I pulled back into my garage and killed the engine. When I had left, I had made sure that I left a glass of Alka-Seltzer on the coffee table as well as a fresh pot of coffee. I was hoping he would get the hint. I had started to get a sense of how insatiable the appetite of my increasingly unwanted house guest was so I did, indeed, do some grocery shopping as well as stopping at a fast food taco shack to pick up some burritos and nachos. I tried to balance the food and the sacks of groceries in one hand while carrying the beer in with the other. I had decided to buy a case of canned beer rather than bottles. I was rather glad I had decided on this as the entire contents of my arms were unceremoniously dumped in the middle of my kitchen floor just after I had walked in.
The house was a mess! The refrigerator doors were standing wide open and I could hear the fan whirring in a vain attempt to maintain the temperature. The crisper drawer had been pulled out and half the contents of my fridge were now dumped in the floor. Eggs were smashed and any jar that could break had been broken. Pickle juice mixed with barbecue sauce and bags of shredded cheese had been overturned and allowed to congeal in the middle of the mess. The contents of the freezer had mostly been dumped into the floor and been allowed to defrost. The pantry doors had also been flung open and in front of the pantry there were piles of cereal, flour, crackers, and broken strands of spaghetti. Across the floor and leading into the den there were oddly shaped footprints. Tracks shaped like large flippers that left damp streamers of slime in their wake.
I stormed into the den and found the mess was even worse there. Piles of wrappers and half eaten food had been strewn everywhere. For some odd reason, toilet paper was also in abundance and had been strung from the bookshelves like a Miskatonic Frat party. The damp fingers that had handled it had already caused it to start disintegrate in places. The television had been dragged from its normal position along the wall and the cables had been stretched to their very limit as it had been dropped in my overstuffed chair. I stormed into the circle.
"Chuck," I barked, "What the hell happened in there?!"
I paused as I looked at him. He was slumped over in the couch and staring intently past me towards the television. His dark and beady eyes now looked strangely puffy and a disgusting half snuffle and half snorting sound was coming from where I assumed a nose would be if he had one. I'm sure my eyes must have been bulging out of my head as I saw him pluck a tissue from a box with one flailing tentacle and then tucked it into the mass of tentacles where I heard a loud honking sound.
"She still hasn't told him!" he sobbed.
I wheeled about and saw that the television had apparently been turned over to some 24 hour soap opera channel. A blond wearing makeup that had probably been applied with a paint roller was mugging it up on camera across from a dark haired man wearing a tailored suit which he was wearing casually inside what I assumed to be his own home. I looked back at the Great Old One in disbelief.
"Told him?"
"After Quinton was in that car accident and was in a coma for six months Jackie was forced to sleep with Dr. Paul MacVee or else he would not perform the surgery needed to save Quinton's life but now she doesn't know if the baby she is carrying is really Quinton's or Paul's, but Quinton is so happy because he thought he had lost his ability to have children because of a tragic skiing accident in Aspen and if she tells him that the child may not be his it could destroy him!"
I blinked and took a step back.
"Keep your damned Deep Ones out of my house, okay?"
He snuffled and nodded, but never looked away from the television. I went back to the kitchen and grabbed a broom. This was going to be a long evening.
It was getting close to midnight when I finally finished cleaning up the kitchen and the much more minor Super Fund cleanup site I found in the hall bathroom. As far as I could tell, Cthuhlu had sent the Deep Ones out into my house to bring the TV over. When he found the soap operas were on, he had sent them back out to rummage for snacks and tissues. The Deep Ones seemed to have a passing familiarity with what a human household layout was like, but no idea how it actually worked. They knew the tissues would likely be in the restroom, but I have no idea why their search also involved turning on every faucet and throwing the towels around everywhere. The toilet was hung and would not stop flushing and I actually had to take the back off before I found out they had actually disconnected the hose inside. Of course, I only found this out after I got hit in the face by a flailing hose spraying ice cold water. Joy.
