Cthulhu Attacks!: Book 1: The Fear (3 page)

Stop that
, she admonished herself.

So
Tulu
wasn’t a curse word, wasn’t an interjection, and, judging by the furtive reactions of the elders to Kip’s utterance, wasn’t
exactly
a blasphemy or insult. A blasphemy would earn disapprobation, but not panicked expressions and narrowed, warning eyes at the one who had misspoken.

She didn’t know if this was a term from their native animism—or maybe fish worship, which she had never come across in her research—but it held all the signs of being a religious name spoken out of turn. Again, not a blasphemy, as the elders didn’t just wag their fingers at Kip.
Tulu
was an important, secret word in some hidden religion of these natives.

Kristen bet
Tulu
was a god or perhaps demon. Letting her enthusiasm get the best of her, she asked, “Do you worship this
Tulu?
Or fear it, maybe?”

The elders’ eyes opened wide, as did Kip’s, who had an added fear as he quickly inventoried the openly horrified expressions of his father and the rest of the elders. Each of the older men rose, turned, and went back to their huts, Kip following them but looking back at Kristen and shaking his head, whether at her or at himself, she couldn’t tell.

Not one member of the tribe spoke a word to her the rest of her visit.

But Kristen didn’t care. She was onto something.
Tulu
clearly meant something that they didn’t want anyone outside to know about. She got picked up right on time by the Jeep, flew fourteen hours back to New Orleans, and blew forty dollars on a taxi to her apartment near LSU. The first thing she did, even before unpacking, was hit the Internet and get every bit of information on
Tulu
that existed.

Which was nothing.

The word was mentioned in certain databases as existing in various old science fiction and pulp magazines and novels, but there wasn’t a single mention of the word (a name?) in any academic journals, popular science sources, or even field notes of any anthropologist anywhere, at any time.

It took Kristen two weeks before she gave up. There was nothing to be learned about this word—this devil or god or sacred ancestor or whatever it could represent—and the only way she could ever find out anything more about
Tulu
would be to travel to visit those fishy natives again. Those same Papuans who sealed themselves away from her, not even holding the feast in her honor that researchers always enjoyed their last night with them, and refused to speak a word to her afterward.

She filed
Tulu
away in her brain and knew she would never hear the word again, let alone learn what it meant.

Kristen Frommer, PhD but ABD, could not have been more wrong.

Louisiana Bayou, USA

30°N 92°W, 9000 km from the Event

Following the debacle of Papua New Guinea eighteen months earlier, when Kristen hadn’t found a damned thing that could be considered publishable information, she had languished under a two-year contract as an adjunct at her alma mater, at the lowest rung of the academic ladder, the ninth level of career hell. She taught a 5/5 load, no allowance being made for research, teaching next to retired high school teachers who had gotten bored not being in a classroom as well as current grad students trying to supplement their meager funding.

She taught from the LSU-approved textbooks, using scanned and uploaded materials of her own to inject a little bit of her personal research and experience (
ha!
) into the classes. Most of the students in the cavernous lecture halls paid her little attention, texting or surfing the Web while she lectured, perking up only when they heard something about an upcoming test. It was disheartening, to say the least, but she was proud she hadn’t given up on her research program, such as it was.

Not having the backing to fly halfway across the world and spend months imitating Levi-Strauss among the inhabitants of islands dotting the Southern Pacific, Kristen had taken up a much less expensive—not to mention less exhausting—research agenda in order to make her mark, to get noticed at long last and pull herself out of the career cellar that the trapdoor of Papua New Guinea had dropped her into. Her research aim, though relatively local, was almost completely untouched by academic investigation: the very strange “Negro voodoo cannibal cults” of the nearly inaccessible Louisiana swamps. (She would never use either term, of course—they were “African–Pacific Islander animist fusion worship groups” and “the bayou,” respectively.)

The few academic papers she had read about these people described them as the product of 150 years of degeneracy, the descendants of cross-breeding escaped slaves, shunned Cajun miscegenists, and (her point of entry) Papua New Guineans pressed into service by ships sailing from Australia to New Orleans, from where the men ran north into the mires to avoid more forced service.

