The Cthulhu Cult: A Novel of Lovecraftian Obsession

by Rick Dakan

  “Not too much, and it was worth the money. I think you’ll agree when you see what we’ve come up with. I paid the full $500,” Conrad said, shuffling the papers around on the table and moving a pile in front of me. “Now look at this—”

  “Fuck! Five hundred dollars? Jesus, Conrad, what were you thinking? What were you hoping to find on him anyway that could help undo the Bill Buchman thing? Why was this so important to you that you couldn’t just ask him yourself?”

  “First of all, I can’t get him to talk to me any more than you can. Ever since the Cthulhu Cult event he has been shutting me out. Even Lauren is having a hard time getting him to return calls. He managed to clear out of the space I got for him without leaving much of a mess, but even so Buchman’s still mad as hell at him and me and that’s bad for my business. So maybe if I can get him to pay Buchman extra or something that might help. Second of all, the way Shelby’s been acting, what makes you think he’d even tell me the truth if I asked him? He’s never been secretive before. Weird, out there, and exhibitionist, but never secretive. Since he came back with that new woman friend of his, he’s like a totally different person. Doesn’t that make you curious? Set off some alarm bells? It does for me. So yeah, I spent $500 to find out something about why he’s suddenly acting so strange, and I’m telling you it was worth it. Look at this.” He tapped a print out of what looked like a credit report. “Shelby has no money and shit credit. He’s maxed out the few cards he does have and had a car repossessed while he was living in New York.”

  “When was he living in New York?”

  “I’ll come to that. So Shelby has no money. One old checking account with Bank of America that’s only got a few thousand dollars in it at most. Not the kind of money you’d need to set up one tenth of the stuff he’s been pulling off.”

  “So it must be Kym’s money then. That’s kind of what I always thought.”

  “Ahhh, yes, Kym,” Conrad said, placing another pile of papers in front of me. “She’s an interesting one. Rambam couldn’t find any sign of bank accounts, credit history, or even a past address or social security number.”

  “So Kym’s not her real name. Whose name is the house in then in?”

  “Her name, but as an officer of an offshore holding company in the Bahamas called, of all things, HPL Financials.”

  “HPL,” I said. “Cute.”

  “And HPL Financials hasn’t done anything else besides buy that house at a tax auction sale a little over three months ago. Rambam couldn’t find any more about them than that without going to the Bahamas.”

  “Please tell me you’re not paying him to go to the Bahamas.”

  “No. The point is, wherever this money came from, they’re doing their best to hide it. They don’t have any bank accounts here in town as far as we can tell. They always pay with cash, and there doesn’t seem to be any money moving from their front company into the US. So the question is, where does the money come from?”

  “I still say it’s Kym.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Kym’s real name is Shoshanna Templeton, and she doesn’t have any money either,” Conrad said, a smug smile on his face. He slapped a print out of a New York State driver’s license on the table in front of me. The attractive, exotic features looking back at me definitely belonged to the woman I knew as Kym.

  “What? How did you find that out?”

  “Well, remember that car that got repossessed in New York? Brooklyn to be precise. Shelby bought it up there right after he left Sarasota.”

  “He said he was in Providence. That he met Kym at Lovecraft’s grave.”

  “I suppose it’s possible, but Shoshanna lived in the same Brooklyn apartment for the last three years. The same apartment building that Shelby’s car was registered to and from which it was repossessed.” Conrad showed me another print out showing the vehicle registration information, along with a number of parking tickets from the New York area. “Rambam just followed Shelby’s money to the car, the car to the address, and then pulled all the driver’s licenses for everyone living in that building. I’d sent him a description of Kym and Shelby, so, voila, he found her. He claims it only took him about forty-five minutes.”

  “So what’s the deal with this Shoshanna person then?” I added. Having worked on a book with him and seen his work firsthand, I knew that doing everything Conrad had described would be standard operating procedure for the seasoned investigator.

  “Not much different from Shelby. Crappy credit, no money. Born and raised in New York, although her mother is Bahamian and her father’s a U.S. citizen. They’re both in the hotel industry in management. Not much in the way of money there either. Certainly nothing that explains where they’re getting all this cash they’ve been throwing around. Absolutely nothing that explains how they were able to afford buying that house.”

  “Which leaves us with the first question still a mystery. Where’s the money coming from?”

  “That’s not the big mystery,” Conrad said, his voice was angry now, like they’d somehow personally insulted him with their behavior. “The big fucking mystery is, what the hell are they up to?

  “OK, sure, that is a big question too. Let me show you this Cthulhu Manifesto thing they’re distributing around. It at least gives some insight into what it is they say they’re all about. And knowing Shelby, I don’t think it’s too far from the truth.”

  “In a minute. I’ve got something else you need to see first.” Conrad took the file full of photos I’d glimpsed earlier and set it down in front of me, but he kept his hand on it to keep me from looking inside before he was ready. “There’s been some serious shit going down at Shelby’s little compound. Construction. Lots of folks coming and going. But I’ve been swinging by there at various times throughout the past few days just to check on things.”

  “You’ve been staking out Shelby’s house? Conrad, what the hell is up with you? Why is this so important to you?”

