“I’m telling you, you’ve got to stop the pumps!”

In hindsight, yelling and slamming my fist down on the head of Memphis Light, Gas and Water’s desk probably wasn’t the smartest idea.

Thankfully, he held his hands up and kept the security guards tackling me.

“Mister-,” he began.

“Professor,” I interrupted.

He coughed, then continued. “Professor Lucas, even if I believed a single word of what you’re telling me – and I don’t – this company supplies water to nearly a million people. Would you suggest I simply let them die of dehydration to satisfy your…speculations?”

I hung my head in frustration.

“The water in the aquifer belongs to them. They sealed themselves down there, God knows how long ago, God knows why, with a hundred trillion gallons of clean water.”

I was talking too fast, I tried to slow down.

“We’ve been pumping water out of an underground sea for nearly a hundred and fifty years. We never knew what was down there before. But with modern scanning, I’ve seen it. There is another city beneath this one. And it is waking up.

Now, please. You’ve got to stop the pumps.”

That’s when he threw me out of his office.

Memphis Note
There are actually four separate aquifers beneath Memphis, the largest of which is estimated to be somewhere around a hundred trillion gallons, maybe more. In all the time we’ve been pumping water out of it, the water hasn’t even dropped a hundred and fifty feet from its original level.

“They always thought that pathetic bigot of a horror writer was talking about Egypt whenever he mentioned Memphis,” he says, stooping down on the muddy shore of the pond.

Dipping his fingers into the brown water, he begins to trace patterns; horrible, maddening patterns of eldritch things that should never exist in our world.

He hums softly to himself. And then the surface of the pond begins to hum along with him.

“But, we know the truth, don’t we? He wasn’t talking about that Memphis at all.” He smiles a gleeful, evil smile, “And won’t we give them such a shock when they see just how wrong they were?”

A lone tentacle, putrid in color, rough in texture and entirely wrong in its very nature, rises out of the water. It pushes upward, as far up from the water as a man is tall, suckers pulling at the air, foulness permeating everything around it. Then it comes for him, wrapping itself around his arm, spiraling up past his shoulder.

It pauses there for a moment, hanging menacingly in the air next to his exposed neck, before reaching over, and gently stroking his face.

“Yes, we will,” he coos to it.

Memphis Note
HP Lovecraft is a 20th century horror writer that is credited with bringing the genre into maturity. If Poe birthed the genre, Lovecraft was its experimental, drunken college years. He wrote a lot about ancient evils and horrors out of time and space that would consume your sanity. And everything had tentacles for some reason. He liked to reference obscure places from antiquity in nefarious was, and mentioned “a dark thing” under Memphis on more than one occasion. I just thought it might be fun to make that our Memphis.