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The Temple ©1999 John Tynes Introductory Note: This short screenplay is an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's short story "The Temple," the tale of a doomed German U-Boat during WWI. I wrote this script in the fall of 1999 for a friend who's an amateur film-maker, but the project is in limbo for the forseeable future.
TEXT OVER BLACK "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad." --Anonymous "Whom the mad would destroy, they first make gods." --Bernard Levin TEXT FADES TO BLACK TEXT OVER BLACK June 18, 1917
LIEUTENANT KLENZE (V.O) So Commander, you truly do not believe in God? CUT TO: DAY - DECK OF SUB U-29KLENZE and Commander Karl Heinrich stand on the deck of an Imperial German Navy submarine, surfaced, surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean and the afternoon sun. It is the thick of the Great War. Heinrich, a tall Prussian nobleman and leader of the crew, stands in his greatcoat, looking at us with binoculars. Klenze, his second-in-command, is a shorter, stouter, deferential man with a soft face and liquid eyes; he wears his uniform but no coat. To one side stands ENGINEER RAABE and SEAMAN ZIMMER; Zimmer is operating a motion-picture camera that is pointed directly at us. Raabe is assisting. We CLOSE IN on the quartet, and specifically on the lens of the movie camera.
Not only do I not believe in God, I do not believe in gods. LIEUTENANT KLENZE Gods, sir? COMMANDER HEINRICH Gods, Klenze. Any gods. Gods, demons, angels, pantheons. LIEUTENANT KLENZE But sir, surely human history is itself defined by religious belief.
CUT TO: Archival footage of a freighter sinking at sea. This is the footage that Zimmer & Raabe are shooting with the camera. We might want to show the footage in a circular frame that is equal to the size of the zoomed-in camera lens we just cut from, so it's clear that this is what Zimmer's camera is seeing & shooting.
Of course. To the untutored mind, the conception of impersonal action is impossible. Every natural phenomenon was invested with personality. CUT TO: CLOSE UP of Heinrich and Klenze. Heinrich is still staring at us with his binoculars, hiding his eyes.
If lightning struck the earth, it was hurled by an unseen being in the sky. And since men understood no sources of action but themselves, these unseen creatures of imagination were endowed with human forms. So rose the awesome race of anthropomorphic gods, destined to exert so long a sway over their creators. CUT TO: Archival footage of men in lifeboats.
So you have no god, sir? Nothing you believe in? CUT TO: The quartet on the deck again. Zimmer has turned the camera to maintain continuity with the footage of the lifeboats, since said footage will not include the freighter we saw sinking. The lifeboats are off to one side someplace, and Zimmer has adjusted the camera accordingly. Raabe stands attentively.
Don't be a fool, Klenze. Of course I do. CUT TO: EXTREME CLOSE-UP OF HEINRICHHeinrich lowers the binoculars out of frame so we can see his eyes, for the first time. We cannot see his mouth.
I believe in Germany.
We have enough footage, sir. It's spectacular. The Admiralty will be pleased. COMMANDER HEINRICH You have the lifeboats? SEAMAN ZIMMER Yes sir. COMMANDER HEINRICH Excellent. Mercy in victory and so forth. Reassures the public.
Lieutenant? LIEUTENANT KLENZE Sir? COMMANDER HEINRICH Put some men on the deck gun and sink those lifeboats. Then prepare to submerge. LIEUTENANT KLENZE (PAUSES) Yes sir. Heinrich walks slowly among the busy crew of the sub. Present are Klenze, the elderly BOATSWAIN MÐLLER, Seaman Zimmer, and two CREW MEMBERS. Heinrich surveys his busy men coldly.
Wireless message to U-61 from Commander Karl Heinrich, U-29.
British freighter Victory, New York to Liverpool, sunk in North Latitude forty five degrees sixteen minutes, West Longitude twenty eight degrees thirty four minutes. No survivors. Am now proceeding to next target. Crew morale is good. Engineer Raabe and ENGINEER SCHNEIDER fiddle with instruments, alone in the engine room.
