‘Hmm? Oh, yes. Of course. You must do as you see fit. I suppose I should crack on myself. Lots of little errands to run and chores to do that have been mounting up while I’ve been playing with you and those other two animals. Azathoth will want the newspaper reading to him, and Shub-Niggurath always wants help changing the nappies.’
‘I’m sure the epithet
‘Oh, don’t I wish,’ said Bose, and sighed. He stirred himself on his throne and sat up. ‘Well, no time for dawdling. You had better see yourself out. I’m bored with being an inoffensive solicitor so I’m going to put on something a little less coherent that will probably shatter your sanity if you look upon it.’
‘How exactly do I get off this island?’ asked Cabal.
Bose’s last few friendly affectations faded away and he looked stonily at Cabal. ‘I wasn’t joking about your sanity,’ he said, in a gravelly voice that no longer sounded much like Bose or, indeed, much like any human. It sounded just like gravel might talk.
There seemed little more to be said. Cabal nodded curtly, turned on his heel and walked out with dignity, while all the time being unable to shake the thought that his exit looked no more decorous to Nyarlothotep than a cockroach attempting a dignified scuttle. As he climbed the corridor towards the crevasse-edge chamber, he could hear something particularly disturbing happening behind him, something that made wet noises, ripping noises and other sounds he could not categorise but which he suspected were generated by happenings neither common nor comprehensible to a mere mortal such as he. Curiosity is one thing, but there comes a point when a wise man sees all the dead cats lying around the place and thinks,
The sunlight was harsh after the subdued illumination of the ‘Phobic Animus’ chamber, and Cabal flicked his blue-glass spectacles out of his pocket instinctively and put them on quickly. He walked down the zigzag path, and found a boulder to perch upon at the bottom. He would risk re-entering the cave again the next day, by which time even the most sluggardly of multidimensional creatures should have had ample opportunity to change form and leave. He doubted there was much of use in there, but all it would cost him was time and that, at least, he had plenty of.
He cast his mind back to his early musings on escaping the island and saw little to change his opinion as to the difficulty of the endeavour. He tried to recall if there was anything useful he might gather from a childhood reading of
He sat and watched the sun settle slowly towards the western horizon off to his left. Before him was a vast expanse of ocean without a hint of distant land. Once he thought he saw an island, but it grew closer and, before it finally submerged, he realised that it was actually a sea monster, approximately the size of Rutland. It was a memorable sight, but not one he felt improved him or his situation.
As the sun started to dip below the water, crabs began to populate the beach. In common with so much in the Dremlands, they couldn’t simply be just like earthly crabs. These specimens had bodies roughly the size of dinner plates, their chitinous armour coloured a dismal brown-orange, puckered like warmed celluloid. They had four eyes, two mounted on stalks in a decent crably way, but the others were large and human-like, peering out of round openings in the front seam of the carapace between the upper and lower parts. These eyes, occasionally moistened with a meniscus that slid back and forth, looked permanently startled and cautious, but Cabal knew that was just an effect of their setting and nothing to do with their owners’ actual dispositions. As he had no desire to be pincered to pieces by an army of startled-looking crabs in the early hours, he retired to the cave entrance, and blocked off the path with rocks. He hoped the crabs weren’t substantially more intelligent than they looked, and settled down for a miserable night’s sleep in the sandy cave mouth.
Next morning he discovered some useful information about the crabs (that they had probably intended to eat him if they could, but that their rapacious appetites fortunately far outstripped their intelligence), and breakfast (there was a small pile of crabs lying on their backs beneath the cave mouth that had fallen there while trying to negotiate Cabal’s rock blockade. They were still alive and, if anything, looking more startled than usual). He cracked them open with a sharp stone, which startled them still further, and cooked them on a fire lit with one of his precious remaining matches.
He decided that he would keep the fire going as long as he could, and start supplementary fires elsewhere. He had no idea how long it might take to get off the island, or if he ever would, and permanent fires seemed like useful things to have. He might get lucky and find a supply of flint, but he probably wouldn’t, and the whole idea of rubbing sticks together seemed very hit and miss. The smoke from the fire might also attract the attention of passing ships, should there be any, bearing in mind Mormo’s reputation for obscurity. Admittedly, given the Dreamland’s tendency towards the dramatic, should any ship come to the island it would probably be full of cannibalistic pirates, piratical cannibals, Jehovah’s Witnesses or similar. That was acceptable, however. He was sure they could come to some arrangement that didn’t involve any unpleasantness. Any unpleasantness to himself, at any rate.
Somewhere around midday, Cabal re-entered the caves and made his way with no great enthusiasm to the throne room. There was no self-proclaimed Phobic Animus in residence, and Cabal presumed that he was no longer of interest and Nyarlothotep was off elsewhere, doing incoherent alien things, incomprehensible to anybody who couldn’t think in more than eleven or twelve dimensions. Somewhere between the realities floated a god’s ‘To do’ list with the name
Cabal sat upon the throne to think, and presently sprawled upon it for comfort, incidentally and unselfconsciously mimicking Bose’s attitudes of the previous day. In the first instance, he decided, it would be necessary thoroughly to explore Mormo to discover what it contained and then to make plans based on whatever resources were revealed. His options seemed to coalesce into a simple choice between making his home there and hoping for rescue, or building a vessel and taking his chances with the sea. The latter course was by far the more dangerous, but also the least maddening. The very thought of sitting around and feeling his life frittering away was abominable. No, unless his survey of the island turned up something unexpectedly useful, such as a marina on the north shore or even an isthmus to a mainland, then he would put together some sort of boat and bet his life on it neither falling apart nor being swallowed by Moby-Rutland. His mind made up, he went out to see what wonders the beaches and wooded slopes of Mormo might conceal.
The woods contained trees and the beaches contained sand and, occasionally, large crabs that seemed astonished by their own vicious aggression. It was a disappointing exploration, but Cabal did not begrudge the three days it took to circumnavigate the coast and to examine much of the forest and look up the open upper slopes of
