Best Little Witch-House in Arkham

by Mark McLaughlin

  * * * *

  All that was several years ago. After Phlemuria was destroyed, I moved to Mu and opened a flower shop. After all that dung, I needed to surround myself with prettier odors. The boy helps out around the place. He’s a good kid.

  So, here I sit in my sweet-smelling shop, writing this tale upon my tail. Sha-Boom and Kyle stop by to say ‘Greetings, Qizami!’ every now and then, but they never buy anything. Cheapskates.

  Life is pleasant. I am happy. But late at night, I sometimes remember the sounds made by that vile ball that Blaalador had rolled up. And still, the memory makes me shiver: the bubbly, quavery squawking and squealing of the river lizard’s quivering, slithering, blubbering, slobbering, insidiously twisted liver-blisters…

  The Hopper in the Hayfield

  I. A Gnawing In The Night

  Many are the methods by which living creatures locomote over, through and under the surface of this world of ours. Some soar through the air on wings—diaphanous, membranous, befeathered or perhaps even scaled, as in the case of certain flying fish. Some swim and some simply float, allowing the currents to carry them along with the flotsam, jetsam and other forms of oceanic detritus. Some squirm and writhe, spewing primordial slime to help grease the glistening path of their progress. Some stride proudly over the land, on two, four or even more legs. Some have an odd number of legs, but that’s usually just the result of some accident. Some legged creatures swing by a prehensile tail, which really isn’t a limb but is in fact a handy muscular extension of the spinal column. But among those creatures that stride, one will find a small percentage that move by hopping—by projecting their bodies upward and forward, upward and forward, over and over and over in a pneumatic fashion, machine-like and yet suggestive in its relentlessly rhythmic ambulation. Allow me to tell you what I have observed—what I know—regarding such matters.…

  In the Spring of my twenty-seventh year, my grandfather, Winston Farthington Sorbet, passed away from a heart attack, caused by prolonged, disturbingly intimate contact with a milking machine at his dairy farm outside of the small town of Bentwhistle, Indiana. Being his only living relative, I inherited that farm. But, unlike my grandfather, I had no desire to milk, groom or engage in any other activities with bovines, so I had my solicitor arrange for the herd and milking equipment, and the tractors, wagons, and most of the excess land as well, to be sold at auction. In the end, I was left with a nice plump bank account, along with a plot of land that held a farmhouse, a barn and a bit of hayfield. I figured I would be able to live in the farmhouse and not have to draw a paycheck for at least four years—more than enough time for me to concentrate on and complete the project of my dreams. For I am a writer, and at that time, I was just starting work on said dream project: an alternate history novel that asked—and answered!—the intriguing question, “How would our world be different if Napoleon had been an elderly Asian woman?”

  So finally—once all the agricultural trappings were sold off and my furnishings had been moved into the house—I was able to start my new life, out in the country. The farmhouse was a bizarre structure, with five added sections—hallways with six small rooms—built on in a slipshod, hurried fashion. They shot out from the square central house like the arms of a starfish. In many of those impromptu rooms, the only wiring was an extension cord running from some plug in the original building.

  I had no idea why my grandfather had decided to add on so many rooms in such a slapdash fashion. Most of the rooms held empty wire cages, all streaked with filth, while in others I found metal vats containing stinking fluids in various shades of red, blue, purple, pink and yellow. The contents of the vats all reeked of vinegar, which must have been a chief ingredient in those problematic brews. It took me some time, but using a pump I bought at the local hardware store and several garden hoses screwed together, I was able to siphon all the colored liquids into a ditch behind the house.

  I carried all the wire cages out into the barn, and just left the metal vats where they were. They were ugly and corroded, but they were also too big to remove from the rooms—in fact, it appeared that the rooms had been built around them. So I left them where they were. I was single, and wasn’t planning on inviting company over, so their appearance wasn’t a major concern.

  At the time, I was happy to be left with the barn and small sector of hayfield, for I was at least able to brag that I was a landowner—though the land I was left with really wasn’t good for much. Still, possessing any amount of land can be an uplifting notion. It pleased me to know I owned outright, and was master of, my own special albeit tiny domain.

  One evening, as I was sitting on my porch, gazing at the orange and golden hues of an especially picturesque sunset, I happened to notice a sort of mild turbulence in the hayfield.

