The Cthulhu Cult: A Novel of Lovecraftian Obsession

by Rick Dakan

  “I need your help finding and buying some books online,” he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folded white envelope. “Is it all right if I give you the money now and have you do the bidding for me and handle all that?”

  “Why can’t you do it yourself?” I asked. I didn’t mind doing the favor. Well, I didn’t mind very much, but I couldn’t understand why he needed my help with something so trivial.

  “We don’t have Internet at the house right now, and I’m kind of in a rush.”

  “If you wanna borrow a laptop with a wireless card or something, I’ve got a spare. It runs Linux but you can do all your online stuff with it… ”

  “There’s more,” Shelby said, interrupting. “I’d prefer not to be directly associated with the purchase. I don’t want anything traced back to me.”

  “What the hell are you buying?”

  “Just some books. Nothing illegal. I’m looking for some first-edition Arkham House editions of Lovecraft’s books and, if possible, some originals of the magazines his work originally appeared in, like Weird Tales. There’s a list of what I’m looking for in the envelope.”

  I opened it up and found it full of hundred-dollar bills along with a folded piece of the same high-quality paper his letter to me had been on. “Jesus, how much is in here?”

  “It’s three thousand,” Shelby said. “It’s probably not enough, but I can get you more when you need it.”

  “Is this some kind of tax dodge thing?” I asked. “Trying to hide money you’re spending?” Not that I had a problem with that, but it was the only explanation I could think of.

  “No, no, nothing like that. It’s just better… better for me and Kym… if no one knows we’re accumulating texts like this. We don’t want to raise any flags.”

  “Raise flags with who?”

  “Other collectors. They might try and jack up the prices or buy them to keep us from augmenting our own collections. Lovecraft fans — like any fans — can be a petty lot.”

  I put the envelope in my own pocket. I didn’t really buy the story, but it wouldn’t be the first time in my life I’d done something a little strange as a favor for Shelby. An incident involving wearing a dress and purple wig for one of his school art projects sprung to mind as being much stranger. “I’ll do what I can for you sure. Is your number on that piece of paper in there?”

  “We don’t have a phone yet either,” Shelby said. “I’ll get in touch with you next week and see if you’ve had any luck. I really appreciate your help. I need to get going now, though. Still a lot of errands to run today.”

  We embraced again. “Great to have you back,” I said. “You’ll have to come out for dinner with me and Conrad one night so we can all catch up together.”

  “I’d like that. I should be able to carve out some time in my schedule at some point. Until then, any help you can give me with the books is great. And please, don’t let anyone know you’re buying them on my behalf.”

  “Sure thing,” I said, watching as he walked back into the woods. What on Earth was he up to, I wondered, and turned back down the path toward the sunlight and my car.

  Chapter 4

  That Sunday night I was lying on my couch playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare on Xbox Live, my default bored-with-nothing-better-to-do activity. I never wore the headset that let you talk to the other players — I wasn’t there for human contact, just for the game — so I had no trouble hearing someone knocking at the door. I hoped the game wasn’t too loud for my neighbor, Joe, but peering through the peephole I saw that it was Conrad. He looked slightly disheveled and very excited as he burst past me when I opened the door into my townhouse.

  “What a fucking evening!” he said, sounding and looking rattled and frazzled, like someone who’d just barely avoided a terrible traffic accident and was both shocked and happy to be in one piece.

  “Come on in,” I replied, but Conrad was already disappearing into the kitchen. I followed him and watched as he poured himself a glass of water from the gallon jug I keep in the fridge. “What’s going on?”

  “I just had dinner at Shelby’s house.”

  “Actually at the house?” I was a little jealous. I’d always been closer to Shelby than Conrad was. Their friendship had been one of the more delicate balancing acts in the group. As a gaggle of young geeks, we’d all gotten along great, but Conrad and Shelby had clashing personalities. Shelby often played the clown, mugging for attention, and sometimes that got on Conrad’s nerves. Sometimes it got on all of our nerves. But usually Conrad was good about teasing Shelby in some light-hearted way that calmed him down and, for lack of a better phrase, put him in his place. Not in a mean way, mind you, but not in a kind and loving way either. It was friends cracking on friends, like boys (and men) do. But the two of them never got together on their own. I might go see a movie with one or the both of them, but they’d never go without me or Paul or Greg along as well. There wasn’t any animosity I think, it was just that the thought would never have occurred to either of them. So I was surprised that he’d invited just Conrad back to his new house for dinner while all I got was a walk in the park.

