The Cthulhu Cult: A Novel of Lovecraftian Obsession

by Rick Dakan

  “Just leave her be. Then we won’t have to call the cops… ” I took Conrad’s hint this time and started to back away from the trio and draw my cell phone from my pocket.

  “Anyone calls the cops,” the knife-wielder slurred, “And someone’s like to get cut.”

  “No one’s calling the police,” Conrad soothed. “You just need to… ”

  “Oh, I know what I need to do. I need to get me some college-girl pussy right here. That’s what I need to do.”

  I had the phone out now and was dialing 911 when I felt a hand on my wrist. It was Shelby, naked, standing beside me. “I’ll take care of this,” he whispered in my ear.

  Shelby, his erection still stiff as a board and leading the way, continued past me and walked straight up to where the knife-wielder held the girl. Both Conrad and the would-be rapist looked at him in surprise.

  “What the fuck? Get that fucking dick out of my face before I cut… ” the man started to say, before Shelby’s right hand slashed out with a powerful blow that slapped the knife from his hand, sending it spinning off into the darkness. Before the disarmed man could express more than surprise, Shelby tackled him, tearing the bastard off the woman and rolling into the grass beyond. She kicked out at him as he fell off, tearing divots in the grass as she pushed herself away from the fray and to her feet.

  There was a scramble, and Shelby somehow maneuvered his nude, yoga-toned body around behind the other man’s and sunk a deep hold around his neck. The man gurgled and choked, clawing at Shelby’s forearm and then, as blood flow to his brain cut off, he passed out. Shelby applied the submission for a few more seconds just to be sure and then rolled out from under the man and let him collapse to the ground in a heap.

  Conrad rushed over to the young woman. She’d spat out the balled up sock from her mouth and was sobbing and cursing the “fucking shit-eating bastard” who’d tried to rape her. Conrad removed his shirt and offered it to her to cover herself up and she took it with a tearful nod. I looked back to Shelby, who still had a raging erection much to my surprise, and saw him standing over the rapist. I was about to go try and find the knife in the darkness when he called out to me.

  “Rick,” he said. “I need your belt.”

  “Why?”

  “To tie him up.”

  “Um, sure.” I started to undo my black leather belt. “Do you want me to call the cops now?” I asked as I handed it to him.

  “I do not,” he said, leaning down and rolling the unconscious man onto his stomach and pulling his hands behind his back. “I can’t have cops here right now. Look around you, man.”

  I did look around and, despite all the commotion we’d caused, no one seemed to be paying us any attention. The two couples by the fire continued to, well, couple, and beyond them I saw other groups of twos and threes and fours doing the same. And those that weren’t were passing around joints and pipes that I knew probably contained high-quality marijuana. Odds were, there were some hallucinogenic mushrooms being consumed out there too, maybe some LSD. The cops would have plenty of arrests to make if they wanted.

  “We could clear everyone out first,” I suggested.

  “Or we could take care of it ourselves,” Shelby said, standing up.

  “Take care of it how?” I asked, uncomfortable as hell with the idea. This wasn’t some little fight or drunken altercation. We were talking attempted rape here. Or worse.

  “Let me think for a minute,” Shelby said. He looked over to where Conrad was still comforting the woman, who was now wearing his shirt. “I need to talk to her, make sure she’s cool. Keep on eye on this fucker, OK?”

  I stood and watched as he stepped over and relieved Conrad of his comforting duties. The girl seemed to know, or at least recognize Shelby, and seemed willing enough to talk to him. Shelby leaned over to Conrad, whispering in his ear. Conrad stood up and retreated to where I was standing guard over the knife man.

  “Is she OK?” I asked.

  “I think so. I hope so. He’d only been after her for a minute or less when we came over and broke things up. She’s pretty shook up, but he didn’t have time to really hurt her, thank God.” Conrad looked down at the attacker and nudged him in the ribs with his foot. “The cops are on their way?”

