The Cthulhu Cult: A Novel of Lovecraftian Obsession

by Rick Dakan

  “You really think they were going to drown me?”

  “What do you think? It sure looked like they were doing something horrible to you, or getting ready to.”

  “Yeah.” But I thought back to Cara’s body touching mine and to the image of Shelby right before Conrad shoved him. Was it going to be horrible, or just horribly kinky? But then there’d been all that talk about cleansing humanity and terrifying truths. I didn’t know what to think.

  Conrad could apparently read my addled thoughts on my face. “You’re not having doubts, are you? You nearly drowned! And remember what Ash told us they did to that old man. I need to try and get in touch with Ash again, see if he’ll tell me what Shelby and Kym did after I rescued you.”

  “We still don’t know that they killed that man,” I protested. Shelby had made a lot of sense early in the evening, and I’d dismissed the outlandish suggestion that he might be a murderer. But then the drugs. And the pool.

  “Don’t let him fool you, Rick. Don’t let his smooth line about there being no Cthulhu and all that fool you. Don’t let him get into your head.” Conrad stopped and suddenly leaned back in his seat, looking up at the ceiling and letting out a deep rush of air. “Oh shit,” he sighed.

  “What?” I asked, but he didn’t reply. “Oh shit what?”

  “Nothing. Forget it. The important thing is that after tonight there’s no way they’re going to try and recruit you anymore, right? I mean, now that they know we’re still friends, and it’s obvious Kym hates me. Did you see the way she rushed at me? Like a freaking banshee or something. Some kind of creature. I’m telling you, she’s not all there.”

  He was right. I’d violated my promise to Shelby to push Conrad away, and after tonight, he wasn’t likely to forget it. I was a little startled to find that the idea of not being allowed into the Cthulhu cult disappointed me more than I would have thought. That, given what I’d just been through, I felt any disappointment at all was strange enough.

  “There was one piece of good news tonight,” Conrad continued. “While you were in there, the neighbor from across the little lake came over to see why I was lurking around outside in a parked car. He’d apparently noticed me there on a couple of other occasions. I was worried at first, but once I got to talking to him, I had an idea. He’s a nice old guy. I asked him what he thought about Shelby and everything that goes on next door. He didn’t say much, just mentioned a few odd noises from time to time and people coming and going at all hours. I didn’t say anything about sacrifices or murders or people disappearing, but I did mention the stuff that’s been in the news, and I told him about Shelby’s run-in with the law last year. He remembered that story, because of the county commissioner connection. When I explained that I thought one of my friends had fallen under Shelby’s spell, he was very sympathetic. Said that I was welcome to keep a watchful, decent eye on the weirdos next door anytime I wanted.” Conrad leaned towards me and smiled. “So we’ve got at least one tool in the arsenal now. I told him I’d have coffee with him tomorrow and we could discuss options. Maybe filing some sort of restraining order or something like that.”

  “What on Earth is that going to do?”

  “Put pressure on them!” Conrad said, a little exasperated, as if I were the slow kid in class. “They can’t be zoned for whatever the hell it is that they’re doing over there. You can’t just have a church in your house. Even if it disrupts them just a little bit, it should help us. Buy us some time. Maybe if Ash comes through for us with some more information like he did last time. I don’t know, Rick. We’ve got to come up with something.”

  After the drugs and the pool and all the rest, I felt entirely rudderless, not knowing what to do or even what result I wanted from this whole mess. Part of me just wanted to lock the front door, write my books, and let the world outside burn down around me. But I also wanted to do something to get back at what Shelby and Kym had done to me that evening. I wanted to save Cara — I was holding on desperately to both the image of her naked and the fact that she’d untied me. Who knows what repercussions she was risking from Shelby for having done that? I fought through the mental haze that had descended on me looking for possibilities. All I came up with was Sinclair’s phone number

  “I should call Sinclair,” I said. “See if he’s come up with any new info on the stolen Necronomicon or any of that. Maybe some link to Kym that we could take to the police? I haven’t heard from him in a couple days. I’m starting to get a little worried.”

