“Welcome to Mom’s Diner, how can I help you?” screamed Zuzu. “How can I help you? How can I help you? How can I help you?”
But it doesn’t last. Lucidity has a seriously krug half-life. Our undermatrices can’t hold on to the mundo psychfest. It all fucks off back to pecan sandie-land and dumps you in a ditch on the side of the multiverse with drymouth and aching tentacles. We were stuck inside ourselves again pretty quick, a sad brood of dun miskos raging uselessly against the sinferno, the exact opposite of what we hungered.
“I hate my life,” I whispered. I couldn’t tell if that was me or the san talking.
So we decided to blow that squalor and go glean our eerie Bifrons and shake him down for some furtive fungiform fun.
Bifrons, now, Bifrons is a dank fhtagn Mi-Go, the Fungus Among Us, a sheol mushroom man who truly has his gills together, guggo for anything and antique as a china cabinet. You gibber over to Bifrons’s flop if you want to get your corpus collosum fully corpse-thrusty skull-strummed. The shiitake scenester laired in a scumlord paradise, waterfront view over a black river of boiling slime that pours eternally into one of R’lyeh’s puckered sphincters, the A-Line that leads through the youth-infected artisanal slums and terminates at a certain Mr. Yog-Sothoth’s amorphous, radioactive, but surprisingly elegantly lit pad. What can I say, the Thing from Beyond knows from window treatments.
Bifrons does not know window treatments. His flop beholds like a schizoid sewer worker’s night terrors. Mold wriggle-gibbering in wallpaper patterns, rags and bones and fugue-pus and broken wine glasses everywhere, Shoggoths yigging idiotically, robotically, in one corner, a mouth-faced Gug smashing his skull into Bifrons’s good mirror, a dehydrated Yith crumbling into nothing within reach of the kitchen sink, the floor more spore than rug.
Home sweet home.
Bifrons doesn’t charge. He does h
is song and dance for the jingles and tingles. It’s some kind of fetish, I guess. He sweats technicolor dreamvenom the whole time and it’s kruggy but Moloch doesn’t judge. Gotta get your yig on where you can in R’lyeh. You’d think an insane chthonic carnival of a shriek-powered city pumping out waves of delirium into the seven seas would have some kind of nightlife. But this is pretty much it. Door to door traveling fucksters trying to keep up our enthusiasm for the latest and greatest howling silver vacuum.
“I got leftovers,” the preternatural portobello puled in our direction. “You hunger?”
Bifrons tossed Zuzu a mundo Chinese takeaway carton half-full of sweet fried chunks of a divorced mid-level import/export manager’s jabbering shredded psyche swimming in anchovy sauce. One, two, three; grab, slurp, devour. Bifrons stroked the greasy slopes of Shax’s pyramid with his creeping fungoid fingers, which was not at all sheol by me, but you gotta stay yellow if you wanna get squamous with the crimini element around here.
“Everybody goat?” Bifrons lisped thickly, his mushroomy otherflesh beginning to crawl with rainbow glowsweat.
“Iä, Biff, my eerie, my mush, iä,” Zuzu hissed.
He was getting bored. Moloch always knows. And when Zuzu gets bored, he starts looking for something to rend. Screams echoed out of the back bedroom and I could tell by the accents of their murdermoaning that it was a high street gloon couple mashing divinities. Probably can’t even cum without reciting the names of their fell ancestors into each other’s waxy hear-holes. If Zuzu clocked the same, it’d get full ghastly frenzy in here with a quickness.
“Iä, Bifrons, babby, do your thing,” I said.
What gets Bifrons off is this: Mr. Morbid Morel worms out his munted wings and the fungal rings of his face start spinning dank and wild. He phases his claws out of the corporeal plane, reaches into your skull, scoops out your brain like vanilla ice cream, sticks it in a dirty glass jar, and shakes the shit out of it until you’re addled and rattled and paddled and straddled, then he shoves your milkshake back and watches your soul jiggle out your orifices.
Here we go.
