AN: Any and all criticism is greatly appreciated and deeply desired. I'm trying my hardest to hone my skills as a writer.
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Dr. Ambrose waded through the blue non-Newtonian fluids filling the vacated city street. She'd protected her body with the orange containment-suit, despite knowing the slime was safe. The "experts" had broken down the chemical components and filtered the fluid for any living, or otherwise, contaminants. She'd redone all the above and more, using her own equipment and forming her own conclusions.
She reached a glove into the motionless river below her waist, and lifted up a handful. Five residual streams stretched and weakened between her fingers, until she shifted her hand sideways, causing the fluid slithered off her palm like a giant blue blood clot. A giggle escaped her lips and she continued down College Street.
Wandering alone in an abandoned town felt reminiscent to sneaking out of the house after her parents were asleep, escaping to the acres of woods surrounding their backyard so she could play in the shadows and dance in the fairy-rings.
Opening the door to Miskatonic University spilled forth an effusion of thick goop. The local power plant had shorted, so she flipped on her headlamp for light. It was much slower progresses slogging in the flooded halls of the school than the wide streets of Arkham City. The floor level of the library brimmed with fluids past her head, forcing her to half swim. There was reprieve the closer she reached the chasm. The giant crater torn into the foundation of the college that opened up like a gaping maw into the earth swallowed most of the outpouring slime.
—-
Dr. Canterthorne greeted her at the site lit by overheads powered by whirring generators. The lights were pointed away from the giant tarp partitioning them from the chasm, but there was still a host of incandescence shifting and winking from the other side.
All around them were tumored sporocarps ranging in size from peaches to wrecking balls, all leaking steady amounts of the blue viscous fluid. Dr. Ambrose knew they'd tried several different methods of excising or deracinating the sporocarps, but they kept cropping back up, through some unaccountable gestation.
They stood next to several instruments, including an array of Geiger counters. "Still no signs of radioactive decay?" She asked.
Canterthorne awkwardly smushed his mask against his face to try and adjust his glasses. "The, uh, the 'thing,' consumed all traces of the Tachyons. We believe that's what caught 'it' in there."
Every once in a while they needed to shuffle their feet to adjust due to the shocks reverberating from behind the tarp and down inside the chasm. Echoing noises like giant glaciers cracking and splintering resounded in unrhythmic waves.
"But that's just a theory," she said, her full attention on the tarp. "For all we know it wants to be there."
"Absolutely correct, Rin," Canterthorne said, looking at neither the tarp or her eyes. His gaze was always directed at the most asinine thing in any environment he was in. "We think it might feed on Tachyons, and its just waiting around for us to offer it a second course."
Ambrose gave a half frown in Canterthorne's direction. He wasn't competent enough to earn a full one. "I'm not on a first name basis with you, Bob."
Bob let out a nervous chuckle.
She smiled at him. It was an unnerving smile, she knew, showing far too many teeth. Friends had ascribed it to her as a rictus. But Bob wouldn't be looking to see it anyway. "I'm kidding. You can call me Possum Shit for all I care."
He blurted another nervous chuckle.
"So can I take a peek at the big lug?" She said, walking toward the curtain.
"Wai-ai-ai-ai-ai," Bob stammered, reaching a hand out in a weak gesture to stop her. "S-s-s-stop. Dr. Ambrose."
Ambrose swiveled to look at the man, setting her hands to her hips. She should have worn a coat, just to have pockets to stash her hands in. Would've looked cool.
"Please, I must insist you look at the screen instead," Bob said, pointing at a computer. "Every person that's seen 'it' with the naked eye has, well…"
"I read the report. But some of them aren't straight-jacketed up in Danvers State Asylum."
"No one who saw made it out unscathed. The only one's not staying at the hospital now were only exposed for about a second."
Ambrose shrugged. "Show me the nanny cam footage."
Dr. Canterthorne directed her to a computer. The screen flickered with static. She could just make out a large amorphous mass stuck in a hole. It resembled a sea anemone winking luminescent for brief periods. The colossal scale didn't translate over the footage as well as she'd hoped.
"Hmm," she said.
"And that's, that's just," Bob widened his arms to gesticulate a large thing.
