Shotguns v. Cthulhu

by Larry DiTillio

  That was when I heard the scream, muffled from behind the door of the old man’s torture room, but unmistakable.

  It was Grace.

  A sudden burst of strength filled my body and I clenched all of my broken muscles, lunging up and reaching for Grillface’s stocking cap. I clawed my hand over it and got a tight hold on the jagged skull beneath. He slapped at my arm with his hands and squealed, taken completely by surprise. I wouldn’t let go, and the grip gave me enough leverage to shake the freezer back and forth. Between my exertions and his struggles to get free, the box finally capsized, falling to the side and bringing the man down with it.

  I let go of his skull and forced myself out of the box, stumbling like I was drunk as I climbed to my feet. Grillface stumbled as well but was quick to come after me. I fell back against a wall as he approached and did my best to put up my guard. He stopped in his tracks and looked at me, tilting his head to the side. Then he sidled over to an open cabinet, keeping his eyes on me as he removed his sawed-off shotgun.

  He’d finally decided I was a threat. He pointed the gun at me and I pushed myself off of the wall, gathering strength as I moved toward him. The air ripped into pieces with the sound of the gun’s discharge, and a heavy force punched me in the side, shocking me with intense pain and flipping me to the ground.

  I looked down to see a frayed hole in the side of my stomach. Grillface stepped over to me and looked down again, this time empty of any pity. He pointed the gun at my head.

  The door to the torture room swung open.

  “What is all of this?”

  Grillface turned his head and I heard Grace whimpering in the background. Drawing on everything I had, I raised my legs and wrapped them around the motherfucker’s calves, rolling to the side and breaking his balance. He tipped like a tree and hit the stone floor hard, his grip loosening on the gun.

  The old man stepped back, pointing his arm at me and spewing gibberish:

  “Ogthrod ah eeeef! Gebble eeeehh!”

  But it was too late for him. I’d wrestled the shotgun away.

  Another earpiercing blast and the old man’s head was gone. His body stumbled back, spasming, and fell against the wall. I flipped the gun around in my hands, the muzzle burning my skin, and started working on Grillface with the butt. His body continued to fight but I pounded his head to jelly, and after a minute or two I was able to stand and get away from him.

  In the room, Grace was strapped to the table, naked. I did away with the straps as fast as I could and took her into my arms. She was weak and unable to move, only staring up into my face with an expression of crazy disbelief. My girl.

  I moved as fast as I could through the cellar. Grillface’s body twitched on the floor like a half-crushed scorpion, and against the wall, something was emerging from the neck of the spasming old man: a thick, fleshy tube that tapered into a pinkish-red point. I turned my face away and focused on escape.

  Up the stairs, through a hallway, more stairs, then into the old man’s house. I eased Grace onto her weak legs and wrapped us in dusty red blankets draped over a sofa.

  “We’re gonna make it, Grace. We’re gonna get out of here.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said to me. Her voice was spacey and distant. “We’re all going to die.”

  I pulled her close to me and placed a hand over the gaping wound in my stomach, the wound that hadn’t killed me or kept me from moving. Just like the broken back hadn’t stopped me. The broken back that had disappeared.

  “We’re already dead,” I whispered to her. “Let’s get a drink.”

  As we stumbled out into the frozen night, I noticed the Doberman watching us from the house’s top window. We would be hunted, but I didn’t care. At that moment, we had each other once again, and that was enough.

  Wuji

  Nick Mamatas

  Roger Wu fumed silently. Friday nights were supposed to be fun—the usual crowd would pile into Chuck’s dorm room because it was a single and in it he had a television with a pair of hot-rodded rabbit ears—and watch The Green Hornet. An excellent show, or parts of it were anyway: about a minute and a half of each episode, when Bruce Lee, as Kato, would let it rip. But The Green Hornet had done it again. Britt Reid was given a pistol as a birthday present, and it went off in his hand, killing poor old Eddie Rech. Kato didn’t see anything unusual—he was too busy serving drinks.

