Cthulhu

By the light of her smartphone, Lois sounded out the Greek letters on the scroll. The father she got in the incantation, the less she liked touching the scroll itself. She was certain it was vellum now, not paper or parchment, and she could feel goosebumps raised on the skin, which was starting to feel slick and clammy. The air she breathed began to taste of ocean spray, cold and humid, but Lois kept speaking, kept reading...

Light began to leak in through the edges. She couldn't take her eyes off the page, couldn't stop her mouth from moving, throat whispering out the words. Green light coming in from her peripheral vision, the source somewhere she couldn't see. On the ground, she heard Circe begin to stir, and Lois wished she could lower her voice or stop but she was lost in the grip of the thing and had to finish it.

The final lines weren't Greek. The letters twisted themselves on the page, and her throat twisted with it, coughing and sputtering. The scent of something dead filled the room, the sickly-sweet scent of rot. Pieces of the walls and floor were sloughing off in strips, the living prison collapsing as the burning green light brightened, closing in around her.

Things were slithering behind Lois Lane as she struggled through the final line. Like snakes, but there was a sense of something massive behind her. Circe shuddered in her sleep, as though caught in a nightmare. Lois couldn't look at her directly, she was focused on the scroll, the last line, voice raw and hoarse, tasting bile in the back of her throat.

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

Relief swept through Lois Lane as the spell was broken, her limbs slackened, she nearly dropped the scroll. Creeping arms like those of an octopus coiled around her, slick with some thick, greasy slime, the smell nauseating, like sticking your hand into a decomposing raccoon. Lois spared a glance at Circe, barely able to see for the bright green light...tentacles were swarming around her, drawing her back...and Lois felt them tug at her too, pulling her backward.

Instinctively Lois tried to rise, to fight. A blistering headache pierced her skull, like her head had been hollowed out and filled with warm cement, straining against its bony prison from the inside out.

There was a presence...Lois felt like an ant under the microscope of some entomologist. That she had caught the attention of something that existed at an impossibly vaster scale than herself. Unable to turn and face it directly, her brain not able to process what it was trying to tell her...too much, too loud, too complex...but at last, as Lois Lane and Circe were dragged through the glowing hole in space, she thought she understood one tiny part of what it was saying very clearly.

It wanted to fuck her.