The Daughter of the Night

by Julian Porter

'But we like throwing sticks.'

  'Well, I like having sex, but I don't do that all the time.'

  'Yes you do.'

  'Shut up, Nina. Look, mister dog, it' very simple. I want an orgasm, and to get one I need to find the unity. Not me, I'm a Unity. The unity. Apparently it's something very complicated that used to hang around back before the stars went mouldy or whatever it was they did, and I didn't really understand much that the glorified starfish said, but I need to find it. Would you lot have any idea how I could do that?'

  At the thought of finding something, all the dogs sat up and started to pant with their tongues hanging out. A Pomeranian said,

  'We love finding things. We're the best at finding things in the whole universe. Do you want us to find this unity for you?' Unity smiled,

  'I say, that's the first helpful thing I've heard in what seems like years. I'd love you to find it. Do you think you can do that for me?' The dogs wagged in unison, which appeared to be their way of saying 'sure thing, old bean', or so Unity surmised, for she said, 'Right then; off you go.' And the dogs zoomed off, going in every direction, some involving dimensions not known to man or woman.

  And that was the last Unity saw of them. She waited. And waited. And waited some more. In fact she waited for several days, for it turned out there was a bed in the shed, as well as a stock of food. After about a week of boredom so intense that she had been reduced to playing twenty questions with Nina on the subject of Nina's one true love (tall, dark, handsome, god-fearing – as if one could be anything else, given the extraordinarily malevolent nature of most of the gods – male and entirely uninterested in sex) or what exactly might be the defining characteristics of an orgasm (like the best possible thing that could ever happen, only more so, like an inward explosion of ecstasy that fills the entire body and mind, like a quadruple chocolate cheesecake gateau with extra chocolate on the side, like the feeling of anticipation before having sex without the let-down of actually doing it and finding that the light at the end of the tunnel was a five watt bulb illuminating a rather jaded-looking water closet), she had reached the point where she had eaten all the human food and had to face the prospect of eating dog food. Nina was all for it:

  'Oh, but you should give the dear doggies a bit more time. They were such nice dogs, and I'm sure they were good dogs, and no good dog would ever do anything so bad as to not find something it had been sent to find by its, er, mistress.'

  'Or bugger off because it noticed an interesting smell.' Nina was aghast,

  'Of course not. Only a bad dog would do that. Good dogs always do what they're told.'

  'Well, all I can say is you must have been moonlighting, because every dog I've ever met has been an easily distracted moron that'd do anything for food. Probably they met a man with some sausages or something like that. They like sausages. But here's the thing Nina, dogs like anything. Dogs will eat anything. Even stuff that another dog's already eaten, if you get my drift. And in particular, they eat dog food. But I won't. Never, never, never.'

  'But don't you think it looks rather yummy in that picture on the tin?' Unity looked at the tin that she was holding and that had sparked this whole debate. It showed an impossibly glossy-coated collie eyeing up a plate on which was disposed viands that wouldn't have looked out of place at a five star restaurant, but while Nina, the idealist, took this as a fair and honest representation of what lay inside, Unity, the cynic, suspected that a little hyperbole had crept into the artist's work. So she said,

  'Well, I was hoping to avoid doing this, but if needs must,' she pulled at the tag on the lid and immediately the air was filled with an odour. An odour that carries no adjectival burden because it was absolutely indescribable. Unity's first, rather frenzied, thought was that perhaps she had found the unity at last. Then she decided that that was stupid and that actually she wanted to be sick. Nina's thought processes were not so sophisticated, in that she spanned the whole gamut of emotion from happy anticipation to wishing she were dead the merest instant. And so, after a brief interlude for retching, a somewhat worse-for-wear Unity addressed a chastened Nina and said, 'Well, I won't do that again. So I think no dog food?'

  'Oh yes, er, absolutely. How can the poor little things bear it?'

  'Because they're stupid. They're omnivores. I suggest you consider what that means.'

