All the way out to the Pickman house, Robin sat like one who dreams, and in dreams quests for something unknown, yet earnestly desired. In vain did Ms. Pickman mention the many points of local interest they passed on their drive. The brooding towers of Miskatonic University elicited as little response from her enamored swain as did the Black Goat of the Woods Dairy Farm.
At last the ancient car took a sharp turn off the main road and began to climb a badly potholed and rutted street. The rain had stopped, and a thick white mist clung to the windows. Higher and higher they climbed. Robin wondered how his fair conductress could see her hand in front of her face under such conditions. True, it was a hand rather … wider than the norm; longer as well as wider, with the most enchanting little webs of translucent skin between the fingers.
Ms. Pickman’s eyes were equally extraordinary, albeit they protruded perhaps a smidgen more than the currently acceptable “look” for women. Robin gave a mental snort. What traitorous thoughts were these, to expect his newfound ladylove to truckle to hollow aesthetic trends? If Brooke Shields could set a new fashion for Sasquatch eyebrows, why couldn’t Ms. Pickman do the same for eyes that were—what was the word he sought? And why did he keep thinking of Kermit the Frog?
Wonderful eyes! The thicker and more impenetrable the miasma surrounding the vehicle, the rounder they seemed to get. Indeed, they appeared to glow with an alien luminescence, although Robin shrugged this observation aside as the fanciful imaginings of his passion-pummeled heart. He took full advantage of her concentration on the road to pay her silent worship.
“Here we are!” Ms. Pickman’s exclamation of victory and relief shattered Robin’s tender dream of love. She leaped from the car with that same ichthyous grace which had first captivated him. He did his clumsy best to scramble after.
His first sight of the Pickman residence froze him in his tracks.
The strange high house in the mist loomed above them. Robin had never seen a gambrel roof before, especially not one with a Garfield wind sock hanging from the eaves. The clapboard walls were speckled with unwholesome fungoid growths whose very forms bespoke an ageless, dreaming evil from before the dawn of Time; especially the patch of phosphorescent mildew just under the front windows in the shape of Papa Smurf. The chill, malevolent eyes of the plastic flamingos on the lawn fixed upon his every move, and their sinister painted beaks whispered of the black and terrible voids between the stars where even now, Elvis might still be alive.
Every healthy instinct for survival screamed for Robin to flee. But there was Ms. Pickman, silhouetted in the open doorway, beckoning to him.
“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your coming all this way to help me with my book, Mr. Pennyworth,” she breathed. “Now, you come right inside and take off those wet things.” As she stepped from sight, he could just barely hear her add, “You can get a fantastic view of the Arkham Megamall from the attic, if I can manage to get those silly old shutters pried open.”
He could do no more than follow where his heart led. The door slammed shut behind him with dreadful finality.
Somewhere a nameless horror gibbered.
August 30, 1990
Dear Ms. Pickman:
Your letter of the 20th was such a wonderful surprise. To think that our Mr. Pennyworth was instrumental in persuading you to visit New York! All of us here at Columbine Press are looking forward to welcoming you on your first trip to the “Big Apple.”
You mention that you will be accompanied by some old family connections, in the capacity of chaperones. How perfectly charming and Old World-y of you! Their expressed concern for your safety here is laudable, if unnecessary. I trust that all of you will soon see that New York is not quite the hotbed of vice and crime that the more sensationalism-minded newspapers paint it to be.
When you do arrive, I hope we can settle the last few miniscule quibbles I have with the manuscript of Fires on the Sea which Mr. Pennyworth brought back from your first meeting. I am still enchanted by the book’s setting. The sleepy little port of Innsmouth is so small-town America, and therefore so perfect for reader-identification. If torrid passions can blaze in Innsmouth, there may be hope for Buffalo.
I also adore your mysterious sea-captain hero. Who’d have thought a name like Uriah Whateley could be so sexy? But it is! I can just picture Richard Chamberlain in the part, come blockbuster mini-series time.
My quibble is with your heroine—or should I say the late Ms. Lovecraft’s heroine? (I still think of Fires as your book.) As you can see from the enclosed Writers’ Guidelines, strong reader-empathy with the heroine is a must. I just can’t see enough of our readers identifying with Captain Whateley’s exotic South Seas bride. Could you rewrite her into the role of the “other woman” and have him courting one of the local girls instead? Maybe Lavinia Gilman? And while you’re making those little changes on the Polynesian lady, could you please do something about her teeth?
