Best Little Witch-House in Arkham

by Mark McLaughlin

  He knew he should be afraid, but he wasn’t. Not really. Because.

  Because they.

  They wanted.

  Wanted him to be happy. Yes, the Great Old Ones wanted him to be happy, and Kugappa was one of the Great Old Ones, and the best way to be happy was to be like them.

  Be.

  Like.

  Them.

  Who’d told him that? Who’d told him about the Great Old Ones? He giggled—the initials of that spelled ‘goo.’ Why, that was who had told him. The goo had told him.

  Before he knew it he was swimming in the dark green sea, even though he didn’t know how to swim, and tentacles and tentacles-upon-tentacles were handling him, exploring him, sliding into every part of him, even into his pores, infiltrating his cells, embracing his soul—

  * * * *

  In the morning, he woke up curled on the bathroom floor, cuddling some used towels he’d thrown in a corner.

  It took him a moment to figure out why he wasn’t in his bed. Then he remembered the whole bottle incident.

  He stood up and looked in the bathroom mirror. He vaguely recalled that he’d had some sort of dream about octopi and tentacles, and he found himself worrying that something might be growing off of his chin. A beard of tentacles, maybe? What a stupid idea. What sort of ridiculous creature would have a beard of tentacles?

  Nothing was growing off of his chin.

  There was, however, a small, gaping hole there.

  A hole wide enough to accommodate the head of a pin. It went into his chin like a tunnel.

  He looked at his eyes in the mirror, but they weren’t dilated. He wasn’t having a panic attack.

  In fact, he was okay with the hole.

  He took a shower, had breakfast, then called Mary just to hear her voice. It was Saturday, so he didn’t have to be at work. His column was only a little job on the side. His real job was—

  He thought for a moment. What did he do for a living? It was pretty important—it provided most of his money. Something about computers, yes, that was it. Funny he couldn’t remember any more. Computers, they had to do with the internet—maybe he did internet stuff, too. Probably. The internet was like a monster octopus, big wires like tentacles reaching out, branching into smaller tentacles, smaller and smaller still, until each was wrapped around some poor fool with a computer.

  Lots of things were like octopi that way, he thought. Business. Money. The food chain. Reaching out. Grabbing. That’s what life was all about.

  He was walking down the street. Streets were like that, too. Big streets branching off into little streets, onto sidewalks, into doorways, down halls, right up to some little idiot staring at the TV. TVs, phones, faxes, all sorts of systems, connecting the world in a multi-tentacled embrace.

  And now he was walking down a sidewalk into a building. Statues and paintings all over the place.

  He found himself standing in front of a huge, glorious statue of a mighty octopus, which was lavishing its affection, its loving caress, upon a skeleton that surely represented all of humanity. Humanity wasn’t dead, but it really wasn’t altogether alive, now was it? People simply went through the motions, like sleepwalkers—no, more like puppets, wooden-headed little morons who didn’t realize that the universe was a grand system of interconnected patterns and forces, swirling and moving together. And the little icons on the statue, the tokens, the treasures on the sinuous limbs, they represented those patterns, those systems, those majestic eternal forces, so powerful, so wondrous—

  Someone was standing next to him, watching him.

  A beautiful woman.

  “Hello. How’s every little thing?” she said. Hers was the voice of a goddess. Or maybe a priestess. She tapped his chin with a shiny nail. “Ah, I see some little thing has gotten into you.”

  He felt his chin. The hole was now big enough to hold the tip of his pinky.

  “Is something in there?” he said, messaging his chin, his jaw, feeling around. He knew the answer, but it was still a thought or two away, like an unspoken truth on the tip of his tongue.

  “There’s nothing in there.” Vyvyka Megamega took his hand. “And the nothing is growing. Come with me.”

  They walked out of the gallery. A teenage girl happened to notice Jasper’s face, and she gasped and hurried away.

  “Ignore her,” the artist said. “The stars are right, and that’s all that matters. Soon Kugappa shall be able to plunge from world to world, spreading joy and knowledge. And you—oh, harshest of critics!—you shall help. Won’t that be fun? I’ve figured out why you’re such an asshole—you’ve never really had any fun. You’ve never been given permission to have fun, even by yourself. But we’ll soon take care of that.”

