by Rick Dakan
As I reached for another grape, Shelby said, “What is it you think you’re joining, anyway?”
I stopped and turned my head towards him. “Some sort of Cthulhu cult?” I asked, not knowing what else to say.
“A Cthulhu cult? Well yes, that’s certainly true. We are some kind of Cthulhu cult. But the question is, what kind do you think we are?”
“What kinds are there?” I asked, thinking I’d do better if it were a multiple-choice test.
“There’s the classic kind of course, as described in old books,” Shelby tapped his Lovecraft volume lightly to emphasize his point. “The ancient kind that carves great idols, is inspired by nightmarish dreams, and dances nude around roaring fires before making sacrifices to the Great Old Ones.”
“That does sound kind of familiar. Where have I seen that before… ” I said in the same teasing tones Shelby and I had used with each other for years.
“You saw something very much like that, as did hundreds of other people. Very much like that indeed. But what is it you really saw?” Shelby asked.
“I saw a show. An elaborate, wonderful, shocking stage show made to look like a cult ritual.”
“Not quite,” Shelby corrected. “Close, but not quite right.”
“It wasn’t a show?” I asked. For a crazy moment I wondered if they really had killed that woman right in front of all of us, but I dismissed the thought immediately. The blood had been fake. It had been a put-on.
Kym answered my question, leaning forward and obviously excited about the subject. “It was a performance, for sure. And we most definitely aimed to shock the audience.”
“And you did,” I said.
“We did,” Kym agreed. “But it wasn’t a show made to look like a cult ritual. The performance itself was the cult ritual. A real, honest-to-Cthulhu ritual.”
“I’m not sure I understand the distinction.”
“It’s all a matter of goals,” Shelby chimed in. “A ritual can serve many purposes, but basically they boil down to one of two things. You’re either trying to impress some outside power or you’re trying to impress yourselves.”
“Or both,” Kym added.
“Or both,” Shelby agreed.
“I get the first one,” I said. “About impressing some outside entity like Cthulhu or God. But I’m not sure what you mean about impressing yourselves.”
“Well,” said Shelby. “I’m not sure you actually do get what I mean in the first case, but let’s put that aside for the moment. What I mean by impressing ourselves is that the rituals are literally for the people performing them. They give comfort or pleasure or a sense of accomplishment. Even just a sense of continuity and regularity. Often they’re ways of teaching and learning and coming together as a community.”
I had to laugh. “That all sounds pretty touchy-feely for a cult devoted to worshiping Cthulhu.”
To my surprise, Shelby, Kym, and Cara all started laughing as well, although it felt more like they were laughing at me rather than with me. “Which brings me back to my first point,” Shelby said. “We do not worship Cthulhu.”
“You don’t?” I asked, confused now. I looked down at the Cthulhu Manifesto on the table. “That’s not how it seems.”
“No,” said Shelby, “I agree, that’s not how it seems. At least not to outsiders. But I assure you, we do not worship Cthulhu.”
Cara patted my knee and said, “I hate to break it to you, sweetie, but Cthulhu doesn’t exist.”
I knew that, of course, but I didn’t think they did. Or rather I wasn’t sure they did. Now I didn’t know what the hell was going on. “He doesn’t?” I asked, not quite meaning the question to come out making me sound so profoundly stupid.
They laughed again, and I added my own nervous chuckle to theirs. “You know better than that,” Shelby said.
“Yeah, I do,” I said. I was starting to feel a growing sense of relief, which was enough to make me a little light-headed. Was this all some weird prank after all? The thought of these three actually sacrificing a homeless person now seemed utterly ridiculous. “Of course I know that. But I don’t understand what you’re doing then.”
“We don’t worship Cthulhu,” Kym said, “But we are a Cthulhu cult and we do perform rituals in its name.”
“But, why?” I licked my top lip, which was salty with sweat even though I didn’t feel hot.
“Cthulhu is a metaphor,” Cara said. “A shorthand way of referring to the uncaring, deadly universe we all live in.”
“This was Lovecraft’s brilliance!” said Shelby, stretching his arms way out to the side, as if to encompass the whole tent. “He saw that the true source of horror was that existence is vastly more complex, dangerous, and uncaring than any of us would like to admit. He knew that our old myths and religions were nothing but thin patinas of false hope that we cling to instead of facing the true nature of existence. He begins the story ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ with that wonderful insight: ‘The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity and it is not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.’ That’s brilliant stuff, isn’t it? I mean, it just sinks a dagger right into your frontal lobe.”
Shelby had rattled the quote off with practiced ease and obviously loved the words, but they didn’t sound so terribly wonderful to me, and I said so. “That’s not the most hopeful thing I’ve ever heard. Madness and a new dark age don’t sound like good options.”
“Lovecraft feared his own insights,” Shelby said. “That’s why he’s such a reliable prophet for us — he saw the true nature of reality, of humanity’s place in the universe, and it scared the shit out of him. He was an old-fashioned, sexually repressed man who loved tradition, hated much of modernity, and yet could not avoid the truth laid bare before him. That’s why we can learn so much from his writings. They are the truth that forced its way past his cultural defenses. And that’s why they’re horror stories, because the truth is fucking scary.”
