by Rick Dakan
A good portion of the art in this long hallway also introduced a new theme into the Cthulhu imagery —sex, or at least nudity. While the sculptural pieces all featured Cthulhu alone, the drawings and paintings showed scenes ranging from swirling circles of nude cultists dancing in the moonlight around an idol of their dead god, to surprisingly explicit imagery of tentacle sex that wouldn’t have been out of place in Japanese porn. Conrad and I both stopped in front of one triptych that showed two nude, tentacle-headed women flanking a nude male figure who was affixed to a leafless tree and instead of a penis had a long, squid-like tentacle that rose up and entwined with the branches. It was impossible to say whether his facial expression was meant to convey agony or ecstasy.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Conrad asked.
“I don’t think it’s supposed to mean anything,” I said. “It’s just supposed to freak you out.”
“I guess it’s working. Although it’s not nearly as weird as that earlier stuff with the, you know, actual squid sex.”
A female voice from behind us chimed in an opinion. “I think it’s making some sort of religious statement,” she said. “A comment on the crucifixion maybe?”
Conrad and I both turned to look at the woman. It was Cara. She wore stylish narrow-framed glasses with dark red frames that complimented the deep burgundy of her cocktail dress. The gold-colored medallion the bouncer had given her looked very out of place nestled between her breasts. She stood there with a nervous twist to her face, as if she weren’t quite sure how I was going to react. I’m not sure if I started sweating at the small of my back the instant I recognized her or five seconds later when I finally said something.
“Hey, Cara!” said Conrad, thankfully.
“Hi, Conrad. Hi, Rick.”
She gave each of us a hug and mine didn’t seem any more meaningful or intimate than the one she gave Conrad. We’d been drunk. She was married. I wasn’t going to bring anything up. Well, not directly anyway.
“Surprised to see you here,” I said. “What brings you back to town?”
“Oh, this,” she said, sweeping an arm around to take in the images of Cthulhu surrounding us. “Shelby said it would be an amazing event, and so far he’s right.” A pause for me to jump in and say something, but I didn’t. “Listen, I’m sorry about not getting to say goodbye after the reunion… ”
“Oh, no, it’s fine!” I said. “Please, it was a crazy night and your ride was leaving. No worries.”
Conrad inserted himself into the awkwardness then, saving both of us. “So, are you here by yourself? Or would you like to join us for the rest of the tour?”
“I’ll join you, I think. I hear there’s a lot more to see.”
“Well, I don’t know what can top squid sex crucifixions,” he said, motioning down the hall. We made our way around the next corner, Cara sandwiched between us. I don’t know about the other two, but I was thinking about the fact that her husband wasn’t with us.
Cthulhu glowered down at us from the back wall of the building, huge and menacing. Just his head, as if penetrating the outer wall into this space, with dozens of long, tentacles spreading out into the room and up toward the ceiling. The head was huge — a sculpture in greens and yellow and blacks that was at least eight feet long, not counting the snaking tentacles. Made from papier-mâché, rubber, and latex, the giant head was a different interpretation from the standard iconography — it looked much more alien, with six glowing yellow eyes spaced in pairs along the length of its sloped, vaguely insectoid head. Its snout ended in a thick patch of shorter tentacles made from lengths of stiff rubber tubing. The longer appendages sprouted from the sides of the creature’s head, some draping down toward the floor while others reached up to wrap around the ceiling beams as if to tear down the building on top of us.
There were several dozen people in the large space, and the Cthulhu head was only the most dominant of the bizarre sights. To our right was a bar and buffet table, which had attracted the thickest concentration of people in the room. The opposite wall was blank and white, and served as a screen for a projector mounted on the ceiling which displayed images and short video clips. They included some images of Cthulhu and other Lovecraft creatures, as well as pictures of Lovecraft himself. But the mix also included a host of other weird and disturbing images, from Japanese-style block prints of nude women and octopuses to bizarre photo-manipulations that melded human and animal elements. The reflected light from the projection and the glowing yellow eyes on Cthulhu were the main light sources in the room, augmented somewhat by candles on the bar and scattered on pedestals around the room.
