The Daughter of the Night

by Julian Porter

  'You're going to find an orgasm in a box then?' Unity rolled her eyes and said,

  'Nyarlathotep give me strength. No, idiot, when I find Hastur he'll tell me who I need to ask next, and then, hopefully, one day I'll find the person who knows the secret, and maybe I can ring down the curtains on this creation by having an orgasm so shattering that the very fabric of reality is shattered by it. That sounds fun, doesn't it?' The Deep Ones conferred, and said,

  'We'd rather you didn't have an orgasm like that, so we won't tell you where Hastur is.' Well, Unity wasn't going to stand for that.

  'Think you can stop me getting what I want, do you? Well, I may not be able to bring the cosmos crashing to the floor in a heap, but I can do for you lot.' With which, reflecting that she had always liked sushi, she grabbed the nearest of them and gamely took a big bite out of his neck.

  Now, you might think that if you were a Deep One and you saw a woman making a spirited attempt at eating your friend you might run away, or attack her. But then, you are not (I am guessing) a fish. When sharks are busy eating herring or sardines, the other herring and sardines don’t run away or counter-attack. They just hang about, watching and thinking 'gosh a shark, how exciting.' So not only did the Deep Ones stand about dumbly, in fact extra ones gathered to watch. And by the third mouthful Unity had decided that she didn’t like sushi that much after all, so she stopped and said,

  'Right, now take that as a warning. Where's Hastur?'

  'Well,' said one, 'We never really had much to do with him, as fire and water don't mix. So we don't know. But we do know a good way to spawn for fun and profit. And fun is what you're after. So, why not breed with one of us, and then you can bring a hybrid into the world and do your own bit towards furthering our plan for world domination.' This was wrong in so many ways that Unity forgot where she was and opened her mouth, getting a lung-full of water. Once she had finished choking, which is quite hard to do underwater, she said,

  'Look, first of all, I don't do fish, okay? As I have repeatedly said to Uncle Dagon . . .'

  'So that's why you were trying to seduce him earlier?'

  'Oh, hello Nina, talking to me again are you? Well shut up, I'm giving these fish things a dressing down.'

  'They don't need it, in case you hadn't noticed, they're all naked.'

  'Oh do try to think figuratively my dear. You're as bad as them. And for your information, I had noticed that they were naked, and they don't turn me on one bit. Not like that whale, he was cute. Where was I?'

  'Undressing Dagon.'

  'Oh yes, right, fine. So, you lot, listen up, I'm talking to you now. As I say to Uncle Dagon whenever he put the moves on me, fish are not for me. Or fish things, or semi-fish, or fish-like races from beyond the void. What I’m trying to say is that I wouldn't have sex with you if Daddy really had eaten every last human being. And for another thing, I do not intend to do motherhood. Ever. I am a good-time girl, which means that I am out to enjoy myself . . .'

  'And to find my true love.'

  'Yes, and that too, but primarily to enjoy myself. And how can I fuck morning, noon and night, which is how I enjoy myself, if I have a squalling semi-human brat? So if you think you can do some kind of quid pro quo then you can fuck right off. Tell me all you know about Hastur, or I may just give in to Uncle Dagon's entreaties on condition that he wipes you lot out.' And that was telling them and telling them good. Being eaten was nothing to creatures who existed in vast schools and had little sense of self. But having your God wipe you out was another matter. Great Cthulhu's cultists may well have found it a blast, but the Deep Ones had too much invested in their quaint little plan to achieve supremacy over the other races to risk going the way of the Insect People of Graah (who were, to a bug, collected, killed and stuck in a display case with a pin by Cthulhu when he went through a brief entomological phase). So, after another quick huddle, one said,

  'Here's what we know. Hastur was one of the Great Old Ones. And all was well. Then he vanished, and at that moment the stars went wrong, and nothing has been right since. We can only assume that there was some connection. So you need to find out what made the stars go wrong.' Unity looked down. She could feel it, but she wanted to confirm the feeling. And yes, her breasts were vibrating. So this was the next step: understanding what happened when the stars went wrong and why. She considered taking a deep breath but, just in time, decided not to, and said, with exaggerated politeness,

  'Why thank you. You've been most helpful. Now how,' her voice turned petulant, 'Do I get to Leng from here?'

  'Well, it's about seven thousand kilometres that way. You could walk.'

  'And you could put on a tutu and dance in a ballet, but no-one's going to want to see 'Fish Lake', and I have no intention of walking seven thousand kilometres, and if you, Nina, even think of saying that hardship is good for the soul, so help me Azathoth, I'll get you exorcised.'

  'But . . . how did you know?' Nina said, as if surprised.

