114

A Form of Worship

"Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him." – H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

They all sat together on the deserted boardwalk with feet in the sand, looking out across the beach to the water of the bay and Minato beyond, where invisible smoke must still be rising from the glittering skyline. Above and below the band of light spread the mirrored darkness of sky and sea. Since the earthquake had ended, the night was quiet.

The Chosen Children were glad to rest a while, both physically and, to what extent they could, mentally. Professor Takenouchi enjoyed the measure of relief that his daughter's safe return and the destruction of the nocturnal predator had brought him. He was hardly free of anxiety yet. He had known without being told that the children's struggle was not over – that much was plain from their demeanor. He did not know that their depression stemmed more from the seemingly insoluble loss of their younger friends than from the scenes of horror they had witnessed in the warzone of mainland Tokyo.

The Digimon also were concerned about their vanished compatriots, but for the moment they were too exhausted to do much more than sit on the beach near their partners. Gomamon was too tired even to take a dip in the water. The children knew that before long they should return home and get their partners something to eat. For now, though, they only sat and stared at nothing. The dust of the disaster area still clung to them.

Many of them wondered what came next. After the rest of this terrible night and the nightmares it would bring there would come a day… and what could they do? As far as they knew the enemy had no more Digimon in the human world, and that was undoubtedly for the best, but what if it meant all they could do for now was wait? Wait for what? What would the end be? They seemed more in the dark now than they'd yet been this summer.

When they had first stumbled across Sora's father they had explained to him in a somewhat guarded fashion what had happened that night, but for several minutes now everyone had been quiet. Professor Takenouchi had been taking that time to turn everything that he had learned over in his head, and he was the one to break the silence.

"How much do you know about this enemy you're facing?"

After an uncomfortable pause Sora answered.

"Not much, really. It's a group of humans and Digimon, but we don't know what their goal is."

Taichi had been informed of one of their goals in the previous night's dream, but he didn't bring it up.

"This is the first time we've encountered a group of humans working alongside destructive Digimon," Koshiro said. "Furthermore, the group has the power to influence our dreams."

"Not just us," Yamato added, remembering Takeru's speculation that the nightmares were also affecting their parents and even people with no connection to them or the Digimon.

"I've also had strange dreams lately," Sora's father said. "Many of them seem to be connected to the Digimon in some way. I wonder what it all means. I'm trying to look at things from a mythological perspective, but dreams have been important in so many cultures. The Digimon you've been fighting recently in this world resemble evil beings from Western religions, but I don't know if that should tell us anything."

Again they fell silent, and their combined gaze was drawn to the darkness of the bay, as if it were the embodiment of the mystery they were attempting to unravel.

"The ocean," Taichi muttered to himself. A few of the others looked at him expectantly. "Maybe there's something you can tell me," he said, raising his voice and addressing the professor.

"Yes?"

Taichi said nothing for a few seconds, carefully collecting his thoughts so as not to give away more than he meant to. "We think the enemy has something to do with another world, a dark world that looks like an ocean." He swallowed. "Hikari, my sister, went there once. She met these fish-man things that looked like Digimon but might not have been. They talked about an evil god that lived in the ocean. Does that sound like anything you know of?"

"Supernatural beings associated with the ocean are like dreams," the professor answered. "They have a role to play in many cultures. Japanese folklore, for instance, speaks of evil beings living in the ocean, like the umibozu, though most creatures like that aren't considered gods. Let me think…"

They waited.

"The Digimon that you've fought recently are all based on gods and demons from Western religions. I wonder…" He paused. "There have been rumors in the anthropological community for many years about the existence of a kind of cult that worships an ocean god a little like what you describe – not the sort of thing a normal person would worship."

His eyes widened in the darkness.

"And after all, why not? If Digimon are the spirits of legend made real, why wouldn't there be a type of person who might decide to worship them like people once worshiped the gods they represent? To someone like that, normal human concerns wouldn't matter. There's no telling what they might do, or why they might do it. This group of humans you've encountered could be such people!"

"It's possible," Koshiro said grimly, and Professor Takenouchi's excitement at his new theory died as he remembered what it meant for his daughter and her friends.

"They'd have to be crazy," Taichi said.

"They are," Jou reminded him. "We know."

"Isn't there more you could find out, Professor Takenouchi?" Mimi asked.

"Maybe," he answered. "I'll get in touch with some colleagues and see what we can dig up. For now, let's go—" He almost said "to bed," went with "home," instead. "It's been a long day for all of you and your Digimon."

They all rose, stretching their stiff joints.

"Let's go, Piyomon," Sora murmured to her partner, who had been roosting on the sand with closed eyes. The Digimon were roused, and the oddly assorted group moved together away from the water and toward the apartment buildings of Odaiba. Just as the group was about to split up, however, Sora's father let out what sounded like a grunt of surprise. "What is it?" Sora asked him.

