“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
H. P. Lovecraft
I.
Mountain City, Tennessee
Alex Carter sat opposite the game warden as Special Agent Robert J. Parkman, his boss, drummed two fingers on the table. He had flown in from Washington this morning, and Parkman – too high on the DC food chain for normal investigative work – had insisted on coming along. Alex flashed a friendly smile at the fourth person, TBI agent Angela Muñoz, and presented his credentials: Federal Bureau of Investigation. Bob was unhappy with the woman’s presence, and Alex’s own smile widened correspondingly.
“All right, folks. Let’s start at the beginning, and you can walk me through –”
“Where is he?” Bob’s threat display was calculated to intimidate, but neither Muñoz nor Leonard Volpe, the game warden, took the bait.
“Not my day to watch him.” The game warden’s smile revealed a gap in his front teeth. “You check the hospital?”
“You listen to me, Mr. Volpe.” A flush spread upward from Bob’s neck as Alex slipped his phone beneath the table. “This is a counterterrorism investigation – do you understand? Counterterrorism. As far as Washington is concerned, you released a dangerous man into the wild, and that means you’re liable for whatever happens.”
“Bill Seifert hasn’t been charged with any crime.” Alex raised an eyebrow in warning, and Muñoz waved him off. “Am I wrong? Show me an arrest warrant, and you’ll have our full cooperation. Otherwise, I’ll give you the number of our Attorney General, and you can take it up with him.”
Beneath the table, Alex typed furiously at his keypad as Bob went from red-faced to deathly pale. Three seconds of eternity later, Bob’s phone rang as Alex read the text message on his screen. YOU OWE ME, BRO. He mumbled an excuse and stepped from the room as Alex relaxed.
“They teach you that trick in the Bureau?” Leonard placed a pair of hands, far too large for his wiry frame, on the table.
“Navy.” Alex winked. “I spent a few years diving for Uncle Sam, and I learned a thing or two about managing the boss. He’ll be on the phone for a good half-hour, and that should give us plenty of time.”
“Outstanding.” Leonard turned to Muñoz. “I think I like this youngster.”
II.
Three Weeks Earlier
The truck sat at the end of Butler Bridge, and Leonard sipped a Diet Coke as Muñoz stared at the surface of the lake.
“You okay to go back down there?” he asked. “After what happened last time?”
“Not really.” Muñoz felt a sick knot in the pit of her stomach. “Doesn’t matter how I feel, though.”
“That’s about what I figured you’d say.” Leonard tugged at one ear and rubbed the thin growth of beard on his cheeks. He’s as scared as I am, Muñoz thought.
“He could still float to the surface,” Leonard said. “Water’s been colder than normal, so he could still float in a couple of days – if he went into the water at all.”
“He’s there all right,” Muñoz said. “We found his boat downstream, and you saw his drawings. His wife says he was acting erratic all week, and… Oh shit.”
“Guess we won’t have to go diving after all,” Leonard said quietly as the dead man emerged from the shallows. “How the fuck is that even possible?”
III.
Mountain City
“How long was he down there?” Alex scribbled a few lines on his notepad. “Purportedly?”
“Seifert took off from Shute’s branch on Wednesday afternoon, and his wife reported him missing that evening.” Leonard stared at the ceiling as he talked. “We found him at the bridge Friday morning.”
“They say Jonah was swallowed by a whale,” Alex said, but neither Muñoz nor Leonard smiled at the joke. “You figured out the location from the drawings?”
“Ten different sketches of Butler Bridge,” Muñoz frowned. “His wife said it had been an obsession of his for months. There might have been others, but he burned most of his papers before he went missing.”
“All right,” Alex nodded. “I don’t know what’s happening, but if Bob is personally involved, then it’s something deadly serious – if there’s more that you’re not telling me, I need to know what it is.”
“He was an eccentric college professor with an interest in ancient lore.” Muñoz shook her head. “I find it doubtful that Bill Seifert was involved in terrorism.”
“He wasn’t.” Bob glowered from the doorway. “He was involved in something far worse.”
IV.
