Urban Temples of Cthulhu - Modern Mythos Anthology

by Khurt Khave

  “I'd still like to see inside, introduce myself and let your reverend see my face so he knows who to call if any of the locals give any trouble. I promise that I won't be too long at all,” Christian replied, sidling inside before she could fully shut the door. “May I ask your name? What do you do around here?”

  Sighing, the woman replied, “My name is Janice Wellsworth, and I am one of the priestesses that attend to Reverend Goslik. I suppose I can show you to the reverend, but please be quick.”

  The main foyer was shrouded in darkness, with only a few scattered candles providing meager light. The candles were laid about with no apparent rhyme or reason. Christian squinted to pick out details along the walls; there were definitely mosaics of some sort but he could not make them out. Following Janice, he entered the main hall. Rows of pews were arrayed in a circle about a central altar, though the altar itself was covered by a giant black cloth. Evenly spaced along the outer edge of the main room were more columns with those strange symbols.

  “What's under the cover?”

  “It is forbidden to gaze upon the altar until the Reverend properly blesses the Temple.”

  “An officer of the law goes where he pleases. You wouldn't be hiding something illegal under there, would you?”

  “Of course not officer!”

  Making his way down the aisle, Christian called back, “Then you'll have no worry if I take a quick glance under.”

  As he reached the steps of the altar, Christian again heard the faint buzzing he heard when he waited outside the door to the temple. Shaking his head, he reached for the corner of the cloth to lift it up.

  “Stop right now!” Janice called out, running down the aisle towards him.

  As he looked around to angrily retort, Christian felt a sting on his arm and jerked back with a gasp. The pain was like liquid fire being poured into his veins; he had never felt anything like it before. Another fly landed on his leg, crawling up under his pants leg and biting again.

  He saw Janice sneering down at him, and saw her reach into her robe to take something out. Christian cried out as he was bitten once more, and then the pain overtook him, and everything went black.

  He awoke an uncertain amount of time later, finding that his hands and feet were bound. Janice loomed over him and tutted like a disappointed mother.

  “I told you it was a bad time to come to the temple. But, I have seen the folly of my ways. It may have been a bad time for you, but it will be a boon to us.”

  “What is the meaning of this, lady? The entire police department will descend on you like an avalanche when they find out that you have restrained me here. Is this a sick joke?”

  A deep, male voice slithered forth from behind Christian, though he could not turn to see its owner. “It is no joke, Officer. But what you do not know is that we are offering you a place in history. You will be the first outsider to witness our Matriarch's Ceremony of Welcoming. In fact, you will be the guest of honor.”

  “Funny that the guest of honor is bound like a common prisoner.”

  Even without seeing him, Christian could hear the smirk in his captor's voice, “I am sure you know all too well the plight of the common prisoner, Officer. The bindings are there because you may not understand the true glory of what you see. Janice, please place our guest in the position of honor.”

  “With pleasure, esteemed Reverend.” Janice snapped her fingers and two hooded acolytes emerged on either side of Christian, pulling him up by his arms. A cloth gag was shoved rather forcefully into his mouth and the acolytes dragged him into the main hall.

  Every row was already filled, dozens of worshipers identically dressed in crimson robes, their hoods drawn low. Christian could make out none of their faces; he wondered which of the denizens of Skid Row were arrayed in the seats around him. Each person held a candle, which they raised aloft upon Christian being unceremoniously dumped into a crudely-carved circle. Through some trick of the light, the swirling symbols on the columns encircling the chamber began to glow an eerie green color, and a low hum, more felt than heard, began to echo throughout the temple. As the hum rose in volume, first one, then thousands of insects began to boil forth from the altar, up from the pews and down the columns. Christian had never seen so many in one place, but each and every one of the worshipers was totally unfazed, even as the insects worked their way up and over their robes. Christian saw the stinging flies that had felled him earlier orbiting Janice, whose visage was one of ecstasy as the multitude of vermin embraced her. Christian resisted the urge to vomit, as the gag would have made the experience even more unpleasant.

