Welcome back to our Dream Cycle Book Club, where we explore the dream based stories and dream-adjacent tales written by H.P. Lovecraft. In this week's thread we shall discuss the final half of At the Mountains of Madness.
This week we will be reading our penultimate story: The Dreams in the Witch House. The Arkham Archivist provides us with a collated collection of stories here. A LibriVox audio recording is not available and so I direct you to a recording by the YouTuber HorrorBabble here
This week image credit goes to Joseph Diaz.
In Chapter X Dyer and Danforth finally begin their descent into the abyss.
The pair are pulled from their shocked stupor by a familiar sound, altogether disconcerting in this location. Despite being hundreds of kilometres inland, the pair hears the squawking of penguins. Dyer and Danforth follow the squawking and find a previously undiscovered species of penguin, gigantic in proportion, albino, and eyeless. They briefly recall images of penguins dotting the murals. The penguins stand outside an entrance to a subterranean vault, from which vapour billows.
The pair descend into the depths, which grow warmer and warmer until the two are forced to remove their outerwear. They eventually enter a vast entrance hall. They turn on their torches to inspect the halls and its art, only to discover that the craftwork of the Elder Things has sharply decayed. Stalactites hang from the ceiling. Carvings appear more crude. While the geometric patterns are clearly inspired by earlier art, there is something clumsy and careless to the carvings.
A new odour begins to assault their nostrils, an odour which overpowers the foul stench of the Elder Things. Ahead, the two see apparently lifeless obstructions in the hallway. They continue.
We saw in a previous chapter that the Elder Things experimented with intelligent Shoggoths for the construction of the new city. Could these crude new carvings be the product of these new Shoggoths, acting upon instruction of the Elder Things but without direct supervision?