The three of us stood for a moment taking it all in, and then Conrad took charge. He led us over to the bar and joined the crowd waiting for some of the free beer and wine. I glanced over at the buffet table, which featured a large silver platter covered in strips of rare beef draped across what looked like some sort of animal skull. Next to that was a platter of cheeses and fruit arranged with more bones. I touched the skull draped with beef (a small deer maybe?) and it was real bone, not plastic. Cara surprised me by leaning forward and picking a piece of beef off and popping it in her mouth.
“Mmm, that’s good!” she said, and took another. I got over my momentary revulsion and tried some as well. It was in fact very good. Looking across the rest of the buffet, which included various canapes and dips as well as an elaborate sushi display (including octopus of course). It was all gourmet-level fare and must have cost a few thousand dollars.
Conrad had started at the other end, where the bar was, and he returned with three red plastic cups filled with a mysterious dark liquid. “They called them Mind Openers,” Conrad said. “Whatever they are, I tasted it and it includes Jaegermeister at the very least. I think we’re better off shooting than sipping ‘em.”
I took an experimental sip and curled my lip. “Nasty. Definitely a shooter.”
Cara raised her cup to the two of us. “What shall we drink to?”
“Old friends reacquainted?” Conrad suggested.
“Or to Cthulhu?” I said, a little swept up in all the Cthulhu-centric imagery.
“To old friends reacquainted beneath Cthulhu’s baleful gaze,” Cara proclaimed. We poured the potent potables down our throats. It burned going down but left a surprisingly sweet aftertaste.
“That’s actually not bad. Shall I get another round?” said Conrad. Looking over at the bartender in black cult robes, he said, “I want to see if I can get the guy to break character.”
Cara and I stood next to each other, but looked everywhere else in the room. At least there was a lot to distract us. As I saw Conrad still chatting with the bartender, I finally said, “It’s a long way down from Michigan to come to an art show.”
“Well, Kym and Shelby really talked it up to me. Promised me it was a sight I wouldn’t want to miss.” I wondered when she’d found time to talk to Shelby and Kym about the Cthulhu Cult. In the limo after they left me behind? “And, well, it wasn’t quite as far as that. I never made it back to Michigan.”
“You’ve been in town the whole time?” I didn’t know what to make of that fact.
“No, no. I got on my plane, but I got off in Atlanta. Just changed my mind before I boarded my connecting flight to Detroit and got out of there. My brother’s in Athens, so I went over to stay with him and his wife for a while, you know? And then I drove down here today to see this thing.”
“Is everything OK?” I asked, not sure how to broach the most obvious questions about her and her husband and suddenly feeling some strange mix of excitement, guilt, and nervousness.
“Not really, no. But it’s getting better I think. It was the right decision. It was time,” she told herself, while I listened.
“Oh, damn! Look at that,” Cara said, pointing to the huge image projected on the opposite wall. It was a clip of some really outrageous Japanese animated tentacle porn — a purple-haired woman being penetrated by monstrous, thick green t
entacles in every orifice. We weren’t the only ones who’d noticed the image either. Looking around the room I saw that every one of the twenty or so people present was watching. Reactions were mixed: some laughed, others groaned in disgust, and a few looked away in what seemed like real horror. Cara and I were both in the laughing category, but some of the others found the video too much. They started to look for exits as the clip continued on with no signs of letting up.
A few of them tried to work their way back through the close hallways of the exhibit towards the front entrance, but the stream of people coming in made that somewhat awkward. The inconvenience didn’t dissuade at least one older couple who were determined to leave the whole affair right away, but most of the other people fleeing the tentacle porn chose the more obvious exit — through the portal beneath the enormous Cthulhu head. The passageway was pitch black, with just a couple of green glow-in-the-dark splotches that showed the way forward without shedding any real illumination. It was impossible to tell from this side of Cthulhu what lay beyond. I figured we’d check it out for ourselves as soon as Conrad got back with the drinks.
