The Mall of Cthulhu (21 page)

"We're just following up on the incident at the mall yesterday, trying to get some more witness statements, see if anybody saw anything that might be at all helpful, you know sometimes people think they don't have anything worth telling us about and it turns out that they've got that final piece of the puzzle. Anyway, another witness said she thought she remembered some people in OSP jackets. Any of these men look familiar to you?"

"Sure. That's Dick there on the left. And Tracy is the other one. I don't recognize the rest."

"Wonderful. And are either of these gentlemen in today?"

"Well, they both clocked in, but they're not here. Let me just check—yeah, they're on the same crew. Leak near McCoy Stadium up in Pawtucket."

"Okay—can you give me their home addresses, just in case we miss each other when I'm driving up there?"

"Sure."

Back in the car, she called Marrs. "I got two," she said.

"Fantastic!" Marrs answered. He sounded genuinely thrilled, the first time he'd sounded anything but professorial.

"Anything on the flash drive?"

"A really shocking amount of foot fetish pornography—if you can call it pornography. I assume close-up photos of feet tied lovingly with silk cords count as pornography?"

"I don't know, but you're making me hot just talking about it." There was a pause. "I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Anything else?

"Yes. There's a file that suggests this group may possess a copy of the book that provides the key to the dangerous parts of the
Necronomicon.
I cross-referenced Mr. Castle's files with our copy of the
Necronomicon,
and though I personally lack the expertise to do the correlation, my resident cryptologist is very excited by what we've got thus far."

"Glad to hear it. The supervisor at the power company told me these guys are out on a job, so I'm going to go see what I can find at their houses.

"All right. But please try to avoid any kind of confrontation. Satisfying as it is to employ your hand-to-hand training, if two of these men are assaulted by you in their home, they will be clear that we're on to them."

"Got it."

A few moments later, Laura arrived at the closest address, which was the home of one Richard Johnson. "Dick Johnson," she thought to herself. "No wonder he turned evil." She felt a sudden pang as she imagined what kind of riff Ted would have done at finding the home of Dick Johnson.

Dick Johnson lived in a small, beige ranch house in a middle-class neighborhood of Providence. A small yellow sign on his neatly trimmed lawn announced that he had an alarm system, and a small white sign on his lawn announced "A Pit Bull Lives Here!" Fantastic.

She called Marrs. He asked her a series of questions about what she was seeing, and then told her which wire to cut to disarm the alarm. Of course, she had nothing to cut it with, so she asked him for directions to the nearest hardware store for wire cutters. Once she had the proper tools and had cut the alarm, she asked Marrs, "What about the dog?"

"Well, I can direct you to a supermarket if you want to buy him a steak," Marrs said. "Otherwise, I'm afraid I can't be much help. While my expertise in subduing supernatural creatures is considerable, my mastery of the more mundane inhabitants of our planet is far more limited."

"Don't you have any sleeping spells or anything I could use?"

"You really don't want to attempt to perform any magic unless you are a hundred percent sure you know what you're doing." Laura had rolled her eyes and made the "blah blah" gesture with her left hand as Marrs had said that into her right ear.

This left the dog as the only problem to be overcome. Laura couldn't shoot it without bringing Providence police around. She'd just have to hope that they were slower to respond to barking dog complaints than they were to gunshots.

She approached the back door. She heard the dog barking and scratching at the door. She took a deep breath. She hoped that everything she'd learned about dealing with a human attacker would be applicable to a dog. She picked the back door lock quickly, then turned the door knob slowly, without actually opening the door. The dog was growling and barking uncontrollably, losing its mind in its desperation to get to her. Laura crouched five feet from the door and pushed it open with the rake.

The dog reacted exactly as she'd hoped he would. As he sprang for her, barking and snarling, Laura caught him in the chest with her foot and used his momentum to flip him over her head. There was a whine of pain as the dog struck the sidewalk, but Laura was already running for the door. She had it closed and locked before the dog had managed to get up.

She had no idea if any of the neighbors were home or if any of them had seen or heard anything. She decided she had to proceed quickly.

Laura began to search the house, and the dog scratched at the back door, barking like mad.

Ted was tap dancing on Cthulhu's forehead. "Wake up, you dirty fucker! Wake the fuck up! You'll be late for school!"

