Best Little Witch-House in Arkham

by Mark McLaughlin

  “Ten…nine…eight…” echoed a chilling mechanical voice, the sort villains just love to use for countdowns.

  A huge panel opened in the tower roof.

  “Seven…six…five…”

  “Well, at least they didn’t—” Vadda began.

  “Four…three…two.…”

  “—feed us to the creature!” she finished.

  “…One!”

  With an earsplitting roar, the missile flew up and out of Cthulhu Royale.

  Bondcraft wriggled his right hand closer to the cufflink. With a brisk tug, he pulled off the bomb and flung it down into the hotel. He looked at the ropes binding him. “What a pity my stupid flame-throwing watch is out of fuel.”

  “Hey, at least yours shot flames!” Vadda said. “The 3D Cult gave me a secret-weapon, too, but it won’t do us any good now.” She poked a shapely forearm through the ropes, revealing a gold wristwatch. “The hands go so fast, it acts as a helicopter.”

  “I’ve always wanted one of those,” H.P. said. “Quick! Turn it on!”

  Vadda clicked her fingers three times. Microchips embedded under her nails send a message to the watch and the helicopter action turned on, pulling her wrist out away from the missile. The missile veered ever so slightly in the direction of the pull.

  “Ah! The tug of the watch is steering the missile out of its trajectory,” Bondcraft said. “The world’s finances are saved! Now you can use the watch’s spinning hands as a tiny buzz-saw, to cut through these ropes.”

  “But Daddy!” whinnied the horse. “If she does that, we’ll fall off the missile, straight into the ocean, and we’ll drown.”

  “Don’t be too sure.” H.P. worked his hand through the ropes until he found the pocket holding the cigarette lighter. He dug out the lighter and said, “Quickly, my dear! Begin sawing through the ropes!”

  Vadda bore down upon the ropes with the watch’s spinning hands, and shreds of fiber flew through the air. On the horizon, Cthulhu Royale went up in a glorious mushroom-cloud of radioactive fire and smoke.

  “Good gracious! What was that?” Thunderball shouted.

  Bondcraft smirked as he wriggled both hands free. “A fish-fry.” He pressed down on the lighter, moving it in a quick circular motion to create a small waffle, which he caught in his other hand the instant it solidified. He continued spraying and adding onto the waffle, always hanging onto one edge, until he’d created a disk as big as a manhole cover. “Thunderball! Help me with this. Grab your side of the waffle in your teeth to steady it—but whatever you do, don’t eat any.”

  He kept spraying and spraying until the thick, resilient waffle was the size of a large raft. Then the ropes gave way and the spy, the girl and the horse all jumped onto the giant breakfast treat, which soared away from the missile like a magic carpet.

  “We’re free!” Vadda exclaimed. “Where do you suppose that missile is heading now—?”

  “We have a bigger worry,” H.P. said. “Eventually the waffle is going to land. Or rather, crash-land.”

  “Before it does,” Vadda said, “I simply must tell you the truth. I’m not really a woman. I…I’m actually a small shoggoth. The Russians found me in Antarctica ten years ago and trained me to talk and retain a human form. That’s why I can change my appearance so easily.” So saying, she transformed into Miss Tuppenceworth.

  H.P. took her hand. “I don’t care if you’re a shoggoth or a jungle beetle or a dancing toaster oven. All I know is this: I love you!” He leaned forward to kiss her and—

  “Again, I hate to break up such a tender moment,” Thunderball said, “but we’ve got company.”

  A huge, scaly claw snatched the flying waffle and its passengers out of mid-air.

  Six terror-widened eyes stared up at an enormous face, dripping with seaweed and squirmy oceanic parasites. The face had shining, malevolent red eyes and a beard of flailing tentacles.

  “Who’s the gigantic bloke?” H.P. finally asked.

  “The creature I’d mentioned,” said the lovely shoggoth. “That’s Cthulhu, a demonic beast-god who, according to ancient texts, has been trapped within the subterranean catacombs of R’lyeh for aeons. They named the hotel after him. I guess that explosion released him.”

  “Oops! My bad!” Bondcraft said.

  One of Cthulhu’s face-tentacles snatched up the huge waffle and flung it into his mouth. The creature swallowed the treat without chewing.

  “How jolly!” Bondcraft said. “That giant waffle had hundreds of thousands of mutant scorpion eggs in it. The creature will have a belly-ache tonight that he won’t soon forget.”

