The Idolaters of Cthulhu

by H. David Blalock

  "I can't believe they stuck me with a shoggoth who can't even talk. Are you even sentient? I’ve always had my doubts,” Jack kept yelling at him.

  Jeff just stood there in silence, totally expressionless as his arm formed back into something a little less monstrous. The mouth disappeared back into the semi-translucent globular appendage, still dripping warm blood onto the floor.

  You just need to do what I tell you and that's it!" Jack yelled. "Well, you created this mess, you clean it up! Get these two in the back while I get rid of the car before anyone nearby notices. We’ll start stripping these things down and get them defleshed when I get back. And clean this place up while I’m gone, and I’d better find it spotless or I’ll disintegrate your blubbery form myself!”

  *****

  In the silent ice cream shop a figure stood motionless behind the counter. The young man he appeared to be was wearing a white uniform and a blue striped apron, his fresh face peering out from behind long hair. He still called himself Jack. He listened to the distant thought of the humans, feeling the occasional bit of pain from one of them. A girl peeked out from behind the half open door that led to the back room, again wearing a stained apron and yellow, discolored gloves. The previously blue eyes were replaced by two greenish, glowing orbs. Jeff still wasn’t too good at forming human eyes.

  A tall and thin figure appeared in the doorway of the shop, dressed in a nice suit. His face was slightly pale, but still in a condition to pass as living tissue if no one took a close look. Jack looked up at him as the bell rang. He knew why the thin man was there. He was in a bad way, almost bad enough for a human to take notice. “I hear you can help me,” he said, the human quality to his voice was compromised by his condition.

  “How long has it been?” asked Jack.

  “A few years, I’m not sure. It’s kinda’ tough to remember sometimes,” the thin man responded. A glob of black, translucent ichor started to bubble out of his nose. Several, small green glowing eyes formed around it. They darted around before he gently pushed them back up his nostril.

  “You’re in luck. We’ve got fresh stuff for you, only a few days old.”

  “Tekeli-li to you my friend,” the thin man said. Jack could fell his sense of relief.

  “Tekeli-li to you too,”Jack replied as he led the thin man into the back room.

  Breakwater

  by

  Gregory L. Norris

  The jewel glinted beneath the water, purple one instant, a deep green the next. There wasn’t much of a sun that morning. By afternoon, the weathermen had forecast summer downpours. But at this early hour, a few beachcombers braved the drizzle in search of seashells or to stretch their legs, and the platinum-colored light seeping past the gathering clouds lit the jewel enough to hypnotize her.

  “What is it?” asked Clara.

  The other girl sounded miles and fathoms away, not a yard to Mila’s right. Mila blinked. The waves attempted to grind down the jewel and carry it back into the ebbing tide. Mila scrambled, nearly knocking her cousin over as she made a grab. Her eyes tracked the treasure. Her fingers clutched. The jewel was tangled in seaweed and half of a razor clam shell. As though testing her resolve, it slipped from her hand once, and then for a second time. The water rose up past her knees. The waves that had lapped at the shore seconds earlier now exerted the undertow’s pull.

  “Mila, don’t,” Clara called.

  One more time, Mila scrambled down, and the jewel seemed to leap into her grasp. The girl straightened. With her back still to Clara and the Sailor’s Bay beach, her eyes fell deeper into the object in her hand: a tiara, the kind worn by royalty. The angular frame seemed made of dull gold. The lone jewel at the crown’s top center that had originally attracted her to the find reflected a rich glow of emerald and amethyst across her pruning fingers and palm.

  Footsteps sloshed beside her. “What did you find—a sand dollar?”

  Mila picked off the seaweed. From the cut of her eye, she saw Clara tense.

  “No, get rid of it,” the girl said. “Right now, Mila. You shouldn’t touch that thing!”

  Clara surged closer and smacked the jeweled tiara out of Mila’s hand. Mila’s spell broke as the beautiful find slipped back beneath the waves.

  Rage surged. “That was mine!”

