by Rick Dakan
A mound of something loomed up out of the darkness in the corner. It was about five feet high and spilled out about six or seven feet from the corner to the center of the room. It looked like a mass of protoplasm, a blob-like monstrosity composed of slime and tentacles and dully staring glass eyes. It was festooned with strangely familiar protuberances and horrifyingly enticing holes. I had no idea what I was looking at.
“It’s the sex shoggoth,” whispered Cara in my ear.
I looked over at her with what must have been a confused look. “Those words don’t make any sense.”
“A sex shoggoth,” she repeated. “Do you remember the shoggoths? From At the Mountains of Madness?”
Now that she’d given me some context it came back to me. Some of the most feared creatures in the Call of Cthulhu game were monstrous, subway-sized blob creatures from the climax of the story. Bio-engineered servants, they could assume any shape necessary to serve their Elder Thing masters, but they had grown intelligent enough to rebel against their bonds and bring down the civilization that had created them.
“OK, yeah. I remember. But there was nothing about sex in that story. Shoggoths were monsters.”
“Shoggoths could be whatever they needed to be to get the job done,” Cara said, pulling me towards the thing. “This one’s built for fun.” She placed my hand on the thing.
I’d expected it to be the same sort of spongy foam that covered the walls, but this was colder, slicker, and almost but not quite sticky. It was latex. Jesus. I could make out some more details now that I was close up, although those details did seem to shift and squiggle around a bit. I hoped that was the drugs and not some indication that the thing was actually moving on its own. I moved my hands over it and came to one of the protuberances — about eight inches long and a couple inches thick and I started giggling as it seemed pretty phallic to me. Then, when I touched it I realized that it wasn’t just pretty phallic — it was in fact explicitly phallic. It was a long, dark dildo securely fastened at about waist height into the latex and foam blob. There were more of them. And other sex toys as well — the kind for men and women and I don’t know who else. There was even a kind of saddle-like seat on top where someone could ride the thing, as long as they didn’t mind sitting on a vibrating phallus.
“Do you crazy people actually fuck this monster?” I asked Cara, not sure what I wanted the answer to be.
“Mmmmm,” she said, moving up against me and slipping her hands around my waist. “I’ll never tell. That’s a cult secret.”
“I thought I was joining up. This is definitely the kind of secret I want to know.”
“You haven’t joined yet,” she purred in my ear. “This is just the entrance interview. A little hint at what’s to come.” She released me and withdrew into the dimness of the room. I stumbled a bit, grabbing hold of the shoggoth thing for balance. What had I gotten into here? Who lived like this?
A door opened, and pale moonlight streamed into the room. It wasn’t the door we’d come through, but rather one on the opposite side of the room, towards the interior of the house. I looked out and saw a great pool of black, shimmering liquid, smoking and steaming. There was no sign of Shelby or Kym, but Cara was in the doorway now, beckoning me forward. I made my way to her, strength returning to my legs as I concentrated on moving first one foot and then the other in as normal a gait as possible. Cara stepped into the interior courtyard and I followed her.
The pool was in fact just a pool. But there was something strange about it. Well, the most obvious strange thing was that it was smoking. At first I thought it was steam, like from a hot tub, but the night was too warm for that and the smoke was concentrated around a sort of wire basket that was floating in the middle of the black water. That was it. Black water. Why was the water black? I stood in the doorway and stared, trying to figure that out. Why was the water black?
Movement at the far end of the pool drew my eye up. Shelby and Kym stood there, unwrapping the long black cords that belted their robes. They both finished at almost the same moment and then tossed the lengths of rope into the pool where I lost track of them in the blackness. Their robes fell open, revealing nude bodies beneath, which I remembered well from the art show. The two of them stepped down into the water, which swallowed them up to the waist. They were staring at me now, not saying anything.
