Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron

by The Book of Cthulhu

  “Come on!” Sheri mocked. There was something too much, something feverish about the hilarity in her eyes.

  Patti balked. “It’s a bad idea. You win, I’m chicken—let’s get outta here.”

  “Ha! And you call yourself a working girl! Well, just a minute here.” She took out the little pad she carried for phone numbers and addresses, and hurried down the hall with a parody butt-swinging hooker’s prowl. The doors nearest Patti said hydrotherapy clinic with an arrow—she watched Sheri pass other doors, sashaying all the way to the corridor’s far end. Patti stood waiting. Did she hear, ever so faintly, a kind of echo from behind these closed doors? Sooo faint, but the echoes of something resonating in a vast cavernous space? And there…ever so soft…it was almost like the piping of a flute…

  Sheri stood by the last door, scribbling on the pad. She ripped off the sheet and slipped it under the door. Then she came running back like a kid who’s played a prank. Patti willingly caught her mood—they rushed giggling back down the stairs like larking twelve-year-olds. Patti wondered if Sheri too was giggling from sheer relief to be out of this building.

  “What’d you write him, fool?!” Patti was elated to be back on the street, out in its noise and its colors; she felt like someone who has just escaped drowning. “You trying to steal my date?” Sheri had once tampered with a note that Patti had passed at a party, so that the trick would show up at Sheri’s house instead of Patti’s.

  Sheri mimed outrage. “What you take me for? Come on for a beer, on me!”

  As they walked, every outdoor breath reassured Patti. “Hey, Sher—did you hear any, like, music up there?” Even out here in the traffic noise she could call up clearly the weird piping tune, not so much a tune, really, as an eerie melodic ramble. What bothered her as much as the strange feeling of the music was the way in which she had received it. It seemed to her that she had not heard it, but rather remembered it—suddenly and vividly—though she hadn’t the trace of an idea now where she might have heard it before. Sheri’s answer confirmed her thought:

  “Music? Baby, there wasn’t a sound up there! Wasn’t it kind of spooky?” Sheri’s mood stayed giddy and Patti gladly fell in with it. They went to another bar they liked and drank for an hour or so—slowly, keeping a gloss on things, feeling humorous and excited like schoolgirls on a trip together. At length they decided to go to the Parnassus, find somebody with a car, and scare up a cruising party.

  As they crossed to the hotel, Sheri surprised Patti by throwing a look at the old office building and giving a shrug that may have been half shudder. “Jesus. It was like being under the ocean or something in there, wasn’t it, Patti?”

  This echo of her own dread made Patti look again at her friend. Then Arnold, the vendor, stepped out from the newsstand and blocked their way.

  The uncharacteristic aggressiveness gave Patti a nasty twinge. Arnold was unlovely. There was a babyish fatness and redness about every part of him. His scanty red hair alternately suggested infancy or feeble age, and his one eyeless socket, with its weepy red folds of baggy lid, made his whole face look as if screwed to cry. Over all his red, ambling softness there was a bright blackish glaze of inveterate filth. And moronic though his manner was most of the time, Patti felt a cunning about him, something sly and corrupt. The cretinous wet-mouthed face he now thrust close to the girls seemed, somehow, to be that of a grease-painted con man, not an imbecile. As if it were a sour fog that surrounded the newsman, fear entered Patti’s nostrils and dampened the skin of her arms. Arnold raised his hand. Pinched between his smudgy thumb and knuckle were an envelope and a fifty-dollar bill.

  “A man said to read this, Patti!” Arnold’s childish intonation now struck Patti as an affectation, like his dirtiness, part of a chosen disguise.

  “He said the money was to pay you to read it. It’s a trick! He gave me twenty dollars!” Arnold giggled. The sense of cold-blooded deception in the man made Patti’s voice shake when she questioned him about the man who’d given him the commission. He remembered nothing, an arm and a voice in a dark car that pulled up and sped off.

  “Well, how is she supposed to read it?” Sheri prodded. “Should she be by a window? Should she wear anything special?”