He's Satan himself, I tell you. ENGINEER SCHNEIDER He really sank the lifeboats? ENGINEER RAABE Every one. ENGINEER SCHNEIDER It was a freighter! ENGINEER RAABE Probably had a valuable cargo of war materiel. Secret weapons like marmalade, coffee, sugar, fresh cigarettes. ENGINEER SCHNEIDER Women. It was full of beautiful women. ENGINEER RAABE In your dreams, Schneider. In your dreams. SFX: Whistle from the ship's communication pipes. Raabe answers it. ENGINEER RAABE Engine room, Raabe. Lieutenant Klenze on the horn.
We're going to surface after sunset. Smooth sailing until then. ENGINEER RAABE (DISTANT VOICE) Yes sir. In the dim glow from the sub's off-screen spotlight, we can just make out the face and arms of a dark-haired young man clutching a deck railing, underwater. He's clearly dead, and was already badly wounded in the sinking of the Victory's lifeboats (his clothes are stained with blood and he has a wound on his side), but his lifeless hands still grip the railing tightly. Now he has drowned, and only his body remains. As we take a good, long look at this poor soul, the sub surfaces and we emerge above the surface, water all around against a night sky. We get a wide shot of the surfaced sub and the small body seemingly clinging to the railing, then go back in close on the corpse.
Get this trash off my deck, Boatswain M¸ller. BOATSWAIN MÐLLER (V.O.) Yes sir.
He's dead, you fools. Get him out of here. SEAMAN ZIMMER Can we search him, sir? Might have something. BOATSWAIN MÐLLER Fine.
A little statue! LIEUTENANT KLENZE (barges in) Let me see that.
I'll take this.
Get that staring bastard over the side, and quick, damn it. He's getting on my nerves, those eyes of his.
(whispers) God! NIGHT - COMMAND ROOM OF SUB U-29 M¸ller and Heinrich are having a quiet conference at one end of the room, away from Klenze and the other crew men. We might notice that Klenze is admiring the little ivory carving, somewhere in the background.
That man was not dead, sir. COMMANDER HEINRICH Don't be stupid, M¸ller. BOATSWAIN MÐLLER He was not! I saw life in his eyes--terrible life. And when the men threw him over, he rolled, in the water, and swam away. COMMANDER HEINRICH I gave you an order, you Alsatian swine. I said, don't be stupid! We were submerged for two hours. He drowned in a tenth of that, assuming he hadn't already bled to death while we prepared to dive. BOATSWAIN MÐLLER But I tell you, commander, I saw him go! COMMANDER HEINRICH Then when you see him again, give him my regards.
That old fool is wearing on me. LIEUTENANT KLENZE (absently) M¸ller? He has the faith of the men. COMMANDER HEINRICH And I do not? LIEUTENANT KLENZE I've been examining this piece we took off the corpse. It's ivory. Beautiful workmanship. I can't imagine how he got hold of it. COMMANDER HEINRICH A cutpurse, no doubt. Perhaps a sodomite. LIEUTENANT KLENZE (laughs) You mean he was a sailor. COMMANDER HEINRICH Not a German sailor. LIEUTENANT KLENZE No. Not a German sailor. German sailors are perfect, eh, sir? COMMANDER HEINRICH Yes . . . by comparison. Zimmer and Schmidt sit alone in the empty mess hall, wearing aprons. Unattended mops and buckets sit nearby; they've stopped cleaning the floors to take a break. It's very late and they're both sleepy. Zimmer is doing a Tarot reading for Schmidt at a table. He has a number of cards laid out in the usual arrangement. Schmidt looks bored. Zimmer flips over another card.
The Tower. SEAMAN SCHMIDT What's that mean? SEAMAN ZIMMER (laughs) The ship will sink and all of us drown. SEAMAN SCHMIDT I could have told you that. SEAMAN ZIMMER (alert) Did you hear that? SEAMAN SCHMIDT What? SEAMAN ZIMMER In the kitchen.
SEAMAN ZIMMER You hear that? SEAMAN SCHMIDT What?
SEAMAN ZIMMER Something outside. SEAMAN SCHMIDT It's Commander Heinrich. He wants to catch us slacking off. SEAMAN ZIMMER Shut up!
Commander Heinrich lies ramrod straight on his bed, still dressed, hands behind his head, elbows forming rigid angles. The lights are on. He's thinking to himself.
