The blonde woman sighed. “Because Farouk is right. There is a cult conspiracy. You’re the only one who’s not in on it. And if you’re not one of us, you’re fish food.”
“Oh my God! You’re all—” Jasmine stared into space for a moment. “I guess I don’t know. What are all of you?”
Pretzel took a deep breath. “We worship the power of the sea and its Dark Lords.”
“But that sounds fun! Why didn’t you invite me?” Jasmine pouted. “Is it because of my weight?”
“You want to join us? Oh, Jasmine, that’s fabulous! I guess we thought—well, what with Farouk being our enemy and your boyfriend, too—”
“But darling, he’s just a man. A really, really rich man, but still, just a man. If the Dark Lords of the sea are good enough for you, they’re good enough for me. Where do I sign?”
“Well first, throw away that awful necklace! It’s like garlic to Dracula.”
Jasmine took off the necklace, and in her excitement, accidentally snapped the cord, scattering the star-shaped stones. She kicked away the ones that had fallen at her feet. “Do we get to be vampires?”
Pretzel drew closer to her. “Something even better.”
She was about to give Jasmine the Kiss of Dagon when a colossal explosion shook the building. “That can’t be Farouk already!” she screamed.
Jasmine winced. “He was calling from his car. They were on their way here.”
Pretzel took her friend’s hand and together they raced to the fashion show. There, they found that the front doors had been blown to bits, along with much of the surrounding walls. Farouk marched through the rubble. He wore a khaki jumpsuit with various black holsters containing a mini-arsenal of weaponry. Several other similarly dressed soldiers marched behind him.
“Really, Farouk!” Jasmine said. “Those doors weren’t even locked.”
The Arab stopped and stared at her. “I am here to save the world.”
She nodded. “I’m sure you are. But while this is all very macho and it has me terribly excited, you must understand that it upsets me when you interfere with my career. I’m a working girl, and unless you’re ready to put a ring on my finger or at least set me up in a Park Avenue penthouse, I’m going to have to keep on working.”
Farouk blinked, speechless. Finally he said, “My darling, you are dealing with a virulent evil from beyond the boundaries of time and space. This isn’t a relationship issue.”
“Oh, so you get to say what is or isn’t a relationship issue? I should be allowed to do my work, pick my own friends and have a good time without you blowing the doors off a church on Easter Island during a fashion show.” Jasmine put her hands on her hips. “That isn’t too much to ask.”
One of the soldiers tapped Farouk on the shoulder. “Sir, are we still going to destroy the ancient evil today? If now’s not a good time…”
“Now is a very good time!” Farouk turned back to Jasmine. “You’re just going to have to trust me on this.” He then fired a pistol into the air. “Attack!”
Jasmine and Pretzel crept along the wall to the bar, where each grabbed a champagne bottle. They then hid behind some ferns, drinking straight from the bottles as they watched the battle. For fifteen minutes, Farouk and the soldiers fought the venomous models and various other glitterati. Johnny LaRock was the first to go, disemboweled by a soldier’s bayonet. As he writhed on the floor, bleeding to death, he took a moment to check his reflection in his attacker’s shiny black boots.
Some of the models sprouted barbed tentacles, which they used to whip at the eyes and groins of the soldiers.
“Can you do that?” Jasmine said.
Pretzel shrugged. “Probably. I’d rather not.” She looked around the church. “I don’t see Ronny. This whole thing was her idea. The first scuffle in our war to take over the world, and she’s nowhere to be seen. That is disappointing.”
Naomi’s severed head rolled to their feet, venom dripping from her dead lips.
“Well, that tears it,” Pretzel said. “If Ronny can’t be bothered to fight alongside her own army of evil super-models, then I’m leaving. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
“I’m with you. I am completely feed up with Farouk.” So saying, Jasmine zipped back to the bar and grabbed a couple fresh bottles. Then the girls slipped out of the church.
Farouk’s limousine was parked right outside. “They left the motor running!” Pretzel said. “Cocky bastards. They must have thought this whole thing would take two minutes. I need a drink. Hand me one of those bottles, darling.”
Jasmine took the wheel and they headed down the road. A few minutes later, Pretzel said, “Say, there’s someone naked on the beach over there. Isn’t that Ronny? Stop the car.”
