Best Little Witch-House in Arkham

by Mark McLaughlin

  “Wow,” I said. “Talk about a tough audience.”

  The next week, I showed up again at the Ha-Ha Hut, my mind buzzing with a teeming swarm of new jokes. And again, H.P. Lungflapps started the evening with a tale of libidinous humor.

  “One afternoon at the nudist colony,” he said, “a necromancer and his beautiful young wife were walking along, having a nice chat, when a huge honeybee flew straight into the wife’s pussy. The frightened couple put on some clothes and headed off to their doctor’s office. The sick people in the waiting room were terrified by the furious buzzing echoing forth from the depths of the wife’s uterus.

  “After a thorough examination and a few x-rays, their doctor shared his professional opinion. The insect, he noted, had crawled a good distance into the woman’s reproductive tract. He then said, perhaps the necromancer could put some honey on his tallywhacker, slide it all the way into his wife, and then pull it out. The hungry bee might then be tempted to follow the honeyed boner.

  “Unfortunately, the thought of a south-of-the-border bee-sting took the romance right out of the necromancer’s erection: it refused to become as stiff as the desiccated old corpses used by the magic-man in his rituals. Finally the physician, a braver fellow, said he would be willing to give it a try. With no other options, the couple agreed.

  “The doctor opened his pants, dribbled some honey on his rigid tool, and slid deep into the woman’s buzzing snatch. Soon he began thrusting vigorously, and the necromancer shouted, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’

  “‘I changed my mind,’ the doctor announced. ‘I’ve decided to drown the little fucker!’”

  Again, the audience hooted and hollered with unbridled mirth. And again, after the laughter had faded away, I was the first performer called up onto the stage.

  I gave the audience the biggest, brightest smile I could muster. I clutched the microphone and cried out, “So! How about this unseasonably chilly weather? It reminds me of my early days as a traveling brush salesman, and of the time I stopped at a shunned and shuttered farmhouse in Dunwich, where—”

  “Enough!” cried a hatefully hoarse voice from the far shadows. “Proceed no further! Boy, I thought I was an entity of incredible antiquity—but in comparison with the age of that cobweb-strewn knee-slapper, I am but a mere embryo! I have heard it a million times, and it has never made any sense to me. A brush salesman would not be able to make a decent living selling his wares to a backwoods clientele. Plus, the farmer’s daughter is altogether too compliant. Away with you, you tedious teller of tepid tales!”

  I could feel hot tears streaming down my cheeks as I rushed off that accursed stage, across the club, out the door and into the night. What was I to do? In truth, my version of that particular joke, admittedly a rather timeworn jest, was going to take a more modern and naughty turn a few sentences into its telling, but—woe unto me!—the Heckler had not allowed me to proceed that far.

  As I stumbled through the night, I suddenly saw before me, glowing yellowish-white in the moonlight, the venerable pillars of the Arkham Public Library, my place of daytime employment.

  I thought back to what Dilbert East had told me of the Large-Print Necronomicon. He had mentioned that it contained within its wickedness-warped pages the most effective joke in the entire cosmos, the telling of which would rip asunder the fragile fabric of the time/space continuum…

  I stood and stared, stared and stood before the library, pondering my options. I was an employee and the key to the side entrance was in my right-front pants pocket. I knew exactly which basement room held the Forbidden, Unspeakably Dangerous, Never-To-Be-Checked-Out-By-Anyone Section. I didn’t have the key to that, but I knew where it could be found: hanging from a nail on the wall behind the coffee machine in the employee lounge.

  That night, a solitary figure (namely, me) entered the library and emerged, a few minutes later, clutching a certain large-print book to his chest…

  Later, that same desperate character (still me) opened the book to page 637 and found a certain doom-fraught rib-tickler—a joke so effective it could reduce the known universe to a steaming pile of baboon flop…

  At this point, the afore-mentioned protagonist (yep, still me) decided to switch back to telling his—I mean, my—story in the form of a first-person narrative. I carefully crafted a new version of that cosmically injurious jest. My subtle adaptation, I believed, would considerably reduce the joke’s destructive power. At the very worst, it would probably give a few audience members heart attacks and maybe knock over a few tables. Nothing too serious.

