Is it really so strange that I shiver when people talk about a newly built power plant? I have had strange experiences which you can judge for yourself as to whether or not they justify my reactions to such stimuli. I shall accede to your threat, but this story may yet cause you to beg me to stay silent about it forever until infinity ends and the world has broken in darkness, you who blackmail me.
No doubt, you have heard of that infamous nuclear disaster- accident, they call it! But no mere accident could have wrought such a horror, may I never lay my sight on such a thing ever again! God! Even as the image in my mind blurs with the thankful erasure of memory's weakness, I still shudder to think of it. For what happened there, in that distant Oriental land of Japan, that accursed place, Tomioka of Futaba district in Fukushima, what happened there in that forsaken nuclear reactor should never have been, should never have existed!
No, it was not that one you speak of, not that. That was too well-publicised. I refer to the other plant, number two, eleven and a half kilometres south of the nuclear plant which you speak of, the number one. I tell this to you with great reluctance, for fear that I might be reported to a madhouse. Yet, even a madhouse would perhaps be a more pleasant avenue. I wish, I hope, I pray that what I had seen was just a mere figment of my madness, but how could even the most warped and twisted depths of my mind spawn such hallucinations?
It all began with that dreadful earthquake on that day of 11th March in the eleventh year of the second millenium. March.. Did it not bring back certain memories? Had I not discovered such a similar date of significance in that bewildering manuscript my old grandfather, Francis Wayland Thurston, left behind amongst his papers after his as-of-yet unaccountable death? Woe betide that day that I had found those papers! That hideous bas-relief sculpture, whose form was thankfully only captured in photographs and yet cursed that it should ever have been captured in physical shape! I still see it now at times, in my dreams and even in my waking hours, that haunting image of a pulp-like head adorned with tentacles over the mouths that looked as if they would begin writhing about like sibilant, horrifying, unnatural snakes! That misproportioned and grotesque body, covered with scales and fitted with a pair of rudimentary wings, a caricature of an octopus, a dragon and a human all at once.
11th March. That date, were it not for my curious delvings into my grandfather's personal effects, would have meant nothing to me. But that I have is the reality, if reality I can still trust, and 11th March was a date of great significance. In my grandfather's records, on the night of 22nd March in the year 1925, that blackest city that was drowned and should never have been raised but for a freak of nature, though I cannot help but wonder how much of it could have been an accident, the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh arose from the depths of the unknown ocean floors. The days prior to it, according to my grandfather, were choked full with cases of hysteria, wild dreams of great Cyclopean cities by sensitive individuals, the sky-flung monoliths dripping with green ooze and slime of foulest compositions, of which that bas-relief sculpture was based upon. Those dreams, my grandfather says, were the calls of sleeping, dreaming Cthulhu. On that day of 22nd March, the visions and madness peaked into an orgiastic climax of crazed violence, where gibbering nonsense words of self-proclaimed prophets filled the streets and suicide cults rose from nowhere, as if as a mimic of R'lyeh! But after that day, nothing more of that nature was to be seen.
We were lucky. We, the human race, were lucky that Cthulhu had not been able to escape his prison-throne and was forced back into his millienia-long slumber.
So I thought, after reading my grandfather's shaky words. That was the case closed. Though I had been shaken, there was nothing more to be done, I imagined fancifully, as if such horrors can ever be successfully staved off.
For twenty days before that day, 11th March, newspapers screamed at me what I was slow to grasp, or perhaps, guessing at its nature, did not want to acknowledge. “Mass Suicide Cults gathering strength in Auckland!”, “Is your stress giving you nightmares?”, “World Sculptor's Asssociations & Societies reject strange art as 'disturbed'” and so forth. That pattern had reformed itself, so horrific were its implications that I had denied it utterly, pretending that I knew nothing about it. With every passing day that I denied it, the headlines leaped out at me with such boldness that I was tempted to simply stop reading the papers.
Then it happened. The earthquake, originating off the coast of that Asian country and I knew, without having to name it, that R'lyeh had moved, that the undersea currents had dragged it there, or perhaps, God forbid, the tides of the sea had been commanded to move so.
God above! For now I must recount to you what had shook and still shakes me so. I, a graduate of the acclaimed, and oftentimes fabled, Miskatonic University, was employed on such a mundane teaching capacity that I had pleaded futilely to be posted to another job more befitting one of my academical learning. If only my pleas now stemmed from that source of indignation as it had then.
