The Book of Cthulhu

by Neil Gaiman

  Then he rolled around to his desk, and consulted the calendar from Nunas Billy’s Hardware Circus. There was a full moon in three days’ time.

  ∇

  It was Saturday, and the full moon was just heaving itself up from the eastern horizon, like a pink pearl. Blue dusk lay on Nunas Beach. The tide was far out; salt mist flowed inland, white vapor at ankle level. Mr. Bright sat inside the darkened Chowder Palace, and watched, and hated, as people lined up on the sidewalk outside Calamari Curls.

  Calamari Curls was having Talent Nite. The Early Bird specials were served, and senior diners went shuffling back to their singlewides, eager to leave before the Goddamned rock and roll started. Young families with toddlers dined and hurried back to their motels, unwilling to expose little ears to amplified sound.

  Five pimply boys set up their sound equipment on the dais in the corner. They were the sons of tractor salesmen and propane magnates; let their names be forgotten. The front man tossed his hair back from his eyes, looked around at the tables crowded with chattering diners, and said in all adolescent sullenness:

  “Hi. We’re the Maggots, and we’re here to shake you up a little.”

  His bassman leaped out and played the opening of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” with painful slowness, the drummer boy joined in clunk-clunk-clunk, and the front man leaned forward to the mike and in a hoarse scream told the audience about his woes. The audience continued biting the tails off shrimp, sucking down frozen strawberry margaritas and picking at Kona Coffee California Cheesecake.

  When the music ended, they applauded politely. The front man looked as though he’d like to kill them all. He wiped sweat from his brow, had a gulp of water.

  Betty Step-in-Time wheeled his bicycle up to the door.

  “We’re going to do another classic,” said the front man. “Okay?”

  Ka-chunk! went the drums. The keyboardist and the lead guitarist started very nearly in sync: Da da da. Dada. DA DA DA. Dada.

  “Oh Lou-ah Lou-ah-eh, ohhhh baby nagatcha go waygadda go!” shouted the front man.

  Betty Step-in-Time dismounted. Just outside the restaurant’s threshold, he began to dance. It began in time with the music, a modest little kickstep. A few diners looked, pointed and laughed.

  “Nah nah nah nah asaya Lou-ah Lou-ah eh, whooa babeh saya whaygachago!”

  Betty’s kickstep increased its arc, to something approaching can-can immodesty. He threw his arms up as he kicked, rolling his head, closing his eyes in abandon. A diner sitting near the door fished around in pockets for a dollar bill, but saw no hat in which to put it.

  “Ah-nye, ah-dah, ah ron withchoo, ah dinkabobsa gonstalee!” cried the front man. Betty began to undulate, and it seemed a tremor ran through the floor of the building. A tableful of German tourists jumped to their feet, alarmed, but their native companion didn’t even stop eating.

  “Just an aftershock,” he said calmly. “No big deal.”

  “Ah rag saga leely, badoom badoom, wha wah badoo, jaga babee!”

  Betty began to dance what looked like the Swim, but so fast his arms and legs blurred the air. The lights dimmed, took on a greenish cast.

  “Who’s playing with the damn rheostat?” the manager wanted to know.

  “Ayah ha Lou-ah Lou-ah eh, whoa ba-bah shongo waygatchago!”

  Sweat began to pour from Betty’s face and limbs, as his body began to churn in a manner that evoked ancient bacchanals, feverish and suggestive. The green quality of the light intensified. Several diners looked down at their plates of clam strips or chimichangas and stopped eating, suddenly nauseous.

  “Ya ya ya ya ah-sha-da Lou-ah Lou-ah he, Nyarlathotep bay-bah weygago!” sang the front man, and he was sweating too, and—so it seemed—dwindling under the green light, and the carefully torn edges of his black raiment began to fray into rags, patterned with shining mold.

  Betty’s hips gyrated, his little sailor hat flew off, and every curl on his head was dripping with St. Elmo’s fire. Several diners vomited where they sat. Others rose in a half-crouch, desperate to find the lavatory doors marked Beach Bums and Beach Bunnies. Half of them collapsed before they made it. They slipped, stumbled and fell in the pools of seawater that were condensing out of the air, running down the walls.

