Return of the Old Ones: Apocalyptic Lovecraftian Horror

by Tim Curran

  The client puffs up. “Get out of my fucking house––”

  Thrush goes over to sit on the arm of the loveseat. “This woman was marked from birth to bear the offspring of an Outer God whose name alone would strike you dead if you heard it. Her womb was consecrated with blood sacrifices to host the new gods who would eat the sun and bring the Night of All Days. To bring forth an army, David!”

  “Dennis …”

  “Now … Can you imagine how it must feel to live for such an exalted destiny, and to have a gift like she has, and then to have to squander it on the likes of a peckerwood fuckup like yourself for goddamned rent money?”

  Ursula’s sobbing ratchets up to a gobbling, whinnying sound almost like a lumberjack’s saw being played with a bow. A monkey like a stick insect scuttles out from between her quivering breasts to feed on her tears. The smell of her grief makes Thrush’s knuckles tear the fabric off the threadbare loveseat.

  Burgundy, acne-pitted cheeks, sweat pooling on the insides of his glasses, the client sits down on the swaybacked recliner. “I’m sorry. I … never thought of it like that.”

  “Now, we don’t care what you want one for. If it’s for a slave, or a proxy to lift a curse, or just for the organs, or what. But you gotta lie with her to make it work. It’s not just your seed. It needs your sweat and your blood and the breath and ecstasy of the act itself. It’s no less a ritual, no less a magical act, than making a real baby.”

  He squirms at that. “I just … I wasn’t ready.…”

  Thrush crosses the room and faces the guy down. Draws his knife so it flashes in the client’s eyes. “You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to like her. You don’t even have to go through with it. Lord knows we all have better things to do. But you don’t get to make her feel bad. She’s the consort of a fucking deity.”

  Somewhere in there, Ursula’s blubbering turned to giggling. Rolling off the couch, cradling the cantilevered hammock of her bra. Her knees pop like gunshots under a pillow. “Take the fucking keys, Tobin.”

  “Pick you up at two.” He dumps her purse out on the glass-topped coffee table and swipes the keys and her fertility fetish and a damp, sticky twenty.

  “Who is this asshole, your husband?” Rediscovering some trace elements of testosterone, good deal.

  Thrush is out the door and slams it, but the wadded-up throw rug fouls him, hanging open so the sound of her forced laughter follows him all the way down to the car.

  The car is full of monkeys.

  The old books call them homunculi. Thrush can’t read Latin, but alchemists made them for all kinds of things. Ursula can make them. Her church got blown up by a Xian militia and the Million Favored ones never manifested to make god-babies with her, but the first time they did it, she got sick and in a couple hours, she made a little manikin that looked just like Tobin Thrush. It had Tobin’s eyes, anyhow, but no mouth to speak of. Thrush got scared and stepped on it. It happens every time they fuck, and sometimes, when she’s angry or sick, she hatches a litter with no heads, hands at both ends, or just long, eyeless serpents. Couple times she hatched something that looked like a chicken, but it sure didn’t taste like it.

  She got real big after that, and unfit for any other work. Some would pay a couple thousand for her services, and what happened after that was nobody’s business.

  “What about when They come?” he asked, that first time, when they were teens in a refugee camp. She’d laughed at that, and it wasn’t her fake laugh. He asked every few years, and she never stopped laughing at him.

  Eight of them creep out from under the backseat once he gets the old Celica moving. He throws a crushed tin can at them, fights them for control of the stereo as he drives.

  Puffing a crooked blunt of Plutonian Gold, Thrush plays 52 Pickup in his head.

  The AM station is local, but weird sounds crowd the newsreader out of the frequency: the mating cries of the unborn, the death throes of mirror universes. The stories are passed from station to station, sifted out from the gibbering cosmic asylum of the shortwave bands.

  Somewhere out west, they’re feeding the last self-professed Xians to the sea. Somewhere down in Mexico, the priests cut the hearts out of a hundred men every day to keep the world turning.

