The Eldritch Lover: Part One (complete)

Female Reader(cis) x Nonbinary Monster 

The summons came at a late hour, and work usually didn’t contact me until the morning on weekdays. Never after six, certainly never on weekends. This was strange, considering how consistent they had been. This job was strange, to say the least, but at least my employers were professional.

It had been storming the last few days. The winds had been strong, and the rain came and went in spurts of heavy showers. Tonight it was drizzling, just enough to lower visibility outside. I had rarely been to the main building of the company I worked for, and it was remote; a huge industrial building miraculously nestled and protected amidst pine trees and rocky terrain.

“Sorry to call you in so late.” I was instantly greeted at the door by Dr. Yora, who said she had sought me out specifically for hiring.

“You sounded urgent on the phone,” I said as I removed my raincoat. “What’s going on?” I was still confused and hoping for answers. I was hired as a linguistics specialist, and I worked from home. I was never called in except for the occasional meeting.

Dr. Yora was a tall woman, and that was as much as I knew about her. “Follow me. It’s not safe to talk here.”

I looked around, only seeing a few guards darting around the main floor. “Okay,” I said uneasily as I tried to keep up with her long stride. I’d never been beyond the second floor of this building, where I went through my interview process and where most meetings were held. I’d never needed to go anywhere else. Dr. Yora led me onto an elevator and pushed a button for the basement floor. My stomach sank as the elevator did. I had to leave my bag and cellphone behind, and the only person who knew I was here was the woman I was standing next to. I should have texted someone to let them know I had gone out. Maybe someone at my apartment building saw me leave. It felt like the elevator would never stop as we descended floor after floor after floor. Each time I saw the number change, another cold stone was added to my gut.

Once we reached the basement floor, I let out a heavy sigh. “Nothing to worry about, Ms. Cleary.” Dr. Yora said to me. “I know this may all seem like an invitation to the underworld, but I assure you, this is still an earthly matter.”

“I wasn’t thinking that before,” I muttered.

When I hear ‘basement’, I picture a musty tomb of old furniture, a stale pot smell, and stacks of cardboard boxes surrounding a pool table. This was like no basement I had ever encountered; a sci-fi wonderland lit up by walls of computers. Dr. Yora took me around a corner, and suddenly we were in an aquarium. There was a large tank positioned at the rear of the room, surrounded by more banks of computers and a cluster of researchers.

“Ms. Cleary, this afternoon we were called to investigate a discovery on Tofino beach. Something washed ashore during the storms, and at first it was thought to be some sort of marine life. But so far, it doesn’t resemble anything known to the natural sciences.”

I had come to accept that this place delved into aliens, demons, ghosts, all that sort of Scooby-Doo Mysteries crap I didn’t believe in. They had me translate ancient texts, and encoded diaries, and that work sounded interesting enough that it made me take the job, along with the pay, benefits and the prospect of working from home. The odd pages they sent me were captivating to pore over, even if I found the organization’s aims laughable.

“Did you find a mermaid?” I asked jokingly.

Dr. Yora gave me a disdainful look from behind her glasses, dropping another stone into my gut. “I wouldn’t have called you here if it had been something we already know how to communicate with.” We approached the tank. “No, Ms. Cleary, what was discovered on the sand was something even I haven’t seen before. I need your help to communicate with it.”

A chill ran down my spine. I glanced back to the tank, not seeing anything inside it. “Do I need to believe in order to see it? Like… clapping my hands for Tinkerbell?”

“This is not a story, Ms. Cleary,” Dr. Yora said sternly. “The creature is injured and frightened, so it’s camouflaged.” She pointed to a screen, where heat sensors had something outlined at the bottom of the tank. It looked like a spider web covering the entire floor, and snaking limbs stretched out to touch every wall.

“What is that?” I felt like I could barely breathe.

Dr. Yora took a step back. “That is what you are here for, Ms. Cleary - to find out. We’ve found it moves when someone touches the tank, so no one has been allowed near it until you could arrive.”

