by Michael Shea
“Of course…but, uh, what would I see?”
“Sorry. I can only show. I can’t explain. So I guess the question is, are you a see-er, or a blinker?”
Rick didn’t like that note of challenge. It gave him the notion that, all along, Luke had wanted him to follow. It happened, though, that Rick particularly prided himself on being a see-er. I’ve got something to show you—it was, of course, the oldest bait in the world…
“I guess you’ve got me really curious now.”
“Come on. We’re almost there.”
They approached, on the inland side of the frontage road, an old cement factory. Structures of rusty corrugated iron, surmounted by tall hoppers, stood amid thickets of weeds. A spur of railroad track hooked into this property, but the rusty cars looked as defunct as the rest of the place. The sagging chain-link fencing stood gateless. They pedaled inside, through the dust along the track. Luke stopped beside a flatcar coupled at either end to rusted, garishly grafittied boxcars. Dismounting his bike and laying it in the dust, he gestured at the flatcar and in a grand, ironic tone declaimed, “Behold, See-er!”
There was nothing on the flatcar but, at its center, a shapeless heap of weathered old tarpaulin. Luke set his gas can on the splintered bed, and vaulted up beside it. Stood there, arms akimbo, a suddenly gleeful, sardonic figure. “Our concoction this evening,” he declaimed, “is Esquelette brulée. First, a liberal besprinklement of premium unleaded.”
He uncapped the can. The purplish fluid chugged out onto the mounded tarp, sending up, where it splashed down, a fine violet spray in the golden afternoon light. Now the drenched tarp glittered like a great fresh dropping from the hindquarters of some prehistoric beast. “Ensuite,” cried antic Luke, an agile, dancing imp in overalls, “le feu!” A wooden match appeared in his uplifted hand. A raking thumbnail snapped it alight. He sent the match cartwheeling down onto the reeking heap of canvas, and it whumphed into flame.
Rick stood drinking it in. Here was some shit! The graphics of it! This crazy fucker Luke was handing him whole panels of raging good graphics. Once again Rick’s instincts for the bizarre were paying off. As he was born to draw, he was born to ferret his way to great images. This was far better than some battered old Chevy or Buick!
At the same time, he might have to think about being careful. Weigh what it might mean to get more deeply involved with a guy like Luke here. Luke had dropped to his knees. Knelt with his arms spread wide, his face skyward, a smiling hallelujah face. Cried, “We seek to sear the dish, not to consume it! But let it burn hotly, hotly! Let the chrysalis cook off it in roiling smoke!”
And the smoke was rich and dense, bulges of velvety blackness surging like rapids straight up to—
What?
Surging up some fifteen feet to a sharp edge of disappearance, to vanish perfectly through some seam in the air, leaving this golden bayside sky untarnished.
Again and again he looked from the truncated column of inky smoke to the clean air just above it. For endless seconds his brain simply refused to put the two plain facts together. Luke was looking at him now, still smiling.
“Whaddya think, Rick? The smoke of the offering goes elsewhere. It rises directly to His nostrils, and how He savors it! But watch!”
The tarp’s ashy husk crumpled off, and there was…a body inside. A crouched skeleton really, for its flesh was all but vaporized already, streaming up so fiercely that the bones seemed to dance.
Did move, in fact! The bowed spine worked, the legs and arms seemed to crawl, though it did not advance. It crouched and swam within the flames, growing blacker, starker as its organic sheath shrank off.
The skull was…not human. A jutting muzzle, a wolfish mandible. The jaws worked, as if feeding on the fire. Luke sprang from the flatcar, down to Rick’s side. “Brace yourself,” he said.
A wind began to blow in off the bay—no sooner began than gusted so mightily it staggered Rick toward the car. Flame and smoke were blown gone all at once. A man stood up where the ashes had been.
The man was beautifully dressed. He looked like some guy in Vogue: lusciously suited, alligator shoes, his face a handsome vacancy. He jumped down from the flatcar, but seemed not even to see Luke or Rick. He straightened the plump knot of his burgundy tie and began walking west. For a long time they watched him. Unhurriedly, implacably he advanced on the City’s proud-towered skyline.