  Kato was even wearing a white suit jacket, just like a waiter or bartender might. Even if the next twenty minutes were wall-to-wall fight scenes, Roger’s evening was ruined. Time for the old stand-by. “Did you know,” Roger began, addressing Chuck and Stan and Lawrence and the two other white guys who were new to Berkeley this semester and whose names he had not yet committed to heart, “that in Hong Kong—”

  “The Green Hornet is called The Kato Show,” they chorused, even the new guys. Chuck hoisted a shot glass. “Drink once whenever Roger complains about Bruce Lee and the oppression of Asian-Americans on white supremacist television!” And they all drank, even Roger. And they drank again. Drink when Kato throws a dart! Drink when Casey sits down on a stool and crosses her legs! The best part of Friday nights was making up new rules to drink by. The worst part was Roger taking the bus back to Oakland Chinatown and bedding down in the same twin bed he’d had since he was three years old, while his friends made time with co-eds into the early hours of the morning. That’s what he thought anyway.

  At four in the morning, Roger was up again and mostly sober, in the small gym behind the United Methodist Church right on Shattuck. Sifu Wong noticed, of course, but he didn’t mind. “You’ll sweat it out,” he told Roger every week, and Roger did. Holding stances till his legs quaked, then stomping across the room and back. Sifu Wong was in his seventies, but performed the drills easily, with the feet of a cat. Then there was form practice, and Sifu would bark at Roger to stop and hold an awkward position—thighs nearly parallel to the floor, most of his weight on one heel, hands “gentle, like a woman’s” in Sifu’s words, but always just a little wrong. Holding a posture was painful enough, but Sifu always found that extra inch of shifted weight, the tensed shoulder, the untucked tailbone, then adjusted Roger’s pose to reveal a new level of agony in the core of his muscles. A grunt, and a wobble, and Roger was on the floor.

  “All right,” Sifu said. “Tui shou.” Roger took to his feet and lifted his arms to make the subtlest contact with his teacher, and hit the floor. Then again, and a second time. Sifu narrated. “Push, push,” he said, and when Roger did, Sifu said, “Lu…lead you into void,” and Roger found himself stumbling past his teacher, then skidding along the hardwood floor on his belly.

  “Bruce Lee has it easy,” Roger muttered to himself.

  “An actor!” Sifu shouted. He heard everything, despite being in his seventies, and a veteran waiter of the noisy dim sum place where Roger also worked. “You think he has any real gongfu?” Sifu waited for an answer, but Roger knew better than to offer one. “He does look pretty good,” Sifu admitted, before tapping Roger on the chest with a knuckle and putting him on the floor. “Dim mak,” Sifu said. “Makes the heart skip a beat.”

  “The death touch?” Roger said. His hands went to his chest, instinctively.

  “Don’t worry,” Sifu said. Then he produced a small knife from somewhere in the baggy sleeve of his shirt. “It just stuns the body for a moment. Then you stab him with secret knife—everyone thinks you have real dim mak!” Sifu laughed for a long time. Roger couldn’t but feel that the laughter was directed at him.

  Roger was Sifu’s only indoor student, the only disciple. But Oakland in 1967 wasn’t China a century prior, so Roger didn’t have to clean Sifu’s home or keep the old man fed. At the Golden Dragon, they were both waiters in white jackets, taking orders in Cantonese and, increasingly, English; pushing dim sum carts; pouring tea; and after lunch was done and the carpet swept and tables pushed together for all-night card games, both kept an eye out for the Jackson Street Boys from San Francisco�
�s Chinatown. They didn’t come by often, but they did come by. More often, Roger kept his eye on the girls who’d come in after hours, though they wanted nothing to do with him. Why would they—he had no money, no good family name, no prospects, and even his illustrious teacher was a waiter here in America.

  “Tonight,” Sifu said, “think about this. The yin-yang are everything, but they are children of taiji. Taiji is the one, but where does one come from?”

  “Uhm, the none?” Roger said.

  “The wuji, yes. The void. The void from which everything springs. Where does movement come from? No movement. Where does no movement come from? Movement. In tui shou, you move, I send you into the void.” He nodded, once. “Understand?”

  “Sifu, I don’t.”

  “Good. From no understanding—”

  “Comes understanding?” Roger said.

  Sifu shrugged. “Sounds good to me! Anyway, you watch the door. It’s a lucky night for me, I think. I’m going inside to play cards.” Roger stayed at the door, peering into the mostly empty street, trying to think of nothing, to no-think of nothing. It kept him awake, for a change, and when Sifu came out of the Golden Dragon an hour before dawn without a nickel to his name, he explained that keeping Roger awake had been his plan all along.