  “Ah Lou-ah Lou-ah eh, ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!” wailed the white-eyed thing the front man had become, and his band raised reed flutes to their gills and piped a melody to make human ears bleed, and the mortal diners rose and fought to get out the windows, for Betty was flinging handfuls of seaweed in toward them, and black incense.

  The pink and turquoise linoleum tiles by the bandstand popped upward, scattered like hellish confetti, as a green-glowing gas of all corruption hissed forth, lighting in blue flames when it met the air, followed by a gush of black water from the forgotten pool below. The first of the black tentacles probed up through the widening crack in the floor.

  Betty sprang backward, grabbed up his sailor hat, leaped on his pink bicycle and pedaled away as fast as he could go, vanishing down the misty darkness of Alder Street.

  The neon olive had become an eye, swiveling uncertainly but with malevolence, in a narrow scarlet face.

  Watching from across the street, Mr. Bright laughed until the tears poured from his eyes, and slapped the arms of his wheelchair. He raised his bourbon bottle in salute as Calamari Curls began its warping, strobing, moist descent through the dimensions.

  ∇

  He was opening a new bottle by the time gray dawn came, as the last of the fire engines and ambulances pulled away. Tom Avila stood in the middle of the street, in gloomy conference with the pastor of St. Mark’s, the priest from Mission San Emidio, and even the rabbi from Temple Beth-El, who had driven in his pajamas all the way over from Hooper City.

  Holy water, prayer and police tape had done all they could do; the glowing green miasma was dissipating at last, and the walls and windows of Calamari Curls had begun to appear again in ghostly outline. Even now, however, it was obvious that their proper geometry could never be restored.

  Tom shook hands with the gentlemen of God and they departed to their respective cars. He stood alone in the street a while, regarding the mess; then he noticed Mr. Bright, who waved cheerfully from behind his window. Tom’s eyes narrowed. He came stalking over. Mr. Bright let him in.

  “You didn’t have anything to do with this, did you, Peg?” the mayor demanded.

  “Me? How the hell could I of? I just been sitting here watching the show,” said Mr. Bright. “I ain’t going to say I didn’t enjoy it, neither. Guess nobody’s going to raise no rents around here for a while!”

  “God damn it, Peg! Now we’ve got us another vortex into a lost dimension, smack in the middle of town this time!” said the mayor in exasperation. “What are we going to do?”

  “Beats me,” said Mr. Bright, grinning as he offered him the bourbon bottle.

  ∇

  But the present became the past, as it will, and people never forget so easily as when they want to forget. The wreck of Calamari Curls became invisible, as passers-by tuned it out of their consciousness. The green olive blinked no more.

  Mr. Bright found that the black things that mewled and gibbered around the garbage cans at night could be easily dispatched with a cast-iron skillet well aimed. His customers came back, hesitant and shamefaced. He was content.

  And mellowing in his world view too; for he no longer scowled nor spat in the direction of Betty Step-in-Time when he passed him on the pier, but nodded affably, and once was even heard to remark that it took all kinds of folks to make a world, and you really shouldn’t judge folks without you get to know them.

  ∇

  Jihad over Innsmouth

  Edward Morris

  A cold, black, liquescent fear laps at the edges of my heart as I approach the first gate in the long Caliph’s Maze of Airport Security.

  Some darker force is trying to sway me unobtrusively away, to make
me renege my retainer’s oath, cut my losses and run headlong to South America with the dwindling remains of my bank account.

  Should I die on my quest, a first-class seat in Paradise awaits me. In my time, I have lived through every hell Shaitan could possibly devise right here on Earth, moving behind newspaper headlines which even Al-Jazeera fears to run. Enquiring minds want to know, but some truths are better left to the darkness at the center of the universe, to be drowned out by the skirlings of the blind piper and his retinue of idiot flute-players.

  But the oath I took goes deeper than the contract I signed with the old black man in Oakland last week. It is one our folk call fatwa, and is not to be broken. Come flood or djinn or plague of insects, I will board this plane.

  I carry no arms upon my person. I’m simply afraid of Americans.

  This is a very hot land for me now. Every time I have to fly, I expect Justice Department agents in sober black suits and Agent Smith shades to surround me, barking on their surveillance headsets that I am under arrest for any one of a thousand occupationally hazardous reasons which I foreswore tabulating long ago.

