Best Little Witch-House in Arkham

by Mark McLaughlin

  “Wait a minute,” Theodore said as we all turned to leave the cave. “Reginald, can you dance?”

  “In my youth, my friends called me Twinkle-Toes.”

  “I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’” Theodore grabbed the scroll. “Why, if the six of us—Reginald and The People of the Village—followed the instructions on this scroll, we could harness the power of the blogdoths, and who knows, maybe even the cosmos! But can someone refresh my memory? What part do the blogdoths play in this ancient ritual?”

  Reginald rushed over to the alcove and brought out what appeared to be an ancient oil-lantern with a directional visor on one side. He took some matches from his pocket and fired up the wick inside the lantern. He then handed me the relic. “The blogdoths will huddle together to watch when the dance begins. Shine the Lantern of Th’narr directly into their eyes.”

  I trembled with anticipation. “Wow. My first ancient ritual.”

  And so it began.

  * * * *

  The six men of Lower Belgravian descent consulted the scroll, and then started the complex dance, complete with hand gestures and hip swivels. At several points in the proceedings, they spelled out S-H-U-B-N-I-G-G-U-R-A-T-H one letter at a time by shaping the letters with their hands, arms and occasionally even legs.

  As per instructions, I directed the light of the lantern into the shiny fly-eyes of the huddled blogdoths. Thousands of beams of multi-colored light reflected off of those multi-faceted orbs, onto the gyrating dancers. I was a little disappointed I couldn’t join the dance, since I wasn’t from Lower Belgravia—but hey, somebody had to work the lights.

  I think the glow of the lantern hurt the eyes of the creatures, because they soon began to cry out, some high, some low, in a complex series of otherworldly rhythms that created an effect not unlike a rather snappy pop tune.

  The whole spectacle was pretty entertaining. But then that toe-tapping good time turned into a horrific, soul-freezing nightmare from the mephitic depths of the Devil’s own bowels.

  For suddenly, the cave walls began to fade away, transforming into the star-spattered darkness of outer space, while the cave floor turned from damp gray stone into a hard black surface spinning beneath us.

  “Great Caesar’s enema bag!” I bellowed. “What is going on now?”

  The spin of the black surface, which was disturbingly etched with grooves, threw me right on my backside. But I still managed to hold onto the lantern. I looked up, and saw—saw—

  There are some visions that no human eyes were ever meant to see, just as there are certain odors that the human nose was never meant to sniff. Above me towered one such sight, and it reeked of one such scent.

  It was a gigantic, goat-headed, snail-antennaed, titanic deejay with a multitude of furry legs, and it was pumping those hairy, behooved limbs as it rocked to the beat of the song created by the mewling blogdoths, who now were scampering all over the giant record which the grotto had become. Reginald and The People of the Village were also stumbling around, vomiting in time to the blogdoth-music as they nauseously danced in circles.

  I knew then that the ancient deejay had to in fact be Shub-Niggurath, the stinking Goat with a Thousand Young—and so I set the lantern by my side and began to grovel—grovel before the primordial god of getting one’s groove on…

  I guess all my groveling must have paid off, because suddenly I was wearing the Black Leisure Suit of High-Priestliness, and Shug-Niggurath was giving me a big thumb’s-up—or rather, hooves-up—and the nature god bid me to dance, to show my true talent so that I might become the ultimate power of the Universe. And just as I began my disco-dance of triumph—

  I accidentally kicked over the oil-lantern.

  The giant record caught on fire, flaming blogdoths were running around bleating, The People of the Village all caught fire, too, since their costumes were made of flammable man-made fabrics—it was just a mess.

  Shub-Niggurath waved goodbye with his hooves as the grotto reverse-faded back into place. I found myself standing on damp gray stone again, surrounded by a variety of charred, dead bodies.

  The visor from the broken lantern was resting at my feet.

  I picked it up and sadly looked at my reflection in its shiny surface—

  And ran.

  I ran from the grotto, down the tunnel, into the living room, out of the house—and that pretty much brings me back to the beginning of my narrative.

  What did I see reflected in the accursed visor of the Lantern of Th’narr? Surely it was a vision of supreme insidiousness, spawned in the bubbling crap-craters of the abyss. I was the Chosen One of Shub-Niggurath, and I would forever wander the Earth with that foetid god’s mark upon my wretched brow.