Cthulhu did not respond, did not stir. It had been this way through all of Ted's attempts to wake Cthulhu, which had been going on for at least two hours and at most several thousand years. When Ted had first caught sight of Cthulhu—supine, but large as a skyscraper, with a hideous ovoid head from which emanated hundreds of tentacles, each the thickness of a telephone pole, each covered in something viscous and green that occasionally dripped off and landed with a wet squelching sound—he'd screamed.

When he'd finished screaming, he cried, and then he laughed, and this cycle repeated itself until Ted was thoroughly bored with himself. He was incapable of any new responses, he was just thinking and feeling the same things over and over, and he could feel his mind beginning to strain. Finally he decided he'd had enough. Ted was bored of playing word games trying to describe the passage of whatever passed here, was bored of trying to describe the geometry—once he'd come up with the perfect description, who would ever hear it? Who would ever appreciate how funny it was? Cayenne? Perhaps, but Ted had no way of knowing whether she'd actually made it through alive, whether she was even here. Certainly the first few hundred years he'd spent searching for her hadn't borne any fruit.

Whatever this existence was, it seemed to be close enough to hell that Ted wanted out. So he'd kicked Cthulhu in the tentacle. And then he'd broken a stone off the roof of a nearby plaza and chucked it at Cthulhu's eye. It remained closed. "Wake up and kill me!" he implored the Old One. But, like many Old Ones, Cthulhu was apparently difficult to wake from his nap.

Ted kicked, stomped, screamed, bludgeoned, did everything he could think of to awaken Cthulhu. But the quiet, wet breathing continued, a tentacle would sometimes twitch involuntarily, and Cthulhu slept on. At some point the quality of the sounds emanating from Cthulhu changed. Ted decided that he was snoring.

He eventually grew bored of trying to wake Cthulhu and tried in vain to think of something else to do. He tried to stop himself thinking, because he could feel his thoughts spiraling downward into the abyss of depression he'd visited on his way here. Once he reached the bottom of the pit of despair, what would bring him out, since everything was apparently hopeless? No way, he couldn't allow himself to start thinking like that, or at all.

In the past, when he'd wanted to stop himself from thinking, he'd tried drugs, none of which were available here; pornography, ditto; and, of course, television. Which of course did not exist here but which existed, blessedly, in his memory.

"Okay," he said to Cthulhu, "now, the most recent thing I can remember watching was this reality show called
Massachusetts Marriage.
So I'll take all the parts—what's that?—no, you can't have the part of the slutty girl who makes out with everyone, that's the best part!"

And Ted told the entire story of
Massachusetts Marriage
to Cthulhu, who was unmoved. From there, Ted began working backwards, assembling entire episodes of
Law & Order
,
Seinfeld,
anything he'd ever watched, which, he found, was an enormous storehouse of material. How many hours had he spent in front of TV Land, watching, for example, a
Munsters
marathon? How many days after school had he swallowed the delicious cocktail of
The Brady Bunch/Gilligan's Island
back-to-back episodes?

"Ah, Sherwood Schwartz," he said aloud, "bard of the blended family, chronicler of the castaways, how do I revere thee on this day!" He then proceeded to tell Cthulhu about how Mom always said don't play ball in the house, and how Gilligan's last-minute blundering had turned the burning S.O.S. into a greeting for an astronaut named Sol.

"And Laura used to give me that tut-tut thing about the TV—you know, 'you could at least read a book for God's sake, even those pathetic comic books you read are better than this crap!' But look at me now! Hanging with a celebrity and saving my sanity, such as it is, only because I wasted so much time! Ha!"

Bringing up Laura's name brought a pang of sadness to Ted, and he fought not to think about how he'd never see her again, about how he might perhaps have leaned on her a little too hard over the last ten years, about how he didn't do enough to show her how much she meant to him. He could feel tears forming when he could swear he heard Cthulhu say something in a tiny, high voice.

His head whipped around. "Whatchutalkinbout, Cthulhu?" he asked. There was silence for a moment, and then he heard it again. Somewhere, someone was saying, "Wake up!"