  “Shelby wants to keep them out of it, which seems… ”

  “Pretty fucking insane!” Conrad yelled, but the drums drowned him out. “How can we not call the cops? This guy’s a fucking rapist menace!”

  “I think he’s afraid of what’ll happen to his other guests.” I waved a hand towards the rest of the party. “And to him, what with all the drugs and sex and stuff.”

  Conrad looked around. “Yeah, well, that’s too bad. The rest of these hippie college kids getting their rocks off and toking up aren’t very important compared to seeing someone like this behind bars.”

  I agreed, but neither of us moved to call 911 on our cell phones. Instead we stood in smoldering, angry silence, our gaze shifting between Shelby and the girl, who were in earnest conversation, and the rest of what could only be described as an orgy at this point. I felt some pang of regret at missing out on participating in my first real orgy, and for a wistful moment wondered what my Balinese dancer friend’s name was. The woman we’d helped save was angry, her arms cutting arcs through the night, but Shelby seemed to calm her down. After about five minutes, a voluptuous but fully clothed dark-haired woman appeared at the victim’s side in response to Shelby’s call. She escorted the grim-faced victim back toward the house while Shelby came over to us.

  “He’s still out of it, huh?” Shelby asked, pointing with his chin towards the knife man. “That’s kind of a surprise. He must be on something.”

  “We need to call the police,” Conrad insisted.

  “That’s up to Genevieve,” said Shelby in a calm, quiet voice. “She’s the one who got attacked and right now she’s OK with us handling it.”

  “And what the hell can we do about it?” Conrad moved towards Shelby, his face aggressively close.

  “When I say we, I mean me and my housemates.” Shelby stepped forward too, and when his penis brushed Conrad’s hip, Conrad, stepped back in surprise. “No need for you two to get involved.”

  “We are involved,” Conrad said, even as he backed away another step.

  “You saved her and she’s grateful for that. I’m grateful for that. But you have to let me handle this now, OK? I’ve agreed with Gen on a punishment. She’s a friend of mine and she doesn’t want the cops busting this celebration up any more than I do. Just leave it be, all right? It’s not your problem anymore.”

  Conrad was about to say something but two more men approached our little group in the darkness. I recognized one of them as Shelby’s fellow fire-dancer. He was naked, like Shelby, and although his erection had at least subsided as he snapped off a condom and tossed it into the fire, he’d obviously had his fun. The other man, a heavyset fellow with bodybuilder arms and chest, and a beer-drinker’s gut, wore shorts and a tank top. Shelby stepped aside to give them access to the knife man and they bent down to pick him up.

  “Where are you taking him?” I asked.

  “Inside,” Shelby replied. Then to the two men he said, “Up into the spare room. Kick out anyone who might be using it.”

  After the two had carried away their captive, Shelby turned back to us.

  “What are you going to do with him?” Conrad demanded.

  “I’m having Benji tattoo the word ‘RAPIST’ in six-inch-high letters on his stomach and ass,” Shelby said with a malicious grin.

  “No, really, what are you… ?”

  “No, really,” interrupted Shelby. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

  “You can’t… ”

  “That’s what he is, isn’t it? He’s a rapist. Or at least he wants to be. And now everyone will know.”

  I looked at Shelby as he stood there, his eyes wild, his penis still shockingly erect, and realized that he was certainly high on
something and not in a place to be dealt with logically. The adrenaline of the dance and the sex and the fight had amped him up to the heights of excitement, mixing with whatever other substances he’d ingested to produce a kind of mania in him. He might sound coldly logical, but inside I suspected his brain burned with incoherent urges and thoughts.

  “Maybe we should just go,” I said to Conrad. He turned to me and stared in surprise.

  “Why go, Rick?” asked Shelby. “You’ve hardly had a chance to join the fun. I know at least two or three young things who’d love to spend some time with a man of letters like yourself. You too, Conrad, assuming you’ve got Lauren’s permission to play.”

  Conrad shot Shelby a withering glance and then turned on his heel and headed back towards the house. “I’m going to make sure that girl’s OK, and then I’m leaving,” he said.

