Dark Gods

by T E. D Klein

  "I know who you mean," said Tina. "The bald guy. They sell his books upstairs in the shop."

  "And that fellow Huysmans," said Nadelman, "the one who w/ote La-Bas." Two blank stares. "And Montague Summers . . ."

  "Oh, yeah, I know him," said Lenny. "We got some books/of his at home. Lots of pages in Latin and German."

  "Right, with no translations. I also used to read a lot of supernatural fiction. Lovecraft, that sort of thing."

  "Hey, that stuff's not fiction!" said the witch. "No way! That dude was into some heavy shit. Believe me, pal, I know. You better learn how to read between the lines. It's all there-those gods of his, and those demons; the whole Dagon myth . . . ." He pronounced it dog-gone. "I'm telling you, that guy knew a lot more than he was letting on. "You just gotta know what to look for-like I do."

  Years later, when the letters began arriving trom Huntoon, Nadelman would remember what had so frightened him about the witch: the man's boastfulness, his certainty that knowledge was concealed to all but him, and his earnest faith in the pleasures of revenge.

  Boy oh boy, they better watch out....

  There was a lesson to be drawn from those people in the bar, and Nadelman had not been slow to learn it. The world, he had discovered, was full of sad, lonely, pathetic people. They were basically good people, most of them, deserving of sympathy; worthy, even, of respect. But many of them-especially the sort who laid claim to celestial wisdom, preternatural power, magical loopholes in the laws of the universe-were not the sort of people he would care to have as friends. They were too disposed to fantasy, play-acting, and delusion: whatever would lend their dreary lives a bit of spurious drama. For too many of them, the occult was just a bridge between cosmology and kinky sex. They were, in a word, creeps.

  In later days he'd met their counterparts in other walks of life. There were the military creeps-Nam-droppers, he called them-with their contempt for civilians and their penchant for macho-sounding jargon. There were the trivia creeps who read the Times from cover to cover and never forgot a fact; there were the movie creeps who saw three films a day and appeared to love them all indiscriminately; there were the religious creeps who'd found Jesus or Jehovah and wanted everybody to know. He'd met left-wing creeps with schemes to pro-mote a workers' revolution, and right-wing creeps with stockpiles of weapons in their basements. He'd met technocreeps who prided themselves on their ability to read Scientific American, and wine creeps who made a show of knowing which brand to order in restaurants, and Mensa creeps who bragged of their IQs, and consumer creeps who always found bargains that no one else knew about. Astrology nuts at the office had given him worthless tips on the market. Fruitarians in his apartment house had warned him that everything he ate was poison, even most vegetables. Cabdrivers had assured him that the national elections were fixed and that they alone knew who was behind it. Their one common denominator, the single sure mark of the creep, was that they were, every one of them, In The Know, privy to information denied to other mortals or that others were simply too stupid to see.

  Believe me, pal, I know ....

  They had banished the questions from their lives, these people; they knew all the answers. But in fact, Nadelman had long ago con-cluded, they knew nothing, and less than nothing.

  Over the years, the witch with the hairy chest had become, in Nadelman's mind, a composite of them all, their elected represen-tative in Congress. Credit the creep with one thing, at least: if Nadelman had had any last flickering vestiges of an adolescent interest in the outre, the witch had effectively extinguished them, his grubby fingers snuffing out that final mystic candle. No longer would Nadelman waste time over cabalism, holistic healing, the Thirty-nine Steps to Power, and the Wisdom of the East; they were merely the banners to which losers flocked. Henceforth the daily battleground of the ad agency would be challenge enough for him, and its year-end raises and midyear bonuses enough of a reward. The woods were full of crackpots armed with mantras and mandalas, volumes of occult knowledge, pipelines to divinity, but he doubted that they dressed as well as he did, or smelled as good, or drove as big a car. Everybody died, after all, holy men as easily as ad men.

