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At The Mountains Of CutenessBeing a H.P.Lushcraft tale, transcribed and edited by Simon Barber.It is not without great hesitation that I break my self-imposed vow ofsilence, and put before the world at last the true facts, as far as Iwitnessed them, of the Grimslaithe-Nakajawa Expedition of '34, fromwhich I alone returned. And it was not wholly ficticious, the loss ofmemory which I claimed before the investigating team and the relativesof those who had left the English shores with me three months before ...a fractured skull was my own souvenir, and it was long before more thanhazy outlines of those final hours returned to mind.Even now, I would keep my silence, preferring to forget foreverwhat I now recall with such hideous clarity. But from Asgarth Universitythere are solid plans being made for another expedition ...... and theywill be heading into the same peril, if they follow our route. To theirleaders, I beg publicly, avoid those deadly waters, if you value yoursouls and your sanity ... for lives are the very least of what stand tobe lost, if you enter there !But I must start at the beginning, with the facts and eventsthat can be proven, if I hope to convince those brave, foolishexplorers. There was a time when I was as brave myself, before my nervewent, and as for foolish - I was not merely ignorant, but worse, Iclosed my eyes to events I should have noted, and refused to drawconclusions that might have saved my sanity and my companions' lives. Itall seems so long ago, now - but the calendar counts only sixteen monthsbefore any of it began. My snout was free of any trace of white fur,back then. It was a telephone call that began it for me, as I returned homelate one evening. I had been working late at the University, in thefinal days of my postgraduate course in Practical and Applied Theology.There was just one interview to write up, and a dozen e-prayers still tobe sent off in thanks, and the final draft would be complete."Glad I could catch you at last, me old hound !" I recognizedthe booming tones of Huddesworth Senior, one of my class who had alsostayed on, though in the PseudoScience department. "Got a vacancy comingup, I thought you might be interested. Professor Grimslaithe's littleboating trip out West, seafloor surveys for a couple of months. They'vehad a couple of folk drop out at the last minute - are you in ?"My eyes fell on the calendar, with two dates underlined in red.The next week, when my final paper had to be in - and the end of themonth, when my grant funding ran out. One of those dates I could facewithout worries, but the other -"Count me in," I nodded to the phone, my tail thrashing happily."I'll be round first thing tomorrow with my toothbrush packed!"Of course, things took rather longer than that. Huddesworth hadthought of me for the crew due to my handiness with improvised machinery- the previous year I had won the Heath Robinson Scholarship by buildingthe most eye-catching, nitro-burning dragster unicycle to ever pulltwelve "g" straight off the start line. Persuading the actualorganisers that they wanted me, was another matter, and it was the dayafter my last paper was handed in that I was accepted, and learnedexactly what I had volunteered for."Undersea mapping," I blinked as I stood on the harbour ofAsgarth town,looking through the expedition plans with Mr. Grike, fromthe Vague Engineering department. "But ... surely that's all been done ?
 
Both ways, from the top down and the native maps upward." I noddedgreetings to Cth'Rhy'Gac Junior, as the handsomely squamous philosophyprofessor climbed out of the harbour. A world-renowned leader in hisarea, he was never out of his depth. A deep one, certainly."Aha..." Mr. Grike tapped his own tusked boar-snout, turning towave at his icthyitic colleague. "That depends. Most of the basic workthat surface-dwellers could do, certainly was finished before theMilennium, and then of course after that we had access to first-handaccounts. But - there's a few parts that .... weren't ON the sea floorthen." He opened up the chart to show where he meant, and I winced. Notlong after the Milennium, following the newly discovered Cup-HandlePrinciple of geological instability, various "Sticking-out bits" of thecontinents had broken off and fallen into the ocean.For a few seconds we both stood there by the harbour wall,somehow feeling slightly chilled despite the Spring sunshine. All aroundus, was the normal routine of the town and harbour, peaceful right outto sea where a heavy swell showed something huge was undulating justbeneath the surface. A mile-long tentacle waved cheerfully on thehorizon, and the feeling passed.The boar coughed. "Actually, we've been asked to investigate thewhole area - here." He pointed on the map. "It seems there's still a lotof geological activity, with some very strange sea-mounts reported froma distance. The local .... government want us to map it out thoroughlybefore any of them swim over and take a look. Surface-dwellers only onthe active team."I nodded, a little relieved. It made perfect sense - in thegeneral run of events, none of the expedition members would expect tosee their fourteenth decade - I knew, as we all did, how much more interms of centuries Cth'Rhy'Gac Junior and his relatives stood to lose ifa dangerous expedition went wrong. (The University had needed tointroduce a new category of "Mature Student", to cope with those whowere only 2 percent into their expected life-spans, but still couldlecture on most of recorded history as seen first-hand.)"So, we're going for a bit of underwater sight-seeing ? " Ilooked at the expedition outline, and my ears raised in surprise. "It'sscheduled to experiment with using ice-dam techniques, in the open ocean? I've heard of that ... freezing a caisson of ice all the way to theocean floor and pumping the water out .... that'll need a hell of aship to provide that much refrigerating power !"Clint Grike's rock-solid features split in a stony grin. "Won'tit just. One hell of a ship."It was Barnstoneworth who filled me in on the details, as weretired to the pub that evening, the Eurocrat's Head. The tavern wasold, comfortably so .... I noticed three of the Historical Architecturestudents in the corner, textbooks out, arguing over the date of a well-preserved leatherette coffee-bar. All around us was history, some of itdating back to the fabled 1960's era ... rumour had it that a band ofghouls exploring deep in the sub-basement had once come across a realaluminium barrel for pressurising ale.I looked around the room, drinking in the familiar sights - theupper floor was new, having been gutted in a firefight with armouredassault units of the Salvation Army just before the Liberation ten yearsago - but down here, things looked much as they had done for merrilyEldritch centuries."Cheers ! Eh, but it'll be good to see the sights a bit." Thegreat bristling badger set two brimming pint tankards down. "I've beenhere ten years, like, time for a change. And ..." he looked around,
 
