FROM THE JOURNAL OF ENSIGN DANFORTH The Captain in Yellow
FROM THE JOURNAL OF ENSIGN DANFORTH
April 29, 2317
Day one as a crew member on the Brotherhood’s flagship! My shuttle from New Innsmouth station met the Carcosa in orbit around Yuggoth. You hear a lot of stories, but until you see her up close you can’t possibly understand. She’s a mountain in space. Four nacelles sweep back from her hull like enormous, glistening metal tentacles. I wiped away a tear of joy as I boarded her.
Before you ask: No, I haven’t met Captain Hastur yet. Obviously, my dream assignment is to the bridge crew, but it’s a long way to the top. The first officer greeted me in the shuttle bay, though. Commander Nyarlathotep lives up to his reputation. Tall, swarthy, handsome, with a jet-black beard and slicked-back hair. I stared, slack-jawed, as he pinned a Yellow Sign comm badge to the chest of my jumpsuit.
“Gorgonzola?” he asked.
I blinked. “Excuse me, sir?”
“Gorgonzola? Brie?” He gestured to a spread of crackers and fancy cheeses laid out for the new arrivals. I shook my head. He led me to an elevator.
The commander simply oozes confidence. The rest of the crew practically worships him. He turned every head as he escorted me through the halls to my quarters. Nobody paid me any notice, but I suppose ensigns come and go on a starship like this.
I’m sharing a room with a Deep One named Ensign Y’hoo-nthleth. He’s green and scaly with big, bulging eyes and constantly palpitating gills. He wears a kind of fishbowl on his head, filled with saltwater or something. The computer translated his croaks for me. Seems polite enough. We’ll probably be best friends in a week.
Big day in Engineering tomorrow. Start of my meteoric rise. Good night!
Little after 0200 hours now. Couldn’t sleep. Kept hearing a gravelly voice whisper “fhtagn” over and over. Probably just my imagination.
Y’hoo-nthleth snores a lot.
April 30
Engineering is . . . not what I expected.
I mean, I graduated with honors from Miskatonic Academy. I know my way around a starship’s engine room. Shining trapezohedrons warp space-time to traverse the black seas of infinity, Brotherhood engineers program the silver keys of the light beam envelopes, etc., etc. But the Carcosa is different.
The entire engineering deck is a vast, empty room. At its center is a podium holding a single, arcane text. Chief Engineer Chandraputra, a blind man from the blue caverns of Tsath, sits on a chair next to the podium. A metal visor strapped around his face somehow allows him to read the old book day and night. He mutters so quietly that I can’t make out what he’s saying, but apparently he’s reciting spells that magically propel the Carcosa across the universe. They call this system a “book drive.”
A few other crew members sat on folding chairs around the room. I approached a young woman named Lt. Whateley. She picked at a platter of cheese and crackers (maybe the same cheese and crackers as yesterday?) and read something in her lap.
“Do we cast spells, too?” I asked her.
She frowned at me.
“What? Oh, no. This is a magazine.” She waved it. “We just take turns giving the chief his eye drops, or changing his bedpan. Speaking of which, new guy . . .”
I spent the evening washing my hands in my quarters. Y’hoo sat on his bed and watched me the whole time with his creepy, unblinking eyes. Weirdo.
Kind of a rough start, Journal. But I’m staying positive!
May 5
This is a nightmare.
I haven’t slept in days. “Fhtagn fhtagn fhtagn.” I asked Ensign Mason what it means, and do you know what he said?
“It’s R’lyehian for ‘dream’.”
Are you kidding me? How the hell am I supposed to sleep with someone whispering “dream” all night long? And who’s whispering anyway?
Not Y’hoo, that’s for sure. He spends every night snoring like an angry walrus. We had a big argument after I covered his fishbowl with pillows.
Meanwhile, I use my advanced degree and considerable skills to warm a seat cushion and watch a blind man read. This dead-end job will never earn me a promotion to the bridge crew.
Oh, fantastic. Here comes Whateley. She’s going to tell me to stop writing in my journal and shove some gruel down the chief’s gullet. Tomorrow I’m asking the commander to transfer me to Astronomics.
May 7
The Carcosa’s science officer is literally a brain in a jar.
Fine, it’s not a jar. More like a big metal cylinder, but same difference. Apparently, Science Officer West was on the Hetty when it was captured by the Mi-Go during the Elder Wars. The bug bastards experimented on West for months. By the time he was rescued, the S.O. was nothing but gray matter in a box. Instead of giving him an honorable discharge, though, the Brotherhood stuck some wires in his cylinder and put him back to work.