  “Maybe so,” said Thunderball, “but right now—we’re screwed.”

  Cthulhu raised his claw and dropped Bondcraft, the shoggoth and the horse one by one into his slavering maw, much like a lazy Roman emperor dropping luscious grapes into his mouth.

  Meanwhile, back in London, W. heard a loud noise and looked out the window, to see if his noisy neighbors were having yet another laser lightshow.

  The last thing he saw was the tip of a missile, heading straight for his smug little world.

  The End of the World Is Brought to You By...

  7:00 - 7:30 p.m. Central: My Mother The Shoggoth

  Yep, my mother died and came back as a protoplasmic monstrosity, and now she oozes around town chasing the butcher, the baker and every other lowlife who ever screwed her and blew her off. She’s literally boiling mad: her superheated acidic secretions bubble and percolate with insane glee.

  Shoggy-Dearest works her old beaus like a nightmare gourmet, frying their skins into crispy rinds, marinating their muscles into soggy ropes of human pâté, steaming their intestines into savory poop-sausages, pressure-cooking their brains until all their lusty memories of her once-lovely body are shriveled into mental raisins within fluffy grey cerebral soufflés. And she doesn’t stop there. She keeps boiling and broiling until she’s poached them all down to the bone, right down to their squeaky-clean grinning skulls…because old habits die hard.

  Mother still likes to leave ’em with a smile.

  * * * *

  7:30 - 8 p.m. Central: Rabid Bitch

  What’s that you say, girl? A foamy-mouthed kitty bit your ass and now you’ve gone mondo batshit? You say you’ve ripped out little Nicky’s throat down by the old mill? You say your brain swims in visions of fresh gushing blood, oceans of delicious heat to help warm the cold nausea of your disease?

  You say I should follow you into the woods outside of town, the woods where Shub-Niggurath capers like an outsized millipede lined with misshapen goatlegs? The very same woods where your victims go to become doggymen, nasty bloody doggymen who smell like pee and hump the legs and butts and mouths of anyone and anything? You say that soon, Nicky will be joining Shub-Niggurath and the doggymen in a mad dance of red pleasure? You say a sad lonely creature like me would love to join, too…join the lunatic orgy of the doggymen, a mindless bacchanalia of blood-drinking and greasy-assed rutting fury in the deep, dark woods outside of town?

  Lead the way, girl. Lead the way.

  * * * *

  8:00 - 8:30 p.m. Central: Bottle Blonde

  You thought you could just toss me and my bottle back in the ocean. I loved you, and would have loved you forever. I blinked up a dozen magicks a day to save your bumbling ass, and that was how you repaid me!

  Fortunately, a lifeguard, a bronzed demigod with more muscles in one arm than you have in your entire body, found my bottle and now he is my Master—and I am satisfying him in all the ways you were too finicky to ever let me try. He is asleep now, smiling the broad smile of the well-pleasured, so I thought I would take a moment to settle your bland hash.

  You wanted me to be a good little show-wife, a prim little ornament to hang off your astronaut arm. When you found you could not tame me, you waited until I had steamed myself back into my bottle and then—chickenshit bastard!—you popped in the cork. When I think of all those wasted blinks, I could scream! You saw my
blonde hair and blue eyes and forgot that I am a creature of boundless power—a djinni, and not just one of those cut-rate Persian knock-offs. I am the best of the original breed: an Egyptian djinni-princess, daemon-daughter of the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. Like my father, who walks among men as a slim Pharaoh, I too enjoy wearing a pleasing human form. But the venom of scorpions flows through my undying veins, and my desert-jackal brain can conceive of a thousand, a hundred-thousand, a thousand-million soul-shredding torments.

  You turned my love into hate—now consider this: I can turn your pubic hair into hungry sandworms. I can turn your kidneys into lice-ridden wharf-rats. I can turn the shit in your bowels into red-hot lumps of coal, and the pee in your bladder into liquid nitrogen. I can transform your teeth into wasps, your ribs into lawnmower blades and your spine into a jumbled mass of rusted, twisty bedsprings. I can do it, you know. I can, I most assuredly can, in the blink of an eye.…

  And certainly, it is time for me to blink away the tears.

  * * * *

  8:30 - 9:00 p.m. Central: Flesh-Eating Castaways

  Six weeks after the boat crashed on this sauna-hot Pacific island limbo, we’d eaten all the crabs, all the coconuts, even all the leaves off the coconut trees.

