The dead thing's body doesn't move.

Okay.

First step. Decide whether she wants to call the police. She doesn't. Second step. Since she's not calling the police she needs to figure out whether anyone else will. Probably they won't? She doesn't think anyone saw? And stopping something's heart with telekinesis doesn't look like a death a person caused. Third step. What is the third step.

If she's not reporting a dead body, which she's not, and nobody else is going to claim she did a murder, which they aren't, because to all appearances she didn't, the third step is to leave. Which doesn't have any steps, she can just do that. And then go... not continuing to the library, home, home is closer.

She's not moving. Why is she not moving.

Step three is to leave. Step three-point-one is to turn away from the body. Step three-point-two is to start walking. Step three-point-three is... she can figure out step three-point-three later.

Mechanically, Inaaya turns and walks away. Her dad is still at work and her mom is still at her aunt's house; she lets herself into the apartment without anyone seeing how shaky she is or asking questions she doesn't know how to answer. She makes herself tea, and then she curls up in her own room in a nest of blankets with her tea and her laptop, and she starts doing research.

The first three websites she finds are a REAL Wiccan love spell (GUARANTEED TO WORK!), an organization of vampires that turn out on inspection to be goths with a bloodplay kink, and someone who feels very strongly that the US president is a lizardperson who sacrifices children to create the world's greatest high.

Yes, that's about what she'd expected. It's also what she's gotten approximately every other time she's tried to look into what was happening to her. This time she has a grey rubbery thing with a face like a dog to narrow her search terms, that might not help any but it also might?

Five Reasons Your Dog Hair Is Turning Gray, The Ten Best Puppy Dog Faces Of Sam From Supernatural, and the Encyclopedia of Magick (scanned by Miskatonic University). 

The Encyclopedia of Magick is almost certainly going to turn out to be a kabbalistic philosophy book from the 1800s or similar, but it's neither conspiracy theorists nor Supernatural gifsets, and Inaaya is not exactly the sort of person who finds university scans available for free on the internet and doesn't at least bookmark them.

What's in it.

The Encyclopedia of Magick suggests that a gray-faced rubbery being with a face like a dog is probably a ghoul. Ghouls are universally female and enjoy luring people into their homes so that they can eat them. Ghouls are what happens when a devil tries to rise to the sky even though the heavens have been forbidden to them. The comets burn them and, if they don't die, they're deformed and driven to insanity so that they must roam the earth as ghouls.

...right. Okay.

Well. It's more helpful than anything else she has ever in her life found, which is not a very high bar but frankly she's happy she found anything at all. And— between ghouls and scanned and uploaded by Miskatonic University— she has somewhere to start.

It isn't much to go on but Inaaya has scihub and determination; let's see what happens if she tries hard, believes in herself, and looks for the rest of the Miskatonic University library catalogue.

Miskatonic University professors have been publishing a lot in business journals!

After reading four business papers Inaaya is ready to start crying out of frustration. She pulls away from the laptop, presses the base of her palms against her eyes until she sees spots, and gets up to make herself more tea before getting back to work.

Inaaya is ready, willing, and able to cold-email every single professor at the entire university if she has to. Even the ones who, from the university website, teach exactly one class and are only on the payroll because they have tenure and their one class is on Sumerian as a Root Language, or Discord as Music, or similar. Especially those ones.

She might email Louise Fauche, who has been on sabbatical for the past year and a half. She is allegedly a professor of medieval metaphysics but her last semester she taught Latin for Advanced Students, Mysticism: A Comparative Anthropological Approach, Secret Societies of the Post-Hellenic Period, and track. 

Inaaya absolutely does email Louise Fauche. She's friendly, professional, asks after Doctor Fauche's research, expresses interest in what she's doing on sabbatical.

She does not say "TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON, SOMEONE HERE HAS TO KNOW" but you can kind of tell, if you're familiar with the sort of person who cold-emails professors of comparative anthropological approaches to mysticism, that she's thinking it.

Louise Fauche's out of office email informs Inaaya that she's on a dig in Ethiopia and can be expected to answer her emails once a week.

Inaaya's waited sixteen years. She can wait another week.