“And the scary fucking truth is what our rituals invoke,” said Kym. “We echo the horror that is existence. Echo, amplify, and distort it. We’re like musicians playing with truth instead of musical notes. We don’t worship Cthulhu, but we do honor, celebrate, and fear everything that Cthulhu stands for.”
“And what is that?” I asked. I was feeling woozy and a little confused with all this philosophizing, not quite following the thread. “What does Cthulhu stand for?”
“Cthulhu is what Lovecraft describes in that passage I quoted,” Shelby said. “Nothing could be clearer — its name is the story’s title and it opens up with that searing insight. And how does it end? It ends with another stab at your pampered sense of place and importance: ‘Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come—’ and then it cuts off. What time will come? One might imagine that the time will come when Cthulhu rises again, and within the simple horror story framework that works fine. But Lovecraft has already told us what will come. It’s right at the beginning of the story. What’s coming is that moment when we connect all the pieces of knowledge and open up such terrifying vistas of reality that everything must change. Lovecraft’s options were madness or dark ages, but that doesn’t mean they’re the only options. He simply could not see past that point because everything after that is unknowable and unguessable.
“That’s what Cthulhu is. Cthulhu is those terrifying vistas. It is the understanding that the universe is chock-full of loathsomeness and these tottering cities of me
n we live in really are in a frightful position. It’s global warming and nuclear winter and extinction-event asteroid collisions. It’s exploding stars, super plagues, and the heat death of the universe. But Cthulhu is also scientific inquiry and discovery. It’s invention and enlightenment and understanding. It is the banishing of misleading ancient myths and the rending apart of religions old and new. Cthulhu is the Singularity.”
“The Singularity?” I asked. My breathing seemed slightly labored. No, not labored, but rather heightened. I was more aware of it and working hard to concentrate on what Shelby was saying.
“Cthulhu is the Singularity,” Shelby repeated. “That moment of understanding which Lovecraft describes when all the sciences come together and knowledge expands beyond human control. When computers start designing newer and better computers without us. When the fundamental building blocks of life, the universe, and everything are exposed to our understanding and we build things not from nuts and bolts but from the atom up. It is that moment of madness, dark ages, or a future we can’t imagine but might, just might, be worth embracing. That time when humanity as we know it ceases to be a ravenous drain on the Earth and finally transcends its own limitations. Or when our own limitations limit us out of existence and something more fit to rule comes along instead, be it microbes or microprocessors. Cthulhu is the end of our world, and the genesis of a new one.”
I could only nod my head up and down a few times and wonder if I really understood what he was talking about. I’d heard some about the Singularity stuff. There was a book about it by some expert on artificial intelligence that I’d heard about, but I’d never read it. But I was still having some trouble making the link to Cthulhu. I was having more and more trouble concentrating on making links of any kind. “So you worship this idea of the future?” I asked.
“Not worship,” Kym corrected. “We don’t worship anything. But our rituals invoke that idea. And others that spring forth from it. Our Cthulhu rituals are designed to test and twist the mind. To make us aware that our consciousness can and does play tricks on us all the time. We slash and burn convention in order to shake off the conventional memes that shackle us.”
“And that means dancing around naked with fake blood?” I asked, and actually giggled at the thought. What was going on?
Kym was laughing now too. “Sometimes it does. And why not? It feels good to dance naked. It’s fun to shock an audience with fake blood. That’s what we mean about the two types of ritual. The art show ritual was one meant to impress others. It was fun for us, but mostly it was hard work and a lot of time and money.”
“A lot of time and money to impress a metaphor of Cthulhu?”
“No,” said Cara, taking my hand in her warm grasp. “Not Cthulhu, Rick. Us. It was meant to impress you and me and the rest of us who were in attendance that night. It was there to provoke and challenge us. And you were there right next to me so I know you felt it too. It was an amazing rush, wasn’t it?”
I looked over at her and my eyes went soft. Lounging there against her pillow, laid out under the tent in the lamplight she seemed to sharpen into almost supernatural clarity. Like she was in 3D, only more so. “It was,” I said. “It was pretty amazing.”
“That’s what the ritual was for!” Cara said. “To amaze us. To show us a new kind of experience, a transcendent, mind-blowing experience.”
“It was almost spiritual,” I said.
“Almost,” Cara said. “But weren’t you listening? It wasn’t spiritual at all.”
“It was hard work and careful planning and technology and money,” said Kym, her voice suddenly much closer. My head lolled over to the left and I was surprised to see her kneeling next to me. “It was all an illusion. It was us manipulating your experience to evoke a response.”
“An amazing response,” Cara said from my right. It took me a long time to swing my head back towards her.
“Amazing… ” I said, my voice trailing off. I felt slow and warm and more than a little fuzzy toward these amazing people in this tent. “I feel kind of amazing now,” I said.