I was never fond of aquariums. I was weirded out by the way fish moved, and sharks petrified me, as did dolphins, to say nothing of piranhas. It frightened me just knowing that we knew less about the oceans than about outer space. I could never have expected I would be called to communicate with something like this. I had snapped up as many languages as I possibly could before college, but I’d never tried to speak to something that wasn’t human, and for the first time, I was terrified about what I might hear.

I was placed near the monitor with the heat sensor, so I could see the camouflaged creature if it approached me.  I placed my palms on the glass, and moments later the webbed limbs moved, retracting to the center mass so that it formed a tight ball at the center of a tank. Then more limbs stretched out of the top, and these looked like arms and hands. They stretched through the water, towards where I was standing.

“It’s responding,” Dr. Yora murmured behind me, watching with someone else on another monitor. “Notice anything, Ms. Cleary?”

If my palms weren’t braced on the glass, they would have been shaking. “Not yet,” I replied thickly. I looked through the water, trying to see something, anything. On the heat sensor, the creature’s limbs were close to the glass in front of me. The thing itself looked huge, and I couldn’t make any sense of its shape.

“My name is Mia Cleary,” I said slowly and clearly. “If you can understand me, then tap the glass three times.” I repeated this in French, in Spanish, and before I could say it in Mandarin the glass was tapped once. Twice. Then again.

“Which language did it understand?” Dr. Yora asked.

I wanted to see what was in front of me. I wanted to understand. I didn’t want to believe this was a hoax or trick. I saw something ripple in the water, like a drop of ink sinking through the tank. It spread out, taking shape, and shifted from black to solid blue before my very eyes. I saw hands with seven fingers, milky-blue palms pitted with suction cups. The long arms were connected to a torso that looked shockingly human.

“Ms. Cleary,” Dr. Yora called out to me.

The creature had a head, but one that was perfectly smooth and featureless. No face, no ears, no nose. The front of the head was only distinguished by a milky blue hue spreading down from where the jaw should be to the shoulders. The torso ended in a cloud of darkness that shifted and moved in an incomprehensible way. I looked back towards the featureless head and wanted to wrench my hands away.

“Ms. Cleary!” Dr. Yora insisted again. “Are you getting anything?”

The creature moved closer to the glass, stroking the surface with a sense of urgency. It pressed its non-face against the glass, rubbing against it. I stepped back in fear, removing my hands from the glass, and the creature slammed its palms against it.

“Ms. Cleary! Back into position!” Dr. Yora yelled.

My heart was pulsing, and my skin was clammy. I wanted to go home and read weird diaries about demon worship. I didn’t want to do this.

The creature knocked on the glass again, snapping me to attention. The fingers flexed, and they had more joints than a human hand. The color of the palm shifted from milky blue to a pale yellow. The color reminded me of a dress my grandmother wore, and the tea set she gave me that we would use in the garden.

I approached again, placing my palm back on the glass. The creature moved its hand towards mine, and I felt a strange tremor that tingled in the spaces between my fingers.

“It's trying.” My voice cracked. “It's really trying.”

Dr. Yora looked from the monitor to me. “What is it doing?”

I shook my head, but I couldn’t remove my eyes from the creature. “Just trying.”

“That’s enough for now, then,” Dr. Yora told me. “We’ll give you a room for the night. Get some rest so you can come at this fresh in the morning.”

“Really?” I scoffed. “You want me to stop now?”

Dr. Yora led me away. “You’ve made some sort of contact with it. I’m not trying to push anything. It’s late, and we need you at your best.”

I was afraid I would never be able to sleep, so I requested a pen and paper, which Dr. Yora denied. Instead I thought myself to sleep, drifting off as I made notes in my mind. The next morning I was fed and given a change of clothes, ones that were more antiseptic than I cared for. I was taken back to the creature’s tank, and once again it billowed out of invisibility as I came close.

“I think he likes you,” a researcher quipped.

I took up the same position in front of the tank as I had the day before, and the creature came right towards me, running its palms over the glass. I placed my hands back on the glass and smiled. “How can I understand you?” I whispered.

