The door began to open, slowly at first but with increasing speed as it approached the tipping point. It was directly below the skylight, and Carla found herself looking straight down into the chamber under the floor.
At first she could see nothing there, but as Esgrith picked up a candle from the altar and moved closer to the trapdoor its light reflected off still, black water. As she watched, the water level began to rise. It reached the level of the trap and began spilling out across the floor of the warehouse. A spectral, green glow appeared below the surface. It blazed, and grew rapidly brighter until it was shining from the opening, flooding with warehouse with Satanic, auroral light.
Oblivious now to the wind and rain, Carla stared aghast as an amorphous black shape broke the surface and rose into the room. It wavered, and then began peeling open like the petals of a flower, growing thicker as more matter erupted and dribbled back towards the water.
The stuff was as dark as pitch, but it was lit from within by a phosphorescent yellow-green light. The oily bulk completely filled the hatchway now, but still more was streaming volcanically through. Carla clapped a hand to her mouth, stifling a cry as a lopsided orifice began to form in the centre of the mass.
Coiling tongues extruded themselves from somewhere at its core and improvised fingers wormed across the floor, sucking at the concrete for grip. Bright cores of primary green flared into being around the edges of the gaping maw, perhaps two dozen of them, shining with the light of another place, another time. Pupils condensed in the centers and several of them reared up on dripping pseudopodae, surveying the congregation at un-guessable wavelengths. Protoplasmic tracheal tubes spluttered and hissed, spraying great gouts of slimy water onto the floor.
Carla felt dizzy as she watched the sprouting eyes and fingers explore the room. The thing seemed to radiate a dark intelligence. Just looking at it, she could sense its hunger and its capacity for cruelty, could feel the malice of countless ages concentrated in its primordial bulk. As it regarded its willing servitors with those cold, unblinking eyes, Carla was reminded of nothing so much as a cat, toying with the lives of idiot mice.
The congregation withdrew apprehensively as a slithering tentacle roved briefly in their direction. Esgrith shouted to his acolytes, struggling to make himself heard above the splashing and atonal whistling coming from the giant shoggoth. Two of them stepped forwards, pulling with them two terrified goats and a hyperventilating teenage girl.
“That’s Debbie Trent!” exclaimed Gary. “She was in my class at school. She must have had her birthday if they’re bringing her before the shoggoth!”
“What are they going to do?” asked Carla thickly, unable to tear her eyes away from the gibbering horror below them. She imagined the roof giving way, the two of them plummeting directly down onto those eager, ravenous jaws.
“They’ll offer the goats to it first and then present the girl. It should just infect her, but I’ve heard that sometimes it just kills them for no reason.”
As he spoke, the shoggoth saw the goats cringing before it. Instantly, two new mouths snapped open, new eyes swam to the surface and it lunged forward, engulfing their heads and instantly decapitating them.
Carla turned away and threw up, trying desperately to strangle the sound of retching. The constant percussion of the rain on the PVC roof, and the sinister piping of the feeding shoggoth below must have been enough to drown out any noise she could make though. When she looked back the monster had sucked the headless goats entirely into its biomass. Carla briefly wondered what kind of strange, archaean enzymes the ancient abomination would use to digest the wretched animals. What kind of profane, apocryphal biology could have given rise to such an entity? How did it – could it – live?
As Esgrith roughly shoved the terrified teenage girl in front of the shoggoth, it gradually ceased fluting and growling, until the only sound was once again that of the wind-driven rain. All its eyes were fixed upon the girl, bathing her in their alien luminescence, at once intimidating and hypnotic. For long seconds they remained perfectly still, as if creature, girl, congregation and Carla had been frozen in time. Carla was almost psychotic with tension, only able to imagine the vile cryptid shearing off the girl’s head with the same relish with which it had dispatched the goats.
Her hand flew to her throat as she saw two plasmatic extrusions begin to coil themselves gently, but firmly, around the girl’s wrists – and then it attacked.
With the speed of a striking snake, the shoggoth splayed itself across the girl’s face like a shiny, molten mask, gripping her limbs with crushing force as she struggled. Carla rose to her feet instinctively and was immediately restrained by Gary.
“She’s OK!” he hissed. “It’s not killing her! It’s infecting her. Travelling to her brain.”
“She’ll die!”
“She won’t die! She’d be better if she did. The First Flesh calls to Father Dagon, he’ll always be with her now. Look!”
The monster was releasing her, almost tenderly. She fell to her knees at once, gasping for air. Beside her, the shoggoth thrashed the air with scores of tentacles and roared through a dozen bubbling vents, sending ropes of mucous flying through the air. The crowd cheered and applauded wildly and Esgrith hobbled back to the girl’s side, grabbing her hand and lifting it in the air as if he was declaring the winner of a boxing match.
“Ia shoggoth!” he cried, hoarsely.
“Ia shoggoth!” chanted the congregation.
“Ia Dagon!”
“Ia Dagon!”
“Ia, IA CTHULHU!”
As the crowd screamed rapturously in response, Esgrith threw his arms wide and his head back – staring straight up through the skylight at Carla’s terrified face.
‘He can’t see me’ she told herself. Not with those cataracts, how could he? But as his expression changed she knew that he had.
“Oh, shit!” yelled Gary, and took off, back towards the plank. “Come on!”
Below her, Esgrith’s face was contorted in fury and he was barking incomprehensible orders at the congregation, jabbing a finger upwards at the roof. Confused, they stared upwards, hundreds of misshapen, misplaced eyes, trying to squint past the glare from the striplights.
Carla was already on her feet when Gary came racing back for her. “Come on! What the fuck are you waiting for? We gotta go! Now!”
Grabbing hold of her cuff he led her in a kamikaze sprint across the slippery roof, ushering her in front of him as they reached the plank.
Carla’s earlier reservations about the safety of the improvised walkway disappeared, as the door of the warehouse burst open with a roar, and the furious crowd spilled out into the street. She closed her eyes and flew across the gap, the wood springing her into the air as her feet came down once, twice – nearly there – and over, onto the opposite building.
Gary wasted no time in following, his arms windmilling in the shrieking gale as he sprang sure-footedly across. As they made for the fire escape, their footsteps on the metal roof sounded thunderous. ‘Just follow Gary’, Carla told herself. ‘He knows where to go. You just have to keep up with him. Don’t think about anything else, just keep up.’
A succession of running jumps took them down the fire escape. She could hear engines being revved nearby, motorbikes and pickups. Gary risked a quick peek around the corner of the building.