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  Some set of choices. Hideous beast or lunatic. I wasn’t sure what I should be hoping for.

  Chapter Six

  After changing into a fresh T-shirt and shorts, I left the house and walked toward the center of New Hope, my body on automatic pilot while my brain pondered my dilemma.

  Whenever I feel depressed or I have something on my mind, a walk down Main Street, then over to the waterfront, usually clears my head. The clean, fresh smell of the salty air rolling in from the ocean, the familiar sound of seagulls squawking for food down by the docks, the storefronts that hadn’t changed a bit since I was a young boy—it all combined to make me feel at home. Every crack in the sidewalk, every cobblestone by the pier, every face on the streets, they were all as familiar to me as the furniture in my own living room. Small towns are like that; everything is so ingrained in the memory that if something changes, like a store going out of business or the police chief getting a new truck, it’s like looking in the mirror one morning and finding a huge blemish on your nose.

  For the longest time, Melissa had been my walking partner, but lately I’d been traversing the streets and alleys of New Hope more often than not by myself. Sometimes I felt lonely, remembering how it had been to talk with her as we strolled through town, but in a way her absence had also been good for me, helping me get used to her not being around anymore.

  The early afternoon sun was warm on my back when I got to Main Street. My first stop was Nellie’s Sweet Shoppe, where I bought a pack of gum and a chocolate bar. I made sure to count out the money slowly and display my malignant-looking hands to old Mrs. Cameron.

  “How are you today, Mr. Black?” Mrs. Cameron’s greeting was the same as always. She placed my candy in a small paper bag and put my change in my repulsive palm without batting an eye.

  If anything, my hands looked worse then than they had in my kitchen. The veins were more prominent and my flesh was sprouting irregular patches of flaking, peeling skin. The sickly color had spread well past my wrists.

  “All right, I guess.” What could I say? Look at me; can’t you see I’m a monster? Seeing things was bad enough. Publicly raving about my hallucinations would only earn me a one-way ride to the mainland.

  I left the store as quickly as possible. As I wandered down Main Street, I repeated my experiment at the drugstore, purchasing a newspaper whose headline shouted “New Hope Center of Unexplained Electrical Storm”. After that, I visited several other businesses and made sure to shake hands with, or wave to, several shop owners and customers. Not once did anyone recoil from my gruesome digits.

  By the time I reached the town’s only diner, I’d resigned myself to having a long talk with my parents that night and asking them to make an appointment with the doctor for me. Maybe it was just the stress of studying for my SATs. Hell, for all I knew, there could have been a streak of madness in the family tree no one had ever told me about. I could hear my parents already: “Oh, the same thing happened to crazy old Uncle Chet. He used to think his closet was a doorway to another universe.”

  The fragrant odors of bacon, hamburgers, meatloaf and fried clams twined together in the air outside the Waterfront Diner and set off an explosion of saliva in my mouth. I realized I hadn’t eaten anything since dinner the previous night—the candy I’d bought still sat in my pocket, and my breakfast was in the garbage at home.

  I dug into my pocket and counted my money. Thirteen dollars and some change. More than enough for a burger, fries and a large Coke. By then it was almost two o’clock, and all the walking I’d done had me thirsty. I sat down at the counter and grabbed a menu from the holder, wondering if I’d have enough cash to add an ice cream sundae to my order.

  “Morning, Sean. How goes it?” I looked up from the menu in surprise. Marty Sloan, dressed in his usual food-stained white pants, T-shirt and apron, put a Coke down in front of me.

  “Uh, hi, Mr. Sloan,” I managed to stammer out. He’d never spoken to me before, not even when I came in with my parents. In fact, he rarely spoke to anyone under the age of twenty unless he absolutely had to. It was a well-known fact around town that the owner of the Waterfront Diner enjoyed the presence of kids and teenagers about as much as he did food critics. Or deodorant.

