The Daughter of the Night

by Julian Porter

  'Yes': he felt that that admission was not unnecessarily incautious.

  'And Hastur is the Unnameable, is he not?' Here the manager was on shaky ground, as he had no idea who or what a Hastur was, but he decided to play along and said,

  'If you say so, miss.'

  'I do. And so, that means that these adepts,' she waved at the crowd, who cringed, 'Must know his secrets. I know, let's ask them.' She stood up and walked up to the stage in front of the screen. 'Okay, you lot. Do you think we could have some lights on so I can see what's happening? Oh, thank you. Now, all of you sit down and let's have a seminar.' She waited while the assorted wankers and criminals settled down, torn between the desire to run, and the desire to feast their eyes on that amazing body, so tantalizingly not quite revealed, and either ply their trade while looking at her (the wankers) or ply their trade by robbing the ones who were looking at her (the criminals). Or both. 'Good now, what I want to know is about Hastur the Unnameable . . .' she paused and stared at one of the wankers, who was doing what he did best. “You – you over there – yes you, the man who doesn't realise how clichéd grubby raincoats are. If there's going to be any sex happening in this room then I am going to be involved in it, if you don't mind, so keep your libido under control until I decide whether to kill you or fuck you, and pay attention.' Well, that was telling him. The woman continued: 'So, what do we know about Hastur?' There was a pause, then one drug-dealer raised a hand. 'Yes?'

  'He's unnameable?' The woman looked at him as a bird might look at a sub-standard worm that it just wasn't worth its while to consume.

  'True, but not helpful. Come on people, you are all students of the unnameable: tell me about your studies.'

  At which point the manager took his life in his hands and decided to rectify the fundamental misunderstanding under which the woman was labouring.

  'Er, miss,' he said. She looked at him.

  'Yes, mister fat, ugly and surprisingly unappealing man.' He blenched, but he knew what he was, his therapist had told him often enough, so he continued,

  'You seem to think that we know all about some strange unnameable thing of yours. But we don't. 'The Unnameable' is a movie. Not a very good movie, but it means we get to spend a couple of hours watching people do silly things and get taken out of . . . wow!' Which last observation was caused when the woman's capacious embonpoint started to vibrate and billow as if it were the surface of the ocean. All eyes were fixed on the amazing oscillations.

  'Oh,' she said ruefully, 'Fuck.' She looked up. 'So you can't help me find Hastur?'

  'No.'

  'And this movie of yours isn't about a missing Great Old One?'

  'No, it's about a stupid young woman who develops two personalities, and the stupid things she does as a result.' This seemed to attract some interest.

  'Two personalities, eh? Like me?'

  What? Well, if you say so.' At which she, rather unfairly, he felt, became angry,

  'So you're saying I'm stupid are you? Sure, Nina's stupid . . .'

  'Thank you.'

  'A pleasure. But I have the most brilliant brain on Cthonia. Why, people say it's almost as good as my boobs. Well, in the sense that my boobs are the best boobs ever, and my brain is one of the best ever. Obviously you can't compare brains and boobs directly. Unless . . .' her eyes seemed to glaze over, 'You enter into the unity, where all becomes essence, and the essence of essence is seen to be one . . . oh fucking hell. Can't you people shut up?' which completely bemused the onlookers, for surely she didn’t have to sing if she didn’t want to. Then, someone that sexy was allowed to be eccentric. And to not understand the concept of 'volume control', for the voices continued to descant their celestial burden, while she shouted, 'But I see it now. Okay, I got confused. It could happen to anyone. Just don't any of you tell anyone about this, no not even about how seeing me has rendered all other women as naught to you. That is unless you would like to be eaten by a fifty-foot high green squid thing. Starting from the feet. So it hurts more. So there. Lips sealed. Bye!' And then she vanished.

