The Shunned Trailer
WHEN SPRINGTIME lays its impertinent hand upon the stony bosom of New England, it is deemed no extraordinary thing for a young man of my years and education to venture forth in search of certain genial entertainments such as may only be procured in sunnier climes than the cobbled streets of Cambridge. Alluring though the houris of sweet Radcliffe may be when snow is drifted deep over Harvard Square, when the Charles River is a ribbon of gray between icy banks, and when a man is willing to date a moose if there is an outside chance that he may get lucky, it is an indisputable law of nature that the local ladies lose their former powers to charm once the thaw sets in. Accordingly I had determined to spend my vernal academic hiatus from the hallowed halls of Harvard in pursuit of the Three B’s, namely Brew, the Left One, and the Right One.
I set out upon my pilgrimage of grace with some trepidation. Alas, my finances were not of the most robust, which situation precluded my engaging an aeroplane flight to the enchanted dream-city of unknown Daytona Beach. Like some latter-day goliard, it was my misguided intention to make so long a journey by presuming upon the kindness of strangers and, in an extremity, upon the reliability of shank’s mare.
My expedition into alien lands at first seemed blessed by my guardian gods, for I was able to engage the attentions of a carload of young ladies passing through Cambridge on their way south from the red-litten towers of Bennington. It was truly unfortunate that our jolly fellowship came to an abrupt and distasteful end when the maiden who owned our common conveyance discovered me paying my compliments to one of her comelier companions. Being of an excitable nature, she was unwilling to overlook our lack of a chaperone, despite the fact that it is virtually impossible to engage a trustworthy duenna at three in the morning when one is more or less completely naked.
Thus it was that I found myself engaging alternate transportation somewhere south of our nation’s capital. My luck seemed to have departed with my first ride, for the second car to offer me a lift was full of Vassar girls.
I came back to my senses on an isolated stretch of dirt road well below the Mason-Dixon Line. Apart from a vague sense of having been thoroughly exploited in any number of ingenious ways, and the presence of a gaudy tattoo on my left shoulder which referred to Stephen Hawking as (I blush) the “Mac Daddy,” I had no recollection of my ordeal. In and of itself this was a mercy, save only for the fact that I likewise had no notion of where, precisely, I was nor of in which direction I must now set out in order to find my way back to a more traveled road.
As I stood thus lost and bewildered under the moon’s indifferent Cyclopean eye, the heavens grumbled their displeasure and it began to rain like an upperclassman pissing on a flat rock. Now my need was both clear and immediate: I must find shelter from the storm. As I staggered along the dirt road, which was rapidly becoming a muddy slough beneath my Nikes, I thought I spied a light in the distance. Hastening toward it, I soon became half-blinded by the rain, which had intensified in both rapidity and vigor. Ere long I could see nothing before me but that one encouraging blur of light, and when ultimately I reached the door which it illuminated, I took no notice of my surroundings but only pounded upon the portal with my last strength.
The door swung open under my unrelenting blows and I toppled into what I thought was a safe haven. Ah, how little I knew then the nameless horrors that awaited me! And yet I must in honesty confess that even had some admonishing angel with a fiery sword appeared to forewarn me of how I then stood in peril, body and soul, I was so grateful to have come in out of the rain that in all likelihood I would have replied to that winged messenger, “Bite me.”
No sooner was I under shelter (and ere I was able to take in my surroundings) than the full physical impact of my late hardships manifested itself. My limbs were seized with a mighty trembling, my body was racked by chills and fever, and through my delirium I heard myself declaiming a rather saucy sestina about Voltaire and a well-disposed Merino. I had just arrived at the third iteration of “Vive les moutons et la France!” when overtaken by benevolent oblivion.
I awoke to the smell of mildew, stale beer, and deep fat frying. My burning eyes opened to behold a dwarfish, gray-skinned creature which hunched over a miniature gas range, its keg-like bulk swathed in a purple-flowered housedress. It clutched a plastic spatula in one paw, and with this it traced arcane symbols in an unknown alphabet within the depths of a black cast iron skillet. Somewhere a recording of Jeff Foxworthy routines was playing at top volume. So this was Hell.
As I lay there, amid sheets as damp as the hands of drowned men or importunate Vassar girls, furtively observing the creature at the stove, I was ignorant that other eyes were at the same time observing me. I was made aware of this only when a voice behind me unexpectedly exclaimed, “Look there, Ma! He’s woke!”
