The Slumbering Beast of the Abyss

       At the edge of the Arabian deserts, between the Riverless Land and the Land Between Rivers, a great depression yawned skyward, its jagged maw bristling with the rotten teeth of ancient ruins—foul stones that glowed sickly yellow in the waning sun. Sinister shadows slithered from the shattered sandstone walls, like vipers hatching. John Smith fought the primal urge to climb higher, to escape. They are only shadows, he reminded himself. But time was short. He checked his pocket-watch: three twenty-seven in the afternoon. And there was no higher ground to scale; he stood atop the rubble of a broken tower, and beyond it, only the distant peaks of the horizon dared touch the sky. It was this very tower that had led him to the buried city, though to the untrained eye, it was but a few weathered stones, and only a poet’s fancy, or the delusion of a mad scholar would recognise a creation of human hands and minds. Yet soon, under the labour of the Indians and Arabs from Smith’s caravan, the desert grudgingly yielded its secret. Shovels bit into the sand, and the wind, howling in futile protest, could not reclaim what was unearthed. The dead city rose, stone by accursed stone, dragged back into the light by the will of one man and the sweat of his hirelings. The sun, in silent outrage, blazed upon the jagged teeth of walls and columns, its fury impotent against the resurrected horror. Even the earth trembled at times, as though striving to shake off this abomination. The superstitious workers muttered, their campfire songs growing hollow, their voices thin—but they held fast, for Smith had promised to triple their pay. When the sand was exhausted and the shovels struck stone and hardened clay, Smith ordered them to take up their picks and dig deeper, through the strata of forgotten ages. Bones surfaced—human, brittle and white—along with shards of pottery, tarnished copper, the skeletal remains of wooden artefacts. Smith waved them away with cold indifference. Throw them back to the desert. Perhaps treasures slipped into the workers’ pockets—let them have their trinkets. Smith sought no gold, though it was tales of Kadatheron’s lost hoards that had loosened the purses of England’s dwindling aristocracy. Half the funds had come from banks, lured not by legends, but by Smith’s lies of oil deposits. Now those borrowed pounds bled into the sand, a fitting irony. Repayment would never come—not if the tattered parchment bought in Ashkelon for six hundred pounds and a pocket-watch spoke true… The watch. Three fifty-nine in the afternoon. The final minutes of this world—of its banknotes, its bazaars, its mirrors, its camels, its shovels. No—the shovels, forged of English steel, might endure. In some distant aeon, visitors from a saner star might unearth them, decipher their purpose, and lose their alien minds to the revelation. Or they would cower behind rational explanations, like those cretins from the Academy of Sciences who, after squinting at the parchment, declared it a mere census fragment from some early Sumerian kingdom, describing the “Decline of Kadatheron”, a name they rendered as “Goat-Dung Heap” or “Where No Fish Swim” in some extinct local dialect. But one scholar—cast out from that guild of fools for a genius bordering on prophecy, a lone mind from Miskatonic University—had read the parchment differently. He drew upon true sources: the cuneiform tablets of Ur, the papyri of Ophir, and, of course, the dreaded works of that mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. The poor wretch finished his research in an asylum, which only convinced John Smith of a dreadful validity of the manuscript. What lay beneath the sand, the earth, the stone was– One day, the workers’ shovels struck something unnatural—fragments of a rock too hard for steel, too vivid for nature: turquoise, ochre, fuchsia colours flashed in the sun. The earth’s hidden secret mocked humanity’s arrogant science. That very night, the Eastern men—waiting not for Smith’s slumber—loaded their camels and vanished into the moonless desert, forfeiting their pay. Smith toiled alone for a week, clearing the pit where a plaza had been. The hole lay in the shadow of the tower and its rubble, and even at zenith, the sun never touched the spot. But the inquisitive mind of Western civilization is not so easily thwarted. A mirror, he reasoned, could bend light where the sun would not go. For days, he polished an ancient bronze mirror to a proper sheen, praying to nameless gods that it would suffice. And now he stood atop the tower, angling the mirror, eyes darting between his pocket-watch and the creeping sun-spot below—slow, inexorable as fate itself. Four-oh-three in the afternoon. For the first time in millennia, light touched a long fissure in the convex stone at the pit’s heart. Smith’s throat clenched—he nearly screamed, nearly leapt—and then did scream as the earth shuddered. The stone split. And the world beheld the Eye. Gigantic. Pupils within pupils, irises of every hue from every rainbow on every accursed planet in the cosmos. It twitched, seeking the mortal fool who’d disturbed its slumber. “O Slumbering Beast of the Abyss!” Smith shrieked, his voice a mad chorus of ecstasy and dread. “Awaken in thy might, and sweep the race of men from the earth as thou didst smite proud Kadatheron ages ago!” His soul whirled like a dervish—not of madness, no, but of supreme revelation. It was the world that had gone mad. What right had humanity to endure after Verdun, the Somme, and Ypres? What use was a realm where glory, prosperity, or mere bank credit could only be bought with lies? Where employers and maidens sneered at an honest man named John Smith, while bowing to some Sir Albert Frederick Arthur George or Mister Rockefeller? The Eye, meanwhile, rotated. All its concentric pupils aligned—fixing upon the fool who dared rouse it. Smith screamed the same invocation, now in the guttural tongue of that dead race. The scholar had sworn in his letters that these were the true sounds of the ancient script, and Smith believed him. To an English ear, the syllables were abhorrent—a cacophony of blasphemy. Then came the thunder. Not from the sky—from below. Ruins trembled; the tower lurched; dust plumed upward like a storm-cloud defying nature. Amid the yellow haze flickered turquoise, ochre, fuchsia—no longer stones, but the scales of the Slumbering Beast. The earth groaned, shaken like a sieve by some monstrous cook sifting foul, sandy flour. Clawed limbs, ridged spines, parrot-bright fragments surged in the cloud—even the Eye vanished within it. Smith squeezed his eyes shut against the stinging dust, coughing through his Arab scarf. Nothing could shield his mind from the telepathic thought of the Beast—a hollow, alien tolling inside his skull, insistent and unencompassed: “The blanket slipped again. Why don’t they let me sleep…” When sight and breath returned to John Smith, the sea of sand lapped once more at his feet. The tower was gone—only two stones remained above the desert. But his sanity never returned. To the end of his days, he could not bear the touch of a blanket. That innocent bedding mocked him with the universe’s absurdity. Had the earth stayed silent—had the Eye remained but a stone—he might have clung to doubt. A miscalculation of era, hour, coordinates… But the parchment had not lied. It merely omitted one truth: The Slumbering Beast of the Abyss was slumbering. In the plainest sense. And nothing more.