Arkham Horror: Ghouls of the Miskatonic (Dark Waters Trilogy 1)

Part One
Strange Tides, 1926
CHAPTER ONE
It starts with the sea. Always the sea. She loved the water, remembering weekends at her grandfather’s Vermont home on Lake Champlain, where she and her brother would swim out from the shore and dive down to try and see the coral reefs below the cold water. No amount of creepy tales her dad told her of Champ, the monster said to live in the lake, could dissuade her from swimming out as far as she could go. She loved the silky feel of water over her skin, the refreshing sharpness of jumping into its cold embrace, and the sense that she was almost flying.
So why did this dream of water scare her so much?
Perhaps because it was so vast, so enormous as to defy comprehension. She was floating in the middle of an uncharted ocean, so far away from land that it might not even exist. In this trackless ocean, land was a memory, a myth of ancient times forgotten by the denizens of this watery expanse. Without knowing how, she knew she was as far from land as it was possible to be on this spinning globe.
The ocean was peaceful, still and undisturbed, like a vast black mirror reflecting the stars wheeling above in their ceaseless dance. But some primal part of her felt a nascent terror that something was somehow out of place, disjointed, or otherwise out of alignment. She was adrift in the middle of the sea, lost and without hope of rescue, yet her fear was not of drowning, but rather of the isolation and the sense that she was an insignificant speck in the face of something unutterably vast, something too large and cosmic to be understood by a human mind.
No sooner had she formed the thought than she was dragged beneath the surface, and she felt the aching cold of the deep ocean envelop her as the water closed over her head. She gasped for breath, feeling the water pour into her lungs, filling them with bitter cold, yet leaving her able to breathe…