The Idolaters of Cthulhu
Page 16
Beneath your bare feet you can feel the floor of my cellar. It is not a dirt floor, but rock. I hope you appreciate the undertaking of anchoring the support of my home to such material. It was necessary, of course, to build this chamber. This is my waiting place, on the very spot of my dear mother's demise and that of my first breath. I am sorry for the pain you feel from the spikes through your hands holding you to that chair. I would embrace you if only I thought you would let me, my love.
I hope that you can accept and note my true affection as I further pierce your body. The blood that is your life's essence must find place on these rocks and in the home of my beloved gods. The pain that you feel is requisite. You must desire for that pain to end and you must know that there is only one way it can.
I thank you again, my love, for bringing me to the arms of my gods. I cherish you, good sir, kind gentleman, bringer of my salvation. Gotha n'gha uln hupadgh shugg 'fhalma y'han. Thank you.
They are coming.
Cthulhu In Autumn
by
Robin Wyatt Dunn
The Ozarks
Breaking my body like bread I invite the forest people to come to me; it has become my time to die.
The red sky soothes me because it knows more than I do: it knows why I am here. This is knowledge that has escaped me. All I know is what I must do:
I offer my arm to Eklazel, whose large eyes pray for me gracefully, somewhere inside their milky depths, as he breaks off one of my fingers and puts it in his mouth, chewing delicately.
“This tastes good,” he says, and I want to laugh, or scream, but I smile instead, my teeth stretching over my face like swords, and he backs up a pace, smiling also. His long coat slices paths through the leaves.
“Happy Fall,” he says, bowing politely. My blood drips from the wound, down into the peat and moss. A small vole has begun to lick at the growing puddle, a messenger for others.
- -
Why was I chosen? The sky knows and so does my father but we are strongest, my people, in our seals, which compartmentalize our shared minds to protect sensitive information, and so although I know so much about my family, my father especially (I know his loves, and his longings, even his dreams) I do not know why he chose me for death. Perhaps simply because I am his son.
- -
At the horizon a stream of green bleeds into the red, electromagnetic rivers hovering over the Ozarks. We are further north than we were in the time of my ancestors. Almost, I hear its green, shadowy voice:
once, I was a man and you came to me. I remember your pain in dying—
Everything has a voice if you’ve ears to listen. My left ear is being eaten even now, by Harmunkleen:
Perched on my shoulder his talons dig deep into my flesh, to bone. I smile wider, some blood droplets appearing at the pores of my forehead. With his beak he tears strips from the edge of my ear.
I am, if you like, a scarecrow. The term is inaccurate, even ridiculous, but somehow appropriate too. I scare no crows, but perhaps I scare you, eh? The word “crow” is onomatopoetic. So if I make the appropriate sound, and instill in you a fear which we may use, my death will be a success.
Tell me, what are you afraid of?
Pain?
Mine is enormous, oceans of pain. It is why I bleed. Why my face is wide with so many teeth: to contain the immensity of my agony.
In the struggles of my pain, I will redeem my people. And I will give them much entertainment.
In my ear Harmunkleen says: “I love your face.” And then he digs out my left eye with his beak and pops it in his mouth.
- -
When I was a small boy my father took me deep into the forest, to the shrine nearest our town, one which hovers in the mind about as far as it sinks into the forest floor: that is, its energy is a spirit which you will feel, in your skull, forever. If only once you see it.
Like a clean surgeon the energy of our shrine performs a precise incision in the psycho-cerebral matter within your skull, cleaving enough neurons to make a fragrant copy of its visage into your grey matter: the face of OkKott, whose eyes torment all civilization.
In this way our forest has been protected from over-eager remnants of other tribes who covet our territory.
The first time I saw the shrine it took my breath away, although it is not so physically prepossessing. Rather it is the elegance of its placement which draws the eye, and the breath. Asymmetry is its own art, and so the harmony of broken tree, fallen iron and altar were to my young mind like the finest of poetry, and if I must confess all (must I, Father?) I did compose some bad poetry right there, on the occasion, when my father opened my vein and gave OkKott his first taste of my body.
I knelt and he drew the knife across my arm and I watched as the stones drank it in, and its tendrils swarmed over my head, giving me in its tenderness the face of the woman I was to grow to love, the arranged marriage over which OkKott would preside, for I was to be a Father in my own right.
With Jezebel the Unlucky, rewardess of swords, with her terrible green lips.
In truth she was only a sort of fakir, with a pretty voice and a con artist’s cool appeal but I loved her anyway, over and above (or despite) OkKott’s compulsions, she was attractive, and as I knelt at our godlet’s altar that day at fifteen with its terrible arms probing my young body I worshipped at her feet, far away, speaking the words that would bind us soon to our marriage bed:
I pledge obedience to this forest, and to your womb:
- -
No obedience may last. All worlds decay into their constituent atoms, even as whole universes die in the bargains made between the Necratorai Gods, those who hover beyond the final lights of our realm. I wish it were otherwise, as do all men, that my wife could have been faithful to me forever, even after my sacrifice, out of loyalty to me and my bravery . . . but these are fantasies.