I am very surprised that our Mr. Pennyworth did not make a similar suggestion to you. He usually has a keen eye for such things. But then, he has not been in the best of health since his return from Arkham.
I am looking forward to meeting you soon.
Best,
Marybeth
Robin Pennyworth closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and tried to think of Sarah. It didn’t work any better than those hokey self-actualization tapes. Ms. Conran remained behind the desk, at the helm, and on his ass.
“—all the stupid ideas you’ve ever had—!” Gone was the smile, the insinuating charm, all mention of his previous successes with the O’Hara Fabric and Flagrante Delicto series. No sooner had the polished toe of his Italian wing tip crossed her threshold, but Marybeth Conran gave him to know that he had been demoted from dear boy to dog meat.
“—and her goddam chaperones for me to feed! Chaperones! No wonder the sex scenes in Fires suck dead seagulls.”
Robin puffed out his chest, trying to look formidable. It didn’t work. Even sitting down, Ms. Conran was a head taller than he. With all the dignity he could muster, Robin replied, “I thought she handled those scenes very well.”
“If that’s all she handled.” Ms. Conran had a nasty chuckle, the sort of laugh capable of assuming an independent existence of pinching beachboys and stuffing sawbucks down the front of Chippendale’s dancers’ working togs.
“Ms. Conran, what are you implying?” Robin felt his blotchy complexion flame a uniform lobster-red.
The disreputable chuckle returned, accompanied by a vulgar snicker it had picked up in a dockside bar. “Oh, nothing, Robin. Not a thing; except that someone in this room called into the office from Arkham to take five vacation days all of a sudden. Five!”
Robin pursed his lips. “There were a number of questions I had to resolve with Ms. Pickman concerning her book. I thought that as long as I was there already—”
“Oh, no, darling; that won’t wash. You’re also the bright boy who convinced our Ms. Pickman to come to New York. After she summoned that precious coterie of chaperones from the nethermost pit of Hell!”
Robin startled. “How did you know where they came—?”
Ms. Conran ignored him, on a full-scale rant. “You can’t fool me, Robin. I know what’s what. The only creature more starved for passion than a Romance reader is a Romance writer. Clever Robin, to seize the opportunity. Heaven knows, you mustn’t get too many of them. I could almost find it in me to pity the poor child. If everything Chuckie Ward tells me is true, she’s led a life of such isolation that when you stumbled into her life, no wonder she mistook you for a man.”
No spectrograph in the world could accurately chart the rapid ebb and flow of colors that washed over Robin Pennyworth’s face. He went so far as to show his teeth to Ms. Conran in something other than a sycophantic smile. “That’s—that’s a 1—a piece of disinformation! Ms. Pickman and I are in love!”
The moment he said it, he wished he had the power to retroactively cut out his tongue and feed it to
the formless abominations that wallowed in the primordial ooze of some blue-litten abyss and were allergic to pizza.
Ms. Conran’s lips tilted upward with the lazy grace of a python in a locked chicken coop. “Love? Is that it, dear boy? Is that why the shy and retiring Ms. Pickman agreed to come to New York after all, when the thought of Boston once scared her out of her miniscule mind? To be with the man of her dreams?” Ms. Conran’s voice went sharply from molasses taffy to A Night on Bald Mountain. “To allow her to talk to other writers? To introduce her to agents? Even, dare I say, to show that petticoated snip what a real book contract should look like?”
Robin’s tongue, still in place, was rendered useless by Ms. Conran’s tirade. Finally he was able to regain control of it long enough to stammer, “I—I never—I—I guess this means I’m fired?”
Anger spent, Ms. Conran folded her hands and gave Robin a smile that peeled his neurons raw. “Hardly,” she purred. She came from behind her desk, and as she spoke, she began to pace the dhurrie in gradually expanding helices that brought her subtly nearer to her prey.
“Really, Robin, if I fired everyone who made an itsy-bitsy faux pas, however would I explain to Ms. Smith why there was no one at the Christmas party?” Even Marybeth Conran’s normally unassailable calm quivered to the roots at mention of Ms. Clarissa Ashley Smith, publisher and avatar of Columbine Press.
