The Mall of Cthulhu (19 page)

"Is that level Z?"

Marrs smiled. "Our programmers really are geniuses. Yes, level Z clearance. I'm the only one who has it. In addition to the other benefits, it allows me to change personnel files at will. So I got you transferred to counter-terrorism especially so you'd be able to work this investigation, and though your superiors have given up on it, it's obviously not over, and I'm going to need your help completing it. I think you'll do more good working for me than you would in the regular Bureau."

"You're the one who got me transferred?"

"As soon as I saw you looking up Cthulhu on the database. We've been keeping tabs—to the extent that our ever-thinner resources have allowed, of course—on you and Ted for the last ten years. Mostly through credit card records, student loan applications, things like that. I was delighted to see that you'd joined the Bureau."

"Yeah. Well, I was pretty psyched at first, too, but it hasn't really worked out that well."

"Ah yes. First the fruitless hunt for Mr. Bulger, and now this. When I saw you trying to access my
Necronomicon
file, I knew it was time to act. We need your help, Laura."

"And you want to catch the fuckers who took my friend?"

"Yes. I can say without hesitation that this operation is our top priority at the moment. So, do you want to work for me?"

Laura thought for a moment, then decided that the guy knew enough already for her to throw caution to the wind. "Okay. I really feel like I owe these guys a lot of pain. And can we get Ted back?"

"Ah. Well. I think it's probably unlikely that . . . well, you see, what we need to do . . . I mean, obviously we need to permanently seal up the rift, not open it again. I'm afraid Ted is . . . "

"Consigned to an eternity of madness and horror?" Laura took another drink, trying not to think about what her words really meant.

"Oh, no. He's almost certainly dead."

Ted wasn't dead. At least, he was fairly certain that he wasn't dead. He was still solid, he hadn't floated toward a light, he couldn't hear the sounds of the Ramones playing with Keith Moon sitting in on drums that he was sure awaited all righteous souls when they died, and he couldn't hear Cherrified's greatest misses, which was a fate he was sure awaited the damned.

He could look down at himself and see a body there. All this argued strongly against his being dead. And yet.

He'd just come through what felt like an eternity of mind-rending despair. As soon as he'd jumped into the rip, he'd spent what felt like weeks in the most profound, unendurable despair he'd ever felt—the worst of his post-traumatic depression was a day at Disneyland compared to what he'd felt—the sense of utter hopelessness, of loss, of dread, the complete certainty that everything was hopeless forever. Not only was Cayenne lost, he, Ted, was lost, Laura was lost, everyone living and dead would spend eternity in unendurable pain.

He suspected that this was the part of glimpsing the Old Ones that drove people barking mad in the Lovecraft stories. He had felt his mind straining under the certainty that all that awaited him and everyone forever was endless torment. And then, it had ended, and he'd found himself face down on some foul-smelling flagstones.

Lovecraft was certainly right about the geometry. It was all wrong—looking around, Ted couldn't get a fix on what was up, what was down, and even whether he was looking at a sidewalk or a wall. He seemed to be in a city, in that there were streets and buildings, but it was like being trapped in that Escher drawing he'd hung on his dorm wall freshman year. Except that it smelled horrific, as though the contents of the Queequeg's dumpster he'd sat in just a few days, or possibly several hundred thousand years ago, had been pureed with a thousand decaying corpses and four tons of dogshit, and spread everywhere.

Actually, Ted's freshman room had also smelled horrific, due to his roommate's aversion to doing laundry as well as a jar of kimchi, which some kid from down the hall had left sitting in the sun on their windowsill one hot afternoon and which had exploded all over. If you magnified the stale crotch-sweat and fermented cabbage smell of his freshman room a thousand times, it might come close to the smell of what he assumed was R'lyeh, the city that, somewhere, held the sleeping Cthulhu.

And, hopefully, Cayenne. Uneasily, Ted stood up . He found that he was on a sidewalk, or possibly a roof. "Cayenne!" he called. "CAYENNE!" he screamed again. He wondered if his screaming might possibly wake the sleeping Cthulhu, which couldn't possibly be a good thing. But as he called Cayenne again, he realized that there was something else funny about this place. Despite the fact that he was standing on a flat expanse of stone with other flat expanses of stone all around—he wanted to think of it as a plaza, but then it kept looking spherical from certain angles—his voice wasn't echoing at all. In fact, it sounded much quieter than it should have in his ears. It seemed that sound waves weren't propagating properly here either.

