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The Call	By : drowsteel Category: Titles in the Public Domain > Call of Cthulhu Views: 3041 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: This is a work fiction, based on The Call of Cthulhu by HP Lovecraft

Chapter List
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Returning to Louisiana came with a feeling of claustrophobia for Tabitha. Driving a Jeep through the open land with sparse population and dense foliage made her think of boating through Africa, searching for Mister Kurtz. The last time she’d been in the state, she’d met Lovecraft. This time, he was probably long gone before they ever arrived.
Tabitha looked at James, behind the steering wheel. His normally calm expression was tense as he scanned the dirt road for fallen branches and other hazards. Behind them, Mayumi’s headphones were probably playing Brahms or Stravinsky, lately her two favorites. She looked out the window without expression.
New Orleans was now an hour away, still a shadow of what it had been before the floods of Hurricane Katrina. Tabitha wished they were still in the city, damaged or not. The dense plant life seemed to reach for the vehicle, snaking all across the dirt road like reaching tentacles and making Tabitha wish for pavement and man-made walls.
The road curved suddenly and curved often, throwing Tabitha’s sense of direction completely off.
“How will we know when we’re close?” Tabitha asked.
“Best guess,” James answered, looking at the Global Positioning System on the dashboard. “I think in fifteen minutes we ought to get out and walk, just to be safe.”
“Fine with me,” Tabitha said. “This path is making me sick.”
It was a relief when James pulled off the road and stopped. They left the Jeep where it would be difficult to see from the road, shrouded in trees before starting to navigate on foot. Tabitha began to miss the dirt road as she stumbled on roots and sweated in the damp heat. James hopped and ducked easily around obstacles in spite of his rifle and backpack, while Mayumi trudged on expressionlessly without stumbling.
“Let’s get back on the road,” Tabitha suggested after twenty minutes. Her ankles were punished by the uneven trails.
Her partners looked at her.
“We can’t,” Mayumi said.
“I’ll carry you,” James offered.
Tabitha looked back at him, thinking he was laughing at her. “Fuck you,” she said. “Let’s get back on the road for a while, just until we can see the town.”
“It’s not a good idea,” Mayumi said.
“I’m going to look at the road,” Tabitha insisted. “If I can’t see anything, I’m walking on it for a mile. Just wait for me.”
Both partners watched silently as Tabitha walked away.
By the time she’d made the five-minute return to the road, the sun was low. Tabitha’s ankles were screaming at her, and she wondered idly if they were sprained. She hated the outdoors and its torturous traps. The road was uneven and unpaved, but at least it was a sign of other human beings.
Cautiously, Tabitha looked down the road. It continued for perhaps another mile, then there was a steep drop that defied investigation from this distance. The town must have been beyond it. Tabitha felt satisfaction that no one could possibly have seen her approach from the bottom of that hill, even if she’d driven the Jeep right up to it.
Sweat was now matting Tabitha’s black clothing to her body, and she considered taking her shirt off, but knew she’d have to just carry the soaked thing. Tabitha wondered if there were brambles in the road. There didn’t look like...
Light glinted off of something. The low sun reflected off of a criss-cross of thin wires about twenty yards back, making a gossamer web which would tear into anything passing through it unawares. Roadside trees unwillingly held the wires in place, their bark ripped from the sharp metal. Tabitha imagined someone on a motorcycle being sliced to meat as they unsuspectingly entered the deadly shining mesh.
James and Mayumi were waiting as Tabitha made the walk back. They hadn’t continued without her, as Tabitha had guessed they wouldn’t. All three of them walked together again, Tabitha now even more pained from her detour.
“There’s a steep hill in about a mile,” Tabitha said, taking comfort in that she’d at least gleaned some information from her trek.
From off the road, however, it was not a hill. It was a cliff.
There was a sixty foot straight drop down to ground level, where a collection of small, damaged houses cast long shadows in the sunset light. The village was next to the ocean, and boats were docked along a badly rotted and amaturely constructed pier.
“What are they doing?” James whispered, even though their voices couldn’t possibly carry down to the fishing village’s inhabitants.
“They set up instruments,” Mayumi replied, not going beyond the obvious.
Tabitha opened James’ backpack and took out the small binoculars.
Magnified, the fishermen looked pale, pasty in spite of their lives spent in the sun. Most of them were bloated, looking as though they must have become victims of some strange illness which inflated their bodies and widened their eyes. They were busy setting up torches, long woodwinds and massive, stringed instruments on the coastline.
James took a second pair of binoculars from his pack and looked on. Mayumi just watched, not needing or wanting to look any closer.
The instruments were ancient. The horns looked like the first ones ever conceived by humankind, the strings like they were strung with the tendons of slaughtered prey. These were instruments which had been given up centuries ago in favor of devices with polish and clarity. These were instruments whose sounds had been forgotten.
“I could kill them all from here,” James said cheerfully. “This is a good position. They’d all be dead long before they could even spot us.”
That sounded good to Tabitha. She wondered if James could really pull it off. It sounded like bravado to claim to be able to kill dozens of people without a problem.
“No,” Mayumi refuted. “You can’t.”
“I can,” James insisted. “I promise you.”
Mayumi shook her head. “You can’t see them all,” she said.
James frowned and scanned the village again, looking for something he might have missed. Tabitha looked at Mayumi’s eyes, which stared at the ocean.
The water was made opaque by the low sun, light glaring and denying any hint of what lay beneath.
Ocean stretches out forever, Tabitha thought. It waits for you to intrude on it, then it destroys you. We aren’t built to live out there.
She shivered.
James turned to Mayumi. “What am I missing?” he asked.
“Wait,” Mayumi answered.

