The Horror Of Atlantis

In the winter of 1882, my grandfather, the aged naturalist and historian, Professor Wade, had been trapped and injured in an earthquake that destroyed his Himalayan lodgings. It is not known what he suffered while in there, for never has he been coherent enough to recount it to me or anyone, but it undoubtedly affected his sanity and health in ways I can only begin to describe. He repeatedly spoke of a city under the water, constructed by beings, the only word he would ever use to describe the creatures of his visions. Long a historian with an interest in the fabled ancient city of Atlantis, we believed he had simply gone insane. But something started gnawing at me a few months later, when a report was written of the occurrence of a sailor’s testimonial that he had found the ancient underwater city of R’lyeh, and that the being inside, which he called Cthulhu, had murdered three of his crewmates and inadvertently killed another two. “Interesting,” I had murmured, reading the report: The Call Of Cthulhu. Out of work for a month, I decided to visit my grandfather at his lodgings in Normandy. I thought I could write my own minor report, detailing his psychological condition, if nothing else. And so, I set off to Caen, to visit my aged and insane grandfather.

Originally intending to stay only a week, I ended up staying in Caen for a month. It was spring, and the bountiful nature of Caen proved healthy for both my grandfather and I. In the interim, however, I was able to learn a lot. In the years since his Himalayan incident, he’d formulated an intriguing semi-coherent theory. These beings, the ones of which he spoke so often, had come from somewhere else. Somewhere beyond. He did not know where they came from- was it a distant planet? Another dimension? Or a place untouched by time, a place somewhere between reality and fantasy? After many long discussions with him, I learnt even more of what he did know- that they were powerful enough to defy all laws of physics and reality; yet they were unaware of any human concept that our societies could create. Rummaging through his belongings, I found evidence that he had been visited over the years, by like-minded individuals calling the beings the “Old Ones”, as he recalled. They seemed eager to learn about the city under the water, his Atlantis, and they would send someone over every few months. While this was certainly worrying, I ended up thinking little of it, as my psychological report on his conditions was progressing nicely, and I believed his visitors were nothing more than fellow lunatics. 

The day before I was set to return to London, a group of men showed up at the door, clad in black coats. The coats had a most peculiar property about them- the black on them was strangely physical. Not as if it was another material stained black, but as if the men were wearing the black, the colour of black, itself. And it was the darkest black I had ever seen. Light touching it seemed to fade instantly, and I found myself wondering how they stayed cool under such thick and dark coats. Initially, I had sought to greet and speak with, to potentially even interview, my grandfather’s visitors; however, it appears their intentions were otherwise. Armed with guns, they forced me into the car they had arrived in, which looked strangely damaged, and left two of their own behind with my grandfather. I do not know what happened next, as I was forcibly blindfolded, driven to what was presumably the shore, forced onto an unsteady boat, eventually loaded onto yet another car, and woke up cold and hungry in a temple made of dark stone, surrounded by cultists clothed in black chanting the same repeated phrase, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”, or, in English, as I later learnt, “In his house in R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming,”

The men and women of the temple spoke the strangest tongues. Some spoke English, others French, some Hungarian, others Ukrainian, a few a certain West African dialect, and so many others that I was unable to take even a stab at identifying. After much internal discussion, they appeared to have arrived at a consensus. A bulky man in the centre, speaking English, asked me what I knew of Atlantis. I told them that it was a myth. A fantasy. They asked of its location. Having inherited the papers and works of my grandfather after his Himalayan incident left him unfit to keep them, I gave the cultists a location, reasoned equally from his works while he was sane and his ramblings while he was quite the opposite. The man stated that they intended to conduct an expedition to the area, to try and find the “original city”. And that they would require my assistance in finding it. The abundance of weapons in the temple made it very clear that I could not resist. And thus, my solo trip to Caen, Normandy, surrounded by the beauty of nature in springtime, turned into a long and gloomy voyage over the dark and stormy Atlantic with a strange and unfriendly crew.

