The Idolaters of Cthulhu

by H. David Blalock

  “Follow me,” I ordered my men, “and bring her.”

  I stepped up to the archway and examined it, looking for the glyph I was sure must be there, the symbol of our order. It was there, as I expected. I touched it and the slab blocking our way glided aside. The Egyptologists would have marvelled to see it.

  “Come,” I said and led them inside. Along a corridor we went until we reached a flight of steps, which we descended before passing through a maze of tunnels, our way lit only by the torches my men carried. It didn’t take long to reach the temple proper, the sacred chamber of Byagoona, my Lord and Master, the Faceless God to whom I had bound myself.

  At my command, my men filled and lit oil lamps that had sat untouched in niches in the walls for who-knew-how-many centuries, even millennia. Our faith had been scattered and expelled so long ago and the location of this place, one of our most holy fanes, had been lost with the murder of its priests and guardians. But now, we had returned.

  The chamber was decorated with murals depicting the fable of Byagoona, describing how the Faceless God had come to Earth and taken human form to dispense wisdom to the human race. Metaphor, surely, for the Old Ones are so far above us that they surely do not register our presence in any meaningful sense. Perhaps a priest or some servitor being. The chamber was dominated by a statue of our god, before which lay an anciently-stained sandstone altar, the space being otherwise bare to facilitate a crowd of celebrants.

  The statue, like the murals, depicted our god in anthropomorphic form, as a fine-bodied Egyptian man with a totally-smooth, featureless face. Again, I guessed metaphor not reality. Sometimes, Byagoona was depicted as a sort of sphinx without a face, but even that was likely a fiction that enabled the god’s depiction by men whose limited minds would otherwise be incapable of comprehending, let alone reproducing the god’s form. Such inhuman beings existed in a state that was utterly unlike our own. The ancient scriptures of our faith hinted at things science was only beginning to suggest, higher dimensions and cosmic infinities beyond our understanding. Their nature and substance was something altogether different.

  “Place her upon the altar,” I commanded.

  The Coptic woman’s screams reverberated through the temple passages as she fought against the men who held her. She knew what fate awaited her upon that stone slab. I couldn’t help but wince at her screams as I hardened my heart to what must be done. Her reaction was to be expected, being the primordial fight or flight response, just as my own sympathy was the inbred reaction of the human as a social animal. Neither was any more rational or aware than the actions of any animal in similar circumstances. Such biological slavery was what we strove to overcome so that we might ascend a little closer to those beings that transcended our limited facet of existence.

  Be strong, I told myself. I had taken a ritually-blessed blade from my pack and it shook in my hand. It would be so easy to succumb to human frailty, I knew, to lose my nerve and abandon my mission.

  I watched as they bound her to the altar and, slowly, I advanced on her. She gabbled at me in a mixture of Coptic, Arabic and mangled English, asking me to spare her. I paid her no heed. She had to die. A sacrifice was necessary to resurrect the fane after all this time.

  I began to chant, calling upon Byagoona by the names of all the masks he wore. Having no face, the Faceless God was free to slip a myriad of others on as needs dictated, or so the old stories claimed. Doubtless such names were no different to the manner in which polytheists compartmentalised divine influence and reflected nothing of higher truth, but they were the words of the sacrificial blessing and whatever their shortcoming, were potent and not to be tampered with.

  Finally, I reached the end of the litany and raised the blessed knife. It was over in a moment.

  The men who had accompanied me let out an ululating cry that echoed about us.

  From somewhere within the temple, there was a distant answering ululation to the cry of the men. A few of them paused in fear. I felt myself shiver a little at the sound, but distantly, as if there were a gulf between my mind and body. I had ascended just a little more towards the transcendent state I desired to obtain.

  The ululation was joined by a rushing sound like wind and water and the men began to panic. They might serve the Faceless God but they had little more faith than the average churchgoer. They lacked the trust to risk all. I felt fear in a primitive corner of my brain but suppressed it. I had to trust that this was what was meant to happen, that the sound I heard was that of the guardian of the fane, hinted at in oblique terms in ancient papyri.