"It's… something I just remembered about that cult I told you about," he answered. "They were supposed to believe that one day their god would rise from the sea—" He hesitated, and the Chosen Children sensed that something unwelcome was coming. "And that the event would be preceded by earthquakes," he finished.

Upon their return to the dark monastery with the Digimon in human shape, the Dark Man and Anubimon had parted ways, the former vanishing down a black corridor with his reluctant charge. The journey back to the lair had been quicker than the journey to the frozen world's doorway, not thanks to the Dark One's ability to warp space but to his relentless driving of the girl. It was fortunate that she had retained a Digimon's resilience. The walk through unforgiving terrain would have left a human body ravaged at that pace.

Anubimon wondered who this "Natsu" was. The Dark One had said nothing more on the subject. That she would be another instrument with which to harass the Chosen Children Anubimon could guess easily enough, but her history and true identity remained a mystery. He did know that her condition had something to do with the constellation of little floating lights that followed her about. He'd been able to sense the corrupt and corrupting data they harbored, and though they had provided the only light in Sato's lair he was glad to see them go.

Once again he was left alone in the meandering halls, and resisting the impulse to despair he had resumed his interrupted search for the Chosen Children's cells. If he could find even one… But of course that was a vain fantasy. Still he wandered. Long hours passed, until he had almost lost the memory of light. I will go insane before long, he thought. No creature can remain sane in a world without light.

He'd had the vague impression for some time that the trend of his path was downward. That wasn't intentional on his part – it made him uneasy to find himself burrowing deeper into the bowels of the hellish plateau. At long last he came to a hall that seemed perfectly level, a little wider than the others and lacking branches, and he was surprised to find that it ended in a vast and lofty chamber where the darkness was no longer absolute.

The space was remarkable not only for being visible but for being decorated. It was the only room he had yet seen in this brutal structure whose walls were more than blank rock. It didn't strike him as an improvement. Murals both painted and sculptured ran from floor to ceiling, and their subject matter reminded Anubimon of the decorations in the control room of the base they had left in the Digital World, scenes to make the viewer shudder. Strange creatures stalked through them, ugly and palpably evil, sometimes depicted triumphant over the tiny, cringing shapes of humans and Digimon.

Anubimon paused aghast, wondering if such creatures could really exist. If so, they were possibly akin to the Dark One, and maybe one of his forms was actually among them, unrecognized by one who had seen as yet only two of his guises. The room's focal point seemed to be the depiction of one particular figure that stretched almost the whole height of the room. It stood at the point farthest from the room's entrance, and in spite of his repulsion Anubimon walked forward to get a clearer look at it.

In doing so he was lucky to stop in time, for at his feet there suddenly yawned a great pit that he had not seen due to his focus on the murals. He looked down quickly, and realized that he had found the true source of his apprehension, which deepened continually as he gazed. It looked like water – a shadowy whirlpool. Staring at it, he couldn't decide how deep it was, but it had a sense of profundity that made him dizzy.

What was the purpose of this place, and of that strange swirling well in particular? Had it always been here, or had Sato had it constructed? As he continued to wonder, Anubimon backed away from the sinister pit. The spiral of gray water beckoned to something inside him when he was near it. He sensed that the well was hungry, a maw continually drawing something intangible out of the air and down into a bottomless abyss.

As he drew back Anubimon threw a last glance up at the titanic figure on the wall. Its color was like the water in the well, dark and indeterminate, and its form like something glimpsed in a half-forgotten nightmare, twisted and shapeless, a mass of intertwined tentacles. In the shadows near the ceiling hints of wings and the shape of a head could be dimly seen. The head's bulbous outline lent it the suggestion of a wicked intelligence, contrasted with the brutish teeth and tentacles at its lower extremity, and Anubimon was thankful that in the gloom he could not make out its expression.

He turned and retreated down the corridor at a brisk pace. What it all meant he couldn't say with certainty, but his soul understand well enough what his mind could only grasp a part of. The monstrosity on the wall was the key to everything. It could only be the abominable Thing for which Sato had toiled – Anubimon could not doubt that such a creature truly existed. Even its portrait seemed alive and watching.

And what of the well and the whirlpool whose mouth it formed? Terror hung about it. Before he had looked down and seen it Anubimon had felt it like a cold draft, sucking greedily, calling, calling…

He thought back to the place they had left and its room of awful machines. Somewhere above him now the systematic torture of the Chosen Children that had begun the night before continued unabated. Could it be that there was more than cruelty behind this? The Digimon in the rows of generators had suffered for a purpose. Of that much he was sure. Perhaps, in the cells of the six human prisoners, that horrific process went on.