Free Ghouls of the Miskatonic (The Dark Waters Trilogy) by Graham McNeill

shaman was believed to be butting the evil spirits, most notably a monster that lived in a long lost city and threatened to cause the end of the world.”
    The girl’s face went deathly pale and Oliver feared he had frightened her with tales of shamans and monsters.
    “And this is where things become rather interesting, as we can see similar, if not virtually identical , practices, chants, and imprecations to mysterious deities within the tribal groups of the Polynesian and Micronesian tribes, and others much further afield.”
    “How is that possible?” asked Malloy. “Surely these groups are too far apart to share any common ancestry.”
    “Well spotted, Mr. Malloy,” said Oliver. “They are indeed too far apart to share any links of civilization, but what if their connection goes deeper than that? What if their connection is on some primal level, from when mankind was little more than a barely upright hominid, a creature that had yet to evolve into the sentient race that now rules the globe?”
    Oliver knew he was taking a risk in mentioning evolution, for the ruckus of the Scopes trial still reverberated in academic circles. Miskatonic University had largely ignored Judge Raulston’s verdict, and continued to teach such principles to its students. For reasons unknown to Oliver, no state prosecution had ever been mounted against the professors of Miskatonic for their continual violation of the Butler Act.
    Hearing no dissenting voices, Oliver continued.
    “What if these ancient men knew of some great and terrible evil, a force that linked all men though a worldwide understanding of its nature? Might not that be enough to bring the consciousness of wildly disparate shamans together? A collective understanding that predates our own, civilized way of thinking?”
    Oliver saw skeptical faces and wrote a series of phonetic words on the blackboard. To the untrained eye, these were gibberish, random collections of syllables and consonants in a mishmash of colliding, unpronounceable letter groupings.
    “Now if you will turn to page ninety-seven, you can read a summation of the findings recorded by a Professor William Channing Webb. Professor Webb teaches anthropology at Princeton, and his travels around Greenland’s western coast brought a tribe of depraved Esquimaux to light, whose cult practices included a strange form of devil worship. Webb described it as including bloodthirsty and repulsive rituals, which I believe to be in direct opposition of those found in Polynesia and the coastal regions of Siberia. It’s almost as though some shamans are attempting to call forth this sea devil, while others are acting against it.”
    “So which were the Yopasi?” asked Amanda Sharpe.
    “Very much the latter,” said Oliver. “Their shamans were reluctant to speak of the deity their tribe so feared. Even when I was able to elicit some form of explanation, their language seemed to have no correlating words to adequately describe the horror they sought to keep at bay.”
    “Did the shamans ever say where this devil lived?”
    In the three seasons Oliver had spent with the Yopasi he had come to know them well. Their home was a nameless island of eastern Polynesia, a scrap of land about as close to the edge of the world as it was possible to find before the vast expanse of the Pacific stretched away into eternity.
    “Indeed they did, Miss Sharpe,” said Oliver. “Would you care to hazard a guess?”
    “Beneath the ocean,” she said without hesitation. “In a great sunken city.”
    Oliver was surprised. Though he had published selected monographs from his expeditions, he had not thought them widely read beyond higher anthropological circles. Nor had he published any of the Yopasi myth cycles, which described their wide pantheon in gross detail.
    “Very good, yes. In a sunken city in the deepest portion of the sea.”
    Malloy raised his hand, and Oliver knew what would be coming next.
    Sure enough, Malloy did not