  It – the guardian – burst into the chamber like a black wind, wailing and writhing as it went. Its arrival caused the lamps and torches to gutter and die, yet somehow I could still see it twisting about us, as if its darkness were deeper than the darkness into which it had plunged us. Somehow, I held my nerve even as the men screamed and tried to flee, were caught up in the hurricane and tossed about like ragdolls. I was untouched.

  Then, the wind rushed away and the light returned as if it had never vanished. I was alone. Even the girl was gone from the altar, leaving just her bonds and her outline in her spilt blood.

  I allowed myself to shudder.

  I had done what I had come to do. The temple was restored. I set aside the guilt I felt for the deaths. What value did a human life hold in the wider Universe? Death would have come for them within the blink of a cosmic eye, anyway. We are but ants, less than ants, beside the Elder Gods. Yet, now, as High Priestess of this place, I am alike to an ant queen. Not an equal of the gods, but superior to the mortal crowds. And one day, I vowed, I would advance yet further.

  Fatwa

  by

  Amanda Hard

  Three years ago today, I released a series of poems into the world. I paid a local printer to run 500 copies with a soft buttery yellow cover, blank but for the words “What the Monkey Sees” at the top and “Verse by Darren Blake” in block letters at the bottom. I don’t know who I thought would buy all of them, but fortunately I was casually friendly with a club owner who offered to consign them alongside a stack of CDs recorded by their house band, Soul-Sucker-Six. I reminded myself frequently that even Poet Laureates had to start somewhere, and if it got me laid a few times it was worth the investment.

  The first week they managed to sell one copy, although Avery, the club owner and record-keeper, apologized and admitted it had actually been stolen. He gave me the money for it anyway. The next week, a total of five were gone from the stack, and Avery grinned as he handed me a fifty and asked if I could bring more.

  By the tail end of August, within six weeks of sitting on that dusty glass shelf, I’d sold all but the five copies I’d kept for myself, and of course the stolen volume, which I hoped had found a good home and wasn’t leveling a table somewhere.

  Was it my best work? Probably. For the time, anyway. It was experimental at best, derivative at worst, since I’d taken inspiration from the insipid dub-step sound of one of Soul-Sucker’s longest and most incomprehensible works. That had been, oh, probably back in the spring, what I laughingly once called the season of hope.

  The band and I were regulars at Club Imago then, one of Louisville’s infamous hipster bars that served coffee by day and overpriced martinis at night. The band was trying to get famous. I was trying to get popular with the younger crowd, maybe find an early 20-something muse who would help me spend the inheritance I’d been living off since grad school. We spent our weekends together, performer and audience member, not exactly communicating but keeping each other company. I scribbled a few phrases on a bar napkin, but throughout the cool spring evenings, I produced less than twenty lines worth keeping. Until the band debuted “Blind Ape.”

  Once I’d heard it, the song’s rhythm stayed in my head for weeks. The first few minutes were all just typical dub-step machine-gun drumming, but once they dropped the bass, the sound changed in an unexpected way. I could never seem to find the beat. At home, I tried counting it
out on paper, with as much of the nonsense lyrics as I could remember. It didn’t want to work out evenly, almost as though the mathematics of the lines and verses was wrong. Finally I managed to isolate an erratic iambic pentameter constrained inside a very regular 14/4 time signature, layered over what sounded like a name: Arleah, maybe. There was a certain poetry to the name itself, so I wove a few lines around it as a lark. Those scant lines grew in my mind and as I read the words aloud more images came to me. By the start of summer I had a book. By the end of summer, I’d sold the lot of them.

  Avery surprised me one Friday as I stopped in for a morning to-go of his fiercest Columbian supreme. Although the weather outside was bright and warm, a chilly breeze followed me in the door and swirled around me as I waited.

  “They’re asking about you,” he said as he filled my cup. “Wanting to know when the next volume comes out.”