  'Er, they eat busses?' Unity pinched the bridge of her nose and took a brief moment to contemplate her companion’s stupidity, then said, in a tone of forced kindness,

  'No. It means they eat everything. Including that – whatever it is,' she pointed at the tin which she had, in the first fine frenzy of nausea, flung about twenty metres away, but whose subtle stench was still detectably present as a looming threat to any who dared go too near. 'But the facts that dogs are stupid and you like dogs are not entirely surprising to me, because that means that there's at least one thing you have in common.'

  'What, what we're good?'

  'No, dear. Never mind, I'll explain it to you one day when you're older. So point one: we need food, and we're not eating that – stuff. Point two: I haven't gone without sex for this long since I was a virgin . . .'

  'But you've been – abusing yourself –every night.'

  'Oh it doesn't count when you do it with yourself. I keep telling you, if you'd only stop telling yourself that it's wrong and you hate it, you'll find that sex is kind of fun even without the big O. It would just be nicer if I could . . .'

  'Yes, yes, yes, I know. You keep trying to persuade me that fornication is good. But it isn't. It's wrong. And learning the way of abstinence will make you a better woman.'

  'Better woman? Better woman? Yeah, right. A desperate woman, yes. A woman obsessed with an unquenchable desire for something she can't have, granted. A woman who's developing nervous tics and a tendency to hear voices where there are none, absolutely. So if that's what being a better woman is like, then I prefer being bad.' At which Nina said,

  'I know. You're a great trial to me.'

  'And I won't say what you are to me, because the words are not for your innocent ears, if you have ears. But what all that boils down to is this: I need food and I need sex. So I am taking executive decision to find the nearest inhabited planet, find the best restaurant in town, then eat everything they’ve got and shag the waiters senseless between the courses. Okay? Okay. Carried nem con.'

  And so she did, and had a very pleasant, if orgasm free, time, and afterwards,

  'So, were any of them your true love?'

  'No.’

  ‘I’m sure whats her name, the cigarette girl, I know, Joscelyn, liked you. She asked your name and everything. And she’s got a great body. Perhaps you could share it.’

  ‘Eww no. I can't love a woman. That would be mucky and wrong.'

  'Suit yourself. Well, I enjoyed that, even if you didn’t. So, who's next?'

  'Shoggoths.'

  'Oh fuck.'

  (vi) The Shoggoths

  Unity was more than a little annoyed when she discovered that the Shoggoths occupied an area of Antarctica whose resident Elder Things had, entirely voluntarily, permitted themselves to be recycled as protoplasm, which was basically what Shoggoths did to anything that wasn't another Shoggoth. And the only reason they didn't recycle one another into protoplasm was that they were already made of protoplasm, so there was no point. Of course, this little act of ethnic cleansing had not been popular with the Elder Things on the other side of Mount Erebus (or the Mountain of Madness, as it was known to the locals) and they submitted a formal protest to the Great Old Ones, demanding immediate action. Things looked bad for the Shoggoths until Cthulhu actually read the protest that he had been using as a door-stop for the past six months. It turned out to be a request for funding for a project to determine once and for all whether the concept of a voluntary action was in any way meaningful, and, if it was, in what way, if any, it could be applied; whether differing cultures, even differing individuals necessarily had the same concept of volunta
rity; and thus whether an act that seems voluntary to its agent is in fact involuntary to its object. Assuming, of course, that the concepts of individual, act, agent, culture, etc had all been defined. In short, as Cthulhu summed it up when recommending that it be ignored with extreme prejudice, it seemed to be a request that the Great Old Ones give the Elder Things a permanent free lunch voucher. So the Shoggoths lived to slurp another day and, as hinted, Unity was not pleased.

  'Why the hell,' she demanded in a rhetorical kind of way, 'Couldn't the Shoggoths have come after the Elder Things instead of those bloody dogs? Then I'd have been saved a journey to this hell-hole and by now I could be having orgasms galore.'

  'And I might have found my true love.'

