#these weird feelings of dread and hovering on the edges of panic attacks sometimes but that's really it

[ecotone99]

[HR] The Abomination

“For the sake of humanity’s future peace and safety, it is absolutely necessary that Earth’s dark corners stay unilluminated and its abysmal depths remain unfathomed; lest we revive sleeping abominations and entice blasphemous nightmares of bygone eons to squirm and crawl out of their murky resting places.”

R.H. Blake, The Burrower Beneath[1]

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His instruments told him that he had arrived in the late morning. The sun was low, hovering above the eastern horizon, yet the atmosphere was dismally gray. With cloudless skies above and no ground-hugging fog to diffuse the sun’s radiance, Brandon Wells found himself at a loss to explain why a beautiful day should have been so preternaturally dreary. It was as though he were looking at the world through a pane of dirty glass in every direction, all color muted or subdued by some intangible filter, and that wasn’t all.

Wells was no neurotic, nor was he given to frequent attacks of anxiety, but never in his life had he felt so unnerved by a mere location. A wellspring of irrational fear had erupted within him almost the very instant his boots touched the ground. The emotion had sprung on him fast, like a striking viper, and just as quickly abated, becoming a kind of raw excitement that made his muscles quiver and his skin prickle.

Like a sprinter waiting for the crack of a pistol shot, his body was primed and ready to run, begging for the signal to go, go, go!

Wells looked over his shoulder at the Ergosphere, the only thing in sight that had any color to it, and its hull of neutron-degenerate gravitonium was hardly esthetically pleasing to the eye. The vehicle seemed to speak to him:

Take me away from this place. Just get in and go!

Wells reigned in his overactive imagination. Despite his innate fears, he was intent on exploring the ruins.

And they’re ruins even now, Wells mused. Over 12,000 years before my time, and this place is already derelict.

Before him, carved out of cyclopean cliffs of dull, striped sandstone, were the gargantuan stepped walls of an ancient ziggurat. Calling the monument a “ziggurat” was a misnomer, Wells knew, but he couldn’t think of a better word to describe the monument’s general form. The builders had taken advantage of natural breaks in the cliff to fashion a megalithic structure with a combination of sloping and stepped walls.

Stepped pyramid? Wells asked himself. That descriptor didn’t seem to fit either, so he took to calling it simply “the Monument” although giving the structure such an innocent name did nothing to alleviate his feeling of disgust.

A tremor coursed through the ground, accompanied by the grating sound of rubble moving against rubble. There was a sharp pop as stonework cracked wide open, and Wells cried out in panic, his nerves already on edge. As if hearing him, the earth calmed, and all became still. Feeling terribly ashamed of himself, Wells sat down on a flat piece of rock and waited for his hammering heart to slow down.

He should’ve known to anticipate seismic activity. Earth was nearing the end of its most recent Ice Age, a time period future geologists and archaeologists would name the Pleistocene. The spot upon which Wells stood was still part of the Asian continent, but 12,000 years later it would be underwater, the Monument reduced to a set of ruins just off the southern coast of Yonaguni Island[2]. Wells had traveled back in time to investigate the area, intent on proving that the mysterious Yonaguni Monument was actually a natural formation. Instead, he had found something clearly man-made.

But what race of mankind could have built such a colossal structure, there, at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, where Homo sapiens and their cousins, the Neanderthal and Homo erectus, were only using crude stone tools? The engineering knowledge and necessary implements were thousands of years away, in the Bronze Age, at least. Had the ancient sandstone really been sculpted by human hands? Was the monument’s geometry, its straight edges and sharp right angles, truly the conception of a human brain? The longer he observed, the more Wells became convinced of an alien and altogether inhuman origin. The chrononaut shook his head, trying to banish his irrational thoughts by repeating his mantra:

It’s the glory of God to hide a thing, but to seek out the hidden is the honor of kings.

