Next❧
Index
thulhu woke up.
Underground.
In the dark.
Alone.
That wasn’t right—he should have awoken wherever Aix was. He looked around, trying to get his bearings. A tunnel, that looked like it had been carved on purpose, with a grid carved into the walls, with inscriptions in each square, and psionic residue of old sorrow, and loss, and death.
What was this place? Cthulhu moved through the halls, trying to understand, and eventually came to a heavy door with a lever beside it, many memories telling him to pull it. The door juddered and strained, obviously half-destroyed, but managed to open just enough for him to squeeze through, though it took him an hour to carefully do so. Once through, he found more light, coming from windows caked with neglect, and carved and intricate statuary that made clear he was in some kind of temple. But what sort of temple was so neglected that the roof was caved in?
And then he saw one of the squares had been opened, revealing it was hollow, and its contents, a long box, were on the floor, the box broken open, an incomplete skeleton inside.
And it all became chillingly clear.
Humans.
Humans put other humans in here. And… what?
Aix had only shown him humans at their best, but… Cthulhu knew Aix had known the worst of humanity too, and had started to understand his other encounters in a new light as well….
Was this… Cthulhu paled in fear. Was this a torture chamber? But there was, he calmed himself with the thought, there was no residue of that kind of misery. There was loss, and sadness, but it was sort of quiet, not sudden. So what was this place? He wished he knew how to read human writing….
Well, he had to touch one of the bones, then—it was always a risk to read the residue directly from a once-living object, but he needed to know.
Touching one of the bones, he saw a life that had been completed, an old woman who had died in her bed at home after going to sleep. From then on, the residue was from others—love and loss, and sorrowful acceptance.
Did humans just put their dead in a box and forget about them? Cthulhu tried to understand, setting the bone back down in the box. Why would they do that? They loved each other well into death, like Cthulhu’s people, and would have remembered them. So why were they paradoxically put in these boxes-within-boxes, in this warehouse, and then the warehouse allowed to decay? But it didn’t look like it had been built meaning to decay, so… was this civilisation lost?
Cthulhu explored every aisle and room, looking out the windows, trying to follow the air currents to the outside. Eventually, he did find the door, which was held closed but in disrepair enough that there was a hole he could squeeze through. This took another hour, but he eventually found himself in a field of green plants and flowers, dotted with stones and statuary, similarly in disrepair. He walked among them, and one was a statue of a human with strange wings, head bent and face covered in their hands. Was that what humans did to express sorrow? It must be.
By now, twilight was dimming the sky, and it was night beneath the trees. Cthulhu found the border demarcated with a metal structure of connected poles set into the ground, and wondered if he should stay where he was—Azathoth always cautioned them to stay in one place if they were lost, so they could be easily found; but Cthulhu had already been found, and he needed food. He wished he had asked Aix more about what food humans ate, but there had been a little bit about it in Aix’s overflow thoughts, enough for him to discern that it was likely he could find something among human foods he could eat.
The streets were abandoned, but they were streets, and the buildings were abandoned but gave him a sense of architecture and what these humans valued. These were humans like Aix, from the shape of the buildings—they matched with the buildings in Aix’s thoughts and memories. There were no humans, but the memories of them were everywhere, and Cthulhu moved slowly, having to contend with them, until…
There was an image of Mommy here! Cthulhu felt his—her?—presence, in the past, and started to follow the strongest paths, getting to know her as he did—both from her perspective and the perspective of every human that had met her.
They didn’t like her.
She didn’t notice.
They’d been cold, and she’d thought they were being kind, for the most part; there were a few incidents of overwhelming rejection, and she had been lonely for a mate, but had met someone, a beautiful someone, who had been nervous and kind and had not been lonely at all but had been pleased for the attention of such an attractive girl, who could converse on evolution and didn’t seem to have any of the usual womanly habits that he found so difficult.
People liked him, but Cthulhu started to realise he and her, and Aix, they were all… the same shape of mind, different from the other human minds here. Different in a way that humans noticed, had no word for, but nonetheless rejected. A few didn’t—the humans centred around one of the buildings on the hill, the ‘school’…
School.
Cthulhu realised there were two schools—the one with the ‘she’ humans, and the one with the ‘he’ humans. They learned completely different things, were they eusocial? Aix had said humans didn’t have that sort of division, and yet… these ones did.
‘Hello.’
Cthulhu realised he’d been so absorbed in the psionic residue that he hadn’t noticed the present, and took some time disentangling himself from it, and experiencing time as linear again. There was a person in front of him, not a human, but bipedal and with similar arrangement of features.
Hello.
‘Oh, that’s where your mouth is,’ said the being.
Where am I?
‘Depends on who you ask, what season it is—’
Is this Turtle Island?
The being paused, long ears twitching, turning fully toward Cthulhu. ‘Well! In that case, you’re in what used to be Old Mattapoisett. The folk that messed about and summoned your lot call this village “Arkham”, though. After the Calamity, the place was abandoned.’
