Chapter Nine

Great Chicago glowed red before our eyes. We were suddenly on Madison Street among hordes of cultists, some of them sprawled out on the street, elongated chitinous scythes where their hands used to be dragging across the ground, hundreds of others gathered around storefront churches or crowded onto corners, all waiting and buzzing. "Wup! Wup! Neal approaches! The Man Of Two Worlds, chosen one of Azathoth! All hail Neal!" I cut the wheel hard and proceeded to downtown Chicago, but there wasn't a true human on the streets anymore. Only mockeries of life: flatulent mugwumps in clouds of swampgas, children oozing along the streets on a mass of thick cilia, hawking newspapers of human skin scrawled with unspeakable blasphemies, letters you couldn't even trace upon a page without the madness coming for you. And those were the remnants of our sweet race, the folks who were people once before R'lyeh rose and the missiles tore their way up from the deserts--there were plenty of pretty girls with a smile for our dream car and swarthy working stiffs, chests broad as barrels and V-shaped torsos leading to chinos and black boots, but there were not women, they were not women, they were not men. Shoggoths to a being they were, phalanges, avatars of insanity and destruction mocking me with human form and countenance.
Finally, I pulled over at the YMCA. Old Bull's childhood piggybank would pay for a night or two. The Cadillac I pointed snout out and ready to go, nobody parallel parked anymore. It was the little things I noticed. The peculiar half-East, half-West of Chicago was only subtly warped by the shoggoth population. "Potatoheads," Bill muttered to me, while Neal ran off to the corner to talk to one, a middle-aged colored woman with swinging hips. They embraced quickly, like veterans, patting each other on the back, and walked off without Neal even saying goodbye.
Bill's old coins weren't marked with the Elder Sign, either the thin branch or the burning five-pointed star with that great fried-egg-eye in the middle of it, so we weren't going to be getting a room. The car of American dreams had conveniently faded back to the ether and mother Earth quaked again, stretching and cracking the city's streets in every direction. Bill stood all hunched up, wearing his suit like he was a child trying on Papa's clothes, fabric pooled around his shoulders, wrists and ankles. What an unclean little man he was; I just felt the urge to punch him, just to see the slime bubble and splurt out of his earholes. But instead I told him of how last time when I was here with Neal, when our Cadillac was a steel prophet and not a speedy phantasm, we listened to bebop and on the intermissions would growl down the streets in our car until God showed up.
"George Shearing, giant old egghead. A master of the ivories. Every stroke a completed action, a day in the life of a tragic hero. You know, Bill? God. Last time I was in Chicago, I was in the very same room with God."
"I see God right now," Bill said, his eyebrows up, and I turned around to see Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles rising flowerlike and delicate like spun crystal to reach for the black and deadly sky. No Cthulhu, none of the swirling red stars of Azathoth mocking us from the heavens, just black. The stars were all dead as coal, the moon blasted to less than dust by the thunder of rockets. And silence. The weird ululations of the city's ruckus fell to a whisper, and then into nothingness. Mother Earth inhaled again, and her fecund bulk shifted, tenderly like Memere brushing my bangs from my eyes as a little boy. And there was God in that blasted night, the God of oblivion where even the horrid clash of pincers, scales and flailing tentacles fade to the wonder of nothingness.
"Kireji!" I cried out desperately. My word didn't echo across the curving alleys or the passages lined with red Gregorian brick, buildings designed to weather winter's hammer, but which seemed like naught but gilded futility to me. We were alone in this universe, a wonder that came to me all at once as I saw the God Bill saw. God is the absence of this all, of us all. "Kireji!" I shouted again, and the furious exhalation died just past my lips. Kireji, that decisive moment in the haiku, where one syllable betrays a thought, a shift in the breath, the contemplation of time and nature without emotion; but nature was too foul and dark. Even God had turned His head away from us, away from Ii Jean when I needed Him most.
If I had all the paper on the earth, I couldn't express what I saw that night, but seventeen syllables of haiku, perhaps that would have been too much. "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face," I said to myself (could Bill even hear me; I felt Great Mother still slowly exhaling, the curve of the earth swelling and drawing me up towards the sky). "Now I know." I didn't finish the verse. I did know, because I was staring up at the dark glass of the Chicago night.
