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

disappoint. “But didn’t the Yopasi disappear, Professor Grayson? Into thin air? Perhaps the underwater devil rose up and killed them all.”
    Nervous laugher greeted Malloy’s words, and Oliver smiled wearily at the mocking look he saw in the young man’s eyes. It was a familiar look. He’d seen it from a number of his colleagues, men he’d worked alongside for many years.
    “I see the scurrilous tongues of academic rumor-mongering have been wagging,” said Oliver. He perched on the end of his desk and laced his hands before him. “Very well, I’ll tell you what I know of what happened. Ask away.”
    He took a deep breath, not wishing to further expose the demise of his most ambitious work, but knowing that it would be better to scotch any rumors now than to allow them to grow with each retelling.
    Jackson opened the questioning. “How could an entire island tribe just vanish?”
    “I wish I knew, Mr. Jackson,” said Oliver. “The Yopasi had boats, but only small canoes used for fishing. Certainly nothing large enough to reach another island. And from what I learned in my time with them, they were certainly in no hurry to leave. They had what one shaman called a ‘duty to the world’ to stay and continue their vigil, which was how they perceived the ritual practices of their tribe.”
    “So what do you think happened to them?”
    “I don’t know. When our ship arrived in the cove we used as a harbor, it looked as though the entire island had been hit by a cyclone. As if a great tsunami had risen up and smashed the island. Trees were bent double, the soil was washed away, and the rocks blackened as though burned in a great fire. I have never seen the like, and I hope never to see it again.”
    Oliver felt a brooding melancholy settle on him as he remembered the sight of the island last summer. “The desolation was complete,” he said. “What had once been a green and verdant paradise was now a hellish wasteland, more like one of the shell-cratered battlefields of western Europe than a Pacific Island. We searched the island for days, but found not a single trace of the Yopasi. Nothing lived there anymore: no birds, no lizards, no insects, no snakes. Nothing. The island had been scoured bare of life, though by what means I can scarcely imagine.”
    “What do you think happened?” asked Amanda Sharpe. “Could it have been a volcano or an underwater earthquake?”
    Oliver shook his head. “No force of man or nature I know of could inflict so thorough an extermination without leaving some trace of its substance. We found no pyroclastic residue and no mud patterns one might expect to find after such a natural occurrence.”
    “Does that mean you think what happened to the Yopasi was an unnatural occurrence?” asked Malloy.
    “Absolutely, but as to its nature I have not the slightest inkling,” said Oliver. “Believe me, I wish I did. I spent three years researching the Yopasi, and to know that none of my findings will see the light of day is a frightful prospect. The university spent thousands of dollars to send me and dozens of others across the world, and such a failure hangs around a man’s neck for a long time.”
    The faces of Oliver’s students had changed, moving from eager anticipation of his academic misfortune to sympathetic regret. They had wanted to hear his tale, but having listened to it, now felt ashamed of their fascination.
    Oliver looked up at the clock at the back of the classroom, checking the time against his pocket watch.  
    “I think that will do for today,” he said. “Remember, for next week’s class I’d like you to be familiar with part three of Folk-Tales of Salishan Tribes . That’s the Okanagon tales by Marian Gould. I will be asking you to posit theories as to how these tales relate to the ethnographic spread of the tribal groupings.”
    The class broke up and the students filed out of the room, some gratefully, some already looking forward to next week’s