  But Arnold had no more to tell them, and Patti willingly gave up on him to escape the revulsion he so unexpectedly roused in her. They went into the lobby with the letter, but such was its strangeness—so engrossingly lurid were the fleeting images that came clear for them—that they ended taking it back to the bar, getting a booth, and working over it with the aid of beers and lively surroundings. The document was in the form of an unsigned letter that covered two pages in a lucid, cursive script of bizarre elegance, and that ran thus:

  Dear Girls:

  How does a Shoggoth Lord go wooing? You do not even guess enough to ask! Then let it be asked and answered for you. As it is written: “The Shoggoth Lord stumbleth unto his belusted, lo, he cometh heavily unto her, upon alien feet. From the sunless sea, from under the mountains of ice, cometh the mighty Shoggoth Lord unto her.” Dear, dear girls! Where is this place the Shoggothoi come from? In your tender, sensual ignorance you might well lack the power to be astonished by the prodigious gulfs of Space and Time this question probes. But let it once more be asked and answered for you. Thus has the answer been written:

  Shun the gulf beneath the peaks,

  The caverned ocean black as night,

  Where star-spawned gods made their retreat

  From the slowly freezing world of light.

  For even star-spawn may grow weak,

  While what has been its slave gains strength;

  Even star-spawn’s will may break,

  While slaves feed on their lords at length.

  Sweet harlots! Darling, heedless trollops! You cannot imagine the Shoggoth Lord’s mastery of shapes! His race has bred smaller since modern man last met with it. Oh, but the Shoggoth Lords are limber now! Supremest polymorphs—though what they are beneath all else, is Horror itself. But how is it they press their loving suit? What do they murmur to her they hotly crave? You must know that the Shoggoth craves her fat with panic—full of the psychic juices of despair. Therefore he taunts her with their ineluctable union; therefore he pipes and flutes to her his bold, seductive lyric, while he vows with a burning glare in his myriad eyes that she’ll be his. Thus he sings:

  Your veil shall be the wash of blood

  That dims and drowns your dying eyes.

  You’ll have for bridesmaids Pain and Dread,

  For vows, you’ll jabber blasphemies.

  My scalding flesh will be your gown,

  And Agony your bridal song.

  You shall both be my bread

  And, senses reeling, watch me fed.

  O maids, prepare her swiftly!

  Speedily her loins unlace!

  Her tender paps anoint,

  And bare unto my seething face!

  Thus, dear girls, he ballads and rondelets his belusted, thus he waltzes her spirit through dark, empty halls of expectation, of always-hearkening Horror, until the dance has reached that last, closed room of consummation!

  As many times as the girls flung these pages onto the table, they picked them up again after short hesitation. Both Sheri and Patti were very marginal readers, but the flashes of coherent imagery in the letter kept them coming back to the cryptic parts, trying to pick the lock of their meaning. They held menace even in their very calligraphy, whose baroque, barbed elegance seemed sardonic and alien. The mere sonority of some of the obscure passages evoked vivid images, a sense of murky submersion in benthic pressures of fearful expectation, while unseen giants abided nearby in the dark.

  The document’s cumulative effect on Patti was more of melancholy than fear. The john who wrote it was a hurt-freak, sure, but the letter-writing types blew it off that way and never came to dealing harm. The girls had done some blow from Sheri’s vial to clear their heads from the beers, and Patti’s body was liking it; she wa
s feeling stronger than she had for days. This letter writer’s words were strange, yes, this incredible gloominess hung over them—but then, bottom line, this was a very easy fifty bucks.

  Sheri, on the other hand, got a little freaked about it. She’d started drinking much earlier in the day, she’d had a lot more blow than Patti, and her nerves now were wearing down. She was still laughing at things, but the humor was very thin. “I’ll tell you what, girl, these are weird vibes I’m getting today. You know what? I did kinda hear like, music. Behind the door…? Now we get this shit!” and she swept her hands at the pages but not touching them, as a woman might try to shoo off a spider. “You know what let’s do? Let’s have a sleep-over at your place, I’ll come sleep over, just like slumber parties.”

  “That’d be fun! But you sleep in my bed, no kicking, OK?”

