Amrita

  I am not very proud of being a human being;

  in fact, I distinctly dislike the species in many ways.

  I can readily conceive of beings vastly superior in every respect.

  She woke up cold and floaty. Her hands drifted in front of her in a way that felt both wrong and totally familiar. She was sitting in a chair; she could feel it. Even that felt wrong, though, like she was about to rise up off it, like gravity had just decided to take a break or something. Why am I so cold?

  Then her eyes opened all the way to a world of blue, green, and black. She was in a large room that faded to murkiness in the corners, seated at a table, and her hands were actually floating in front of her. Her brain sprang back into sudden awareness. I’m underwater! She thrashed about, confused and on the edge of panic. Where’s the surface? I’ll drown!

  “Don’t struggle, little one,” said a warm, gravelly female voice. “You’re in no danger.”

  Amrita twisted about in her chair, but she could see no one. She kicked free of the chair and table, swimming up to the ceiling. There had to be a way out.

  The laugh she heard was fond and totally unconcerned. “Most of us get more preparation before our first visit. You won’t find an exit up there, dear.”

  She ignored the voice and palmed her way across the ceiling, pushing past some kind of yellow-green light bulb encased in crystal and set in rusting metal brackets. You can’t have lights underwater. That’s stupid. What’s going on? Panic was clawing at her brain now, and she jerked first in one direction, then another, unsure of where to go but unwilling, unable to give up.

  “Amrita, Amrita! Just stop for a moment. You’re breathing. You won’t drown. Everything’s fine. If you’ll just listen, I’ll tell you exactly what’s happening.” The voice sounded like a three-hundred-year-old smoker, but something about it reached inside Amrita and loosened her up. It was a voice she felt she should recognize, even though she’d never heard it before. Have I?

  Either way, the voice was right. Now that she wasn’t struggling, she realized that her lungs weren’t burning at all. Am I breathing? She experimentally pulled in through her nose and panicked once again as water flowed in an unbroken stream up her nose, down her throat, and into her lungs. It changed nothing. Her lungs were already flooded, and water touched her everywhere it possibly could. Yet somehow, she still breathed.

  “What the hell is going on?” she said. Her voice sounded odd, muted and all around her at the same time. There was no bubbling, no escape of air. Only water remained in her lungs.

  “I’d love to tell you. Come back down and let’s chat, you and me.”

  Amrita let herself drift back down to the table. There were little anchor cleats under the table where she could hook her toes to stay in place. No one else sat there. “Who are you? Why can’t I see you?”

  “You’ll see me soon, I promise. One thing at a time. Sit, please. I had no idea you’d be joining me today, and I can’t tell you how pleased I am.”

  “Yeah, I’m a real treat. Why am I not drowning?”

  “A bit of quick work on my end. Once I realized who you were, I made a little change for you. Most of our folk have to do it on their own, but you’ve been unfairly held back. I grew some gills for you.”

  Amrita’s hands flew to her neck, but she felt nothing. The voice chuckled tolerantly.

  “Not there, dear. Behind your ears.”

  Reaching behind her ears, Amrita felt at the flesh. Her hands were numbed from the cold, but she felt ridges that had never been there before. Dread in her stomach, she slid a finger under the ridge and felt it flap forward. The skin beneath was as tender as the inside of her mouth, and she quickly withdrew her hand.

  “Don’t play with them, dear. You’ll get used to it soon enough.”

  Amrita clenched her fists. “Why. Do I. Have. Gills?”

  “Well, I didn’t want you to die, did I? It’s a lucky thing you had that little old broken statue of mine in your hand. It made me stop and take a second look, because otherwise… well! I’m glad it turned out the way it did. You didn’t happen to find the head of the statue, did you? No matter. Thank you for returning it.”

  “Sure thing.” She held her hands in her lap, resolutely not touching the space behind her ears.

  “This is difficult for you. I’m sorry.”

  “People keep saying that, and it gets weirder every time.”

  Another laugh. “Yes, I can imagine.”

  “Where am I?”

  “You’re in my home, dear.”

  “That really doesn’t tell me much. Where am I, exactly?”

  “You’re the one who came to visit. I assumed you knew what it meant.”

  “We’re still at Miskatonic Pond?”

  “The only part of it that matters.”

  Amrita hesitated, but she had to say it. “I saw a body.”

  “Yes, that’s a sorry business. Well, I can imagine it looks so from your perspective, at least. Try not to worry about it; I’ll explain everything in due time.”

