20,000 Years Under the Sea
He dreamed of tentacles again.
The battered Nautilus cruised listlessly through uncharted waters, its engine struggling, pumps and pistons wheezing like an injured man trying to catch his breath. The hull seams showed the strain of the recent battle, and some rivets leaked water, preventing the armored sub-marine boat from diving deep.
But the dreams of her captain were darker and more restless than the seas around them.
In his stateroom, Nemo’s bunk was padded with fine cushions, and he tossed under silken sheets that were fit for a caliph—stolen from the corrupt caliph, as was the Nautilus and everything else.
In the nightmare, he fought alongside his loyal crewmen against the slimy, thrashing tentacles. Though Nemo’s true war was against evil men and their unquenchable thirst for slaughter, the giant squid was a mindless beast of nature. The squid had tried to crush the armored hull in its suckered embrace, and Nemo and his men fought it with cutlasses, harpoons, and daggers, covering the deck with foul-smelling slime and a gushing of black ink like a shadow made out of acid. A well-placed harpoon blinded the monster’s eye and penetrated its rudimentary brain, then the wounded creature released its death grip, slipping away from the sub-marine boat and into the sea, taking four crewmen with it.
Captain Nemo and his surviving sailors tended their injuries. The men already had many scars from years of engineering slavery at Caliph Robur’s prison camp of Rurapente. After escaping in fire and blood, Nemo had declared his own war on war; nature, however, didn’t care about their battle or their pain—the giant squid proved that.
Nemo would not be deterred by storms or by attacking monsters. He tried to rest while Mr. Harding and his engineers repaired the motors. Others caulked and welded hull breaches, reinforcing the seams on the wounded vessel. The navigator steered through the night, looking for some sheltered place where they could put in and complete repairs.
Exhausted and sore, Nemo tried to rest, if only for a few hours, but nightmares of that soulless tentacled creature granted him no peace. Even in sleep, Captain Nemo continued his battle.…
Thus, it was a relief when Mr. Harding tapped on his cabin door. “Sorry to disturb you, sir, but we found an island. Looks uninhabited.”
Nemo climbed from his bunk, disentangling himself from the silken sheets that reminded him too much of tentacles. “I’m on my way.”
Nemo was amazed his navigator had been able to find this bleak and rugged island. With its crescent-shaped cove bounded by black walls that plunged down to the waterline, it reminded Nemo of a claw.
When they encountered the giant squid, the Nautilus had been stalking naval battleships in the southern seas, eager to eliminate the bloodthirsty soldiers before they could prey upon innocents. Nemo left any merchant vessel unmolested, but French, British, or Spanish warships were sunk to the bottom of the sea. No mercy. The sailors aboard would have shown no mercy to those they preyed upon: innocent women and children who became pawns in political power plays, like Nemo’s own wife and son, like the families of the other engineering prisoners from Rurapente.
Because the seas were so rough south of Terra del Fuego, few sailing vessels wandered far afield for the pleasure of exploring. Now, damaged and limping along, the Nautilus had blundered upon a bleak no-man’s-land not far from the untouched shores of the Antarctic continent. This isolated, never-inhabited island was surrounded by mist and freezing drizzle.
The sun was only a pale, gray fuzz swathed in mist when Nemo emerged from the hatch with Mr. Harding and engineers named Louart and Fallon. He inspected the glistening hull for traces of slime or pools of blood, but the spray of rough waters had washed the Nautilus clean.
Nemo inhaled the salty, mist-laden air, but there was a sour, rotten taint to it. Louart asked, “What’s that smell, Captain?”
“This is a sheltered cove,” Harding suggested. “Maybe a school of fish …”
Fallon said, “I remember each year when the alewives would die off and wash ashore. Made the whole port stink.”
Nemo did see numerous fish floating belly up on the surface of the cove. “But these are all different species. They wouldn’t have died off at once.”
Harding got down to business. “No matter, Captain. We’re here to make repairs and be on our way.”
