One, two, three; grab, slurp, devour, then sucked sour slime off the Providence pipe to chase it down.
“Fhtagn, iä!” Zuzu yelled.
The rest of the pub goggled and gurgled and gleeked at us like they never saw anyone enjoying anything in their whole infinite existence before.
God, this fucking neighborhood.
Used to be an antique place, very goat, full of artists trying to get back to their roots and hone their craft, create a warm sense of community delirium, drive the mundflesh to a really authentic eternal madness. But then the Old Fucks moved in with their gleeth and their gloons and their penthouse sepulchers and organic organ banks and locally-forced whole food cannibal bistros and now it’s a shoggo wasteland of narcoleptic zombie demi-gods who couldn’t give two deranged toadshits for anyone under a hundred thousand years old. Back in the day, you could dance at the Pnakotic. Get your underground shubstep electrotrance tentaclecore maenad groove on. Now we had to sit uncomfortably in some dead crab-god’s claw-me-down stench just to get a drink while the upper crusty glared at us like zoo creatures.
Shax swiveled to me, her three globular golden eyes pulsing, her seventeen irises contracting to one hideous human mundeye. “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents,” she blurted.
“What the fuck?” I giggled.
“Pick up some butter and flour at the store on your way home!” she howled. “The bank keeps calling about our mortgage!”
Pazuzu slapped the pub-floor with one massive kangaroo leg. “Fhtagn iä! Can you feel it? Mundmouth McGee is in the house! What do you want for dinner tonight, sweetie? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our son got into Brown next year?”
“Who cares?” I giggled again. I couldn’t stop. I could hardly wheeze out words when the lucidity kicked in and my essential Molochness gibbered off.
“Hello,” I yelled, as if possessed, without meaning to, without any hunger to: “my name is Moloch, nine hundred and ninety-seventh son of the Great Black Goat Shub-Niggurath, the Outer God, the All-Mother, and I am an alcoholic. Are there cookies in the back? Debbie always brings pecan sandies.”
“Welcome to Mom’s Diner, how can I help you?” screamed Zuzu. “How can I help you? How can I help you? How can I help you?”
But it doesn’t last. Lucidity has a seriously krug half-life. Our undermatrices can’t hold on to the mundo psychfest. It all fucks off back to pecan sandie-land and dumps you in a ditch on the side of the multiverse with drymouth and aching tentacles. We were stuck inside ourselves again pretty quick, a sad brood of dun miskos raging uselessly against the sinferno, the exact opposite of what we hungered.
“I hate my life,” I whispered. I couldn’t tell if that was me or the san talking.
So we decided to blow that squalor and go glean our eerie Bifrons and shake him down for some furtive fungiform fun.
Bifrons, now, Bifrons is a dank fhtagn Mi-Go, the Fungus Among Us, a sheol mushroom man who truly has his gills together, guggo for anything and antique as a china cabinet. You gibber over to Bifrons’s flop if you want to get your corpus collosum fully corpse-thrusty skull-strummed. The shiitake scenester laired in a scumlord paradise, waterfront view over a black river of boiling slime that pours eternally into one of R’lyeh’s puckered sphincters, the A-Line that leads through the youth-infected artisanal slums and terminates at a certain Mr. Yog-Sothoth’s amorphous, radioactive, but surprisingly elegantly lit pad. What can I say, the Thing from Beyond knows from window treatments.
Bifrons does not know window treatments. His flop beholds like a schizoid sewer worker’s night terrors. Mold wriggle-gibbering in wallpaper patterns, rags and bones and fugue-pus and broken wine glasses everywhere, Shoggoths yigging idiotically, robotically, in one corner, a mouth-faced Gug smashing his skull into Bifrons’s good mirror, a dehydrated Yith crumbling into nothing within reach of the kitchen sink, the floor more spore than rug.
Home sweet home.
Bifrons doesn’t charge. He does his song and dance for the jingles and tingles. It’s some kind of fetish, I guess. He sweats technicolor dreamvenom the whole time and it’s kruggy but Moloch doesn’t judge. Gotta get your yig on where you can in R’lyeh. You’d think an insane chthonic carnival of a shriek-powered city pumping out waves of delirium into the seven seas would have some kind of nightlife. But this is pretty much it. Door to door traveling fucksters trying to keep up our enthusiasm for the latest and greatest howling silver vacuum.
“I got leftovers,” the preternatural portobello puled in our direction. “You hunger?”
Bifrons tossed Zuzu a mundo Chinese takeaway carton half-full of sweet fried chunks of a divorced mid-level import/export manager’s jabbering shredded psyche swimming in anchovy sauce. One, two, three; grab, slurp, devour. Bifrons stroked the greasy slopes of Shax’s pyramid with his creeping fungoid fingers, which was not at all sheol by me, but you gotta stay yellow if you wanna get squamous with the crimini element around here.
“Everybody goat?” Bifrons lisped thickly, his mushroomy otherflesh beginning to crawl with rainbow glowsweat.
“Iä, Biff, my eerie, my mush, iä,” Zuzu hissed.
He was getting bored. Moloch always knows. And when Zuzu gets bored, he starts looking for something to rend. Screams echoed out of the back bedroom and I could tell by the accents of their murdermoaning that it was a high street gloon couple mashing divinities. Probably can’t even cum without reciting the names of their fell ancestors into each other’s waxy hear-holes. If Zuzu clocked the same, it’d get full ghastly frenzy in here with a quickness.
“Iä, Bifrons, babby, do your thing,” I said.
What gets Bifrons off is this: Mr. Morbid Morel worms out his munted wings and the fungal rings of his face start spinning dank and wild. He phases his claws out of the corporeal plane, reaches into your skull, scoops out your brain like vanilla ice cream, sticks it in a dirty glass jar, and shakes the shit out of it until you’re addled and rattled and paddled and straddled, then he shoves your milkshake back and watches your soul jiggle out your orifices.
Here we go.
So Moloch’s in the brain jar and his medulla is smashbang oblongataed into blueberry psychic jelly and when a Mi-Go has your black matter on frappe, shit gets very topsy indeed. Memory yigs itself raw. One minute I’m goggling out a filthy glass jug, next minute I’m little, tentacles barely grown out yet, writhing on the infinite mud flat of my birth under a gape-wound sky where the stars are dying over and over, being devoured over and over, devoured by something vast and gorgeous and unstoppable, inevitable, perfect in its total hunger.
Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Cosmos, the Digestrix of Aeons, the All-Mother.
My mother.
I reach my stubby little nubs out to her impossible fœtid body. I stretch every soft babby tentacle curling on my cherub-noggin up to her grotesque countenance, her million interdimensional breasts foamy with nightmare milk, her billion lithe squiddy limbs branching and forking like an immense untoucheable winter tree. Wee tiny Moloch cries for his mama up in the sky and she screeches ultrasonic daemonoharmonic over the boundless bloodswamp of her thousand sobbing young, her babbies, her brood, the spawn of her wonderful hell-womb.
I love you, Mommy, I love you, I wail but she don’t come down, she don’t wriggle me in her feelers and nuzzle my goaty face looking so much like hers, she don’t even know me from my brothers and sisters, she don’t pick me out and make me special, she just makes like she’s gonna hork up all that starshit she guzzled her whole life like a mama seagull into a thousand writhing gullets and jets. But then she doesn’t. She doesn’t feed us the stars she got to eat when they were fresh and eldritch and sweet. She keeps it all for herself and we starve while Mumma shrieks across the continuum to something else, something prettier, something danker, something better than us. Than me.