Cthulhu Attacks!: Book 1: The Fear Read Free Page A

Guinea ate up pretty much the last chunk of this money that was supposed to last her for several more years, so she had to make it count, prove her committee wrong, and get a good-paying academic job as a reward for finding something entirely new while she was down there.
    With the welcome the natives gave her—wearing their sunglasses and Simpsons T-shirts—it took Kristen literally one minute to realize that her committee was right, that she was covering ground that had already been extremely well trod. It was disappointing, especially since she had hoped to get some oral history of their cannibal cults from those who had seen it firsthand or even been a part of it. Cannibals were like catnip to anthropologists.
    Not only had every native willing to talk to her already talked to a hundred other anthropologists, but they could in fact anticipate the questions she was going to ask, in some cases even seeming amused at her naïveté about how the world worked. It was humiliating.
    Her second night there, watching from her hotel window an old—hell, almost mummified—beggar playing his two-string guitar and howling something vaguely melodic, she got an idea: Talk to the people nobody talks to .
    So she got dressed and went down to the street where the ancient man sat leaning against a bank building’s wall. It was dark indeed except for the lights from her hotel and the streetlight that cast a yellow halogen haze over the beggar. He probably didn’t speak or understand English, but she had a $100 bill he would probably understand quite well and maybe take her somewhere she could find something worth researching.
    “ Skius ,” she said in Tok Pisin, the official language of the country. “ Yu save long tok Inglis, a ? ”
    The old man looked at the slim blonde American in front of him, taking in all of her body. Fine , she thought, if letting a horny old guy stare at my susus makes him happy and willing to talk, stare away, pal.
    “ Ya or Nogat? ” she said, slightly more emphatically. “ Mi nidim halivim bilong yu .” (“I need your help.”)
    He put the guitar aside. “I tok English at pretty girl.”
    Yes!
    “What you want to tok?”
    She sat down next to him and leaned on the wall, too, and tried to think of something to say that would convey both the gravity of her request as well as its unusual nature, but in simple English the old man would understand. “I want to know secrets.”
    His mouth opened to let out a wheeze of a laugh. Not a lot of teeth in there. “What kind secrets you tok?”
    “I want to meet a tribe—”
    “ Ha! You want cannibals, ya? Everybody want cannibals!” he said, and put a bony hand on her knee. “ Mi sori , pretty girl, I give you truth. Nobody cannibals no more. Everybody American now!” And he laughed some more.
    “Listen,” Kristen said, and threw ethics out the window by unrolling the $100 bill from her jeans. “I don’t care about cannibals, okay? I just want a tribe that’s different .”
    The man’s eyes never left the money. “Different?”
    “Yeah, some people that you maybe heard about in your many years. People who are weird, not like the other tribes. Take me to them and this is yours.”
    His eyes now darted between her face and the money she held.
    “Well?” she said, shaking the bill in front of his face. “You know these people?”
    “ Ya ,” he said, “but you not want to meet them. Ol pis pipel . Ol longlong .”
    “They’re ‘fish people’? Why are they all crazy?”
    It was obvious that the old man didn’t want to say anything else, but he still stared at the $100 bill.
    “Tell you what: you take me to them and I give this to you.”
    “It is night!” he whined. “And they are far.”
    “Okay, no problem.” She moved (slowly) to put the bill back in her pocket and stand up.
    “ No! No, I take you to them. But you hire car, not me.”
    Quite satisfied, Kristen stood and helped the old man get up. “I’ll get my suitcase and