"Look! What is that?" I asked, pointing to a large mound shaped structure in the distance.
"That's where we're headed!" Roger yelled above the screeching wind.
We walked past the bizarre statues. I noticed that there weren't any tree or vegetation of any kind. Under my feet I felt only sand and rock. This was covered by a thick layer of slippery muck which lay over everything including the stone men. The substance gave off a foul odor.
"What is this?" William asked over the growling thunder. He felt one of the slick statues. He examined his stained hand.
"Come on you fool!" Roger ordered. It was clear that he considered himself in charge.
Even under the black slime the dome revealed its ornate construction. It looked like a cross between an Arabic mosque and a fiendish Aztec temple. We went inside through a large arch shaped entrance.
The stone floor was treacherously slippery.
"What in God's name is this place?" William asked.
What was inside the temple remained a mystery to us. It was mercifully veiled that night by the numbing nigrification of the night. Oh, that just a corner of that evil place had been illuminated by lightning! If we could have but seen....
The three of us fell into a deep silence. Only the gale falling against this antediluvian looking shelter was heard until we each fell into sleep.
I drifted off, fighting against hunger pains. I noticed that Roger had begun to stare most curiously at William.
*
The morning sun poured in through several holes in the peculiar dome. Beams slipped through the cracks cutting holes in the blackness.
Outside the sky was ultramarine. The ocean lapped at the rocky shore of the barren landscape. There was not a single tree, bush or blade of grass. Not a bird or any living thing in this muck covered rocky island. The landscape looked like another world.
"Roger?! William?!"
No answer.
I decided to go back into the temple to look around.
My calls went unanswered. As I went deeper into the temple the sunlight fell on certain sections of the walls. They were covered with ornate carvings. I wiped them free of the grime and stood back examining them.
The wall were decorated with hieroglyph like characters that I could make no sense of. But the ghastly pictures clearly revealed human sacrifice in some of the most horrendous ways imaginable. Crudely rendered people were being flayed, dismembered and torn apart. In some pictures cannibalism was clearly shown by priest like men devouring the severed limbs of their victims.
Such was my horror, my macabre fascination, that I wiped clean another section of wall that the light fell on. A large carving of a being that was clearly not human met my gaze. It appeared to be a cross between a human and some type of insect. It reminded me of a mantis. Its body was close to a man's but the arms terminated in hideous barbed blade like appendages.
Several men were offering pieces of the mutilated victims to it, others were bowing down and giving the abomination worship.
I could feel the evil of the place penetrating my soul. I had the strongest intuition that someone....or something watched me from the shadows. I heard movement coming from deep within the temple. It was coming closer towards an altar like table that stood in the middle of the dome.
"Roger!? William!? Is that you?"
No answer came from the darkness.
I sprang to my feet and ran towards the entrance. I tripped over something, which after I picked it up, proved to be an ancient looking leg bone. On the floor all around me I saw large piles of ancient human remains stacked up neatly.
I bolted through the arch shaped entrance and out of the temple of madness. I had gotten thirty feet out of the dome when I froze in my tracks.
A few things caught my attention. The daylight revealed the grotesque features on the statues to be the same as the mantis like being carved on the wall....
Several of the statues were missing. The ones that remained were unmistakably beginning to move....to turn towards me....
I heard Roger's frantic screaming.....
The statues were very powerful looking, but moved slow. I ran towards the sound of the screaming. It came from the side of the cursed dome.
Roger had William down and began striking him in the head with a large stone.
"Stop! Are you mad?" I screamed. I slipped on the oily muck. I looked up in time to see the final blow that left William silent, his body twitching helplessly.
Roger's eyes were crazed His face was twisted into a primal rage as he sank his teeth into William's face and tore of a large piece of his cheek. He began to devour the flesh like a starving dog.
I froze. He growled at me as he protected his kill. I watched him gnaw off an arm, ripping it indifferently from the torso as if it were a limb on a cooked turkey. He began making strange sounds, I could tell it was a language. I had never heard anything like it before. It had clicks and chips punctuating the guttural rumblings.
As if invigorated by the bloody act, the stone men gathered around us. I saw two of them grab Roger while he again began ripping off the raw meat from the arm like it was a piece of corn. Two of the powerful statues grabbed him by each arm. I watched as they quartered him like a wishbone. He howled like an animal.
I felt a stone hand brush against me. Before the fingers could close around my shoulder, I jerked away and ran passed the slow moving stone men.
In seconds I had made it to the small life boat.
I hurriedly pushed it into the water as several of the men began picking up speed as they came for me. I pushed off into the water. Fate smiled on me. The boat was soon pulling away from the island. A few statues came into the water after me. They sank beneath the waves.
As I looked back one last time to the island, a figure had came out of the dome. Several of the stone men carried pieces of Roger and William to it. It saw me and began an inhuman scream the like of which I have never heard before or since. It raised the hairs on the back of my neck and gave me goose flesh.
Before I lost consciousness, I realized that it was the creature that I had seen from the wall of the temple.
I remember nothing else except the merciful blackness that overcame my mind. When I awoke, I was being pulled aboard another ship. The crew had seen me floating lifeless in the boat. They assumed that I were dead.
For several days I could not speak at all. When I regained my senses, I knew better than to tell the truth about what I had seen.
For years I told everyone that I alone had survived the sinking of the Savannah. In private, I asked several sailors what they knew of an island located where the horrors had taken place.
I was assured that no such island existed. It was as if the damnable thing had risen from the sea, claimed two new sacrifices for a long forgotten dark god, and then quietly sank back to the hellish subterranean depths from which it came.
************************************************** *
Taken from my site at
The Qlipothic Abyss,
http://qlipothica.tripod.com