She had no baubles with which she could bribe them. No alcohol or less-legal mood enhancers to convince them she was some kind of white angel. No technology to amaze them into telling her their stories. All of that was unethical as hell, anyway. This was America, these people were Americans, and this mucky hellhole was less than 300 miles from one of the biggest cities in the Southeast. They weren’t going to cook her in a pot and eat her.

At least, she hoped not. These were people whose great-grandparents had all thrown off their shackles. Certainly they would not imprison a well-meaning college professor (
don’t you mean adjunct instructor?
) and kill her and devour her. People knew she was coming there. Well, not exactly
there
, but the swamplands. The bayou. These degenerates of strong genetic lines wouldn’t be able to make her disappear, not like the few studies on these people—some dating back to the 1920s—claimed. The newspapers of those days still used the word “Negro” and “mulatto,” for Christ’s sake.

Thanks to Easter, Kristen had three days away from her own captors at the university during which she could drive up from campus to penetrate as far as she could into the swamps, then use a collapsible canoe and finally hip waders to access the last place the (
cult
) worship group was believed to have gathered.

It was Monday morning by the time she reached the geocached coordinates noted in her iPhone (
a signal even out here!
), but she found nothing but the usual blackened tree stumps, aggressive insects, and slimy, muddy water.

You’d
have
to be degenerate to live here
, she thought with an ironic smile that was wiped off her face the instant she heard the ululations of some excited revelers coming from just around a cluster of mossy, spider-infested upgrowths. There must have been some kind of dry ground there, and she ran—if it could be called running, trying to move in her hip waders through the muck and mire—to catch a glimpse of what was going on.

As she swished her legs through the green water, she saw something familiar indeed, here in the last place she would have expected it: a circle of loinclothed old men around an altar of some kind (
made of out what? There’s no stone around here
), and around that circle a wider circle of women, old and young, holding hands, and around them still another, bigger circle with children of all ages, also with hands interlocked.

It
is
a cult!
she thought, completely without evidence, and mentally slapped herself back to her senses.
An anthropologist does not use that word
. They were a worship group, certainly, but they could be Christian for all she knew at that moment. Pentecostal crazies over from northern Florida. Maybe Santeria practitioners from—

“
Tulu!
” one of the elders cried from the innermost circle.

Kristen stopped dead in her watery tracks. She could not have just heard that word.

“
Tulu!
” the second circle called in response.

Then the children sang out the strange word: “
Tulu!
”

Tears almost came to Kristen Frommer’s eyes. This was it. This was
it!
Her gratitude for a saved career and emotion at hearing that word again, that word that had shut her down, was so great that she abandoned all ethics and cried to them as well, in a voice heartier even than those of the children.

“
TULU!
”

Every face gathered around that altar—now she could see that it was something that must have been carried here from a church washed out by Katrina—turned as one to face her.

Icy fear grabbed her by the throat. She was a dead woman. They were obviously going to rush her and kill her for seeing their secret rites—

“Welcome!” a man in the inner circle shouted with happiness.

Every face that turned to her was bearing a smile. They were odd, fishy-looking faces with severe deformities in some cases, but all with some kind of abnormality from advanced skin disease to bowlegs to webbed fingers. Except for the one who had spoken, who now was coming through the circles to greet her. He seemed to be the one nonafflicted person there, one with European features, although his face was darkly tanned.

“Welcome!” the man said again with a huge smile.

“Welcome!” the congregation echoed, with the same ebullient expression.

“Y-You speak English?” she stammered.

“Yes, of course we do. Well, I do,” the apparent leader said in his Noo Yawk honk, and the gathering giggled, not unkindly. They at least understood some English. “I am Howard, the tribe elder. But who are you?”

Tell the truth. Ethical anthropologists tell the truth
. “I’m, um, I’m Kristen. I teach (
freshmen and athletes
) at Louisiana State University. I’ve come here to learn about your … worship group.” She decided to go for broke and added with much more confidence than she felt, “The Tribe of
Tulu
.”

Now the faces turned from surprised happiness to open astonishment.

Goodbye, cruel world
, she said inside her head.
Nice knowin’ ya.

But then they laughed. It started in that inner circle of old men, a new giggle that turned into a hearty laugh, and then into a veritable roar of hilarity. It took almost no time for the rest of the (
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.