CHAPTER 17
In summer, Oxford doesn’t shut down completely but it does shut down mostly. The lawsuit was still wending its way through court and I was still persona non grata in US hunting. So I took a few trips to work toward my doctorate. There was no new information about the potential mava paṇauvaā beneath New Orleans. I’d done all the research I could at Oxford. It was time to sally forth.
I started in the US, specifically in the Everglades. There was a known group of swamp-apes in the Everglades and nobody knew how to communicate with them. Time to change that.
As I drove through the endless mass of sawgrass on an airboat, I noted that I really should have done this in winter. Summer in England is a charm. Summer in South Florida was killing me. I was back in the heat and hating every moment of it.
My guide was an old Seminole who spoke barely passable English. I’d book-studied Seminole in preparation and he spent most of the ride yelling corrections to my accent. Finally we reached the cluster of hammocks where the swamp-apes were reported to have been sighted. He dropped me off, fast, and took off. He clearly thought I was an idiot for going anywhere near them.
Florida swamp-apes are not pacific herbalists like the sasquatch. They were omnivorous and were known to have attacked, and rumored to have eaten, humans. But I wasn’t worried about being eaten by swamp-apes. They were going to have to fight the mosquitoes.
I found a clearing to set up camp, sprayed on some more OFF!, laid out the tasty viands I’d brought to propitiate the hostile cryptids, sprayed on some more OFF!, inflated the boat I was going to use to get from one hummock to the other, sprayed on some more OFF!, drank some water, cursed the heat, sprayed on some more OFF! and finally just got in my tent, despite it being—if anything—hotter inside, and sprayed insect killer all over to kill the mosquitoes that followed me in.
Then I shot a spider so big I swear to God it should have been PUFF-applicable. Christ, I hate the tropics and subtropics. Those idiots who think exploring jungles are fun are fucking nuts.
I had a mantra, though, to keep up my spirits. Doctorate. Doctorate. Doctorate. Doctorate.
The fuckers attacked in the middle of the night.
* * *
The first inkling I had was when my tent collapsed. Then the hooting started and I was punched through the tent material so hard I was sure I was fighting trolls.
“Guh! Guh!” I yelled, hoping that some Sasquatch remained in their language. Other than that I just balled up and took it. “Guh! Guh! Oomph! Oomph!” (Friend, friend, good good.) Then I tried some Louisiana Swamp-Ape since they were closer. “Yut! Yut!”
Whatever was pounding me stopped attacking.
“Yooo?” it said in a querying tone.
“Yooo?” I said back. “Oomph?”
There was a rustle and they were gone.
It took a few weeks for me to finally make real contact. Weeks of moving from hummock to hummock, swatting insects, avoiding alligators and rattlesnakes and giant spiders. In a couple of cases, actually PUFF-applicable giant spiders.
They were smaller tribes, I’m pretty sure fairly inbred, smaller in stature, meaner and much devolved from the noble sasquatch. The language was much devolved as well. Forget phonemes, there were barely two hundred words in the language and sixteen related to mosquitoes. For one thing, they were a primary food source as well as a scourge. The swamp-apes picked them off of each other and ate them as they were foraging.
And aggressive? Jesus. They make chimpanzees look tame. I figured out the beta posture pretty quick and spent most of my time learning their language at arm’s length. Territorial as hell. The family groups even got into it frequently and viciously. Fortunately, they weren’t quite as strong as chimps and I eventually got a reputation as someone who could hit back. Hard. Not quite the way you’re supposed to do crypto-anthropology, but after watching one family group rip an alligator to pieces for lunch, I wasn’t taking any chances.
I spent most of June among those fucking monsters and it was the worst June of my life. I can understand them being off the PUFF table but it’s a near run thing. Doesn’t really matter. Between inbreeding and habitat loss, they’re pretty much going to be extinct in short order. I’m not going to sweat it.
I flew back to England, wrote up my notes and then headed to Canada.
* * *
Why Canada? There were, and are, Laurentian yeti. Shorter, darker and squatter than sasquatch, they are frequently mistaken for brown bears. They’re also more aggressive, similar to swamp-apes. But at this point I had pretty good contact techniques and was able to make contact more smoothly than in Florida.
The bugs were nearly as bad as Florida’s but at least it was cooler. In fact, one night it snowed. Blessed relief.
The language was even more removed from Sasquatch than Swamp-Ape, yet richer. Many more nouns, some fairly complex verbs, several adjectives that were more related to Inuit, with whom they must have made contact in the past. They even had cursing which neither other group had developed. Three of their curses, though, had an etymology that escaped me until I was on my way out and the Quebecois guide dropped a heavy pack on his foot. Ah. Etymology accepted.