At this, the spatula-wielding thing turned its head slowly toward me. Ah, pitying heavens! What manner of countenance now met my eyes! It was a face that might be termed human only as a courtesy. The skin thereof was, as I have already remarked, of so drab a cast as must be classified as gray. The few tufts of wiry hair atop the broad, flat head were of no perceptible color at all. The bulging eyes and wide, almost lipless mouth, were batrachian features whose like I had never seen outside of my elementary biology dissection lab. Indeed, as the creature approached me, I imagined that it was preceded by the aroma of formaldehyde, although I quickly realized that this was merely the smell of breakfast.
“So he is,” the creature said, and when it spoke I presumed from the timbre of its voice that it was a female. She smiled, a grimace which set my stomach to quaking like a blancmange. In fear for my powers of peristalsis, I sought to revive my intestinal fortitude by diverting my eyes from that uncanny visage and fixing them upon some pleasanter sight.
Fat chance. Above my head a low, curved, poorly lit ceiling stretched off into ill-omened shadows, suggesting a dwelling shaped according to no sane architectural principles but rather based on the Hostess Twinkie™. It was narrow to the point of inducing claustrophobia in snails, yet these tight confines had not deterred its inhabitants from packing every available inch of wall, shelf, and countertop with the wretched idols of Kitsch, demon-god of yard sales. To my left I beheld a calendar illustrated with a photo of a pig wearing lingerie. To my right loomed a row of syrupy-eyed children, pastel-colored figurines adorned with idiot simpers and odious observations like: “A Friend Returns Your Car Keys But Holds Your Heart.” Nor might I evade the horror by staring directly overhead, for someone had affixed to the ceiling a Mylar imitation of a mirror framed by the words If You Ain’t Smiling Yet, It’s Not My Fault.
“Dear God!” I exclaimed. “I’m in a trailer!”
“Whoa, can’t hide nothin’ from you, college boy,” Ma said dryly. She brought the sizzling skillet almost under my nose. “Hungry?”
“Ah . . . maybe?” I replied, pulling the sheets up to my chin. I was fully in my senses now, after having had them frightened out of me, and had just become cognizant of the certitude that I had been sleeping au naturel. In a moment of painful epiphany, I knew that what I passionately desired more than anything else in this world—even beyond certain private fantasies I had long entertained concerning the Spice Girls and a large tub of chocolate frosting—was to get my pants back on and myself the hell out of there.
My distress must have painted itself plain to see upon my face, for the creature snickered in a dreadfully knowing manner, and even went so far as to make a playful feint at the nether hem of my enshrouding bed linens with her spatula.
“’Sall right, honeybug, they’s just dryin’ out some. Yer jeans, that is. Won’t know about them sheets until later if you get my drift and I think you do, heh, heh, heh, chuggerumpf!”
“Aw, now, Ma—!” The same voice which earlier had declared my waking state now sounded again in my ear. The thin mattress beside me sagged as a second being, marginally nearer the human form than Ma, plopped himself down beside me on the bed. “Don’t you mind her none. She always gets kinda brassy to guests when it’s our turn to host the sabbat prayer meet.”
“Sabbath prayer meeting?” I echoed, or thought I did. The minor difference in our exchange eluded me, although later on its dreadful significance did not. Of course by then it was too late. It always is.
“Brassy, am I?” Ma’s tone hit somewhere between a first alto and a blender full of cockatiels. She boxed her offspring’s ear smartly and snapped, “That how I learned you manners? You keep a civil tongue in your head, boy, or I swear I’ll—!”
“Shoot, Ma, where else would I keep it?” he replied, and with that an unimaginable stretch of flabby blue-black flesh shot out of his mouth and flew the length of the trailer, returning with terrible alacrity and a copy of TV Guide stuck to the tip. “Thee?” he concluded as he wrestled with the tongue-tying periodical.
The sight of this unmanning spectacle at first stunned me, then caused me to break into a nonstop stream of mindless chatter, alternately thanking mother and son for their philanthropy and begging them to give me back my clothing that I might no more abuse their hospitality. The monstrous pair was visibly baffled.
