originally published Singers of Strange Songs, Chaosium, 1997
Bob, our narrator (stop the presses! The narrator has a name!) is an author and retired civil engineer, with a fairly typical teenage niece he apparently dotes upon - or at least pays more attention to than her parents do.
Things start to get strange in their little town. Balls don't bounce on a particular spot on the tennis court. A dog dies in its backyard house and decomposes in a single night. Plants and orchards are suddenly sick and ruined. A kid disappears in a tiny patch of woods.
Bob's niece Rianne thinks there's something going on. Bob dismisses it all as coincidence (maybe I've read too many of these things, but since Rianne has rattled off something like a haf-dozen incidents plus he's witnessed a couple himself, Bob seems a little dense). But, he does see eerie parallels with incidents that happened in Dunwich and Managansett (cue ominous music).
Bob learns that Rianne has enterprisingly researched the incidents and even pinpointed their epicenter on a map in her bedroom. When he learns that she and a friend have gone to said epicenter to investigate - said epicenter being a local dam - he rushes off the find them. There he finds the bodies of two missing kids, and Rianne's friend in the process of being sucked of life by a mass of tentacles springing from the ground. He and Rianne flee as he floods the dam. Due to his political connections, Bob is never charged.
This certainly isn't a bad story, and it sets itself up nicely, but it doesn't really go anywhere. And I find the image of Rianne, whom Bob describes as a typical 14 year-old girl, becoming an intrepid investigator of Cthulhoid activity way too much of a stretch. This probably could have worked in D'ammassa had fleshed her out as a girl of exception intellect or maturity, but he doesn't. She's just a typical young teenage girl who suddenly starts acting like Dana Sculley.
Well-written, and entertaining enough read, but nothing special.
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