A flash of motion to me right caught my eye, and I turned to see Cara slipping her top off over her head, revealing her pale breasts. I stared of course, but not just for the obvious reasons. I also saw her Elder Sign again, that shocking mark of Great Old Ones. It seemed to squirm and squiggle on her flesh now. Pulsating. I was going to ask her about it, but watching her slip her skirt off distracted me. She saw me watching and favored me with a smile that wasn’t at all shy.
“Are you ready for more?” she asked.
“Oh yeah,” I said.
“Then take off your clothes.”
“Uh-huh. OK. Sure.” I’d agreed but I was having a hard time making my body do it. Maybe because I was still too busy looking at Cara’s body. Maybe because I was all of a sudden a little shy. But that’s what drugs are for, I suppose, and so while I had a moment’s doubt and worry, the rest of my brain (and certain other body parts) said “Fuck it!” I pulled off my T-shirt and started to kick off my shoes.
Cara watched me as I stripped bare, something that might have caused a not-under-the-influence Rick a moment or three of body self-image anxiety. But the current reigning attitude of “Fuck it!” prevailed, and I was soon as naked as the other three. She took me by the hand once more and led me toward the other end of the pool of black water. Why was the water black again? That still seemed pretty weird. I looked in and saw that Shelby and Kym were busy doing something with the ropes that they’d been wearing as belts. They were tying them to metal loops sunk into the concrete at four points around the pool’s edge.
“What are you guys doing?” I asked them as Cara and I neared the steps down into the water.
“Preparing,” said Kym, gazing up from her knot-tying to favor me with a look that might have been meant to be reassuring but which came across as a little wolfish.
“Oh,” I said. Cara and I stepped into the water and it was warm. Bathwater warm. It felt really good as I eased myself down into it. The pool was not deep or very wide. Not a full swimming pool but rather a kind of half-sized wading pool. I splashed some water over my shoulders and saw that it wasn’t black at all. It was just water. After a few long moments of enjoying the feel of the water on my skin, of really feeling it, I figured out that the secret was simple. They’d painted the inside of the pool black. Huh. I’d never seen that before…
Shelby slipped a loop of rope around my right wrist and pulled it tight. Kym did the same with my left. I watched it happen in silent confusion, at first not sure whether I’d simply lost control of my own arms due to the drugs or if they were moving them for me. I was enjoying their touch too much to protest. But now I could feel my arms being pulled apart and stretched, like Jesus on the cross. I’d been attached to the metal loops on each side of the pool. Before I could start to panic about this, I felt Cara come up from behind me and pull me against her. The back of my head nestled down between her breasts as she drew me backward. I was all of a sudden floating on my back in the water, Cara supporting my upper body while Kym and Shelby each took a leg. Then there were ropes around my ankles as well. While Cara stroked my forehead and I closed my eyes, the ropes cinched tight, pulling my legs apart. Either the ropes on my legs were shorter or they’d been tied tighter, because they pulled up slightly on my ankles, drawing my lower body up at a shallow angle. I was helpless now, and wide open in a very exposed way that under almost any other circumstance I would have found incredibly distressing. At the time, I found it merely pretty darn distressing.
“What’re you doing?” I asked, but no one answered me. With Cara still supporting my head, I had no trouble breathing, but given the angle of my body caused b
y the way they’d tied my legs, I wasn’t sure it would be easy or even possible to keep my head above water if she let me go. Ash’s stories about the homeless man disappearing flooded back into my mind. Is this what they’d done to him? Drawn him inside the house and tied him, spread-eagled in the pool, as some sort of sacrifice to Cthulhu? Cthulhu was supposed to live in a city beneath the ocean. He had an octopus for a head. A wet, watery, drowning might be just the kind of sacrifice he would want. I started to strain against the wet ropes, but they only cut tighter into my wrists and ankles as I did so.
Then Cara let me go and I started to sink. I’m a big guy. A dense guy with a fair amount of muscle mass. I don’t float well. That combined with the fact that my legs were tied higher than my arms meant that as soon as she let go, my head sunk beneath the surface and I had to flex my torso and strain my neck to bring it back into the air. Sputtering, I started to shout. “Let me go! Let me go!”