  Bedecked in white robes, a sole figure strode confidently to the altar. It could only be the Reverend. Under his hood he wore a golden mask in the shape of a wasp's face, grotesquely oversized eyes and antenna poking forth out of his hood. He came to a stop about three feet from the altar, and Christian saw centipedes crawling around both of his hands, expertly weaving through his fingers. The Reverend stood there, arms outstretched as more and more insects swarmed about him and his followers. It felt like an eternity to Christian as he watched this bizarre spectacle unfold; was there any end to the horde of pests crawling forth? Soon they would engulf the whole temple. The sounds of their activity was maddening, a constant drone that echoed across the marble. Christian thought he would go mad from the sound.

  Reverend Goslik finally spoke, his deep baritone reverberating throughout the temple, climbing above the hum of the insects. “O honored mother, Matriarch of the Swarm, bless this temple with your presence, that we might consecrate this ground and claim this land for you. Most fertile Zstylzhemghi, Bride of All Insects, mother of the mighty Tsathoggua, come that we may offer unto you this fetid land so that your children may multiply and overtake the heretical humans that fester like a boil on your rightful lands. Accept the sacrifice of this unbeliever and lay your eggs in his flesh.”

  With that, two acolytes drew back the cloth covering the altar and unveiled a most grotesque sight. A statue of what must have been Zstylzhemghi, a huge fly-like monstrosity with a single massive eye for a head and far too many limbs stooped atop an altar of obsidian. As Christian looked on in confusion and horror, the droning increased in volume, drowning out all sounds of the outside world and even the chanting of the followers. The statue began to shimmer, dark light coruscating down through openings in the ceiling as the followers of the Temple of the Matriarch fell to their knees in supplication.

  The droning changed in pitch, becoming much deeper, and cracks in the statue began to form. As Christian looked in disbelief, the outer layer of the statue sloughed away, falling off in flecks, and what emerged was even more nightmarish than the statue portrayed. Zstylzhemghi emerged in all her dread magnificence, an enormous fly-like creature who looked upon her followers with malign intelligence. Larger than a horse, she was far, far more hideous than even the bizarre statue she emerged from had led Christian to believe. Black ichor dripped from her single eye and a viscous white ooze seeped from her chitinous hide. Raising up as one, her followers drew back the hoods of their cloaks and Christian's mind wailed at the very wrongness of what he saw. For the vast majority of the worshipers were not wholly human, but some unholy cross between human and insect. Some were barely noticeable in their hybridization, others had human faces with multifaceted eyes, others had heads that were wholly inhuman. Roaches, wasps, flies; all were represented and bowed before their God.

  Bound to the floor with his rope, Christian was helpless as Zstylzhemghi made her way down the aisle towards him. Though bedecked with gossamer wings, she seemed to prefer crawling along on the ground towards him, perhaps in honor of some of her children. Under the monstrous eye was a barbed proboscis which began to extend as she neared her newest victim. For untold eons had Zstylzhemghi and her children plagued the world, first Gnophkehs and then the race of man. In that single, baleful eye, Christian saw centuries of hate. Man had long warred with insect-kind, but they faced an implacable foe; one
who always re-emerged no matter what chemicals mankind blasted across the landscape or what predators man enslaved for the express purpose of annihilating Zstylzhemghi's children.

  “Consume this sacrifice, oh glorious Mother, and let us take back what is rightfully ours!” With his final ejaculated command, Reverend Goslik tore off his mask, revealing a face not too dissimilar from his golden mask, save for a much more humanoid mouth. The light of hundreds of candles glittered off of his compound eyes as he watched his god make her way towards Officer Evans.

  The last thing Officer Evans ever saw was that barbed proboscis lowering towards his face, as the monstrous disciples of Zstylzhemghi looked on in unmistakable glee, their tiny kin crawling all over one another in an orgy of ecstasy.

  He was one of the lucky ones, for Zstylzhemghi was not gentle as she began her crusade to reclaim this world for her sons and daughters from the decadent race of men. Skid Row was a most fertile breeding ground for Zstylzhemghi and her children. The castaways of mankind, millions of tons of filth and thousands of poor, unwanted souls were ripe breeding grounds for the taking. Pestilence and plague swept through mankind, their epicenter a rundown part of the largest city on Earth wherein an ancient god could rebuild her empire from the rubbish of man.

