by Rick Dakan
We all raised our glasses once more and drank to Shelby’s toast. He sat down and most of us dove right into the cheesecake, but Conrad and I both seemed to have the same idea at the same time. We stood up and went over to Shelby’s table to get a look at these cards. Shelby nodded as we approached and held out two of the black invitations. On one side was the branch-looking rune or symbol that matched Conrad’s description of Kym’s tattoo. It was a dark red. I flipped the card over and, in matching red letters saw the following: THE CTHULHU CULT: A Celebration of Old One Iconography, March 23, 8:00 p.m. 1600 58th Street.
“The Cthulhu Cult?” Conrad said to Shelby. “What’s this all about? Something to do with your church?”
Shelby’s lips curled up into a kind of leering grin. “It’s about the future, my friends. The Cthulhu Cult is the future.”
Under other circumstances I wouldn’t have gone to the Palmetto Club that night. Conrad and Lauren didn’t. Chris Hewitt did. I was tired and already more drunk than I’m accustomed to. But then I saw that Cara was going. Plus, Shelby and Kym had a limo. There it was, pulled up in front of the restaurant, nearly blocking the street and causing a bottleneck in Hillview Avenue traffic, and Cara was stepping into the doorway that Shelby held open for her. I bid Conrad and Lauren a quick adieu and slipped up beside Shelby, who smiled, clapped me on the back, and got in right behind me.
It was a ten-minute drive, one side of me pressed against Shelby’s leg, the other just a few inches from Cara’s. Kym sat in the back, a queen holding court and pouring champagne as she elicited school-days stories about Shelby from the other passengers. Cara and I caught up a little more, made some small talk. She had been a middle school art teacher in Michigan, but now, for reasons that went unexplained, she wasn’t. She was, to my disappointment, married, but never quite mentioned hubby’s name. Why hadn’t he come down? Couldn’t be bothered. What did he do? Bought and sold stuff no one wanted. Would you like some more champagne? Why, yes. Me too. Kym poured for us both.
The Palmetto Club is a Main Street institution, two stories of brick and glass and smoke-saturated wood paneling. It had been a regular hangout for me in my late twenties when my friend Randy poured single malt with a heavy hand at the upstairs bar and never charged me more than $11 for the whole night. Recently it had been given a surface-level makeover and changed management, so I seldom went anymore. The music had always been loud downstairs where the live band played, but in the new configuration it seemed equally loud upstairs among the high-backed couches and well-worn pool tables. Shelby had reserved the semi-private room, but given our late arrival, it was already filled with regular customers. Shelby didn’t seem to care at all. He and Kym passed out cards for the Cthulhu Cult and bought drinks for anyone that asked. I snagged two glasses for me and Cara while she staked out a quiet corner for us to “continue catching up.”
I talked a lot about myself. I told stories about anarchists and hackers and private investigators — all my greatest hits, and I seemed to hold her rapt attention as I shouted over the music. We got another round of drinks. She asked and I talked about the challenges and rewards of being a writer and working from home and holding yourself to a deadline. She got the next round and, as I caught her up on what had really happened at Shelby’s party and his weird new fascination with H.P. Lovecraft, she also bought the next. I was polite and also interested in her, but any questions I asked about her got deflected. No, not deflected. Flat out swatted to the ground. First the facts about her life in Michigan were “too boring.” A few drinks later they were “too depressing.” By evening’s end they were “a fucking mess.” I finally got the message and stopped asking and only then did she kiss me. Not a quick lean across to be my first kind of kiss. This was a vodka-soaked tongue down my throat, her arms around my neck pulling me in close. We sucked at each other for a blessedly long time, my left hand caressing her thigh under her dress and her fingers crawling down my back. She seemed as hungry and ravenous as I was and it was just so very exciting. It wasn’t even that it felt that great — we were positioned awkwardly, and people in the crowd jostled my elbow twice and she bit the tip of my tongue once, and I really needed to pee. But it was so exciting, so unexpected, so not at all what happens to me in bars.
“OK,” she finally said. “We should stop.”
I replied by kissing her again. And it was another long, breathless, groping while before she repeated, “I should stop.”
“Do you want to get out of here?” I asked. “It’s almost closing time anyway.”
She nodded. OK, how to maneuver this? My car was back at the restaurant. I looked around and didn’t see any sign of Shelby or Kym. Was the limo gone? There would be cabs waiting on the corner below. My house wasn’t far. Neither was her hotel. I still really needed to pee.
“We should go,” she said, and I kissed her again.
“OK,” I said. “Let me just run to the bathroom.”
She nodded and kissed me. I arranged myself a little, caught my breath as I moved through the thinning crowds towards the bathroom. It all felt good and right and I didn’t give her nameless husband a moment’s thought the whole time I was gone. She must have. When I got back she was gone. I didn’t quite panic, but I looked all around the room with very rapid, lurching twists of my neck. I even went back to the restrooms and asked a woman at the bar to see if she was in there. She wasn’t. Downstairs was still crowded, the band still playing. No sign of her. Then across the bar and through the open front door I saw her, stepping into Shelby’s limo as he held the door for her. I fought my way across the length of the dance floor, knowing they would, of course, wait for me. Of course they didn’t. The limo was already out of sight before I got outside and I wondered for a moment if I’d even seen it at all. I took a cab home.