Nemo gazed up at the sheer cliffs. Seabirds wheeled about, not the usual gulls but black ones that looked like bats. As they hunted in the shadowy mist, their screeches were haunting.
In some trick of the warming dawn, the mist thinned, and hazy light dappled the surrounding cliffs and the mountains inland. Nemo saw more than just boulders and outcroppings: the cliffs were scattered with blocky geometrical shapes, graceful pillars, magnificent but crumbling towers. Even from this distance, with details blurred by fog, the structures looked unspeakably ancient.
“They’re ruins, Cap’n!” Fallon cried.
Nemo frowned. “We’re off the coast of Antarctica. No civilization ever existed this far south. Even the savages in Terra del Fuego have nothing more than huts.”
Louart pointed toward the mysterious city inland. “And yet, Monsieur Capitaine—they exist.”
Nemo turned to his second-in-command. “Mr. Harding, I’ll let you continue the repairs. I intend to see that city.”
Harding never argued. “Suit yourself, Captain. We have plenty of work to do.” His bearded face was smeared with grease and his hands were dirty. “I spent hours in the engine room. We’ll have to take the motors apart, replace one of the screws. That squid did us a lot of harm.”
“Can you fix it?” Nemo asked.
The other man raised his eyebrows. “Of course, we can fix it—we built the boat in the first place. It’s just a matter of time.”
“Time to explore, then.”
Joined by five companions, Nemo took a boat to shore, searching for a safe landing spot against the cliffs. At last, they encountered a cleverly hidden road cut at an angle down the rock, all but invisible except when approached face-on. The wide path was paved with moss-slick flagstones cut from black obsidian. The carved steps were at the wrong height for human legs.
Inland, the strange, bleak island was littered with ruins, white stone structures with trapezoidal doorways that were too low and too wide for an average person. The streets spread out in unsettling angles, and the walls were constructed with a disorienting obliqueness that made Nemo feel as if he were falling when he faced them.
Temples or observatories crowned outcroppings, and huge columns rose high, but many were broken, strewn about like the bones of prehistoric animals. Boulevards led across a high plateau and then plunged over a cliff edge. Rounded arenas had once hosted some kind of unknown sport or spectacle.
On the lintels of collapsed buildings and an altar of what must have been a temple of worship, or sacrifice, Nemo saw a repeated dot pattern that seemed familiar to him, but he couldn’t place it.
Standing tall, dark stone obelisks were covered with strange glyphs unlike any alphabet Nemo had ever seen—a mixture of runes, hieroglyphics, and squiggles. He had learned many languages in his life, and after years of oppression at Rurapente, he was fluent in reading and writing Arabic. His engineers understood the language of mathematics. The language of the ancient engravings seemed an amalgam of all those things.
Even in the gray cold mist Nemo smelled brimstone, and a pall of old smoke seemed hung in the air. These ruins reminded him far too much of Rurapente.…
He had been selectively captured in the Crimean War along with other scientists, engineers, and visionaries. The evil Caliph Robur forced them to work in his isolated prison. As the ambitious French engineer de Lesseps carved a channel across the Suez Isthmus that would connect the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, the caliph had commanded Nemo and his fellow workers to build him a warship unlike any the world had seen: an armored vessel to prey upon trade ships that came through the new Suez Canal. He could become the world’s most accomplished pirate, the greatest leader, the master of the world.
For years Nemo and his comrades had toiled in slavery. They were rewarded with wives whom they learned to love, even families that gave them a spark of solace in their captivity. Caliph Robur had made the Nautilus his fortress, until Nemo and his men overthrew and assassinated him during a test voyage, stole the armored sub-marine boat, and raced to Rurapente to save their families. But they were too late. The caliph’s political rivals had already marched upon the secret base and slaughtered everyone.…
Nemo could never burn away the images of his return to Rurapente. The foundations of buildings stood like blackened stumps of teeth. The smelting refineries had been caved in, windows smashed, bricks crumbled. The living quarters had been burned to ash and slag. Everything … destroyed.