“Then you understand—?” Robin could scarcely believe it. Visions of his head on a cartoon chopping block faded.
By this, Ms. Conran was close enough to drape her arm around his shoulders. “Certainly. Provided that we clean up the little mess we’ve made. I just reread Fires on the Sea this morning. If the torchlight dance on the reef scene doesn’t rope in the readers, I’ll go back to editing Elves with Really Big Swords trilogies.”
Robin could feel Destiny pressing down upon his shoulders with an even heavier hand than Ms. Conran’s. His guts told him not to listen to another word from his diabolical mentor’s mouth; rather to square his shoulders, stiffen his upper lip, and tell the lady just where she could stick her trilogies. Alas for the heroic gesture, he was a man in love, and as such had given bound and wriggling human sacrifices to Fortune. Suddenly job security had become intrinsically tied to dreams of the tastefully small wedding, the rose-covered condo, the pitter-patter and slap-slap-slap of little feet. He could not go through with it.
“What do you want me to do, Ms. Conran?” he asked.
She smiled.
Sarah Pickman sat primly on the edge of the hotel bed, reading a note that her Robin had left for her at the front desk. Her accommodations had been selected on the basis of economy alone, and would give Leona Helmsley a case of the screaming pips. Most of the decorative accessories had been bolted to the nearest convenient surface, although it was difficult to visualize anyone wanting to steal them. Perhaps the establishment’s owner was anticipating the advent of the occasional guest with taste, who might try to remove the bulbous lamp, the sappy “art” print, or the mutant swan-and-potato-shaped ashtray in order to give them decent burial. The room’s minimal charms were further diminished by the fact that the special New York godling in charge of Optimized Tourist Aggravation had caused the air-conditioning to die on the hottest Labor Day weekend in ages. The room was cramped, ugly, sweltering, suffocating, nearly lightless, and a miasma of nauseous smells.
“Ahhhh,” Great Cthulhu sighed, stretching out in the bathtub. “All the comforts of home.”
“Sshhh.” Sarah laid a finger to her lips. “I’m trying to read.”
“Read it out loud,” came a voice from the closet. “And good and loud. These damned shoggoths are making so much noise I can hardly hear myself gibber.”
“Why do you need to know what’s in Sarah’s mail?” Great Cthulhu shot back.
“Oh, that’s right.” The thing in the closet uttered a sarcastic snort. “Nobody has to know anything around here but Great Cthulhu. Nobody can take a little healthy interest in what Sarah’s doing or who she’s seeing but you, right, you bet, sure. Who am I to ask one little question about the things that matter to her? I’m just Nyarlathotep, that’s all. You got a message for one of the Great Old Ones, then right away it’s ‘Yo, Nyarlathotep! Lookin’ goo, homeboy! You wanna take this message to Azathoth at the center of all infinity and see if you can get him to stop bubbling and blaspheming long enough to give me a straight answer for a change?’ Sure, when it’s neither-snow-nor-rain-nor-fungi-from-Yuggoth time, then it’s anything I want. But the minute I’m off-duty it’s ‘Shove him in the closet with the shoggoths!’ You ever been stuck with a bunch of shoggoths any length of time? Do you know how damned many knock-knock jokes they tell? Do you?”
A squamous tentacle whipped out the bathroom door, flicked open the closet, and jabbed inside. A pained yelp responded, then silence.
Great Cthulhu made a world-weary sound midway between tsk-tsk and n’ha’ghaa. “Nobody likes a kvetcher, Nyarlathotep,” he said.
“I don’t mind reading this aloud,” Sarah said, raising meek eyes toward the open bathroom door. “It does concern all of us.”
Great Cthulhu waved one paw and a selection of tentacles at her in a gesture of regal munificence. “Proceed.”
Sarah cleared her throat and did so: “ ‘September 2, 1990—
“ ‘My darling Sarah!
“ ‘Oh, my beloved girl, was it just minutes ago that you and I clasped hands above the brioches? Some call it brunch; I call it Heaven. Anyplace is Heaven, to my eyes, if you are there.’ ”
The closet gave a nasty titter. “Clearly a man who’s never been to sunken R’lyeh for the I ♥ Dagon Festival.”