I looked over to where he was still trying to talk to the robe-clad bartender, who maintained a steely, blank face. Conrad, his hands full balancing the three cups, finally gave up and rejoined me and Cara. I moved forward to help him, relieving him of two of the cups and handing one to Cara.
“Jesus, it’s still going,” said Conrad, motioning towards the screen where the tentacles kept pumping away. “I can’t believe he’s showing that kind of crap in a public event like this. Shelby’s got a pretty fucked-up sense of what an art show is supposed to be.”
“I wonder where he is,” I said. “No sign of him or Kym anywhere.”
“You’d think he’d want to be at the center of all this attention,” Conrad said. “Eating up all the outrage and disgust.”
“Well, they must be through there then, right?” Cara said, nodding to the passageway under Cthulhu.
“What’s through there?” Conrad looked around the room with his realtor’s eye. “It must lead outside, there’s no more building left.”
“Let’s drink up and go see, shall we?” I suggested.
“Hear, hear! Into the darkness we go,” Cara agreed, raising her cup to me and giving me a smiling look that seemed to hint at something exciting and mysterious. Did she know what was out there or was she just as excited as I was to find out?
We slammed the second round of whatever foul concoction Shelby’s cultists were pouring for us and I felt this one hit my head almost at once. I hadn’t really gotten much of a buzz from the first shot, but it had obviously worn down whatever tolerance I had in me. A pleasant fuzziness descended on my perceptions. No doubt feeling a similar level of inebriation, Cara reached out and took my hand and started pulling me towards Cthulhu. Conrad just stood there for a moment, seemingly unsure of what to do next until Cara grabbed him as well and the three of us stumbled, laughing and drunk, toward the darkness.
Fire. Lots of fire. That was my first impression as we emerged from the passageway. The journey through the darkness had been short and awkward. After passing through a curtain of thick black ropes, we’d found ourselves on a sharply inclined ramp headed down. More than a few people had already spilled their drinks and no doubt one or two had fallen. Conrad almost slipped and lost his footing, but Cara and I caught him in time, laughing. Ten feet of darkness and then out through another curtain of ropes and into the night.
The stretch of land behind the warehouse spread out back into pine trees and scrub brush, and was at least an entire acre. It was outside the apparent property line of the industrial park that contained the warehouse/gallery building. I wondered if Shelby even had real permission to use the land. I did notice that it was fenced in, with ten-foot chain link fences topped with barbwire. But all these details came later. At the moment the thing I noticed most of all was the fire.
It put the old bonfires Shelby used to have in his back yard to shame. It was a pyramid of thin logs standing on end, coming to a point about ten feet high and fifteen feet in diameter at its base. Around this central inferno were five smaller bonfires set out symmetrically to form the five points of a pentagram, with the passage we’d just passed through disgorging between two of them. Out beyond the bonfires I could see torches and braziers spread out around the enclosure, providing a little light and casting a lot of shadows on five or six standard-issue picnic tables — the kind you find in public parks and rest stops the country over with built-in bench seating. These had large, silver punch bowls on them and each had a crowd of attendees huddled nearby, away from the fiery center. Within the ring of bonfires there was no grass — just hard-packed dirt. A few people wandered through the bright and very hot paths between the fires, but none of them stayed for long.
“Holy shit,” said Conrad.
“Um, yeah,” I agreed. I looked over at Cara, who, I was sad to realize, had let go of my hand. She looked at the display with wide eyes and an open mouth and took a step towards the infernos.
“Can he possibly have gotten a permit for all this?” Conrad asked me. “I don’t see how… ”
“I have no idea,” I replied, and watched as Cara stepped into the pentagram. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to follow her or not.