  'You're very predictable. Didn't you know? The only thing that makes you even marginally entertaining is seeing what synonym for 'bad' you'll come up with next when you tell me that you don't like me having sex, eating too much, having sex, refusing to believe that I have a soul, or having sex. I mean, really, it'd be more interesting if I had a parrot on my shoulder. Some of them are quite good conversationalists, you know. Now where was I? And yes, Nina, I am asking you, but remember, if you even think of commenting on the fact that I'd give almost anything right now for a good shag, that exorcism works underwater. And you lot,' this to the assembled deep ones, 'Just bear in mind that as someone once almost said, I'd do anything for a screw, but I won't do that. Human-fish miscegenation is all very well for those that like it, but I don't. So just remember, that I may not like having fish inside me in the sense you were thinking of, but as far as seafood goes, I positively adore it. And you count as seafood. Loosely. So,' with another abrupt switch of attention, 'What was I talking about before the last time I asked you what I was talking about? Come on, Nina, the longer you delay is the longer I have to go without sex. And no getting ideas, okay? Just learn to live with the fact that sex is happening in the near future. So, come on, tell me, or I'll start rambling again, and then we'll never get to Leng and I'll never, ever, ever have an orgasm. Oh I could cry if I wasn't already wet all over.' Seeing that Unity finally seemed to have ground to a halt, Nina said, very tentatively,

  'Well, I, er think . . .'

  'Yes, come on. Time spent talking is time spent not fucking. Which is bad.'

  'So why don't you let me finish?'

  'Eh?

  'Well, who is it who's been rabbiting on and on for the last ten minutes?' Unity considered this, and being a fundamentally fair woman, she admitted, even at this moment when she was subsumed with lust, that Nina had a point.

  'Okay, I'll be really, really quiet. Until I have sex, that is. I'll probably get quite noisy then.'

  'Don't remind me.'

  ‘Look, just tell me what it was I was talking about that was so important that I've totally forgotten what it was.’

  'It was that you didn't want to walk to Leng.'

  'Of course,' said Unity, as enlightenment filled her. 'How stupid of you not to tell me earlier. No, shut up. The exorcism threat stands. Okay then, I need another plan. Either a submarine that I can, er, lowjack, though I'm not entirely sure how, or something to take me to the nearest airport, where I can seduce a pilot or something, and talk them into taking me to Antarctica. So what do I do, what do I do?'

  And at that moment there came the sound of a cow in distress. Many cows in distress. Hugely amplified cows in distress. A whole herd of cows who had eaten something that had disagreed with them. And as the lowing grew in intensity a great shape loomed up out of the stygian blackness of the deep ocean and Unity cried happily,

  'It's my whale! He's come back for me. He can take me to the airport.' She turned to the Deep Ones. 'Well, it hasn't been fun, but it's been useful. And, i
f I ever see you again, just remember that if you even think of suggesting that I interbreed with you then you are, as a species, kaput. So so long suckers, oh do stop being so bloody literal-minded,' she concluded as they all started to suck in their cheeks. She climbed onto the back of the whale, made a rude gesture in the direction of the Deep Ones, and was off on the next stage of her journey.

  (iv) The Elder Things

  A few hours later a small plane set down on a plateau in Antarctica that appeared on no human maps, or at least none that anyone was prepared to admit to. And then for a while nothing happened and a group of Elder Things, who had hidden for fear of being discovered, came out from behind their rock and started to move towards it in case something interesting was going on. And indeed it was. The plane began to rock, gently at first, but soon with increasing force and vigour, and then came a high-pitched voice urging someone unseen and unheard to move himself on to fresh heights of something or other. Then the rocking stopped and there was a cry of,

  'Is that it? Is that fucking it? I'm barely even excited and you're finished? Well I know what to do about that,' followed by another voice uttering a scream that shifted from terrified to agonised to eventual silence. Then as the Elder Things debated whether there was in fact a simple explanation of all these strange events, or whether they should just be seen as disconnected fragments with no coherence or underlying narrative, reflective of the essentially random nature of reality, if indeed there was such a thing as reality out there to be essentially random, or essentially anything, the door of the plane was flung open and what the empiricist among them would undoubtedly have said gave the impression of appearing to be a woman stood in the entrance. She was talking to herself.

  'I do wish you wouldn't do that.'

  'Yes, but you don't like anything I do. Anyway, which bit? The shagging him or the killing him?'

  'Oh the killing, it's so cruel. I mean the, er, canoodling was naughty, but killing people is wrong.'

  'Come on, he was a lousy lover, and I had to threaten to break his arm to stop him from groping me in mid-air. I mean, I have some standards, and I didn't want to go to meet those bloody Deep Ones again. So I thought keeping us up in the air was more important, or should have been, to him, than squeezing my tits. Any anyway, I even asked if you liked him before I offed him. You didn't like him, did you?'

  'Eew no. He tried to chat me up.'

  'There you are then. Clearly mad. Killing him was for the good of the species. And thinking of which,' Unity stopped glaring at Nina and looked out into the white wasteland, I do think we've found what we were looking for. Excuse me,' she addressed the Elder Things, 'Are you Elder Things?'