I felt Cara’s hands under my head almost at once. “Shhh,” she said. “Calm down. You’ll hurt yourself.”
I stopped thrashing, but I didn’t calm down. “You need to let me go,” I said.
“It will all be over soon,” she said. “Soon.”
“What’re you doing?”
“Baptizing you,” I heard Shelby say. He sounded far away. I couldn’t see him but it sounded like he’d gotten out of the pool.
“What?” I asked. But again, no one answered. I heard wet footsteps on the concrete and the sound of a box or trunk being opened. Was he getting the sacrificial dagger? Is that why the pool was black, to camouflage the blood?
“You’ve seen the good,” said Shelby’s voice from far away. “You’ve enjoyed the pleasures of sensuous company and challenging conversation. Those are what we classify as easy truths. Happy truths. But truth is emotionally neutral. Truth is but truth. And sometimes truths trouble us. Terrify us. We classify them as hard truths. But they aren’t hard. They aren’t easy. They’re just truth. The truth is, humanity as it exists today, rapacious, ever-expanding, ever-destroying, is not long for this world. Humanity as it is is not only doomed, it’s running headlong for the precipice. Easy for me to say. Hard for some to take. But just the simple truth. Everything’s going to change. What it means to be human is going to change. Throwing off our outdated modes of humanity, our faith-corrupted, myth-poisoned culture of credulity must be ever first in our minds if we’re to ride the wave of changes to come. When the stars are right and Cthulhu comes, it will wipe the old from the face of the planet. And you know what, Rick? That’s the glorious thing about stars, they’re always exactly right where they’re supposed to be. That’s a fact. That’s the truth. The stars are right now.”
“Please let me go,” I pleaded.
“Not yet, Rick. Not yet.” I still couldn’t see him, but his voice was drawing nearer. My fate was drawing nearer? Panic was definitely drawing nearer.
Then came the shouting.
A door, somewhere far away, slammed. There was a pounding of feet and the bright beam of a flashlight played across the pool before settling on my face. I squinted into it. “What the hell is going on here!” someone shouted. No, not someone. It was Conrad. Thank God.
“Conrad,” I heard Shelby say in a calm voice. “What a pleasant surp—”
“Shut the fuck up,” Conrad yelled. The flashlight beam moved off me and, I assumed on to Shelby. I could see Conrad now, standing in the doorway that led back into the sex shoggoth room. “Let him go!”
“Calm down, Conrad,” Shelby said. “It’s not a probl—”
“Untie him, now! The police are on the way.”
“Now listen, Conrad,” Shelby said. I heard footsteps as he walked towards Conrad. “You’re the one trespassing. When the cops get here, you’re the one that will have to do some explaining.” He now stood in front of Conrad, naked and dripping wet and holding what looked an awful lot like a black rubber dildo in his hand. “We’ll untie Rick if he wants, but you need to—”
Conrad shoved Shelby into the pool with tremendous force, almost falling in himself. Shelby went flying, splashing down right between my outstretched legs. I knew the pool wasn’t deep and that he probably hit bottom when he went in. He came up cursing and, at the same moment, Cara let go of my head and I went underwater again.
I thrashed and thrashed, coming up long enough to gasp for breath and then sinking again. Then one leg was free. I thought maybe I’d pulled the metal loop anchored into the side of the pool free, because I could still feel the rope pinching off circulation at my ankle. I tried to get some support with the free leg, but it was too awkward with my other three limbs encumbered, so I just kept thrashing. Then the other leg was free and I regained my feet and some small measure of calm. As I shook the water from my eyes, I looked up to see Shelby trying to get out of the pool and Conrad pushing him back in. Kym was running along the side of the pool towards Conrad, screaming at him. My eyes went wide in horror at the sound. I didn’t see Cara at first, but I was so busy watching the scene unfold in front of me that I didn’t look too hard.