I took meagre comfort in the fact that this demeaning position would bring me on a tour of places that, while inherently dull in their ends, were extraordinary in their means. I speak of nothing other than the curved cylindrical shapes which powers vast nations with harnessed lightning, smoke pouring out in thick, languid clouds of venomous black.
I arrived at dreary Tomioka on the eve of that fateful day, which was to prove so horrendous in ways nobody sane can never imagine. I set my foot onto that wet ground, noticing instantly the foetor carried by the noxious wind. Had I ever been put off by the sea-breeze in any seaside village? But no, this was different, this wind bore no relation to any fresh sea-spray-ridden gale I ever breathed. The pungent odour cut my olfactory organs viciously and I cringed in disgust, my scholarly pursuits conditioning me to a state of piteous delicacy.
A first glance at the people inspired nothing but disgust, disgust with no apparent cause. Something in the angles of their odd, narrow heads and that hideous shambling agitated distaste in me. They walked as if unstable, shaking from side to side like a spiteful drunkard roaming the night, arms slack and loose about their side, bringing to mind an image of what an artist I once knew had dubbed “Devolution”. Anthropoid, as opposed to human, these inhabitants seemed. Their bulgy eyes that seemed to stare without blinking and their flat noses were completely unlike other Japanese as I knew them and it seemed to me that these people might not be related at all to the Japanese gene-stock.
I entered the plant without much ado, introducing myself in the indigenious tongue to the chief engineer. His appearance was that of a normal Oriental and I permitted myself a vague sigh of relief, vague owing to not knowing what or why that relief had come about. I found, after brief conversation, that he was from neighbouring Naraha. He was greatly pleased at my appearance, both in the action and the description, he too disliked and abhorred the swarthy appearance of the inhabitants and preferred to deal with them as little as possible.
I spent many long hours talking to him that day, and what he had to say about the history of this town that I was contracted to teach in at its junior and elementary schools was disturbing and uneasily laughed away. His words were more of myth and legend than concrete fact, yet I could not help but connect his words to my deceased forebear's manuscript.
I shall now endeavour to repeat to you part of his speech into our English though I shudder in foul remembrance of anything connected to those days in that accursed region.
“When I was a young boy, my grandmother would warn me to stay away from any stranger, particularly those of Tomioka. There was, she claimed, bad blood in them and bad blood between them and us. I saw little of people from Tomioka, but I vividly remember the one time when I met one on the streets. Even in those years, the Tomioka folk had already gained that inhuman appearance of regression... Yes, even then.. It gave me nightmares for a long time. My grandmother told me that they were not believers of Shinto, our Japanese religion, but worshipped some evil spirit of the sea. She told me that their religion brought with them great riches- have you seen the strange trinkets they sell to tourists? Those images and its material components are not of this world- but at the cost of sacrifices.. Human sacrifices, she told me.. I listened to my grandmother's stories with great attentiveness, because they were usually interesting but this one was just macabre.”
“Her stories about this always began with dire warnings about how many young children disappear in the area of Tomioka and she would then carry on describing just how these adolescents were said to have been laid on altars made of a stone that could not be found anywhere on land and then slit from navel to throat, baring their innards to the cold, wintry air and letting the blood drip down the altar whilst invoking nameless dark demons of the deeps.. The air, I remember, has always been like this, ever since I was young. She would tell me about how her sisters told her about eerie witch-lights on the top of the hill towards the north were seen at definite times of the year... No, my grandmother was not the only one who told me such tales, other people too, but I thought it was just a legend.. What made me decide to work here? The nuclear plant, nothing more. I have no other reason to be here except for my work.. Yes, my friends and family tried to dissuade me from coming here and I can partly see why they would do so. The air is unwholesome, as you have said, the people are queer and belligerent.. It is hard to get anything out of them except passive acknowledgement...”
“I don't like this town, but my job is here and I am used to it. What troubles me is the rate of disappearance in the town. If you look at the older areas, you'll find many buildings that look as if they have been abandoned, boarded up with planks, but sometimes at night, you can hear people talking inside, many many people... This town is ancient.. It is only your first day here, but you will notice weird rituals taking place.. Recently, the rituals have been increasing in frequency. They are anticipating something.. Something.. Oh, have you noticed how very sub-human they behave? They don't speak properly, they don't walk properly.. It isn't natural. Once, just before my grandmother died, she told me that the people here weren't completely human. Inter-breeding with something.. She never explained, or she didn't have time to explain, because she died days later.. My grandmother? A remarkable woman, I loved her very much. Cause of death? A kitchen accident, she slipped and fell onto a knife. Very strange, she was ever nimble in the kitchen... I don't believe she died so simply.”
