“You're Tamara.”
The Japanese girl nodded somewhat confused. The shadowy ghost of Marie smiled warmly, seemingly full of excitement.
“Mon dieu...you're my granddaughter.” A tear streaked down Veronica's cheek. “Lorne told me about you, but I never got to see...” her words gave out as she motioned for Tamara to come into her arms. She hugged her tightly. Tamara thought she would squeeze the life out of her. Veronica wept tears of joy as she held the two children, repeatedly kissing Tamara's head and stroked her silk-like black hair.
Hiromitsu stood stoically. He was confused. “But, Tamara... your mother... Shantigra is my sister...” He turned to the beautiful Asian ghost in the inter-dimensional window.
Her voice was soothing in his mind. “I am all these things... mother, daughter, wife, sister... You help me remember who I am... or was.” These thoughts were not just shared with Hiromitsu. Her voice sang in Veronica, Dante, and Tamara's mind also.
Tamara stood up out of Veronica's embrace, but still held her hand. “I have seen the pathways, mama,” she spoke to the Remnant-Marie. “I know the Gateways and Portals and windows. I can open it and you can be with us!”
“Might I hold my daughter again?” Veronica asked hesitantly, hopefully.
The shadowy Remnant-Marie placed her hand against the inter-dimensional barrier and smiled sadly at Tamara. “My love... I can never enter your world. I simply cannot exist in your world... My time has passed. It's your world now,” and as she spoke these final words, she faded into the shadow's embrace. The circular window shimmered and buckled for a moment and closed.
By this time the sun had peeked over the horizon. The entire eastern sky was a dark blue and all but the brightest stars had vanished. The silvery-blue light of the moon was replaced by a warmer candle-coloured light of the dawn sun. Colour started to creep into the ocean, the beach's sand, and the forest behind them. But stranger still, the more the sun rose, the more noticeable became its bizarre shape, for it too was elongated and stretched. No longer a circle or sphere, it was as irregular and mad as was the moon.
Veronica looked at Hiromitsu. “This is the strangest place. Where are we?”
Tamara answered. “We're on Nyarlathotep's special island.”
Chapter 7: Amber
The last residues of Lorne's consciousness were faltering. They were struggling for ascendance, but ultimately failing; being absorbed in the Amber-facet's memories. Becoming little more than memories himself.
She hadn't controlled her teleportation. It was too new to Amber, and the evanescence of the Lorne-facet had left nothing but vague memories and instincts. His instinctive destination was the only place he could remember – home.
When Amber materialized in the flooded Bellefeuille Maison, just outside Montreal, nothing was familiar to her.
The carpets were soaking wet on Amber's bare feet as she walked through the house. As she looked at framed family pictures, the Lorne-facet struggled to remember and identify them.
His mother-in-law, Veronica.
His wife, Marie.
His father-in-law.
Marie when she was a young child.
A young blond boy with an aged Veronica – Lorne couldn't recognize.
They were all strangers to Amber. They were becoming strangers to Lorne's memories now too.
Lorne's divided and diminishing facet was confused. Where were the pictures of his daughter? Where was Tamara?
A flash of deep emotions overcame him. He had saved them. He thought. He had saved them all! And they hunted him down. They killed Marie! They tried to kill his sweet baby Tamara!
Anger and rage tore through what little was left of his memories! These were the searing emotions that raged through Amber as well! The world abandoned her! Left her to die! Alone!
Behind the subconsciousness of both Amber and the Lorne-facet The Whisperer worked. Stitching together selected memories and aspects of the dying Lorne-facet. Cultivating and grooming Amber to Its will and manipulations and machinations, whispering half-truths and delusions into her mind.
“They allowed my baby to die!” Amber raged as she stormed through the flooded house. “They stole my one chance of redemption!”
“They killed my Marie!” the fractured Lorne-facet's patience had boiled over. “They took my sweet Tamara from me!” Amber was speaking Lorne's raging thoughts out loud.
Suddenly, Amber's face changed from teeth-grinding anger to sorrow. Tears flooding over her cheeks as she wept her next words. “...no... I... I fucked up my life... my baby's life... I failed...” Her pain became overwhelming and crushing.
The Whisperer's influence billowed forth beneath her mind, pulling her strings. It moved, shuffled, squeezed, and reorganized her mind. Only rage and anger could stifle the pain, it told her.
Lorne's voice boomed through the corridors of their multimind. “They took everything!”
“Everything,” echoed Amber. “They took everything!” As she screamed the final word, a psychic concussion wave shattered the framed pictures.
“Alone!” her voice was shrill and parched now. “Alone, they let me stumble and fail. They let me believe it was me!” The Whisperer's toxic delusions were entrenched now.
