Copping Squid and Other Mythos Tales

by Michael Shea

  “Didn’t you read your own poster? It’s of a Portal, man! A Portal Beneath. Turns out the Grand Theater has this huge basement. They’re already resurfacing its walls and floor, are making a mural space as big as a freeway billboard—we’re talkin’ lots of image room.”

  “Do I sense, just possibly, a further commission?” Rick meant this to be humorously conspiratorial, but it came out sounding just a little scared.

  “Don’t think I haven’t thought of that. If these posters really rock, I’m gonna pitch him. Oooh! I just got an idea for mine. Like a flash on the Mountains of Madness! You gonna be working here a while?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Gimme an hour or so.”

  Rick did panels. Here was Chet Shugrue emerging from the flames. Here was that splendid figure advancing on the City skyline. As he worked Rick had a giddy, wonderful sensation, like a tile-setter who, square by squre, was paving over a road that arched up into the empty air; each image he laid down seemed to overlie a gulf, a darkness within which immense things echoed.

  In no time at all, it seemed, Rat was at his elbow with his sketch. Rat was a rigorous draughtsman, severe, but at the same time he was able to kindle an image, to haunt it. Here was a huge underchamber of dressed stone, hexagonal, a massy arched doorway in every facet, all opening upon a millennial rubbled emptiness between them. Five of the doorways were vacant. From one of them, an immense searching tentacle extruded.

  “It rocks, Rat-man, it rocks.”

  “I’m gonna call the girls. We could be puttin these things up all over town by tomorrow night.”

  V

  Zed was small and angular. When you ran something by Zed, her body language seemed to angle into it, her black-lidded eyes and purple lips adding accent-angles of both skepticism and glee.

  “Cthulhu’s really back, you know. Wall art everywhere crawls with his minions.” A spraycan commando capable of Carrivagian compositions, Zed also wrote half the stories Death Groan printed.

  Jackie had sharp green eyes and a delicately hawkish nose, like a young falcon—was feeding now on the two drawings Rick and Rat produced. Feeding and looking very amused. That meant Jackie was also in. “They’re gonna love this. All of ’em. They’re gonna get into it big time—so what about this mural? A portal? Are there guidelines? A period? Parameters?”

  “Yes,” said Rat decisively. “There are parameters. It’s all fresh buffed concrete. This huge goddamn wall sixteen feet high, and half the floor in front of it.”

  “So the drawing space is going to have a big ninety-degreee fold across the middle of it.”

  “Correct. So one parameter is the canvas. We are, simply, to fill that canvas with the Portal.”

  A pause. Jackie cocked an eyebrow. “Any, uh, further parameters?”

  “I’m not sure you’d call it a parameter. Draw what you will.”

  Rick, inexplicably to himself, shuddered. “GQ’s very words?”

  “Slick Chet Shoggua’s very words.”

  “Chet Shugrue,” Rick corrected hollowly. Draw what you will. He realized he had shuddered because the thought excited him.

  Just before dark they piled into Zed’s ancient Beemer, an anti-status symbol, all rust, and rocketed up to the Haight, the sky all indigo with stars coming out, a night wind scouring the fog off the City’s magnificently architected peninsula.

  They worked in pairs. Even as they put them up, street folk gathered to the posters. As Jackie pressed one to a pole and Rick plied the staple-gun, he felt a touch at his elbow. A bearded face, hesitantly smiling, its unfurred surfaces all tarnish, the skin a kind of dust-tanned leather, asked, “Is chalks OK?”

  “You bet!” smiled Jackie. “Look, says chalk right here.”

  But the beardman, though he looked at the poster, seemed to have eyes only for its image—this one of Rick’s, the gloriously graffitied boxcar.

  “And the mural,” he said, looking shrewdly at Jackie—“it’s a big open door, right?”

  “A big open door,” she nodded.

  Maybe it was the gusts of wind, but everywhere they went the streets seemed to hustle with excitement. Even the real people, those on their way to restaurants, with credit cards and digital remote car keys in their pockets, seemed to frisk as they walked. Indeed, when a clear starry sky is laid over the grandeur of Frisco, who is not uplifted as he walks?