She curls up very very small for a few hours, and then gets up and figures out things to talk about with her parents at dinner and is not, to the outside observer, visibly vibrating.

Her days pass normally, insofar as "normally" is even a thing. She doesn't go back to the library. Her parents don't ask what she's studying; they rarely do. She reads everything Louise Fauche has ever published. 

Louise Fauche has published multiple papers in Latin. Do people even do that anymore?

Apparently yes! Inaaya doesn't understand them on account of not knowing Latin, but with determination, the ability to recognize root words, and several dictionaries she found on the internet, she still doesn't understand them.

Louise Fauche has published weirdly few papers. Probably in order to get tenure you're supposed to publish more than one paper every two years and more than half of them should be in English.

The English ones are unenlightening. There's a paper on a particular point of translation in the Summa Theologica, one on comparative medieval fishperson myths, and one tracing the genealogy of the Book of Eibon to earlier texts. 

She reads them anyway, and she attempts to do more research on ghouls, and she invents a research project to explain to her parents why she's spending so much time on scihub, and she waits.

A week later, Inaaya gets a very dense, nigh-incomprehensible email about fine points of Ge'ez translation. Halfway through three paragraphs are in Hebrew for no obvious reason.

That's very fascinating to the extent that she can parse it at all but it is also— especially when paired with the fact that Fauche is the only one who's responded at all— unbelievably frustrating!

Inaaya takes four days to draft a coherent response, but she does draft one, because somehow this is her most promising lead in sixteen years, and sends it. And resigns herself to another week of waiting.

Does Inaaya want to learn more about proclitic prepositions in Ge'ez because that's what she's going to learn about. 

She doesn't not want to learn about proclitic prepositions in Ge'ez. Learning things is fun. But it's not really the point, no. It's just—

It's just that this is her only lead in sixteen years. In her whole life. She is the closest she has ever been to actually being able to find out what might be happening to her. And she's not giving up on it, no matter how many incomprehensible emails about languages she doesn't speak or know anything about she has to figure out coherent and semi-professional-sounding responses to.

(This is the kind of sentence that one thinks, and then two incomprehensible emails later goes "FINE I WAS WRONG" about. Inaaya is aware of this. She thinks it anyway.)

Louise Fauche is happy to return as many emails as Inaaya is willing to send, and is stubbornly incomprehensible in all of them.

And when Inaaya's walking past a graveyard she sees another of the dog-faced people. This one is digging up a grave.

Inaaya doesn't walk past graveyards when she can avoid it; hasn't since before she figured out how to make the dead people she heard shut up.

She freezes up when she sees the— thing is rude, person is weird, ghoul is the best she has. It doesn't (they don't? inanimate pronouns also seem rude) look at her. She doesn't look away from them. Shakily, silently, she pulls out her phone and takes a photo, and then thinks better of it and takes ten seconds of video, and then she puts her phone away.

"Hey."

"Hello!" the ghoul says cheerfully. "You're not fleeing in terror."

It has very sharp teeth.

Well that's not terrifying or anything.

"You're not attacking me," she says, because explaining that when she's scared she is more likely to freeze than flee seems like a bad idea.

"I don't eat humans, my boyfriend doesn't like it." He sounds like he's indifferent to the question but wants his boyfriend to be happy.

"Glad to hear it. Hi. Is ghoul the word you use for yourself or is it really rude, it's the only term I know."

This is such a surreal conversation. Then again, Inaaya has spent the last month determinedly learning about Ge'ez so she can email an academic in Ethiopia in the hope of learning more about her own psychic powers; she supposes surrealness is relative.

"Yep, we're ghouls. I'm not sure anyone really cares about being rude to ghouls, given our culinary habits."

He successfully digs up a coffin and starts to chomp on an arm. 

Inaaya is not going to protest that only eating humans who are already dead is not the same as not eating humans. She is also not going to point out that buried bodies are full of poison. "I feel like caring about whether or not you're offending someone who might eat you is a basic requirement to not be suicidal but I guess it takes all sorts. Are there a lot of people who... know things... about ghouls, and if so where would I find them."