“My baby was the one good thing that came out of my life!” Amber half shouted, half wept. “They took him away! They took away my one chance to make a difference away!” She had absolutely accepted herself as the victim now. The Whisperer reinforced her delusion; It whispered the lie into her mind. “They stole my chance at redemption! No!” Her eyes scanned the room, searchingly. “No!” she bellowed. “They stole my salvation!”
Amber walked in front of a mirror in the flooded hallway. She briefly saw Lorne in the reflection. His face faded as she absorbed the remnants of his memory into the dark recesses of her multimind.
She stared at herself. Her face was red and flushed; her blue eyes piercing. Her chest heaved with her enraged breathing. Her eyes rimmed red from her tears. She looked at herself as a stranger. Her blonde hair messed and uncombed. She might have been pretty once... once. “You want a monster?” she thought.
“Extinction,” she grunted through clenched teeth. The Whisperer spoke directly through her now. “They deserve annihilation. They deserve nothing less than their extinction!”
She heard The Whisperer's call. She knew where to find It. Distant. Desolate. Isolated. A Cyclopean watery graveyard. A Necropolis. It would become the very source of humanity's extinction. Sunken R'lyeh!
As she watched her reflection in the mirror she saw her body dissolve into a mist and for the briefest of moments before she teleported, she saw Its tentacled face in the reflection.
Chapter 8: The Storm of Humanity
It looked like a crude carving of an octopus. The white paper-like bark on the birch tree had been peeled back.
It was the third carving like this they came across. The first were on Durian tree trunks, although they couldn't inspect them closely due to the mulch surrounding the tree. Its old and decomposed fruit and husks reeked and formed a bed of dried thorns.
This was the first of the carvings they could inspect in minute detail. It wasn't so much carved as it was chiseled. Veronica ran her fingers over it, feeling its texture. “We're not alone here,” Veronica said, glancing back at Hiromitsu. “Do you think it could be tribal?”
“It does not look fresh,” Hiromitsu stated. “I wonder how old it is.”
“Where did you bring us?” he asked Tamara.
She shrugged her shoulders. “We need to continue that way,” she changed topics, pointing towards the island's centre. “I can sense Nyarlathotep that way.”
“I can feel him too,” added Dante.
Veronica put her arm around him pulling him close, kissing his head and smelling his hair. “Shh, it's okay. We're not in a rush.”
“I can sense another too. You're right mama Ver. We're not alone,” said Dante while looking at Tamara for some kind of confirmation.
Tamara closed her eyes and attempted to reach out her mind. She slowed her breathing and stretched her limits of awareness.... but all she could sense were the island's strange microscopic time-space curvatures, and that central artificial energy field. She couldn't pick up anyone's thoughts. Something was blocking her, interfering with her.
“I can't see,” she said with a pout to Dante. “You try.”
“What? I... I don't know how.”
Tamara held Dante's hand. “It's okay, I'll help!”
Dante took a deep breath. He was shocked how quickly it happened. It took no effort on his part. It came instinctively and second-nature to him. Where before he may have been empathic, now he was telepathic.
He immediately became aware of Veronica's and Hiromitsu's thoughts, but the outer edge of his awareness was expanding at a racing speed.
They were correct. They weren't the only ones on this island. There was another. Half delirious and hiding – Leaman was his name - he barely remembered his name himself.
Dante picked up the consciousness of someone – something? - beneath the island. Its thoughts were strange; half-dead, its thoughts were – slow.
But he couldn't enjoy the luxury of exploring these weird individuals further. The outer edge of his consciousness kept accelerating and expanding; demanding his full attention.
Miles off the island he sensed the thoughts of something terrifyingly alien; The Whisperer Itself! But this one's aura was devastatingly different. It could look back! Its thoughts, Its calling began infiltrating into the sanctity of Dante's mind. But he wasn't alone. Tamara was with him, their minds linked. She instantly blocked and segregated Its toxic whisperings.
The peripheral edge of his awareness continued expanding out in a lightning quick ripple effect. It expanded like this for minutes and minutes... nothing... no one!
How isolated were they? he began to worry. But no sooner did he think this than his mind passed over a trio of naval American warships. There was nearly a thousand men aboard the three destroyers. Their collective thoughts were staggering! It was a barrage of psychically deafening noise. Dante was overwhelmed. He couldn't handle it.
Again, Tamara was with him. She began meditating and exercising Clear Mind – categorizing the cacophony of voices and thoughts and prayers; silencing their fears into a background of white noise.
Still Dante's expanding consciousness rippled across the Earth's surface.
