But I realized about halfway through this story that it’s too ambitious and complex to fit into my normal “Story of the Week” slot, so I’m breaking one of the rules I set for myself with this project: that each story be a complete story. This is Part One of an anticipated two parter. Part Two might not show up for a few more weeks, though, because I have a few others in the works.
It occurs to me that some Lovecraftian purists — and their are many, of various types — will probably object to how I’ve portrayed several of the entities from the Lovecraftian mythos. The thing is: Lovecraft himself never really wrote anything down in stone. And when he alllowed other writers to use the deities and characters he created, he essentially gave license to other writers to mess around with them as much as they pleased. So I like to think that Lovecraft would have appreciated this little parody.
Anyway. Enjoy! As always.
TEH K1NG IN Y3110W (Part One)
©2008 by Richard S. Crawford
The game had started out pretty boring, but round about the middle of the third quarter, Cal had finally started to gain ground against the Mustangs, and soon they were tied. It was twenty yards to go with two downs when the phone rang.
Hastur cursed the phone, but it kept ringing, its hideous bell echoing through the nameless void of his apartment. He’d cursed it many times. It hadn’t stopped working yet. He decided to let it ring and let the machine pick it up. But when four rings passed, then five, then six, it became clear that the machine wouldn’t be getting it this time.
Hastur sighed. There was only one being who could bypass the answering machine like that. He picked up the receiver and put it against his ear, careful not to tangle the cord up in his ropy tentacular arms. “Hello, Nyar,” he said, keeping his eyes on the game.
“Don’t call me that!” the eldrich voice said. “You must call me by my full name! I don’t call you Has, do I?”
“Sorry, I forgot.” Hastur smirked. He hadn’t forgotten. He knew full well that Nyarlathotep wanted to be called by his full name. Respect, the elder god had said. Whatever, Hastur had replied. “What are you calling for? I’m watching the game.”
“Well, this is important, Hastur. It’s about Cthulhu.”
On the television, the game was suddenly obscured by a cloud of static. Hastur went over to it, adjusted the rabbit ear antenna, and slapped the side of the television. The picture cleared a little, but not by much. This was the only problem about living in the interdimensional void that connected Earth with his ancient home in Aldebaran. Television reception was awful, and he hadn’t yet found a cable or satellite company that could handle interdimensional signals.
“Hastur? You there?”
“Yeah, I’m here. What’s up with Cthulhu?”
“He says he’s on to something. Something big.”
“Cthulhu’s always on to something big,” Hastur said. “Remember the last time he was convinced that things were going his way? Only to be rammed and forced back into the sea by that oil tanker or tugboat or whatever that was?”
“He says it’s different this time. Really big.”
Hastur snorted. He couldn’t help himself. Cthulhu was such a drama queen. Every little incursion into his territory, every little summoning, every new wrinkle, it was always all about him. Such a prima dona.
“What was that?” Nyarlathotep asked.
“Nothing,” Hastur said. “Some really stupid play on the television.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, this new linebacker for the Mustangs, Carter, can’t play worth a damn. Get this, he just–”
“I’m not interested. There are bigger things at stake here.”
“Yeah, right. Again?”
“Yog-Sothoth has called a meeting. Attendance is compulsory.”
“When?”
“Right now.”
Ah, hell. Hastur didn’t want to miss the game. But when Yog-Sothoth called, you couldn’t just ignore it. The ancient pandimensional god had a way of opening up portals between worlds and forcing you to go through them. If Hastur had a soul, then Yog-Sothoth would have blasted it eons ago.
“Well, then,” he said. “I suppose I’ll be there.”
“Yes you will. Momentarily.”
Hastur’s apartment was suddenly filled with a storm of nameless colors and flashing spheres, like a bubble bath lit up from within by a thousand Christmas lights. Hastur had just enough time to step away from the television so that it wouldn’t get caught up in the portal’s wake and be destroyed.
When the spheres and lights died away, Hastur found himself in the foyer of Cthulhu’s underwater palace. Right away his nose was assaulted by the smell of fish rotting. He closed his eyes tightly to avoid becoming disoriented by the awful angles of the place. Cthulhu took great pride in his architecture, which he called “Neo-Classical Non-Euclidean”, but which just looked stupid to Hastur. Of course he couldn’t say that out loud. Everyone loved Cthulhu and hung on his every syllable.
