'Bubbles? Oh, ah, yes. In principle, maybe so. But may I suggest that you talk to humans with minds wide enough to encompass more than flying and sex.'
'I can't think why. I've got by all this time on just half of that.' To which there was no sensible, or at least polite, answer. 'So anyway, what you're saying is that I should go talk to people and try to find out about why Hastur vanished and what he meant to the universe?'
'Yes indeed.' Unity turned, as if to go, then a thought struck her, and she said, almost shyly,
'And one last thing. Did you mean it when you said my breasts were perfect? Oh bloody hell,' as the music started up again, 'I didn't mean that sort of perfect.'
'There is only one perfection. All that we call perfect mirrors it inexactly. Your breasts more exactly than most. And . . .' the music swelled and grew . . . 'This is really irritating. Could we go and continue this discussion somewhere more private?'
'I thought you'd never ask.
Chapter 4: Unity Meets the People
(i) Starting out
So, it seemed that Unity's travels were not over. She had hoped that at least one of the seven Elder Races would have had the answer to the vexed question of how she was to achieve orgasm, but all she had got out of them was a load of very complex theology, more philosophical confusion than you could shake a stick at (which unfortunate metaphor served only to make her shudder by reminding her of the Hounds of Tindalos), and a hankering for crab mayonnaise. Oh yes, and she seemed to be being stalked by the Vienna Boys' Choir, or at least some friends of theirs, and they, being discorporate, were not, unlike Mr Crowley, susceptible to constraint. No, she realised that the time when she could lie back and experience one delicious orgasm after another had to be further delayed while she, as far as she could tell, basically had to act as mother to the entire universe, kiss it, put plasters on the scrapes and, metaphorically speaking, make it better. And as her interest in human reproduction had always been limited to the precursor activities, she wasn't exactly what you'd call the motherly type. Which meant that the whole thing was a right pain, and having to go and start rooting round among the humans was just the icing on the cake. Just so long as those bloody children kept their distance, she thought, she could even put up with talking to people in what she knew to be a good cause (having an orgasm, not restoring the order of the cosmos), but if they started singing again . . .
Anyway, that was Unity's take on things. Nina's was much simpler. She wanted to find her one true love. She now knew that he existed and she knew what he looked like and that he was a human. They were going to mix with the humans. So all she had to do was to persuade Unity to wander around looking for him and then, when she did, to not do anything unnecessarily shocking that might create a bad initial impression (even Nina was realistic enough to accept that the first meeting was going to get sexual; she was just hoping for seduction as opposed to rape, because though, in her rather extensive experience, most men became really quite enthusiastic once Unity had got to work on them, no matter how initially stand-offish they might have been, she – that is Nina – was sure, no certain, no positive, that her one true love would be different, and would be of such moral perfection that he may look askance at strange women who debagged him and then did strange things with their tongues that Nina had always felt she would be happier not knowing about, though she had to admit that they did seem to make the people they happened to very happy indeed). So Nina lived in a state of optimistic naivety, filled with hope and joy and the absolute conviction that when push came to shove, Unity would probably do her best not to mess up Nina's hopes of happiness too badly. If she remembered.
Unity initially believed, whatever the Yithian may have said, that the good news about Hastur must be widespread among humanity, and the reason they never told any of the Elder Races was pretty much the same as the reason why families never told strangers about Uncle Harold who was doing time for money-laundering. After all, when all was said and done, the Yithian was just a giant ice-cream cone (albeit an upside-down ice-cream cone, but that was, she felt, a distinction without a difference), and what did ice-cream know? Other than that you were likely to have a loose bowel movement some time in the near future. So, on arriving home and finding Bubbles spelling her way through 'The Voorish Sign and other Frightful Sigils' with increasing perplexity, she managed to (a) hang up her coat and hand-bag, (b) rip the book from Bubbles' hands, rip off Bubbles' clothes and start foreplay, and (c) say,
'Hiya Bubbles, did you miss me? Now, tell me all about Hastur or I'll dump you right after this,' all more or less simultaneously. Bubbles would have been happy to oblige, but being made love to by Unity was a pretty full-time activity, and it didn't help that, while Unity was driving her up the slopes to the peak of the highest climax she had ever known, Nina thought it might be a good time to get acquainted. She waited, being a good-mannered young lady, until Unity and Bubbles had settled down to a definite rhythm and then, reasoning that Bubbles could now spare some attention said,
'Good afternoon, Miss. I do hope that you realise that I don't share my sister's lax moral standards, though of course, I'm not criticising you for giving in to her,' ruefully, 'Everyone does. But still,' more brightly, 'I'm sure you agree with me that what she needs is to find her one true love, settle down, and stop all this fornication. Don't you?' Bubbles, startled at this voice from the void as much as by what it had said, looked around wildly as if she feared she was going mad (that often happened to Nina), but then Unity engaged her supercharger, so instead of guarded enquiries along the lines of,
‘Who are you? What are you?’ she shouted, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh Unity,' and fainted. Unity stood up and adjusted her dress, which always seemed to look perfect, and to conceal just enough to showcase her beauty and allure, while enhancing it in a way that simple nudity never could, no matter how violent or intimate had been her activity mere seconds before. She looked down at Bubbles.
