Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma and Other Stories

by Alex Shvartsman

  “What do you want it for?” I asked before Grandma could get up to any of her matchmaking.

  “We’re the Order of Saint George,” said Barnabas. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Humor me.”

  “We hunt and slay dragons.”

  “Dragons are extinct,” said Grandma.

  “You’re welcome!” said Barnabas. “We shall hunt this Cthulhu and kill it, too. It will be glorious. Songs will be composed about…”

  “Cthulhu isn’t a dragon,” I interrupted.

  “Strictly speaking, you’re right,” said Barnabas. “But it’s got scales and wings, and it’s a vile beast. That’s as close as we can hope for, these days.”

  “I see.” The idea of a bunch of knights trying to defeat an elder god by poking spears at it was amusing, but only until I remembered that I shared the same planet with them. And that those spears would probably make Cthulhu mad. Madder. “What is your order prepared to pay for the privilege?”

  “The Knights of St. George take a vow of poverty. But your assistance in this quest shall be immortalized in the annals of our order. That’s better than mere money.”

  Grandma frowned. “Poverty is the stupidest vow a knight could take. However is one supposed to come up with a proper dowry then?”

  For an excruciating fifteen minutes, Sir Barnabas kept trying to convince us to hand over Cthulhu to him, gratis. I promised to consider it, just to get him out the door.

  “Told you no one will pay money for this thing,” Grandma said, checking out the knight’s posterior as he walked down the street.

  She was wrong.

  Two days before Cthulhu officially became the property of the shop, the next and final potential customer had arrived. He was a nondescript middle-aged man of medium height wearing a dark blue suit, the sort of person you would never look at twice in a crowd. The only distinguishing characteristic about him was an aluminum attaché case, which he plunked onto the counter in front of me.

  “I’d like one Cthulhu, please,” he said as he opened the case. It was full of money.

  Grandma appeared out of nowhere again. The only thing capable of summoning her faster than a set of perfect pecs was a briefcase full of cash.

  “It’s a deal,” she said. “But you’ll have to come back on Wednesday. The original owner has until then to claim his property. Rules and regulations, you understand.”

  “I’m from the government, ma’am. I assure you that you won’t get into any trouble for handing over the creature a few days early.”

  “What do you want with it?” I didn’t trust the government. Who does? “Is it the whole ‘why settle for a lesser evil’ thing? But the elections aren’t for another two years.”

  “Very funny,” he said, but his tone and eyes did not agree. “My department is charged with destroying dangerous items and beings, before they get the chance to break free and bite everyone in the ass. Your operation is always on our radar.” He turned to Grandma. “You should make things easy for yourself and take the money. I could’ve just as easily classified Cthulhu as a weapon of mass destruction and confiscated it with no compensation for you at all.”

  Grandma stood up straighter and glared at the government agent, fire in her eyes. “No. You couldn’t have. This is an ancient place of power, and there are wards and protections layered upon it by a hundred generations of my ancestors. It is much too tough a nut for the likes of you to crack.”

  “Go.” Grandma pointed at the front door. “I don’t appreciate being threatened in my own establishment. Come back in two days’ time and we will think about accepting your offer.”

  Without another word, he went.

  On Wednesday, Grandma and I were awakened well before business hours by loud noises coming from the street. Both of us got dressed and came down to the shop to investigate. Outside, there was pandemonium.

  Hundreds of the Deep Ones’ worshippers faced off against an equally impressive force of soldiers who had a pair of helicopters and a tank. In the middle of the street, a dozen knights stood shoulder to shoulder and sneered at anyone who came too close. And all around, small clusters of gray-skinned, gilled aliens milled about, getting underfoot of everyone else.

  “This is madness,” I said. “They’re going to begin killing each other any minute now.”

  “I knew this Cthulhu was nothing but trouble,” said Grandma. “I’ve half a mind to let them fight it out.” But I knew she didn’t mean it.

  We were perfectly safe inside. The shop is protected by a collection of charms, spells, and enchantments laboriously assembled by the family over the centuries. An intruder would have an easier time getting into Buckingham Palace or the White House.

  But that didn’t stop them from brawling with each other in the street. And, Grandma’s offhand comment aside, we couldn’t let that happen.

  “I know you like to do things the traditional way,” I told Grandma, “but I’m responsible for causing this mess, and I have to set things straight. This situation calls for a forward-thinking, unorthodox approach. Will you please trust me to handle it?”

  Grandma hesitated for only the briefest of moments, then smiled at me and nodded. I unlocked the shop’s front door and stepped outside.

  A few minutes later, I had gathered the leaders of each group inside the shop. Keldmo, Sir Barnabas, Nemo, and the agent whose name—unsurprisingly—turned out to be Smith scowled at each other. The tension was so thick you probably couldn’t cut it with Sir Barnabas’ sword.

  “I can resolve the issue at hand to everyone’s satisfaction,” I said. The four of them paid close attention.

  “Sir Barnabas, meet the interdimensional alien. His world is suffering from a terrible sea serpent infestation.”

  “Oh?” The knight was practically salivating at the thought of hunting sea serpents.

  “Would you agree that sea serpents are phylogenetically much closer to dragons than a dead elder god?”

