So that’s how we ended up on a rickety rooftop huffing Cthulhu’s farts. Highly recommended; would huff again. They detonate in your brain pan like the birth of cruel galaxies and come streaming out your nose in globs of black opal blood, electric reeking soulpit slime and I loved it, I couldn’t get enough. Shax turned bright purple and started sobbing like a wee baby slug, Zu slammed his skull against the chimney over and over till he had a dent in his face like a bootprint, and it was the dankest time I ever had or ever will have.
Shax reeled back, her tentacles floating wild uncurled shub-red gorgeous. Her gelatinous body pulsed out-spectrum colors, a ship code I’d never translate.
“Moloch, darling, love of my pythagorean fundament,” she moaned, “we gotta ask, we just gotta ask, what are they waiting for?”
“Who?” Zuzu rasped, wringing his scabby kangaroo tail in his great meatgob hands.
“Come on, eerie,” I sighed, spinning in my own personal gassy squamous. “Them. The Elder Gods. The Old Ones. The Waiting Dark. In his house in R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. This fat fucking octopus right here.” I kicked the gambrel roof twice. “Why’s it always gotta be about the Elder Gods? What the fuck are they waiting for?”
Pazuzu thumped his pustulant tail. “The whole system’s rigged,” he chanted, “by the time we’re Elder, there’ll be nothing left for us but the ash-end of the universe. We slobber and serve and ain’t nobody ever gonna serve us. It’s not right. They got it all stitched up nice the way they like it, Yog-Sothoth and Yig and Azazoth and Hypnos and that fat sack of shit down the chimney. Even Mom. Shub-Niggurath herself, I know we love her and all but she spends all day shitting out kids on the dole and fuck me if you and me will ever be able to afford a slavering brood of our own. And then they turn around and call us krugs and layabout shubs when they’re the ones who snooze all aeon instead of rending the mortal world like they always promise. It’s bullshit, Moloch. Bullshit.”
Shax’s three eyes shone hideous, thinking of all those mortal streets she shuffled in her precious bloodpuppets. “You don’t even know how right you are, Zuzu. The mundworld is totally shoggo, believe me. The best they could do against us is cry while they piss their pants. But the Old Ones? Oh no, they just gorge and giggle and yig themselves and dick around while centuries go by and those mundo fucks up there invent nuclear fission. They got everything dank there was to devour and we get squidshit because they were born at the dawn of existence and we weren’t. Because they’re entitled to the whole damn multiverse while we’re entitled to sit on our asses and clap for their crumbs. Why don’t they just fhtagn retire and let the Young Ones come up the ranks a little? I’d be a bloody yellow queen of everything. Come on, you know it’s true! Shax, the All-Devourer, Accursed Meretrix of the Nether Nebulae, Mother of Madness, Flayer of All Things Dun and Shoggo! I’d capture hearts and minds, you better believe. But no, I have to wait, because they love waiting, and maybe when I’m a shriveled old cone I’ll get to devour one measly asteroid if I ask real nice. Fuck that.”
Shax rose up to the dark air, the stubby protuberances beneath her pyramid spinning and smoking furious. She screeched down the chimney.
“Do you hear that, Cthulhu, you sleepy motherfucker? I hate you. I hate you so fhtagn much.”
Then, Shax did something I didn’t even know she could do. Maybe it’s just a Yith thing. She sucked up a breath, sucked it all the way in, withered down to a dried-up triangular old-cheese-looking turd-chip and dove down the slime-lung chimney into the bowels of the house of Cthulhu.
Zu and me exploded into a real cacoph of waits and wheres and whats and Shax you fœtid bitches. We gibbered down the brainspout and busted a dag fulgy stained glass window as quiet as we could so as to crawl in after her. My cultist had re-inflated, re-hydrated, and re-animated in the smack middle of the Great Old One’s Great Old Foyer. Seventeen dimensional staircases corkscrewed all around her, mirrors yawned into nations unknown and unknowable, old mail spewed out from the post-slot in the Great Old Door. And all over everything sprawled the mottled sicksilver sapphire obese and pustulant tentacles of dreaming, waiting Cthulhu, bulging out everywhere, rotto mottled vomit-golden bloodless flesh balloons straining out of doors, cabinets, furnace grates, snoring like a siren out of time, sickly blueblack suckers all down his diseased limbs opening and closing shubbily, oozing hallucinogenic acidslime onto his own nice clean floors.
Shax dug one of Nyarlathotep’s tomes out of who-knows-where and lit it with an orange beam from her lower eye. She kicked one of the wormy tentacles. It didn’t budge.
“Maybe he’s dead,” Zu whispered.
“You wish,” I hissed back. One of Cthulhu’s moony eyes fluttered iris-down in the downstairs bathtub. Shax was in full seethe, turning magenta with righteous loathing. “Come on, Shax, enough. Babby, let’s go. You don’t want this ichor on you. It’s too much.”
Zuzu held out one crusty hand. “Girl-thing, leave this fat bat be. He’s not worth it.”
Shax smoked her peace for awhile. Listened to the shriek-flute of the Boss’s sleep apnea. The end of Papa Ny’s hand-rolled tome flared violet flame in the shadows.
“Fine,” she said finally. “Whatever.”
Mr. Moloch has never done anything so tough in his dun life as getting that granite slab door open without a creak. Mr. Moloch sweated sour green in the dark. And Mr. Moloch, when he got it open, stared across the veranda of the demon of the ultradeep into the crystalline snake-mug of his own sister Shit sidewinding up the stairs.
“I followed you,” hissed Shit before I could pull a repeat of my 9 pm performance of the What Are You Doing Here jive. “It wasn’t hard. You’re very loud.” Shit quick-kissed my face with the prongs of her tongue. “I do love you, Moloch. I try to look out for your dun ass.”
Shit took in the scene. Her many livers and spleens and lungs and stomachs and hearts pulsed wetly in her cellophane skin. She gawped Zuzu, winking guilty side-eye at her because back at Bifrons’s pad he’d tried to say he hungered her all casual but it was true and she shut that shit down. She gawped Shax, still flushing squamous magenta fury, plasmic pores still full of iridescent ancient fart-gas, sucking on her tome-butt. She gawped me, mutant goatsnake of the hour, just hungering to bolt back to the couch and sleep and another dun day in R’lyeh. But most of all, she gawped that effulgy fucking house, the columns and staircases and mirrors and curtains and beautiful foetid dank things she’d never have no matter how hard she glooned for the big boys, no matter how antique and eldritch she slavered for them, no matter how many eternities she devoted to their worship and their plans and their secretarial needs. And she gawped the lazyfuck octocunt flop of the squid sensation of every nation, the great pharaonic secret she had never been allowed to behold, even at the office holiday party. And the Great Ancient One, bulging out of every orifice in that grand house we’d never be able to buy if we outlived Saturn, was as disappointing as our own mother, useless and wrinkled and old and shoggo as shit.
Her serpent face crunkled and cracked.
Her organs twisted and boiled inside her. She hungered. Maybe she’d always hungered more than me, and I just don’t know anything about anything. I sure as sheol didn’t call what happened next.
My babby sister put her eyes on Shax.
“Burn it down,” Shit said. “Burn it all down.”