  He passes the old Trinity Baptist, now mint-green and rebranded the 1st Ophite Church of Christ & Bible Museum. The sign out front promises tonight’s sermon, HOW EVE DECEIVED THE SERPENT––GNOSTIC GOSPEL REVEALED. A naked man hangs by his ankles from a gibbet over the rock-garden frontage, blackened and swollen to bursting from thousands of rattlesnake bites.

  In Egypt, some prophet calling himself Mahdi Nephren Ka has declared victory in his war on Islam, and now orders his Fedayeen armies to destroy the rival prophet bearing his name, who broadcasts from the glowing ruins of Jerusalem.

  He slows down on Kansas to watch the cheerleaders drilling on the football field. Two cops are burning a truckload of unclean chickens in their cages out front of the flea market in the old central-library ruins. The occult symbols on their hoods wink in the sun. Thrush feels their eyes on him and slows, nodding like he knows them, like they have faces. The one with the flamethrower makes a gesture at him that makes his heart pound faster and everything he was ever ashamed of comes gushing out of his skull, and he waits for the fire to splash across the side of the crippled Toyota, but he crawls past them and they just keep incinerating chickens that shriek Tekeli-Li! as they burn.

  Somewhere in China, there’s a city getting ready for the first visit of the Lama of Leng. In accordance with his edicts, nearly fifteen million people put their own eyes out so as not to see his veiled form.

  In Norman, it’s not so bad. Books are illegal, writing and recordings of any kind are anathema, because nothing written comes out true; every recording is corrupt, a trap, or a door. So they stopped teaching kids how to read and write, but nobody around here misses it. TV is a different story, but you can’t ever trust them. Thrush’s friend Forkboy says it’s because there’re embryonic Outer Gods swimming in the sun, and the sunspot activity transmits their dreams. Whatever the hell it is, nobody has seen one for years.

  It’s not illegal to be famous, but with what you can do with just a name nowadays, it’s not a good idea. The cops, nearly all public servants, wear masks, hoods, veils. They still have elections, like any democracy. Tomorrow, the town will choose their new mayor from between two anonymous rich gentlemen in identical hooded ceremonial robes. Regular folks are mostly real polite because they’re scared shitless of each other, because nobody’s got anything to lose. Strangers die every day, and there still seems to be no shortage of people.

  A Jeep overstuffed with neighborhood militia cuts him off on the right and runs through the intersection, clipping a pedestrian who caroms off the hood of the Celica, which knocks them down and they don’t get up, but the cop waves at him like a ref saying play on.

  Some people got everything they prayed for.

  While he drives, he opens the little paper bag, crisp brown bag like somebody’s lunch is in there. He pulls out the sandwich bag and opens it, digs out the clump of pale blond hair. A lock of hair would be prettier, but he ordered the client to clean out all her brushes. When it’s tugged out, the roots come out, and the roots contain DNA.

  Absently listening to the radio, he wads the hair into his mouth and lets it marinate on his tongue.

  In the South Pacific, there’s an island that wasn’t there before the waves smashed the west coast. It’s covered in clouds and fog, and the one or two satellites still working have never seen it clear, but there are sixteen thousand ships, boats and rafts tied together in a junk-continent around the island, waiting. No one has set foot on the island and come back since it surfaced, and bloody internecine wars sweep the fleet whenever someone tries to mount another expedition to the new holy land. Seven years, and nothing has come out of the fog.

  A few blocks further down, he sees what he’s looking for.

  Thrus
h is half Toxodo. American Indian tribe local to Oklahoma, they believed they emerged from a hole in the ground on the First Day, forsaking the ruins of a subterranean empire more advanced than modern white society today. Massacred by Cherokee and Choctaw forced into Oklahoma by Andrew Jackson, the Toxodo’s numbers dropped into the double digits before they were officially denied protected status by the U.S. government. Their genes had more in common with Olmecs than with Indians, though later sequencing efforts pegged them as closest to a tribe of Greenland Eskimos that went extinct shortly after the first contact with European explorers, but whose DNA survived in artifacts and apparel Vikings made of their skin and hair.

