Cthulhu Fhtagn!

by Laird Barron

  I am living a cruel nightmare and feel my wits have finally left me. I fear that…does anyone here feel a vibration? Forgive me… what is…? Who would call me in the middle of my speech? This can’t be! My father’s number?

  Excuse me while I take this call. Hello? Yes. I’m listening. Who is… Uhhh…

  Uhhhhhggggnnnnn…

  …

  …

  Where am? Ah, it is done. And I feel so…yes.

  Pardon me. I must excuse myself. Someone kindly show me to the exit at once.

  April 7, 2018

  World Weird Con — Houston, TX

  8:00pm

  Best New Author Award Acceptance

  Well I must say this is truly awkward and humbling, to be welcomed back to WWC after such an inauspicious exit those two years back. I have listened to the transcripts and cringed like a nightgaunt whose prey, once released from so lofty a height, missed the chasm entirely. But let us now turn our gaze to the event at hand.

  Thank you, my colleagues of the cacodaemoniacal and spinners of the strange. I attest that writing a book of this depth should have taken much more time, yet perhaps genetic instinct surfaced from creative pools so deep and black they were warmed only by vents of vulcanism at my very core.

  Indeed, I found a dark delight in crafting my latest, er rather my debut tome, Cthreelhu, the first hardbound to bear the byline of Ashton N. King. It seemed no stretch to set Johannesburg as the site of recursive rites and pale pageantry. I speak of course of the backward South African minority that cannot accept the true nature of man. It was on a humanitarian visit and honeymoon that I came to know the place and its shamefully white-hooded dark side. All proceeds from the book will be donated to benevolent charities in the region chosen by my fiercest of brides, and today’s award will only bring more attention to our mission.

  I look now to the front row and see love and tears in the eyes of my forever one. Oh how I find myself dangerously in love with my mononymous paramour, my child of destiny, Beyoncé. Though I found fortune long ago, a love so true has long eluded me. It seems lifetimes that I have waited for such an angelic being to touch my jaded heart and bring new purpose and hope. Misanthropy be damned! So many years, wasted in bitterness and fear of the unknown.

  Together, our combined wealth and notoriety can do wonders for this ailing globe. But I fear it may be too little too late. Feed the poor, we may. Still, there are things I know. Things I’ve seen. Call it dwarf or planetoid, Pluto or Yuggoth. It matters not. They are coming. Our world is not ready. Please do not misread my words as jest or performance. We must prepare. My next book arrives in the Fall of ’19. It shall be no mere flight of fancy—but a survival guide for our species. You must believe me. I have done many wrongs and am all but damned myself. But I have learned to love my fellow man, and would save you all if I can. Thank you, and may your dreams lurk in lands less shadowed than my own.

  The Insectivore

  Orrin Grey

  There was an old man on our street who ate bugs. Beetles, pill bugs, those things that my mom called locusts but that were actually cicadas. Anything with a crunchy exoskeleton, pretty much.

  We’d see him sometimes, picking cicadas off the trees, hanging out under the streetlights at night, scooping up June bugs. On the porch of his house were a dozen of those bug zappers, with their eerie purple-blue glow and their low-key buzzing. They were a buffet line to him. Us kids would stand on the other side of the street and watch as he walked from one to the next, picking out the beetles between two fingers and popping them into his mouth—a delicacy!

  His name was Mr. Petrie, and he lived all alone in an old two-story house that had once been white but was now fading to gray. Its windows always looked dark, and the porch was screened with trellises, though nothing grew on them but the occasional brown vine. As kids, he was a figure of equal parts fascination and terror to us, and we’d sometimes dare each other to go up and peer in those darkened windows, but we rarely saw much when we did. Old furniture, dirty dishes. Desks and sideboards stacked deep with books and papers and objects that were indiscernible in the gloom.