June in Florida. July in the Laurentians (better than Florida). Now it was off to Nepal where I hoped to make contact with true yeti.
* * *
I didn’t climb Everest, but I went there to see where Sir Edmund Hillary and Shaman Tenzing Norgay defeated the Goarahli Snow Demon. Why did they climb Everest? “Because it was there.” The snow demon, that is. It had been using Everest as a safe redoubt only going lower to steal children to eat.
I did make contact with the yeti. They were even more shy than the sasquatch but I had Hillary’s book to fall back on and I was really just verifying the data. Most of it held out. I think either Nepalese yeti were less developed than Tibetan or he’d exaggerated a bit. They weren’t nearly as insightful as he’d described. I’d put them as less developed than Laurentian. But most of his information held true and at least the dictionary was more or less on.
I got a full plate back tattoo in Katmandu from an old man whose family had been doing tattoos back to prehistory. All freehand, no predrawing, all hammered. Absolutely beautiful depiction of the Wheel. He was also a shaman and the tattoo was supposed to be a ward against scryings. If it actually worked, maybe the MCB wouldn’t be able to make up any more bullshit readings about me.
The yeti wasn’t the only thing that brought me to Tibet. While I was there I tried to track down more original scrolls with information about the mava. I did not have many contacts there, but Rigby had given me directions to a few obscure mountain monasteries.
There were a few things there of use. Most of the description of the mava was, as noted, extremely euphemistic and the sheer horror of the sight of the thing translated clearly despite being second- or thirdhand and in Tibetan. And much of it I initially took to be so euphemistic as to be useless. “Of a multitude of that which is used in the airiest places.” I mean, what the hell does something like that mean?
But one phrase kept cropping up, “Of like unto the crown of the Most Perfect.” Crown could mean many things. It could mean brow, top of the head, since the lamas of that period shaved their heads presumably bald, it could also mean the hat they wore, it could mean what most people take as a crown. I had no idea.
My lucky break came in an unexpected form. While I was studying at the monastery, a monk arrived and presented me with a note and a summons. Somehow Father Pema in Crestone, Colorado, had known I would end up here eventually, and sent a letter of introduction ahead. It must have been a good letter, because I was invited to meet with an expert who never spoke with Westerners.
I took all my notes with me to Nepal to meet with a lama in exile. The lamas of Tibet had been the lords and priests of that land from time immemorial. They were worshipped nearly as gods but by and large maintained an ascetic lifestyle that would make most homeless in the US throw up their hands in anger.
Lama Kotokai had once been the abbot of a monastery housing a thousand monks and libraries with even more thousands of scrolls, some so ancient they were as fragile as snowflakes. Now he lived in a thin-walled, drafty hovel on the poorest edge of Katmandu where he ministered to the flock there, dispensing wisdom and medicinal healing and blessings.
And he was probably more content.
It was Lama Kotokai who figured out the hidden meanings in my notes.
“This crown refers to the hat of the Most Perfect of the period,” he told me, nodding over my copy of a copy of a copy of the original text. “They were made in the shape of the shell of a sea creature. These shells were very prized by the people of that time for they came from far away and were quite rare. ‘That which is found of the airiest places’ is ropes, such as are used on bridges. These are the airy places.”
Okay, so, covered in ropes. Tentacles? Probably. But the rest?
“With humility.” I bowed. “There are many shells of sea creatures, Most Holy One.”
“This was a sort of clam.” He pulled out a sheet of paper and sketched on it with a stick from the fire. “There. This was the form of the body of the mother of serpents according to these writings of the apprentice of the Most Perfect.”
I looked at the thing and blinked. It made no sense.
Every indication I’d had was that the body of the mava paṇauvaā was amorphous like its pseudopods. But this was, indeed, a clam. Sort of. Sort of a cross between a clam and a snail.
A clam with tentacles? Did those even exist? Wait. What was I thinking? If this was a creation of the Old Ones, it wasn’t even from this dimension.
“I must ask, with humility. Does this indicate that the body was hard? I had been under the impression, perhaps mistaken, that it was quite soft.”
“Hard,” Lama Kotokai said. “Very hard. Like rock. Such is known of the Sacrifice of the Most Perfect Thubten. Their covering is like armor. If you have such in your land, they must be expelled most quickly. They settle in and cause great havoc to all around. They summon the worst of the guras, mavas and srul. It is said that they are but the young of Those Who Are Not Named. Those Who Are Not Named spread their seeds among the worlds. When the time is right, when the stars align, some hatch and, like the butterfly or the locust, go through stages of change. In time, when the changes are complete, they become one of Those of the Darkest Stars.”
