The Monster Still Gets You In The End

Hell Diver

It was in late November of 1934 when I and the local rancher, Mr. Whitticker, took his skiff out onto the center of crater lake up in the panhandle of Texas. The wind was strong and cold and bit hard against the skin.  The black brackish water was rippling and attempting to carry the boat away. Mr. Whitticker had lowered the anchor and looked at me. He was a man of fifty or so with thickly calloused hands and dark brown eyes that stared at me sternly from below his yellowed cowboy hat. He wore a flannel jacket of evergreen shades and blue jeans and worn boots. 

"Well?" He said in his slow guttural drawl.

I said nothing to the man and instead picked up the bronze colored diving helm and hoisted it over my head and lowered it onto my shoulders. The rancher helped me fasten the helmet onto my shoulder pads. Then I instructed him to remember to pump in air through tubes with the billows. Then the man nodded and demonstrated his knowledge of the apparatus by pumping a few puffs of fresh air through the tubes that ran into my helm. He had brought a King James edition with him out onto the daemonic waters and requested that I pray with him before descending into the depths. Normally, being a man of skepticism, I would have refused, but sensing that engaging in the ritual would put the man at ease, I agreed.  In addition, reciting the Lord's Prayer always reminded me of my mother and brought back warm memories. 

When the prayer was finished I lowered my feet over the edge of the skiff and dropped off the ledge and into the abyss. My lead boots dragged me quickly down. I had coated myself in chain mail as I had done when I confronted sharks in the southern gulf who had acquired a taste humanity. I had also equipped myself with a dagger which I kept fastened to my belt. The latter was also done to put Mr. Whitticker at ease since he insisted that some indescribable shuffling horror had dragged his dog down into the depths of the lagoon. The headlamp that was attached to my helm provided meager light here at the bottom of the crater, but I could make out skid marks here at the bottom of the lake where the asteroid had collided with the earth and carved a path like a great glacier. 

The crater lake had been created earlier that year, in the middle of the night and in the midst of a dust storm when an asteroid had plummeted into the local rancher's estate. The celestial crash had gone unnoticed by the astrologers of the universities and unseen by the pilots of the airplanes in the skies.  At first, Mr. Whitticker had disregarded the oddity as nothing more peculiar than fulgurite along the beach after a severe thunderous storm. The rancher having been the least sycophantic individual I had ever met neglected to retell the story of the celestial crater to any of his neighbors or even in casual conversation to the local barman or general store clerk. Additionally, Mr. Whitticker was a widower and had been disavowed by his children who had left for the pavement streets of New York some years ago. 

So, the crater and the asteroid was allowed to fester. The spring rains came and the pit was filled with water that was dark, salty, and completely unheard of for this region. Still, the rancher thought little of the new lake and even quite liked it, as the local fauna would arrive at its waters and drink, however, as the months drew on and summer turned into fall things began to alter. The wildlife began to disappear and Mr. Whittaker no longer saw hoof prints along the water's edge. And then when winter came his barn cats began to disappear. I had a deep suspicion that the retired cattle-driver would have taken the story of the crash in the night to his grave, had his pets not been dragged down into abhorrent depths of the lake. It was only in the depravity of his desperation that he had called me. 

I was a biologist and a renowned, let us say, exterminator of beasts of aquatic nature. Having worked along coastlines of Texas and Louisianna and along the great river of the Mississippi, I had heard a great many ghastly tales uttered in hushed tones from old men and women who cleaned fish along the docks. I had often heard tales from the local trawlers of predatory fish of prodigious size. Creatures whose vampiric fangs had been known to drag away local children who had swam to far from shore. I had heard stories of cyclopean algae covered fiends that emerged from the swamp at the first gleam of the full moon to snatch young maidens from their beds and steal them away to its lair. I heard tales of sharks and selkies of krakens and crocodiles of behemoths and barracudas of pythons and prehistoric plesiosaurs. All of which were damnably indescribable, but capable of producing unspeakable levels of fear in those who crossed their hellish paths! All had turned out to be half-truths at best and at worst complete figments of the fearful mind of a lone traveler in the black of night. 

I had taken this task of investigating the crater, not in seriousness (it is most likely that the rancher's cats and dogs had been devoured by a rogueish batch of coyotes), but as a favor for a colleague of mine who was interested in the geological attributes of the asteroid. I was also certain that after examining the asteroid and returned to Mr. Whitticker I would be able to convince him that the only course of action that could free him from the clutches of the daemonic presence would be an immediate excavation of the celestial rock. Then I would turn the show over to my colleagues and the otherworldly stone would be removed and the rancher would be relieved and go back to his peaceful retirement and me and my friends would be all the richer. 

Yet, here at the bottom of the pit, I felt uneasy. It was deeper than I had expected. Wider than I had anticipated. I could see bone fragments and bits of sinew drifting in the malevolent current that seemed to swirl around me. I could see shatter slivers of antlers protruding from the muck. The uncrushed skull of a cat jutted out of the lake bed, its maw was wide and tilted toward the sky, its white fangs catching the light of my headlamp.  As I approached asteroid I could see that it was split in two, cracked and hollow. What lurked here at the hellish bottom of the crater was no mythos. My hand reached for my danger and froze and I could see two goatish yellow eyes open in the gloom. Horrendous clawed, webbed, extremities pulled aside the shell of the asteroid and I turned from the eldritch monstrosity and fled from those nightmarish waters, dropping my dagger as I ran. I clawed my way out of the black lagoon and onto the cold muddy shores of the crater lake. 

Perhaps the malignity spared me because it found it amusing, the way in which I fled. Perhaps the monstrosity was drowsy as it awoke from its great slumber and could not be bothered by such a trivial disturbance. Perhaps it was bloated on cow flesh and the primal urge to slay and feed had been satiated. Perhaps my mother, 12 years dead, heard my prayer with the rancher and took pity on me.  I know now, to an astute certainty, that hell exists in the abysmal enormity of darkened space for I have seen its spawn.