I love you, Mommy. Why don’t you love me back?
When Bifrons sleeved me back into my squidsack I was crying hideous, naphtha seeping out my stupid shoggo eyes and stinking up the joint with feelings, dripping kerosene shame onto Biff’s rug in time to the telltale sound of a scabrous mutant kangaroo named Zuzu thump-thump drumming some sorry fulgy skull into the wetwall.
Be me: Moloch, clawed back from his righteous hard-earned squamous, blurred blotto, gibbering around the rank lair of an evil mushroom, staggering down, then up, then down again before scraping Zuzu off a tall, cold, dark drink of trust fund water half out of his madrags with black, ancient blood all over his dumb wormpile face. Moloch, gobsmacked as a bloody mundo in the naked throbbing bonelight of true reality, when he sees the shub that handsome devil is yigging is none but his babby sister Shit, see-through snakebody wrapped around his tarantula legs, fangs all the way out.
“Stop it, stop it, you fhtagn shoggo loser,” hissed Shit.
“What the fuck, Shit?” Zu slurred around the kruggy edges of his Mi-Go trip. “Why you yigging that fuckboy yuppie establishment gloon? You two go suck Elder ass together, too? If you were that hard up I’d have whipped your eggs for you. Why’d you do him for, you mundane bitch?”
My sister uncoiled herself, every inch the serpent daughter of the Digestrix of Aeons. Her hood flared. I don’t think I ever noticed how beautiful Shit was before. And the thing is, up until that second, Shit always spoke full fulgy. I never heard her drop so much as a scrap of yellow dank into her talk. But just then, with her cultist boy-thing bleeding into Bifrons’s crusted space-colored carpet, she swore like us.
“I didn’t hunger you, you dun cunt. Lurk me now? Iä? Call him a gloon? No. That’s Qaatesh. Say hello, Qaatesh!” The worm-faced hunk of her affections coughed and spat out several fangs. “Lurk him. He has a name, just like you. He enjoys long walks on the beach and flaying the minds of smug academics, not that you give a fuck. Gloon, gloon, gloon. That’s all you behold. That’s all you babble. Flapping your gash and farting out this kruggy class war squidshit. You think you’re sheol? Think you’re yellow? Behold me, Pazuzu. I am a gloon. I carry water for the Great Old Ones and I am well dank at it. I am paid in blood and diamonds from the nether reaches of space which means I have the gleeth to spot you two that nice apartment with the big slither-in closet where you make your garbage homebrew ghastbeer and Moloch puts the empty carton of ichor back in the fridge instead of throwing it out every goddamned time. You hunger to savage some fulgy sneerheart gloon? I’m right here. Show me that eldritch deathdick, you shoggo fhtagn fuckaroo.”
Zuzu just gawped. A big scab over his ear fell off. I gibbered up between them.
“No deathdicks tonight, brood,” I soothed. “Not tonight. What you doing in Bifrons’s squalor, brood-girl?” I smiled my most antique smile, tongue behind the teeth and everything.
My translucent sister-snake smoothed down her hood, eyes still blue fire. “Same as you, Moloch. What? I’m not allowed to have a little fun?”
Just like that, Shit was back to her fancy high street babble, stripped of all that oozy slang.
Bifrons asked us, politely, to fuck off out of his squalor. Can’t blame the shroom. Brawling harshes his lustfronds. My cultist Shax never said a word the whole time. She doesn’t have a brain, per se, so whenever we go Mi-Go she sits in the corner and draws pictures of horses on her jelly belly. She knew horses from all the times she injected her heroin-reek anima down inside some overall-wearing ruralfuck pile of mundflesh. Dunno about horses. They just look like munted goats to me. But I always tell her she’s got dag talent.
“Hey, Moloch,” said Bifrons as I beat the dark aquatic out of there, “watch out for your sister, iä? I worry. You kids are always seething all the time. Just calm down and wait, like the rest of us. Soon enough our time will come.”
“Our time?” I gibbered. “Whatever, Biff. I don’t even know what that means anymore.”
I DON’T REMEMBER whose idea it was. Probably Zuzu. Poor roo had his ichor up and nowhere to spend it. But the dankest shit we ever did always came out of Shax’s rotten mind-bucket. It could’ve been me, even. After all that ungoat business with Bifrons, the featured creature known as Moloch was stone cold sober. And no one can handle R’lyeh at 3 am on a Friday night sober. The streets literally roll up at nine, like slugs shotgunned with salt. You’d kill yourself just to see something interesting go down.
And sometimes, sometimes, events just… unfurl. Nobody hungers it, but happenings hunger all on their own. You gibber down the road with your eeries minding your own stench, concentrating extra hard on not getting in trouble, on being an antique boy-thing, a fine, upstanding, mild-mannered unspeakable horror from beneath the skin of reality, and all of a sudden you’re standing in front of His house, and you don’t even know why.
His house. The biggest, grandest, dankest, moldiest, blackest house in town. Cthulhu Central Station, a swanky-ass mansion high on the hill, swollen up with damp, falling down from neglect. Apparently Mr. C don’t pay his maids too well. All the best for that fat motherfucker, the blue-blood boss man, the Chief Executive Octopus, winner of Most Likely to Rise Up and Devour the World three aeons running, the patrician magician, the insane aristocrat squatting on all our backs, waiting, dreaming, snoring, farting and scratching his balls in his fulgy fhtagn sleep. And he can’t even be arsed to tip the help.
We three eeries gawped up at His porch, the columns, the stonework, the yawning height and depth and intellect-shearing ostentation of that naff goth wedding cake of a house. That neighborhood was so eel even Azathoth and Hastur got priced out in the Neolithic Era. We hissed at the flowers. No one but no one in R’lyeh could afford a garden—but all around the C-Man’s squalor, millions of black lilies and sicksilver roses writhed and runnelled and strangled each other, gibbering up into empty cottages and walk-ups all round the joint, puking out the windows, living rent-free in houses me and mine could only dream of.
A big, blousy fart-bubble belched up from Cthulhu’s veiny chimney. Oily colors wriggled on its surface as it rose up through the oceanic ultramarine night. We watched as it burst into a polluted rainbow beneath the black lozenges of ships moving silently through the airy, idiot mundworld.
“Best squamous going, I heard,” Shax gurgled. I’d almost forgotten she was there. I’m not much of a cultist when you get right down to it. I know that about myself. I’m trying to work on it.
“Iä, me too, I heard that,” Zuzu growled, still stung, pride still snake-stomped. “Only you gotta be 100% goat. Quiet like a misko in a library. If you disturb the man’s slumber, it’s bad fhtagn news. He’s cranky when he first wakes up.”