Cthulhu Comes to the Vampire Kingdom

by Cameron Pierce

  Franz turned toward the doorway. The footsteps were fast approaching. He shoved the soggy book down his pants and climbed onto Lola’s back.

  Lola spread her batwings and leaped from the ledge.

  They fell.

  Nosedived.

  Until a gust of wind swept them upward.

  They circled the peak of Gaul’s mountain, spiraling in a swift current that propelled them toward their cottage on the far side of town.

  They passed over the Bat Cave, where a riot had broken out.

  They flew faster, home.

  As Gaul bled to death, he lamented the fate of the vampires. He had withheld a vital piece of information from Franz and Lola. Yes, Cthulhu would save the planet, but Gaul had neglected to mention all that salvation entailed, which essentially boiled down to the total annihilation of the vampire race. After Cthulhu returned darkness to the planet, unspeakable ghouls and other beasts borne up out of the collective unconscious of the vampires would rise from the black muck of the planet. And if the monsters failed to wipe out the vampires, Cthulhu would take care of them personally. Gaul just hoped that none of them had to face down Cthulhu in the eldritch hero’s favorite death game, an eating contest of cosmic proportions.

  Fang Foot’s henchmen burst into the library and crowded around Gaul’s crumpled body. He closed his eyes and died with a smile on his face, relieved to be through with the suffering of the flesh.

  Kayla parked her hearse beside the seashore.

  A distant light without an apparent source cast an eerie green glow on the horizon. As the excitement in the car turned to anxiety, they stopped talking over each other, and then they stopped talking entirely.

  The waves, jagged in the howling wind, pounded against the frosty shore.

  Nothing was more commonplace than violence, and what they needed to pick their spirits up was an overdose of the normal.

  Kayla popped the trunk and they got out of the car. They stood around the trunk, Isaac and Cyrus on opposite sides of Kayla.

  “Maybe we can squeeze the babies out,” Isaac said.

  Cyrus had no clue what he was talking about. From the look on Kayla’s face, he suspected that she didn’t know either.

  “Yeah, squeeze the babies out,” Cyrus said, hoping to appease his friend and soon-to-be executioner.

  “We should hurry,” Kayla said.

  She opened a large velvet bag with the words Pickman’s Costume Emporium stitched into the side.

  “Just warning you, they were out of Cthulhu costumes, so I went with the next best things.”

  She pulled out two plush masks and a body suit for each. She handed a furry black goat mask to Isaac.

  “Sweet, Shub-Niggurath!” he said, fitting the mask over his head.

  “Actually,” Kayla said, “it’s the Black Goat. The Necronomicon describes Shub-Niggurath as ‘an evil cloud-like entity,’ which that silly goat mask obviously does not represent.”

  Isaac took off the mask, looking disappointed. “I thought Shub-Niggurath was the Black Goat.”

  “That’s because you spend all your time listening to music and huffing blood blisters when you should be reading the Necronomicon. Besides, Shub-Niggurath is a female. Do you want Cthulhu to mistake you for a girl?”

  “I ain’t no girl,” Isaac muttered.

  He dressed in a black rubber body suit and slipped the mask over his head.

  “Do I look sinister or what?” he said. “I am the Black Goat. I will eat your babies and shit. Come on, guys. I look sinister, right? I said I’ll eat your fucking babies.”

  Kayla rolled her eyes.

  Isaac batted at the yellow felt horns of his mask, muttering to himself.

  Kayla handed a tentacled, seaweed-colored mask to Cyrus.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “A squid.”

  “So we’re summoning, correct me if I’m wrong, the supreme eldritch force of the universe, and I’ll be dressed as a squid.”

  Kayla threw up her hands. “I compared it to the Cthulhu costume. They’re exactly the same. They use the same exact pattern for both costumes. One of them comes with a cape, is all.”

  “You said they were out of Cthulhu costumes.”

  “I lied, okay? The Cthulhu costume cost twice as much. I’m sorry, I wasn’t going to pay that kind of money for a stupid cape.”