  Conrad thought it over for a few moments and then nodded, his face stern and grave. “That sounds like a good idea. I’d like to talk to him too, finally.”

  Sinclair wasn’t at the store or at his home number, but he picked up his cell phone on the third ring. I was on one cordless, Conrad was on the other. I’d decided to sit up in my office for the call while Conrad remained in the living room so I could look stuff up online if needed.

  “Mr. Dakan!” Sinclair said, his voice filled with alarm. “Is everything all right? Are you in trouble?”

  That wasn’t a question I’d expected. “Calvin, hi. No, no, I’m fine.”

  “I take it you haven’t been online in the past half hour.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s been a weird night. Conrad’s on the other extension, by the way.”

  “Hello, Mr. Sinclair. This is Conrad Laughton,” Conrad said. “What’s this about being online?”

  “Well, apparently you’ve both been proscribed as personae non grata by the Church of Starry Wisdom. Your pictures have gone out to all the Web sites and discussion boards, including a rather, shall we say, revealing image of Mr. Dakan standing by a pool with, um, how shall I say it… ”

  “Naked?” I asked, my stomach churning. A hidden camera somewhere. Maybe multiple ones. Of course.

  “Yes,” Sinclair confirmed. “Rather.”

  “Well, that’s just fucking great,” I said. I thought about going to one of the sites and seeing for myself, but I couldn’t bring myself to move the mouse.

  “Jesus!” Conrad shouted. “That bastard!”

  “There’s one that I presume is of you as well, Mr. Laughton, clothed of course. You’ve quite an angry look on your face.”

  “That’s probably because I was so pissed when they took it,” Conrad snarled.

  “May I ask what happened?” Sinclair said.

  I didn’t want to give him any details and I hoped Conrad would be discrete as well. He wasn’t. “A failed attempt to learn more about what Shelby and Kym are up to. It went badly.” He went on to describe the entire evening from his point of view in rather graphic detail. I tried to hint that he might want to be a little circumspect, but he talked right over me. “What are they saying about us?” he asked when he’d finished.

  “Nothing specific,” Sinclair said. “Just that neither of you are to be admitted to any church events and that everyone should be aware that you’re both, and I quote here, ‘deceptive, manipulative malcontents out to stir up trouble and spread lies about the church,’ end quote.”

  “Well, he’s got our number,” Conrad said. “Except the part about spreading lies. We’re trying to do the exact opposite of that.”

  “Indeed,” Sinclair agreed. “And to that point I have some more information that I think might well be of interest to you.”

  “Do you have some firmer link between Kym’s family and the stolen Necronomicon pages?” I asked, anxious for some good news.

  “I do not. How those pages disappeared and who took them remains a mystery. But I have managed to uncover some more facts about what the content of those other pages might actually be. You will remember that when we last talked I warned you that the nihilistic metaphysics of these particular Necronomicon pages set them apart from the more common Necronomicon forgeries and pastiches that we’re used to. They are wholly outside the corrupt and largely fatuous traditions of so-called modern magic.”

  “Yes, right, OK,” I said. “So what?”

 
“And let me preface this all by saying that I’m on as unfamiliar ground as I’m sure the two of you are. Until recent events, my interest in the occult and such matters has been purely from the point of view of a devotee of supernatural horror fiction, not as a believer. I’ve always kept an open mind of course, as one should, but I’ve never put much thought or intellectual energy into such matters before.”

  “We’re right there with you,” Conrad said. “But we all know now that some strange shit is going on, and we can’t ignore it just because it’s freaky. There’s too much at stake.”

  “Well, I still have some connections to confirm and some hypotheses to test. That’s why I had not yet called you, you see. But since you called me, I’m happy to report what I’ve found out. Let us start then with Lovecraft himself, the person widely regarded in academic and literary circles as the inventor of the Necronomicon.”

