by Martha Wells
Then the wall stopped. It hung there, dividing the room in half, preventing me from my only means of escape, but it came no further. For a moment I wondered why, but then I became aware of another presence. I heard a sound, as of a slapping upon the ground, a great girth moving in jerking steps. I turned to face it, whatever it was, whatever new horror was to meet my eyes. It was not what I expected.
In my younger years, I’d gigged my share of frogs in the Southern swamps. I now repented my youthful indiscretions.
I’ll explain what I saw, but the best I can tell you is this—it appeared to be a giant frog, a great toad complete with massive belly and globular eyes that looked as if they longed for nothing more than sleep. It was covered with brown fur, which might have been disconcerting on an actual frog but somehow seemed perfectly reasonable here. Its mouth opened slightly, and the tip of a tongue darted out. I fully expected to hear the mightiest ribbit ever to issue forth in the history of the world. But when he spoke, it was only in my mind that I heard it.
“Bullfighter, I am the one who sleeps. You have awakened me from my slumber.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, almost questioningly. My mind could not process what I was seeing and hearing.
“No matter. You are not of the cult. The others should have known better.”
He moved toward me, his massive splayed feet crashing down upon the temple floor with every step.
“It is a strange thing. I knew another, of your kind, long ago, in a very different place from this. He was a thief, a master at his art, whose name is now lost to the shrouds of time. But not his memory, and not his soul.”
He raised himself up to meet my eyes, even though one of his was the size of my entire head.
“Twice our paths crossed, the thief and I. And twice I let him go. I promised him there would not be a third time. And now, I sense some of him in you.”
I swallowed hard, but my mouth was so dry that there was nothing there to swallow.
“I see into you. There is courage there, unlike most of your brethren. Enough, I think, to make me overlook my promise, oh Satampra Zeiros.”
Upon hearing that name, something stirred within me, something I had not known was there.
“Go,” it said, “and see that you do not come back.”
It turned from me then and began to shuffle away. I glanced behind me and watched as the great black curtain split down the middle and opened. I looked back at the other beast as it went, the giant frog, and for reasons unknown, I opened my mouth to speak.
“What do I call you?” I asked.
It stopped and turned to look upon me. This time when it spoke its voice rang out with such force that it drew the consciousness from me, and it didn’t come back until I woke up, inexplicably, on the main street of the abandoned town above, Sam and Jake shaking my shoulders and screaming at me like they thought I was dead. The beast, the god, didn’t say much. Just one word…
His own name.
“TSATHOGGUA!”
Tsathoggua
Men often worship what terrifies and repulses them. The driving emotion of such worship is fear. By adoring and abasing ourselves before that which horrifies us, we hope to win its favor and turn aside its wrath.
So it is with the worship of the old one known as Tsathoggua, who is adored in the jungles of Africa and on the high steppes of China, and in many other odd backwaters of the world. He is depicted in the form of a corpulent black toad with bulbous heavy-lidded eyes, gaping nostrils, and a wide mouth from which droops the tip of a thick tongue. His gross body is covered in a fine, silky fur not unlike the fur of a bat.
The features that are carven in the black stone of his idols express perversion, cruelty, sly malice, and a dull hatred. Yet fathers offer the sacrifice of their first-born sons before the squatting obscenity of his body. Such is the power of fear.
The black toad is not the true form of this old one, who is so alien to the mind of man as to be beyond comprehension. It is said that Tsathoggua fell from the stars aeons ago in the dim beginnings of this world, and was worshipped by various tribes who were not able to conceive him as anything other than a creature of the dark swamps in which they dwelt.
Where the god abides is a matter of conjecture. Some sages claim he resides in the lightless cavern deep beneath the earth that is called N’Kai. The great necromancer Klarkash-ton asserts in his texts that in the distant past Tsathoggua dwelt beneath a mountain in fabled Hyperborea, but that he fled that land when it was covered with a vast mantle of ice—for by his nature the god favors warmth and darkness.