  * * * *

  Vyvyka led Jasper to her house, which was only a few blocks from the Pavoni Gallery. The walls needed painting, the grass needed cutting. and a crack in the front door’s windowpane had been covered with duct tape.

  In the living room stood a statue made from gardening tools and pieces of bicycles and tricycles. It resembled some sort of gigantic centipede. The artist’s home was more of a workshop than a dwelling. All of the rooms held statues in progress, as well as materials, welding equipment, tools. In the corner of one room Jasper saw a hotplate, a make-up kit, a refrigerator and a futon mattress with a few quilts piled on it—Vyvyka’s combination kitchen/bedroom. She led him to the mattress pushed him down onto his back.

  She helped him out of his clothes, then removed her own. Soon she began to pleasure him. He tried to kiss her, but she simply shook her head. He wanted to say something—to whisper some gentle words—but found it impossible to speak. But, maybe that was just as well. He didn’t want to scare her off by saying the wrong thing. So Mary had been right: the girl liked him after all. A few seconds later, he wondered, who was Mary? And this girl, what was her name again?

  Now the girl was upon him, riding him, her eyes closed, lost in her own world of bliss. Jasper squirmed with pleasure—but not too much, he didn’t want to throw the girl off. He saw something twinkle out of the corner of his eye. He looked to the left. The girl’s make-up kit. A navy-blue plastic box overflowing with tubes and little brushes. A mirror was leaning against the side of the box, and his reflection stared right back at him.

  Hair, brow, eyes—those were all the same. But the nose, cheeks, mouth, chin—all gone, swallowed up in a slowly swirling vortex of blackness, dotted with shimmering stars.

  Suddenly the mirror shattered—the girl had thrown a shoe at it. She climbed off of him, and no wonder: the sight of his own ruined face had dwindled his erection to a puny mushroom-cap.

  “So much for fun,” she said with a sigh, “but at least Kugappa will get to have his way with you. Or rather, through you. Shouldn’t be long now.” She crossed to a toolbox by the wall and began looking inside. “I managed to give up smoking about two weeks ago, but you know…” She found a silver cigarette case and clicked it open. “…I think the occasion calls for a little lung candy. What the Hell. I’d offer you one, but, well…” She laughed as she lit up.

  He didn’t know what to do, but since he was having difficulty thinking, he decided to just do nothing. Nothing at all. He stared at the naked woman as she sucked on her cigarette, blue smoke swirling around her face and shoulders. She really looked quite lovely. Her expression was one of…What ? Amusement? Anticipation? Were they waiting for someone?

  He felt a light touch on his shoulder. Now what was this little thing called? A fly! Yes, he remembered that. What a pretty thing it was, black and shiny, so small and yet so complex, so—

  Suddenly his vision was filled with sinuous, swirling flesh, flowing out of him at lightning speed from just below his eyes. The tentacles and tentacles-upon-tentacles flexed and flailed, ripping apart the living gateway of Jasper-flesh, making way for the bloated body and ravenous mind of Kugappa.

  The critic didn’t even have time to form an opinion.

  The Heckler in the Ha-
Ha Hut

  I. What Lurks Within Pickman's Motel

  I arrived in the mystery-shrouded, fear-spattered community of Arkham hoping to make a name for myself in stand-up comedy, my career of choice. But though I had chosen that line of work, it had not yet decided to embrace me to its bountiful bosom.

  Previously I had dwelled in the seaside city of Innsmouth, where I had plied my trade in a damp, ramshackle nightclub called Dagon’s Den—but alas, my material was not to the liking of its fish-eyed patrons, and they simply regarded me with blank stares as thin lines of watery drool spooled down from their flabby lips.

  Arkham, I hoped, would treat me a bit better, since it featured not two, not four, but three comedy clubs. There was Wilbur’s Hideaway on the corner of Squamous and Rugose; Shoggy’s Bar & Grill next to the Plateau of Leng Travel Agency; and the Ha-Ha Hut, inside Pickman’s Motel. All three were considered prestigious venues—especially the Ha-Ha Hut. Certainly Arkham was the place for me. If I made it there, I could make it anywhere.