  Let me put it this way—

  The TV isn’t the only thing in my house with…antennae.

  Anecdote Overheard at the Last Cocktail Party Ever

  The moon is watching us, my friends. Watching us with enormous quicksilver eyes.

  What can be said for the morning news anchorman who delivered his update on Iraq in Pig Latin, with the help of Jeff, the Malaysian hand puppet? And who can fathom the matter of the Sicilian volcano that spewed five-hundred and sixteen gallons of extra-foamy cappuccino while belching out swamp gas to the tune of “Un Bel Di”?

  Strange forces were at work that day. Insidious influences of an extra-dimensional nature.

  In a village on the Yucatan peninsula, oversized cicadas ate the elastic out of all the white cotton briefs. A British secretary staying in North Rhine-Westphalia was told by the ghost of an insane seamstress where to dig (“Behind the rabbit hutch!”) to find a long-lost jar containing half of a cookie that had been nibbled upon by the Marquis de Sade. And at 10:23 p.m. Central Time, a cornfield in Buttercup, Iowa split open and It emerged: that selfsame deity that the Pre-Atlantean, Post-Lemurian Serpent Priests addressed by Seven-Thousand-and-Twelve Sacred Names (Number Eleven translating to “Whatever It Is, We Wish It Would Just Leave Us Alone”); that lugubrious critter known to the ancient Aztecs as He-Who-Drips-Sweat-All-Over-Our-Nice-Clean-Temple, to whom they sacrificed the lymph nodes of their enemies after they’d given the hearts to gods they actually liked. This entity had the face of a rhinoceros, the wings of an albino fruit bat and the body of a hotel bellboy (It also wore the little hat). It stood eight-hundred feet tall and shot rays out of Its golden-brown eyes that could turn stainless steel into a truly good tapioca.

  This being was in fact the odious and horrific Rhinodactyl, Lord of the Absurd, and on the day that It emerged from the cornfield, It screamed and squealed and screeched and caterwauled for—what else?—women’s dress shoes. It then added, in a disturbingly conversational tone (for oh, It was trying to lull civilization into a false sense of security), that if It did not receive enough women’s dress shoes, and mind you, they had to be stylish, It would coat the entire world with a thick layer of rabbit excrement, ruining TV reception for all eternity. Reporters and channelers and spokesmodels conveyed the news to international heads of state, and so began the mad global dash for shoes, shoes, lovely and delicious and ever-so-rococo shoes. But as soon as the first dump truck load of Italian leather goodies arrived, the fiendish Rhinodactyl requested creamed spinach casserole by the ton.

  And the madness continued thusly.

  Lava lamps. Couches upholstered in animal prints. Hygiene films. Those little plastic houses that tell you the barometric pressure by whether the little burgomaster or his milkmaid wife pops out of a door. There was no way to predict what the unsavory behemoth would want next.

  This nightmare creature shook the world like an aging movie queen shaking the last few drops of hand-cream out of a crystal decanter just before her long-awaited rendezvous with a $150-an-hour male gigolo named Big Johnny. It played with civilization like a garden spider playing with a leprechaun in its web (the afore-mentioned spider thinking, “Gee, a leprechaun, what luck. Maybe it’ll grant me three wishes,” so the spider asks for three wishes and the leprec
haun says, “Oh, okay,” and the spider promptly asks for three more wishes and the leprechaun says, “I think not,” and the spider says, “Therefore, you are not,” and begins to suck all the juice out of the poor little leprechaun who only wanted to be loved).

  The perfidious Rhinodactyl teased and taunted civilization; It sprinkled itching powder down civilization’s back; It slipped a plastic ice cube with a bug inside in civilization’s drink; It then told an utterly shocking fib regarding civilization’s little sister and a pimply Food-O-Luxe bagboy (or should I say, comestible packaging engineer) from Wichita Falls, and that was the last straw. The outlandish and superfluous Rhinodactyl was a pest, a bother, a cosmic ne’er-do-well; so actually, no one was surprised when the nations of the world got together and tossed one nuclear warhead, extra-large, upon It.

  At this point, one might expect a sweet and dandy resolution, a tidy denouement, a big rubber stamp that reads CASE CLOSED, BABY. But alas, such is not to be. For you see, the atom bomb did what it was supposed to: it atomized the insouciant Rhinodactyl. And the wind carried the monster’s atoms through the air into the lungs of people everywhere…from the lungs, the contamination leached into the sweetmeats, into the damp grey convolutions of the brain.

