The Idolaters of Cthulhu

by H. David Blalock

  I don’t use this word often but the product of those four missing days was brilliant. Glowing and shining with radiant language and that omnipresent beat, the lines were absolutely brilliant, down to every perfect syllable. I knew when I put this work out into the world, that world would love me as it had loved Byron, Shelley, Blake. Dear Astrid, with her cold eyes, would read my words and melt.

  Yet there was a persistent nagging truth behind it all. I could be so impressed by this work because I knew the words were not mine. I had used them before, but never together this way and never with that pulsing beat. The words, the lines, the stanzas, even the images were all alien, as though dictated to me by the dreaming of a greater mind. I was not the creator, merely the scribe. But I wasn’t quite content. I wanted more, needed more. I needed to find the source of these dreams and rip from it even more brilliance.

  But the song from which I had taken my inspiration was gone. The fuel that had fired my imagination was spent. I needed to hear it, to feel that rhythm pounding in the floor under my feet. I needed “Blind Ape,” so I threw on a clean pair of pants and a shirt and headed to Club Imago.

  The dying light burned my eyes as I drove. When I reached into the passenger seat for my sunglasses, my fingers instead found my book, the one thought stolen then recovered, complete with the reader’s annotations. I grabbed the book before heading into the club.

  Soul-Sucker’s keyboardist was experimenting with minimalism, dangling his fingers gracefully on the upper register of keys as a drum machine swallowed up the silence with their normal annoying dub-step background rhythm and bass line. He was playing alone and stifled a yawn when the lead singer took the stage, trailing a string of groupies back from the dressing room. I tuned out their noise, accepted a shot of something that glowed green under the UV lights, and flipped through the marred pages of my first opus.

  I hadn’t left a lot of white space when I’d come up with the original design, so there wasn’t much room for my unnamed critic to work, but he’d managed to pack a lot of commentary in the margins. The handwriting was dense, the letters narrow ovals compressed to fit the space. It took me a while before I could decipher it. They were notes, annotations to be exact, cross-referencing lines in my poems with lines from what appeared to be other manuscripts. There was no key, no list of referenced works, but I thought I recognized a few lines from the Old Testament. Interspersed here and there were Arabic words, a few Latin phrases, and what appeared to be just nonsense words — chunks of unpronounceable consonants and illogically linked vowels that defied speech and definition. In short, the ravings of an unstable person, aided no doubt by certain under-the-counter substances.

  I flipped to the last page, blank to finish out the printing signature, and was about to toss the book aside when I recognized the word scrawled inside a circular seal. Stray marks marred the design of a seven-pointed star inscribed with thick black letters that read: FATWA. Under that was written, “It has been decided,” printed in the same narrow script used throughout the book. “The poet sees. The poet is the new priest and shall be elevated as one who sees the darkness in the light, in service to He Who Haunts the Dark. So it shall be, as has been decided.”

  “Decided?” I said aloud, just as the music switched to a more quiet volume that made that single word sound louder than I’d intended. It hung in the air in front of me, the answer to a question I hadn’t known to ask.

  “I thought as much,” said a clipped voice over my shoulder. I turned, but she had already walked behind me and taken the seat opposite. She wore a tight lace tank top with the same spiral pendant nuzzling her cleavage. She had to notice me staring but it didn’t seem to bother her. “I guess if it’s not gonna be me, you’re the next best choice,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said, not altogether certain she was paying me a compliment. “But for what?”

  “Look, I liked your book, I really did,” she explained, leaning closer as two more of the band members added to the volume of the electronic symphony beside us. “It’s just that—” She stopped and frowned. “I thought I had a claim is all.”

  “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

  She leaned towards me even more, the tops of her breasts spilling out of the shirt as the black pendant fell out to rest against the table top. She picked it up and held it out to me, as if to illustrate her point.