II
“The sun is down,” mused Luke. It startled Rick. He realized he and Luke were standing side by side, still gazing at the skyline, seeing the first freckles of lights coming on in the skyscrapers. Luke’s hand lay absently on Rick’s left shoulder…
Where had Rick been just now? Where was it he felt he was just coming back from…? Undeniable strangeness came off of Luke like cold off ice. His bony profile, his skin so tautly stretched, seemed a slender sheath for raging energy—for glacier-driving forces, or for flames like he’d just set up on the flatcar. Yet though he stood so close, his hand on Rick’s shoulder, Rick felt somehow totally cool with it, as if they’d just been through something rich and rare together, and everything was settled between them.
But what was it?
“Just look,” said Luke, turning him to face the Bay, “at this fine, round world! How it crawls with life!”
And the Bay was indeed the glorious sight it always was. Above its wide eastern rim, house-crusted hills spanned left and right past sight. Great container ships crept past the islands, and atop the mighty bridges that arched from shore to shore, whole rivers of steel-boxed humanity inched rumbling and fuming along.
“To Him,” said Luke—and with what loving, tender awe he said it—“this world is like an immense pie. Into this vast pie, His sharp-searching tentacle-tips branch down from above, up from beneath, and everywhence from Time itself, and they find every plum in the pie, and pierce it, and wear it like a finger-puppet, and finally, feed on it, and He is greatly pleased therewith!”
The words, so utterly insane, somehow nonetheless sent a shiver of answering awe along Rick’s spine.
“Listen,” he said. Then stood at a loss, blinking at the reddening sky, at the wide waters darkening to indigo. “Listen, Luke. I’m…losing track here. This…He. Who is it?”
“Rick! Dude! His whole pet world here bears His name, writ large and small upon its every surface! It’s everywhere! It’s there!” He swept his arm up at the leftward boxcar. Preeminent amidst its dense grafitti, a slash of white, indecipherably stylized letters.
Wondering at himself, his eye usually so sharp at decoding design, Rick pulled his little sketchpad from his fanny pack, began simplifying each blocky letter, trying to crack their code.
And then he saw it, all at once. It hit his brain like a bestial shout:
CTHULHU YA FHTAGN
Rick was used to seeing the world as a large potential comic book. To see what belonged to the world of the comic book erupt into this one, while it stunned him, stunned him with its symmetry. Its rightness.
At the same time, the rest of him spun like a whirlpool around this axis of revelation, and the rest of him was registering doubt, terror…panic.
A calming weight upon his shoulder. Luke’s hand again.
“Rick.” A gentle merriment was in his face. “You need to understand. This is simply happening, your contribution is…so minor. Our friend Chet Shugrue, whom you just helped me liberate, he’s doing all the heavy lifting. He’ll put it all in motion. Meanwhile, nothing’s asked of you except what you’d do willingly, on your own, if you were ignorant of all this.”
This—it was as much Luke’s aura as his words—calmed Rick a little, though it left him dazed. “Chet who?”
“Chet Shugrue.”
“Luke…you say this is simply happening. What is happening?”
“What is always happening? A body of greater mass, that can bend light and time, draws in all lesser masses, and adds their slightness to its ageless bulk! To see this happen close at hand—why, it
’s a see-er’s dream. You should rejoice, because, nothing you do can change a jot of it.”
“And so,” he ventured, “I will see more…of this?”
“Oh yes! Just go back to your business! Do what you will! Do what you would! You’ll take the needed turnings as they come.”
In the growing dark, Rick pedaled back along the empty frontage road. The decaying piers—some little more than thickets of plankless pilings—seemed like the bones of some earlier civilization upon which this one stood. A whole previous world annihilated by some Greater Mass that reached down for its life and ate it whole.