It finally devolved upon the son to address me, when he could get a word in edgewise. “Friend,” he said, “I can tell you’re a little put off by what I just done, but I can’t help it; it’s my nature. Not the sort of thing you’re used to, what with your big city ways and your canned eggnog and your edible underwear and all of them other high-tone delights of civilization. Well, Ma and me, we’re just simple, Elder Godsfearing country folk. Our ways ain’t your ways, but we don’t mean you no personal harm. Less you’d happen to be a virgin—?” His voice trailed off on a hopeful note, which it was my duty to squelch at once. He was crestfallen, but continued. “Too bad, too bad. Anyhow, I’m assuming that you’re mostly upset by our looks. That right?”
“Well, you do look a bit—” I groped for a way to speak accurately without insulting the folk who had literally taken me in out of the rain “—batrachian.” It was a good word to use, for the odds were excellent that these people had never heard it and, rather than taking umbrage, would mistake it for a compliment.
To my shock and chagrin, I was half wrong. The son slapped his meaty thigh and looked extraordinarily pleased. “That’s it! That’s just it, brother! You have gone and hit the nail smack dab on the head. What we are, see, is New Liturgy Batrachians, the only spawn of Great Cthulhu who have preserved His teachings and commands and assorted hideous gibberings in the truly proper and orthodox manner.”
“Not like them sinners up north in Innsmouth and Arkham,” Ma put in scornfully. “Hoity-toity little shitepokes, ever’ last one of ’em, think they’re so all-fired great ’cause they got them Dagon churches with store-bought roofs on ’em and a coupla stuck-up high priests that snuck their sorry froggy butts through Yale Divinity. Hunh! Why, they’re no more fit to greet the rise of sunken R’lyeh from the depths than a pig to sing Kenny G’s greatest hits.”
With those words, the full horror of my situation struck me: Cthulhu! Innsmouth! Arkham! Sunken R’lyeh! Names, alas, whose sinister meaning was not unknown to me. When I was a boy at home and a day student at St. Dimmesdale’s Prep there had been one among my schoolmates whose pale complexion, grim mien, and demon-haunted eyes had provoked my curiosity. His name was Randolph Akeley, a boarding student who seldom spoke of his family, nor of much else save the occasional froward Latin declension. Intrigued by his reclusiveness, I resolved to learn more of him. One day I stole into his room, on the pretext of borrowing a condom, and nosed about. He came in and caught me studying a large, expensively framed photograph of a smiling angler displaying a fish almost as large as he was himself.
“Nice catch,” I remarked, trying to put a bold face on things.
“That’s what my sister said when she married him,” Randolph replied in his flat, affectless voice.
“I meant the fish,” I said.
“So did I. Was there anything else you wanted?”
I stammered out my contrived excuse for calling upon him and he detained me only a moment while he located the item I had requested. I was deeply startled to discover that a person of Akeley’s unsociable temperament had such a thing to hand, yet there it was. It was of an unfamiliar make with nothing upon the wrapper save the image of a black goat in one of those red-circle-and-sideways-slash symbols. Later on, when again my inquisitive nature got the better of me and I opened it, to my horror I perceived it to be a condom of alien and unknown geometry!
That was enough to put paid to any further fascination young Randolph Akeley might have held for me. We never exchanged another civil word, although shortly thereafter I received in the post a crudely printed pamphlet entitled Cthulhu Awareness for the Non-Inbred Seeker. In this manner did I learn of the Elder Gods, of Nyarlathotep, of Azathoth, of Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath and a dozen others whose names alone seemed to be the product of a demented mind with a bad lisp. Within the pages of that hellish tract did I read of how they had been banished for a time from the sight of man, likewise of the arcane and unspeakable worship still done to these deities from beyond the stars, worship by depraved, half-mad cultists whose ultimate goals were to bring about the Elder Gods’ return from well-merited exile and to reestablish their vile reign over all the earth!
I returned the pamphlet to Akeley privately, in politic silence, although I did feel constrained to give him a dollar when he thrust his Save the Shoggoths collection can under my nose. At the time it seemed a cheap price to pay for my escape.
What price would such flight be now?
My hosts, mother and son, were somewhat troubled by the silence whither my apprehensive recollections had deposited me. Ma shook her head and sadly said, “Y’know, if’n I had a nickel for every time I heard people like you go on all smarmy-like about how looks don’t really matter and it’s what a body’s like on the inside what counts, I’d be able to buy me a decent Sunday-go-to-orgy dress and then some. But talk’s cheap, even for a bigot like you.”
“I am not a bigot! I’m a Harvard man!”
