Papa's Scope, Chapter 2

Part 4: The Dreams

Kaelyn still had the nightmare regularly and each time it was frustratingly identical. Try as she might she could not affect the outcome – she drifted above the town, she saw the darknesses writhing, and they drew her in. Each time she would struggle, thrash, try to shout – nothing worked. That one tentacle, noticing her, would stretch up and reach for her and just as it seemed about to grasp her she would wake, trembling and sweating. When she had the dream now, the whispers would linger for the whole day, just out of the reach of her consciousness. She could hear them – feel them – slithering behind her thoughts, but she could not make out any words she understood nor any meaning other than menace and malice.

As terrible as it was, that nightmare was nothing compared to the new dream; it had started only recently, two months after Papa Greene died. In it, she was sitting in his living room. Everything was just the way it had been the last time she had visited, only days before his murder. He was in his leather easy-chair, smiling over at her. They were talking about something, something banal and boring. Her mind screamed at her to ask him about the scope, about his death, about the nightmare, but again she could not control her actions... until one night, a week after the first time she had it. She summoned all of her willpower and her hand moved, slowly, until her nails dig into her side. The pain of the sharp pinch seemed to release her from the langour that had kept her trapped and helpless and she found herself suddenly able to act as she liked.

“Papa!” He blinked in surprise at her sudden outburst, his words cut off. “Please, Papa, what is happening to me? What happened to you? What are the whispers? Why ca'n't I sleep without these horrible dreams? Why did you have to go?” The words poured out of her, as if a dam had burst and all of the questions she had no outlet for came forth in a torrent.

He smiled sadly. “Kaelyn, my dear, there are some things that must happen. This is how it had to be. There are dark forces in our world, my dear. Things from beyond the stars, which have been here far longer than we. They live – if it can be called living, their manner of existence – outside of time, and beyond our understanding. It is all we can do to resist them, to hold them back from overwhelming all that we love. But we pay such a price...” He shook his head. “I truly wish that it did not have to be you, but fate chooses and we must simply strive to meet it.”

She frowned, frustrated and confused. “What do you mean? Fate? I'm not special! I'm just a normal girl.” Even as she said it, though, she knew it wasn't entirely true – the dreams had sunk deep into her mind, and she knew that they told the same story. Those whispers... no one else could hear them, no one else had the dreams. And she had been seeing things – flashes – out of the corner s of her eyes, for several months now... but when she would turn to look, sure she had seen a writhing tendril or star-white eyes in an inky-black face, there was only her teacher, the priest, a woman in the supermarket...

He could see the struggle in her eyes. “You know that you are. This is not a gift, Kaelyn. It will not bring you joy or power or happiness. But it is yours and you must do what you can with it, because there is no one else.” He leaned towards her, his eyes serious and his expression stern. “Did you heed my warning? Do not look until you are ready to see. I did not heed my own warning, and you will see now what happened.”

He stood and walked to the window, where his telescope was set up, and he bent to look through it. She could see that it was pointed toward the church in the center of the town, and she could see as he put his eye to the eyepiece that his skin paled and he trembled. He jerked himself away as if the scope had held him fast with some power he had to use force to overcome, and he stumbled to his writing-desk. He pulled a sheet of rich paper from a drawer – the same paper that had accompanied the package on her doorstep – and with his antique pen quickly wrote a note, folding it closed and sealing it. He sealed it in an envelope just as there was a knock on his door. Looking toward the sound, his face slack with fear, he wrote those three words just as she remembered them - “Kaelyn, I'm sorry” on the front of the envelope, and then he moved to answer the door.

She tried to cry out, tried to get from the chair, to stop him, suddenly knowing what was coming... but it was as if she were bound with bands of cold steel, unable to move from the chair or even to struggle. All she could do was watch helplessly as he opened the door and stepped back, letting the man who had knocked in. It was the rector from the church in town, but it wasn't – there was something wrong with him. His eyes glowed with the burning white light of the dream-stars, and his shadow writhed, reaching out in inky tendrils.

“You should not have looked, old man. You've seen too much, now.” He reached out and where his hand should have been there was a pair of long, oily tentacles. They writhed and wrapped themselves around her grandfather's limbs as she man's sneering, eerie face drew close to him. “Goodbye, old fool.”