  Maybe it was those leaves that made us go bonkers, because soon, we were chomping on that old millionaire’s leg, chomping on it and loving it, loving that rich fatty tender meat. That girl from Hollywood gnawed off his pecker at the root and said it tasted like lobster. That other gal, the one from the Midwest, dug her tough farm-girl hands deep into his belly and pulled out his liver and we all broke off chunks for dessert—so rich and sweet, who needs coconut cream pies?

  He lasted us for three days. Next, we ate his wife: a touch old bird, but we softened her up by pounding her with rocks. Then we barbecued the college teacher by wrapping him in the chain from the boat’s anchor and dipping him for just a few seconds in the volcano’s lava. He squealed like a pig, he did. Guess he wasn’t all-the-way dead!

  The teacher was a pretty smart guy—I miss talking to him. He once said that about four-hundred years ago, the natives of this island worshipped Cthulhu, the tentacle-bearded dream-god of the deeps, who delights in turning men into ravenous beasts.

  A lot of time has passed, and a lot of meals, and now it’s just me and the captain. He’s been protecting me…up to now. He calls me his little buddy, but that look in his eyes tells me that he’s seeing his little cocktail weenie. Well, come and get me, fatboy! I palmed the millionaire’s money clip and I’ve been sharpening the edge of it on a piece of rock. I’ll cut you, porky—cut you like the crazed hog that you are. Cut you and roast you on a spit! Roast you golden-brown, oh, you’ll taste so good!

  I feel the ancient powers of this island flowing through me, and yet I know there is no need for me to make an offering to Cthulhu. For Cthulhu sees through my eyes, feels with my eager hands, tastes with my dripping mouth. But is it my mouth that drips, or perhaps my luxuriant, glistening new growth of fleshy beard?

  * * * *

  9:00 - 10:00 p.m. Central: Dunwich Place

  Meet the neutron-hot men and women of Dunwich Place.…

  Meet Mitzee Pickman, six-foot-one bulimic supermodel: seventy-five pounds of nervous energy with sinuses scrubbed to the bone from a steady diet of nose candy.

  Meet Ricky Zann, insatiable, achingly beautiful chorus boy: his backdoor’s as nimble as a Czechoslovakian gymnast.

  Meet Arkham prettyboy Chucky Ward…med-school dropout Herby West…and Beulah Mae Whateley, a small-town girl with big-cosmos dreams.

  When these five Generation Hex love-machines get together, anything goes, including Beulah Mae’s hymen. She opened the dimensional gate to her Mystery Date, and before you can say “Sufferin’ Psychopompos,” she’s as big as a bloated hog—and if you listen really close, you can even hear squealy little belly-sounds.

  Herby and Chucky assist in the delivery, and both lose a few fingers in the process. The twins, Cletus and Li’l Unspeakable, gangbang Ricky into a puree on their second birthday. The next year, they chop up Mitzee, put her in a food dehydrator and snort up the bits. Chucky and Herby keep losing parts while babysitting, as Beulah Mae pursues a career in interior decorating and performs lavish makeovers on the Shunned House, the Witch-House, and the Strange High House in the Mist.

  One day Beulah Mae returns home to find a note from the kids, spelled out on the floor in mingled Chucky and Herby innards. The note explains that the twins have shambled away from home to find their father, even if it means calling his name from atop Sentinel Hill. Beulah Mae recalls there’s a television station at that address, and when she gets there, she discovers that Cletus and Li’l Unspeakable have taken over. They’ve even had stationery printed up, with a three-lobed burning eye as the logo.

  The new programming begins to fray the April-fresh fabric of the space/time continuum: soon, housewives everywhere are finding fungi from Yuggoth sprouting in their bathrooms, and windshields worldwide are caked with the shit of shantaks and night-gaunts. Between programs, the twins keep broadcasting the same commercial: that logo, with the brothers gangsta-rappin’ the voice-over, “YOG-SOTHOTH…YOG SOTHOTH…YOG-SOTHOTH…”

  Inevitably comes that day when the skies turn dark, and all one can see overhead are miles of tentacles as thick as barrels, writhing around dark masses of purple flesh studded with bulging eyes and gaping moray-toothed mouths. Millions soil their slacks and/or die of heart attacks, but Beulah Mae simply looks up, holds out her arms and purrs, “Hey, Big Daddy. Gimme some sugar.”