  “Suit yourself,” Shelby said with a laugh. “What about you, Rick? Are you sure you won’t join us?”

  I looked around at the intertwined bodies, watching a woman ride a man bucking underneath her while a second man suckled on her left breast. “No… I don’t think so.” I turned away and followed Conrad into the house. I looked back just before I walked through the back door and saw that Shelby was already back with the two women he’d abandoned earlier, as if nothing had happened. I shook my head in amazement and went inside.

  Chapter 2

  Sarasota veers back and forth between cosmopolitan airs and small-town sensibilities. Rich, mostly retired, and rather Republican, it’s a conservative place. But it also prides itself on its arts scene, its theaters, its galleries, its museums. Very few artistic edges get to do much cutting, however, and all of the most salacious, scandalous behavior happens behind well-closed doors. We’re more than big enough for those who wish to do so to live in anonymous privacy, but small enough that when some shocking event does break through into the public consciousness it need not be too terrible to find a place on the front page.

  At Shelby’s party, Genevieve had told me and Conrad that she was OK with “letting Shelby take care of things.” She rightly changed her mind in the sober light of morning. Two days after that night, Conrad called. He’d told his wife Lauren about what had happened, and being a former State’s Attorney, she’d asked around the courthouse for any news. It turns out that, urged on by her roommate and friends, Gen had gone to the police and filed a formal complaint against the man. This led to police questioning Shelby about his involvement in the attempted rape and about the party in general. Shelby provided them with a description of the man, stating that as far as he knew the attacker was a homeless drifter. The police didn’t seem to know anything about any punishment Shelby and his housemates might have inflicted on the man. Conrad told me that he’d stopped by the Indian Point Drive house the day after he heard, but that Shelby wasn’t there and none of the other residents would let him in the door. I called Shelby to check in on him, but no one answered the phone, and he had no answering machine or voice mail.

  It might have all ended there had not the attempted rapist gotten drunk or high later that week and inadvertently turned himself in. According to the police report, he staggered into a police station, demanding to file a complaint against those responsible for knocking him out and tattooing him. He then raised his shirt, dropped his pants, and revealed the “RAPIST” tattoos. Although the tattoos hadn’t been part of the description put out in the police bulletin, the officers on duty recognized the man as their wanted rapist and promptly placed him under arrest.

  It was only after Genevieve (who remained nameless in the articles of course) had identified the man as her assailant and given a sworn affidavit about what she’d seen that night that the matter began to gain notoriety in the local press. One of the investigators leaked the sordid details of the drug-fueled orgy to a reporter, who asked around and found that the house was quite notorious for such wildness, especially among the college and art school sets. A look back through the past few years saw numerous police reports for noise complaints and drunk and disorderly arrests associated with the house. Even then the story might not have had much in the way of legs until the intrepid reporter dug into the house’s ownership and discovered that it belonged to a sitting county commissioner’s husband (originally intended as a retirement home for him and his first wife, now a languishing investment property).

  “COMMISSIONER’S HOME SCENE OF SEX PARTIES, RAPE,” the headline screamed on the front page. It was enough to make me buy a copy as I walked by the newspaper machine on my way to the gym that morning. The article retold the events of that night much as I’d experienced them myself, down to the alleged tattooing by Shelby and his friends. Again I called Shelby, but neither Conrad nor I were able to get in touch with him. The legal drama played out in the courts and in the papers over the next few weeks. The rapist pled guilty to assault, and the commissioner’s husband kicked Shelby and everyone else out of the house and put it on the market at a discounted price. Charges were considered but never brought against Shelby, who had hired a talented young lawyer to defend him and had then withdrawn to some unknown location. When a number of local pot dealers were arrested a week later, Conrad told me that, according to Lauren, the rumor around the courthouse was that Shelby had turned them in in exchange for having the investigation against him dropped.