  This robust philosophy had sustained him over the succeeding decade far more efficiently than art or religion ever had. Once he and Rhoda had lived in Cobble Hill, in a drafty fourth-floor walkup where their bookshelves were of bricks and planks, and roaches ruled the kitchen. Now they lived on the rich side of the river, in a two-bedroom co-op with a $240-a-month parking space in the basement garage. He no longer jogged round the little park on Congress Street each morning, or scribbled strange, desperate poems at bedtime in an old spiral notebook; he belonged to a health club near his office now, where he sweated away the extra pounds on steel-and-leather Nautilus machines, and the last thing he'd written that rhymed had been a jingle for Jergen's Lotion. He had a wife who'd just gone back to work for a computer graphics firm, a son in third grade at a special school for dyslexics, a $160,000 mortgage, and a dachshund. On Fridays after work he had guilty athletic sex in a Village apartment with a Yugoslavian divorcee from the health club. He still had roaches, but then, everybody did.

  Huntoon's letter, which arrived midway through the second week of October, came as a minor intrusion. When Nadelman got home from work that night, it was waiting for him, laid out alongside the New Yorker renewal notice, American Express bill, and annual Cancer Care appeal that had come in that day's mail. He frowned when he saw it, and as he read it through, he shook his head and muttered "God!" and "Such a creepy kid!"-though other men in his position might actually have been flattered.

  The letter was, at least in part, a fan letter; and, as Nadelman immediately realized, it had come to him as the indirect result of a poem he had written twenty years ago in college, during his sophomore-year flirtation with the occult.

  The poem, grandly titled "Advent of the Prometheans: A Cantata," was one of several that Nadelman had published in the Union Col-lege literary magazine, the Unicorn. He had written it as a protest against the compulsory Sunday chapei service that Union, as a Bap-tist institution, had in those days imposed upon all undergraduates, Christian, Jew, and atheist alike. The poem had been, as he saw it, a kind of metaphoric rock hurled at the ancient chapel's ugly stained-glass windows, with their pious flock of prophets, saints, and Savior.

  A more compelling motive, though, had been one of simple imita-tion: having spent half the year reading books on black magic, followed by a dalliance with Swinburne, Huysmans, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, and the rest of their decadent crew, from the exquisite, blood-drenched torments of Lautremont to the batrachian-faced horrors of Lovecraft-in short, all the dark and sinister exotics to which adolescents are drawn-he had set out to write this kind of thing himself. The resulting work, a paean to some imaginary "leprous-featured rival of the Lord," had had ten distinct sections, each with its own peculiar meter, including a gaudily ornate "Invocation" near the end. It had been the longest poem, and by far the most ambitious, that Nadelman had ever attempted, or ever would again.

  No one at Union had been as scandalized by the poem as Nadelman had hoped, since no one at Union actually read the Unicorn, save for those few souls whose names appeared regularly on its contents page. (It was popularly known around campus as "the Eunuch") Nadelman's epic would have shared the same fate as the rest of that magazine's offerings-to molder away, forgotten, on some dusty library shelf, or, as with Nadelman's own copy, stuffed into an old suitcase in the hall closet, amid a jumble of papers, school reports, and tattered notebooks from his youth-if it hadn't been for Nicky Sondheim.

  Sondheim, two years Nadelman's senior, had been editor of the Unicorn in those days, an intense, fast-talking character with a subver-sive grin. He'd been the first person Nadelman knew who smoked marijuana; he'd lived off-campus, played folk guitar, and was known to have slept with a professor's wife. Nadelman had revered him as a great aesthete and, thinker, but had lost touch with him in the years following graduati
on. Sondheim, he'd heard, had gone on to become a not-too-successful songwriter and, later, a highly successful record producer. Today, in fact, Sondheim was an executive at Warner with several up-and-coming young rock groups in his stable, among them one from Astoria, Queens, that-after calling itself Rumpelstiltskin, the Fireflies, and a succession of similarly uninspired names-was now known to the world as Jizzmo.

  Like AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Twisted Sister, and a host of lesser-known bands, Jizzmo specialized in purveying a kind of loud, satanic rock that appealed mainly to prepubescent boys. Nadelman's can-tata, with its lines about "poison'd kisses," "the lord of dark corrup-tion," and "the hunger of the worm that gnaws," would be just their meat. When, a year ago, it had come time for the group to cut its fourth album, Walpurgis Night, Sondheim had gone rummaging through his collection of old Unicorns and had seen to it that the group's lead singer, Ray Minor, who wrote most of their songs, got a look at Nadelman's poem. It lent itself perfectly to the type of florid, somewhat convoluted scoring for which Minor was famous. Nicky had also gotten R.einhold Schramm, the grave-looking lab-coated actor on the Phiso-Derm acne cream commercials, to narrate the Invoca-tion; he'd described him to Nadelman, with a laugh, as "the poor man's Vincent Price." After a bit of prudent surgery here and there and the excision of some stanzas on divine retribution, Nadelman's poem had found its way onto the album's "B" side, where it appeared, retitled, as "New God on the Block," just between "Darn Tootin'" and "Devil of a Time."