  But the unreal people, the ragged gypsies of street art, were all astir. Not all the street people. Many were burnouts, or kids just strutting the role for a while, and these were like the real people, a little excited without knowing it.

  But the sly ones, the guerrillas—some kind of word had gone out among these. Perhaps it was because they had slept in doorways that the word of an Open Door spread like wildfire among them. Never had Rick, as he stapled up his and his friends’ work, felt so directly the pleasure of an audience for it. Here were his spiritual brothers and sisters, rising up from the shadows, drinking it in.

  Art—truth—was power. He’d leaned on that all his life, but so rarely felt it as he felt it now. The open doorway was this sky itself, its stars, its infinitude revealed. They, he, and his street colleagues were the only ones in the City hooked into the Truth right now. And they were about to open the door to Him.

  VI

  How had this even happened? This gathering of thirty-odd people, and many of them truly odd, in the Death Groan Comix loft? To have gotten the majority of the City’s freelance muralists in the same place at the same time was a minor miracle.

  Further marvels were to come, however. Rat stood in the midst of their disorderly enclave of folding chairs, stood there clearing his throat, the group beginning to quiet down to hear him, when a bony tattooed arm went up.

  “Excuse me? Could I offer just a word?”

  “Well…sure.”

  The guy stood up, a tall, bearded, elegant rack of bones in a sleeveless T-shirt. “We’re talking Mythos, so it should be a portal of Cyclopean stonework. And it should be circular, a colossal stone sinus. If we just agreed on that at the start, we could get right to work. Have time to make it really bitchin’.”

  The almost perfect silence that greeted this was like a revelation to the whole room. Did accord actually exist among them already?

  “Well…” said stunned Rat. “Well, whatever we decide, we’ve first got a lot of organizing to—”

  “Forgive me. Excuse me. That’s the real point I want to offer. If we’re agreed on only that much of the image, then we should just spread out, and start doing it. We have to be spontaneous. Of course we stay linked up to each other, adapt to our neighbors’ work as we go along. A coherence will emerge if we’re together in spirit, but if we don’t take the chance of doing it that way, the whole thing’ll choke up. I mean, this is sorcery, right?”

  Again the silence was complete. The roomful of mavericks knew perfect unanimity, and sat amazed by the realization.

  After a moment, someone else said, not even bothering to stand up, “And for the street artists, the only rule will be, that they have to wait till we’ve finished a section before they draw on it.”

  After a pause, Rat said, “Well. All in favor, say ‘aye.’”

  It was a soft roar, a burst of Gregorian plainsong. “AYE.”

  “Well, OK, then. Just one organizational detail, I suppose. If you’re gonna use scaffold, it has to be small and mobile. Bring that, and your own ladders if you favor them, to the construction entry off Third, or the Grand will provide you with any kind of ladder you want. Also construction lamps. So, how about seven A.M., before the traffic?”

  “Hell with that,” someone said. “I wanna start now.”

  Me toos rose from half the room.

  VII

  Zed and Jackie were breaking to stand back from their work. As they gazed at it, Zed glanced at her watch—a Rolex, another sardonically exhibited status bauble—and murmured, “Seventy-two hours.” Meaning since that so-brief organizational meeting in the loft.
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  It was amazing, this murmurous, intent swarm they were part of, filling this vast basement. And the Image was already more than half painted…

  The portal’s vertical arch spanned the whole wall, and many artists had left their ladders and rolling platforms standing and were on their knees, bringing the horizontal arc out across the floor. Meanwhile the street-artists had occupied the abandoned ladders and were encrusting the Cyclopean stonework of the arch with gnostic haikus of exploding letters, with images spiky or spiraling or spidery or intricately faceted, with whole little cityscapes in chalk like barnacles on the basalt ashlar of the arch, with mythic micro-figures dancing in delirious bacchanal along the moss-furred mortar lines of the antediluvian stone.