  No minions of the law shew themselves in the crowd. My fear settles back inside me and changes shape. For myself, I merely offer a silent prayer to Allah that my limited human perceptions somehow interpreted the recent stars incorrectly. If not, as the American GI’s I ‘consult’ with, put it, I’ll be in a world of shit.

  They know they can batten down all the iron hooks of their ‘Patriot Act’ upon me for any number of ‘moving violations.’ If he were here, Dad would tell me I’m just being paranoid. But Dad’s in Gaza, on a contract of his own.

  In any case, your William Burroughs writes that perfect paranoia is perfect awareness. In my line of work, selective application of that idea holds the potential to save one’s life. Under that lens, I realize that if They (definition subject to change without notice) felt like taking me out of the game, they could have done it by now. I can only assume I’m still in their good graces and travel at will, until a harsh and bracketed detainment at this pestiferous little airport, followed by an unspecified hitch in the Tombs, wherein New York’s Finest would perform upon my habeas corpus certain interrogation methods never proscribed by the Geneva Convention.

  I’m afraid of Americans. But I keep forgetting that I’m an American, too. It seems an unlikely thing to forget, but one way or another, I’ve been a nomad all my life.

  Under my real name, Hassan Sabbah al-Gazi (just call me Han, as people have since my sixth-grade year, the year of those ubiquitous Star Wars movies), I became a naturalized citizen when I was eleven.

  Dad moved us over here from Jerusalem after things got a little tense between himself and a false friend in the Mossad, the Israeli Secret Service. Our people have long sworn that Mossad eat what they kill. But my father, in disappearing, was actually doing the operative a favor (albeit one of a nature that would never hold up in court.) But that’s another tale, for another day.

  I approach the gate. A petrified-looking Lebanese guy with a chicken chest and a fake badge puffs up in my face at the first metal detector. The Marines have a wonderful idiom for his sort, an “empty uniform”. His is hanging on him like a drop-cloth! I stifle a laugh.

  “Sir,” he barks in heavily-accented English. “Could you please remove your shoes?”

  I drop to one knee, hands where he can see them, and do so, handing them up. He inspects them, then looks as though he may presently swallow his chin. As he reaches for his radio, I stay his hand so quickly he doesn’t anticipate the motion. Amateur. I address him softly in Arabic.

  “Look, effendi, you push on the back and the heel fills up with air.” I show him.

  He looks again, and groans at my Reebok pump gym sneakers that are probably almost as old as he is. “A thousand pardons, cousin. My boss, you understand, he asks that we—”

  I sigh. “Yeah, yeah. You’re just doing your job. No worries.”

  He scutters back to the X-ray conveyor, takes a long look at the screen, and hands me my bag.

  “Shalom aleichem, habibi. Safe journey.”

  I bow with my right hand over my heart. “Asayem aleichem shalom, cousin. Don’t work too hard.”

  “Not possible.” He chuckles and waves me through. I start looking for Gate 11.

  ∇

  The thought of hitting Boylston Street in Boston around dinner time makes me salivate. De gustibus est non disputandem, especially after the Swanson frozen fare in first class. From what I hear, the Combat Zone has been strip-mined of most of its red stoplights and dive bars, so further recreation is probably best left out. I wish I had time hit the old MTA Pneumatic Railway tunnels down there and see if there are any new leads for me on the corkboard in the lobby of the other Pickman Gallery.

  But there’s no time to schmooze with the denizens, let alone the citizens. I am to meet with my contact on Boston Common an hour after we land. Transportation has been arranged. We will drive much further north from there, along a particularly fierce section of the Massachusetts coastline. Most maps have forgotten our destination, simply listing it as an unincorporated township on a dead, played-out reef. But the old brain-cases living on Supplemental Security in Arkham and Kingsport still call it Innsmouth.

  Innsmouth. I can taste the word in my throat like raw calamari. My skin goes hot as my sweat goes cold. The word, and the memory of the word, fills my nostrils with the smell of cold boom town gone bust, mine-dumps leaching sulfur into the water table, sad rotting houses covered over with Z-Brick, with living denizens and permanently bolted doors.

  The word smells like Kreutzfeld-Jakob’s Disease, leprosy, cannibalism and a hundred other kinds of runoff from inbreeding that science does not yet wish to name.