  (iii) Unusual events at a bookshop

  All was, as usual, quiet in 'Unnameable Books', the bookstore that liked to think of itself as being just that bit closer to the cutting edge, so while others stocked Philip K Dick, who was weird and incomprehensible, they stocked Stanilaw Lem, who was weird, incomprehensible and went in for interpolating long philosophical essays in the middle of scenes of weird alien monsters doing something incomprehensible (they were Cthulhu's kind of book), while others stocked Ezra Pound, who was complex and obscure, they stocked Laura Riding, who was complex, obscure and totally incomprehensible, and while others stocked Derrida, who merely deconstructed things, they stocked Mensonge, the ne plus ultra of ne plus ultras, the founder and postscript of post-anti-neo-deconstructionism. Strangely, despite the tempting offers ('Buy two books of poems by Somali camel herders, get one free') that screamed out at passers-by, and there were many passers-by, custom was never brisk, and the manager had once confided in the assistant manager, who constituted the other fifty percent of the shop's employees, that everyone was a philistine save for he and she, and didn't he think that brought them very close in an astral kind of way, to which he replied that he really had to go and sort the Dagestani belles lettres. And what was more, it was a Wednesday afternoon, a time that the assistant had proven by exhaustive statistical analysis to be positively the worst of all possible times when it came to having a customer walk through the door, such an event being so improbable that it was more likely that whole squadrons of pigs should take to the skies, much more likely, than that anyone coming through the door should be looking for a book and not change for a parking-meter.

  And so, and so, the manager was lost in her usual reverie regarding how to get into the assistant's pants, and wondering whether dyeing her hair all the colours of the rainbow would do the trick, while the assistant was, as usual, wishing that he could meet a nice, well a nice young woman would be the preferred option, but at times, such as the day when the manager had decided to demonstrate her neo-structuralist take on burlesque, a nice aardvark would have done. Which could have kept them going until closing time. All of which meant that when there came a loud thud from behind the bookcase of critiques of the Critique of Pure Reason, followed by even louder swearing in a forceful female voice, they both jumped and then stared at one another with a wild surmise. Neither of them knew how this had happened, but a customer had managed to sneak past them. And that must not happen. They must not leave without purchasing at least one book on the cultural history of Tajikistan, a slim volume of essays on 'Feminism in the Age of Shredded Wheat' and a copy of the daring debut novel of a Glaswegian drainage engineer, which, by virtue of being written entirely in phonetically rendered Glaswegian dialect, was incomprehensible, even to other Glaswegians. So they made as if to cut this woman off before she could escape, but they were too late, for a figure staggered out from behind the shelf, saying,

  'Fuck this for a game of soldiers. Why didn't you tell me books were heavy? If I'd known what it was like to have a dictionary of Upper Sorbian hit me on the head, I'd have materialised in the middle of a field and walked here. And then I'd probably have ended up landing in a cow-pat.' Her eyes narrowed. 'Those cultists have got it coming just as soon as I get my hands on them.' The eyes of the manager and the assistant manager widened to their fullest. As has been indicated, customers were a rare event in that shop, and such customers as they received tended to the weedy. Gorgeous women with faces that could make a thousand ships kneel down and beg for just one curl of those lips, not to mention bodies that made all known sex symbols seem in comparison like something the cat brought in and then up, tended to be rare. The assistant manager looked on those scarlet lips, that golden hair and was entranced. While the manager just stared at her cleavage. While she stared back with a certain disdain and said,

  'If I told my father that you had hit me, or indirectly caused me to be hit by,' she looked a
t the tome she happened to be carrying, 'Ahem, “Some thoughts on post-decolonisation in the Upper Volta, with particular reference to the evolution of market prices for cow dung” then he would be most upset. He doesn't like cows. They give him wind. So watch it, okay? Now what the hell's Nina up to?'

  ‘What do you mean what am I up to?’ said a voice from nowhere.

  ‘There’s no point lying to me. You stopped telling me not to swear as soon as you saw that guy there, so I know there’s something up. Is he . . .’ She took a closer look at the assistant manager, which almost made him expire in ecstasy, and said, ‘Oh fucking hell, it’s him, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the voice. ‘Oh, what shall I do, what shall I do, what shall I do if he looks at me?’

