidean geometry—”

Asshat chimed in. “Speak white!”

I took another long, steadying breath, and fantasized asking Lee to throw him out the hatch. “You might want to show more respect to the woman who’s going to bring you safely home again... or not. Non-Euclidean means, essentially, that the lines aren’t straight. As I was saying, we encourage you to gaze upon these majestic sights with your naked eyes for as long as possible. It’s a memorable—not to say haunting—experience. Nonetheless, because you’ll find the sights extremely disorienting and increasingly uncomfortable, we have a solution. The glasses Miss Lee is distributing will subtly correct for those effects and restore your sense of equilibrium. However, they distort normal vision in unpleasant ways. Do not put them on before we land.”

Lee, having done this roadshow before, began handing out the glasses. We’d learned not to hand them out before the lecture; inevitably, someone tried them on before they were necessary, and spewed their five-star-hotel buffet breakfast all over the plane. Sure enough, there came a sound of retching from Asshat’s seat, and Lee dexterously intervened with a large barf bag.

“As I told you: Do not put them on if you’re not experiencing visual distortions. Now we’ll see one of our special surprises. First, for passengers on the left side of the plane, look out your window.” I banked the plane to provide a dramatic view of the twin pillars that guarded the entry to the city. There were gasps, and passengers on the right side of the plane craned their necks in a vain effort to see. “And now, passengers on the right.” I banked to give the other half of the plane a view, then returned to my original course. Each of the unthinkably ancient pillars had been reshaped and colorized—not without violent protests from both cultists and scholars—to resemble the ETs. Each was nearly 200 feet tall, and resembled the unholy love-child between a star-nosed mole and an upright sea cucumber that had some kraken in its genetic background. If the ancient beings had had normal mouths and eyes, they’d have been beaming at the inbound tourists. But they didn’t, and despite the garish colors, I found the effect more creepy than welcoming. At least they hadn’t given them the ubiquitous mouse-ear hats.

I re-centered the plane between the pillars. “If you’ll look to either side, you’ll see what appear to be prism-shaped or blocky structures lining the walls of the pass. Archeologists are still debating their purpose. They might be temples.” That wasn’t my belief; we’d found no evidence of any of the disquieting temple structures hinted at in the frustratingly vague Necronomicon.

“Others, myself included, believe they were defensive structures. Whether they were designed to keep something out...” I paused dramatically. “... or in is not yet clear.” I believed the latter. No matter how many times I returned through the pass, I felt the walls closing in, and always redlined the engines until I was safely past the pillars.

The city’s labrynthine streets came into view, and I toggled the nose camera. “If you’ll look at your seatback display, you’ll see the Plateau of Leng.” I throttled back and began a slow, circling descent, greeted by gasps from the passengers. The more one looked, the more the convoluted streets and contorted architecture drew at the eye. Looking away didn’t help; often, it made things worse, as the images tugged harder at the corners of one’s eyes. Most passengers hastily donned their eyewear. Despite several summers working with me, Lee turned green and quickly donned her own glasses. I was one of the lucky few who actually enjoyed the disorientation; it was like the sick sense in the pit of your stomach during a rollercoaster’s initial steep drop.

I rechecked the heads-up display, corrected my course one last time, and with the tower’s assent, descended to a graceful landing. As Lee popped the exit door, a shuttle arrived from the terminal to collect us. The thin wind gusted as we crossed from the plane to the small vehicle, bearing unfamiliar odors.

In the terminal, It’s a Small World was playing endlessly, on the off chance any visitor had forgotten who was running the site. A handful of greeters dressed as ETs approached, hawking deluxe tour brochures. The slits at head height through which they peered were well camouflaged, but if you weren’t wearing the special glasses, you could see their faces. Sherpas, mostly, displaced from the Himalaya by the unceasing landslides provoked by global warming. Here, at least, it was cool enough nobody smothered in their costumes, unlike their mostly Black and Hispanic counterparts in Florida and California.

Lee handed out passes, each tagged with a small RF transmitter in case someone strayed, and held up the baton that distinguished our group from other groups. Joining the wrong group wasn’t an issue this early in the year; apart from a few singletons, we’d be alone in the ruins. Lee used a foot-tall green macramé ET that some long-departed tourist had left on the plane. The group assembled around us. As always, some lingered, just to prove they could. Asshat and his friend, of course, had gone in search of cigarettes.

