XI

begun it at once⁠—else we would not have been alive and blindly racing. I shudder to think of what a shade of difference in his nervous reactions might have brought.

“South Station Under⁠—Washington Under⁠—Park Street Under⁠—Kendall⁠—Central⁠—Harvard⁠—” The poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations of the Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through our peaceful native soil thousands of miles away in New England, yet to me the ritual had neither irrelevance nor home feeling. It had only horror, because I knew unerringly the monstrous, nefandous analogy that had suggested it.

We had expected, upon looking back, to see a terrible and incredible moving entity if the mists were thin enough; but of that entity we had formed a clear idea. What we did see⁠—for the mists were indeed all too malignly thinned⁠—was something altogether different, and immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist’s “thing that should not be”; and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees it from a station platform⁠—the great black front looming colossally out of infinite subterraneous distance, constellated with strangely colored lights and filling the prodigious burrow.

But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the nightmare, plastic column of fetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus, gathering unholy speed and driving before it a spiral, rethickening cloud of the pallid abyss vapor.

It was a terrible, indescribable thing, vaster than any subway train⁠—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.