  As for the Heckler in the Ha-Ha Hut…Surely he would be impressed by my newfound comic acumen. Who knows, perhaps he’d even buy me a congratulatory cocktail. Maybe one with a festive little umbrella!

  I arrived at work a half-hour early so I could return the Large-Print Necronomicon to its shelf before the other employees arrived. Around noon, I bumped into Dilbert in the employee lounge.

  “You know what I just noticed?’ he said. “The key to the Forbidden, Unspeakably Dangerous, Never-To-Be-Checked-Out-By-Anyone Section’s room doesn’t have any cobwebs on it today. And yet yesterday morning it was positively festooned with spider-exuded gossamer. What do you suppose is the reason behind this disturbing new development?”

  “I’m sure I do not know!” I replied. “Maybe one of the other librarians did a little light dusting. Maybe somebody opened a window and an unseasonably chilly breeze blew away those pesky cobwebs. Who knows? My storehouse of knowledge in the matter of the now inexplicably clean key holds no inventory! Okay?”

  Dilbert, apparently, had stopped listening to me at some point during my discourse, because he then turned to me and said, “Hey, we’re out of creamer.”

  IV. At The Microphone Of Madness

  At last came the fated evening of ultimate destiny: the next open-mike contest at the Ha-Ha Hut. The withered old emcee opened the evening with yet another salacious story. It was clear there was no end to the old coot’s inventory of smutty utterances.

  “A blind mystic showed up at a furniture factory,” he said, “sat down in the owner’s office, and asked to be interviewed for the position of quality control manager. The owner asked, ‘But how can you do your job? You won’t be able to see the wood.’

  “The blind fellow assured him that he could do the job by smell. His ultra-sensitive nose, he stated, could not be fooled.

  “‘Is that a fact?’ the owner said. He took a piece of wood from a table near his desk and held it under the man’s nose. ‘What kind of wood is this I am holding in front of you?’

  “The mystic took a few sniffs and said, ‘Ah, that is clearly a fresh piece of Norwegian pine!’

  “‘Very good!’ the factory owner said. He grabbed a small piece of wood out of his wastebasket and held it out for the mystic’s nasal consideration. ‘How about this one?’

  “The sightless gentleman announced, after just one sniff, ‘That, I am sad to say, is an inferior grade of mahogany.’

  “‘Absolutely correct!’ the owner cried, quite impressed.

  “At that point, the owner’s wife entered the room. The owner put a finger to his lips to let the woman know she shouldn’t speak. He then gestured for his wife to stand in front of the mystic and lift the front of her skirt, and being a saucy lady, she did so. ‘Now what can you smell?’ the owner said.

  “The blind man sniffed once. Twice. Three times. ‘Hmmm, this is rather unusual. Can I smell the other side?’

  “The wife turned around and lifted the back of her skirt. ‘Okay,’ said the owner, ‘try another sniff.’

  “The mystic took a good, deep sniff, gave the matter some thought, and then smiled. ‘Ah, I have it figured out—though it took me a moment. That rotten plank came from the shit-house door of an old tuna boat!’

  Audience members howled with merriment, and some even fell out of their chairs. But I was far too nervous to share in their amusement. Sweat seeped forth on my forehead and in my armpits; fr
om those fleshy locales, it flowed down my body and pooled coldly in my trembling belly-button, under which, butterflies of nervousness fluttered in my acid-addled stomach.

  I let out a wee burp of mingled apprehension and indigestion when H.P. Lungflapps called me up onto the stage. My hands shivered like twin albino bats in an Antarctic ice-cave, assuming such caves served as lodging for such bats. I’m not really sure. They’d have to be pretty hardy bats. What would they eat? Maybe baby penguins.

  My hands shook so ferociously, I practically knocked the microphone to the floor when I went to grab it. I managed to take a firm hold of the auditory appliance, and with a deep intake of breath to steady my jangled nerves, I delivered my scaled-down version of that unspeakable joke from the pages of the Large-Print Necronomicon.

  I dare not share the punch line with you, but I can tell you this: the set-up involved a creature belonging to a non-extinct species of Atlantean poultry, trying to cross an avenue of traffic on a moonless winter’s night.