  I’m going back. The mere thought makes me better understand, in this moment, the Hakkagure of the ancient Japanese samurai. It is the same with those of my faith who ply my trade. Behave as though the flesh is dead. Then… and now more than ever… one does not lose his mind when confronted with the dark.

  In place of fear, my thoughts turn to wrath as Gate 11 looms large, just down the way a bit on the right. Several screaming children twine around me like cats for a moment. I consult my watch. I know I’m not late.

  Wrath. The denizens of Innsmouth deliberately flout my faith. The Prophet teaches us that Man evolved from clots of blood. Our learned men of this age teach also that somewhere between blood clot and H. sapiens sapiens, we crawled out of the sea. This is not to be doubted.

  But Innsmouth follows an infidel faith. Their own Shaitan, whom Islam has called Dagon since Babylon, has performed a miracle of fish unto any and every hard-luck sailor dumb or amateur enough to steer his tired old Downeaster Alexa into the waters off the town’s own Devil Reef.

  Since the 1920s, decapod mating patterns in that part of the Bay, and migratory patterns of just about every aquatic species that ever turned a buck, have climbed steadily with no spike in sight. Of course, the corporate fisheries were in there first. But the fish are so thick you could practically walk on the water like Yeshua. Dagon apparently shares and shares alike.

  By hypothetical evidence, (which, being based in the supernatural, can neither be proven or refuted in court) rock-ribbed Protestants in every hamlet for miles around Innsmouth, are slowly being swayed to the notion that there might be other fish in the sea. To harvest said fish, their mad TV preacher boasts, you must devolve back to the blood clot, to drown beneath the waves of our own DNA, to crawl back to the womb and die.

  The Prophet cast out Dagon with all the other false gods. My business with the debased tornado-bait of Innsmouth is nothing more or less than jihad. One may work full-time during Ramadan for such a purpose, it is written. I just hope it’s over with quickly.

  My contact is a rich writer from Bangor, only a few years my junior. Mr. Bachman is to outfit me with the necessary ordnance and artifacts. Dick also holds a private pilot’s license. All the paperwork has been taken care of
through my Oakland liason.

  When did they start calling this section “Business Elite”, I wonder? Was “First Class” too classist for these people? These funny, half-blind, blissfully oblivious, cell-phone-babbling, off-in-their-own-little-world Americans? It’s their world. We’re all just living in it.

  Long might some of them live to think so. I sigh, stepping hurriedly on board. The pilot looks like a whippet with an elaborate mop of gray hair, prescription shades and a thick mustache. He grins a set of teeth like the white keys on a piano.

  “Welcome aboard! Happy holidays!” He briskly shakes my hand. I notice a bead of cocaine-colored snot twinkling just beneath his right nostril. Pilots are all alike. In Arabic, I tell him he’s an idiot and he’s going to get us all killed. He smiles and nods and herds me in.

  I slide up through Coach, glancing at the seat number on my ticket. C-4. Very funny, Boss. You want me blown up that bad, do you? Freak. I can’t help but chuckle.

  The intercom speakers blare into life, “GOOD MORNING. HAPPY HOLIDAYS.” I part the curtain and venture into “Business Elite,” my eyes slightly ahead of me.

  “FLIGHT 180 WILL BE DEPARTING LAGUARDIA IN JUST A FEW MINUTES. YOUR—”

  “Oh, shit.” I look down fast. A soccer mom two seats ahead glances back at me like I’m about to pull out a box-cutter. Right now, she’s the least of my worries.

  We Sufi have a kind of prayer for times like this. No matter what the Creator hands you, be it a hundred dollars or two broken legs, you smile as broadly as you can and say Thank You, Sir, May I Have Another? And you laugh. Thus, the worse something gets, the more important it becomes to deflect it.

  But… my God… if… the man… if such he can be termed… who I was hired to find in …Innsmouth and kill is… seated… right beside me on… this plane?

  I committed the photograph to memory before I rolled a hashish spliff with it and smoked it to the head. This is a spot-on match. This is a practical joke. This is…

  Why, this is going to be a long flight. I smile, grit my teeth and sit down, trying not to look at him. But to hear him slurp and slobber over that sushi box, sucking on his mucilaginous webby fingers, a green rill of wasabi wending its way down his vestigial chin—