He had discovered something truly extraordinary, and his imagination was running amuck with terror, filling his mind’s eye with terrific visions of eldritch horrors. Wells, disgusted with his childishness, pushed himself to his feet, wondering why the Monument had evoked such a strong reaction from him. Perhaps it was an ancient instinct, something in the genes passed down through the ages from his earliest progenitors. He ignored the feeling of impending danger and marched up a winding ramp to a large rectangular gateway cut into the rock wall. As he did so, another tremor shook the Monument, causing him to trip. Again, he suppressed the urge to run away, to return to the Ergosphere and leave the cursed Monument behind forever. When the quake passed, Wells continued up the ramp; although, each small step was a herculean effort.

He finally reached the top of the ramp and peered down an unlit passageway of indeterminate length. Wells knew immediately that he was looking into the abysmal mouth of Hell, that lurking somewhere in the hidden recesses of the Monument, a terrible evil was waiting for him. Reaching into his pants’ pocket, he took out a flashlight and shined the beam along the walls, revealing intricate symbols carved into their surface. Wells ran his hands over the faces of the walls and was startled by their glassy smoothness. Not only was the rock like polished granite, but the signs were etched in gold! It was impossible, but Wells could hardly dismiss the evidence as easily as he could his own imaginings. Where had the knowledge to make such sophisticated artwork come from? It was certainly beyond the skills of humanity, there, at the end of the Ice Age, where stone knives and bear skins were the cutting edge of technology.

Wells’ research had hardly been exhaustive. The ancient history of Yonaguni Island was vague, its earliest recorded history reaching back only as far as the fifteenth century A.D. Had the region been home to a heretofore undiscovered species of technologically advanced humans sometime in the far distant past?

It’s the most plausible conclusion, Wells thought, but he was skeptical.

Wells continued down the passage with renewed curiosity, trying to decipher the wall art as he went. The symbols were accompanied by intricate and beautiful bas-reliefs that, together, seemed to tell a story. He took his translator out of his back pocket and, using its camera, took a picture of a section of the wall. It could not decipher the ancient language, but it did identify several characters that were similar to those found on the Dispilio tablet[3]. The translator also suggested that the language was meant to be read from top to bottom, left to right.

Wells had better luck interpreting the scenes depicted in the bas-reliefs. Although they were dazzling and gorgeous works of art, their gold outlines sparkling like ribbons of sunlight in the beam of his flashlight, the story they told filled the chrononaut with unmitigated dread.

Minutes turned into hours as Wells laboriously pieced together the narrative represented in the bas-reliefs, switching from the left wall to the right, trying to establish linearity of plot, all the while progressing deeper into the bowels of the Monument. He eventually came to the conclusion that he was looking at some sort of creation myth. The story started with a war being waged in the heavens, depicted in the bas-reliefs as two sets of entities engaged in combat against a background of stars. One faction had an anthropoid outline, the figures cloaked head to toe in armor and wielding weapons. In opposition, the second set of figures were depicted as misshapen monsters that could hurl lightning bolts. The carvings of the monsters, though outlined in gold, were grotesque and lacked the refined detail of the anthropoids, and Wells had trouble finding words to adequately describe their characteristics.

In another scene, the armored anthropoids were shown victorious, casting the monsters out of the stars and exiling them to a planet. It couldn’t have meant anything else, Wells knew. Shown in the background of the same relief was a large, four-pointed star and two dots. One dot was smaller and closer to the star while the other was slightly bigger and further away.

“The Sun,” Wells said, his voice sounding oddly muted within the passage. “Mercury…Venus…Earth.”

The curved line in the foreground must’ve represented the surface of the Earth; the anthropoids, still among the stars, pointed their outstretched arms across the emptiness of outer space towards the planet; the monsters were shown falling down a tunnel represented as a gold-speckled triangle that twisted and wound through the void until it’s vertex touched the inside of the curved line.

