Cthulhu's Reign

could not draw things in that way himself and he was always surprised when the marks joined together to form an image.

This time the picture would be of Broken Dirt, whatever that might be, but when Echo took her hand from his wrist and snuggled her face into Moms’s shoulder, he thought that she must not have finished the picture and had given up. He had been struck by this fear before, that Echo was only making random scratches. She never closed her eyes to concentrate. It was as if she saw an image already in the sand and was merely tracing it out. So he leaned close and studied.

It was not a picture of an animal or a person or of one of the Olders. Echo could not have drawn one of the latter without crying out in terror and retreating into herself for a long time. It was no machine that Vern could puzzle out; the lines were too far apart. Maybe it was some building or monument the Olders had constructed or that they were constructing now. They were always busy, always remaking the world around them into something it should not be, something that made Vern queasy when he saw it. Echo’s picture was of nothing that plied through the sky like the monstrous flying machines that whispered back and forth in the upper air on unguessable errands.

Maybe it was something in the stream. There was a wavy line between two sets of straight- line segments that were joined. There were squiggly circles and lines disposed about the line-segments. He peered more closely at the wavy line between the segment sets; it was broken in two places with small empty spaces.

Echo was watching him look, her face expressionless. When he pointed at one of the broken places and asked, “Is it a waggly?” she buried her face in Moms’ shoulder. Then she looked out again to watch him examine it.

So, whatever, the hiatus indicated, it was not something that flapped or waved or fluttered in the breeze. Those irregular movements fascinated Echo; they were to her the salient parts of any landscape.

“Is it a too-bright?”

Echo rocked back and forth, excited, but she did not smile.

A too-bright would be something that flashed or glittered or glimmered. There were two of them, so it probably wouldn’t be something that emitted a steady shine as an artificial light would probably do. What things in nature flashed or flickered intermittently?

Well, it was a stream, of course, or a river. When the three of them went to bathe in the stream in the warm summer, the thing that captured Echo’s attention most firmly was the way the sunlight reflected off the wavelets. She was transfixed, watching these changing lights as fixedly as if she were trying to decipher a code.

So then, if the wavy line were a stream, the surrounding segments would represent the banks. The squiggly circles and other lines would represent bushes and grasses.

Except that Echo could not “represent” with abstract symbols. She always guided Vern’s hand to draw, as closely as the sand-medium would allow, the exact lineaments of the thing to be seen. So his interpretation must be wrong and these disjointed marks composed a realistic picture of something he could not recognize.

Or —

Or maybe it was a true-to-life drawing of the picture that was in her mind. Maybe it had come to her just as it was laid out here in the sand, a schematic diagram of a place. In that case, it must have been sent to her as a message — and not from the Olders or any of their slaves. Their aura about it would ravage his sister. She would crouch with her face to the cave wall, clutching her knees and wailing.

He looked at her, safe in Moms’ arms, watching him. She was not frightened. The message had come from something or someone else than they knew, an entity that had searched to find a receptive mind and had encountered Echo. This was not the first of her extrasensory episodes. Such experiences had been remarked as fairly widespread among autistics, even before the advent of the Olders had heightened, in greater and less degree, according to individuals, those powers among humans. Some person, or group of persons, was trying to make contact, either with Echo alone or with the whole family by means of Echo.

He examined the drawing again. Was he looking at a map? Did these scattered lines represent a specific place? He could not ask. “Place” would mean nothing to Echo. If she arrived at the location suggested by her drawing, she almost certainly would not be able to recognize it. It would be too detailed and, to her, would bear no resemblance to the lines in the sand.

Well then, supposing that this telepathic being, whatever it might be, really had transmitted a map to Echo’s mind, and, supposing that Vern had interpreted the hiatuses in the wavy line correctly, how would the sender have known to include a representation of a “too-bright” in the scheme? The telepath would have to know her mind thoroughly, understanding the way Echo experienced things and reacted to them. But that would not be possible without her knowledge and if she had felt someone rummaging through her mind-pictures, her fear and trembling would alert her mother and brother.

If, however, the telepath understood the kind of mind it had touched, it would not need intimate knowledge of its contact. If she or he or it recognized autism and had had previous commerce with autistic personalities, it would know how to contact them and how to communicate information without distressing that person. Echo had been disturbed; she had murmured in her sleep, reacting to the encounter, but she had not been distressed. The telepath was not immediately threatening. But the further intentions might not be benevolent.

Now, supposing that his first two notions were not groundless, the situation would be that some being had made purposeful contact with the family, or at least with Echo, and had transmitted a map, though one with limited geographical information. Perhaps it had transmitted only as much as it estimated that Echo could receive and pass on.

Why had it done so? Did it desire that the family travel to the mapped place?

He passed his hand above the sand drawing and looked at Echo, into her unwavering stare, and asked, “Go here?”

For a long time she did not respond and when she did, it was only to sing one of her songs. “All night all night all night. ”

“Queenie, play with Echo,” Vern said and the big black dog rose and came to his sister and nuzzled her elbow and suffered herself to be petted. This was one way to break Echo’s verbal cycles, but it did not always work.

She had retreated from his question, Vern realized, because here meant to her not the place the diagram represented but the sand itself. Echo did not want to go sit in the circle and destroy her drawing; she was always proud when she had guided Vern to draw a picture that was in her head.

She would never be able to say, “Yes, let us travel to the place we have drawn the map of. Something wants us to be there and it is important.” Those wishful sentences Vern furnished for himself in his anxiety to comprehend, and this fancy was a signal of his frustrated impatience.

There might be other explanations for the contact. Vern knew that others had retreated to these caves to escape the onslaught of the Olders. In their small university town, most people had been killed with dreadful weapons or left to the mercies of the slave-organisms called shoggoths that had no notion of what mercy might be, and so killed lingeringly, as if taking enjoyment from the spectacle and music of the final agonies. A number of persons had been taken away to the colossal laboratory structures the Olders had reared and there they were divested of the knowledge the dire creatures judged might be useful to their purposes — whatever those might be.

Among those who had managed to flee and hide in the caves that had once sheltered the abused Cherokee people, there might be another autistic with some of the extrasensory powers that Echo possessed.

The question would still remain, however. Why should such a person transmit a map? Whoever sent it had sent an invitation. Or a summons.

They were as well prepared as they could be to leave the cave and journey. Moms and Vern had made a list and gathered the accessories necessary for travel. “Someday,” she had said, “the Old Ones will come into our territory. They are always expanding their reach, tearing down our world and rebuilding it to suit them, remaking it in their own image. So we must gather supplies and put them away in the cave and be prepared. I heard once long ago that it is best always to be prepared.”

So they had scavenged for twine and for whatever other binding materials they could find, for cloth of any kind that might warm, shelter, and hide them, and for any handy pieces of metal that could be beaten into useful