I groaned. When I groan it sounds like an owl’s death-scream. It’s my dankest feature.
“I’m not gonna let your mopey tentacled ass get between me and a fœtid high, you fhtagn misko,” laughed Zuzu, hopping off the roof ledge and running one meaty hand through his pustulant, blood-crusted pompadour. “We’re taking the subway and if you whine about it, I’ll kick your beak in. And then I’ll tell Mom you went to bed at eight with a glass of warm milk and a book so you could be fresh for work in the morning.”
If Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, heard that noise, she’d paint the nursery with my intestines.
But you gotta understand, public transportation in R’lyeh is a fucking shitshow. Remember that decomposing transdimensional honeycomb knowledge I threw your way earlier? It’s the naked truth. This crapheap town is full of holes—and the holes move. Look—R’lyeh is old as balls. R’lyeh sits at the crossroads of a million planes of sickening unreality. And R’lyeh does not invest in infrastructure. You can walk down the Uvular in Gugtown, dank and antique as you please, flip a corner, and peer down into the bottomless red cavern of Yoth. You can park in the frozen maze of East Yuggoth and come back to find the volcanic pits of Voormithadreth have totaled your accursed chariot without so much as leaving a note. Nyarlathotep’s porn shop on Id Row? That’s actually in Carcosa, which isn’t anywhere near R’lyeh as the squid swims, but the old bitch-town wore a hole in its filthy sock, and now you can trip over a nightworm in Kadath and land face-down in Carcosa if you don’t look both ways before crossing universes.
So the subway is no-go in Moloch world. I’m not about to shoot my shit through Gug-gnawed subterranean tunnels underneath this cyclopean clown car and end up drinking on freaking Saturn with a bunch of giant cats. No, thank you.
But for my eeries, anything. Anything, forever, always.
And that’s how it happened. That’s all it was. Our fœtid, degenerate quest, the dark crusade that would echo down through the centuries like one of Cthulhu’s grand farts was just a Hadean beer run through the toilet bowl of the cosmos. Lurk this and lurk it well: the fancier the history reads, the trashier it really was.
Only one hobo Shoggoth barfed and pissed on my feet at the same time the whole way there, and there appeared where it was supposed to be after only an hour of the wyrmcar screaming profanities at us. All nameless horrors considered, I call that dank.
So a half-breed goatsnake, a Yith, and a Ghast walk into a bar. Stop me if you’ve heard this one.
Most all the fiends and mutants in the plushy-ass eel booths of the Psychotic Pnakotic swiveled their heads and floating globes and writhing antennae to stare at me and mine. R’lyeh’s a pretty conservative squat when you get right down to it. Yiths with Yiths, Ghasts with Ghasts. But I didn’t give a fhtagn because I’m not a fucking racist. Shax wound one of her crimson tentacles around my neck and we gibbered up to the bar. Shragga was manning the taps. She’s got a drill for a face but she’s basically yellow.
Shax smeared a dream of becoming and unbecoming on the bar. It glowered ultraviolet netherhot, curdling into pestilent lumpcream. Shragga shrugged. Shax’s gleeth was always dank here, even if she wobbled in with her Niggurath cultist boy-thing and embarrassed the high-end clientele.
“Three hits of san with lucidbacks, Shraggs,” my girl-thing oozed, right eldritch and shameless.
“We gotta dress code, Yithling,” Shragga’s drill whined, ground, spun. “Blackest of ties. Writhe here a minute, I’ve got a couple of old exoskeletons in the back.”
Shragga shuddered back with meaty arms full of black clattering crabskin armor that hadn’t been sheol since the Cretaceous, whistle-screeched through her drill-face, and poured out three shots of thorazine plus three tall glasses of Providence tapwater. The PP’s got a pipe that goes straight up to New England and suckles at the municipal mundflesh supply. Zu and me licked sea spores off Shax’s stomach.
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 h
is 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.
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 min
d-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.