En Route to Washington DC
They bypassed security and made their way to the tarmac, and Bob checked his phone as he pulled a bottle of bourbon from the overhead compartment. The plane was federal property, and officially, alcohol was not allowed. You can get away with a lot when you have the Director’s ear, Alex thought sourly. Like shitty cybersecurity. Bob was so careless with that damned phone that he made no effort to conceal the PIN, and one of these days, Alex thought, he would slip the phone from Bob’s pocket and send a few group texts to the Bureau’s upper management. Bob poured a pair of drinks into plastic cups.
“There’s a briefing at nine PM tonight, so fill me in – what did the hillbillies find?”
“They airlifted Seifert to a trauma center in Kingsport,” Alex said. “Wherever he had been, it must have been pretty nasty, because they said he positively reeked of dead fish. Leonard – the game warden – asked a few questions to see if he was alert and oriented.”
“And what did he say?”
“Nothing that they could make out. Pure gibberish.”
Bob emptied his cup in a single swallow and poured another round. “Finish your drink and get to the good part.”
The liquor slid down Alex’s throat as he closed his eyes, remembering.
“What are you leaving out?” Alex asks. “No detail, no matter how small, is unimportant.”
“All right.” Muñoz and the game warden exchange a glance like partners in a conspiracy. “Six months ago, I had an experience while diving in that spot…”
“And you believe her?” Bob, perhaps loosened by the alcohol, was oddly sanguine about the woman’s tale.
“I’m going by the instructions that I received,” Alex said. “Some of the witness statements will be odd, but their relevance is on a need-to-know basis.”
“What kind of gibberish?”
“Mostly a repeating sequence of numbers,” Leonard says. “That, and some nonsense about being asleep and dreaming –”
“Not asleep,” Muñoz interjects. “Dead. ‘Dead and dreaming’ is what he said. And then there was something else – it sounded like a language of sorts, but not one that I’ve ever heard.”
Alex scribbles furiously in his notebook, transcribing the phrases to the best of his ability. Muñoz and the game warden stumble over the words, and he swears that the room grows imperceptibly colder as they talk, as if a shadow has passed over the sun.
“And then what happened?”
“Bill Seifert checked himself out of the hospital in the middle of the night. No one’s heard from him since.”
“My God.” Bob shook his head. “This is the worst one yet. Anything else?”
“There was one more thing.”
“Point Nemo,” Leonard says. “That series of numbers – he said it was Point Nemo. Mean anything to you?”
“Told you I was a Navy man,” Alex replies. “Point Nemo is a location in the Pacific Ocean that is farther from land than any other place on earth. Roughly equidistant from Pitcairn Island, Easter Island, and Antarctica.””
He pulls out his phone again and rattles of a set of coordinates, latitude and longitude; degrees, minutes, and seconds.
“Yeah,” Leonard says. “That sounds about right.”
“That’s fine work.” Bob poured another round of drinks. At this rate, Alex thought, we’ll both be plastered before we reach Dulles. “However, your pronunciation was all wrong. Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
“Jesus!” Alex jumped, spilling his drink, as the words rolled from the senior agent’s tongue. “What is that?”
“An ancient language, one that man was never meant to hear. It means, In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.” Bob crushed the plastic cup in one hand and took a long swig from the bottle. “Now that the preliminaries are out of the way, it’s time to read you into the operation. This would take a directive from the President under ordinary conditions, but we don’t have time to wait.”
They continued to talk, drinking from the bottle, as the strange words hung unpleasantly in the air, a nest of vipers spoken into existence.
V.
Dulles International Airport
The image was carved in stone, a scaly biped with hands and feet of long, prehensile claws. It sat brooding upon a throne, its face marked by malignant eyes, and the lower jaw – if it could be called such –a mass of tentacles. Alex stared at the photograph with bleary eyes for the last ten minutes of their flight.
“Six months ago, someone inserted a worm into the defense network computers – a set of authentication codes to be used in the event of a nuclear first strike.” Bob takes another drink from the mostly empty bottle. “In a worst-case situation, it was envisioned that the President and his entire cabinet would be killed or incapacitated, and we – the Defense Department, the CIA, NORAD – wanted to ensure that we retained the capability to retaliate. The worm creates a set of codes that bypass the normal safeguards – meaning that some unknown party has the capability to order a nuclear strike at any point on the globe. If that were to happen, our adversaries could be expected to respond in kind.”
