Sunday, October 02, 2005

Main Story: Chapter Four - Daughters of Hydra

The Deep Ones Project

By David Reichen


Chapter Four: Daughters of Hydra



If we're offensive and pose a threat
You fear what we represent is a mess
You miss the message that says it all
And you'll never know why
Oh no, you never know why

We ROCK

{ We Rock, by Ozzy Osbourne, from The Ultimate Sin }


As we make our way to Ipswitch, I continue to question Lief about why there was all this secrecy behind what my parents and he were working on.

"Your parents and I became involved with each other just after your mother had her first trimester checkup and had very unusual results."


After finding out what was causing all of the commotion at the Arkham Sanitorium, I returned to the Miskatonic University to refocus my research into the Ancient One Cthulu and his supposed minion Dagon. I went to the rare books vault that the Wilmarth Foundation maintains there in the library and browsed their wide collection of books and manuscripts: Cults Du Ghouls, Mysterie des Vermis, Notes on the Necronomicon. They even had a copy of The Way of the Shadows, by Sun Tzu, the same guy who wrote The Art of War.

As I took the Notes and placed it on the table, somebody rang the bell that was next to the barred door. Yes, not only does the door have bars on it, it even has a vault type door, just like at a bank. I turned to the door, saw a young couple there and asked, "May I help you? You do know that this is a restricted area and I can't let just let anyone waltz in here. They complain about the noise."

"Are you Lief Chancey, we were told that he might be here? We really need to see him about something important," said the guy.

He and his companion looked familiar. I had seen them on campus a few times and knew that they had a lab in the Biology department, clear over on the other side of where my office was. I had a small office in the Advanced Computational Research Facility and according to their records I was doing research on information storage methods.

"Yes, that's me. Please come in," I replied. I opened the door barring their entry into the room and closed it once they had stepped inside. I was surprised that anyone would be looking for me. The only people who knew what I was doing here were connected with the Foundation. When it was found that I was interested in unusual occurrences happening in regard to Innsmouth, they were happy to let me handle it on my own. They even gave me clearance to their coveted collection of documents. It's amazing what results you can get when you drop a few names.

They looked very uncertain at me, especially when I relocked the door, so I tried to calm them a bit. "Please, sit down, make yourselves comfortable. Tell me what is bothering you. Maybe I can help."

Once they sat down next to each other, the guy started to tell me their troubles, "This is my wife, Marsha Waite, and I am Elliot Gilman. We just got back from my wife's doctor and he suggested that we should talk to a Lief Chancey about the results of the examination."

Marsha confided, "I went in for the first trimester check up. Everything was normal until they did a sonagram. Things did not go as planed during it." She reached into her bag and took out a couple of printouts and handed them to me, "as you can see, there are a couple of strange things happening in her development. When we told the doctor where our parents were from, he insisted that we speak to you. He told us that we should consider an abortion to reduce undue stress on me from carrying an obviously deformed child to birth."

I took the offered prints and felt pieces of the puzzle move into place. The growing fetus seemed normal at first glance; however, when I looked more closely, I noticed what they must have seen, "let me guess, you are from what people insist on calling Innsmouth."

They looked at each other and shook their head, "No, our parents were from there though."

"I am looking for the source of strange deformations that some of the local people are suffering from. The only thing that I have been able to find out is that all of them come from that specific town, wherever it may be. All the ones that I know of have been adults though, this is the first time I have seen of anything like this. Does either of you have any ideas on what exactly is happening here?"

"Our area of expertise is on how DNA, the molecules that encode information about how an organism is to develop, is used to differentiate between separate species. A good example is the difference between us and the rest of the primates, which is quite small. We think that somehow areas in her DNA are becoming active that normal have no effect at all. It is very strange, like being Adam and Eve of another species." She said, reaching out to the guy and they held hands.

"Only Father Dagon and Mother Hydra know what is planned," Elliot said, raising his free hand, as if giving a benediction.

"Father Dagon? Mother Hydra?" I ask, quizzically.

"It's an expression that our parents say when they comment on something inexplicable."

"Hold on a minute," I said, getting up from the chair and going to one of the locked filing cabinets stored in the far corner of the room marked Wilmarth Foundation Archives, "They mentioned something about a report that someone filed about seeing an outbreak of an unknown disease that was discovered when he went to Innsmouth. He wrote about somebody using such a phrase. One of the locals. A Zadok Allen."

