A Circular Prison

1.

Carleton knew he was dreaming.

Outside the tent the wind whistled and howled, the sand rose and scattered, and the thin air of the plateau was freezing cold. The moon cast a light, pale as bleached bone, over the tent in which the Professor slept and dreamed his lucid dreams. Five other tents had been erected only metres from his remarkable discovery: the seven deep and perfectly cylindrical black wells his team labored to unseal. He wondered if his men, too, were dreaming when a sudden confusion blurred his thoughts and anxiety squeezed at his heart; for he could not be sure if his reputation-making discovery was only a dream itself and not a bit of waking life that had slipped into a restless slumber...

2.

Why did he think of it as a prison almost from the first moment they had uncovered the thin layer of sand and rock that had concealed it? There were certainly other possibilities but his intuition was too strong to simply dismiss. It was a prison, he felt, and the victims must have been intended for ritual sacrifice. But he was at a loss to even conjecture the identity of the people who could have built such things, let alone the gods they sacrificed to and worshipped. Only the first of these wells had been successfully opened. It was designated N1-T by Carleton who was unable to even identify the type of carved rock (reckless and improbable thoughts of modern two dimensional compounds like Graphene with its strange optical properties came to mind), let alone translate the strange carvings that sprawled along the surface edge of the sealing stone, giving it, to his mind, the appearance of a sundial of sorts. The massive sealing slab, like a cistern’s cover, had proved formidable. Digging away the sand and rock around the well’s lip, workers attempted to pry and drag the vast cover; a laborious task that took days and was only made possible by the surprising weight of the thing. Difficult as it was, it was amazingly light in relation to its size. Once they had hauled the cover away he was delighted to find the interior wasn’t sand-choked as he had feared.

********

His Dream Self had completed the descent safely but as he washed the light of his electric torch over the floor of the pit a thought and a confusion came unbidden: Am I dreaming still?

...and almost simultaneously with the thought full lucidity returned to the Dreamer, ...for the moment.

********

3.

The prison was circular, a deep cylinder bored into the sand and earth. Of course there was no evidence that it was or had ever been a prison. The hard packed dirt and stone floor revealed nothing, not bones, not scraps of cloth, nothing. But what else could it have been? A sacrificial well, perhaps, like the cenotes used by the Mayans. But those earth wells were a natural phenomenon the Mayans took grim advantage of; This wasn't, and Carleton found it hard to conceive of an archeological find more unnatural. These strangely corroded metal rungs, for example, were just one thing…one utterly impossible thing. He felt more like a sanitation worker descending into the bowels of an urban sewer than an archeologist! And while the rungs he had descended were secure enough they were hardly conductive to peace of mind. It was a dangerous descent no matter how one looked at it. The rungs, protruding from the smooth walls were a mystery as great as the chamber itself. They seemed incongruous with the age of the ruins above and seemed to make a mockery of the notion this pit had been an ancient prison.

At its widest the pit was more than ten metres across. Certainly this could have held many prisoners if comfort and basic humanity were thrown out the window. But the absence of artifacts troubled him. Food and water could have been lowered by rope, large buckets could have delivered and removed other things —bones, human waste, whatever—the same way.

The voices of the guides far above caught his attention. They seemed inordinately excited, the distance as well as their broken English (made even worse by their excitement) made it impossible to distinguish meaning in their words. There seemed to be a third voice which puzzled him but he couldn’t be certain. He glanced at his watch. There were still several hours of daylight left though the sky or what he could see of it seemed to be darkening rapidly; perhaps the men were nervous that the ascent would be too risky in the dusky light if a sudden storm moved in. He had witnessed such storms before; one minute a clear unblemished sky of merciless heat and the next dark clouds rolling in, grumbling like ogres as the wind began to whip sand, driving the stinging particles into any exposed human flesh.

Suddenly he heard what must be a scream. It was abbreviated brutally--followed by an absolute silence that chilled him...and then he heard the guide's body smash into the hard ground. Numb with the unexpected he stared at the twisted limbs, the skin pierced in multiple places by jagged bone, the skull burst like a leaking blood sack. From the colorful and intricate designs of the man's deel, he knew this was Batsaikhan.

Horror began to grow and he could only turn away, close his eyes and shake. For nearly a minute he found it impossible to look up. When he did he couldn’t be certain of what he saw. Was it the other guide, climbing clumsily down the rungs and emitting a terrible sound that could only have been called a laugh in some mad circle of Hell…His eyes focused at last, and he saw clearly it was the other man, the other man who was laughing madly, then making choking sounds before laughing again. The choking sounds, he realized, had become sobbing. Carleton yelled a warning, alarmed at the wild movements of the guide who seemed unable to focus on his descent, his feet missing rungs or slipping off them...and it was no surprise when his body seemed to crumble and lose any will to navigate the rungs. The professor quickly moved around the chamber calculating where the man would most likely fall…

The impact missed Carleton by inches. To his amazement, the older man saw the young guide was still alive.