  “You realize money is useless after tonight, don’t you. That in the grand scheme of everything you’re an idiot for not blowing every cent you own.”

  “Excuse me if I forgot.” Kayla wiped a few tears from her eyes. “I went into Pickman’s and saw the price on Cthulhu and thought, no way. I thought how I needed to make my next car payment on time and save up so I can move out of my parent’s basement by the end of this decade. It wasn’t until I was driving over to your place that I realized money doesn’t mean anything anymore. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Cyrus said. “I kind of always knew I would die like an invertebrate.”

  Kayla looked as if she would start bawling. Instead, she clenched her jaw and ground her teeth. Cyrus cringed at the grating noise.

  A steely expression clouded the vulnerability in Kayla’s eyes. Her moment of opening up, of revealing that she felt as scared as Cyrus, was over.

  “Anyway, there’s a theme to our costumes,” she said.

  She removed a third mask from the bag and placed it over her head.

  “You’re a bird,” Cyrus said flatly.

  “Yeah, so together we embody land, sea, and air.”

  “Then who’s fire?” Isaac asked.

  Kayla ignored him as she stepped into the clawed feet of her feathered bird costume.

  Cyrus struggled into his green rubber jumpsuit, feeling like the cheap knockoff of an eldritch god.

  Cthulhu had not always been a hamburger connoisseur. A long time ago, he was a master of the mystic art of sushi. He owned Floating World, a floating restaurant on Tokyo Bay in Japan, on a planet warmer than this one. He was renowned by people rich and poor as the greatest sushi chef in the world. He prepared all the rolls and sashimi varieties known in the modern world, but also possessed a mastery of the most ancient form of sushi, narezushi, from which sushi derived its definition, which means “sour-smelling.” Narezushi was a preparation of fermented fish and rice preserved with salt. The vinegar produced by the fermenting rice broke down the fish proteins into amino acids, resulting in a sour taste. Originally, when the fermented fish was taken out of the rice, only the fish was consumed and the rice was discarded.

  Cthulhu first made a name for himself in the cutthroat sushi business by putting an alcoholic spin on the historical narezushi. His fish contained more alcohol than sake, and it tasted great too. People flocked to Floating World day and night. The only people absent from the constant crowds were food critics and other sushi chefs, all of whom derided Cthulhu as a charlatan and a hack. Even after the people took to celebrating Cthulhu’s sushi with street parades and national holidays, the critics and restaurateurs stayed away. They fumed, in bitter jealousy, scheming to take down Cthulhu and Floating World.

  By this point, their restaurants had all closed down and the critics had been fired, for nobody was interested in any food other than what Cthulhu served up.

  Their careers ruined, they locked themselves in a dungeon and vowed to stay down there until they had thought up a solution. They did not even pause to eat or sleep. On the twenty-eighth day, by then delirious and stark raving, they burst out of the dungeon and ransacked an electronics store, making away with every television on the shelves. They intended to throw these televisions into Tokyo Bay, to electrocute Cthulhu and everyone aboard Floating World, but on the way they ran by a feline café (one of those places where you can go to pet cats in Japan, because people in Japan cannot own cats). This ignited a spark of brilliance in the fractured mind of one former restaurant owner. Passing the feline café, he shouted for all his fellow foodies to hear, “What are televisions without
cats?”

  They halted in their tracks, gave up a great big cheer, and robbed the café of all its cats.

  With cats and televisions in tow, they made their way down to Tokyo Bay. They broke out the screens of the televisions and stuffed the cats inside, as if giving new life to the broken televisions by implanting furry guts. Before the police who were now gathered could stop them, the critics and restaurant owners and chefs heaved the cat-filled televisions into the bay, and a great electric meow rose up from the deep.

  This was how the elites of Japan’s food culture invented the internet.

  Despite their prompt incarceration and eventual execution, Cthulhu’s enemies had succeeded in their mission. The internet proved to be far more addictive than his sushi. Every day thereafter, less and less people showed up at Floating World, opting to stay home and look at cats with the new technology.

