"It's almost like a whisper at first," Lita intoned, her eyes just a little too wide and her smile just a little too hungry. She was sitting on top of the low retaining wall separating the road from the river, which would have worried Jessie a lot more if the river was anything more than a shallow trickle running directly under the center of the Cesar Chavez Bridge. At this time of year, the only risk you ran falling down there was skinning your knee on the pavement or landing on a film crew... but Jessie felt uneasy anyway. She'd never seen her friend like this before.

Or heard her like this, either. Lita had a sultry lilt to her voice that felt distinctly at odds with the weird, rambling monologue she apparently picked up from the HP Lovecraft Discount Store, almost as if she was enticing Jessie to join her up on the retaining wall. "It's not like the kind of whisper you hear, though, Jessie. It's the kind of whisper you feel, like the faintest breath on the back of your neck when you thought you were alone in the room. A whisper that shouldn't be." Lita licked her lips and watched Jessie's approach with a knowing look in her wide, gleaming eyes. Almost as if she'd expected Jessie's approach.

Not that it was anything supernatural that led her closer. It was just that Lita had the car keys, and if there was one thing Jessie didn't want it was to abandon her friend who was suddenly acting very weird and try heading on foot in this neighborhood to go looking for help. It was getting dark, Jessie's cell phone was already somewhere on the other side of the retaining wall and probably in a few dozen pieces thanks to Lita's unexpected grab and fling a few minutes ago, and the best plan of action Jessie could come up with was to get the keys away from her friend and....

And okay, the plan kind of stopped there. But it didn't matter, because Lita swung her legs over the retaining wall when Jessie was still a few feet away and dropped lightly down on the other side. "You'll hear the whispers soon, Jess," she called out, as the frantic blonde made a lunge that was a few seconds too late, and the sound of sneakers on concrete told Jessie she needed to climb up and keep pace with her if she wanted to get out of this place. Damn it, why did Lita pull over like this in the first place?

She did feel a breeze on the back of her neck as she climbed over the wall, but the wind was picking up as the sun dipped below the horizon and any whispers it might have carried with it were lost in the sounds of traffic on the bridge overhead. "Come on, Lita, this isn't funny anymore," she called out to her friend, now walking backwards down the wide, trash-strewn river basin with her gleaming eyes catching the last of the fading light. Not that it had ever been funny, but it was even less funny now that they were alone and night was coming on and this wasn't the kind of place you wanted to be a twenty year old woman who stood 5'1" and weighed 101 pounds soaking wet.

"It's not supposed to be funny, Jess," Lita called back, her feet carrying her unseeing directly toward one of the big sewer pipes that dotted the sides of the river. "It's supposed to be true. They get louder as you get closer, and they get more insistent the louder they get. When I was down here yesterday, I... ohhhh, Jess. You won't be able to believe what's going to happen to you." Jessie made a hard sprint, desperately trying to catch up to her friend, but Lita kept moving backward with a speed and a sure-footed grace that didn't seem quite normal for the gawky brunette. The chill running down Jessie's spine became a river of icewater.

"Can you hear them yet, Jessie?" Lita called out, approaching the big pipe behind her. "They're so loud in my head right now, but that's because I've been here before. I know how to listen for them." Thankfully the giant concrete spout had a heavy metal grate covering it, and the gaps between the bars looked a little too small even for a pair of skinny bitches like them... but Jessie didn't want to hang around while Lita tried to squirm her way through. Some parts of the basin attracted a rowdy, violent crowd after dark, one that would see two women barely into their twenties as targets of opportunity. Jessie wanted to be gone before they were noticed.

Only... only she didn't see anyone down here. Anyone at all. Forget the movies, anyone who lived in Los Angeles knew that the river basin was a crowded hangout spot any time it wasn't actively flooding--but even in the gathering gloom that was drawing in all around them, Jessie could see that the two of them were completely alone. It was just Jessie, Lita, and oh shit there was a door by the side of the sewer pipe and it was swinging wide open. Jessie made a darting grab for Lita, but of course it was too late and her friend disappeared into the pitch darkness of the tunnels.