  Every now and then, here and there, I would spot multiple pairs of snowy-white, fuzzy protuberances sticking up out of the hay. It soon dawned on me that my little field was populated by a large family of rabbits, happily hopping through the crisp leaves. Easter was coming up in a couple weeks, and so I called out jokingly to the long-eared interlopers, “Which one of you is the Easter Bunny?”

  Imagine my surprise when suddenly, all of the ears stopped in their tracks. The rabbits ceased their hopping, as though disconcerted by my innocent statement. Then, slowly, all the ears lowered into the green growth, and I saw no more of the creatures that night.

  Later, while preparing for bed, I heard a creaking and scraping in one of my grandfather’s slapdash spare rooms, and so I threw on a robe and hurried through the house in the direction of the noise, to see what the matter might be.

  As I opened the door of the room that contained the source of the disturbance, I heard a quick scrambling sound, like that of many little creatures rushing away. I felt a light breeze upon entering the room, and was shocked to see that a portion of a board near the base of a wall had been gnawed away, as though by many rodentlike teeth, allowing a small entrance from the outside. I then realized that one of the floorboards also had been gnawed at, though it was still in one piece. Clearly I had interrupted the vandals before they could finish their dirty work.

  The gnawing had loosened the board, so I pulled up on it along one side, to ascertain what unknown treasure the night’s trespassers had been trying to abscond with. The board came up with a whining creak, and there, hidden amidst mounds of sawdust and mouse droppings, I found a mildewed blue notebook. The cover had been scribbled over with a smeared but still readable title in black ink:

  THE AIEE-SH’TAR EGGS OF BUG’ZHA BHUN-YEH

  There was a metal vat in the middle of that room, so I pushed against it until I had moved it to the wall, covering the hole that had been gnawed there. I then carried the notebook back to my bedroom, where I opened the slender tome and gazed upon the cramped, spidery cursive—my grandfather’s handwriting—therein.

  II. Bloatsome Blasphemies Of The Easter Feaster

  I settled into bed and hugged my pillow tight as I studied that mystery-ensorcelled notebook. The text read as follows:

  “I now realize why I was able to buy this place for so cheap. I was talking to some of the town elders earlier today, and they kept making the Sign of the Rabbit—index and middle fingers held aloft—as they spoke to me. And oh, the things of which they spoke!

  “The age-wizened couple who sold me this place—who have since relocated to Canada—hadn’t mentioned that this farm had been built on unholy ground, where once evil settlers had worshipped the great and terrible nature god Bug’zha Bhun-Yeh. Had I only known that, I might have reconsidered spending my life’s savings on so accursed a chunk of rural real estate.

  “Bug’zha Bhun-Yeh! I have been doing some research in the ‘Rare Books’ section of the Bentwhistle Town Library. Of course they had copies of the Necronomicon and The Book of Eibon—most ‘Rare Books’ sections do—but I was quite shocked to see that they also owned a copy of the very rarest occult volume of all time.

  “Yes, they
possessed a duckskin-bound copy of Der Kwacken-Kulten De Daf’fei-D’ukkh—written in 1684 by that mad necromancer, alchemist and huntsman, Elmharr Fhud. Elmharr was well-versed in ancient secrets, and his mission in life had been to find and eradicate all traces of demon-adulation in his native land of Kartoonia. This was no easy task, for that small but wicked country was—and in fact, has always been, even to the present day—rife with covens, worshipping the hideous likes of Bug’zha Bhun-Yeh, Daf’fei-D’ukkh, and even that stuttering, snout-faced abomination, Por-Kyei Pe’yugg.

  “No doubt the evil settlers who had worshipped dreaded Bug’zha Bhun-Yeh—on the land that is now my farm!—had come to America from Kartoonia, so that they could worship as they pleased.

  “So I checked out Der Kwacken-Kulten De Daf’fei-D’ukkh from the library—but since it was a rare book, valued at many millions of dollars, I was only allowed to take it home for three days. But horror of horrors! I tremble still when I reflect upon what I read in those demon-plagued three days of ultimate madness!

