The Future Is Blue

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “Best squamous going, I heard,” Shax gurgled. I’d almost forgotten she was there. I’m not much of a cultist when you get right down to it. I know that about myself. I’m trying to work on it.

  “Iä, me too, I heard that,” Zuzu growled, still stung, pride still snake-stomped. “Only you gotta be 100% goat. Quiet like a misko in a library. If you disturb the man’s slumber, it’s bad fhtagn news. He’s cranky when he first wakes up.”

  So that’s how we ended up on a rickety rooftop huffing Cthulhu’s farts. Highly recommended; would huff again. They detonate in your brain pan like the birth of cruel galaxies and come streaming out your nose in globs of black opal blood, electric reeking soulpit slime and I loved it, I couldn’t get enough. Shax turned bright purple and started sobbing like a wee baby slug, Zu slammed his skull against the chimney over and over till he had a dent in his face like a bootprint, and it was the dankest time I ever had or ever will have.

  Shax reeled back, her tentacles floating wild uncurled shub-red gorgeous. Her gelatinous body pulsed out-spectrum colors, a ship code I’d never translate.

  “Moloch, darling, love of my pythagorean fundament,” she moaned, “we gotta ask, we just gotta ask, what are they waiting for?”

  “Who?” Zuzu rasped, wringing his scabby kangaroo tail in his great meatgob hands.

  “Come on, eerie,” I sighed, spinning in my own personal gassy squamous. “Them. The Elder Gods. The Old Ones. The Waiting Dark. In his house in R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. This fat fucking octopus right here.” I kicked the gambrel roof twice. “Why’s it always gotta be about the Elder Gods? What the fuck are they waiting for?”

  Pazuzu thumped his pustulant tail. “The whole system’s rigged,” he chanted, “by the time we’re Elder, there’ll be nothing left for us but the ash-end of the universe. We slobber and serve and ain’t nobody ever gonna serve us. It’s not right. They got it all stitched up nice the way they like it, Yog-Sothoth and Yig and Azazoth and Hypnos and that fat sack of shit down the chimney. Even Mom. Shub-Niggurath herself, I know we love her and all but she spends all day shitting out kids on the dole and fuck me if you and me will ever be able to afford a slavering brood of our own. And then they turn around and call us krugs and layabout shubs when they’re the ones who snooze all aeon instead of rending the mortal world like they always promise. It’s bullshit, Moloch. Bullshit.”

  Shax’s three eyes shone hideous, thinking of all those mortal streets she shuffled in her precious bloodpuppets. “You don’t even know how right you are, Zuzu. The mundworld is totally shoggo, believe me. The best they could do against us is cry while they piss their pants. But the Old Ones? Oh no, they just gorge and giggle and yig themselves and dick around while centuries go by and those mundo fucks up there invent nuclear fission. They got everything dank there was to devour and we get squidshit because they were born at the dawn of existence and we weren’t. Because they’re entitled to the whole damn multiverse while we’re entitled to sit on our asses and clap for their crumbs. Why don’t they just fhtagn retire and let the Young Ones come up the ranks a little? I’d be a bloody yellow queen of everything. Come on, you know it’s true! Shax, the All-Devourer, Accursed Meretrix of the Nether Nebulae, Mother of Madness, Flayer of All Things Dun and Shoggo! I’d capture hearts and minds, you better believe. But no, I have to wait, because they love waiting, and maybe when I’m a shriveled old cone I’ll get to devour one measly asteroid if I ask real nice. Fuck that.”

  Shax rose up to the dark air, the stubby protuberances beneath her pyramid spinning and smoking furious. She screeched down the chimney.

  “Do you hear that, Cthulhu, you sleepy motherfucker? I hate you. I hate you so fhtagn much.”

  Then, Shax did something I didn’t even know she could do. Maybe it’s just a Yith thing. She sucked up a breath, sucked it all the way in, withered down to a dried-up triangular old-cheese-looking turd-chip and dove down the slime-lung chimney into the bowels of the house of Cthulhu.

  Zu and me exploded into a real cacoph of waits and wheres and whats and Shax you fœtid bitches. We gibbered down the brainspout and busted a dag fulgy stained glass window as quiet as we could so as to crawl in after her. My cultist had re-inflated, re-hydrated, and re-animated in the smack middle of the Great Old One’s Great Old Foyer. Seventeen dimensional staircases corkscrewed all around her, mirrors yawned into nations unknown and unknowable, old mail spewed out from the post-slot in the Great Old Door. And all over everything sprawled the mottled sicksilver sapphire obese and pustulant tentacles of dreaming, waiting Cthulhu, bulging out everywhere, rotto mottled vomit-golden bloodless flesh balloons straining out of doors, cabinets, furnace grates, snoring like a siren out of time, sickly blueblack suckers all down his diseased limbs opening and closing shubbily, oozing hallucinogenic acidslime onto his own nice clean floors.

