"Well what's that to me?" Fishhook asked. "I couldn't pay for a good go-round thump-in-the-bed even if there was a fancy Gibralter girl there who was blind and ugly and stupid enough to take my money."
I guess a man's got to know his limitations.
Fishhook was definitely not anywhere close to the good looking side of things, in fact he leaned a good long way towards maximum ugly.
"Gibralter's is awful close to the Hand Grenade," I pointed out. "I figure it's only a matter of time before old Gnarly Hotep is over there peeing in the beer and generally spoiling and soiling the way of things."
That got Fishhook's attention, right sharp.
"You think he might go into the Hand Grenade?" Fishhook asked.
The Hand Grenade is our local tavern. Randolph Waldo, the proprietor of the Hand Grenade had originally wanted to call his tavern Hand Grenades and Horseshoes, but he'd run out of sign paint and decided that Hand Grenade was close enough for what he'd been aiming for.
"An elder god can build himself up a powerful kind of thirst riding bare back donkeys on top of fancy girls," I pointed out. "Sex will lead to liquor just as sure as shit will lead to stink."
Being the thinking man that I was, I knew this ploy was all that was needed to stir Fishhook into some kind of action. You see, as far as Fishhook was concerned, Gnarly Hotep could burn down churches and vandalize orphanages and lap dance the local chapter of the Virgin Harmonica Celestial Choir, but when he started in on messing around at our local tavern, he'd stepped his cloven hoof way too far across the don't-go-there-buddy line. We're talking verging on sacrilege.
Fishhook stood up.
"I'm in," he said. "We boot this asshole out of the Hand Grenade and then Donny can buy the beer."
"Glad you got it all figured out," I said. "Are you in on this dance, Willy?"
"You're talking Elder Gods, Donnie," Stout Willy pointed out. "That's like marching into a Gatling gun shoot-out with a starter pistol in your hand."
"Elder God or not," I said. "You plant a starter pistol in the right anatomical location and you can cause someone a world of hurt."
"The anatomy of an Elder God is likely to be a hell of a lot different than a Nova Scotia fisherman," Fishhook mildly pointed out.
I gave Fishhook my best don't-fuck-with-me stare, as taught to me by my sainted Grandmother who had died twelve years back but was too damn stubborn to let anyone pot her into a grave.
In fact, as far as I knew Old Granny was still stumping around the back hills of Empty Harbour, pieces of her falling on the ground like autumn leaves paratrooping out of the cold November oaks.
"There's got to be something we can do," I said. "What do you figure, Stout Willy?"
Stout Willy chewed on this for a while. Well, actually what he was chewing on was a tattered copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I guess it helped him to think, or maybe he was just trying to up his fiber intake.
Finally, he spoke.
"Near about the only thing that I know of that can defeat old Gnarly Hotep is an incantation read from the pages of the Necromnicon."
Now we were getting somewhere.
"So whereabouts do we come by this book?" I asked.
"Seems to me I used to have a copy of that there unholy tome in my reading stacks, but it went missing a while back."
Him having the book didn't surprise me one bit. Stout Willy always had himself a mountainous stack of reading material, culled from every yard sale, garage sale, and church rummage sale in the county.
"You sure you didn't accidentally drop it down your potty hole?" Fishhook asked.
Stout Willy looked hurt at that suggestion. Fishhook was never much on sensitivity.
"It's got to be around here somewhere," I said, gingerly sorting through a handy stack of books.
"I took it, Donny," Angus confessed.
I must have looked astonished on account of I hadn't even realized Angus could read. Angus studied the toes of his gum rubbers. I knew that look that he was wearing on his face and it worried me some.
"What did you do with the book, Angus?"
He kept looking at his gum rubbers, as if the mud-stained toes might have held the secrets of the universe in them.
"Angus?" I asked louder, trying to guilt it out of him.
"I cut it up and used it."
Stout Willy started making cod-out-of-water faces, like he couldn't believe what was going on.
"Why'd you cut it up?" I asked.
"It was the biggest book I could find. I needed me a hiding place for my origami collection, so I glued the pages down by dipping them in wallpaper paste, and then I cut a box inside of the pages with a box-cutter."
