by Tanith Lee
“ ‘What if you don’t?’ says I.
“ ‘Then,’ says Death, ‘even I shall fear him, and when he comes fully into his power and his kingdom and his glory, when he beholds himself and is filled with terror, not even I shall be able to comfort him. Therefore, let me pass.’
“Maybe my brain was clotted with drink, or it was the lateness of the hour, or pride, or madness, or the malicious gods whispering encouragement to me as their little joke. I don’t know. But I wanted to be a hero, and saw my chance, and so hefted blade and shield — I mean meat cleaver and an old stool — and shouted ‘Ha!’ and ‘Ha!’ again, in a not very good attempt at a war cry. Like one who chews on his shield’s edge in the rage of battle, I bit a few splinters out of the stool and spat them with contempt at Death. ‘Ha!’ I cried, and smote him, smashing his bones with both cleaver and stool. It was a fine battle. He put up his hands to shield himself, but I chopped them off. I sent his skull skittering across the floor, and still I hammered away at the wriggling bones before me, all the while thinking of the glorious song that would make the rafters ring with the memory of my deed. ‘Ha!’ I cried.
“But then the others in the hall were wrestling with me. They wrenched the cleaver and stool away. I scrambled across the floor, but they caught me by the belt and hauled me up.
“ ‘You’re drunk, old man!’ says one, and they all commanded me to be silent, to leave our lord and lady to their rest. I tried to explain what I was doing. But they only laughed. They could not see what I did. To them, I had been fighting the empty air. One of them pantomimed drinking from a jug, then staggered. All of them laughed. Then they picked me up as if I were a log and battered the door open with my head, heaving me out into a snowbank. ‘Now sober up and shut up,’ somebody said; and there they left me.”
The teller, my informant or host or comrade, looked into my eyes once more with that gleam that caused me such unease. He paused for a long time, sipping from his cup. I noticed, to my distress, that I could see silhouettes through our curtain, that even the ram-horned prophet stood with the rest, just outside our booth, listening.
I tried to summon my confidence once more, but it was like lifting a wicker basket that has somehow turned to stone.
I fumbled for words. I felt ill, certain that the power of my dreaming was waning fast, that I could not linger here. I tried to focus my mind on what I was supposed to be doing. Something about a secret, a final discovery.
I tapped my fingers on the table top.
The storyteller belched loudly, put down his cup, and said, “Now, judge . . .”
“It’s an absurd story.”
“Some hero I was. With a cleaver . . .” He made that grunting laugh again, as if he found this terribly funny.
“Some utter, babbling fool —”
“But harken! The tale is not yet done! Did I perish from cold in the snowbank? Obviously not! What I didn’t tell you was that, as they were wrestling with me, as I crawled across the floor, just before somebody got me by the belt and hauled me out of there, I snatched up Death’s skittering head and clung fast to it all that night as I sat in the snow. Its eyes glowed like embers deep down in a pit. It wasn’t when I fought that I became a hero, no, but then, afterwards, in the snowbank that I did my wondrous deed, which deserves or have a saga written about it. It wasn’t by fighting —” He laughed again his barbarous, bestial laugh. “Ha! No! It was by words, by sheer long-windedness that I prevailed —”
The teller was growing progressively intoxicated. He belched again, and coughed up something that the darkness mercifully hid; and he paused, as if he’d lost the thread of his own speech and had to fumble for it, like a drunken man who’s dropped something on the floor.
Perhaps it was my own folly or impatience or even growing dread that made me prod him further.
“So, what did you do?”
“Do? I told him tales! I, who had been a go- fetch-come-clean-up in that hall for so very long, who had stood silently by while the rafters rang with the songs of their adventures, even I, the silly old man they’d heaved into a snowbank, remembered every last one of those songs and stories and whatever. Even the jokes. So I sang and spoke and laughed all the night long, holding the head in my lap, rocking it side to side as you would a baby.
