They slowed when the small fire was in sight. “I don’t understand; the red gates should be open if Cthulhu is free. It doesn’t make sense.” Matt turned one way and then the other. There was still no one at the fire.

He stopped. For the first time he could hear clearly the noise of the waterfall. Underlying the constant splash of liquid was another sound. Matt frowned as he concentrated. He stared for a moment and then backed up a step.

“Don’t stop; what is it? What do you see?” Abrams stopped with him, looking around.

“Give me your field glasses.” Matt held out his hand, dread in his gut.

Abrams handed them over, and then he and Adira, kept watch for any danger while Matt lifted them to his eyes.

It was as he imagined. No, it was worse than he imagined. The sound they could hear: it wasn’t just some strange noise caused by rushing water or air movement against deep cavern walls. Instead, it was wailing, crying, screams of horror, terror, anguish and hopelessness. The waterfall wasn’t water at all. It was thousands of tumbling bodies, people, falling through space.

“Cries of the damned.” Matt lowered the glasses. “When the Shoggoth have been herding the people below ground, this is where they have been bringing them.”

He felt sick to the stomach. A living cascade of people voicing their last screams as they jumped or were pushed from the rim of the giant cave mouth about half a mile up on the cliff wall face.

Matt could see that there were hundreds of these falls, and he followed the stream of people from one of them down to where they fell to the dark water, and where the thrashing was occurring. Whatever was in that dark ocean was either consuming them or converting them, as no heads bobbed back to the surface. Instead they were totally swallowed up and disappeared. But maybe only vanishing as what they once were ... the lumps Matt had seen before. They couldn’t have been just some freak phenomenon. The dark ocean was coated in protrusions like dark boils trying to burst free– there were thousands of them, hundreds of thousands. Perhaps they would soon be newly birthed as Shoggoths.

“It’s people,” Matt said softly.

Adira and Abrams stared.

“Not an ocean.” Matt staggered back. “And not water at all. That dark mass is part of Cthulhu itself.” Matt felt tears of futility on his cheeks. Perhaps the Shoggoths, monstrous things to us, were just like some sort of tiny symbiote that existed upon the Great Old One. As it woke, so did they, dropping from its huge body like some sort of horrifying lice.

He felt a building rage in his gut. “A nightmare?” He looked up at Abrams and wiped his face. “No, this truly is Hell.”

Adira made a noise deep in her throat that sounded like a growl. “I have heard men and women die before. This is what it sounds like.” She turned away from the stream of humans falling to their death. “Don’t look at it. We cannot save them, but perhaps we can stop many more suffering the same fate. Let us finish what we started.”