"That's just a horizontal kilometer of the brim of its head," she finished the thought for the man. "But the length of it goes down for miles."
Bob nodded.
Dr. Ambrose licked her lips. "I need more than this."
"Can you identify it?"
Her eye twitched. "I need to see more of it. This resolution is worse than the scrambled frames between flickering static on those cable porn channels you'd watch as a kid when your parents were at work."
Bob's face was blank.
"Didn't you ever have to," Ambrose squinted as if at a tv she was straining to make something out on, and mimed furtively tugging at an imaginary penis. "Ooh, I think I saw some labia!" Bob's face reddened, and he turned away. She sped up the motion, and whined pathetically, then swayed her body, moaned to a crescendo, and splashed a pile of blue slime into Bob's face, mimicking a splooge.
"Stop it," he said, and glared at Ambrose's feet. The muck slid off his mask, leaving it about as clean as before. Ambrose guffawed, mostly at his stupid propriety.
"It's a pretty apt metaphor, actually," she leaned into the image on the screen. "Our understanding of this Thing is like a prepubescent child's briefest half glance at a panned in shot of grown up's alien genitalia; too hazy to even partially make out, they strain to base their understanding of adult salacity on that moment."
An emotion, that felt like rage in its intensity but joy from the context, radiated shivers through her spine. Her rictus peeled open in full bloom. "This is why we're fucking alive." Her body didn't relay what any of her emotions were, but she knew this was jubilance. How could it not be? They were facing the unknown. Even though she'd been called in as an expert, she'd never seen an Elder Thing, or met anyone sane with a first hand account on one. Until now.
She looked at the tarp longingly. "Where are the images from the GPR?," she asked.
Bob handed her a folder. Inside were three photos of three different angles, all in dark grey, giving approximations of the Elder Thing below the earth. The images were produced using ground-penetrating radars.
"This will have to do," she told Bob. Then, walking toward the curtain, addressed whoever it was on the other side, saying, "I'm Dr. Ambrose. Soon I'll figure out what you're doing here and what can be done about it. It's been very nice meeting you. Good night." And she turned to leave.
"Where are you going?" Bob asked. "You haven't told me anything yet."
"You've done what you can. But I can't get any more answers here. Do you have a place I can take a nap?"
—-
Rin sat in the wooden chair that was large enough for her legs to dangle off. She swayed and kicked her feet in a consistent rhythm. She looked at the ceiling, a grin wide on her face. The hair her mother had strung together into a bob had come half undone, sweeping into her face, which was smeared and grubby.
Rin's mother, Dr. Ambrose, along with Rin's father, entered and began wiping roughly at her daughters face with a handkerchief. The girl didn't say anything, but fidgeted away from the preening.
Dr. Ambrose grimaced. "Hold still, Rin. You're a mess. How do manage to get this dirty every day?"
Rin pushed her mother away, but looked out the window and kept grinning, acting like Doctor and Mister Ambrose weren't there at all.
"Are we early?" Mr. Ambrose asked.
Mr. Blokes entered his own office and offered the parents a seat. His eyes met them, but never Rin. "Thank you for both coming in."
"I'm sorry, for whatever it is she-"
Dr. Ambrose held up her hand to stop her husband. We can't apologize for something she did, she thought, pursing her lips, and likewise ignoring the fidgeting Rin. They were good parents; tried parents. If anything, the school should be apologizing to them for not giving the same attention and discipline to the girl she did herself; on top of her actual job. This 'Mr. Blokes' was a glorified babysitter. So if Rin was acting out, it would be due to his negligence.
"I'm a busy woman, Mr. Blokes," she creased her brows to a noticeable limit. She was still sore the little man had made them wait for him. "What was so important you thought it pertinent to bring us in?"
"As you're well aware, your daughter is a constant, if not daily, trouble-maker on the campus," Mr. Blokes didn't even sound that interested in what he was saying. He sounded like the whole issue was trite and mundane. "She seems to only listen to our teachers when she herself agrees with them, she's an instigator in getting other students to act out in class, will often not return to class after recess unless dragged by our groundsman; and, of course, her other issues."
"Other issues?" Mr. Ambrose asked.