- -
I don’t want to talk about her any longer. Soon I will be free of women forever . . .
- -
What is it that I did? Still I ask myself this as Rombo chops off my left leg with his motorized axe. Though the antigens incorporated into my bloodstream stem considerably the rate of flow from my femoral artery, still Rombo has hastened my end. In gratitude, I incline my head, and let my smile relax for a moment. My eyes speak of my benefit to him: he will have dinner tonight.
In the forest, the aphid detonates its body to deter the ladybug, saving the colony. The rook submits to the judgment of its parliament, crying those truths unbearable at other times in the throes of its death ... and avatars bind the minds of their future followers, translating physical torment into the submission of catechisms to come, during their final moments in life.
So too for me, if I am judged well, will my catechism be enforced in these darkening generations to come:
I AM A VOICE FOR MY PEOPLE. MY MESSAGE IS SIMPLE: DIE. SUBMIT TO OUR WILL. OUR GALAXIES ARE STRONG, AND INTERPENETRATED, WITH THE VOICES AND TENDRILS OF MY PEOPLE, STRONG NOW FOR GENERATIONS, AND GROWING STRONGER, AS WE BIND OUR FEMORAL VOICE TO YOUR CAROTID BODY, WE ARE THE WIND IN YOUR THROAT, TO PROVIDE THE OOMPH OF YOUR WORDS OF SURRENDER:
KNOW ME AS YOUR DEAD BROTHER. IN THE GROUND BENEATH YOUR FEET. HAUNTING YOUR HOUSE. APPEARING IN YOUR MIRRORS. SPEAKING INTO YOUR DAUGHTER’S MIND. I AM WEAK BUT MY FAMILY GROWS STRONGER WITH EVERY BITE YOU TAKE FROM MY FLESH:
- -
Perhaps I am too fond of my own voice. It will soon be snuffed out in any case.
In truth Cthulu is only one of many: once you begin to explore the depths you learn, naturally, how little, and how few, you really knew. My death may earn my family another ticket, a horrible imprimatur upon the scroll that grants passage another dozen meters through the penumbrae which shield us from the Greater Lights. Every step some portion of a light-year . . .
- -
It’s strange the things that creep into one’s mind in the final moments. Agony and ecstasy are only two parts of a complementary equation whose solut
ion is death, like the death of my love for Anubel that last high field:
Over the high field my love, before I had been chosen, sparked from my hands like worlds: magic blue fires I had trained myself to make. Each magic fire used worlds and peoples and galaxies far away as fuel―genocides uncountable―to fertilize my lover’s garden:
Skeletons from ten thousand catalogued species I had arranged into benches, and specimen bowls, with the violet foliage I knew she adored. I was waiting under the skull of the Antiphon, whose sound explodes the brain.
She screamed in delight and we made love in the sands of a mandala, mixing our fluids with the sidereal ones mapped in silicate by my slaves.
I can still taste her breasts.
Some in my village said she was too young to marry but my family has more power than that.
I was like the bird, whose nest serves no purpose other than as decoration: gardening as a form of seduction.
We had a literal honeymoon, the mead brought to us in secret when we broke from our mutual repast of flesh.
- -
One of the Hoopelturrs gnaws now into my torso; its intimacy inviting other reminisces . . .
- -
At the birth of my son I knew with absolute certainty my Father would ask for my death. I held John in my arms and beheld his alien eyes and knew my time was at an end.
What are these things called generations? I know the Old Ones find them tedious, focused as they are on the Final End, one cycle is much the same as the next, and sometimes I almost agree with them, except . . .
Why did my son John’s eyes look alien?
They were more intelligent. And more afraid. More paranoid. The circumspection that had granted me my Shield (one I will soon be carried on), had combined with the purity of Anubel’s hate, to make a boy paler and crueler than anyone could have imagined.
He will hasten our descent from the last vestiges of our ancestors’ world, I know. No more trees. And no more mammals. Perhaps it will not be his generation but the one following where we will break through into the abyss. I can feel it happen.
Like I could feel her body as many bodies, her hips as the gems of the earth, her teeth stars. I grunted and thrust within the soul of the earth, to turn my mind within this tumbling dream that is my family’s descent through time, down to our darker ends:
- -
I held my boy John as an infant and he coughed up blood, and almost immediately began to feed on it. Like a father naturally would, I helped him to feed on his own fluids, though even I was somewhat horrified.