Fishhook was steaming like an oyster on the grill. "Angus, are you stupid or do you just act that way?"
"Hey it was hard work," Angus protested. "The pages kept screaming while I was cutting them out, even after I burned them with my family Bible which my mother had already erased my name out of, and salted the ashes down with Dead Sea salt."
"Well hell," I said. "That fixes that."
Stout Willy kept making them cod fish faces, looking even worse than when he'd found those dozen eggs spoiled. Looking at him now, I kind of wondered if he was ever going to truly recover.
I tried to make the best of it.
You've got to look for the less-brown side of the used toilet paper, as my granddad Mulligan always used to tell me.
"I guess we're just going to have to find ourselves some other way of getting Gnarly Hotep to hell out of Empty Harbour," I said.
And that's when the trouble really started.
The trouble was old Gnarly Hotep hadn't bothered waiting for us four to come up with some sort of plan of action. He was way too busy stirring up his own particular brand of horseplay.
He started out by raising the dead up out of the Empty Harbour Burying Grounds. He set the revivified remains to jigging a lively two step; while he played himself a cosmically inspired rendition of "The Darktown Strutter's Ball" on a fiddle carved from the petrified carcass of a Ming dynasty Siamese tomcat, strung with a strangler's garrotte, and coaxed with a bow of cedar culled from a Frig-blessed spriglet of Yggdrasil with a trio of castrato banshees wailing in background harmony.
And that's right about when we arrived on the scene. It had taken us nearly an hour to hitch up Fishhook's trailer to my dune buggy, and nearly three hours to get Stout Willy and his brooding toilet off of the dump-tug and on to the trailer. While we were loading, me and Angus tried to figure out just why in the hell Gnarly Hotep would ever want to stop here in Empty Harbour in the first place. There wasn't much more for a body to do for entertainment around here, other than to stand on the shore and throw mouldy bread wrapped around homemade M-80's up at the hungry seagulls, watching the grey feathered tide wash in and out.
"I think he came here for the cod tongues," Angus said. Angus is always thinking with his stomachs. I'm certain he has three of them. One for swallowing, one for digesting and the third I just don't want to talk about in mixed company, however the biochemical warfare department of the Government has been trying to decipher the third stomach secret for years. Personally, I think they just ought to declare Angus's rectal expulsions as being weapons of mass destruction and a hazard to world peace and oboe recitals.
"Man," Angus continued. "The way my mom fries them little suckers up is a thing to be believed. Right scrumptious they are, cod tongues and scrunchins, all crisp and crackly and oozing with good pork grease."
"Shut up and lift," Fishhook said, bending and stooping beneath the weight of Stout Willy's brooding throne.
"I'm lifting," I said. "Talking makes the load lighter."
"Talking is nothing more than blowing hot air," Fishhook said. "It never helped anyone, but ear doctors."
"Well what in the hell do you think floats zeppelins?" I asked. "Nothing but hot air and high hopes. Just keep lifting and don't look back, because I'm one step and a half a handful of toilet
paper behind you all the way."
"Why in the hell would I be thinking of the Hindenburg?" Fishhook nervously said.
"Cod tongues make a lot of gas," Angus said.
"Oh the humanity," I said.
"Shut up and lift," Fishhook repeated.
"I wish I had me some cod tongues right now," Angus said and kept on lifting.
Now a cod tongue is just what you might figure it is. You roll them in flour with a bit of salt and pepper and fry them up with a panful of scrunchins. Now scrunchins are the fat part of the pig, fried to a crackling sizzle. The resulting combination and contrast between the sloppy gelatinous cod tongue and the crisp and greasy scrunchins is, at best, an acquired taste. I got to tell you cod tongues taste no better on the dinner plate than they ever did in the cod's funky roe-chewing mouth.
"Cod tongues and scrunchins," Angus dreamily repeated. "Hmm-hmm."
"Have you counted your cholesterol lately, Angus?" I asked.
"I'm not big on math," Angus said. "Is it lunch time yet?"
"We ate lunch three hours ago," I said. "Are you thinking about food again?"
