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

gear, and you wait in the lobby until I come down, okay?”
    “Okay,” he said. As they started toward the hotel, however, he called, “ Wait! They no let people like me in the fancy.”
    “They let you in if I tell them to let you in. I’m an American.”
     
    ***
     
    The old man was as good as his word and earned his hundred dollars. The distant spot he directed the driver to was inhabited by a tribe of some sort, and indeed their skin looked like it was drying into fish scales, their odd faces like … well, fish .
    They dropped her off with this strange new group, Kristen instructing the driver to come get her at noon three weeks hence. It wasn’t until the Jeep was just out of hearing range that she spied the first Coke can.
    Aw, goddamnit , she moaned to herself, but shook it off and approached the villagers with the humble Papuan greeting she had learned in her studies. To her surprise, they welcomed her even without advance warning that anyone was coming to see them. They didn’t speak English, but they did know Tok Pisin, a stroke of luck this far into the jungle.
    She had three weeks to spend rooting out some secret of their tribe and developing an understanding of their practically Stone Age ways to better shine a light on modern life, etc. and so on. Whatever the “weirdness” of these “fish people” was, she was determined to root it out, examine it, and publish, publish, publish. What strange rituals would she witness? What eldritch ways of their ancestors would they bring to their evenings?
    Three weeks. Time to learn and understand.
     
    ***
     
    “All in,” Kristen said two weeks and five days later at the makeshift poker table with its well-worn playing cards. The tribe elder made a “ Bah! ” sound and threw in his hand.
    “Winner winner, chicken dinner,” another of the elders said, in completely the wrong context. Kristen sighed.
    She had been a sucker for the old beggar’s claims, reduced to spending her precious three weeks playing Texas Hold’em poker with the tribe’s elders for the baubles she had brought to entice them into telling her the incredible secrets of their people. They put up coin money from all over the world, further depressing Kristen, but they had good sweet potato mash alcohol. It was fun at first, even if it had as much of a bearing on what she would write for her dissertation as staying home in Baton Rouge watching TV would have.
    The tribe chief’s grown son joined the game. He looked strong but also resembled Admiral Ackbar from Star Wars , as so many of the tribe’s men did. Was that it? Was the fact that they had facial aberrations their “big secret”? She wasn’t studying physiognomy, for Christ’s sake.
    They had all been drinking the mash alcohol and getting crazy with big bets with no cards to support them. Then, at what had to be after midnight judging by the placement of the full moon, right in the middle of a hand the son of the tribe’s chief said the word “ Tulu .”
    At first Kristen didn’t realize anything unusual had been said, since the tribe unavoidably used some Tok Pisin words she didn’t know. “ Tulu ” didn’t sound like anything out of the ordinary, especially as the son said it in anger folding what must have been an initially promising hand. The word, dropped in the middle of what was essentially “this sucks,” must have been an expletive or interjection, not exactly the stuff of tenure-track research.
    She didn’t notice anything about the word , but she sure as hell noticed how every one of the Papuans stiffened at its utterance. They all looked up from their cards simultaneously, fixing the chief’s son with a look first of surprise and then with annoyance and finally turning their eyes furtively as one to the anthropologist. She could see they were obviously trying to gauge if she had picked up on what the younger man had just blurted.
    That was interesting. Was it some kind of taboo word? Maybe this was the