Ted wandered aimlessly for a period of time through the streets, sewers, hallways, plazas, walls and rooftops of R'lyeh. He had no idea how long a period this happened to be. His feet did not get tired. He did not feel like sleeping. He was not hungry. He didn't have to pee. The light in and around R'lyeh—a sick greenish-yellow glow that emanated from the sky, or possibly the ceiling, or, then again, maybe the floor, did not vary at all.

All of which seemed to argue only that Ted hadn't been walking for very long. Yet it felt like at least three hours. Then again, he'd been to ninety-minute movies that felt like three hour movies simply because they were dull, and dull was certainly a good way to describe R'lyeh. Oh, sure, the city was dotted with statues of what he assumed to be Cthulhu—a big, octopus-headed creature—but these didn't live up to Lovecraft's billing of mind-destroying wrongness—they were a little weird, but Ted had seen weirder at Goth dance clubs, and they were not weird enough to distract Ted for long from the monotony of his surroundings and the feeling of dread and despair that was welling up inside him.

He called for Cayenne again, got no response, and started to run. When he found himself suddenly on a wall that used to be a sidewalk, he shouted at the top of his lungs that he was "Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man." This remained entertaining and funny for a period of time, and then, suddenly, the dam burst on his despair, and he began to cry.

He'd been a fool to hope, to believe even for a second that he wasn't doomed to live a shitty life, that everything hadn't been ruined that night in the sorority. He'd only known Cayenne for a few days, but he felt a connection with her that he hadn't ever felt with anyone. He had dared to hope that he was going to get a third act—the one where he got to be happy and live some sort of approximation of a normal life and possibly end up as the patriarch of some large happy family instead of just being a ghost that haunted Laura.

Well, that's what he got for hoping. It seemed God, or whoever ran things, was pretty pissed at Ted and had His own special plans to make Ted suffer. Even this place, with its boredom and horrible smell and bad geometry, might be endurable if he and Cayenne were together. He'd given up everything for her—the hope of ever setting foot in his own reality with its comforting, Euclidean geometry again—and it turned out to have been a sucker bet. He couldn't help her, he couldn't help himself.

And maybe, he thought, he was actually dead. Maybe this was hell—this terrible solitude, the boredom, and the sense that everything you'd done was ultimately for nothing. Maybe the cruelest part was that when he'd first found himself here, he'd been allowed to feel some hope.

He curled up and cried for a period of time. Or maybe, he thought, for a period of no-time. Did no-time even have periods? Or was it menopausal? Ted made himself smile with that, and then thought that showed he was desperate for a laugh. Ted went to wipe his eyes and found that they were dry. So maybe he hadn't been crying. Except he remembered crying. Maybe this was the part that drove people crazy—this inability to be sure of anything, ever.

More no-time did or did not pass. Ted wandered. None of the structures he passed looked familiar, but since he might be seeing them from different angles, he couldn't be sure if he was just walking through the same area over and over and over again. "Hey," he said aloud in his strangely too-quiet voice. "Where the hell's Cthulhu anyway? I mean, the guy's supposed to be friggin' huge—how could I possibly keep missing him?"

Armed with a purpose, Ted went wandering again. He alternated calling for Cayenne and calling for Cthulhu. Neither answered. He had three more dry-eyed crying fits as he sank into a pit of despair. He emerged from the pit of despair and walked. Eventually, or else immediately, he came upon a long wooden box. It was definitely a rectangular solid with right angles at the corners, and so was unlike anything else he'd seen in R'lyeh—it was definitely an object from his own dimension. He spent some time trying to figure out how to open it and eventually pried the top off. The smell of vomit and decay rose from the box, and, inside, he saw a corpse with blistered red burns all over it.

"Ah, Half-caf, we meet again," he said. Half-caf said nothing. Ted briefly imagined the horror of enduring the trip here sealed in a dark box, mind already straining at the seams from the pain of the untreated burns. He felt a swell of pity for Half-caf, and a pang of regret about burning him so badly. Then he remembered the young couple with their brains all over the Queequeg's wall, and he remembered Cayenne and the whole city of Providence, the whole earth that this guy had been trying to destroy, or at least transform into a facsimile of this stinking, unchanging shithole. "Tough luck, buddy," he said to Half-caf. He replaced the lid to the box and walked on.