  Of the old man himself we saw plenty. Though he wasn’t exactly social, he came out of his house all the time to wander the streets looking for bugs to eat. He seemed pretty unassuming, old and bald with papery skin over his skull, always wearing old-fashioned brown suits that I imagined smelled like mothballs, though when I was little I never got close enough to find out. I was born early enough and our town was small enough that the paranoia concerning the safety of young children that seems to define our age hadn’t yet taken hold, and the parents on our street considered him harmless, “just a crazy old man.”

  He lived off Social Security or a pension or something, so he didn’t have to go to work. He just walked around the streets talking to himself and eating bugs. Sometimes I’d see him hanging around in front of the library or the post office. Sometimes I saw him coming home carrying armfuls of books. He got groceries delivered to him from the Golden Apple Grocery—an older boy with shaggy blonde hair pulled up in a hatchback car and unloaded brown paper bags up to the front door of that old, dark house.

  When I was a little older, I was that boy. I had a job behind the video counter at the Golden Apple, and because I had my dad’s old Subaru and a driver’s license, I got the task of doing the deliveries, hauling bags of groceries to old ladies and the guy who’d lost his leg in Vietnam and other people who couldn’t come get them on their own. How exactly Mr. Petrie made that list I couldn’t say, since he seemed to still be able to get around just fine, but maybe mental stability was factored in. Anyway, that’s how I got to get closer to Mr. Petrie’s house—and Mr. Petrie himself—than any of us ever had as kids, and why I got a ringside seat to what ultimately became of him.

  ***

  The first time I delivered groceries to Mr. Petrie, I was still pretty scared of him. The house seemed a little smaller now that I was in high school, but it was no less dark, the faded paint no less peeling, the whole edifice no less grim. The first time I walked up his creaking front steps and pushed the button on the doorbell, my skin crawled.

  On the other side of the door I heard a sound, a rustling, like something big moving under a bunch of newspaper. I imagined a giant cockroach, scuttling out from under the refuse that cluttered the house and creeping toward the door. I imagined the door opening inward onto darkness, and rough, segmented legs reaching out to draw me in. I wanted to run, but I knew that Mr. Jorgen at the Golden Apple was expecting me to come back with payment, so I couldn’t.

  I don’t know why I pictured Mr. Petrie as a giant cockroach—I hadn’t yet read “The Metamorphosis,” and wouldn’t until college. You are what you eat, maybe? That’s what my mind’s eye conjured, anyway, and when I heard something on the other side of the door, and then saw the door begin to fall open, the bags slipped out of my hands and split on the porch, spilling onions and a single orange to go rolling across the uneven boards.

  That distracted me, and when I looked back up, there was Mr. Petrie, looking as he had when I was a little kid. Not a monstrous insect, just an old man in a rumpled brown suit. He blinked at me, and at the groceries that lay scattered on the porch, and I began stammering an apology, and offering to help him gather them up, to carry them inside. And that’s how I wound up stepping into Mr. Petrie’s house for the first time.

  Given his dietary predilections, imagining Mr. Petrie as a giant spider, rather than a cockroach, would probably have been more apt, but it didn’t occur to me until I was already stepping across his threshold. At that moment, the whole “welcome to my parlor” thing popped into my head, and I called up images of Mr. Petrie standing behind me, his shadow crawling up the wall, sprouting too many arms. But still, as I glanced back, he was just an unassuming, sad-looking old man. Nothing terribly sinister.

  His house was dark inside, even in daylight. When I went back out to my car and looked back up at the house, I realized it was
because all the windows were strangely recessed, sinking them in wells of shadow. From inside the house, it just looked like the sun was always shining the wrong way, always turning a corner to avoid coming inside.

  It wasn’t as dark in the house as I’d always imagined when I was a kid, though. There were lamps with dusty shades standing here and there, casting little spheres of light that I’d struggle to call golden but also wouldn’t quite just call yellow. From inside, the whole house looked like an antique store or a museum that someone had long since abandoned to neglect. Cobwebs were everywhere except in the main thoroughfares, and all the furniture seemed to be piled with discarded papers and other bric-a-brac.