Cthulhu tried to go through all that Aix had told him, all that he’d learned from wandering around. Old Mattapoisett. Are there any people left from there? I understand there was a genocide.
‘Ah, you’ve talked to sensible humans. Yes, there’s some. Looking for anyone particular?’
Yes, but it is not polite to give names away to strangers.
The being looked disappointed, but laughed. ‘Ah, feck, and you’ve talked to the other kind of sensible humans, then. Well, as your folk and mine have no quarrel, I’ll help you.’ He turned and led Cthulhu some way, to a circle of fungal fruits that had been utilised as a sort of locational form of shifting out of linear time and space. They went through a very old hub on the other end, and Cthulhu said, after a time,
I had no idea people on this planet were capable of this. You’re not humans, who are you?
‘You know now to give away names but you don’t know who we are?’ The entity said, in disbelief, and laughed.
My human and I have not had the chance to speak on many subjects. Cthulhu said apologetically. I was supposed to travel to where he was, after I passed the challenge of learning to communicate with a human fluently. Yet I found myself in Old Mattapoisett, which I understand is thousands of miles away from the location.
‘Ah, I’d wager a guess that’s because of the muckin’ about that was done at Miskatonic—that was the university set up by the English.’
The English… they are the colonising people?
‘Aye, one of them that colonised our folk as well. I expect they’ll try to colonise yours, so be careful and don’t share anything with them you wouldn’t want used against you or stolen.’
I will remember that.
‘Your human give you anything other than a name that might help find them?’
Cthulhu thought on the discovery of the Baby. Sleepy Hollow.
‘Ah! You know about the child then? Good, I’ll take you straight there.’
Do your people have a name for yourselves, or is that also a name that is impolite to ask?
‘It is, but we’re often called The Folk, and you can tell that to your human when he asks.’
They stepped through into a younger copse-wood, at the crux of some desire paths through cleared woodland; the entity pointed away from the path and into the trees and brush, where there was a low barrier of stacked stones, and the ground rose into a hill beyond it. ‘That way, follow the gravestones—do you know what a grave is?’
No.
‘Humans bury their dead in the ground and put a stone at their head that says the dead one’s name and the time they lived, and how they died. It’s odd, but it gives them a little shrine to cry over. They get very upset if somebody eats their dead, hence the burying.’
Cthulhu thought on this quietly, as the entity left, and then there was another,
‘Oh, hi!’
There was a human with another animal attached to them by a strap. The animal on the strap was very fluffy and white, and had a softer but just as humanly friendly intelligence, tail wagging. The human was a different colour than Aix, a darker one, with something on his head that looked pleasingly like tendrils, though they did not move and seemed to be made of black keratin. His eyes were also darker.
Hello. Cthulhu said, excited to meet another human, excited that he was finally able to communicate correctly. I am going to the house that way. He pointed, as the other entity had.
‘Ah,’ said the human. ‘I thought you might have come from there, yeah. That’s the Averay estate.’
What is that animal you have attached to yourself? Cthulhu asked, too curious to leave just yet.
‘This is my dog, his name is Hap. You wanna pet him?’ The human ran their hands over Hap in a firm sort of manner, wiggling the large ruff of white fur around Hap’s neck, ‘Here, this is how. Let him sniff your hand first.’
Cthulhu let the human guide him, and Hap sniffed his hand before going back to letting his long red tongue hang out.
‘Go on, it’s okay, he likes you.’
Cthulhu imitated the human’s motions, You are very soft, Hap.
The dog was very pleased to know this, and very pleased to meet Cthulhu, and very pleased to be outside with his human. He was a very pleased animal, generally.
‘Good boy, Hap,’ the human said. ‘Well, we ought to go. I promised him a good run, and there’s a group of tourists somewhere behind me that’re from The City, and you don’t want to end up going viral on the internet.’
Cthulhu wasn’t sure what that was, but the impression was clear enough—the human was concerned for his safety, and knew that the best way to keep him safe was for him to not be seen. Going Viral On The Internet was the opposite of not being seen.
Your advice is appreciated. Cthulhu said, and was relieved when the human reacted favourably, smiling.
‘Be safe!’ had the ring of a greeting, and it proved to be thus as the human went on the path, dog trotting happily ahead of him.
Be Safe. What a loving working of will to leave someone with. Cthulhu marvelled again at how friendly humans could be to everyone, as he turned and went up the hill, eventually finding that, yes, there were gravestones, overgrown but kept clear of leaves, clean and maintained by some intelligent hand. They became more clear as he journeyed, and there was not simply sorrow here, but joy, and playfulness of all kinds, and laughter.
A human emerged from the glass part of the building, a sharp tool in one of his hands, though it was not held in threat. ‘Hello,’ he said, and was all over warm and powerful like Aix. ‘You must be Aix’s young man. Come in, we were just having luncheon.’
Next❧