The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction

by Paula Guran

  “May Xuthltan eat your woes!” said the old man.

  “Hello,” said Matthew.

  “Come in,” said the old man, “The Grand Chronopastor is not here, just me. Are you here to buy a book? Light some incense, say a prayer? Or just shoot the shit?”

  Matthew saw the pedestal he had guessed was a baptismal font was fake marble; its basin was full of gray plastic rectangles with the word “Xuthltan” printed on each in black letters. These were identical to the one embedded in the stone he was carrying in his left pants pocket. Matthew pointed at the basin as he walked in.

  “What are those?”

  “Prayer stones.” Said the old man. “they’re free if you are a member, and a buck (tax included) if you ain’t.”

  “What do you pray to?” asked Matthew.

  “Well I ain’t much of a theologian,” said the old man, “I’d say they was bugs. Hardy bugs of the future, I’d say. Makes more sense than praying to a dead Jewish carpenter, if’n you ask me.”

  “Why’s that?” asked Matthew.

  “Well what can a dead carpenter do fer you? Build something in the past? Heck that’s over two thousand years ago. Let’s say you wanted some bookshelves. You could pray ‘Dear Jesus, make me some bookshelves and hide them so I can find them!’ Well even if he did make them and hid them real good, you’d have to get on a jet and head off to the Holy Land and try and find them. And if you did find them, they’d be two thousand years old – and what kind of shape do you think they would be in then, I ask ye?”

  Matthew wasn’t prepared for this line of reasoning. So he asked, “Uh, what can future bugs do?”

  “What do reg’lar bugs do? Eat of course. They can eat up your problems if you chant on ’em.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Praise Xuthltan! I had two no-good sons. Never took care of me. When they was out of jail, they would literally rob me out of house and home. Took my car. Took my tiny savings from the bank. Hell, they tried to steal the silver jar that held their mother’s ashes. I used to live over on Chicon Street. One day I walked past this place. Door was open on account of the AC not working. They was all prayin’ and chantin’ up a storm. Xuthltan! Xuthltan! Xuthltan! And rubbing these little doodads. Then one of them jumped up and said, ‘Praise Xuthltan! My husband’s gone!’ And she showed everybody her ring finger and there was no wedding band on it. I came in and asked just what the holy hell was going on.”

  “And these bugs had eaten her husband?”

  “Of course I didn’t believe it at first. But I was hurtin’ so bad from the way my no-good kids had done me. I dropped down and started chantin’ along with the rest of the morons. I took the talisman home and chanted for three days. Then I looked up. I used to have a picture of my son Ed in his graduation robe in a little frame on the mantel. It was gone! I looked around my house – it ain’t very big, so it didn’t take me very long. There was nothin’ belonging to Ed. There was still some of his brother Mark’s stuff, so I went back to chantin’, and guess what?”

  “Mark’s stuff disappeared, too?”

  “Well eventually. He called me on his cell phone. All I got is a landline. He called me and told me his house was full of roaches that were hissin’ at him. Could I come over and help him? I told him I could’ve – had he not stole my car. Said I’d ride over on the bus tomorrow. Told him he could’ve called his wife – ’cept she was smart enough to leave his ass. Hung up. Unplugged the phone. Chanted for three hours. Next day I took the bus to his neighborhood. Different family livin’ in his house. Looked like they been there for a spell. They had a swing hangin’ from the sycamore in the front.”

  “Don’t you feel bad?”

  “No. That’s the beauty of it. The bugs are just tryin’ to get here. They’re in some crazy war with flyin’ octopi or something in the future. When the Reverend Nadis first found them they were a hun’erd million light years away. Now they’re maybe a million.”

  “Closer than that,” said Matthew.

  “You’ve received Word?” asked the old man with a look of holy awe, his backwoods craziness suddenly set aside.

  “No,” said Matthew, “I don’t know why I said that.”

  “They can come through inattention, through synchronicities through certain shapes, as well as the shape waves of the mantra. Their name is not really Xuthltan. That just has the right vibrations. You need to meet The Reverend Nadis.”