  Then there were the bugs. Wherever I looked there were glass cases filled with insects pinned to boards. Not just beetles, either. The walls were hung with butterflies and moths preserved behind two sheets of glass, their wings still iridescent even in the dull light. Insect collections like the ones you see in the 4H building at the state fair lay on desks and chairs, some of them completely enclosed in glass cases and bearing careful hand-lettered labels, others open to the air in various stages of dissolution or deconstruction. There were bell jars and mason jars, and just about everything made of glass in the place seemed to hold at least one dead bug.

  I saw everything out of the corner of my eye—just jumbled impressions of the mosaicked shadow-space that was the interior of Mr. Petrie’s house—as I carried groceries in handfuls into the kitchen at the back. I don’t really know what I expected to find there—ice cube trays piled full of pill bugs, meals left out to rot—but aside from the same signs of neglect that were everywhere in the house, the kitchen looked no different than any other kitchen I had ever seen.

  As Mr. Petrie was walking me back to the front door and pressing some crumpled bills into my hand in payment for the groceries, it struck me for the first time in all my then-seventeen years that Mr. Petrie must have once had a family. As kids we’d sometimes seen an adult son come to visit, parking a silver car along the side of the road and going up to ring the bell on the front door. He didn’t come often, and never stayed long, and if Mr. Petrie had any grandchildren, he never brought them by. But once Mr. Petrie must have had a wife, and she and the son must have lived in this house with him, and I realized as I walked back to my car that the house was less the home of a madman than an archaeological relic, the ruins of a life that had crumbled under some unguessed weight.

  ***

  After that, I brought all of Mr. Petrie’s groceries through to the kitchen, though I gathered that I was the first delivery boy to ever do so. Soon, I wasn’t even coming up to the front door at all, but walking around the house to the screened-in back porch where Mr. Petrie often sat. Over time, he came to tolerate me pretty well, if not exactly like me, or maybe he was just lonely. Whatever the case, he began to open up to me, and so I learned his odd story, or some of it.

  Mr. Petrie had been a psychic. Not just casually, he did it for a living. He didn’t start out that way. First he was an 8th grade social studies teacher, but he started doing psychic readings on the side, and eventually it became his career. He toured the country, gave lectures, went on the radio and the TV, wrote two books. That last part, at least, was true, because I saw them.

  So what happened? “I was a fraud,” he told me. “Oh, not on purpose. I really believed in what I was doing. But at best I was squandering my gift, using it for frivolous things. ‘Is my husband seeing another woman, where did Aunt Ida leave her jewelry?’ There wasn’t much call for finding bodies or tracking down killers, like you see on TV. It turns out that psychics go over badly in the courtroom. But I had no complaints, until I experienced a real vision.”

  Apparently, this real psychic vision didn’t happen all at once. It came to him piecemeal, a bit at a time, over the course of months. When it did finally come together, though, it ruined him, destroyed his life. It concerned the fate of the world after humanity had died out, and the race of coleopterid people who would ultimately take our place. Not kill us off, he was unclear about what did that, just rise to fill our niche. I had to ask him what “coleopterid” meant, and he replied, “Beetles, son. We’re going to be replaced by beetles.”

  So there was the root of his odd mania, anyway, at least according to him. At first, he’d gone about it in different ways. He’d tried to warn people, to take the audience that his psychic abilities had gained him and tell them about what was coming, maybe try to prevent it. To change the course of humanity so that we would never die out, so that they would never evolve. Since he didn’t know what destroyed us, he focused on what he did know: the identity of our successors. He’d gone to the civil authorities, tried to go on TV, but no one listened. “People don’t want a genuine psychic revelation,” he said. “They want comforting parlor games, the sense that there are invisible threads that hold the world together. They don’t want to know that the world is vast and grim and hungry. They know that already.”

  As he became increasingly obsessed with this glimpse of the future, it gradually destroyed his marriage and his relationship with his children—I learned that, in addition to the son, he also had a grown daughter, who never spoke to him at all anymore—just as it destroyed his credibility and his career. “Ironic,” he said, “the one time I can be really sure I saw something was the one time no one would listen.”

