Gary led the way to the stairs. As they reached the first floor they could hear guttural voices travelling up the stairwell. Abruptly changing course he led her into the first floor corridor, to the stairs at the far end of the building. Achieving the ground floor, they plunged through a fire exit into the driving rain, triggering a moaning fire alarm throughout the building.
“Wait!” panted Carla. “My car keys!”
Gary shook his head. “Your car’s no good. They bust the engine already.”
“Why? Why are they doing this? Who sent them?”
“The Reverend, who d’ya think? Me, Dad, Ramram’s dad, Kara’s brother, a few others. He said you had to disappear. You were causing problems and we had to get rid of you. Now come on, we have to get moving!”
“Where? Where are we going?”
“The temple. Come on!”
“We need to find a car or something” panted Carla as she struggled into the mismatched clothes that Gary had grabbed from her room. They were hiding in a darkened shop doorway somewhere between the hotel and the seafront. Gary was keeping lookout. He answered her over his shoulder.
“It’s only round the next corner, we can make it on foot.”
“On foot? I told you, I’m not going to your blasted temple. I want to get out of here. I’m not going back there. Not without a National Guard unit right behind me!”
“It’s a full moon, high tide. There’s a ceremony tonight. I can get us to where you can see it. Once you have, maybe you can convince your FBI friends to come and help us.”
“I don’t have any FBI friends.”
“Whatever. Look, it’s safe. We can go up the next-door fire escape and get onto the roof that way. We can see in through the skylight. I’ve done it loads of times before.”
“What if they see us? I wish you’d picked up my phone!”
“They can’t. There’s no lights up there. Trust me, it’s safe. And it’s a full moon tonight, so there’ll definitely be communion.”
“Holy communion?” enquired Carla, pulling on the woolly hat she was glad to discover still in her coat pocket.
“Communion. With Y’ha-nthlei.”
“Who’s Y’ha-nthlei?”
“It’s not a person, it’s a place. Come on, let’s move.”
They crossed the street cautiously and moved through a warren of dark, deserted alleyways towards the seafront, picking their way past overflowing bins and discarded furniture. The crumbling tenements were too close together to admit cars here, and at least gave them some shelter from the storm-driven rain.
“Gary” hissed Carla. “Gary! When you say communion, do you mean—”
“Look, it’s complicated” interrupted the teenager. “You need to know the history or it doesn’t make sense.”
“So, tell me the history” demanded Carla. “I really think it’s the least you can do.”
Gary sighed. “Well, look, it all started way back in, like, the 1920s or something. I mean, it started earlier than then, but that’s when the old temple got destroyed. The way the Rev tells it, it was like the whole town were all worshippers back then, and the people from Y’ha-nthlei were still coming back up to the surface and into the town.”
“Where is this ‘Y’ha-nthlei’ you keep talking about?” interrupted Carla.
“Under the sea. It’s a city under the sea. The entrance used to be out by Devil’s Reef.”
“A city under the sea? That’s ridiculous!”
“Yeah, well, that’s what they say. I’m just telling it like they told me. An undersea city that’s the home of Lord Dagon.”
“Lord Dagon? Like in the Bible? The Philistine god from the Bible?”
“Dunno about that. He’s, like, the leader of Y’ha-nthlei. There are these two voices from Y’ha-nthlei, him and the Hydra. Anyway, the point is that back in the 1920s or 1930s or something, the FBI, like, totally shut them down. Arrested everyone, and burned down the temple, and locked all the top temple people up somewhere. Then they got a submarine and torpedoed the reef, totally collapsed the way to Y’ha-nthlei. Closed it off completely. Yeah?”
“If you say so.”
“Right, so then in the 1960s ol’ Esgrith comes to town. Dunno where he came from, but he arrives here with all this money. Buys up all these burnt-out warehouses, and in the basement of one of them he finds this tiny piece that survived.”
“Piece of what?”
Gary began to sound evasive. “I don’t rightly know, OK? Esgrith calls it ‘the First Flesh’. The voices from below call it ‘shoggoth’. It’s like this weird stuff, like a living creature, but not any particular living creature. It’s hard to explain, but the thing is that the Deep Ones can, like, totally control it. They make it do whatever they want, yeah? And once it gets into you, you can hear the voices. From down there. You can hear Dagon and Hydra. And they can make the shoggoth force you to do whatever they want.”
“So, wait, let me get this straight—”
“Hang on, let me finish! You wanted me to explain, right? Just let me finish telling it. OK, so Esgrith finds like a tiny scrap of this shoggoth thing, still alive after all those years – survived all the fire, and the dynamite and whatever, but only this tiny piece. So he starts taking care of it, growing it and feeding it however the voices tell him to, and he reopens the temple. Only he has to change the name in case the Feds are going to come back and tear it all down again. So he’s clever, he picks a new name, and then he goes around finding all the families who used to be in the old temple. Talks ‘em into joining, tricks ‘em maybe, I don’t know. Once they’re in, they have communion and the voices from below start telling them who to, you know, have sex with.”
Gary seemed slightly embarrassed by the direction the conversation was taking, and waited until they’d turned the next corner before continuing. “Yeah, so Esgrith called all that ‘strengthening the old blood’. This is like back in my grandparent’s time, the old Innsmouth blood, trying to make sure that those old bloodlines were kept pure. Anyone who was an outsider, who didn’t have any of the Y’ha-nthlei blood, I think they just got returned to the Flesh.”
“Returned to the Flesh? What does that mean?”
“Recycled.” Gary stared at her, looking for some sign of comprehension. “Fed to the shoggoth”, he clarified.
“Right. Right. So this “shoggoth”, this is meant to be an actual monster of some sort?” asked Carla, skeptically.
“It’s more than that” answered Gary. “It’s what they reckon can reopen the way to Y’ha-nthlei, once it’s big enough. They take, like, ages to grow though. The Rev reckons it’s nearly there, but then he would say that. Once the way is reopened the Deep Ones will be able to come up again, and we’ll be able to go down.”
“Go down?”
“Those of us with the old bloodlines, the Y’ha-nthlei blood. We’re meant to swim down into the city and be, like, slaves or something. Fuck it, who knows. Here. This is it. We need to go up this fire escape.”
Carla followed carefully up the rain-slick, iron steps, trying to construct a coherent narrative from the various articles of faith and bizarre, cult dogma the teenager was regurgitating. The EOD was clearly far more psychotic than even the most irrational of the cults her mother had dragged her through as a child. Psychotic and dangerous. She wished again that she had her phone.
“Gary!” she hissed as he disappeared out of sight, pulling himself up onto the eaves of the warehouse. “Gary!”
He reappeared and extended his hand. “Come on, I’ll pull you up.”