The oppressive silence had been broken only by a faint whistle of wind. As he stood there, Nemo had thought he heard the shouts of raiders, the crackle of flames, the clang of scimitars against makeshift weapons, or against soft flesh, hard bone. Screams of pain and pleas for mercy from the desperate slaves, the women, the children—everyone who had endured life at Rurapente. All dead.
And was this place any different?
He and his companions found weathered statues hewn from lava rock, details blurred by time and something more. Together, two crewmen pried loose a stone figure that had toppled face-first into the crumbling gravel and frozen mud. When they lifted it up, Nemo saw not the figure of any man, but a creature with a face that was a hideous mass of tentacles, and eyes that even in the pitted and eroded stone looked as empty and unimaginable as the universe.
Louart paled and made the sign of the Cross, though he had not previously demonstrated any penchant for religion. “It must be one of their gods,” said Fallon.
“Or one of their demons,” Nemo said.
They continued to explore, studying friezes that depicted the daily life of a civilization inconceivable even to the most fevered opium dream, populated by barrel-like creatures with starfish heads. None of the men spoke, uneasy, awed, and intimidated.
The sour smell of rot was more pronounced as he led the way to the steep path down to the cove. The sun ducked behind the mist again, and gray shrouds thickened around them.
Mr. Harding was on the upper deck of the Nautilus waiting for the captain. “Those are ruins even greater than the city of Pompeii,” Nemo told him.
The gruff second-in-command scratched his bearded chin. “Then you’ll be even more interested in what we found in the cove, Captain. There’s an even larger ancient city submerged under the water.” His lips quirked in a small smile, “And this one’s intact.”
When the Nautilus had fought its way to the shelter of the natural harbor at night, no one had been looking deep below. As Nemo peered into the deep cove, he could see the shimmering fever-dream architecture of the sunken city. “That city down there has waited a long time for us. It might have been submerged for twenty thousand years or more.”
“I don’t intend on staying here anywhere near that long, Captain,” Harding said. “We’ll get to work.”
Nemo picked Louart and three other men to don exploration suits and join him. The Rurapente engineers had designed the suits for Caliph Robur, after he lied that he wanted to explore the bottom of the sea; in truth, Robur had needed those suits so his underwater army could augur holes in the hulls of helpless ships.
Nemo gathered the waterproof leather suit, the weights, the buckles, the helmet, and the wrappings that sealed all the seams. As he and his team fastened their helmets and attached the breathing hoses to tanks so they could inhale the stale compressed air, he thought again of his war against war.
The Nautilus could have been an unprecedented means of exploration, a boon for science. Before being captured in the Crimea, Nemo had seen much of the world, dared many adventures, but thanks to the smoke and the misery of Rurapente his spirit of curiosity had been snuffed out like a bright ember under a bootheel. Now, though, this ancient and mysterious underwater city intrigued him.
He sank slowly and gracefully toward the bottom. The pressure of the water closed around him like a squeezing fist, but the reinforced suit protected him. His weights pulled him down until the Nautilus was only a strange angular shape that eclipsed the rippling daylight. The other men spread out as they drifted down and landed with slow gracefulness. Together, they turned on their galvanic lights, shining yellow into the gloom.
The buildings of the sunken city were similar to the ruins up above, but here they were better preserved. The walls stood upright and arches gracefully framed entryways into ominous temples.
Taking the lead, Nemo walked with his armored boots on the silty floor, sending up puffs of murk to expose broad flat flagstones. They passed titanic facades, statues, obelisks covered with markings, friezes that depicted the creatures with the barrel-bodies and starfish heads, and another species that were formless conglomerations of bubbles or masses of pseudopods that seemed to be servants or guardians to the starfish-headed creatures. And more images of the tentacle-faced creature from the toppled statue. The arches and rune-encrusted pillars again bore that familiar dot pattern. Perhaps it was something from a book Caliph Robur kept inside the Nautilus library.
They spread out to explore, and their galvanic lights bobbed along. The sunken metropolis carried a weight of ancientness, a weariness of years that extended far beyond the twenty thousand years he had suggested. Perhaps these buildings had been erected long before humans had ever populated this planet.