The babbling voices hit a crescendo when his awareness hit New Zealand and Chile simultaneously. Dante felt like he broke through a barrier into a realm of absolute chaos! He cried aloud and physically covered his ears. But again Tamara was with him. She was the calm eye of the storm, the roaring chaos screamed around them, and still Dante's mind raced outwards!
His awareness encompassed half the planet now: Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia and South America.
Dante's mind enclosed 3/4 of the planet when his encircling consciousness encountered both North America and India.
India was the worst. India was where his psychic telepathic expansion stopped. Billions of voices cried out. The tsunami of emotions, wants, desires, thoughts, prayers and fears threatened even Tamara's concentrated centre of serenity.
As Dante cried out to Tamara that it was too much, he couldn't even hear his own thoughts. Tamara's Calm was beginning to erode. Just as she was about to let go, she thought she heard something in the chaos.
Through the screaming vortex she reached out one final thought to Dante. “Just... be... calm... and... listen...”
Hidden behind the raging storm of humanity's fears, envy and delusions he heard it. It was faint, subtle, elusive, evasive. It was The Whisperer. It was in the minds of all humanity. A cancer that had infected the entire planet eons ago.
Madness. Psychosis. Paranoia. Insanity. They were never part of the human condition. They were artificial, inserted into the collective consciousness; manipulated by The Whisperer's Master.
For the most fleeting moment, Dante saw The Whisperer clearly. Krulgh.
It wasn't a sound or Its name. It was Its very identity. Krulgh, high priest of the dead yet dreaming Cthulhu. It was the genesis, the source of all humanity's madness.
And then, It saw him. Tamara's Calm was instantly broken. Dante's expanded mind sprang back – recoiled through the psychic ether.
* * *
Tamara was holding his hand when his consciousness returned to the confines of his body. Dante took Veronica's hand in his other.
Neither Veronica or Hiromitsu were aware of what the children had encountered or experienced. Veronica spoke first, “Is there someone else on the island?” she asked.
Dante's eyes slowly came into focus. “Yes. Yes there is another. His name is Leaman. He has been marooned here for over ten years. I think he is crazy...”
Tamara continued speaking, “...but he is not the danger.”
“Nyarlathotep's not the danger,” Dante blurted out frantically. “We still need to make him go away, but there's a much greater threat.”
Tamara switched to Japanese and spoke to Hiromitsu, “Krulgh intends to awaken Cthulhu! He needs the Symbiot to do it. He has summoned her...”
Dante looked to the sky through the forest's canopy as he finished her thought. “She's coming.”
Chapter 9: Into the Maw of Madness
They could see the island's central clearing from a good distance away, and as they worked their way through the tangled vines and undergrowth their imagination had ample time to dream what they might find. They had expected any number of things, but not what they encountered.
Predominantly there was a pit. A large gaping stony hole in the ground; more like a huge 150 foot quarry, its circling stones carved and stripped bare of all undergrowth. The sound of cascading water found its way up from that massive pit, clearly the island's source of fresh running water.
On the outer edge, overhanging the precipice, lay a fallen tree, its large branch extending over the abyss. Secured by a rope of vine and suspended beneath the large branch hung a large woven casket-sized basket. The rope appeared to extend down into the pit and back up and out, over the branch, in some complicated pulley-like apparatus.
Below the pit's outer rim, on its west side, was an expansive and shallow-inclined embankment and upon this embankment sat a house. Although its method of construction was more of an elaborate shed of fallen branches and logs, its sheer size suggested anything but a primitive shed. Its roof ran flush with the quarry's upper rim and was layers upon layers of forest mulch, fallen twigs and branches, leaves and debris. Had they approached the pit from the west it may have been completely camouflaged.
“He's down there,” both Dante and Tamara said, approaching the edge of the pit. “I can sense him. Nyarlathotep's down there!”
Hiromitsu inspected the coffin-sized basket, pulling and testing the wound rope. “It seems impressively solid and stable.”
Veronica stood nearer the house, her eyes nervously surveying and scanning the surrounding area. “We're not alone. You know we're not alone?”
“Otouchan Hiro,” began Tamara, “We need to go into the cave,” she pleaded with urgency. “There isn't time.”
Hiromitsu began scanning the surrounding edge of the cavern. “We will need to stand watch – Guard!”
Dante and Tamara climbed into the large basket, Hiromitsu holding it steady for them, his eyes scanning the complicated path the rope followed through and around the fallen tree's branches, his engineer background analyzing and struggling to understand what he was seeing. But once the children were seated and the rope pulled, it lowered them, perfectly mimicking a pulley.
Necropolis: Book 4: Hybrids Page 4