'Huh,' she said, 'Well I'm glad someone had a good time. There's no point waiting for her to come round, I'll just have to find out some other way. Come on, let's go to Earth.'
(ii) Incident at a movie theatre
It must be assumed that Unity arranged her transit to Earth, whether by seducing selected cultists, or by stealing some translocation pills from Cthulhu's private cookie jar, we do not know. That information is lost to us. All we can know is that soon after Bubbles had come round and left with a copy of the Necronomicon to keep her company, a strange incident occurred at a late-night screening in a run-down cinema on a run-down street in a run-down neighbourhood of a city that had most definitely known better centuries. None of the audience batted an eyelid when an extraordinarily beautiful woman, with curves that would make a mathematician weep, and wearing a dress that left remarkably little to the imagination, sauntered down the aisle and sat next to a reasonably good-looking young man who, surprisingly, actually seemed to be there to watch the movie. That sort of thing happened all the time. In the experience of these jaded movie-goers, the woman was almost certainly a hooker down on her luck – she didn't look down on her luck, but any working girl desperate enough to come to this flea-pit at this showing of this movie must be having problems selling herself. And yet this woman was, well, the sexiest thing any of them had seen in the flesh or in their imaginations, which should have made her the sort of hooker who charged by the second, not the sort who ended up here. So there was a general frisson of confusion, not to say bemusement, when she sat down and spoke to the more-or-less handsome young man, which only increased when she said,
'So tell me about Hastur,' but there was a first time for everything. The young man, who had been watching an older man, who was bad, you could tell it from his hyper-mobile moustache, acting, hypnotising a young woman everyone in the theatre had been lusting after until thirty seconds ago, jumped and said,
'Er, I, I beg your pardon, er, miss?' The woman said, as if affronted,
'M
iss. Miss? He called me miss?' and then some of the audience could have sworn that she answered herself in a totally different voice, saying,
'Well, Unity, do you really think you look like a married woman?' It was eerie how her lips didn’t move at all. You'd almost think a disembodied voice had spoken. Anyway, the woman looked down at her body and said, in her real voice, which sounded like a symphony of erotica, not the fake one, that sounded like a cold bath,
'I really don't see why you think a woman shouldn't make the most of herself just because she’s married. I mean, if I ever did marry, and I know that's not going to happen, but let's just entertain the hypothesis shall we, then surely I'd dress even more alluringly, so my wife was turned on, and everyone else was encouraged to ignore the wedding ring and come and take what was on offer.' Yes, she was a hooker. But a hooker with a strangely large vocabulary. Most of the hookers these men knew, and they knew a few, knew how to say 'Hello sailor', 'Show me the money' and 'Swallow is twenty extra', but not things like 'entertain the hypothesis'. The only explanation could be that she was a fine-arts major who had failed to get that job flipping burgers but who, unlike most fine-arts majors, had at least one other career open to her. Call that two, but who'd be a ventriloquist when they could be a prostitute? Who indeed? Well, possibly this woman, because the pretended voice moaned and said,
'Oh Unity, I really don't know how I will ever reform you.'
'Oh Nina, I don't want to be fucking reformed. I want to find Hastur so I can have an orgasm, and I'm sure,' she ran the sexiest finger any of them had ever seen over the youngish man’s chin, 'This guy can help me on both counts.' So a schizophrenic hooker. Then, peerless beauty, coupled with an erogenous zone so vast that everyone in the theatre could feel its influence, made up for a lot.
At this point the youngish almost-handsome man interrupted what promised to be a good bicker by saying,
'Er, miss?'
'What?' her head swivelled towards him and, though this was hard to credit, she managed to snap out the monosyllable in both voices simultaneously. The man quailed beneath her angry gaze, and said,
'I was only trying to be polite.' The woman appeared to consider this and said, to the Martians or whatever it was that only she could see,
'I think he must like us. Are you sure he's not your one true love?'
'Positive. You can eat him as far as I'm concerned.'
'Nah. I’ll just suck his dick until his head explodes.' Well, this looked more promising. The clientèle hunkered down for some solid oral action, some wondering if she would be able to continue her amazingly lifelike feats of ventriloquism while otherwise engaged, but it seemed they were anticipating overmuch, for she turned back to the man and said,
'Okay. Hastur. The unnameable. Tell. Now.' The man looked puzzled, as well he might, for this was probably the strangest pick-up line since the previous week when George the Geek had said 'If you give me a hand-job I'll upgrade your graphics card'. And possibly even stranger. But he was game, and said,
'I haven't heard of Hastur, but this is 'The Unnameable' that we're watching. Is there anything you can do to help me help you?' The woman gave him a long calculating stare, as if she was divining by X-ray vision just how much cash there was for her to clear out of his wallet, and said,
'Okay, how about this,' then launched herself at him. This was more like it. The regulars settled down to watch. Okay, it wasn't oral, which was always good for a laugh, but some good old-fashioned woman-on-top humping would do quite nicely, thank you very much.