His ancient temples are formed of massive blocks of black stone unadorned by any carvings or pillars. Like the god, they are thick and squat in shape, square, without a dome or spire, having an entrance door of bronze and high, narrow windows. It has been said that they are similar in appearance to temples in the Vaults of Zin, but who has ever walked the Vaults to verify or disprove this claim?
They contain no furniture, only the black idol of the god upon a block of stone, that leers down at the worshipper as he enters, and before the idol a bronze altar of sacrifice, and before the altar a large rounded basin of bronze supported by three legs, which stands in the center of the floor.
When the worship of the god was active, each temple had a guardian that would punish anyone foolish enough to enter without the proper forms of obeisance. It dwelt within the bronze basin, and had the composition and appearance of a kind of living ichor that was as black as bitumen. This creature, if indeed it was alive in the sense that we understand, was said to be ageless, tireless, and deathless.
Any violation of the temple of Tsathoggua called forth the swift judgment of his guardian, for by its touch the black ichor affects living flesh and bone like a powerful acid, dissolving both in moments. This liquid creature was able to rear itself up and strike like a cobra, and it could progress along the ground with great rapidity, faster than a man can run. This it accomplished with a sinuous motion, like that of a large snake, or by extending numerous feet and legs from its underside so that it could run along like a centipede.
There has been much scholarly conjecture as to the relationship between Tsathoggua and his temple guardians. Some say that they are his spawn, and that he cast them off from his own substance. Others assert that they are an alien race fallen from the stars that worships him. Deep in lightless N’Kai they minister to the needs of the god, and serve as both his hands and legs. For it is the nature of Tsathoggua to never stir from his place, but to wait for the sacrifices that sustain him to be brought before him, or before his idols, which are channels that nourish his spiritual essence.
The hunger of Tsathoggua is insatiable. No matter how much he is fed, he always craves more. Yet in spite of the keenness of his appetite, he sits and waits patiently for his prey to venture near, as the toad waits for the foolish fly, and only then will his guardians rise up and strike.
Rattled
Douglas Wynne
The myth caught up with me in New York City, returning after years like a dog lost on a family vacation, mangy and battered and possibly rabid. Not to be trusted, and yet, undeniably familiar. It came in a moment of synchronicity, the light of dawn still far off and the light of the skyscrapers scraped thin across the November sky. I was burrowed down in my sleeping bag on the cold ground of Zuccotti Park, listening to bits of conversation and the staggering, syncopated rhythm of the drum circle winding down in the Sacred Space.
After all the years of denial, distortion, and creative recollection, this was the first time I heard the defining event of my childhood, the final event of my childhood, framed so succinctly. The words reached me as I drifted in the liminal state between waking and dreaming, the muted pulse of the djembe and shakers lulling me until the phrase struck a chord and jerked me back to wakefulness, images of red rock formations gnawed by the insatiable wind haunting my head.
“You ever hear of the Curse of Yig?”
A small group w
as huddled around one of the rectangular ground lights that glowed from the granite like the center lines on a highway, the cold white illumination failing to do much to define their faces. I craned my neck toward the group. The speaker was female. I hadn’t met her yet, but had maybe seen her working in the library tent. Long beaded braids, aquiline nose, dressed in a pea coat that looked too big for her anorexic frame. She was saying something about how myths weren’t meant to be taken literally, but that you could decode any culture’s values by them. More of the same pseudo-intellectual blather I’d been hearing all day and now it was going to sing me to sleep, but I swore I’d heard her mention the curse. Or was that just my tired brain slapping a pattern over a rhythmically similar phrase? I’d almost tuned out again and pulled the insulated nylon flap over my ear when she said it again.
“The Curse of Yig. It’s a Native American legend from the Snake People. Have you guys heard of the Snake People? No? That’s the name the whites gave to the Shoshone and Paiute Indians. They had settlements along the Snake River on the West Coast. You guys should read up on the Snake War. It was the deadliest Indian war in the West, but it’s mostly been forgotten by history because it was overshadowed by the Civil War.”