  ‘Well,’ said the woman, ‘I hate to break this to you, Nina, but the chances of that happening are really quite remote, what with you being disembodied.’

  ‘True,’ said the voice in a brief moment of composure, but then it regained its former fever pitch and said, ‘But Unity, he’s the one, my true love. What do I do now? How do I make him mine?’ Unity (for it was she) examined Nina's one true love with great care and attention and concluded that he was smitten but, being less of an optimist than Nina, she suspected that the cause of his entrancement was not so much that Nina had entered the room, as that that her (Unity's) breasts had. Well that was that, any man who couldn’t keep his gaze from her cleavage was fair game, especially one who turned out to be much more personable in the flesh that when being impersonated by a Shoggoth. So, not being a woman to delay, she strode up to him and said,

  'So what do we have here, then? I think that if dear Nina is going to take an interest in you, I really ought to check out whether you're suitable for her, me being the more experienced one, as it were. So, if you don't mind . . .' with which she pulled down his trousers, thrust his face where his gaze had been and, within seven seconds, was making the Earth move for him on top of a pile of remaindered copies of the Autobiography of Muammar Gadaffi (‘My People Worship Me’), while singing 'She'll be coming round the mountain when she comes' in a pleasing mezzo-soprano – if there had to be a musical accompaniment to her actions, she reasoned, she might as well get to choose what it was.

  Reaction was mixed. Unity was enjoying herself immensely. First of all, it was a good half hour since she had last had sex, and she did tend to get a bit less mellow and laid back, less of her usual equable, laissez-faire self, if she went without for too long. Then again, it was really some while since she had had a plain, simple, uncomplicated screw, with no motive more complicated than to feel that old stimulation of the joy buzzer once again. In fact knowing that she wasn't going to have an orgasm made it even better, as she could stop worrying an immerse herself in the pleasurable aspects of the act itself, which were many. So Unity, we may say, in a nutshell, was happy.

  Nina was aghast. Here she was, at this tender and momentous occasion in her life, her first meeting with her one true love, and far from it being the moment of tremulous joy, that subtle intermingling of souls that her exhaustive study of the works of Barbara Cartland had led her to believe, here she was, not exchanging shy nothings with her beloved, not sneaking longing looks at him, not building her confidence to the point where that first delicate hint indicated that true love had hit the mark, and Shub Niggurath was going to have another baby to celebrate. No, she was doing none of these things. Instead, she was watching her true love play out the part of the well-head to Unity's increasingly enthusiastic nodding donkey. And it had to be said that he seemed to be unnecessarily happy about the whole thing, given as he was now providing harmony to Unity's descant, in a reedy tenor. Oh it made Nina sad. Not so sad as poor abandoned kittens, but in the same ball-park. But what could she do, what could she do?

  The manager's emotions were mixed. First, she was appalled at the idea of anyone doing anything so vulgar as to have sex in her bookshop. Second, she realised that that was the ghost of convention speaking within her, and that in fact, there was no act more transgressive, no deed more thorough in thumbing its nose to the man, than having sex in a bookshop. It was, she reasoned, the ultimate in deconstruction, the reduction of the once proud edifice of positivist literature, with its laughable pretence of a realistic depiction of life (realistic!) to the animal grunts emitted during coupling, which were, after all, the only true and authentic communications available to us. Third she decided that that train of thought was so good that she would write it up and submit it to 'Deconstruction Today'. Fourth, having got the philosophical preliminaries over, she began to feel rather jealous. Why wasn't it her to whom the most beautiful and sexy woman in this or any other universe was making mad, passionate love? Surely she deserved it too? And, after all, heterosexuality was so, so, so empirical.

  And as for the assistant manager, well, he was a man, and he was being made love to by the most beautiful woman in this or any other universe. What do you think his emotions were?