  Shax dug one of Nyarlathotep’s tomes out of who-knows-where and lit it with an orange beam from her lower eye. She kicked one of the wormy tentacles. It didn’t budge.

  “Maybe he’s dead,” Zu whispered.

  “You wish,” I hissed back. One of Cthulhu’s moony eyes fluttered iris-down in the downstairs bathtub. Shax was in full seethe, turning magenta with righteous loathing. “Come on, Shax, enough. Babby, let’s go. You don’t want this ichor on you. It’s too much.”

  Zuzu held out one crusty hand. “Girl-thing, leave this fat bat be. He’s not worth it.”

  Shax smoked her peace for awhile. Listened to the shriek-flute of the Boss’s sleep apnea. The end of Papa Ny’s hand-rolled tome flared violet flame in the shadows.

  “Fine,” she said finally. “Whatever.”

  Mr. Moloch has never done anything so tough in his dun life as getting that granite slab door open without a creak. Mr. Moloch sweated sour green in the dark. And Mr. Moloch, when he got it open, stared across the veranda of the demon of the ultradeep into the crystalline snake-mug of his own sister Shit sidewinding up the stairs.

  “I followed you,” hissed Shit before I could pull a repeat of my 9 pm performance of the What Are You Doing Here jive. “It wasn’t hard. You’re very loud.” Shit quick-kissed my face with the prongs of her tongue. “I do love you, Moloch. I try to look out for your dun ass.”

  Shit took in the scene. Her many livers and spleens and lungs and stomachs and hearts pulsed wetly in her cellophane skin. She gawped Zuzu, winking guilty side-eye at her because back at Bifrons’s pad he’d tried to say he hungered her all casual but it was true and she shut that shit down. She gawped Shax, still flushing squamous magenta fury, plasmic pores still full of iridescent ancient fart-gas, sucking on her tome-butt. She gawped me, mutant goatsnake of the hour, just hungering to bolt back to the couch and sleep and another dun day in R’lyeh. But most of all, she gawped that effulgy fucking house, the columns and staircases and mirrors and curtains and beautiful foetid dank things she’d never have no matter how hard she glooned for the big boys, no matter how antique and eldritch she slavered for them, no matter how many eternities she devoted to their worship and their plans and their secretarial needs. And she gawped the lazyfuck octocunt flop of the squid sensation of every nation, the great pharaonic secret she had never been allowed to behold, even at the office holiday party. And the Great Ancient One, bulging out of every orifice in that grand house we’d never be able to buy if we outlived Saturn, was as disappointing as our own mother, useless and wrinkled and old and shoggo as shit.

  Her serpent face crunkled and cracked.

  Her organs twisted and boiled inside her. She hungered. Maybe she’d always hungered more than me, and I just don’t know anything about anything. I sure as sheol didn’t call what happened next.

  My babby sister put her eyes on Shax.

  “Burn it down,” Shit said. “Burn it all down.”

  Shax grinned. Her pyramid slit itself almost in half to grin that wide. The Yith floated out the Great Old Door and flicked her smoldering tome behind her. It landed in a puddle of Cthulhu’s dreamsic
k spittle.

  And the whole place went up behind her like the Big fhtagn Bang.

  Unto the utter end of time and existence, it was the dankest thing I will ever see.

  Be me: Moloch! Eldritch as they come, antique as a goddamned china set, maximum yellow fellow! Only five thousand years old, practically fresh-baked, belly full of san and gas and mushroom chemtrails, tentacles a smoking hot mess, fur the opposite of goat. Gawping on the sidewalk at the big ultraviolet hellcloud of Cthulhu’s fancy fucking house burning at the bottom of the sea.

  For a minute, I gotta tell you, it felt fucking eldritch, my eeries. I could smell barbecuing god and it smelled like the future. A real future. Our future, a future Young and not Elder.

  Then the shriek started.

  It gibbered up from the cellar and out of the chimney and then everywhere at once. And the shriek had a color. It had a weight. It had shape inside the smoke and flame. The shriek shattered into shards flying up into the sea, out into the city, slicing through reality like sewing scissors. Shax and Shit and Zu and me fell to our knees, assorted mitts over our hear-holes, ready to babble for forgiveness, mercy clemency, all those fulgy words.

  Then it stopped. Cool black water flowed down through the transdimensional doily separating us from the sea, down and through and over the Great Old House, drowning out the fire, the smoke, the shriek, everything, everything, smoothing it back the way it was, like nothing ever went down in there, like fire never even got itself invented in the vicinity.

