The Cthulhu Cult: A Novel of Lovecraftian Obsession

by Rick Dakan

  “Why don’t you send it along. I’m sure he’ll appreciate it.”

  “Of course, I will do that. The stories are entertaining enough I suppose. But really, mixing Chamber’s ‘King in Yellow’ with Lovecraft is almost a kind of miscegenation don’t you think? An intercourse between the base and the sublime. Lovecraft himself warned against such depredations both in ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ in general and in a letter to August Dereleth about Chambers himself.”

  I remembered “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” well. It had been one of the stories I’d reread in recent weeks in my used paperback Lovecraft editions — it featured a small New England fishing village that had been interbreeding with fish men called Deep Ones for centuries and worshiped Cthulhu. The Deep Ones were a perennial favorite low-level villain in Call of Cthulhu games, so I’d read numerous summaries of the story and entries on the Deep Ones and their interbreeding with humans. “Comparing reading two different authors to breeding with Deep Ones seems a bit of extreme,” I said to Sinclair.

  “Oh, just a little exaggerated literary analogy for effect, don’t mind me. Sometimes it seems like I see all of literature through Lovecraft’s eyes, although he admired Chambers more than I.”

  “Perhaps you should be more open-minded then. If Lovecraft liked him.”

  “Perhaps, perhaps. It has been a while. But before I forget, there is one more thing,” Sinclair said. “If I could steal a moment of your time? As you might imagine, in my role as a nexus for Lovecraft aficionados, I have an abiding interest in keeping track of any news or happenings related to my field. There’s been a bit of Cthulhu-related news coming out of your hometown. I was wondering if you knew anything about it?”

  This was a surprise. Word of Shelby’s art show had reached out through the Internet all the way to Sinclair in Providence. “What exactly are you referring to?” I asked.

  “Images of Cthulhu in the streets and on posters and billboards, that sort of thing. I thought you might have seen them.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond. Shelby had all but come out about what he was doing (well, at least as far as the art show was concerned), and so I didn’t think he was trying to hide the fact that he was interested in Cthulhu and other things Lovecraftian. At the same time, he had been pretty clear with me that he didn’t want other collectors to know that he was assembling his own private stock. Because of my decision to run most of my acquisitions through Sinclair, now the self-described “nexus” of Lovecraftiana was in a position to put two and two together and figure out that Shelby was indeed the collector. Then again, did it even matter? I’d never really bought Shelby’s justifications for having me do his shopping for him. Jealous sci-fi fans didn’t seem much of a threat, and certainly not people like Sinclair. I decided to split the difference and tell Sinclair a few half-truths.

  “I’ve seen a few fliers around, sure. They’re promotions for an art exhibit of some kind.”

  “So I’ve gathered. At least that’s been the speculation I’ve seen on various Internet fora. Do you know much more about it?”

  “I really don’t,” I said, which was true. Shelby hadn’t spoken about it any detail.

  “I was wondering if perhaps you or your friend had some connection to the event. I thought perhaps that his growing collection might feature in the exhibition in some way.”

  “No idea. As far as I know there’s no relation between the items I’ve purchased from you and what’s going to go in the art show.” Also technically true.

  “But your friend is involved?” Sinclair pressed.

  I paused, but was growing tired of lying on Shelby’s behalf. “You might think so. I couldn’t possibly comment.”

  “I see,” Sinclair said with a chuckle. “Well maybe there is one thing you could comment on. When is this event actually taking place?”

  “March twenty-third, or so I’ve been lead to believe.”

  “Oh?” Sinclair sounded surprised. “An intriguing choice.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, you should reread your ‘Call of Cthulhu,’” Sinclair said, chiding. “Then you’ll see the grave import of that date.”

  “Could you just tell me?” I said with a sigh. “I’m a bit overloaded to be hunting down the meanings of dates in old horror stories.”