Mr. Blokes coughed into his fist, in lieu of answering. "Yes, well, the issues I've mentioned are manageable, despite your daughter's clear refusal to attempt reformation. So, I've called in a professional." He addressed someone outside his door, "Mr. Graham, can you come in please?"
A lanky man with a kind face wearing an ugly sweater vest entered. His eyes were pinpoints behind coke-bottle lensed glasses. When he came in he looked at Rin and offered a smile she was too busy to register.
"Mr. and Mrs. Ambrose?" Graham said. "It's nice to meet you. I'm a therapist."
Dr. Ambrose rolled her eyes, due to everything he'd just said. "Actually, it's Mister and Doctor Ambrose. Also, get a real profession."
Mr. Blokes was about to say something, but Graham held up his hand and offered the Doctor a smile. "I apologize for the faux pas. We're all on the same team here. Team Rin."
Dr. Ambrose sighed. People this obstinately optimistic made her skin crawl. Rodney grabbed her hand and squeezed. He never made that move out of support. It was a gesture to remind her to reign in the outrage for a bit longer.
"You have a very special daughter," Graham continued, despite the Doctor's flinch at the word 'special.' "Very strong willed, determined… and has the mental capabilities to be exceptionally creative. Though, there's a less fortunate word I've had to include in my report: disturbed."
Dr. Ambrose pulled her hand away from Rodney's. She glared at Mr. Blokes. "Why are we here?"
"A rowdy child is nothing new," Graham said, his voice's cheeriness remained unaltered. "Back in the day, a child like your Rin would be termed a Changeling. But we're an evolved society these days, and where discipline fails, a society can work together to help mend a Changeling through understanding and patience.
"Lately, however," Mr. Blokes cut in. "Other parents have called in to me, worried. It seems that other children have been having nightmares, and have been bothering their parents about it."
Doctor Ambrose shrugged, confused. "So?"
"It's always a good sign when a child shows a healthy interest in bonding with peers," Graham said. "Rin has been gathering the other children around and telling them stories. And the stories are, well… I've used the word 'disturbed' before."
"She's telling them campfire stories?" Rodney asked. "Like ghost stories?"
"Or those, what do you call them?" Dr. Ambrose said. "Those weird stories. One of those Pulps?"
"The Pulps," Rodney said, nodding his head.
"It's interesting you say that," Graham unlatched his briefcase. "Rin has been writing and selling her own pulp magazines, garnering pennies for each issue. Which, in turn, has proliferated the nightmares in the other children." He brought out a folder which he handed to the parents.
Inside, they found pages of Rin's drawing paper with three holes poked into the left and a bit of twine in each one to latch the pages together. The entire surface and back of every paper was covered to the edge in dark colors. Words spiraled around drawings telling an illustrated story. Mr. Ambrose gasped, and Dr. Ambrose felt her hand cover her mouth after seeing the drawings.
"She's quite talented," Mr. Graham offered, to the benefit of no one.
"What- what am I looking at?" Rodney ventured to ask.
Dr. Ambrose snapped the folder shut like it was the door to a starving lion's den.
"Disturbing, isn't it?" Graham asked. "You can see how this is concerning, as it is prompting ill effects in others."
Dr. Ambrose blinked at that. Others? "But what about my daughter? What does this mean? I mean, where did she get these images? How did these come from my daughter's head?"
"I could offer you the theory the Celts had," it sounded like Graham was making a joke for only his own benefit.
"What do we do about this?" The Doctor reflexively put her hand on her Rin's shoulder to restrain her, as she tried standing up for some reason.
Mr. Graham pushed back his thick glasses with a knuckle, and looked at each adult in the room quizzically. "Do?"
—-
Dr. Ambrose sloshed her way back into ground zero. Dr. Canterthorne sat writing something at his desk. His furtive movements and creased face made her think his nerves were beginning to fray. She wondered how long the man had been stationed at the site. There were laws about how long a person could be in the vicinity of the Thing.
Although his superiors would take the brunt of responsibility for not sending a replacement in time, Canterthorne would be itching to be relieved more for potential retribution to his mental health by exposure, than whatever slap on the wrist he would get from the brass.