When they returned, I provided the pro forma safety lecture. “All right: listen up. We like to play up the dangers of this place, but in reality, it’s quite safe if you stick with me and follow three rules. Rule 1: Don’t leave the marked pathways. Seriously: don’t. Odds are good you’ll make it back, but every year, we lose at least one wise-ass who thinks he knows better—and it’s almost always a he. Some years we lose many more. Don’t be one of them. Rule 2: Don’t touch anything. And I mean anything. Most things are safe, but we’ve only explored a small part of the ruins and can’t be sure we’ve tested everything. Rule 3: You’ve all had time at the hotel to acclimatize to the thin air, but that doesn’t mean you’ll escape altitude sickness. Miss Lee is handing out oxygen masks and tanks. If you start feeling dizzy, and it’s not because of the weird architecture, tell us immediately and start breathing from your tank. We’ll call the EMTs and they’ll evac you to a pressure tent in the terminal. Any questions?”

Asshat, of course, had questions. “Can we sue you if anything happens?”

I snorted. “Good luck. I’m a Miskatonic associate professor. You’d have better luck squeezing money from... well, just about anyone, really. More importantly, you signed waivers. Waivers written by the best lawyers FunnyMouseCo could afford. Now if you’ll follow me?”
We left the terminal and walked along the first street. The sense of incredible age one experienced elsewhere in the ruins was diminished by incongruities such as wi-fi repeaters at strategic locations and the prominent eye-height arrows that marked the safe trail. Hard experience had shown that without such fixed referents, even experienced guides got lost, and had to be rescued by specialized search teams. Worse, though, were the Seven Dwarves security guards armed with large-bore assault rifles equipped with grenade launchers. It wasn’t clear what marketing genius figured the city’s deep and winding tunnels required the presence of Dwarves. Privately, I doubted they’d be much use against an angry shoggoth, but the weaponry reassured the tourists.

I led the group into the first and best-preserved of the chambers, Lee bringing up the rear to collect stragglers. “If you’d gather ’round?” The room filled with a shrill mosquito whine as iDrones launched and began recording. “Okay. As best we can tell from the diaries of Dyer and Danforth, this is where they entered the ruins. They used scraps of paper to mark their trail. We use permanent trail markers. That’s the arrows you see everywhere. If you get lost, follow the arrows. You’ll either catch up with us, or be led back to the terminal. Do not backtrack. Sometimes things wander around behind us.” Anticipating the question, I continued. “No, we don’t know what kind of things. People who backtrack tend not to be found again.”

I took a deep breath and began my memorized banter, describing the salient points of the colorful frescoes and bas reliefs that adorned the walls. Without the special glasses, they moved with a life of their own—something Dyer and great grandad hadn’t reported, but that was a hundred years ago. Maybe the plateau’s rapid warming had changed some fundamental property the cold had formerly stabilized?

The tourist trail emphasized images that were accessible to non-academic eyes, just as the tourist-friendly copies of the Necronomicon in the giftshop had been carefully redacted. The images were largely domestic scenes, including still lifes of disturbing foods—my favorites were simian figures being carved like a Rockwell Christmas turkey, posed with bright red apples in their mouths, like ball gags. There were family portraits—think American Gothic, with tentacles. There were images of what must have been ET celebrities playing strange instruments—think Velvet Elvis. And there were ETs playing games, such as the famous image that had been reproduced and sold around the world: ETs smoking cigar equivalents and playing a card game, seated around a green baize card table.

The disturbing images we wouldn’t see today were primarily of academic interest. You reached them via a very different trail the tourists never saw, unless they wandered off and it was the last thing they saw. Except for the literal images, which were disturbing in their own right, nobody had any idea what most of the really out-there artwork meant. There were fierce debates among academics, but it was all Motel of the Mysteries stuff: anyone with a PhD could find evidence in obscure portions of an image to support whatever pet theory they espoused. About the only thing everyone agreed on was that Rule 34 appeared to transcend species and geological eras. There was no ET porn along the publicly accessible trails. There was, however, a deeply buried temple that was the ET equivalent of Khajuraho. I shuddered. I was a modern woman, with an open mind, but still... what had been seen could not be unseen.

The rooms were huge and our footsteps echoed loudly when I wasn’t speaking. Not all of the whining echoes were from the iDrones. Before we climbed to the second floor, I stopped. “You’ll notice that the ETs used ramps, not stairs, to travel between floors. Even though they had functional wings, they apparently preferred to creep about with their teeny triangular feet. To prevent backsliding, they equipped the floor with grooves for traction.” I pointed at one. “Be careful when you climb. Don’t trip.”