“I distracted Death. I kept him so entertained that he forgot what he had come to do. So, in the morning, when at last my grip of my hand and the words of my mouth failed me, and Death loomed above me all back together and whole again, he only looked down on me mournfully and was, I think, afraid. He turned aside and fled. And the victory was mine. And our lord’s son was born nine month later with no mark on his lip, for Death had not touched him.”
The teller belched again, in conclusion.
Nervously I slid my finger across my upper lip.
The room seemed to sway around me. I was forgetting my own mission. Was it something in the ale, the air, the smoke? What was I supposed to be doing? Something about learning the Secret of Everything.
The teller reached out for me. I swatted his hand away.
“None of it makes any sense! What happened to the miraculous child? Where is he?”
“I think he has lost his way among the worlds, and wanders around and around, over many roads, not knowing that he has traveled them before. It is my duty to find him, and my curse to tell this tale over and over until I do.” Now, appallingly, he was pleading with me. “Do you think, finally, I have?”
“No,” I said. “You have not.” More angry than afraid, again, I simply didn’t want to have anything to do with this ridiculous person and his tale. In my own folly, or madness, or light-headedness, I tried to argue with him. I called him insane, a liar. I demanded of him where and when that hall had existed; and he spoke of a land that was old when the Pyramids were new. I laughed and shook my head and shrugged with exaggerated relief, certain that he was talking about somebody else. I had been born, and not all that long ago, in America, in the middle of the twentieth century. I had been a poet once, and a scholar, but I’d fallen from grace, had no friends, and now lay starving and freezing in an alley, in a cardboard box, dreaming preposterous dreams about conquering the universe. I’d been in hospitals. I’d been diagnosed schizophrenic.
One more comforting story, he said, to mask the truth and help me forget. Did I not remember other lands, other lives, other times, in my dreams?
I allowed that I dreamed many dreams, and mighty ones. For an instant, my old arrogance returned.
Then he reached up and touched me on the bare lip and spoke in the bleating voice of the ram-horned prophet: “Master, for so you are — I, we, all of us fall down before you and worship you, and only ask that you remember us when you come into your kingdom. We only ask you that, when all the gods and worlds of dream are no more, you re-create us, at least, again to serve you.”
I rose from my seat and burst through the curtain, shouting, “You’re mistaken! You’re talking about someone else!”
I staggered through the crowd. The monstrosities gathered there had become as insubstantial as smoke. I tried to throttle the ram-headed one, but my hands passed right through him. I choked. My eyes ran with tears. The very floorboards rippled and heaved.
I thought of Icarus, falling.
I ran to the sunlit door, to the earthward side of the tavern. I tumbled like a drunkard over the threshold, down along the bright road that leads into the fields of mankind, into the mists of the morning.
And as I walked through the mists, one walked beside me; and his face was as a bare skull, and he bore a scythe in one hand and an hourglass dangled from his belt; and with his other hand he reached into a pouch at his side and scattered pestilence through cities as we passed, as a farmer sows grain.
“It is the retainer’s curse to tell the same story over and over again for five thousand years,” he whispered, in a voice like wind blowing over a metal pipe, long an low and moaning, “for I will not gather him up, despite
his many pleas. I leave him to suffer increasing age and witness his sin until the ending of time…but perhaps the ending is nigh, I fear — and I do fear it, for how shall Death exist if there is no one left to die?…It is your curse to know that the most ancient name of the place you call the Dreamer’s Rest translates as Mirror, and that when you discover yourself there, and are afraid…I can offer you, alas, no mercy, no comfort at all.”
“But I am not afraid,” I said feebly, to the air, finding myself alone again.
(Based on an imaginary illustration by S.H. Sime.)
THE WORD, by Stephen Eley
I killed a word this morning on the kitchen floor.
It was scurrying across to the pantry door
and I believe I mistook it for a roach. I
stomped it flat by instinct, before it could
even mean at me. Now I’m troubled by this small ignorance.
I’m not above the death of a few words, of course —
like everyone else, we’ve got them festering in
the corners, crawling around our minds at night.