Those Who Are Not Named covered a lot of entities. Tibetans. If it’s bad, we don’t talk about it. But Those of the Darkest Stars. I had to think about that one for a second. I’d heard it somewhere before. No, I’d read it somewhere before. I’d read a lot of stuff.
It wasn’t in English…Tibetan…No. Nepali?
Sabaibhandā’adhyārō tārāharu?
That’s the Nepalese term for Old Ones. Great Old Ones. Great Cthulhu sleeps Great Old Ones! End of the world, do not pass Go, Extinction Level Event Great Old Ones!
Oh, shit.
It wasn’t a servant. It wasn’t some mindless creation. The fucking thing was a larval Old One? Here? On Earth? Specifically under my house?
Oh, shit.
I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs but you didn’t do that around a lama. I just thanked him and left a large donation for the poor.
Oh, shit.
There went my property values.
* * *
There wasn’t much in the way of fine hotels in Katmandu in the late eighties. I was in a fleabag with a couple of single beds, a rusty sink, barely functioning toilet and a black and white TV. I went back to it to think and turned on the TV for background noise.
So…did MCB know what a mava really was? Generally MCB knew more than they let on. Only if they knew there was a baby Great Old One they’d probably be doing “underground nuclear testing” beneath New Orleans. In this case, I might have made myself the greatest living expert on mava in the world. I probably knew more than MCB at this point.
The problem was, I was on MCB’s shit list. They might or might not believe me. All I really had to go on was the words of some old fucker in a saffron robe. I was not on MI4’s shit list, though. They owed me for taking out that piru. They’d probably believe me. But it wasn’t like the thing was under Manchester: it was under New Orleans.
I needed more proof. Hell, I wasn’t sure if I was panicking. I was having a hard time believing there was a larval Great Old One under New Orleans. Did being larval mean it was only an “Old One” and not a “Great Old One”? How did you get the honorific “Great” when you were an Old One? Size? Territory? How fast it melts your brain? Just how long do they remain “larval”? And what happens when they hatch?
I was pretty sure I knew the answer to that one.
More interesting question: How long do they remain larval and how long had it been cooking? These things were a complete mystery. It was assumed they could live for millions of years. Their larval stage could be a long time, like millennia or even aeons. “That is not dead which can eternal lie and with strange aeons even death may die.” Lovecraft must have had some sort of line to the pure quill.
Was it ready to hatch? What sort of sign would there be? Or did we have until the sun went cold to worry?
I wasn’t really watching the TV, it was just on for noise. There was only one channel that occasionally had on English programs and it announced it was changing to a “blockbuster” movie.
Blockbuster. It was some horrid B-grade SF flick from the 1950s called…
It: The Terror from Beyond Space!
I got up and changed the channel. In my current state of controlled terror, this I did not need.
Wow. Apparently the Nepalese are really into 1950s horror flicks.
The Monster who Challenged the World…
Is about a mollusklike monster which lives under the Salton Sea in California and is released due to nuclear weapons testing or an earthquake or something.
I was about halfway through the two-hour run. I did some math and figured that I’d tuned in with fifty-seven minutes to go. The Nepalese host who did comedy skits during the commercial breaks said the movie was from 1957.
When the guy I was assuming was Saint Peter had sent me back to the world of living, he’d told me to watch for signs. And specifically my sign was the number fifty-seven.
“Okay, God,” I said, looking up. “Got it. Giant mollusk creature. Bad thing. Do something.”
I called the airport and booked the next flight out. Time to head back to the States and see if I could scrounge up some proof that didn’t involve signs from the Almighty.
The in-flight movie?
On the flight from New Delhi to London: Alien.
Flight Number? Indian Airlines Flight 257.
On the flight from London to Atlanta: The Blob.
Flight Number? You guessed it: 1157.
On the way out of the airport in New Orleans there was a homeless guy standing there with a sign: THE END IS COMING.
“But do you have a specific date?” I asked him as I got in the car. Remi had previously redeployed to New Orleans and picked me up.
“Sir?”
“You don’t want to know.”
Once is coincidence, twice is happenstance, three times is “Okay, God, I’ve got it! You can turn down the volume.”
“Things are worse here than I thought, Remi. I’m really thinking about moving.”
“Out of New Orleans, sir?”
“I’m not good with this continent. If I could find another planet, we’d be moving that far.”