  I was able to tell my joke from start to finish: the Heckler did not interrupt me once. When I had finished my comedic tale, I looked out over the room to witness the results of my performance on the audience and of course, the time/space continuum.

  Apparently, it was the sort of joke where the complexities of its elaborate plot had to really sink in before any sort of response could be expected. A full minute of complete silence passed. Suddenly, I heard a shrill squawk of what I thought sounded like laughter—then another and yet another. Soon the entire room was filled with wild, unbridled cackles of raucous mirth.

  As the piercing cries of my audience continued to peal forth, it gradually dawned on me that those loud squawks weren’t really laughter at all. They were just…

  Squawks.

  The folks in the audience were actually squawking like common hens. When they began to shrink and grow feathers, beaks, and scaly, clawed feet, I realized that perhaps my revision of the joke had concentrated just a little too heavily on the poultry-related aspects of the plotline.

  I gazed into the inky blackness at the far end of the club. What, I wondered, had become of the Heckler?

  Leaving the stage, I grabbed a cigarette lighter off one of the tables, flicked up a flame, and kicked hens and roosters out of my way as I walked to the back of the room.

  A thousand mixed emotions swirled through my brain when I saw the thing seated at the lone table I found there.

  I approached the table and did something rather curious…altogether unusual…

  Then, I left the building and strolled the streets of Arkham, trying to gauge the extent of my joke’s influence.

  It turned out my joke only had a three-block range. Some folks living on the fourth block had sprouted a few feathers, but those dropped out almost immediately.

  But as for me…

  On the chair next to that lone table in the shadows of the Ha-Ha Hut, I’d found a single egg, large as a melon and as black as a raven’s wing. The otherworldly Heckler had undergone an exceptionally complete metamorphosis.

  Ordinarily, I’m not a vengeful man, but you must understand: the Heckler had vexed me beyond the limits of human endurance.

  Taking a butter knife from the table, I’d tapped a hole into that oversized ovoid and greedily sucked out its contents, so that I might experience the ultimate victory over my tormentor.

  But as it turns out, the yolk was on me.

  It’s a good thing I’m getting close to the end of my narrative, because it’s getting pretty hard for me to type as my fingers slowly turn into ebony talons. Good God, my emerging feathers, darker than the night sky, are really starting to itch! I know I shall have to leave my current dwelling, since the business across the street is a chain restaurant specializing in fried chicken. The very thought of what goes on in there makes my vermilion comb stand on end.

  Where shall I go? The answer is ridiculously clear. I don’t know how to get there, but I shall. I shall.

  I must go to the dimension from which Nyarlathotep came—that dreaded domain of grotesque dreams and arabesque nightmares known as…

  The Other Side.

  Finesse

  “I need something special for my show tonight.” Zannika tap-tapped her nail-thin heels down the aisle, past monkey-fur miniskirts and sequined bustiers. The artist bit at the tip of a black-lacquered fingernail. “Something delicious. Nasty. To die for.”

  Her manager adjusted the lavender rose in the lapel of his lemon-yellow blazer. “Ernst told me they’ve got some new fishnets in every neon imaginable.”

  “Earth to Yoyo: neon is out, out, out.” Zannika sighed hugely. “This place is full of whore clothes. Let’s try somewhere else.”

  “In a minute. Ernst went to get us some Dust Bunnies.” Yoyo glanced over a display of pins and selected a jade spider in a silver web. “We ought to buy some little thing. This is nice.”

  “I should dye my hair red. Flame red. I’m so tired of platinum-blonde. Aren’t you?” The artist glanced in a three-way mirror and wrinkled her nose. “It’s so severe. I’m surprised you haven’t said anything by now.”

  Yoyo brushed the bangs of Zannika’s pageboy cut with his fingertips. “Your hair is gorgeous. You’re the only woman I know who could get away with brown hair. An earth tone, for Christ’s sake.”

  “That was years ago. Back then I’d try anything once.”

  A pencil-thin boy carrying a silver tray entered the shop from a back room. On the tray were two small glasses filled with blue liqueur; the rim of each glass was coated with white powder. Yoyo and Zannika downed their drinks and licked the rims clean.

  “Buy your little spider so we can go,” the artist whispered in her manager’s ear. “It’s time for some serious shopping.”