The music began after the sun went down. First came the strings, being plucked and strummed in low tones. The horns howled in after, sounding like wounded animals. The tones blended into a strange melody which echoed off the cliff walls, projecting out over the waters made black without the sun. Waters which still rejected the attempts of those on the surface to glean its secrets.
“It doesn’t sound right, does it?” James asked rhetorically.
“No,” Mayumi answered. Her expression was pained, offended by the music.
Tabitha squinted at the waters near the village, then grabbed James’ arm and took a breath sharply, holding it to keep from screaming. James grimaced at the stinging grip on his wrist, unable to see what Tabitha was looking at.
Things moved in the water. Heads and arms emerged onto the shore, almost invisible in the dim torchlight as they crawled from dark water to black earth. Their skin shone, like fish scales. Bulbous milky eyes were barely visible from the top of the cliff.
“Deep ones,” Mayumi said.
“Fuck,” Tabitha whispered, fingers still tearing at James’ flesh. “Oh fucking god oh shit.”
One eye clenched from pain, James looked at the shore. Frogs, he forced himself to think. Those are giant frogs, nothing more. They’re odd, certainly, but that’s all they are. Frogs. Frogs. Frogs.
The creatures crawled on all fours, coming into the fishing village in droves. The shore was teeming with them; a mass of horrific things which were like men but unlike them, which were like fish but older than fish, too alien to have emerged naturally from the sea. They had voices, of a sort. They croaked what might have been words to each other, and to the fishermen of the village.
Tabitha loosened her grip on James and took deep breaths. “Mayumi,” she whispered, voice cracking, “what are they doing?”
“They play the Song of Leviathan,” Mayumi answered. “The Music Man Was Not Meant to Hear.”
The three were silent for a moment, looking on with terror at the monstrous spectacle below.
“I have to stop them,” Mayumi said.
“We can’t,” James said. “Impossible. There are too many. Far too many.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Mayumi said. “I have to.”
She started moving quickly through the dense vegetation. Startled, James and Tabitha followed. Neither of them had any idea what was going on, or what Mayumi planned.
The ground which was treacherous in the day was doubly so at night. Branches seemed to assault the trio with malicious intent, even as exposed roots snatched at ankles. Tabitha and James could each feel bruises forming as they reached an exposed slope only a few hundred feet from the village. Mayumi peered down, gathering her courage.
“What the fuck are you thinking?!” Tabitha gasped.
“Leave this alone!” James hissed at Mayumi. “We don’t have to jump in the middle of this!”
Calmly, Mayumi turned and looked at James. He couldn’t meet her eyes.
“We never have to,” was all she said.
Mayumi dropped her backpack and undressed, going completely nude before her partners. James couldn’t help looking at her small, cute body and at the same time feeling ashamed for looking.
“You can’t go in the water,” Tabitha said, almost in a trance. “It wants to destroy us.”
James blinked, confused.
“If I come out,” Mayumi said, ”I’ll come out near here.”
She stumbled down the sharp slope, easing into the cold water before her tiny, nude form was completely lost under the blackness.

Mayumi had thought the music would stop under the water. It had a different source, but it continued. Resonant echoes hammered Mayumi’s entire body, now not only burning in her ears but felt through the core of her being. The music was evil, making sounds which might have been the songs of whales which had gone insane. Of dolphins being smashed into rocks.
You can’t break rocks with your body, Mayumi thought as horror and desperation flooded her chest. You break on the rocks.
She forced her fear down, swimming deeper into the black waters. She swam deeper than even James could have with his training in the Royal Marines. Normal people couldn’t go that deep and survive.