They got out of the car and sat on the hood. Yes, the nude figure was indeed Ronny. She appeared to be chanting and dancing around one of those enormous stone heads. This one had gill-like grooves carved into its cheeks. The eyes seemed buggier, too.
Jasmine pointed out to sea. “Look at all those bubbles. What’s the deal there?” A huge frothing patch of turbulence churned violently. “Maybe we should just drive on.”
Pretzel shook her head. “I know what that is, and driving away won’t do any good. The world isn’t big enough to escape—that.”
Suddenly Ronny spotted them and began walking their way. As she approached, it soon became obvious that Veronica Gilman was not like other women. She was still extraordinarily beautiful, yes, but in the short time since they’d last seen her, Ronny had grown iridescent scales all over her body. And she had another addition: flapping gill-slits on her cheeks, neck and under her breasts.
“You’re just in time, ladies,” Ronny said. “I have only to recite one more incantation to awaken Dagon from his timeless slumber beneath the waves. Even now the Deep Ones are throwing open the doors of his sunken temple. Dagon will in turn awaken Cthulhu, Master of the Ocean Depths, and that will spell the beginning of the end for humanity.”
Jasmine raised an eyebrow. “All this work just to wake up some old fish? Somebody should buy him an alarm clock for his birthday.” She ran her hands through her hair. “What’s this—?” she said, but then stopped.
Ronny advanced on Pretzel and put her webbed hands on her shoulders. Poisonous claws shot out of her fingertips. This new dose of venom brought up patches of scales on Pretzel’s slender arms.
“Join me in the final chant, sister,” Ronny hissed. “Then we will sacrifice this fat land-hog—” She nodded toward Jasmine. “—to our new masters.”
“Don’t do it!” Jasmine said.
“Dagon k’hra! Cthulhu ph’galla m’nak!” Ronny and Pretzel intoned together. “M’hraa gl’gra ph’thaka! M’baga Dagon blaggog! Cthulhu blaggog!”
As they intoned, a fresh surge of furious bubbles rose up from the ocean floor. Then a claw, mud-streaked and as huge as a house, broke the surface, followed by a muscular, scaled arm. Deep-sea fish and octopi flopped and tumbled in the ooze that slithered down its length.
As Ronny and Pretzel continued to chant, Jasmine brought forth the item she had found tangled in her hair—a star stone from the broken necklace.
I believe it’s time,” Jasmine said, “for you to get stoned, Ronny.” She bounced up to the Innsmouth girl and popped the stone into a gill-slit beneath her left breast.
With a shrill cry of hellish pain, Ronny fell writhing to the sand. Black blood poured from her lips and gills, followed by gouts of thick, greenish slime. This outpouring, thankfully, did not wash out the offending stone. Her flesh began to blister around her scales, until she looked like a huge trout that had been attacked by a swarm of bees. Her eyes—so big, so lovely—popped like two huge pimples, spraying goo across the sand. She continued to bubble and seethe until all that remained was a pile of bones mired in a multi-colored paste of ruined flesh and ruptured organs.
Pretzel and Jasmine looked out to sea.
The claw clenched into a fist as it sank back down bene
ath the roiling water.
Pretzel, however, still had her new scales.
“Oh, dear,” Jasmine said. “I was hoping that little skin condition would clear up after I finished off Ronny. Well, we’ve saved the earth.”
Her friend nodded. “Actually you did, but at least I didn’t stop you. So what now? Should I turn you into a sea-creature, like we talked about earlier? That might be fun. Swimming around with the dolphins all day. They’re supposed to be very smart.”
Jasmine thought for a moment. “I think we’re forgetting something. The only thing we’d be able to drink underwater—is water.”
Pretzel gasped. “Nightmare! Yes, let’s stay up here on land. I can always wear long sleeves. Speaking of drinks, let’s go to the beach house.”
They returned to Farouk’s limousine and headed down the road.
“Next week,” Pretzel said, “I was supposed to go with Ronny to a big to-do in New England. A birthday party for some Miskatonic University girl named Wilma Whateley. From some place called Dunwich. Her family is fairly established—old money and all that. Since Ronny’s out of the picture, do you want to go with me? I’d hate to go alone.”
Jasmine shook her head. “Tell little Miss Whateley you can’t make it. We’ll go shopping in London instead. Forget about small-town girls. They’re nothing but trouble.”
“Yes, of course you’re right. What was I thinking?” The blonde said. “She’s probably some slutty coed who’d give us just as much grief as Ronny. We certainly don’t have time for the Dunwich Whore!”