  The vertical arch contained a great semicircle of darkness. They’d really gotten a sense of space into that darkness—it seemed an inward-yawning hemisphere as big as night. So many blacks, with sulphur and indigo and royal purple shot through them—so many different blacknesses had pieced together that painted darkness within the arch…

  “How did we do it?” Jackie asked in simple awe—both of them gazing at that blackness now for the thousandth time. And already, working amidst the legs of the ladders on which the graffitists zestfully toiled, artists were extending that same uncanny darkness out onto the floor they stood on.

  “And just look,” enthused Zed, “how the stonework flows. Look what it does.”

  The arc of masonry seemed to ripple with millennia of human endeavor. Sumerian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Honduran, Incan—the stonework idiom of all these echoed from it, one style seamlessly segued into the next. With this latent flux in it, the portal seemed to breathe, seemed only by a strenuously sustained grip to contain the immensity of the darkness within it.

  “You know what,” said Jackie. It wasn’t a question. “We’re really stepping into some deep shit here.”

  Zed blinked her blackened eyelids and did her Stan Laurel imitation.

  “That’s right, Ollie!”

  Jackie slanted a look at her friend and then ventured, “You felt it too, didn’t you?”

  From Zed, perplexity—a beat too much. “Felt what?”

  Jackie nodded. “So you felt it too.”

  “…Yeah. Especially on the Dark, but also on the stonework too. As if I was carving it.”

  Jackie nodded. Had felt her brush feeding pigments into a deeper surface than the polished cement. Had felt her brush cutting her work in stone. “Did you feel a…cold,” she asked, “coming up through the handle of your brush?”

  “Yeah.”

  Jackie had to grope for her next thought. “Well…it is cold out there. It’s the truth.”

  “Amen, Sister.”

  And still, filling them both except for this cold core of understanding, there was the happiness of this whole productive spectacle. Humanity’s sweet congeniality when immersed in a clear, shared task. A semi-prosperous muralist with his own mobile scaffoldette conferred enthusiastically with the ragged graffitist sharing his perch. Slick young Art Babes talked up a storm with multi-sweatered chalk-guerrillas wearing fingerless wool gloves. (And there was that chill in their subterranean studio. It seemed to leak in from the darkness they’d painted and framed…)

  But the two women savored it. That social murmur that filled this space, how sweet it was! Here was that mythic thing people were always talking about, that fabled Sense of Community…

  VIII

  Rick and Rat sat at a table in Winchell’s. The girls were at the counter getting the coffee and donuts—their treat, since the four of them just this afternoon had banked 20K apiece from the poster and mural commissions.

  Rat picked up a discarded Chronicle front section from an adjacent table. Gave it to Rick, indicating an article with a smallish headline below the fold. “I noticed this earlier. You see it?”

  There’d been a strange spike in Missing Persons the last two weeks. Not runaway kids or the rootless underclass—no news there—but all mature adults of the upper executive class. Three guys from banks, a couple from big brokers, one man and one woman from two major ad agencies, several women in publishing…

  “Spooky,” said Rick, gauging his friend’s eyes, trying to see how much he wanted to put on the table between them.

  “Let’s not dance around,” said Rat, offering the paper to Jackie as Zed set the tray down. Taking their seats, the women traded a look. “We know,” Jackie said.

  “So why dance around? It’s connected, obviously.”

  “One of those jellies is for me,” Jackie said firmly.

  So they ate, watching the early evening traffic outside, debating Rat’s claim by not saying anything about it for a while.

  Zed burped softly, gulped coffee, and sighed. “Are we really surprised? What did we suppose we were doing?”

  Rick realized, as her question echoed between them, that he’d been waiting for this moment. He’d seen more than they had and was tired of being alone with it. “Lemme tell you guys what happened to me. Two weeks ago, I think I saw the beginning of this whole…project.”

  He told them about Luke, the quarter, the gas can, the flatcar, Chet. In the middle of the account, Rat’s cell phone chirred. They all sat silent while he said “yes” twice, described their present location, clicked off looking mildly perplexed, and then waved Rick on with his story.