The good ones I try to push out the door,
scooping them up with a piece of paper
and shaking them loose on the front step.
The useless ones Alice feeds to her iguana.
It’s a minor nuisance, mostly; we’ve never had
to call an exterminologist, and I’m glad.
The linguicides can’t be good for our books.
But the word this morning troubles me.
Should it have lived? Did the meaning that
never reached me redeem it? It wasn’t a
simple word; it looked a little like paisley,
except it had three feet. I can’t remember
what filled its middle syllables, and it all
looks the same on the bottom of my shoe.
Damn. I just hope it wasn’t something
someone needed to say.
CTHULHU FHTAGN, BABY!, by Will Ludwigsen
Your gentle critic will grudgingly concede that he has sometimes been prone to hyperbole in his fight to protect his readers from mediocrity. True, calling Cats a “festering sore on the New York art scene” might have been a trifle harsh. Yes, my observation that City of Angels was “ersatz Hollywood trash” incited more than a few angry letters. But when I say that the new Broadway sensation Cthulhu Fhtagn, Baby! is the hideous spawn of dark, evil forces, rest assured I mean that literally.
You have, of course, heard of Cthulhu Fhtagn, Baby! The shameless marketing campaign that pumps its propaganda into the American cultural bloodstream with all the subtlety of an oil well has insinuated this Broadway show onto every newspaper page, magazine review, and television show in the country. One cannot escape its growing influence in any hair salon, book club, college class, or office break room. A person in every elevator is humming one of its memorable tunes. Normally, I shun the popular, the bourgeois, the trendy. Yet something this pervasive compels me to study it as an observer of our culture.
There is little to say about the origin or the backstage politics of the play. The usual gossip that surrounds every Broadway production is oddly missing from this one.
The Innsmouth Players came to town under cover of darkness in a dented, rusty bus and have shrouded themselves in mystery since their arrival.
The playwright listed in the playbill, Abdul Abhazred, has studiously avoided the obligatory promotional appearances. The cast has holed up in the theater away from prying journalists. Even the posters are cryptic, displaying only the title and that leering face.
I knew Cthulhu Fhtagn, Baby! was going to be a peculiar night on the town from the moment I entered the theater. A hunchbacked usher with bulging eyes escorted me (none too politely, I might add) to my seat. The crowds around me were a bizarre cross-section uncommon to the city’s arts scene. Of course, the usual fashionable elite was there in full regalia; Dame Hillary von Mehren wore a stunning black dress, and her escort wore impeccable tails. Yet most of the audience were average citizens from quaint suburban neighborhoods out for a night on the town. Also in attendance but from further down the economic food chain were the blue-collar rabble from across the river. Apparently there for the sheer spectacle of the show, they tittered and whispered nervously in the unfamiliar surroundings and were most rude. Eventually, however, the diverse crowd settled into their seats and the show began.
I must admit that the plot was certainly a clever twist on the traditional boy-meets-girl story. The male lead character, Franklin Whipple, is a dashing young professor of antiquities at Miskatonic University. He is drawn from his solitary, academic life of personal genealogical research and occult dabbling by the charms of a deceptively beautiful woman. During a bicycle tour of the smaller Massachusetts hamlets he discovers the seductive Gretchen, who to his idealistic eyes looks like the very figure of purity and goodness. His heart deceives him, however, as we in the audience soon discover that she happens to be the illegitimate demi-human spawn of the great evil Cthulhu. Her sole purpose on the Earth is to complete the foul marriage of the human race with the shambling, pestilent alien overlords from the dark corners of the galaxy. A tragic series of events ensues. I wouldn’t normally spoil the end of the show for my readers, but since it is my sincere hope that you avoid this one at all costs, I will do so. After a few fitful starts and stops, the petty arguments and jealousies of young lovers give way to a passionate romance between the two. Whipple refuses to believe the gathering series of signs that he is in trouble: his lover’s predilection for raw fish, her bulging eyes, the passages of the Necronomicon she quotes tenderly in love letters. With the inevitability of destiny, the play concludes with the terrible wedding of Franklin and Gretchen (the father, incidentally, does not give her away) and the subsequent grisly murder of Franklin upon a stone altar of blasphemy. With a spray of blood into the first three rows of the audience and a howling scream that echoes through the theater, she then clinches the destruction of the human race, devouring his flesh during a crescendo of song and dance.