  “I thought you were meeting him at the beach.”

  “I did, but he immediately invited me back to his place. He didn’t seem too happy with the way the drum circle had turned into a circus since the last time he went. So we both got in my car and drove out to his place for dinner.”

  I ushered Conrad towards the living room and into one of the big comfy chairs while I resumed my seat on the sofa. “So what’s it like?”

  “It’s big for one thing. Not, like, mansion big or anything like that, but kind of sprawling. I’d guess there’ve been additions over the years. From the outside it looks like a normal, large suburban house, built in the 1980s. Single story, but with lots of square footage. Probably 4,000 square feet all told, although I didn’t get the whole tour. There’s a pool and a huge garage that could hold two big trucks, but it’s off to the side. The most impressive thing is that it’s located on two and a half acres and there’s an eight-foot-high wooden fence around the whole property, so from the road you can’t see anything but the top of the house. There’s even a high wooden gate in the fence. And the thing is, I’m pretty sure Shelby and Kym put the fence in when they bought the place — the wood’s all brand new and the supports are fresh.” Conrad prided himself on his ability to size up real estate at a glance.

  “Jesus,” I said. “That’s a step up from the place on Indian Point Drive.”

  “I know, and he owns this one! It kills me that I missed this deal. I could turn that place around in a few months and make a profit. Even in this market. Unless the inside is just a total disaster zone I suppose. And it might be. I never got to see inside. Still, how does Shelby always luck into deals like that?”

  “Do you want a drink besides water?” I asked. Conrad looked a little flushed, his hair disheveled and a thin, oily sheen on his skin that suggested he’d been sweating recently.

  “No, I’m still pretty buzzed from the hash we had at Shelby’s… ”

  “Ahh, the real reason you came by here before going home to Lauren.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said, laughing. “But listen to this shit, man. I have to tell you what happened. So we drive out there, right? I don’t know how he got to the beach in the first place. Maybe Kym or one of the others dropped him off or something. So we get there and… ”

  “Wait,” I interrupted. “What others?” Shelby had mentioned living with multiple someones when we’d met.

  “I’ll get to that, hold on. So we get there, right, and pull up in front of the wooden gate. I honk the horn because he tells me to, and a minute later some guy inside opens it up for us. I drive in along the gravel driveway, which sort of curves around to the left and runs parallel to the front of the house. There’s five or six cars already parked on the grass across the driveway from the front door, and I pull in beside this old, beat-up Toyota Land Cruiser. Wh
en we get out of the car I can hear music coming from somewhere, like from a radio or stereo. Instead of going inside, Shelby leads me around the side past a bunch of oak trees that totally screen the house from the neighbors. There’s neatly stacked piles of lumber and bricks and other construction stuff under tarps and we kind of have to pick our way through it all.

  “So I come out and see a half-dozen people digging in the dirt about fifty feet away. They’re working on what looks like a garden. It’s still kind of hot out and they’re wearing just shorts for the most part, no shirts. As we get closer I recognize from the Home Depot that one of them is Kym. She turns and waves and comes over. She’s wearing just these low-hanging denim cut-offs and nothing else, her tits on display like it’s no big deal. She’s a really good-looking woman, and she’s got the African/Caribbean accent which is so sexy. It was everything I could do not to stare as I said hi. I focused on the tattoo she has above her left hip. It’s really simple and looks kind of like a branch from a pine tree or something — very simply done — a line at an angle going up from left to right with five lines like branches coming off the sides at angles. But even then I had to stop staring at the tattoo because her shorts were riding so low I could see the top of her pubes and so I got all flustered. I shouldn’t have been too shocked. This is Shelby we’re talking about here. How many naked women have I seen him lounging around with?