  “How can a writer from the 1920s have invented it if we’ve seen pages from the Middle Ages?” asked Conrad.

  “Exactly the point! How indeed? The obvious answer is that Lovecraft did not in fact invent the Necronomicon at all. He must have found his inspiration for the book from some other source. It first appears in the story ‘The Hound,’ from 1922. But of course there is an earlier reference to the book’s supposed author, Abdul Alhazred in the story ‘The Nameless City,’ which was written the previous year. However, it is well known that the name Abdul Alhazred was an invention of Lovecraft’s when he was a small child and does not conform to any traditional Arabic naming conventions. Nor are there any other known references to him or the so-called Al Azif of which the Necronomicon was meant to be a direct translation.”

  “So you’re saying it is in fact a fake?” I asked.

  “No, not at all. I’m saying that Lovecraft did invent part of the mythology around the book’s origins, but that he in no way created the book itself out of whole cloth, although he may have believed that it was his own invention.”

  “You’re saying that he thought he made it up, but he really didn’t,” I asked. “How does that work?”

  “I know it sounds odd. But I have good reason to believe it is the case. You will know that Lovecraft’s stories were in many cases inspired by his dreams. In letter after letter he describes his vivid dreams and how he later transformed them into his stories. And in fact, according to Lovecraft himself, the name and nature of the Necronomicon first came to him in one of these very vivid dreams which he so often had. The question is, where did that dream come from?”

  “Is that really the question?” I asked. “The dream came from his brain, where all dreams come from.” Although even as I said it I thought of Conrad’s dreams and his theory that Shelby was behind them.

  “Perhaps, perhaps. But at this stage we must bring a new player into the game. Remember how I mentioned that Lovecraft first tells of the Necronomicon’s author, Adbul Alhazred, in ‘The Nameless City.’ Now, that is commonly cited as the first appearance of the Necronomicon in print, but the name Necronomicon is never mentioned in the story. Scholars simply make this assumption because in later stories Lovecraft says that Alhazred wrote the original Arabic version of the book, calling it the Al Azif. But we know that the Abdul character was a childhood figment of Lovecraft’s imagination and had nothing to do with the real Necronomicon, and can therefore conclude that in fact it’s very unlikely that someone named Alhazred could have written the book that became the Necronomicon. It is, to sum up, a false lead, invented by Lovecraft to mesh his own imaginings with his dreams about the Necronomicon.”

  “And why don’t you think he just invented the Necronomicon too?” I asked. “Isn’t that the most logical explanation?”

  “It would be,” Sinclair said, “Were it not for three pieces of data that contradict Lovecraft’s own assertions that he invented the book. First, of course, is the existence of pages from the actual Necronomicon, stolen by Greek monks, sold in New York in the 1970s, and in part translated, with great embellishment and alteration, for mass consumption. Second, and perhaps even more significant, was the introduction into Lovecraft’s life of one Sonia Greene while he was living in New York, a woman who, for a few brief but crucial years, was Lovecraft’s wife.

  “It was shortly after they met in 1922 that Lovecraft had his Necronomicon dream and first incorporated it into his fiction in ‘The Hound.’ This is significant because Sonia Greene was no ordinary woman. In addition to being active in the amateur fiction-writing subculture, which Lovecraft was a major force in, she had other, less usual associations. It has long been rumored that in fact Sonia Greene was a former lover of no less an occult personage than Aleister Crowley. It now seems certain that in fact they had quite a torrid and tempestuous relationship. Crowley, the self-proclaimed Great Beast and infamous sex-magician, was used to dominating his women, but Greene apparently proved too strong-willed even for him. There have been theories put about for some time that Crowley influenced Lovecraft through Greene, and it was from her that Lovecraft first heard of the Necronomicon. But I believe I will soon have proof that that is only half true.