  “I’m a Bowen,” she said in a well-enunciated whisper. She sat back as though the name itself were a signal of something formidable. She mistook my silence for surprise and nodded proudly. “I know, right? If there was gonna be a Door in this town, it should have been me by all rights. Not you and certainly not that idiot.” She jerked her chin toward the stage, where the lead singer growled into the microphone. “He’s just some white trash alcoholic asshole who stumbled into something he doesn’t understand.”

  “Everybody’s an asshole when you get to know them. Even me.” Self-deprecating usually worked with younger women. Astrid didn’t seem to notice.

  “Why are you even here?” she asked, a touch of disgust in her voice.

  “I was hoping you might be here,” I said. She rolled her eyes and managed to look even more disgusted. “It’s true, actually. But I also came to see the band. I’ve been, well, inspired by them and I needed to hear one of their songs again.”

  “They’ve already done ‘Blind Ape,” she said. “And they’re probably done with it now, since you showed up. I doubt they’ll play it after next week.”

  “What? Why?” I asked. “It’s their biggest hit. Everybody loves—” Suddenly it hit me. Of course, it would be on the CD. I got up, leaving Astrid at the table with her drink and my tab. From the stage came the scream of electric guitar as the band moved into their heavier metal set.

  The girl behind the counter peered up at me through her asymmetric dark bangs. I pulled a twenty out of my wallet and mouthed the letters “CD.” She passed me a dusty cellophane-wrapped package and stuck the bill in her back pocket. There were thirteen songs in the track list and none of them had a name similar to “Blind Ape.” Astrid appeared by my side and shook her head. She took my elbow and led me outside to the quiet darkness of the parking lot.

  “You won’t find it. They won’t record that music,” she said. “They can’t. That was decided, like, years ago I think.”

  “What are you talking about? Decided by who?” I asked. “It’s their best song, their only really good song. Surely they’d want to sell it.”

  She shrugged and lifted her eyes to the clear night. Residual light from the city left the sky nearly starless.

  “That’s not what it’s for,” she murmured. Her eyes scanned the sky in long sweeps, back and forth from one edge of the horizon to the other.

  “I don’t understand any of this, but I need to hear that song again. It’s haunting me. I’m hearing it—”

  “In your dreams, right?” She didn’t look at me, her eyes still searching the sky.

  I nodded. “Astrid, I don’t expect you to understand this, but that song — it’s a kind of inspiration for me.”

  She dropped her chin and glared at me.

  “Why do you think I’m here every weekend?” she said. Her eyes were narrow, angry. “You’re not the only artist in this hemisphere.” She looked away and her hands went to the pendant in between her breasts. She twisted it between her fingers.

  “You’re clueless, you know that?” She shook her head, but slowly. I was forgiven. “Worst decision they’ve ever made.” All I could do was shrug.

  “It was out of my hands,” I offered.

  “Look, you don’t need the music anymore. The door’s open now. Go home, write. Get a couple more books done before next weekend. After that it won’t matter anymore anyway.” She looked back up at the sky and swept her eyes across the wide expanse of darkness once more before sighing. She turned to walk away but I caught her arm.

  “What’s next weekend?” I demanded, pulling
her towards me. The disgust reappeared in her eyes and her fingers went back to her throat to circle around the pendant.

  “September twenty first,” she said and yanked her arm away. “Soul-Sucker-Six’s last concert. They’ve got signs up on every street light on the block.” She smoothed her sleeve back down over her arm and turned to leave. “And your big day, poet.”

  “The twenty-first?” I said to myself, remembering a note I’d seen on the calendar. “The equinox. Last day of summer.”

  “Last day of everything,” she said over her shoulder before disappearing into the darkened parking lot.

  *****

  All the following week, I slept in fits. My dreams were filled with increasingly more disturbing imagery: colors that defied the visible frequency, rhythms with no interior logic, massive structures and lengthened landscapes that seemed out of proportion, as though their very geometry was wrong. I struggled, both in waking hours and in sleep, to make sense of what I saw, what I imagined, but my words continued to fail. I wrote nothing, scratched endless nonsense marks on paper. I needed that music, that song, just once more.