  And just like that, Shelby was gone. Without a goodbye to me or Conrad or any of his other acquaintances, Shelby vanished from Sarasota. The city had reared up against him in full (and sometimes faux) outrage. To think that such depredations take place in our town! In such a nice neighborhood! In the home of a commissioner! Not that they were wrong to be angry or too terribly prudish by being upset. It had been a nasty, ugly business to be sure. But Shelby hadn’t tried to rape anyone. He’d saved her (well, we’d saved her too, but Conrad and I were left blessedly out of the story). I’m sure in his mind it seemed monstrously unfair, and perhaps it was, but if he’d played by the city’s rules instead of his own, things might have gone very differently for him and, as it turned out, for all of us.

  Conrad and I would talk about that strange night from time to time in the months that followed, when the rest of Sarasota had moved on to other stories and other scandals, joking about Conrad’s having to explain to his wife why and how he had lost his shirt that night, and wondering whatever became of old Shelby.

  One evening a year later, I waited for Conrad to join me for our weekly dinner, our time to catch up and kvetch about the past week’s events. Sometimes Lauren joined us, sometimes not. Lately she’d come along less and less and I was wondering if maybe I’d done something to offend her or, as was more likely, she was tired of us telling the same old stories again and again while she picked at her salmon. Conrad didn’t seem to mind, though, and often told me how he relished our evenings alone when he could really cut loose and be himself. Tonight Conrad had chosen the restaurant, a new Cuban place that smelled delicious and offered a warm, family-friendly environment. My stomach was already grumbling for some black beans and fried plantains. Conrad was characteristically five minutes late, time enough for me to be halfway through my first glass of wine. He’d come straight from work, or something work-related like showing a house. He was a realtor and ever since the market had turned south and he’d let his assistant go, he was always running around doing something. In his monogrammed blue dress shirt with French cuffs and dark pants (he’d left his tie in the car, no doubt) he made me feel rather scruffy even though my T-shirt and jeans were more de rigeur for the crowd at Havana Nights.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Conrad said, as always.

  “No you’re not,” I replied, also as always.

  “You look at the menu yet?” he asked.

  “I’ve already ordered. You’re having the tripe.”

  “I actually like tripe,” Conrad said, as he looked over the menu.

  “You like trout. Tripe is intestines.”

  “I know that,” he paused as he read over the m
enu. “Although trout does sound good… ”

  “They don’t have trout. There’s tilapia. And of course tripe.”

  In the end he got the roast chicken and I got the pork. Conversation turned from movies, television, and local politics to the ongoing renovations he and his wife were doing on their house. Not that it didn’t need renovations. It was a great old Spanish-style place in the desirable Laurel Park neighborhood, and Conrad had paid handsomely for it, despite its rundown state. It was definitely a fixer-upper from day one. Another story about weird customer service at Home Depot took an unexpected turn when Conrad said, “You’ll never guess who I saw in the checkout line!”

  “Who?”

  “Shelby,” he said, grinning.

  “You’re shitting me. Really?”

  “Really. We were in line to pay for some new light fixtures we’re trying out in the spare bedroom and I looked over and there he was, standing in line trying to figure out the self-checkout system.”

  “Wow. Did you talk to him?”

  “I kept trying to catch his eye, you know, looking away and then looking back and hoping he’d look over. He never did and so I ended up calling out to him as he was headed out the door. I don’t think he even recognized me at first. Lauren stayed in line to pay and I went over to talk to him, and it wasn’t until I was real close that a light went on and he realized it was me.”

  “So how’s he doing?” I asked. “Is he back living here?”

  “He seems to be good. He got a haircut. He’s put on a little weight. Healthier. Filled out, you know? Not all skin and bones anymore. And he’s definitely moved back here. He and his new girlfriend bought a house together.”

  “Girlfriend? Is Shelby Tyree actually becoming domesticated?” That he’d come back to town without contacting us didn’t surprise me. Shelby’s thoughts seldom strayed too far beyond himself and whatever he was up to at the time, although when you were in the same room with him he would focus on your every word and tend to your every caring thought. I was surprised that he might have settled down with just one girl.