The palms of the creature shifted to that familiar yellow again. I licked my lips and thought very, very hard about what to do next. “Markers,” I suddenly said. “Are there any markers around here?”

“I’ll get the dry-erase ones,” the woman sitting with Dr. Yora said. She got up quickly and ran off.

The creature’s palm had turned yellow, so perhaps color was a clue. I decided to try and talk again while I waited. “Are you hurt?” I asked. “Is there something we can do to help you?”

The creature rapped each fingertip against the glass.

I repeated the sentences in French, but before I could finish the creature moved its hand to a spot on its body. I saw an irregularity in the color there, black and gelatinous. “It’s hurt,” I called urgently.

“What are you doing to communicate?” Dr. Yora asked. “How are you figuring this out?”

“I don’t know. I’m thinking really hard. I…” I stopped. “Maybe it’s telepathic. Or empathic. I’ll need more time.”

For the first time, Dr. Yora smiled. “For now, we need to earn the creature’s trust so we can help it. Keep at it, Ms. Cleary. You’re doing fantastically.”

The other researcher returned and handed me the markers - just red, blue, and black, not the variety I was hoping for. My idea was a long shot, but if it worked, it might be the key to unraveling the enigma in front of me. I scribbled on the glass while the creature followed my movements, mimicking them so closely it was like I was standing in front of the creepiest funhouse mirror ever. Blue meant ‘yes’, black meant ‘no’, and red, I determined, meant ‘undecided’.

I pressed my hands back against the glass. “Touch blue if you can understand me. Touch red if you almost can.” I said it out loud, then thought the words over again in my head.

The creature touched somewhere between blue and red. “Oh, wow,” I gasped.

Dr. Yora had moved behind me to watch. “What is it? What did it say?”

“Maybe ‘yes’?” I licked my lips, then gnawed them. “Okay, next question. Touch blue if you are in pain, black if you aren’t, red if you don’t know.”

The hand pressed against the blue patch on the glass. My heart was pounding. “Can we help you?”

The creature moved its palm to red.

“You’ve done it!” Dr. Yora exclaimed.

I shook my head. “No. No, it’s barely understanding me and I don’t understand it. I need to get closer.”

Dr. Yora gave me a stern and all-too-knowing look. “That could be very dangerous. We still don’t know enough about it. I’m not risking your life for this, Ms. Cleary.”

The creature knocked against the glass to bring my attention back, then swirled its fingers around the red patch. “I don’t think it trusts us, either,” I murmured.

The creature pressed its palms on the glass like it was trying to push it away. I placed my palms over it and tried to feel something, anything. There was that tingle again, like ants between my fingers. I would need more time, but this creature needed help now.

I stayed long into the night, asking questions that ultimately went in a circle. Dr. Yora finally made me leave, saying her team would use what I discovered to continue trying to communicate with the creature. I was taken to my room again so I could sleep, but my mind was racing so hard I didn’t think I would ever find rest.

I descended into a quiet place, like sinking into water. Bubbles rose above my head, and I could see light filtering through the surface above me. A pulsing sound pressed into my ears as I continued to sink, and the light grew dimmer and dimmer above me. Out of the pulsing sound, a faint noise grew louder, voices all talking at once, bleeding together until they became a dull roar. I tried to sift through them all, to single out one voice, but I found a hand instead. I took hold of it and the noise stopped.

I bolted upright in bed, gasped, and then began coughing furiously. My left side ached intensely, but as I came to the pain faded. I lifted up my shirt, and found a bruise there that quickly faded with the pain.

I raced from the room, straight back to the tank where the creature was being kept. “Ms. Cleary!” a researcher yelled at me. I ducked past him and the other researchers, leading them on a childlike chase around the tank. I came to a ladder, which I climbed up to get to the top of the tank. Inside the creature was moving, rising towards the surface.

“Ms. Cleary!” A researcher was chasing me up the ladder. “You need to come down here this second!”