After I mopped up the water and salvaged what I could of the food, I brought Cthulhu his reheated nachos and a burrito, room temperature beer, and a half gallon of rocky road that had already melted too much to be salvaged. I dumped the food on top of the table and turned the TV off and shoved it out of my chair.
"Hey!" he said and pointed at the blank screen, "I was watching that!"
"Look, I didn't summon you here to raid my fridge, make a mess, and veg out in front of the TV all night! Actually, I have no idea why I summoned you other that I have been having those nightmares for five nights telling me how to do it."
"I told you," he said as he picked up a spoon and began eating the ice cream right out of the carton, "You seemed the best one to tell my story."
"Tell your story? How am I supposed to do that when I spend all night cleaning up after your frogboys while you try to figure out if Dr. Paul is the father of Janie's baby."
"Jackie," he corrected me, "Janie is her evil twin with multiple personalities who Quinton accidentally slept with when she was impersonating her sister because one of her personalities wanted to destroy Jackie so Janie could collect the inheritance from her father's software company."
I was so baffled I could only stare.
"Really?"
"No, not really," he admitted, "Just fucking with you."
"Oh," I said and then nodded at the TV, "You watch that a lot?"
"First time, actually," he said, "Couldn't figure out which buttons to hit for the longest time. One of the Deep Ones, though, is a hybrid and he still remembered a bit about how they operate."
"Hybrid?"
He shrugged.
"Half human and half Deep One. Deep One DNA seems to have the dominant traits, but they don't usually start transforming until some time in middle age. Dumb bastards usually think it's just some sort of skin condition at first. When you hear a banging at the door and you find some dumb shit Deep One smelling like chamomile lotion with this lost puppy look in his lidless eyes you know its a fucking hybrid."
I thought of the frog-like inhuman men with their unblinking eyes and slimy gills. I shuddered.
"Must do a lot of work in the dark," I mused.
"What?"
"Nothing," I said, "I was just thinking out loud."
Then something he had just said a moment before began to register.
"Wait? That was the first time you've seen a TV?" I asked, "Then how did you know the storyline?"
He slurped more ice cream.
"Betty Evaningston."
"Who?"
"Nice old lady, likes cats," he said, "Just about every day she turns on her soap operas and starts watching. But she's an old woman, you see, and very tired. She falls asleep in front of the TV almost every day and dreams about what she hears. I get bits and pieces of the show as I watch her dreams."
I frowned and eased back deep into my chair.
"You watch people's dreams?"
"Not much else to do around here," he admitted, "Even the dreams are pretty boring. You know what most people dream about? Sex. Doesn't do me much good. I find you humans fairly repulsive. Watching your hairy fleshy bodies slapping against one another gives me the dry heaves. Second most popular subject? Flying! Can you believe that? I have danced in the spaces in between and touched the hearts of the very stars and people think lifting a few feet off the ground is a nifty trick."
I shifted uncomfortably in my chair.
"Then why do you do it?"
He slammed the bucket of ice cream on the table with enough force to make me jump.
"You ask a lot of questions," he snapped and went back to munching the ice cream. I sat there in stunned silence and tried to puzzle out what the purpose of this entire evening was other than to raid my pantry.
"Um, Chucky," I said after a moment, "You were going to tell me about your story."
"And you," he said, "Were going to turn on TV back on, hand over the damn nachos, and then you are going to sit over here and watch the show with me."
"Watch the show?" I squeaked, "I can't stand soap operas!"
"You'd rather have your still beating heart sucked out through your nose as your flesh is torn asunder to feed hordes of ravenous byhakhee? Well, that's your choice."
I turned on the TV.
"Which one's Janie?"
"Jackie," he corrected me, "And we're on a different show now."
