Cthulhu Fhtagn!

by Laird Barron

  Lochinvar: “You smack-talkin’ bitches need to stifle yourselves.” Her cool glare shuts them right down. She takes her orders directly from the Old Woman. The Old Woman calls the shots and she has spoken. That makes you the It Girl.

  Plans are laid. The point of no return zooms past.

  Go North, Young Woman

  The going-away ceremony is a barbeque on a beach near the Nest. Lochinvar’s a disco fanatic. She lugs a record player and a portable generator to the event; broadcasts the hot ’70s beats on scratched vinyl. Neither KC nor his entire Sunshine Band help to dispel the mood of impending doom. The driftwood blaze isn’t merry either, it’s a Roman Legion bonfire on the eve of a massacre.

  Everybody kisses your cheek, except for Norse who goes for a little more. Mace hugs you and whispers to check the drop box in Palmer; she’s sent ahead her second-favorite holdout knife. In the morning you’re gone and the cabal of kick-ass bitches, the voice on the midnight-blue rotary in the gun safe, and all the rest, recede into the province of dream and delusion.

  There’s a three-and-a-half-hour flight from SeaTac to Anchorage, Alaska. The easy part. From Anchorage, you drive. The rental is dinged in all four panels, its windshield is cracked. Duct tape on the gear shift. You swing through Palmer and visit the apartment of your contact, a sympathizer. A bland woman in a red bathrobe with a heron stitched to the breast mutes her soap opera to answer the door. She doesn’t ask questions. She hands you a key and points to a metal box in her shoe closet. Inside that box there are three burner cell phones, an atomizer of compressed acid (with Mr. Yuck stickers plastered to the barrel), a set of topographical maps, and, tucked into a manila folder, fifteen hundred dollars in assorted bills and a nine-inch commando knife attached to a sticky note emblazoned by a lipstick kiss. Thanks, Mace.

  The real driving begins.

  Alaska is emptiness ringed in prehistoric fangs. This is the season of mosquitos and thunderstorms. The sun never completely sets. Red skies. Wetlands, peckerwood forest, and mountains keep going and going whichever way you turn your head. The sea gleams harsh as chipped glass, but you haven’t seen it since you pushed inland. Mace claims sleeping on a boat brings the weirdest dreams. She’d know.

  Green earth gives way to tundra and shale. Towns lie in strips. Roads are geometric slashes radiating from the carven visage of a forsaken god’s skull. Summer is eighty-seven days long. Dust cakes the windows of the shops and of the cars. Beams of sunlight and headlights through the dusty windows intersect as rays of mud.

  You pop a ball of chocolate caffeine. Trucker-strength, goddamnit. Onward and onward.

  Poor men are made of mud. Said Tennessee Ernie Ford. He also said a rich man has blue in his blood. When the blue is black and black is mud that pours from incandescent clouds and caged filaments and oozes like tar from opened flesh, you will have arrived at the great X burned into the map. You will stand in the mud-light, buried like a flint arrowhead, in the heart of the X. Eventually the habitations of men fall away and there are no other vehicles. The land aches. It doesn’t want you around either. You’re the grain of irritating insignificance in the flesh of the oyster.

  Onward and onward until the radio grinds static and ravens glide overhead. Signs warn against trespassing before they disappear.

  Murdockville is the ghost of a mining town a corporation laid out seventeen years ago at the height of a boom. No one has lived here in fourteen. Sadly, the mine went bust and the brand spanking new facilities were evacuated overnight. Tundra and earthquakes and relentless north winds are returning the place to dirt, one roof tile, one brick, one smashed window at a time. Summer, and thank the powers for that much. This will be no place for a human being when winter howls down from the snowy range.

  You’ve traveled through dust and darkness to claim your prize, to grasp Fate by the throat. Yours is the gift of second sight. Premonition, clairvoyance, telepathy, woman’s intuition. Whatever it is, it’s not reliable enough to break the bank in Vegas. Weak and intermittent as a radio broadcast that can only be received under perfect atmospheric conditions, it has led you in fits and starts to these modern ruins lost within the ancient wilderness.