“No! I had a dream!” I stopped myself when I realized how ridiculous this sounded. “It’s research! Let me do this.”

“Stop!” Dr. Yora’s voice rang clearly through the room. She folded her arms as she glared up at me. “Ms. Cleary, there is protocol for this. You can’t just rush into things without consulting or even talking to anybody here!”

The creature was pounding on the lid of the tank.

“I can’t explain this well. I haven’t eaten or even had coffee yet. But I think this thing was trying to reach out to me in my dream.”

Dr. Yora’s brow furrowed.

“I’m serious!” I pulled up my shirt, showing the outline of the bruise along my side. It had turned from blue to yellow and was almost gone. “I woke up with a bruise similar to the injury it has.”

Dr. Yora sighed. “And you thought jumping into the tank would do what, exactly?”

I pointed into the tank. “I need to talk to it face-to-face. I think I need tactile contact in order to understand it.”

Dr. Yora wagged her fingers. “Come off the ladder. We need to discuss this.”

As I reluctantly descended the ladder, the creature followed me, trailing ribboning tentacles like those of a jellyfish. I stared at it, hoping it understood I wanted to help it. Dr. Yora took me to eat and get coffee so I could properly start my day, and all the while she gave me a sound talking-to.

“This is a place of science, and you have to operate according to procedure, not gut feelings. I need you to tell me your process. What led you to run around like a damn chicken with its head cut off?” The usually polished and poised Dr. Yora looked a little dull today, frazzled and exhausted.

“I’ll apologize for that. This the first time anything like this has ever happened to me. I’m used to translating from texts and documents, and I’ve never had something living to work with. Certainly nothing unknown like this.” I stared down into my coffee, and the black surface seemed to stir like the creature did.

Dr. Yora’s eyes narrowed. “I told you what this place was when I hired you. You’ve read pages from early demonic possessions, and the Wakefield Accounts. You never believed in any of it until now?”

I shrugged. For me it was easy to brush off, or at least it had been. “I still don’t believe it. I think the Wakefield visions were caused by fumes from the plant. I think the texts are interesting, but manatees don’t make mermaids.”

Dr. Yora took her glasses off and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Then explain to me what that creature is.”

I shook my head. “I can’t, Dr. Yora. Can you?”

“Not quite.” Dr. Yora fixed her glasses back on. “My father started this institute on a shoestring budget, and it literally began in our basement with my mother and uncle. I’ve seen everything you don’t want to believe in. There’s a carnival that travels between worlds. A town full of werewolves. And I am afraid our little Tofino beach monster could be a breach.”

Dr. Yora knew I didn’t believe, but I worked well and got the job done so she never argued with me. Not until now. The conviction in her voice was real, and she was a woman I admired so I listened to her, taking her word where I hadn’t before. “A breach? Do you mean something evil or something extraterrestrial?”

“I’m not sure. The demons aren’t into talking.”

I thought about the documents I’d translated, most of them dealing with demons. “You’ve been trying to summon demons?”

“Locate,” she corrected me. “At least a dozen of the highest-ranking members of the demonic royal family are up here, including dukes and princes. They’ve come because they’re fleeing an expected crisis. The pages we’ve sent you are on how to identify them amongst humans.”

I swallowed hard. “But why would they want to be here? Is there really something that bad coming?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out. The Tofino creature could be a clue of what’s to come, or even where it is and how we can stop it. But until we can understand it, we have no idea what it is, or even if it’s relevant to our other areas of research.”

“So, I still can’t touch it?” I asked.

Dr. Yora shook her head. “For the time being, no. I think your marker solution was working out well.”

I pushed my plate aside and leaned across the table. “It wasn’t, though. I’m only getting half of what I need. The creature can understand me, but I can’t understand it! My dream was an inspiration, an idea of what I could accomplish if I could just get in the tank.”

Dr. Yora sighed and shook her head again. “I understand your frustration, but I can’t risk you getting hurt on an idea. You’ll have to figure something else out, Ms. Cleary.”

“Guess so,” I muttered.