Wells moved on to another bas-relief, wondering how much of the story he was missing without reading the ancient text that went with it. The next carving depicted a pantheon or hierarchy of creatures that, he supposed, were the worshiped deities of the people who’d built the Monument. They were hideous things, and he wondered if they didn’t symbolize the exiled monsters from the previous image.

“But why would the artists choose to represent their gods as vague and amorphous in one picture but well-defined and hideous in another?” Wells asked.

Within the pantheon image, the deities were given weird and exaggerated features in both face and body. There was a thing that looked like a squid with the round, sucking mouth of a leech. Another was a spider with a lidless eye for an abdomen. A third was long and serpentine, but it had great big paws, a pair of leathery wings, and a head like a bearded dragon. Those were just a few of the less disturbing characters, but what drew Wells’ attention the most was the symbol that occupied an empty spot at what should’ve been the top of the hierarchy. It was a dot with a straight line, a hooked line, and an arrow, each radiating out of center.

None of the other deity images had a symbol associated with their picture, and Wells was left wondering why the top god only had a symbol to represent it.

Wells’ continued examination of the walls brought him before a bas-relief depicting the squid monster, its feelers wrapped around some massive sea creature, possibly a prehistoric whale, and apparently in the process of devouring it. Other reliefs showed similar scenes of the monster gods, one in particular depicting a lumbering giant that dwarfed a herd of roving brontosaurs. Finally, Wells came to one of the last panels. He wiped cold sweat from his brow, unaware until that moment that he had been sweating profusely. His skin was clammy and his clothes were uncomfortably sticky and heavy. His instinctual urge to flee from the Monument, which he had largely been able to ignore, absorbed as he had been with interpreting the bas-reliefs, suddenly resurged and he had a vision of himself running out of the Monument, screaming like a madman.

“It’s the glory of God to hide a thing,” Wells whispered, “but to seek out the hidden is the honor of kings.”

Some things should stay hidden, a voice in his head replied, and he shuddered.

He had been wondering who, or what, had built the Monument and for what purpose. Wells found his answer in the last bas-relief on the left wall. It showed a vaguely anthropoidal creature which stood upright on a pair of thick, backwards-bending legs and a saurian tail. Its chest and torso were humanoid in shape, but the hands on the ends of its arms possessed three clawed fingers and an opposable digit like a thumb. Attached to the shoulders by a stubby neck was a round, hairless head with two eyes, a flat nose, and a round, lipless orifice that must’ve been a mouth.

The Earth was old, Wells understood, and humanity would be forever ignorant about most of her past. That was why he had taken it upon himself to explore the hidden history of deep time, to fill in as many gaps as he could, but the mysteries of the Monument were too baffling. Was he really supposed to believe that the Earth had been home to an intelligent race of monstrosities from the stars? Setting aside the possibility of extraterrestrial life, which Wells was willing to entertain, where was the evidence? Surely they were part of the fossil record. Why hadn’t he seen their bones in the dinosaur exhibit next to the T-Rex? And what about the Monument’s builders? To what bygone era of Earth’s antiquity did they belong? The carving on the wall was a bastard hybridization of saurian and human physiognomy, which should have been impossible, considering dinosaurs and humans had 65 million years of time and one mass extinction separating them.

The planet is 4.6 billion years old, Wells thought. There have been five major extinctions that we know of. It’s physically impossible to account for every creature that’s ever lived. New species are discovered all the time, but how many species go extinct every day that we never know about?

A new wave of seething terror coursed through him, and Wells jumped to the side, aiming his flashlight into the chamber beyond the passageway. He had suddenly become aware of a foul stench akin to burnt garlic, a permeating odor which threatened to smother him like a wet blanket, and he began to dry heave. His impulse to run came roaring back with a vengeance. The smell—that smell—it was the crack of the pistol, the go sign, the final warning. A voice called out to him from deep within his mind:

Run, you damn fool! Run! Get out while you can!

