“I love you too...” she whispered into the silence.
* * *
Hiromitsu was alone in the elevator. It had been over a full year since his sister had mysteriously bought the penthouse and became suddenly reclusive.
This bothered Hiromitsu greatly. He had always looked after Shantigra. She was the only family he had left. She had finally invited him to her new penthouse. She had news for him. Important news. He was happily surprised and frightened at the same time.
He knew she had seen her doctor recently. He knew this had to do with the doctor as well. Their family physician had confirmed this with Hiromitsu. Yes, it was a breach of doctor-patient confidentiality – but it wasn't only Hiromitsu that was concerned with his sisters drastic changes.
Was she sick? No. He wouldn't allow himself to run in circles. He had calmed his mind before arriving. He had attained a temporary state of Clear Mind and planned to maintain it. He would know shortly. Once he knew, then he could do something – take the appropriate actions necessary.
The elevator stopped and the doors opened. Shantigra was there to greet him. Although she was smiling – that stranger's smile – it looked like she might have been crying.
* * *
Lorne lit the kerosene lantern. The lurking darkness disappeared in the Chiba cottage. Creepy crawlies scattered from the light.
He opened the windows and let the fresh night air in. The cottage was flooded with the sound of crickets and ocean. Lorne was surprised how loud the crickets were. But then again, this was their domain.
He did a circuit of the cottage, collecting dry sticks and anything he might use as kindling. There was a light breeze coming off the ocean. Everything was draped in a haunting silver-blue moon-light. He had no difficulties finding enough kindling.
He stopped for a moment, his arms ladened with sticks and dry brush. The breeze played with his hair; made it slowly dance. He looked up at the nighted sky. Stars! Countless stars. More stars than Lorne ever had imagined could fill the sky.
His mind was filled with the song of the crickets as he returned to the cottage. He felt almost sorry to light the fire in the hearth. He'd grown used to the silvery-blue light.
* * *
“I'm pregnant!” she said with both trepidation and excitement in her voice. She couldn't read Hiromitsu's face.
He cocked his head to one side. “Pregnant?” he asked.
“Is that why... Who is the father?”
“That's why I've been distant from people,” she lied. “I don't know who the father is. I'm afraid... people will judge me. People will think -” Marie stopped mid-sentence, expecting some sort of response or reaction from Hiromitsu.
He simply sat there, motionless. The left corner of his mouth every so slightly twitched. The twitch slowly spread into a smile and then the smile into a grin. Hiromitsu burst out with laughter.
“...people will think... I'm... promiscuous...” Marie was unsure of his reaction, although the Shantigra-facet recognized her brother's response as ecstatic! He was overjoyed!
His attempts to convinced her to see their doctor had paid off. It seemed to him that she was gaining weight and growing more and more pale in complexion. This was more of an excuse than a reason. He knew something had changed. He just didn't know what. He had tried many times over the past year to convince Shantigra to see a doctor, but she always refused.
She was gaining weight too! He was certain of that, and he had noticed her dietary tastes had changed too. But this made sense! Hiromitsu was relieved! He had believed her. Marie was glad. For she knew that her – and Lorne's – year long isolation was causing suspicion. It was getting attention within their community. This seemed to be the perfect excuse. Things simply fell into place!
However, Shantigra had lied to her brother. She knew who the father was. She secretly lived with him in her penthouse. The father was none other than Lorne S. Gibbons.
Hiromitsu's laughter was contagious. Marie felt her spirits rising, her worry abating. She was so happy! The Gibbons were having a baby!
She began laughing and crying at the same time.
The two siblings held each other's hands and simply laughed with joy.
* * *
Lorne had the fire burning and could feel the damp within the cottage receding. The soothing sounds of the ocean and the song of the crickets became mixed with the soft crackle of the fire; the occasional pop of sap would silence the crickets for only a moment.
It was dark outside now. Clouds had rolled in, hiding the moon and blanketing the surrounding wilderness with darkness.
As the room warmed up the timber began to voice its complaints; began to moan in protest. The house seemed brought back to life and sentient.
Lorne wasn't aware of the cricket song any longer. The crackle of the hearth and the talking house filled his ears.
Tink. A tiny sound of a rain drop on the clay shingled roof. Tink. Tink.
Tock. A drop fell through the open window and hit the floor. Then, like a blanket of sound was thrown over the crickets and ocean, all Lorne could hear was the hissing of rain dancing on the reeds and bamboo canopy.