  Sheri cawed with relieved laughter—her sleep-kicking a joke with them. Sensing Sheri’s fear—her desperation not to be alone tonight—scared Patti in turn.

  They walked the sidewalks through the almost-night, headlights blazing everywhere, both of them so glad of each other’s company it almost embarrassed them.

  At the all-night Safeway they got provisions: sloe gin, vodka, bags of ice, 7UP, bags of chips and puffs and cookies and candy bars. They repaired with their purchases to Patti’s place.

  She had a small cottage in a four-cottage court, with very old people living in the other three units. The girls shoved the bed into the corner so they could drop pillows against all the walls to lean back on. They turned on the radio and the TV, then got out the phone book and started making joke calls to people with funny names while eating, drinking, smoking, watching, listening, and bantering with each other.

  Their consciousness outlasted their provisions, but not by long. Soon, back to back, they slept; bathed and laved by the gently burbling soundwash and the ash-grey light of pulsing images.

  They woke to a day that was sunny, windy, and smogless. They rose at high, glorious noon and walked to a coffee shop for breakfast. The breeze was combing buttery light into the waxen fronds of the palms, while the Hollywood Hills seemed most opulently brocaded—under the sky’s flawless blue—with the silver-green of sagebrush and sumac.

  As they ravened breakfast, they plotted borrowing a car and taking a drive. Then Sheri’s pimp walked in. She waved him over brightly, but Patti was sure she was as disappointed as herself. Rudy took a chair long enough to inform Sheri how lucky she was he’d run into her, since he had something important for her that afternoon. Contemptuously he snatched up the bill and paid for both girls. Sheri left in tow, and gave Patti a rueful wave from the door.

  Patti’s appetite left her. She dawdled over coffee and stepped at last, unwillingly, out into the day’s polychrome splendor. Its very clarity took on a sinister quality of remorselessness. Behold, the whole world and all its children moved under the glaring sun’s brutal, endless revelation. Nothing could hide. Not in this world…though of course there were other worlds, where beings lie hidden immemorially…

  She shivered as if something had crawled across her. The thoughts had passed through Patti, but were not hers. She sat on a bus-stop bench and tightly crossed her arms as if to get a literal hold on herself. The strange thoughts, by their feeling, she knew instinctively to be echoes raised somehow by what they had read last night. Away with them, then! The creep had had more than his money’s worth of reading from her already, and now she would forget those unclean pages. As for her depression, it was a freakish sadness caused by the spoiling of her holiday with Sheri, and it was silly to give in to it.

  Thus she rallied herself and got to her feet. She walked a few blocks without aim, somewhat stiff and resolute. At length the sunlight and her natural health of body had healed her mood, and she fell into a pleasant, veering ramble down miles of Hollywood residential streets, relishing the cheap cuteness of the houses and the lushness of their long-planted trees and gardens.

  Almost she left the entire city. A happy, rushing sense of her freedom grew upon her, and she suddenly pointed out to herself that she had nearly four hundred dollars in her purse. She came within an ace of swaggering into a Greyhound station with two quickly packed suitcases and buying a ticket to either San Diego or Santa Barbara, whichever had the earlier departure time. With brave suddenness to simplify her life and remove it, at a stroke, from the evil that had seemed to haunt it recently…

  In the end, it was Patti’s laziness that made her veer from this decision. The packing, the bus ride, the looking for a new apartment, the searching for a job…so many details and hours of tedium! And as she meditated on the toilsomeness of it all, she found that these familiar old Hollywood residential streets were taking on a new allure.

  And really, how could she leave? After what had it been? Four? Five years? After so long, Hollywood was basically her hometown. These shady little streets with their root-buckled sidewalks—they were so well known to her, yet so full of interest.

  She had turned onto a still, green block, gorgeously scented and overhung by huge old peppertrees. She was some few dozen yards into the block before she realized that the freeway had cut it off at the far end. But at that end a black-on-yellow arrow indicated a narrow egress, so she kept walking. Then, several houses ahead, a very large man in overalls appeared, dragging a huge German shepherd across the lawn.