  “Many and varied were the squamous and lugubrious tidbits of elder lore I learned from that fowl-fleshed volume of unspeakableness. Now I know that the day we call Easter is in fact based on an early pagan holiday of sacrifices and ritualistic egg-dyeing known as Aiee-Sh’tar, which celebrates the foul night that Bug’zha Bhun-Yeh came to our world from his horror-hutch beyond the stars!

  “In an especially hideous and rather lengthy footnote started on page 273 and continued onto pages 274 and 275, Elmharr related numerous facts regarding the appearance and origins of Bug’zha Bhun-Yeh. This fearsome and demonic presence stood over eighty feet high, and resembled the worst possible cross between a rabbit, a squid, a grasshopper and a carnivorous plant. It had a flabby body covered with fluffy white fur, with powerful, scaly legs that kicked out backward, like most hopping insects, propelling it up to a quarter-mile per leap. The body was encircled by sinuous green tentacles, that in repose, hung down from around its waist like the verdant stalks of a hula-dancer’s grass skirt.

  “But the head of the creature was by far its most repulsively horrific feature. It had a sleek, rabbitlike skull with moist, blinking pink eyes and a dew-flecked pink nose that twitched nervously. Beneath that nose, its ravenous, fang-lined, saliva-dripping, chomping mouth opened vertically, like the copious maw of a Venus flytrap. Atop its grotesque head reared two long, fleshy, pointed ears, forever turning from side to side, trying to catch the sound of potential prey creeping about, for the loathsome rabbit-god constantly hungered for the satisfying, tangy flavor of living flesh. The diabolical entity possessed a variety of strong mental powers, including telekinesis, as well as the unique ability to break itself down into hundreds of smaller versions of itself, to enable it to track down and devour very small creatures.

  “Bug’zha Bhun-Yeh came to Earth countless aeons ago from the world we humans know as Mars. The creatures that once dwelled there used to call it W’haa-Tzupp-Dokh. The red planet is void of life now—for quite simply, Bug’zha Bhun-Yeh ate it all. And after devouring all of the red planet’s inhabitants, the rabbit-eared one sealed itself into a protective capsule formed of pure psychic energy, and then used its telekinetic powers to send the projectile to our lush green globe.

  “But Bug’zha Bhun-Yeh was considerably weakened by the enormous strain of propelling its own mighty bulk such a phenomenal distance. That is why it hasn’t devoured all of the Earth’s inhabitants—the trip to this world left it crippled, with a reduced appetite. But there may come a day when its health and all-consuming hunger will return. Woe to humanity should that day ever come!”

  At that point, I stopped reading, for I was extremely tired from the evening’s exertions. I tucked the notebook under my pillow and promptly fell asleep. Unfortunately, it had been a bad idea to retire after reading of such frightsome matters. Instantly I lapsed into a nightmare of mind-numbing intensity. I dreamed that I was running through a valley of maroon boulders and orange sand, kicking up clouds of bright dust as I hurried along—for I was being pursued by something monstrously huge, a behemoth that squealed with glee as it hopped after me. In that nocturnal fantasy I was a very fast creature—I appeared to have many dozens of jointed legs, like some kind of millipede—but what pursued me was even faster, for suddenly it grabbed me in a coiling green tentacle, hoisted me up and then slowly began to lower me into a multi-fanged mouth that gnashed from side to side.

  The dream ended with a prolonged crackling sound, as my dream-self realized that what I was hearing was in fact the violent crushing and crunching of my own chitinous exoskeleton…

  III. The Lurkers From Beneath The Barn

  In the morning, over breakfast, I read more from the blue notebook. Every now and then, I would glance out of my kitchen window and spot furry white protuberances moving up and down, out in the hayfield.

  According to the notebook, my grandfather began to notice more and more fuzzy ears out in the field—the very field I’d been watching from my breakfast table. Like me, he never actually saw the rabbits. When I read the final entry in the notebook, it chilled my blood, even though I was eating a warm, butter-laden serving of blueberry flapjacks at the time:

  “Great God in Heaven! It has been months since my last entry—how I shudder as I recall, albeit dimly, the events leading up to my current crisis! For this morning, I hit my head on an open cupboard door in the kitchen, and it knocked me out of the hypnotic stupor imposed upon me by that uncouth creature.