  Matthew felt the hairs on the back of his head stand up. He didn’t want to meet The Reverend Nadis. He looked over at the books for sale. Most were used paperbacks on the paranormal – The Truth About Mummies, The Truth About Werewolves, UFOS in Colonial America, etc. There were a few antique hardbound books with hard-to-read titles in German and French. Money. Money could buy time. Little church like this must need money.

  “I would like a couple of the Xuthltan talismans. And let me make a little contribution toward the church.”

  Matthew took a twenty out of his worn black wallet. Kathleen had given it to him four years ago for Christmas. He never bought wallets for himself, he hoped that she would notice it was time to get him another.

  “You don’t have to give us anything. We may look like nothing now, but the time will come when this little church in this little strip mall will be the only thing standing.”

  Matthew could picture what the man was saying. This stupid strip mall on a gray featureless plain surrounded by the bugs. They must have great intelligence to have worked this all out. Somewhere there would be vast insect cities, haunted hives where they fought another incomprehensible race. And they used pure human selfishness as a weapon in their war. Matthew stood there, shocked at the vision – it as though he was really seeing it. He could almost hear their hissing song.

  “It gets through to you, doesn’t it?” said the old man, his eyes now full of intelligence, his hick accent still gone. Matthew wondered if this were The Reverend Nadis. The old man went on, “I see you have a wedding ring, that means you’ll be wanting two of the calling cards. Here you go.”

  The plastic felt slimy in his hands. Almost as if the tokens were alive. He felt – or imagined he felt – the rock twitch in his pocket.

  “How long? How long have you known about them?” asked Matthew.

  “Now that, sir, is difficult to explain. Working with them plays hell on your time sense. Your mind gets more and more hollow the longer you know them. On the one hand you remember them. But on the other hand you have a great hollowness in your mind. Things echo in hollow spaces, you know.”

  Matthew turned to leave.

  “Come ag’in!” The old man’s voice had gone all hillbilly stupid again.

  Matthew said, “I won’t. I’ll throw your plastic prayer stones away, and I’ll forget this place.”

  “Don’t matter,” the old man said. “Just you comin’ starts another cycle in motion. Don’t you even want to show me the rock in your pocket, boy?” He laughed a little.

  Matthew turned his back and stepped out of the shop.

  “Praise Xuthltan!”

  On the way back to his house Matthew edited and re-edited the story he would tell Kathleen again and again. He stopped at McDonald’s and had a large chocolate shake. He would tell her about the talisman’s supposed ability to make people disappear. He would portray the old man as a crazy hick. Overdo the accent when he told his wife – make him sound East Texas, bayou country. He wouldn’t mention the vision, and of course nothing about the bugs. The whole thing should be a dead end. He thought about throwing away the talismans, but found he didn’t want to handle them. He needed to see Kathleen laugh at them. She was so sensible. She was a science teacher for god’s sake. Then after she had destroyed their magic with a good laugh, he could drop them in his document shredder. It was strong enough for credit cards, and these were not much thicker.

  By the time he drove home he was all smiles and sheepishness. It had been such a waste of time.

  “So he really c
hanted his sons away?” Kathleen asked.

  “He was a crazy old man in a closed-down storefront. He was probably homeless. You should’ve seen the junk they had for sale.”

  “But you bought two of the cards?”

  “I offered him twenty bucks for them. I figured the guy needed to eat.”

  “And he turned your money down?”

  “I told you he was crazy.”

  She looked at the cards, shrugged, laid them on the kitchen counter.

  She spent longer than usual on her computer that night. He felt sure she was chatting with Randall. He took a long bath, listening for the sound of her going to bed. When he left the tub about midnight, the plastic cards were gone, and she had taken the rock out of his pants pocket.

