/tg/ - Alex Jones in Call of Cthulhu

/tg/ - Alex Jones in Call of Cthulhu: https://8ch.net/tg/res/303398.html

I sat down in my study and turned on the radio. I carefully twisted the dial until a familiar voice caught my attention. It was the sound of a flustered man in the throes of a fit of madness. His feverish rants of shadows "theys" and the things they didn't want us to know send a chill down my spine.

I knew this man. A one Alex Jones. A year prior, he had been a promising athlete and the star of both the Miskatonic University Track and Field team and the Football team. A strapping young man with a finely honed physique and a stern face that betrayed his boisterous nature.

''''

I felt a deep sense of personal guilt for what had befallen Mr Jones. I'd seen him on campus several days ago. His hair had started to fall out and his fitness had clearly become a lesser priority. He had a wild look in his eye, like an animal that knew it was being pursued by some unseen predator.

I tried to ease my nerves by telling myself that I'd done all I could to dissuade him from this path, but the words being shouted through the speaker of my radio brought the memories I'd tried so hard to repress back to the surface. Cries of substances being added to our water, of meetings by moonlight in the coves of old Arkham. To some, it was the ravings of a man unhinged, but the frightening truths hidden in his ramblings caused my body to shake.

Yes.. Just over a year ago today, that terrible night. As one of the younger faculty members, it was occasionally put on me to handle small matters of social disturbance. This mostly meant patrolling the grounds to ensure no students were breaking curfew. In this particular instance, I was tasked with investigating some matters of vandalism and late night romps by the bay.

Mr. Jones had been assigned to help me with the matter to offer me some peace of mind. I was to be walking in the night with naught more than whistles and electric lanterns to guide our way through the forested grounds that surrounded the University, after all.

Our initial patrol was quiet. Mr. Jones and I shared very little in common. He was not a student of mine and I had little interest in his sporting achievements. So we walked along the forest path in relative silence, occasionally sweeping our electric lanterns across the darkness.

It was Mr. Jones who first spotted something, though now I wish he hadn't. A figure darted through the trees in the distance of the darkened forest. At first I didn't see anything, but the sounds of breaking branches and hushed whispers gave us cause to pursue.

We made our way through the forest until we began to approach the bay. The sound of gently lapping waves could be heard before we were able to see the coastline, but it was the sound of something else that cause Mr. Jones and I to more frequently exchange concerned glances. Voices, but not quite those of young students. They became more distinct as we approached until we could make out the faint, foreign words of a thrumming, guttural chant.

I was already quite unnerved by this point, but Mr. Jones silently insisted on pushing closer. At his suggestion, we turned off our lanterns and proceeded closer at a low crouch. We had yet to understand what we were approaching, but our shared gut feeling ensured us that we did not want to be seen first.

Closer still and dancing shadows cast by flickering firelight confirmed what the sounds had warned us of. Dozens of figures gathered on the bay. Standing torches arranged in a circular pattern where the group appeared to be cloistered together.

For a moment, I told myself this was not unlike things I'd done as a younger man. Raucous parties by the shore, drinking and dancing. I believed that once we finally got a good look at the gathering that all I'd see was the carefree shenanigans of inebriated students. The longer I listened, the more clear it became that this could not be the case.

Mr. Jones, against my hushed protests, inched closer, now kneeling in the brush and mud of the forest. Even in the dim light, I could see the color draining from his face, his expression contorting into one of disgust and horror.

I attempted to get his attention, asking him what he could see, but he was fixated on something on that beach. Against my better judgement, I carefully crawled closer to give him a sharp tug, but before I could reach him, I gained a clear view of the gathering on the beach.

Dozens, as I had guessed from the sounds, but it was not quite right to say they were all people. They bore a faint resemblance to men, but their flesh was discolored a greenish hue, baring a slimey, almost scaley quality. Their physiques were misshapen, their torsos too bulky, their necks too thick, but also too short, their limbs gangly and long with massive webbed hands and feet. Their broad, flattened faces with their wide set, unblinking eyes were too revolting to stare at for too long.