“Ha! If you was any more fulla shit, your eyes’d be brown. You ready to swear you’re not carrying ’bout half a hunnerd prejudicial thoughts ’gin Butchie and me just because we happen to look like frogs and worship the Elder Gods and—?”
“Bu-Bu-Butchie?” I repeated idiotically. It did not sound like a name proper to a potential purveyor of human sacrifice.
It was the first time I had ever seen someone with gray skin blush. “‘S’not my real name,” he said sullenly.
“Which is—?”
Butchie swallowed hard: “Kermit.” The corners of his mouth turned down, which placed them somewhere in the vicinity of his knees.
In the ensuing awkward silence, Ma left the trailer briefly, returning with my clothes. They smelled of sunshine, fresh air, and Tide. (Though, for all I knew, it was a malign and fantastic Tide that once had swirled about the spires of Great Cthulhu’s blasphemous abode in sunken R’lyeh and—oh, the hell with it, it was plain Tide laundry detergent, probably bought on sale at Wal-Mart.)
“They’re startin’ to arrive,” Ma said as she tossed my apparel onto the bed. “Cousin Ephraim’s just now pullin’ in with that old family rattletrap of his, and the car don’t look too good either. Now, city-boy, I don’t mind you talkin’ down to me under my own roof, but I’m tellin’ you right now I won’t have you doin’ the same to my blood kin, nor my friends and neighbors, so if you can’t get down off your high night-gaunt and act mannerly, you can just hit the road right now. Otherwise you’re more’n welcome to stay, and maybe we can scare you up a ride to the bus depot after. Like Butchie says, we’re hostin’ the sabbat here today and I wouldn’t mind an extra pair of hands to help me get the food on the table.”
“I’d be more than happy to oblige,” I said. “It’s the least I can do to thank you for taking me in last night.” What evil angel possessed me to give such a reply, so glibly? It must have sprung from some lingering ghost of shame for my indefensible bias against Ma and Butchie, a prejudice based solely on their looks, their creed, their economic and social standing, and their abuse of the Budweiser logo as an interior decorating motif. No sooner were the words out of my mouth than I repented them, but there could be no going back. No stronger bond exists upon this earth than the word of a Harvard man, I don’t care what that self-styled Camilla-Mistress-of-Pain person over on Brattle Street claims.
Ma was more than pleased. “Well, that’s mighty pink of you, city-boy, mighty pink. Me and Butchie’ll give you some privacy so’s you can get decent, and then you just come on out and join the fun.” With that they left the trailer.
I dressed with alacrity. I was not in any hurry to become a part of the “fun,” as Ma termed it, but reasoned that the sooner I discharged my obligations, the sooner I might be on my way with a clear conscience. Fully clothed at last, I flung wide the trailer door and stepped into a nightmare.
I also stepped into something else. I regret to say that this accident caused me to curse loudly enough to draw Ma’s attention.
“Gods damn it, Billy-Joe Tindalos, you pick up after them hounds o’ yours!” she bellowed, shying an empty bottle at the head of a snot-nosed abomination from beyond the stars or under the porch or somewhere.
As I scraped the muck from my shoes, I looked around. The space before the trailer teemed with all manner of weird beings, some of the same amphibian appearance as Ma and Butchie, others whose hair had a disquieting tendency to hiss, and still others whose skin bore the leprous cast of a fish’s belly. To these, one and all, Ma extended the hand of kinship and greeted them with a cheerful, “Iä, Iä, y’all! Grab a cold one and kick back, we’ll start the nameless rites and obscene gibberin’ soon’s the band tunes up some.”
Something tapped me moistly on the shoulder. I turned to face a pair of Ma’s guests, beings of such abhorrent and alarming appearance as to make even Jerry Springer think twice before booking them. The male was clad in a grease-stained sweatshirt, the sleeves cut off, the front limned with faded runes proclaiming it stolen from the Miskatonic Co-Ed Naked Chug-a-Lug Team. His mate sported a similar garment, its message to the world simply I’m With Eldritch.
“Yo, city-boy,” the male said, his breath a musky compendium of all things foul and loathsome, with just a hint of Cheez Doodles. “You seen our kid?”
“I’m sorry, I’m a stranger here,” I replied. “I wouldn’t know the little fellow if I tripped over him.”
The female snickered. “Oh, if you done that you’d know him all right! Right before he sucked your brains out through your eye-holes.”