  “But there was something different about this. Maybe it was that she was half-naked and doing yard work instead of partying. I don’t know. None of the other guys seemed to mind, certainly. Not that I got to really talk to them much. I only caught some of their names — the ones who stayed around for dinner. There were five of them, and they all had that sort of college hippie look to them, you know? Scruffy beards on some, half-assed dreadlocks on others. Mostly really thin and kind of pale with, like, piercings and faux Celtic or tribal tattoos on their arms. One of them was a girl, although I wasn’t sure at first because she was flat as a pancake and had hairy-ass armpits. They’d all obviously been working at setting up the garden for a while, judging from the amount of dirt and sweat on them.

  “Anyway, Shelby introduced me around to everyone and I felt pretty out of place in my nice linen shorts and Tommy Bahama shirt. Kym told everyone that it was time to stop for the day, and they all did this kind of group hug thing, like a football huddle. Kym said some weird, guttural sounding words, like a chant and they all repeated after her. Some kind of prayer or something maybe? I just sort of stood and watched with Shelby. I snuck a glance at him and he had this little smile on his face, kind of like a proud father gets, you know?

  “Three of the others, including the other girl, said their goodbyes. That left me, Shelby, Kym, and two of the hippie guys, who were named Ash and Oliver. Oliver was a quiet guy, I don’t think he said a dozen words the whole night, but Ash was more of a talker. More engaged. Not that he was anything like Shelby, who pretty much dominated the whole conversation the rest of the night. That certainly hasn’t changed about him, although Kym seems able to rival him when she wants to. The five of us walked on around to the back of the house and there was a long wooden table set up back there underneath this great big oak tree. And not some store-bought thing. It was one large piece of wood supported by legs that looked like tree trunks — in fact they were, with the bark still on them. It looked kinda crappy from a distance, but once we sat down around it I could see that it was actually pretty well made. We sat on these little stools that weren’t very comfortable.

  “Ash and Oliver went inside while Kym and Shelby and I sat down and started chatting. Kym asked me a lot of nice questions about what Shelby was like back when we were kids and Shelby and I told some funny stories. We even talked about how we used to play Dungeons & Dragons and all those nerd games all the time. She seemed particularly interested in that Call of Cthulhu game, same as you and Shelby talked about. I didn’t remember many specifics about the game, just that everybody’s characters always went crazy or died by the end, which she thought was kind of funny. So Oliver comes back out with this big glass jug. You know, like a cider jug? And it’s full of beer. Shelby made the beer himself and I was a little unsure about it, but it was actually really good. Strong and dark, like one of those Belgian beers you’re always drinking. I’ve got no idea when Shelby learned to make beer, but it was good. Maybe he said ‘we made it’ now that I think about it. So I guess Kym or one of the others could’ve been behind it. Anyway, a little while later the two guys come out again and this time they’ve got all this food. It was sort of Indian food — all vegetarian with curried beans and spinach and cheese and this flat bread. I was surprised I liked it, but it wasn’t too spicy and the beer made everything taste better. It was kinda weird, but tasty, and the company was good. The kid Ash was pretty funny at the table, and you got to remember Kym still wasn’t wearing a shirt, so that kind of added to the excitement, although I guess I got used to it pretty quick.

  “But I noticed something kind of weird as we ate. It wasn’t like a bunch of friends just having dinner together. For me and Kym and Shelby it was like that, but I got a whole different vibe from the other two. First of all, Ash was clearly doing his best to impress Shelby and Kym. And both he and Oliver were hanging on their every word. You know what it reminded me of? It was like going out to dinner with one of your professors in college. Did you ever do that? This was the same vibe. Everybody’s friendly and laid back, but the students are trying to really show off if they can, and still suck up some at the same time. That’s totally what it felt like.”

  Listening to Conrad’s story, I though that maybe Shelby had finally found the students he’d always wanted. During his long path through college his stated goal had been to become a philosophy professor. What else did you do with a philosophy degree anyway? He’d joked that he wanted to do it for the easy hours and the chance to seduce co-eds, but I’d always suspected that if he could pole-vault directly from student to tenured professor, he’d jump at the chance. It was jumping through all the hoops academia set up between those two points that Shelby (and I for that matter) could never handle. So if a few doe-eyed young men and women wanted to look up to Shelby as some kind of teacher, it didn’t surprise me at all.