  In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu rolled over on his giant flabby cosmic belly. The last of the flames turned his infinitely-chambered lardheart as orange as a rotting pumpkin, as gold as the world we’ll never inherit, as soft and corrupt as the first moldering peach of original sin. In his dreaming, the Old One spluttered, groaned, cried out for some mundforsaken mother I cannot believe ever truly existed, and went back to sleep.

  But the shards, my eeries, the shards of that antediluvian shriek were still going, shredding through the dimensional dome of our sky, bobbing up into the galleon-clotted mundsea like insane islands. Me and my brood didn’t know it was gonna happen. Believe me that if you believe anything. Everything that happened after that moment, topside and bottom, well, iä, iä, it’s our fault, sure, whatever, but all we ever meant to do was forget how garbage R’lyeh really is for one fhtagn night. Everybody deserves that, don’t they? Once in awhile?

  I mean, maybe, just maybe, all that time, Cthulhu was waiting for us.

  Two of the black ship-blobs tottered squamous up there in the far reaches of the mundworld. Tottered, gibbered, fell. Plummeted down through the fathoms of the fathoms toward R’lyeh, toward us, me and my Shax and my sister and my scabby sweetheart brother, delinquents junking up the gated community. As the wrecks rocketed toward the plane of me and mine in a champagne apocalypse of ultradeep bubbles, I gawped the names on the sides of the kruggy hulls. Just before they crashed our interdimensional undersea party for good, I got their names graffitied on my venomy heart.

  The Alert and the Emma.

  What fucking dun names, honestly. Mundflesh’s got no sense of style. Shax hid her face in my shoulder. Shit flared her crystal hood so no one would recognize her and shamble-slithered off down an alley ’cause she wasn’t gonna take on a speck of shame no matter what. Pazuzu stood fast, though. He squeezed my hand.

  “What are you gonna say,” Shax whispered, “when our spawn asks where you were the night the humans landed?”

  We watched the ships fall down to us like black, uncertain rain.

  Oh, well. There goes the neighborhood.

  The Limitless Perspective of Master Peek, or,

  the Luminescence

  of Debauchery

  When my father, a glassblower of some modest fame, lay gasping on his deathbed, he offered, between bloody wheezings, a choice of inheritance to his three children: a chest of Greek pearls, a hectare of French land, and an iron punty. Impute no virtue to my performance in this little scene! I, being the youngest, chose last, which is to say I did not choose at all. The elder of us, my brother Prospero, seized the chest straightaway, having love in his heart for nothing but jewels and gold, the earth’s least interesting movements of the bowel which so excite, in turn, the innards of man. Pomposo, next of my blood, took up the deed of land, for he always fancied himself a lord, even in our childhood games, wherein he sold me in marriage to the fish in the lake, the grove of poplar trees, the sturdy stone wall, our father’s kiln and pools of molten glass, even the sun and the moon and the constellation of Taurus. The iron punty was left to me, my father’s only daughter, who could least wield it to any profit, being a girl and therefore no fit beast for commerce. All things settled to two-thirds satisfaction, our father bolted upright in his bed, cried out: Go I hence to God! then promptly fell back, perished, and proceeded directly to Hell.

  The old man had hardly begun his long cuddle with the wormy ground before Prospero be-shipped himself with a galleon and sailed for the Dutch East Indies in search of a blacker, more fragrant pearl to spice his breakfast and his greed whilst Pomposo wifed himself a butter-haired miller’s daughter, planting his seed in both France and her with a quickness. And thus was I left, Perpetua alone and loudly complaining, in the quiet dark of my father’s glassworks, with no one willing to buy from my delicate and feminine hand, no matter how fine the goblet on the end of that long iron punty.

  The solution seemed to me obvious. Henceforward, quite simply, I should never be a girl again. This marvelous transformation would require neither a witch’s spell nor an alchemist’s potion. From birth I possessed certain talents that would come to circumscribe my destiny, though I cursed them mightily until their use came clear: a deep and commanding voice, a masterful height, and a virile hirsuteness, owing to a certain unmentionable rootstock of our ancient family. Served as a refreshingly exotic accompaniment to these, some few of us are also born with one eye as good as any wrought by God, and one withered, hardened to little more than a misshapen pearl notched within a smooth and featureless socket, an affliction which, even if all else could be made fair between us, my brothers did not inherit, so curse them forever, say I. No surprise that no one wanted to marry the glassblower’s giant hairy one-eyed daughter! Yet now my defects would bring to me, not a husband, but the world entire. I had only to cut my hair with my father’s shears, bind my breasts with my mother’s bridal veil, clothe myself in my brothers’ coats and hose, blow a glass bubble into a false eye, and think nothing more of Perpetua forever. My womandectomy caused me neither trouble nor grief—I whole-heartedly recommend it to everyone! But, since such a heroic act of theatre could hardly be accomplished in the place of my birth, I also traded two windows for a cart and an elderly but good-humored plough-horse, packed up tools and bread and slabs of unworked glass, and departed that time and place forever. London, after all, does not care one whit who you were. Or who you are. Or who you will become. Frankly, she barely cares for herself, and certainly cannot be bothered with your tawdry backstage changes of costume and comedies of mistaken identity.