The Brouhaha of Cat-Hula
Truly it is a merciful fact that humankind has abundant difficulty in discerning its fecal egress orifice from a perforation in the surface of the earth’s crust. For if us mammalian bipedal units were even just a shade more clever, the true facts concerning the state of the Universe, and our true place in said piece of real estate, would hurl us into a planet-wide hissy-fit of mind-boggling proportions. Yes, if we could decipher even the weensiest rune of some of the noisome mysteries to be found certain Forbidden-Book-Of-The-Month Club selections, humanity in general would endure a mind-boggling freak-out of such duration that the world’s underwear would be ere long filled with fear-pinched crap-logs of madness.
I am Wilbur Tillinghast McAzathoth IV. My awareness of the events, circumstances and memos entailed in this narrative began with the sudden and irreversible death of my nephew’s father, Zebediah LaMambo in the year 2——, in the month of J——on the day of 2—, at the time of about 6:3—p.m. He had been a renowned go-go dancer and part-time man-pussy at the Spotted Rakshasa Gentlemen’s Club in southern North Dakota. As his only living relative (the rest of the family had perished years earlier in a freak barbecue accident), his every dossier, diary, notepad and feather boa went to me.
In the homey comfort of my own well-appointed masturbatorium, I opened the first packet of journals and letters, and—Great Gurgling Shoggoths!—I received a paper-cut that really hurt, especially since I was a little sweaty and some sweat got in the cut. Would that I had stopped there! Would that I had taken that paper-pushing epidermal misfortune as a clear omen of worse extra-dimensional tidings to come. Would that I had never inherited that bloatsome and lugubrious legacy. But alas, terror was the order of the day, served with a side salad of wild greens and despair.
Fool that I was, I willingly studied the fear-wizened legacy of Zebediah LaMambo. It appeared that Zebediah had been embroiled in various esoteric studies at the time of his demise…In retrospect, how strange it was that the statue of an ancient sea-daemon should fall on him not once, but in fact, fourteen times at a dock bordered by not two, but seven disreputable houses of pagan worship. Hula-hoops seemed to be a major preoccupation of Zebediah’s, as well as their oblique connection with especially large cats from a certain fear-beshrouded island.
References were made in his notes to corrupted spellings of cryptic terms: “Cat-Hula? Kathooloo? Kt’hu’lu, or who knows, maybe even Cthulhu? It’s hard to say.” These terms, it was revealed, had some sort of connection to “the Kat-Hooloo Cult of the volcanic island of Tikki-Takki-Toa,” which was in fact only a branch office of a larger cult base—on Asparagus Island.
One hastily scribbled entry read: “Why do the cats of Asparagus Island begin to walk on their hindlegs mere moments after they are weaned from the soggy teats of their mothers? A cat on its hindlegs—signs of Hula Worship? Who do these cats hope to summon, or what, and where, and when and why? And in what manner?”
Impromptu sketches suggested that the cats of Asparagus Island were not only larger than most, but also had rounder, fuller hips. “For more insidious hula action?” wondered one note in the margin of an especially disturbing pen-and-ink sketch.
Zebediah also feared the coming of some great and cataclysmic event known as The Brouhaha. The notes stated: “Ten-thousand monkeys on ten-thousand typewriters can recreate Shakespeare, so there’s no telling what The Brouhaha will bring forth—I fear that—” and here the ink—curse him for using a fountain pen instead of a ballpoint!—had been blurred into incoherency by a stream of some yellowish liquid which stank—God help us!—of the musky excesses of a ripe cat-box.
Other miscellaneous notes only served to deepen, obfuscate and murkify the mystery:
“Hula-hoops—plastic? Can certain rotating polymers warp the space/time continuum? Maybe!
“Cats—devolved descendants of an ancient, alien race that crash-landed on Earth, eons ago? Perhaps!
“The Brouhaha—‘Brou’ as in ‘brew,’ as in ‘beer’? ‘Haha’ as in ‘ha-ha,’ as in ‘laughing’? The drunken laughter of an unimaginably vile deity about to be unleashed on an unsuspecting cosmos? Sounds about right to me!
“Must remember to take the Scarlet Acolyte of Horror his dry-cleaning—and ask him to explain everything, since he holds all the answers.”