  “The meanings of dates in Lovecraft’s work are not to be overlooked. Lovecraft himself attached great meaning to numbers, dates, and the complexity of language. In his letters, for example, he often addresses his friends by strange names that only they will recognize. And similar dates recur in many of the tales, as do astronomical elements and of course the dread ancient beings that have made him so famous. There are many who believe that he hid codes within his stories, a practice common with some other pulp authors of his day. The difference being Lovecraft’s codes were not meant to be solved with a simple decoder ring you bought after reading an issue of The Shadow or Doc Savage. They were mathematically complex and fraught with meaning.”

  “Really? And this March twenty-third date is one of these codes?”

  “No, no,” said Sinclair. “Its meaning is much more obvious than that. No, the codes are said to be hidden within the artwork and even the layout of the text in the original pulps. Or at least that’s what the so-called Crypto-Lovecraftian school of thought claims. Thus you could never really get the true meaning of the codes from reading one of the reprints.”

  That sounded pretty far-fetched to me. Like my professor in college who made the bizarre claim that if you found one specific line from each of Shakespeare’s comedies and then put them together in the order the plays appeared in the first authorized collection of his works, they would form a secret sonnet. As a professional writer, I knew we authors seldom have any awareness of, much less control over how our words appear on the printed page. But that wasn’t a discussion I wanted to have with Sinclair. “OK, then, if it’s not a code, what’s the date mean?”

  “Why, it’s the date upon which Great Cthulhu’s sunken city of R’lyeh rose from beneath the Pacific. The day the insanity-inducing dreams began and all humanity teetered on the brink of extinction,” Sinclair said, a note of tense enthusiasm creeping into his voice.

  Well, I thought, that certainly sounds like the kind of anniversary Shelby would want to celebrate.

  Chapter 9

  The warehouse Shelby had rented for his art show was not in Sarasota proper, but rather right over the city limits in Bradenton, just north of the airport. It was one of a half-dozen midsized warehouse spaces, some of which were used for storage, while others had been turned into offices or light manufacturing businesses. It was an odd place for an art show — far from the well-lit and -traveled galleries on Palm Avenue, but at least here there was plenty of parking. As Conrad and I pulled into the lot, we didn’t need the signs marked “Cthulhu Cult” to figure out where the event was — a crowd of cars and people were already gathered at the far end of the property around a dark doorway.

  “I can’t imagine Bill Buchman has any idea that this was what I meant when I said it was for an art show. Hell, I didn’t even know this was what I meant,” said Conrad as he pulled into a parking space a good hundred feet away from the entrance. There were at least fifty other cars between us and the building. Bill owned the warehouse and was a casual acquaintance of Conrad’s. To hear Conrad tell it, he’d taken a fair amount of convincing to rent the building out for just one month, and I gathered Conrad had called in a few favors on Shelby’s behalf. We got out of the car and made our way towards the crowd. Lauren had begged off attending the event, as she had an early court date the next morning. I wasn’t too sure how interested she was anyway. From what Conrad had told me, Shelby and Kym weren’t the easiest clients to deal with. I’d dressed up a little more than I had for the reunion, with black slacks and my nicest long-sleeved, button-down blue shirt. I’d even freshly shaved my head. Conrad looked dapper and well appointed as usual in a blazer-and-slacks combo, but no tie. Looking at
the rest of the crowd as we approached, we fell into one of two categories, mostly defined by age and dress.

  About half the crowd were thirty- and forty-something professionals of the kind who usually attended art openings and young professionals mixers around town. They were well dressed for a night on the town, albeit generally a little more hip and stylish than the hard-core Sarasota-style yuppies that herd at the town’s various high-priced watering holes. The other half were in the general category of what I’d call “college kids,” teens and twenty-somethings, mostly from Ringling or New College either as current students, recent graduates, or general hangers-on. They wore a lot of black and make-up and, while not quite goth, would certainly not have looked out of place behind the counter at Hot Topic. It was good to see the college crowd at the event — in my experience it was a sign that the art was going to be actually interesting in some way, and at the very least that the party would be better.

