The Depths

Part 5

It slowly rose to its feet. It was a hulking figure, nearly a yard taller than the roof of his shack, allowing him to roughly estimate its height at nearly 11 feet. It had a vaguely humanoid frame, but it's limbs were of incredible length; its legs were more than twice the length of its abdomen, and its arms were the length of its body. What he supposed to be its hands were, at the very least, 2 feet long. Its skin was completely covered by large, jagged bluish-gray scales. He received only a short glimpse of the thing, illuminated by a single flash of lightning, before it took three slow, gaping steps toward the rocky edge, crouched once more, and flung itself, with incredible force, more than ten yards over the edge of the stone cliff. Through the cacophony of the hurricane, he didn't hear it make contact with the water.

He could no longer feel his right arm. He wanted to pull himself back toward the shack, his only source of cover, but his feeble attempt was in vain, as he watched his lifeblood continue to drain through the vast multitude of perforations in his flesh. The torment he had undergone, the slow, agonizing torture, the constant fear, the months spent in solitude even before the events of this night, had all caused him to feel almost nothing at the sight of this monstrosity. He felt no fear. No anguish. No anxiety. He only felt the need for relief, for a way to escape the cold, burning blackness of the storm.

He began slowly crawling to the lighthouse. The massive structure was untouched by the raging fire, and was his only source of sanctuary. The tips of his fingers met the cold, sharp stones of which the tiny atoll was composed, and were subsequently split open. He didn't care. He felt nothing, save for a solitary, blind instinctual desire for self preservation. His painstakingly slow journey to the door of the lighthouse seemed to have taken hours. He had now lost all feeling in his feet. He glanced behind him to see that the water accumulating on the stony ground had been dyed a deep crimson. Past the shack, he saw the humanoid silhouette duck down behind the rocks, as he had seen before. His terror began to return to him.

He reached up, grasped the door handle with bleeding, cracked fingers, turned it, and pushed it inwards with a gentle thrust. The wind assisted in opening the door, as it shot back into the lighthouse with an audible clatter. He entered, pulled himself into the structure completely, and threw the door shut. The towering structure stood approximately 78 feet tall, and was constructed mostly of wood. Skeletal iron supports penetrated the entirety of the wooden body, and an iron staircase led up the height of the structure, to the light itself. He could see the slowly revolving bulb flickering through the floorboards of the levels above. Wind broke through the cracks of the wooden exterior, and droplets of rain leaked down from above. Through the screaming rain and pounding thunder, he heard the most terrible sound any man would have the displeasure of experiencing.

He heard the sound he had so easily dismissed the few minutes prior to his encounter. It was a high pitched warbling, which he had easily mistaken for screaming earlier. The frequency rose and fell methodically, as if each change in tempo had a different meaning, if this sound could be considered a form of communication. The sound slowly seemed to draw nearer to the lighthouse. He heard a thunderous splash in one of the puddles outside of the lighthouse door. Then, another sound erupted through the freezing darkness. It was of such tremendous volume that it drowned out the sounds of the hurricane.

It seemed to emanate from everywhere. His relatively uninjured hand leapt up to his left ear, in a feeble attempt to shield it from the terrible sound. He bent his neck and buried his right ear in his right shoulder as best he could, as his right arm was all but useless at the moment. It was a thundering, low drone, like that of a foghorn, which made the very stone foundation of the atoll quake. The lighthouse itself began to sway with the motion of the island, as its floorboards' creaking grew in volume and intensity. The high pitches warbling stopped, and he heard a pronounced splash in the ocean.

His eyes widened in terror as he began scrambling to ascend the iron staircase of the lighthouse. Before the terrible, prolonged sound had come to a cessation, he had already climbed more than halfway up the damned spire. His blood dripped down through the minute perforations in the iron steps. He felt the pain in the shredded tips of the fingers on his left hand for the first time as he placed them on the next step of the seemingly infinite staircase. As he crawled on, he felt each jagged shard scrape against his withered, weakened bones.

As he slowly ascended, he realized that he had lost all sensation below his knees. He fought the urge to glance down. Visions of young men in a hospital tent, blue uniforms dyed red, limbs shredded by shrapnel and minie balls, echoed in his mind. He was afraid of what he would see if he looked at his legs. He glanced up. He was almost to the top. He could see the ladder that lead to the top level of the lighthouse. Less than thirty steps left. The slowly revolving mechanism that led from the coal-driven engine below the house up to the lamp shook as the lighthouse door slammed open with a heavy crash. The clang of the iron doorknob hitting the floor resonated throughout the structure.

It was inside. He heard a noticeable thump on the first iron step.