Amongst the crowd were normal men and women. The beach was littered with discarded clothing, some of which bore the insignia of Miskatonic University. They were students, reveling with these repulsive creatures.. No, perhaps that was too gentle a description. The behavior I witnessed with Mr. Jones was more akin to an orgy. A wanton, degenerate display of debauchery as young men and women alike writhed and thrusted with the creatures. Those that were not yet engaged with the rest of the gathering were taking turns quaffing deeply from a strange chalice which appeared to be carved from a type of green stone that I could not identify from my distance hiding place.

I would learn later, after we had gathered our wits, that one of the woman we witnessed at the center of the nauseating ritual was none other than Mr. Jones's fiance. His High School sweetheart, whom he'd followed to Miskatonic University for the chance to stay by her side, even though the school offered little for him.

There were words being spoken amongst them, but it was no language I was familiar with. The students among them could not speak such unnatural words with the ease that the primal voices of the creatures did, leaving them screaming incoherently in between the sounds of their own revolting indulgences.

In the short few moments we observed this ritual, more of the creatures had begun to emerge from the waters, shuffling with a sort of difficulty that implied that they were unused to movement on dry land. That did not deter them from partaking in the ritual, however.

It was by misfortune alone that one of the creatures happened to surface near our hiding spot. It began to make it's way towards the rest of its kind, but stopped briefly to snort in the air through the nose that looked as if it were smashed flat against its bulbous face. It took several steps towards us before Mr. Jones burst from the bushes screaming with barbaric rage.

The creature was unprepared to deal with Mr. Jones's rage. The tackle launched the creature back against a nearby tree. Though he'd incapicated it, the brief scuffle had caught the attention of the creatures. Those that were taking part in the orgy were slow to respond, but they started to scatter into the night. Much to my horror, some of the creatures had made the hasty decision to take some of the students with them into the cold waters. The ghastly sounds of the screams were too much to bear.

By the time I'd mustered the nerve to get to my feet and do something, Mr. Jones was already frantically fighting against 3 of the creatures. My own cowardice had me believing he alone would drive them back. The enraged young man was handily clobbering and battering away at the creatures, all the while screaming with the sort of mad passion that I'd come to recognize now playing on the radio.

They started to grab at his shirt to pull him down, but he ripped it away without hesitation to continue his brutal crusade against these unnatural abominations. When he was finally close enough, he ripped one of the standing torches from the sand and began brandishing it against the creatures, driving them further back.

I wish I'd realized sooner what he was attempting to accomplish. He was trying to get to his fiance at the center of the beach, but during his battle, he'd lost sight of her. My eyes darted around the dim, moonlit beach, but I could not find her. Had she been dragged into the waters? Had she taken to the forest with some of the others? It didn't seem to matter, because Mr. Jones could not get the thing he risked his life for.

With fewer options left, I raised my Electric Lantern and used it to bludgeon the skull of a creature that had latched onto Mr Jones's back. I placed a hand on his shoulder, and he turned, clenched fist ready to strike, but he hesitated just long enough to recognize me. Finally heading my demands, he started to run with me. We bolted into the forest, the infuriated croaking, guttural voices shouting after us.

I can't be certain when the creatures stopped giving chase, but Mr. Jones and myself ran until we had arrived back on the campus grounds, battered, muddied, and scraped up from our haphazard spring through the forest.

Mr. Jones demanded an explanation of me, but my panicked mind demanded I deny the whole experience. Mr. Jones did not find that particularly agreeable, and the strange ichorous substance that coated his hands from violently engaging the creatures made for a compelling argument. He grabbed my by the shoulders, smearing some of the substance on my shirt, and shook me. The world needed to know, he declared. It wasn't right that such monstrosities could get away with turning his classmates into degenerates.