  M.C. Bluhm has appeared in several anthologies of science fiction and sword and sorcery from Horrified Press and Dynatox Ministries. He spends most of his time contemplating the endless ice of his new home. He has an amazing wife and mischievous dog who keep him sane.

  Uncle Lovecraft: The Complete Oral History David Acord

  If you’ve attended a comic book or science fiction convention over the last twenty years, chances are you’ve run across a bootleg DVD (or, in the early days, VHS) of Uncle Lovecraft, one of the most elusive television programs in the history of the medium. Only grainy fragments of a single black-and-white episode survive, but that fact hasn’t stopped dealers from charging outrageous prices. Despite years of efforts by an army of obsessed H.P. Lovecraft fans, no additional footage has been unearthed. No one knows exactly when the show was filmed, who created it, or how it made its way onto the airwaves in the first place. Countless reporters, writers and bloggers have tried in vain to track down producers, directors and stars rumored to have been connected with the show in some way.

  At last count, more than three hundred websites are devoted to analyzing various Uncle Lovecraft-related conspiracy theories. The scant seconds of existing footage have been viewed on YouTube more than ten million times. Uncle Con, an annual Boston convention “Devoted to Uncovering the Mystery and Preserving the Legacy of Uncle Lovecraft,” draws more than three thousand attendees each year. In 2014, an online petition requesting that the White House “initiate a a formal investigation into the origins of Uncle Lovecraft, including but not limited to the possibility that the Smithsonian has several unaired episodes of the program hidden in its archives,” received more than 36,000 signatures.

  After twenty-plus years of cult status, the precise details of the phenomenon have become somewhat obscured, and the roles played by various people have been misrepresented or (more charitably) misunderstood. The following collection of interviews is intended to provide as accurate a retelling as possible of the true story of Uncle Lovecraft.

  “WE’RE TALKING FIFTY-EIGHT SECONDS HERE” SAM BURKETT, Bootleg Dealer and Collector:

  Me and the other dealers on the convention circuit used to joke that it’s the TV show that put our kids through college. Back in the pre-Internet days, we were the only game in town for the Uncle Lovecraft footage. I’d sell fifty or sixty VHS tapes a day at comic book conventions. It was ridiculous. If I was the only video dealer there, I could name my own price, pretty much. If there was a group of us working the same show, we’d get together beforehand and settle on a price range — we weren’t out to drive the other guy out of business or try and gouge anybody. Not too much, anyway.

  I remember I ran out one day, the last day at a little sci-fi con in Cincinnati, and this guy really wanted a copy. He wouldn’t take no for an answer, followed me out to my van afterwards. I had to call the cops. He was almost in tears. When I wasn’t at a show, I was holed up in my garage with my duplicating equipment, just churning out as many copies as I could. My brother’s a graphic designer and he came up with the box art. Later on, when DVD's came out, it got a little easier and you could make copies faster.

  STEVE PELTS, Editor in Chief, UncleLovecraft.com:

  It’s the London After Midnight of TV sitcoms. Everyone knows someone

  who knows someone who says they saw an episode on local TV late one night

  in a motel room in Boise, or they have an uncle who remembers watching it

  for real back in the 1950s, or they swear they had an Uncle Lovecraft lunchbox

  when they were in the second grade. But solid, reliable information about it is

  so elusive. I think that’s one reason why so many people are drawn to it, in a

  strange way. They’re just so, so intrigued. We live in an era where you can

  find out anything you want about any conceivable topic by typing a few words

  into a search engine. I mean, even the most obscure TV shows and movies,

  there’s still tons of information out there about them. But not Uncle Lovecraft.

  It’s like there’s this invisible force field around it. No matter how hard we try,

  we can’t punch our way through and get the information we want.

  It won’t budge. At this point, I’ve personified it in my mind. I see Uncle

  Lovecraft as, like, this incredibly beautiful girl at the bar, and she won’t pay

  attention to you or give you the time of day no matter what you do, no matter

  how many drinks you buy her, no matter how good-looking you are. You have

  to admire that kind of strength or power or whatever. I’ve come to have a, I

  guess you’d say a grudging sort of respect for this TV show that just drives me

  insane.