  Well, by the time it was over, he was too tired to have emotions. He lay there, flopped like a dead fish over a table of the more conventional books, some of them so positively ancient as to have bee written in the second half of the twentieth century, that the shop stocked, by way of a ruse, in the hope of pulling in the masses. It hadn't worked. It never does. And while he lay there, disturbing the neatly disarranged piles of Atwood and Rushdie, Unity pulled herself off him and stood up, adjusting her dress as she did so, popping bits that should not be seen back within their restraints, and carefully revealing bits that should be seen but had become accidentally obscured. And this done she looked around and saw one stern, censorious face and one stern, censorious absence of a face.

  'What?' she said, 'What have I done? All I did was do what I do best with someone who, well, could do with a bit of practice, but isn't a bad performer. I mean, what did you expect me to do? Shake his hand?' Nina, fury boiling over within her, spoke with unaccustomed passion, saying,

  'That man is my true love. Let me remind you: my true love. And he was about to speak to me, and I was nerving myself for the challenge of speaking back, telling in shy, halting words of my deep, deep love. But what did you do? You took him from me. You committed deeds of filthiness with him. Now he can never be mine.'

  'Don't you think you're dramatising things just a bit, my dear? I mean, all I did was fuck him. You could even say I was doing you a favour, giving him a test drive to make sure that he'll be all right on the night, as it were.'

  'Ha!'

  'But it was only sex. It's not as if I wrote him down in my little black book. Wherever it's got to.' She paused for a moment to have a rummage in the deepest declivities of her bosom, 'Oh, that's where it is. I wondered what was sticking into me. But really, Nina, sex doesn't mean anything. It's just something I enjoy doing more than anything else in the whole wide world, and that I'm very, very good at, and it's not easily done on your own. But it's not as if I love him, or have any expectations of him, other than possibly doing it again at some future date, or any idea of ownership. He's yours, my dear, take him and love him. Once he's come round and had some nourishing broth or something, because I'm guessing he might feel a bit drained right now.'

  'Hmph. Next you'll be saying you did it for my own good.'

  'Well, honestly, Nina, do you really want to shack up with a man who's no good in the sack? Come on, look into your heart and tell me Azathoth's truth. Aren't you much happier really to know that he has the Unity seal of approval?' Nina's lower lip, had she had one, would have wobbled, and she was clearly trying to speak. Eventually she succeeded and said,

  'Oh yes, yes, yes, I do, I do. I want a great lover, and I want to be as passionate as you are, and I want to wear nice dresses and look nice in them, and I'm like you, I'm nothing but a whore.' Unity was affronted.

  'Pardon me, but did cash change hands? Does it ever? I think not. I am a lady of easy virtue, yes. A nymphomaniac, certainly. A sex-goddess without a doubt. But I am not, and you a
re definitely not, a whore, because I have never, never, never made a business transaction out of sex. Now stop blubbing. He's coming round. Here's your chance.' With which, eager to miss the predictably saccharine, nay syrup-like conversation that would ensue on the meeting of two lovers such as the world had not seen since Ronald and Julia, she turned to the manager and said, 'And what are you looking so sour about?'

  The manager was glad to be asked. She had been standing seething during the double act, alternating between her hurt, and scorn at hearing any woman so out-dated as to be taking a post-post feminist attitude to her freedom to use her own body, when everyone knew that post-neo-post-post-post-post-anti-feminism had proved conclusively that women had no say in their sex-lives, which were in fact dictated by the vagaries of their intestinal flora. And hearing such ridiculous, antiquated tosh had made her temper worse, so now, when allowed to speak she allowed her (self-diagnosed) flair for the dramatic to come to the fore.

  'Why him?' She said, making a wide gesture with her hands, which resulted in Unity dodging backwards. 'Why him? Why not me? Am I not as good as him? As attractive as him? As,' she did it again, leading to Unity taking refuge behind a shelf of erotic poetry for tractors, then put on her best (also self-diagnosed) alluring look, while allowing her voice to husk (she thought) like Lauren Bacall's, 'Sexy as him?'