For the first time, Alex understands why the bottle is on the plane, and he takes a long drink.
“Ordinary terrorists would be bad enough,” Bob continues, “but what happened to Bill Seifert has been happening all over the country. People vanish in close proximity to water, they die – and let’s be clear about this, Seifert went into the water and drowned – and return several days later. All of these events are connected to the Cthulhu cult, and after our briefing tonight, I expect there will be a large explosion in the vicinity of Point Nemo.”
“But we don’t know who inserted the code,” Alex says.
“Nope.” Bob takes the phone from his pocket. “It could be anyone, and all they need to end the world is one of these. That’s why I needed to read you into the program – only two of us know the secret, and if one of us dies…”
Alex was jolted in his seat as they touched down and rolled to the end of the runway. The plane taxied to an open hangar, where a black sedan waited, and the ground crew approached as the cabin door opened. Bob shoved past him, tottering a little as he descended the steps, and Alex would later think that, had the alcohol not dulled his senses, he could have reacted more quickly.
Bill Seifert stood at the head of the ground crew.
The sawed-off shotgun roared, and Bob was no more than three feet away when the blast tore into his face. Alex did a stumbling pirouette as his boss fell dead, the right side of his head missing entirely, and drew his own weapon. Alex fired three shots as Bill Seifert attempted to reload, striking him in the center of the chest, and retreated – outnumbered and outgunned, Alex had no chance in a stand-up firefight. He fired again, taking down two more men, and sheltered behind the car. The driver was already dead, but the keys were still in the ignition, and he pulled the corpse through the open door and slid behind the wheel. You’re way too drunk to be driving, he thought, and the road bobbed and weaved through the windshield as he blew past the security checkpoint. A dead man emerging from the water. An unknown suspect with full access to our nuclear arsenal. The idea that formed in his brain was pure madness, and had he been sober, he would have rejected it out of hand. Alex maneuvered onto the interstate with some difficulty and began driving.
Behind him, the ground crew refueled the plane and loaded the bodies into the cabin. Ten minutes later, it taxied down the runway again, headed for another destination.
VI.
The phone at her bedside rang, and Muñoz stirred awake from a dream in which she was deep underwater, her air tanks empty, as a drowned girl pulled her toward the lake bottom.
“Special Agent Muñoz? I need your help – can you meet me on that bridge around sunrise?”
“Carter, is that you? I thought you flew back to Washington, and – wait, are you drunk?”
“Bob is dead, and if I stay in Washington, they’ll kill me next. Just meet me at the bridge where Seifert vanished and bring a diving rig.”
“Oh no,” she growled. “I’m not going down there, and you are in no condition –”
“Just do it. Please.” The line went dead.
Angela Muñoz rolled out of bed. No way in hell I’m letting him dive, she thought, but the image of Bill Seifert emerging from the water lingered in her mind, and she scrolled through the contacts on her phone.
“Good morning sunshine.” Leonard Volpe sounded as awake as she felt. “I’m guessing this ain’t a social call.”
Muñoz glanced at her watch. Three-thirty. “Meet me at the Butler Bridge in three hours.”
VII.
He stopped once to vomit up the evening’s liquor and again for gas, water, and several cans of energy drinks. His vision remained blurry, but Alex pegged the speedometer as he prayed for light traffic. If you’re caught, you’re going to lose your job and end up in a federal prison, he thinks. You’re drunk and driving way too fast, and you’re likely to kill someone before you get where you’re going. Somewhere around Roanoke, he called Muñoz – he needed her help, and he needed the sound of another human voice.
I’m going to my death, he thought. I don’t know where this ends, but it’s going to end badly.
VIII.
The sun was rising over the lake as Angela Muñoz waited in the car. She was friends with the owner of a dive shop in Hampton, and despite the late hour, a wetsuit (she guessed at Alex’s size), regulator, dive computer, and two tanks of air resided in the trunk. A big truck, olive drab with blue lights, crossed the bridge and turned right, heading for the boat ramp. Leonard Volpe waved, and Muñoz threw up a hand in response. Nothing like an early morning boat ride, she thought. We’ll watch the sunrise, do a little fishing, and see the haunted bridge where bodies disappear. Ten minutes later, a black sedan pulled in behind her.
