Cthulhu Attacks!: Book 1: The Fear Read Online Free PDF Page A

cultists ) worshipers to join them, and before Kristen knew it, she was smiling at them, almost laughing herself. Why, she had no idea, for these people were certainly about to slit her throat for finding their secret location.
    “I’m sorry if I interrupted,” she said and waded one step closer to gauge their reaction. “If this is the wrong time—”
    “Not at all, Kristen,” Howard said. “In fact, you’ve come at just the right time. It’s an amazing coincidence, in fact, or perhaps not a coincidence at all. Something entirely unprecedented is about to happen, and you’re here to see it. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if your arrival wasn’t the final signal that, truly, Tulu is rising. We felt it, and now that you’re here, the prophecy has been confirmed.”
    “Do you all live as ( savages ) primitive people?”
    “We live in trailers not far from here, dear,” Howard said. “We have TV, you know. That’s where they get their English lessons!”
    She waded a few steps closer. Was this some kind of Society for Creative Anachronism, like Civil War reenactors making everything authentic, down to the last detail? The men’s skin looked scaly, just like that of the Tulu followers in Papua New Guinea. The women’s breasts were uncovered and pendulous. This was more than some kind of playacting, but they made the whole thing seem no weirder than the swingers’ clubs researched ad nauseam by some of her male Anthropology 101 students.
    “Won’t you join us?” Howard asked, the children’s circle opening up a space for her. “We’re not cannibals, if that’s what you’re worried about. Some of our grandfathers and grandmothers were, certainly, but we catch fish or grow what we eat. Also, on Feast Day, I drive to KFC to bring back a couple of Bucket Meals.”
    She smiled at his warmth and waded toward the worshipers, the water getting shallower with each step until she was out of the mire and standing on merely moist ground. She was silently invited to join hands with the youngest tribe members, who opened a space for her in their circle. “Howard, may I ask a question?”
    “I can only imagine it will be the first of many. Of course.”
    “What is Tulu? ”
    As one, every head whipped around to indicate the small but singular idol on top of the altar. They started mumbling then, all of them, even Howard turning his back to Kristen to face the idol. Their words were nothing like English, or the Papuan Kristen had learned, or any kind of Pidgin English, or Slavic, or anything she could identify. It was altogether alien. Then, again as one, the congregation fell silent, and Howard and the other elders held up their hands in joy or supplication or both.
    “ Tulu ,” Howard said as he looked into her eyes, “is risen.”
    A shearing agony ripped through Kristen’s head, as scorching and corrosive as if someone had poured molten lead into her eyes and ears. She tried to scream but nothing but a choked click came out of her. She fell to the ground and writhed like an epileptic in grand mal. Her gyrations of absolute torment made her flop into the shallow swamp water. Was she having a stroke? The pain made her unaware of anything that might be happening to the members of the worship group, but after just a few seconds of the exposed-dental-nerve horror, she could tell she was breathing in the foul water and insect larvae and disease, but she could do nothing to keep herself from drowning. She hoped she would drown, actually—the horror inside her head would have to stop then. Between the crushing of her skull and the ingestion of swamp water, her vomit bloomed out into the green water like an undersea volcano. Then tunnel vision turned everything black but the fetid green marsh.
    After a minute or so, the brutal pain stopped, as if shut off by a switch, and as the tunnel opened up again, she found herself lying flat on the moist land of the tiny swamp island. When she was able to focus her teary