taking in the memento-packed room, the air rich with hops and the sharpscents as pints of absinthe were poured out, " it's a bit o' historythat'll be taking us out there, an' all. A Macro-ship, that's what we'vefound, left ower from the War .... enough of it left to salvage, forwhat we want."I almost choked on my ale. "A Macro-Ship ? There's one survivedin one piece ... and they just let us Have it ? HOW ?" For I had onlyonce seen one, the size of a small town on tracks, far off on thehorizon in the final days of the EC Liberation, heading south towardsthe nightmare land that our ancestors had shudderingly called Belgium.He chuckled, his sharp teeth gleaming. "For this trip, like, youmight say we've got friends of Influence, who want to see it gosmoothly. Friends in high places, 'cept they're down there at the fivetonnes per square inch level, like. And .... you might say, it needs alittle ... work on it, to get it going."How much work, and the scale of the problem in every sense, Ifound out the next weekend. There were twenty or so of us on thequayside, looking out into the rain-swept drizzle that faded into greyevening out to the East, where we strained our eyes every few minutes.Suddenly one of the engineers, a white cat in a fluorescent yellowboiler-suit that would probably show up from orbit, pulled off hispocket stereo and grinned around at us, whiskers twitching."Got a neutrino detector patched into the left channel," hetapped the pocket-sized box smugly. "Someone's running a reactor outthere, or I'm an ape-descendant. Take a listen."The box was passed around us eagerly, and we had to agree. TheBulky Disc was still running in one ear, one of the "neo Prog-Rock"albums that modern digital recordings have made so popular, allowing thebands to explore musical frontiers involving eleven-hour guitar or evendrum solos. But in the other ear, there was a slow, random ticking asultimately tiny particles passed through the world's mass unhinderedtill they met the "Virtual V " of the detector's force-field. Swingingthe set, I stared out with the rest of us to the rolling fogbanks ofthe North Sea, where something was definitely fissioning its waytowards us.Half an hour later, our thoughts of damp fur and freezing pawswere forgotten. The wind had sprung up in sudden squalls, just as thelast of the light touched the moors and altar-stones high above Asgarthtown behind us. And there, suddenly churning through the grey waterstowards us, was a quarter of a million tonnes of sentient armouredfighting vehicle, its wrap-round tracks each the width of an autobahn,driving straight out of the pages of History and onto our dockside !There was a massed sigh, and night-vision glasses were raised asmore of it came out of the cloaking fogbank, its grey-black armouredbulk blending into the darkening horizon. And then someone coughednervously, and passed the glasses around. From the first we had seen ofit, I had thought there was something .. strange about it, apart fromthe tracks rotating in the "wrong" direction, slowing it for a dockingrather than an overrun attack on Asgarth.I saw the cat in the yellow suit wince, as he stared out at ourclass project. He handed me the glasses, and I could read the name"Eckingthwaite" on his nametag."It's something like a Class Twenty-Six, as far as I can tell,"he murmured. "At least... it might have been, before someone was ....Unkind to it."The next morning, I stood aboard our new home as it lay aground
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m30wc0w

One day I shall read this all. Very good work :)

reply12 / 18 / 2008
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