  I knew Astrid would be at the concert. What I didn’t know was if she would talk to me, help me make sense of the nightmares and the mounting dread I experienced at every sunset. I was beginning to fear sleep, to fear the darkness and the strange and unnerving dreams which defied description.

  The morning of the last concert, I realized what I needed to do. It was so simple, I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before. I waited at the window until the sun’s first rays penetrated the glass and illuminated my apartment. I found small comfort in light which seemed to exaggerate and deepen the shadows of the room. Evening took hours to arrive and I wasted most of them trying, unsuccessfully, to scratch out another poem.

  The street lamps were just beginning to light as I made my way to the warehouse advertised on the fliers, a windowless metal building I hadn’t specifically remembered seeing before. The one door which stood propped open was guarded by a stout bald man wearing sunglasses who ensured the line of skinny teenagers kept their distance from the roped-off entrance. When I approached the doorman, he immediately unclipped the rope and motioned me in.

  “Poet,” he said, in an inviting deep baritone. I thanked him and slid into a darkness tinged with violet smoke.

  The stage was set up but empty of musicians and the dance floor was packed with a somewhat older crowd than I expected, all of whom were softly chanting while they slowly swayed back and forth en masse. Black lights illuminated white lace and lipstick with a deathly blue-purple glow. Thick smoke rose in spirals from buckets placed around the perimeter of the floor. There was no bar, no alcohol being served. No hands held drinks.

  I found Astrid in the center of a group of middle-aged women, eyes closed, her head tilted back and her arms raised in the air. She wore that familiar pendant and as she rocked, it rolled between her breasts. I moved towards her, but at that moment her eyes fluttered open and she saw me staring. She didn’t acknowledge me, but dropped her arms and pushed her way through the crowd to where I stood.

  I don’t know what she meant to tell me. Her lips were pinched together with the same disgust I’d seen before. She looked pale in the black light, her makeup giving the skin around her eyes a tired and bruised look. She reached up to grab the pendant and opened her mouth but her words were swallowed by the hellish thunder of drums and the screaming cheer of the crowd. The dancing began in earnest as both the bass and the lead guitar inserted themselves into the riot. Vocals soon followed, strange nonsense vocals not even the dancers could imitate.

  “Take it,” I thought I heard her say as I felt something cold and smooth press into my palm. I closed my fingers around Astrid’s pendant. She nodded, looking younger than I’d remembered her, and so very sad. She closed her hand around mine and stretched her neck up to brush her lips against mine. They were cold and limp. She nodded and dropped her hand. Without another word, she disappeared into the crowd.

  I shoved the necklace into one pocket and pulled my phone out of the other. I thumbed the power button and the screen blinked to life, showing me the default home screen and the battery charge: 93 percent. It couldn’t be too much longer now, I thought.

  But it felt like hours that I waited, forcing myself to stand in the near darkness watching the dancers. They moved as one roiling mass of flesh and black clothing, mostly silent but for momentary shouts of nonsense words. The stage was poorly lit and I could barely make out the shapes of the musicians, but the shadows on the stage appeared to move with the crowd. My memory recalled a church revival I had attended as a young boy. There, too, the audience had moved and swayed with the preacher, punctuating his sermon with their exclamations of faith. But that church had been well-lit and cooled by slowly rotating ceiling fans. This warehouse had been growing warmer by the minute and what little illumination escaped from the black lights was fading just as quickly. I sighed inwardly and wiped the sweat from my face when I heard the shriek of feedback that indicated the beginning of what I had been waiting for.

  A frenetic dub-step beat poured out of a line of speakers, amplified so intensely I could feel the throbbing rhythm banging at my skin. It vibrated the gelatinous centers of my eyes and thin tears dropped from their lids. When I breathed, I inhaled the lead singer’s whine into my mouth where it thickened my tongue. I could hear nothing but the beat, see nothing but tendrils of darkness reaching from the stage. The sound was so loud it took all my concentration to remember why I was there, what I came to do. I wanted to scream, to bury my head in my hands, but I was held in place by the terror of knowing I was only seconds from inspiration, mere moments from the creation of epic beauty. Because this time I would be ready. I had my phone out, thumb ready to begin recording the moment the guitarist’s fingers slid down the scale and landed at the beginning of that incoherent beat.