  I found a quaint, furnished apartment two floors above a bar called The Blasted Heath. I would need some humble income to float me while I perfected my act, so I found a low-stress office job at the Arkham Public Library. The library closed at 6:30 p.m., so that would give me plenty of time to zip off to any late-night comedy gigs I might have scheduled.

  On my first day at the library, I met a young coworker named Dilbert East, who seemed immensely interested when I told him of my humor-spawned aspirations.

  “A comedian?” he exclaimed in a nasal, aristocratic tone. “How immensely interesting. I admire anyone who would try to pursue such a calling. I could never engage in such a fear-fraught endeavor. I am terrified by the very prospect of public speaking, of rising to address an assembly of potential critics who might ridicule the nervous gibberish shambling forth from my palsied lips.” The fine-boned man shivered visibly and blinked his sky-blue eyes repeatedly. “I only hope you are never tempted to…to…But no, I dare not tell you!”

  “Oh, give me a break,” I replied. “You can’t just say, ‘I only hope you are never tempted to…’ and then not finish the sentence. Not only is that rude, but the sight of your impossibly neat desk over there by the window, with seventeen piles of paperclips arranged by size and color in a navy-blue plastic tray, tells me that you must be so insanely obsessive-compulsive, the very thought of not finishing a task you have started—even the completion of a sentence!—would surely drive you to madness. And it would be a short drive indeed. So come on, spill your guts, shaky-boy.”

  Dilbert let loose with a shrill gasp, much like the sort an effete monkey might release upon discovering he has eaten the last banana in the Congo. “Curse you, ummm—whatever you said your name was. I have such a poor memory for names.”

  “Winthrop Goiter,” I reminded him.

  “Oh yes. that’s right. So…Curse you, Winthrop Goiter! You have discovered my most lamentable weakness—my puritanical need for closure!” He shook his head sadly. “Very well. You win. Here is the end of that sentence. I only hope you are never tempted to venture into the library’s Forbidden, Unspeakably Dangerous, Never-To-Be-Checked-Out-By-Anyone Section to peruse our secret copy of that most shocking and insanity-inducing of ancient tomes, typeset at a point-size convenient to those with impaired vision—the Large-Print Necronomicon!”

  He paused to wipe a trickle of sweat from his pale brow before continuing with his babbling. “The book of which I speak features the most frightening joke in the known cosmos—a joke so fiendishly effective, the very telling of it would flail to bits the fragile fabric of the space/time continuum. Beware! Promise me you will avoid that joke, which can be found on page 637, a couple inches down from a woodcut depicting Cthulhu’s half-sister Catherinulhu.”

  “Never fear, Dilbert,” I said. “My latest material is so strong, I shall never need to destroy the cosmos just to get a laugh. But tell me this: why is this copy of the Necronomicon set in large print?”

  “Most scholars of ancient lore do not know this,” Dilbert said, lowering his voice, “but the author of the Necronomicon, Abdul Alhazred, wrote the book not for humanity, but for a pantheon of intergalactic demon-gods known as the Old Ones, who shared their mind-snapping extra-telluric knowledge with him. He was their scribe, and he created the book for them in case they should ever forget the details of their own eon-spanning history.”

  “That’s all well and good,” I said, “but again I must raise the question: why was this accursed volume, created for the Old Ones, set in large print?”

  “Quite simply, the Old Ones…are old,” Dilbert said. “Thusly, they cannot see very well.” He leaned closer. “Alhazred himself wrote on page 248 of his macabre masterwork: ‘He who asketh a stupid question, verily shall receive a stupid answer.’”

  II. Open-Mike Walpurgis Night

  A week later, I performed at Wilbur’s Hideaway on an Open-Mike Evening, which happened to fall on Walpurgis Night. I was in top form, opening my act with the jaunty tale of a golf outing attended by the Pope, a bishop, a rabbi, and the King in Yellow. I won first prize, which was a seventy-five dollar gift certificate for fiddle lessons at the Erich Zann Conservatory of Music.

  Two nights after that, I hit another open-mike event at Shoggy’s Bar & Grill. I treated their patrons to a saucy anecdote concerning a necromancer from Nantucket with a penchant for speaking in rhyme. Again I won first prize—this time, a coupon good for a rubdown and colonic irrigation at a nearby health spa called the Towel & Bowel.