  The Old Woman in the Mountain says the prize will be subtle, yet obvious. Your choices inside this shelled-out room in an abandoned rec center boil down to either a jukebox, a buckshot blast pattern through a corkboard bulletin board, or the bundle of rags and wooden sticks cast aside in the corner. The bundle proves to be an Edgar Allan Poe puppet. Two feet long; the puppet’s colors are faded bronze flecked black, its skull is deformed, and its prim black suit hangs in cerement tatters. Its strings are clipped and its mustache is clotted from a nosebleed. One cockeye peers, cold as the permafrost. The other eye is a ragged hole. Behold a simulacrum of Poe, dead from booze and rabies and after the vermin have had at his face.

  You don’t want to believe that you’ve seen this puppet. Your sister, Harmony, owned several marionettes when you were girls. Poe, an astronaut, a Punch puppet, and others. Harmony wasn’t skilled in puppetry; she enjoyed flailing her troupe across makeshift stages in skits she learned while watching Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Teen years (boys, cliques, and a new car!) arrived and those puppets went into a Salvation Army bin. Yet here Poe is, the once pallidly morose creature who resided on a shelf above Harmony’s bed. Pallid moroseness has progressed to disease and horror.

  First prize, indeed.

  Poe Boy

  Poe says, “Humans are not inevitable, Annabel. You used the Black Glass to find me. An unwise course. Exceedingly.” The puppet’s voice is cultured, yet rough, and far from the mannered Victorian accent your subconscious might be expected to affect. This is closer to your grandfather’s voice, or how you imagine it after these many years.

  A lesser soul would scream and hurl the puppet aside. You are made of heavier metal; one flinch and a strangled cry of surprise is the extent of your concession to civilian frailty. The puppet’s lips don’t move, the first clue this is a hallucination or a miracle. You would love to believe you’ve acquired super powers manifesting as psychokinesis or full-on telepathy, however it seems more probable that the brain tumor is finally impinging upon something vital, as promised. Migraines, nosebleeds, hallucinations; none of it is promising. Puppets don’t speak of their own accord and that means you’ve elevated the art of the interior monologue to a new level.

  You: “The Old Woman says that.” You set Poe in the passenger seat. The trunk would seem more plausible, except you decide to keep the puppet near, like a proper enemy.

  Poe: “Does she? Lochinvar claims to speak to her.”

  You: “Maybe I should tape your mouth.”

  Poe: “I’ve seen hell, Ann.” He pronounces Ann with a sneer.

  You: “My friends will want to hear all about it.”

  Poe: “It is not inevitable that you will meet them again.”

  You turn the key in the ignition and nothing happens. You unwrap another caffeine pill and eat it, slowly crumple the foil and its hornet graphic. Wind pushes against the car. Directly before you, the skeletal frame of a radio tower trembles. To your left lies a row of low buildings with boarded windows and tan doors, sealed tight against the elements. On your right, across a tussock field, spreads a disjointed landscape of alder thickets and marsh. Hills rise and rise. It is late afternoon and the sun is a blade stabbing toward the mountains. You dial the special number and let the machine record, then disconnect. Waiting is the hardest part is right.

  The burner phone hums. It’s Lochinvar.

  Lochinvar: “What you got, girl?” After you describe the situation and your acquisition, she says to hang tight. Minutes pass. “Has it said anything?” Her tone is different.

  You: “The puppet?”

  Lochinvar: “Has it spoken? This is important.”

  You: “It’s not that kind.”

  Lochinvar: “All puppets are that kind. This…puppet was abandoned in New York State ten years ago. Now it’s hiding ou
t in Tumbleweed, Alaska. Hell of a migration.”

  You: “Someone obviously—”

  Lochinvar: “Someone obviously my ass. Has it spoken or not?”

  You: “No.” You massage your skull even though the pain hasn’t started. You don’t need second-sight to detect the edge in her voice. She’s been on the horn with the Old Woman, getting the signals.

  Lochinvar: “All right. Thank god.”

  You: “Why thank god?” You straighten in the seat and regard your little buddy.

  Lochinvar: “Mrs. Shrike says if it’s quiet, you’re still in the green.”

  You: “Oh. I probably don’t want to explore the implications.”

  Lochinvar: “Correct, you do not. Keep X under direct supervision. Get home.”

  After Lochinvar has gone you chuck the phone and hit the ignition. No joy.

  Poe: “Scary music and car troubles mean only one thing.”