The naked and wet Kym charged at Conrad, hands held out like claws, reaching for his eyes. He stood his ground and timed his attack perfectly. He swung the flashlight around in a perfect arc, catching her in the side of the head and knocking her off her feet and into the pool, almost on top of Shelby. I gasped and then gasped again as my arm was free. I looked to see that Cara had just undone the rope that attached my right arm to the third metal loop. I snatched it back, rope still attached, and immediately went to work untying myself from the fourth and final loop, but my wet and panicked hands kept fumbling with the simple knot. Cara joined me, moved my hands away and deftly freed me just as Shelby’s started screaming a string of hateful epithets at Conrad.
“You motherfucking fucker!” Shelby shouted. “I’ll fucking kill you! Get the hell out of here before I tear your fucking eyes out of your head and skullfuck you, you sick fuck!”
Conrad ignored him, coming over to the side of the pool near me and offering me a hand up. I took it and he helped me clamber out of the pool. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
I moved to look for my clothes, but Conrad yelled at me, “Come on! Before the others come!”
I hadn’t even thought about the others. How many more cultists were there in this place? At least two that I’d seen. And looking around I saw four other doors that could lead inside. They were probably used to screams and weird noises around here, but I was sure they’d come running if they thought Shelby was in trouble.
So we ran. Me naked, five-foot lengths of rope tied to my wrists and ankles, Conrad leading the way with his flashlight. Through the shoggoth room and through the tents and out into the yard. Conrad led me back around the other side of the house, not the way I’d come with Cara. We circled around the dark, looming structure of the temple itself and then back towards the front of the property. I saw that the gate was still closed. “How did you get in?” I asked, panting for breath.
“I waded through the damned lake,” he whispered back, gesturing with a wave toward the small pond that formed one edge of the property. “But we should be able to open the gate from the inside.”
He was right. And although I cut my feet to hell running along the gravel driveway, we made it out and into Conrad’s car in under two minutes. There was noise and commotion from back inside the house, but no one came chasing after us that we could see. Shivering, panting, and suddenly sore all over, I huddled into a fetal position in the passenger seat of Conrad’s SUV. He took me home.
Chapter 20
Even after a long hot shower and fresh clothes, I was still shivering when I collapsed on my couch across the living room from Conrad. I could still feel the mushrooms suffusing my system, and everything seemed a little high-contrast to me, although I definitely wasn’t high any more. I was, in fact, very angry, although I wasn’t quite sure at whom. Shelby for drugging me? Cara for leading me on? Conrad for b
reaking it up? That last one didn’t make any sense, of course; Conrad had saved me. But I still had this niggling feeling in the back of my mind that resented being saved. Maybe the drugs had brought out some latent masochism I wasn’t aware of. I didn’t have long to stew in my doubts though. Conrad knew exactly who he was angry at, and he was ready to focus my anger as well.
“Fucking Shelby,” he said, his voice low and serious. “I can’t believe he did that to you.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, shaking my head.
“I should have come in as soon as I heard you say that he’d drugged you. I should have come right in then. But I didn’t, and I’m really sorry about that.”
“It’s OK.”
“No, it’s not, but thanks for saying it is. But I got ready. And when I heard you yelling for help I came running. I practically flew through that damned pond. Lost a shoe in the mud.” I looked down and for the first time noticed that he only had one shoe on. I kind of wished he’d changed clothes before sitting on my furniture in wet, muddy pants, but he had just saved me so I didn’t feel I could say anything. He was too wrapped up in his own thoughts to probably even notice the state he was in or the stains he was leaving.
“So,” I said, “What now?”
“We need to get them out of there. Get the news out. Somehow. Stop them.”
“But how? I mean, I don’t feel comfortable going to the cops about what happened tonight,” I said, although I wasn’t sure why.
“No, we can’t. I lied to them about calling the cops. Fuck it, I probably broke more laws tonight that they did. Well, as many. If I’d waited for them to drown you or whatever they were going to do it might have been different, but then you’d be dead. Or worse. As it is, they’d have me arrested for trespassing and assault I’m sure.”