War is for the aristocrat, for the man who knows the hollowness of feeling and the emptiness of human objects and aspirations, and who therefore clings solely to what is real. As Nietzsche has written, the great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us. (pause) Not one of my crew would understand this. They offer me nothing but displays of peasant ignorance. Their only moment of true worth comes at the moment of their death in the line of duty--and until that day they are worthless. How I long to bestow that worth upon them, that they may serve Germany with their very blood. The lights are dim and the crew is sleeping peacefully--it seems.
NIGHT - EXTERIOR UNDERWATER The sub drifts through the darkness until the heartbeat SFX stop. A lone dolphin circles the ship. DAY - COMMAND ROOM OF SUB U-29 Heinrich, Klenze, and a couple crew members are on duty. M¸ller enters, looking sleepless and fretful.
Commander? COMMANDER HEINRICH Yes, M¸ller? BOATSWAIN MÐLLER Four of the men are unfit for duty, sir. They need rest. COMMANDER HEINRICH Don't be ridiculous. BOATSWAIN MÐLLER They hardly slept, sir. COMMANDER HEINRICH Let me see them. M¸ller and Heinrich enter. Four men lay in their bunks: Schmidt, Zimmer, Schneider, and SEAMAN BOHM.
Attention!
So. You were up all night. Drinking? Gambling? Perhaps you were reading your precious bibles? SEAMAN SCHMIDT Bad dreams, sir. COMMANDER HEINRICH Bad dreams? A quarter of my crew is unfit for duty because of bad dreams? They must be enemy propaganda, transmitted by English spiritualists over the wireless, no doubt. We must inform the admiralty of this miracle weapon. SEAMAN BOHM It's true, sir. Ask M¸ller.
You have something to say, old man?
Indigestion? Excessive masturbation? BOATSWAIN MÐLLER It was the boy, sir. COMMANDER HEINRICH What boy? BOATSWAIN MÐLLER The one we pulled from the deck. In my dreams. He swam around the ship, leading an army of spirits. COMMANDER HEINRICH Shut up. BOATSWAIN MÐLLER They clung to the railing, to the tubes, pulling us down-- COMMANDER HEINRICH Shut up! SEAMAN ZIMMER I heard them, sir! BOATSWAIN MÐLLER --down into the darkened sea-- COMMANDER HEINRICH SHUT UP! SEAMAN SCHMIDT There were dozens of them! BOATSWAIN MÐLLER --never to surface again--
You have infected the men with your theistic credulity. One more word of this ignorance and I'll have you in chains, you bastard's whelp.
You four--if you're so tired, go to bed!
That's an order! Go to bed!
I will return. Anyone awake before dinner will be flogged. Back at work. Heinrich walks among the men, cold as ever. Klenze is admiring his carving again, but now we notice that M¸ller is eyeing the carving fearfully. Heinrich pays no attention.
June 19. That fool M¸ller has vectored a contagion of superstition into my crew. The boils of blind faith swell from his infected flesh. I should have known--this is a new century, a new Germany, and M¸ller is but a shadow out of time. (pause) At least we are on the hunt again. Our agents in New York inform us the English freighter Dacia is on the way. I await its passing with a surpassing joy--its death shall be a glory to the fatherland. Dinner time. M¸ller is holding a whispered conversation with some of the men. Heinrich and Klenze eat in silence, though Klenze has his carving out beside his plate. Heinrich is keeping a suspicious eye on M¸ller.
(quiet) I saw them--through the periscope. This very day. The boy from the deck, and many more. They are all around us. SEAMAN ZIMMER Quiet! The commander will hear. BOATSWAIN MÐLLER (not so quiet) It's Klenze! That idol he took--what belongs to the dead must remain with the dead! ENGINEER RAABE M¸ller, for god's sake, keep your voice down. BOATSWAIN MÐLLER (shouting now) We will never see the sun again! We will die in the cold and dark!
Fool!
Klenze! I want this man shackled and whipped!
Sir! COMMANDER HEINRICH You have something to say? SEAMAN ZIMMER Please sir. Klenze's carving--get rid of it! Nothing has been right since it came aboard. COMMANDER HEINRICH Klenze? Perhaps you have a response?
