I was about to swim across to the other side of the cave to see if there was a ledge 
on which I could rest, when a familiar voice called: 'Mason! Is that you? Mason!'
    I looked back at the grisly beach where Chulthe had been wallowing in blood. Somehow, 
the maggot-beast seemed to have disappeared, and there was nothing there but plain rock. 
The voice called: 'Mason!' again and I realised it was Rheta. But what the hell was Rheta 
doing down here, in this Godforsaken subterranean cave? The last time I'd seen her, she'd 
been on her way to New Milford hospital with a sprained ankle.
    Yet-she was there. She was standing by the edge of the water in her white laboratory 
coat. She was waving. There was no question at all that it was Rheta. I called 
breathlessly: 'Rheta!' and started to swim towards the beach.
    Rheta tossed back her blonde hair, and started to unbutton her laboratory coat. I was 
only fifty or sixty feet away now, and I could see that she was smiling at me. I called, 
in between swimming strokes: 'How did you-make it-down here? Is there another way in?'
    She didn't answer. Instead, she pulled off her laboratory coat, and underneath she 
was wearing flame-red underwear. A red quarter-cup bra that exposed her wide pink 
nipples. A red garter-belt, holding up sheer red stockings. And a red G-string that 
barely covered her.
    I floundered the last few feet towards the beach. My feet at last touched bottom, and 
I waded in to Rheta like Captain Webb after his first successful swim across the English 
Channel. I coughed water out of my lungs, and held out my arms towards her.
    She let the bra catch loose, so that her breasts swayed free. She undipped her 
garters, and peeled off her stockings. Then she turned and walked coquettishly away from 
me, across the uneven rock, the thin red elastic of her -G-string tight between her bare 
white bottom.
    'Do you want me?' she asked, over her shoulder.
    I stopped. Did I want her? Of course I wanted her. But what the hell was she doing 
here? She couldn't be here. This couldn't be Rheta. But if it wasn't Rheta, what was it? 
Or who was it?
    'Are you coming?' called Rheta. 'Come on, lover, we can lie down here, and do 
everything you ever dreamed of.'
    I stayed where I was. I was frightened now. Chilled, shaking, and frightened. Where 
had that black maggot creature gone? Where was all the blood and the offals?
    I said, firmly: 'You're not Rheta. You can't be.'
    She hesitated. She was staring at me, and for the first time I saw that her eyes 
weren't Rheta's eyes at all. They were dark, snake-like, malevolent. They were watching 
me through Rheta's face like the eyes of someone looking through a mask.
    She opened her mouth, but instead of speaking, a thick black torrent of puffy, 
wrinkled flesh poured out of her. At first I thought she was vomiting, but then the black 
flesh grew to the size of a man, and larger, until it piled up as huge as the 
maggot-beast that had been feeding on the shore. Rheta's image was swallowed up 
altogether, until I was faced by Chulthe, in his basic grotesque form, with scissor-like 
mandibles, and eyes as dull and emotionless as an insect. I stepped back, away from those 
terrifying jaws, and as I did so I slipped on a stringy, slithery piece of human flesh.
    A voice whispered: 'I have come across your kind before. Men who have tried to thwart 
me. Men who have fondly and foolishly believed that they can prevent me from taking my 
rightful place in the world. Your weakness is below contempt. Your sins are so petty that 
you can hardly even be tempted to die like a man should.'
    I kept on retreating. Maybe it wouldn't do me any good, but I wasn't planning on 
staying around there to decorate Chulthe's personal beach.
    I said: 'You've been defeated before. You'll be defeated again.'
    'Not as long as there is foolishness and jealousy and primitive lust. I am the 
greatest of the gods from bjleyond the Hyades, remember, and while men still worship 
evil, I shall continue to survive, and rule, even while I dream in the wells and the 
caves, and wait for the days of Atlantis yet again.'
    'Atlantis can never rise again.'
    The maggot-beast moved towards me. It might have been my imagination, but I kept 
glimpsing different faces that I knew on its insect countenance. I kept seeing Dan, and 
Carter, and Jimmy Bodine. I saw Alison, but it was an Alison I scarcely recognized, with 
her mouth drawn back in a feral grimace, and her eyes as red as if they were filled with 
blood. I saw Rheta again, smiling with blatant lewdness. I saw my mother and my father, 
and faces of people who were long-forgotten or dead. I saw myself, in moments of 
weakness, or pain, or regret.
    'Atlantis may never rise,' whispered the voice. 'But the Kingdom of Quithe will rise 
again. I sense the world around me, after all these centuries of imprisonment. I sense it 
well. It has nourished the legacies I left it. It has nourished lust and deceit and 
cruelty. These are the instruments by which I always ruled, and they are well-maintained 
for when I take up my rule again. Only this time, the world you will see will be by 
comparison the blackest night, in which pain and pleasure will be the only beacons on a 
hellish horizon.'
    I was wading backwards in the underground lake now, up to my knees. The water was 
freezing, and I knew damned well that I couldn't survive for long if I tried to swim. And 
there was no chance at all that I could escape Quithe, dive down to the bottom, and make 
any kind of escape through the tunnel.
    There was a thunderous vibration throughout the cavern, and before my eyes the 
maggot-beast seemed to roll in on itself, like a black parachute being folded, until a 
tall horned man stood in front of me, dressed in a long shimmery black cloak. He had high 
cheekbones, and slanting eyes, and skin the colour of dead parchment.
    'I am a creature of the seas,' he whispered, 'but this is the manifestation I always 
used to walk in the world, in ancient times when darkness was the rule, and light could 
not penetrate the deserts nor the swamps, nor the strange cities where men and half-men 
lived. This face and this body have become engraven in your culture, as objects both of 
loathing and of worship, and it shall walk again, leaving its cloven hoofprint on the 
path of the night. This is the manifestation they called Satan, although they could never 
have known that this was one of my bodies in eons gone by, when I was the proud and evil 
Agnarga on a world so distant that your people have never perceived it. In the name of 
Agnarga, your people have committed indescribable sins, and offered backwards prayers, 
and held up inverted and perverted symbols of your greatest religions. Those things shall 
be as nothing, compared to what Satan shall do now.'
    The man pulled apart his cloak, to reveal an erect penis the size of a horse's tool, 
and the colour of aged wood. Its foreskin peeled back, and black ectoplasm billowed out 
of it, until the maggot-beast had once again taken on its huge and repulsive form.
    'The people who creep on the surface of this earth are so ignorant,' whispered the 
beast. 'They have suspected my presence for so long. They have so many stories of the 
days when I was great. But they have never truly believed that I was still waiting for 
the Day of Iniquity, when the graves shall be opened not for judgement, but for the dead 
to rise again and shamble upon the earth to prey upon the living. The living have always 
fed upon the dead; now it is the turn of the corpses and their miserable spirits. They 
have never suspected that each of their legends has been one more piece in a jigsaw which 
could have proved my existence. Yes-gods came from out of the stars in the days when your 
people were little more than animals. We taught them powers and strengths and practices