The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction

by Paula Guran

  Within two years, she was favored to win the heat that would qualify her for a spot on the national team. Her parents and Maya Dommel watched with bated breath from the bleachers as she lined up alongside her unenlightened competitors, the white and gold shooting star emblem emblazoned across her heart. Her gaze was iron as she crouched on the track, flexing her strong, taut tendons. And yet after the gun was fired and the race begun, Zola showed her frailty: she rolled her ankle before completing her first lap, then lay howling on the clay like a grotesque fallen animal. Afterward in the hospital she thrashed and wept and insisted that she could still heal and glorify Saint Sasha, but the Church had seen clearly from this failure of mind and matter that Zola was not a Champion.

  Perhaps they would have only remembered Zola as a misdiagnosed contender if the Church had been an ordinary one; but the extraordinary Church of the Holy Star has eaten the flawless eyes of Champion marksmen and sees all things. In this particular instance the Church’s Champion vision moved through Zola’s best friend, Julie Chen, who went to the hospital to deliver a care package and overheard Zola laughing fiendishly with her coach, that deviant mortal man. She was laughing, so Julie told the Church, because apparently Zola could not believe she was such a convincing actress. Once aware of this betrayal, the Church of the Holy Star moved quickly to protect itself. The coach was destroyed with no witnesses in his apartment building, but the false champion Zola Golding slithered out of the reach of the Church’s Justice. It is said that she dwells in a poisoned city across the sea, hiding from the light of the Church and dreading the shame and torture that will befall her on the inevitable Day of Judgment.

  Maya Dommel still proclaimed Zola to be an innocent who had been corrupted by her coach, perhaps seduced by his promises of earthly rewards. In dramatic fashion she beat her chest and blamed herself for exposing Zola to the influence of a man who had never been taken into the Church’s fold. But a seed had been planted in the congregants’ minds: perhaps the willing sacrifice was not a sustainable long-term model for their community.

  Zola’s good-hearted parents attempted to make amends for their daughter’s sins by sacrificing themselves. Yet while their faith was stellar, their bodies were not; in the end they only succeeded in creating more work for the little old woman who cleaned St. Sasha’s altar.

  III. I BELIEVE THAT

  The treason of Zola Golding shook the foundations of the Church of the Holy Star. The Rising Star Foundation, too, had been embarrassed by her failure to qualify for the Olympics – its mentors and sponsors always stressed to its athletes that they were one enormous family of heroes, and for one of their most-favored sisters to fail so abominably after years of patient, dedicated training cast self-doubt on the entire stable of athletes. The organization did not win a single gold in 1990, and soon a few of its strongest jumped ship to other clubs, citing concerns about Rising Star’s strength and conditioning program. The beloved Reverend Orrin Spell died shortly thereafter of a broken heart and a hungry soul, and in this dark and uncertain time several pillars of the Church journeyed out into the wretched world in search of answers.

  One of these pilgrims was Professor Richard “Dick” Kettle, who taught Culture and Power in Ancient Societies, The Living Myth, and Advanced Topics in Shamanism at Rosewood College. He took an academic sabbatical to visit the tropical city of Parkidi, which had just begun construction for the 1994 Olympics, and climbed a nearby hill from whose peak he could see into the entrails of the blossoming Olympic Stadium. There he knelt, lit a small candle, opened his mind, and wept for the beauty of the stadium, the purity of the contest, and the failure of the Church to seize upon its potential. He pled with the known and unknown universe to deliver to him, and so to the Church of the Holy Star, the light.

  He waited there for two days, and then a man came up the hill from the city shining with the lights of progress. He was tall and slim, wore a jet-black suit and a sympathetic expression, and introduced himself as Hyperon Talta. He said, “I hear that you are in need of help, Professor. I have something to show you.” Professor Kettle took his hand, and Hyperon showed him a great many wondrous things about the velocity of blood, and the truth of the sword, and the eternally spinning face of God. Hyperon Talta illuminated a truth that the Church had previously been unprepared to see: sacrifice is noble, but conquest is glorious.