  Tobin’s mother took him out to California and they drifted up and down the coast until she found someone who took her in and kicked him out. He was a debt collector and weed dealer in Buttonwillow when the Big One leveled California and the whole Imperial Valley became an inland sea again. Lost in the mass migration of refugees fleeing the demolished coastline and the unbelievable horrors that emerged from the vengeful sea, Tobin heard white people gibbering sounds exactly like the little fragments of the Toxodo tongue his mother taught him, just before they died of hemorrhagic fever. He would’ve joined one or another of the bizarre cargo cult sects that sprang up in the camps, had he not found Ursula. Together, they made their way back to Oklahoma, because he heard about the Sink.

  For all Tobin Thrush knows, he is the last of the Toxodo. The blood of the shamans of the Shapeless Sleeper runs in his veins, the rhythm of the Backward Path pounds in his ears, the legacy of K’n-Yan is his birthright.

  All of which means he knows where to score drugs.

  Horace “Forkboy” Labrador comes out from under the awning of Hideaway Pizza and jumps in his car. They drive around the corner to a burnt-out duplex on Asp, across the street from the curtain wall of the college.

  Between his mules out of Mexico and Texas and the college labs, Labrador can get most anything––hydroponic weed, DMT, ayahuasca, mushrooms, peyote, amphetamines, even coffin salts and Snakeladder, if you’re that far gone.

  Labrador is one of a handful of people who can get in and out of the old OU campus, now a walled forbidden city run by a mob of mad grad-student monks. Labrador says they kept all the dangerous books after the big burns, and they’re doing things behind the walls that would get them all burned at the stake themselves, if anyone found out.

  He shakes his head at the photo as he fires up a joint and passes to Tobin Thrush. “Nobody’s into young stuff in there. Necromancy is a waste of time if your dead don’t know anything. ’T’aint the meat, it’s the humanity,’ as they say.…” Then he catches the look on his customer’s face. “What?”

  “I’m not saying eating people is bad,” says Thrush, “it’s just stupid. Wasn’t mad cow from cannibals eating brains in New Guinea or some shit?”

  “That’s what they want you to believe, man! Don’t buy their bullshit!” Forkboy bogarts the hotboxed joint, using it like a leash on Thrush’s rambling attention. “Behind every taboo, like, there’s a secret they don’t want you to know. That’s why the big scare campaign around LSD and weed, like, it was because they alter your perceptions so you see through their bullshit, and you slip right through their controlling fingers. Same exact thing with cannibalism.”

  He doesn’t eat the whole body, he explains. The med students render most of the corpses they get into salts when they’re done dissecting them. Not everybody’s into salts; it’s a dangerous trip because when you snort it, you trip on the holographic memories stored in their organic matter. Forkboy just eats the brains. Photographs his teeth and takes careful skull measurements daily to chart his devolution into a ghoul.

  Thrush finally gets the joint back and hits it hard, trying to remember what he wanted to ask about. “I can see it, man,” he chokes out amid a storm of smoke. “It’s totally happening, dog.”

  “Fuck off, Toby. Whether or not, man, next semester, I’m going down there. You should go with me, dude. Fuck, your people came from down there, right?”

  Thrush flicks the roach at Labrador. “I’m from right here, asshole.”

  “Gotta be somewhere safe; there ain’t gonna be no shelter on the surface, soon.…”

  Thrush shakes his head. “I hear Mexico’s fucking nice now, if you get across the desert.”

  “Must be; they’ll shoot your ass, you try to cross the river.”

  “It ain’t gonna change.”

  “Fuck, man. Everything changed. I was a fucking Econ major when the Thunderbird Sink opened up.… But like … sure, maybe the Sink is just a fucking hole. Maybe it’s just we fracked so much shit into the ground that it broke. Maybe we dumped so much shit in the ocean that it just threw up. Like … maybe Cthulhu isn’t a real thing, like a shark or Godzilla, maybe he’s just a name for all the shit we don’t understand.…”

  “They’re just another crutch. If a giant foot came down out of the sky to crush us like bugs, most folks around here would be dancing in the street and lining up to kiss that foot.”