And for a moment Jessie considered leaving her there. She felt bad about it, naturally; whatever was going on with Lita, whether it was a psychotic break or a bad drug trip or just an uncharacteristically mean-spirited prank from someone who normally didn't even watch PG-13 horror movies, it was clearly causing her to make some serious mistakes and she'd absolutely put herself in danger of getting lost in there. But Jessie would only be compounding the mistake by following her. Maybe it would be better to just leave on foot and hope she found someone helpful.

Not to mention... well, Jessie hated to admit it, even just to herself. But this place gave her the creeps. It was so dark, and the whole place stank of stagnant water with some other, indescribable odor lingering just underneath and bringing Jessie's fight or flight reflex to the surface. And okay, yes, the way the wind whistled past the pipe did kind of make it sound like some faint and unholy whisper just a little too quiet to understand. It made Jessie want to turn and forget her friend and book it the hell away in any direction as fast as her legs would carry her.

But that was a shameful impulse. Lita needed her. And Jessie never turned her back on a friend. She eased the door open and stepped inside, every muscle tensed up expecting Lita to grab her at any moment and cackle with laughter at her scaredy-cat pal.

It didn't happen. Instead, Jessie saw Lita standing some thirty feet down the tunnel, her face lit up by the gleam of a cell phone flashlight and her eyes gleaming in the dark. She was still walking surefootedly backwards, a detail that unnerved Jessie more and more with every passing moment. And she smiled preternaturally wide when she somehow saw Jessie even in the inky shadows. "I knew you couldn't resist, babe," she cooed, wiping away a trickle of saliva at the corner of her mouth. "The voices are already inside your head, even if you don't know what they're saying yet."

Jessie followed after her, something damp and unpleasant soaking into her sneakers as she stumbled along toward the receding light. "I'm not hearing any voices, Lita," she said, trying to sound calm and reasonable despite the frantic terror fluttering away inside her gut. "And if you are, they... they're just in your imagination. They're not real. You, you're having a--a breakdown or something, and it's making you do things that aren't safe. Please come back this way? I'm really worried you're going to get hurt."

Lita's smile widened further. Jessie imagined microscopic rips and tears forming at the corner of the brunette's mouth. "That's what I thought, too, the first time I was here. I believed it was just my imagination playing tricks on me, some kind of phantom sound I could disprove if I only went in a little deeper and investigated. Just like you probably think you're coming in after me, and those whispers you hear are only the sound of the wind whistling down the tunnel. The voices have a way of fooling you into thinking you're making the decision yourself, but really they've already got you. You're doing exactly what they tell you, even if you don't know it yet."

Jessie knew that was a lie--she was fully in control of her own mind, she was making her own decisions, and the only thing messing with her head was Lita's amateur psych-out tactics. But it would have been a lot easier to believe it as well as know it if Jessie wasn't looking into that creepy smile. She picked up the pace, hoping against hope that Lita would stumble or go down a dead end or anything that would let Jessie catch up to her. Even if she still didn't have the foggiest notion what she'd do if she did.

Not that it mattered. Because of course Lita sped up whenever Jessie did, keeping the same distance between them as surely as if she had it measured on a yardstick. "You're doing so good, Jess," the brunette purred, slowing down a little as Jessie's energy began to flag and her pace slowed to a weary plod. "I can tell they're beginning to break through now. Soon you'll understand, and you'll be glad I brought you down here so they could crawl inside your head the way they crawled inside mine. I promise you'll be so amazed once you stop resisting and give in."

That did worry Jessie... but not for the reason Lita thought. Sure, she was hearing the sound of voices further down the tunnel, murmuring to each other in indistinct conversation as the two women approached closer and closer--but Jessie was already putting that together with the total absence of gangbangers and drug dealers up top, and coming up with an answer she absolutely didn't like. The creeps and lowlifes must have found that open door and relocated down here, where the cops couldn't find them in the maze of tunnels. One of them must have gotten Lita high or something, and convinced her to come back and bring a friend. And Jessie was walking right toward them.