  “Most assuredly, my lady,” said Sir Barnabas.

  “Will you undertake the noble quest of hunting them down and, in exchange, abandon any future claim on stalking the Cthulhu?”

  “Gladly, my lady.” He pumped an oversized fist on the breast plate over his heart.

  I addressed Nemo: “And will you accept the help of the knights and give up on the foolish idea of releasing an even more dangerous predator into your eco-system?”

  “They seem bloodthirsty enough,” said Nemo, “and yet honorable. It appears to be a great solution.”

  The two left the shop to break the news to their people. They were already discussing logistics, munitions, and the songs to be composed in the knights’ honor.

  “Well, that was the easy part,” I turned my attention to the remaining parties.

  “I won’t let a dangerous creature fall into the hands of a cult,” said Smith.

  “I won’t let them murder my god,” said Keldmo.

  “You can’t stop me. I have the entire military at my disposal.”

  “My disciples are everywhere. If you dare to harm a single tentacle on our god’s head, they will exact a bloody revenge. My people are willing to kill and die for me.” Keldmo sighed. “Well some of them, anyway.”

  “No dying. No killing. I already told you, I have a solution. Wait here,” I dashed for the stock room.

  I returned with a large silver plate under my arm.

  “Keldmo, you told me that you don’t want to wake up Cthulhu, you just need an impression of him to rally your followers.”

  Keldmo looked at me, waiting to see where this was going, but made no protest.

  “This is an enchanted plate, part of a matching set. It will display an exact replica of whatever item is placed on the other plate, for as long as it remains there.” I tapped the side of the plate gently and the pyramid pocket dimension appeared on it. I offered the plate to Keldmo, who grabbed for it greedily. “You can see it, touch it, and verify that it’s safe and sound on the other plate, whic
h is at the back of our shop. Just don’t remove the replica from the plate’s surface or you’ll break the spell.”

  “As for you,” I turned to Smith, “killing Cthulhu isn’t an option. You don’t need the trouble with Keldmo’s followers, and I seriously doubt you could kill it anyway. So instead, I will offer our shop’s services to store it for you permanently.” Smith looked dubious, but I pressed on. “There are few locations in the entire world more secure than our shop. You know this, or you would have come in guns blazing, trying to take Cthulhu by force. No one will get at it here, and anyone who might want to try will believe that Keldmo’s people have it anyway. Keldmo will make sure of that, won’t he?”

  Keldmo nodded, with a huge grin on his meaty face. Smith thought about this and finally nodded, too.

  “We will, of course, require payment for our services. That bag of money will cover rent for the first hundred years. Our descendants can renegotiate after that.”

  Smith mulled this over a while longer, but he could find no obvious flaw in my plan.

  Several hours later the contracts were drawn up (in triplicate. That’s how the government rolls) and signed, and everyone finally left. The briefcase full of money sat in the office next to the silver plate housing Cthulhu. Smith wanted the case back, but Grandma got peevish at the last moment and insisted we keep it as part of the deal. She must’ve been still punishing Smith for his bullying earlier.

  “Did you like how I managed to make everyone happy and sell a silver plate for a giant wad of money in the process?” I did good, and deserved a chance to brag. “And we even get to keep Cthulhu. Governments and cults come and go, and who knows what it will be worth a few generations down the line? And are you convinced I’m ready to take over the shop now?”

  “Not yet,” said Grandma. “If only you didn’t pick up this beastie in the first place, we could’ve avoided all this nonsense altogether.”

  I frowned, but didn’t argue. Expecting too much and complaining regardless of outcome is the prerogative of family.

  “Not yet,” Grandma said again, “but you’re getting closer.”

  I came over and hugged her. She pursed her lips, but in her eyes I caught a hint of a smile.

  This story was born on Twitter.

  Fellow writer Sylvia Spruck Wrigley posted something along the lines of “I’m having a difficult time explaining Cthulhu to Grandma.”

  To which I responded by saying that “Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma” would make a great short story title.

  Sylvia was kind enough to let me have the title, and I came up with a family-run magical pawn shop (loosely inspired by the History Channel’s Pawn Stars), and named the protagonist Sylvia, as a thank-you to my friend for inspiring the idea. Sylvia’s grandma and gran-gran are also named after my friend’s mother and grandmother.

  This story was originally published in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. It went on to become the finalist in the 2013 IGMS Reader Poll and made the 2013 Tangent Recommended Reading List with the maximum possible rating of three stars. It won the 2014 WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction.

  You will encounter another Magic Pawn Shop story, “High-Tech Fairies and the Pandora Perplexity,” later in the book.

  THE RUMINATION ON WHAT ISN’T

  This isn’t a time-travel story. As you sit in the sterile room that looks and feels like a hospital ward but doesn’t smell or sound like one — you know the difference after so many months — as you stare at the thing at the other end of the chessboard and try to picture your daughter instead, you ponder the choices you’ve made. You realize that, if given a chance, you wouldn’t go back to change anything. There is no decision, no single action that would have altered the course of events. No moment in time that could have been modified to avoid this outcome. No matter what, you would find yourself in this room, lost in thought as your fingers caress a white pawn. She is waiting for you to make your move.