“I heard that, Selma Jean!” Ma’s words boomed out as her formidable presence manifested among us. “What d’you think yer doin’, tryin’ to run off this nice young man when he’s said he’ll help me set out the noon meal? Maybe you don’t want to eat my prize-winning barbecue after sabbat?”
“Your barbecue?” The male licked his lips, a gesture which likewise wetted down all of his face and part of his lady’s. (Fortunately this was a sight for which Butchie’s earlier display of lingual excess had prepared me.) “Man, your barbecue kicks cloaca. Let’s get this show on the road, ’cause once we hit that last ‘Cthulhu f’thagn,’ I’m beatin’ feet for the table.” He grabbed Selma Jean and dragged her away.
“Services be startin’ real soon now,” Ma informed me. “I got to go, but meanwhile why don’t you see to the spread? All the stuff what’s s’posed to go out on the tables’s in them coolers under the tree.”
There was only one tree she could mean, a titanic, gnarled, lichen-shrouded botanical anathema that only a deeply kinky druid could love. The trailer which had been my haven the previous night was—as I now saw—but one of many which nestled, like scabrous mushrooms, among its far-flung roots. In its distant shade reposed a number of picnic tables, a pyramid of beer kegs, and the prophesied coolers.
As I approached the tree it was my misfortunate necessity to pass between several of the other trailers, a gauntlet of visceral terror. Innumerable lawn flamingos, their plastic beaks twisted into leers of unholy malice, followed my progress with glittering, evil eyes. The incessant creak-creak-creak of spinning pinwheel sunflowers thrust their droning paean to iniquity through my throbbing skull. The one ray of hope that fleetingly lightened my way—the sight of a welcomely prosaic statuette of the kind commonly referred to as Our Lady of the Upended Bathtub—was instantly extinguished when I noticed that the supposed Madonna had more tentacles than conventional iconography generally allows.
I was in a cold sweat and breathing heavily by the time I reached the coolers, but I soon stiffened my backbone and set to work. As I relieved the coolers of their contents, I was only half aware of the muted sounds of Ma’s kinfolk raising their voices in worship. The glubberings and whinings, the shrieks and ululations, the bad guitar riffs and worse banjo solos, all united in one quasi-musical discord that would probably go platinum in a heartbeat if anyone from ASCAP showed up in these parts with a tape recorder.
“Purty sound, ain’t it, city-boy?”
I looked up from my labors and saw yet another of Ma’s relations perched atop the table beside me. She was a young female of certain healthy thoracic dimensions which permitted me to overlook the fact that she had a mouth that even Mick Jagger would have to kiss in installments. The thin fabric of her top (one which announced My Parents Howled on the Frozen Plateau of Leng and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt) was stretched to the point where merely watching her breathe was a religious experience.
“H-how do you do?” I rasped.
“Jus’ fine, less’n Daddy catches me,” she replied with a grin that covered two zip codes. “Name’s Beulah May Waite. Uglier’n a shaved dog’s ass, ain’t it? I like my nickname better.”
“Which is—?” I asked, leaving a cooler still half-full of gelatin salads to look after itself.
“Can’t Hardly.” My comprehension registered as a beautiful scarlet flush, which only encouraged her to straighten her shoulders in a way designed to bring down empires. “Tsk-tsk, city-boy. Maybe you better reel in that tongue o’ yours before someone mistakes you for one o’ the family and hauls your butt back to services. They’s compulsory, y’know.”
“In that case, why aren’t you over there?” I countered, scrambling to recover some miniscule portion of my self-possession.
“’Cause Daddy thinks I’m doin’ homework.” She waved a familiar black-and-yellow booklet at me. I never knew that Cliff’s Notes published a study guide to the Necronomicon. I was about to ask my bosomy batrachian babe where she’d purchased such an item, as a clever prelude to less academic discourse, but it was not to be. My suave moves perished unmade, my cleverly seductive chit-chat never left my lips. A dire air of cryptic menace fell over the trailer park, an atmosphere redolent with such ominous significance that I found myself immobilized like one who has stumbled upon the site of ancient and unhallowed sacrifice, or has studied for the wrong subject during finals week.
“Yog have mercy!” Beulah May cried, wringing her hands.
“What is it?” I was at her side, ready to defend her fair person against any peril. “What’s wrong?”
