“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.