  That was long ago. So long that to say the numbers aloud would be an act of pure nihilism. Oh, but I am old, good sir, old as ale and twice as bitter, though I do not look it and never shall, so far as I can tell. I was old when you were weaned, squalling and farting, and I shall be old when your grandchildren annoy you with their hideous fashions and worse manners. Kings and queens and armadas and plagues have come and gone in my sight, ridiculous wars flowered and pruned, my brothers died, the scales balanced at last, for having not the malformed and singular eye, neither did they have the longevity that is our better inheritance, fashions swung from opulence to piousness and back to the ornate flamboyance that is their favored resting state once more. And thus come I, Master Cornelius Peek, Glassmaker to the Rich and Redolent, only slightly dented, to the age which was the mate to my soul as glove to glove or slipper to slipper. Such an age exists for every man, but only a
lucky few chance to be born alongside theirs. For myself, no more perfect era can ever grace the hourglass than the one that began in the Year of Our Lord 1660, in the festering scrotum of London, at the commencement of the long and groaning orgy of Charles II’s pretty, witty reign.

  If you would know me, know my house. She is a slim, graceful affair built in a fashion somewhat later than the latest, much of brick and marble and, naturally, glass, three stories high, with the top two being the quarters I share with my servants, the maid-of-all-work Mrs. Matterfact and my valet, Mr. Suchandsuch (German, I believe, but I do respect the privacy of all persons), my wigs, my wardrobe, and my lady wife, when I am in possession of such a creature, an occurrence more common and without complaint than you might assume, (of which much more, much later). I designed the edifice myself, with an eye to every detail, from the silver door-knocker carved in the image of a single, kindly eye whose eyelid must be whacked vigorously against the iris to gain ingress, to the several concealed chambers and passageways for my sole and secret use, all of which open at the pulling of a sconce or the adjusting of an oil painting, that sort of thing, to the smallest of rose motifs stenciled upon the wallpaper. The land whereupon my lady house sits, however, represents a happy accident of real estate investment, as I purchased it a small eternity before the Earl of Bedford seized upon the desire to make of Covent Garden a stylish district for stylish people, and the Earl was forced to make significant accommodations and gratifications on my account. I am always delighted by accommodations and gratifications, particularly when they are forced, and most especially on my account.

  The lower floor, which opens most attractively onto the newly-christened and newly-worthwhile Drury Lane, serves as my showroom, and in through my tasteful door flow all the nobly whelped and ignobly wealthed and blind (both from birth and from happenstance, I do not discriminate) and wounded and syphilitic of England, along with not a few who made the journey from France, Italy, Denmark, even the Rus, to receive my peculiar attentions. With the most exquisite consideration, I appointed the walls of my little salon with ultramarine watered silk and discreet, gold-framed portraits of my most distinguished customers. In the northwest corner, you will find what I humbly allege to be the single most comfortable chair in all of Christendom, reclined at a, at first glance, radical angle, that nevertheless offers an extraordinary serenity of ease, stuffed with Arabian horsehair and Spanish barley, sheathed in supple leather the color of a rose just as the last sunlight vanishes behind the mountains. In the northeast corner, you will find, should you but recognize it, my father’s pitted and pitiful iron punty, braced above the hearth with all the honor the gentry grant to their tawdry ancestral swords. The ceiling boasts a fine fresco depicting that drunken uncle of Greek Literature, the Cyclops, trudging through a field of poppies and wheat with a ram under each arm; the floor bears up beneath a deep blanket of choice carpets woven by divinely inspired and contented Safavids, so thick no cheeky draught even imagines it might invade my realm; and all four walls, from baseboard to the height of a man, are outfitted with a series of splendid drawers, in alternating gold and silver designs, presenting to the hands of my supplicants faceted knobs of sapphire, emerald, onyx, amethyst, and jasper. These drawers contain my treasures, my masterpieces, the objects of power with which I line my pockets and sauce my goose. Open one, any one, every one, and all will be revealed on plush velvet cushions, for there rest hundreds upon hundreds of the most beautiful eyes ever to open or close upon this fallen earth.