III
The following night, Rick was rough-sketching panels—had four whole sheets drawn already. It was a struggle to stay in the sketch mode, he kept slipping into details, like that boxcar’s grafitti, but it was always most effective to block out the whole spread first, establish the narrative…
Rat—as Irving had recently insisted he be called—was working on his own board. The big loft was full of gloom, and their two stations were isolated cones of light, the scratching of their pens and the rustle of their sheets the only sound.
“Sounds like you’ve got something hot,” said Rat, his eyes not leaving his own work.
“You sound hot at it too,” evaded Rick, himself still sketching.
“Yeah. I met an interesting guy today. He gave me some ideas.”
Rick stopped sketching. “Who was he?”
“A total Suit, but remarkable.”
“A Suit. So what were you talking about?”
“We weren’t talking—him and Mark were. But the guy, Chet something, had, like, vision. He gave me some great ideas. Mark didn’t hear a word of it, of course. He was just listening to the money part.”
Rat was still bent over his panels, scratching away, but Rick could see that he wanted to be coaxed for the details, that he wanted to spill it all. And Rick wanted to hear it. Could this be the same Chet? He stared at Rat with a sense of seeing himself from the outside. Another comix artist, drawn into this strange eruption of the impossible through the fabric of the possible.
The man who had stood up, an Armani vision, from a cone of crumbling ash atop a flatcar, talking to Mark. Mark was Rat’s stepdad. He owned this and seven other buildings in the artistically hot South-of-Market, but these real estate assets, weighing in at seventy mil, were a mere detail in Mark’s fiscal landscape. He was farming graphics talent in all these lofts and remodeled warehouses. Three of them housed the computerized smithies where video games were forged, two of them already crafting, respectively, Acute Angle II and Nano-Barbarians III, while their labels currently enjoyed between them almost thirty percent of the market share. Good old Mark, as Rat always sourly called him, had boardroom links with AOL and Time Warner. Rat—Irving then—was stepfathered by Mark at the incendiary age of fifteen, and one of corporate America’s eternal adversaries was born from that conjunction, despite Mark’s continuing effort to instruct and induct his stepson into Business. Rat was now and forever an Artist.
“So what was the money part? What was Chet talking to Mark about?”
Rat turned from his work with gusto. “You had to see him, Rick. A walking one-man big-buck Presentation! Good old Mark, sitting there all sober and judicious, was drooling almost visibly within three minutes. The guy looked like Mr. GQ, but he talked like…like Shakespeare! Like Martin Luther King! I know good old Mark didn’t understand half of it, but he was lifted just by the guy’s charisma. He said some amazing shit! Said people talk about parallel universes, but the reality is infinite concentric universes. So that into any one of them, the contents of the contiguous one can erupt through the membranes of time and space, can erupt within that world’s inhabitants, and wear its fabric as the hand wears the glove!”
“Whoa. Is that a direct quote?”
“You know, I think it is! His words just…stayed with me!”
“So…talking like that…what was this guy selling to old Mark?”
“Meta-Cinema. The New Dimension of theater-audience immersion. Light-years beyond I-Max.”
Rick chewed on this. “I…guess I don’t see the connection.”
“What connection?”
“Between this Meta-Cinema and the concentric universes.”
“Oh! You know…it’s funny, I don’t remember the connection. The guy said so much in like what—less than ten minutes.”
“So Mark, like, got onboard that fast?”
“I’m telling you. This guy was a pitch-meister. Turns out his principals are renovating the old Grand Theater for a Presentation of this new experience, and afterwards the theater’s gonna be like a ten-million dollar gift to the people of San Francisco. The whole renovation will be done in two weeks. Perfect status-leverage built into the pitch. The Presentation is a black-tie special invitation affair limited to ‘first-rank corporate media investors.’ And get this—this is the perfect, balls-out touch of showmanship: these black-ties are required to bring their laptops, and be empowered to transfer funds electronically in their very seats after the lights go up! That’s what’s going to bring the big machers. The impudence, the insult of that condition. Come ready to buy, or stay home, because you’re going to buy.”
“Renovating the Grand is good publicity too. Half the City drives by it every day. When do they start?”