  This isn’t a horror story. You certainly felt like it was, on that day in the doctor’s office, when he delivered the diagnosis with practiced compassion. Words like stage four and metastasis sounded surreal. They were fears of old people; there was no place for them in the life of a ten-year-old girl. You remember feeling shaken and detached, as if this was happening to somebody else. But the oncologist wouldn’t let you process this fully, to despair, to grieve. He wanted to talk treatment options, and DNA sequencing, and clinical trials. And he wanted decisions to be made right away, because there wasn’t a lot of time.

  But it wasn’t all fear and dread. There were moments of happiness, when the two of you giggled while watching cartoons together, or went apple picking under the pleasantly warm September sun. There were moments of boredom, hours spent in waiting rooms filled with year-old magazines and stone-faced strangers who probably understood what you were going through better than your closest friends, but were barricaded behind the walls of their own distress. And then there were mundane moments, because even when your world is shattered you still have to go through the motions of picking up paper towels at the supermarket, and getting the oil changed in your truck, and doing laundry.

  This isn’t a fantasy story. When her hair fell out from the chemo, and she lost weight, and the doctors began to mention the word hospice, you sought alternative treatments. Folk medicines and psychics, and any number of other things that don’t work, yet desperate people try them anyway, because they’re better than doing nothing. But this isn’t a fantasy, there’s no magic or miracles. She kept getting worse.

  This isn’t exactly a tragedy. Before the illness could take her, lawyers in expensive suits showed up and offered you a way out. It was an experiment, they said. The procedure had never been performed on a human being before. There were plenty of risks and unknowns, but your daughter was given an opportunity to make history. More importantly, it was the way for her to survive. You hated the thought of her being used as some sort of a guinea pig, but the doctors said that she had just a few weeks left. This was her only chance. So you signed endless pages of legal documents until your hand ached almost as much as your heart, and you allowed yourself to hope.

  This is a love story. You sit in the sterile room and play chess against a sleek metal box that houses your daughter’s mind. She has been uploaded, the first herald of the coming singularity. She will never again pick apples, or play soccer, or hug you. The scientists don’t know whether her mind will continue to develop or if she will remain a perpetual ten year old. They don’t know whether she will live forever inside the machine, or if her consciousness will degrade and disappear with time. The entire world is waiting to find out.

  She watches you through digital cameras and hums her favorite tune through the speakers, impatient for you to finally make your move. And you know with absolute certainty that this is a love story, because you love your daughter just the same, regardless of her physical form. You get to tell her stories, and watch cartoons together, and play chess, and face whatever challenges may come in the future as a family.

  You smile at her, and push the pawn forward.

  I consider this to be the strongest flash story I’ve ever written, and certainly one of the darkest.

  I wrote “Rumination” in one hour-long sitting. I woke up very early in the morning that day, and my son Joshua’s health was weighing heavily on me. He was five years old, and had begun experiencing some stomach problems. We had a strong suspicion that he was becoming gluten-intolerant, and were waiting to see a specialist in a few days.

  I have a number of friends who live with various degrees of gluten sensitivity and certainly don’t mean to imply that such a diagnosis would in any way be equivalent to what the characters in this story are going through. However, it is not something I would wish on any child, and my dark mood helped produce a deeply emotional piece.

  Joshua’s stomach problems thankfully proved to be far less severe; he isn’t allergic or sensitive to anything so far, and I hope it rem
ains that way. But the story went on to earn first place in a Codex anonymous flash-fiction contest with fifty-odd competitors, then became published in Nature and podcasted several times.

  DOUBT

  An operative’s worst enemy is doubt.

  As the town car drove him through the patchwork of narrow streets in the heart of the Russian city of Kursk, the Raptor stared out the window at the ramshackle storefronts, the boarded-up windows, the downtrodden locals hanging around in front of the ugly apartment buildings. If not for the ubiquitous Cyrillic graffiti, it would have looked much like turn-of-the-millennium Camden or Baltimore.

  Was coming here the right move? He’d never worked with these people before. On the other hand, their technology was far superior to anything his usual sources could procure. It was worth the risk. The Raptor issued a mental command to his implant chip and the car seemed suddenly filled with a strong smell of tangerines. Activated by the changes in the chemistry of his brain, the computer altered the signals sent by his olfactory receptors. For the Raptor, this deception was as good as the real thing. The scent of tangerines always calmed him down.

  The town car stopped in front of a four-story building, chrome and glass gleaming in the afternoon sun. The driver circled the car to open the door for the Raptor. A bald man, whose wide shoulders, straight back, and military bearing didn’t quite mesh with the white lab coat he was wearing, waited by the front door.

  “Welcome, Mr. Bauer,” he said with a thick Russian accent, his W sounding like a V and his R a little too sharp. “Follow me, please.” He headed for the elevator without bothering to check if the Raptor followed.

  Something felt off. The Raptor had no evidence yet, couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but years of dangerous missions had allowed him to develop a sixth sense about such things. He considered his options. Getting away now might prove messy, and he needed what he came here for. He decided to see how things would play out, and rushed to catch up to his guide.