“Good to see you again, Hastur,” said a voice to Hastur’s left.
Hastur opened his eyes and looked around. A thing that looked like a giant bipedal frog, holding a spear and wearing a ridiculous crown on its head stood, leaning against one of the stone walls. “Hello, Dagon. How are the fishfrogs biting?”
Dagon shrugged. “You know. Same as ever. You know what this thing is that Cthulhu’s got?”
“Nope,” said Hastur, shaking his head. “It’s probably nothing, though. You know how Cthulhu is, gets worked up over the tiniest thing.”
“Yeah, tell me about it. You know I’ve still got messes to clean up from that whole Innsmouth thing from 1928. My reputation was shot. Whenever Cthulhu gets one of these things into his head, everything goes haywire.”
“What are you guys talking about?” A spherical globule of festering matter, dripping ocher and with thousands of eyes and mouths that opened and closed in waves across its surface, floated just a few inches over the floor.
“Hey, Shubby,” Dagon said. “Looking hot as always.”
“Oh, this old thing?” If a globule of festering matter could blush, then that’s what Shub Niggurath did. “I just extruded it this morning. I’m glad you like it.”
Hastur sighed. Shub Niggurath was a tease, and Dagon always fell for it. Many was the night that Hastur had spent on the phone or in his apartment with the froglike deity, consoling him. “She’s just not into you,” he’d say, and Dagon would reply with something like, “Yeah, but I could get into her, if she’d just let me.” And no reminders that Shub didn’t even have a corporeal form, strictly speaking, could dissuade Dagon from his desires.
It hadn’t helped that Hastur himself had once had a fling with Shub Niggurath. He’d been much younger and, well, he’d made a lot of mistakes. A lot.
“We should probably get going,” Hastur said. “Come on.”
“Oh, yes!” Shub said. She floated over to Hastur and slipped a pseudopod through his tentacle. “Will you show me the way? I can’t remember how to get there. I’m such a ditz sometimes.”
Hastur disengaged his arm. “Just follow me, all right?”
Shub pouted. “Don’t you like me?”
“All I want,” Hastur said, “is to be left alone.”
“What, in that dreary abandoned dimension you haunt? Aren’t you like the only person in that whole place?”
Dagon chuckled. “Yeah, everyone else up and left eons ago. But Hastur likes it there all by himself.”
Shub laughed with Dagon, then oozed over and slid her pseudopod through the frog deity’s arm. “You’re so funny,” she said.
Hastur winced at the clumsy flirtation between the two and started making his way to Cthulhu’s audience chamber. He was afraid that tonight was going to be another long night of soothing Dagon’s sensitive ego.
#
The audience chamber was the size of a small city. Elder Gods and Great Old Ones of all types and sizes packed the place. Even Azathoth had shown up, though he was bound in a straitjacket and anti-eating mask, like the one worn by Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs. One of Hastur’s favorite movies.
Yog-Sothoth had spread himself throughout the chamber, filling up several different seats with his ethereal bubbles. Hastur looked around for a free seat, and finally sat down in a cold folding onyx chair between an avatar of Cthuga and a squirming Elder Thing that kept poking at its parent and asking for a treat.
Hastur yawned and twitched his foot. He hated these gatherings. He wondered how the game was going. Maybe if this meeting didn’t go on too long he could catch a recap.
Finally the chamber went dark, and a single bare light shone on the stage in front. Nyarlathotep took the stage, and manifested a microphone on a stand in front of himself. “Good evening R’lyeh!” he shouted.
The audience cheered in response. Except for Hastur.
“I can’t hear you!” Nyarlathotep shouted.
The crowd cheered louder. Even the young Elder Thing next to Hastur got into the action. Nyarylathotep cheered along with them, and the din went on for several minutes. Finally, it died down, and Nyarlathotep put the microphone to his face again. Or what passed for his face; the avatar he wore was the vaguely man-shaped tripod thing with the conical face.
“Now, Cthulhu asked that I don’t go into a long introduction,” Nyarlathotep said, drawing an appreciative laugh from the audience, since he was well known for his long, drawn out, rambling speeches, “so I’ll just cut right to the chase. Beings and entities, I give you, straight from his tomb in deep R’lyeh, where he lies dead and dreaming and yet still mobile, your High Priest and mine, the man with the plan: the Great Cthulhu!”
