“Okay, um… ‘I felt a great force overpowering my mind, as if a thousand Eldritch horrors were pressing against my skull. I fell, and the world darkened. And then, the voices. Those dreadful voices began to speak in my head, and they have not since stopped. Even now, I can hear them.

“ ‘Sgn’wahl! Sha’shogg! Throd! Cthulhu’ai!’ ”

The wind began to pick up, blowing my hair into Vik’s face. I realized that the words I had just read were not printed in English, yet I had no difficulty pronouncing them, despite their deficiency of vowels.

I read on, growing fascinated by the author’s hallucination.

“ ‘He calls to me! Dead Cthulhu shall rise again!

“ ‘Uln Cthulhu! Wgah’n ya!’ ”

And then I realized—I was speaking the same language I’d heard in my dream. Impossible as it seemed, I was sure of it. Was this book somehow related to my dream? Maybe it was mystical, after all. It almost seemed as if the very words I spoke had a direct effect on the sky, which was getting darker, the wind growing more furious.

“Um, guys, maybe we should stop,” Bree winced. “It looks like there’s a wicked bad storm coming.”

But I hardly heard her, and I ignored the powerful wind; I simply kept reading. I had to keep reading. I could not stop. I felt as if I were falling into a trance. The only thing that existed to me at that moment was the book, the Necronomicon.

“ ‘The Daemoniac cries never cease!’ ” I read. “ ‘He shall rise from the depths of the sea, and the Earth shall be no more!’ ”

I was vaguely aware of birds taking off all around us, as if trying to escape the magnificent, mad manuscript from which I read. The effect was empowering, and my voice grew louder as I recited more of the strange language which somehow in that moment seemed to make so much sense to me.

“ ‘Ch’ftaghu shugg Cthulhu! Thr’throd!

Ch’ftaghu shugg Cthulhu! Thr’ngli!

Ch’ftaghu shugg Cthulhu! Thr’ghlfnaw!’ ”

As I spoke the last word, the loudest clash of thunder I’d ever heard rang out directly above us. The sound shook through me, reverberating straight into my core. The skies flashed with jagged streaks of lightning and a powerful gust of rain attacked me, forcing the book closed. Bree screamed, and Vik muttered something in Hindi that was lost beneath the riotous wind.

“Andi, we have to get back inside now!” Bree said worriedly as a branch was blown off of a tree behind us.

Where did such a storm even come from? The forecast hadn’t mentioned anything of the kind. It couldn’t have had anything to do with the book…

Could it?