  RON KING, Fan:

  It’s an interesting thing when you break down the numbers. All we have to go on is a partial clip of the opening title sequence, and about half a minute of the very end of one episode, followed by a few frames of end credits. Add it all up, we’re talking fifty-eight seconds here. That’s what the entire, what would you call it, “cult” is built on: less than a minute of old, grainy black-and-white TV footage.

  SAM BURKETT:

  Every bootleg has the exact same amount of footage. Bootleggers would just buy a bootleg and then bootleg that. It all comes from the same source, there’s only one source for Uncle Lovecraft. Anyone who tells you they have a better copy or more footage, they’re lying. Back in the early eighties there was a guy in Kansas City, Jim Green — he’s been dead for years, died of cancer — he was a big Japanese monster movie fan. Godzilla this, Godzilla that. Really, really into it. He would even fly to Japan to buy toys and model kits. And he bought one of the early VCR's, the kind that weighed half a ton, just so he could record monster movies off the local UHF station. I believe it was Channel 41. So the summer of '83, they have this late-night monster movie fest all week long, and he sets the timer to record certain movies, because he can’t stay up all night, every night. I can’t remember what they were exactly, but they were rare, they didn’t pop up on TV all that often. Maybe some of the Mothra flicks. Anyway, he sets his timers to start recording a couple of minutes before the actual start times, just in case. We all used to do that back then. He also set them to stop recording a few minutes after the movies were supposed to end, in case they ran long. Again, standard operating procedure for TV nerds. So he records them and gets his rare Japanese monster movies and he’s very happy, the end. Only it’s not the end.

  DEFINITELY NOT HAZEL

  LEE HALESTON, Collector:

  I was part of a group Jim had put together called The Green Hand. It was a play on his last name, of course, but it was also
the name of a group that Richard Matheson and some other Twilight Zone-style writers had created back in the sixties. In addition to being a huge Japanophile, Jim loved The Twilight Zone. We were just a bunch of guys who dug sci-fi and fantasy and comic books, that sort of thing. I was really into adventure serials from the 1930s then, too. Anyway, we would trade tapes amongst ourselves, and Jim started circulating these monster movies he’d taped off of Channel 41. I popped one into the VCR one night, and at the beginning there was the tail end of another program, it was just wrapping up, he’d set the timer early. Some sort of blackand-white sitcom, but it was just so. . . strange. Like an early episode of Bewitched on LSD. I was really intrigued. Then the movie started. And I watched it for a few minutes, but then I rewound the tape and watched the sitcom thing again. And again and again! I mean, I was hooked. Totally bewildered, but hooked like a largemouth bass, man.

  I went back to Jim, I said, ‘What the hell was that?’ and he didn’t know, he’d fast-forwarded past it. He said, ‘Wasn’t it the end of a Hazel rerun or something?’ And I said, ‘That definitely was not Hazel.’ And then he gives me another tape. He said there was another snippet of something weird at the end of it. So I go home, I fast-forward to the end, and sure enough, he’d set the timer to record a few minutes after the movie just in case, and at the very, very, very end, it catches the opening credits of the next show — Uncle Lovecraft. And I knew right away it was the same show. And I just sat down and had the greatest out-of-body experience of my pathetic little life, right!

  TIM BALES, Collector:

  I kind of have this claim to fame. I was in The Green Hand with Jim

  and Lee and a bunch of other guys. This was before I got married. So, I’m

  almost positive it was 1983, and one day Lee comes over to my house with a

  couple of VCR tapes and he’s just so excited. He shows me the Uncle Lovecraft stuff. At the time, I was an assistant editor at one of the Kansas City TV stations. I would edit the film that came in from the news crews, get it ready for the nightly broadcasts. So I had access to all of the video equipment at the station. And Lee asked me if I could edit together these two bits of Lovecraft footage, put the opening credits first, then the fragment of the ending of the other episode. Just splice them together on a tape for him. I said, ‘That’s only gonna be like a minute long.’ He said, ‘I don’t care, I just want it!’ So I did it. Took me like five minutes at the station, I did it on my lunch break when no one else was there. I gave it to Lee. And that was the beginning, I guess, of this whole thing, because it just spread like wildfire after that, everybody and his brother bootlegging it. People have made so much money off of it. I missed my calling, I should have been a video bootlegger!