As I was led through the temple, I noticed statues and effigies, made of a certain dark rock with gold flecks. At the time, thought and reasonable consideration of my surroundings seemed impossible. Internally, I was reeling from the shock of my situation- I was going to be dragged on a voyage with cultists devoutly worshipping the beings that had first become present in my life after my grandfather’s fit of insanity. Only later would the hideousness of the statues strike me. Interestingly enough, no two statues were ever the same- some portrayed the being as a creature with a head not unlike an octopus, covered in tentacles, the body of some large mammal, enormous, draconic wings, and claws standing atop black rock. Others showed a snake-like head with tentacles for hair, a body of masses and masses of something like stone, those same draconic wings, and scaly legs atop black rock. And some still showed a blob-like head, with its iconic tentacles, some sort of metallic-looking muscle consisting most of its body and its thick, powerful wings, with clawed feet adorning black rock. Clearly, however, they all referred to the same being, the same Old One, the one the cultists all revered as “Cthulhu”. I was blindfolded once more, and next opened my eyes to see a solitary bed in a cell of black rock. The only other thing was a small table fashioned out of a small rocky outcropping, with a miniature Cthulhu effigy atop it. With the reality of my circumstances finally setting in through the deep water that clogged my mind, I closed my eyes, and cried for a while. I do not know or remember how long it was for, but when it was over, I was so tired that I closed my eyes again, and surprisingly managed to obtain a sweet few hours’ relief in the form of sleep.

I spent a few days in the cell. In terms of holding cells, I was actually relatively well-taken care of, with three large meals of varying contents and two smaller ones of bread every day. Occasionally I would engage in brief conversation with one of the English-speaking cultists passing by. But eventually, the rock door was opened, and I was blindfolded again, eventually finding myself on a quiet pier late at night. I did not know where I was, and my best guess was somewhere in Northumberland. Really, I was none the wiser as to my location; I might not even have been on the British Isles. Either way, I set off on the large ship, which appeared to previously have belonged to some respectable organisation, but had been rechristened the Alhazred, with a new figurehead of black, gold-flecked rock, very reminiscent of the numerous statues I had previously seen. I was loaded aboard the ship, and told what I would do- I would navigate them to Atlantis, and provide them with the information they would need to explore it. Their guns made clear their threat. And thus, I set off on the worst few months of my life, searching for a fabled city together with cultists worshipping an eldritch god spoken of by an insane old man.

Over the months, I slowly began to learn more and more. Despite their clear proficiency at seamanship and long stretches of leisure time, the cultists proved initially unwilling to provide me with more information than necessary. However, as our voyage went on, they let slip details which I absorbed and processed. The Old Ones, or beings, as my grandfather called them, were gods coming from unknown realms, presumably the undiscovered reaches of space. Their wings allowed them to, against all laws of nature, traverse its void, where they landed on planet Earth. The primary god of their cult was the prophet of the Old Ones, Cthulhu. They believed it was their job to learn his knowledge and awaken him, whereupon he would bring salvation to humanity, and elevate humanity to the level of the Old Ones. We would have abilities like never before, and an ability to see beyond time and space. That was as close to a summary of what they described as possible. Supernatural abilities, people of today would think, but the day would come when the concept of nature would be nothing more than a collection of words.

After months of our expedition, we arrived at our destination. In all honesty, I had expected to find nothing there. However, I was proven wrong- the strangest rocky outcropping protruded through the water. I distinctly remember this rocky outcropping, for it was of that dreaded black rock with gold flecks. But there was something else about it. When observed from another side, the same rock appeared… different. It was as if looking at it from a different angle had changed the rock, changed its composition entirely. There were some places that when looking from one side, the rock was present in, but when looking from another side, the only thing present there was the cold, salty air. The cultists took this as a good omen. I did not. It was a mere optical illusion, I told myself. These cultists were insane. I could not possibly believe anything they said. But there was truly something peculiar about the rock. What it was, I did not know, but there was something about it.

Whatever the case, I had little time to dwell on this most upsetting matter, for the cultists were starting their plunge into the deep ocean, taking me with them. I had believed it was a fool’s errand. Our diving equipment could barely handle taking to even a tenth of the depths at which a city on the seafloor would be located. But they had the guns, and so we dived regardless. There, I saw the most terrifyingly beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life.