  “Who?”

  “The kids,” he said, meaning his after-five crowd. “They couldn’t get enough of the first one.”

  “They tell you that?” I asked, trying to play it cool, but to tell the truth I was thrilled. Achieving cultural relevance with the Millennials meant I just might be marketable after all.

  “It’s all they’ve been talking about, for weeks now. You touched a nerve, my friend. Touch it again just right, and you might make a name for yourself.”

  I opened my mouth to make a clever but off-color joke about touching some of the young Goths at the club, but he interrupted me.

  “Oh I almost forgot.” He reached under the counter and pulled out a thin yellow package. My book. “Found this a couple of nights ago in the stock room. You owe me ten bucks,” he said. I flipped through the first few pages, disappointed to see numerous pen markings through the text.

  “Somebody wrote all in it,” I said, feeling more than a little outraged.

  “Then we’ll call it even,” he mumbled. He turned his back to me and greeted the next in a line of business people waiting to fuel the beginning of their day. Summarily dismissed, I took my cup and walked outside, where the cold spiral of air I’d been feeling quickly dissolved in the warm sunlight.

  I didn’t look at the book. I’ve come to believe that had I done so, had I paid even the slightest attention to the words scrawled over my own, the sequence of events that followed might have been much different. But I didn’t look. I tossed the book on the passenger seat of my car and forgot about it until Astrid made an issue of it.

  *****

  Astrid. Sweet, sexy little Astrid. What can I say about her that a century of better poets haven’t already said?

  She was seated at my usual table in the club when I returned later that night, in between sets. I took a stool near the bar and scrutinized the foreign face in my chosen seat. She was small, with narrow shoulders and short arms. Her ample breasts were sausaged into a close-fitting v-neck, and an oversized pendant hung in the valley between. When I turned my attention to her face I saw spiky brown bangs and straight bobbed hair framing the angriest eyes I’d ever seen. She’d done them up with heavy liner which emphasized their thinness. She was cute enough in her own way but unremarkable in the sea of noble and tall bodies who smiled and swayed on the dance floor.

  She caught me staring but I met her gaze and nodded politely. It was, after all, my table, and I was the regular. Her hands were folded in front of her, resting on the table by her glass, and she raised two fingers in acknowledgment. I watched her face as I rose slowly, my glass in hand. Her expression didn’t flicker even as I began walking. As I approached, she opened one hand, palm up, to indicate the empty chair in front of her. It was only as I sat down that her eyes broke away and she turned her attention to the stage on her side, where a man in a black t-shirt wrestled extension cords.

  I found myself distracted by the heavy pendant nestled in the upper groove of her cleavage. Hanging from a silver chain was a long black bead, inexpertly carved to resemble a spiral, with faint markings too small to decipher.

  “That’s a unique piece,” I said, a little too loudly for the mid-volume electronica playing in the band’s absence.

  “It was my great-grandmother’s.” She took a small sip of her drink.

  “It’s lovely.”

  “Yeah. So you’re the poet,” she said slowly.

  I nodded, smiling inwardly. She was mine; she’d been waiting here for me. I wondered if I’d have to buy her another drink before we left.

  “Interesting. I’ve never known a poet, I don’t think. They’re not the kind of artists I’m normally drawn to.”

  “Are you also an artist?” I asked her, going from hobbyist to professional in one round of small talk. I drew myself up taller in my seat and tried out an easy, non-threatening grin. She gave me a quick nod and glanced over at the still-empty stage.

  “Yeah I’m an artist. A painter. Mixed media, but oil mostly.” She crossed her arms on the table in front of her and leaned towards me, causing the black pendant to wedge itself farther into her cleavage. “I read your book, you know.”

  “I’m happy to hear that,” I said.

  She just snorted. “I had to see what was draining all my energy. Been at it a while?”

  “Writing poetry? I guess since college. I got my MFA in it.”

  She shook her head. “Writing that kind of stuff.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about so I deflected.

