Paul and "Miller"

Paul felt like his head was a lump of paste, or maybe a cabbage—in any case, something thoroughly unreliable, or else he wouldn't have had such a strange dream:

He felt himself sinking toward the seabed—this was undoubtedly an illusion. He had grown up in Dunwich, and the farthest he'd ever been was the nearby town of Arkham; the closest thing to an ocean he'd ever seen was the waterfall at Sentinel Hill, less than five meters tall.

Yet he felt himself falling toward the ocean floor, a gut instinct he'd never possessed before telling him: that was the sea, not some lake.

He breathed freely in the ocean, saw clearly in the dim seawater, and spotted a distant city of gloomy green, like a legendary lost underwater city, ancient and grand.

However... Paul admitted that his first thought wasn't that romantic sunken city, but rather mustard sauce, which was also green. He hated mustard sauce.

That city was far dimmer than mustard sauce, much deeper.

But Paul couldn't make out the city's true form; it was as if a massive sheet of frosted glass separated him from it, blurring and softening the light.

"Cthul... fu... enter dreams... hallowed be thy name..."

Paul heard a voice coming from the city, but it was too far away for him to catch clearly. Yet he felt a sense of familiarity, like sitting by the fire with his parents on a winter night, talking. He realized he had a certain longing for that strange voice.

An almost instinctive urge drove him to swim toward it. He flailed his arms, but the swimming skills he'd taught himself in the river were useless; his movements reduced to pure biological instinct.

Organs he didn't originally have vaguely appeared on his body: huge gills on his chest, fine and hard scales. He felt his legs becoming suited for swimming, like a frog's. He couldn't blink, couldn't even try, and saw himself turning green, the same color as that city.

He quickly realized it was just an illusion; nothing had actually changed on his body.

The lack of reference points made him doubt whether he had truly moved at all, and the city's unchanging size deepened his suspicion.

As he floundered, the falling didn't stop. He had truly become the center; the seawater swirled around him, enveloping him in its midst. He fell faster and faster, yet the sea had no bottom.

The silence of the environment and the cold of the water made him tremble involuntarily. The earlier familiarity turned into fear and panic. Gradually, a sense of suffocation set in, and the discomfort of being in the deep sea began to manifest on his body.

His obsession with that city vanished. For the first time since falling into the "ocean," he looked around. He was at the center of a massive whirlpool.

He didn't know where the whirlpool's edge was. There were no other stranded creatures or ships inside it, as if the entire whirlpool had been prepared just for him. A tremendous suction pulled him down toward the seabed...

Paul suddenly realized there was no seabed at all. He was just falling endlessly. This was a whirlpool without a bottom—or rather, death.

He closed his eyes, ready to meet his end.

But then a change occurred.

The whirlpool stopped.

"And then you woke up?" Hope asked.

"That's it. Strange, right?" Paul replied. He was wrapped in Hope's bedsheet but still shivering, so Hope piled all the spare clothes from his bed onto him, including a hole-ridden sweater and a pair of industrial fleece pants now used as a shawl.

"You said you felt like you were about to die. Can people really foresee their own death?" Elizabeth asked.

Paul shook his head. "I don't know. I felt like I was dying, but look, I'm still alive and well, so I'm leaning toward it just being an illusion born of despair in that whirlpool."

"But you really were close to death back then. At least from the outside, you looked like a corpse," Hope said.

"Really?"

"Of course. Robert told me you were dead, and I stared at you stubbornly, but in the end, I didn't detect any signs of life on you."

Hope had already told Paul what happened after he passed out, omitting a few details. He only said that Robert was killed by Old Whateley's pet, and that the pet, having eaten its fill, had gone back to rest. After listening, Paul shivered and said that pet must have been a goat, then pointed at the dragon scale and asked if he had almost turned into a superhero.

Hope was surprised that superheroes existed here too, but after Elizabeth explained, he was disappointed to learn that the guy didn't wear his red underwear on the outside. He shook his head and said Paul hadn't almost become a superhero, but rather a villain from some issue of that comic—and probably the kind of extra who gets knocked out in one punch.

"Bro, I'm not doubting you, but how far were you from me back then?" Paul asked.

Hope froze. "Two to three meters. You were lying in the middle of the room, and I was in the corner."

"And you really think you could see clearly? Robert's words don't count for much; he was more likely just trying to piss you off for fun."

But when I looked at your body back then, no numbers came to mind.

Hope shook his head. Maybe he really was too far away. He hadn't yet measured the exact distance needed for numbers to appear. "Probably," he said.

He brought up another matter. "Do you know Karl Miller?"

"Of course. The New Federation's 'Distinguished Gentleman' for both 1925 and 1920. Everyone in the New Federation knows that."

Distinguished Gentleman?

Sensing Hope's confusion, Elizabeth added, "The government selects a 'Distinguished Gentleman' every year, choosing the person who contributed the most to the Federation that year. Only one is chosen annually. Mr. Karl Miller is one of the rare few to be selected twice. Are you suspecting that Robert Miller is related to Mr. Karl Miller?"

"Isn't that too much of a coincidence?"

Paul shook his head. "You really don't remember anything, do you? In the New Federation, there are too many people with the surname 'Miller.' Dunwich has only about five hundred residents, and I know less than half of them. At least a hundred of them are named 'Miller.'"

"A hundred?"

"And another hundred are named 'Courtney.' Dunwich originally only had two surnames: 'Miller' and 'Courtney.' Your 'Whateley' and my 'Corey'—we're both outsiders. Do you remember that red-haired guy from last night?"

"The big one?"

"That's him. His name is Colin Miller."

Hope frowned. He still suspected Karl Miller, but with that said, just the surname "Miller" alone didn't prove anything. The "Miller Family" Robert Miller mentioned couldn't be pinned down to which branch.

"Does your Corey family have any Miller relatives?" Hope asked stubbornly.

"Colin and I are cousins. His mother is my aunt."

That didn't seem to help. You couldn't inherit anything from a cousin anyway.

"There are no other relatives in our family," Paul said. "My mother and aunt were orphans—they never knew their parents. My father said that when he was a child, he was a fisherman. His whole family was on a boat when a shipwreck happened. Only he survived out of everyone on board. He came to Dunwich on his own."

He loosened his clothes a little. "Can we stop with just the questions for me? I have plenty I want to ask too."

Hope nodded. Whatever Paul wanted to ask about Whateley House or Robert, he was ready.

"Miss Elizabeth," Paul said, not looking at Hope. "Please tell me—were you really kidnapped by this beast in human form, Hope? Don't be afraid. I still have the strength to beat him into staying in bed for a month."

"Maybe I should strip you naked right now and throw you into ice water to cool you down," Hope said.

"Really, no," Elizabeth said with a smile. "I fainted from poison yesterday. Hope saved me."