A golden glow flared and then died down, but the suit made Nemo sluggish, and the hazy glow had faded by the time he turned. He felt a chill. He had encountered many predators under the sea, had fought off sharks and a giant squid, but this fear was different and inexplicable.
Louart approached him, signaling with a gloved hand. The two men pressed their face plates together so that when Louart’s voice echoed through the thick glass. “Notice, mon Capitaine. No coral, no seaweed, no rubble.”
Nemo indicated a cluster of perfectly placed sea anemones and a large fan of corral, but Louart shook his head inside the helmet. They touched panes of glass again. “Those are intentional—decorations. Something is tending this city.”
Nemo realized the other man was right. Always when he ventured to the sea bottom, the marine flora was scattered and lush: sponges, shellfish, anchored kelp, and waving fronds of seaweed. Here, though, the cove appeared sterile. He realized that he hadn’t seen any fish.
The group spread out again, wary. Nemo shone his light around, found a line of imposing arches that seemed to guide him on. He walked under the first span, and the second, until he saw a domed and thick-walled structure ahead, sealed and armored like a bunker … or a crypt.
Nemo felt drawn to it, as if compelled. The vault door was barricaded with a complex stone mechanism … clean, smooth stone. Any normal ruins would have been encrusted with marine growth and cemented shut by coral, but the lines here were razor sharp and clear of debris.
He shone the yellow galvanic beam to illuminate the door. It was covered by a stylized bas-relief that showed a creature with the smooth dome of a skull and baleful red eyes that glowed with inset phosphorescent jewels. The lower half of the creature’s face was covered with twisting, curling tentacles.
Though the thing was frightening, Nemo felt a tantalizing tug on his heart that ignited his anger. This thing with the tentacled face symbolized Nemo’s own hatred toward those who wrought violence, and it seemed to possess a power to eradicate war. This was something far more deadly than the Nautilus, if only he would set it free.…
With great difficulty, he pulled himself away and withdrew beneath the looming arches. He could hear his breathing in the helmet, and his heart was pounding like drums. He looked around for his companions.
One figure, Louart, stood close to a tall, ethereal spire of rock carved into delicately balanced segments. The man studied the carvings, then pulled himself to a higher section to see.
Although the sunken ruins were perfectly preserved, they were still fragile with unspeakable age. As Louart placed weight against the joints, the segmented spire wobbled and bent. He pushed himself backward and out of the way as the stone sections collapsed.
The galvanic lights flashed in random directions as the other men backed away from the tumbling stone. Suddenly, the golden glow appeared at the edge of Nemo’s vision, brightening and rushing forward. He caught only a glimpse out of the curved helmet.
A swarm of light and bubbles erupted along the corridors of the ancient city. It was a mass of living spheres, like gelatinous blind eyes clumped into a sentient form. All the spheres turned forward, as if targeting the intruder who had knocked down the spire.
Louart saw the thing coming and flailed away. The bubble mass moved so swiftly that it reached the man before the last spire block had tumbled to the ocean floor. The shapeless amoeboid swarmed over Louart. He fought with his arms and legs, but the bubble creature surrounded him and squeezed.
Nemo and his companions hurried to Louart’s defense, but they were too slow underwater. The ocean was so incredibly silent. Nemo and one other man had spears; the others carried scimitars. The bubble thing continued to contract around its victim, and a sudden splash of red exploded in Louart’s helmet, filming the faceplate.
Nemo hurled his harpoon, and it glided through the water, sizzling into the amoeboid thing, puncturing several of the spheres before it disappeared into the mass. But the formless creature rearranged itself, extending pseudopods in other directions. By now Louart was surely dead, perhaps even half digested. The other crewman threw his spear, to no effect.
The bubble thing squirmed along and retreated among the empty buildings of the sunken city. Nemo knew that it could have killed the rest of them, but the creature had retaliated only against the one man who had caused damage.