  A few seconds later, the house lights dropped completely and I found myself alone in the crowd, in the blackest darkness I’d ever experienced. But this darkness had a shape, took a form; a squirming mass reaching out to stroke the upturned faces of the dancers. I felt its fleshy tendrils drift over my blind eyes and stroke the edges of my open mouth, leaving an earthy taste on my tongue. Something that might have been a hand found its way into my pocket and cradled Astrid’s necklace in its claws.

  I threw my head back and blinked away tears at the black ceiling where hundreds of balls of an even blacker darkness swirled in slow spirals over my head. Each ball was a universe and as I watched, the balls coalesced into one thick swirl, isolated out of time and space and presented to me like a play toy. I could see everything. All the nonsensical images from my dreams were now in order, making perfect sense in their context. Those monstrous cyclopean buildings whose labyrinthian floor plans defied description were made up of simple angles and arches. The unnatural rainbow was merely an intensely vivid spectrum of normal light. The incomprehensible rhythm was countable, danceable. I could even understand the lyrics for a moment before two spears of darkness thrust into my ears and I heard nothing—the bliss of pure silence—for a blink, a microsecond, before the bass dropped and the real music began. It was the moment I’d been waiting for. I jabbed my thumb into the power button. There was only the briefest flash—scant illumination from a sunny beach scene—before the world I knew and understood ceased to exist.

  I felt the light before I actually saw it. I felt the fury of five hundred pairs of eyes turned towards me, then against me. I heard the agony emanating from the darkness and heard the screaming before I saw their open mouths and terrified eyes. I smelled the foetid stench of death and decay surrounding me before I saw what embraced me in the darkness. I tasted my own blood when my jaws slammed closed against the black fingers splayed on my cheeks. By the time my eyes saw what hovered above me, I found myself sliding to the floor, begging and pleading for any god who could hear to strike me instantly and permanently blind. As I fell, I saw in its man
y-lobed eyes the shrinking edges of our universe as that horrible mouth opened impossibly wide and devoured the light of the stars, leaving behind nothing but a bottomless void of nightmares.

  My phone fell to the ground and shattered. Darkness returned but it was an empty darkness now, ice cold and alone and shrieking in agony. I opened my eyes to screaming and the thundering of hundreds of feet fleeing the warehouse. I was deaf to the darkness, broken here and again by a door opening and the incoming rush of street light from outside. I felt nothing but that rhythm, that damned rhythm, running circles through my consciousness.

  Someone took my hand and dragged me to the door and we both collapsed on the street under a blinking caution lamp. I tried to squeeze my eyes shut against it but they were burning now, blazing with that sickly yellow light. I tried crawling away but something held my ankle. I was uncertain of the ground beneath me. It felt at odds with my feet and when I tried to walk, the angles felt somehow wrong. I howled with rage at the other blind apes staggering in the street, fleeing the warehouse. I kicked at the hand holding me in place and looked back to see a teary-eyed and red-faced Astrid screaming at me.

  “You ruined it,” she sobbed, beating at my calf with her fist. I kicked at her again and something tumbled out of my pocket and rolled over to her. “You could have seen everything,” she shouted. “You were supposed to be the Door, and you could have opened it for other people but you ruined it!” She reached for the shattered pendant on the ground and screamed as it fell to pieces in her fingers. I kicked at her again but I had to press my hands against my eyes as the swirling red lights brought more pain and a swell of nausea. Firm hands lifted me up and then there were blinking lights and sirens and questions and bright lights in my eyes and finally darkness and sleep.

  And dreams.

  Oh dear god, the dreams. The horrible, endless dreams.