The Prophet of Dagon

"Gentlemen, our guest of honor!"

The president of the Royal Archeological Society with a beaming but perspiring face raised his glass to the man seated on the dais to his right. I rose with the rest, and with a smattering of applause and a few hoarse hear hears we of the Society (to our own sullen amazement) also lifted our glasses to toast the health of Baxter Carswell.

He was a small man with dark hair and pinched features, and even when he smiled—and I suppose he was trying to smile as we cheered him—his face tended to curl into something between a grimace and a scowl. He acknowledged our applause with a quick wave of his palm, then hunched in his seat.

"Perseverance— Perseverance and scrupulosity," continued our president, "are two of the virtues without which no archeologist can hope to succeed. Without them—"

And so he was launched.

Professor William Stapleton was a man of some twenty stone, and when appearing in evening dress his critics had been known to unkindly compare him to a timpani drum. And like a timpani, he had a tendency to boom, as he now boomed his remarks at our gathered Society. They were his usual. Diligence, caution, skepticism, humility ... The archeologist's virtues, as he had reminded us many times.

They were also, signally, virtues that Baxter Carswell lacked. Twice, Stapleton himself had venomously attacked the man in the pages of the Society's Proceedings, mocking his outlandish claims and his "swinish and disgusting" theories. How galling, then—and not one of us present, I'm sure, wasn't thinking it—for our president to now have to acknowledge and honor Carswell's momentous discoveries on Crete.

"Thank you, Mr. President," I heard a voice say, and I retrieved my attention from the foggy distraction into which I had fallen. "I know how hateful tonight's ceremony must be for you, and so I am immensely gratified to be attending it."

It was Carswell speaking. He had risen to his feet, and it struck me what a little man he was. Not only morally—an audible murmur of disapprobation was rippling through the assembled members—but physically. Even standing, the crown of his head barely o'er-topped that of our seated president. Unpleasant, too, was his accent, for he spoke through his nose in a kind of quack.

"—the magnitude," he was saying, "nay, without conceit I assert, the epochal profundity of the revolution that will attend the resurrection of that city we have gathered tonight to mark—"

"I say, he's really laying it on, isn't he?" murmured my neighbor, a man named Wilditch, into my ear. "Well, the man has a right to preen, I suppose."

Indeed. There was not only the extraordinary find itself—the one that had forced the Society to recognize Carswell and the truth of his theories—but the extraordinary circumstances that had confirmed them.

It is every archeologist's dream, I suppose, to find a "lost civilization." Few would dare conjecture them, however, and none save Carswell would have so brazenly asserted the existence of a drowned city off the coast of Crete—the lost outpost, he insisted, of an antediluvian culture wiped from the Earth ere the founding of Atlantis. Under its cyclopean walls and within the tentacular labyrinths of its temples and palaces, he had written, prospered things more like unto gods than men. Or unto demons, he had cryptically added in a footnote, if one's morality is of the conventionally cramped sort.

No, these were not the sort of cautious and conservative conjectures Stapleton liked to commend. But then, Carswell was an amateur, a man known to "dabble in the dregs of metaphysics and moonshine," as Stapleton had described him in one of his (less vituperative) passages.

Carswell was describing the city now, I noted as I again began to attend his remarks. It was hard to concentrate on him. It was not only his accents and manners that were odious. His very claims were repugnant.

He was, of course, entitled to describe for us the ruined city that had lunged so spectacularly to the surface of the Aegean—exactly where he had claimed it existed—as the result of a violent undersea tremor. And if one forgave the pugnacity of the image, one might even applaud his descriptions of its "sturdy bones still dressed in the glistening, oozing muds of the deep." But—

Come, come, I thought with some irritation. You still have not established that it was Dagon they worshipped. And even if you mean it as a poetic turn of phrase, it is meretricious to credit the earthquake to the agency of some god or other.

"Even now," Carswell was wheezing as the choler in our president's face deepened, "my men are obliviously scooping away the slime and silt of centuries from out the avenue that leads to the pythonic temple of dread Dagon, before whose idol—whose immensity still fails but to impotently gesture at the awful exaltation of the deity it represents—but before which, as I was saying, the frenzied divines of his cult performed such mighty oblations as caused the very stars to wobble. Even now," he piped as he flushed, and his glittering eye roved the room, "yea, even as we speak, the very lineaments of eternity are bending into alignments monstrous, to parallel that roadway out of Deepest Time, and down them like ladders shall descend—!"

"Yes, thank you, Mr. Carswell," interrupted the president. He stood and politely clapped some three or four times, nodding at the assembly to join in. (We didn't.) "We shall be delighted to hear all about it when—"

"The Earth's very foundations shall shatter! The continents shall reel!"

"Yes, yes, the earthquake. Certainly," murmured Stapleton as he laid a great hand on his guest-of-honor's shoulder and shoved him back down into his seat, "we should all of us pray for such happy accidents as that which helped confirm your—"

"Accident!" shrieked Carswell, and even at a remove I could see the whites of his rolling eyes. "Was it by 'accident' that I drenched the Altar of Meleck-Taos in gore, to slake the long-parched gullet of Dagon's Herald?"

The Altar of Meleck-Taos? I thought I knew the name. I turned to my neighbor Wilditch, to confirm that that was the identification given by Carswell to some immense sarcophagus or other he had found buried twenty feet beneath the foundations of the palace at Knossos.

He forestalled me with a question and frown of his own. "Gore?" he asked. "Wasn't there some ghastly business back there on Crete, nearly got him kicked off the island? Some local girl gone missing?"

The murmur of the company had risen, but even over it I could hear snatches from Carswell. "By bribery, the keys to this hall!" — "Sigils written in invisible blood!" — "Tentacles and beaks and the baleful eye of Dagan Takala!" — "The wall behind this dais!" Spittle showed on his lips as two burly waiters, at a signal from Stapleton, seized him by the arms.

"Yes, spare me a day, a week, a month!" he laughed as he was dragged away. "You are but the first! Gladly did I seek to mingle with you tonight, that I might delight at the whistling music your bones will make after the marrow is sucked from out them by the gale-force hurricanes that shall envelope your blaspheming company! But to the maddened squeals of humanity's writhing mass shall I yet dance and cut myself before the—!"

Twisting like a thing of coiled wires, he was carried bodily from the banqueting hall.

"I must apologize to you all," said our president as he patted his forehead with a white handkerchief, "for the, er, regrettable behavior just shown by our distinguished guest." He said the words with undisguised contempt. "Even a madman may have lucid intervals," he went on, "but I think we can all congratulate our fortune in being able to remove the madman whilst retaining, for our own delectation, the antique remnants he—"

He got no further, and few had attended him even that far before he broke off as those of us seated before the dais began to stand and gasp and point at the wall behind him, in which there had opened what to all appearances was a swirling vortex of smoke and mist.

That in itself was unaccountably strange. But I could not help but believe I comprehended within it certain uncanny shapes. Was that not a black and baleful eye glittering from out its center? Where those not beaks that orbited, darting and biting as they dipped in and out from between the vortex's whirling arms, which were themselves like tentacles tipped with cruel pincers?

I had but a moment to take the nightmare in before the lights of the hall blinked out, and a roaring gale lifted and sucked me into it.

-30-
Submitted for "SCREAMS!!!"  for 3-16-21
Prompt: Use "gale-force", "dread", "pincers", "swirling", "toast" in the story