The ghoul considers this. "You could go down with me and meet my friends? --I promise none of us will eat you. It would be very rude."

Chomp chomp chomp arm.

"For context," Inaaya says, "I have spent the last month trying to learn about Ethiopian languages so I can respond to emails from a university professor who I cold-emailed because I was cold-emailing everyone on the entire faculty list at Miskatonic in the hopes that one of them would explain to me what is up with the psychic abilities I have. The thing I want is not so much information on ghouls specifically as more information on the world in full generality. —Also last time I saw a ghoul I killed them but in my defense they were trying to kill me first."

"That's fair of you. --I thought the humans had some people whose job was to deal with that kind of thing."

"If we do, I didn't get the memo. Unless 'that kind of thing' is 'someone trying to kill you' and the people whose job it is to deal with that is the police, in which case I did get the memo but I don't like getting the police involved in things."

"These humans came to us and they said 'you can eat people but you have to be discreet about it or we'll shoot you.' Probably they know about what's going on?"

Thank you.

"Probably they do. Do you happen to know when this was, or where this was, or any of their names?"

"They didn't talk to me," the ghoul clarifies. "Just someone. We passed it along. --I knew a bunch of stuff when I was human but I don't know how much of it was actually true and I don't know anything about psychic powers."

Still. If a group of people exists then a group of people exists, and she can find them. Maybe. Hopefully. She's closer than she was before she knew they existed, anyway.

"That makes sense. Um. Do you by any chance have contact information, I don't go by graveyards much."

"I'm going to be coming back to this graveyard to eat for a while?" he says dubiously. "You could leave a note."

"Fair enough. Thank you anyway."

"Randolph-- he's my boyfriend-- would love to meet you."

"I would be interested in meeting your boyfriend." This is the understatement of the decade but it's whatever. "My name's Inaaya, I'm free pretty much all the time."

He collects the rest of the dead body and throws it over his shoulder. "You'll need to go through this hole."

Well, this is certainly not getting any less surreal.

She follows him through the hole, doing her best not to think too much about Alice in Wonderland.

The ghoul climbs easily down the hole. It's designed for people who are significantly more dexterous, or at least more used to rock climbing, than Inaaya is. 

"There are places where the line between the Earth and the Dreamlands is thinner," the ghoul says. "Cliffs, islands, rivers... but the best way to get to the Dreamlands is just to go down." 

She has to ask for help a few times on the way down. Hopefully help will still be available on the way back up.

She's not sure what, exactly, she's expecting from the Dreamlands, but the Alice in Wonderland parallels just keep going, don't they.

The ghoul is very helpful!

The climb takes a really, really long time. It feels like she's been climbing for hours. 

She is very very very tired and also much too stubborn to stop.

And then she feels a jerk and a twist and gravity is suddenly pointing the other direction.

Jesus fucking christ that's so goddamn weird feeling.

Okay. Now she is exhaustedly climbing up, and she really hopes this is going to be done soon.

It's only a few more feet before the ghoul pulls her out of the hole. 

Owwwwwwwww why are shoulders and also hands and also the muscular system and also the entire concept of joints.

After that long underground she has to blink a lot before she can see much of anything.

She's entered what one might call a cavern, except that the roof is her eyes can barely make it out. One might even call it Cyclopean. The light in the cavern is gray, like twilight the moment before the dawn. The ground is scattered with bones-- human, animal, and miscellaneous. She sees a set of ribs three times as large as she is. The cave walls glow with sickly green bioluminescent fungus. In the distance, a fire flickers, and the ghoul heads towards it.

As she walks, something sticky catches her feet. 

Cool.

Or, gross, but also, cool. Low light photos are hard but she's going to try; she gets distracted for a couple of moments by examining the ribs but is, in general, following the ghoul (whose name she still doesn't know and she's not sure whether she should ask, he didn't give a name when she gave hers, maybe ghouls don't do names?) towards the fire.

At the campfire, there's a white human man in his mid-thirties. He's dressed like Indiana Jones, except for the sword slung across his back. He pokes the fire with a stick.

"Pickman! What did you bring home? Human or dreamborn?"