The music that warbled from the Erich Zann Orchestra during this spectacle was as horrible as the events on the stage; its melodic structure and tonal quality had all the musical majesty of a toppled china cabinet. The songs, from the baldly derivative “Don’t Cry For Me, Miskatonic,” to the strangely familiar “Ode to Dagon,” mercilessly abused my musical sensibilities. The pulsing rhythms of the “March of Rhan Tegoth” are not for a normal number of marching feet.
Costuming was another weak point. Oily sequined fish scales comprised most of the women’s costumes, evoking images of West Virginian prom nights. The dresses stretched to coat every ill-placed lumpy curve of the slimy dancers. Gretchen’s tattered rags were designed by the same person who dresses our city’s homeless. Whipple’s wardrobe, evidently resurrected from Grandpa’s attic trunks without an intervening trip to the laundry, hung on the actor like a ragged set of curtains. Every local thrift store must be empty.
The less said about the acting, the better. The actress who played Gretchen overdid the part with an intensity apparently studied at the Charles Manson School of Wild-Eyed Staring. The actor who played Whipple, the sixth to do so in as many performances, was so obviously ill-prepared for the role that his death would have been utterly unconvincing without the gore. The supporting cast was similarly dreadful; the dancers stomped and wriggled like epileptics, the so-called monsters drooled and staggered like drunks. The cast was, to a man, incompetent and amateur. They shouldn’t be doing high school Shakespeare, much less Broadway.
In every measurable, objective quality, this show was quite probably the worst to ever appear before human eyes. One need not spend eight years in Europe studying the form as I have to know that this play is dreadful. To preserve the decency and prestige of the stage, this travesty should be pulled from the theater and all involved should be publicly shamed.
Yet every show is sold out, and my
night was no exception. Even more disturbing than the show itself was the reaction of the audience. From the first scintillating undulations of the Innsmouth Chorus Line, the audience sat entranced. The emotional tenor of the room slavishly rose and fell with the moods of the play, and the collective unconscious of all present swirled and frothed at the stirrings of those players. Never before have I seen spectators so involved with a show. They were transformed at the beginning of the first act from an audience to a congregation.
They were most disturbing at the end of the show. While my stomach was turning and only journalistic integrity prevented me from bolting from the theater, they stared with rapt attention at the vicious slaughter of Franklin Whipple and indeed cheered on the evil woman who did the deed. With every thrust of the knife, they leaned closer. They drooled, licking their lips and wringing their hands in starving anticipation.
The restless excitement of the crowd became a frenzy after the climax of the play. When the curtain finally and mercifully dropped, the crowd rose as a single massive creature from their seats chanting “Iä! Iä!” Gnashing their teeth with primal rage, they pushed their way through the crowd with a low growl, and emerged from the building in a great blood-thirsty horde. I could barely hear someone in the lobby screaming for salvation that would never come over the din of their march.
Only my formal training in theater allowed me to resist the hypnotic presence of the play and the mass psychosis of the audience. Using my cape to shield me, I managed to squirm through the crowd and escape into the nearest cab. As the taxi pulled out of sight, all I saw behind me were hundreds of people flooding into the streets, kicking over garbage cans, smashing store windows, and assaulting passersby. They were not a Broadway crowd any longer.
This show isn’t simply bad; it is evil. It is profane even by current standards, and watching it can very literally be damaging to the health. To borrow a metaphor from my less sophisticated colleagues, I cannot thrust enough thumbs down far enough to convey the utter horror of Cthulhu Fhtagn, Baby! At the very least, the show is profoundly disturbing, and I believe the disclaimer in the playbill that children under six should be forbidden to attend is somewhat understated. This show is not meant for human eyes.