Someone who sounded like he might be talking around an indrawn hit off a joint interrupted the amateur anthropologist to get her back on track: “What’s the curse?”
I silently thanked him.
“I’m getting to it,” she said. “I heard about it from a shaman I met in Colorado.” The storyteller paused, whether for effect or to take a hit of her own, I couldn’t tell. I was lying on my back now, looking up at the light-polluted cloud cover through the little golden leaves of the honey locust trees while I listened.
“Okay, the legend is simple, right? If you kill a snake on sacred ground, you become a snake, or a snakelike creature.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah, that’s it. Why does everything have to be three acts and explosions?”
“Sacred ground. Isn’t all ground sacred to the Indians?”
“Sacred to Yig, the snake god. There are power places scattered over the Earth dedicated to him where ley lines intersect. Places where the kundalini energy of the planet wells up to the surface. In Nepal he’s Nagaraja, in Mexico Quetzalcoatl, and in Africa he is known by many names. Anyway, the curse, it’s like karma, right? It means that the Indians valued the lowest of the low, creatures literally without a leg to stand on. And if you hurt one, you should expect to find yourself stripped of power and crawling on your belly on the ground among them, yeah? So what I’m saying is: look at any people’s myths and you’ll see what their values are.”
“Yeah, you said that.”
“I did. And I’m saying it again man, because you’re not fuckin hearing me. What are the myths of these bankers who prey on families? What myths are the cops digesting when they gather around the Comcast campfire for story time?”
I turned inward after that, sinking down deep in the bag and heating it with my breath as fatigue finally claimed me. The last sound I heard before I drifted off was the languid grainy rattle of maracas from the last percussionist standing in the Sacred Space by the London plane tree.
In the morning I slithered out of my sleeping bag, packed my scant possessions, and headed uptown to the Port Authority where I bought an Amtrak ticket west. In Chicago, I would learn that the police had cracked down on the demonstration right after I left, clearing the park in riot gear. When I read the news I felt a little pang of guilt for checking out early. I’d met some good people at Occupy and I hoped they were okay. I’ll admit I’ve never been especially political, but I’ve always wanted to find my tribe.
When I reached Omaha, I changed to buses to save money and paid extra for a handgun without a permit at a pawnshop. I barely looked at the thing before rolling it up in my sleeping bag. A simple revolver that looked reliable. Not that I know much about guns. I only knew that it lacked the wicked beauty of the first one I’d ever held in my hands when I was 13 and living in California.
***
It was a girl that set us apart and a gun that brought us back together, at least for a little while.
Adam and I met on a soccer team when we were seven. The Roughnecks. I played for six seasons and have forgotten most of the teams I was on, but I still remember the orange and black uniforms of the Roughnecks. Adam’s dad was the head coach, mine the assistant, and as they became friends we started seeing each other outside of games and practices and spent a lot of time in each other’s pools that first summer.
One-on-one soccer on the lawn and board games when it rained. Battleship and an old version of Chutes and Ladders handed down from Adam’s grandparents, called Snakes and Ladders. Adam usually won, even in games of chance and if he’d gone on to college, I’m sure he would have climbed the ladder somewhere.
A summer can feel like an age when you’re seven years old, and by the time we went back to school it felt like I’d known him forever. We were on different teams the following year, and it wasn’t until junior high that we attended the same school. I didn’t realize until then that unlike me Adam had plenty of friends. I was more introverted. Well, bullied might be a more honest way to put it. And unlike me, Adam had an easy way with girls. Of course at that age, all circuits were firing and it wasn’t long before he told me he’d made out with Gina Barbieri, a pert little blonde I knew but didn’t find attractive. Blondes weren’t really my thing, but I could see why other guys would be into her. Adam didn’t go into detail when he told me the score, but it was clear he was bursting to share the achievement.
It was just the latest thing he had done to outpace me, to leave me behind. Over winter break he’d even gone hunting with his grandfather and claimed to have shot a deer. I wasn’t sure if I believed him about the kill, but I had heard his father talking to mine about the trip before it happened.