  'Eh, oh, yes, of course. But keep your mind on the orgasms. They're the main goal.'

  'But I don't want an orgasm; I want my true love.'

  'And how do you think that love will manifest itself once you've found her or him – and I think you're making a bit mistake ruling out women, you know? As orgasms; that's how.'

  'Eew. I thought love was romantic, about holding hands and kissing and sweet nothings.'

  'All of which are a preliminary to taking your clothes off and having sex. And, if you're lucky, which I haven't been so far, but every other bastard in the cosmos seems to be, having sex means having an orgasm. So there.'

  'So are you saying that I'm going to have to have sex with my true love?'

  'Well,' said Unity, considering the question carefully, 'There have been a few strange people, like Dante and Beelzebub, that weirdo Swift and Sandra, or that Abelard chap with his Lucinda. Of course,' she added in a conscientious fashion, 'Abelard didn't have a todger, so he doesn't really count; I'm willing to bet he'd have shagged Lucinda silly if he'd had the necessary equipment.'

  'Then I,' said Nina in a quavering but determined voice, 'Shall be like . . . which one of Dante and Beelzebub was the girl?'

  'Er, Dante, I think.'

  'Right then, I shall be like Dante and have a true, pure love with no nasty, mucky deeds of naughtiness.' Unity was philosophical,

  'Well, at least you don't write poems. You don't do you? I suppose I can always fuck him for you. When I'm not off fucking other people, that is. But I'm sure I can fit him in every now and then.'

  'Oh, that'll have to stop. No deeds of naughtiness means no deeds of naughtiness.'

  'You mean you're expecting me, having finally had an orgasm, to never do it again?'

  'To put it simply, yes.'

  'Fat chance sister. I'd hand myself over to the Fungi sooner.'

  'You're not putting yourelf in a tin can. You know I'm claustrophobic, and I'd. . .'

  'All right, all right. If I recall rightly one of Daddy's old friends, chap called Frankfurter, had a way of building new bodies for people. he can whip up a body to your spec – I'm guessing, you being you, that you'll want it to be flat-chested with no discernible figure – and then we can do whatever invocation it is to get you to possess it, and there you’ll be. The true Nina for her true love.' Nina didn't seem too excited by this prospect, and eventually said,

  'Well, I think I'd like . . .'

  'Yes?'

  'I think I'd like to have a few curves,' she said wistfully. 'Not as many as you, but I want to look nice.' Unity was simultaneously amazed and triumphant,

  'So, what have we here?' she said, 'Nina wanting to be attractive after all? Whatever next? Come on,' she said in a confidential tone, 'No-one's closer to you than me. Quite literally in fact. So you can tell me. You do want to be sexy really, don't you?' Nina struggled, but having made the initial admission, things couldn't get worse, so she said,

  'Well, I suppose I do, a bit. But I just don't want to be like you. My love, and yes,' she said defiantly, though it wasn't clear who she thought she was defying, as what she was saying was scarcely of such a nature as to shock Unity, so probably it was herself, 'I mean that physically too, will be reserved for my true love, and it is for his sake that I want to look nice, and feel nice, and er, be, er, good, at, er, you know,' she tailed off into embarrassed incoherence.

  'No, not really. Unless,' a smile appeared on Unity's face, 'You're saying you want to be a right little raver, but only in the privacy of the marital bedroom?'

  'Well, that isn't how I'd put it, but, er, yes.'

  'Well fancy that. You have hidden depths, my girl, did you know that? In that case you really ought to pay more attention when I'm doing it. After all, how better to learn than from watching the mistress at work?'

  'Yes, but what you do is wrong.'

  'Oh Nyarlathotep, here we go again. Fucking is the same whether it's your true love you're doing it to or some person you've just met and who you’re never going to meet again.'