  Four days after that, still riding high with confidence from my recent performances, I entered an open-mike contest at the Ha-Ha Hut. The emcee was a cadaverously thin old chain-smoker named H.P. Lungflapps, who started off the comedy night with a joke of his own.

  “One morning,” he wheezed, “an old witch had this to say to her husband, the warlock. ‘Honey, I had a very strange dream last night. I was at an auction where penises were being sold. The longest ones went for about fifty dollars each, and the thick, meaty ones went for one-hundred dollars apiece.’

  “The warlock raised an eyebrow. ‘What kind of a price were they asking for cocks like mine?’

  “The witch waved a hand dismissively. ‘Oh, they were just giving those out as free samples.’

  “‘I also had a dream,’ her husband said. ‘But in my dream, they were auctioning off vaginas. Normal-sized ones sold from about three-hundred dollars each, and the tight, muscular ones had bidders spending up to a thousand dollars.’

  “This time it was the wife’s turn to raise an eyebrow. ‘And what about vaginas like mine?’

  “‘Where do you think they held the auction?’ the warlock replied.”

  The audience roared with gusto, relishing the ribald jest. And as soon as the laughter began to die down, the emcee announced the first performer of the evening—

  Me.

  “Winthrop Goiter,” he wheezed, “let’s start with you. Get your ass up here and make us laugh! Remember, first prize is a haircut, shave—face or legs, your choice—and cappuccino at the Arkham Unisex Grooming Boutique & Coffee Shoppe, where the elite gather to blather and be coated with lather.”

  I climbed the steps up onto the stage and looked out over the murky gloom of the club. As I regarded the misshapen lumps that passed for audience members, a tremor of dread scampered up and down my body like a tarantula on crack.

  I decided to follow the emcee’s example and lead with an anecdote of an adult nature. “So! A lady of the evening and a winged night-gaunt walk into a bar—”

  “Impossible!” thundered a hoarse, impossibly low voice from the shadows at the back of the club. “A night-gaunt cannot pass through a typical door. Its huge membranous wings do not fold in against the body all the way. It would be able to pass through a garage door, but no bar would have an entrance that wide. Huh! It is clear you did not do your research!”

  I found this bizarre and overly long outburst so disconcerting, I was only able to
choke out a few more feeble witticisms before I finally returned to my seat, saddened and humiliated.

  I stared into the shadows which housed my tormentor. The darkness was too complete for me to discern his form, but I could sense he was still there. Veritable waves of contemptuous psychic energy seemed to wash over me from out of that lightless limbo.

  Later that evening, huddled under threadbare blankets in my drafty bedroom, I could still hear the malignant “Huh!” of my unseen abuser, echoing in my gooseflesh-flecked ears.

  III. Horrors Of The Heckler

  In the library’s employee lounge the next morning, I told Dilbert of my ordeal.

  “Truly, it sucks to be you,” he intoned. “It is a pity your performance has invoked the contempt of the Heckler in the Ha-Ha Hut!”

  “And exactly who,” I asked, “is this alliteratively titled individual? Does this insidious interrupter have an actual name?”

  “Vince, the bartender there and a close personal friend of mine, has informed me that the Heckler is a creature of great antiquity,” Dilbert whispered. “The index of the Large-Print Necronomicon lists thirty-seven references to the Heckler within its panic-plagued pages. He is the one whom the serpent-priests of Lemuria dubbed ‘the Killjoy of Kadath’—but other, less reptilian but more lemurlike primordial scholars knew him as Nyarlathotep, Dark Lord of the Screaming Abyss!”

  “This nightmarish scenario gnaws at my soul like a hungry trucker chewing on a spicy-hot buffalo-wing!” I cried. “I wish to appear at the Ha-Ha Hut again, but how can I, knowing that this vile nemesis with such a preposterously polysyllabic name is waiting to lay waste to my next performance there?”

  Dilbert’s frantic eyes rolled up and down, back and forth as he pondered my predicament. Finally he said, “You simply must strive to be funnier, my friend…so funny, you can actually bring laughter to the vicious lips of a creature that has not even chuckled since its shocking and sacrilegious genesis, millennia ago.”