The other men were panicked, and Nemo pointed upward. His three comrades tore off their weights and floated upward to the waiting Nautilus.
Nemo remained in the ancient city, warily looking around. He glanced back toward the tantalizing, armored tomb that he hadn’t had the nerve to explore, then he, too, released his weight belt and swam up to daylight.
Even without Louart’s body, the Nautilus crew held a solemn funeral for him. Afterward, Harding came to stand in the doorway of the captain’s quarters. “We’ve lost too many crew already, Captain.”
Nemo sat at his small desk but did not nod. “We would all be dead if we’d stayed at Rurapente. This way, at least we can keep fighting.”
“Fight against what, Captain? A giant squid? Some primordial monster in an ancient city?”
“The world is not a safe place, Mr. Harding, and there are other kinds of wars besides the one we chose. We can either give up, or we can continue our fight. This is a setback, but it is not a defeat.”
Nemo stared at the books on the shelves, ancient Arabic tomes that Caliph Robur had considered essential—military strategy reports and treatises about the use of bladed weapons, instructional manuals on methods of torture (some of which masqueraded as medical texts). But he thought he remembered seeing something …
“When will the repairs be completed?”
His second in command stood in cold silence for a moment before answering, “Tomorrow, sir.”
“Then let me read tonight.”
After hours of paging through documents, he found the volume that contained the familiar dot pattern he’d seen on so many of the ruins. It was a thick handwritten book bound in a curious pale leather. The text inside had been penned in a dark brown ink; all the words were scribed in a trembling hand, as if the author were afraid to put into words the nightmarish thoughts that consumed his brain. Necronomicon.
After years as the caliph’s prisoner, Nemo was fluent in Arabic, but this writing seemed to be an odd archaic dialect, written by a man named Abdul al-Hazred. Pages and pages of speculations seemed utter gibberish, something concocted in the hashish houses of Cairo or scrawled by a man dying from a madness plague.
According to the mad Arab, the dot pattern was a sign of the Old Ones, creatures from beyond time and space that had settled Earth soon after its formation, long before any natural life had emerged from the ooze. He saw drawings of the starfish-headed things depicted in statues in both the above-ground ruins and the sunken city. The Necronomicon’s ravings told how the Old Ones had found a way to traverse the airless chasms of open space, how they had created and enslaved a race of shapeless sentient clusters of protoplasm called Shoggoths that were their servants, their guardians, their caretakers.
The preposterous imagined history laid out a march of epochal events, how a race of tentacle-faced beings—immense and powerful strangers from beyond the stars—had engaged in a great war against the Old Ones, nearly wiping them out, but the Shoggoths and the Old Ones fought back, defeating the octopoid creatures, at least for a time. And the Old Ones had retreated into their cities beneath the sea.
Nemo thought the ruined city on this mysterious island might have been one of those ancient and impressive dwellings of the Old Ones. And the shapeless bubble thing that had attacked Louart—was that a Shoggoth?
The bas-relief carved in the doorway of the armored crypt was much like the octopoid race. The Necronomicon named the beings in a word written in blocky letters, as if al-Hazred had dared himself to write the word: CTHULHU.
He closed the book. Rationally speaking, Nemo didn’t believe any of it. And yet in a primitive and easily frightened corner of his mind, he thought he knew the answers.
Mr. Harding delivered the welcome news that repairs were nearly completed and the Nautilus could be under way by nightfall. The crew let out a ragged cheer. After the death of Louart, the oppressive anxiety that hung over the abandoned island and the ruined city had begun to seep into their psyche like mildew in a dank tomb.
Nemo, however, heard the report from his second-in-command as if it were distant background noise. He wasn’t yet finished with this ancient sunken city. The tales from the Necronomicon had inflamed his imagination, caught hold of him like an incurable fever.
If he had read the ravings of the mad Arab in the camp of Rurapente, he would have discounted it all, but after what he had seen, not just the statues and cyclopean buildings, but the appearance of the murderous—protective?—Shoggoth that had killed Louart, he knew it had to be real. And that thing sealed in the armored tomb pulled on him like the inescapable current of the fabled maelstrom off the coast of Norway.