  Professor Kettle returned to the Church of the Holy Star and convened an emergency meeting that very night. He brought with him Hyperon, who rose and unfolded like an enormous bat from behind St. Sasha’s altar.

  “Hold the knife to the throat of weakness.”

  Hyperon Talta showed them a god that was boundless and limitless: a reveler god whose name was Azathoth the Ultimate. The name itself opened their cells, reconstructed their nerves. For there is nothing larger, nothing stronger, than Azathoth the Ultimate, eater of worlds, absorber of stars, the one and only universe-straddling Champion. Hyperon showed them golden athletes dancing for this god within a stadium of stars. He taught them the games these athletes played: the plucking of the bloodshot eyes, the clack-rattling of the ribs, the drumming of the skin stretched tight and tense. He sang for them the soul-stirring, adrenaline-pumping cacophony of a thousand cymbals and a million trumpets and a billion raw vocal chords strained hard enough to break: a song that he called The Canticle of the Hunter.

  “Come before God and conquer fear.”

  Then Hyperon withdrew into his black sleeves and left them to themselves. Nearly all of the Church members threw up their arms in revelation. “Have you ever seen a more perfect vision of victory?” cried Professor Kettle, and the congregants confirmed the answer to be no. Not even those who had witnessed St. Sasha’s first, primitive sacrifice could claim not to be moved more violently by this vision.

  As always, there were skeptics. Maya Dommel shouted, “There is always another side! He calls it the Canticle of the Hunter. What is that? Who is the Hunter? If we are the Hunters then who are the Hunted?”

  Professor Kettle, standing at the pulpit, wisely proclaimed: “If you wish to be one of the Hunted, Maya Dommel, then there is none among here who can help you, and you should never have been taken into St. Sasha’s flock. She conquered all there was to conquer. She would never have been Hunted, by anyone.”

  And so the Church split between those who heeded the guidance of Hyperon Talta, and those who refused to deviate from a tradition that was evidently failing the community. Red-haired Maya Dommel, who proudly took the title Apostle, led the heretics away from the Church of the Holy Star like the Pied Piper stole children – she even lured away the great-nephew of Reverend Orrin Spell, young James “Jimmy” Spell. These shadow-cast stragglers gathered their worldly possessions and drove to the other end of the nation, and in a city of empty factories – near a colossal football stadium that lay gutted to the sky like a dead whale – they established a house of sin and worship that they called the First Church of the Star.

  Well into 1993, the First Church of the Star continued to recruit human sacrifices. With their siren songs they encouraged elite-level competitors in basketball, hockey, and baseball to lay down their lives in honor and celebration of the sublime. Eventually, this legion included the starting wide receiver of the team with the wolf herald that played in the dead whale stadium, a passionately religious young man named Henry LaCloak. Henry carried so much finely seeded muscle mass in his gunner’s arms that he had to get his dress shirts custom-made. He was also the spiritual leader of his team: it was he who organized pancake and sausage fundraisers, and he who invited the team to join him in mass prayer upon their knees in the traditional Abrahamic style. He had about him an abundance of ritual, including pointing skyward after successful catches and repeated verbal genuflection toward a “Lord” and “Big Man in the Sky.”

  The First Church of the Star doubted Maya Dommel’s decision to make a sacrifice out of Henry. “He is closed to us,” they whispered to her. “He is on fire for his god,” she
replied. “He only needs to be brought to ours.”

  Ah! You may ask, what god did the First Church of the Star worship, if they refused Azathoth the Ultimate? According to their logs, they worshipped an intangible force that resides within all creatures: the will to improve, strengthen, and prosper – the will, that is, to make one’s self a living god, and one’s body a beating testament.

  Henry LaCloak had tapped into that force at a very young age, when he first won a foot race against his brother. Pursuit of the force had defined his life, just as it had defined the Church. He met Maya Dommel when she asked the team’s public relations department if he would co-sponsor a food drive for a local sports team, and Henry LaCloak immersed himself more deeply into the Church than any other recruit ever had.