  It felt weird to laugh underwater, even if it was only a disbelieving scoff. “You want me to not worry about a dead body? Who was it?”

  The hidden voice made a sound that was the audible equivalent of a shrug. “One of the others will know. We can find out if you’d like.”

  “Hell yeah, I’d like.”

  “Such anger you have. It’s as if a part of you knows what you’ve been cheated out of all this time.”

  “Or maybe I’m freaked out because I’m talking to a voice I can’t see that’s totally cool with people getting murdered.”

  “Well, there’s people and then there’s people, aren’t there? You can’t tell me you haven’t noticed. You could walk up to half the people you know up there and slit their throat; they’d hardly even notice. It’s almost as if they’re…”

  “Sheep,” Amrita whispered.

  “Clever girl.”

  “Will you please come out where I can see you?”

  “It may upset you.”

  “Bit late for that, lady.”

  The laugh was delighted this time. “You think so? We change when we come under the water, Amrita. It’s wonderful; we get to live for a thousand years or more if we’re careful, but we’re not the lovely, smooth little things we were in sunlight days.”

  “I can handle a little bit of ugly.”

  “Well, we’ll find out, won’t we?”

  She saw a stirring in one of the dark corners of the stone room, and a figure moved forward into the murky green light. It drifted on webbed hands and feet, the shadowy suggestion of a tail behind despite its humanish shape. It wore no clothes and lacked anything that marked it as male or female. Then the face got close enough to see and Amrita gripped the table hard, anchoring herself. The creature’s skin was crocodile rough, grey-green, the long, billowing black mane on its head closer to seaweed than hair. Its eyes were oversized and bulging, completely black, a whitish membrane flicking back and forth across the surface. Its nose was barely a suggestion, and its chin would have been nonexistent if not for the line of white, jutting bumps that lined jaw and eyebrow. With a shudder Amrita realized those growths were teeth, erupting from the reptilian skin and crowding against one another in a crazed, misaligned profusion like calciferous cancers. The broad, fleshy lips spread nearly from jaw to jaw, gapping open to reveal multiple rows of needle teeth.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  “Welcome, Amrita Rajani,” it said in its gravelly voice. “That’s my name too. I’m your grandmother.”

  Something inside her knew it was true, but she shook her head, feeling her braid swish against her neck in the water. “Bullshit. My grandma died.”

  The froggy, fishy, crocodile thing wove through the water and sat in the chair next to her, expertly threading its powerful tail through the back of the chair. It took all of Amrita’s control not to scramble away. Her grandmother looked like Gollum had a baby with Godzilla.

  “People talk about death as moving on, but in my case it was quite literal. It’s what most of us elder folk do sooner or later, those know the true worship. Your father had taken you away to who-knows-where, my changes were becoming noticeable, and the Great One needed my services here in the real part of Olmstead. Why not let the world above think me dead? It’s not as if I wanted to keep paying taxes.”

  Amrita frowned. Feeling it was one thing, but she wanted to know. “What’s my dad’s name?”

  “Anit. Though if you’re testing my identity, you’re doing a poor job.”

  “Okay, it was a stupid question. Sorry, when I got dragged underwater in the middle of nowhere and grew gills, I forgot to bring a list of security questions for my dead grandma.”

  “Your father tried so hard to fit in. I always felt bad for him. He could never be a priestess, and the fate for our men down here isn’t always pleasant, so I kept much of my knowledge from him. Perhaps it was wrong of me. Maybe if I’d included him more, he wouldn’t have taken you away. I was so happy when you were born. The thought of the line dying with me was a painful one.”

  “He said you tried to kidnap me.”

  “I suppose that’s what it looked like to him, but a queen doesn’t leave her heir to grow up in government housing.”

  “I like my house.”

  “That’s because you’ve never experienced what’s waiting for you. Come take a turn about and you’ll see what a true home looks like.”

  Amrita gestured around the bare stone room. “Not that I’m unimpressed by a whole damn house under the water, but it’s not exactly a palace.”

  “This is nothing. A waiting room. Come with me.”

  She flowed up from her seat, black hair trailing behind her, and swam to an open doorway on the far side of the room. Amrita didn’t move. The creature sighed.

  “You have a birthmark on your stomach right by your ribs. It looks like a crescent moon.”

  “Shit,” Amrita said. “All right, I get it. Hold up.”