Alex Carter looked exactly as she expected, like a man who had been tossed out of every bar between Knoxville and Bristol. Muñoz dredged up the memory of an old boyfriend – we drove sixty miles to watch the game last night, and it was beer all the way down and a goddam half-pint of liquor at the game and beer all the way back – and smiled in spite of herself as Alex tapped her window.
“I’m ready.”
IX.
The water was cold, and Alex wondered whether it was the elevation – the streams that fed Watauga Lake originated high in the mountains – or if the cold was something deeper, more sinister. Leonard briefed him as the boat rested against the concrete piling of the bridge.
“The water’s about fifty feet deep in this spot, and I got a hundred-foot coil of rope on the boat. We’ll play out the line as you go deeper, but you need to do your part. Don’t get tangled,” he exchanged a look with Muñoz, “and don’t unhook for any reason. Neither of us wants to fish your carcass out of the lake.”
He began the descent, maintain his bearings with one hand on the piling, as he marked off the depth on his dive computer. Ten feet, twenty, thirty. His stomach clenched, and Alex wondered whether diving with a hangover was, in a lifetime of acts foolish and fair, the stupidest thing he had ever done. It merits a bronze medal at least. If he started puking down here, Alex thought, he would either spit out the regulator and drown with a reflexive gasp or choke on his own bile. At forty feet, he glimpsed a nearby shape, perhaps five feet long and vaguely humanoid, and he shined the waterproof light in its direction. The shape vanished, retreating from the light. Fifty feet.
Where the hell is the lakebed?
He continued to dive, moving more slowly, and Alex wondered whether the bridge builders had unknowingly placed the piling near the opening of an underwater cavern. Sixty feet. Sixty-five. Seventy. He felt a change in texture beneath his gloved fingers, and the light revealed no longer concrete but rectangular blocks of limestone. Seventy-five feet. Eighty. At ninety feet, there was an upward tug on the rope – Leonard and Muñoz checking his status. Alex responded with two gentle pulls – everything okay – even as he wondered whether alcohol, dehydration, and depth had addled his mind. The stones of the piling appeared older at this depth. Too old to be laid by human hands. Ninety-five feet. One hundred. Alex stretched forth his hand and felt only empty space – the piling was gone, and he hung suspended above a blackened void that no light would penetrate.
Six months ago, someone inserted a worm into the defense network computers. Alex tasted blood in his mouth, and as he closed his eyes, he saw a spray of blood erupting from Bob’s wounded head. If he unhooked from the line, he would be lost to the waiting boat, and to dive any deeper meant almost certain death. Someone has the capability to strike targets at any point on the globe. He unclasped the rope and, lest he be tempted to reach for a lifeline in the penultimate moment, forced himself to look away as it vanished in the darkness. With his last means of rescue gone, he pointed his body downward and continued toward the missing lakebed. One hundred five feet. One hundred ten. One hundred fifteen.
X.
“No.” Angela Muñoz stared at the slack line. “What the fuck is he doing?”
Her own gear was stowed at the back of the boat, and she kicked off her shoes. Alex Carter was a drunken, incompetent ass of a federal agent, and she was a fool for trusting him, but she would not leave him down there to die. The boat rested in full view of the bridge, and any passers-by would get an eyeful as she stripped down to don the wetsuit, but she fumbled with the button of her jeans, her fingers clumsy and leaden.
“Angela.” Leonard’s huge paw encircled her arm. “Angela! There’s fifty feet of water to the lakebed, and we played out a hundred feet of rope. He hung onto the bridge the whole way.”
“So? Do you just want to leave him there?”
“No.” Leonard exhaled as he released her arm. “I don’t – but wherever he’s gone to, I don’t think we’ll find him now.”
XI.