Her Papa started screaming, then, as the tendrils tightened and trembled with the force they exerted on his body. Mercifully, she woke, but his screams rang in her ears in the darkness for hours. She lay there in her bed, shaking, tears and sweat pouring from her to soak the bedclothes, unable to move for fear that something lurking in the darkness just outside of her vision would notice she was awake. She was still there when her mother came to wake her for school.

Part 5: The Church

After that night, Kaelyn spent every waking moment when she wasn't at school researching the church in town. It was nominally Episcopalian in denomination, and its marquee proclaimed it as the 'St. Alhazred's Episcopal Church', presided over by the Rector, Priest Paul Buchanan, formerly of Dunwich, MA. However, she could find no listing of this priest in the official Episcopalian literature, nor was there any mention of a 'St. Alhazred' in any official or unofficial religious documentation she could find on the Internet.

She did, however, find a number of references to that name in connection to a book – or at least a supposed book – called the 'Necronomicon', the Book of Dead Names. As far as she could tell, it was widely considered to be a hoax or a rumor, the legends never having produced any evidence for its actual existence. It was purported to be a codex of ritual and mythology for contacting and dealing with 'Old Ones', creatures from the distant past who seemed to exist outside of what people thought of as 'reality'.

She found the similarities between this information and what her grandfather had told her in the dream to be disturbing – especially when considered with the common implication of cult activity, strange tentacled beasts, and other horrors in the same context as the Old Ones. She became even more resolved to discovering what had happened and how this church was involved in what had happened to her Papa.

It was several weeks later when she made her first real breakthrough, though perhaps 'break-in' would be a better word. She waited for their weekly Sunday service to end and then she sneaked into the Church through a basement window which had been left unlocked. She was very curious, because she had seen at least a dozen more people enter the church before the ceremony than had left afterward, and the main worship hall was empty. As she slipped through the small storage closet she had found herself in and peered into the hall outside of it, she could hear muffled chanting and smell a sharp, foul odor that burned her nose like ammonia.

She stepped out into the hall, seeing it was clear, and immediately froze; she suddenly recognized the chanting. It wasn't in any language she knew or had heard of, but she had heard it before – it was the same as those sibilous, slithering whispers she heard in and after her dreams. She paled and her skin grew cold as it called to mind the nightmare-tentacles, and suddenly she felt as if every shadowy corner in the dimly-lit basement held a monstrosity she could almost see.

She turned and crept towards the door which seemed to be the source of both the odor and the chanting, and as she drew closer she could hear new sounds as well, the soft, wet slapping of scaled flesh and the scrape of claws on stone. She put her hand on the knob, steeled her resolve, and then cautiously opened the door the slightest fraction, peering through the gap. As the caustic ammonia miasma washed over her her eyes filled with stinging tears, but even through them what she saw filled her with horror and revulsion.

In the center of a large, candle-lit chamber, there was a broad pool of – not water, it was too viscous and dark to be water. There was a stone slab on the floor beside the pool, and it was around the slab that the chanters were gathered. They wore long, hooded black robes, embroidered with silver runes that seemed to make her eyes twist as she looked at them. On the slab lay a woman, naked and chained to the stone. Over her crouched a horrific beast, its scaled bulk hiding most of her body from Kaelyn's view. It had large, powerfully muscled legs, its feet ending in webbed, taloned toes, its claws leaving gouges in the slate as it moved. Its body was oddly human, save for the dark green scales and the slime still dripping off of it. Its arms each ended in a pair of long tentacles instead of hands, just as the rector's did in her dream.

She could not help herself, the stench and the creature's disgusting appearance making her gorge rise. She gagged, tasting bile in her throat, and the chanting cut off as the figures turned as one to face the door. The last thing she saw before she slammed it closed and ran for the window she knew was an escape was the creature's face, as it turned to look at her. It had huge, bulbous eyes, glowing white with star-fire, a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth and framed with writhing tendrils, and a scaly frill which rose up from its neck at it hissed at her, rippling with colors that made her mind recoil, colors not natural to her world.

She wasn't sure exactly how she got out, nor how long she ran, but when she awoke in her bed the next morning she was covered in scrapes and scratches from thorns, her clothing torn by branches and full of leaves for the forest. She almost thought it had been a nightmare, until she sat up and saw a single, slime-encrusted bruise around one ankle, where it had grabbed at her as she tried to climb from the window.

Her mother came running at the sound of her panicked, ear-piercing shrieks.