so arcane that your people can only whisper about them now. We mutated men into 
sea-people, so that they could serve us both on the land and under the waters, where our 
greatest citadels were. Yet you have forgotten the water-mutants, who terrorized you, or 
if you have not forgotten them, you think of them as fanciful fiction. Mermaids and 
mermen, you call them, and weave them into children's stories. We did many other things. 
We moved stones so vast that your people today believe their ancestors were magical. We 
laid down networks of psychic lines upon the earth through which we could communicate, 
and which men still believe have mystic powers. The whole human species was controlled 
from the underwater mountains of Atlantis, in a forgotten dynasty of indulgence and 
viciousness and corruption. They were great and terrifying days. They shall return.'
    Again, the maggot-beast appeared to shift and alter its form, until it stood before 
me as a huge Cyclopean creature of gaseous milky-white. It was this manifestation that 
gave off such an intense odour of rotting fish, and I recognized it straight away. The 
single eye was the evil-eye symbol of which Mrs. Thompson had spoken before her death. 
The creature was the actual beast from which some ancient artist had drawn the being now 
thought by popular scientists to be one of the 'gods from outer space'.
    I dropped to my knees in the cold water. I don't know why. I was exhausted and 
bruised and defeated, and I couldn't see what I could possibly do to escape, how I could 
ever stop Chulthe from breaking loose from these subterranean lakes and recreating hell 
on earth.
    I lifted my eyes towards the beast, and it made illusions for me. Out of the air, it 
drew pictures that lived and murmured and spoke and breathed. I saw men raking their own 
skin with barbed hooks, and mumbling at the agony of it. I saw men slicing open their own 
stomachs, and taking out their stomachs and their intestines in their hands. I saw 
children guzzling blood and wine mixed, and I heard their high, echoing laughter. Women 
poured blazing oil over their own heads, and stood with fiery hair, masturbating in 
frenzy at the pain. Naked girls crouched on all fours before whispering crowds, and were 
penetrated by apes and dogs. Their cries and whimpers of pleasure seemed to be hideously 
close, and yet thousands and millions of miles distant.
    The illusions faded. The black beast was close to me now, not more than five or six 
feet away. It gave off an aura of deadness which was frightening and sickening, and even 
its insect eyes looked devoid of any kind of feeling or any kind of life.
    'What are you going to do?' I asked it, and my voice echoed and re-echoed over and 
over and over again. 'Are you going to kill me?'
    The creature said nothing at first. Its sharp mandibles dripped with a kind of acrid 
fluid. Then it whispered: 'I need your strength. I need your flesh. I have lain in these 
caves for so long, dry and powerless. When I have your flesh, I shall swim into the last 
cavern of all, which is the cavern you and your
    ridiculous friends first entered. That is the cavern which shall be my throne-room, 
and my unhallowed church, and from that cavern I shall begin to build my new empire.'
    More tremors rippled the surface of the subterranean lake, and the green fluorescence 
of the stalactites and stalagmites dimmed. They must have contained crystalline salts 
which were excited by the maggot-beast's psycho-kinetic energy, and that was why they 
glowed. I was glad they did, if glad is the right word. At least it was better than being 
devoured in complete darkness, by a beast I had never seen.
    Kneeling in the cold water, I bowed my head and said a prayer to God. God, whatever 
I've done wrong, however impetuous and stupid and overbearing I've been, no matter how 
often I've refused to take other people's problems and other people's fears seriously, no 
matter what I've done, please deliver me from this Satanic creature, please deliver all 
of us. Amen. Oh, God. Amen.
    There was a slight splashing sound on the surface of the lake. I raised my head, and 
turned around. The maggot-beast lifted its head, too, and I could see its eyes searching 
the water.
    It took a few seconds before I saw what had made the splash. It was a human body, a 
woman's body, and it was drifting slowly towards us, still impelled by the earth-tremor 
which must have dislodged it from where it was trapped in the tunnel on the lake's bed. 
It was Alison Bodine, my dear friend and terrible enemy, whose death had at last released 
her from the claws and scales and tentacles of the crab-creature mutation. Even if God 
hadn't rescued me from Satan, He had taken Alison's soul, and left her body as it had 
been before.
    Chulthe's attention was fixed on the corpse. Its mandibles juddered and squeaked, and 
its black wrinkled body contracted in peristalsis. It was dead human meat, just what the 
devil wanted. It was torn, maimed flesh, from which it could feed.
    Chulthe slithered and rippled into the water with hardly a splash. It swam quickly 
and unerringly, a hundred feet of wet black flesh, like a shark or a moray eel. In a 
second, its mandibles had risen from the water and snatched at Alison's body, and then it 
was curving around the surface of the lake and making its way back to the shore.
    This was going to be the only chance I was ever going to get. I gulped an enormous 
breath, and I kicked away from the rocky beach with all my remaining strength, which God 
help me wasn't much. Chulthe, dragging Alison's body on to the shore, didn't even notice 
that I had gone, and that I was swimming out towards the place where I hadlfirst risen 
from the lake's bottom with desperate, panicky strokes. I swam and I swam and it seemed 
to take me for ever to cover nothing more than a few feet.
    I glanced back over my shoulder. Alison's body was sprawled out on the rocks, and the 
maggot-beast was dipping its head towards her torn-open entrails. I took another breath 
and swam harder, telling myself that my feet weren't really chilled, that my hands 
weren't really numb, and that I was really going to make it. For the first time in my 
life, I didn't believe myself.
    At last, Chulthe and his dead victim disappeared around the curve in the cavern, and 
I was treading water over the spot where I guessed I had first emerged. I lifted my head 
from the surface, and I took one, two, three hefty breaths. Then I sucked in a fourth 
breath, as agonizingly deep as I could, and I dived beneath the lake, and struck out for 
the bottom.
    Cold water leaked up my nose and into my ears. But I kept on swimming downwards, my 
eyes wide open, searching and searching for the tunnel that led through to the next 
cavern. The faint green glimmer of light faded away and then I was swimming in total 
darkness, forcing myself down and down to the bed of the lake.
    I reached it sooner than I had expected. But there was solid rock there, rough and 
uncompromising. No tunnel. I swam slowly around, kicking my legs and flapping my arms to 
keep myself submerged, and I felt like nothing less than a fully dressed plumber under 
twenty feet of iced water looking for a hole that I probably wouldn't have the breath to 
swim through, even if I found it. I began to feel light-headed and silly, and it occurred 
to me that if I breathed in water, like I had in my dream, I could probably swim just as 
well.
    I found the tunnel without even realising it. I was struggling so hard to keep myself 
down on the lake bottom that I swam right down into the cavity before I understood what 
had happened. Suddenly I felt rock all around me, and nothing but
    water beneath me, and I struck out desperately pulling myself along by seizing the 
jagged sides of the tunnel and heaving my body forward.
    It took forever. My head was bursting again from lack of air. But I knew that I had a