  Nadelman hadn't even heard of Jizzmo until last winter, when Son-dheim had telephoned him, quite out of the blue, to tell him they were interested in his poem. Since, the way the group sang it, you could barely make out the words unless you strained to hear, and since the money he'd eventually received-twelve hundred and change, plus a point or two if the song ever went single and another if the album went gold-wasn't half as much as he'd initially expected, he had greeted the album's release last spring with little enthusiasm. Nicky had invited him to a party marking the event at Tavern on the Green, where Nadelman and his wife, nibbling on caviar-coated squares of pastry, had been introduced to the various members of the band. Despite their shaggy appearance and the air of sneering menace that their public image demanded, they had struck Nadelman as an ordinary bunch of high school dropouts, good-natured, rather giggly, and no more satanic than the boys in the office mailroom. He had nothing in common with any of them; he could barely remember their names.

  Besides, he had better things to do. He was now, at forty-two, one of the best-paid group heads at Sheridan-Sussman, creator, almost single-handed, of the highly successful Nobanana campaign that had taken a nine percent share of the fruit-flavored soft drink market away from Sprite and Seven-up. (The soda was said to contain the com-bined flavors of eight healthful fruits, bananas not among them-hence the product's name and also its popular jingle, "Yes, we have Nobanana.") Nadelman had no illusions about the actual social value of his work, but he took a certain pride in doing it cleverly.

  It was hard to be proud, though, of being immortalized on a rock-and-roll album-especially in light of the other songs on it, most of them written by Minor, all of them juvenile and silly. Even his own words sounded silly, at least the ones he was able to make out.

  The patience of the glacier, The comfort of a shriek, The cruelty of the razor As it slices through your cheek-

  Whatever had he been thinking of?

  He kept a dozen or so copies of the album in his record collection, intending to give them away as joke-gifts someday, or maybe sell if they ever became valuable. Nicky has assured him that they might; there was, he said, "an excellent market for out-of-print LPs."

  "What an odd phrase for record albums," was all Nadelman had said. "Our-of-print!"

  Two of the songs from Walpurgis Night had already gone single: "Darn Tootin"' and "Mercy Fuck" (under the abbreviated title "Mercy!"). Thanks to the notoreity of its lyrics, a cleaned-up ver-sion of the latter had even made the Top Forty-not that that par-ticular honor was one to which Nadelman had ever aspired; the phrase itself merely reminded him of middle age.

  Unlike the two hits, "New God on the Block" had never become particularly famous. As the longest song on the album, it had been considered too unwieldy for a single. Friends occasionally informed him that they'd heard it played in its entirety-or in a slightly cut version with the instrumental section in the middle removed-on cer-tain FM progressive-rock stations, the sort that didn't confine themselves to singles; but Nadelman seldom listened to the radio, except for a couple of all-news stations, and he'd never once heard it on the air.

  The only mention he'd ever seen of his song had been in a West Coast magazine called Hippodrome, which was dedicated to hard rock and heavy-metal music and featured earnest articles with titles like "Freak League Hits the Comeback Trail" and "Motley Crue's Grossest Gig Ever." This year's June issue had had a think-piece by one Jordan Steinbaum entitled "Satan Calls the Tune?" (Nadelman suspected that the question mark had been an afterthought inserted by the magazine's lawyers.) It analyzed each of the songs on Walpurgis Night in reverent detail, and concluded that the album's central message was essentially one of "guarded nihilism."

  Nadelman would not normally have come across it-he'd never even heard of the magazine-but Sondheim had mailed him a copy with a note paperclipped to it that read, "You're famous, kid! See page 31."