  She swam awkwardly toward her grandmother, her jeans and hoodie hampering her movement.

  “I told him to give you swimming lessons.”

  “Maybe you did, but he thinks you’re crazy. And dead. So.” Despite feeling like she was fighting her clothes, the caress of the water on her skin and the total lack of pressure or discomfort made Amrita feel at ease. Even the cold had stopped bothering her. Grandma Amrita reached for her hand with her webbed, clawed fingers, and she jerked back unthinkingly.

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be, child. I may not care much for mirrors these days, but I know what I look like.”

  Steeling herself, Amrita linked hands with her, and with a powerful push of her tail, Gran pushed them through the doorway and into a world unlike any Amrita had ever seen. Faint sunlight filtered down from far, far above, and the whole world was darkly green and blue. The room they’d just left was a freestanding structure that looked… weird. The roof and walls met at odd angles, and the whole thing appeared trapezoidal or some other stupid math-ey shape that made her eyes want to double back to be sure they hadn’t just been tricked. She blinked, relishing the cool ease of the water on her eyes, and turned to where Gran pointed.

  A whole city stretched out in a sunken, murky valley far beneath Miskatonic Pond. Some were simple one-room vaults like the one she’d just exited, but others were tall, narrow obelisks or strange compound structures that looked like a child’s wooden blocks fashioned from stone and fused together in impossible ways. In the center of it all stood a grand, stepped pyramid rising a hundred feet or more from the mud and kelp. The lanes between buildings met and refracted off each other in a geometric confusion. There was not a single ninety-degree angle in sight. And on these roads, each paved with huge stone blocks, swam a tangle of creatures of all shapes and sizes. Some had tails like Gran, others had fins and flippers, and still others looked like oversized tadpoles. Above it all, circling the top of the pyramid like a shark, was maybe the biggest moving shape she’d ever seen.

  “Holy shit,” she breathed. “What is that?”

  “A shoggoth,” her grandmother said. “There are many kinds, of all shapes and sizes, but that one is the protector of our little city.” It looked like a manta ray, except it had four powerful legs churning beneath its vast wings and a group of barbed, hooked tentacles drifting down from its mouth. It had to have been thirty feet from one wing-tip to the other.

  “Hell of a protector.”

  Again came that grandmotherly smoker’s laugh. “Yes, it is. I take our safety very seriously. Olmstead is a more dangerous place than you know. Just yesterday one of our other shoggoths was attacked by a terrible enemy.”

  She kept her face blank, trying hard not to think of her escape from the library with Olly. “Really?”

  “Had I not been able to treat the beast we’d have lost one of our most valuable tools. It’ll need to feed soon if it’s to survive.”

  Amrita turned to her. “Feed?”

  Gran hmmmed thoughtfully. “Your father has you in school, yes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How many of those children are even as self-aware as a chicken?”

  Amrita shrugged. “I mean, yeah, there’s a bunch of weirdos. People who don’t talk to you.”

  “They feel different than other people, do they not?”

  “Like they’re blank. Like they’re zombies.”

  “That’s because they were bred to serve, child. They’re not people, not like you and me.”

  “So you feed them to your pets?”

  “Not exactly, but… something like that.”

  “And the dead person I saw up top, was that one of those?”

  “It was.”

  She pulled her hand free from the Gran-monster. “That is the most deeply not-okay thing I have ever heard.”

  “You might as well feel bad for your hamburger as those children. Go spend a summer at a slaughterhouse and then tell me what you think.”

  Amrita shook her head, drifting away from her. “You’ve got me halfway to being a vegan with this line of thinking.”

  Gran clacked her toothy jaws. “I’m saying this poorly. This is the real world, Amrita. Up there exists only to feed and support us, to help us bring our Great One back into the world. This is what you exist for, Amrita. You will lead all of us to the heights.”

  “Depths.”

  “Don’t be snotty, Amrita. I mean this. I can pull back the veil for you – you will be one of the greatest among us. The work is progressing now, and you are needed.”

  She looked up to the underwater cavern mouth that let the light filter down and led back up to the world she had known. Could I swim to the surface without her catching me? Not a chance. “Do I get my very own monster mouth and crocodile tail?”

  “You mock, but I forgive you. Your changes will come in time, and you will learn both their beauty and utility.”

  “What if I say no?”