  Conrad and I joined the line waiting to get past the bouncer. Wow, the bouncer. He was big and muscular and wearing a black hood. With the sword strapped to his back and the red pentagram painted on his chest, he looked like something out of a Conan movie. He was checking everyone who came in for contraband, mostly weapons. An interesting precaution not usually found at Sarasota area art openings, but not uncommon in Bradenton nightclubs. I assumed Shelby wanted no repeats of the knife-wielding maniac we’d subdued at his last party. The bouncer’s deep voice and over-the-top menacing air did a good job of playing the search off as all part of the show, which I’m sure helped keep the folks he was searching from getting too nervous at the idea that such security might actually be necessary. There were no weapons, but he did make everyone with a cell phone or digital camera go back to their cars and leave them there. Absolutely no kinds of recording devices were being allowed into the gallery show.

  The guard gave Conrad and me a quick glance and just stared for a moment. He reached into a black velvet bag and pulled out two gold-colored medallions strung with rough twine. They were wood, painted gold, with a pentagram symbol on the front and a Roman numeral on the back. I got number XLII. Conrad received LVII. Everyone who came through the door got one of these little keepsakes. Then, without patting us down he motioned for us to move on in, saying, “Cthulhu has been waiting for you.”

  “I’ll bet he has,” Conrad replied, and walked through the black curtains that prevented those outside from seeing what lay beyond.

  “Thanks,” I said, and followed Conrad in, giving the muscle-bound doorman one last glance and wondering if Shelby had shown him a picture of us and if we were on some kind of special guest list. It was nice that being old friends with the host had some perks.

  I’d expected to walk into a large, open warehouse space, but instead I found myself in a small, dark room. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness and for me to figure out what the space actually was — a foyer made from sheets of black drywall suspended from the ceiling by chains. Looking up, I could just make out the bare steel beams of the roof structure and the air conditioning ducts in the dim light. The chains, attached to those beams, supported eight-by-four-foot sections of wall that hung just a few inches off the floor. To our right the suspended walls formed a wide, dark hallway, leading further into the exhibit. At first glance the walls in this entryway seemed to be unadorned, but closer examination revealed that they were in fact covered with words. As my night vision improved, I could make out rambling sentences scribbled in dark gray chalk, interspersed with symbols and sketches of tentacled monsters and arcane patterns. They covered all four walls of the ten-by-ten space, and the only recurring theme I could discern was the words “Ia Ia Cthulhu Fhtagn” repeated again and again.

  “This took a lot of work,” I said to Conrad, who was examining the chalk scribblings with intense interest.

  “And money. He already paid 20 percent above market for the space and God knows how much else for all the rest of it. And I don’t have any idea where the money came from.” Wondering the same thing myself, I followed him into the gloomy passage. The maniacal scribbling continued along the walls of the passage, broken up occasionally by larger images drawn in chalk showing Cthulhu and other alien creatures disporting themselves by devouring stick-figure humans and razing crudely drawn cities. Weak spotlights far above provided enough light to make out the basic details, but not enough to really examine the imagery without straining your eyes. When we reached the concrete outer wall of the warehouse we rounded a corner and the passageway doubled back the other way, but it soon opened up into a larger space, this one containing actual exhibits.

  Here again, all four of the space’s walls were hanging slabs of black drywall, but there was more light in this room, thanks to spotlights shining down on the featured pieces. Each wall had a large painting of Cthulhu. Opposite us was a six-foot-high, meticulously detailed oil painting showing the monstrous Great Old One rising from the sea, water cascading down his bulbous, foetid body, threatening to swamp a hapless ship caught in the alien god’s shadow. It was the kind of picture that might have adorned the cover of one of the role-playing game books — very literal and energetic, but on some level a little too ridiculous to be very scary. It was cool certainly, but not chilling.

  The wall to our left was more intriguing: an intricate photo collage, the compound parts of which were impossible to make out from a distance, but which combined to produce an image of Cthulhu as a sort of squatting, toad-like thing, with red and pink tentacles. Closer examination made me recoil in revulsion — the entire piece was assembled from photographs of offal and organs. The tentacles themselves were cobbled together from a butcher’s block–worth of intestines, while the body and head were hearts, livers, and other nasty bits I couldn’t identify. The head was of course brains, with photos of eyeballs for the eyes. It was as graphic and viscerally disturbing an image as I’d ever seen, and although I assumed the organs pictured came from cows or pigs, they looked human to my untrained eye. Conrad made a gagging noise when he saw it and looked away in disgust after giving it scarcely a glance. But then he was drawn back to it, as was I. We couldn’t help but keep looking.