Chapter 8
Cara had given me her e-mail and cell phone numbers and I left messages with both, but in the cold, hung-over light of day, I can’t say that I was surprised when she did not call back. She was married, after all, and we were drunk. It had been, to pervert a phrase, a slip of the tongue. As excited as I’d been at the time, it wasn’t like there was much future in it. I didn’t want to move to Michigan. I didn’t want to have a long-distance relationship. And I suppose it would have been more than uncomfortable being part of breaking up what seemed like a pretty unhappy marriage. I just wanted to let her know that I understood and there were no hard feelings. She might be feeling some sort of shame and didn’t want me reminding her of it. Those are all the things I kept telling myself anyway.
I had an article to finish and revisions on the anarchist book to get working on. It wasn’t until late the next afternoon that I stepped out the front door, dragging myself to the gym down the street to get some exercise in. I found a manila envelope taped to my door with my name on it. I peeled it off and looked inside, discovering a money order for $5000 and a letter from Shelby, along with several dozen fliers and cards advertising the Cthulhu Cult event.
The letter read:
Dear Rick,
Good seeing you again last night, as always. Kym really likes you and we’ll have to have you over sometime soon, but for now our focus is on orchestrating the Cthulhu Cult event and that’s demanding every iota of our concentration and every moment of our time. In the meantime, if you could see if you can find some more of these pieces for me online, I would greatly appreciate it. Here’s another $5000 to help you find the pieces I need. Time is of the essence, while cost is less of a concern, so please act according to your best judgment.
Blood and kisses,
Shelby
The second page was a list of more books and other items Shelby was hoping I could find for him online, all of them seemingly Lovecraft-related in one way or another. I was a little surprised that he was giving me more money and a new shopping list when I hadn’t even made any progress on the last list. How could these things be so important that money wasn’t an issue but time was? Did he need them for the art
show itself or was there some other reason? Or was this just Shelby being impatient? I also wondered when he’d found time to tape the note to my door. I’d been writing all afternoon, and my office window looks out over the front door, so surely I would have seen him come and go. He must have left it late last night while I slept, which I found a little creepy. I went to the gym, still mostly trying not to think about Cara and wondering if maybe she’d said something to him about me. I’d have to ask him next time we saw each other.
I didn’t get around to doing Shelby’s shopping for him until the next day. A number of the items were things he could easily have ordered for himself and weren’t collectibles at all. For example, a group of enthusiastic Lovecraft fans had made a silent black-and-white movie adaptation of the Call of Cthulhu story. They were now selling replicas of some of the props used in making that film, including three different Cthulhu statuettes. Shelby wanted all three of them, plus a copy of the DVD and a poster. This was as simple as filling out an online form and charging it to my credit card — I had the cash and now I got the points as well. I ordered a copy of the DVD for myself too, deciding it would be part of my commission for serving as Shelby’s personal shopper. The other items on the list were harder to find. There were more copies of Weird Tales and similar pulps that had first printings of Lovecraft’s stories, along with some other issues that, as far as I could tell, didn’t have anything to do with Lovecraft. I checked around on eBay and ABEbooks.com first, but decided to e-mail Sinclair and see if he could help me with any of them. He’d certainly proved efficient last time and if time was more important that money, it seemed the quickest way to go.
The next afternoon I met Conrad for lunch at The Four P’s, a coffee shop where I often sit and work when the distractions of my home become disruptive. I’d been there for three mugs of coffee, typing away about Emma Goldman’s influence on modern worker’s movements in the San Francisco Bay area, when my friend sat down beside me.
“Have you seen this?” Conrad said, showing me the display screen on his cell phone. It was a picture of a piece of sidewalk art, apparently made with a stencil and chalk. A tentacled head looming over the single word “Cthulhu.”
“Nice. Where’d you see that?”
“They’re all over Main Street and Palm Avenue. I have no idea what good he thinks scrawling a gibberish word on the street is going to do him. Who the hell knows what Cthulhu means?”
“Not many people, I’m sure. But I’ll bet this is just the first step. There’ll be more, no doubt about it.”
“Oh, I know there will,” said Conrad and I couldn’t quite tell if he was excited or annoyed about it. “I just got off the phone with Lauren. Kym stopped by the office today to pick up the paperwork for his church thing, which as it turns out is actually all in Kym’s name, not Shelby’s, so she has to sign everything.”
“Interesting,” I said.
“That’s nothing.” He leaned forward, the left side of his mouth curling up just a little bit. “Guess how she tried to pay?”
“How?”
“With antique coins.”
I cocked my head to the side in confusion. “I’m not sure what that means… ”
Conrad laughed. “Lauren said she had this leather pouch filled with all these gold and silver coins from, like, the eighteenth century. She had appraisals for them that showed their value and wanted to pay her legal fees with them.”
“Jesus. What did Lauren do?”
“She said they only take checks or money orders. Apparently Kym seemed a little put out by this. She ended up leaving and an hour later came back with a money order.”
