Why had it done so? Did it desire that the family travel to the mapped place?
He passed his hand above the sand drawing and looked at Echo, into her unwavering stare, and asked, “Go here?”
For a long time she did not respond and when she did, it was only to sing one of her songs. “All night all night all night. ”
“Queenie, play with Echo,” Vern said and the big black dog rose and came to his sister and nuzzled her elbow and suffered herself to be petted. This was one way to break Echo’s verbal cycles, but it did not always work.
She had retreated from his question, Vern realized, because here meant to her not the place the diagram represented but the sand itself. Echo did not want to go sit in the circle and destroy her drawing; she was always proud when she had guided Vern to draw a picture that was in her head.
She would never be able to say, “Yes, let us travel to the place we have drawn the map of. Something wants us to be there and it is important.” Those wishful sentences Vern furnished for himself in his anxiety to comprehend, and this fancy was a signal of his frustrated impatience.
There might be other explanations for the contact. Vern knew that others had retreated to these caves to escape the onslaught of the Olders. In their small university town, most people had been killed with dreadful weapons or left to the mercies of the slave-organisms called shoggoths that had no notion of what mercy might be, and so killed lingeringly, as if taking enjoyment from the spectacle and music of the final agonies. A number of persons had been taken away to the colossal laboratory structures the Olders had reared and there they were divested of the knowledge the dire creatures judged might be useful to their purposes — whatever those might be.
Among those who had managed to flee and hide in the caves that had once sheltered the abused Cherokee people, there might be another autistic with some of the extrasensory powers that Echo possessed.
The question would still remain, however. Why should such a person transmit a map? Whoever sent it had sent an invitation. Or a summons.
They were as well prepared as they could be to leave the cave and journey. Moms and Vern had made a list and gathered the accessories necessary for travel. “Someday,” she had said, “the Old Ones will come into our territory. They are always expanding their reach, tearing down our world and rebuilding it to suit them, remaking it in their own image. So we must gather supplies and put them away in the cave and be prepared. I heard once long ago that it is best always to be prepared.”
So they had scavenged for twine and for whatever other binding materials they could find, for cloth of any kind that might warm, shelter, and hide them, and for any handy pieces of metal that could be beaten into useful shape or sharpened to an edge. There was no way to preserve foodstuffs, so Vern had laid several fish traps in the stream below the waterfall. An early autumn rain had washed away two of them, but there were three left, though only one now contained a trout.
We have enough to travel a short way if we must, he thought. He thought too about how people used to discard all sorts of good things, now useful for the family. That time was a world ago and the kind of time it had existed within could never return.
But if they were to travel, answering that summons, where would they go?
He looked at the drawing again. The line segments crowded near the wavy line upon its left- hand side, but on the other side they were set farther away. So if the wavy line was indeed a stream that sparkled intermittently, the right bank was farther from its center. Or maybe that was just the angle of vision. If the right bank only appeared to be farther, it would mean that the stream was deep in a ravine and the map showed it from the right-hand side. The stream they lived beneath ran to the south and as it rolled down the mountainside, it had cut, over the millennia, deep declivities. Vern thought that if they decided to answer the summons, they should follow the stream, descending the mountain until they found a place that fit the map.
He sighed. It was all very chancy, but this was the best interpretation he could come up with. He would talk it over with Moms in the evening. Now he would go to his daily chores, gathering food and fuel where he could and collecting any shard or scrap or leaf or root that might help to keep them alive. Then this evening they would hold council and decide.
This was the best part of the day for them, although Echo, if she were overtired in the evening, would be fretful for a tedious time before settling to nestle in Moms’ lap. Vern and Moms were by this hour good-tired, the cessation of the long, active day pleasant after their labors were accomplished. This was the hour they talked, making plans and sometimes recalling the good things they had stored in memory.
During this time they would also debate courses of action, and this evening Vern had asked Moms whether it would be wise to try to find the place Echo had depicted.
“You say it is an invitation or a summons from someone or some people we cannot know,” Moms said.
“That’s how I make it out.”
“She is not in a state. She is not frightened by this. message.”
They watched Echo. She had gone back to the circle and was playing with the sand, pouring the grains into one hand and then into the other and letting them spill through her fingers. Over and over she did this, over and over, while crooning a wordless song.
“That is one reason I think I should try to find it.”
“You?” Moms asked. “That cannot be. It would have to be the three of us together.”
“I could go find it and, if I can figure out what is going on and see whether it’s safe, then I could take us there.”
“But if you did not come back, Echo and I would perish.”
“If we all go, we all might die.”
“That would be better.” Her eyes moistened and she turned her head away. Vern heard her taking deep breaths to calm her emotions.
“It would be hard traveling with three. Faster for me to go and come back and go again.”
“But you can’t be sure you have found the right place unless Echo is with you. She will know the place when she arrives there.”
“She might not.”
“Whoever is sending the message now will tell her when she has arrived.”
“What if it is some plan of the Olders to draw humans out?”
“You have already rejected that idea or you would not even consider going. And if there was any slight hint of the Old Ones about it, Echo would smell them out. She is more sensitive to them than we are.”
“Could they not find a way to disguise their presence?”
“I don’t think so. I can’t pretend to understand their psychology; I don’t know that such a concept can even apply to them. But when I try to translate their ‘attitude,’ if I can call it that, to our terms, I would describe it as contemptuous in regard to humans. They probably hold us in less esteem than those amoebean slaves they created, those shoggoths. They think themselves invincible on our planet and maybe within the whole cosmos, as I heard once long ago. They would not think of hiding or disguising their presences. They do not confer upon us the dignity of being considered their opponents. We are, at most, mere nuisances.”
“Yes.” Vern let the image of the star- headed monstrosity slip into his mind and then imagined its disappearance before it could bring up his emotional temperature. But their handiwork, all those immense towers and cyclopean, steeply sloped pyramids with ridged ramps, all that bewildering hyper-geometry of almost unvisualizable angles — these images and many others he allowed to register in his mind. They would not attract the attention of a probe, for they were only pictures of things that existed and any animal might be gazing upon them. “Yes,” he said, “we are only minor pests to them. But we know that they have enemies much more powerful than we are. They have battled Cthulhu and triumphed and were defeated and then triumphed again. This is something I heard once long ago. It may be that this call — this invitation or summons — is intended to entrap an enemy more dangerous than humans.”