They weren't sure yet what effects, long or even short term, caused by proximity, but everyone could agree that sooner or later, they began to feel the strain of being around an Elder Thing.
Was Bob looking that on edge due to exposure, or was it something else?
"I was instructed to let you do anything, save for breaking protocol, in order to conduct your research," Canterthorne said, "but you leaving the minute you get here to take a nap has been unorthodox enough I was forced to write you up."
Dr. Ambrose didn't really care enough about that topic to respond to it. Instead, she held up the statue. "Look familiar?"
Canterthorne smushed his mask again to lift his glasses, and squinted. "Where did you- Did you just sculpt that right now?"
She tossed the relic to him. He nearly dropped it into the blue slime. He looked up at her with consternation, then grew excited examining the statue.
"There's no way you just sculpted this now," he said. "This craftsmanship…"
"His name is Evsh'gin'thush," Ambrose took a seat near Bob. "I found the artifact on a crumbling world in a modest temple sitting within an arcosolium dedicated to him."
The relic to the Elder Thing Evsh'gin'thush was formed of a hard marble that was nearly translucent in parts. The figure of the monster was a long, roughly centipede-like creature with tentacles rather than legs, the top growing bulkier into a congealed mass of tumors and giant eyes. The eyes were either buried by pellucid flesh, or exposed and lidless, discharging frozen mucous. Raw bones as those from a human rib cage stabbed from the cranial appendage in painful angles. The statue felt as if it were made from a perpetually cold stone of unknown mineral, inlaid with impeccable detail. Where it was to be gathered the creature was muculent or covered with protoplasm it appeared the stone had somehow been melted into giving the perfect sense of what the actual thing would look like, if it were meant to be seen with human eyes.
"Of course," Dr. Ambrose said, "it's not actually a male. But Elder Things are most typically assigned male, female, third gender, androgynous, or hermaphroditic by their worshipers. An attempt, I suppose, to translate them better into concepts we can more readily understand."
"I'm sorry, did you say you found this on another world?" Bob did not look like a person that was believing.
"Something like that," Ambrose tried. "I mean, I couldn't point to a constellation. I'm not even certain it's in our same universe. And before you ask, I travelled there in a dream."
"You got this from a different universe? And brought it to here?" It was a rhetorical question. He wasn't fishing for a real answer. "Isn't that breaking the law of conservation?"
Dr. Ambrose shrugged. "Would it be breaking the law of conservation if I picked up something from a different room and brought that in here?"
Bob made a point to sigh loud enough for her to hear. He set the statue next to his papers. "As instructed, I'll take what you give me as an applicable sample. Any cults known to be based on around this… grotesquerie?"
"No, he's pretty out there. I'd believe some of the usual suspects are aware of Evsh'gin, but he's not in the center of anything. Well, I guess not until now."
Canterthorne began writing on the paper, so hard that a resounding SNAP made him pause.
"That was a pen," Ambrose pointed at the two halves of metal and plastic in Bob's clenched fist. "Are you doing okay?"
"Ya, I'm fine."
"If you say so."
Bob tossed the decimated pen aside and swiveled toward Dr. Ambrose, his entire face a steep incline focused at her feet. The shadows from the mask and fixated curvature of his face pointed into an angry 'V.' "Oh, there is one thing. Before, when you wanted to look at the-" he waved a dismissive gesture toward the chasm. "You were about to swing open the curtain to look right at it before I stopped you."
"Ooooooooo-kaaaaaaaaaay," Ambrose said as a half question.
"Why would you risk your sanity like that?" His voice sounded accusatory.
"Oh, that," Ambrose shrugged. "Unlike those other's enjoying their stay at Danvers, I've already lost a portion of my sanity."
"Well that would explain some things," Bob muttered. Ambrose guessed he was recalling some past experience he'd had dealing with her as a student.
"According to the lore, 'insanity,' as we think about it concerning Cosmic Beings, is a gained perception, rather than a lost one. It's simply too much stimulus about the higher things our brains weren't designed to process."
"But according to science," Bob said, "Insanity is a term to describe people with behavioral and mental patterns who are a danger to themselves and others."
"So does that mean the physicians who conceived of the atomic bomb were insane?"