  “All your sacrifice, all your sweat, this is what it was for,” Maya Dommel whispered to him as he knelt at the altar of St. Sasha, “This is why you are a winner. This is why you have never been second-string. You are the nectar of the heavens. You are the reason we are alive. This will be your ultimate victory.”

  “When?” he asked.

  “When you have become all that you can be on this mortal plane. Then you ascend.”

  All threads began to unravel when Henry tried to spread the word of this bastardized First Church of the Star – to his nervous coaches and ‘roid-raging teammates, the scandal-hunting reporters who spent nights camped outside their locker room, the little children in the pediatric cancer ward who received chemotherapy in Henry’s 9 jersey. Maya Dommel urged him to be silent about his newfound passion but he believed he had found the key to all things and he had only ever wanted to use his athletic prowess to inspire others. When Henry scored touchdowns he now made shooting star gestures. “God was on our side today,” he said after a come-from-behind win, “And I just want to thank the First Church of the Star for, uh, showing me why I was made a winner. So I could be the vessel for glory. God bless you, and God bless this city.”

  None of the unenlightened knew what to make of this, and Henry grew alienated from his team. Freak, they called him. Bible-thumper. Satanist. A kicker on his team finally agreed to attend a service with him on one rainy Sunday, and despite Maya Dommel’s attempts to sanitize her message, the blind cannot be subjected to the light too quickly. The kicker asked Henry, “Why are those crazies so obsessed with you? Aren’t you scared of what they want?” Henry said that the Church only wanted the same thing he did: it wanted him to win. Henry was cut from the team after the season was over, citing a disruption to team harmony. It was the first time he had ever failed, as an athlete or a leader, and he came hysterically weeping to the First Church of the Star, where he pulled a switchblade across his throat and sacrificed himself.

  Here the full scope of Maya Dommel’s error became apparent. The city could not care less for most of its athletes. They were drug addicts, child-beaters, rapists, dog-fighters – criminals who had been lucky to be blessed with phenomenal muscular and skeletal build. In this the city fundamentally misunderstood the Champion spirit – their foolish finger-wagging only served to blind them from the simple, absolute truth of victory, which supersedes all other supposed facts. But the city did love Henry LaCloak, their hero, who reminded them that there was some good left in their vile city. They came a-calling when he vanished. There was no body for them to find, but using their trickery and technology, they were able to show that Henry LaCloak’s blood had once dripped upon the gleaming altar that Maya Dommel had erected in her pauper’s church, the First Church of the Star.

  So it came to be that red-haired Maya Dommel was placed in a human prison whose walls her legion could not penetrate, and sentenced to reside there for the rest of her years. Stories circulated for decades of a cannibal prisoner with a head of flames at Gossling Penitentiary, but flesh alone would not sustain her – not the flesh of those unclean sinners greased with heroin and greed, and especially not after the eye of Hyperon Talta looked away.

  The remnants of the First Church of the Star scattered to the four corners of the known Earth, running like rats into the small, hidden places between buildings whenever they sensed that a triumphant disciple of the Church of the Holy Star was nearby. An attempt was made to recover Jimmy Spell, as he was a blood-relative of St. Sasha, but he had burrowed like a termite into an architectural crevice and moved below ground, leaving behind slanderous warnings in the nation’s subterranean train systems – warnings which were, fortunately, too cryptic for the uneducated to understand.

  IV. I BELIEVE THAT WE

  These had been lean times for the true Church of the Holy Star, which had kept afloat on the unripe, semi-sweet bodies of young athletes who were not yet at their pinnacle but were more easily overpowered. Many had to be kept in cages and bled at length to prolong their usefulness, though the drop-off in the quality of their juices was precipitous. The undernourished Church members gnashed their restless teeth and complained that Maya Dommel’s heathen splinter church was feeding just fine on willing sacrifices in the Rust Belt.

  “We chase something greater,” said Professor Kettle, as Hyperon Talta’s long leather-gloved fingers softly clenched both sides of his head. “We must make our break with the past. Sacrifice is over. Surrender is over.” In the end the flock accepted this; they knew firsthand, now, that sacrificed blood would never taste as rich as spilled blood. It is the difference between an insect trapped in amber and a buzzing fly. There is simply more iron and punch in the latter.

