“So where are they keeping all this wealth-to-be?”
“Inside the monuments. Well, underneath them, really.”
“Like the tunnel I just came from?”
Stipe’s eyebrows raised. “No wonder they nabbed you. Cthulhu’s got a thing for tunnels. Loves ’em.”
“Why? He’s the size of the moon. He couldn’t fit his left nut in one.”
“And you know what else?” Stipe confided. “Some of the other groups showed up with more seals.”
“Seals like Beckman’s, you mean?”
“Absolutely. A shame Beckman’s book got smushed.”
“How so?”
“Well, see, that’s the only translation that was accurate, just like Beckman claimed.”
“So nobody can work the seals.”
“Nope, and now they’re not gonna get the chance.”
“Why not?”
“Well, Cthulhu doesn’t want anyone to have them.
Every time somebody’s shown up with another one, it’s confiscated.”
“He doesn’t want to open the rest of the gates?” Stipe shrugged. “Not yet, I guess. Probably wants to finish remaking the world in his image so he can show it off to the other gods.”
Detwiler glanced around at the carved interior, the canted doorways, vaulted ceiling, rough and narrow steps. “Seems to be having some success with that.”
“I got a place picked out we can move everything till we need it.”
“Place?” Detwiler asked.
“Yeah, awhile back I found an old abandoned subway line that I don’t think has been in operation since like forever. The tunnelers covered it up to bore one of Cthulhu’s tunnels, but I made sure to leave one way into it. It’s so close to the Temple of Yuggoth, though, that nobody else’ll go near it.”
“Why not?”
“You haven’t been there, have you?” asked Stipe.
“How would I know?”
“’Cause if you had you’d be a gibbering mess now.
The place exudes cosmic dread like a noxious gas. You hallucinate loathsome star clusters, and feel your very atoms come apart in slow motion, in agony so terrible that most people hurl themselves to their death at the very start of it.”
“Yeah, I think I’d remember that.”
“We only get together and chant there like once a year.”
“How is it anybody’s left?”
Instead of answering, Stipe went on, “I figure we can pull whatever we want out of the other temples, store it down under there. Sell it back to them if we have to, but otherwise we sit it out till we need some capital. Then we bargain.”
“You’re talking about the seals.”
Stipe smiled broadly. “You always were a smart guy, Detwiler.”
“Not smart enough.”
“That’s why you got me.”
Detwiler closed his eyes and said nothing.
And so they’d spent days worshipping Cthulhu and his inhuman underlings at various sites around New R’lyeh, and their evenings scouting each elephantine temple and slimy tunnel until they’d located the collected Seals of Kadath, a matter made harder by the repeated denials they heard, mostly from the Cthulhulians themselves, that the seals had never existed at all.
With the stone pulled out, the two slipped into the unguarded vault beneath the Temple of Ultimate Chaos, which Detwiler observed looked like a greenish-black intestinal polyp.
They filled the duffels with the five seals, and Detwiler took time to add as many of the rough- cut diamonds as he could scoop up before Stipe nervously said, “They’ve stopped chanting.”
It had indeed grown silent overhead. But no one was making their way down the Stygian stairways to this vault either. Detwiler snatched a few more jewels.
Stipe grunted as he hauled his duffel over to the hole. It took the two of them to lift it up and over, and lower it down the outside. The weight of the bag almost pulled Stipe out the opening. They repeated the act with the other two before climbing out. Stipe was dirty and sweating. Detwiler imagined that he looked much the same. “We’re gonna have to come back for the third one of these.”
“Just to the end of the tunnel for now,” said Detwiler.
“You’re crazy.”
“I must be.” He lifted his duffel and started walking, bow-legged and slow. Stipe followed him. At the mouth of the tunnel, Detwiler set his bag down and went back in for the third one. He carried that with less trouble, and set it on top of Stipe’s bag. They looked out into the night. This was the part of the journey that presented the most peril. The duffels had to travel to the subway entrance, a good half a mile away. But Detwiler had worked that all out. After checking to be sure no one was watching from outside the glowing tunnel, he crept off into the dark and returned a few minutes later with a dinged up wheelbarrow.
“Where’d you find that?” Stipe asked.
“I used to move with it before your Twinkies caught me.”
“You’re a genius, John.”
“Now and then.” They loaded the last of the duffels and then Stipe’s into the barrow. “We’re still going to have to leave the third one here. Three’s too heavy.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll stay with it,” Detwiler said. “I know how you like to make off with the goods. And I can wait.”
Stipe lifted the wheelbarrow onto its single wheel. “Yeah, I can handle this okay. I’ll be back in under an hour.”
“Be careful.”
Stipe headed off, shortly disappearing over the rise and into the landscape. Amazing how dark it got without streetlights, Detwiler thought. No wonder we invented them.
He set to work. First he recovered his satchel, which he’d been careful to hide near the tunnel’s mouth. Now, in the dull greenish glow of the fungi at the opening, he pulled out the battered copy of Beckman’s Necronomicon, and with a few loose bricks set it up so that he could read from it. Next he unzipped the duffel. He’d put two of the seals in the bag in order to ensure that Stipe could transport the remaining duffels by himself. Now he hauled them out one at a time, afterwards rolling each to where he could see it clearly in the pulsating glow.
A low, shambling sound caught his attention, and one of the Twinkies slid sluglike into the edge of the tunnel’s luminescence. Detwiler edged back to the book and flipped through the pages. “Regna’d kesin,” he read. The Twinkie flexed as if something invisible had poked it. “K’la ye’hah!” It turned and scuttled away. “Bug-shoggoth.”
Detwiler glanced from the book to the seals. The runes on each were distinctive, and only one bore the correct symbols as illustrated in Beckman’s book. When he was absolutely certain he rolled the other one across the rubble to where an old fire hydrant still stood, anchored to pavement below the debris. Certain he’d end up with a hernia, he lifted the round stone over his head and then as hard as he could dashed it on the tip of the hydrant. The seal shattered. Somewhere, distantly in the night, something squealed like a lobster being immersed in a pot of boiling water. The sound faded. Thunder rumbled.
“Hey!” a voice called.
Detwiler turned. Stipe was approaching with the empty wheelbarrow.
Detwiler walked back over to his duffel and the remaining seal. He knelt beside the book and placed the seal face up on the ground in front of him.
Stipe set down the barrow. “Whatcha doing, man?” “Oh, this and that.”
Stipe stopped. “That’s the book, Detwiler,” he said. “Beckman’s book.”
“Yes, it is. Makes for interesting reading. For instance, I can tell you why Cthulhu’s been hoarding all these seals.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah. But give it twenty minutes and he’ll be here anyway.”
Alarmed, Stipe looked around, up at the sky, at the repulsive towers. “He will?”