“There! Look there!” She pointed to the north and moaned with fear.
Well might she moan! For now I too saw, against a morning sky gone suddenly dark, the unmistakable funnel shape of an onrushing twister in search of its natural prey, the trailer park.
The gravity of our situation had a peculiar effect on me. Rather than run away screaming in mindless panic, I felt instead washed by a great calm. Solemnly I said, “Ms. Waite, we must warn the others.”
“Oh, it’s no good, not a lick of good at all!” she keened, clutching her hair. “They’s all deep into the rites by now; they won’t quit in mid-Iä for no one or nothin’!”
“That remains to be seen,” I replied and, taking her firmly by the hand, we sought out the place where Ma and the rest were calling upon the Elder Gods.
They were conducting their services in an open space behind my hosts’ trailer. The same innate curiosity which in former days had made me snoop in Randolph Akeley’s room now manifested itself as an unhealthy desire to view the infernal shrine to which they paid their cacophonous homage. After all, I reasoned, with the twister fast bearing down upon us, this Stygian fane might soon be literally gone with the wind. Fast in the toils of my own overweening nosiness, I winkled my way into the crush, Beulah May in tow, for a better look.
I winkled my way out again double time and stared at my companion. “That’s a wading pool in there,” I stated.
“Uh-huh,” she said.
“Your extended family is standing there, three deep, chanting barbaric hymns to a child’s wading pool.”
“Sometimes they do an up-tempo number, too,” she offered.
“They are standing around a child’s wading pool—a child’s Power Rangers wading pool, might I add—with a folding lawn chair set up in the middle of it.”
“Well, they can’t just plunk the idol of Great Cthulhu straight in the water. That wouldn’t be respectful. If you already got a shrine and an idol and a salaried preacherman like we do, you gotta have an altar, too. Anyone knows that.” She spoke disdainfully, like every religious Insider who has ever relished telling an Outsider that he is ignorant, ineffectual, and inferior, a smug state of mind which allowed her to forget our imminent danger.
I did not care to be condescended to by the likes of Beulah May Waite. “Your shrine is a Power Rangers wading pool, your altar is a folding lawn chair, your idol is a stack of Mrs. Paul’s frozen fish sticks boxes, and your preacherman—salaried or not—has just placed a paper party hat on top of the whole soggy mess.”
“I should hope so; it’s Great Cthulhu’s birthday. But I guess you didn’t know that either, huh, city-boy?” Ms. Waite had fallen out of temper with my reportage of the obvious, and apparently impatience brought out a viciously mean streak in the girl for she then sneered: “I guess they just never taught you anything about that up at Yale.”
“YALE?!”
That did it. That was the straw up with which my proud Harvard-educated camel’s back would not put. Her effrontery had no excuse: I was wearing a crimson and white shirt proud with the name of fair Harvard. She could not hope but know; the insult was deliberate, and one that I would not brook even from a woman of twice Ms. Waite’s endowments.
Anger kindled in my belly. Deep within my entrails I felt the old powers churn. My eyes burned with the rage of a thousand demons. Minor lightnings crackled from my fingertips and potent words of austere and fearsome condemnation roared from my mouth. The worshippers around the wading pool broke off their mesmeric chant, although the banjo player wouldn’t take the hint. I blasted him to strings, splinters, and moist froggy smithereens with a minor side-spell and inwardly thanked God that I had opted to major in something more practical than English.
The amphibian congregation scattered before me in terror, hopping into their waiting vehicles and speeding off at a furious rate. Beulah May vaulted onto the back of a Harley, straddling the bitch seat behind a jacket-wearing member of the Yuggoth’s Angels. I laughed triumphantly to watch her flee my just and awesome wrath.
Silly me: I’d forgotten all about the tornado.
It had not forgotten about me, though. I heard its approaching roar and felt the first lashings of its captive winds at my back. I fell to my knees then and there and raised my voice in prayer. “O Lord,” I began, my eyes tightly closed against earthly distractions. “Lord, I implore Thee, save me. And if that’s not possible, then at least don’t let me have to watch a cow go flying past before I die. If I’ve got to go, let me do it without suffering the indignity of any stupid movie clichés first, please. Amen.”
Hey, I liked that scene with the flying cow!
My eyes shot open. “Who’s there?” I demanded, though I had to shout my challenge down the throat of the screaming wind.