The crowd rose and cheered as Cthulhu himself stepped from behind the curtains and thundered across the stage. His tentacles writhed, his wings scraped the ceiling, his skin dripped greenish-black slime. He shoved Nyarlathotep to one side, drawing more appreciative laughter from the audience, and took the microphone. “Beings and entities,” he intoned, his voice rumbling throughout the chamber. Hastur could feel it in his feet. “Tonight I bring you news of a startling development in the mortal world. Without going into too much detail, let me just say this: the time for us to reclaim our dominion over th earth and all its realms is at hand!”
Hastur groaned. Not this again.
Abhoth piped up from her seat near the front of the chamber. “But Great Cthulhu! How can that be? The stars are not yet right, and won’t be again for a thousand more strange aeons!” To Hastur, Abhoth’s voice sounded scripted and rehearsed. Obviously she and Cthulhu had practiced this little interchange before the show.
“I’m glad you asked, Source of Filth,” Cthulhu replied. “As it turns out, there’s a mortal human who has actually found a way to bring the stars into alignment. Not in the true mortal reality, but in a simulacrum, where all these aspects of our reality can be controlled, and their effects piped the Interstice to the mortal world through a process called ‘Interstitial Translation’.”
Hastur zoned out as Cthulhu went into the more technical details of what this human was proposing to do. This sort of technobabble was boring and Hastur never got anything out of it.
One thing was for sure, though. If Cthulhu’s plan succeeded, then all of the entities and deities that surrounded Hastur would be able to spill through into the mortal world and wreak havoc. Hastur was pretty sure how the humans would react. He’d seen Cloverfield and Godzilla. The humans would fight back, probably with more and more powerful conventional weapons until they finally resorted to nukes. Or worse. Millions of humans would die, maybe even billions. What was worse, though, was that the Elder Gods would be wandering the face of the earth, and a few would very likely be destroyed.
But worst of all, things would change. Hastur didn’t deal well with change. He’d spent the decades since the last attempt to break through making his existence just so, and he resented the notion that things could be better.
Bugger.
Hastur looked around to make sure no one was watching, especially none of Yog-Sothoth’s avatars. When he was sure that no one was, he teleported immediately from the chamber and back to his apartment.
#
Once, Aldebaran was a popular hangout for Elder Gods, Great Old Ones, and a host of entities and beings from all over the universe. The cafes had been overflowing with patrons. All of the apartments were inhabited, and there was one year when Hastur himself had been forced to share an apartment with Vorvadoss, a pairing which the Housing Authority thought would have been a good idea because both of them typically wore cloaks.
Times had moved on, though. Even among the Elder Gods, fads come and go, and what’s popular one eon may be spurned the next. For Aldebaran, it had all started when the family of nightgaunts had moved into one of the nicer houses in the suburbs, and then all the deities had decided to just move on. Hastur had stuck around, because, well, he liked Aldebaran. As time passed, even the nightgaunts had moved back to Earth’s Dreamlands, leaving Hastur living all on his own in his otherwise abandoned apartment complex. That was okay. He liked being the only one in the whole realm. No one bugged him. He got to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted.
Which isn’t to say he had avoided all modernization and all new technologies. He had a television on which he enjoyed watching football. He had a GPS tracker, though it was more of a curiosity because none of the databases that came with it extended beyond Earth itself.
The prize of his collection of human artifacts, though, was his computer. He’d bought the first one just a couple of years ago and kept it up to date, and he played a lot of World of Warcraft. Unhampered by any need for sleep, he could play for days at a time and was a legend in his guild.
After arriving home from the meeting at R’lyeh, though, Hastur avoided World of Warcraft and went straight for one of the older text-based chatrooms, where he could communicate with other like minded individuals.
TO: tau.chat
FROM: hastur@aol.tau
RE: cthulhus speech
did ne1 else think c was grasping @ straws? srsly c do u even no what
ur saying?
He went on for several paragraphs, breaking down Cthulhu’s plan point by point and attacking each point. Mostly, he kept reminding people of the last time Cthulhu tried to rise up from the deep, back in the year the humans had named 1926, and how miserably it had failed them, all because of some stupid tug boat. And now he was trusting another human with this new rising?
No doubt about it. Cthulhu was an ignorant putz.
