The Ethereal Pursuer

“You are evil,” said the fortune teller after he finished reading my hands.

“What? How can you tell?”

***

Amanda was running down the deserted streets in the middle of the night. It was pouring hard and the shirt and jeans she wore hugged her petite figure. In her panic, she had forgotten to wear her raincoat. She clutched a thick black tome in her hands.

She knew her running was pointless, and yet she couldn’t help it. The fear coursing through her pushed her onwards.

Everything had gone to shit and it was all her fault. She had done the most grievous of things, which people had been trying to prevent for centuries.

She kept her eyes glued to the pavement, not looking around at the writhing shapes and shadows that were all around her, from whom came the most gruesome of moans and shrieks that set ice inside her heart. She was crying, her mascara mixed with tears and rainwater dribbling down her face.

Suddenly, she collided into someone and fell on her backside. She screamed and covered her eyes, afraid to look at who, or what, she had bumped into.

“What’s the matter, little missy?”

“Huh?”

She looked up and saw an elderly traffic policeman looking down at her. She could make out the uniform in the hazy light from a nearby street light, that barely shone on him through the pouring rain.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. She could see his teeth glint as he smiled.

She looked around and saw that there were no shadows or shapes. The sounds too had disappeared. There was a strange calmness, except for the pattering of the rain.

“Listen, sir. You have to get out of here.”

“Why is that, missy? It’s almost dawn, my shift’s just starting. Don’t you know how crazy the traffic is in the morning?”

“But-”

“No buts, come on, I’ll take you home,” he said offering his hand. She grabbed it and instantly jerked it away. Why the hell is it so sticky? She looked down at her hand and saw that it was covered in blood. She looked up and her eyes went wide.

The old man that had stood in front of her had black tentacles coming in and out from all over his body. The old man’s eyes were lifeless, and his skin was pale as death. There was blood all over his body, dried in patches. The old man’s body smiled, blood trickling down his mouth, as the tentacles inside controlled it like a ventriloquist dummy.

The inhuman moans and shrieks were back as she looked at the wisps of smog coming out of the writhing tentacles.

She screamed as she clutched the tome to her chest and ran.

She ran and ran, as far she could, wherever, she could. She didn’t care where, all she wanted was to get away from those awful sounds. After a while, the pavement and road underneath had gone and she found her sneakers sliding across wet grass, as the rain continued to pour. She collided into trees, pushed through thorny bushes and tripped on trailing branches, oblivious to it all. All she knew she was she had to run.

The sounds seemed to be a bit far now and Amanda was exhausted. She dropped to the grass and struggled to regain her breath, fighting the urge to heave out the contents of her stomach. She looked up and saw that she was in the woods. There was a small abandoned shack in front of her, dark and blurred in the pouring rain and mist.

She half-walked, half-crawled her way inside and leaned against the rotting wooden walls of the shack. Drops of rain water seeped through the ceiling and onto to the cuts and scrapes on her face.

She hugged the black tome to her as she shivered from the cold.

She couldn’t believe what she had done, all because she had wanted to sate her curiosity.

You know you really shouldn’t be feeling so safe.

Amanda eyes went wide and she sat up. Who said that?

After all, you are the one who summoned our master in the first place, along with that idiot descendant of Alhazred who you did the ritual with.

Amanda pressed herself against the wall of the shack. She couldn’t see what was going on. She started to cry.

Not to mention, you have the Necronomicon in your hand which you literally used to summon us. Do you have any idea how much ethereal energy is seeping out of that? You might as well have screamed ‘Here I am! Come get me!’

“Please-”

She didn’t even get a chance to complete her sentence when the dark wispy tentacles broke through the wooden wall from either side of her, and she didn’t even get a chance to scream as they clasped around her mouth.

***

“You are evil,” said the fortune teller after he finished reading my hands.

“What? How can you tell?”

“It’s because your hands are covered in human blood. Not only that, they’re not even actually hands, but tentacles.”

Oh, you’re right. How could I be so blind?

T’ep laughed as he tossed aside the dead fortune teller’s body, who was the descendant of Alhazred, alongside Amanda’s, who had been her curious apprentice. He shook his tentacle to dislodge the fortune teller’s eyeball that had somehow twirled around it.

Cthulu had a strange way of treating the two people who had summoned him, but who was T’ep to question his master. Maybe it was mercy, because after all, T’ep and all the other servants of Cthulu were here to make humanity’s end as painful as possible.

T’ep guided his slimy mass to the exit of the fortune teller’s shop. He looked up at the stormy sky and savoured the painful screams of the humans and the gleeful shrieking of his kind.

He couldn’t let them have all the fun.