After Orr was done running through his laundry list of engineering details as to how they lowered the equipment and then got it down to the plateau itself, he said, “Like I said, this whole operation went on for months and months, and although there were glitches, the team was never in any danger. They encountered none of these creatures, nor any other dangerous life-form down there. An ROV reconnaissance of the city has not seen any of them either. If they’re still there, people, then they’re hiding. Beyond that, I cannot say.”

But he didn’t have to.

Bell could feel them down there, as if he had established some crazy psychic uplink with them as a result of seeing those photos. It made no sense and he knew it. But his mind was a storm of images. The creatures. The city. The city. The creatures. Distorted, aberrant memory and malign association that left him reeling, left him feeling like he was suffocating, as if he could not get enough air and was about to pass out cold.

Something about them, about that city, about all of it was so goddamn familiar. He had no idea why. Only that it was not some fantasy dream-train. It was real. It was solid.

His dread and revulsion of them was absolute and unnerving. He wished to God he had passed this mission up, because the damn thing had been voluntary. Then he would have been safe in blissful ignorance.

But now he had seen them.

And to see them was to know them.

And to know them was to remember them in a hazy, surreal, ephemeral sort of way. One minute, those stark and awful memories were crystal clear, the next muddy and obscure. It was a very transitory thing and all the more frustrating because of which.

He thought: God, why do I remember that city? Why do I feel like I’ve seen it before? And why are those Old Ones familiar? I know I’ve never seen them…but they’re in my head like maybe they’ve always been there. Just waiting for me to make the connection. And now that I have…what happens next?

Yes, he had never known anything as forbidding as the way all of it made him feel. It was as if merely looking at those horrors had opened up an ancient can of worms in him, worms that were finally free, slithering through him and breeding their looping larvae in the hot moistness of his subconscious mind.