  “Listen, I need to show you what I found,” Conrad replied, ignoring my question.

  “This is weird, Conrad.”

  “I know it must seem that way, and I would’ve dropped the whole thing if I hadn’t seen what I’m about to show you. Just look at these, OK?” he insisted, opening the file and tapping the top picture. It was a poorly focused image of Shelby and someone I didn’t recognize coming out of the gate to the compound in a large conversion van. Then there was another photo, this time of the same van waiting in front of the closed gate, headed back into the compound. The third pic showed the gate being opened from within by a woman in a flowing black skirt and tank top. Her face was obscured. The next showed the gate fully open and the van driving though. The final one showed the gate almost closed again, with the woman who’d opened it peering out from the gap. It was Cara.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered.

  “Yeah, exactly,” said Conrad. “She’s living there now. Or at least staying there.”

  “Holy shit,” I repeated. What did this mean? How had it happened? Had she gone to Shelby after the Cthulhu Cult show? Or had she been with him from the beginning, some kind of plant in the audience? Is that what happened in the limo? Did they convince her to join their church? Did they send her to the party to spy on me and Conrad and see how we’d react? “Why the hell would she be there?” I asked.

  “That’s what I was waiting for today before I came over here. I wanted to figure out everything I could before I told you. I called Rambam again and hired him to look up Cara as well.”

  I was a little horrified to hear this fact, but my curiosity overwhelmed my revulsion. “What did he find out?” I asked.

  “She’s filed for divorce. Looks like it was an ugly marriage and an even uglier ending. No money to speak of, lots of debt, and no current place of employment as of three and a half weeks ago. She also filed for unemployment benefits.”

  “In other words, vulnerable as hell,” I said.


  “Just the way cult leaders like their new recruits. Vulnerable, seeking a new life, and the kind of person who participates in a ritual like we went to and says they want to wear one of the masks next time.”

  I realized I’d been holding my breath. I didn’t care about Conrad’s business problems anymore— I was just worried for Cara, although at the same time, logically, I wasn’t quite sure why. Shelby was one of my oldest friends. Cara knew us all from high school. It wasn’t that strange, not really. And it sounded like she needed a helping hand. But coupled with all the weirdness surrounding Shelby, the whole thing gave me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  “Now do you see?” said Conrad. “Now do you understand that something potentially dangerous is going on here? In another world, if things had gone different, Cara is someone I could have married. Maybe she’s even someone you could settle down with. She was always special to me, always an amazing, different kind of girl. But you know as well as I do that even back then she was impressionable, prone to flights of fancy. The first vegan I ever knew. The first person in our class to get anything but an ear pierced. And now she’s in this vulnerable state and we just can’t let her be taken advantage of like this. Certainly not by Shelby of all people, who seems like he’s maybe gone off the deep end himself. And throw this mysterious ‘Kym’ into the mix and who knows what kind of damage will get done? If they were just going to screw with each other that’s fine, but I think Cara’s had a hard enough time without this weird cult shit, don’t you?”

  “I think maybe you’re right,” I said, although I wasn’t sure what exactly he was right about. I had not realized he still cared so much about what happened with Cara, nor did I realize how much I suddenly cared as well. I imagined I could still feel her desperately groping me in that upstairs corner of the Palmetto Club, clinging to my mouth and hungrily drinking me in. What better word to describe her than desperate at that moment? And Shelby and Kym had latched onto her right afterward, filling her with Lord only knew what kind of dangerous ideas. “But what do we do about it? We should try and talk to Cara maybe, get her side of things.”

  “You should do that,” Conrad agreed. “She seemed to like you still. You do that. Go over there and try to talk to her. Maybe you can get through to her.”

  “And what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t quite know yet. But I know we’ve got to do something. We’ve got to do something before Shelby does something much, much worse.”

  Chapter 12

  By the time I got over to Shelby’s the next morning, Cara was gone. Or at least that’s what the guy at the gate, told me. He said she’d gone back north to get her things, but would be back down sometime the next week. I asked him to tell her to give me a call when she did. Of course he wouldn’t let me talk to Shelby or Kym either, although at least he admitted they were both actually there. I drove home frustrated and worried. The fact that Cara really seemed to be packing up her life and moving down to join Shelby’s cult set off all my warning bells. The only way I was going to feel comfortable with the idea was if Cara herself reassured me. Or so I thought. After going online and reading up on cults at www.rickross.com, I got even more worried. If Shelby and Kym really were indoctrinating people into some sort of genuine Cthulhu worship, it might be impossible to tell if Cara was really happy or under the influence of some sort of brainwashing technique.

  Despite all our resolutions to “do something” about Shelby and Kym, Conrad and I were at a loss as to what exactly our next step should be. We met for lunch to try and hash out a plan, but all Conrad could come up with was watching the house more and paying private eyes to do some more digging. I didn’t have the money to spend on PIs, and Conrad said he didn’t think Lauren would be too happy with him if he spent any more of theirs. In truth I was surprised that she’d gone along with hiring Rambam in the first place, but Conrad said she was almost as worried about what Shelby was up to as we were. In the end we decided that all we could really do was wait and watch and be ready to do our thing (whatever it turned out to be) when the opportunity presented itself. For the time being Shelby’s only public act was distributing copies of the Cthulhu Manifesto, and until he showed himself again, there wasn’t much to do.

