I coughed. 'Supernatural or not, we're going to have to do something positive, aren't 
we? There's no point in going back unless we know that Chulthe's here for sure.'
    'What do you suggest?' asked Dan.
    'I don't know. Maybe we ought to try disturbing him.'
    Carter frowned. 'You want to disturb a beast-god, one hundred fifty feet underground, 
with only a jack-rabbit's burrow for an escape route?'
    'I don't want to. But it looks as if we're going to have to.'
    Carter let out a testy breath. 'I wish I'd been able to bring that anti-tank gun down 
here. I'd like to have the weight of that thing in my hands right now.'
    I stepped right up to the edge of the balcony and looked at the lake's limpid 
surface. Then I turned to Dan and asked him: 'This is one hundred fifty feet below the 
surface, right, or thereabouts?'
    'I guess so.'
    I rubbed my cheek thoughtfully. 'When you tested the water, didn't you say that the 
organisms and the soil material in it came from deeper down? Maybe a mile and a half?'
    'That's right. That was where Chulthe was probably lying when he first started to 
revive. These vaults and chambers must go down miles into the rock. All flooded, too. 
That was where Jimmy Bodine must have gotten his dream of swimming under tons of rock. 
But now the flooding's risen up as far as here, and Chulthe must have the freedom of the 
whole water system.'
    'You mean he could start to pollute water in other places?' asked Carter, bluntly.
    'I'm only theorising, but yes.'
    Carter unbuttoned his holster. 'Well,' he said, 'I don't know about you two guys, but 
I've seen enough of ordinary innocent folks being mutated into horrible creatures that go 
around murdering more ordinary innocent folks. If Mason here says we ought to disturb 
this Chulthe to get him out, then let's disturb him.'
    Dan raised his hand and said: 'Carter, I shouldn't-'
    But Carter was annoyed, and determined. He took out his police revolver and aimed it 
down at the surface of the lake. He fired twice, and the whole cavern was filled with 
ear-splitting echoes. Shelley jumped off his stalagmite on to the balcony, and came to 
stand nervously close to my legs. The echoes gave one last shout and then there was 
silence again.
    The water had hardly been ruffled. But circles of lightly-drawn ripples ran across 
the surface, and lapped softly at the stalactite pillars, and then ran back again. We all 
stood watching them, until the last one had faded away.
    'Seems like guns don't worry him none,' said Carter. 'Maybe we ought to try a few 
rocks.'
    I said: 'Wait a minute. We've all said how much this place looks like a cathedral. 
Maybe it's intentional. Maybe this place has been specially formed as the devil's place 
of worship.'
    'How can you specially form a place like this?' asked Dan, with undisguised 
scepticism. 'Those stalactites take twenty thousand years to reach that size. Twenty 
thousand years.'
    'Maybe they do,' I told him, 'but we're dealing with a beast who can flood a whole 
second-floor room, and empty it out again, and think nothing of it. We're dealing with a 
beast who's supposed to be more than two million years old, something from out of the 
past beyond the past. Something unbelievably ancient and powerful. This is Satan, Dan. 
Think about it. Couldn't Satan have made himself a place like this?'
    'It's remotely possible, I suppose.'
    'Well, let's say it's remotely possible, then, If it's remotely possible it's also 
remotely possible that if we desecrate this place, if we do something to invoke God, or 
the forces of good, then the devil's going to come out of that water to try stopping us.'
    Carter and Dan looked at each other without much enthusiasm.
    'I'm not too sure about that,' said Carter. 'What do you want us to do-sing Bringing 
in the Sheaves? My hymn-singing voice would desecrate any place you care to mention, but 
I'm not convinced it would work.'
    'Let's just say the blessing. Let's just profess a little Christianity here.'
    Dan sighed. 'All right. I guess we could do dumber things.'
    We bowed our heads and stood in silence for a while. Shelley fretfully clawed at the 
ground, and kept rubbing up against my leg, but for a few moments I deliberately ignored 
him. I wanted to keep my mind firmly concentrated on God, and His son Jesus Christ, and 
the Holy Spirit, and the sign of the crucifix. I wanted to see some kind of brightness in 
my mind, something that would show up this subterranean cavern for what it was-the dark 
cathedral of Hell.
    I raised my eyes. I said, clearly but not loudly: 'In the name of the Father, and of 
the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, we three profess our belief in goodness and Christian 
ministry. We renounce the devil and his works. We bless this place in the name of our God 
and everything we believe to be right. We cast out evil.'
    There was a deep, subdued rumbling in the ground. It felt like the beginnings of 
another earthquake. The surface of the lake began to shudder and ripple, and behind us, 
loose rocks began to fall.
    Carter said: 'Mason, hold on there.'
    But it was too late for holding on. If we were going to rouse Quithe out of his 
flooded caverns, then we were going to have to use any means possible.
    'We bless this place,' I repeated. 'We ask God to sanctify it, and cast out all evil 
from it. We ask God to make it untenable for Quithe, who is also Chulthe or Satan.'
    The vibration in the ground was shaking us so much that we could scarcely keep 
upright. A huge stalactite cracked and dropped from the ceiling of the balcony on which 
we were standing, and shattered only a few feet away from us. Our ears were deafened by 
an endless, painful rumbling noise.
    Dan shouted: 'The lake! Mason! The lake!'
    I raised my flashlight and shone it into the vaulted darkness, across the trembling 
meniscus of the water. There, humped and glossy with wet, mottled and crustaceous, rose a 
crab-creature so huge and hideous that I nearly dropped everything and ran. Its claw 
lifted out of the water with a noise like a car being dragged out of a river, and its 
beak grated and squeaked. What was worse, there were wet and tattered remnants of 
clothing trailing from its jaws and its pincers, and an indescribable shred of human meat 
caught in its antennae.
    With his teeth clenched tight, Carter said: 'Dan, I want you to do something, and 
it's an order. Go back up that tunnel and bring down that anti-tank gun. Go quick as you 
can. Mason and me will try to hold this thing off until you get back.'
    Dan hesitated, but Carter snapped: 'Go! It's the only chance we've got!' and he went. 
That left Carter and me and Shelley standing on the balcony above the lake, while the 
crab-creature rose higher and higher out of the water, an infested beast of horny plates 
and writhing squid-like tentacles; a soulless monster whose only motivation was to rip 
out our insides and digest them for its terrible master.
    
    
    Ten