by Rick Dakan
I looked up at Cthulhu above me, still twitching from its release. Or maybe it was a trick of the light. Maybe it had never really done anything at all.
Chapter 25
What I understand now, which never even occurred to me at the time, was that Shelby never lied to me. He hid the truth, yes, but he never lied. More vitally, he never intended to do anything other than exactly what he claimed to be doing, never believed anything beyond (or less than) what he’d explained to me. That Shelby might be telling the truth all along was the one possibility that never occurred to me. Everything he’d told me that night at the compound, everything he’d written in the Cthulhu Manifesto, it was all exactly what he believed. I’d thought it was a prank, or a scam, or a cult at first, a way to get money or sex or just rile up Sarasota in revenge for running him out of town. And then I’d found it easier to believe, to my everlasting shame, that Shelby was actually worshiping Cthulhu or under some sort of mind-control spell from Kym. I’d found it easier to believe he was being enchanted than that he just believed what he said he believed. Shelby was right when he said words are but words. We’d made the terrible mistake of translating misunderstood words into radical actions.
That night ended Shelby’s church. Not because of the scandal or the stories in the papers. If anything those raised Shelby’s status as a martyr and blind prophet and would have earned him more followers, not fewer, if he’d chosen to capitalize on them. Certainly his loyal cadre stayed around for some months; so did the Cthulhu compound, lingering on under mounting costs and a lack of firm leadership while Shelby was in the hospital. He was in intensive care for most of the time he and I were both there, and Cara shuttled back and forth between our floors, keeping me updated on his condition. I was well enough long before he was, although my hand needed some skin grafts and surgery that my uninsured status couldn’t afford. To this day typing and writing with it causes pain that medication lessens only a little. At least I still have it. Shelby’s eyes were gone, destroyed by flame and stick.
I’d been home for weeks before Kym said I could finally come up and talk with Shelby, and even then I found excuses to put it off for a couple days. Cara guilted me into seeing him, which I was grateful for. I needed to be pushed. Walking back into the hospital that evening, Cara beside me, the potent combination of nasty hospital sense memories (blistered skin flaking, chemical stench of anti-bacterial gel) and the dread of anticipation nearly doubled me over with nausea. I haven’t been back in a hospital or even a doctor’s office since. But I made it up to the third floor and down the first hall on the right to Shelby’s room.
In my imagination I’d somehow assumed I’d have to face those horrible, empty, burned-out holes where Shelby’s eyes once were, but of course they were hidden under clean, white bandages. Kym sat in the single chair in the room, reading from the day’s New York Times aloud. I rapped lightly on the already-open door with my good hand and peered inside. “Hello?” I asked.
Kym looked up, neither welcoming nor dismissing me. She motioned for us to come in, I gave her the flowers I’d brought, and Shelby, Cara, Kym, and I tiptoed through a polite ten minutes of hospital talk and doctor’s prognoses. He’d live. He’d be blind forever. His phantom eyes itched constantly. They were moving back to New York to live with Kym’s family. With no health insurance and Kym’s trust (held in a bank in her Bahamian homeland, undetectable by simple background check) nearly drained, they had to sell the house to cover costs. Besides, she missed Brooklyn and her mother loved Shelby.
Oh, was all I could think. Oh, how wrong I’d been. Oh, how banal and reassuringly normal their life was. Oh, congratulations, they’d gotten married last week, here in this very room. Oh, why did this happen?
“Why did this happen?” I asked the room out loud.
“Because Conrad went crazy,” Kym said. Left unsaid was the accusation that I had helped him, or helped drive him there. Was she accusing me? I felt guilty as charged. I’d fed Conrad’s obsession with Shelby. I’d helped his resentment over small slights and mysteries grow into concern and then preoccupation with Lovecraft and the occult. I’d fed his mind Sinclair’s lies, often with my own horribly misguided additions.
“It was only what we said it was,” Shelby said. “We were always honest.”
“But it was so strange,” I said. “Such a strange thing for you to do.”
“A strange thing for me to do?” Shelby asked, his head almost pointed towards me. “Or a strange thing for someone else to do?”
“A strange thing for anyone to do,” I said.
“But it wasn’t so strange, really, was it? I mean compare what I believe to any other religion out there. Compare Cthulhu to Christianity. I didn’t even pretend to believe my god was real. And all our teachings were based in science and reality. We may have wrapped them in pulp monster aesthetics, but at least our church had the advantage of starting from actual truth about the cold, heartless universe and then extrapolating our chosen behaviors and rituals from that. By any logical standard we were the reasonable ones.”
“That’s what made it so strange, I think. Who could believe in a church with no gods?”
“I could never believe in a church that has them,” Shelby countered. “Could you?”
I knew the answer at once. “No, no, of course not. Not anymore. Not for a long time.”
“All we wanted,” Kym said, “Was to create a place for people like us, like you.”
“That would have been cool,” I said, and I meant it. “I’m so sorry.” It would have been cool, but instead I’d helped Conrad destroy the church of Cthulhu, too blind to see something amazing when it was laid out before me. What a disaster.
Shelby just nodded, and I wasn’t sure if he accepted my apology or not. Kym just looked away in disgust. We lingered in mutual discomfort for a long moment. I shuffled and, in my mind at least, was headed out the door. But my feet, or at least Cara, remained.
Cara broke the silence at last. “It was wonderful for a while. For a long while it was the most wonderful thing I’d ever done, even if that long while was only a few weeks. Wonderfully strange.”
More silent contemplation all around, then Shelby broke it. “Do you want the church?”
“Me?” Cara asked.
“Both of you if you want. Or just Cara. Not the house or any of the stuff — that’s all being sold to pay… for this mess,” Shelby said, gesturing in a twirling motion to the room and hospital that surrounded us. “But the actual legal entity. The church itself. Do you want to take it over?”