This was supposed to be some kind of drama. I'd been given just enough information to get by, thanks to little buzzes in my ear by the demon Kilaya, my sweet and pure Marie. Neal showed up just in time; so did Allen and so did Bill. Hell, so did the old bums and the bennies and the truckers and cool bottles of Coke for sale on the side of the highway by some round peach of an old lady with flabby arms and a wrinkly smile. We may well have been immune to the siren call of the cult; our features were still men's features, our profiles human, but we were being pushed and shoved around, like a kid making an inchworm crawl down some specific twig and onto a particular leaf that just happens to be square on the bottom of a crystal-clear Mason jar. The sky was clear that night too.
"See," Bill said. "There's Neal!" Then he cackled, his laugh wet and nasty. He was just happy to be out of the damn car.
Neal was heading back our way, an entourage of cheering cultists and hoboes, all drunk and stuffed to the gills with Vienna Beef, behind him. Trudging quietly amidst the group was this little Mexican girl, walking like she was on her way to First Communion.
Neal hugged me hard (he was flabby just a few minutes ago, now his arms were like steel cables twisted around granite bones) and said, "You're standing up for me, Jack! I'm getting married tonight! It'll be a great little scene for my book. Marriage, a night alone with my little girl in a little Chicago railroad apartment, the el chugging away outside-- I'll leave out the bit about the trains being nothing but giant white worms snaking across the city like the tracks were garden paths--making sweet love before heading out to that final battle with lords dark and sundry, with two boon companions at my side. A surefire bestseller, don't you think?"
Bill said, "I like it, but I don't think Jack reads adventure books. You'll probably just lose him in the story. It's not so stream-of- consciousness if you go out of your way to get married just to shoehorn in a sex scene, is it Jack?"
"I'm hungry," I said. "Do any of your friends have that tainted money people in this town want?" I don't think we had eaten in days, and I was drying out from the beer and the race down the highways to Chicago. The whole town smelled of beef to me; I would have eaten a brick if it had gravy on it.
"A wedding feast! Perfect idea, we were just on our way." Behind Neal, the shoggoths tittered and nodded. I squinted at the girl; she was a young one, not more than fifteen, with eyes so brown you couldn't see where pupil ended and iris began half the time--a lesser man, or a better man, really, would have looked away from her solemn stare, but I'd just seen God. A pair of kewpie doll eyes weren't going to do it anymore, even if planted on a sweet bronze apple of a face, one framed with straight black hair, the kind that just falls over shoulders and down backs without ironing or clouds of noxious spray--she had that hair of least resistance. Cute little thing, just grist for Neal's mill. She didn't stare back at me or flinch and look down like a lot of Neal's pick-ups in the old days used to, she just looked right through me, disinterested.
The rest of the gang were simultaneously well- and poorly dressed; they wore fine suits and skirts probably snatched right off store window dummies. Some wore thick scarves even in the heat of late July, and not in the fashion of some hip young girl struggling to look continental either. They had the vague facial features of shoggoths now. I'd seen enough of them now; even when they mocked human forms, they never did it perfectly. Hooked noses, goggle-eyes, receded chins like some inbred British royal. I didn't need my third eye to see their auras; the degraded sham of creation was obvious to any sharp observer. They marched down the middle of the empty street, right down the yellow lines, with me and Bill in the middle of the circle, taking up right behind Neal and his latest little thing.
"This is really queer," I told Bill, talking between my teeth. It's not like they couldn't hear me, but I felt like an infantryman being led to some POW camp, and found myself playing the part.
"Ah you get used to it," he grumbled. He made me mad. Bill had a pistol jammed into his pants again too, probably part of what was weighing them down. A two-bit fag gangster; of course he didn't care so much about the beetlemen, they may as well have run off the pages of his own damn book. I glanced over at Neal; he was nearly skipping, his hand swinging with his girl's. A young man again. Even Chicago was against me, dead and not rowdy, quiet except for wet soles slapping on asphalt, not one fat Polack screaming down the street, no bakeries puffing out after-hour clouds of the sweet smell of newborn bread.
