He came to in a room that smelled of fish and salt and bile, the echo of a scream that sounded familiar rapidly fading from his ears. It was a basement, probably; large, stone, and dank in a way that rooms above ground could never manage. It was also dark — dark enough that the single candle flickering a few feet from his face only made it harder to see.

From behind and to his left, a robed figure dragged a young woman he had never seen into the small island of candlelight. A low keening whimper escaped her lips, but her eyes made it clear that it was the mental equivalent of a light left on; the owner mercifully long gone to some other place. He struggled to stand or to shout, but his hands were tied to something solid and low behind him and all that escaped his painfully raw throat was a low sort of gasp. The robed figure snapped its head up and from beneath the hood the candlelight reflected off two deep-set eyes and a row of smiling teeth.
“Getting to you, Professor,” it said. “Wait your turn.”
Turning back to the task at hand, the robed figure dragged the girl across the circle of candlelight. There it pulled a long, thin-bladed knife from the loose rope belting its waist and almost casually sliced the girl’s dress and belly open. With a snap her eyes registered fear again and the whimper turned into a scream. The robed figure pushed her and she fell away and down, out of the candlelight, her scream echoing and fading for a long time before it cut off. A blast of hot, foetid air struck the Professor’s face and he heaved, finding his stomach mercifully empty.

“You killed her,” his voice quivered with astonishment and a rising anger.
“Hardly,” the figure replied, coming to kneel in front of him and drawing back its hood. It was a young man, unremarkable to look at. “Oh, don’t get me wrong, she is surely dead, but not by my hand. She was just chum.”
“The blood…”
“No, Professor. The terror. At his will, I call them to feed.”
“You worship those… those things?”
“Oh ho, Professor, I was right about you after all. You do know what lurks beneath this town. But no, I am no brainless cultist worshiping monsters in the dark. I serve the deepest. From his watery throne he dreams me here to do his bidding.”
“If you are to kill me, then do it now and dispense with this rot.”
“All in good time, Professor. You must wait your turn. You are an interesting one, though. I wonder, what dreams you?”