“The nuclear plant? I don't know why it was constructed here, except that there's a lot of seawater if we ever need it for any problem, though seawater will ruin the plant.. Fish are abundant here, more so than anywhere else in Japan.. More than four thousand megawatts produced by the plant.. The religion here? We in Naraha call them 'cultists'.. I don't know if they have a name for it, but whatever it is, it is unnatural. I have seen some of their religious images, disgusting part-humanoid things with an octopus head, small wings on the back, a great bulk covered with green scales.. Are you okay? Your face is extremely pale. Are you sure? I'm not sure, I don't recall a name given to it.. Maybe if I had a starting sound to help.. Yes.. I do believe that was the sound. Cthulh- Mr Thurston! Mr Thurston, are you okay? You are not well, not at all.. I'll take you home.. The power plant can do without me for the night..”
It was that incredible description that tore apart my veils of self-evasion, that horrid sculpture of that monstrous thing, that which I must not name or face insanity in remembrance of everything. As I rested at home and he took his leave of me, my mind was racing as my heart thundered without pause. If the folk of Tomioka were indeed what my new friend's grandmother claimed to be, then this was no place for me. Sheer terror almost brought me to running down the immaculate, pungent streets and leave the town immediately with nervous energy but my rational mind- Rational, ha!- stopped me from doing so, and I reassured myself with meaningless words that such fantasies belonged to ages past, that phantasms of my grandfather's past did not exist, that in this enlightened age of ours, no such monster could exist. Curse the day I ever read the Necronomicon! Curse the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred! Yes, I have laid my eyes on that tome of monstrous formulae and many more! I have delved into the cursed Unaussprechlichen Kulten, the fragmented but still diabolical Book of Eibon! The Pnakotic Manuscripts I have gorged my eyes upon, the King in Yellow horrifically analysed and deconstructed!
I apologise for my outburst.. I am still touchy about this, but I have promised to tell you what I found and I shall do so now. Perhaps all my words were but a digression in vain hope that I might leave without naming what will soon be named..
That night, the wretched all-seeing eye of Polaris grinned down at me. It is thankful that I know not fully what it saw that made it laugh with that twinkling light from the cosmos. Suddenly, I heard strange cries in the night and I looked out of the window. As my friend had said, devilish witch lights shone from the hilltop in the distance. But what caught my attention was not that.
Under flickering street lamps, the hideous folk of Tomioka were shambling through the streets indolently, their shifty eyes staring into sheer emptiness as they held strange candles with soul-searing symbols and blasphemous images inscribed into the wax. Their mouths opened, tongue lolling; it was they who emitted that awful noise, that terrible cries of words that I beheld in some formulae of the Necronomicon. A single sentence, if sentence that horrible jumble of syllables and consonants was, repeated itself over and over through the frightful cacophony of unholy sounds.
“Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!”
God above, God of this earth, that demented shouting nearly drove me to my knees and I could scarce bare the sight of the cultists, so many of them, so numerous as they marched away. Only when the last of them passed my window did I see just where they were headed.
The nuclear plant was their destination. The first thing that came to my mind, astonishingly, was not to flee the town and never look back or even inquire as to the nature of their rites. You might say that I am embellishing my story to make myself look like an unlikely hero, for unlikely it is. But I say, it is in the unlikeliest situations that men do things that on hindsight are foolish and inconsistent with their thoughts.
My first thought was to warn my friend. I had to get to him somehow at the plant and perhaps help him away. I do not know what I wanted to do, all I knew was that I had to get to him.
The means were simpler than expected, for in Japan, nobody expects to steal anything and so I helped myself to a motorcycle by the side, keys still in the ignition. I drove as quickly as I could, skirting around the discordant sources of the continued ritualistic yells.
How long it took me to get there, I do not know, for as I entered the plant, there began the start of my nightmare.
Inside I found my friend, trembling and cursing in a corner. He was as incoherent as my mind must have been, his visage was a mask of fright, pale, shaky, eyes wide, lips unable to keep together firmly. I tried to tell him about what I had seen, but my own tongue was unable to form the proper vocalisations. I tried to pull him, but he pushed me away with a force that only desperate souls have, people who have witnessed things that should not have been and wish to see nothing in the world any more.
I'a! The cries of the cultists had grown louder and louder; they had now entered the building and my friend was abruptly and frantically spurred into action at the sight of them. I ran after him, even as the front cultists spotted us and gave a horrific shriek that no human's vocal cords can ever reproduce, it chilled me to the bone and yet spurred me on.