So Moloch’s in the brain jar and his medulla is smashbang oblongataed into blueberry psychic jelly and when a Mi-Go has your black matter on frappe, shit gets very topsy indeed. Memory yigs itself raw. One minute I’m goggling out a filthy glass jug, next minute I’m little, tentacles barely grown out yet, writhing on the infinite mud flat of my birth under a gape-wound sky where the stars are dying over and over, being devoured over and over, devoured by something vast and gorgeous and unstoppable, inevitable, perfect in its total hunger.
Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Cosmos, the Digestrix of Aeons, the All-Mother.
My mother.
I reach my stubby little nubs out to her impossible fœtid body. I stretch every soft babby tentacle curling on my cherub-noggin up to her grotesque countenance, her million interdimensional breasts foamy with nightmare milk, her billion lithe squiddy limbs branching and forking like an immense untoucheable winter tree. Wee tiny Moloch cries for his mama up in the sky and she screeches ultrasonic daemonoharmonic over the boundless bloodswamp of her thousand sobbing young, her babbies, her brood, the spawn of her wonderful hell-womb.
I love you, Mommy, I love you, I wail but she don’t come down, she don’t wriggle me in her feelers and nuzzle my goaty face looking so much like hers, she don’t even know me from my brothers and sisters, she don’t pick me out and make me special, she just makes like she’s gonna hork up all that starshit she guzzled her whole life like a mama seagull into a thousand writhing gullets and jets. But then she doesn’t. She doesn’t feed us the stars she got to eat when they were fresh and eldritch and sweet. She keeps it all for herself and we starve while Mumma shrieks across the continuum to something else, something prettier, something danker, something better than us. Than me.
I love you, Mommy. Why don’t you love me back?
When Bifrons sleeved me back into my squidsack I was crying hideous, naphtha seeping out my stupid shoggo eyes and stinking up the joint with feelings, dripping kerosene shame onto Biff’s rug in time to the telltale sound of a scabrous mutant kangaroo named Zuzu thump-thump drumming some sorry fulgy skull into the wetwall.
Be me: Moloch, clawed back from his righteous hard-earned squamous, blurred blotto, gibbering around the rank lair of an evil mushroom, staggering down, then up, then down again before scraping Zuzu off a tall, cold, dark drink of trust fund water half out of his madrags with black, ancient blood all over his dumb wormpile face. Moloch, gobsmacked as a bloody mundo in the naked throbbing bonelight of true reality, when he sees the shub that handsome devil is yigging is none but his babby sister Shit, see-through snakebody wrapped around his tarantula legs, fangs all the way out.
“Stop it, stop it, you fhtagn shoggo loser,” hissed Shit.
“What the fuck, Shit?” Zu slurred around the kruggy edges of his Mi-Go trip. “Why you yigging that fuckboy yuppie establishment gloon? You two go suck Elder ass together, too? If you were that hard up I’d have whipped your eggs for you. Why’d you do him for, you mundane bitch?”
My sister uncoiled herself, every inch the serpent daughter of the Digestrix of Aeons. Her hood flared. I don’t think I ever noticed how beautiful Shit was before. And the thing is, up until that second, Shit always spoke full fulgy. I never heard her drop so much as a scrap of yellow dank into her talk. But just then, with her cultist boy-thing bleeding into Bifrons’s crusted space-colored carpet, she swore like us.
“I didn’t hunger you, you dun cunt. Lurk me now? Iä? Call him a gloon? No. That’s Qaatesh. Say hello, Qaatesh!” The worm-faced hunk of her affections coughed and spat out several fangs. “Lurk him. He has a name, just like you. He enjoys long walks on the beach and flaying the minds of smug academics, not that you give a fuck. Gloon, gloon, gloon. That’s all you behold. That’s all you babble. Flapping your gash and farting out this kruggy class war squidshit. You think you’re sheol? Think you’re yellow? Behold me, Pazuzu. I am a gloon. I carry water for the Great Old Ones and I am well dank at it. I am paid in blood and diamonds from the nether reaches of space which means I have the gleeth to spot you two that nice apartment with the big slither-in closet where you make your garbage homebrew ghastbeer and Moloch puts the empty carton of ichor back in the fridge instead of throwing it out every goddamned time. You hunger to savage some fulgy sneerheart gloon? I’m right here. Show me that eldritch deathdick, you shoggo fhtagn fuckaroo.”
Zuzu just gawped. A big scab over his ear fell off. I gibbered up between them.