  None of this fully explained his odd dietary habits, however, and it took months of talking with him, bringing him his groceries and sitting with him on the screened-in back porch where June bugs sometimes caught their hooked feet in the wire, before he finally explained it in any way that made even a little sense.

  “There’s a story by Ray Bradbury, maybe you read it in school—”

  “We read Fahrenheit 451.”

  He ignored me. “It’s about these people who arrange time travel safaris—to hunt dinosaurs and things, you know? Anyway, they’re very careful. They have these floating paths they walk on, and they only kill things that are about to die anyway, so that they don’t do anything to change the future. But one time a guy falls off the path, and he kills a butterfly, I think. And then when he goes back to the future, he finds that the world is a completely different place, just because he killed that one butterfly. Do you understand?”

  I told him I didn’t, but he didn’t really seem to hear me. “The thing is,” he said, “I think they know that I know. The beetle people. I mean, they must have history books, right, something that tells them about what came before? Beetle archaeologists digging up fossils of man’s reign on earth, just as we dig up the dinosaurs. I think they know that I’m onto them, and I think that one of these days one of them will come back in time to kill me, to put a stop to me before I can put a stop to them. I tried warning people, tried stopping them through organized force, but maybe I don’t have to. Maybe if I just find that one right butterfly…”

  ***

  I continued taking Mr. Petrie his groceries until I left for college. The summer after my freshman year, I came back home and moved back into my upstairs room, which remained unchanged from how I’d left it, except that my mom had moved her sewing machine in there to get more light. I got another job at the Golden Apple Grocery, though someone new was standing behind the video counter looking bored and helping old ladies reach movies off the top shelf, so I ended up unloading trucks as they came in.

  There was a new kid doing the deliveries—he drove a pickup, and had hair that fell down over his eyes. I asked the manager about Mr. Petrie, and he said that after I left the old man stopped taking his deliveries the old way. He still phoned in the orders every week, but now he mailed a check, and the delivery kid just left his bags on the front porch.

  After I’d been back home for three weeks, I tried going to see Mr. Petrie. For old time’s sake, I guess, or maybe because I was curious, or because I felt sorry for him. Distance from my childhood and from the town had taught me that Mr. Petrie was probably schizophrenic or something, p
robably in need of better care than he had ever gotten.

  When I approached the house, it was as dark as ever, the paint now completely faded to gray and flaking off in swaths. The lawn needed mowing. Back when I was a kid Mr. Petrie had always mowed it with an ancient push-mower, and once I started taking his groceries to him I would bring our newer mower up and cut the grass once every couple of weeks. It didn’t look like anyone had gotten to it since I’d been gone, and I felt a stab of guilt at going away without giving the old man a second thought. There were dandelions sprouting everywhere, growing almost obscenely long, their heads weighted down with seeds. Other than that the house looked just as I remembered it, except that the bug zappers were gone from the porch.

  I rang the bell and peered in, but could see nothing through the gloom inside. There didn’t appear to be any lights on beyond the windows that I could see, and while I occasionally thought I detected movement in the dimness, I could never be sure.

  I walked around to the screened-in back porch. The back yard was in even worse repair than the front. Grass grew up past my knees, and an old birdbath just barely poked above the verge, with only a bit of brown water standing in the center of it. The porch was empty, the metal chairs on which Mr. Petrie normally sat just crouching there in the gloom. The back door was locked, which I knew could only be accomplished with a hook-and-eye on the inside. So if Mr. Petrie wasn’t home, he must have gone out the front.

  I went by a couple more times over the next few weeks, and the thought occurred to me that maybe Mr. Petrie had died while I was away—he must have been getting on in years, since he had been an old man in my memory for as long as I had been alive. I wondered how I would know if he had. Who would I ask? Aside from me, who in town really knew him? I asked Mr. Jorgen at the Golden Apple and he told me that the phone calls still came in every week, regular as clockwork, but when I asked my mom when the last time she’d seen Mr. Petrie was, she couldn’t recall.