“I’m going back down there, Mr. Harding.” He raised his voice and glanced at his crewmen at their stations on the bridge. “I’d like three volunteers to accompany me—but I won’t require it.” He didn’t speak further, because he didn’t want to be challenged to explain what he was doing or why.
Harding looked skeptical, but he held his tongue. The crew were terrified, knowing what had happened to their comrade, but they were Nemo’s men and they would do anything for him. In the end, he had more volunteers than he needed.
As he suited up, Nemo felt preoccupied, his thoughts focused on what he knew was down there. In his life he had fought pirates, been shipwrecked, crossed Africa in a balloon, fought in the Crimean War, and suffered years of imprisonment under a murderous caliph who wanted to be the master of the world. But he doubted he would ever face anything as nerve-wracking as this. His obsession went beyond fear.
In their weighted underwater suits, the four explorers plunged to the bottom of the cove, shining their galvanic lanterns into the murk. They were all more wary now, seeing movement in every shadow, alert for the golden glow of the lurking Shoggoth. The men each carried a spear in one hand and a cutlass in the other, although the previous day’s encounter had shown that such primitive defenses were ineffective against the Shoggoth.
This time, Nemo was pulled by an invisible force, like a questing tongue drawn to a broken tooth. He felt a call of that other being whose very image and name exuded awe. Cthulhu. The crypt seemed to contain more power than Nemo would need to win his war against war.
The four galvanic beams shone out, illuminating the arches that led to the squat armored building. The circular walls were like low battlements surrounding the sealed temple—or was it a tomb?—of an Elder God.
The other men spread out, holding their spears and cutlasses, on guard for the swarming mass of one of the Old Ones’ guardians. But Nemo faced the graven image of the cosmic creature. This being was different from the builders of the ancient sunken city; it might have caused the destruction of the starfish-headed Old Ones. But if so, why would they build a temple to it here? Why honor Cthulhu with such an impressive and elaborate tomb?
He ran his gloved hands along the complex locking mechanism that sealed the crypt door. The stone components were carefully carved and arranged like a puzzle, a mystic trigger built by minds immeasurably superior to his own.
This mechanism was a problem unlike other engineering challenges he had faced in Rurapente, but his hands had their instincts. He applied his mind to the problem, sliding the components sideways, then down, then back into a different interlocking configuration. Something seemed to be guiding him. He felt the stone door thrum beneath his fingertips, as if an energy inside were building, awakening.
Next to him, the men scrambled backward, and Nemo turned to see if the Shoggoth was coming, but his companions were staring at him, at the temple … at the door cracking open. What seeped out was not a golden glow, but the opposite—an emptiness of light, a shadow that sucked at the beams of their galvanic lamps.
The water grew suddenly colder, penetrating even his thick undersea suit. The stone door spread wider, and darkness boiled out, along with an ominous emerging figure—a titanic looming shape that seemed much too large to have been contained within the structure.
A current blew Nemo backward like a howling storm wind as the crypt burst open, and the enormous thing with baleful eyes and facial tentacles emerged. The statues had conveyed only a hint of the overwhelming cosmic presence of what Abdul al-Hazred had named Cthulhu.
Then Nemo realized what he should have known from the start—that this was not a temple or a tomb … but a prison.
One of his men thrashed in a frantic effort to swim away, but the reawakened Cthulhu turned a horrible, maddening gaze upon him—and the man’s struggles immediately ceased. He drifted motionless, struck dead by the mere sight.
The galvanic lamps flashed wildly in all directions as the other two fled. Nemo was stunned and tumbling, trying to reorient himself in the water. He slammed into one of the stone walls and held on for balance. Nemo’s mind couldn’t contain the immensity of the emerging Cthulhu, a being that had been locked away for twenty thousand years or more beneath the sea.
What have I unleashed?