  “What can I get ya today?” A broad smile showcased several missing teeth but looked genuine nonetheless. His body odor, a heady mix of sweat, grease and overripe cheese, threatened to pummel the tantalizing smells of the food into submission.

  “I’ll have a hamburger and fries. Please.” In my confusion, I forgot all about my sundae.

  “Comin’ right up.” He leaned forward, causing me to hold my breath, and lowered his voice to a whisper. “This one’s on the house. But don’t let anyone know. Can’t have people thinkin’ I’m givin’ food away.” Then he was heading back to the kitchen, moments before I thought I’d start coughing.

  Just when you think things can’t get any stranger, I thought.

  I put the menu away, catching another glimpse of my repulsive hands. Their color had grown even more hideous, if that was possible, like I’d just crawled out of a grave.

  Several people passed by the counter as they headed in or out. All of them made it a point to say hello to me, even people I barely recognized.

  I was beginning to feel like the butt of an immense practical joke. Half the people smiling and waving at me wouldn’t have known me from a cement block a day ago. But what kind of joke is it where everyone is extra nice to you? And who would do something like that, and why?

  Before I could digest this latest addition to a day full of oddities, Sloan placed a giant double burger and a basket of steaming steak fries in front of me. My stomach growled in anticipation, sending actual tremors of hunger through my midsection.

  Maybe I just needed to eat something.

  I thanked him again and doused the greasy patties in ketchup and mustard, layered on some lettuce, tomato and onion, and prepared to take a giant bite.

  I had the sandwich halfway to my mouth, which was open and waiting, when all hell broke loose.

  The tentacles burst from my oral cavity, five or six of them, each one as thick as my index finger and tapering to rounded ends no wider than the head of a cotton swab. They started out as a pale, pale pink where they emerged from my lips and darkened to bloodred at their quivering tips. A series of ridges, visible as the appendages squirmed and writhed, ran down the undersides, like the scales of a snake’s belly.

  The prehensile extensions wrapped themselves around my food, pulled it from my frozen hands, and withdrew into my mouth. My throat expanded in reptilian fashion to swallow the burger whole, while the boneless appendages returned to whatever place inside me they’d been lurking.

  It happened so fast I didn’t even have time to choke.

  I looked around, anticipating startled gasps and exclamations of fear from nearby diners.

  No one was paying the slightest attention to me.

  Mr. and Mrs. Coleman, two stools to my left, were calmly spooning up mouthfuls of Marty’s famous clam chowder. Just past them, a man in a business suit was placing his order with Maggie, the skinny blonde lady who’d worked the counter for as long as I could remember.

  To my right, three men in stained coveralls and rubber work boots discussed the previous night’s Red Sox game while they hungrily devoured the meatloaf special.

  “Boy, you sure was hungry, Sean.”

  Marty Sloan stood before me again, wiping his hands on his apron and adding another layer of grease to the weeks-old strata already layered there.

  A lone tentacle wormed its way out of my still-open mouth, descended into the French fries, snared two in python-like fashion, dipped them into a glob of ketchup and retreated again. My throat gave a reflexive swallow.

  Sloan never batted an eye.

  “Let me know if you want a refill on your Coke.” He walked away, shout
ing for Maggie to put another pot of coffee on.

  My mind screamed in terror but my mouth stayed silent. I wanted to curl up and hide, just pass out and wait in blessed oblivion, but I felt none of the dizziness that comes with a fainting spell. No black spots crossed my vision.

  Even my stomach felt calm.

  “This can’t be happening,” I whispered.

  I slid off my stool and ran for the door, suddenly desperate to be away from everyone, to escape the confines of the diner with its walls and noise and crowds.

  I raced down Main Street, heading for the wharf. I wanted to smell the salt air, splash cold water on my face.

  Wake up from the crazy nightmare my life had become.

  I reached the first of the benches that formed a line down Water Street, grasped the top of it with dead-gray hands. As I stared out at the ocean, my dream from the night before came back to me.

  The dream, I realized. That was the turning point, the nexus of my crisis. Before then, my life had been normal. Since then, I’d been living in some kind of dreadful fantasy.