  You study the surroundings. The hand of darkness is slipping ever closer.

  You: “We’ve got the place to ourselves, Eddie. We’re in the green.”

  Poe: “Why’d you lie to your pal?”

  You: “I didn’t lie.”

  Poe: “You lied your lips off.”

  You: “We aren’t having this conversation. You’re an aural hallucination precipitated by my terminal decline. And shut up.”

  Poe: “Please, put me back.” The puppet’s head slips, so its remaining eye fixes on you.

  You: “I’ve driven all this way. C’mon.”

  Poe: “You’ve never killed. You’re not the same as the other girls. You don’t have the guts. Please put me back. It’s going to get me. You led it here. Please, please, please.”

  You: “Nevermore.”

  Poe: “Fool! The car isn’t going to start. I’m dead. The Eater of Dolls is coming.”

  You: “Shut up, Eddie.” After a deep breath, you try, try again and the engine catches, praise the powers above and below.

  Poe: “Oh no oh no oh no.” Then the puppet laughs.

  You’ve heard that sound. Once when the doctor called to say your mother’s cancer, and now your cancer, had done its work. You heard it again when your old golden retriever cried once in the night as she was going, gone. You heard it during an adventurous youth, moments before the thin ice of a lake cracked beneath your boots. You heard it last when a kid from Indiana, a Star Trek fanatic, cocked the hammer of a pistol.

  You rev the engine and roll.

  Black Kaleidoscope

  Chocolate speedballs can only take a woman so far and no farther. Pricks of fire float upon the eternal Alaska summer twilight and resolve to the streetlamps and illuminated shops of a town. You fuel the car at a Tesoro and roll into a flophouse motel. Your watch says it’s a quarter until nine. Exhaustion weighs your skull like an iron ball. Three or four hours sleep to recharge the batteries, then you’ll hit the trail again and press on to Anchorage. Food can wait, a shower can wait. Sleep is what you yearn for.

  Poe: “Dear Ann, this isn’t a good idea.” The puppet tries to sound reasonable, avuncular. “Keep trucking, sister. It wants you to stop. It wants to catch us.”

  You tuck Poe under your arm and go into the cheap, claustrophobically narrow room. Mold, sweat, smoke, a hint of whorish perfume. Water stains and AC on the fritz. TV works fine, though.

  You: “Hey, Lamb Chop reruns!” You click and click the remote, hunting for some porno.

  Poe: “Stopping is bad.” The puppet lies primly in its nest on the opposite bed. The table lamp bathes it with a cancerous glow. “In these situations, stopping is always the worst thing you can do.”

  You: “Short of fucking outside of wedlock, right? Does masturbation count? Because I plan to rub one out and cash in for the night. I can’t see straight enough to avoid the ditch. Free skin flicks and a soft mattress win.”

  Despite your bravado, you lock the door and block it with a coffee table. A peek through moth-eaten blinds apprises you that the parking lot is mostly empty, and no one stirring except a drunk in shredded fatigues collapsed near the PEPSI machine by the manager’s office.

  You: “There. You’re safe from The Eater of Dolls. Wake me up if he, er, it, comes knocking.”

  You swallow pills to dull the spike traveling through your skull, dim the lamp, and lie propped against the headboard while spray-tanned actors undulate perfunctorily on the television screen. The next click of the remote takes you back and back to a shirtless Danzig performing “How the Gods Kill.”

  Poe: “You’re a doll.” Its tone is petulant and sinister. “It will like you too.”

  You: “Be quiet. You’re pissed because somebody snipped your strings. For a marionette that’s like getting turned into a eunuch, right?”

  Poe refuses to dignify that crack with a reply. You feel the puppet’s anger seething, nonetheless.

  You haven’t dreamed in years. When your eyes close and your consciousness dissipates, it funnels into the barrel of what the eggheads, Toshi and Campbell, who work for Mrs. Shrike, call the Black Kaleidoscope. Quantum location and temporal fragmentary acquisition and dilation is a mouthful. Itty bitty time molecules get snagged in the sieve of your ultra-powerful, ultra-sensitive subconscious and translated into occasionally useful psychic imagery. It feels a hell of lot like astral projection from the way generations of hippies and crystal-loving earth mothers have described gliding along at the whip end of a silver cord. The main difference is, you don’t zoom through a gulf of mist and light; you submerge into the black tar between blazing stars, the infinite Lagerstätte where consciousness goes to die. The ichor of the cosmos drowns your senses.