  I continued to track the manifesto’s propagation across the Internet over the next few days. It made the rounds of all the Lovecraft and Cthulhu fan sites and then moved out into more general interest New Age/mysticism and horror fan sites. The reactions split about evenly into three camps: those who, like me, thought it was interesting but pretentious; those who thought it was silly and/or lame; and those who really got into it and thought it was inspiring/awesome/cool. Of course the majority made no comment at all, no doubt letting the fact of the manifesto’s existence flow in and out of their brains along with the thousands of other factoids that avid net surfers accumulate every day.

  On the third day a Web site appeared at the domain name www.thecthulhucult.com. I couldn’t tell from looking at the WhoIs whether or not Shelby was responsible for the site — it showed as an anonymous business owner — but the site soon became the focus of interest in the Cthulhu Manifesto debate since it had a complete copy of the text along with a Wiki interface allowing anyone to add comments. Later that day the site got “dugg” on the social-network-run news site Digg.com, which drove a lot of new traffic to it. I checked the Wiki and the site over the next few days and figured someone had to be moderating the comments since they didn’t fill up with spam or mindless profanities. Not that there weren’t profanities. There was plenty of back-and-forth discussion about the manifesto’s merits from people belonging to all three of the view points I’d identified the day before, but no sign of anyone I could identify as Shelby himself.

  The next morning, Conrad called me and woke me up at 7:30 in the morning — usually I’d have been awake, but after a late night following the discussions on the Cthulhu Cult Web site, I’d slept in.

  “You should read the paper,” Conrad said when I picked up.

  “Did you get that link I sent you last night to the Cthulhu Manifesto online?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I saw that. Hold on, I want to read you something from today’s paper.” I heard the faint rustling of pages. “Dear Sirs, I’m writing to warn your readers about an evil comic book that’s being distributed to our city’s children without their parents even knowing. My eleven-year-old son recently bought a used video game from a local store (which I won’t name since I don’t want to give them free advertising). He got not only the game he paid for, but a ‘free’ comic book as well that the store was giving away. This comic is a Satanic Recruiting Tool that calls itself the Cthulu Manifesto. My son tells me that he and his friends have seen many copies of this evil magazine in stores and other places, even at school. As good, churchgoing Christians, my husband and I threw the evil comic away and I complained in person to the store’s owners. They refused to remove the comic at first but after threat of legal action changed their minds. I felt it necessary to warn others about this dangerous comic book and call upon our civic leaders to investigate its obviously Satanic origins and take the right steps to protect our community and our children. Sincerely, A Concerned Mother.”

  “Well, the prose doesn’t really flow, does it?” I said. “They really published that in the paper?”

  “They spelled ‘Cthulhu’ wrong, but yeah, it’s in there at the bottom of the page.”

  “I’m sure she’s talking about Extra Credits Games over by New College,” I said. “I didn’t know they had copies of the manifesto there, but it doesn’t surprise me.”

  “He’s going to have problems if the church moms get up in arms about him. Especially in this town.”

  “Maybe, yeah.” I didn’t think of Sarasota as a particularly religious town, but it is definitely a very conservative community and there are a lot of churches. Just because I didn’t know many people that went to church didn’t mean the religious right couldn’t cause real trouble
for Shelby. The fact that the paper had even printed the letter showed that they thought it was in some way newsworthy. “There’s nothing in the manifesto that connects directly to Shelby, though — no information at all on who wrote or printed it.”

  “Oh, I’m pretty damn sure Shelby’s going to want to take credit at some point. Someone’s going to put the pieces together. Who was it who wrote up that Web entry about the art show ritual?”

  “Wendell Locking from the Weekly Voice?” I suggested.

  “Yeah. He was at the ritual. If he hasn’t seen the manifesto already, you know he’s going to go out and find it himself and he’ll tie it to Shelby.”

  “Probably. We’ll see.”

  “So, what are your plans for the day?” Conrad asked.

  “I’ve got to get some serious work done this morning. I’m way behind on the book.”

  “Do you think you’ll have time to swing by the compound at any point?”

  “I wasn’t planning on it. I figured I’d give Cara a full week to get back before I tried to see her again.”

  “I was going to swing by this afternoon for a few hours and watch the gate. Could you go by tonight? I’ve got a dinner thing with Lauren’s law partners.”

  I hadn’t actually done any staking out of the compound, and I didn’t feel like starting now. Even if it didn’t sound incredibly boring (and it did), I still felt strange about the idea of spying on Shelby and was worried about how I’d explain myself to him if I got caught. “I don’t think so, man. I’ve really got to get this done. Besides, what do you expect to see?”

  “The heat is on him now,” Conrad said. “With this letter to the editor thing? The heat is on. I want us to be on top of things when he makes a move. You could go by for just an hour or so tonight, right? If we get some dirt on him before Cara gets back — assuming she even really left — then maybe that can help us when it comes time to try and convince her to leave the place.”