Bob stood up fast, creating large plopping noises from the slime toppling out of his lap. He picked up the relic and walked behind Ambrose. She made sure to swivel to keep an eye on him. He said, "assuming that now we have its name and its physical likeness, can we figure out what it's doing here and how we get it to fuck off our planet?"
"Evish'gin," Ambrose said, "is hard to get more details on, since he's only a minor deity."
"Minor?" Bob sneered. "That Thing is taller than a skyscraper."
"Minor, as far as Elder Things go. But since they operate on higher, if not simply different, planes of reality than us, my theory is that he lives in a dimension overlapping our planet. And since tachyons move in imaginary time, even though to us it seemed like moment the researchers here were able to create the first ones in our existence at the same moment Evish'gin manifested, on his plane the particles could have been there for eons. It could be just as likely that he got stuck as he came to them intentionally."
Bob began slapping the bulbous end of the otherworldly relic against his open palm, as one might do with a bludgeon with the effect of rousing suspicions toward imminent violence.
Dr. Ambrose would have preferred to continue thinking about the Elder Thing, but she supposed she had to address the immediate issue. "Did I do something to upset you Bob?"
He shot a glare at around her chin, still avoiding eye contact. "You really need to ask that? Remember that time you emailed the answers to the test to every student in the class?"
"You knew that was me? I only did that because I hadn't studied. Knew you'd have to set something else up, giving me more time to prepare."
He jabbed an accusing finger at her. "How about half an hour ago when you threw slime on me? You didn't think that would make me blistering mad?"
"I had an idea," she confessed. "But I just thought it was funny. Color me confused as to why everybody is so frustratingly severe all the fucking time."
"Frustrating? Frustrating!? Frustrating!?"
"Heard you the first time, Bob," she let her annoyance seep into her tone.
"You're the one that's frustrating," Bob screamed, lunging at Ambrose, swinging the relic's bulbous end at her face.
After years of interviews with psychotic inmates in psych wards or blood-sacrificing cultists, Ambrose had equipped herself with a repertoire of useful techniques for dealing with outbursts of violence directed her way. She was also accustomed to keeping herself armed with pepper spray, a yawara stick, or a taser; none of which she had on her. Also, she was unaccustomed to harrowing circumstances while wading almost waste deep in blue slime.
She back-stepped to dodge the bludgeon and create space from her attacker. The first worked, but the second failed, and she fell backwards into a splattering noise. Her arms positioned behind her back were hardly enough to keep her face above the liquids.
Bob dove on top of her, barraging her with slippery open palms to try and keep her below the slime. It was an awkward, breathy battle, with Ambrose searching for decent 'footing' with her hands to leverage herself to crab-walk away from the assailant or hoist herself out of the slime, and Bob pressing his weight, from his hips up, down against her abdomen, while his slaps slid off her like water hitting oil.
Dr. Ambrose laughed at how silly the image must have been. Seeing her laugh made the other doctor even more incessant, and he redoubled his assault. She finally let herself sink down, so it appeared she was being drowned.
She hit the intercom button on the side of her head. "We're going to asphyxiate at the same time, idiot, if that's how you intend to kill me. We're both strapped with oxygen tanks, remember?"
And like she'd hoped he would, he reached back to grab the relic, presumably to crush her tank with, or use the pointy parts to tear her mask open.
As he leaned back, she grabbed the wrist of the one arm he held her down with, and wriggled with everything she had to slide through his legs and effectively pop up behind him.
Bob brought up the relic from the slime, but found himself facing the wrong direction to bash it against Dr. Ambrose.
She grabbed the arm he held it with using both her hands, and shoved hard against his inner elbow, while also spreading his lower leg wide with her own foot. Bob tripped, and the relic careened into his mask's face.
As he fell, Ambrose leveraged herself on top of him. She grabbed the relic and tore it away from Bob's grip, while keeping it dug into his mask.
Bob floundered to stand up, and Ambrose backed away from him, reeling the relic back like a baseball bat. She squinted, curious to see if he'd be fine without the masks protection. See if he was physically fine, at least. His mind was clearly being fucked with by exposure to the Elder Thing.
The unhinged Bob found his footing. He stood in an unusual stance, legs wide, his back lurched forward, and arms drooped down with no rigidity. His face peered directly below him.