Anubel of course did not notice; no son can do any wrong in a mother’s eyes.
When he began to fly at first I summoned bird carriages so I might follow him into the night skies; but he began to resent even this, and when I saw him with three of the Greater Muskites hovering in the dark over our forest he looked me in the eyes and I knew I was no longer welcome. Not even in the throne I had begun to build.
Easy for others to say my decision was brave. To make way for a smooth transition of power from grandfather to grandson, leaving me quite out of it.
(Now the Hoopelturr is gagging on my kidney).
The truth is that I’m not sure why I did it. Even fear is not the whole reason.
Some darker logic was at work, one I will perhaps be granted knowledge of in my final moments.
Dying
In this Autumn I am at sea. Swimming through greater and greater darks, to find the Voice I remember from childhood. The Voice who granted me my first Weapons, who explained to me how they might be held, and used . . .
Through the shimmering deepening blues into midnight shades I am swimming, down through my death towards the ship that hovers waiting:
Squishing out of its metal seams the psychic and ultramarine lines quiver in the water, waves, over waves, trembling round my body and blurring my vision. Then I hear it, and I begin to feel the Being wrap its great jaws around the edges of my decaying mind:
I REMEMBER YOU
Gurchkin. You’re there.
I NEED FOOD
I am already dead.
IT IS YOUR MIND I WOULD EAT, BOY.
Have me.
ALWAYS A PLEASURABLE BOY YOU WERE, SO EAGER TO LEARN. LET ME GRANT YOU YOUR FINAL KNOWLEDGES THEN. WHAT IS YOUR PLEASURE, MY PLEASURABLE ONE?
Tell me how I will be used.
AS FUEL, OF COURSE. FOR OTHER ENDEAVORS.
But my deeds. What will people―
THEY’RE MEANINGLESS OF COURSE. WHAT MEANING COULD DEEDS HAVE? THEY ARE JUST SHAMBLINGS UNTIL THE FLESH IS RE-PROCESSED.
You’re lying.
I DO NOT LIE, THOUGH PERHAPS I AM USING A LANGUAGE YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND. TELL ME, BOY, SINCE YOU ALWAYS GAVE ME SO MUCH PLEASURE, AND SINCE YOU DO SO AGAIN NOW, WHICH I AM GRATEFUL FOR, WHAT MEANING WOULD YOU HAVE? THOSE THINGS YOU DID, WOMEN YOU BEDDED, OR ENEMIES YOU SLEW, WHAT MEANING DO THEY HOLD FOR YOU NOW?
Women and enemies, by themselves, nothing. Only what I learned from them.
PERHAPS THAT IS WHY YOU TASTE SO FINE TO ME, BOY. THIS KNOWLEDGE YOU HAVE BURROWED AND BEDDED IN YOUR CELLS. IT IMPROVES YOUR FLAVOR.
Thank you.
HA HA HA HA AH AHA HA HA AHA HA
I wonder why it is I feel so calm. So restful.
THIS IS A NATURAL PSYCHOLOGICAL REACTION TO HORROR. EVEN AS THE MOUSE FREEZES BEFORE THE SNAKE. TO PREPARE ITSELF FOR THE JOURNEY. PARALYSIS IS A FORM OF MEDITATION . . .
There is something you’re not telling me.
HA HA AHA AH. MANY THINGS. BUT ONE THING, IT’S TRUE, IN PARTICULAR: THAT YOU’RE ME.
- -
They have told me what my new capabilities are to be. Even now I am not sure I believe them. I am to be a holy vessel, an avatar, the selected one, one of many I’m sure, but they do make me feel special. To go now here, to you.
The decline of Cthulhu is only natural.
As will be my rise.
From one body to another!
From one plane of being, to another!
From the Ozarks to California.
From Andromeda to underneath your bed:
Sing with me and I will tell you of Great Mammon Tower, she whose wings are ice and stone. There is nothing you can do now, you’ve listened long enough, and that’s fine, it’s just what I would have done, fool that I was before I expanded into these regions. Hold my hand, in these autumn rains! See my face of glass! See my transparent organs! I am like a fish, in new waters! North America only another aspect of a woman’s face, whom I fall more deeply in love with every day. Come, let me kiss you. Do not be disgusted. The maggots are natural, part of the transition. You are a crow and you will serve me. You will do many things for me. As you have chosen to listen, so too will you choose to serve and learn from my wisdom. Reach into your skull, and remove your eyeball, and rip it out. Good. Now chew the eyeball. How does it taste? You see how its flavor is the flavor of interstellar space? Now that you are one-eyed you will be a stronger crow. See for me, reader:
Reader
I am seeing. Over the city the artillery is firing. My neighbors are running into the streets but their cars are not working. The bats are descending, biting them. The ocean of blood is rising, moving in to the land . . .