“Who did this?” he demanded. “Did Batsaikhan jump or fall? Something unhinged you, man. What was it?”

The guide managed words, tenuous as a fading distant wind, barely audible:

“Bone-eaters…”

“What, Chinua? How—“

“…out of the old ruins in the caves that gape like black mouths…they came…the old legends speak of them…eaters of bone and flesh…The eclipse…when the sun darkened they came…”

Once agin reality seemed more like a dream. No eclipse had been predicted. Such a thing was impossible even though he had seen the outer sky darken from the pit. And the things the guide gasped of pouring forth from the openings of the other ruins…it made no sense. Quickly, he asked of the others, the two professors, the three students, the seven workers who had accompanied him.

“Gone,” said the dying man, “…all…gone…the eaters of bone took them."

He asked what these things were, what they looked like.

“Like nothing…on God’s earth…they are described in the old inscriptions…on the sides of cliffs, ancient temples, the deepest caves in the mountains…They are shapeless but take mad form for only seconds before changing back into gigantic spheres of flesh. The old wives' tales were true...”

The Professor was oblivious to the fact the guide was speaking perfectly fluent English.

"Professor take my gun"—Chinua had always boasted of his weapon. an ancient pistol he always carried as a weapon to deter colorful and largely imagined desert raiders—"Then kill me. Please, I beg of you. Then do the same for yourself. But you must be quick—"

“There's still time—“

“You don’t understand Professor. I do not fear Death, even a Death as terrible as this one. But I fear death after death—a horror you can’t understand”

"They will devour you whole. You would say absorb. The process of digestion is long and painful. Your mind, not just your bones, will be eaten. You’ll dream your death again and again—and each time you’ll begin to feel the pain. It will grow through each dream. And you will dream until every atom in your body is assimilated into their mad flesh..."

Suddenly, something massive covered the well’s entrance plunging the pit into total darkness. Mere moments later light returned and looking up the Professor saw why. The unwelcome intruder was no longer covering the mouth; it was sliding down the walls smoothly and slowly like streams of black oil. And in that moment he understood the corroded appearance of the rungs, and the glassy appearance of the walls . Chinua'a ranting wasn't madness after all...Carleton's discovery was far greater than he had realized. He had unearthed a pit of the Bone Eaters.

Failing them both, Chinua's old relic refused to fire.

4.

Carleton knew he was dreaming. Paralyzed, unable to open his eyes or twitch a finger or rouse himself to wakefulness, he was fully aware his consciousness was venturing in another world, another reality that reflected his waking world with all the distortions one might expect of a Funhouse mirror. Beyond the tent the wind whistled and the sand scattered and the moon cast a light yellow as bleached bone over the silent plateau. The air outside was freezing cold. The tent in which he slept and dreamed and found minimal warmth was only metres from the first of his team’s discoveries: the seven deep cylindrical wells his workers had excavated, wells with sides smooth as black glass. He wondered if the workers too were dreaming when confusion and fear suddenly blurred his thoughts. An intense anxiety squeezed his heart--for he could not recall if the discovery mirrored in his restless slumber was itself just part of the dream and not a carry over from his waking life...

And at that moment, he became poignantly aware, for mere seconds perhaps, that he was dreaming, not in his familiar tent of so many expeditions, but in a circular prison of mad alien flesh; and that nothing, not even that monstrous a revalation, should surprise a dying man, not when even the delirium of dreams might pale compared to the impossible realities he and his team had unearthed. The moment of lucidity, of terrible insight, swiftly and mercifully passed and the ruminations returned. The walls smooth as polished glass, obsidian, basalt, obviously volcanic in origin, it made no sense (because he had already forgotten), it was an outrage against the sane order of existence and without the photographs and testimonials of his men, archeologists and scientists would regard him as mad or a liar. The whole thing was impossible—as impossible and absurd as the iron hand holds that were now allowing him to make his descent into the pit. As he made his way downward he became more and more aware of a deteriorating stamina. His arms felt heavy and painful, his head throbbed, his eyes felt like sand had been ground into them. No doubt he had unwisely pushed his body to the limits in the excitement following these discoveries...

Why did he think of it as a prison almost from the first moment they had uncovered the thin layer of sand and rock that had concealed it? There were certainly other possibilities but this intuitive hunch was too strong to just let go...to let...go...

Something wouldn't let go.

Dear God...my body is wracked with pain...

Could you experience this kind of pain in a dream? he wondered. And then following, inevitably: Am I dreaming again?

It seemed likely.



Note: I wrote this with fond thoughts of Michael Shea and ATMOM and The Thing on the Doorstep where we are first introduced to The Pit of the Shoggoths.
But I couldn't call them that. It just made sense that the Old Legends of the locals would have their own name for such an Elder Evil.--Druidic.