"Human, I'm pretty sure, unless she's very lost."

"Hello, I'm Randolph Carter, and that disgusting and very rude pile of flesh over there is over there is Richard Pickman."

"You know," Pickman said, "from my perspective you're disgusting. All the fur."

"Has anyone ever screamed in horror to see me?"

"They screamed in horror when they saw your cooking."

"Hello, I'm Inaaya Khadpo, I am to the best of my knowledge human, I find it hard to believe that whatever you cook is worse than embalming fluid, and he was not rude to me he was actually very nice. Also, cool sword."

"Using cool swords is a good idea because in the Dreamlands weapons mostly work based on how cool they are."

"...is there an objective ranking of weapon coolness, how do you tell whether a sword is cooler than a bow and arrow, is a sword that glows cooler than a lightsaber or does it not work like that, speaking of cool things what kind of animal left that ribcage do you know I didn't get a chance to look at it properly, is this an obnoxious number of questions should I stop—"

"--are you a dreamer?"

"I don't know what that is. I have psychic powers but I haven't noticed them having anything to do with dreaming?"

"At night, do you have elaborate dreams, probably with continuity from night to night, of-- adventures, wars, beautiful cities--"

"Mining, farming, pastoralism," Pickman added, "not everyone is as violent as you."

"No, my dreams are all things like 'I'm teaching a sibling I don't actually have how to ride a bike' or 'I have to get to Oakland before robot vampires take over the world but all the public transit maps got scrambled and the connections don't make any sense' or 'someone on the internet is having extremely stupid drama which I am for some reason involved in.' To name a few recent examples. Why?"

"Well, welcome to the Dreamlands, home of the unconscious and the archetypal. Also ghouls. --That animal's a gug, I'd recommend avoiding them because they like eating humans."

"Neat. —I want to ask approximately a million questions and I don't know where to start."

"I'm going to recommend not learning things because it tends to rend your sanity and render you incapable of participating in normal life and then your boyfriend is a ghoul."

"Gee. Thanks."

....so they weren't going to tell her anything either.

"Oh."

"I didn't listen to this advice, to be clear, but I feel like I have to give it."

"...I can set things on fire with my brain and have been able to hear the dead, among other things, for as long as I can remember, and I don't actually think I have the option of not learning about what's happening to me."

"I wonder if that has a protective effect against not being suitable for polite society."

"I mean I also am sixteen and have not in fact been able to learn very much so far. Maybe when I get weird I'll get really weird. But I don't think I can just leave it alone and have that work."

"What do the dead have to say?"

"Talking in great and upsetting detail about how they died, sometimes. Asking questions about their relatives I didn't in fact know the answers to and wouldn't know where to start finding out. I figured out how to get them to shut up when I was seven but I still don't spend much time around graveyards when I can avoid it."

"Figures. Technically I'm dead, you know."

"Huh. How so?"

"If you're a dreamer and you desperately want to live in the Dreamlands, when you die you'll wake up in the Dreamlands. Can't go back to Earth anymore though."

"Ah. ...not sure if I should offer congratulations or sympathies so both I guess."

"Mostly I find that things just sort of happen and you have to roll with them without thinking about whether they're good or not. This is probably because I'm too strange for polite society."

"....guess if it works for you it works." Pause. "I still have a lot of questions. I — do not have nearly enough evidence to conclude that the universe isn't actually reductionist but the more I hear about the Dreamlands the more it sounds that way — why does nobody know about magic since it clearly exists, is there an afterlife for people who aren't dreamers — is the asking lots of questions thing a dreamer thing usually?"

"Dreamers are curious, creative, weirdly likely to write fantasy novels for some reason--"

"--or draw art--"

"Or draw art, thank you Pickman, no one would want to forget your pre-cannibalism career. They love new things, they're constantly thinking about something, they love art, they love beautiful things. For most of history people did know about magic, haven't you ever read about sorcerers in old books? Dunno why people don't know about it now, it's not like I get a chance to talk to humans very often. I believe the current consensus at the University of Ulthar is that the universe is reductionist but we don't understand how for much the same reason that cavemen would be confused by how airplanes fit into a reductionist schema."