Not one of the female shoggoths was remotely makeable, though they tried. The dimensions were just off--one looked like she had an ottoman stuffed under the back of her skirt, another a bust that was half-busted at least. We walked a few blocks before finding some VFW hall in a storefront of a rundown little rowhouse that was twisted enough that its right side had five stories and its left side only four. Neal jimmied the lock and pushed the door wide open, crying, "Hallelujah! The time has come for me to take a bride!" He spun and wiggled his eyebrows. "So, where do you think I should take her first?" Then he danced inside, limbs loose like the old Neal. The party kicked up the second he entered the room. Table settings for a hundred, with the big table for the wedding party empty (Bill sat next to me like we were going to have to dance together, usher and bridesmaid) but every other seat already jammed with some hideous monster or bloated account executive with wine-red cheeks. They all gibbered identically though, the slimy purple fellows with no mouths but for fleshy orifices that squeezed open and shut like sphincters, and the two brothers with electric plaid jackets who co-owned the Greater Maywood Pre-Owned Ford and could make even a goblin a sweet deal on a pre-war creampuff. Yes, they gibbered louder than even skittering mechano-roaches who crunched whole bowls of shrimp scampi down their ravenous gullets while scampering about the tables and knocking over centerpieces. It was a real peach of a wedding party, with multi-colored crepe paper streamers and flowers with living razors for petals clicking in piles in each corner.
A foul wind blew the door open and a shadow dark as coal slid in and over the polished wood floor. With it came a blanket of silence, even Jimmy and Jerry (the fellows with the car lot) clammed up finally. And the shadow trembled, then erupted into a pillar that hit the ceiling with a furious quiet. And the shadow spoke, finally, a whisper of stone on ancient stone, in our minds. It was Dreamland's own country parson, here to pronounce Neal and skirt man and whore of Babylon. As he recited some blasted liturgy in words I couldn't understand, but that I nevertheless knew, the wriggling column shifted and shrank into a more human, but not a more pleasing, shape. The rhetoric was pure blasphemy, the stuff of nameless tortures and blood drunk as easily as cheap beer, but Neal just sat there with his country grin on his face, drinking it all in. Wifey was humble in the chair next to him, eyes lowered and chin tucked against her collarbone. Like vibrations on the railroad tracks it came to me; forget the blood and guts. My poor little human brain wasn't even bothering to translate a tenth of what the pastor was ranting; there was a deeper meaning to it all, the mountainous iceberg of it occulted by the deep ocean of my unconsciousness. I knew because I turned to Bill and he was white as a knucklebone, his fingers twitching, and a bit of blood drinking and carcass-rape wouldn't even get that old pervert worked up.
Preacher Horror was nearly human now; impossible wrinkled and stooped over, eyes gone and sockets nearly endless in their depth, teeth thick as gravestones and brown besides, his leer fixed since he need not speak but only think his mad gibbering blasphemies to cement this union. Limbs, only four of them now, but the vestigal stumps from his transitional tentacles still swayed with the rhythm of his cant as they sunk back into his torso.
My fevered brain filled with the black clouds of this matrimonial horror, clouding out all sense and reason. I wasn't nearly drunk enough for this; I could feel the ritual pulling me in, like the musky taste of a woman on the edge of my lips. Bill did what my muscles rebelled against doing. He pulled out his gun and fired it right at the preacher. A bullet smacked right into the forehead of the man-thing and kept right on going, not breaking the skin or shattering bone (since the beast had none, being only viscous shadows and strangled, ancient spells) at all. Instead it burrowed in and slowly stretched the back of the preacher's head, first six inches, then a foot, then two feet, the little bullet struggling to finally pierce the preacher and lead a parade of brainy goop out the back of his head. Then with a whip-crack, the back of preacher's head snapped back into place, and Neal and his girl were named man and wife with a final swampy gibber.
"Women? I love, love, love women! I think women are wonderful! I love women!" Neal cried out, and he kissed his little china doll hard. Great beads of sweat fell from his forehead from pure excitement, but the girl was placid, her mouth just a slot for tongue. A cacophony of forks started up against the glasses.
"I think I'll shoot him instead," Bill said, cranking his arm to put the barrel of his pistol at the base of Neal's busy little head, but I grabbed his wrist. "No!" I told him. "All this nonsense just proves that Neal is still the key to all this somehow."
Bill lowered the gun, but kept it right on the table next to the salad fork. Neal and his girl were still going at it, to hoots and clapping flippers, but most of the humans (or mocking man-shaped shoggoths) had turned to their bratwursts (or mocking bratwurst-shaped shoggoths; I waited for Bill to take a bite before diving in myself).
"I feel like I lost a quart of blood. Neal is a goddamn asshole, and I don't care what he thinks or what the mugwumps think. I'd want to shoot him if we weren't knee-deep in dark dimensions."
Bill ate and drank with the abandon of a junky and a hobo combined, and I followed as best I could, and danced with a few of the human-seeming girls--some were monsters, others flesh and blood, one was just a fag in drag. Neal was a gun firing in every direction at once, as usual, leading a bunny hop, then swinging with his stonefaced but limber wifey. The music wasn't anything but the grinding of five-dimensional space against the floor of the world, but it had a beat and you could dance to it. I got tired quickly though, and leaned up against the wall to watch Neal. He was flailing his arms, cutting from one partner to another, kissing other girls while the little Mexican girl just looked on, standing stock still, 'til Neal touched her again and demanded some animation from her.
Clothes hit the ground with a sudden violence, and an orgy of men and monster was on--tentacles probing orifices, flesh caressed by scale and slime, fat men crawling from teat to tit and back again. Even old Bill was poking around (literally) the edges of the cluster. For a long moment I wished I had Memere's old rosary beads, but I couldn't turn my head away. Once again, I did the absurd thing and crawled into the mess myself. I didn't even need to take off my clothes. Inhuman limbs snaked under my collar and then into the waist of my pants, hungry for real American meat. I spread out my arms and legs and just floated atop the crowd; it held me aloft like I was in the Dead Sea, where the salt can keep anyone buoyant.
Of course, Neal's marriage lasted all of three days, of course of course. Bill and I were staying with some squatters, a family of Beats with a little beatnik baby even, in the sub-basement of a Greektown diner. I found myself worrying about the kid (I found myself thinking the word "rugrat") because the place wasn't well-ventilated, and if the smell of grease wasn't pushing its way down the creaky wooden steps from upstairs it was only because of the cloud of marijuana smoke that filled the place like those new Styrofoam packing peanuts. Bill spent most of his time in the corner, his ear cupped to a headset connected to a crystal radio set he found amidst the boxes. I entertained a parade of marginal sorts--fat Puerto Rican women with great pans of beans, cranky old men who still read the tattered racing forms from months ago though all the horses had been killed and eaten in lumpenprole bacchanals. The hungry, not the hip, ruled the tracks after all. I passed on the octopus salad.
"The Reds are ready to drop the big one on us," Bill said, more than once, but always calm as parking lots. The days were cool and relaxing except for the frequent parades through the streets, full of puppet-string patriotism and flags with glowing eyes amidst the field of white stars. I was standing atop a box of pre-cut French-fried potatoes, staring through the bars of the window, when I saw Neal's dancing feet heading our way. In seconds, he was down in the sub-basement with us, declaring his blasphemous annulment!
"Friends! I melted the bitch!" Neal said, smacking his hands against his chest. "She didn't last through the consummation before dissolving like a sugar-candy skull in a hot Mexican mouth, I tell you!"
"Neal, shut it, I'm trying to listen to the news. Frisco is flooding," Bill said.
Neal ignored him and hugged me hard. He lifted me six inches off the ground, a feat formerly impossible for him. "You can't stop Neal," he said right in my face. "Pow! Zoom! Gookly gooky, Neal's a spooky! Poof, I'm outta here!"
"Well," Bill said, "now that we're all here again, let's get going. The world's already all bureaucracy and flood plains; I want to put some holes in the cult already. That is what we are supposed to be doing, right?"
I didn't know what we were supposed to be doing. Neal was such an imponderable. He left me baking with a Mexican fever once and now spent half his days cavorting with the enemy and I was still ready to ride shotgun on whatever car he felt like stealing, roll right up Broadway and do who knows what to save the world from the perils of desire.
"I had tons of problems with the in-laws too," Neal said. "So many demands. They're so hungry all the time, for a little flesh, a little soul. Just last night we were atop a skyscraper, right over the flaming lake, calling up the dark forces to further bind the populace to the blind chaos of Azathoth. Out over the horizon Cthulhu was rising as well--the two don't necessarily get along, I just realized this. Earth is like a Gettysburg pebble for the two of them really, as they lead mad and bloody charges against one another. But under the ectoplasm, they are brothers, truly. I was just standing off to the side with my girl, her little hand in mine, watching the ceremony. It was like a blasphemous roller derby, boys. I don't even know what we would have ended up experiencing--the salty embrace of Cthulhu or Azathoth's swirling wisdom; but then God showed up, like a ghost."
Bill finally looked up from his radio set. I wasn't sure what to say myself. "You know, George Shearing," Neal said. "He was white as a ghost, his fingers trembling. I don't know how he got on the roof with the rest of us--I'm damn sure I would have noticed George Shearing as we all squeezed our way up the stairwells--and that spark in him was gone. God had withered on the vine. He didn't even smell like beer in the way old jazz guys tend to these days, that sweet and hollow creamy fog of beer was gone. Replaced with the sweat of illness, decay.