  “My work keep you up at night?” I grinned. I wouldn’t have called the poems erotic, but the book had a few borderline moments.

  “It stole my dreams,” she said, unsmiling, her eyes narrowing even more. “But you already knew that, I guess. And now I’m just another one of these miserable shits.” She gestured to the dance floor, now crowded with slender black-clad bodies. “Apparently it’s been decided.”

  Her anger and frustration was palpable. It poured from her like stale cologne. I wasn’t sure I wanted her negativity tonight, but I didn’t want to ruin it for another night—a night when I was bored and less interested in figuring out just what the hell that song was all about.

  “I’m Darren,” I said and held out my hand. “Let me buy you another drink so we can talk, one artist to another.”

  She shrugged and shook my hand.

  “Astrid.” Her palm was warm and soft, but she pulled it away almost immediately and brought it up to brush her bangs to the side. She gave me another narrowed-eye look that was half curiosity, half disgust. “You know this isn’t going anywhere, right?”

  I gave her my best solemn nod. “Does anything, really?”

  She brightened immediately.

  “Now that’s the poet talking,” she said as she rose from the table. I started to get up but she held out a hand in front of me. “They’re about to start.” She put the hand on my shoulder as she passed by, and I felt her fingers give a strong squeeze. She bowed her head closer to mine and may have whispered something but at the same moment I was nearly deafened by the whine of electronic feedback which signaled the opening riff of “Blind Ape,” and I found myself so mesmerized by the music that I didn’t even turn to watch her leave.

  *****

  I left the club in a state of euphoria. Wide awake and energized by that incomprehensible beat, I went back to my apartment to write. I scratched a few lines about Arleah but the face I’d previously written about was already taking on a cold and narrow gaze, and by the time I’d finished, the dream woman I’d come to associate with Soul-Sucker-Six was of course, Astrid herself. It was a long poem and by the time I collapsed on my bed, I had to bury my head under my pillow to hide the penetrating rays of morning sun.

  When I opened my eyes again, the sunlight dipped behind the western tree line just as a long series of strange dreams rendered in incomprehensible colors faded from my consciousness. The images were confusing. Alien landscapes, devoid of humanity. A swathe of black night peppered with even blacker stars. A darkness so black it had neither width nor height nor depth. I lay in my bed, overcome by
an intense nausea and sensation of vertigo that kept me flat for nearly an hour. While my memory of the visions slowly dissipated, I translated them as best I could into words, mentally weaving them into a long passage of prose which I transcribed the moment I could sit up.

  The dreams left me anxious and disconcerted, feelings which stayed with me throughout the next week. I locked myself in my apartment, and with pen in hand scribbled images, descriptions, feelings. From these lists of disparate elements, lines began to form. Lines, stanzas, finally whole poems. I wrote a dozen short quatrains and, as I wrote, more images came to me of twin dark-eyed girls, mindless and near-blind from darkness, piping an agonized melody on narrow silver flutes. Their pale skin was in shadow, while bone-white lace intertwined their throats and wrists. The images became a series of interlocking villanelles, linked together by their opening lines in such an artful and masterful way I impressed even myself. The more I wrote, the more inspired I became and the more the words flowed unhampered. I wrote until the pen went dry, picked up another; drained it and another, again another. When I finally awoke at my desk, half-starved and completely exhausted, my pants stained with dried urine, I was shocked to realize I’d lost almost three days in unconscious, nearly automatic writing.

  My first thoughts weren’t of celebration, though. They were of sheer terror; terror that my fugue state hadn’t harnessed any muse, terror that the pages littering my desk and study were filled with random nonsense. My fingers shook as I picked up the closest of the many pages and held it up to the dwindling light. Sick with fear, I imagined the paper covered in doodles and the scrawlings of a broken mind. I blinked back tears even before I read the words but they weren’t psychotic doodles. These were poems, long and deeply detailed poems. Thirteen cantos in thirteen parts, blank verse but constrained inside an interior rhythm so like that song I’d been unable to get out of my head.