James had a rope wrapped around his shoulder, and had his Weatherby .320 in his hands. He and Tabitha waited anxiously.
“If she comes out,” James said, “she may be trailing big frogs behind her.”
Tabitha nodded. “We’d never be able to get down the slope. They’d catch her at the bottom of the hill.”
“Should I shoot her, if that’s the case?” James asked.
“I’d want you to, if it were me,” Tabitha said. After a moment, she amended “if you couldn’t save me.”
“Right.”

Blood flowed from Mayumi’s nose. She couldn’t adjust completely to the sea. Better than almost anyone, but not completely. Her lungs were starting to burn, already starved. Her eyes stung, though she could still see.
She could see the Deep Ones. Their dark shapes moved easily through the water, only ignoring her because of their mesmerized singing of the music of madness. There were so many of them. Mayumi knew now that she should never have told her partners that she might surface again. She couldn’t. There were too many. There was no way.
Mayumi swam deeper.

For a long time, neither person spoke.
“Are we friends?” James asked, trying to break the tension.
“I think so,” Tabitha said. “It’s just that we don’t really have common interests, so we wouldn’t spend time together if we didn’t depend on each other...and...we’re all so different...”
James smirked. “So, no?” he said.
“Not really,” Tabitha agreed. “I just didn’t want to say it.”
“Right,” James looked at the water. “Not while one of us would die for the others.”
“Right.”

The music was shattering. Mayumi could no longer think, but only allow her focus and magic to guide her. The Deep Ones floated past her, unnoticed and oblivious. The body of Leviathan was forming, and would likely crush her before she could reach the source of the music.
The largest deep ones, now visible through the gloom, were in a circle. They sang, responding to the call from the surface. Their bulging eyes saw nothing except the notes, their minds given to Leviathan. Mayumi swam towards them, thought absent from action.
Mayumi’s mouth opened, sea water filling her lungs. She sang back at the Deep Ones, blood emerging from her throat as her mind snapped. Above her, Leviathan thrashed.

“No one is going to remember her,” Tabitha said, breaking another long silence.
“We will,” James answered solemnly. “Friends or not, we will.”
“She’s our friend,” Tabitha said. “Fuck it, I changed my mind. Anybody who’d give their life up for you is your fucking friend! She’s the best friend of everybody in the fucking world, you know that? She just threw her life away for all those fucks who wouldn’t cross the street to spit on her!”
“Not enough will remember, I suppose,” James agreed.
The ground under them shook, almost pitching James down the slope. Tabitha yanked him back.
“Is this it?” James asked. Tabitha wasn’t sure what he meant.
Waves grew, smashing against the steep hill beneath them. Hundreds of feet away, the village of fishermen was engulfed. The men and things like men were reclaimed by the enraged ocean.
James struggled to stand, activating the nightvision scope on his rifle. Next to him, Tabitha also tried to see through the scope, hardly catching glimpses.
The world was awash with green through the scope. Green froth churned on green waters, while a massive mouth devoured the smaller monsters in the water.
Leviathan, James thought immediately before he reordered his mind. Nothing, he forced himself to think. A storm. Harsh water. Nothing. He switched the nightvision off.
“What is it?” Tabitha tried to take the weapon, but James held it firm.
“Nothing,” James said. “Rough water.”
“It isn’t!” Tabitha growled. “There’s something out there!”
Inhuman roars carried to the pair, and still James refused to give up the rifle. “Don’t look,” he said. “Tell yourself it’s something else. Keep yourself sane.”
Tabitha stared at James, and James stared back. Tabitha let go of the gun.
The roars continued, the shaking hard.
The roars softened, the shaking subsiding.
The roars dulled, the shaking stopped.
And there was silence.
“She isn’t there,” Tabitha said before James even looked.
The slope was bare. Nothing moved.
“We’ll check the village,” James said.
“Okay,” Tabitha felt numb.

It was a half hour before they spotted her, clinging to a rock and bleeding. Without hesitation, they ran to her. Her nose and mouth were oozing blood. She vomited sea water.
“She’s here,” Tabitha felt her eyes stinging as she and James pulled Mayumi’s naked form away from the sea. “She’s okay.”
James looked at Mayumi’s face, haggard and pale. He looked into her eyes.
“We break on the rocks,” she said, and James knew that the person who had left them would never really come back.
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The Call