Cthulhu turned out to be fairly knowledgeable about the background of the soap operas we were watching, but it did take me some effort to convince him that the commercials were not just some sort of reoccurring subplot. Apparently Old Betty had incorporated everything she heard in her dreams, including the commercials and Cthulhu assumed that having a bald cartoon muscle bound man come in the room and talk about cleaning dirt and grime on grout was just a peculiar human way of enhancing dramatic tension. He thought I was just trying to trick him at first, but after seeing the same commercial three times where women danced through a field and rejoiced at how their tampon moved with them, he had to admit it did not seem to be a terribly important plot point. After that I actually began to extract a bit more information out of him providing I only asked questions during the moments of unimportant plot development, which he still refused to call commercials as he claimed "that damn bunny with that drum is up to something." So I waited for a less integral subplot involving a home pregnancy test promising the earliest results to ask my next question.
"So," I said after a moment, "Is Christi only pretending to love Luther so that he will marry her so she can use his money to pay off her blackmailer or does she actually love him and is lying to Frederico so he won't use his mafia ties to kill Luther for revenge?"
"You fool!" he growled at me, "Luther is the blackmailer! Weren't you paying attention? You stupid monkeyboy! Go make so more popcorn! At least you can do that without requiring a superior being to give you instructions!"
I looked down and saw that there was, indeed, an empty bag of microwave popcorn that the two of us had been eating out of. Which explained that odd slimy taste in my mouth. This also begged the question, when the hell exactly did I get up and make popcorn? What time was it anyway?
I stepped out of the conjuring circles and my house returned to normal. I left the TV playing and went to my newly cleaned kitchen and found another bag of popcorn. I noted that the clock on the microwave said that it was just after three in the morning. It was just over three hours before I had to wake up to go to work. Oh wonderful! I hit the power button and tried to figure out how to politely tell a nearly omnipotent being that it was time for him to go. I yawned just as the microwave beeped and I heard the last kernels pop. I picked up the bag and shuffled back into the den. Commercials were either still playing or we were on a new set because Cthulhu seemed to be willing to talk.
"I can't believe what all you monkeys have accomplished," he said and nodded to the TV, "Howard would have loved this. Say! You wouldn't happen to have one of those Playstation things I've heard about, would you?"
"No," I lied, "Couldn't afford one."
I then tried deliberately to look everywhere in the room but the shelf where my old Playstation was currently collecting dust.
"Pity," he said, "Hey! There is this role playing game out there I heard about and, you'll love this, this one has-"
"Here's the popcorn," I interrupted and dropped the bag on table, "May want to eat it while it's still warm."
"Oh yes!" he chortled and began downing fistfuls of popped kernels, "Want some?"
Despite gargling with salt water, that slime taste was still in my mouth.
"No thanks," I said, "I'm on a diet."
He snorted.
"Humans," he said as his tentacles shook, "You're never happy. I've seen countless famines where they would gut you and hang you by your own entrails for just a bowl of popcorn like this. Now that you have food, you complain about that too. Your species is never happy, you know that?"
"That's probably true," I agreed, "But I'm trying to lose a couple of inches."
"I'd like to gain a few feet back."
I tried to get the image of a rotund Great Old One terrorizing the masses with a beer belly flopping over his belt. It didn't seem to quite mesh for some reason.
"Beg pardon?"
"Shh!" he said, "The show is back on!"
"Gain a few feet?"
"Not many," he said quickly, "Maybe just another twenty or so!"
Do pants even come with a twenty foot waistline?
"You what?" I asked.
"I'm tired of using a stepladder to reach the top shelves in my house, okay? Now be quiet or I will gut you like a fish and stitch you back together inside out!"
I was quiet until the next set of commercials, but that was only on the outside. Inside I was buzzing with questions. When I heard the TV start talking about dish washing liquid, I could hold it in no longer.
"You were taller?"
"Yeah," he said, "I told you I haven't ate in millenia."
I thought about that.
"Didn't Lovecraft say you were taller than the mountains?"
He shrugged and slumped further back in the couch. His tentacles began picking microscopic crumbs off his chest and carrying them to that invisible maw.
"He was trying to make me feel better. Remind me of the old days. It's been thousands of years since I was that tall."
"Since R'yleh sank?"
He nodded. He pretended to watch the TV, but I could tell he was still listening.