  Within a year, Cthulhu closed the doors on Floating World for the final time. He was so depressed on his walk home that fateful day that he stumbled into one of the internet cafes that had suddenly opened everywhere. Through no conscious thought or effort, he sat down at one of the terminals and began clicking around.

  A Lolcat popped up on the screen and broke away the ice that had formed around Cthulhu’s heart. The Lolcat conquered his depression.

  Twelve hours of Lolcats later, Cthulhu rose on wobbly, bloodless legs and declared, “I can has cheezburger!”

  And so he commenced his quest for the perfect hamburger.

  Unfortunately, he never found much success, for he was a sushi master at heart. After a few luckless years, the internet cats seized power and Cthulhu moved away from Japan.

  He found a cold and icy planet with a great big body of water, the perfect house for his depression, which had grown inside him like an egg despite his Lolcat addiction. Sinking to the bottom of the sea, he found a desolate reef and crawled inside, then passed into a snoring, dreamless slumber that commenced unbroken for fathomless years.

  Once inside, Franz and Lola locked the door and peeped through the curtains.

  “Do you think they followed us?” Lola asked.

  “No, we flew too fast. They’ll have to descend the mountain.”

  “Remember, it’s Fang Foot who’s after the Necronomicon. When the book fails to turn up among Gaul’s possessions, he’ll come after us.”

  “We’ll lie. We’ll say that Gaul told us the whole story about the Necronomicon, that he threatened to kill us and destroy the book. We’ll say we had no choice but to murder him in order to restore the book to Fang Foot, its rightful owner. Then we’ll give the book to Fang Foot and move underground with the others.”

  “You would dishonor Gaul so quickly? After everything he did for you?”

  “It’s not dishonoring him if our only other option is getting killed. As long as we’re alive, we still have a chance. Being dead doesn’t help anyone. Except . . .”

  “Except what?”

  “Except if you die to become the virginal firstborn sacrifice nobody wants to make.”

  “Our Lion Man was a genius.”

  Franz and Lola kissed, their spirits renewed in the battle for environmental justice.

  “Come on, let’s go raise Cthulhu with this ancient book. It’s sticking to my thighs,” Franz said.

  “Where should we do the ritual?”

  “Our sacrifice is already in the cellar, and that’s the least likely place they’ll look for us. Want to do it there?”

  “Sure, but let’s pack our bags first. We should make it look as if we’re already gone.”

  Franz nodded. “Good plan.”

  They spent the next half hour throwing clothes into suitcases, emptying their cask of blood into portable pint bottles, and rushing through the house, ensuring that everything gave the impression of a quick exit. They packed their toothbrushes, but left the blankets in their coffin disheveled. No one leaving home without a plan of return would ever make their coffin.

  “How’s the book holding up?” Lola asked.

  Franz reached a hand down his pants and fingered the large rectangular bulge. “Yeah, it’s definitely sticking to my flesh. Can we do the summoning now?”

  “Sure, take these suitcases outside.” Lola pointed at the two bulkiest, heaviest suitcases.

  Franz groaned.

  “We’re not leaving them inside,” Lola said. “Even if we hide them in our coffin or something, anyone snooping around will find them. If we bring them down to the cellar and someone happens to discover us, we’ll tell them we were only saying goodbye to our dead baby boy, then you can tell them all those lies about Gaul. Is that a good enough plan?”

  Franz knew from her tone that she did not want him to answer this question, so he nodded acquiescently and lifted the heavy suitcases.

  “I’m not carrying these all the way underground, you know,” Franz said on his way out the door.

  “If Cthulhu rises, you won’t have to.”

  Even though Franz was walking in front of Lola, he could sense the listen or fuck off smile on her face. He loved her listen or fuck off smile. It never failed to make him feel like jumping her bones. The world was ending and he could think of no one else he would rather spend it with.

  “Bats fly too,” Isaac said.

  He grunted as he lifted the duffel bag full of weapons.

  “Duh.” Kayla said. She threw her backpack, the one purportedly holding a real copy of the Necronomicon, over her shoulder.

  “Just saying, you could have chosen something more sinister.”