  “Greene and Crowley did have an affair, but it was Greene that drove Crowley away, not the other way around. Greene latched onto the master magician hoping to influence his writings and mystical philosophies with the horrifying truths she had discovered in the Necronomicon. But such mind-altering doom-saying was too much even for the so-called wickedest man alive. His was magic of personal empowerment and imposing your will on the universe. The Necronomicon offered none of that — nothing but hopelessness in the face of impossibly vast alien powers to whom man was as insignificant as a fleck of dust. Crowley rebuffed her and used his influence with the occult and theosophical communities in New York to have her blacklisted. It was shortly after this that she met Lovecraft.

  “Taken with the great man’s powerful imagination but otherwise relatively fragile psyche, she latched onto him and started to slowly influence him with pieces drawn from the Necronomicon. She planted her seeds in his subconscious while he slept, where they sprouted as dreams that later blossomed into his stories. It is impossible to say how deep her corruption of him might have spread, but there was one thing more powerful than even Greene’s hold over him — his hatred for New York. He hated their life there together, and when family affairs drew him back to his beloved Providence, he took refuge in the comforts of home. He never reunited with Greene, who, seeing him as a lost cause, moved on to other targets. But the seeds she’d planted in his mind remained and continued to provide more and more insight as they grew, informing his stories and eventually becoming what we now call the Cthulhu Mythos. A fact proved by the existence of Cthulhu, or ‘Kutulu,’ references in the original Greek/Sumerian Necronomicon, which vastly predates Lovecraft’s life.”

  “Fuck,” said Conrad on the other line. “And now Kym’s used the same techniques on Shelby that this Sonia Greene woman did to Lovecraft, except Shelby’s no wallflower and he ate it all up.”

  “I fear that may be the case. Your friend’s African-blooded consort seems to be following in Greene’s footsteps,” Sinclair said.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said with a loud exhalation. “That certainly puts it together. But where are you getting all this from? How do you know this Sonia Greene woman was mixed up with Crowley, much less that she had access to a copy of the Necronomicon?”

  “There are several mentions in Crowley’s writings that tie him to Greene while they were both in New York,” Sinclair said. “Although as is often the case with Crowley’s texts, he refers to her by various occult pseudonyms. As for the last, that is the one piece of the puzzle I am waiting to confirm. My researches have unearthed a fellow collector who claims to have a letter from Sonia Greene to one of her fellow occultists in Chicago that mentions the Necronomicon and her connection to it. I have spoken with him and he has agreed to let me come to Chicago and see the letter in person to ascertain its authenticity. If it proves to be genuine, which I believe it w
ill based on my preliminary investigation, then it will be the final piece tying this matter together.”

  It was all too mind-boggling to contemplate. I’d only been dimly aware that Lovecraft had been married and knew nothing about his wife or his time in New York. There was no denying that it bore an eerie, disturbing similarity to what seemed to be going on with Shelby and Kym.

  “That’s great work, Sinclair, keep on digging,” I said. I was rocking back and forth slightly in my chair with nervous excitement. “Call us as soon as you know for sure, and see if you can get a copy of that letter!”

  “I will, Mr. Dakan,” Sinclair replied. “In the meantime, I urge both of you to be very cautious. I sense that matters could soon be coming to a head.”

  “We will be,” Conrad said. “Don’t worry. We’ve got things covered at this end.”

  We hung up and Conrad came pounding up the stairs. “Is this guy for real?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Does he know what he’s talking about with all this Lovecraft stuff?” Conrad’s voice fairly boomed in my still-addled ears, he was so intense.

  I looked up at him. “Without his help I wouldn’t have any idea what’s going on with Shelby. Not really. He’s the Lovecraft expert, for sure.”

  “Then we’re verging into some seriously scary territory here, aren’t we?”

  “I don’t know. I think we might be.” I was tired, and instead of being assured by Sinclair’s news, I was more confused and worried than ever.

  “Then we do need to be careful, like Sinclair said. We need to act, and act soon, but also take every precaution we can.” Having decided on a course of action, Conrad’s face finally softened. “You’ve had a rough night. You should get some sleep.”