Paul felt like his head was a lump of mush—or maybe a cabbage. Whatever it was, it had to be something unreliable, or he wouldn't have had such a strange dream:
He felt himself falling toward the bottom of the sea—though that was obviously an illusion. He had grown up in Dunwich, and the farthest he'd ever gone was the nearby town of Arkham. The closest thing to a sea he'd ever seen was the waterfall at Sentinel Hill, less than five meters high.
But he felt himself falling toward the bottom of the sea all the same. An intuition he'd never had before told him that it was the ocean, and not some lake.
He could breathe freely in the ocean and see through its gloomy waters. In the distance, he saw a city of ghostly green, like the legendary lost city beneath the sea, ancient and magnificent.
But... Paul had to admit that the first thing he thought of wasn't the romantic underwater city, but another green thing: wasabi. He hated wasabi.
The city was far darker than wasabi, and much more profound.
But Paul couldn't make out what the city really looked like. It was as though an enormous pane of frosted glass stood between him and the city, blurring and softening the light.
"Cthulhu... fhtagn... dream... may your name..."
Paul heard the voice coming from the city, but it was too far away for him to make out the words. Yet he felt a sense of warmth from it, like sitting by the fire on a winter night, chatting with his parents. He realized he felt a strange yearning for that voice.
An almost instinctive urge made him want to swim toward the city. He thrashed his arms, but the swimming techniques he'd taught himself in the river were useless. All he could manage were the movements of a creature acting on instinct.
Organs he'd never had seemed to appear on his body: huge gills on his chest, fine, hard scales. His legs felt better suited for swimming, like a frog's. He couldn't blink—not that he needed to. He saw himself turning green, just like the city.
He soon realized it was only an illusion. Nothing had changed about his body.
With nothing around him to use as a reference, he wondered whether he was really moving at all. The ghostly green city, which never seemed to change in size, only deepened his doubts.
As he thrashed about, his fall never stopped. He truly became the protagonist of this ordeal: the seawater flowed around him, enveloping him in its midst. He fell faster and faster, but the sea still had no bottom.
The silence and the cold made him shiver uncontrollably. The warmth he'd felt moments ago turned to fear and panic. He began to feel as though he were suffocating, and the discomfort of being in the deep sea gradually took hold of his body.
His obsession with the city faded. For the first time since falling into the "ocean," he looked around. He was at the center of a gigantic whirlpool.
He didn't know where the whirlpool's edge was. There weren't even any other creatures or ships caught in it. The whole whirlpool seemed to have been made just for him, its immense pull dragging him down toward the bottom of the sea...
Paul suddenly realized there was no bottom to the sea. He was simply falling endlessly. This was a whirlpool with no end—or, he realized, death.
He closed his eyes and awaited his end.
But then something changed.
The whirlpool stopped.
"And then you woke up?" Hope asked.
"That's right. Pretty strange, huh?" Paul answered. He was wrapped in Hope's bedsheet, but still shivering, so Hope had piled all his spare clothes on him, including a holey sweater and a pair of industrial fleece trousers that were now draped over him like a shawl.
"You said you felt like you were about to die. Can people really sense their own death?" Elizabeth asked.
Paul shook his head. "I don't know. I felt like I was about to die, but as you can see, I'm still alive and well. So I'm more inclined to think it was just an illusion brought on by despair in the whirlpool."
"But you really were close to death. At least, on the outside, you looked like a corpse," Hope said.
"Really?"
"Of course. Robert told me you were dead. I didn't want to believe him, so I kept watching you, but right up to the end, I couldn't find any sign of life in you."
Hope had already told Paul what happened after he passed out, leaving a few details out. He only said that Robert had been killed by Old Whateley's pet, and that the pet had gone back to rest after eating its fill. Paul had listened while shivering, then said the pet must have been a goat. After that, he pointed at the dragon scales and asked if he'd almost become Superman.
Hope was surprised to learn that Superman existed here, too. But after Elizabeth explained, he was disappointed to learn that the guy didn't wear his red underwear on the outside. Hope shook his head and said Paul couldn't become Superman. He'd nearly turned into one of the freak villains from a Superman comic—and quite possibly the kind who got knocked out with a single punch and only appeared as a bit player.
"Buddy, I'm not doubting you, but how far away was I from you?" Paul asked.
Hope froze. "Two or three meters. You were lying in the middle of the room, and I was in the corner."
"Do you really think you could see that well? Robert's words don't prove anything. He was more likely just trying to rile you up for fun."
But when I looked at your body, no numbers came to mind at all.
Hope shook his head. Maybe he really had been too far away. He still hadn't measured the distance needed for numbers to appear. "Probably."
He brought up something else. "Do you know Karl Miller?"
"Of course. He was named 'Outstanding Gentleman' in 1925 and 1920. Everyone in the New Federation knows about him."
Outstanding Gentleman?
Seeing Hope's confusion, Elizabeth added, "The government selects an 'Outstanding Gentleman' every year—the person who made the greatest contribution to the Federation that year. They only choose one. Mr. Karl Miller is one of the few people to have been selected twice. Are you wondering whether that Robert Miller has some connection to Mr. Karl Miller?"
"Isn't that a pretty big coincidence?"
Paul shook his head. "You really don't remember anything, do you? There are too many people named Miller in the New Federation. Dunwich has only a little over five hundred residents, and I know less than half of them. At least a hundred are named Miller."
"A hundred?"
"And another hundred are named Courtney. At first, there were only two surnames in Dunwich: Miller and Courtney. People like you, with the surname Whateley, and me, with the surname Corey, are outsiders. Remember the red-haired guy from last night?"
"The big, muscular one?"
"That's him. His name is Colin Miller."
Hope furrowed his brow. He still suspected Karl Miller, but in that case, the surname "Miller" alone really didn't prove anything. Nor was there any way to know which branch of the family Robert Miller had meant when he mentioned the "Miller Family."
"Does your Corey family have any relatives named Miller?" Hope asked, unwilling to give up.
"Colin and I are cousins. His mother is my aunt."
That doesn't seem to help. You can't exactly inherit genes from a cousin.
"There aren't any other relatives in our family," Paul said. "My mother and my aunt were orphans. They didn't know who their parents were. My dad said he was a fisherman as a boy. His whole family was on a boat, but there was a shipwreck, and he was the only one who survived. He came to Dunwich by himself."
He loosened his clothes a little. "Could you stop asking me questions for a change? I've got plenty of questions of my own."
Hope nodded. Whether Paul wanted to ask about the Whateley family or Robert, he was ready.
"Miss Elizabeth." Paul ignored Hope. "Please tell me, were you really abducted by this heartless beast, Hope? Don't be afraid. I can still beat him badly enough to keep him in bed for a month."
"Maybe I should strip you naked and throw you into ice water right now, so you can cool off," Hope said.
"Not at all," Elizabeth said with a smile. "I passed out from poisoning yesterday. Hope saved me."
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