  “So, the wuji, that’s all...”

  “It’s all true, yes. But for now, it just keeps you awake,” Sifu said. “Awake so you can breathe, breathe so you can collect chi, collect chi in your dantien to perform internal alchemy. Then you’ll feel life inside you, where now there is nothing.” Roger smiled at Sifu, confused, but Sifu didn’t explain further, didn’t shrug.

  Roger took the bus home and slept for most of Sunday—anything to keep his mother from going on about his “dirty” white friends or lack of a “decent” Chinese girlfriend or his “lowlife” teacher—and he dreamed. But not of nothing. Roger dreamt of a great dark something, shiny and black with the outline of a roaring wave, and neither his own taiji nor Bruce Lee’s snap kicks and chain punches could save him.

  The hippies had found taiji and brought it over to the Cal campus. Roger was appalled at what he saw. Not only was the form simply bad—there was hardly anything to it other than an occasional dip, and a subtle shift of weight—there were girls doing it. White girls, who a week before might have been folk dancing, or performing yoga, or just worshipping their own yonis while squatting over a hand mirror. And Chuck. And those two new guys from Chuck’s dorm. They wobbled on their heels like drunken ducks and snorted and giggled and breathed improperly. Their form was over soon enough; it only had a handful of moves. The class broke up immediately, and Chuck spotted Roger and smiled. One of the other guys waved.

  “Whaa-taaah!” Chuck said, his hands up.

  “Don’t tense your mouth or neck when doing taiji. It ends up tensing your shoulders, which means you can’t channel force from your legs.”

  Chuck kept smiling. “You’re into this stuff, eh? You should meet the master.”

  “No, I don’t think so. I do...something different.”

  One of the other guys from Chuck’s dorm stepped up, to Roger, a bit too close. He had a pointed beard of the sort that Cal students who liked to think themselves intelligent often adopted. “Hello Roger,” he said, as if he didn’t believe the word Roger. “How are you doing today?”

  “Fine, fine.”

  “Listen, I wanted to talk to you. About China. About the great things going on there.”

  “The mainland...? But my parents are from Hong Kong.”

  “Exactly!” he said. “Exactly!”

  “Bernard,” Chuck said. “Take it easy.” Then, to Roger. “Bernard’s on a Maoist trip these days. Even the form we were just practicing is Communist Party-approved.” Roger smirked. That would explain it.

  “It’s not a trip—”

  “It was Trotsky before. He still has the Trotskyite beard,” Chuck said. Roger noticed that Bernard did put a self-conscious hand to his beard at that. “This is,” Chuck said, hiking a thumb toward the dispersing class, “Communist Party-approved tai chi.” Chuck said it like it was two words, like an American.

  “Oh, is that why you’re doing it too?” Roger said, an edge in his voice.

  “Nah, I’m just trying to make a little time with Leslie.”

  “I have an interest too...” the third guy said. “Hello.” He offered Roger a hand, it was clammy, like old sweat. “I’m sorry, I don’t know if we ever really got to talk. Croshaw.”

  “It’s his last name,” Bernard said. “An affectation. Bev Croshaw.”

  “Well, uh, nice to meet you officially, Bev,” Roger said. The scene was strange here, heavy. Did any of these guys have anything in common other than that stupid TV show, and failed love lives? Roger made his excuses, and left. For a moment he thought to tail the teacher, ask to do a little push-hands, but decided against it. Then Roger realized that he was being tailed himself. He was ready to turn on his heel and palm-strike Bernard right in the nose, but it was actually Bev.

  “Roger, please...” Bev said. He was such an ordinary-looking guy, this Bev. His picture could have been in a brochure for the college. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “You apologize a lot,” Roger said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry...uh, I mean, I am from the Midwest, you know.”

  “Okay,” Roger said.

  “I took that tai chi class today because it seemed like something I once saw in a book!” Bev blurted out suddenly. “An old book, not something one can buy in a store—an ancient text. Well, it’s not a text, really, but more of a collection. Like the Bible, it’s an anthology of myths and correspondence, and pseudo-histories, and even poems and—” Roger started stepping backward, so Bev stopped and apologized again. “I’m sorry, it’s just...you know more about this than anyone else, probably.” Bev took a breath. “Not because you’re Chinese or anything; I mean, you seem very interested in martial arts.”