“There’s gotta be well over a hundred people out here,” Conrad continued, looking around. “Maybe two hundred.”
Cara had passed the two closest small fires and now approached the central flaming pyramid, her hands held out in front of her to feel the heat. I took a step towards her when the music erupted from all around us. Startled, I jumped and maybe even screamed a little. Cara recoiled from the fire and looked around like a frightened rabbit, as if she’d just awakened from a dream.
Drums thrummed, with strange animal noises mixed in that reminded me of whale song, but with a kind of growling, menacing bass line. I couldn’t see speakers anywhere, but the music seemed to come from all around us. Catching some movement out of the corner of my eye, I looked back toward the mouth of the passageway into the warehouse and saw a procession of half-naked dancers emerge at a sprint. I was right in their path as they rushed towards me, and then around me like I was a boulder in a stream. There were over a dozen of them, men and women wearing some sort of fringed loincloths and covered in fluorescent green body paint and nothing else. I spun around to watch as they flowed into the pentagram of fire. Cara, seeing them coming, danced out of the way and retreated into the surrounding darkness. Moving to the beat, the glowing dancers started an intricate choreographed serpentine dance around the central fire, shouting up to the stars every few seconds something that sounded an awful lot like, “Ia! Ia! Cthulhu Fhtagn!”
The appearance of the dancers motivated the other attendees to move forward from the picnic tables to get a better look now that the show — whatever kind of show it was — had begun. Conrad and I moved over and rejoined Cara. I touched her shoulder and she twitched, surprised. When she saw it was me, though, she smiled. “Quite a show,” she said.
“No sign of Shelby or Kym here,” Conrad said and then pointed to the dancers. “Just whatever you’d call these helpers.”
“I don’t know what to call them,” I said.
“I’d call them cultists,” Cara said, her voice dreamy and far away as she watched them dance.
There was no doubt in my mind at all that Shelby’s primary inspiration for the current mad spectacle of ritual dance and public nudity was Lovecraft’s most famous tale, “The Call of Cthulhu,” one of the many I’d reread since I became Shelby’s secret shopper. Although we were just a few hundred yards off Highway 41 instead of deep in the murky depths of a Louisiana swamp, the scene evoked the orgiastic cult ritual Inspector LeGrasse and his men broke up in the story. I wondered how many of those unsuspecting observers who’d come for an art show were starting to feel discomforts and fears similar to those the brave policemen had expressed in the Lovecraft narrative.
&nbs
p; The dance seemed to go on longer than necessary, the music pounding from the hidden speakers growing louder and louder until conversation other than shouting into your neighbors’ ears became impossible. The audience had grown restive and uncomfortable, and many of them had fingers plugged in their ears to try and block out some of the noise. The dance broke down from a complex choreographed display into pockets of individual writhing as the “cultists” paired off and started gyrating against one another with lascivious abandon, groping and grinding by firelight and crying out “Ia Ia Cthulhu Fhtagn!” over and over again.
And then the music stopped. The dancers collapsed to the ground. From behind me I felt a growling bass note vibrating through my body, almost sub-sonic. I turned back to the passageway as a bright light flashed. Puffs of flame and red smoke along with a noxious, sulfurous odor of rotten eggs wafted through the night air from within the gaping maw. Two figures emerged from within: a man and a woman wearing nothing but long cloaks and ornate masks stepped into the light. I recognized Shelby, and from the dark skin and lithe frame of the woman next to him, I assumed it was Kym striding forth at his side. Their cloaks dragged behind them on the ground and looked like they were made from quilts of bird feathers in all different colors and patterns. The masks were equally ornate, miniature versions of the huge Cthulhu head that had been mounted on the wall inside — multiple glowing yellow eyes and an insectoid proboscis with wriggling tentacles emerging from it. And these tentacles were in fact wriggling, as if they were worms or serpents.