  “But it was after dinner that things got really interesting,” Conrad said. I leaned forward, eager to hear what happened next. Conrad leaned back in his seat and gave a dramatic pause while he took a long sip of water.

  “It all started with the hash truffles. The chocolate kind, not the ones pigs dig up. Yeah, homemade truffles with some kick-your-ass-into-space–quality hash in them. Not that Shelby mentioned that until I’d already bitten into one — in fairness I guess I could’ve spit it out, but it tasted so good. Surprisingly good. So we each had a few and they brought out another jug of beer and everything got really loose and friendly, you know what I mean? By this time I needed to take a wicked piss, so I asked to use the bathroom. Also of course I wanted to get a look inside the house. But Shelby just pointed towards the thick bushes along the fence line and said we could piss over there. He joined me. When we got back to the table, Kym was laid out on top of it. She’d taken off the rest of her clothes and was lying there like she was sunbathing. I guess it was moonbathing, although only a few spots of moonlight made it through the tree branches. The other two guys had disappeared. I was pretty surprised, I’ll tell you. Shelby didn’t even seem to notice. He just kept on talking about stuff for a while. Then he went over picked up one of the last couple truffles and held it in his teeth and then bent over and kissed her, you know, feeding her the truffle in the process. I asked if they wanted me to give them some privacy and they both laughed and said no. Shelby sat back down and so I did too, right next to him. Kym got up off the table and just kind of wandered off into the darkness without saying a word. ‘She’s quite a woman,’ I said, and Shelby told me that I had no idea.

  “So I asked him about his plans now that he was back. Was he going to get a job?
He brushed aside any talk of work or money. He told me he had bigger plans and started talking about Socrates and Greek academies and Lovecraft. And then he just kind of went on and on about a lot of stuff I didn’t really quite understand. The hash was coming on strong at this point and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t even talking English part of the time. I do remember a lot of talk about guiding people or leading them or showing them the way. Being a teacher of some sort. And those people I’d met, Oliver and Ash and the others, those were his students. No, not students. Followers? No… acolytes. He called them his acolytes. Like he’s some kind of priest or guru.”

  “Shelby told me he’d found the meaning of life in Lovecraft,” I said. “Or, to be precise, he said that life has no meaning at all. That Lovecraft was some kind of prophet of nihilism.”

  “That sounds familiar. I think he told me something similar,” Conrad said. “But you gotta hear what happened next. This is the part that almost made me shit myself I was so scared.”

  “Scared?”

  “Fuck yeah, scared,” Conrad took a gulp of water. “So I’m sitting there at the table with Shelby and he’s going on and on about cosmic this and insignificant that and I’m just sort of zoned out on the hash still, staring at one of the candles on the table. And then I look up at Shelby because he said something interesting sounding. Something about buying a church, maybe? So I look up at him right, and it’s now pitch black all around us. Can’t even see the moon anymore under the tree there and the house has no lights coming from it or anything. Just black, right? And then, mid-sentence, as he’s trying to tell me something, there’s this wet slapping sound and all of a sudden there’s this, like, tentacle wrapped around Shelby’s body. Like around his chest. It whips out the dark and kind of lassos him and he screams. And then I scream.

  “And Shelby is all of a sudden yanked backwards out of his stool and disappears into darkness. I stood up and started backing away and looking all around. There’s this noise now, right? Like a kind of flute or something. Real far off. And I hear Shelby kind of grunting or gasping in the darkness. I call out his name and I don’t hear anything back so I yell again. Nothing. So I get out my cell phone right? And I flip it open and turn it on and sort of use it like a flashlight. But it’s only lighting a few feet in front of me, so I have to move towards where I hear Shelby’s moaning. Fuck, I’ve never been so freaked out that I can remember. So I take one step, then another. Just kind of inching my way forward and asking Shelby if he’s OK.