“Why?” I asked.
“Yes!” Cara said.
“You do?” I asked.
“I do,” she affirmed. “Of course I do.” She thought for a moment. “It will have to be different. More open. More about doubt and humanity’s tenuous place in the universe. More about opening minds and exploring the boundaries of experience.”
“I suggest much less fire,” Shelby said. We all wanted to laugh at that, but no one did. “Do what you want. We’re going home.”
“I thought this whole thing was about you coming back home,” I said.
“No, not really,” Shelby said. “It wasn’t about that at all.”
Kym ushered Cara and me out a few minutes later, and we walked without talking back to her car.
I didn’t take much convincing. I would have thought I would have, that I’d stay as far away from the idea as possible, but I didn’t. I felt a compulsion, a need, to build on the ashes of this disaster. Shelby really had been on the path to creating something new and exciting, something that would not only shake this staid city of Sarasota, but also maybe offer those who were willing to listen some much-needed perspective on existence. But most of all I felt I owed it to Shelby for the role I’d played in blinding him, for the damage I’d done. I wanted something good to come out of all this. Or if not good, then at least interesting. And Cara was so enthusiastic, so driven. It was contagious.
The church’s bank a
ccount only had $1700 in it when Cara signed the papers. But the space she found, a rundown office in a strip between an awning shop and a day-care center, had been a Spanish-language church up until a month ago, and the rent was cheap. She’d managed to salvage some of the décor from the old temple before the creditors and other former cultists made off with all of it. It was a start. And she changed the name of course. Much more forthright I think. The Church of Cthulhu.
Most of the original inner circle are gone now, but the last legacy of Shelby’s reign as head of the church helped boost our relaunch. The videos of that final night survived. We hadn’t been able to find the tapes, nor the cameras, nor the cameraman. He’d apparently been so freaked out by the violence that he just took them with the rest of his stuff and left town. But then they showed up online. Chopped into ten-minute segments, edited together with footage from other cult events, they leaked out onto the Internet. That final clip, the image of Cthulhu erupting from the burning statue after the nude Cara was placed inside, some crazed figure waving a torch in front of it, that was a big hit. And once that clip got connected to our church, we had no trouble finding new recruits.
Cara runs the place, holds the weekly meetings where they discuss the science and mythology of the mind, oversees the open arts days and evening cocktail hours. She’s organizing them, educating them, preparing us as best we can for the changes to come. I’m there in the background mostly, watching, although there’s been talk of starting a magic club in the church, real magic like card tricks and sleight of hand, not the fake kind that doesn’t really exist. Copperfield, not Crowley. I think I might enjoy that, although my right hand will never be able to palm a coin or shuffle well. I like spending time there. Sometimes I even sleep over in the space. Sometimes Cara stays with me, but she can’t help flinching when I touch her bare skin with my scarred right hand.
“Church of Cthulhu,” I said, answering the phone in the back office. There was no response at the other end of the line, but I thought I heard breathing. “Hello?” I said.
“Mr. Dakan?” a familiar voice said. It had been eight months.
“Sinclair?”
“I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr. Dakan,” he said, almost but not quite stuttering over the words. I hadn’t heard a thing from him since I’d kicked him out of my house, not that I’d gone looking. I had nothing to say, but I didn’t hang up, and he finally filled the awkward silence. “Let me say first of all that I’m very sorry. I know now that I lost my head a bit. Got carried away if you will. I see that now of course, but the excitement of the time had me terribly agitated. And confused. Agitated and quite, quite confused.”
“What do you want?” I asked, although I’d intended to hang up.
“I understand you’re angry at me. I’m angry at me as well, I can assure you, and I don’t imagine you can understand how dreadfully embarrassing it is for me, but I had to make this call. Have you heard from Conrad?”
“No,” I said. No one had. Lauren had divorced him in absentia. He and his car had vanished that night. Even Rambam hadn’t been able to find him.
“He, um… he showed up here. At my apartment.”
“When?” I asked. I suddenly felt hot, sweaty. I imagined I could smell Shelby’s eyes burning. “What did he say?”
“He wanted money. And, um, a spell. I had neither for him and he grew quite angry. I locked myself in the bathroom and called the police. He was gone when they got here. He’d taken some things. Some books. Some other things. All three of my Arkham House first editions of Lovecraft, I’m afraid.”
“When was this?” I asked, the words dripping out in what seemed to me like slow motion.
“Last night,” Sinclair said. “There’s one more thing, Mr. Dakan. He knows about your church. The new Church of Cthulhu. That’s how I found the number to call you there. Before things got… got bad, we talked about it. He talked about it. About you.”
“What did he say?”
“I didn’t understand it all. Not really. But I know he’s worried about you. Worried about what he thinks you might have become. I wanted to warn you. You must be careful!”
“Why? What does he think I’ve become?”
“Another Shelby,” Sinclair said.
“I haven’t.” Had I? I didn’t think so. But how would I know? And was that so bad?
“He thinks you have.”
“Oh,” I said. “Damn.”
“Yes, well, I thought you should know,” said Sinclair. When neither of us said anything for a long time, he hung up. I sat behind my desk, staring at the computer, an image of Cthulhu in a devastated city the background on my desktop. Beyond my door I could hear Cara lecturing about how to invoke lucid dreams with the help of special electronic eye-wear. Later the inner circle would meet to go over this quarter’s budget, and I needed to sit in on that meeting. Outside it would be dark now. A clear night. If I walked out now I could see the stars. If the stars were right, I’d be able to figure out what to do next. And that’s the nice thing about stars. They’re always exactly right where they’re supposed to be.
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