  Well, that was the sort of question that could keep an Elder Thing happily occupied for months, and so it is not entirely surprising that one of them said,

  'That depends, as it begs several questions, such as what is an Elder Thing? Is there a concept of Elder Thinghood distinct from the collective identity of those beings, if there are such things, that self-identify as an Elder Thing? And how does one establish that one is an Elder Thing? If there is no larger idea, no essence of Elder Thinghood, then what makes one an Elder Thing, if such a thing exists, which I do not consider to be established? Is is that one wishes to or believes one is? That one is accepted as such by other beings that are so identified, in which case we run the risk of eternal regress, unless we establish a process for mutual identification, which is problematic in as much as it requires us to be absolutely certain of the identity and existence of any being other than ourselves, and to be certain that what we perceive of them can be related by some means or other to what they perceive of themselves or us. I think not. But if there a form, an absolute, an essence of Elder Thinghood that exist in some way beyond what we playfully call reality, of which we are but the localised instantiation, an imperfect realisation of a perfect ideal, and it is that realisation, imperfect though it is, that makes one an Elder Thing? But once again, though I may be dimly aware of my essential nature, how can I be certain that that essential nature is reflected in anything so gross as mere physical appearance or anything else that can be detected by my senses? For all I know, you may be an Elder Thing and I may be a woman, but then again . . .' At which point, Unity held her hand up for silence and said, rather weakly,

  'And I thought “yes” would do as an answer. Wow. Hey, did any of you lot understand what – er – it just said?'

  'But of course,' said another Elder Thing, 'Though I have to say that my colleague is entirely mistaken. There is no essential truth or deeper reality of the kind he was speaking of. There are merely random flashes of sense data that we, in the privacy of our own worlds of belief and prejudice, playfully assemble into coherent wholes, not because there are such things, but rather because we like to believe that there are, for only those of us who have trained ourselves to look the absence of reality in the face are strong enough to accept that there is none. So it is foolish for us to ask if we are Elder Things. What we, if we even exist, think is irrelevant, as what we think we see and what you think you see are of their nature incommensurate. So if you want us to be Elder Things, then Elder Things we are, but we might as well be fish, or Shoggoth, and you might just as well be Great Cthulhu's daughter.'

  'I am Great Cthulhu's daughter,' she said in a tone of some alarm.

  'Well, if you want to believe that, I cannot say you are wrong. But I can believe, if I like, that you are in fact Marie Antoinette and nothing could gainsay me.'

  'She didn't have such a good body as me.'

  'She might have done. If she had wanted to. Or if I had wanted you to believe that she did. It is all a matter of how I decided she should be, because then I projected my ideas of her onto my reality, which its inhabitants picked up. Yes, you may look as if you are the loveliest woman who ever lived or will live, but that is a result of a conspiracy of belief. If we were to try really hard, you and I, we could turn you into something hideous.'

  'What a load of old . . .'

  'But no,' said the first Elder Thing with great passion. 'She is lovely because she is the embodiment of the ideal of loveliness, so nearly perfect an embodiment that she seems to lighten even the gloom of this Antarctic night. Just as she embodies the essence of desire so that even I feel her allure in spite of the fact that I am asexual. This woman is living proof that there is beyond this realm an empyrean, a place where are the forms that make up the perfection that everything in this realm below is but a shadow of. And that is the realm of the absolute, the unity that lies within the forms, and that lies within us all.'

  Now this looked set to carry on for hours, and Unity was feeling the cold. In addition she was very, very bored, as her personal idea of philosophy was limited to the motto “shag 'em hard and dump ‘em fast”, while Nina's, though she would probably have put it more diffusely that this, was something along the lines of “everyone but me is bad”. So, being a direct kind of woman, Unity cut through the philosophical debate as with a knife, by saying,

  'Well I'm sure that's all very well, and I suppose when you look like two starfish glued to a barrel and don't even have sex to take your mind off things, you have to do something to fill your day. But I was quite serious earlier when I said I am Cthulhu's daughter, and if you don't shut up and take me to your city, or at least somewhere warm where I can talk to someone sensible, I'l get him to come down here and eat every last one of you. And then you won't be able to philosophise at all. Apart from, I suppose, whether the fear, and the pain, that you feel is real or not. Which it will be, of course. Maybe there is no deep reality, though in my opinion what you were talking about with the unity and all that sounds very like Grand-Dad Yoggie to me, but that's by the by, because my experience is that once dead they stay dead . . .'

  'And you should know.'

  'Thank you for that Nina. Apart from that one time I decided to try out food fetishism and gobbled a bit too fast and had to go into hospital to have my stomach pumped because th
e wriggling inside was making me feel funny. Where was I?' Well, that was just asking for it.

  'Where are any of is? Is there any here? Or are we just a shadow, a vague representation of the truth that is the unity?'

  'Nonsense, there is no here, there is no us. There are just beliefs that collide and breed with one another, turning themselves into the shadow of an ordered reality because they cannot bear the infinite emptiness of nothingness.'

  'But who's thinking those thoughts? You see, you are of my way of belief after all. All is but a dream of the unity, and one day the unity will be reformed in this world and the stars will come right again.'

  Now that got Unity's attention all right. At last, just at the point at which she was wondering which of the two Elder Things to kill first, and pondering vaguely how she was going to do it with nothing more by way of weapons than her nail-scissors, one of them had said something relevant. So, jumping between the two Elder Things like the referee at an unusually fractious boxing match, though much better looking than most referees, she said,