  The horror in Clara’s gaze registered, as did the first distant rumble of thunder that sent the other beachcombers running from the water. For a shocking moment that filled Mila with icy-hot emotion, the urge to seize her cousin by her long, golden locks and force her head beneath the waves possessed her.

  Tears spilled down Mila’s cheeks, mimicking the rain. “Mine. He gave it to me!”

  She stormed toward the shore, kicked at Clara’s hot pink plastic bucket containing periwinkles and mussel shells with polished purple insides, and followed their footprints in reverse, which the ocean was doing a fine job of erasing.

  She remembered the heat rising on her throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe. What few tears spilled down her cheeks after returning to the cottage were hot and brief. The ocean had given her a gift and her cousin had robbed her of it.

  “She’s not really our flesh and blood,” Mila heard Clara’s pompous witch of a mother, Aunt Linda, say from the beach house’s back room. Clara had opened up after Mila pushed her, her screams loud enough to be heard all the way to the breakwater, Mila imagined. Aunt Linda coddled the girl, thinking their unwanted houseguest for the next two weeks out of earshot. “She’s not a real Barrington, like you.”

  Mila supposed she always knew she wasn’t one of them, that her heart and especially her soul belonged to the sea. By the time her parents confessed she was adopted, Mila already sensed that she was different, and had buried the last of the hurt deep within her, where she imagined it growing, changing, transforming.

  “I dreamt of you last night,” she said, extending her arms.

  The wind caught in the diaphanous folds of the gauzy shirt. Mila closed her eyes and imagined the breeze carrying her up, up into the sky like the kite in the shape of a bat being flown farther along the beach, near the breakwater. The kite had reached the very limits of the stratosphere, she was convinced. She only cared about traveling as far as the end of the barnacle-encrusted black rocks jutting out into the Atlantic.

  “Me?” a voice said, suddenly beside her ear, male.

  Mila turned to see a young man with a mop of sandy blond hair, blue eyes, and dimples had invaded the space between her vantage spot on the shore and the view of the ocean. He wore board shorts, nothing else. College-age, she assumed. His physique was supremely ripped, supporting the arrogance in his expression.

  “You?” she dismissed with a snort.

  “Those dreams you had,” he said, and chuckled.

  Mila turned and attempted to walk around him. He made a game of it, blocking her at every angle until she was forced to dig in her soles and address him. She’d already gotten a good enough look and had decided that, unlike his other conquests—which likely tallied up to impressive numbers, no doubt—she wasn’t interested.

  “You’re not from around here,” he said matter-of-factly.

  Not sure why, she decided to play his game. “My family used to summer on Sailor’s Bay when I was little.”

  “Yeah? Which house?”

  She extended a pointer finger, its nail painted in royal purple, which complemented the streak of electric green running down the left side of her dark locks. “Over there.”

  He tracked her lead. “The old Barrington place?”

  Mila noted that some of the arrogance had been siphoned off her new admirer’s face. “Yes,” she said, and smiled.

  “You’re a Barrington?”

  “Only by adoption. You know what happened?”

  “Everybody does.”

  He gave her a second look, ran his eyes up and down, likely either undressing her between blinks or contemplating whether the girl with the electric green highlights was worth furth
er investment of his time and charms.

  “I’m Mila,” she said, flashing a coy smile.

  “Derek,” he said.

  She didn’t know if it was his real name or just another part of his swagger, a fake name unable to be traced or substantiated by other visitors to Sailor’s Bay. She didn’t care about names.

  “How long you here?” he asked.

  “As long as I want. I love the ocean,” she said, and walked away, her toes conscious of the sand, her heart of the tide.

  He was the perfect choice and she hoped the language of her body proved seductive and impossible to misread. When he pounded after her, she resisted the urge to smile.

  “There’s a party tonight,” Derek said, no longer so cool. He blathered about only the choicest of the choice being invited, drink and other vices in abundance, if she knew what he meant. Mila did.

  “You want to go with me?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Mila said, making sure to hide her enthusiasm.