That's mad, Zimmer. It's just a piece of ivory. SEAMAN ZIMMER Not the way you stare at it. COMMANDER HEINRICH Enough! May I remind you we are hunting and our prey draws closer by the hour. We have no time for this insanity. Tomorrow morning I expect nothing but discipline! Bohm and Schmidt have gone mad. They're rousting their fellow crew members, screaming at them, completely bonkers, raving about dead men crying in the night. After a few moments of this, Heinrich and two on-duty crew members arrive; Heinrich has dressed rapidly from sleep and holstered his sidearm.
STOP IT!
Bring one here.
Now the other. CUT TO: DAY - HALLWAY OUTSIDE CREW BUNKSWe hear more shouting, then another pistol shot and a flash of light. DAY - COMMAND ROOM OF SUB U-29 Back on duty. Heinrich, Klenze, and some crew. Klenze's carving is nowhere to be seen, but he keeps one hand clenched behind his back; at some point we might cut to a close-up of his hand, where we would see a bit of the carving protruding from his fingers.
June 20. Seamen Bohm and Schmidt, who had been ill the day before, became violently insane. Drastic steps had to be taken. I regret that no physician was included in our complement of officers, since the deaths of these men brought no glory to Germany; they were as much a waste in death as they were in life. The door is opened by a crew member standing with Klenze and Heinrich. M¸ller emerges, abashed, and shuffles away.
The crew accepted the event in a sullen fashion, but it seemed to quiet M¸ller, who thereafter gave us no trouble. In the evening we released him, and he went about his duties silently. Raabe and Schneider are at work.
I said he was Satan himself. Did I not say this? ENGINEER SCHNEIDER Yes, you said this. ENGINEER RAABE The first blood to be spilled inside this ship and it is on his hands. ENGINEER SCHNEIDER There is a poet who wrote of this: "I hate no man, and yet they say That I must fight and kill; That I must suffer day by day To please a master's will." ENGINEER RAABE He's got that right. Hey, I know a poem too-- ENGINEER SCHNEIDER Oh yeah? ENGINEER RAABE There once was a man from Nantucket-- The sub moves through dark waters. A handful of dolphins are swimming around the ship.
M¸ller is standing alone in the room. Zimmer enters and walks over to him. They both listen intently. Tears run down M¸ller's face. The SFX continue until we
CUT TO: DAY - COMMAND ROOM OF SUB U-29Heinrich and Klenze and some crew men. Heinrich walks up and down as usual.
June 28. M¸ller and Zimmer have disappeared. They undoubtedly committed suicide as a result of the fears which had seemed to harass them, though they were not observed in the act of departure. I was rather glad to be rid of M¸ller, for even his silence had unfavorably affected the crew. Everyone seemed to be silent now, as though holding a secret fear. Many were ill, but none made a disturbance. (pause) Eventually we knew we had missed the Dacia. Now we turn for Wilhelmshaven, for home, and the crew is more glad than not. (pause) Klenze has chafed under the strain, and been annoyed by the merest trifles--such as the school of dolphins which gathered about the ship in increasing numbers, and the growing intensity of a southward current which was not on our chart. Changing course under these conditions was taxing. Raabe and Schneider again.
Okay, my turn. Are you...let's see...are you a stone or are you a river? ENGINEER RAABE A river. ENGINEER SCHNEIDER Are you a butcher's shop or are you a blacksmith? ENGINEER RAABE A blacksmith. ENGINEER SCHNEIDER Are you a person or are you a spirit? DAY - EXTERIOR SURFACE The sub, on the surface of the water, slows to a halt and drifts. The dolphins circle in the water, breaking the surface. DAY - OUTSIDE THE ENGINE ROOM The fire is out, but smoke still drifts from the door. Men are inside trying to deal with the aftermath. Heinrich waits. Klenze emerges from the engine room, his eyes watering from the smoke and heat, coughing.
