Still keeping low but raising my head just enough to scan the length of the platform end to end, I saw what he had seen: the large, damp imprints of webbed feet where the dusty paving flags had been criss-crossed. Then, too, I detected the stench of weedy deeps and the less-than-human creatures risen up from them.
Deep Ones! Henry framed the words with his lips, both silently and needlessly. And: Look! He pointed.
From the mouths of the entry/exit archways, rubble had been cleared away and heaped aside. The stairs and one wrecked elevator, visible beyond the archways, were also clear of debris. But from one of the exits a thin stream of water was flowing forth, snaking across the platform and over the lip of the bull-noses, before finding its way down into the well and from there, presumably, into unseen channels that were deeper yet. But even in the moments we spent watching it, so the flow rapidly increased to a torrent, and at the same time a massed, triumphant shout—a hooting, snorting uproar, even at the distance—sounded from on high. But of course we already knew that the engineering going on up there wasn’t the work of human beings.
And now Henry whispered, “Come on, let’s get out of here!”
Minutes later and a hundred yards or more into the comparative darkness of the tunnel, finally the old man spoke up again. “We were very lucky back there, fortunate indeed!”
“Oh?” I replied. “Fortunate?”
He looked at me incredulously. “Why, the fact that they had recently gone up out of the station! And that they hadn’t begun to flood the place earlier, like yesterday maybe. For if they’d done that we’d be swimming by now! Surely you know or can guess what they were doing—what they’re doing even now?”
Trudging along beside him, sloshing through inches of cold, black water, I shrugged. “Well, like you said: they’re flooding the place.”
“Yes, but why?”
“Because… because they like the water?”
Henry offered up a derisive snort and repeated me sarcastically: “‘Because they like the water’? Is that all? Man, can’t you see? Don’t you understand? They’re terraforming—no, aqua-forming—the Underground system, similar to what we had planned doing to Mars before those freaks in the Esoteric Order messed everything up! They’re making the Tube system suitable, comfortable, compatible—to themselves, to their loathsome way of life! Now do you see it? This maze, these endless miles of tunnels, stations and levels; these massive great rabbit-holes—and all of them filled with water, if not now then soon! Paradise to the Deep Ones! Subterranean temples to their master, octopus-headed Bgg’ha, with myriad submarine connections to his Twisted Tower like the strands of a gigantic sunken cobweb!”
Henry’s thought or vision was fantastic and even awe-inspiring: the entire Underground system filled with water; a vast submarine labyrinth where the Deep Ones could spawn and worship their bloated black deity for as long as the Earth continued to roll in its orbit.
Then for several long minutes we remained silent, Henry and I, as we slopped along under the swirling and gradually brightening glow of Shoggoth filth.
But eventually he said, “Well then, Julian—have you figured it out yet?”
“Eh? Figured what out?”
“Why they take young men, of course.”
“You mean, if not to eat them?”
“Yes,” he nodded. “If not to eat them. What other use could young men be put to, eh?”
Deciding to let him tell me, I shook my head. “I’ve no idea, Henry.” And beginning to sob again, however quietly, he said:
“It’s because young men are sexually potent, Julian. Just like horses in the stud farms as once were before They came. That’s what my girl Janet told me, but it’s also why she escaped and came home worn out, dying, and pregnant! The baby—not much more than a foetus, I imagine or hope, poor innocent creature—he or she died with Janet. But better that than the other. And now… and now…”
I nodded and said, “I understand—I think. And now there’s Dawn. Why don’t you tell me about her, if you can?”
“No,” he shook his head, “you don’t understand! You haven’t thought it through. But I didn’t have to, because I had it from Janet, and I’ll tell you anyway; or perhaps by now you can tell me? Why would a monstrous thing like Bgg’ha—and his monsters in that Twisted Tower of a house—why would they want children, babies, from their captives?”
We both slowly came to a halt and stood facing each other; but even knowing what he was getting at I made no reply. The old man saw that I knew and nodded an affirmative. “Oh, yes, Julian. In the long-ago era of sailing ships, men from the west would sometimes come across cannibal tribes in the South Sea Islands, and these savage people had a term for the enemies they roasted for food. They called them—or the flesh they ate off them—‘long pig’, because that’s how we taste, apparently. Now I don’t know if they ever tried ‘short pig’, if you follow my meaning, but what could be more tender or pure than—”
“—Yes, I do understand, Henry,” I cut him short. “There’s no need to torture yourself any further.”
“But what horrified me most,” he continued, as if he hadn’t heard me at all, “wasn’t the thought of those monsters at their repast, no, but wondering what the young men who fathered those babies—what they themselves, or for that matter the mothers—could be living on in the Twisted Tower! For what other source of… of food could there possibly be in that dreadful place? And what kind of inhuman, bestial people could bring themselves to do something as terrible as that in the first place? Surely they would rather die first… you’d think so, anyway.”
“Yes, you certainly would,” I replied, even though he hadn’t meant it as a question.
Henry could barely stifle his soul-wrenching sobbing as he turned away from me, staggering and yet in some superhuman way seeming more determined than ever, windmilling his arms and only just managing to maintain his balance as he went splashing along the drowned, rusty tracks.
I caught up with the old man, caught his arm to steady him before he could trip and hurt himself, and said, “But there are all kinds of men, Henry. Most men couldn’t do that, I think, but as for those who can, what choice do they have? They can reap what they’ve sown, as it were—if in this case you’ll excuse such a metaphor—and eat or starve in the absence of any other choices, and that’s all. But you know, some men, women too, are very adaptable; and in desperate times and situations the survival instinct in people such as these will quickly surface, and they’ll soon become inured, accustomed to… to whatever. Yes, that kind of person can get used to almost anything.”
But yet again he may not have heard a word I said. And instead of scolding me for my “logical” approach to what he had told me—however sickening and disgusting that approach must surely have seemed to him, if indeed he had heard anything of it at all—he once again began to babble about his youngest daughter, Dawn: