by Rick Dakan
By noon I craved distraction and new information so much that I couldn’t wait any longer. I assumed that Shelby, always a night owl, was keeping late hours, but surely he’d be awake by now. I decided to drive over to his house and deliver the package.
The house was only about fifteen minutes from my condo, an easy drive along six-lane streets and past the increasingly stereotypical assortment of suburban sprawl. I passed by one recently completed subdivision and then one just being birthed from mounds of dirt and felled pine trees before turning onto the winding dead-end road that led to Shelby’s. The long street had older, ranch-style homes for the most part, with large yards measured in acres and suitable for keeping a few horses. Toward the end of the street, though, the sub-urbanity had begun to metastasize into two- and three-story concrete walled McMansions in creams and whites. But Shelby’s new home fit into neither category. Unlike the unscreened newer homes or the horse-confining wire fences of the older ones, a fresh, ten-foot-high wooden fence surrounded Shelby’s sprawling green structure. Oak trees and stands of bamboo provided additional cover, so that from the driveway it was impossible to make out much beyond the slate-gray slant of the roof and a few glimpses of walls. Brazilian pepper trees crawled up along the edges of the pond that separated the property from its newly built neighbor, providing additional camouflage. It was not a home that invited visitors.
The gate was closed and locked as I pulled in front of it, tires crunching on the driveway’s gray rocks. A black wrought-iron bell hung from the wooden fence, so I gave that a few rings and waited. Nothing. I gave it a few more and heard someone shout from inside the compound. “One moment!” I listened to the crunching of feet on the gravel driveway and then the voice spoke again. A young adult male that I didn’t recognize. “Present yourself!”
“My name’s Rick. I’m here to see Shelby.”
“Are you expected?”
“No. Yes. I have a package for him.”
“I can sign for it.”
“It’s for Shelby only, a rare manuscript I acquired on his behalf,” I said, trying to make it sound as important as possible.
“The Hierophant is not available. You may leave it with me or return later perhaps.” The man sounded sort of ridiculous using such formal language, reminding me of a high school kid at a Renaissance fair.
“He’s not here?” I asked, disappointed. “How about Kym?”
“The High Priestess is not on this plane,” the stranger said. “You may leave the manuscript or return later. I will tell them you came by, though.” I found this lapse into colloquialism amusing, but it was frustrating, not being able to even see whomever it was I was talking to.
“When will they be back?”
“I cannot say.”
Fuck. “OK, I guess I’ll come back.”
I got in my car and drove off, angry that Shelby had put up so many physical and personal walls between us. As one of his oldest friends, it seemed ridiculous that I couldn’t talk to him when I wanted to, especially since he’d already asked me to join his church. Maybe he was upset that I’d refused and it was a power play of some sort, a way of keeping the upper hand in our relationship. Whatever the hell our relationship was. Of course another possibility was that Kym and these other people he had around him were the ones putting up the barriers. Maybe Shelby had no idea that I’d even stopped by. Who knew if he’d even get the message I’d been there? Nothing I could do about it then though, so I drove off in a huff, trying in vain to think of something besides Shelby and/or Cara to occupy my mind.
Chapter 11
Four days later and I’d heard nothing from Cara. Or Shelby, or Conrad for that matter. I’d decided to hold onto the Bloch letters until Shelby took the time to come and find me. I was done making deliveries. After a day of moping I’d gotten back into the writing groove and was making good progress on the Anarchy at Work project. The following Wednesday I went, as always, to pick up my week’s comics at precisely 11:00 a.m. It ended up being 11:15, as the owner, Brian, wasn’t opening the store that morning, but rather Dan, one of his young employees, who wasn’t quite as punctual as the store’s proprietor probably liked. I gave him a familiar “What’s up?” by way of greeting as he unlocked the door. I nodded and went to the back of the store to look at the week’s new comics. I picked up the new issues of Fables and some new titles that piqued my interest before heading back to the front.
Dan handed me a pile of comics that he had on file for me — subscriptions that I got month after month. As I took the stack from him I felt something rough and stiff on the bottom. I flipped the pile over and found a black, hand-bound pamphlet with two sheets of stiff card stock that looked handmade for a cover binding it together. It had dark copper-wire binding. There was nothing written on the back, but when I flipped it over I saw the words CTHULHU MANIFESTO inscribed in metallic red foil on the front. Opening it up, I saw creamy, parchment-like paper that also had a handmade look to it. There were only a few score pages — together they were just barely as thick as the front and back covers combined — and they appeared to have been printed using some sort of block printing rather than with a modern press. It was an impressive piece of bookbinding.
“Oh, you’re one of the lucky ones,” Dan said to me, interrupting my careful study of the book.
I looked up from the manifesto. “What do you mean?”
“Some guy dropped a bunch of those things off the other day. A couple dozen of them are the nice handmade ones like you got. The rest are, you know, printed the normal way. Brian must’ve thought you’d want one of the nice ones.”
“I do. How much are they?”
“They’re free, if you can believe it.”
“Jesus, really?” I said, looking the finely crafted book over once again.