And so it went on. And on. And it became clear, as if it hadn't been already, that this was no ordinary hooker. Ordinary hookers favoured quantity over quality, so speed was of the essence. They didn't keep on drawing the whole thing out just to make it more exciting, or pausing just when their partner was about to boil over in order to speculate about, of all things, theology (perhaps that was her major), while simultaneously singing 'Twinkle, twinkle little star' in close harmony with herself. Then, why not? If you are into specialised tastes, you might as well go for it and guarantee yourself an income by ensuring that there are no, repeat no, competitors. Sure, some of the movie-fiends found that the idea of the negation of negation made their heads hurt so much that they were forced to the utter degradation of actually watching the movie in an attempt to recover, but the not-so-young man was entranced. Though that may have been more to do with having her glorious bosom rubbing against his nose than with the theologico-philosophical conundra of which she spoke. But eventually, to the assembled throng's great relief, she stopped talking about something called Yog Sothoth, and took to humping in dead earnest, until, at long, long last, the following dialogue transpired. Him:
'Give it to me, give it to me, oh, that's so good, that's so . . .' Her:
'Give it to you, you bloody sod? What about you giving something to me? Like, at least the low down on Hastur, if not a big O? Bastard. Well, if you liked that, you'll love this,' then suddenly in a far less angry tone, 'Nina, are you sure you . . .'
'Quite sure. He's a nasty man and he deserves it.'
'Right,' back to the man, who was looking more than a little puzzled, and even slightly hurt, 'Okay, big boy, try this on for size,' which her audience took as meaning that she was about to exercise some sexual ploy so amazing that none of them, having seen it, would ever need to masturbate again, for the mere memory would be enough. Which meant that obviously the projectionist had managed to get cannabis smoke into the air-conditioning system again, because they couldn't really be seeing her, as she had promised, suck a man’s dick until his head exploded.
Further explosions followed, as over-strained organs gave up the ghost. By the time the manager had burst into the auditorium waving a pick-axe, nothing was left of the erstwhile man save a rather pathetic smear of blood and some stains on the handkerchief with which a beautiful woman was primly dabbing at her mouth. Film-buffs from all sides crowded to tell him what had happened, which, if they were to be believed, was that the beautiful woman had just managed to blow up one of their number. Literally. Which was ridiculous. That sort of thing didn't happen. Especially not in cinemas. In the movies, yes, it happened all the time. But, and this, as his therapist repeatedly told him, was the point: the movies were not real life. There were no gorgeous women with amazing bodies who went round blowing people up. At least so, after some considerable effort, he had come to believe. So, walking cautiously, but not too cautiously, for what could a woman, especially one so top-heavy as this woman, do to a man with a pick-axe, he made his way up to where she stood, apparently, enjoying the gross over-acting projected upon the screen before her, which was most strange, because nobody came to his theatre to watch the movies, especially not anyone looking like that, and said,
'Er, miss.'
'Not you too.' The manager continued regardless. He was paid good money to keep the cops out of this joint, and he wasn't going to have no dame, not even, he ran his finger round his collar, one who looked like all the stars of the golden age of Hollywood rolled into one, interfere with his number. So he said,
'Er, they say you killed someone. Nonsense, I know, but you upset them, and I don't like it when . . .'
'Oh, but I did,' she said fluttering her eyelashes and starting to edge towards him. 'I was annoyed, and he wasn't a nice man. Poor oral hygiene. I always look out for that. I mean, I know I don't get orgasms, but it's even less likely if I have to dodge bad breath, isn't it? So yes, I did. Do you mind?'' she fluttered her eyelashes again, now standing so close that her breasts brushed against his chest. And then, for some reason, she threw her voice and said, out of thin air,
'Unity, you are a sad, sad, lost soul.'
'Hey, it works. Just you watch.' And indeed it did. Confronted with a face so dazzling that he could scarcely believe it, lulled by her gentle manner, confused by her not-so-subtle advances, he entirely forgot that he was meant to be being mister heavy, and said,
'Well, I'm sure he had it coming. B
ut, why?'
'Well,' she said, while touching him in an intimate place, 'I was trying to find out about Hastur, so I came here because you are showing a documentary about him, aren't you, and I thought I'd find serious students who could help me in my quest. But,' she sighed, and sent the manager's blood pressure to dangerous heights, 'He only wanted my body. How demeaning.' The other voice made a rude noise, in response to which the woman snapped, 'And up yours too,' before reverting to her sad, seductive tone, 'And I so want to know about Hastur the Unnameable, so I can have an orgasm and be happy for the rest of my life. Oh yes, and find Nina's true love too, I forgot that.' The manager was fogged at this sudden reference to another woman.
'Nina?' She removed her hand from where it had been causing him great joy and pointed at thin air.
'Man, Nina. Nina, man.'
'How do you do, sir? I do hope you can help us.'
'Er, yes,' said the manager, trying hard not to run back to his office, lock the door and hide under the desk. He grasped at the last straws of sanity and said, 'But what do you want here?'
'Well, you are showing 'The Unnameable' are you not?'
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