  Gran spread her webbed hands. “No means nothing. Yes means nothing. We are who we are, my child, my priestess. Great Cthulhu will use you, and either you will allow him to make you great or you will be ground to mud and dust.”

  “Gran, you really need to work on your hard sell.”

  “Think, Amrita!” she growled, swimming to her. “I touched you and you grew gills in a matter of seconds. Fully functional organs capable of taking oxygen from the water and feeding it into your blood. That is the least of what I can do – of what you can do. The world above is about to change; you can help shape it if you’ll just listen to me!”

  Amrita kicked off from the mud underfoot, stroking toward the surface. “Sorry, Gran. I’m kind of a bitch, and I don’t listen when the conversation starts with murder.”

  A concussive bellow shook the water all around them, startling Amrita out of her upward stroke. Looking around, she saw the great shoggoth paused in its rounds, its face pointed off to her left. A glance down at the streets of the submerged city of Miskatonic Pond showed that every single denizen had stopped and was looking in the same direction. Amrita was reminded of the swimmers in the YMCA pool.

  “Intruders!” her grandmother hissed. “Stop this idiocy and follow me, girl.”

  Amrita trailed after her half-heartedly. “What’s going on?”

  “Another one of the foul ones approaches. How dare they come here?” She sounded furious.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Protect my people. It’s what we do, you and I.”

  Amrita mentally chewed on being grouped together that way, but still she followed. They were approaching the shoggoth. A subsonic rumbling emanated from the huge beast, and she saw red eyes grouped in clusters all along its shark-like hide.

  “Come ride with me,” her grandmother commanded. “I’ve not found you just to let you die the same day, even if you are being stubborn.”

  “I’m not sure I want to,” she said.

  “I wasn’t asking!” Gran snapped, whirling on her. Her needle teeth were bared, her claws extended. “You will ride the shoggoth with me, and once we’ve stepped on this interstellar cockroach, we’ll discuss things further.”

  Amrita crossed her arms, though it didn’t have quite the same effect in the middle of the water. “No.”

  With a hiss like a steam engine, her monster grandmother slipped through the water, darting to her side and taking her by the wrist. Her grip was impossibly strong.

  “Back off, bitch!” Amrita cried, swinging her fist. Once again the water spoiled her movement, and Gran had her other wrist pinned in a heartbeat. She pulled Amrita close, baring her teeth.

  “If I wanted to harm you, I would tear out your throat like those sheep people above. But I won’t. I value your strength. But when I say you’re coming, you’re coming. You may choose otherwise once you’re powerful enough to resist me.”

  Gran settled into a shallow depression in the shoggoth’s broad back and sunk her claws into its thick skin with one hand, holding Amrita’s wrist in the other. Her huge black eyes turned to her, the white membrane flicking into place over them.

  “Hold on unless you want this to hurt,” she said.

  Amrita’s wrist felt like it was in steel handcuffs. Even as she wished she had a knife to stick into her Gran, she scrabbled with her fingers at the pebbly hide of the shoggoth, finding crevices first for her hand and then for her feet.

  “I’ll keep fighting you.”

  “Good. You’ll learn faster that way.”

  Then the shoggoth shot toward the surface and Amrita was grateful Gran had told her to hold on. The sense of speed and power was incredible. Had she not gotten a firm grip, the inert water would have torn her from its back instantly.

  “That’s right,” Gran cooed at the shoggoth, her gravelly voice pleased. “Let’s go hunting.”

  Looking behind and down, Amrita realized the sunken city was at least five hundred feet below them. “I had no idea the Pond was this deep.”

  “It wasn’t originally. We’re master builders, my people. You’ll see soon enough.”

  They paused just below the surface, and one of the shoggoth’s great tentacles drifted upward, its tip just piercing the surface.

  “Where are you?” Gran murmured, watching the tentacle. It weaved back and forth erratically as if it were searching. Then it stiffened, pointing shoreward. “There.”

  Amrita didn’t know how or why, but through her fingers she felt the shoggoth’s concentration, its satisfaction. It was hunting, and it loved it. For a moment, so did Amrita.

  The great beast surged forward and broke the surface like a blue whale breaching. There, in the far distance, stood a person on the shore. Water streamed from Amrita’s nose, mouth, eyes, and – with extreme discomfort – her new gills as her body expelled it so she could breathe air again. She coughed and sputtered, taking her eyes from the distant figure.

  Gran was not so distracted. “Kill!” she screamed.

  The shoggoth thundered to the shore.