Move Under Ground by Nick Mamatas (guided reading books .txt) 📕

foul wind blew the door open and a shadow dark as coal slid in and over the polished wood floor. With it came a blanket of silence, even Jimmy and Jerry (the fellows with the car lot) clammed up finally. And the shadow trembled, then erupted into a pillar that hit the ceiling with a furious quiet. And the shadow spoke, finally, a whisper of stone on ancient stone, in our minds. It was Dreamland’s own country parson, here to pronounce Neal and skirt man and whore of Babylon. As he recited some blasted liturgy in words I couldn’t understand, but that I nevertheless knew, the wriggling column shifted and shrank into a more human, but not a more pleasing, shape. The rhetoric was pure blasphemy, the stuff of nameless tortures and blood drunk as easily as cheap beer, but Neal just sat there with his country grin on his face, drinking it all in. Wifey was humble in the chair next to him, eyes lowered and chin tucked against her collarbone. Like vibrations on the railroad tracks it came to me; forget the blood and guts. My poor little human brain wasn’t even bothering to translate a tenth of what the pastor was ranting; there was a deeper meaning to it all, the mountainous iceberg of it occulted by the deep ocean of my unconsciousness. I knew because I turned to Bill and he was white as a knucklebone, his fingers twitching, and a bit of blood drinking and carcass-rape wouldn’t even get that old pervert worked up.

Preacher Horror was nearly human now; impossible wrinkled and stooped over, eyes gone and sockets nearly endless in their depth, teeth thick as gravestones and brown besides, his leer fixed since he need not speak but only think his mad gibbering blasphemies to cement this union. Limbs, only four of them now, but the vestigal stumps from his transitional tentacles still swayed with the rhythm of his cant as they sunk back into his torso.

My fevered brain filled with the black clouds of this matrimonial horror, clouding out all sense and reason. I wasn’t nearly drunk enough for this; I could feel the ritual pulling me in, like the musky taste of a woman on the edge of my lips. Bill did what my muscles rebelled against doing. He pulled out his gun and fired it right at the preacher. A bullet smacked right into the forehead of the man-thing and kept right on going, not breaking the skin or shattering bone (since the beast had none, being only viscous shadows and strangled, ancient spells) at all. Instead it burrowed in and slowly stretched the back of the preacher’s head, first six inches, then a foot, then two feet, the little bullet struggling to finally pierce the preacher and lead a parade of brainy goop out the back of his head. Then with a whip-crack, the back of preacher’s head snapped back into place, and Neal and his girl were named man and wife with a final swampy gibber.

“Women? I love, love, love women! I think women are wonderful! I love women!” Neal cried out, and he kissed his little china doll hard. Great beads of sweat fell from his forehead from pure excitement, but the girl was placid, her mouth just a slot for tongue. A cacophony of forks started up against the glasses.

“I think I’ll shoot him instead,” Bill said, cranking his arm to put the barrel of his pistol at the base of Neal’s busy little head, but I grabbed his wrist. “No!” I told him. “All this nonsense just proves that Neal is still the key to all this somehow.”

Bill lowered the gun, but kept it right on the table next to the salad fork. Neal and his girl were still going at it, to hoots and clapping flippers, but most of the humans (or mocking man-shaped shoggoths) had turned to their bratwursts (or mocking bratwurst-shaped shoggoths; I waited for Bill to take a bite before diving in myself).

“I feel like I lost a quart of blood. Neal is a goddamn asshole, and I don’t care what he thinks or what the mugwumps think. I’d want to shoot him if we weren’t knee-deep in dark dimensions.”

Bill ate and drank with the abandon of a junky and a hobo combined, and I followed as best I could, and danced with a few of the human-seeming girls—some were monsters, others flesh and blood, one was just a fag in drag. Neal was a gun firing in every direction at once, as usual, leading a bunny hop, then swinging with his stonefaced but limber wifey. The music wasn’t anything but the grinding of five-dimensional space against the floor of the world, but it had a beat and you could dance to it. I got tired quickly though, and leaned up against the wall to watch Neal. He was flailing his arms, cutting from one partner to another, kissing other girls while the little Mexican girl just looked on, standing stock still, ‘til Neal touched her again and demanded some animation from her.

Clothes hit the ground with a sudden violence, and an orgy of men and monster was on—tentacles probing orifices, flesh caressed by scale and slime, fat men crawling from teat to tit and back again. Even old Bill was poking around (literally) the edges of the cluster. For a long moment I wished I had Memere’s old rosary beads, but I couldn’t turn my head away. Once again, I did the absurd thing and crawled into the mess myself. I didn’t even need to take off my clothes. Inhuman limbs snaked under my collar and then into the waist of my pants, hungry for real American meat. I spread out my arms and legs and just floated atop the crowd; it held me aloft like I was in the Dead Sea, where the salt can keep anyone buoyant.