This last entry was followed by a street address, phone and fax numbers, and three e-mail accounts. Curse Zebediah for being so damnably vague! If only he had left me some blessed clue toward the decipherance of this unholy enigma!
I then noticed a book among Zebediah’s belongings—a leather-bound tome entitled SECRETS OF THE CAT-HULA CULT REVEALED. A sticker on the inside cover indicated that the book was ‘From the Library Of’ an individual known as ‘The Scarlet Acolyte of Horror.’ A coincidence indeed.
I called the Acolyte that very minute. “Hello, you don’t know me, but I am the last remaining relative of the late, deceased Zebediah LaMambo, who has passed away and is in fact dead. I see that he expired with a book of yours in his possession. Could you stop by and get it one of these days? I’m too busy investigating the mysterious circumstances of Zebediah’s death to bring or even ship it to you.”
The Acolyte had a voice like dried leaves blowing across a time-forgotten Lemurian tomb. I think he had a cold, or maybe he smoked. “Yes, I gave him the book so that he could at last figure out—”
I was bored by the Acolyte’s incessant prattling, so I ignored him and turned on the TV. A documentary sprang to life on the screen—the title EVERYTHING YOU COULD EVER POSSIBLY WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THE CAT-HULA CULT appeared, emblazoned across a scene of lush island scenery.
“I’m going to have to hang up,” I said, interrupting him—he was in the middle of a tedious explanation of some sort. “I think, Mr. Acolyte, that the answers to my enquiries can be found on a news program which has just started on the Eldritch Mystery Channel.”
“Yes, I researched, wrote, directed and produced that show,” the Acolyte said.
“I have no time for your vainglorious boasting!” I cried, slamming down the phone.
I listened intently as Niles Lathotep, the program’s smiling host, explained the goings-on at Asparagus Island.
“This pleasant, breezy, delightful tropical paradise,” he said, “does in fact hide a curse-ridden secret that threatens to destroy not only the Earth and the entire Solar System, but also humanity.”
I s
huddered with dread, and also because the room was a little drafty.
Niles continued. “Asparagus Island is famous for being the home of an indigenous species of domestic cat that can walk on its hindlegs. In recent weeks, island homeowners with cats have been receiving mysterious packages addressed to the afore-mentioned felines. These packages have contained rings of plastic, about eighteen inches in diameter. The rings look much like hula-hoops, except they are far too small for human hips. A small animal walking on its hindlegs might be able to use a hula-hoop of this size—but what sort of animal? And, why would anyone bother to send such hoops to the cats of Asparagus Island? And most importantly, why have these mysterious hoops—and the hindleg-walking cats—suddenly disappeared at the same time?
“We’ve asked the islanders, but all they can do is look to the east and scream. This behavior is especially inexplicable, since the eastern half of the island is the forbidden half, where it is rumored that a valley can be found that is sacred to an ancient deity named Cat-Hula, or Kathooloo, or Kt’hu’lu or maybe—and this is a long-shot—Cthulhu. Legends state that if some act—we’re not sure what—is performed by ten-thousand animals—we’re not sure which kind—at the same time, then that unspeakable deity will rise up from its forbidden tomb, sunk beneath the waves just off the coast of Asparagus Island. And then—”
I’d heard enough. It was clear what I had to do.
I turned off the television and called my travel agent, but his prices seemed a little steep, so I called a different travel agent but he wasn’t any better. So then I went on the internet, found some reasonable ticket prices for a round-trip flight to Asparagus Island, and made my arrangements online. I then went to the bedroom, opened my closet, picked out some nice outfits, and called some friends until I found one who was willing to come by and water my plants for a few days. Then I crammed some odds and ends in my overcoat pockets, since you never know what you’ll need on a long trip (especially if you’re making your plans at the last minute). Suitcase in hand, I ran to the car, then remembered I hadn’t turned off the computer so I went back and did that, put some more stuff in my coat pockets and then went back out to the car and was soon heading down the road. Next I stopped for gas, and then remembered I had to drop off my key at my friend’s house or else he’d never be able to get in to water my plants. When I got to the airport I had a little trouble getting my ticket order straightened out—that particular online service still has some bugs to work out, or so they told me at the airport. But before long, I was on a plane to Asparagus Island, and the in-flight movie was Footloose II, which I liked, but then, I really liked the first Footloose and I was pleasantly surprised that Hollywood had finally gotten around to making a sequel.
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