  'Well, I'm sorry, Unity, but I refuse to believe that some of things you do could ever form part of a proper loving relationship. I mean, setting aside your unnatural acts with women, Elder Races and animals, which are entirely reprehensible but irrelevant from the point of view of me and my true-love, some of the things you do with men are quite shocking. Like those times when you get them to . . .' And, luckily for us, we never will know what it was that Unity did that Nina disapproved of so much, for there was a sudden roar of the plane's engines as it came in to land, through which Unity heard only the isolated words '. . . up the . . .', which didn't really give her much to go on when it came to guessing which part of her extremely wide and inventive repertoire it was to which Nina objected so much. Which left her puzzled and annoyed, and so she was preparing a form of twenty questions to try to narrow things down a bit, as she could think of several hundred widely differing things she could do to a man to which the words 'up the' could be made relevant. But when the plane had landed and things quietened down, and just as she was about to launch her first question ('Does this involve any mechanical aids?'), Nina got in first and said, 'Unity, for heaven's sake, whatever you do, this time don't kill the pilot. I won't say a word about anything else you do with her: if you want to commit unnatural acts with her go right ahead and I won't object. Just don't kill her.'

  'Why this sudden attack of moral relativism?'

  'Because your sex-life may be filthy and immoral, but it isn't as terrifying as your flying.' Unity shrugged.

  'It's a fair point.' She called to the pilot, 'Hey, Bubbles, fancy a quickie?'

  A little time passed – some time – actually quite some time, because Bubbles turned out to be rather inventive, and for a moment Unity had even dared to hope that she might achieve her goal without having to talk to a Shoggoth, but no. In her disappointment she did consider seeing if she could make Bubbles have a seizure, but then she remembered her promise to Nina, and a promise was a promise, even if it was a promise to a half-wit. So she sighed deeply, leading subsequently to a deep intake of breath that excited Bubbles so much that they were off at it again, and could well have continued indefinitely had not Nina, in a rare and devastating moment of brilliance, remarked snidely that,

  'It's terribly nice, you finding your one true love, Unity, but I thought you only cared about orgasms.' In fact, though on face value this may seem like almost snake-like subtlety, one almost certainly has to conclude that Nina intended it as a pure statement of fact, and was unaware of any sub-text it might have. Or even of the idea of subtext, for that matter. But what does it matter when the end result was Unity leaping off Bubbles, who squeaked in dismay and saying, as she adjusted her dress to give what minimal cover it was capable of when expressed to its full extent,

  'Oh, er, yes. Right then. Let's go shall we?' Then, more tenderly, 'Oh Bubbles,' and yes, that really was her name, and yes she was blonde and blue-eyed and stacked, and indeed she lived up to all the cliches for blonde, blue-eyed, stacked women with stupid names, by being a complete and utter airhead whose sole redeeming features were that (a) she knew how to fly a plane, (b) she was almost as voracious as Unity. Not, of course, that (b) is necessarily a good thing, that is unless one intends
to set oneself up as a sex-goddess, a pop star or a hooker (which last had been Bubbles' chosen profession until the day when she persuaded a pilot to initiate her into the mile-high club, in the course of which he had died of a heart attack and she had landed the plane, and discovered something better than sex), now where were we? Oh yes: 'Oh Bubbles, you really are something. If only I’d had an orgasm, I’d never let you go. But maybe next time,' with which she gave Bubbles a look of dark passion, then left the plane.

  Anyway, as Bubbles lay back and contemplated a future as the dominatrix to Unity's submissive (I said she was dumb, didn't I?) Unity crossed the plane to the large cave behind which lay the realm of the Shoggoths, arguing with Nina along the lines of,

  'Well I did say if I’d had an orgasm. But I didn’t, and in the long run that’s what counts, so I’m bound to get bored and throw her away eventually. But I promise I won't do it until we’re somewhere where there’s the right cultists to do a transportation conjuration. I believe there’s a Crowleyite cell at one of the British Antarctic Survey sites. That should do. We could even use her as the sacrifice, couldn't we?' She paused. 'Strange people Crowleyites. I mean, Aleister was a sweet man, but he had some very odd habits.'