  The third piece in the room followed a similar theme, but was much less shocking to view. Here the artist had created Cthulhu using a collage of words — whole sentences in fact, cut out from pages and pieced together to form a carefully shaded and shadowy portrait of the Great Old One. Instead of the active, menacing Cthulhu of the first piece, or the nasty, glowering one of the second, this monster lay, as Lovecraft’s tale suggests, “dead but dreaming.” The picture showed the beast as seen from above while he reclined in his tomb like some sort of gigantic alien pharaoh. Cthulhu literally and literarily entombed in words. A close examination of some of the more visible texts revealed Lovecraft’s dense, wordy style, and although I wasn’t familiar enough with the cannon to recognize any particular lines, it was obvious that all the words must have come from his unmistakable prose.

  Conrad had moved on more quickly than I had, so I joined him in front of the final image in the room, a massive canvas covered in the browns and tans of an ancient desert wall. The artist had used every trompe l’oeil trick in the book to give the illusion that you were looking at a series of weather-worn bas reliefs carved by some ancient Middle-Eastern peoples now long extinct. The “carved” pictographs were simple but powerful, reminding me of the kind of imagery you find in some art deco friezes from the 1930s. Read from left to right, the images told the story of Cthulhu and its minions (smaller versions of the Great One), descending from the stars to Earth and building vast cities. They then made war against other strange, barrel-shaped aliens and winged, crab-like monsters, before eventually conquering all and ruling over man and beast alike. Then disaster struck, and their cities sank beneath the sea, with Cthulhu and the others imprisoned in their tombs beneath the waves while the stars shone on above them.

  “What do you think?” I asked Conrad.

  “I t
hink Shelby’s really into this Cthulhu thing.”

  “You think?”

  “But why? I don’t see the appeal really. I mean, yeah, he’s a cool monster and all that, but it’s just some crazy thing a long-dead pulp writer made up. Seems an odd fixation for a whole art show.”

  “And an even stranger one for a whole church,” I pointed out.

  “I know, right? It’s a strange thing to base a hobby or art show around, but as a basis for religion it’s just plain creepy. Or crazy.”

  “Or both.”

  “Or both,” Conrad agreed. “I’m just so curious as to why they spend all this money and time. I mean, we’ve seen Shelby do some crazy things in the past twenty years, but all this? I’m a little worried that all this isn’t just Shelby crazy. It might be actual, clinical crazy.”

  I didn’t quite believe that yet, but I knew that Conrad was right to be asking the question. We stood in silence for a few minutes and watched other guests circulate through the room. It was especially interesting to see their reactions to the “meat Cthulhu,” most of which were disgust or horror, but all of which were quite strong. They mostly blew right past the realistic and trompe l’oeil pieces, but a few of them took a second or third look at the “word Cthulhu.” Then we moved on out the passageway at the other end of the room and toward the next exhibit.

  More of the black walls covered with chalk scribblings guided our way to another switchback and into a long corridor that stretched ahead the length of the building. Unlike the earlier passageways, this one was twice as wide and better lit because it had pieces of art along both walls. There were about a dozen other people in the space, some of them just giving the works a glance, and a few poring over each exhibit. Conrad and I moved at a pace somewhere in between the two extremes, pausing to appreciate but seldom lingering long. The exhibits alternated between paintings and drawings hung on the walls, and small pieces of sculpture atop black pedestals. Of course Cthulhu was the subject in all of them, although the styles varied wildly. Taken as a whole they showed images of the Great Old One in the manner of a dozen different cultures and time periods. There were rough, primitive stone and wooden carvings mixed with classical and modern sculptures, some of which were quite abstract. I recognized two of these statuettes as items I’d purchased for Shelby online — recreations of props from the “Call of Cthulhu” short film. I wondered how many others were things he’d found on the Internet as opposed to being made by artists he actually knew.