Cthulhurotica (13 page)

After a while, he stopped being able to understand why she kept him around, and started suspecting every man she spent time with professionally. He imagined he could smell them on her when he got close enough. He was certain that if she hadn’t fucked at least two different authors at her last convention, it was only because she was too busy to maintain even the most superficial of relationships. On his worst days, Steven feared that she only stuck with him because of convenience, familiarity, and even worse, out of spite.

Linda was deep in thought when she stepped off the small boat that afternoon. Steven watched her jot notes in her notepad as she walked slowly up the warped wood in the salty breeze. The research had germinated, and the story was starting to take root inside of her. She would be easier to deal with for the next few months as she pounded out the first draft, distant, but less prone to micromanaging the affairs of the house, less prone to running Steven’s life. Of course, she’d still comment that
God knows you can’t be trusted to run it yourself
.

“You look like you’re ready to start writing,” he said, hands thrust in his pockets despite the heat.

She looked up as if startled to see him. “Yes.” She nodded, looked back at her notes, nodded again. “Yes, I think I’m going to spend tomorrow in the room working on an outline. We’ll be on our way back to Chicago in two days…three at most.”

Despite his wife’s mood, Steven felt the ground below him open and swallow his heart. “Three days?” he stammered.

“Maybe less, baby,” she replied thoughtlessly, letting her mood blind her to her husband’s. “This novel is going to be a best seller for sure. I just want to make sure I get the outline before we leave. Did you find anything in the library?”

Interesting? Beyond a doubt
. But she wouldn’t use it. She had her story in place. “Maybe,” he replied instead. Through the sea air, the smell of her shampoo was cloying. “Did you decide what to do with Brolly’s fishwives?”

“Bonfire. It brings the ‘they used to lure ships to their doom’ full circle. I can’t prove it happened that way, but no one can prove otherwise, either. Plus, it makes a better story.”

Steven thought of the briny hair, the swollen, blackened tongues, the cold, slimy hands, the pungent scent of fermentation. He felt a stirring in his jockeys and thought instead about what he had found in the library. That snuffed his passion. “Oh. Good. Then I didn’t really find anything contradictory. Brolly was a madman, arguably a fisherman. He lived in a cluster of stilt homes on the tide flats with his wives.”

Linda nodded. “That, we found.”

“The papers had documented that quite well, as well as the nature of his arrest,” Steven continued. “His ranting as he was led from the tidal flats into the center of town had shaken the most resolute of men. Women who heard his shouting had fainted. The parish priest knotted a rag into Brolly’s mouth to mute his blasphemy, but the damage was done. Too many people had heard his cries to the ancient fish god, Dagon. Too many people had heard him attest to a lost city beneath the waves, of a race of Deep Ones who served, ageless. They were moved to a man to execute him before the madness spread. He was hung from a tree as soon as the mob reached the center of town. There was no trial. Nor was there further mention of his wives.”

“Maybe what happened to the fishwives had been too terrible for the reporters of the time to record,” Linda said, relishing the words as she said them. “Perhaps it had been a dark, guilty secret that those responsible took to their graves. I can work with that.”

The memory of a pungent, salty kiss told Steven all he needed to know. It was a fiery end the fishwives had gone to.

He started back towards the motel with Linda in the passenger seat, jotting down notes, the window rolled down to let in the seaside aroma. “Should we celebrate the beginning of the next book?” he asked.

“I’d like that.” Her hand left her notebook long enough to squeeze his thigh through his jeans. “Let’s stop at the grocery store on the way back to the room.”

Steven tasted the sour bile of panic. He forced a smile and complied like he always did. Wine helped Linda let down her guard, dropped some of her inhibitions. Maybe it would be enough.

She had finished most of the bottle of Merlot by herself with her dinner of BBQ pork and sweet potato biscuits. By the time the bottle rolled emptily along the bedside table, she had slid one hand inside his shirt, fingers curling in the fine hairs of his chest. Her teeth nipped at his ear, breath sour with wine, one leg thrown across his thigh as she ground lightly against it.

Steven closed his eyes, his body responding to her touch though his brain found it hard to remain in the moment. Eyes shut against the harsh realities of faded bedspread, shabby drapes, and shipwreck of his marriage, he could almost lose himself in the sensation. He gave in to the feel of her warm hands on his chest, teasing his nipples, sliding across a belly given more to flab than he would like to admit. Linda massaged his cock through his jeans, felt it eager to please, and so released it from its denim prison. Her touch was real. It was warm. It was drunkenly eager.

And it felt wrong. Her hands were too small, too inexperienced. Even fumbling as it was, her touch was far too gentle.

Steven looked into Linda’s blue eyes, probed for clues, for reactions. He reached up and caressed the soft skin around her eye. Her pupils were dilated with lust, but the eyes themselves seemed too squinty. His fingertip lightly grazed across her eyelid. So suddenly he almost didn’t realize he was doing it, Steven flipped her eyelid back over on itself.

Linda screeched and fell sideways off the bed as she scrambled at her folded eyelid. She collided with the side table, sending the wine bottle to the floor, shattering it on the hard wood of the floor. “Steven! What the FUCK!”

“I don’t know…”

“You’re fucking right you don’t know!” She found her feet, shrieking at him. The passion had converted from lust directly into rage with no stops in between. “You bitch and whine about how we never have sex, then I throw you a bone and you turn into a freak on me.”

Steven stood, his voice shaking as adrenalin surged through his bloodstream. She didn’t understand. How could he explain it to her, that maybe she had never taken the time to care about his desires, his needs? There was nothing wrong about it. No, certainly not. He was just unique. “I’m not a freak, Linda. I’m just a man with needs…”

“The fuck you are!” She shouted, spittle landing on his face, finger jabbing so hard in the chest he damn near lost his breath.