  …Your father folds his arms and stares into the sunset. He never hugged you, never hugged your mother or sister. He backhanded you once, for coming home after curfew with your hair mussed and lipstick smeared. He apologized and apologized and pressed an icepack to your cheek. Last time he ever touched you…

  …The Maserati careens into a cow pasture. Spanish cops with automatic weapons fill the car with holes, your accomplices with more holes. You surrender peacefully, like the coward you are… A Spartan cell, iron cot, a corroded toilet, trained cockroaches to keep you company…

  …Norse caresses your cheek. “Did you have the sight when you were small, or did it develop after you got sick?” You can’t remember not possessing some form of the sight. You don’t know if non-memory is true memory. The Black Kaleidoscope has a tendency to overwrite your mind. For example, it helps you forget that Harmony was driving the getaway car and how, after the third or fourth bullet, her face relaxed until it assumed a puppet’s perfectly lifeless expression.

  …Lochinvar drags on a joint, although her expression remains severe. She struggles to explain how the team receives assignments; it’s cryptic—Mrs. Shrike is a facilitator; she doesn’t tell her girls everything. Some of it they must learn for themselves. “We use auguries,” Lochinvar says. “Tea leaves, pigeon guts, the stock market. Tarot cards. Fortune cookies. Crazier than that.”

  “Brute force,” you say and decline the joint when she tries to pass it to you. “What’s it all about?”

  “Survival. Living to fight another day. We’ll see where it goes from there…”

  …Ants mobilize in the depths to invade rival colonies. The quiet slaughter that ensues dwarfs all the wars of men combined… Giant wasps float down from the spreading shadows of the canopy to assault a honeybee fortress, and again, the carnage is numbing…

  … In the rearview as you bail out of Murdockville, the doors of the deserted buildings swing open, one after another in a domino chain…

  …Poe tumbles through darkness, limbs jostling, wrapped in a feeble halo of light, dissolving. “Oh dear Annabel. It’s your fault she’s dead. She was the good girl.” You want to defend yourself. Harmony was a grown woman. She chose to roll the bones and they came up snake-eyes. Words remain impossible. You howl in grief instead. Poe can’t hear you. Your sister can’t hear you either. They’re out th
ere, zipping farther into the great dark…

  …Meanwhile, something is coming up from behind. You glance over your shoulder…

  The Eater of Dolls

  You come to around midmorning. No one murdered you in the night and that wipes the slate. You check in with Lochinvar. She’s unhappy, says to decamp and get driving. Pain pills and breakfast are in order. Your head and stomach conspire to heap misery upon you.

  There’s a lounge three blocks from the motel. The lounge is arranged similar to those rococo establishments that were popular in the ’60s and ’70s when your parents dragged you along for breakfast before church. Heavy paneling and dark, heavy furniture that invite gloom. Thick glass ashtrays. The host herds you into the smoking section despite your muttered protestations. He seems fearful.

  Pancakes, eggs, coffee. Your waitress is haggard. You wonder if she stayed up late watching porn too. You have to wonder because your talent is more remote-viewing than ESP. Her nametag says CRO. She stares at your forehead, your shoulder, Poe canted against the opposite side of the booth, everywhere but your eyes.

  The coffee is bitter. It’s daylight, barely, and the place is half full of truckers and the jocular plaid and Carhart workaday set.

  Two young women occupy a booth closer to the entrance. Tourists like yourself. Unlike you, the pair wear slinky dresses glittering with sequins, long white gloves (more sequins), and expensive hairdos. The brunette faces the door. The nape of her neck curves most shapely. The blonde is sharp-featured in a way that some women find repulsively attractive. Her lipstick lends the illusion she’s been sipping at the neck of a slaughtered gazelle. She smiles and sips orange juice, extra-large. She isn’t wearing jewelry. Hmm. What to make of that?

  The Black Kaleidoscope grinds inside your skull. Crystalline flakes of potentiality quiver, seeking to coalesce into concrete knowledge—all the knowledge that exists exists in the cosmic tar of your subconscious, if only you’ll stare deeper… You fight the compulsion. Too much pain this early in the morning.