  And so, while the false First Church of the Star was hoisted upon its own petard, the Church of the Holy Star continued its holy quest to find its way to Azathoth the Ultimate. Hyperon Talta took up residence in the vestry of the church, counseling the elders and bringing joy to the children through magical binoculars and enchanted gyroscopes. The Church knew it was blessed; Azathoth’s emissary could have taken his wisdom anywhere in the world (and perhaps he was doing God’s work elsewhere, but such is the nature of omnipotence that the Church of the Holy Star never felt his calm eagle-eye waver, not even for a heartbeat), and so committed its best and brightest to Hyperon’s makeshift training camp.

  All throughout 1993, the Church of the Holy Star perfected its rendition of the Canticle of the Hunter. For those unlucky enough never to have heard it, this is not a song like those children’s hymns performed in common ecclesiastical choirs, nor a tearful anthem for a hamstrung nation. It is a calling, closer to the ritual war-chants that human sport clubs have used for decades to support their team and intimidate the enemy: “Rock Chalk Jayhawk,” “Glory Glory Man United,” “We Are Penn State,” “I Believe That We Will Win.” The Canticle of the Hunter had no words, only sensations; no gestures, only dreams. To observe a solo performance of the Canticle of the Hunter is to hear nothing but a faint growl emitted from a focused, open mouth. It is also to feel wildly compelled, at a biological level, to join. You may not believe at first that you know how, nor even what the singer is doing. But your mouth will drop before you know it. Because above all else, the Canticle of the Hunter is a demonstration of overbearing and undeniable will. A will that is too great for any individual human to refuse.

  At the first public performance of the Canticle, Professor Kettle stood at the back of an underground arena, hot and dark as the womb save for the fluorescent lights that lorded over the boxing ring, and sang to the two heavyweights as they bounced off the ropes in their respective corners. Reginald Peters and Luis Cabron blinked and shook their heads, as if their ears were clogged with water, but neither stopped the fight. They were would-be Champions after all. Professor Kettle did not share the Canticle of the Hunter with the crowd, but their inborn energy still bolstered the song: amplifying its crests, deepening its valleys. The fighters, pre-selected for their ruthlessness, grew bolder and bloodier. In the end it was Luis Cabron who punched his opponent into unconsciousness, and then into death. He tore into the corpse, broke two ribs, and swallowed three mouthfuls of Reginald’s deflated lungs. At his murder trial,
Luis would claim that voices in his head had forced him to kill Reginald. Due to the cold and clinical nature of human society, there was no consideration of his claim, and Luis was sentenced to death by electric chair.

  “Hum, hum,” said Hyperon Talta with infinite patience as he sat cross-legged upon the cabinet of vestments. “Azathoth responds to roars, not screams.” And so the Church learned that mass action would be needed to please their new God.

  In 1994, a small Church mission traveled to Parkidi to pay tribute to the Summer Olympics and perform a second recitation of the Canticle. They chose an early soccer match between two small nations with no love lost between them, thanks to a history of arbitrary and inconvenient colonial boundaries, and from high in the stands unleashed the Canticle of the Hunter. This time, they sang to the crowd as well as the players. For fifteen minutes there was no increase in the number of red cards thrown at players, no unusual noises from the crowd. And then, for what must have been a second but seemed to be an hour, all things aligned for the missionaries, and the ravenous minds of one hundred thousand spectators and athletes were lassoed within one heavenly burning crown.

  And then the Church of the Holy Star lost control. To conduct so many souls who had shown so little disposition toward following the weakest of rules was a greater challenge than they had anticipated. The crowd ripped free of the Church’s restraints but absorbed the Canticle’s rage, and as the noble Canticle splintered into a million shards of petty human anger, the crowd used this psychic bomb to set the stadium and the city on fire. The shock waves from the massive bleeding heart that was the Parkidi Olympic Stadium could be felt hundreds of miles away. Players bludgeoned other players, fans threw their seats at other fans, and the referees, symbols of the dying light of human civilization, ran.