Jonesville 2000-part three

Jones drove on, ransacking his eroded memories for the key to his dilemma. The insistent piping of the shoggoths that guarded his once-human cargo had long since driven him mad.

To his left lay the open expanse of the sea, which he had driven toward from Chicago, starting out two days ago. The sea was rougher than usual, the waves tipped with foam of the same luminous white-green as the shoggoths themselves.

To Jones' rear were the shoggoths, piping and drumming, and the body of what was once a woman, now merely the incubator of a child from beyond the stars, whose birth-cries would summon the cyclopean towers of lost R'Lyeh, the home of the dread Cthulhu, the octopoid god whose tiny figure he had received in the mail.

The visions of the vistas he had beheld swam in front of Jones' eyes, causing him to swerve and nearly lose control of the vehicle.

The images returned to the back of his consciousness, where they continually spooled and ran.

Amid those images was that of a carven star, of the same green material as the stone figures, with a black jewel in the very center of the star. This star-stone was of the same substance as the Elder Gods, and was charged by them with the power to send the Ones from Outside back from whence they came.

Jones grinned crookedly at the thought of the star-stone, which he realized was the key he sought, and didn't have possession of.

Or did he? There had to be a reason why he had brought along the black package...so many alien thoughts had been running through his brain, and he was so tired, and felt so close to death that he didn't recall everything he'd done and seen very clearly. But the image of the star-stone was very clear now, as if proximity were the hidden key to its influence.

He hastily grabbed the black package with his right hand, steering with his left.

Jones lifted the package to his face and began to gnaw at the scarlet ribbon. hanks and streamers of it wedged between his teeth, but he succeeded in getting the ribbon off. He tore at the wrapping in the same fashion, and worried the cardboard box the item was shipped in.

Evil streams of mucus ran from his nose and mouth, dripping onto the seat and his mangy clothing, and onto the star-stone from his chin.

For the package indeed carried the stone, with the black jewel in the center, and strange marks on each leg of the star. He turned the stone over, and over, and over, until the things written on it began to make sense to him.

He'd seen those characters before, many times. On the carven bases of the obscene idols in the great cities he had visited, and in the unutterably ancient tomes he'd glimpsed inside the buildings he had passed through in his dreams...

They were very near the shore now, off the road and driving down the rocks toward the water. Jones knew that they'd just keep on going when they reached the water, and still couldn't quite get the words right. He glanced out the window, and the moon loomed, close enough to touch, it seemed.

Jones stretched out his hand to touch it. The hand gripping the star-stone reached, and reached, and reached, and made contact with the agency that had sent the stone to him.

The Elder Gods heard his cries, his desperate prayers, but couldn't yet take action. Hoary Nodens stirred, waited.

Jones stopped the van, the front bumper already in the water, and the drumming and piping stopped at the same time.

The heartbeat of the soon-to-be born child could be clearly heard in the momentary silence. It got louder and louder, and the sky itself began to roil.

The father had come. The clouds formed into a facsimile of his hideous visage, and the stars were blocked by the sheer immensity of his bulk.

Drums began to sound from the other side as the moment of birth approached.

The van was surrounded by hundreds upon hundreds of ravens and whippoorwills, clamoring and shrieking and swooping down, then up again, in a grotesque frenzy, waiting for the souls that they could catch.

Offshore, the great city began to rise, slowly majestically.

Jones could see the wave from this rising form and begin heading toward the shore, and saw the shoggoths clamber around the mighty towers and obtuse angles of the city of R'Lyeh, and that which is not dead started to awaken from its eternal sleep. The wave of the city's rising grew larger still, and bore before it the odor that Jones had been smelling now and then, the stench of the Great Old Ones.

The tips of its tentacles began to appear from apertures in the towers, and the drumming grew steadily louder, and the piping resumed.

The sky cracked open, and the denizens of the other side made their way across the barrier.

Cthulhu's brethren began to chant his name, and a cry went up-Ia!

The shoggoths pulled the mother and child from the van, into the water, and the son began to come forth.

The immense eye of Cthulhu could now be seen as the city was entirely risen.

His tentacles reached the shore now, just ahead of the massive wave that threatened to engulf all the land, and Yog-Sothoth's terrible voice could be heard above the din and bedlam of the wilding skirling pipes and obscene pounding of gigantic drums.

Jones moaned, and cried, averting his eyes, and praying to whatever gods would listen to take his soul, take him, please, and save the world from this monstrosity, stop this horrible process, and return things they way they were.

He drew back his right arm and hurled the star-stone into the gigantic red eye of Cthulhu, where it disappeared into the gelatinous mass with a ploosh that was audible above even Yog-Sothoth's voice, and the sky exploded into darkness, and the wave crashed, and then withdrew back from whence it had come, the city once again sinking beneath the waves, drawing all of the participants save Jones into the sea, back to the cold and unforgiving bosom of R'Lyeh, the crisis averted once again.

The star-stone returned to the black package, its task fulfilled.

Jones lay on the rocky beach, listening to the van's motor run, until the mother sun came up, and the cries of seabirds roused him enough to get behind the wheel and drive back inland, toward home and the relative sanity of the holiday season.

He passed the trappings of Christmas on his way, and was glad that there would be at least one more Christmas, and soon another new year, for the teeming masses that inhabited the globe he had just saved from an unimaginable fate.

The Elder Gods are merciful, and no knowledge of those proceedings remained for the world at large.

But the price Jones paid for his role was to always remember that moment when the planet was nearly torn asunder by the Great Old Ones, to whom time is nothing, and of his part in the proceedings. Jones also had the knowledge, the lore that he had gained through his travails, and knew just exactly how thin were the barriers between the mundane world of the everyday, and the terrors of the Great Old Ones.

The Great Old Ones will wait for another opportunity to enslave the people of earth and the rest of the universe. They are older than this universe, and will outlive it, waiting in the cold and the dark for another chance...perhaps soon. There are always those who are willing to sell their souls for immortality, and don't think twice about the consequences. All of these beings dream, and can be reached through those very dreams, molded and influenced, cajoled into doing the bidding of the awesome beings from Outside.

Jones drove home, where he placed the terrible statues in a strongbox of oak, along with the package bearing the star-stone, and bore the strongbox up into the attic, mouthing a great many powerful charms over it. Destruction of the box was out of the question. Jones didn't know that anyone else living knew how to prevent such an event from happening again, and he would possibly need those tools some time in the future.

This done, Jones returned downstairs, where he glimpsed himself in the hall mirror, and shivered at the sight of himself.

He cut quite a figure as Santa Claus, with his newly-white hair and beard, and enjoyed himself all the more with his awareness of the transience of it all.

I hope you enjoyed this odd little tale of a Christmas that almost wasn't. I certainly enjoyed writing it. And the character Jones is already making an appearance in two other stories, coming soon to a web site near you.

I always enjoy feedback about my fiction-let me know what you think-email me here.

Moderan-Christmas Eve, 1999.

P. S. I notice that there is a children's television program that features characters called Zoogs. I've never seen it, but I just find it, um, interesting that there were characters in "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" that shared that name.

I can't imagine any similarity between HPL stuff and what I think is Disney programming, but interesting nonetheless.

At any rate the Dream Quest is one damn fine short novel, and I highly recommend it. It usually comes in a volume that contains some of HPL's Sarnath stories, which are precursors to the Cthulhu cycle, using more of the portents of Dunsanian* fantasy than he was to employ later in his career.