  A day passed, and then a week, and eventually the memory of the strange bugs and the stranger church were obscured by bills and problems at work. WDS lost two technicians, so everyone had to pull an occasional extra shift. Matthew drew Sunday morning. He crept out of the house at 6.45 a.m. and drove into Doublesign. He took great pride in not waking Kathleen, although she got two months off in the summer plus Christmas, fall and spring breaks. He stopped at the Sac-n-Pac store and bought his Diet Dr Pepper and multivitamin packet and let himself in at work. The mainframe was up, the satellite systems were (mainly) up; he checked the night log and the emails. He put coffee on and raided a banana from the boss’s fruit bowl. He’d begun file maintenance, when he heard something in the server room. Probably rats. (Rats had given Arjay a huge fright a couple of months ago.) He ignored the sound. Then he heard someone say something. He jumped out of his chair. Should he dial 911 or confront? Probably kids from the Discipline Alternative Program.

  He moved to the back and threw open the white painted door. The servers were warm, happy and alone. He stepped in and walked up to them.

  Something fell from the ceiling behind him.

  He turned.

  It was one of the bugs, even larger than before. Two feet long, still the same but bigger sharp legs on each side and pinchers in front. It was bigger now, he knew – somehow – because it had eaten its way closer in time. Two more were crawling along the walls, their blue human-like eyes focused on him. One spoke – not a hiss this time – with his wife’s voice, “Xuthltan!” Matthew could see the three rows of glasslike serrated teeth clearly reflecting the yellow, green, and red lights of the servers.

  Two scurried out from under the server rack. One spoke with the slightly Chinese accent Dr. Randall Wong affected, “Xuthltan!” Another hissed.

  Then they rushed him.

  It was quick, but not quick enough.

  For Matthew Carpenter, super-fan

  Nadia Bulkin writes scary stories about the scary world we live in – and sports (metaphorically and in reality) are definitely part of our world. She became a University of Nebraska Cornhusker fan at the age of eleven, but now also cheers for the Washington Nationals (baseball) and Wizards (basketball). When not becoming irrationally angry at sporting events outside of her control, she tends her garden of student debt sowed by two political science degrees. She has written other Lovecraftian stories set in Indonesia (Lovecraft’s Monsters, Sword & Mythos) and Nebraska (Letters to Lovecraft, She Walks in Shadows). She apologizes deeply to the athletes who inspired characters in this story.

  The genesis of her story lies in “the human cults that worship Lovecraft’s monsters, probably for the same reasons that I’m fascinated by real-world suicide cults: why would someone sign up to bring about the end of the world? In this story, I was working on the assumption that some cults are more inviting to the Outer Gods than others. I wanted to chart a history of one such cult that was ripe for the picking: the Church of the Holy Star, obsessed with the idea that absorbing ‘superhuman’ athletes will enable them to overcome what they see as the fragile weakness of ordinary humanity. Choosing the athletic angle was easy. Saturday in my hometown was the week’s true holy day, with eighty thousand people making the pilgrimage to the stadium for three hours of furious communal worship. Even now, just thinking about game day gives me goosebumps.”

  I Believe That We Will Win

  Nadia Bulkin

  ——

  I. I

  When the 1969 Stairway to Paradise Campaign became the Great Famine of 1970, the landlocked city of Jackson’s Tomb was hit particularly hard. An estimated 45 per cent of the population of Jackson’s Tomb died of starvation and violence before a new population equilibrium was established and the national economy recovered. Riots were suppressed with lethal force until the police force discarded their badges and joined the rioters, at which point only the Tomb’s wealthiest citizens could afford to feed or flee. It was in this dark time that Sasha Spell, the “Perfect Ten,” star of the 1970 Global Artistic Gymnastic Championships, ignited the dormant passion within her father’s Church of the Holy Star.

  The Famine brought Sasha Spell home after it forced the nation to withdraw from the 1970 Summer Olympics, and killed her mother. Devout from a young age, Sasha spent up to seven hours a day in solemn prayer. She burned her palms with candles, eating only wax and scar tissue, to show her sleeping god how badly her people were suffering. She finally heard the answer as her father gave a sermon about the holy bread and wine of communion. Unexpectedly struck by the sublime, Sasha approached the altar, declared herself “food for my people,” and sacrificed her perfect tiny body with a Swiss Army knife.

