That night, Shax was burning down a flyleaf off the Book of Azathoth, sucking up the purple smoke through seven slits in her protoplasmic face and exhaling misty dodecahedrons out over the power lines and train tracks and horror-shards of our drowned and drowning city. Pazuzu scratched his scabby balls and knocked back a forty of the skunky, hoppy black bile he insisted on brewing in Shit’s closet. She hates the smell, but Shit’s way too nice to say anything. How the two of us can have come out of the same cloaca is just beyond.
“Fuck this,” grunted Pazuzu. “I’m sober as a goddamn archeologist. I wanna get bloody squamous. 100% iridescent. Straight obliterated. I wanna yank my brain out through my nose, boil it in beer, and beat the shit out of it with a fhtagn hammer. Lurk me?”
I did, indeed, lurk him completely. So did Shax. Her tentacles twisted and lithed above the apex of her gelatinous pyramid-head.
“Iä! Iä!” she ululated. “Screw this babby shit to the seafloor.” She threw down her tome and crushed it beneath her protean bulk. “Eeries, let’s hunt down some real ichor tonight. I wanna get ordinary. I wanna be totally fucking mundane! Thoroughly, balls to the wall, XXX normal.”
This meant gibbering down to the Psychotic Pnakotic for pints of san with rationality chasers. I didn’t have the gleeth for that kind of action, no how, but Shax usually covered me. She’s a Yith, which is kind of like being in the mafia, except with psychic parasitical spores instead of tommy guns and zoot suits. Zuzu only ever tolerated Shax because she never acted like the richie she was, really. Shax ate shit and puked despair like a real sheol proletariat princess. Like the rest of us. So Zu carefully ignored all the times she picked up our tab.
I groaned. When I groan it sounds like an owl’s death-scream. It’s my dankest feature.
“I’m not gonna let your mopey tentacled ass get between me and a fœtid high, you fhtagn misko,” laughed Zuzu, hopping off the roof ledge and running one meaty hand through his pustulant, blood-crusted pompadour. “We’re taking the subway and if you whine about it, I’ll kick your beak in. And then I’ll tell Mom you went to bed at eight with a glass of warm milk and a book so you could be fresh for work in the morning.”
If Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, heard that noise, she’d paint the nursery with my intestines.
But you gotta understand, public transportation in R’lyeh is a fucking shitshow. Remember that decomposing transdimensional honeycomb knowledge I threw your way earlier? It’s the naked truth. This crapheap town is full of holes—and the holes move. Look—R’lyeh is old as balls. R’lyeh sits at the crossroads of a million planes of sickening unreality. And R’lyeh does not invest in infrastructure. You can walk down the Uvular in Gugtown, dank and antique as you please, flip a corner, and peer down into the bottomless red cavern of Yoth. You can park in the frozen maze of East Yuggoth and come back to find the volcanic pits of Voormithadreth have totaled your accursed chariot without so much as leaving a note. Nyarlathotep’s porn shop on Id Row? That’s actually in Carcosa, which isn’t anywhere near R’lyeh as the squid swims, but the old bitch-town wore a hole in its filthy sock, and now you can trip over a nightworm in Kadath and land face-down in Carcosa if you don’t look both ways before crossing universes.
So the subway is no-go in Moloch world. I’m not about to shoot my shit through Gug-gnawed subterranean tunnels underneath this cyclopean clown car and end up drinking on freaking Saturn with a bunch of giant cats. No, thank you.
But for my eeries, anything. Anything, forever, always.
And that’s how it happened. That’s all it was. Our fœtid, degenerate quest, the dark crusade that would echo down through the centuries like one of Cthulhu’s grand farts was just a Hadean beer run through the toilet bowl of the cosmos. Lurk this and lurk it well: the fancier the history reads, the trashier it really was.
Only one hobo Shoggoth barfed and pissed on my feet at the same time the whole way there, and there appeared where it was supposed to be after only an hour of the wyrmcar screaming profanities at us. All nameless horrors considered, I call that dank.
So a half-breed goatsnake, a Yith, and a Ghast walk into a bar. Stop me if you’ve heard this one.
Most all the fiends and mutants in the plushy-ass eel booths of the Psychotic Pnakotic swiveled their heads and floating globes and writhing antennae to stare at me and mine. R’lyeh’s a pretty conservative squat when you get right down to it. Yiths with Yiths, Ghasts with Ghasts. But I didn’t give a fhtagn because I’m not a fucking racist. Shax wound one of her crimson tentacles around my neck and we gibbered up to the bar. Shragga was manning the taps. She’s got a drill for a face but she’s basically yellow.
Shax smeared a dream of becoming and unbecoming on the bar. It glowered ultraviolet netherhot, curdling into pestilent lumpcream. Shragga shrugged. Shax’s gleeth was always dank here, even if she wobbled in with her Niggurath cultist boy-thing and embarrassed the high-end clientele.
“Three hits of san with lucidbacks, Shraggs,” my girl-thing oozed, right eldritch and shameless.
“We gotta dress code, Yithling,” Shragga’s drill whined, ground, spun. “Blackest of ties. Writhe here a minute, I’ve got a couple of old exoskeletons in the back.”
Shragga shuddered back with meaty arms full of black clattering crabskin armor that hadn’t been sheol since the Cretaceous, whistle-screeched through her drill-face, and poured out three shots of thorazine plus three tall glasses of Providence tapwater. The PP’s got a pipe that goes straight up to New England and suckles at the municipal mundflesh supply. Zu and me licked sea spores off Shax’s stomach.
One, two, three; grab, slurp, devour, then sucked sour slime off the Providence pipe to chase it down.
“Fhtagn, iä!” Zuzu yelled.
The rest of the pub goggled and gurgled and gleeked at us like they never saw anyone enjoying anything in their whole infinite existence before.
God, this fucking neighborhood.
Used to be an antique place, very goat, full of artists trying to get back to their roots and hone their craft, create a warm sense of community delirium, drive the mundflesh to a really authentic eternal madness. But then the Old Fucks moved in with their gleeth and their gloons and their penthouse sepulchers and organic organ banks and locally-forced whole food cannibal bistros and now it’s a shoggo wasteland of narcoleptic zombie demi-gods who couldn’t give two deranged toadshits for anyone under a hundred thousand years old. Back in the day, you could dance at the Pnakotic. Get your underground shubstep electrotrance tentaclecore maenad groove on. Now we had to sit uncomfortably in some dead crab-god’s claw-me-down stench just to get a drink while the upper crusty glared at us like zoo creatures.
Shax swiveled to me, her three globular golden eyes pulsing, her seventeen irises contracting to one hideous human mundeye. “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents,” she blurted.
“What the fuck?” I giggled.
“Pick up some butter and flour at the store on your way home!” she howled. “The bank keeps calling about our mortgage!”
Pazuzu slapped the pub-floor with one massive kangaroo leg. “Fhtagn iä! Can you feel it? Mundmouth McGee is in the house! What do you want for dinner tonight, sweetie? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our son got into Brown next year?”
“Who cares?” I giggled again. I couldn’t stop. I could hardly wheeze out words when the lucidity kicked in and my essential Molochness gibbered off.
“Hello,” I yelled, as if possessed, without meaning to, without any hunger to: “my name is Moloch, nine hundred and ninety-seventh son of the Great Black Goat Shub-Niggurath, the Outer God, the All-Mother, and I am an alcoholic. Are there cookies in the back? Debbie always brings pecan sandies.”