He wondered if nitrogen narcosis was affecting his brain, for the numbers on the dive computer made no sense – his diving rig allowed no more than one hundred thirty feet, and at this depth (he checked the computer again, and the readout indicated three hundred feet), he should have been dead already. Still, Alex felt perfectly fine, with none of the giddiness or confusion that warned of danger – even his hangover had abated. He continued on the downward trajectory, and though the readout on his wrist indicated ever-more impossible numbers – when he passed one thousand feet, he was approaching world-record depth – he found that swimming actually became easier. Alex guessed that a half-hour had elapsed since he entered the water, but the chronometer told him that he had been swimming for days, then weeks, and at one point, began to run backward. My air should be long gone by now. Above, or perhaps below, he saw a dim light, and he began to swim faster. The light expanded and grew, and Alex realized that he was swimming next to a deep foundation of cut stone, immense in size and coated with a thick layer of algal growth. He touched the surface, and his skin crawled as the viscous layer stuck to his gloves. The dive computer indicated a depth of twenty feet.
His air gave out as he reached the surface, and Alex spat out the mouthpiece before slipping the tank from his shoulders. The stone column protruded for another fifty feet before terminating in a wide platform, and wide gaps in the rock provided a route upward, like rungs on a ladder. Alex kicked away his flippers and began to climb, and when he reached the top, he lay on the surface, exhausted and gasping like a beached fish. There were buildings at the far end of the platform, but he could not judge their size or distance – the geometry of this place was somehow off, and to look at the angles hurt his head.
Beyond the platform, in every direction, was nothing but ocean. A group of men approached, and Alex struggled to his feet.
“Welcome to Point Nemo – you figured it out,” Bob said, and shot him in the face.
XII.
“They’re going to fire us.” Muñoz threw back a slug of whiskey and raised two fingers to catch the bartender’s attention. They had taken her gun and badge that afternoon. “Both of us.”
“Then they better be quick about it.” Leonard said, casting a wistful look toward the billiard table. “That story he told you –”
“The end of the world?” She shook her head and downed another shot. “I believe it. I saw a dead guy come out of the water, and I’ll believe damn near anything after that.”
“In that case, we’d better play some eight-ball before we die.” Leonard picked up his beer, careful not to spill the foam. “Ten bucks says I beat you this time.”
XIII.
“I’m not dead.” Alex sat up. The hole in the center of his forehead itched, but he felt no real pain.
“In stranger eons, even death may die.” Bob’s face was half-healed but misshapen, and Alex saw a large divot in one side of his skull. “Biggest national security threat in history, and they ended up putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. I knew you’d turn tail when I got shot, but I figured you’d run stumbling drunk around Washington and discredit your whole story.”
“Would it have made a difference?”
“Probably not.” Bob’s contorted grin revealed several missing teeth. “As of today, I’d say that nothing makes a difference.”
Alex watched as the other men assembled at the edge of the platform, and from the corner of one eye, he caught the movement of a tentacle, about the thickness of a man’s arm and covered in black slime, slithered across the stones. The others saw it too, but no one moved – they remained perfectly still even as a man was snatched from the platform. Bob caught his expression and nudged him with one elbow.
“Don’t be so squeamish – to merge with the Old Ones is a great honor, and each of them hopes to be chosen as the next sacrifice. We’ve waited a long time for this.”
“For what?”
“The end of humanity, and the dawn of a new age.” Bob spread his arms in a gesture of benediction. “Man believes himself the highest good, but we are a flyspeck in the cosmos, the plaything of gods who care nothing for our existence. The Old Ones live and die with the alignment of the stars, and they have slept through the age of man, waiting for of a time of rebirth. Soon, we will be like unto them, living and dying and living again – but first, we must make a sacrifice, an interlude of fire and blood.”
“That was why you hacked the defense network computers.” Alex said, careful to look away from the gun in Bob’s waistband. “It was you all along.”
“The codes were right here the whole time.” Bob slipped the phone from his pocket. “As soon as I give the order, the whole world will be set aflame. His followers are gathered across the globe, waiting for the end time, and now you can take a place at our side – if you are willing.”
Federal agents, as a rule, do not settle matters with their fists, but Alex was a former Navy man and the veteran of more than one barroom brawl, and his first punch sent the older man into a looping, head-over-heels somersault. Bob’s head struck the stone platform as Alex delivered a stomping kick to his groin, and the phone went flying as Bob doubled in agony. Alex seized the pistol from Bob’s waistband and snatched up the phone as another tentacle oozed onto the platform. At the water’s edge, the assembled worshipers milled about in confusion. A long rivulet of blood dripped from Bob’s nose and spattered onto the stone surface.