Ted ran to the top of Cthulhu's head and looked down the other side, where he saw what had to be a hallucination. It was obviously a hallucination, because he was cursed, doomed to live a thousand thousand lifetimes of loneliness and despair, and that simply didn't square with the sight of Cayenne kicking Cthulhu in the tentacle. His heart leapt, and he began running down Cthulhu's slimy head, screaming, "Cayenne!" but, as before, his voice wasn't carrying, and Cayenne appeared to be lost in a reverie of rage and despair, so Ted actually got quite close before she could hear him.

"Oh my God, it's you!" she called, and she immediately began to sob. He ran to her and put his arms around her and felt her body heave up and down and she gave great, gulping sobs. "I thought . . . I thought . . . Oh, my God I was going crazy, I was going so crazy, how many decades have I been here, how long have I been wishing . . . Oh my God, you can't be real, I must just be completely insane, and I don't care."

Ted thought about insisting that he was real, but he just didn't feel all that sure of things after however many lifetimes in R'lyeh. Maybe, after all, he was Cayenne's hallucination, and it just took a while to find her. That would explain the absence of hunger or thirst or fatigue, though not how he'd known so much about television, or even Laura's name.

He said none of this. He simply held Cayenne in his arms, thrilled at her presence, her aliveness, her separateness from him. They stayed like that, embracing and feeling the solidness of each other's presence, for what might have been a year. Then Ted pulled away and kissed her face, and then her mouth, and soon she broke away and said, "Let's find some place away from prying eyes and tentacles."

They walked, hand-in-hand, for a while, and Ted didn't dare to let go of her hand for fear she'd disappear and he'd never find her again, or that one of them would simply stop existing without the other one there to perceive them. Finally they found an opening in a wall or floor and crawled into a pyramidal or possibly spherical space and were alone together.

To say it was the best sex either of them had ever had was akin to saying that a chocolate truffle is mildly preferable to a shit sandwich. Which is to say that what passed between Ted and Cayenne appeared to be an eternity of bliss, an extra-temporal festival of the flesh that had every nerve in Ted's body singing for joy for what must have been days. Each of them had orgasms that lasted centuries, and what transpired between them for those eons they spent in R'lyeh was simply the Platonic ideal of sex, the sex that all sex on earth, in real time, strove to be and could never be because of the regular passage of time. Ted had occasion to think at one point that he'd thought himself in hell earlier, and now he felt he must surely be in heaven, that if he were to die right now, he'd feel that his life, despite the killing and the blood and the eternities of despair wandering the streets of R'lyeh, had been an embarrassingly lucky one, that the good far outweighed the bad, and that he was glad he'd been alive.

Trying to shut out the sounds of the pit bull's insistent barking and her own heart beating, Laura searched Dick Johnson's house as methodically as she could. The living room revealed nothing but the obligatory large television, the sectional sofa, the complete works of Lovecraft, white supremacist pamphlets, video games, and pornography. (Laura paused when she uncovered DVDs labeled as volumes one through six of
My Big Fat Black Cock,
realizing that she'd probably just uncovered something pretty significant about the psychology of the white supremacist, but she went immediately back to her search that could never be as thorough as she wanted it to be.)

The kitchen looked unused, and the fridge, though clean, was in all other respects a stereotypical bachelor fridge. One half-eaten jar of mayonnaise, a package of hot dogs, a bottle of ketchup and three bottles of beer sat on otherwise empty shelves. The freezer held only three inches of frost and a half-empty ice cube tray.

Dick Johnson's bedroom, like every other room in the house, had plain white walls uncluttered by art work or photographs. It featured a king-sized bed with plain white sheets, a dresser full of white undershirts, white briefs, and white polo shirts. "I get it, I get it, you like white," Laura said to Dick Johnson. His closet held one suit, one white dress shirt, one tie and a pair of dress shoes with a layer of dust that suggested they hadn't been worn in years.

A laptop sat atop the dresser, and Laura opened it and waited what seemed like ages for it to boot up. Meanwhile, the dog barked and scratched, and Laura thought she heard a car door slam outside. "Come on, come on," she coaxed the computer, but it was booting up in its own sweet time. Finally it seemed that whoever had gotten out of the car had not decided to come and ring the bell. Perhaps it was Providence police surrounding the house, though. Finally the computer was ready for business, and Laura inserted her flash drive and copied the documents file.