  That place, those words.

  Yog-Sothoth.

  Shub-Niggurath,

  Azathoth.

  The world swam around me. Colored shapes filled my field of view, rainbow paramecia glided across my eyes. Pictures formed in my mind: vague visions of enormous tentacled hydra, whorling maelstroms of impossible hues, winged demons and ambulating giants with features too grotesque to contemplate.

  These apparitions terrified me, not because of their alienness but rather because of their familiarity. I felt that if I could view them more clearly, break through the veil of obscurity that prevented me from seeing all the horrible details, I could match these blasphemous monstrosities to the words that had summoned their images, which even now filled my stomach with sick loathing.

  A black circle rose up amidst the vile creatures, its size impossible to gauge but which nevertheless gave an impression of enormity, of unimaginable height and width. Flaming bursts of violet, red and purple surrounded it like a demented corona around an ebon sun. The center of this disk bulged toward me as if a great weight pressed against it from the other side.

  The other side of what? I wondered.

  A strange compulsion filled me, an unnatural desire to see what lay beyond that sinister sphere, even as a part of me screamed to run away, to avoid touching it at all costs.

  I reached out a hand toward the disk.

  Something touched me, and I screamed.

  Chapter Seven

  “Hey, Sean. What brings you down here?”

  I stumbled to the side, still straddling the line between the real world and the hallucinatory realm of the giants. Light and dark fought for supremacy in my head, with light ending up victorious as Melissa’s radiant beauty swam into focus, backlit by the healthy yellow of the sun, framed by the deep azure of the sky and sea behind her.

  The bright sunshine caused me to blink rapidly, and for a brief moment the darkness returned and a part of me went away, leaving someone—something—in control of me.

  “Uga ye durresh amu enki tiamet!”

  My vision cleared and Melissa still stood there, her face speaking volumes in its impassiveness. I knew I had spoken aloud, but she acted as if I’d merely said hello.

  “Damn it!” I ground my fists against my eyes and blindly kicked at the wooden bench. So far gone was I in my fury that I felt no pain from the impact.

  “What’s wrong?” Melissa’s question carried no more emotion, no more concern, than if I’d just expressed trouble over my math homework.

  Not that I’d ever had that particular problem.

  “What’s wrong? Either I’m going fucking crazy or this whole town is. I should ask you what’s wrong. I spout words in a strange language and you don’t even react. A freakin’ squid crawls out of my mouth and everyone in the diner acts like they don’t see it.”

  I grabbed her arms, relishing the familiar, normal feel of her flesh. “Look at my hands! I’m turning into some kind of sea creature and no one says a word. You tell me what’s wrong!”

  “Ow! You’re hurting me.” Melissa drew back and I let her go, reluctant to relinquish the one thing I knew was real. “No one’s crazy, Sean. Maybe you just need to put that brain of yours to use. There’s more to life than science or math.”

  “Huh?” I didn’t know what else to say. Her reply was an enormous non sequitur; I couldn’t comprehend where her line of thinking was moving. “What are you talking about?”

  “There’s history, for one thing. New Hope is full of it. You’ve lived here for years, but you’ve never bothered to learn about your town. Maybe you should rectify that.”

  She flashed a quick wink at me, then turned and started down the path toward the park. I could see some of her friends from the track team already there, standing around in shorts and T-shirts. One of them waved in our direction, although I doubted the girl meant to include me in her greeting.

  “Wait,” I said. “What does history have to do with anything?”

  Melissa tossed an impish grin over her shoulder at me. “History is everything, Sean.”

  I called out to her again, but she kept walking, flicking one hand up in a goodbye gesture. The sun ignited her hair into a shining ball of golden fire, a comet on a trajectory that left me alone once more, only now my thoughts were more confused than ever. With a sigh, I turned my back to the park. And found myself staring across the town square directly at the library.

  My legs were moving before I made the conscious decision to follow Melissa’s advice.