But I was not a man like Alex Jones. I did not have his unwavering conviction or his deep-rooted righteousness. I had neither the stomach nor the spine to stand up to the horrors that lurk in the unexplored shadows of our world. It was late, we were both tired and dirty. With some pleading, I got him to agree to wash up and get some rest.

On the next day we reconvened. Using my status as a Professor at the University, I was able to convince some police officers to investigate the bay under the pretense of searching for evidence of underaged drinking. They found no signs of any odd ritual or scaley green men. The tide had washed away any evidence of the happening. All that they had discovered was a broken electric lantern.

Mr. Jones had me probe into the matter of the missing students. We'd witnessed several being dragged into the sea, perhaps as food or perhaps as a source of posthumous pleasure. What we'd found had caused Mr. Jones to fly into another rage. He nearly throttled the elderly man working the records department when he was told that several students had all dropped out or transferred to another school in the days since our encounter.

The daily visit from Mr. Jones became a source of great distress for me. I had no answers for the increasingly cryptic and esoteric questions he had about archaeology and mythology. I started presenting excuses and finding ways to be gone from my office more often, but he persisted with further notes and correspondence. He called me a coward and all manner of other unflattering things and I could not argue with his assessment.

Mr. Jones, as one of his more hastily written notes told me, perceived himself as a righteous man. An inheritor of the divine human spirit. Someone who couldn't leave a known evil to do as it pleases. It wasn't long after this that I found out he was taking regular excursions into the forests. The correspondence became less frequent, but the messages he sent became more worrying. He swore he'd sighted the creatures pouring things into the reservoir that fed water to the town. Discoveries of markings carved into trees that match eldritch symbols from the University's more infamous tomes.

The time between Mr. Jones's messages became longer and longer, until he finally stopped contacting me. I was relieved to see him still on campus, though dismayed by his appearance. The stress of his investigations were taking their toll.

I listened to Mr. Jones's broadcast until it sounded as if he was forcibly removed from the studio. I recognized the sounds and the ravings of Mr. Jones fighting the men. He seized the microphone again, leaving only his heavy, labored breath to fill the silence. They must have disconnected the microphone, because the signal cut out. A short while later, a much more timid and subdued voice nervously tried to explain away the lengthy rambling of Mr. Jones as a sort of original radioplay, though he was unsure if the school would allow him to continue.

Much to my dismay, there was an overwhelmingly positive response to Mr. Jones's antics. Some were curious about the bold statements he made and others were entertained by his bombastic antics. Against my own protests, the school allowed him an allotted amount of airtime to do as he pleased.

I told myself that as long as it was believed to be some sort of act that the sharp minds of Miskatonic University would not believe in stories of amphibious monsters that lure young men and women into degenerate behavior through use of ancient concoctions.

A week after Mr. Jones first broadcast, I was visited in my office by a strange man in a dark suit. He was portly and squat, with drooping features and a large nose. He inquired, at length, about my relationship with Mr. Jones. He seemed to know of the extended correspondence I had received, but it was clear from his questioning that he did not have all the details. I feigned ignorance as much as I could, claiming to have disposed of the letters or not recalling any specifics. I spoke to Mr. Jones's abilities as an actor and entertainer, but never to his obsession with other dimensions and supernatural entities.

Once the man had finished with his cryptic queries, he told me to contact him, should I remember anymore. The address he left I quickly recognized as being located near the city harbor, in a part of town known for its high immigrant population, where lowlifes and degenerates cluster together like rats.

I tendered my resignation that same evening. I would not allow these creatures to haunt me any further. Along with my resignation, I penned a letter to Mr. Jones, warning him in no uncertain terms that dangerous people were asking questions about him. That his righteous tirade against unknown forces as a danger to him and all around him. I told him I would not be dragged into the ocean like the others. I would not allow myself to be used by those subhuman things.