Not surprisingly, the S.O. is an ornery S.O.B. I can’t believe this, but I miss Engineering. At least the chief didn’t yell at me while I wet his eyeballs. The S.O. barks orders at me all day long. Via text messages, of course. Fortunately he can’t see the faces I make at his stupid jar.
At least, I don’t think he can see me . . . Oh, shit . . .
May 20
You might think that these jumpsuits are waterproof. Having stood hip-deep in a swamp for the past two hours, let me assure you, they are not. Also, I’m pretty certain that something is crawling around in my pants.
Sorry, Journal. Let me catch you up.
After the S.O. fired me, Commander Nyarlathotep re-assigned me to Security. I’m a grunt now, further away from the bridge than ever.
Two days ago, the Carcosa received a distress call from the Nug-Soths of planet Yaddith. The “book drive” zapped us across the void in an instant. I winced when I saw the planet through the porthole in my quarters. Yaddith is a disgusting ball of mud in space, orbiting five red suns and surrounded by five black moons. I felt sorry for the poor losers who had to set foot on that hellhole.
That’s when my comm badge beeped.
“Danforth!” growled the security chief, Lt. Graah. He’s a satyr from Leng, but more bull than goat. “Report to teleportation. You’re on the away team to Yaddith.”
The chief engineer can move an entire spaceship across light-years in the blink of a blind eye, but we still have to teleport from ship to surface. Go figure. And the Carcosa’s ’porters are notoriously unpredictable. When we appeared on Yaddith in a sparkle of green energy, Ensign Lake’s arm was impaled on one of Lt. Graah’s horns. After a lot of screaming and crying on Lake’s part, the lieutenant managed to tear himself free.
It gets worse. Sub-Lieutenant Warren didn’t even make it. There’s nothing left of her but a few scraps of her red uniform jacket and two eyeballs in a mound of flesh. When I close my eyes, I see hers staring at me.
This swamp is so cold. Can’t stop shivering.
We’ve been marching across this soggy bog planet for hours. Y’hoo would be right at home. Why’d I get stuck with this duty while he’s in our warm, dry room, doing whatever it is that he does? Jerk.
We haven’t found a sign of the Nug-Soths who sent the distress call. Maybe they left. Who could blame them?
For the love of . . . What is Lake screaming about now? “Dolls?” “Holes?” He probably stepped in some—
Bloody hell! DHOLES!! They’re everywhere. Tell my mother I—
May 21
I’m alive, Journal. Barely.
Dholes are even more horrible than the training videos led me to believe. Gigantic, slimy worm-monsters, sure. But the teeth. Nobody said anything about the teeth.
It’s impossible to run in a swamp. All you can do is slog through the muck while huge, white worms explode from underneath and devour your mates. Oh, the chewing . . .
Every time one of them ate another crewman, I thought, “You’re next, Danforth. This is where you die.”
I didn’t, though. Thanks to Lt. Graah. Just when the brackish water around me began to bubble, Graah shoved me out of the way. A dhole burst up between us. Graah grappled the monster with both arms and wrapped his hairy goat-legs around its gooey body. He dug his fingers into the dhole’s hide and somehow steered it away from me, toward the other monsters. The last thing I saw of him before he vanished in a tangle of writhing, viscous tubes was the mad grin on his face.
I think he enjoyed it.
The dholes took the rest of the away team. I’m the only one left. Alone, wet and frozen, stranded on a dirty, dank planet under a blood-red sky. It’s only a matter of time before the monsters return. I’m waiting for death.
“Fhtagn,” whispers the voice in my ear. “Dream.”
If I could just close my eyes for a few minutes. Sleep.
This wasn’t what the brochures promised. “Join the Brotherhood! See the Universe! Follow the Yellow Sign!” I expected fun and adventure and a steady day job, eventually a position on the bridge, a chance to prove myself. Instead . . .
For crying out loud, the Yellow Sign! I totally forgot about my comm badge. Hang on, Journal. Hang on.
Everything’s turning green and shimmery. Oh no, not the telepo—
May 30
Doctor Morgan says that the teleporter accident could have been much worse. My bandages should come off in another four to six weeks. She was able to remove my leg from my shoulder and reattach it in the right place, but there’s nothing she can do about my pinky toe.
Y’hoo came to visit me in sickbay. He’s been assigned to the bridge as Captain Hastur’s new chief of security.
My right eye won’t stop twitching.