"So when the stars changed, whatever that means, you had to retreat to your stronghold," I continued while trying to think furiously, "And you did something to preserve yourself while in there, but it also traps you inside. In the meantime you are draining your reserves of power and it makes you physically shrink?"
He sighed and, to my amazement, picked up the remote and turned off the TV.
"Close enough," he admitted, "The first century was the worst. It takes more power to sustain a body that is sixty thousand feet tall than it does to support a body that is only a few hundred feet tall. I was losing up to a yard a day back then. But after awhile it began to settle down a bit and now I only lose a couple of inches every five hundred years or so. Not too bad, really."
"And eating will make you grow again?"
"Nah," he belched, "Just slows it down. Why do you think I don't send the Deep Ones out for carry out? I need the stars, man. They ain't right."
"I guess that could be unsettling," I said, "Are you sure the stars will come back the way you need them?"
"All a matter of time," he said and waved a claw absently, "The stars are stars and you can't change what they are and it is only a matter of time before they will be right again. Besides it's not all bad shrinking. There are advantages."
"Like?"
He shrugged.
"Well," he said, "I didn't realize you monkeys would accomplish so much. You know, in my day you guys were still beta testing the wheel. Those spells I use to create my own reality bubble can't be opened from my side. I need an outside agent. Well, the solution seemed pretty simple at the time. You monkeys will worship anything that is just a bit different. A tree, a rock, or even a person. I tell you, we were overrun with messiahs those days and none of them were even half as good as that David Copperfield guy. Give him a thousand years and you monkeys will have temples dedicated to him. So, yeah, there were always a few half mad cults that worshiped me. I even sort of liked the attention when I could be bothered to notice you monkeys. So, arranging to have one of these cults open the door to the city was the easy part. But I also needed them to physically take my body out of the temple, you see? Well, I couldn't anticipate you inventing forklifts and cranes and lifting a fifty billion ton body seems to be a bit much to ask of a bunch of temple dudes, you know? But, if they work together, they could carry out a twelve foot long body and-"
His pallid green flesh suddenly turned a slightly paler and more sickly green and he picked up the remote control and turned on the TV.
"Which channel is the one that talks about food?" he asked, "I want to see what else you monkeys have invented that might be worthwhile."
It was too late, I had already caught his slip up.
"Twelve feet?" I asked, "You're shorter than that already! You can't be more than eight feet tall!"
"Eight feet two inches!" he said, with just a shade of indignity, "And I miscalculated, okay?"
"No you didn't," I said with a shake of my head, "You know exactly when the stars will be right. You've drained too much power."
Realization suddenly hit me.
"You were supposed to be asleep this whole time! But you're not! You haven't been, have you? You've been awake this whole time and eavesdropping on our dreams!"
"Oh please," he snorted, "Me? Eavesdrop? Your dreams are like a constant buzz buzz buzz in my head! I can't shut off the noise! Who needs to eavesdrop when you are all shouting?"
He started flipping channels. I turned around and slapped the power button.
"No," I said, much to my own surprise, "You don't come in here, keep me up half the night, eat me out of house and home, and freeload my cable and then try to dodge the issue when we actually start talking!"
"Talking is overrated," Cthulhu grumbled, "You know, it never works out right. I try to explain things to you monkeys, but you never seem to get it. How could you possibly understand what I am saying? Your minds are just so limited. Even when I try to help you out, you get it wrong. Take Elizabeth for example. Really cute Hungarian girl I met awhile back. You would have liked her, but she had a really rough childhood and married a real creep. She felt stepped upon and used to dream of what it must be like to never be under someone else's heel again. You know what I'm saying?"
I squirmed uncomfortably.
"Sure," I nodded, "We all feel a little trod upon from time to time, I guess."