A long sorrowful note sang alongside the rain. Lorne was hypnotized by the rain and suddenly realized the note was from his violin, and he had already began playing. The violin's tempo increased then became melodic again. It sped up, racing up an alien scale and slowly, melodically, descended. This musical pattern repeated, increasing tempo every repetition until, suddenly a pocket of sap in the burning log popped. It broke Lorne's concentration – snapped him out of his state of mushin.
Bright orange embers bounced out of the fireplace, their dull glow returning the room to darkness. He hadn't noticed the fire had gone out. As his eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness, his bow slipped off his violin strings as he stopped playing... but the music continued.
It was a deep, low, bass sound. He felt it in his belly and groin and through the floor as much as he heard it. He couldn't tell where it was coming from. The ancient cottage timbers moaned and reverberated along with the deep wailing song. The stones and mason shifted and popped dully.
As he looked to the windows, they appeared as little more than pitch black squares in the surrounding darkness. The haunting alien whale-like song droned on as Lorne took a flashlight from his backpack and made his way to the inky black window.
A strange alien wind meandered outside, causing the reeds to make a hushing sound. It seemed to accent the bass drone. He shone his flashlight out as far as he could. The light beam ended abruptly when it met the surrounding edge of the black Gate-sphere. It encircled the entire cottage; a great shadowy black wall.
Then he noticed it. The ground. The ground beneath the reeds was moving. It was a black crawling mass! His panic began to rise and he turned the flashlight to the ground.
Crickets. Hundreds and hundreds of crickets marched in silence towards the cottage! His attention was drawn away from the creeping black mass by a sudden change in the wailing music – a deeper thundering roar.
He turned back and saw a single purple spark in the room. Then another. Then numerous purple sparks erupted in a shower and as the Gateway expanded, neon-blue lightning dancing across its surface.
Lorne held his breath. The droning music shook the very foundations of the cottage and he could see purple-tinted dust floating down from the ceiling.
The crickets began pouring into the cottage through the window, their black mass covering the stone floor. The neon-blue lightning of the Gateway gave a strobe light-like effect to them, making their advancement less fluid and sporadic.
Within the limited confines of this finite pocket-universe Lorne became aware of faint voices in his subconscious – beneath his subconscious. He was barely aware of their whisperings but they were there all the same. Not words, not coherent thoughts; barely even crude concepts. Like echoes of memories – absolutely alien in their content. They were soft, evasive and elusive; madness itself. And al
though he couldn't see their source, he could sense that it issued from an incarnation of madness itself. It was a call. As faint and forgotten as it was; it was a call.
The crawling mass of crickets were coagulating around his feet when his focus was broken by a sound. The music turned over, booming in its intensity! ... and then everything fell silent. The purple Gateway snapped out of existence and the black surrounding Gatesphere simply vanished.
The crickets seemed confused, wandered about the cottage disorientated. Lorne released his breath. The sounds of the rain on the reeds came in the room. The soothing sounds of the ocean wafted in. Crickets in the distance continued their song. Tink, tink, tink sang the rain drops on the roof.
“No Nyarlathotep,” Lorne whispered to himself. “.... it worked!”
* * *
Perth , Australia,
New Year's Day,
January 1st, 2005
(10 years in the future)
Amber Miller was an attractive woman of nineteen. She was curvy, full-bodied and shapely. She had large breasts, which were larger still now due to her condition.
She wore her blonde hair shoulder-length and rarely combed. She possessed the most charming and piercing blue eyes and a smile many of her heart-broken ex-boyfriends would describe as 'a ray of sunshine'. Her pale complexion only further enhance her beauty... that is until one learned the reason behind it.
She had only just woke up. Her head still throbbed. She was hungover and didn't remember exactly where she had spent the night.
When she sat up she found herself naked. The stale smell of the bed was powerful. So was the smell of dried sweat on the sheets. As she leaned over to see who the sleeping man was beside her, her ribs showed through her pale gray flesh. No, she didn't know who he was. No big deal.
She got out of the stained bed and searched for her clothes. They were on the floor, mixed with the stranger's in a tangled heap. She sorted through the mess, found her panties and put her left foot through the leg hole. It was then that she realized she must go to the bathroom. She was not sick. She didn't have to vomit. She did not have to go to the washroom, so to speak... but she had to clean this mess out that was dripping down her leg.
Last night was her New Year's party! 2005! Wow! What a blast that was! Or as much as she could remember of it. She had drank whiskey and taken cocaine. She remembered sleeping with one fellow... but this stranger in bed wasn't him. Oh well, no big deal. She couldn't get pregnant. Not now at least. She already was! Four months pregnant.
She remembered that night. September 4th, 2004. She was picked up by a rich American business man at a bar. He bought her drinks all night and in return she kept him company and danced with him. At the end of the evening he offered to pay her to sleep with him.