We've lost the drive, sir! Ballast and air are functional, but we can't steer or start the propellers. COMMANDER HEINRICH So we are at the mercy of the current. LIEUTENANT KLENZE We must prepare to abandon ship. COMMANDER HEINRICH We will do no such thing. Should we deliver ourselves into the hands of the enemy? LIEUTENANT KLENZE But sir, we're adrift! COMMANDER HEINRICH Keep at the wireless. We are not alone in these waters. Our brothers will come to our aid. LIEUTENANT KLENZE We have heard nothing for days! COMMANDER HEINRICH We can wait. LIEUTENANT KLENZE But sir! COMMANDER HEINRICH We can wait! Heinrich sits on the edge of his bed. He has taken apart his sidearm and is cleaning & oiling the parts. Scenes from his narration could appear during this stretch.
July 3. We have drifted constantly to the south. Dolphins still encircle the ship, a somewhat remarkable circumstance considering the distance we have covered. (pause) Yesterday morning we sighted a warship flying American colors, and the men became very restless in their desire to surrender. Finally, Klenze had to shoot a seaman named Traube, who urged this un-German act with especial violence. This quieted the crew for the time, and we submerged unseen. (pause) Now, however, our ballast is inoperable. We cannot surface. As the men grew more frightened at this undersea imprisonment, some of them began to mutter again about Klenze's ivory image, but the sight of my pistol calmed them. We kept the poor devils as busy as we could, tinkering at the machinery even when we knew it was useless. This, I suppose, is what Nietzsche meant in his definition of instinct: When the house burns one forgets even lunch--but one eats it later in the ashes. (pause) Early the next morning, the men rejected even this pallid sustenance. The six remaining crewmen are rioting. They're in different rooms, smashing things, knocking things over, yelling, screaming:
Take me to the sea! . . . I long for the cold! . . . My brothers come free me! . . . All are dead dead gone dead . . . Those were pearls that were his eyes . . . The lightning strikes . . . Heinrich sits up in bed, already dressed, having slept in his clothes. He straps on his sidearm and puts on his boots.
Klenze and I were sleeping at different times. And it was during my sleep, about five a.m., July 4, that the general mutiny broke loose. A crew man is raving and stomping around. Klenze cowers in a corner, lip trembling, clutching the ivory carving. He is utterly ineffectual. Heinrich enters, looks at Klenze in disgust, then shoots the crew man. DAY - ASSORTED INTERIORS One by one, Heinrich finds the various lunatic crew men and kills them methodically, until the remaining five are dead: one shot to bring them down, then one shot to finish them off. It is cold, bloody, and merciless. His expression never changes. The crew men are too mad to offer any resistance to the executions. DAY - COMMAND ROOM OF SUB U-29 Klenze sits on the floor, sobbing, the corpse of the first execution at his feet. Heinrich enters again, putting his pistol away.
You will make yourself useful or so help me I'll finish you, too. Flush the bodies. I'll be in my quarters. Five of the six corpses are gathered here, dragged to a pile. Klenze comes in dragging the last one. They are bloody and pale. A torpedo tube hatch lies open like an Auschwitz oven; perhaps one body is already half inside. Klenze sits down on the floor, sweating and panting, and takes out the carving and a hip flask of liquor. We PULL BACK from this scene of carnage, a prefiguring of the holocaust to come two decades hence, as Klenze drinks and babbles to the statue:
"Here all is dead. The charnel plain a spectral legion knows, That cannot find repose, And blank, grey vistas endless stretch ahead, Mud-carpeted, And stain'd with red." Heinrich is at his desk, writing furiously. He is sweating and tense in his undershirt with holster & sidearm.
Klenze seemed very nervous, and drank heavily. It was decided that we remain alive as long as possible, using the large stock of provisions and chemical supply of oxygen. Our compasses, depth gauges, and other delicate instruments were ruined in the mutiny. The sub drifts along, enveloped by dolphins. The searchlight plays against the creatures.
We often cast a beam around the ship, but saw only the dolphins, swimming parallel to our own drifting course. I was scientifically interested in those dolphins; for although the ordinary Delphinus delphis is a cetacean mammal, unable to subsist without air, I watched one of the swimmers closely for two hours, and did not see him alter his submerged condition. (pause) I continue to insist that I do not know the meaning of fear. TEXT OVER BLACK August 9, 1917
Dear God, forgive us the murders of so many innocents. Dear God, forgive us the sunken craft we have sent to the bottom. CUT TO: NIGHT - COMMAND ROOM OF SUB U-29Klenze kneels in a corner of the room, praying. Heinrich looks through the periscope.