“You kidding? All the scaffolding’s already up. I passed it coming in. The pedestrian walkways all built—there was a night crew already working inside.”
Rick had a sense of the whole loft shifting, very gently, around him, the sensation that the world was a step ahead of him. Revelation was already on the move. It was approaching.
“So what’s—” he had to clear his throat. “So what’s the new technology? What’s he got?”
“Who knows? Wild words! ‘A whole dimension beyond holographics.’ Your guess is as good as mine.”
Who knew and who cared? Rat was already back at work on his panels, and Rick was again strongly drawn to his own. That was all they wanted really, wasn’t it? Something good, something rich and strange on the board. He scanned his work lovingly. Here, for instance. He’d given Luke a car after all, had it slouched in the dust by a boxcar—an old big-boat convertible, satanic fins, chrome-browed headlights like jet-streamed demon’s eyes. It struck him that while he often thought Rat’s work was good but marred by a stridency, an angry exaggeration, didn’t his own work bulge with anger too, with an implacable opposition to Normality?
Well, they were brothers in art, doing what they did best. That was all that mattered here and now, and he got back to it.
IV
Two nights later, Rick had half the panels ready for inking. He’d always smiled at people saying things like, “It drew itself,” because if it did he figured it wasn’t likely to be very good. But these panels drew themselves! And they were great. And, another new thing for him, he’d drawn the incident straight, from life.
There were alterations, embellishments. The car now had tire-treads patterned like the paw-pads of beasts. Its upholstery was the stretched skins animals and its steering wheel was a circle of welded bones. And slashed across its hood was a stark white grafitto. HE COMES.
And in the last panel he’d already decided on another fantastic augmentation. Luke, pedaling away from the smoking flatcar, would have, within his overalls, the lean-thewed and back-jointed limbs of some monstrous hound, while his face, still his own, was lifted in a profiled smile of exultation.
The distant clatter of the door. Rat hustling in, and calling across the high-ceilinged gloom as he came, “Rick! We gotta comission off it! That Meta Cinema presentation!”
“How much?”
Rat didn’t answer, saving his punchlines for a dramatic close-up in the cone of Rick’s worklight. He looked transported. He pulled a scrolled poster from under his arm and unrolled it. It was blank, except for blocked out letters across the top.
COME CHTHULUBRATE
THE MURAL MASS
ADD YOUR SPRAYCAN CHALK PAINT FELT-TIP ART
TO THE PORTAL BENEATH
“We draw up a couple of pictures. Print off five hundred of each. We hire some help to put em up all over the Haight, the ‘Loin, the Mission, South of Market…wherever street people and street artists abound.”
“How much?”
“How much, the man asks! Ricky my brother! Are you ready? Forty K! We cut Jackie and Zed in—we draw, they color. Ten each!”
“Who—”
“Mr. GQ! He called me! Chet Shoggua or something.”
“Shugrue?”
“Maybe. I didn’t really catch it on the phone, and I can’t read his signature here.” And with a sly smile he pulled out a check. “A twenty K advance. He messengered it over this afternoon.”
Rick sat there, his mouth slightly ajar. He felt paralyzed—not because of the check—but because he felt full of so many questions, and he couldn’t determine what those questions were. All he had was a powerful sense that questions should be asked. He groped and found the simplest one. “So what do we draw?”
“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Something from the Mythos. Something HPL. But what he said was it could be anything that came to mind. His words. Our take entirely, he said.”
“So…what does the Mythos have to do with Meta Cinema?”
Rat beamed. “It absolutely beats the shit outta me! But who cares? We can have fun!”
“Well…” said Rick, something dawning on him. “I think I’ve already got my drawing done. How about this?” And he showed Rat the panel with the graffitied boxcar, CHTHULU slashed across the lesser writing. Beside it in the same image, smoke rose from the flatcar and ended at a seam in the sky.
“Whoa! Dude! That’s so evocative! It’s perfect. It’s oblique and tantalizing. And it totally fits into this whole Mass idea, all the street artists and graffitists contributing to the same mural.”
“So what about the Mural. What’s it of?”