“We all do,” said Cara. “Why do you think that is?”
“Do you think it’s because we’ve enlightened you?” Shelby asked. I lolled my head and looked across the table now. He was standing there, swaying. “Is this a moment of spiritual epiphany?”
I looked at him and blinked twice, very slowly. My eyes wandered down to the tea set in the middle of the table. “No,” I said. “Not an epiphany. I think there were drugs in the tea.”
“Mushrooms,” said Shelby. “We collected them ourselves.”
“Yeah?” I said, smiling. “That’s kind of fucked up.”
Chapter 19
Everything seemed unbelievably funny and interesting to me, and it was difficult to concentrate on any single train of thought for very long. The whole tent seemed to kind of swell with each breath I took, then contract. Then swell again. As I realized that the hallucinogenic mushroom tea was now coming on strong, I had a moment’s panic. I’d done mushrooms before a couple times, so I knew what to expect, but it had never been this strong or this fast. I felt nauseated all of a sudden, sick at the thought of having been dosed in secret and not knowing if in fact it was only mushrooms or something else. I bent over and looked down at the Persian rug, taking deep breaths and trying to calm down. Cara put her hand on the back of my neck and rubbed it, which helped a lot, and soon the panic seeped out of me as I got more interested in watching the patterns in the rug squirm and shift. I put my hand down flat on the fabric and enjoyed the contrasting textures. I could really see my pores and maybe even the bones of my hand underneath. And I thought for a moment that my hand was sinking into the rug.
“Are you OK?” Cara asked.
I rolled over onto my back and looked up at her. “I am OK. I am. Just seeing things is all. Little things.”
“That’s good,” she said. “I am too.”
“How come you’re not rolling on the floor down here with me then?” I asked, reaching out to her. “It’s really nice.”
She laughed and took my hand. “There’s more to see. Come with me.”
I didn’t want to get up, but I also didn’t want to not get up. I squinted at the edges of her, backlit by one of the oil lamps. She had a halo. A sort of pulsing halo. It pulsed in time with my breath. Or maybe hers. I thought about telling her, but I still had the presence of mind to realize that I’d sound like a drugged-up goofball. “OK,” I said, and pulled on her hand for support as I rose.
I staggered to my feet and looked around the tent. Shelby and Kym were both standing as well, over at the end of the tent nearest the house. Shelby had drawn back the sheer muslin wall to reveal an opening into the smaller tent. It was dark in there. I watched as Kym passed through, pausing only to look back over her head and smile at me. Shelby motioned for me and Cara to follow Kym in, and we did. Shelby squeezed my shoulder as I passed by him. “Are you ready to go inside?” he asked.
“I am,” I said.
“No,” he replied. “You’re probably not. But let’s go anyway.” Cara, still holding my hand, pulled me forward into the darkness. It was just a few feet and we came to a set of French doors that led into the house. Like the rest of the windows, the glass was tinted black, but Kym was opening one of them. It swung inward and a blast of air conditioner–chilled air slapped me in the face. It felt wonderful. I hadn’t realized how overheated I was. The room inside was lit by a purple glow. Kym held the door open, allowing Cara and me to step in first.
The purple light managed to do little more than illuminate the white tile floor around me. I was wobbly-kneed from the drugs, so I reached out a hand towards the wall to steady myself. It felt spongy and very uneven to the touch, and for a moment I thought I was having some sort of touch hallucination, which would have been a first for me. But no, as I explored the knotted, rough, spongy wall with my hand I moved closer until my face was only a few inches away. The whole wall was covered in som
e sort of strange substance. Some kind of foam maybe? Parts of it glowed white in the purple light, and it resembled nothing more than an undulating mass of tendrils. Or maybe a lava flow hardened and turned on its side. What was it?
“What is this?” I asked.
Cara let go of my hand and moved to my side, feeling the wall as well. “It’s the wall. It’s like it’s alive, isn’t it?”
And it was like that. Staring at it close, I could see the ropey foam contortions move and slither like worms. Or like the patterns in the Persian rug back in the tent. It was just a hallucination of course, and I knew that, but that didn’t make it any less fucking cool. I started to feel along the wall, working my way around the dim room. There were patches of other materials locked within the foam. Bits of velvet and silk, pieces of mirror and spiked rubber; each offered a new and intensely interesting sensation for my mushroom-addled mind to appreciate.
As I got to the corner, Cara pulled me away from the wall and towards the far side of the room. I grabbed at the wall as we left. “Wait… ” I said. “I’m not done.”
“I’m not done either,” she said. “You need to see the best part.”
The room was big. Probably originally a living room or great room. I couldn’t see the far wall, but as she drew me towards it I caught glimpses of other features in the room. The ceiling seemed to be comprised of long, thin straps of black leather or vinyl, draped in sweeping arcs just a few feet above my head. Shelby and Kym had come in at some point, and I could hear them moving in the room as well, laughing and whispering. There was a clinking of chains from somewhere. I was completely disoriented by the time we’d stumbled to the far end of the room.