It spanned a great distance, and I would not have seen it on its incredible mound of dark rock had it not been for the sparkling and glistening of the myriads upon myriads of gold flecks, a darker, more ominous and chthonic night sky. As we neared the city, I felt an unsettling presence set in. Something inhabiting the same space as me, despite our being alone. From the limited languages I had picked up over the course of my voyage, I could gather what the cultists were saying. The Old Ones had been here. This had been their city.

As we explored the long, hollow passageways and the massive, gloomy chambers, I noticed on the wall strings upon strings of symbols. “That is not dead which can eternal lie; and with strange aeons even death may die,” murmured the English speaker. The symbols seemed closest to Arabic of all the world’s alphabets. We progressed through Atlantis, as I noticed something about the greater structure. It was wrong. Not wrong as in wrongly constructed, but wrong in its purest, most human sense. Corridors that seemed as though they would lead to one place led to another, places we had already seen seemed foreign, and the geometry of the place, the details of its construction, were something none of us could comprehend. The stone seemed to be older than the planet itself, and yet the city was fashioned in a way only possible by a living, conscious being. It was a city, and it was clearly not a natural city. But what human can, or could have, made cuts in stone so perfect they reflected light after an untold amount of time submerged in the ravaging waters of the Atlantic? Once again, I had little time to collect my thoughts, for we had navigated our way through the labyrinth and found ourselves in the centre of the city of Atlantis.

It was a giant, enormous, immense, towering, titanic statue. A statue of the god, the being, the Old One, that was Cthulhu. Its sheer size immediately gave me a sense of being overwhelmed. It towered over me, seeming as though it would stretch over me, collapse atop me, and consume me whole. Its force of existence, its force of being, stretched into the very depths of my mind and my soul. I knew there and then that no human could ever even hope to create something like this. It was simply too massive for any being to comprehend for too long. I desperately turned away, and its disappearance from my vision soothed the mental agony and pressure on my tortured self. I did not even notice it before, but my vision had been blurred, as if I was underwater, while in an underwater city. Only now was the double-blur subsiding, leaving me with the standard underwater vision I had grown accustomed to. By the side, I saw two cultists collapse. Both were dead on the spot. I cannot describe the statue, for its sheer detail and precision was simply something I could not understand. Us humans are far too primitive to even comprehend the designs of the grand cities of the Old Ones. We are even less to them than, say, an ant is to us. We simply cannot comprehend their immensity, their being. This was when my reality cracked, and when I accepted that the cultists were right. These Old Ones did exist, as beautiful and terrible as they were. And they did indeed have such earth-shattering, universe-splitting, reality-breaking powers, completely and utterly incomprehensible to us mere mortals.

As I slowly recovered, I noticed a number of pictures on the walls of the central plaza. They were the most beautiful pictures I had ever seen, with both detail and simplicity, clarity and grandiloquence, animal and that sense of the beyond, that sense of being held by whatever the Old Ones touched. No human could ever hope to measure to even the smallest fragment of one of these images. They were beauty incarnate, constructed and painted of beauty, the colours still radiant and clear as if it was the day they had first been willed into being, that is, if the sun still rose and the days still passed then. They told a story. And so, my eyes relished the pictures, as my mind connected them to tell the story of the Old Ones’ arrival.

The Old Ones had arrived on their great wings, angelic and draconic, soaring down from the great beyond to our Earth. When they first landed, their impact and being was so tremendous that it spawned the first cultists, brought out of the muck of their primitive ignorance by the Old Ones’ arrival. The Old Ones willed for their followers a grand city, the city of Atlantis. However, exhausted from their voyage through the stars, the Old Ones departed Atlantis to found a new city and a new home. And they called it by their name, with the closest possible human interpretation that can be said, written, or comprehended being R’lyeh. With the Old Ones asleep, the enlightenment and salvation that had been brought about by them disappeared. The first cultists died out, and the city of Atlantis lay ruined and abandoned. But time had passed, and now the new cultists would rediscover Atlantis, and make it a beacon of light, hope, and salvation for all that followed Cthulhu and the Old Ones. It would be a holy city surpassing the likes of Rome, Constantinople, Mecca, Beijing, Kyoto, or Delhi. It would be the city, and it would be the base of the cult of Cthulhu for aeons to come.