We mounted slowly to the second floor, several guests taking surreptitious hits from their oxygen tanks. When the ramp leveled out, we came to the first of the dioramas. In it, two proud ET parents beamed down on a cherubic baby ET in a cradle. “You’ll have noted that the rooms we pass through are empty. Early researchers believed the city’s inhabitants learned of some impending catastrophe in time to remove their cherished goods and depart. The absence of any corpses supports this hypothesis. You might expect corpses to have long since decayed into dust, but recall that Lake’s team found well-preserved corpses that had lain here for millions of years. If a plague or other surprise struck, there’d surely be at least some corpses. Other researchers suggest the material goods were looted by humans who somehow survived the arduous ascent to the plateau. That theory’s contradicted by the lack of any evidence of ‘souvenirs’ in any human culture that might conceivably have visited Antarctica.

“The best-supported theory, supported by certain wall decorations that aren’t on today’s route, is that most inhabitants left during a period of spreading glaciation, leaving behind only the most hardy, the most impoverished, or the most desperate. Yet that doesn’t fully satisfy. Anyone who’s moved to a new home knows you always leave something behind, no matter how carefully you pack. But these rooms were immaculate. Even if the ETs were the most anal-retentive obsessive-compulsives the universe has ever evolved, would they really have removed every last scrap? My Roomba doesn’t clean that well. Last, but not least, it’s implausible they didn’t accumulate great mountains of dross, as all intelligent races do. If nothing else, they’d have storerooms full of Ikea furniture they’d upgraded as they grew more prosperous or replaced with heirlooms inherited from their grandparents. Something truly monstrous must have disrupted this natural process.”

“So what d’you think happened?” Asshat again, and I was glad to not be the only voice in these empty, echoing chambers.

“I suspect the shoggoths. We know they revolted and killed their masters, as we’ll see later in the tour. They must have oozed their way through every room in pursuit of survivors, engulfing and dissolving anything that remained.”

We continued for the next hour through a series of empty chambers, eventually descending again to ground level. Despite my repeated warning, Asshat tripped on the ramp, fell, and dragged his buddy down with him. Their oxygen tanks rolled down the ramp, striking the wall at the bottom with a clang. I raised an eyebrow, and temporarily chastened, they looked away.

“Now comes the creepiest part of the tour. We’re going to walk deep, deep below the surface, and if you’re claustrophobic or are having trouble breathing, you might want to skip this part. We’ll be down for about an hour in total. Please note that there are two sets of trail markers. First, there are these:” I gestured vaguely at the familiar arrows. “They’re the ones we’ve been following. If you don’t want to come with me, Miss Lee will follow these arrows to a lovely espresso bar and giftshop where you can have a snack and buy souvenirs. The second set of arrows are these dayglo-orange ones.” I gestured at a steeply descending passage. “They’re the trail down and back. Should anything unfortunate happen to me, follow them back up here—rapidly. Any questions? Good. Okay, those who want to come with me, gather here. Everyone else follow Miss Lee.”

Most of the group opted for the espresso. Asshat wasn’t one of them, about which I had mixed feelings. The rest followed as I descended steeply for about twenty minutes through weaving, intestinally convoluted corridors with condensation-slicked walls. Asshat brought out his cigarettes now that we were in the worst possible place to smoke. The smoke coiled at head level, then was sucked downwards by a damp, sticky breeze, forcing me to swallow much of the smoke. We eventually came to an archway that opened onto a giant chasm. The sides and roof were invisibly distant, and the darkness was smothering. I wasn’t the only one who shivered despite the damp heat. “We speculate that the shaft in this chamber leads to a subterranean sea, but we can’t tell. There’s no such thing as a bottomless pit, at least not according to conventional physics, but nobody’s found the bottom of this one. And believe me, they’ve tried: with ropes, with drones, with radar, and even one madman with a parachute, whose body was, unsurprisingly, never recovered. Maybe some day, if we can break a helicopter into small enough pieces to fit through these corridors and reassemble it.”

Asshat approached the railing that protected tourists from themselves. He took a deep puff on his cigarette, and threw it into the void. We watched it descend, flaring briefly, until it vanished from sight. I restrained the impulse to ‘accidentally’ nudge him while he was extended out over the chasm. The intensity of that urge grew with each year’s new flock of Asshats. If anyone truly deserved such a fate...

I resisted the urge.

When they’d done taking photos, we departed through a second archway. Asshat and friend lit another cigarette. This passage led up, and had two virtues: the ascent was sufficiently steep that the smokers were breathing too heavily to talk, and the downward rush of air pulled the cigarette smoke away from me.

We rejoined the rest of the tour in the coffee shop, where they sipped supersized mugs of espresso and thematically appropriate snacks. Some were biting the heads off the cookies with proto-human shapes, others were dissecting the ET layer cake, still others consumed the shoggoth pudding—a glutinous cross between tapioca and bubble tea, presented in a souvenir dish the shape of a hollowed-out ET. Many had purchased replicas of the greenstone artefacts Lake and others had found during the first expedition. Without a Rosetta stone to translate them, we could only speculate about their meaning. Some posited the ET equivalent of e pluribus unum, assuming the stones were currency. I subscribed to the theory they were like those Chinese characters many Westerners tattooed on their arms without knowing what they said.