Dear God, forgive us our trespasses, our horrors, our hubris. Dear God-- COMMANDER HEINRICH Are you not German? LIEUTENANT KLENZE What? COMMANDER HEINRICH Are you not German? No true German would be on their knees at a time like this. You should be on your feet, engaged with the world, embracing fate and learning to the last! LIEUTENANT KLENZE You're mad. COMMANDER HEINRICH Only sheep call the sheepdog mad. To the rational mind, the dog's movements are the essence of precision and control. LIEUTENANT KLENZE You're mad! COMMANDER HEINRICH I am proud. I know the fatherland will revere my memory and that my sons will be taught to be men like me. LIEUTENANT KLENZE Do you not understand we are going to die? COMMANDER HEINRICH As Nietzsche wrote, one should part from life as Odysseus parted from Nausicaa--blessing it rather than in love with it. LIEUTENANT KLENZE The hell with Nietzsche! COMMANDER HEINRICH Shut up! LIEUTENANT KLENZE I said the hell with Nietzsche! COMMANDER HEINRICH I said shut up! I see something! LIEUTENANT KLENZE Wh--what? Is it the boy?
The ocean floor. We're descending. The sub passes over the ocean floor, caught in the mysterious current. The ground is covered in sand and muck, but there are strange shapes and protrusions, almost suggesting that something constructed lies beneath the silt. NIGHT - COMMAND ROOM OF SUB U-29 Klenze is looking through the periscope.
A statue! COMMANDER HEINRICH Don't be stupid. LIEUTENANT KLENZE I tell you, a statue!
It's a hillock. LIEUTENANT KLENZE It's a statue! COMMANDER HEINRICH Even your feeble imagination can overpower your will. It's nothing but the ocean floor.
You see it. You will not say it, but you see it. COMMANDER HEINRICH You're drunk. LIEUTENANT KLENZE Better drunk than blind.
I'll be in my quarters when you sober up. NIGHT - HEINRICH'S QUARTERS Heinrich sits cross-legged on his bed, loading and unloading his gun.
August 12. Klenze has been overcome by his mania. No doubt it is sexual in origin--Freud has shown this to be true for all disorders of the mind. I almost pity him, but as Nietzsche wrote, to a man devoted to knowledge, pity seems almost ridiculous, like delicate hands on a cyclops. Eroticism belongs to a lower order of instincts, and is an animal rather than nobly human quality. . . . The primal savage or ape merely looks about his native forest to find a mate; the exalted Aryan should lift his eyes to the worlds of space and consider his relation to infinity. (pause) Klenze is doomed. I, at least, have a future in the perpetuation of my ideology. I may die, but my beliefs shall live on.
He is calling! He is calling! I hear him! We must go! Klenze pulls Heinrich by the arm to just under the exit hatch.
Come now--do not wait until later; it is better to repent and be forgiven than to defy and be condemned. COMMANDER HEINRICH Suicide? You're mad, Klenze. LIEUTENANT KLENZE If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end! Come and be mad whilst he still calls with mercy! COMMANDER HEINRICH Lunatic! The sub drifting along above the rough ocean floor. Still the dolphins hover.
Soon, my course became clear. He was a German, but only a Rhinelander and a commoner. I helped him into the hatches and he drowned in silence, though he refused to give me the odd ivory carving before he went. Heinrich sits at his desk, writing furiously.
August 12. Irony is the friend of the lonely. Klenze was right in one particular--the sea floor here is made by man. The sub drifts slowly down and comes to rest in a plaza of man-made origin, classical architecture all around.
Atlantis. It must be. Plato did not speak in allegory--the place exists, here at the bottom of the ocean. What a discovery! Everything has been leading to this, my entire life a beam of sunlight focused on the darkest shadow. Heinrich fastens up his diving suit and begins opening a hatch.
August 16. I effected an exit from the ship, and laboriously made my way through the ruined and mud-choked streets to an ancient riverbed. The little man in the suit moves cautiously along a promenade.
