I did not know how long I was out that first time, either. But I remember it now. I remember all of it, not just the teasing, shadowed fragments that dreams leave behind. I had just shut the car door, trying to balance the coffee that would be my only breakfast because I was running so late, and my notebooks, and locking the car door, when everything fell out from beneath me, A tearing and grinding sound, thick, like fabric being ripped away, filled all of my senses. It was louder than anything I had ever experienced, only not just loud. I could feel it on my skin, through the frame of me, taste the wrongness in the air as I watched the otherwise perfect spring sky above stretch and warp.
I couldn’t move then, either.
It had gone from a pulling, to a stain, to a hole opening like a lens, in that kind of smooth irising motion. I had squinted, against instinct and all better judgement, looking at something indistinct that rose like smoke to meet it, but thicker. It was the shadow being thrown by whatever was opening, but it was also solid, or approaching such. It coiled and writhed upwards, spreading, growing more opaque as it did so, and opened like a hunting sea creature. Within that-
“Cait! You need to get out of there. The umbra is approaching. It’s diffused by the clouds, but we don’t know if that matters, yet.” Andy’s voice breaks the spell for a moment, the signal growing rougher. I am still frozen to the spot, rabbit-in-headlights, girl too far gone in remembering.
When the seething mass opened, unfolded like a terrible flower, I remember falling over, scraping my palms and then my knees, as my mind was assaulted by too many streams of input to process at once. It was coiling tendrils and blackness that crawled like flame and a human figure, but of a substance like volcanic glass. It had no face, and its face was smooth, was nothing but teeth like a viperfish, and it was as flawlessly, inhumanly beautiful as an Egyptian sculpture of some ancient king. It was male and female and monstrous and breathtaking. It had risen until it was framed by the hole, the gate, like a reverse halo. Beyond, alien stars, a nebula or a galaxy perhaps, lined with rows and rows of teeth larger than any star, maybe even than entire solar systems.
And it had turned to look at me.
“Cait, can you hear me?”
I do not know why it had left me alive and sane, or mostly so. But I had not lied about not being interested in men. I wasn’t interested in women anymore, either, or anything descended from ape. The very thought seems pedestrian, even like lying to myself, blinding myself to the wider reality I had seen, to try to return to my old life. I want to love this madness, to lie down with monsters like Lilith did, and come out of the experience transfigured, more than myself, than human. To ride this beast, wrapped tight in its unearthly substance, and fuck reality itself.
I step out of the containment suit, and then my clothes and shoes, and I leave them in a neat pile inside the door so everything will remain intact for whoever takes my place, ignoring the cries I can still hear from the helmet’s radio. The rain is cold on my bare skin, and sharpens my senses as it runs down my back, drips off my fingers. Everything is thrown into sharp detail.
This time, I will not kneel.
ASTROPHOBOS,
conclusion…
Originally published in The United Amateur, 17, No. 3 (January 1918), 38.
Kenneth Hite
CTHULHU’S POLYMORPHOUS PERVERSITY
The Thing cannot be described — there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled.
For $19.95, you can buy a foot-tall plush toy Cthulhu from ToyVault. You can also buy a plush “Mini Cthulhu” (only 8 inches tall), or a plush Cthulhu in a Santa Claus outfit. Plush Cthulhu also comes in variant color schemes (red-black, black-silver, and “wicked”), or with mounted suction cups for window-clinging action, and in the form of slippers, gloves, fanny packs, hats, dice bags, backpacks, pillows, and Christmas wreaths. Or you can buy small plastic Cthulhu collectible “action figures” called Mythos Buddies in blind packaging: will you get My Little Cthulhu, Goth ‘Thulhu, Coolthulhu, Matrixthulhu, Ninjathulhu, Ghost ‘Thulhu, or “Buddy ‘Thulhu”? (That last Mythos Buddy, a parody of director Kevin Smith’s satire of the modern Church’s “Buddy Christ” travesty of Jesus, may be so semiotically weightless that it actually floats away of its own accord.) What’s that? You don’t want Great Cthulhu in collectible toy form?
Not a problem. You can also get Cthulhu in comic books (The Fall of Cthulhu or Cthulhu Tales), card games (Mythos or Unspeakable Words or Munchkin Cthulhu), or board games (Arkham Horror, Do You Worship Cthulhu?, The Stars Are Right!), not to mention refrigerator magnets, bumper stickers, pendants, Tarot decks, poker decks, and rub-on tattoos that proclaim your allegiance to the Dreamer in the Deep. You can mount a “Campus Crusade for Cthulhu” or sport a “Cthulhu For President” button. (“Why settle for the lesser of two evils?”) Cthulhu or his ilk inspire music from Metallica (“The Call of Ktulu”), Fields of the Nephilim (“Kthulhu”), Deicide (“Dead but Dreaming”), and Blue Öyster Cult (“The Old Gods Return”), plus an entire Canadian ska-punk surf-rock band, The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets. (To say nothing of the 60s psychedelic quasi-rockers The H.P. Lovecraft. Of whom, “to say nothing” is exactly the thing to say.) Perhaps appropriately, Cthulhu appears as a bass player in the comic book Savage Henry, as well as in episodes of South Park and in Donald Duck comics, in the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft (under the risible alias “C’Thun”) and in an Expressionist silent film — albeit one shot in 2005. Cthulhu is everywhere. He is the King of All Media.