We stayed in the city for hours more, occasionally resurfacing to refill our oxygen tanks. We observed altars and shrines, worshipping the Old Ones in the most diverse of ways, from a strange early perception of respect to barbaric human sacrifice. We saw great libraries, with texts upon texts in that language we could barely translate, engraved upon tablets of black rock with gold flecks, and rooms with chambers like coffins, but far smaller. These were certainly strange, but ultimately, they were human. Or human-like. After a short time of discovery, it became apparent that the first race of cultists had been a sort of human, or at least a humanoid, modified to the conditions of Atlantis, since they were clearly shown to breathe underwater. I had also vaguely suspected that they laid eggs, and that the miniature coffins I had observed earlier were in fact used to protect the first cultists’ young. But all along, we thought this was the city of a dead race. Until we heard the cries.

Inside the dark rock itself, in crude caves existing in stark contrast to the splendid city above, we heard cries. We initially moved to investigate, much to my dismay. The moment I heard those, I immediately wanted to leave and never return. But the cultists would not have it. We went to the mouth of the caves. I will never know for sure, but I strongly believe that my unfriendly companions were attempting to see if there were any survivors among the first cultists. And as it turns out, there were. Hundreds upon hundreds of them.

They came in all shapes and sizes. While it was clear that they had all once been of the noble aquatic race that had once walked the halls of Atlantis, they seemed degenerated. More lethargic. As if when great Cthulhu had slept, they slept too, losing whatever humanity they had over the myriad years spent in the caves; and that they had only awoken now to defend their abode. Shards of blue, hard matter, sharp, streamlined, and extremely mobile underwater found themselves ripped from the backs of the first cultists, and flung into the diving suits of the cultists I was with. Some died, and more were injured. Luckily, I emerged mostly unscathed, having stayed at the back of the small crowd and been prepared to flee at a moment’s notice. And eventually, we made it to the boat, the Alhazred, a friendlier sight than ever before, and fled, the horror finally at a close.

Or so we thought. Because among our injured, we noticed something most peculiar. They would be covered with a layer of opaque blue scales, which, after a few days, would soften, to reveal an egg-like object where the cultist had once been. And when those eggs burst open, a creature like that of the first cultists would emerge. Had the egg been damaged, it would come out even more gross and misshapen. It took us several awakenings and attacks to fully realise this, and eventually, we began to throw all eggs overboard, since neither blade nor bullet could harm a converted cultist once they had hatched. More and more of us were converted until eventually, our crew had been whittled down to two cultists, neither of which spoke a language I could understand, and myself. I thought I was safe. And eventually, we hit land. Another month of journeying brought us to France once more, where I was sworn to complete secrecy, and left at the former residence of my grandfather, who I found had, while I was on my unintended voyage, perished from old age. Not likely, I thought, but by then I was too tired to continue.

I stayed in Caen for another few months, recovering and recuperating. My voyage had taken something from me. It had totally shattered my worldview and forced me to consider absolutely everything. Once, I even contacted a member of the cult of Cthulhu and asked for one of those statues. They were only too happy to oblige. I thought my adventure was over. However, as it turns out, it was not the only thing that was coming to an end. One day, something fell out of my shoulder. It was a small blue shard, which appeared as though it had been lodged in there ever since my Atlantis incident. It seemed to me as though it was shrapnel, one of the remnants of those long blue spikes. And over the next month, those dreaded blue scales began creeping up on me, slowly immobilising me from the legs up. And now, as I know my hands are coming next, I write this final report to catalogue my experiences over the past two years. I was presumed dead by all in Britain, and I have seen no reason to announce my return. Alone in my grandfather’s estate, now repossessed by a certain non-profit religious organisation, is where I know I shall die. Maybe not die, but be converted. A contact from the cult of Cthulhu has informed me that after we left, Atlantis has disappeared, hiding itself beneath the dark ocean once more, and that they were unable to find it again. So, this is my message in a bottle. My report, and my warning, of the horror of Atlantis.