Me, said the wading pool. And with no more prologue than that, the tentacled countenance, leathern wings, and squamous bulk of Great Cthulhu erupted from the waters. He was wearing the paper party hat and looked like a squid on a toot.
Thus is it written in ancient tomes of forbidden lore: Verily the Elder Gods do not fart around. (This sounds better in Latin.) With a single stroke of his gargantuan paw, Great Cthulhu swept the tornado from the sky. A grateful hush fell upon the heavens and the earth. I tried to stammer my thanks as well, but the strain of the moment would not let me do other than raise my voice in a reedy rendition of “Happy Birthday to You.”
The Elder God stopped me before I got to the end of the “How old are you now?” verse. Perhaps he was sensitive about such matters.
Look, don’t mention it, all right? he said. I was summoned anyway, I might as well answer a prayer or two as long as I’m in the neighborhood.
“But I wasn’t praying to you,” I felt bound to point out.
Hey, Coke or Pepsi, Mickey D’s or Burger King, paper or plastic, who gives a shoggoth’s ass? His bat-like wings rose and fell in an affable shrug. Besides, if you weren’t praying to me now, you will be some day.
“I . . . don’t really think that I’m going to—”
Sure you will! My demurral did not seem to affect his good humor at all. Because it’s guaranteed; you won’t have a choice. Baby, it’s comeback time!
“This comeback, it’s not going to be too soon, is it?” The thought of my dear Mummy’s reaction if I didn’t get married in the Episcopal church scared me worse than Great Cthulhu ever could.
Sooner than you think, college boy. I haven’t been wasting all my time dreaming the aeons away in sunken R’lyeh. Damn sharks keep swimming up my nose every few centuries, for one thing. I figure that since I can’t get any decent REM sleep anyhow, I might as well get off my thumb, bring about the return of the Elder Gods, overrun the globe, reward our followers, destroy our enemies, and yada, yada, yada.
“Is that why they were invoking you here?” I asked, unable to repress a shiver. “To begin the conquest of Earth?”
The fearsome being gave me a disbelieving look. On my birthday?!
In a more amicable tone he confided, Listen, college boy, these are nice folks out here, so nice that I don’t have the heart to tell ’em how all their rites and sabbats and pep rallies and frozen ichor socials won’t do dick to bring back the good times. Oh, that sort of thing was all right once, but it’ll take more than faith to float sunken R’lyeh. If you really want to accomplish something these days, you’ve gotta have the chops, the tech, the brains. And to get that, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know: Network, network, network!
He slapped one paw into the palm of the other to emphasize his words.
Which is exactly what I’ve been doing. No more seeking out the debauched mongrel races of the world, no more scattering my spawn like there’s no tomorrow, no more breeding with cannibal South Sea islanders and barbarian savages in the cold wastes and people from Massachusetts, nuh-uh. Besides, who knows where they’ve been? No sir, nowadays I’ve got some really scary guys on my side, and I didn’t even have to say “Of course I’ll respect you in the morning” to get them!
“Who are they?” I demanded. “What manner of men would be so degenerate, so corrupt, so possessed of an unfeeling lust for pure, ultimate, uncontested power and worldly dominion that they would betray their fellow human beings and serve you?”
The horrendous creature from between the nighted gulfs of space winked at me and flicked his party hat to a more rakish angle with the tip of one bloodstained claw. Tell you what, sport, I’m gonna leave you a clue.
Something dropped from his paw. It splashed into the water at his feet, creating a plume of fetid smoke and a violent burbling on impact. Ere the last seething hiss died away, he was gone.
I stood for a time recovering my composure. Then, with rapidly beating heart I steeled myself to face the smoldering token which the awful Elder God had left in his wake. By inches I sidled closer to the edge of the deceptively peaceful wading pool and with a manful effort gazed down at what reposed beneath the softly lapping waters.
Ah, the accursed thing! Even now, even here, safe once more within fair Harvard’s ivy-swathed incubation pouch, the memory thereof fills me with a griping nausea and a terror whose claws are set into the uttermost depths of my soul. That thing, that damned “clue” which the departing Elder God had left me was no ordinary object, but a warning to all mankind, an omen which wordlessly spoke of our predestined doom, a harbinger of the inevitable extinguishment of all things kind and warm and good and human in the earth, in our lives, and in our very hearts. For you see, it was—it was—
It was the class ring of a graduate of M.I.T.!