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

represent—and the only way she could ever find out anything more about Tulu would be to travel to visit those fishy natives again. Those same Papuans who sealed themselves away from her, not even holding the feast in her honor that researchers always enjoyed their last night with them, and refused to speak a word to her afterward.
    She filed Tulu away in her brain and knew she would never hear the word again, let alone learn what it meant.
    Kristen Frommer, PhD but ABD, could not have been more wrong.
     
    Louisiana Bayou, USA
    30°N 92°W, 9000 km from the Event
     
    Following the debacle of Papua New Guinea eighteen months earlier, when Kristen hadn’t found a damned thing that could be considered publishable information, she had languished under a two-year contract as an adjunct at her alma mater, at the lowest rung of the academic ladder, the ninth level of career hell. She taught a 5/5 load, no allowance being made for research, teaching next to retired high school teachers who had gotten bored not being in a classroom as well as current grad students trying to supplement their meager funding.
    She taught from the LSU-approved textbooks, using scanned and uploaded materials of her own to inject a little bit of her personal research and experience ( ha! ) into the classes. Most of the students in the cavernous lecture halls paid her little attention, texting or surfing the Web while she lectured, perking up only when they heard something about an upcoming test. It was disheartening, to say the least, but she was proud she hadn’t given up on her research program, such as it was.
    Not having the backing to fly halfway across the world and spend months imitating Levi-Strauss among the inhabitants of islands dotting the Southern Pacific, Kristen had taken up a much less expensive—not to mention less exhausting—research agenda in order to make her mark, to get noticed at long last and pull herself out of the career cellar that the trapdoor of Papua New Guinea had dropped her into. Her research aim, though relatively local, was almost completely untouched by academic investigation: the very strange “Negro voodoo cannibal cults” of the nearly inaccessible Louisiana swamps. (She would never use either term, of course—they were “African–Pacific Islander animist fusion worship groups” and “the bayou,” respectively.)
    The few academic papers she had read about these people described them as the product of 150 years of degeneracy, the descendants of cross-breeding escaped slaves, shunned Cajun miscegenists, and (her point of entry) Papua New Guineans pressed into service by ships sailing from Australia to New Orleans, from where the men ran north into the mires to avoid more forced service.
    She had no baubles with which she could bribe them. No alcohol or less-legal mood enhancers to convince them she was some kind of white angel. No technology to amaze them into telling her their stories. All of that was unethical as hell, anyway. This was America, these people were Americans, and this mucky hellhole was less than 300 miles from one of the biggest cities in the Southeast. They weren’t going to cook her in a pot and eat her.
    At least, she hoped not. These were people whose great-grandparents had all thrown off their shackles. Certainly they would not imprison a well-meaning college professor ( don’t you mean adjunct instructor? ) and kill her and devour her. People knew she was coming there. Well, not exactly there , but the swamplands. The bayou. These degenerates of strong genetic lines wouldn’t be able to make her disappear, not like the few studies on these people—some dating back to the 1920s—claimed. The newspapers of those days still used the word “Negro” and “mulatto,” for Christ’s sake.
    Thanks to Easter, Kristen had three days away from her own captors at the university during which she could drive up from campus to penetrate as far as she could into the swamps, then use a