  “Fuck you. Birds are scary shit.”

  “Okay, yeah, whatever.”

  Cyrus slammed the trunk and hurried to catch up with his bickering friends.

  “Birds are sinister too,” he said, hoping it wasn’t too late to convince Kayla that Isaac might make a better sacrifice.

  “Shutup, pussyfat. You’re only saying that because we’re about to smear your guts all over the ice.”

  “Don’t be a prick, Isaac,” Kayla said.

  “Only wish I had a stick of dynamite to shove up your ass.”

  “I said don’t.”

  Cyrus felt wounded by Isaac’s words. He could not understand where the maliciousness was coming from.

  About a hundred yards from the hearse, Kayla stopped walking and told him to lie down on his back.

  Cyrus complied, as he knew he always would.

  “It’s torture time!”

  “No, Isaac. It’s time for ritual sacrifice. We are not sick murderers. We are sorcerers of the dark arts.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Can I do one thing before I die?” Cyrus asked.

  Kayla looked skeptical. “What is it?”

  “I want to see the real Necronomicon. I want to hold it in my hands.”

  “We’re running out of time.”

  “I’m asking for one minute. That’s all. I promise.”

  Kayla sighed heavily. “Fine.”

  Cyrus propped himself on his knees as Kayla unzipped her backpack.

  Although they often spoke of having read the Necronomicon, the truth was that none of them had seen the actual book, let alone read a single passage from it. Well, maybe Kayla had, after she nabbed it under mysterious circumstances the previous night.

  What they had read was an approximation of the book. Some vampire, writing under the pen name Diablo Rex, purportedly dreamed up the entire original text of the Necronomicon and wrote it down in a book.

  After this forgery summoned the ghoul that robbed the blood bank, Cyrus and his friends began treating it like the real thing. However, when it came to summoning Cthulhu, there could be no replacement. Even Diablo Rex warned never to attempt summoning Cthulhu without the real Necronomicon, the location of which was a mystery. Nihilistic consequences of cosmic proportions would befall any who attempted summoning the evilest force in the universe with a false book.

  “Be careful, it’s fragile,” Kayla said, her voice quivering.

&nb
sp; Her hands trembled as Cyrus took the real Necronomicon from her. It was a thick, warped tome bound in flesh, just as the legends said. Cyrus felt its nightmare energy surging through his fingertips. He opened the book to see if it was written in blood and . . . “Is that a unicorn?”

  He turned the page. Another unicorn. And it wasn’t dying or suffering. It wasn’t even inked in blood.

  He eyed Kayla, bewildered.

  “Did you forge this?”

  “Tracking down the real thing is impossible. It might not even exist anymore.”

  “You told us you had found it.”

  “I did. You’re holding it right now.”

  “But this. . .” Cyrus turned page after page “. . . this is a handmade book full of unicorn pictures.”

  “I didn’t want to tear up any of my own books, and my sister had so many dumb coloring books lying around.”

  “So you planned on killing me and then reading from a coloring book?”

  “Still plan on it, in fact. Let me explain.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “A few weeks ago I was rereading the Necronomicon, I mean the Diablo Rex version, when I started picking up on the true meaning of the text. He’s not saying that his is the one true version of the Necronomicon—”

  “Actually, he claims that his is the one true version several times throughout the book.”

  “Never mind what he says on the surface. It’s what’s beneath the tip of the iceberg that counts.”

  “Let me guess. There are unicorns beneath the iceberg.”

  “No. Not under every iceberg, but maybe. There might be unicorns. In this case, yes, definitely unicorns beneath the iceberg.”

  Cyrus closed the book and handed it back to her. “I’m sorry, I can’t go through with this,” he said, hoping in his heart that Kayla was not as crazy as he suspected. He started to stand up, but Isaac pushed him back down, and then slapped him for good measure.

  “Let me finish,” Kayla said. “There’s no such thing as the real Necronomicon because every Necronomicon is real. See, like, Diablo Rex created his Necronomicon, and that’s real to him. This here is mine, and it’s real to me. That’s the whole message. Whatever you create is real.”