My patreons voted for it, so we’ve got it here: the next addition to the Pets novella. Caitlin and Calvin have had the welcome mat laid out for them, so all they need to do is step on through the door. Will they, and if they do, what will they find? We get a glimpse in the snippet below and the full chapter in the link above.
Enjoy
~
As the stories went, sometimes Naiads would run from others. Sometimes they would kill them. Sometimes they would stalk them, only to disappear before attacking, leaving their quarry panicked and questioning their own sanity. But one thing was clear: Naiads always sang.
The songs were as varied as they were unnerving: fragmented and bizarre transmissions, near-perfect imitations of living beings or edited and re-cut into new conversations. Messages from starships long missing and people long dead. Sometimes, like Breclinson, they would take the voices of those they’d killed. Other times it would be people still alive and many light-years distant. They didn’t just sing with their victims’ words, either. There could be the strobing thrum of a black hole where none existed, the harsh, shrill cry of a pulsar turned into horrifying screams. Voices hidden in the standing waves of stars and planets… and their own incomprehensible, terrifying melodies.
It was said that listening to a Naiad’s songs caused madness and death. ‘When a Naiad sings in its own voice, it’s not meant for us.’ That had been the testimony from a transport leader who’d killed his crew. In his interrogation, he said it was because they’d heard a Naiad’s true voice and weren’t worthy of it. Whatever had truly happened, no one could say: he’d purged all records of the killings and the surrounding days from his ship’s logs. His recounting of events was all any investigation had to go on.
Some conspiracy theorists insisted that he actually had heard a Naiad’s song and it had driven him insane. Others said the man was a paranoid schizophrenic who’d had a psychotic break brought on by the isolation of deep-space cargo runs. Most stories of Naiads ended like that; with no clear evidence and all either side had to go on was what they believed to be true and how satisfying an explanation they felt it was.
Lots of people claimed to have seen Naiads. As father said, you could throw a coin in a bar and whichever hand snatched it out of the air could tell you about the time they’d encountered a Naiad. If you believe even half what drunken fools say, Jivek had sneered. There’s more of them than stars in the sky. Some people even claimed to have spoken with them. Calvin wasn’t sure if he should count himself and Caitlin among them. He wasn’t sure about anything except that he needed to know the truth…
…and that he couldn’t utter a word of this to father.
~
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