I opened up the cabinet and took out the file mentioned, put it on the table and pointed out the relevant section. "Here it is! Father Dagon and Mother Hydra is mentioned right here:

{an' the childern shud never die, but go back to the Mother Hydra an' Father Dagon what we all come from onct. - Shadow over Innsmouth, by H P Lovecraft}

It even mentions an agreement made with a group of Pacific Islanders:

{When it come to matin' with them toad-lookin' fishes, the Kanakys kind of balked, but finally larnt something as put a new face on the matter. Seems that human folks has got a kind a relation to sech waterbeasts - that everything alive come aout o' the water onct an' only needs a little change to go back agin. - Shadow over Innsmouth, by H P Lovecraft}

"I know about Dagon and the Esoteric Order of Dagon but I have no clue to how this and Hydra relate to each other." When in doubt on such arcane matters, there is only one source where these sorts of things are recorded. Before I tackled the main book, I opened the book that I had placed on the table. The book was Notes on the Necronomicon and I used it to find out where in the main book that the information about Hydra was at.

"It says here that Hydra and her daughters are like the Amazon's of Greek legend. Hydra, the Goddess Queen, ruled over the daughters. They are from the Pacific area. Unlike most species, each of the daughters is capable of mating with other species to produce chimeras, hybrids.

"There is supposedly a section about this right after Dagon in the Nerconomicon. It's strange but I didn't notice one though."

I removed that vile book from its enclosing case and opened it to the section describing Dagon. The book was the English translation of the Greek version and not the one that I was familiar with, the Alemanic version translated in the 1500's from the original Arabic by the monks at the Abbey of Gallus. Where I expected the section on Hydra to be, was the section after it, the Shadow People. The Shadow People are warrior monks of the Tcho-Tcho, who use to live in China's Xin Jian Provence but now live in Leng. Their leader is the Veiled King, they guard the Halls of Destiny and worship Nyarlathotep, Messenger of the Other Gods.

"Hey! It's not here!" I informed the couple. I examined the book more closely, especially the book's spine. "Oh! Oh! Someone tore pages from the book. You can just barely see where the missing pages should be."

"I wonder what happened to them?" Marsh asked.

"I don't know but take a look at the chart on the back of the page you are holding, Lief. It seems to resemble a species chart, just like the one we use in our lectures on Evolution," Elliot comments, "why is there a faint marking running up and down the page?"

"A stray fiber in the paper maybe," I suggest, puzzled that such a chart was in use at the time that the book was written in.

I was curious of what the chart looked like under closer examination so I took pictures of the page with my camera and loaded them into my laptop computer. I then had the computer enlarge the pictures so that they could see the chart more closely.

"Not them again," I said with a sigh, "that's defiantly a species chart. Each of these braches is labeled in Tocharian Script," I wiggled the mouse around the labels of a few of the braches, "here is the one for Man, one for a fish something, most of the others I don't recognize though."

Elliot bent down, closer to the display screen and stabbed his finger at where the word for man was on the diagram, "Could you enlarge this area a bit, please?"

I had the computer zoom into the requested area and was in for a shock. To me, the area had looked like a word but once enlarged, it looked like a collection of hexagons with stick thingies coming out of the corners with balls attached to the ends of the sticks.

"Those are chemical diagrams, probably of enzymes, that are hidden in the writing," Elliot said, explaining to me what I was looking at.

"Enzymes? A Chart of Evolution? What else are we going to find out, The Missing Link? You do realize that the book this was translated from is at about one millennia old. It should not contain this sort of information!"

Marsha, who up until now was watching her husband and I discuss what was in the book, pipes in with a reply that stopped our verbal tennis match, "Book, Schnook. Those enzymes are the ones Granny Marsh, who I am named after, put in her special elixir she gave to me before she passed away. She told me to take it, for good luck, whenever I got pregnant. I have some of it left that I keep in one of the lab's refrigerators.

"Her dieing words to me, that no one else heard, when she handed the thing to me were that the Daughters of Hydra will be reborn again. You don't suppose that this is what she meant?"



We put all of the books and such back in their places and left the vaulted room and went to their lab in the Biology department.

Marsha took out what looked like a perfume bottle from the refrigerator she went to and showed it to us. The bottle had a bunch of wigglely lines in a language that was undecipherable. Below this caption was a drawing of a Hydra with distorted female figures surrounding it.



"You now know how I became involved with your parents," I say, stopping the story so that I could concentrate on driving through Ipswitch's streets.

Production Notes: Key Frames - Wake up


























I feel that I have had this dream before. This time, it is different. Unlike all of the other time, this one seems real. What is even worse of all is that this time, I REMEMBER!

Production Notes: Key Frames - Or Scream











Yeah, Baby!




















What the..

EEK!

BEGONE!




















Now what

Oh, SHIT!!

This can't be REAL!