Oh no. Every answer to every question opens ten more questions. It turns out Inaaya has a lot of questions in her.

"Old books say a lot of different things about magic and most of them contradict each other and some of them contradict themselves, do we know who's right, can you tell me who's right, speaking of things old books about magic tend to agree on if the consensus is that the universe is reductionist that implies no Christian God but is that in fact correct, are there other things that correlate with high openness—"

"What's an openness? I know what's right about... some things... and not other things? I'm not, like, omniscient or anything, I just make a lot of really bad decisions. There is definitely no Christian God. We have no idea who created the universe but I think the University of Ulthar thinks it came into being sort of unofficially." 

"Openness to experience is the thing you said dreamers have a lot of? Curiosity and creativity and caring a lot about art and new things and beauty and variety. I.... should have more questions about magic but in fact I think I don't know enough to ask useful ones. —also I am glad there's no Christian God because if there were I'd have to kill him and that sounds difficult. Oh, new question, what is the coolest thing in the Dreamlands according to you."

"Oh, huh, cool. --Don't worry, there's absolutely no shortage of gods for you to attempt to murder. The coolest thing in the Dreamlands in my opinion is my city, although of course I would think that."

"You have a city? What's it like? Also what are the gods like— you don't have to answer that comprehensively or anything— or like you don't have to answer at all but."

"Providence, Rhode Island."

"...like, literally? Or am I failing to get a metaphor or a reference or something."

"Or so I was informed by a very obnoxious deity immediately before he tossed me to the outer edges of space in order to be devoured by the blind idiot god Azathoth."

"...that not only fails to address my confusion at all it is somehow even more confusing."

"You wanted to know what gods are like! Mostly they ignore you. Sometimes they throw you to the outer reaches of space. Sometimes they devour you. Surprisingly often they provide you genuinely useful life advice. In general we are as ants to them and they are as concerned about our wellbeing as we are about the ant we step on on the way to the bathroom."

Well. She's going to have to be nicer to ants, then, just in case.

"Not as bad as it could be, I guess. ...I am still not sure in what sense your city is Providence, Rhode Island."

"Interesting fact, by the way, ants kill ten to fifteen humans a year."

"Probably more than that these days. More people around and all." The way she's smiling is extremely sincere.

"My city is, specifically, Providence, Rhode Island as viewed through my memories of growing up there and my nostalgia for what I once had and have now lost, both metaphorically in terms of childhood innocence and literally in terms of gambrel roofs."

Nodnod. "That makes sense and also does in fact sound extremely cool."

"The gods thought so when they stole it."

"What, like picked it up and made off with it—"

Inaaya can spend quite a lot of time asking an enormous stream of questions about Randolph Carter and the Dreamlands ("There's a university run by cats? What do cats write papers about, are there other earth animals with language, how did cats get to Saturn, is Saturn still made out of gas in the Dreamlands, if the Dreamlands is underground how do you get to space from it—") but eventually, she is going to have to go home.

"Technically you don't have to go home."

"I am fairly free-range as teenagers go but if I suddenly vanish with no explanation there are people who will be very very worried and who I would prefer not grieve their daughter at least if I'm not actually dead. —unless there's a thing where if I leave I can never return in which case I want to actually think about it, but Pickman clearly can go back and forth so I've been assuming it isn't that?"

"Well, you can come back down, it's just that you're going to run into a lot of people nastier than Pickman. Or, well, equally nasty, more likely to murder you."

"Thanks."

"So it's even more important that I go back, then. Most people don't know about the things that are likely to kill them and I'm not the only person who lives in the world."

"To be fair, nearly everything that lives under the earth won't bother you as long as you stay above the earth. Other than ghouls."

"Yeah. Well. I think it's important that people know what's actually happening and also I have family and things that I don't want to just leave."

"Fair enough. If you run into Pickman again you're welcome to come visit."

"I will do that."

The climb up is... well, she's still not a rock climber. But she manages and when she gets to the surface she calls an uber, all of her limbs feeling like rubber.

And the next morning, when Louise Fauche checks her work email, there are two messages from ikhadpo@gmail.com.