The water around him suddenly glowed, frothing golden as if illuminated by an unknown and insane source of light. Through his faceplate, he saw a roiling blob of bubbles, a conglomeration of translucent spheres that might or might not have been eyes—it was the Shoggoth returned to continue its attack.
But the formless thing did not pursue Nemo or his companions; instead, it confronted the horrific Elder God. The light in the water continued to grow, and another Shoggoth streaked in from a separate part of the city. Then a third—and four more!
The Old Ones may have been long extinct in this isolated city, but they had left these shapeless but somehow faithful creatures to maintain their cursed metropolis. The Shoggoths did more than just maintain the buildings, arches, and sunken gardens; they were also here to keep the Cthulhu thing imprisoned.
Nemo and his men tried to find shelter behind the enormous facades, unable to do anything but watch. In their scramble away, they had dropped their cutlasses and spears. Nemo’s eyes were so blasted that he could barely see details in the glaring light, the masses of bubbles, the thrashing tentacles, and a defiant roar that vibrated through the fabric of the universe.
The Shoggoths swept in and surrounded the powerful, unspeakably evil creature that had emerged from its millennial prison. The formless creatures showed no vengeance toward the Nautilus men seeming to regard them as utterly beneath notice.
Nemo and his companions tore away their weighted belts and clawed their way upward, rising toward the distant surface while expecting to be struck dead at any moment.
Below, the battle continued with all the fury of an active undersea volcano. The emerging Cthulhu tore Shoggoths to pieces, ripping the masses of bubbles apart, but the spheres reconverged. The Shoggoths were many, and they had been placed there for the sole purpose of guarding this monster. In a hurricane of golden light and swirling pseudopods, they drove the Cthulhu thing back, unable to destroy it—how does one kill a godlike being that has existed since before time?—but at least the Shoggoths could contain it. They surrounded the ancient monster in a cocoonlike embrace and pushed it back toward the tomb chamber.
Nemo finally broke the surface of the water, and he detached his helmet, gasping. The muffled sounds suddenly grew louder; next to him, the men couldn’t stop screaming. Nemo’s own throat was raw, and he knew he must have been screaming as well.
Careless and terrified, they dropped their helmets into the water and climbed the rungs to fight their way aboard the imagined safety of the Nautilus.
Mr. Harding stood watching them, surprised and alarmed. “Engines are ready to go, Captain, but what—”
Below, the supernatural storm continued to unleash explosions of light and inky shadows. “We must depart immediately!” Nemo said. “Now!”
Harding didn’t argue. Seeing the expressions of absolute terror, not just on the other sailors but on their brave captain as well, the sailors moved more swiftly than they ever had in their lives.
When he spoke, Nemo’s voice was torn and hoarse. “Take us away from this island. Far, far away.”
The repaired engines hummed, and the sub-marine boat lumbered forward, picking up speed. Beneath them, the cove’s deep water looked like a storm of lights and fire, inconceivable colors in a simmering battle that Nemo himself may have triggered … but one in which he could do nothing to fight on either side.
“What was down there, Captain?”
“Nothing I could understand, Mr. Harding.”
The second-in-command gave a small nod, then focused on business, intent on more than cosmic monsters, Elder Gods, or vanished alien cities. “The Nautilus is in prime condition again, Captain. Engines at full power. Hull integrity, ramming blades, and reinforced bulkheads all check out. We can continue our mission.”
Nemo stared ahead through the dragon’s-eye portholes. The Nautilus left the mysterious island behind and cut across the water into dark and uncharted seas. His own war against human hatred and bloodshed was an all-consuming struggle, a war so big that he knew it could never be won … still, the battle had to be fought.
Yet, the war he had just discovered between the Old Ones and Cthulhu was so much vaster, so much more ancient, so much more inconceivable that his own puny struggle against the evils of man seemed laughably trivial in comparison.
But it was his struggle, and it was all Nemo had left. “Yes, Mr. Harding, we will continue our war.” He lowered his voice. “Even if it doesn’t matter to the rest of the universe.”
The Nautilus cruised away from the nightmarish island, toward the normal trade routes, continuing the hunt.