A kill.
A kiss.
On the day Adam told me about Gina’s tits and tongue, I got some cardboard boxes from the garage and packed up most of the toys that still cluttered my room.
I still don’t know if he was just raising the stakes and showing off when he filched the gun from his grandfather’s dresser, or if he was trying to repair things between us and bring me in on something risky with him because he sensed how badly I needed it. In any case, I remember the heady rush and the renewed sense of standing at eye level with him when he took it out of his backpack and handed it to me swaddled in a red rag that smelled of oil.
The weight of the bundle surprised me. He hadn’t told me what the “surprise” was and I thought maybe he’d brought his BB gun. My parents wouldn’t let me have one, and even shooting his would have been good. But the weight in my hand told me this was no BB gun. I looked around the junkyard at the refrigerators and washing machines leaning against uprooted trees amid the fragile lattice of rust-eaten cars. We were alone.
“Go ahead,” he said, and bumped my shoulder with his.
I unfolded the fabric, and the nickel plate flared in the sunlight. It was engraved near the grip with a wild horse rearing up. A Colt.
“Is it loaded?”
Adam nodded and I went a little numb in the fingers. This was real.
He had handed me adulthood and it was all silver and black.
Stamped on the short barrel were the words KING COBRA.
I met his eyes and I’m sure mine looked too wide, devoid of cool.
He laughed, a lighthearted, breezy sound. “Man, you should have seen Matt’s face when I showed him a bullet on the bus,” he said. “I don’t think he’ll be riding you in the locker room after gym anymore.”
My face flushed with heat, a mixture of gratitude and embarrassment. I focused on the gun in my hand and felt momentarily lifted off of the ground by a wave of exhilarating fear. What does he expect of me?
“What are we gonna do with it?”
Adam laughed again and slapped me on the back. “We’re gonna
shoot some fuckin rats, man.”
Rats were a huge relief compared to the thought of threatening Matt Fremantle with a loaded gun. They were also better than deer, in my book. I’d honestly felt a little sick at the thought of my friend blowing a hole in a deer, but rats were nasty, disease-ridden vermin. I’d already seen a friend’s brother who worked at a pet store feed a rat to a snake one time, and I don’t think I could’ve done that; dangle one from its tail over the fangs. That would almost be the same as crushing one under my shoe. But the gun would take them out in a flash. I could hear them scampering through the junk, see the places where loose scraps of metal and cardboard trembled at their passage. It made my skin crawl.
Adam was bouncing his heel on the ground beside me like he did when he was gaming or anticipating something, his knee bobbing in an agitated rhythm, a vestige of the ADHD his parents had medicated into remission. “Get in a shooting stance,” he said. “Sight it on the junk pile. You want to be ready before you spot one.”
I raised the gun, gripped it with both hands, and bisected the trembling trash heap with the sight blade.
I was wired. Was that a scaly tail flicking through a rust hole?
“Feet shoulder-width apart. That’s it. Dude, this bitch is a .357. You hit one it’s gonna pop like a blood balloon.”
A flash of fur.
I saw Adam sliding his hand down Gina’s pants.
A deer collapsing in a thicket.
The power to make life. The power to take it. A threshold between us.
A rat scampered across the fuel tank of a tractor chassis and perched there on its haunches, its black fur stark against the blue sky.
I christened it with thunder.
***
Danny Wormbone. Not a handle I expected a New Age huckster to still be going by almost twenty years later. But there he was in the search results advertising RUNES, MEDICINE CARDS, SPIRITUAL COUNSELING & RETREATS. In 1994 my father had probably found him in the Yellow Pages. Now he had a website that might very well be obsolete, and what had once been a “vision quest” was now a “spiritual retreat.” I wrote down the phone number. The Greyhound station on Main Street where I had rolled into town still had a few pay phones, but the nearest hotel with an Internet kiosk didn’t. Apparently they attracted the wrong crowd—people like me, who couldn’t keep up with a cellular bill.
