powerful than it seemed to be. Carter may have shot out its eyes, but we forgot that it 
was a creature whose natural habitat was pitch darkness, down in the flooded caves and 
chambers beneath Connecticut, and so it could feel its way around, when it wanted to, 
with the same speed and strength as it could in the daylight.
    Carter didn't even get the chance to fire before the crab-creature rose horrendously 
out of the water in an explosion of spray, and its massive green-and-black claw swung at 
his head. He yelled once, hoarsely, but then the pincer closed and his skull was crushed 
with a noise like a breaking walnut. The crab-creature flung him to the ground, and its 
secondary pincer dragged his bloody body downwards, beneath its abdomen, where the 
writhing tentacles entwined themselves around it. I didn't even think what I was doing. I 
must have been claustrophobia-crazy from all that time under the ground. But I picked 
myself up and leaped across the loose rocks that separated our hiding-place from the 
crab-creature, and I made a frenzied dive for Carter's discarded anti-tank gun. Dan 
yelled: 'Mason! It's no use!' but it was too late by then, even though my own mind was 
clattering out a message like a teleprinter: IT'S NO USE. I tripped, fell, picked myself 
up again, and there was the gun right under'my feet. I reached its webbing strap, lifted 
it off the ground, tried to couch it over my shoulder and aim it. But then my vision was 
filled with nothing but black overwhelming shell, and my senses were blotted with a 
crushing weight that I couldn't understand or resist.
    There was a screeching, scraping noise as the crab-creature slid back off the 
rock-balcony into the water, dragging me with it. It had gripped my left thigh in its 
claw, too far up inside the gap between its pincers to crush the bone, but fierce enough 
to make it impossible for me to twist myself free. I shouted: 'Dan!' but that was all I 
had time for. In the next instant, I was pulled down into the freezing depths of the 
underground lake, and I let out almost all of my breath with shock.
    The crab-creature dived straight downwards. I felt the cold water penetrating my 
eardrums, and I knew that I only had enough breath for a few more seconds. I tried to 
wriggle my leg, but the beast's strength was unyielding, and I couldn't break loose. My 
face was battered against the rough shell of its head, and its prickly spines, and once I 
brushed with terror and disgust against one of its leech-enclustered eyes. We sank down 
and down, and the water grew colder and darker until the last glimmer of Carter's 
flashlight was swallowed up. In a second or two, I would have to breathe in water, and 
when I did that, I was dead.
    Swimming at a steep angle, the crab-creature pulled me right down to what must have 
been the bottom of the lake. But once its claws had touched rock, it scuttled sideways 
until it reached a wide crevice in the lake's floor. In my splitting, oxygen-starved 
brain, I could only think of Dan's words: ' These vaults and chambers must go down miles 
into the rock. All flooded, too.'
    The crab-creature dived downwards again, down through the crevice, down through a 
rough angled tunnel that scratched and lacerated my hands and my legs. I knew I couldn't 
hold my breath any longer, and that meant it was all over. My lifeless I body would be 
dragged down through chambers and vaults and j tunnels, and then devoured in utter 
darkness, in the most | unhallowed place on earth. This was hell, in the most terrible ' 
and medieval meaning of the word. i
    But like a touch on the shoulder from a saint, the anti-tank gun bumped against my 
hand. I thought I'd let it go, but its webbing strap had gotten caught up in the crab's 
pincers, and it had come down with us. I seized it ferociously, grappled with it, tried 
to feel in the cold and the darkness where its trigger was, where its muzzle was. My 
lungs were bursting, too near the end of their air supply, and my mind was dizzy with 
carbon dioxide. But I found the strength to thrust the gun up against the crab's body, 
deep into the mass of wriggling tentacles that still clung on to Carter's body. And I 
found the will to pull the trigger.
    There was an abrupt rush of bubbles as the gun's rocket was discharged. Then there 
was nothing but tumbling, walloping, wrenching, heaving chaos. The crab-creature rolled 
heavily over sideways as the rocket penetrated its belly, and my head was slammed against 
the rocks. In a second, the rocket blew up, and the water surged and expanded, and I was 
suddenly released. An underwater blizzard of shell fragments and torn-apart claws and 
shrapnel followed me and surrounded me as I swam desperately upwards, my arms working as 
hard as a water-boatman, my body long since out of air. I prayed to God that there was a 
surface above me, and air, and that the crab-creature hadn't pulled me right through into 
a lower vault that was flooded right up to the roof. I thought of Jimmy Bodine's dream. I 
thought of drowning. I thought of Atlantis.
    'The thing that always gets me is the j'eeling that the water is underneath tons and 
tons of solid rock, so even ij I did reach the surface, I couldn't breathe.'
    I saw an odd glimmer of light. A wavering green glimmer. And then my head broke the 
surface of the water, and I was breathing air. I trod water, coughing and gasping, 
doggy-paddling my way around until I could relax enough to float. The air was so cold 
that it hurt my lungs, and I was chilled all over, but right at that moment I didn't 
mind. The crab-creature was dead, and I was free of it.
    At last, I stopped panting and started shivering instead. I looked around me, and saw 
that I was swimming in another underground lake. The cavern in which this lake lay was 
quite different from the devil's cathedral cavern. It was curved, like a boomerang, so 
that from where I was swimming it was only possible to make out one end of it; and its 
ceiling was high, slanting and formed out of a huge formation of flaking slate-like rock. 
The strangest thing of all, though, was that there was light, and that I could see at 
all. It wasn't lamplight. It was too faint and greenish for that. It was a dim uneven 
fluorescence, like one of those pictures that glows in the dark. It was emanating from 
the farther end of the cavern, the end which I couldn't see. Taking a deep breath and 
kicking my legs, I started to swim around the cave towards it, weighted down by my icy, 
soggy clothes.
    I was exhausted by the time the end of the cavern came into sight, but I wasn't so 
tired that I couldn't pause, and tread water for a while, and stare at the chilling and 
terrifying scene which met my eyes with shock and disbelief.
    At the end of the cavern, there was tier upon tier of stalactites and stalagmites, in 
magnificent formations, and they were all glowing and pulsating with dim green light. 
They reached the roof of the cave like an extraordinary pipe organ, and they formed a 
fluted wall around a wide rock beach. It was what lay on the beach that horrified me most 
of all. It looked like a vast black maggot, with dry and wrinkled skin, except where its 
body was partly submerged in the subterranean lake. It had glossy dark brown mandibles, 
and with these it was rooting amidst a slough of human offals. It must have been ninety 
or a hundred feet long, and twenty feet high, and its body had the colour and the 
sickening softness of the worst kind of worm you can find under a stone. It was Quithe, 
the beast-god of the chasms. It was Chulthe, the obscene master spirit of Atlantis. It 
was Satan, in his true larval form.
    I didn't know what to do. I couldn't tread water any longer, mainly because my feet 
and legs were so cold. I had to get out of the lake somewhere. And yet the only possible 
place was on that gory beach where Chulthe was feeding. There was an alternative-diving 
back down into the water and trying to find the tunnel through which the crab-creature 
had brought me-but I was pretty certain that if I did that I would kill myself. I just 
didn't have the strength.