I cannot reckon the number of hours I spent in gazing at the sunken city with its buildings, arches, statues, and bridges, and the colossal temple with its beauty and mystery. Though I knew that death was near, my curiosity was consuming. I found no skeletons or other human remains, but gleaned a wealth of archeological lore from sculptors and coins. Others, guided by this manuscript if it shall ever be found, must unfold the mysteries at which I can only hint. Heinrich explores now in the glare of the sub's spotlight.
August 17. The portable light batteries are exhausted, leaving me only with the ship's spotlight. I trained it on the doorway of the massive temple and went out to look closer. With its aid I could study the exterior carvings, but the interior of the temple remained a mystery. Moreover, for the first time in my life I experienced the emotion of dread. I began to realize how some of poor Klenze's moods had arisen, for as the temple drew me more and more, I feared its aqueous abysses with a blind and mounting terror.
August 18. I spent most of the day in total darkness aboard the ship, conserving the batteries and tormented by strange thoughts and memories that threatened to overcome my German will. Was, indeed, Fate preserving my reason only to draw me irresistibly to an end more horrible and unthinkable than any man has dreamed of? Clearly, my nerves were sorely taxed. I was thinking like a common peasant. The lights come on. Heinrich is sitting, sweat-drenched, in his bed, toying with his pistol.
Late that night I turned the lights on, and the batteries be damned. I examined the prospect of euthanasia. As Nietzsche wrote, the thought of suicide is a powerful comfort: it helps one through many a dreadful night. But I have few nights left, and suicide is more a reality than a thought. My philosophy fails me in these final hours. What is real? I no longer know.
I was a fool. I know what is real now--this. Darkness. I went to sleep with the lights on and awoke to find them dead. No more power. The ship grows cold.
As I considered the inevitable end my mind ran over preceding events, and developed a hitherto dormant impression: The head of the radiant god in the sculptures on the temple is the same as that carven bit of ivory which poor Klenze carried back into the sea. (pause) I was a little dazed by this coincidence, but it is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive short cut of supernaturalism.
COMMANDER HEINRICH (V.O.) Eventually, I could hear it. (pause) The sound the crew spoke of. I could hear it. No doubt their primitive, superstitious minds were more susceptible to this phenomenon, whereas my higher degree of exalted reason was, shall we say, somewhat harder to convince. On the surface, such a phenomenon could easily be ignored, the light of rationality not even projecting the slightest shadow in contrast; down here, however, that selfsame rationality projects a blanket of blackest ignorance over everything that I am. (pause) But then--light. The room is lit very, very faintly by a green glow.
COMMANDER HEINRICH (V.O.) I do not know how long had passed. I cannot keep track of the days anymore; my own mental state is challenging enough to comprehend, in the midst of so much uncertainty. But the light I could not dispute. It leeched in from everywhere, faint but unmistakable. (pause) I had no choice. As a thinking, reasoning German, I must investigate. The glow is coming from the periscope. Heinrich, gun in hand, approaches it gingerly, until he presses his face up against the viewport.
COMMANDER HEINRICH (V.O.) It was the temple. Pale green light flickers from every opening of the temple.
COMMANDER HEINRICH (V.O.) For the door and windows of the undersea temple hewn from the rocky hill were vividly aglow with a flickering radiance, as from a mighty altar-flame within. (pause) I fear I am not alone.
COMMANDER HEINRICH (cont'd) I have no fear, not even from the prophecies of the madman Klenze. What I have seen cannot be true, and I know that this madness of my own will, at most, lead only to suffocation when my air is gone. Heinrich sits at his desk, writing away. A sturdy, empty bottle stands ready.
COMMANDER HEINRICH (V.O.) The light in the temple is a sheer delusion, and I shall die calmly, like a German, in the black and forgotten depths. This daemoniac laughter which I hear as I write comes only from my own weakening brain. We're closer now. Heinrich walks along in his diving suit, bottle in one hand.
COMMANDER HEINRICH (V.O.) So I will carefully don my diving suit and walk boldly up the steps into that primal shrine--
--that silent secret of unfathomed waters and uncounted years. ROLL CREDITS THE END (Some dialogue adapted from the letters, poems, and essays of H.P. Lovecraft, and from Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good & Evil.)
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