“Ah-nye, ah-dah, ah ron withchoo, ah dinkabobsa gonstalee!” cried the front man. Betty began to undulate, and it seemed a tremor ran through the floor of the building. A tableful of German tourists jumped to their feet, alarmed, but their native companion didn’t even stop eating.
“Just an aftershock,” he said calmly. “No big deal.”
“Ah rag saga leely, badoom badoom, wha wah badoo, jaga babee!”
Betty began to dance what looked like the Swim, but so fast his arms and legs blurred the air. The lights dimmed, took on a greenish cast.
“Who’s playing with the damn rheostat?” the manager wanted to know.
“Ayah ha Lou-ah Lou-ah eh, whoa ba-bah shongo waygatchago!”
Sweat began to pour from Betty’s face and limbs, as his body began to churn in a manner that evoked ancient bacchanals, feverish and suggestive. The green quality of the light intensified. Several diners looked down at their plates of clam strips or chimichangas and stopped eating, suddenly nauseous.
“Ya ya ya ya ah-sha-da Lou-ah Lou-ah he, Nyarlathotep bay-bah wey-gago!” sang the front man, and he was sweating too, an—so it seemed—dwindling under the green light, and the carefully torn edges of his black raiment began to fray into rags, patterned with shining mold.
Betty’s hips gyrated, his little sailor hat flew off, and every curl on his head was dripping with St. Elmo’s fire. Several diners vomited where they sat. Others rose in a half-crouch, desperate to find the lavatory doors marked Beach Bums and Beach Bunnies. Half of them collapsed before they made it. They slipped, stumbled and fell in the pools of seawater that were condensing out of the air, running down the walls.
“Ah Lou-ah Lou-ah eh, ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!” wailed the white-eyed thing the front man had become, and his band raised reed flutes to their gills and piped a melody to make human ears bleed, and the mortal diners rose and fought to get out the windows, for Betty was flinging handfuls of seaweed in toward them, and black incense.
The pink and turquoise linoleum tiles by the bandstand popped upward, scattered like hellish confetti, as a green-glowing gas of all corruption hissed forth, lighting in blue flames when it met the air, followed by a gush of black water from the forgotten pool below. The first of the black tentacles probed up through the widening crack in the floor.
Betty sprang backward, grabbed up his sailor hat, leaped on his pink bicycle and pedaled away as fast as he could go, vanishing down the misty darkness of Alder Street.
The neon olive had become an eye, swiveling uncertainly but with malevolence, in a narrow scarlet face.
Watching from across the street, Mr. Bright laughed until the tears poured from his eyes, and slapped the arms of his wheelchair. He raised his bourbon bottle in salute as Calamari Curls began its warping, strobing, moist descent through the dimensions.
He was opening a new bottle by the time gray dawn came, as the last of the fire engines and ambulances pulled away. Tom Avila stood in the middle of the street, in gloomy conference with the pastor of St. Mark’s, the priest from Mission San Emidio, and even the rabbi from Temple Beth-El, who had driven in his pajamas all the way over from Hooper City.
Holy water, prayer and police tape had done all they could do; the glowing green miasma was dissipating at last, and the walls and windows of Calamari Curls had begun to appear again in ghostly outline. Even now, however, it was obvious that their proper geometry could never be restored.
Tom shook hands with the gentlemen of God and they departed to their respective cars. He stood alone in the street a while, regarding the mess; then he noticed Mr. Bright, who waved cheerfully from behind his window. Tom’s eyes narrowed. He came stalking over. Mr. Bright let him in.
“You didn’t have anything to do with this, did you, Peg?” the mayor demanded.
“Me? How the hell could I of? I just been sitting here watching the show,” said Mr. Bright. “I ain’t going to say I didn’t enjoy it, neither. Guess nobody’s going to raise no rents around here for a while!”
“God damn it, Peg! Now we’ve got us another vortex into a lost dimension, smack in the middle of town this time!” said the mayor in exasperation. “What are we going to do?”
“Beats me,” said Mr. Bright, grinning as he offered him the bourbon bottle.
But the present became the past, as it will, and people never forget so easily as when they want to forget. The wreck of Calamari Curls became invisible, as passers-by tuned it out of their consciousness. The green olive blinked no more.
Mr. Bright found that the black things that mewled and gibbered around the garbage cans at night could be easily dispatched with a cast-iron skillet well aimed. His customers came back, hesitant and shamefaced. He was content.
And mellowing in his world view too; for he no longer scowled nor spat in the direction of Betty Step-in-Time when he passed him on the pier, but nodded affably, and once was even heard to remark that it took all kinds of folks to make a world, and you really shouldn’t judge folks without you get to know them.
KATHERINE’S STORY
She knew the marriage had been a mistake by the time they stepped off the train.
All the same, she smiled and waited patiently as Bert got their suitcases from the porter. She had determined to make a life as different from her mother’s as was possible; that meant making the marriage work, whether or not Bert was the man she had envisioned him to be when she gave up college for him.
This was a pretty place, at least. There were big, green mountains and trees, and the little train station was quite rustic if not exactly charming. Lean men in overalls, red clay thick on their workboots, waited in a silent line as goods were unloaded: sacks of feed, sacks of fertilizer, wire cages full of baby chicks. The chicks peeped and poked their tiny beaks through the mesh. The heat was shimmering, sticky.
Bert approached with the luggage. She turned to smile at him but he was looking past her, grinning and hefting one suitcase in a wave.
“Pop!”
One of the lean men was loading cages into the back of an old truck. He turned and saw Bert, and nodded in acknowledgment. Bert ran toward him and she followed.
“Hey, Pop!”
“Hey,” the man responded, looking them up and down. “You’re early.”
“I got the train times wrong,” Bert said.
“Well, that’s you.” Mr. Loveland shook his head. His gaze moved briefly to Katherine. “This the wife?”
“Yes—”
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Loveland, I’ve heard so much about you,” said Katherine, smiling as she twisted the strap of her handbag. He just nodded, considering her.
“We got your room ready, anyways,” he said.
“Oh, thank you—”
“You may’s well put those in the back,” he told Bert, gesturing at the suitcases. Bert stepped close and hoisted the suitcases into the truck bed. As he did so he kicked one of the wire cages and there was a pitiable cheeping from the chicks inside.
“Oh, Bert, you’ve hurt one of them,” Katherine cried, stooping down. “It’s this black one, look! I think his little foot is squashed. There’s blood—”
“Oh! Sorry—”
“Things happen,” said Mr. Loveland.
The ride to their new home was silent and uncomfortable. Literally; she rode perched on Bert’s lap, which would have been funny and romantic under other circumstances. They bumped along unpaved roads for miles, up into the mountains, far out of town, before turning down a gravel drive to a frame house set back among trees. There was an enclosed porch running the length of the front.