  When it was done, the street outside looked more sparsely trafficked. Their eyes lingered on passersby, staggery or limping folk who seemed to slant them looks of fear, or sinister speculation…

  “Just when your income starts getting good,” muttered Jackie, “that’s when you have to really look at who’s signing your checks.”

  “But we knew, didn’t we?” protested Rat.

  A modest black limo, looking much classier than any stretch, slid to the curb. The chauffeur, suited and capped, with massive shoulders and an almost wolfish mid-body leanness, emerged, but the passenger erupted impatiently before he reached the door.

  It was Mark, Rat’s stepdad. A thick guy in power casual, nice sportscoat, no tie, his balding crown flanked by styled backsweeps of vigorous badger-gray hair. He bustled into the shop.

  “Hi, folks. Can I sit?” He was a nice, gruffly friendly guy. His aura of wealth, the moment he entered, made the whole Winchells look three sizes smaller and four shades dingier.

  “I’m sorry to barge in like this”—he smilingly declined Rick’s offer of a hit of his coffee as he took a chair—“but this is in the nature of an urgent matter. Close-out for the art staff in the basement is in two hours, but I’ve, uh, been informed that the mural isn’t finished till it’s signed. We have to finalize the contract with the Signatory at once. And the Signatory would be you, Rick.” He laid a check before him.

  “Me?” The check was for four hundred thousand dollars.

  “I know, believe me,” said Mark, displaying sympathy. “Talking to my son here, I’ve come to understand the artist’s perspective. You all worked together, and one signature would seem, ah, egotistic. But Mr. Shugrue is very specific about it.”

  Rick picked up the check and held it up in front of each of his three friends. He couldn’t quite decide how he felt about what he was going to do. He had a sense that there might be something wrong with it, but he couldn’t see what it was. He asked Mark, “Can you write four checks right now? Dividing it equally between us?”

  “Well, as long as you sign it, I don’t see why not.” For a beat there, Marty’s surprise was nakedly visible. Taking out his checkbook and beginning to suit his actions to his words, he recovered some of his poise, talking as he wrote. “And I have to tell you how I admire this, Rick. This artistic spirit, this ethic. This kind of sharing is so refreshing. My son has helped me to really understand it.”

  “You just refuse to call me Rat, don’t you?” said his stepson. He was smiling tolerantly enough, receiving his own check as Mark tore it off and handed it over.

  “Son, we come from different…cultures.
We just have to learn to give and take a little. And while we’re on the subject, I hope you all don’t think”—here came Zed’s check, torn off and handed over—“that this limousine idea is my style. I would’ve driven myself! But Chet said his Principal insists on an entire…protocol.” Rip. Flutter. Here came Jackie’s check. She plucked it from his fingers.

  “I’ll back you there, Mark,” smiled Rat. “The limo’s not you. Your slick little Jag’s your style. That limo’s too gothic—especially with that driver.”

  “That driver…” echoed Mark. His mind seemed elsewhere for a moment, and just detectably, he shuddered.

  “Mark?” Rat prompted gently.

  “Oh. Yes. And here’s yours, Rick. No contract necessary. Just endorsing that constitutes acceptance.”

  The chauffeur was ready for his passenger when Mark returned to the limo—stood with a deferent stoop, door held wide for him. The four at the table saw, under the shadow of the driver’s cap, the glint of his eye as it followed Mark into the back seat.

  They sat watching them drive off. Then it dawned on Rick, what was wrong with his generosity. Responsibility had been conferred on him, and he’d instantly paid his friends to share it with him. All four of them looked at their checks.

  “So, Jackie,” Rick ventured. “About what you were saying? We know who’s writing these checks, don’t we?”

  They looked at each other then. “So are we evil minions?” Rat asked. “Is that what this makes us?”

  “First and foremost, we’re people who draw the truth.” This from Zed. “We don’t make it, we show it. And if the truth…emerges from our work…”

  “…it’s not our fault,” finished Jackie.

  There was a long silence. Rick was not the one who could break it—that had to come from one of his friends.

  It was Jackie. “The real question here is, are we fulla shit or not? Do we mean it or not? So, I guess we better get back,” she said. “Showtime’s eleven.”