He thought about Half-caf for several days while he walked in circles, or arcs, or intersecting parallel lines or something. He decided that he would try to mark time by singing some of his favorite albums over and over again. This broke down when he couldn't remember some of the lyrics from Matthew Sweet's "Girlfriend." Then he couldn't remember which song he'd been singing. He tried to sing every Ramones song he knew, but then felt like he'd been singing "The KKK Took My Baby Away" for a year and a half. Perhaps he had. It occurred to him that he could think of eighteen-month periods he had spent in far worse ways. This made him smile. He was happy.

He was sad. He walked. The wall he'd been walking on suddenly became a ceiling. This made him laugh out loud. "What a feeling," he sang. "Dancin' on the Ceiling." This was funny, but the ceiling he was dancing on suddenly turned out to be a floor.

He decided that trying to play both ends of a chess game in his mind might help pass the time, or at least keep him sane, but then he found himself cackling rather alarmingly as he yelled out, "Yes! Feel the sting of my fianchettoed bishop! Put that in your Nimzo-Indian and smoke it!" This struck him as even funnier, and he started calling out chess openings that never existed outside of this greenish, strangely constructed zone outside of time and space. "Ah, yes, Townsend's hard drive! But black counters with the Queen's knickers! Fantastic move. Ah, White has reached Gilligan's Island by transposition! Now, if this were Gilligan's Island, which I guess it is, who am I? Am I Gilligan? Or am I the Professor? Or possibly Mary Ann?" He wondered why no one had ever made a pornographic version of
Gilligan's Island,
then realized that someone almost certainly had. "Great idea for a porno movie," he said, and then began to cry as he realized he would never ever see it.

Except in his mind, where Ginger and Mary Ann frolicked enthusiastically for quite some time. Or no time at all. Or something.

Finally, or, then again, initially, Ted rounded a corner, or cornered a round, or fianchettoed the bishop, and was knocked out of his pornographic reverie by the sight of the gargantuan Cthulhu, sleeping.

In books, people were always suddenly sobered up by hearing something surprising, but Agent Marrs, if that was his real name, with his absurd tale of werewolves and Bible-based supernatural defenses and Ted being dead, did not sober up Laura one bit. Indeed, her encounter with Agent Marrs made her, feel, if anything, more drunk, like hearing about secret government anti-supernatural fighters was something that just happened when your brain was fogged, kind of like calling your ex at one in the morning. Perhaps it was just the tequila hitting bottom, but she suddenly felt that all the alcohol she'd consumed that hadn't had any effect on her at all had suddenly kicked in.

"Bullshit," she said. "I mean, it's all bullshit, probably, but Ted being dead is definitely bullshit. The guy—I mean, a sorority full of vampires and a mass killing in a Queequeg's and the guy walks away without a scratch. There's no way that something like being sucked into another dimension of unimaginable horror could possibly kill him. The guy is immortal."

Marrs gave Laura a look that she recognized as, "You poor dear, you're in denial, but I'm not going to burst your bubble right now."

"Well," he said, "be that as it may, I would really like to put a stop to this whole Cthulhu Cult business, and I'd love your help if you're willing to work for me."

"Let me just ask you this, Mr. Marrs—" Laura killed her beer and signaled the waitress for a refill, and then suddenly started to giggle as she imagined what Ted would do if faced with somebody named Marrs. "Are you related to the M.A.R.R.S. who did 'Pump Up the Volume'?"

For the first time in this conversation, Marrs looked unbalanced. "I'm sorry," he said, "I'm afraid I don't . . . "

"I'm kidding, I'm kidding. But that would be pretty funny, though, if that was like a fund-raiser for your department or something."

Marrs looked at her blankly, and she tried to make her brain serious for a moment. "Okay, listen—you know about the Omega house, you were just about to stop it, you know about this, you have the power to get me transferred, but why the hell can't you do anything about it? I mean, these losers were digging up the
Necronomicon
on a public street! You couldn't do that?"