“Anyone who needs a bathroom break, now’s the time. There are no rest stops on the rest of the tour, and you really don’t want to be relieving yourself on the walls. There’s a picture in the bathroom of what happened to the last jolly joker who tried that.” Asshat and friend were the last ones to go, so they could make everyone wait for them.

When they returned, we continued into the room that told the story of the Shoggoth slave revolt, which resonated deeply for me both for its own sake and as a metaphor. Some academics considered the ETs to be ‘people’ much like us, with similar hopes and aspirations, emphasized their good aspects, and portrayed their fall as somehow tragic. I saw things differently: the lurid images of ginormous shoggoths gnawing the heads off their former masters struck me as long-deferred karma. Deferred for millions of years if the geologists were right. Let’s be clear: disgusting carnivorous giant slugs do not awaken empathy in my breast, but I couldn’t help but empathize with slaves of any race.

I gave them a few moments to enjoy the view before resuming my narration. “The shoggoth’s story is also mankind’s story. In every age, some men have enslaved others—the Hebrew people in Egypt, say, or the African slaves in Confederate America. Sadly, the ETs seem no better. But in the end, there’s always revolt. The ETs defeated and once more enslaved the shoggoths, but it was only a temporary victory. The shoggoths revolted again and destroyed their masters. It’s clear from Professor Lake’s records that some ETs survived that slaughter. We don’t know whether some remain alive deep in the bowels of this city. The occasional disappearance of tourists who stray from the marked path suggests something is still down there.”

I glared at Asshat, and he closed his mouth.

“Here, I can’t resist quoting George Santayana: Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Let’s hope we’re wiser than the ETs were.”

I looked around at the mostly blank faces, only a few showing signs of having been touched by either tragedy. Asshat and friend had left the room, though I could hear their voices a short distance along our back trail. I sighed, and gave Lee a sign. She nodded.

“If you’ll pardon me, it seems a few of our sheep have strayed from the flock. I’d best go collect them before they get themselves in any trouble. Miss Lee will take over the tour, and I’ll catch up with you shortly.” I put on my most concerned look. “I hope.”

I found the pair a short distance behind us. Asshat was just zipping up after having marked his territory. I waited until he’d done, then cleared my throat. “You two show uncommon initiative exploring on your own. Leads me to wonder whether you might be interested in a special surprise, not offered by Miskatonic Tours to just anyone: Shoggoths!”

They looked at each other and exchanged shit-kicking grins.

“Let’s be clear about one thing: they’re terrifying, and dangerous, and not everyone has the balls to go see them. Do you gentleman have the balls?”

Their grins widened, and Asshat’s friend gave me a once over, tits to Tevas. Both nodded.

“Just one thing before we leave. You’ll need to sign a special waiver for this part of the trip.” I held up my phone and blipped them the contract. “Face and thumbprint, please.” They signed, returned the contracts, and I uploaded them to my cloud account. Then I led them into an unmarked corridor that led steeply downwards. After about 10 minutes, Asshat cleared his throat.

“Miss Danforth? There are no arrows.”

“Doctor. Of course. This isn’t part of the regular tour, and it’s not safe to visit shoggoths without an experienced guide.”

“It’s safe, right?”

“Of course. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t, would I?”

“It stinks like a sewer!”

“Worse. Shoggoths aren’t so much with the personal hygiene.”

He muttered something inaudible.

The corridor leveled off, debouching into a cavern lit only by dim phosphorescence. In the shadows, some half-seen shapes lurked, twitching in disturbing ways. I switched my phone to flashlight mode and shone it towards them.

“Voila! I’ll get them to come forward so you can do selfies.” I pursed my lips, and into the silence, used the ancient call: tekeli-li, tekeli-li. And they came. At rest, they resembled a great frothy mass of disturbing foamlike material. In motion, they became giant, blackly translucent slugs the size of dump trucks, pulsing with eerie green lights, eyestalks coming and going randomly; vacuolar bubbles formed, moved to the surface, released noxious farts, then reabsorbed.

The whine of the iDrone propellers in no way concealed the shortlived screams and glutinous popping noises as the shoggoths tore off the duo’s heads and enveloped what remained. When the noise faded, I bowed to the shoggoths, who returned the courtesy. Then I made my way back to Lee and the rest of the group, mustering a well-rehearsed cautionary tale.

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