They could smell the mud flats now. A pungent, salty odor of stagnant brine and putrescent shellfish drifted toward them, whipped by the wind. A sickly yellow light was spreading sluggishly in the eastern sky. Across the road ahead of them a turtle shambled and vanished hideously in a flash.
“See that?” cried Little. “That’s how Chaugnar would go if it wasn’t as old as the earth.”
“Be ready with the brakes,” Algernon shouted back.
The end of the road had swept into view. It ran swiftly downhill for fifty yards and terminated in a sandy waste that was half submerged at its lower levels. The illumed bulk of Chaugnar paused for an instant on a sandy hillock. Then it moved rapidly downward toward the flats, arms spread wide, body swaying strangely, as though it were in awe of the sea.
Little steered the car to the side of the road and threw on the brakes. “Out — both of you!” he shouted.
Algernon descended to the ground and stood for an instant shakingly clinging to the door of the car. Then, in a sudden access of determination, he sprang back and began tugging at the machine, whilst Imbert strove valiantly to assist him.
There came a bellow from the great form that was advancing into the marsh. Algernon drew close to Little, and gripped him firmly by the arm. “Hadn’t we better wait here?” he asked, his voice tight with strain. “It seems to fear the sea. We can entrench ourselves here and attack it with the light when it climbs back.”
“No,” Little’s reply was emphatic. “We haven’t a second to waste. It may — mire itself. It’s too massive to flounder through the mud without becoming hopelessly bogged down. We’ll drive it forward into the marsh.”
Resolutely he stopped and beckoned to his companions to assist him in raising and supporting the machine. Dawn was spreading in the east as the three men staggered downward over the sandy waste, a planet’s salvation in the glittering shape they carried.
Straight into the morass they went, quaking with terror but impelled by a determination that was oblivious to caution. From Chaugnar there now came an insistent screeching and bellowing, a noise that smote so ominously on Algernon’s ear that he wanted, desperately, to drop the machine and head back toward the car. But above the obscene bellowings of the horror rose Little’s voice in courageous exhortation. “Don’t stop for an instant,” he cried. “We must keep it from circling back to the road. It will turn in a moment. It’s sinking deeper and deeper. It will have to turn.”
Their shoes sank into the sea-soaked marsh weeds, while luridly across the glistening morass the greenish light from the machine, effacing everything in its path save the mud itself, which bubbled and heaved, made younger in an instant by ten thousand years. And then, suddenly, the great thing turned and faced them.
Knee-deep in the soft mud it turned, its glowing flanks quivering with ire, its huge trunk malignly upraised, a flail of flame. For an instant it loomed thus terribly menacing, the soul of all malignancy and horror, a cancerous cyclops oozing fetor. Then the light swept over it, and it recoiled with a convulsive trembling of its entire bulk. Though half mired, it retreated swayingly, and its bellows turned to hoarse gurglings, such as no animal throat had uttered in all earth’s eons of sentient evolution.
And then, slowly, it began to change. As the light streamed over and enveloped it, it began unmistakably to shrivel and darken.
“Keep the light steady,” Little cried out, his voice tremulous with concern, his features set in an expression of utter revulsion.
Algernon and Imbert continued to advance with the machine, as sickened as Little was by what they saw but supported now by the disappearance of all uncertainity as to the truth of Little’s claims.
And now that which had taken to itself an earth-form in j eons primordial began awfully to disincarn and before their j gaze was enacted a drama so revolting as to imperil reason! A burning horror withdrew from its garments of clay and retraced in patterns of unspeakable dimness the history of its enshrinement. Not instantly had it incarned itself, but by stages slow and fantasmal and sickening. To ascend, Chaugnar had had to feast, not on men at first, for there were no men when it lay venomously outspread on the earth’s crust; but on entities no less malignant than itself, the spawn of star-births incalculable. For before the earth cooled she had drawn from the skies a noxious progeny. Drawn earthward by her holocaust they had come, and relentlessly Chaugnar had devoured them.
And now as that which had occurred in the beginning was enacted anew these blasphemies were disgorged, and above the dark wrack defilement spread. And at last from a beast- shape to a jelly Chaugnar passed, a jelly enveloped in darting filaments of corpse-pale flame. For an instant it moved above the black marsh, as it had moved in the beginning when it had come from beyond the universe of stars to wax bestial in the presence of Man. And then the flames vanished and nothing remained but a cold wind blowing across the estuary from the open sea.
Little let out a great cry and Algernon released his hold on the machine and dropped to his knees on the wet earth. Imbert, too, relinquished the machine but before doing so he shot back the lever at its base.
Only for an instant did the victory go unchallenged. For before the spheres on the machine had ceased to revolve, before even the light had vanished from the gleaming waste, the malignancy that had been Chaugnar Faugn reshaped itself in the sky above them.
Indescribably it loomed through the gray sea-mists, its bulk magnified a thousandfold, its long, dangling trunk swaying slowly back and forth.
For an instant it towered above them, glaring venomously. Then, like a racer, it stooped and floundered forward and went groping about with its monstrous hands for the little shapes it hated. It was still groping when it dimmed and vanished into the depth of the hazy, dawn-brightened sky.
It was the fifth day since Chaugnar Faugn had been sent back through time. Algernon and Little sat in the latter’s
laboratory and discussed the destruction of the horror over cups of black coffee.
“You think, then, that the last manifestation we saw was a kind of spectral emanation, without physical substance.”
“Not wholly, perhaps,” replied Little. “An odor of putrefaction came from it. I should regard the phenomenon as a kind of tenuous reassembling rather than an apparition in a strict sense. Chaugnar had been incarnate for so long in the hideous shape with which we are familiar that its disembodied intelligence could reclothe itself in a kind of porous mimesis before it returned to its hyperdimensional sphere. So rapidly did our machine reverse entropy that perhaps tiny fragments of its terrestrial body survived, and these, by a tremendous exercise of will, it may have reassembled and, figuratively, blown up. That is to say, it may have taken these tiny fragments and so increased their porosity beyond the normal porosity of matter that they produced the cyclopean apparition we saw. All matter, you know, is tremendously porous, and if I could remove all the ‘vacuums’ from your body you would shrink to the size of a pin-head.”
Algernon nodded, and was silent for a moment. Then he stood up, laid his coffee cup on the windowsill and crossed to where Little was sitting. “We agreed,” he said, “that we wouldn’t discuss Chaugnar further until… well, until we were in a little calmer frame of mind than we were a few days ago. It was a wise decision, I think. But I’m now so certain that what we both witnessed was not an illusion that I must insist you return an
“What do you wish to know?” Little’s voice was constrained, reluctant.
“What destroyed the horror in the Pyrenees? Why were there no more massacres after — after that night?”
Little smiled wanly. “Have you forgotten the pools of black slime which were found on the melting snow a thousand feet above the village three days after we sent Chaugnar back?”
“You mean…”
Little nodded. “Chaugnar’s kin, undoubtedly. They accompanied Chaugnar back, but left like their master, a few remainders. Little round pools of putrescent slime — a superfluity of rottenness that somehow resisted the entropy- reversing action of the machine.”
“You mean that the machine sent entropy-reversing emanations half across the world?”
Little shook his head. “I mean simply that Chaugnar Faugn and its hideous brethren were joined together