  That’s the funny, little-known thing about absurdity: it’s really, awfully, terribly, implacably, highly contagious.

  These curious and virulent atoms insinuated themselves into all living things (the catalpa tree outside of my apartment is hopelessly in love with the wire-haired terrier that piddles on it) and into the very workings of our planet…but ah, the grandeur of fuchsia days, the decadence of neon-orange nights! Eventually, these capricious particles seeped beyond the ionosphere to invade the endlessly swirling web of space. Just last night, eyes blinked open in several of the moon’s larger craters. And now the moon is watching us with eyes that shine.

  So here we are, drinking furniture-polish margaritas and snacking on fricasseed trilobite esophagi. End of lecture…and everything else, for that matter.

  Look to the window, my friends, and behold: the full moon, growing larger (hence, nearer) by the second, staring hungrily and grinning with more teeth than I have grubs crawling in the folds of my neck.

  Cthulhu Royale

  I. Her Majesty's Secret Shoggoth

  “Bondcraft,” said the tall, lean, dark-haired, lantern-jawed man in the tuxedo. Black, of course: a tuxedo of any other color was madness, a veritable mountain of madness. “H.P. Bondcraft.”

  “Dash it all!” ejaculated W., the Minister of Arcane Defense, a balding, heavyset man. “I know your name! Why, we’ve known each other since we roomed together at the London Academy for Young Espionage Gentlemen.”

  Miss Tuppenceworth, W.’s pretty blonde secretary, looked out the window of her office, which served as antechamber to her superior’s sanctum sanctorum. “Why is it that whenever H.P. shows up, the sky is suddenly filled with multi-colored silhouettes of shapely women flying about? One can see outlines of guns among the female forms, and hear music filled with saxophones and trumpets. And there’s this sort of swirly gun-barrel shifting to and fro…Decidedly odd.”

  “Not at all,” W. said. “It’s that private club down the road—the Society for the Advancement of Musical, Gun-Collecting Lady Gymnasts. Their ostentatious laser lightshows happen to coincide with Bondcraft’s visits.”

  Miss Tuppenceworth fluttered her lashes at the spy. “So you went to school with W.? What was he like as a young lad?”

  H.P. puffed thoughtfully at his cheroot. “Though Z. is the Ministry’s resident expert on curious devices, W. also showed signs of great mechanical aptitude back then. I remember one summer, he bought one of those jolly vibrating massage chairs, and added parts from a milking machine and an automatic taffy-puller, and we took turns—”

  “Now, now,” W. chided, “Miss Tuppenceworth doesn’t have time to stroll down memory lane.”

  H.P. smiled. “Oh, and once, W. played the part of Juliet in our espionage school production of—”

  “Come with me, Bondcraft!” W. led the spy into his office and then locked the door behind them. H.P. headed straight to the liquor cabinet, where he made himself a tequila sunrise. Swizzled, not agitated.

  “Drinking on the job!” W. scolded. “And tuxedos, always tuxedos. Why? Explain yourself!”

  “Why?” Bondcraft smirked. “Why not?”

  “You’re a spy! You’re supposed to blend in with the common rabble.”

  “Or so one would think!” H.P. drained his glass. “But because I’m usually a little drunk and stand out so, no enemy would ever suspect that I am in fact a secret agent. They’d be expecting someone sober and utterly nondescript.”

  “I say! I never thought of it that way. Ingenious!” W. sat down behind his enormous mahogany desk, which was littered with stacks of papers and several anatomically correct primitive fetish dolls.

  “So what’s new in the Ministry of Arcane Defense?” the spy asked.

  “Some good news from our research base on Antarctica.” W. flashed a merry grin. “We’ve found and captured a shoggoth! All very hush-hush, of course—top secret! We’re still trying to figure out what to do with the blasted thing…It’s so big and squishy. It eats quite a lot…it can change its shape…perhaps the awful thing has some potential as a biological weapon.”

  “You could always drop it on an enemy camp,” Bondcraft said, “and let it eat everybody.”

