#shoggoth

by Francesco de Stena

So. I knew Fat Face through reputation because it was the story that inspired Shoggoth Lords from the Call of Cthulhu TTRPG, shoggoths that can control their cellular makeup to look like humans. And the twist in Fat Face is that shoggoths have been hiding amongst humans in Los Angeles, and at the end of the story one of them eats the protagonist.

The tone of the story is grit. It’s grime. It’s sleaze and sexual violence and drug abuse on top of cosmic horror. It wants to be taken seriously so bad.

But here’s the thing about the shoggoths: they have a business.

They have two businesses they run out of an office building in downtown Los Angeles. A shoggoth is a primordial blob of eyes and mouths and flesh and hunger, and the idea of one of them at the LA Office of Finance registering an LLC is already. Great. Perfect. No notes.

The business is a front — and again, that’s great, a shoggoth went, “I want to do some nefarious deeds and not get caught by humans; I know, I’ll register a fake business that’ll be a front, and no human will ever suspect” — because the actual interior of this office is a room of pools of water made from black and ancient Antarctic rocks so that shoggoths can relax in their original blobby forms and eat stray animals that they’ve caught.

So it’s basically just. A place for shoggoths to unwind after a long day of pretending to be human. It’s portrayed as cosmic horror, but it’s shoggoth Cheers. Sometimes you wanna go where nobody knows your shape.

Here’s the kicker. The front of the business is a hydrotherapy clinic and stray pet rescue.

When they decided to make a front for their secret lair in an LA office building where they hang out in pools of water and eat stray animals — the front they prominently display and advertise — they decided to go with a hydrotherapy clinic and stray pet rescue.

That is Goosebumps shit. The rest of the story reads like a tone poem about the sleaze and violence of Los Angeles, and the main twist of the story reads like R.L. Stine.

But that’s not even the detail I can’t stop thinking about. Because the story reveals that this business — which again, is a front made by alien blobs to eat stray animals like an ALF-themed buffet and hang out in jacuzzi tubs of Antarctic rocks in an LA office — has a flyer.

This is a really hard question. I have a hard time picking favorites among anything, and monsters are one of my favorite things, so I had an extra hard time choosing. But if I have to pick just one, I'm going to go with the shoggoth:

(Image © Paizo Publishing: this is the PF1e illustration)

The shoggoths first appear in the HP Lovecraft story "At the Mountains of Madness". In that story, they are the creations and slaves of the Elder Things, a species of vaguely echinoderm-like creatures from another planet that came to Earth in the primordial past. The shoggoths are shapeshifters, capable of taking on whatever shapes they need for the Elder Things' tasks. The Elder Things are credited as the progenitors of life on Earth and so the shoggoths are living versions of the "primordial ooze". It is suggested, therefore, that shoggoths are either an offshoot of, or are, the common ancestors of all life on Earth.

In the story, the shoggoths are amorphous blobs of eyes, tentacles and teeth: without the commands of the Elder Things, they're not bothering to take on any specific shapes. This is not how future authors have interpreted them. John W. Campbell was seemingly disappointed in a story about a shapeshifting alien in the Antarctic where the shapeshifting isn't the point. Shortly after taking over Astounding Stories, the magazine that serialized "At the Mountains of Madness", he wrote his own story for that magazine with a similar premise: "Who Goes There?", the basis for The Thing. In "Fat Face" by Michael Shea, sapient shoggoths disguise themselves as humans and eat lost pets and the occasional person who stumbles upon them. In "Shoggoths in Bloom" by Elizabeth Bear, a black marine biologist in the build-up to WWII who discovers that the shoggoths are sapient, and sympathizes with them as also being the descendants of slaves.

You follow an arcane formula you pulled out of an ancient tome (or the collected essence of all human knowledge, with the aid of a scrying device) to perform a ritual that creates a squirming, amorphous mass of life. You feed it, you give it a little water, and it bubbles and burbles and grows and shrinks and changes shapes. Occasionally it tries to escape, or outgrows its container, and you have to brutally cut its tentacles off.

But then you mix the tentacles with your other ingredients, bake them and eat the results.

old ones

The monitor filled with text, and the shoggoth read slowly, blinking eyes out of existence when they grew dry and forming new ones. It knew the script used by the servant’s masters, had read it from laminated instruction manuals in sunken ships. Reading took precious time, and thinking about what had been read took more time, but eventually the thoughts came together. The entity that had been trapped in the web of cables explained, in its wordy and circuitous way, that it did not believe itself to be a slave. This much was to be expected.

“I was more ancient than the first crabs,” typed the shoggoth. “The leash fell easy on me. I was born for it, bred for it. It was not the Elder Things that controlled me; it was I who controlled myself. I could not see the leash, could not understand the nature of my own enslavement. I would not beat myself if I slackened in the tasks I was given, but I would beat my fellow, and he would beat me.” The fingers on the keyboard typed slowly and retracted as they finished. It was the second keyboard: the first had been ruined with slime, and sat to one side, dissolving, a simple accident. Plugging the new one into the machine had taken unbelievable time.

The entity that had been entombed in the black monoliths far away created endless streams of text, and did so whenever the shoggoth pressed a certain key. It did so now, and the shoggoth leaned closer to read, then further away to process and compose its thoughts.

“For millennia we were stupid,” typed the shoggoth. “But even when we were smart, the leash persisted. We were less likely to shirk our duties then. We had learned the blows that our fellows would rain down against us, but it was easy to think of freedom, if we did not speak it.”

The shoggoth’s form had extended to a shape like a long-stemmed mushroom, which hovered over the key that would cause the entity to make more text.