I'a! The accursed cultists chased after us with that heretical speech churning about their tongues and pouring in unspeakable foulness from their lips as I ran and followed him. No thought of where we were heading entered my mind, for all thoughts were crowded out by an infinite horror. Only now in the aftermath, months later, the questions come to me: What did they want there? I shall never know, and I am grateful.
We ran, our legs pounding against the floor in such desperation that I fancy that the entire plant shook with our strides. But truly, it was a race between life and insanity or eternal death. No doubt, that was the fate the cultists must have had for us, to be their sacrifices on that infernal altar described in such menacing detail by my friend. Oh, what I would have given to never have been there!
But perhaps it is thankful, not to me, that I was present, for mayhap without my presence and actions, our world would be clad in doom.
The reactor room! I'a, i'a, what I saw there can never be unseen! Even now, I cannot lie to myself, I cannot say that it was a dream, surreal though it felt, impossible though it was, I cannot bring myself to say that it was not!
Let me calm down for a moment before I continue.
The reactor room had a clear window, its view directed to the majestic producer of electricity, that which smashes and crushes atoms together. An erect pile, pierced through with numerous rods like a voodoo fetish of barbaric, primitive tribes, a modern totem pole.
The lights were on, but, heavens above! If only it were lightless, that I would not behold what I saw! That great pile was covered in some kind of viscous, thick, slimy, black thing that drooled down to the floor in a slimy pile, but that was not the worst, it only drew your attention to that which was what would have tortured a stronger mind and utterly destroyed a weaker consciousness.
I'a! It cannot be unseen, not now, not ever, not even with that opiate joy with which you have obtained this horrid confession by blackmail! I say loudly, here and now, that I should have gone to jail, for my story was never intended to be made, never intended for human ears! Lock me behind bars!
But I gave my word.
I.. Yes.. The pile. A large, gaping black hole with faint spots of toxic green appearing and disappearing, a gaping maw, a hungry abyss had been burned through in the floor by the pile. That hole was as large as the pile, if not larger and the edges gave the impression of the biting effects of acid. I thought the hole was empty, but.. The slime dripped down and did not fall into the abyss. It landed on the hole.
It wasn't a hole! God help us all, that black gap was not a hole! Or rather, it was a hole, occupied! A closer look told me what I should not have sought. The blackness was bubbling, yes, bubbling! Small onyx bubbles formed and burst and- I'a! I can see it, I can see the eyes! Those eyes, forming and bursting in that gigantic amorphous blob of supreme idiotic malice! It had no form, no solid shape, but was just slime and it kept changing! It grew limbs and organs and eyes and tongues and tentacles but nothing of it held solid for more than a single moment, bursting and spraying droplets of itself all over the floor! Where it touched the floor, there were sizzles of smoke. That hideous, iridescent blackness, a shapeless mass of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly luminous and with the myriads of temporary eyes and organs forming and un-forming, bursting and spewing pustules of sick greenish light in a display over the room.Dread, disbelief and terror overcame me all at once, as it still overcomes me now! I lost consciousness there and then, before my mind could contemplate that sheer impossibility and my soul could flay itself into futile attempts at escape.
Have you read the Necronomicon? Have you? If you had, you would have recognised my description. I will never be able to look at a power plant, nuclear or no, ever again. If that thing, the shoggoth could lie there, under the plant, feeding on its power and growing larger and larger until one day, some day, it would burst out, large enough to consume and fall upon houses, when it would be larger than any subway train or train station, when it and the rest of its kind would sweep over the world and clean the land evilly of anything organic.
As I have said, I lost consciousness there, and my knowledge of what happened during my lapse of awareness is limited to my conjecture based upon what I saw when I woke. Perhaps I only fainted for a minute or two, for when I awoke, I was in a corner of the room. My friend must have hid me under the panels of bright buttons and flashing alarms, rest his soul. I saw a cultist, adorned with strange jewellery of a kind I have never seen before, the same jewellery my friend had mentioned, saying, “Those images and its material components are not of this world”. The cultist stood over my friend with a curved knife in his hand, stylised like his ornaments and radiating a hateful aura. You may laugh at me when I use such words, but there are no other words to describe it. Looking at that knife, I could feel the sheer weight of its wrath and I knew, I know, that knife has been used on many an altar. Do not ask me how, it is something that you can only realise on your own. A scream sounded and the cultist turned towards me, something like a startled expression forming on his own distorted visage, with those unblinking, wide, fish-like glassy orbs. I must have screamed, but I was still disoriented then and my friend took the chance to knock the cultist to the ground. My friend's expression was bestial at that moment when he attempted to wrest the knife from the cultist's grasp, horrifyingly bestial. It makes me wonder just what exactly humans were, aeons ago..