  Patti saw a new brown van parked by the curb, and recognized it and the man at once. The vehicle was one of two belonging to Fat Face’s stray refuge, and the man was one of his two full-time collectors.

  He had the struggling brute by the neck with a noosed stick. He stopped and looked at Patti with some intensity as she approached. The vine-drowned cottage whose lawn he stood on was dark, tight shut, and seemed deserted—as did the entire block—and it struck Patti that the man could have spotted the dog by chance and might now be thinking it hers. She smiled and shook her head as she came up.

  “He’s not mine! I don’t even live around here!”

  Something in the way her words echoed down the stillness of the street gave Patti a pang. She was sure they had made the collector’s eyes narrow. He was tall, round, and smooth, with a face of his employer’s type, though not as jovial. He was severely clubfooted and bloat-legged on the left, as well as being inordinately bellied, all things to which the coveralls lent a merciful vagueness. The green baseball cap he wore somehow completed the look of ill-balance and slow wit that the man wore.

  But as she got nearer, already wanting to turn and run the other way, she received a shocking impression of strength in the uncouth figure. The man had paused in a half turn and was partly crouched—not a position of firm leverage. The dog, whose paws and muzzle showed some Bernard, surely weighed well over a hundred and fifty pounds, and it fought with all its might, but its struggles sent not even a tremor through its captor’s massive arm; the animal was as immovably moored as to a tree. Patti edged to one side of the walk, pretending a wariness of the dog, which its helplessness made droll, and moved to pass. The collector’s hand, as if absently, pressed down on the noose. The beast’s head seemed to swell, its struggles grew more galvanic and constricted by extreme distress. And while thus smoothly he began throttling the beast, the collector cast a glance up and down the block and stepped into Patti’s path, effortlessly dragging the animal with him.

  They stood face to face, very near. The ugly mathematics of peril swiftly clicked in her brain; the mass, the force, the time—all were sufficient. The next couple of moments could finish her. With a jerk he could kill the dog, drop it, seize her, and thrust her into the van. Indeed, the dog was at the very point of death. The collector began to smile nastily, and his breath came—foul and oddly cold—gusting against her face. Then something began to happen to his eyes. They were rolling up, like a man’s when he’s coming, but they didn’t roll white; they were rolling up a jet-black—two glossy obsidian globes eclipsing from below the watery blue ones. Her lungs began to gather air to scream.
A taxicab swung onto the street.

  The collector’s grip eased on the half-unconscious dog. He stood blinking furiously, and it seemed he could not unwind his bulky body from the menacing tension it had taken on. He stood, still frozen on the very threshold of assault, and the cold foulness still gusted from him with the labor of his breathing. In another instant Patti’s reflexes fired and she was released with a leap from the curb out into the street, but there was time enough for her to have the thought she knew that stench the blinking gargoyle breathed.

  And then she was in the cab. The driver sullenly informed her then of her luck in catching him on his special shortcut to a freeway on-ramp. She looked at him as if he’d spoken in a foreign tongue. More gently he asked her destination, and without thought she answered, “The Greyhound station.”

  Flight. With sweet, simple motion to cancel Hollywood, and its walking ghosts of murder, and its lurking plunderers of the body, and its nasty, nameless scribblers of letters whose pleasure it was to defile the mind with nightmares. But of course, she must pack. She rerouted the driver to her apartment.

  This involved a doubling back that took them across the street of her encounter. The van was still parked by the curb, but neither collector nor dog was in sight. Oddly, the van seemed to be moving slightly, rocking as if with interior movement of fitful vigor. Her look was brief, from a half-block distance, but in the shady stillness the subtle tremoring made a vivid impression.

  Then she remembered Fat Face. Of course! She could report the driver to him. His majestic face, his bland avuncular smile—the comforting aura of him flooded soothingly over her fear. What, after all, had happened? A creepy disabled guy with an eye infection had been dangerously tempted to rape her. Fat Face would talk to him. Fat Face would vigorously protect her from any further danger. And meanwhile, in the telling of the story…Patti smiled, planning her pretty embarrassment at the intimate topic; she would express her girlish gratitude so warmly. It would lead smoothly to the tender seduction of her fantasy.