"What else is there to think about?"
"Beer, women, tax reports, global warming and women," I said, ticking them off on the fingers of one hand.
"You said women twice," Fishhook pointed out.
"They count twice in my book," I assured him.
"Hm," Angus harrumphed. "Must be new math."
I shook my head at him. "Angus, you really ought to have your head examined. All you ever think about is your stomach."
"How is examining my head going to help my stomach?" Angus asked. "I repeat, what else is there to worry about?"
"What indeed?" I added.
While we were busy loading Stout Willy, Police Chief Harnigan drove his brand new squad car on out to the Burying Grounds armed with a sawed off shotgun and a bullhorn, swearing to put an end to the old god's shenanigans.
"I'll show the bilge bastard," had been Harnigan's last words of farewell.
Two hours later Police Chief Harnigan returned back to the police station wearing nothing but a hot pink Victoria's Secret French lace flyaway baby doll nightie and peddling a Flintstones Big Wheel Nova Scotia plaid ride-on toy. He kept babbling on about bloated floating women and a tentacle that he swore was growing out of a mole on his left shoulder blade.
So much for the official police action.
That left any setting-to-right that needed doing to me and Angus Thibault, Empty Harbour's unofficial A-Team, only we'd never made it that far on into the alphabet.
So we loaded up the truck and we headed on in.
"Drive," Fishhook said.
I kept the pedal where it was. I wasn't the least bit interested in speed right about now. I wasn't about to go tearing on into something that I couldn't see coming.
"Stop your worrying," Stout Willy hollered from out back. "Gnarly Hotep feeds off this stuff. Fear, paranoia, nightmares and doubt. He fills the air with terror and then sucks it up."
"I bet you he's the life of the party come election time," Fishhook grumbled.
We pulled on into the Burying Grounds.
The joint was hopping like a kangaroo full of jack rabbits salted down with jumping juice. We're talking jigs and reels, black bottom, can can, bunny hop, tango, morris, quadrille and saraband. Hip-hop and Vienna waltz, allemande and cotillion, two step and turkey trot. The dead were up and moving and shaking and it sure was one hell of a sight to see.
Everybody that had been buried in the Empty Harbour Burying Grounds and even a few who had not, were heel-toeing and high-stepping, cutting a caper that would stone a satyr speechless. They had laid out a granite dance-hall patio stomping floor constructed from the overturned gravestones and a few scavenged blocks of beach rock. They lit the proceedings with a bonfire of unclaimed bones and a crackling penumbra of arcing current stolen from the heavens on high.
Gnarly Hotep spared no expense.
And it wasn't just dancing, you understand. High on top of the town father's marble and seaweed encrusted family crypt the revenant bones of the great-great-grandmother of Mayor Hortonby Klingerstone were unashamedly conjugating with the revivified remains of a World War 2 Kriegsmarine Unterseeboot Kapitan Horst-Horst Von Beuller-Beuller, whose drowned carcass had been found washed up on the Empty Harbour beach way back in 1941 and who was unceremoniously buried and pissed upon in an irreverent impromptu midnight interment.
"Whew," Angus whistled. "Talk about limber."
"Ain't nothing like a fine manly jig," I started to say, but then I noticed Fishhook walking right on past us, straight towards Gnarly Hotep.
"Fishhook," I called out. "Hold back here. We don't know what we're doing yet."
Which was gospel truth.
The truth was we didn't know what we were doing or what we were getting into, which never stopped me from getting Angus to poke an alder stick into a hornet's nest or trying to steal the Stilton from my granddaddy's mouse trap with his tongue before.
Only this time was different.
This time we were up against something that weighed pretty heavy.
"You can help me, can't you," Fishhook was saying to Gnarly Hotep as he drew fearlessly nearer. "You can help me find Nessie, can't you?"
"Oh hell," I said. "He's caught under some kind of a spell."
I don't know quite how old Gnarly had done that. I hadn't even seen him gesture hypnotically, like Mandrake the Magician. I figured maybe it came off of him in waves, like a natural aura of concentrated confusion.
"Do you know where my eggs are?" Stout Willy said, walking slowly after Fishhook. "I bet you that you can help me find my missing eggs."