  Chapter Eight

  “The history of New Hope? We’ve got plenty of books on that subject. Follow me, Mr. Black.”

  Eleanor Watkins, head librarian of New Hope Library, slid past the long, wooden counter and motioned for me to follow her across the wide expanse of the main reading room. As usual, all the tables were empty; for the most part, New Hope’s citizens preferred sitcoms and Jeopardy! to academic pursuits. I trailed behind Miss Watkins’ skeletally thin frame, the click-clock of our footsteps the only sound in the cavernous room. The towering ceiling and faraway walls paradoxically amplified and muted all noise at the same time, creating a muffling effect that made it difficult to judge where any particular sound came from.

  I expected her to stop at one of the many rows of books that formed three sides of the reading room, the fourth taken up by a series of wide windows that looked out over the ocean. Instead, she led me past the thousands of tomes gathering dust in New Hope’s least utilized building and into a smaller room filled with cubicles where computers had taken the place of the outdated microfilm machines.

  “Where are we going?” I stage-whispered to her, as we continued into a dimly lit hallway I’d never been down before.

  “The books you want are in a special section,” Miss Watkins responded, her white hair a beacon in the murky light.

  At the end of a hall was a single door, marked Authorized Personnel Only. “Go down two flights of stairs,” she told me. “The room you want is the first door to the left.” She handed me an old-fashioned skeleton key, apparently oblivious to my mutated condition. “You’ll need this down below. Take as much time as you want.”

  She squeezed her small, bony frame past me in the narrow hall and returned the way we’d come, leaving me alone in the gloom.

  I thought about turning around and following her. The idea of going into a musty basement and perusing mildewed treatises on colonial history suddenly seemed a poor way to spend a summer afternoon. Besides, what could ancient history possibly tell me about the strange turn my life had taken over the past twenty-four hours? If anything, I needed to be studying science fiction.

  But something about Melissa’s tone, as if she knew something I didn’t, forced me to move forward. I reached out and slowly grasped the doorknob, ove
rcome by a sudden hope it would be locked. If it was, I could go home and forget about whatever was waiting for me downstairs.

  However, it turned easily in my inhuman hand and I pushed the door open, accepting that fate had something other than hot chocolate and television in store for me.

  A single lightbulb, covered in dust and dead insects, cast a dim yellow glow over the landing. I could just make out a similar light one floor below me. Everything in between was so dark as to be almost in twilight. I carefully made my way down the stairs, gripping the handrail in case I missed a step.

  When I’d descended two levels, I exited the stairwell and located the first door to the left. Inside, I found myself in a darkened room. I felt along the wall until I touched a light switch. The room was long, almost as long as the reading room far above me, with rows of books to both sides. With only one direction available to me, I started forward, trailing one hand along the dusty shelves as I walked.

  Most of the books rested beneath too many layers of cobwebs and dust for me to read the titles, but occasionally I came across one whose spine bore legible letters. Cantus Circaeus. De daemonialitate et incubus et succubus. De occulta philosophia. Magia Mathematica. De Vermis Mysteriis.

  My knowledge of Latin was limited to the little I’d picked up in order to understand etymology and taxonomy, but I quickly grasped that I wasn’t in the history section.

  Incubus and Succubus. The Philosophy of the Occult. Magic and Mathematics. The Mysteries of the Worm.

  The room seemed to grow warmer around me, and I remembered the stentorian voice bellowing in my nightmare. Azathoth! Tulzscha! Cthulhu! Yog-Sothoth! Shub-Niggurath!

  Down in the dark, creepy basement of the library, those words—names?—no longer seemed so imaginary, as if in this room it would be acceptable, even expected, to speak them. I passed another book whose cover was dust free, and considered drawing it from its place on the shelf and perusing the contents. Malleus Maleficarum. However, when I reached out for the leather-clad tome, I felt an immediate repulsion to it and quickly pulled my hand away. Continuing forward, I wondered who had been down there recently and what their business with the arcane volumes had been.