He peered up at Ambrose. There was a trickle of blood from a superficial abrasion spanning one cheek to the other.
"You Bitch," it sounded like he was about to say. The last part was cut short by a guttural wet noise, like he was vomiting his entire stomach.
A closed beak-like protuberance from somewhere beneath his throat spluttered out of his mouth. He continued retching more of it out than should have fit anywhere in his body, or should have fit through his mouth. Thick tears, the consistency and color of gatorade, dribbled from his bulging eyes. The beakish protuberance in his mouth split open, causing a flood of blue slime to explod out of. A sporocarp.
Smaller sporocarps grew out of every pore on his face, each opening up at various sizes to squirt their own payloads.
"It's like puberty all over for you," Ambrose muttered.
The thing that had once been Dr. Canterthorne began bulging at the seams of its containment suit. The suit began ballooning up as the Non-Newtonian fluids were discharged from the increasing sporocarps cropping up across the body. In less than a minute the suit burst, flinging goop in every direction.
Ambrose was reminded of a frog she'd put into the microwave a long time ago, and the ensuing gory climax.
The cluster of sporocarps resembling a humanoid shape waded over to the curtain. Ambrose knew what the conglomerative-thing's goal was, but there was no use in trying to stop it. Due to its entire surface being composed of leaking abscess's, there was no viable friction allowing it to be grabbed and halted by.
The sporocarp-slime-man, or, Bob, pawed at the curtain until it could grasp it. Apparently it had found some enough friction on its surface to effectively tug. It tore the curtain away.
A wave, potent as a water and salt composed wave from the sea, bellowed out of the chasm and struck Dr. Ambrose. She felt the presence of an idea of Evsh'gin'thush carried by the wave, surrounding her, as inviolable as the natural force of gravity when falling off a cliff, or the passage of time as one's life draws to an end.
The Elder Thing contained as much mystery and as many properties as an entire universe. A fraction of that immutable essence, of an eternity, of infinite energy, of recondite intelligence, wafted into the perishable and lorn Rin.
Rin succumbed to the feeling of being force fed an avalanche; of having every memory from an entire life play out in total, composed of every small and grand detail, all resounding through one mind in a single, lingering moment.
She felt she might explode from over encumbrance. She needed her mind to purge every iota of being, as the super-sensory onslaught beyond what the physical confines of a brain's grey matter were incapable of processing ceased to abate.
She hadn't even looked at the Thing, but its mere suggestion was already an omnipotent force.
Miraculously, the behemoth amount of raw data pile-driving into her mind began syphoning elsewhere. Not anything that offered too strong a reprieve, but the force began spanning in a direction that made the experience manageable for Rin. She believed she could survive through the experience, partially intact.
Instead of being crushed under the Elder Thing's force all at once, it was deliberated through time, back before the current moment, allowing her past selves to alleviate portions of the onslaught along with her present continuity.
The Elder Thing's shadow of unbearable might echoed through then behind her, into the past, to when she was a young child.
She remembered it happening, as it happened to that self for the first time.
The event had always happened, and yet, had never happened until her present self had bore witness to the unveiling of the curtain.
—-
Dr. Ambrose walked away from the university, as worse-for-wear as she had been all those years ago, since childhood. She'd never gotten better, because her mental afflictions had yet to happen. Or they had consisted in happening, even as it happened in one moment. And, as always, she knew there was no 'getting better,' after what she'd just been through, which she'd been going through every living second during her entire life.
After the mishap with Dr. Canterthorne, the perimeter was relegated to the furthest bounds of the slime, miles away from the university and its chasm.
Further tests revealed that Rin's exposure had sucked out the last of the tachyon presence from the chasm, which had been suspected to have been the net keeping the Elder Thing at bay. The world waited to see if It would leave.
When anything failed to happen, they attempted feeding Evsh'gin'thush more tachyons, to see if that would satisfy it and encourage it to leave.
Nothing happened.
They tried blasting it with a tachyon weapon. Shot it with missiles. Some prayed to it. Some sacrificed to it.
Nothing happened.
Sometimes there was nothing that could have been done from the beginning, and stories just end.