Sarah shushed him and went on. “ ‘Our eyes sought each other with a hunger that could not be denied. My lips thirsted to drink love’s rapturous bliss from those delicious lips of yours. My whole being longed to enfold your adorable form in an eternal embrace which—’ ”
“Are you sure you want to read this out loud?” Great Cthulhu came out of the bathroom, all the towels and a bedspread wrapped around his waist.
“No, no, let her read!” Nyarlathotep called from the closet. “This is getting good.”
“This is getting personal.” Very much on his dignity, the Great Old One flushed a rosy red to the tips of his tentacles.
“Yah! Cthulhu’s a pru-ude, Cthulhu’s a pru-ude!” Nyarlathotep’s singsong taunt was taken up by a mixed shoggoth chorus, with a few dholes chiming in to chant bass.
“Now that will be enough of that.” Sarah waggled an admonishing finger at the closet. “If I don’t see some improvement in the general level of behavior around here, I’m not taking any of you with me to visit Red Hook tomorrow.”
The threat worked on Nyarlathotep, who stopped teasing Great Cthulhu and commenced whining about how it wasn’t fair, that he was being nice as pie, that some people he could mention ate the bellhop and tried to blame it on others.
Sarah confronted Cthulhu, shocked. “You ate the bellhop?”
The Great Old One looked shamefaced. “It seemed the easiest thing to do at the time. I never know how much to tip them, so—” Abruptly, he went on the offensive. “Anyhow, I don’t need you to take me to Red Hook. I am privy to the secret passageways of sunken R’lyeh. I have flown between the cosmic gulfs of Eblis. I have inscribed arcane and eldritch graffiti upon the walls of Eryx. I have howled obscenities at alien moons and stalked the witch-haunted streets of—”
“You have never taken the subway to Brooklyn,” Sarah said, putting paid to all the dread Ancient One’s posturings. “Now would you please pay attention to what Robin writes? This concerns us all.”
Having restored order and maintained authority, Sarah Pickman skipped over several further paragraphs of Robin’s most empurpled prose and finally arrived at:
“ ‘—it is therefore with the deepest sorrow that I must now urge you to return to Arkham, my darling. You must know how every moment out of sight of those delectably batrachian orbs of you
rs is like a dagger through my heart—’ ”
“He’d better be referring to your eyes,” Great Cthulhu muttered. “Orbs indeed.”
“ ‘—and yet I will make the sacrifice because it is for your own good. New York is in truth a monstrous and chaotic wasteland of nighted monoliths, their insane angles answering only to a hideous and unwholesome geometry whose origins are not of this world. You know what I mean; you saw Batman. And can I, solely for the selfish gratification of my own desires, ask you to spend any more time than needful in this quagmire of hellish horror? No, for your welfare is infinitely more precious to me.
“ ‘Go then, my love, but go with the knowledge that our parting will be a brief one. Could I live were it not so? Ms. Conran has promised me a raise and a promotion in the near future, to coincide with the publication date of Fires on the Sea. When that happy event transpires, I will at last be able to ask you the question nearest my heart. Dare I hope your answer will be … “Yes”? Your Robin.’ ”
Sarah folded the letter and laid it in her lap. Her eyes filled with tears, her thin lips trembled. In a quaking voice she asked, “Well, what do you make of that?”
From the air shaft just outside the room’s only window, an answer came: “If you want my opinion, the little bastard’s giving you the old heave-ho. Breaking off the relationship. Looking for more ‘personal space.’ Initiating a cooling-off period. El dumpo supremo. Giving you the gate. Sending you pack—”
“Shut up, Hastur,” Great Cthulhu directed. “For someone who’s so damned proud of being called ‘the Unspeakable,’ you could do us all a favor and try to be ‘the Unspeaking’ too. Who devolved to primal ooze and made you the big expert on personal space?”
“You kidding? In the midnight abyss where the black stars hang we got nothing but personal space!”
Sore pressed, Sarah at last gave in to the urge to sob. Her grief immediately turned the Great Old Ones’ attention from their petty squabbles. Great Cthulhu himself slid a paw and two tentacles around the girl’s heaving shoulders.
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