“That’s just weird.”
Conrad rolled his eyes towards heaven and shrugged. “She’s just weird. They both are. Still, I’m insanely curious to see whatever the hell it is they’re going to do at this art gallery thing.”
“Enough about them, though.” I leaned back and tried to hide my shit-eating grin. “I haven’t told you what happened at the Palmetto Club the night of the reunion.”
“What did Shelby do?”
“Not Shelby, me. Me and Cara McMillan.”
“Oh shit! Really, come on, spill it.”
I told him what happened, from the first limo ride to the one I’d missed and filled him in on my theory that Cara had had second thoughts about screwing around on her husband and all.
“What a jerk,” he said.
“Me?” I asked, lips tightening.
“No, Shelby.”
“What did Shelby do?”
“He totally cock-blocked you. He had to have seen the two of you making out right? And then he takes the limo and leaves with her and without you? I mean, come on! Total dick move on his part.” I hadn’t thought of it this way at all, although now that Conrad was suggesting it, it did make me a little peeved. “I think Cara’s great and you two would be great together. Sounds like her marriage is all but over anyway, so why not you? When she and I dated, I knew then that she was really special. She has this, I don’t know, spark. This something special where she sees the world in a different way. She could always make me think of things in new ways.”
“Yeah,” I said. Although there hadn’t been much of that side of Cara last night, I remembered the same thing about her from school. And listening to Conrad, I felt the same wistful nostalgia that I heard in his voice, a remembrance of times past when the world seemed like it was filled with many more options.
“You know,” Conrad said. “I only broke up with her because of you.”
“I know, I know.”
“Not that I’m complaining now.”
“You complained then.”
“But I’m not now. What I’m trying to point out, is that if I broke up with her because she was ‘your ex’ then that means it’s up to you. If one of us is going to get her, it’s your responsibility.”
“She’s married and lives in Michigan.”
“All I’m saying is don’t give up on her.”
“That is in fact exactly what I’m going to do. See above under ‘married, lives in Michigan’.” Conrad shook his head and sighed at me, but we had a nice lunch after that and he only brought her up five more times, but mostly just to tease me.
I headed home where I found a long e-mail from Sinclair detailing which of the items he could get easily, which would be more problematic, and which were impossible. He asked me to give him a call at some point to go over specifics. I wasn’t up to dealing with him at that moment so I e-mailed back and asked him to go ahead and purchase the items he had easy access to and promised to call him later in the week when my schedule freed up some more. I then tried to put all thoughts of Cthulhu and (less successfully) Cara out of my mind and concentrate on the job in front of me.
Over the next week, more and more signs of Cthulhu started popping up around town. The street chalk stencils spread out from downtown to the parking lots of malls and popular restaurants. Fliers showed up stapled to telephone poles and pasted onto the sides of abandoned buildings. None of them had any explanation at all— just a rough, primitive-looking sketch of the squid-faced monster and the word “Cthulhu.” There were also more of Shelby’s cards placed everywhere. The comic shop I frequent each week even agreed to put them in all the subscribers’ folders, which was a minor shock when I picked up my comics on Wednesday. All over town people were talking Cthulhu, even if they couldn’t pronounce it (much less understand what it was).
The evening with Cara still haunted me. I imagined I could still taste her on my lips and feel her leg pressed against mine. The crick in my neck I’d developed from our awkward positioning, sandwiched into the corner of the bar, was less of an annoyance than a fond reminder of those few hours. As the physical discomfort faded, I added mental anguish as I composed and didn’t send a score of e-mails ranging from the quick and simple, “Hey, how’s it going?” to long, thoughtful prose about old friends and new chances. I almost sent the one that was all careful concern and friendl
y advice. I erased the erotic one as soon as I finished typing it. I’d given up any hope that she’d call or e-mail on her own, but I was still trying to decide how long I should wait before trying again. “Never” still seemed like the wisest option, but I hadn’t resigned myself to that fate.
Sinclair, however, apparently grew weary of waiting for me to call. That evening the phone rang around 9:30 and I picked it up to hear his voice on the other end. “Hello, Mr. Dakan, this is Calvin Sinclair. I hope I’m not calling too late.”
“No, no, not at all,” I said. “I’m sorry I haven’t gotten back to you sooner. I’ve been swamped.”
“I understand perfectly. I just wanted to let you know that I dispatched your most recent set of purchases this afternoon and they should arrive by Friday according to Federal Express. I have e-mailed you the tracking information.”
“Thanks. That’s great. Any luck with the other stuff?”
“Much of it is out of print but also not particularly collectible. For instance, the Guide to the Cthulhu Cult was a small-run paperback that I believe has no actual historical value, but was rather meant as some sort of pastiche. And of course there is no actual play The King in Yellow as your list suggests. I assume you were looking for the short-story collection by Robert Chambers. I must say, I’ve never been too impressed with Chambers. He wasn’t a very serious writer and I think the connection between his work and Lovecraft’s is over-emphasized by some. Adding Chambers into the mix distracts from true scholarship. I did manage to locate a nice older edition and have it here if your friend really does want it.”