The older one — dated from 2:32pm EST that Wednesday, three days before; subject line "Re (8): Research inquiry" — is much like all of I. Khadpo's other messages over the past month and change: scrupulously polite, in a professional tone; the writer is clearly doing their absolute best to keep up with the conversation and equally obviously has no goddamn clue what they're talking about and is scrambling to compose coherent questions based on seven open Wikipedia tabs.

The newer one — sent at 6:13am EST the previous day; no subject — reads:

Hi Dr Fauche,

It's currently three in the morning where I am and I did like four hours of rock climbing earlier so I'm very tired and not gonna be super coherent, sorry about that. Today I went underground until gravity flipped and met someone who could build a city out of love and nostalgia and also talk to cats (not in the sense that everyone can talk to cats, in the sense where he and cats share a common language. apparently cats only have the one?). I don't know what you're doing in Ethiopia because you are very determinedly being incomprehensible about it but I hope it's at least that interesting, unless you are one of those people for whom interesting is always meant in the Chinese-curse sense, in which case I hope it is very boring and you are spending all your time in nice quiet libraries where nothing happens.

Look I know I'm probably really annoying but I can do telekinesis and set things on fire with my brain and I have been trying to figure out what was happening to me for literally my entire life and you are somehow the most promising lead I have ever had. If you want me to leave you alone and never send you an email again I will do that but please, please, refer me to someone who will help.

Thanks,
Inaaya

Can you get on a plane to Miskatonic?

-L

Two minutes of looking up internship paperwork templates, four minutes of filling out fake paperwork, twenty-three minutes of talking to her parents, and an hour of comparison shopping between airlines later,

I can get there by Monday afternoon.

-I

Excellent. We'll meet outside the rare book room at Miskatonic Library.

--L. 

Nice.

Inaaya has no idea how long she's packing for but calls it a week and if she needs more than that she'll find a laundromat. Over the next two days she obsessively researches transit times, AirBNBs near Miskatonic, and how exactly airports work. (If her parents think it's weird how much this internship does not require them to help with logistics in any way, they're used to it by now.)

And on Monday afternoon, after six hours on a plane and half an hour on a bus and twenty minutes wandering around asking for directions from anyone who looked like they would know where things were, Inaaya is outside the rare book room of Miskatonic Library with a duffel bag and a backpack.

Louise Fauche is reading a book. She doesn't look up when Inaaya appears. 

That's fine. Inaaya looks around until she sees the person who matches Louise Fauche's photo on the faculty list and sits down at the table with her.

(Even for a sixteen-year-old, Inaaya is small, and the oversized denim jacket she's wearing isn't doing anything to make her look less so.)

"Ma'am, the prospective students' tour meets downstairs."

".........okay, but you said we were going to meet here."

"...are you Inaaya Khadpo?"

"Yes. Yes I am. Hi."

"...you're quite young."

"Yeah, I get that a lot. —I'm sixteen not fourteen I'm just also short."

Louise Fauche doesn't seem to consider sixteen to be very old either. 

"Well, I suppose that doesn't change my tactics. --Can I convince you to stop using your powers, go home, and never think about any of this again?"

"Nope." She considers this. "...or, there are reasons you could want that that I would find convincing enough to try, but if it's just for my own good, no. Also I am pretty sure if I tried to not think about this I would not succeed and I have already had to use my powers because something was trying to kill me."

"To be perfectly frank, the more people know about the true nature of the universe the more likely it is that we all die."

"That would have worked great if someone had told me two weeks ago, but at this point I have already been to the Dreamlands and talked to someone who got thrown by a god into another god and I think the cat might be out of the gravity well."

"Thrown by a god into a-- never mind."

"This is the same person who can build cities out of nostalgia and talk to cats, for the record, I haven't had two absurd experiences in the last week. Unless you count this one which I guess lots of people would."

"The Dreamlands are an extraordinarily strange place."

"They are certainly that. —my parents do know where I am, that's usually the next question, but I printed out fake internship paperwork so if there's real paperwork that also has to happen it'll be a bitch and a half to explain."