"The man was a pickle," Neal said, giddy. "Briny and preserved. And it struck me then, you know, just how insignificant we are. George Shearing spent his life mastering, what, a musical instrument that is only a thousand years old, for an artform that is what, fifty years old, and already half-dead, so some people who are thirty years old can be happy for an hour. And we call this mayfly tinkling God, Jack. Let me tell you, tonight I really saw God--"
"Shaddup!" Bill demanded in the corner. He was back to his radio set, a hand cupped around the headphone at his ear. "They're saying the big one hit San Fran. The Bay is reclaiming the city."
Then I knew it wasn't Neal. Not because the news didn't affect him, like it did me (I could only see Allen and his little fag friend drowning in the swiftly tilting sewers, the swinging lanterns outside Chinatown restaurants swallowed under black waves), but because he actually shut up. Neal never stopped talking on command, for anybody.
Shoggoth! The thought arced between me and the false Neal, and it showed its true colors right away. Neal didn't turn to face me, his face shifted to the side of his head and glared at me. Its jaw was already distending, fangs like sabers gathered up at the corners of its mouth. I did the absurd thing and dropped into my tired old three-point stance and rushed the transmogrifying beast.
It was like tackling a wave on the beach. Hard and blinding, and you, and by you I mean I, of course, ended up on the floor, soaked and stunned. Neal filled the room, I was drowning in him, flailing, gasping, spitting out mouthfuls of his liquid flesh. Bill was overwhelmed too, his ratty shoes and socks up in the air, the rest of him crumpled in the cut between floor and wall.
In the haze of ectoplasm another face formed before me. Neal again, but white and desperate, begging. His face was a mask fading into a broader darkness, a mouth of madness. Teeth the size of my head solidified about me and the flimsy mask of Neal. I heard the liquid whisper of "Help me help me Jack, they have me in New York . . . "
The teeth were a crushing vise, looking to push the last bit of air from my lungs. Bill's pistol floated by; I grabbed it and fired. The shock of report rippled through the ectoplasm but the bullet did nothing but drill itself, almost leisurely, through the fluid atmosphere of the shoggoth. Potatoes, a watch, Bill's crumpled hat, floated by as a pulse, a flex of plasmic muscle. I was pinned against the wall, far from Bill, who was just about as bad off as I was but skinny and shriveled (were his ribs broken) and upside-down, against the opposite wall. The teeth, arranged in two arched rows, smiled in the middle of the flux.
Absurd, absurd, do the absurd thing! It's hard not to think clearly when you see your death eight feet away, slick as tusks. I kept doing sensible things; my fingers skittered along the wall, looking for some crack or handhold, legs pumping and trying to swim, sensible and useless like pantyhose. Really, there was nothing absurd to do, once jammed up against the wall. Except!
Except tucked in the corner, in the little bit of the room not yet flooded with the translucent crushing flesh of the monster, was a little can with a thin spritzing wand. Bug spray. I slipped towards it, not pushing against the blob, but squeezing between the wave of Neal and the smooth basement wall. I grazed the wand with a finger, then a second. I had it, and squeezing the trigger in my fist, started pumping the spray into the gelatinous mass that had me pinned. The bug dust swirled in the suspension, filling it with a pinkish fog. For a long moment nothing happened, the pressure was still nearly unbearable, and my consciousness would have dimmed around the edges if not for the bennies I'd been chewing all afternoon. Finally, the roomful of jelly spasmed and began to shrink and scream, a quiet scream though, the scream of a room nearly out of air. The teeth crumbled into icicle shards as the ectoplasm deflated--I was draped over it like a bean-bag, then finally I was on my feet squeezing the last few puffs of bug dust into the shriveling mass. And along the surface, I saw Neal's white reflection, his face tortured and tired, the Divine spark enslaved to this monster. "New York, New York" he mouthed, "Save me in New York."
"Marriage and women ain't nothing but trouble," I said. Bill scrambled to his feet--he was covered in slime.
"What did you do?"
"This," I said, holding up the canister. "The absurd thing. The unexpected. Bug spray."
"Well, it isn't that absurd," Bill said. He was wiping his slimy hands onto his slimy pants, or maybe trying to wipe the slime from his pants with his slime-coated hands. Either way, he was having a rough go of it. But he was right. "The mugwumps, beetlemen. They're all insectoid. What's so absurd about having a similar chemical weakness?" Bill pulled out a soaked hanky and tried that on his hands, then his pants, giving himself an even coating.
I was pretty moist myself.