She tried to move a little faster despite her growing fatalism, but it was no use. She'd been sprinting and racing and running for what felt like hours now, down long passageways and around corners and through ankle deep water in places, and all Jessie could really do now was trudge grimly forward after her friend in the faint hope of at least not leaving Lita to stumble into danger alone. "Lita, I... I can hear them up ahead, we... we have to...." Jessie trailed into silence, recognizing that there was no point in reaching her friend. She needed to conserve her energy for whatever was in front of them anyway. She'd never heard herself sound so unbelievably tired before.

Lita gave her an encouraging nod that once again clashed with her bizarre, inexplicable ramblings. "Of course we do," she murmured softly, her voice somehow joining in with the susurration of voices from deeper in. "We have to keep going so the voices can speak to us directly, so they can empty out all the nonsense in our heads and fill us with the joy of obedience. I'm already hearing them clearly, because the noise that used to be my thoughts is gone now and I'm fully attuned to the signal that is their will. But you're still a little confused, aren't you, Jessie babe?"

Jessie nodded dully, realizing a little too late that the weariness that had sapped her body's ability to move any faster than a plodding walk had slowly crept into her mind as well, filling it with a wearying fog that confused her thoughts and made it impossible to sort out Lita's nonsensical ravings from her own ideas. She was beginning to feel like she was hearing voices, voices that told her to shed her clothing article by article as she stumbled along behind Lita so that she could approach them naked and in supplication....

Supplication. That sounded like such a nice word, full of beautiful connotations of surrender to something larger than herself. Jessie wanted to be a supplicant now. She wanted to kick off her shoes and feel the water flowing around her bare feet. It had a briny scent to it, that same odor that she'd been unable to place before, and even though it didn't make sense to smell salt water this far from the ocean Jessie didn't mind. She was just happy her worries had fallen away along with her clothing. "You understand now, don't you?" Lita asked, now naked as well, and Jessie gave another dull and vacant nod. It felt better and better to agree with every step.

They felt like they were going downhill now, another impossibility for a series of tunnels that was supposed to drain out into the river, but Jessie was beyond worrying about that anymore. She felt light and free now, wading through the waist-deep water with a smile on her face almost as wide as Lita's, and when she passed by naked strangers who stood stock-still with expressions of vacant bliss she only sighed in warm, comfortable understanding. Those were people who didn't know anyone they could lure down here to listen to the voices. They were waiting until, until....

Of course. Until their numbers were large enough to bring new supplicants by force. That made so much sense to Jessie now.

When the water came up to her shoulders, she stopped, almost trembling with the desire to commune with the voices right at their source. A tiny, almost insignificant part of her was shrieking in terror, desperately and futilely trying to argue with the voices that drowned her out inside Jessie's head, but it was so much easier and more pleasant not to listen to own mind. Jessie had better things to listen to right now. Wonderful things. Things that caressed her body all over, leaving faint sucker marks on her ivory skin. Jessie wanted to be touched by them and let them into her body as well as her mind.

She got her wish mere moments later, as something thick and muscular and slick to the touch pushed up and up and up until it fully filled her cunt. A second tentacle slid into her asshole, lifting her with its thrusts until Jessie was up on her tiptoes and struggling desperately to keep from toppling over, and she felt as much as heard the tiny little voice of resistance inside her mind fade into blissful silence leaving her with a smile as wide as the ocean. There was only the booming shout of command inside her head now, and it filled her with orgasmic euphoria from head to toe.

Lita stood a little ways back as the ritual reached its climax, a beatific expression on her face, and Jessie knew without being told that her friend was being fucked by yet more extensions of the vast body that lay submerged beneath the surface of the cavernous lake they found themselves in. They all felt so much pleasure in service to the god beneath the sea. It was no wonder they surrendered so completely to the voices that filled their minds with the perfect joy of true obedience.

When it was finished, Jessie was dropped into the water to splash and splutter her way back to her feet, but she no longer cared. She'd given up all her fears, all her worries, and the surrender to the god was so complete that if it had dragged her beneath the surface to lie with it until the last bubble of air escaped her lungs she would have accepted it without even a notion of complaint. But she knew that it wouldn't do that to her. She had so much service to give it. So many people to introduce to its voice.

She and Lita waded back out, exchanging a knowing look as they finally emerged onto dry land. They had so many other friends who deserved this experience. So many who needed to hear the voice of the god under the sea. And they had all the time in the world to bring them to it.

THE END