"Right," he nodded, "But this poor girl, she used to beg in her dreams for just a taste of real freedom. So, on a whim, I decided to show her what real freedom felt like. More freedom than your limited monkey brain could believe existed. I gave her just a taste, the smallest amount I could. Next time I hear about her I'm told that she's been grinding up peasants and using them as vanishing cream. Really sucks, you know? I was just trying to help her out. Or Vincent! Oh, man Vince. There was a piece of work. Artistic type guy. He knew that the world arrived to him filtered through his own perceptions. He knew that color was something that had been invented for him. He knew what he saw when he looked at a color, but he also knew that it did not mean the color was actually there. Or even that someone standing next to him was seeing it the same way. What if the color he thought of as red actually looked more like blue to someone else, but they had always been told it was red."
"I'm with you so far. I guess we all think about it from time to time. We have no idea what is really going on in someone else's head."
"Yeah, well I do," he sneered, or at least it sounded like a sneer, "And I can tell you it's not much. I also know what things really are without all the filters. He was an artist and I tried to help out. So I thought I would show him a color. I'd show him what yellow really looked like. Just one color. What's the harm in that? Next thing you know he's off in wheat fields painting birds that aren't there and mailing bits of himself to prostitutes. And don't even get me started on that time I tried to talk to that Russian monk, Gregor. There's a conversation that really went off the deep end. You guys never get it. Not even Howard, and he really tried. I mean, really tried. You guys are just too small and have no frame of reference."
"So why do you do it?"
"Talk to them?" he asked as he stood up and, of all things, began pacing the length of the conjurer's circle like a caged lion, "I told you. I'm trying to get the story right. You guys have it all wrong."
"Yeah," I pointed out, "But you've already said we can't understand. So what difference does it make to you? We're too limited and too fleeting. Everyone who's alive now will be long dead and turned to dust before you get out of your city. So what does it matter if we know your story now or not?"
"Because," he repeated, "It's been all wrong and I don't want to wake up and have paparazzi in there flashing cameras and asking me if Azathoth and I are lovers or something."
"Oh come on!" I said as I stepped up to him and poked a finger in his chest. A move I would not recommend under other circumstances.
"You expect me to believe that?" I asked him, "You smite entire civilizations just because you're bored on a Thursday. We're beneath you. You really expect me to believe that this is an appeal to your future PR department?"
His void black eyes narrowed upon me.
"You mock me, mortal?"
"No," I said, "I'm calling you a liar. That whole apathetic god of blood lust and destruction is just a ruse, isn't it? You just keep meddling in human affairs. Yeah, it blows up in your face, but you keep doing it. That isn't apathy, Chuck!"
"Look, my amusements are none of your business. You humans are nothing more than an ant farm to me."
"I'm not buying it. Why don't you just go to sleep and not even worry about a hobby?"
"Who can sleep with all the noise you humans generate?"
"And here I thought you said that the water acted like a barrier and you couldn't really link up to the dreams of most humans."
There, in that tiny pocket of mixed reality, the star spun deity who could shatter my sanity with a mere thought locked eyes with me and then, to my surprise, looked away.
"What does it matter if I do prefer to stay awake while I'm waiting?" he muttered, "What do you think 'Cthulhu fhtagn' means anyway?"
"But why? And why do you insist on talking to us?"
He shrugged.
"I can't explain it to you, mere mortal," he said as he walked away towards that dark, irregular hallway, "You lack the capacity."
"Bullshit!" I snapped.
He paused.
"Maybe," I said as I took a step towards him, "We don't understand the true nature of freedom or even the color yellow, but as a non-telepathic species we understand this just fine. It's not that complicated."
He froze in place. Not a scale nor a tentacle quivered. For the first time since I first saw him, the great god Cthulhu was now perfectly still. I took a deep breath, but did not take another step forward.
"The Great God, um, Chucky, High Priest of the Old Ones . . . is lonely."
He stood there motionless.
"All powerful," I continued, "And also all alone. There's no one there for you, is there?"
All of the sudden, Cthuhlu spun on his heel and he was in motion. Before I realized what was happening, my eyes that had been staring at the back of his head were level with his chest. The massive chest heaved with a sharp intake of breath. My heart thundered in my ears as I suddenly realized who my house guest really was. I had just challenged a god. What's more, I had stepped to the wrong side of the coffee table. I was fully in his domain. Anger and hatred radiated off of him in a palpable wave and I knew, then, the magnitude of my arrogance and of my mistake. I slowly craned my neck upwards and looked into those empty black pits one last time. But, the pits weren't empty this time. In fact, they were strangely moist. A horrible snuffling sound came from within the tentacled head.