  Pickman's Motel

  Anton Matterhorn Pickman was an eclectic, eccentric, brilliant and yet disturbed and disturbing man of many interests: movies, travel, history, photography, gourmet cooking, Egyptology, astronomy, and all forms of pornography. He owned a business just outside of Arkham called Pickman’s Motel, best known for its highly popular comedy shop, the Ha-Ha Hut.

  There was once a time when I considered Anton my very best pal in the world, for certainly he was fascinating company, someone with whom one could talk about anything and everything. But then came that hideous night of repellant blasphemy when I learned more than I cared to know about my friend. I discovered the abysmal depths to which he could sink, and after that, he was my friend no more.

  His body—or rather, what was left of it—was found stuffed in a dumpster behind the Fancy Lad Male Grooming Emporium. Of his attackers, not a trance was found. I have no idea where they are, and do not wish to ever know.

  Several weeks before his shocking demise, Anton phoned to invite me to his home, to show me his latest acquisition. He lived in one of the apartments of Pickman’s Motel, and in his rooms he kept an enormous collection of rare, quasi-mystical, and for the most part, sexually explicit films and videotapes. Items in his collection included such controversial works as Virgin Werewolf in a Whorehouse, I Married a Sex-Pig from Mars, Hitler’s Satanic Prom Night, The Horny Revenge of Franken-Caligula, and that little-known ’70s hardcore science-fiction epic banned by the government of Japan, The Happy Hooker Meets Godzilla.

  When I arrived at Anton’s dwelling, he greeted me at the door with an absinthe cocktail and an enormous smile. He was a handsome man in his own strange way, with his wide, flat nose, ruddy complexion, lustrous green eyes, and thick silver hair with black streaks at the temples. One of his front teeth was missing, courtesy of a long-ago bar-fight, but even though he was certainly a wealthy man, he’d never bothered to have the gap mended. I recall he once mentioned the space made it easier to drink Long Island iced teas through a straw. Whenever we dined together and he ate corn-on-the-cob, it was always disconcerting to note one row of whole kernels still girdling the gnawed-upon cob left behind on his plate.

  “So what amazing treasure do you have for me to view this evening?” I asked, gesturing toward a stack of videotapes piled on his coffee table. Some appeared to be new, but I recognized some from his previous tape-hunting expedition. Only three m
onths before, he’d returned from a trip to the Forbidden Plateau of Leng, where he’d purchased, from a disgruntled and bowlegged temple acolyte, a copy of the tape, Why Temple Acolytes from the Forbidden Plateau of Leng are Disgruntled and Bowlegged.

  Anton sat on the couch next to his table-trove of unhallowed goodies. “I just got back from a quick visit to the Nameless City, hidden in a formidable, windswept Middle Eastern desert. There I learned fourteen of the one-thousand secret names of the fabled deity Nyarlathotep, and—”

  “What are they?” I interjected.

  “You really want to know?” Anton shrugged as he pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of the stack of tapes. “I wrote them down. It’s really no big deal.”

  “I’ve always been fascinated by the mythologies of other lands,” I said as I took the paper from him and began reading the list.…

  1. Dark Lord of the Screaming Abyss

  2. Protector of the Night-Gaunts

  3. Messenger of the Crypt Gods

  4. Vile Master of the Blood-Soaked Torments

  5. Father of the Black Scorpions

  6. Uncle of the Flesh-Eating Hawks

  7. Second-Cousin of the Accursed Pharaoh with Pubic Dandruff

  8. Niles Lathotep

  9. The Killjoy of Kadath

  10. Discount Abdul, the Persian Carpet King—Half-Off This Week Only

  11. Keeper of the Sacred Camel-Toes

  12. He Who Doth Swing Both Ways in Darkness

  13. Minty Belasco

  14. Big Jake

  When at last I looked up from the list, I saw that Anton was loading a videotape into his combination TV/VCR.

  “Behold!” he cried. “You are about to witness what may be the greatest find in my obscure-movie-finding career! I have been reading about this little gem in secret-society fanzines for years. I have made hundreds of phone calls and sent countless letters and e-mails, trying to track down a single copy. And now, finally, it is mine! Hurray! Watch, my friend…watch and learn! But first, could you hand me the remote? It’s right next to you, on that little table with the blue lamp. Oh, and put a coaster under your glass, please. Thanks!”