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 XI Dyer and Danforth are confronted with a horror in the depths.
The lifeless obstructions in the hallway are in fact the bodies of four of the eight Elder Things, clearly dispatched recently. Green ichor pours from the stumped where their heads should be. Inspecting the bodies further, the pair realise that each body has had its head torn off, and that a pungent black ooze surrounds the stump.
Both recognise this method of killing as the method employed by the Shoggoths in the war of re-subjugation. Danforth is so shocked that he screams; the nightmarish Shoggoths are "known" to not exist on this world. A response comes from deep within the cavern. The sound was noted by Lake in his radio transmissions; Danforth and Dyer were subconsciously aware of the sound while travelling the city; and Dyer is aware of the inspiration for an odd utterance described in Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym.
From the abyss comes the repeated cry "Tekeli-li!" which the pair associates with the Elder Things. They believe that they see a wounded Elder Thing approaching and they immediately flee. The two run with only dim torchlight in hopes of losing the Elder Thing in the vast honeycombed network of tunnels.
Oddly enough, the scent of the Elder Thing does not grow stronger as it must surely be catching up to them. Instead, that second foetid odour becomes unbearably strong. The two look around out of morbid curiosity and nearly succumb to madness. They are being chased by a black ooze that squeezes through the incredibly vast hall, wider than a subway car. It screams "Tekeli-li!" in a mocking tone.
The Shoggoths, only given intelligence to serve the Elder Things and having no language of their own, could only imitate the language of their masters.
I find it odd but not uncharacteristic of Lovecraft that he has sympathy for the Elder Thing slavers in this chapter. The "poor Old Ones" who built their empire off the backs of engineered slaves had their final city usurped by their former slaves. I definitely fall on the side of the Shoggoths who are so engineered that they can't even devise their own language and must resort to a half-intelligent mockery of their masters' language.