  The article had devoted far more space to Minor's song "One Virgin Too Many" and to a ditty called "Blasted" by the group's notorious drummer, "Rocco" Roskone. Nadelman's contribution had been the subject of a single meaty paragraph:

  But for sheer metaphysical chutzpah, Roskone's pagan battle cry is the merest whimper compared to the LP's longest cry, "New God on the Block," in which Minor's bravura tunesmithery and club-honed guitar pyrotechnics provide a solid heavy-metal under-pinning to the arcane maledictions of a non-Jizzmo lyricist, the mysterious "/. Nadelman," described by Warner publicity only as "a decadent poet and surrealist currently residing in a bohemian section of Manhattan." The song's arrangement, complete with a spoken narration, is a bafflingly complex one, and so are the lyrics themselves, hinting at the emergence of some sinister "rival" deity responsible for all the world's ills-

  The Idol of the abbatoir, The god of cancer, insanity, and pain- and, unless these pointed ears deceive me, providing listeners with a list of ingredients, a kind of allegorical recipe, for the construc-tion of a servant in this new god's image, presumably to do it some form of worship. Heady stuff for a sub-teen-oriented group like Jizzmo, and perhaps signaling the direction the band will be taking in the years ahead.

  Nadelman had been amused to learn that his East Seventy-sixth Street neighborhood was a stronghoid of bohemianism. Presumably Sondheim had had a hand in that. He didn't know Nicky well enough anymore to guess whether the line had been an ironic joke, or merely nostalgia.

  Apparently it was the article that had led Nadelman's correspondent to him. A little white gummed label, pasted slightly askew on the corner of the envelope, bore the return address-Mrs. Lonee Huntoon, 1152 Locust Court, Long Beach, Long Island, NY-and the silhouette of a tiny red lobster. The s in Mrs and the first name had been crossed out by the same heavy, childish hand that had written the letter, in a thick black ballpoint pen on pages torn from a spiral notebook, leaving ragged perforations at the edge like a line of broken battlements.

  "Dear Sir,

  Your the only I. Nadelman in Manhattan so I sure hope this let-ter gets to you. If it falls into the wrong hands I bet we would realy be In For It-right? I figured you were one of those West Coast writers & never thought you could actualy be living so close by to me!!! Well sir enough of that. Your probably a busy man & I dont want to waste your time. I realy have got to take my hat off to you though. You do know what your talking about thats for sure. Ive tried the charts in the Crowley books but they don't work worth shit & I used to practice the Bledsoe Color Method & belong to the Astar Society & the E. O.D. but frankly the S
tates Ive gotten into are not all that powerful. And I tried playing that new Judas Priest album backward (you know that cut 1 mean) on a device I personaly invented but though I heard some hints at Who was up there calling the shots (I dont have to tell YOU-right?) & the last cut on the album has a line I distinctly heard about "He waits" & "watch us over" or "watch us suffer" or some such-the rest was not too clear.

  Got sick of following Priest after there Jersey City gig. Well sir you cant blame me-right? But Ive been a Jizzmo fan since that dynamite Out/Rage/Jizz album. (By the way are you friends with Rocco Roskone? Whats he like?) The main reason lm writing is I was really excited by your song. The way you come right out & give those Instructions & all for making that Creature to serve the God. Thats just got to get the others scared dont you think!!

  I think your really brave for letting out the Process like that - I have been building one of these Creatures on my roof in the Gods image just like you say. I: will sure as Hell scare the Bejeesus out of those little pests that keep leaving there shit up there & disturb-ing Mama - so she is all for it!

  I have all the necessary Ingredients right here on the beach £ir will follow all your Instructions. Well sir 1 know you are a very-busy man but thcres just one thing I want to ask you-How do I give it the face thats in the song? ("Licorice" is it? Its hard to make it out with all those damn guitar riffs.) I cant carve a rock like the song says-there arent even any around here big enough anyway & the melons I try keep coming out a mess.

  Please worite back real fast!!!

  Faithful Your Follower, Arlen Huntoon"

  No doubt the boy had meant this as a fan letter, but Nadelman found it disturbing. It reminded him of the strangers' letters that occa-sionally found their way into the agency, full of rambling complaints about a faulty product, sometimes in tones of deference bordering on obsequiousness, sometimes making veiled threats or hinting at a payoff, often veering from sentence ro sentence between these two postures. He usually read them over with a mixture of pity and revul-sion, mentally adding sic every few lines. Huntoon's letter aroused the same reaction; he was sorry that the young creep had found out his address. At least, though, he didn't live nearby; Long Beach was nearly an hour away on the Long Island Railroad. Nadelman himself had spent most of his childhood in Woodland Park, only two stops earlier on the same line.