“Yeah, I know. Weird, huh? I read through one of them when they came in. It’s actually kinda interesting. I wish I’d been at the art show thing they did.”
“It was pretty wild.”
“You went?” Dan asked, his voice rising half an octave in excitement. “That’s awesome. I’m totally going the next time they do one of those.”
“You should, it was pretty cool. So do you have any more of these?”
“No more of the nice ones. But there’s some of the others in back. I think Brian’s holding onto them for eBay or something.”
“Could you grab me one of those?” I thought Conrad would want to see it too.
Dan thought about it for a moment and then nodded. I’d been a regular customer for years and was a friend of Brian’s, so he knew his boss probably wouldn’t mind. “Sure, hold on,” he said. He went into the back room and returned with a slim, staple-bound printed version of the Cthulhu Manifesto. This one was about the same size and quality level as a comic book, with pulp-level paper and a flimsy glossy color. It made a lot more financial sense as a give-away promotional item. I thanked him, bought the rest of my comics, and headed right home, eager to read the full text and hopefully gain some insight into whatever the hell Shelby was actually up to.
The Cthulhu Manifesto was a dense, sometimes confusing piece of theology. Or was it philosophy? I’m still not sure how best to describe it, except to emphasize that Shelby’s choice of the word “manifesto” was not an idle one. The slim volume was definitely a call to action and a radical statement about how the universe works and what humanity’s place in it really is. It echoed Marx’s Communist Manifesto in many ways — not about politics or philosophy, but in laying out a model for how the world works and making specific predictions and prescriptions about how the world and human understanding could and should develop. One major difference was that it wasn’t as hopeful as Marx’s manifesto — there was no inevitable proletarian revolution and coming worker’s paradise. The only thing the Cthulhu Manifesto maintained as inevitable was the fact that we’re all doomed.
The book promised doom to humanity and even the universe’s very existence at the hands (tentacles) of the G
reat Old Ones — those obscenely powerful alien gods of Lovecraft’s tales. As written, it was hard to tell if Shelby meant that these beings actually existed and would someday destroy us or if they were metaphors for the universe’s fundamental callousness. But having established a basis of doom and gloom, the Cthulhu Manifesto moved into the meat of its argument: given such a doomed existence, how best to make use of our very limited time here on Earth. There were no promises of salvation or threats of damnation, nor any hope of any kind of spiritual survival in another form or afterlife. Again and again Shelby’s book returned to three central themes: Flesh is but Flesh; Thoughts are but Thoughts; Words are but Words. It rejected anything but materialism as a legitimate world view and urged readers to shake off the chains of conventional mores and values in favor of a “Cthulhu-centric” world view that acknowledges the universe as a place of wonder, awe, and terror that will consume us all in the end. In particular, the Cthulhu Manifesto railed against the entire concept of faith and the respect for other people’s foolish beliefs, stating flat out that “There is nothing good or respectful or even honest in honoring false gods and mendacious myths.” The manifesto did offer one dim ray of hope in the form of science and technology as tools for seeking truth, but even here Shelby warned that, “Once discovered, such truths needs be nigh impossible to forget, so the seeker must beware, for the truth about Truth is that we’re likely to find it an ego-shattering experience: our place in the cosmos being tenuous and meaningless at best.”
It took me less than an hour to read the whole manifesto, even with my having to go over many of the dense passages multiple times to make sure I truly understood their meaning (or at least thought I did). The underlying core world view seemed to jibe well with what I knew about Lovecraft’s writing and philosophy, although there was markedly less supernaturalism than I had expected from something based on a bunch of horror stories. As a piece of philosophical prose, I found it overly pretentious, straining to be taken seriously but not quite verging into the territory of parody. It struck me as the kind of rambling thoughts a particularly ambitious and talented college freshman might come up with. I didn’t see any obvious logical flaws in any of the arguments, though, and as events would soon show, the Cthulhu Manifesto was powerful enough writing to capture the imagination of a certain kind of person, and enrage another type.
Religion, belief, and metaphysics had been popular subjects with me and Shelby and the rest of our coterie in our school days. Shelby’s family dragged him to an unassuming Presbyterian church through middle school but gave up on him once he reached his teen years and found the weekly fight to rouse him from his Sunday morning bed more trouble than it was worth (a rare victory for Shelby against his grandparents’ preferences). I’d attended a liberal-minded Episcopalian church all through high school and enjoyed it well enough before easily shedding all interest in its teachings or devotions by the middle of my freshman year of college. Conrad’s parents were entirely unchurched, although they did enjoy over the top Christmas lights that went up promptly every year on the Saturday afternoon following Thanksgiving.
With little in the way of forceful dogma to tie us down, our midnight musings on the unseen world ranged with the wild abandon of imaginative geeks through the excesses of all the mystical claptrap, half-baked pagan revivalism, and Illuminati-inspired conspiracy theory, to every other subject in the New Age shelves in the bookstores. As gamers we were looking for something that worked, a system we could employ in real life that mirrored the logically constructed levels, systems, and magic points of our games. Of course none of it did work, but we got plenty of laughs out of our explorations. I remember one embarrassingly funny séance scene where Shelby pretended to channel the spirit of my ancient Atlantean soul mate that ended with him urging me to give up masturbation for a month in order to cleanse my aura. By the time we’d graduated we’d all left religion in our rearview mirrors, along with belief in ESP, aliens, and ghosts. To see Shelby return to these overgrown fields of the soul now struck me as a bit odd, but judging from the qualities of his manifesto, he’d obviously been giving these matters a lot of thought.