  Silver light dappled the ocean, now at high tide beneath the moon’s full and grinning face. Mila held the drink in one hand—some foul concoction in a plastic cup with a blood-red maraschino cherry bobbing atop the sweating ice cubes—while her mind drifted out to sea, past the line of black rocks. The breakwater separating the seaside communities of Sailor’s Bay and Newburyport barely seemed there in the moonlight. Neither did she, she agreed.

  She indulged in a waking dream. The party, with its obnoxious guests and pounding rap beat, evaporated around her. She was out there, floating on the waves, being carried farther out past the breakwater. She half-closed her eyes, aware that her legs were gliding away from the upscale beach house filled with spoiled trust fund brats who’d never want for anything or work an honest day in their lives’ futures. She abandoned her flip-flops. The sand tickled her soles. The crash of waves sent her heart into a gallop and fueled her arousal. Yes, in those ocean depths…

  A hand clamped her bare upper arm, shocking her out of the trance. The call of the waves ceased its siren’s song. Mila opened her eyes to see Derek again standing between her and the sea. His breath reeked of alcohol, his skin of whatever syrupy body spray he’d blasted onto it by the bucket. She shook free.

  “You going for a swim without me?” he asked, and then belched.

  Mila hated his dumb face and struggled to hide her disgust for him. In her mind’s eye, he had already lost his head, and the teeth that had removed the offending thing had bitten down past the shoulders, into his chest. The vision was there one instant, gone the next. Derek smiled his stupid, inebriated grin, showing the best set of teeth good dental plans could buy. Mila unintentionally salivated, though not for the reasons he suspected.

  “Sure,” she said, and gracefully stepped out of her diaphanous sundress.

  Saying nothing, she wandered the rest of the way to the water, her flesh electrified. The sensation quickened as the Atlantic, icy even in July, licked past her ankles and up her calves. Higher, higher still.

  “I dream of you,” she whispered. “I always have.”

  Turning, she saw Derek struggle off one of his expensive, brand name sneakers. He yanked the T-shirt over his head, dropped his shorts on the sand, and trotted past the shore clad only in black boxer-briefs and the one matching ankle-length sock unlucky enough not to have been left behind. She noticed that he was erect, according to the swell at the front of his underwear. That would change after he had waded up past his hips.

  The energy charge worked beneath Mila’s flesh, through what she imagined as her blood cells, deeper even than her marrow. Into her soul.

  “Wait up,” Derek chuckled.

  The splashes behind her grew louder, more desperate. This was almost too easy, she thought, as the next wave swept her off her feet and the water reached her neck. She lolled on the surface and watched as he stroked the waves. By that point, Mila was more intoxicated by the briny odor of the sea than anything contained within the abandoned plastic cup. The beach house glowed and pulsed with the wretched beats of forgettable white rappers with auto-tuned voices and looked to be as far away now as the surface of the moon. Sailor’s Bay in the present was a life only partially there, superimposed over another world she desperately longed to visit.

  “Damn, girl,” he sighed, right near Mila’s ear.

  She wrapped her left arm around him. They bobbed atop the surface, bodies intertwined. Mila realized that the Atlantic’s chill had little power over Derek’s arousal. He kissed her. At first, she allowed it. Sloppy kisses, inelegant—demanding and verging on painful as he stole what he wanted. His greed made him oblivious, which was to her advantage.

  She pulled her mouth off his. “For you,” Mila said, and uttered the words she’d been taught in her dreams. “F’tang’eh, vah’rosh ungl Dagon!”

  He started to question her. Then Mila seized hold of his throat and pushed. She heard him gasp right as his idiot’s face vanished beneath the water and felt his body spasm as his lungs sucked down ocean. She pushed, prayed. Then the drowning young man grabbed hold of Mila and pulled her under.

  Even in his inebriated state, Derek proved himself still dangerous, his muscles clamping hold, competing against hers even at the minute of his death. Mila’s head plunged beneath the surface.