  “Would that I had never found, weeks ago, under those loose, warped floorboards in the barn, that secret entrance to the cavernous crypts under my seemingly innocent farm! Would that I had never stumbled across that unhallowed subterranean temple where the All-Hearing One, Bug’zha Bhun-Yeh, resides when it is not out prowling for small animals to devour! For I now know that the hideous creature, still weak all these aeons later from its trip to Earth, has broken itself down into smaller versions of itself to conserve energy and still allow for greater ease in hunting. In addition, I now realize that those hundreds, maybe thousands of little Bug’zha Bhun-Yeh avatars have been using their psychic powers to compel me to feed them!

  “That is why, for seemingly no reason at all—as though in a trance—I have been building and maintaining so many chicken coops, adding them onto the house itself so that I could collect the eggs as soon as the chickens had exuded them! That is also why I have been coloring the eggs with the sacred dye of Aiee-Sh’tar and leaving them outside, hidden in the grass, for the small avatars of Bug’zha Bhun-Yeh to gobble down during the night! For with each egg, made sacred by that specially formulated dye, Bug’zha Bhun-Yeh grows a little stronger, until at last it will be able to merge again into one mighty creature, so that it can take over our planet and devour every living thing, just like it did on W’haa-Tzupp-Dokh!”

  Then came the last paragraph in the notebook, in which the spidery handwriting grew ever more frantic and hastily scrawled:

  “But no! I cannot let that happen! I am out of that hypnotic trance now, so I must kill myself so I cannot again be enslaved by Bug’zha Bhun-Yeh and forced to feed those hopping avatars more eggs! But first I will get rid of the chickens and hide this notebook—and then!—then I will kill myself! I have always had problems with my heart—perhaps I can somehow induce a fatal heart attack by experiencing an overwhelming surge of excitement. But how? How? Unless—yes, the milking machine—!”

  Simultaneously repulsed and terrified, I threw the notebook away from me. The events detailed in that shocking narrative were simply too bizarre, too outlandish, too nightmarish to believe. All yet all the facts—the cages, the vats, the bunny ears, my Uncle’s death by milking machine—all seemed to point to one inescapable conclusion: namely, that every word in that accursed notebook was true.

  Clearly there was only one thing for me to do. I would have to go into the barn, search out the loose, warped floorboards and see if I could find the entrance to that secret, underground realm o
f terror. And if I did, I also would have to go down into those noisome subterranean depths—perhaps to fight the core swarm of those wee Bug’zha Bhun-Yeh avatars.

  I finished my flapjacks, had another cup of coffee, and then rummaged around in the closet until I found a flashlight and a nice big hammer—perfect for smashing evil little bunny-heads, if necessary. I felt it would be best to act quickly—for after all, Easter, also once known as Aiee-Sh’tar, was coming up in a few weeks. No doubt Bug’zha Bhun-Yeh’s powers would be at their peak on that doom-laden pagan holiday.

  As I walked out of the house and down the porch steps, a flashlight in one hand and a hammer in the other, I suddenly realized that I was being watched.

  The hoppers had crept out of the greenery and were standing in a line by the hayfield. Their lurid tentacles swirled about their bodies, flexing their rubbery muscles. Their fanged, vertical mouths drooled and their dewy pink noses twitched. They stared and glared with loathsome glee at me—and I suddenly found myself feeling sleepy…very sleepy indeed.…

  IV. Keeper Of The Secrets Of Der Kwacken-Kulten

  Time passed in a foggy, dreamlike blur. Then one day, I stumbled over something small and furry as I was leaving the house, and I fell down the porch steps, hitting my head on a rock in the lawn.

  I rose to my feet, confused. A shrill, constant cackling, as of hundreds of chickens, seemed to be coming from the house. I walked back into the building and happened to see a newspaper on the coffee table. I checked the date on the paper—it was the day before Easter.

  I then walked though the various built-on wings of the house. In all of their rooms, chickens in cages were laying eggs and vats of dyes were all filled to the brim with fresh batches of their vinegary brews. It appeared that the avatars of Bug’zha Bhun-Yeh had managed to work their hypnotic spell on me, forcing me to do their bidding. How many eggs had I dyed and fed to those legions of hopping fiends, bring them ever closer to their ultimate goal of reuniting into a huge, ravenous cosmic monstrosity?