After I’d finished, I called Conrad to tell him about it.
“Have you read Shelby’s book?” I asked as soon as he answered.
“What?” Conrad said. He sounded tired and a little stressed.
“Are you in the middle of something? I can call back.”
“No, no. It’s just been a weird morning. What’s up with this book thing?”
“Shelby printed up something called the Cthulhu Manifesto and he’s been passing it out around town.”
“Passing it out? Like standing on street corners?”
“No, no, not like that. He’s got free copies in the comics shop and other places around town that people can take. It’s kinda interesting stuff. I’ve got a couple copies. You should read it.”
“Yeah, yeah. I should. Listen, I’ve got some stuff to tell you. And I’ll know more in a couple hours. What’re you doing for dinner?”
“Nothing. No plans.”
“Can I come over around 7:00?” Conrad’s voice was stern, like he wasn’t really asking so much as stating his intent.
“Sure, see you then.”
“Are you going to see Shelby today?”
“I don’t even know how to see Shelby these days. Why?”
“Just don’t talk to him until I see you, OK?” Conrad said, his voice heavy with import.
“Shouldn’t be a problem. What’s the big deal?”
“I’ll tell you tonight,” Conrad said, and hung up.
Now I was really curious, wondering what could’ve gotten Conrad all worked up. I tried to get a little work done, but it was impossible to concentrate on anything productive as my thoughts kept wandering back to either the Cthulhu Manifesto or to Conrad’s mysterious and unnecessary admonition to avoid talking to Shelby this afternoon. I puzzled over the manifesto some more, but I felt that I really was missing a lot of the allusions and metaphors Shelby was making. Then I realized that I had my own Lovecraft expert on call and that he might have some insight into the pamphlet. I e-mailed Sinclair to tell him I’d gotten a copy of something called the Cthulhu Manifesto and would send it to him when I got a chance. That got Sinclair’s attention and he seemed anxious to get it as quick as possible. He e-mailed me back a few minutes later suggesting that I use his FedEx account number to overnight the manifesto to him. I thought that was a little odd, but agreed to send it out that afternoon (the printed version of course, not the handmade one). I went out, dropped it in an overnight envelope, got some coffee and came back.
I spent a few hours poking around Web sites like yog-sothoth.com where they discussed all things Cthulhu, and saw that Shelby’s manifesto was already creating a little bit of a stir. Someone had scanned the whole thing and uploaded it onto his or her Flickr account. The general consensus was that it was all a little kooky, but kind of interesting. Certainly no one seemed to be taking it very seriously aside from a handful of critics decrying it as a blasphemous reinterpretation of Lovecraft’s true philosophies and a few enthusiastic fans who trumpeted its brilliance at every turn. I wondered if they were true new converts to Shelby’s cause or Shelby himself trying to drum up interest.
Conrad showed up a few minutes before 7:00, charging into the house as soon as I opened the door to his insistent knocks. He had a thick brown expandable file folder under his arm which he all but slammed down on my dining room table.
“Hello,” I said, closing the door behind him. “Are you all right?”
“I’ve had better weeks,” he said as he started sorting through his papers and folders. “Bill Buchman gave me the big Fuck You and he’s been badmouthing me all over town. I’ve heard it from three different realtor friends that he’s talking shit about me.”
“Oh, Christ, Conrad, that sucks.”
“In this market? It really fucking sucks. And all because I did a favor for Shelby. That was s
uch a huge fucking mistake on my part. Just so stupid. I should have made him tell me what the hell he was actually doing. And I still don’t know what he’s doing, not really. But I know more than I did a couple days ago.” He motioned to his papers. “Did you have some book he wrote you wanted to show me?”
I felt really bad for Conrad. Reputation was everything in the real estate business, especially in a town like Sarasota. “Let me get that Cthulhu Manifesto thing of Shelby’s from upstairs—”
“Sure, sure. I’ll lay all the rest out here.”
“OK,” I said and walked upstairs to retrieve my copy of the manifesto. When I came back down I saw that Conrad had covered my large glass dining room table with papers and photographs. “What is all this?”
Conrad swept some of the photos into a folder and then motioned for me to sit down. “I hope you don’t mind, but I talked to your friend Rambam a few days ago.”
“What?” I said, surprised. Rambam was a private investigator in New York that I’d worked with on a book on privacy. “Why?”
“Well, you’re always going on about how he can find all kinds of information about anyone in just a few hours at his computer, so I hired him to dig into Shelby and Kym and see what he could come up with.”
“Jesus, really? How much did that cost?” I knew Rambam’s expertise didn’t come cheap. I doubted it was worth any money to hire a private eye to investigate one of our friends, even if he had caused Conrad some serious professional difficulties. “Did Rambam cut you a deal or something? You should’ve talked to me first—”