  * * * *

  It was a vile, ripe, impossible day. Heatwaves writhed up from the sidewalk like translucent tentacles. The heat stifled most of the shoppers but curiously, vitalized the streetpeople. Bag-ladies and hard-eyed funboys held sway on such a day, second only to the likes of Zannika. She did not perspire or even glow. Her pale skin was always dry and cool.

  Zannika was a graceful, elongated creature: her hands and arms and legs were long yet elegantly, perfectly curved. She loved to look at herself in the mirror. Sometimes she wondered what she would look like with a penis. Penises were usually lumpy, ghastly-yet-comic things. If, through some unlikely miracle, she should ever sprout a fleshy spout, she knew it would be the absolute best: a sculpted alabaster masterpiece.

  Their next stop was The Long Look. Within the next half-hour, Zannika spent more than eight hundred dollars on gloves, hats, perfumes, and hair toys.

  “Oh, Yoyo.” She brushed her fingertips lazily over her manager’s rump as he bent over a display of brooches. “I would ask what Mr. Soap Opera’s got that I haven’t, but I’m afraid I already know.”

  “That’s the one thing I hate about being on the road with you. I can’t keep an eye on Andros.” Yoyo pouted. “I was on the phone with him and he kept going on about that cow Pauline. He says they’re only friends, but I’ve been watching the show and he’s always got his hands all over her. I know it’s just acting, but still…”

  “Andros is a common sort of man. That sort is notoriously indiscriminate. Why do you even put up with him?” Zannika poked her manager in the side with a pinky finger. “It’s a miracle you can be so urbane with all those awful male hormones brewing inside of you.”

  Yoyo smiled. “It’s the cross I must bear.”

  A young black-haired woman in a leather jacket came up to Zannika. “I know you! You’re playing at The Black Box. I just love your show.”

  “That doesn’t mean you know me.” The artist crossed to the makeup counter and began to examine the mascaras, the lipsticks — anything so she wouldn’t have to make eye contact with a fan.

  The woman followed close behind. “I’ve been telling my friends, ‘Go see Meat for Daddy. It’s so unreal!’” The fan glanced at the lipst
icks. “Try the deep purple.”

  At last Yoyo came to Zannika’s rescue. “Ms. Taint does not feel comfortable talking with her fans,” he said, taking the woman by the arm and turning her in another direction. “Her act is so very personal. You understand.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any harm.” The woman turned toward Zannika. “Really, I didn’t.”

  “That’s fine, dear,” Yoyo said. “Ms. Taint understands. Deep down she loves all of her fans.” He gently pushed her away. “Bye bye, now. And thank you.”

  * * * *

  “Why in the world am I carrying these?” Outside of The Long Look, Zannika handed her shopping bags to Yoyo. “A day of lugging these around and I’ll turn into one of those awful muscle-women. Where now?”

  Yoyo squinted down the street, past storefronts of faux marble and metal. “There. The Snake Pit.” He pointed to a small boutique a block and a half away. The display case was filled with what appeared to be mannequins twined in telephone cord.

  “It’s not too Goth, is it?” Zannika’s heels shot sparks as they hit the sidewalk. “I don’t do retro.” As they drew closer to the shop, she realized that the dummies were in fact wrapped in barbed wire.

  Inside, the store was in fashionable disarray. Jewelry and scarves and boots were strewn on the steps of silver stepladders and hung from thin silver chains. Scattered on small tables were glowing spheres of blue glass. The walls were splashed with thick, shiny clots of black and red paint. The high ceiling seemed to be covered with dark lace or netting. No clerks or customers were in sight. Beside a bell on the counter stood a small engraved sign — WE LIVE TO SERVE.

  Zannika tried on blue metal earrings shaped like fingers. “These are darling. I could wear them during my act. And look at this belt.” She removed a long strip of shiny pinkness from a chain. “What do you think it’s made of?”

  An obese, perfumed shopboy appeared so quickly at her side that she gasped in surprise. “That belt,” he breathed in a hollow tone, “is made from the sun-dried small intestine of a crocodile.” His silver contacts rode his bulging orbs uneasily, occasionally flashing slivers of his dark brown irises. “Isn’t it extraordinary?”