“I’m not a freak!” His shout accompanied a stinging slap that sent her reeling. Her head hit the edge of the side table, dazing her as she fell. “I’m not a freak,” he grumbled again, not caring that she probably couldn’t hear him. “I just know what I like.”

He crouched over her body, pinning Linda’s arms between his knees. Steven grabbed the broken wine bottle by the neck and eyed his canvas.
I know what I like
, he thought again. Even with eyes open, he could smell the ocean. With a steady hand, he guided the glass to Linda’s throat and began cutting gills.

The warm waters of the tidal surge rushed up across his legs, his naked crotch, washing him clean. The sand and silt beneath Steven’s feet sucked at each step as he waded deeper out towards the center of the tidal marsh. The image of Linda’s body flashed briefly across his mind. Steven saw her as he had left her – submerged in the tub, a cloud of red mist marking the flaps of gills he had carved in her throat, body full of his seed.

The waters rose above his hips, surged against his belly, his chest. There, out past the breakers, he knew the fishwives of Sean Brolly waited for him. With a surge of newfound strength, Steven dove into the breaking surf and swam out to meet them.

Deep Ones
by Galen Dara

Silvia Moreno-Garcia
FLASH FRAME

The sound is yellow.

****

This story I have, just remember that you were the one who wanted to hear it.

It was when you could still make a living freelancing in Mexico City. Nowadays, it’s wire-services and regurgitated shit, but in 1982 rags still needed original content. I did a couple of funky articles, the latest about the cheapest whore in the city for
Enigma!
, a mixed-bag of crime stories, tits and freakish news items. It paid well and on time.

I also did articles for an arts and culture magazine which, I was hoping, would turn into a permanent position. But when it came time to gather rent money,
Enigma!
was first on my mind.

The trouble was that there was a new assistant editor at
Enigma!
and he didn’t like the old crop of stringers. To get past him, I had to pitch harder. I needed better stories. Stories he couldn’t refuse.

The crime stuff was a bust, nothing good recently, so I moved onto sex and decided to swing by El Tabu, a porno cinema housed in a great, Art Deco building. It’s gone now, bulldozed to make way for condos.

Back then, it still stood, both ruined and glorious. The great days of porno of the 70s had come and gone, and videocassettes were invading the market. El Tabu stood defiant, yet crumbling. Inside you could find rats as big as rabbits, statues holding torchlights in their hands and a Venus in the lobby. Elegant, ancient and large. Some people came to sleep during a double feature and used the washrooms to take a bath. Others came for the shows. Some were peddling. I’m not going to explain what they were peddling; you figure it out.

It was a good place to listen to chatter. A stringer needs that chatter. One afternoon, I gathered my notebook and my tape-recorder, paid for a ticket and went looking for Sebastian, the projectionist, who had a knack for gossiping and profiting from it.

Sebastian hadn’t heard any interesting things – there was some vague stuff about a whole squadron of Russian prostitutes in a high-rise apartment building near downtown and university students selling themselves for sex, but I’d heard it before. Then Sebastian got a funny look on his face and asked me for a cigarette. This meant he was zeroing on the good stuff.

“I don’t think I should tell you, but there’s a religious group coming in every Thursday,” he said, as he took a puff. “Order of something. Have you heard of Enrique Zozoya?”

“No,” I said.

“He’s the one that’s renting the place. For the group.”

“A porno theatre doesn’t seem like the nicest place for a congregation.”

“I think it’s some sort of sex cult. I can’t tell because I don’t look. They bring their own projectionist and I have to wait in the lobby,” Sebastian explained.

“So how do you know it’s a sex cult and they’re not worshiping Jesus?”

“I can’t watch, but I can very well hear some stuff. It doesn’t sound like Jesus.”

****

There was no Wikipedia. You couldn’t Google a name. What you could do, was go through archives and dig out microfiches. Fortunately, Enrique Zozoya wasn’t that hard to find. An ex-hippie activist in the 60s, he had turned New Age guru in the early 70s, doing horoscopes. He’d peaked mid-decade, selling natal charts to a few celebrities, then sinking into anonymity. There was nothing about him in the past few years, but he’d obviously found a new source of employment in this religious order.

Armed with the background I had clubbed together, I ventured to El Tabu the following Thursday with my worn bag pack containing my notebook, my tape recorder and my cigarettes. The tape recorder was a bit banged up and sometimes it wouldn’t play right, or it would switch on record for no reason, but I didn’t have money to get a new one. The cigarettes, on the other hand, could be counted upon on any occasion.

Sebastian didn’t look too happy to see me, but I mentioned some money and he softened. He agreed to sneak me into the theater before the show started, onto the second balcony where I would not be spotted. The place was huge and the crowd that gathered every Thursday was small. They wouldn’t notice me.

Sitting behind a red velvet curtain, eating pistachios, I waited for the show to start. At around eight o’ clock about fifty people walked in. I peeked from behind my hiding place and recognized Enrique Zozoya as he moved to the front of the theater. He was dressed in a bright yellow outfit. He said a few words which I couldn’t make out and then he sat down.

That was that. The projection started.

It was a faux-Roman movie. Rome as seen by some Hollywood producer. It could have been filmed in 1954 and directed by DeMille. Except DeMille wouldn’t have featured bare tits. Lots of women, half-dressed, in what was some sort of throne room. In the background I noticed several men and women, less comely and muscled. Slightly unsettling in their looks. There was something twisted and perverted about them. But the camera focused on the people in the foreground, the young and beautiful women giggling and feeding grapes to a guy. There were men, chests-bared, leaning against a column. The tableaux was completed by an actor who was playing an emperor and his companion, a dark-haired beauty.