  “Let’s start over,” Roger said. Nothing was worse than hearing some “tuned in” white guy talk about how Roger being Chinese was utterly unimportant. “What’s your major?”

  “Classical languages,” Bev said. “Western languages.”

  “Econ.” Bev had nothing to say to that. He didn’t even nod. “Well, I guess I can take a look. Maybe show it to shi—my teacher.”

  “Well, come on then!” Bev said. He nearly grabbed Roger’s hand.

  “Now?”

  “Yes!”

  Roger blew off a class to go through microfiche with Bev, who whispered excitedly the whole time about the “mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred, who supposedly wrote, or found, or compiled the book—the Book of the Names of the Dead, which sounded spooky enough to be interesting.

  “Abdul Alhazred doesn’t even make sense as a name,” Bev said, without explaining what he meant. The original language of the text was lost, but there were a number of diagrams that Roger admitted did look familiar. A man in a bow-legged stance, tentacles spiraling along his limbs and across his waist. There was something like that in Chen Xin’s manual—a depiction of chan si jin, coiling power. Dragon power, after a fashion. Another image of a spiral, black and white interlaced—like the taijitu symbol Roger had been so annoyed at finding tacked up on storefront windows, on crazy hippie pamphlets next to crosses and stars of David—but exploded and swirling ever outward.

  “Roger, do you know of the theory of Alexander? He conquered the world, and his troops brought with them their martial tactics—boxing, and wrestling, and pankration. That’s an all-in no-holds-barred martial art. The ancient Greeks believed in pneuma, or breath—”

  Roger snorted. “Who doesn’t believe in breathing?”

  “Do you really want to know?” Bev asked. He sounded serious.

  “What!” Roger slapped his own hand over his mouth. It hardly mattered though; the library was basically a hang-out for students sleeping off the previous night’s adventures until finals. “What, just go on.”

  “Breath. L
ike chi, which is Chinese, yes. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to tell you about your cultural beliefs—” Roger just stared. “Anyway, it’s the same concept. An energy, gathered from the entire universe and stored within ourselves, to fuel acts of both creation and destruction.” Bev continued. “Alexander made it as far as India, the birthplace of Buddhism. And from India came Bodhidharma, who then traveled to China and transmitted Chan to the people who would later become Shaolin monks. And he brought with him from India the art of kung-fu.”

  “Where did you get all this?” Roger said. “A secret tome out of the back of a comic? ‘Forbidden Oriental Fighting Arts’ for three ninety-eight and a thirty-day money-back guarantee?”

  “You mean it’s not true?”

  Roger shrugged. “Maybe? There are lots of stories about lots of things. Maybe it’s all true, or none of it is, or some little grain of it is.” Roger wasn’t going to give this kid anything. Let him show up before dawn to practice six days a week for three years before hearing any of the secrets of gongfu.

  “Well, it explains these pictures, doesn’t it? In the Necronomicon. From Greece, through India, perhaps then to China, then back to Northern Africa—Arabia, essentially—and then the West.”

  “But this,” Roger said, tapping the microfiche screen with a fingernail, “isn’t Shaolin. Or anyway, it’s a lot closer to taiji than Shaolin, and taiji is Taoist, not Buddhist. But sure, Wudang Mountain isn’t far from Shaolin, and in China everyone’s a Buddhist and a Taoist and a Confucianist and a Legalist and a Communist and runs a small business on the side...well, until Bernard’s new best friend Chairman Mao gets wind of it.”

  “I’m sorry, but what do you mean?” Bev asked. His enthusiasm soured in a moment—enflamed yang receding into yin with a single turn of the head.

  “Something my teacher told me: people have four limbs, one trunk, and one head. Fighting always looks the same at a high level because we all bring the same tools, and the same weaknesses to a fight. There’s no trickery, no secrets, just practice. ‘No hit, no teach’ he says. And then he hits me.” Roger patted the top of the machine. “But this is cool though. Looks kind of Chinese to me, but I’m no expert.” Roger felt just a bit malicious, so added: “I’m just the only Chinese guy you know, except for Bruce Lee.”