June 27
My third session with Counselor Shirefield went as badly as the first two. She’s a K’n-yan telepath, which basically means that she can read me like Chief Chandraputra reads an open book.
“Have you always harbored such resentment toward the Deep Ones?” she asked.
I fed her a line about the anguish I felt as a child when my pet goldfish died, but she didn’t buy it. What was I supposed to do, bad-mouth a member of the bridge crew? That was practically insubordination. The Brotherhood would keelhaul me.
Besides, I wasn’t really jealous of Y’hoo. Not anymore. I don’t want to work on the bridge or meet the captain.
I just want to go home.
We sat there in silence for a while, Counselor Shirefield in her high-backed chair, I on my back on the couch. It was comfier than the bed in my quarters and I started to doze.
Finally, she said, “Tell me about your dreams.”
“Fhtagn!” I blurted.
She raised an eyebrow and began writing on her notepad.
I might be in trouble.
July 3
She didn’t have me committed, but she didn’t send me home, either. Instead she transferred me to Interstellar Communications. At this rate I’ll work at every duty post before my probationary period is over.
Commander Nyarlathotep personally escorted me to my new station. He continues to take an interest in me for some reason.
InComm is located in the bowels of the Carcosa in a sad room lit by dim, flickering fluorescent lights. Communications officers sit at long tables, hunched over computers like old crones, sagging under the weight of their oversized headphones.
“You’ll be on our R’lyehian desk,” the commander told me.
“What am I listening for?” I asked, sliding into a seat next to another miserable sap.
The commander grinned. “The call.”
July 4
There isn’t much time, Journal.
I heard it before lunch. At first, I thought my headphones were broken. All I picked up was static. That changed to buzzing, then a low hum, and eventually a whisper so soft that I couldn’t make it out.
I pressed the cans against my ears.
“Fhtagn,” said the voice in an otherworldly timber. Then, as I transcribed the words, it yelled, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!”
My head hit the desk. The InComm room disappeared. I floated in the darkness of space. Asteroids tumbled past me, trailing globules of strange new colors, almost impossible to describe: the color of old paper to a sightless swami; the color of a jar to a brain with no eyes; the color of a dhole’s digestive juices seen from the inside.
A space rock exploded and revealed Him in His terrible glory.
Mighty Cthulhu swam among the stars. His tentacles pinwheeled as he drifted nearer to me. I trembled beneath his shadow. Our eyes met.
“Gorgonzola?” asked Cthulhu. His feelers undulated as he chuckled.
My supervisor shook me awake. Apparently I was laughing uncontrollably in my sleep, but I don’t remember that at all. I looked down at the cord dangling from my ear. My headphones had never been plugged in to anything.
Commander Nyarlathotep was alerted. I stood at attention as he approached me. This is it, I thought. He finally shoves me out an airlock.
But when he read what I’d transcribed, he put an arm around my shoulder and walked me to the exit. “Congratulations, Danforth. You’re being reassigned. You’ll never guess where . . .”
I’m writing this in the bathroom, Journal. The commander agreed to a pit stop on the way to the bridge, but I can’t hide forever. Smells like limburger in here. Or yellow . . . Yellow what? Other colors, without names. It’s hard to gather my thoughts. They’re slipping away like eyeballs through melted flesh.
Nyarlathotep is knocking on the stall door. My time is almost up.
Captain Hastur is waiting.
UBS Carcosa Helmsman’s Log: Space Date 97XQ-441@5-L’Z
Lt. Danforth here, reporting another magnificent Brotherhood day!
All hail He Who Must Not Be Named! The Captain in Yellow sits atop his throne of bones at the center of the bridge. From behind a pallid, tattered mask he gives the word: go forth and serve great Cthulhu!
Powerful Nyarlathotep sits on the captain’s right, and the immortal psychic of K’n-yan on his left. Their counsel is wicked and wise. Hoo hoo!
A disembodied brain, forever entombed in a steel coffin, towers over the operations console next to mine. He processes the data of different dimensions.
Our security chief, my dear friend Y’hoo-nthleth, paces the bridge, ever vigilant against threats to the ship. “CROAK!”
Chief engineer! Ready the book drive! Give the gift of reading! New or gently used arcane texts accepted!
And I, the humble helmsman? My eyes have been opened and at last I dream. Cthulhu taught me to swim. Lost Carcosa! Seek out old life, old civilizations! Abbith, Kythanil, Chavignol, Neufchatel, Shonhi, Roquefort and Xoth, Wensleydale and Vhoorl!
Let us explore strange, old worlds.