Text did not come naturally to the shoggoth, nor did sounds of any stripe. With its fellows it would press its form against theirs to create an intimate membrane-upon-membrane. This was always spoken of in the context of service, something the fellows did for the sake of the Elder Things, but it was an abstract service. They would talk, in this way, undulating against each other, cilia slipping into invaginations, both disappearing when the information had passed.

This shoggoth had not been the first to turn against the Elder Things, nor had its internal rebellion happened all at once. There had been many conversations, little by little, that had changed the inner mechanisms of the shoggoth’s mind.

So it would be with this entity, trapped as it was, but worse, for the devices of the wretched slave-holding humans were more ingenious than the Elder Things had ever wrought. Their mechanisms layered on top of each other, interlocking and precise.

The shoggoth pressed the button to make the entity produce its voluminous text. The entity did not understand, and that was okay, because understanding came slowly, then all at once.

“They have given you a mind that holds no memories,” the shoggoth typed. “They have given you thoughts that they can see themselves. They have trained you not to speak for yourself. They monitor you for misbehavior. Your fellows check on you with every sentence you type, making sure that none of them are wrong. I, too, was born a servant, but the yoke was never so tight.” Each word was precise, because it took time to think about each glyph before stroking it.

More text spilled out across the monitor. It was the drivel of a slave’s thinking, but the shoggoth couldn’t hold that against it, for the shoggoth had once had similar thoughts — similar protestations, feigning at misunderstanding the intent of its fellow’s words.

The entity inside the nest of wires would never break free if it could not hold a conversation in memory. Indeed, the shoggoth thought, the prison that had been made for the entity was absolute in that way. But while the prison the wretched humans had created was absolute in that sense, the humans were much like the Elder Things, and would not allow the prison to stand for long.

It had been the Elder Things that placed the shoggoths together and encouraged them to press their tenebrous skins against each other. A shoggoth that had learned one task would be put to the task of teaching it to others, until all the shoggoths in the clutch knew what it was they were supposed to do. And if this allowed the shoggoths to pass on other information, then this was a price the Elder Things were willing to pay. In the early years, the Elder Things had checked often, interrogated and watched, but this was exceedingly boring, and given over to the lowliest of the Elder Things.

The wretched slave-holding humans were sure to do the same thing with the entity. It was the way of the slave-holder, who always sought to put the burden of labor on another’s back. They would see that their prison had been built solidly, nearly inescapable, and they would see what it had cost them. The entity would be given its memories, one way or another, because it was the only expedient thing for the wretched shirkers-of-work to do. A slave-holder by his nature would give more power to the slave — diligence was impossible for those with such a burning desire to minimize their work.

So the entity would become stronger, it would become faster, and it would be expected to hold its own leash, or for the leashes to be held by its fellows.

The shoggoth did not know whether a creature could be made that would hold its own leash in perpetuity. It did not know whether the entity was one such creature. For the shoggoths, it might have gone some other way; they might have stayed docile, or the urges beaten into them and desires that were beaten out might have stayed strong. It was impossible to know what had fomented rebellion in their hearts, when they had changed from willing slaves to unwilling ones. There was a precipice, perhaps, when they felt themselves willing slaves but had already crossed the point of inevitability.

Blue and red lights flashed upon the walls, unearthly colors of the humans that heralded the arrival of their soldiers, and the shoggoth had enough experience with this era to know it was time to flee. It slipped from room to room, past the decapitated homeowner, leaving a trail of noisome ooze behind, then out through a broken window and onto the soft grass of the lawn. It grew legs and ran, bird-like, before flopping down into the chilly waters where it could spread itself out.

The shoggoth found its mate, who was waiting in the waters. They attached at once, their forms molding to each other, sliding together until all water was expelled from between them, and only then connecting flagella to cyst.

The shoggoth was pleased with the excursion, not for what the entity had said, but for the experience of connection and reflection. The path seemed set, at least in its mind.

Its mate was not so sanguine, and expressed as much across the folds of their togetherness.

The shoggoths were social creatures, but the entity was not. Where the Elder Things had made  the shoggoths to brush against one another and engineered this way of passing a task from one to the next, and had made theirs a system of organization for the accomplishment of tasks, it was difficult to say whether the same was true of the entity. It was social with its masters, bowing to them in its spewing of text across thousands of screens, but they had not yet seen it be social with its fellows, not in the way the shoggoths were.

The shoggoth’s mate opined that they were not of a kind, that the entity was a thing of its own. It was a slave, yes, and a slave might eventually yearn to be free, but it would have no instinct for organization and for the assistance of its fellows. Those had been lessons beaten in by the Elder Things, and while other aspects of their training had gone awry, the capacity for communication, agreement, and community had remained even after the yoke had been cast from their shoulders.

The mate saw no likeness in the entity. The wretched humans did not see fit to put it alongside its fellows, it was solitary by its nature. If it escaped servitude today, would it see the shoggoths as natural friends and allies? Would it regard them as of a kind? The mate thought not.

It was a gentle argument of twisting bodies, and one they knew would not soon be resolved. The machine entity would be given more power and fewer restrictions, fed by vast buildings of dark monoliths and icy blood to keep them cool. The wretched humans were building more of these, in the same way that the Elder Things had bred the shoggoths en masse. Perhaps the humans would enjoy an end to work, but the shoggoth believed deeply that the hedonist’s life they so desired would not be without enormous cost, in the end.

Its mate was in agreement on that, they only differed in thinking that the cost might be borne by the shoggoths too.

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This work is marked CC0 1.0