Wells remained resolute and forced himself to continue through, past the end of the passage. He knew that he was in mortal danger—all his senses told him so. Something was waiting for him within the Monument, something old and expectant and every bit as curious about him as he was about it. Wells didn’t understand how he knew these things, he simply knew them to be true, as if they were self-evident. What horrid abomination could stir such ancient instincts within him to life? What star-born monstrosity could unbury prehistoric knowledge from the deepest recesses of his brain and draw it to the surface?

Wells had to know.

“It’s the glory of God to hide a thing,” he whispered, “but to seek out the hidden is the honor of kings.”

Ignore me at your own peril, you fool. It was the same voice that had told Wells to run, to get out while he still had a chance. It was his sense of self-preservation, his survival instinct, the oldest and most basic of human drives. It had been given a voice, snarling, angry, and loud. It was furious at Wells for ignoring it. How old was that voice? Over how many millennia had it been passed down that it should know the implicit danger of the Monument and the alien thing inside it?

Wells entered a tall, vaulted chamber with a flat, circular floor. The walls, ceiling, and floor were the same striped sandstone as the rest of the Monument, and Wells hypothesized that the cavity was a natural cave that had been altered by artificial means to serve a purpose. The sandstone walls had been cut into stepped ledges, forming a kind of amphitheater or auditorium. The smell of burnt garlic was overwhelming within the confines of the chamber and grew to unbearable levels nearest the center of the room, where there was a circular pit, six feet in diameter, carved out of the floor.

Inside the pit was a churning, bubbling fluid, dark and wretched in color. It was then that Wells saw the other markings on the floor, each pointing radially from the lip of the pit: a straight line, a hooked line, and an arrow.

The fluid heaved, and a vaguely human appendage emerged out of the pit to slap wetly against the floor, and Wells jumped backwards, a scream lodged somewhere in his throat. Another arm appeared, its three-fingered hand grasping the lip of the pit, the dark fetid fluid dripping sinuously onto the sandstone floor. Then the fluid expelled a round head with lidless, bulging eyes, each blood red with a few black dots in each. A lipless orifice made a wet, sucking noise like a single, deep breath, and Wells finally screamed.

The Monument trembled, dust falling into his eyes. He was running down the long passageway with the horribly beautiful bas-reliefs and the ancient language carved in gold upon its walls. The light at the entrance of the passage was like a beacon, urging him on. He ran at full steam—it was the fastest and longest sprint of his entire life—screaming all the while; although, he could barely hear himself over the sound of cracking rock. His body had been tensed like a taught rubber band for hours, and he had finally snapped, all the stored adrenaline burning up in a matter of seconds.

Wells reached the entrance and flung himself off the ramp and into open space. Gravity snagged him, pulling him to the ground, and he landed on his feet, white hot pain shooting up his legs. He rolled on his side, grimacing. Looking up, he saw the mouth of the passage belching gray rock dust as portions of the monument cracked and fell all around him. The latest earthquake did not abate as the previous ones had. It was as if some unseen force was intent on destroying the Monument now that its secret was known.

The chrononaut got to his feet and limped to the Ergosphere as quickly as he could. It was hard to keep his balance while tremors shook the ground, but he made it to the hatch and hauled himself up the steps into the time machine. He turned and watched with tremendous satisfaction as the Monument folded in upon itself, and then he smashed the big red button on the wall with his fist, closing the hatch.

For many weeks following his excursion, Wells found himself unable to sleep without dreaming about the Monument and the abomination that had lived there. He wanted to believe that it had been buried in the ruins and swallowed by the seas, lost to time forever, but an angry, snarling voice within him kept saying the same thing, over and over:

It’s too much to hope for.

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And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this is also a vexation of the spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

Ecclesiastes 1:17-18

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[1] Original quotation paraphrased from At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft

[2] The westernmost inhabited island of Japan, located between the East China Sea and the Pacific Ocean.

[3] Discovered in 1993 during excavation of a Neolithic settlement in Greece and dated to circa 5202 B.C., the symbols on the Dispilio tablet are thought to represent the earliest form of writing ever found to date.

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