Amber saw this as an opportunity! She had planned to sleep with him anyway and now he was offering money! All the better! She accepted and ended up pregnant. Oh well. At least her parents offered her more money now. She could always use guilt when they wizened up. She was set! Things hadn't been this good in a long time! She didn't even have to hold down her shitty job anymore! Her parent's money paid for her habits. Things were great!
She hadn't gotten around to seeing a doctor yet. In all honesty she really didn't want to. All she needed was for some pompous prick to talk down to her, judge her, and lecture her on how smoking and drinking and drug use was harmful to the baby. Fuck the baby. She had her own life to live! The baby had a whole lifetime ahead of it. Why should she change? Besides, if she had made it through four months of pregnancy without medical supervision, why start now? Women have been giving birth naturally for thousands of years, right? She was nearly half way there!
Her parents were giving her a hard time over it though. But that wasn't a big problem. What's the worse they could do? Threaten to stop giving her money? Ha! An empty threat. She would threaten them! She would have to have an abortion! Tell them that if they wouldn't help her then she had no choice but to have the abortion. If they wouldn't give her the help she needed, she would have no means of supporting the baby. She would have no choice. It would be their choice, she would tell them.
Amber Miller knew she'd never actually go through with it. It was too good of a thing she had going. If she did her parents wouldn't give her money anymore and would probably stop supporting her. She would have nothing over them. But she knew the threat of abortion would not be challenged by them. They were so stupid.
After she was finished cleaning herself, she got dressed and left the stranger's house.
Chapter 8: From the UNCGSC Files:Tamara Takahara & Global Elliptical Ocean Phenomena Theory
Tamara Takahara was born on October 17th, 1994. She was born a human-symbiot hybrid.
A sudden rise of ocean levels coincided with Marie's labour, peaking with Tamara's birth at 5:14 am, flooding low lying districts of Tokyo and coastal areas. After which, the flood waters mysteriously and suddenly receded. A beautiful brown-eyed black haired Asian baby girl, her biological parents were Massao Yokomoto and Shantigra Takahara.
Where her parents were both physically human, they were not completely human themselves. Lorne and Marie Gibbons were not simply human beings but a symbiot-species hybrid.
However, her birth and the events that coincided, did not go unnoticed.
* * *
CSIS-SAT-RCMP Joint Task Force Command Documents (Codename: Foxhunt) excerpt:
Koseki Family Registration (Birth):
Name: Tamara Takahara
Sex: female
Mother's Name: Shantigra Takahara
Father's Name: unknown
Birth date: October 17, 1994
Place of Birth : Tokyo, Japan
Issued Date: pending
Information collected and compiled in accordance with the CSIS-SAT-RCMP JTFC Synchronicity Mandate**
* * *
United Nations Covalent Global Security Conclave (UNCGSC), Codename: Foxhunt, Submitted Report by Professor Howard Neilson, excerpt:
I believe Genevieve Cadeaux's (M.Sc. (meteorology)) theory of Global Elliptical Ocean Phenomena* (GEOP) might be valid.
Her GEOP has linked the reports of a storm surge (ocean swell) in Tokyo Bay on Oct. 16th-17th, 1994 with the apparently unrelated reports of flooding of Porto Algre, Brazil.
Genevieve Cadeaux pursues this theory based on the hypothesis of this phenomena being artificial or possibly man-made.
T. Paupst, a student of mine, would seem to maintain G. Cadeaux's hypothesis of an original, and much earlier, “0-event”, centering in ancient Egypt.
The storm surge (ocean swell) and minor flooding in low lying districts of Tokyo Bay coincide with the birth of Tamara Takahara at 5:14 am, Oct. 17th, 1994.
We have reason to believe Tamara Takahara is yet another symbiot-species, or possibly, mutant, or new life-form.
Professor Howard Neilson
Information collected and compiled in accordance with the CSIS-SAT-RCMP JTFC Synchronicity Mandate**
* * *
* Genevieve Cadeaux, Masters Degree of Science (Meteorology), Ph. D. Thesis Paper: “Global Elliptical Ocean Phenomena”, Excerpt:
When GEOP occurs its oceanic action – whether it is a sudden ocean swell or storm surge, or its opposite, a drastic and sudden drop of oceanic or sea-level – is mirrored on the planet's antipodes. These two diametric opposite events, I believe, are connected and related. Initial evidence suggested gravitational fluctuations, but it is unclear at this time whether this gravity phenomena is extraterrestrial (and pulling) or inter-terrestrial (and pushing).
The Hunt: Symbiosys Page 6