"It's," he said and then paused to let out a horrible sobbing sound, "It's all true!"
Flabby clawed arms swung around me but did not sever my spine nor did their enormous strength cave my chest in to smother my heart. The head of this deity lowered itself to my shoulder and I felt his body spasm in great racking sobs. Oily black tears oozed from his eyes and onto my shoulder as his dank slime permeated everything. I knew I should put my own arms around him, but I stood there perfectly rigid as I was engulfed in a man-hug with a ravenous deity and all I could think at the time was, "Damn it! I liked this shirt, too!"
After a few moments of sobbing, he finally let me go and wiped a bit of the black ichor tears away from his eye with a claw.
"I'm so all alone," he said, "And no one understands me. Even when I try to explain it, they just go insane and start killing people."
"I know, I know," I said soothingly as I searched around briefly to find the box of Kleenex and then handed it to him, "It's tough being an all powerful deity. Thousands of years of waiting for the stars and no time off for good behavior."
"None," he said as he took out a tissue, with a brief nod of gratitude, and blew an unseen nose with a great honking sound. The tissue was suddenly green with the ever present slime.
"It's okay," I said, "It's normal to feel this way."
"But how do you humans deal with it? You aren't even telepathic! You can't ever know what someone else is thinking."
I shrugged.
"We get through it somehow," I said, "You try to find someone special just for you. You settle in and spend the rest of your life trying to figure each other out and hope the loneliness goes away one day. If it doesn't, well, we don't last forever."
"But I'm immortal!"
"True," I agreed, "And you don't even appreciate that. You know, we can spend an entire lifetime discovering another person and still be surprised by them. You have from now until the end of eternity to discover someone and you don't even realize how many humans would do anything for just that opportunity."
He glared at me and snorted in what I took to be mock anger.
"Oh, so I need to find a girlfriend and trap her in my sunken city for all eternity as we play touchie-feelie games?"
"Or," I said, "You could find an immortal friend to spend time with. Maybe another god or that king you were telling me about earlier."
He sniffed.
"You . . . you think that would help?"
"At this point do you think it could make you feel worse?"
His tentacles split in the middle and swooped upwards at the sides in that parody of a human smile.
"No, not a lot," he admitted with a barely stifled sob.
"Look," he said and jerked a thumb to point at the ominous hallway behind him, "I have to . . . have to go . . . for a moment. Hit the can, you know? A real asshole out there did a bad conjuring."
I smiled and nodded.
"Yeah, I've heard that can really mess you up. You go right ahead."
He nodded.
"But, it was . . . really good talking to you, you know. Thanks a lot."
"Sure, no problem. You know where to find me if you need to talk again."
He nodded and began a slow and steady walk down the dank hallway towards the deep and foreboding darkness trapped within. As soon as he was out of sight, I casually stepped back towards my own side of the room. Slowly and carefully I walked past my overstuffed chair, with the TV still sitting where I had been earlier in the evening, and out of the conjurer's circle. I then turned and looked back. I saw nothing. Then, before anything could have time to stop me, I quickly and deliberately kicked and scuffed the chalk line I had drawn on the floor. The scuff mark broke the circle and I felt the world jerk as the spell ended and the tiny bubble of reality I had created for Chucky and me popped.
So you see, officer, there was a very good reason I was standing in my backyard wearing nothing but boxer shorts as I doused a flaming couch with gasoline at four o'clock in the morning. No, I have not been drinking. No, none of that other stuff either. No, I don't have a lawyer and I'd rather not sleep this off in a cell, if it is all the same to you. In fact, I'd rather not go to sleep again for a little while. He's probably still a little bit pissed at me.
Submitted September 27, 2015 at 02:25AM by semiloki http://ift.tt/1FAagXu HFY
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