  “Not a bad idea, but afterward, recapturing it would be a problem. Right now it’s very sluggish, since it’s down at that research base. The thing can’t move very fast in that frigid climate. If we let it loose in a warmer spot, we might never be able to pen it up again. We’re trying to figure out how to control the beast…perhaps even communicate with it. Maybe we’ll find some more—the research chaps say Antarctica used to be crawling with them, back when it was less chilly down there. Anyway, let me tell you about your assignment.”

  Bondcraft smiled. “Is there an international casino involved? And a sexy double-agent?”

  “Silly boy,” W. said. “There’s always an international casino involved. Master-criminals cluster around those casinos like flies around a dead street urchin. And yes, naturally here’s a sexy double-agent. Vadda Fookenhottie.”

  Bondcraft smirked. “Such language!”

  W. rolled his eyes. “That’s her name: Vadda Fookenhottie. We have no pictures of her on file, but it wouldn’t matter anyway because she is a master of disguise. Or should I say mistress of disguise…? Anyway, in addition to Miss Fookenhottie, you will be dealing with—not one, not two, not four, but three arch-villains.”

  H.P. allowed himself a small gasp. “Not…the 3D Cult? Dagon’s Deadly Disciples?”

  W. nodded. “The very same. Three worshippers of a foul and frightful oceanic deity.” He tapped a button on a console on his desk, next to his THANK THE QUEEN IT’S FRIDAY mug. An oak panel on a far wall slid to one side, revealing a large monitor. On the screen, an image sprang up of a grey-skinned creature with a bulbous snout and a tiny, coal-black right eye. The left one was covered by a leather patch. The creature had arms and legs, but a dorsal fin, too, and was pictured stroking a little mutant with the head of a catfish and a human body.

  “You’ll remember this fellow, Bondcraft, since you’re the one who put his eye out. Very clever of you, making him run with scissors. Villain Number One: Blowhole. A half-man, half-dolphin, power-crazed mad-merman. His tiny new fish-headed assistant, who I believe you haven’t met yet, is the evil Baitbreath. He can fling a fish-hook with deadly accuracy.”

  The next picture showed a scaly humanoid with flat, fingerless hands and a bumpy reddish-yellow shell on his back. “Villain Number Two: Goldflipper. This ruthless, wealthy turtle-man plots to control the world’s finances from his underwater base near the Galapagos Islands.” W. shook his head sadly. “Alas, we live in a world where even turtles can go bad.”

  The final image depicted a slender sea-man
in a pin-striped suit. His skin was covered with slimy, iridescent scales. “This is Tunamunga, the Man with the Silver Spear Gun. He is the world’s deadliest, most expensive and worst-smelling assassin. We aren’t sure which is more lethal: his lightning-quick spears or his garbage-can odor.”

  “Three bad little fishies,” Bondcraft said with a frown. “I see I have my work cut out for me. So where do we start?”

  W. hit another button on the console and a panel opened up in the middle of the ceiling. A large plastic model of the Earth lowered on the end of a copper chain. He walked over to the globe and tapped a small land-mass in the South Pacific. The island responded by glowing neon-green.

  “That,” he said, “is the island of R’lyeh. It rose from the ocean depths a few years back and developers quickly converted all of its ancient architecture into a resort for jaded billionaires. It’s the sort of place where the filthy-rich can frolic like satyrs hopped up on Viagra and PCP. It has twenty-seven gambling casinos, nineteen brothels, twelve roller coasters, eight ice-cream shoppes and three amusement parks where you can have sex on a roller coaster while you are gambling and eating ice cream.”

  “Yum,” Bondcraft murmured.

  “But the most famous—or should I say infamous?—establishment on the island is a luxury hotel called Cthulhu Royale. Anything goes at Cthulhu Royale—and when I say ‘anything goes,’ I mean ‘warped inhuman perversions.’ Why, if you wanted a sixty-three-year-old albino transsexual named Lulu to tickle your nether-regions with a peacock feather while he/she sings I’m A Little Tea-Cup, you could easily procure such a diversion at Cthulhu Royale.”

  “Good Lord!” H.P. uttered. “Do you know this for a fact?”

  “Yes.” A smile played around the corners of W.’s lips. “Anyway, Cthulhu Royale was recently purchased by the 3D Cult and is now being operated by its unspeakable minions.”

  “Really,” Bondcraft laughed, “what could be so ‘unspeakable’ about these ‘minions’?”