He read through his message one last time, just to make sure he’d covered all the points he wanted to, signed his standard signature — TeH K1nG in y3ll0W — then clicked “Send”. For a moment he felt exhilarated, charged up with a rebellious spirit he hadn’t felt since checking out of his gig as a pastoral deity. That lasted only a moment, though, only as long as it took for him to start reading some of the other messages in the newsgroup and the chatrooms. It seemed as though most everyone else thought that Cthulhu was right on target, with a great message and a great plan for the future.
With a sigh, Hastur signed off. He considered logging in to World of Warcraft and going on a few guild raids, but he didn’t really have the energy for that. Interdimensional deific politics always upset him and left a bad feeling in his stomach. He decided to grab a beer and catch the rest of the game.
HASTUR, a voice echoed from behind him.
Hastur jumped, startled, and spun around.
In the corner of his apartment stood a large male human, carrying a staff. He looked like most other humans that Hastur had seen, except for his beard of writhing eel-like tentacles.
“Nodens”, Hastur said. He cleared his throat. He tried to think of something to say. You never just asked Nodens what he was doing or why he was here, because that upset him. Instead you did your best to make him feel welcome. “I was just going to have a beer and catch the game. Want one?”
NO, HASTUR, replied Nodens. I HAVE COME TO SPEAK TO YOU OF A MOST PRESSING MATTER.
“Oh,” Hastur grunted. He shambled over to the turquoise refrigerator and took out a bottle of Coors. “And what would that be?”
THIS BUSINESS OF CTHULHU’S. IT WORRIES ME GREATLY.
Hastur popped the cap off his bottle. “Yeah, me too. But what can you do, eh? Once Cthulhu gets something like this into his head, he’s just impossible to live with. But, you know, it won’t work out. He tried it once before, remember, and it didn’t work.”
AH YES. THE INCIDENT IN THE ATLANTIC OCEAN. BUT, HASTUR, I AM AFRAID.
“Afraid? You? The Mighty Nodens? What could you be afraid of?”
IF CTHULHU’S PLAN SUCCEEDS, THEN MILLIONS OF HUMANS WILL DIE. PERHAPS BILLIONS.
“And what concern is that of ours?” Hastur knew the party line, and when to toe it. He figured it was safe to assume that Nodens would toe the same line as well.
Nodens sighed, set down his staff, and sat down in the leather recliner next to the sofa. YOU JUST DON’T GET IT, he said, scratching his belly. THESE HUMANS ARE MY BUSINESS. THEIR DREAMS AND IMAGINATIONS CREATE THE DREAMLANDS THAT I RULE OVER.
“Yeah, but so what?” Hastur sat down on the sofa and took a long sip of beer. “You’re the Lord of the Great Abyss. You have other realms to rule over.”
TRUE, TRUE. HOWEVER, I REMAIN THE UNDISPUTED MASTER OF EARTH’S DREAMLANDS, AND I SHARE THAT DOMAIN WITH NO ONE. I INTEND TO KEEP THINGS THAT WAY. AND THAT MEANS PROTECTING THE HUMANS.
Hastur furrowed his brow. “But why come to me, then?”
BECAUSE I KNOW THAT YOU ALSO WITH TO KEEP THINGS AS THEY ARE, HASTUR, Nodens said. He dug a finger in his left ear, then examined it. TOGETHER, WE MUST FIND A WAY TO STOP CTHULHU, AND PREVENT THE STARS FROM ALIGNING.
“It’s a human plan, Nodens. There’s not much we can do.”
I HAVE INFORMATION, HASTUR. I CANNOT MOVE IN THE MORTAL WORLD. NOT IN THEIR WAKING WORLD, AT LEAST, AND THAT IS WHERE OUR WORK MUST BE DONE. YOU CAN. AND YOU CAN MOVE RELATIVELY UNSEEN AS WELL.
Hastur nodded. He hadn’t thought it was possible, but talking with Nodens had actually made him start to feel better about this whole business. Maybe there was something that could be done. Maybe, just maybe, Cthulhu could be stopped.
He leaned forward. “Tell me, Nodens. What exactly do you have in mind?”
END PART ONE
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Very interesting take on things. Anthropomorphizing the Great Old Ones a little more than I would, but it reads really well. I’m glad to see I’m not the only one working on a modern day Mythos tale.
Glad you enjoyed it. There’s more on its way, sometime soon. Not sure when, though.