Of course, Neal’s marriage lasted all of three days, of course of course. Bill and I were staying with some squatters, a family of Beats with a little beatnik baby even, in the sub-basement of a Greektown diner. I found myself worrying about the kid (I found myself thinking the word “rugrat”) because the place wasn’t well-ventilated, and if the smell of grease wasn’t pushing its way down the creaky wooden steps from upstairs it was only because of the cloud of marijuana smoke that filled the place like those new Styrofoam packing peanuts. Bill spent most of his time in the corner, his ear cupped to a headset connected to a crystal radio set he found amidst the boxes. I entertained a parade of marginal sorts—fat Puerto Rican women with great pans of beans, cranky old men who still read the tattered racing forms from months ago though all the horses had been killed and eaten in lumpenprole bacchanals. The hungry, not the hip, ruled the tracks after all. I passed on the octopus salad.

“The Reds are ready to drop the big one on us,” Bill said, more than once, but always calm as parking lots. The days were cool and relaxing except for the frequent parades through the streets, full of puppet-string patriotism and flags with glowing eyes amidst the field of white stars. I was standing atop a box of pre-cut French-fried potatoes, staring through the bars of the window, when I saw Neal’s dancing feet heading our way. In seconds, he was down in the sub-basement with us, declaring his blasphemous annulment!

“Friends! I melted the bitch!” Neal said, smacking his hands against his chest. “She didn’t last through the consummation before dissolving like a sugar-candy skull in a hot Mexican mouth, I tell you!”

“Neal, shut it, I’m trying to listen to the news. Frisco is flooding,” Bill said.

Neal ignored him and hugged me hard. He lifted me six inches off the ground, a feat formerly impossible for him. “You can’t stop Neal,” he said right in my face. “Pow! Zoom! Gookly gooky, Neal’s a spooky! Poof, I’m outta here!”

“Well,” Bill said, “now that we’re all here again, let’s get going. The world’s already all bureaucracy and flood plains; I want to put some holes in the cult already. That is what we are supposed to be doing, right?”

I didn’t know what we were supposed to be doing. Neal was such an imponderable. He left me baking with a Mexican fever once and now spent half his days cavorting with the enemy and I was still ready to ride shotgun on whatever car he felt like stealing, roll right up Broadway and do who knows what to save the world from the perils of desire.

“I had tons of problems with the in-laws too,” Neal said. “So many demands. They’re so hungry all the time, for a little flesh, a little soul. Just last night we were atop a skyscraper, right over the flaming lake, calling up the dark forces to further bind the populace to the blind chaos of Azathoth. Out over the horizon Cthulhu was rising as well—the two don’t necessarily get along, I just realized this. Earth is like a Gettysburg pebble for the two of them really, as they lead mad and bloody charges against one another. But under the ectoplasm, they are brothers, truly. I was just standing off to the side with my girl, her little hand in mine, watching the ceremony. It was like a blasphemous roller derby, boys. I don’t even know what we would have ended up experiencing—the salty embrace of Cthulhu or Azathoth’s swirling wisdom; but then God showed up, like a ghost.”

Bill finally looked up from his radio set. I wasn’t sure what to say myself. “You know, George Shearing,” Neal said. “He was white as a ghost, his fingers trembling. I don’t know how he got on the roof with the rest of us—I’m damn sure I would have noticed George Shearing as we all squeezed our way up the stairwells—and that spark in him was gone. God had withered on the vine. He didn’t even smell like beer in the way old jazz guys tend to these days, that sweet and hollow creamy fog of beer was gone. Replaced with the sweat of illness, decay.

“The man was a pickle,” Neal said, giddy. “Briny and preserved. And it struck me then, you know, just how insignificant we are. George Shearing spent his life mastering, what, a musical instrument that is only a thousand years old, for an artform that is what, fifty years old, and already half-dead, so some people who are thirty years old can be happy for an hour. And we call this mayfly tinkling God, Jack. Let me tell you, tonight I really saw God—”

“Shaddup!” Bill demanded in the corner. He was back to his radio set, a hand cupped around the headphone at his ear. “They’re saying the big one hit San Fran. The Bay is reclaiming the city.”

Then I knew it wasn’t Neal. Not because the news didn’t affect him, like it did me (I could only see Allen and his little fag friend drowning in the swiftly tilting sewers, the swinging lanterns outside Chinatown restaurants swallowed under black waves), but because he actually shut up. Neal never stopped talking on command, for anybody.

Shoggoth! The thought arced between me and the false Neal, and it showed its true colors right away. Neal didn’t turn to face me, his face shifted to the side of his head and glared at me. Its jaw was already distending, fangs like sabers gathered up at the corners of its mouth. I did the absurd thing and dropped into my tired old three-point stance and rushed the transmogrifying beast.

It was like tackling a wave on the beach. Hard and blinding, and you, and by you I mean I, of course, ended up