It was like watching a kernel of hope growing into a whole goddamn wishful orchard. Gnarly Hotep had the two of them tuned up like they were the scarecrow and tin man and he was the goddamn evergreen Wizard of Oz. I could feel his innate power curling around in the back of my mind like some kind of runaway diesel snake.
"Angus," I said. "Get out of here before it gets you too."
And then I felt it catch me up like a fish in a net. I was washed up in a whole tsunami of hallucination. I saw this giant in a giant black canoe sailing out beneath me, made of shadow meat and dreams, and I was sailing in it high over Canada.
I could look down and see the jolly thickness of Quebec, the fat lush money vaults of Ontario, the ironing board of the prairies and the deep dark distant Rockies. There were voices talking to me out of the Rocky Mountains. I saw an army of mountain goats parked on every mountain peak, bleating out chants and incantations that threatened to twist my mind inside out.
I looked down and I could see a crawling armada of deep fried cod tongues, with legs and arms and tools of all sorts shooting out from their fat and shapeless deep fried bodies. I could hear them singing in the darkness, Yay Gnarly Hotep, Yay Gnarly Hotep.
They're singing for me, I thought, and when I thought that I felt their tiny amoeba cod tongue legs kicking around inside my skull like a flotilla of Swiss clock wind-up synchronized swimmers.
Now we were on some kind of a long black river that was leading down into a deep dark sewer hole, and down inside the sewer hole I could hear the singing of slugs and mold and darker things. I could see the stars twinkling down in the deep sewer darkness, singing and screaming and tearing out chunks of the sky, and dancing in the heart of it, dancing a crazy assed two step of tonal insanity in the center of the Shining Trapezohedron and standing there in the midst of it all was Nyarlathotep, chaos singer, dark dreamer, dark man, expulsion of the dawn.
"Help me, Angus," I remembered calling.
And then everything exploded all at once.
"Take that asshole," Angus shouted, pumping shotgun blast after shotgun blast of origami paper sculpture into the tall dark figure of Gnarly Hotep.
You had to be there to see it.
Somehow the sculpture seemed to have a negative kind of effect on Gnarly Hotep. Maybe it was because all
of those paper sculptures had been locked up in the hollowed out gut of the Necronomicon. Maybe it was because Angus was just too simple-minded to catch hold of the madness that old Gnarly Hotep was trying to spin. Or maybe, just maybe, there was something more to Angus all along.
In the twinkling of a mad god's eye old Gnarly Hotep went on the ballistic offensive, growing himself some switchblade wings, razored eyes, chattery teeth and a battering ram nose guard. He came running at Angus with everything he had, but Angus blasted away, firing paper cranes and dragons and elephants and salmon and trilobites and pagodas. His entire origami collection, all of his creativity and imagination pumped full blast into Gnarly Hotep's dark screaming form.
"You rotten eyed prick with ears," Angus swore. "I ain't scared of you. Leave my friends be. Leave go of Fishhook and Stout Willy."
What about me, a part of my mind wanted to shriek, but my thoughts were still turned inside out and wrung clean clear dry and beat to death on some rock of desolation and recycled into a fifty-eight year old spinster's hand bound journal of anglicized haiku. My eyes were rattling around like a pair of last ditch Bingo balls and my ears were radar dishes homed in on the secrets of super models and my tongue felt like it had been used and reused as the welcome mat for the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse and the horses they rode in on.
And then all I could see was the moon wide face of my good buddy Angus, shotgun butt whipping the dark messenger of the abomination into a pansy assed pulp, old Gnarly Hotep himself, and then when I was looking it looked to me as if Angus was shotgun whipping me as I was looking up through a billion pair of dirty sunglasses and then everything rolled back into darkness and swam away.
I looked up and saw a seagull, soaring overhead.
"So what happened?" Fishhook asked.
I tried to answer but nothing came out.
"We've had our minds torn asunder by the raving vision of Gnarly Hotep. He's shown us through the dark rear end of the cosmos, the night fears of eternity, the underbelly of blind devious despair, and then Angus went and saved us," Stout Willy summed it up.
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