  And so Sasha Spell became the first athlete to climb that highest rung of divinity and become a true Champion. Her father, Reverend Orrin Spell, was also struck by the sublime: he demanded his congregants accept his daughter’s noble sacrifice and began to offer her to them piece by piece. Awestruck by Sasha’s purity, the congregants drank of her blood and ate of her flesh, and lo! – they were transformed; rewarded for their piousness and rescued from their human frailty. Raised up by Sasha’s well-disciplined muscles and fierce lioness heart, the Church of the Holy Star became stronger and healthier and so survived the Famine. The sole exception was one bookkeeper who doubted the righteousness of St. Sasha’s sacrifice and starved in his attic two months later, weak and shriveled like all others in Jackson’s Tomb who were unblessed by the Champion, the warrior-angel made flesh.

  II. I BELIEVE

  As the nation got its feet back underneath it and rediscovered its collective interest in sporting – and resumed sending athletes to the Olympic Games – the Church of the Holy Star dug its way out of the ruins of Jackson’s Tomb and entered a world filled with the seedlings of Champions. The Church understood that raw talent needed to be sculpted, funded, positioned. Members became recruiters, elders became boosters, and babies born into the Church were scoured head to toe for talent.

  During this period, redheaded Maya Dommel exerted a high degree of influence over the Church of the Holy Star. She was its top recruiter, and had used her unusually persuasive personality to marry an aged industrial baron who loved what he called “sportsball.” The Rising Star Foundation was her brainchild, financed by the baron’s fortune. It sponsored more athletes at the 1986 Olympics than any other organization; at its heyday, Maya Dommel and the Foundation were even invited to dine with President John Jacob Wilder in honor of their “steadfast commitment to elevating the health and spirit of our youth through sport.” The Church launched the careers of a hundred young Champions who returned like boomerangs once glory wore thin and only the long dark slouch into obscurity lay ahead, to give their bodies to splendor while they still could. The Church also propped up the dreams of a thousand others who were not quite Perfect Tens, but could still sustain the growing ranks of the congregation.

  Most of those attracted to the Church of the Holy Star were the unfortunate, those who sought salvation. They would hear of the Church through friends, neighbors, and family who had joined and grown strong and beautiful. To protect the Church, they were never informed of the community’s holy rites until they had signed the paperwork and entered the san
ctum. But when they laid eyes on the bronze statue of Saint Sasha the Perfect Ten, almost every newcomer was struck by the sublime, and quickly swallowed their spoonful of Champion blood. The exceptions – weaklings who through some deep fault of their character would rather embrace death than life – were immediately delivered unto the pitiful fate that they had chosen. The Church of the Holy Star provides only what one can handle.

  One of Maya Dommel’s rising stars was Zola Golding, born to a pair of young alley cats who had found the Church while in need of a firm guiding hand. Their devotion to the Church and its mission was derived from a life spent in hunger. Zola had been reared on the Church diet, weaning off her mother’s milk straight to the blood of baseball pitcher Matt Frankberg, whose 120-miles-per-hour fastball might have won him the World Series, if only he were on a better team. Thus Zola showed a gift for speed early, and her parents delighted at the opportunity to repay the Church for its generosity.

  Zola Golding received everything that a young runner could need to transcend into a Champion. The best shoes, the best singlets, access to the best training facilities and provision of the best meals – Zola was always among the first to dine on any Champion, and she was served her portion on a porcelain plate, not the great metal trough. She was excused from public schooling and gifted with state-of-the-edge electronics. She was also trained by the best coach available, a man who had spun several gold medals out of impermanent and faulty human flesh.

  Early signs of Zola’s selfishness were misread by Maya Dommel as ambition. Zola was sure that her new coach could unlock hidden reservoirs of agility, and insisted that her sacrifice be delayed until she was at her physical peak. She wanted to wait for the next Olympics; she wanted to see just how much glory she could attain. This at a time when the congregation, including her parents, was thirsting for the essence of a Champion! But the Founding Father, Reverend Orrin Spell, was reminded of his daughter’s indomitable spirit and her own unfairly-aborted Olympic bid, and gave Zola the blessing to train for the 1990 Olympics.