I ran forward and pushed their hands into the cultist's heart; oh God, the knife was radiating heat as it slid into his chest like a blazing knife cutting soft, rancid, oozing, putrid butter. His flesh was such and his blood- no, he had no blood! That cultist did not have blood, he had ichor! The foul ichor stung like an acid, making me spasm uncontrollably for a moment in memory of the shoggoth. My friend breathed heavily beside me, gesturing wildly for a moment before articulating his actions.
“They.. They want to use the power here, they want to use the power here. Mr Thurston, I don't know what that wretched thing said, it didn't make sense, maybe you can understand it. There were strange sounds and it seemed as if he was saying that something was rising. What was that something? It sounded like 'R'lyeh' to me.. Mr Thurston! What is going on? He said something about using the power to open up a tomb and awaken some monstrous thing, I don't dare to repeat what it said. Yes, yes, the thing they mentioned was that name I told you about that they worshipped. Are they summoning a devil?”
I'a! A devil would have been a kinder end to these insidious means! I completely understood everything he told me. Do you hear me? Completely. The cult.. that nightmare-cult was not formed in that town without reason. They had contrived, in an eldritch plan spanning across the centuries, to release the Great Old One himself from R'lyeh when it next rose by their town. They had manipulated and schemed for the nuclear plant to be built there and- how could they ever have known of the existence of nuclear power years before its appearance?
This revelation only came to me in the form of unworded emotions of horror induced by those horrors which span the cosmos and bridge the past and future with such mindless ease.
The only thing that came to mind was to stop it, for if we did not stop it now, the entire earth would be enslaved in that darkness, those cultists would sell us all to an eternal torture of our souls and we would be devoured, being but mere slave-things for it to destroy and manipulate.
“Mr Thurston.. is it possible to.. destroy that thing?”
My friend had seen the shoggoth and kept his voice low, deliberately controlled. His spirit was made of a firmer stuff than mine, thank the stars. I know not how I would have thought of what he knew were he not there.
Yes indeed! I knew that it was possible to at the very least hurt the shoggoth, if not destroy, and simultaneously stop the cultists' foul plans! I told him what I intended, he nodded and began to work; I had not such a skill-set as his.
I gingerly peered at the pile, still producing electricity for the town to use, for the cultists to doom the world. It seemed as if only one cultist had broken away from the main group to pursue us and no other disturbed us.
The control rods were being removed from the pile, like gigantic needles being removed. I did not dare look further down the pile, lest I lose consciousness and all sanity.
I did not need to see the shoggoth to know what effect removing the control rods had: An ear-piercing shriek tore through the whole structure, repeating itself over and over again in acute agony. The shoggoth was crying out, “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
That mad, shrill piping! Fiendish noise! Eldritch cry! It went on and on, “Tekeli-li!”
I don't know how long it took before the thing stopped its wailing, but my friend was the one who pulled me up and spurred me to run.
Never have I ran with such haste! The nuclear plant was to explode. With the control rods removed, the heat would be too great for the coolant and cause the whole facility to overheat. Thoughts of our own well-being did not cross our minds, but we realised it all too soon.
We ran out of town, all the way to the subway station where we took a train nervously, paranoid, unable to stop moving, pacing back and forth.
The lack of an explosion could only mean that the cultists had averted the disaster. But from later reports, the damage had been done. We parted ways when he stopped at Naraha, white-faced and swearing never to go back to Tomioka. It was not long after when the earthquake struck, but by then I was safe, on a flight back here, to New Zealand.
You know my whole story now, blackmailer. I feel a strange sense of release now that I have no more secrets to hide. Draw your own conclusions from this tale that seems like fantasy. Understand why I drug myself day after day, night after night with this opiate which without a doubt is killing me slowly. It does not matter. The cult of Tomioka yet lives and I have done too much to ruin their plans. I do not expect to-
Oh God, behind you! That thing!
[Story End]
A/N: Holy nuts, I managed a short story! It's just under 5k words. This is my tribute to H.P. Lovecraft. Written in that magnificent style, though I think I didn't do it quite well. Okay. If I have anybody reading this from Japan, I just want to say, no offense is intended to anyone of any race or religion. I only used the Fukushima incident as my setting because a) inspiration made me do it, b) the Lovecraft style involves terror in places closer than expected. If anyone from Tomioka, or anywhere at all is offended, I wish to apologise. Hope you had a good read, people!
-agoraoptera the Homo Ludens