  She was there again, her eyes wide open, her head under the water. She ran the bath warm. By the time she raised up, the water had turned cold. Years of similar experiments were yielding solid results. One day, she knew, Mila would simply refuse to surface.

  Derek dragged her under, his voice smothered by the ocean. She went somewhere else, back through time to that long ago night and summer when she’d lured Clara down to the water’s edge. This now was like that then: she felt Derek’s body convulse and cease its struggle in the silver-gilt chop, giving up the ghost as Clara had. The body drifted beside her, beautiful in a way it wasn’t when connected to its soul. Thus freed of that burden, she appreciated Derek’s physique, sculpted like the most famous of Greek marbles.

  Mila’s flesh tingled with icy-hot pinpricks. Movement slithered at her periphery. Something gargantuan moved closer through the water, causing her to gasp and exhale. Beyond the bubbles, she saw its large hand reach up, grab hold of the dead youth’s body by its legs, pull.

  Mila closed her eyes and said, “Thank you for accepting this sacrifice.”

  Distorted in the water like Derek’s shrieks, the words sounded part of the old language, a divine offering to the ocean god.

  She broke the surface. Another soul was already waiting, bobbing on the waves. Mila’s heart raced. At first, she worried he was one of the partygoers—some drunk, horny frat boy; an escapee from the crowd, arms dealers and assholes each and every one.

  Then he spoke.

  “He is pleased,” the young man said.

  Mila blinked, and she realized he had stepped out of her dreams and into the waking world. Her excitement surged. She smiled and focused on the strange young man floating beside her. His hair was dark, short, his skin pale in the moonlight. His bare chest bore elaborate tattoos, patterns of swirls and runes above and beyond the trendy Celtic scrolls inked into the flesh of the upper crust crowd partying hard far behind her back. Mostly, it was his eyes that were familiar. Big, they reflected the moon’s glow off the ocean’s surface and never once blinked.

  A loud crash sounded just beyond the breakwater, what played to Mila’s ears like a happy whale jumping up from the sea and soaring back down. A rare and glorious event, she compared it to glimpsing the arrival of a comet that circles the solar system once every century. Only this was greater. Mila’s insides warmed with pride.

  “The god sent me to find you, to guide you,” the young man said. “But before we focus on matters of the sea, you should first know about life on the land and what happened here.”

  On the shore, he pointed at a bare patch of ocean.

  “There,” he said, “is what used to be Devil’s Reef.”

  He told he
r about a ridge of sandbar and shoal, his words unleashing in her a desire to swim out there, to sun herself like the hordes of magnificent creatures whose bodies once glinted in the sunlight before the events of 1927.

  “There were caves, leading deep underwater,” he said. “Some filled with the treasures our people created.”

  “Like my tiara,” Mila said. “The one He gave me when I was a girl.”

  The strange young man with the wide eyes nodded. “The federal government with the help of the people who lived in Newburyport and Arkham blew up Devil’s Reef. They swept through this town, burning and killing. There’s more, and you should know it. All of it.”

  Mila nodded. For all of her eighteen years, she’d felt like an outsider, living a fabricated life while aware of only part of the story. Half-truths and unclear visions had haunted her from the start. The only constant has been the ocean, her desire to return to it, and to him, now real and standing beside her.

  “Come with me,” he said, extending his hand.

  Mila saw the thin, webbed flesh between the young man’s fingers and thumb. Smiling, she reached out. When their hands connected, she experienced a strange and unfamiliar emotion. As they walked down the shore, past the breakwater and into Newburyport, she decided that it was love.

  The place was an old, worm-eaten house, Colonial in design, painted white with black shutters. “Tilton House,” he said. “The patriarch of the family was a taxidermist who worked in league with the same federal criminals that destroyed Devil’s Reef and laid waste to the town before it became known as Sailor’s Bay.”

  Tilton House sat silent and dark except where the moon’s light reflected off window glass. The youth led her around to the back, through the cool green glades of the wild, weedy overgrowth, to a broken cellar pane. She followed him through the oblong space, down into the dark realm below. The air was sour and sweet from mold and other funereal smells.