“Are you really that stupid?” Bob clutched his nose with one hand as he sat up. “I put a bullet in your head, Carter, and only the power of the Old Ones is keeping you alive! If you fuck this up now, you’ve killed both of us!”
Point Nemo, Alex thought. The tentacle drew closer, and he stood motionless as it passed within inches of his bare toes. Bob moved away, sliding on his hindquarters, as it paused, sampled the blood on the deck, and found the taste to its liking. There’s no help coming, and no land for three thousand miles.
“Please, Alex.” The tentacle snaked around Bob’s ankle. “Please help me.”
Alex fired a single round into the gelatinous arm and threw himself backward as the wounded appendage, still firmly attached to Bob’s leg, whipped past his head. It snapped across the deck with the crack of a bullwhip, sweeping the remaining acolytes from the platform as Bob was thrown clear. Bob landed in the water, and Alex watched as the sea churned with red-tinged foam. After several minutes, the tumult subsided, and all was quiet.
XIV.
“Hello?” Muñoz sat up in bed as she answered the phone.
“Special Agent Muñoz. It’s good to hear your voice again.”
“Good to hear… Alex? Get your ass back here! I’m about to get fired, I’ll be lucky if I’m not arrested, and you’re… where in hell are you?”
“I’m at Point Nemo, and I’m afraid my travel options are limited. Thank God Bob’s phone can pick up the satellite overhead. You’ll never read this in the news, but I wanted to let you know that you helped save the world. Sorry about your job.”
“Are you serious?”
“More serious than you’ll ever know. Get some sleep, and when you wake tomorrow, go enjoy some green grass and sunshine. Have a good life.”
Angela Muñoz sat on the edge of her bed, too thunderstruck to answer, as the line went dead.
XV.
The app for the defense network computer was easy to find, a squid-shaped icon on Bob’s home screen, and the call was routed to a submarine in the South Pacific. Shitty cybersecurity. Alex read a sequence of numbers, and when a voice on the other end requested the latitude and longitude of the target, he recited the coordinates from the phone’s GPS. When he was finished, Alex tossed the phone into the water and sat at the edge of the platform.
Fifty feet below, something stirred, perhaps drawn upward by the rising moon.
The stars grew dim, and the moonlight vanished entirely as its shadow fell over the empty husk of R’lyeh, a beast of such monumental size that Alex wondered whether its proportions, like those of the city itself, transcended the dimensions of ordinary human perception. A hundred tentacles probed the deck, searching for life, as he continued to watch the sky. For a long time, there was only blackness, and Alex’s hope began to fade until finally, he found what he was seeking – two pinpricks of light streaking across the sky like meteors.
The glowing exhaust of incoming missiles.
When its eyes fell upon him, his sanity was blasted into atoms, but the agony was short-lived. The world erupted in fire and light, and Alex Carter passed from the world in the space of an eyeblink, carried away like vapor on the sea breeze.
Afterword
Nashville, Tennessee
Muñoz was astonished, for Leonard was outfitted in a military-style dress uniform, and he responded to her raised eyebrow with a shrug of incomprehension. Maybe he wants to look good for our execution. They stood at attention before a conference room desk manned by the Special Agent in Charge, a man outfitted similarly to Leonard, and an unfamiliar gaggle of dark-suited men and women.
“Special Agent Muñoz.” Her boss wore an expression of discomfort as he nodded to his counterparts. “Our colleagues at the FBI have informed me that the details of your commendation are to remain classified…”
The phone in her pocket vibrated, and Muñoz glanced downward by reflex, reading the text message that flashed on her smart watch.
YOU HAVE NOT BEATEN US. WE WILL BE BACK.
Author’s Note: The preceding story is an installment in Sepulchral Roots, a writing project developed by Substack’s Macabre Monday horror fiction community. Many thanks to Jon T., Shaina Read, John Coon, and The Chronicler for the writing prompt. If you like scary stories, you can check out more of their work at the link below.
And, as always…
Lovecraft would have been pleased!