Dagon's Promise: The Culling

The news reports coming to my cell phone had only confirmed what my fractured soul already felt. This onslaught was not just local. It was global and not just from the oceans. Northern climates had the Wendigo, Phoenix and Las Vegas battled the diminutive sand dwellers. Even the island cultures such as the Philippines were attacked by tsunamis and earthquakes of the heartless Lloiger.

I turned a corner and had to stop before a makeshift barricade. At a silent gesture a knot of sea monsters threw away the body they were fighting about and began tearing it down.

The scene on the other side seemed a bizarre parody of a carnival. Hundreds of college students were wearing bright and garish costumes of every imaginable style and color. The astonished party-goers stared at my group and panicked, but the matching closure at the next intersection made their safety zone into a horrific trap.

Deep Ones poured through the opening, rending and tearing, biting and gnashing. The gutters ran red. A young man's eyes pleaded with me as a four moss-ridden fish-men approached. They each took a limb and ran in opposite directions. The popping of the man's joints rang through the street.

For every ten or so slain one or two living people were spared and my helpers began herding the sobbing humans into larger groups. They cried for their loved ones and cursed me in anger, but all wore the same terrified expression as they looked upon the dismembered dead and dying.

I looked to the sky. Not much time left and I had preparations to make. As a priest of Dagon and emissary to his flock I needed a church to prepare humans for the Second Coming.

The lowering sun gleamed on a distant cross. The Seaside Assembly of God. It even had a baptismal pool pumping water in from the ocean. Perfect.

A tear-stained face appeared from within the church and a young woman stepped into the setting sun. She held out a white hooded robe. “The master must have proper raiment if he is to reflect the Old Gods.”

“Master,” she had called me. I did not know who this person was, but I named her Sarah, Hebrew for “Princess.” I had my first acolyte in the New Age.

The robe had become slightly soiled, its hem and sleeves stained in putrescent green but it pleased me. I stepped to the edge of the pool and gazed at the frightened faces and the charnel streets. The Deep Ones stopped their jostling as their ichthyoid mutterings. One or two brandished tridents at their human captors.

Sarah raised her own glistening trident. “Silence!” she yelled. “Silence, for the time is nigh with the setting sun. Hear the words of the Master Joshua Obediah Marsh, present incarnation of Obediah Marsh of Innsmouth, now and for all time High Priest of Dagon, Servant of Mighty Cthulhu who yet lies dead and dreaming.” The last of the sun's rays gleamed from the weapon and a cold wind sprang up from the sea.

A woman jumped from a coffee shop window, brandishing a long shard of glass. “Evil!” she yelled, “See how they follow you!” She lunged at me as a scaly creature dashed in front of me.

I pulled the blade from the fish-man. “Even as this blade was meant for my death,” I said. “It instead gives me life.” I plunged the shard into the woman's chest. “As it slayed my servant so it is sanctified with the blood of my enemy.”

I looked again to the church. The pastor and his wife hung on tridents mounted on either side of the double doors. Even as they bled they had worked feverishly to assemble a new sign above the entry: Seaside Esoteric Order of Dagon.

I stepped over a pool of semi-coagulated blood and climbed the steps to my new home.


Word Count: 660