  “Maybe it’s stinky thinking like that that’s keeping them away.…”

  He drives aimlessly for another hour, stops at a couple places, runs down a couple pimps on the street. Norman isn’t such a big town. Word gets around about anything, even something as ordinary as a kidnaping. The Esoteric Order of Dagon in the old Rotarian Hall officially rejected human sacrifice to pick up a broader flock, but were known to drown a drifter or ten in the river on the holy days. The pyramid weirdoes in their shantytown, where they almost built a mosque back in the day, they like to set offerings on fire and make them dance to those crazy, skirling flutes. Thrush has seen them dance till there’s nothing left but ashes and smoke. But their god likes young men and boys. Out on the reservations, they go for the old gods in a big way, but they’d never come into town and take a white girl out of her house. Even now, such a thing just isn’t done. The Mexicans, steadfast suckers for Catholicism and Santeria, still try to get by on red wine and chicken blood.

  He ends up cruising the gated enclaves along Oak Tree, near the golf course. A woman on horseback with an English saddle asks him if he isn’t lost. He mumbles in Spanish until she directs him to the landscaping depot. His infallible senses have led him back to the family’s house. He sees the Volvo tucked in the open garage beside a Hummer and a Lexus SUV. Two trucks are parked on the driveway, one from a catering place, and the other from a party rentals place.

  He slows down as he passes, puts on a toque from the floor. It wouldn’t help to get spotted outside the one place where Megan isn’t. Davenport would be stupid not to assume Thrush was casing the place, himself, and Oak Creek security, unlike the cops, excels at their job.

  Nice place, but far from impregnable, as was proven last night. People come in and out all the time, invisible to the residents, so long as they work. Just like someone must’ve come in to paint the street numbers on the curbs, because it sure doesn’t look right here, like curb feelers on a Ferrari––

  He’s almost to the corner when it registers. He hits the brakes and turns around, clips a mailbox, and stops out front of the Davenports.

  A golf cart screeches to a halt in front of him and two rent-a-cops in ragged flak jackets with badges painted on jump out.

  “Get out the car!” one screams at him over and over while his partner cracks the Celica’s windshield with his truncheon.

  It’s a time-honored suburban grift. Spray all the curbs, then guilt the money out of the rubes. A perennial favorite of cults, churches, and bogus charities.

  They’re not allowed to carry guns around the plantation, but sure to drag him off to the fairway to be murdered by a driving-range firing squad, if he gets out.

  As quick as he can, which is still infuriating, sub-glacial, Thrush climbs out of the Celica. Billy Club thumps him about the head and shoulders while his partner hauls out the pepper spray and douses him like a dog in flea dip.

  It’s starting to g
et on Thrush’s nerves. In a few minutes, it’s gonna start hurting. “You boys are pretty tough now. Where were you last night when the Davenport girl got snatched?”

  The mercenaries look at each other and laugh. Pepper Spray lets him have another faceful. His vision foams over. Billy Club works the body. Somewhere, another golf cart pulls up. “Goddamn it, Toby, whyn’t you get the fuck out of here when you had a chance?”

  Tobin Thrush wipes the foam out of his eyes and spits. “Can’t you see I’m interviewing for a job?”

  The fresh paint numbers are black on mint green.

  He shivers, shaking off sweat, suddenly frigid, even though Pepper Spray is tasering him now.

  “Cut it out,” Thrush yanks the taser ramrod off his feet by the wires, facefirst into Thrush’s fist like a punch-balloon. Billy Club gets tangled with his friend and Thrush doesn’t even have to push them over.

  “Fuck off out of here and don’t come back. Nobody’s selling what you’re buying.”

  Makes as much sense as anything else today. Thrush stumbles to the Celica and falls behind the wheel.

  The last people in the world he feels like dealing with. Still the nastiest, blood-simple cult on the block.

  Xians.

  Just after sunset, he pulls into the church parking lot, among a dozen other junkers. The mint-green paint is so bright it almost glows. All the windows are boarded over; there’s no seeing inside. A fiery preacher’s sermon blares out the open door, hot and flat from blown-out speakers, loud even over the growl of their generator.

  Thrush drops a piece of goat cheese in the bowling bag in the passenger footwell, then stubs out his joint and pops his knuckles, his neck, his shoulders out of and into their sockets, limbering up. These jobs are a hassle enough without getting physical.