The flow of water over their gills grew frigid and forced them back. Expelling the contents of its bowels and compressing its tissues with the agonizing relentlessness of a wringer, the shark struggled downward for another mile until the pressure crushed its cartilaginous skeleton.
Expelled out through the shark’s collapsed eyes, she spilled helplessly down into almost total darkness that soon became a starry night sky filled with swooping, stalking, luminescent life.
An anglerfish drifted past, bloated black head bisected by a grin of needles painted eerie thallium green by the glow of its bobbing barbel lures. Other creatures she saw only by the fitful glow of their beguiling witch-lights, fluttering or skulking through the drifting sleet of organic debris from the surface.
Tiny jewels of glistering ectoplasm and endless garlands of stinging tendrils and greedy gullets seemed to pulsate with arousal at the passage of their bodiless ghosts, but the predators’ attentions were diverted by the rich feast of the imploded shark’s carcass that came tumbling after them.
It abruptly dawned upon her that, as a mote of pure intelligence, her senses were limited solely by her will. Whatever caught her mind’s eye seemed to magnify itself until it loomed over her bodiless mind or engulfed her whole. And yet she was drawn inexorably downward, into zones of pure darkness and paralyzing cold, by the invisible grip of the mad Russian psychic.
Falling, flowing through the inky void, she still felt some inkling of the mounting pressure above them. Water is a thousand times denser than air, yet seawater is only one tenth as dense as lead. The pressure at their destination would exceed six tons per square inch. Exposed to this environment, her physical body would implode long before it could drown.
Ingrid was not claustrophobic, and as her instinctual fears for her body receded, she began to feel a kind of creeping exhilaration, the euphoria that submariners called the rapture of the deep. No human had ever been where they were going. No one had ever seen what they were going to see. Not like this.
The last fleeting traces of glowing marine life faded away far above, and the blackness again became absolute. Only by painful degrees did her mind begin to discern the deeper contours of tortured stone, little more solid than the water laying heavy upon them.
They touched down before a cathedral of bones—the skeleton of a whale, trailing tattered banners of putrefied blubber to feed swarms of gulper eels and dragonfish. Swarms of giant brittle stars squirmed and spawned in the calcareous ooze that coated the ocean floor.
How deep? she asked.
This is the bottom of your bottomless pit. We are nearly five miles beneath the surface. You are only a breath away from your body, but the mind plays tricks, yes? To return so quickly would kill us both.
Floating over a plain of basalt slabs fragmented into disturbingly tessellated geometrical patterns, they approached a towering column like a skyscraper volcano, easily twelve stories high.
Festooned with giant tubeworms and anemones that twisted in the gelid gloom to bask in the torrent of superheated water and clouds of molten minerals that gushed from its peak.
Swarms of enormous shrimp sported on the corona of the boiling outflow, only to be ensnared and devoured by monstrous arachnids, which farmed globules of cooling heavy metals, and bore them off across the plain, like leaf cutter ants harvesting fungi from carrion.
And beyond the chimney lay more chimneys, and larger ones. Hundreds of them, in a uniform field. A farm.
This was what they had really been sent to find, though Ingrid knew the company would lie to her as blithely as they’d deceived Sergei. The energy wasted here could power a city, if only they could harness it.
Beyond the last chimney, the plain was broken by dozens of octagonal pits, each hundreds of yards across, and seemingly bottomless. But as she reluctantly floated over them, Ingrid perceived honeycombs of wormholes in the walls. Their hypnotic complexity suggested that they were inhabited by something utterly alien, yet older—and perhaps wiser—than humankind.
They live, Ingrid railed, and they’re still active, the ones you supposedly exterminated at Opaque Zone 38a?
Men try to steal the power from their enemies by numbering them. Call it what it was, and what it will be again—R’lyeh.
Something gleamed in the nearest pit, and she warily reached down to focus on it. Massive metal hulks hung suspended over the void—the missing company submersibles, and the sunken Soviet sub. All were badly crushed, but also dismantled. Rybinsk’s empty nuclear missile silos gaped like the holes in a toothless jaw.
The Russians said they destroyed them all, Ingrid railed.
Destroyed them! Girl, even if you could believe a Russian, never suppose that they can be destroyed. This is their world. We live in it only so long as they sleep.
Beyond the wells lay a vast plain of fluted lava spires and craters that might have covered a mile. They sped over it to stop suddenly at a gaping, glowing rift in the abyssal plain, which seemed to hold the sun in it.
No, my dear. All we did was wake them up…
Tornadoes of heavy black smoke roared up out of the spreading rift in the floor of the trench, which seemed far too hot for even the best-adapted inhabitants of the ocean floor. Slurping waves of fresh magma oozed up over the lips of the rift, melting the crust of Archaean basalt and remaking the earth’s crust at the rate of a flood engulfing a levee.
This isn’t natural, is it?
Everything is natural, you fool. Watch…
Something splashed in the white lava flow, lurched up out of the molten stone and thrust a net of barbed tentacles after her. She almost felt their razored heat, until she was chilled by Sergei’s intangible laughter.
It was at least as large as the biggest submersible in the company fleet, and resembled a fusion of trilobite and salamander with snarls of segmented tentacles for a head, but only the merest portion of it emerged from the rock-river before it sank again.
This is retaliation for what you did, twenty years ago.
What we did, all those years ago, was done with your country’s secret blessing. It was perhaps Soviet Russia’s first and last true selfless act for the good of the world. To end the nightmares, yes? Or perhaps it was not so pure… Moscow could not imagine a world without itself at the helm. Perhaps they meant to rid the world of its nightmares by awakening the sleeper who sent them.
But it mattered not. The bomb hit its target, and the mission was a success, yes? And yet the one they sought to slay, they did not even disturb his sleep. His children… they are awake again, but they would not trifle in revenge upon insects.
Away across the plain they flew, to the red mouth of the lava river. A glowing seam of fresh faultline sprouted from it and arrowed away across the plain. The cracked earth subsided like a misfit jigsaw puzzle, and eager gouts of magma bubbled up between the jagged edges.
At last, they came upon a mountain that crawled across the murky plain, gouging open the earth’s brittle crust with thousands of armored claws like steamshovels. Pitted with age and clotted with colorless, glowing coral reefs, infested by clouds of submarine parasites, its colossal, chitinous shell hid all but the countless antennae and eyestalks that emerged from seams, fissures and faults in the cyclopean exoskeleton.
The size of a city, the creature yet bore some kinship with the lava-borne larvae. In its wake, the mountainous isopod left glowing opals which bored into the splintered earth like depth charges, like the treasures carelessly spilled by a god, or the eggs sown by a devil.
There are no gods, as you mean it, Sergei interrupted. There are those who dwell outside, and who neither live nor die, as we know of life and death. They answer prayers, but only when offered in blood and geometry, and their miracles…