Smoke and Mirrors (19 page)

“Well. There’s no harm in that.
I
used to read that Zane Grey,” said the taller.

“Yes. Well. That’s nothing to be proud of. This bloke—what did you say your name was?”

“Ben. Ben Lassiter. And you are . . . ?”

The little man smiled; he looked awfully like a frog, thought Ben. “I’m Seth,” he said. “And my friend here is called Wilf.”

“Charmed,” said Wilf.

“Hi,” said Ben.

“Frankly,” said the little man, “I agree with you.”

“You do?” said Ben, perplexed.

The little man nodded. “Yer. H. P. Lovecraft. I don’t know what the fuss is about. He couldn’t bloody write.” He slurped his stout, then licked the foam from his lips with a long and flexible tongue. “I mean, for starters, you look at them words he used.
Eldritch.
You know what
eldritch
means?”

Ben shook his head. He seemed to be discussing literature with two strangers in an English pub while drinking beer. He wondered for a moment if he had become someone else, while he wasn’t looking. The beer tasted less bad, the farther down the glass he went, and was beginning to erase the lingering aftertaste of the cherryade.

“
Eldritch.
Means weird. Peculiar. Bloody odd. That’s what it means. I looked it up. In a dictionary. And
gibbous?
”

Ben shook his head again.

“
Gibbous
means the moon was nearly full. And what about that one he was always calling us, eh? Thing. Wossname. Starts with a
b.
Tip of me tongue . . .”

“Bastards?” suggested Wilf.

“Nah. Thing. You know.
Batrachian.
That’s it. Means looked like frogs.”

“Hang on,” said Wilf. “I thought they was, like, a kind of camel.”

Seth shook his head vigorously. “S’definitely frogs. Not camels. Frogs.”

Wilf slurped his Shoggoth’s. Ben sipped his, carefully, without pleasure.

“So?” said Ben.

“They’ve got two humps,” interjected Wilf, the tall one.

“Frogs?” asked Ben.

“Nah. Batrachians. Whereas your average dromederary camel, he’s only got one. It’s for the long journey through the desert. That’s what they eat.”

“Frogs?” asked Ben.

“Camel humps.” Wilf fixed Ben with one bulging yellow eye. “You listen to me, matey-me-lad. After you’ve been out in some trackless desert for three or four weeks, a plate of roasted camel hump starts looking particularly tasty.”

Seth looked scornful. “You’ve never eaten a camel hump.”

“I might have done,” said Wilf.

“Yes, but you haven’t. You’ve never even been in a desert.”

“Well, let’s say, just supposing I’d been on a pilgrimage to the Tomb of Nyarlathotep . . . ”

“The black king of the ancients who shall come in the night from the east and you shall not know him, you mean?”

“Of course that’s who I mean.”

“Just checking.”

“Stupid question, if you ask me.”

“You could of meant someone else with the same name.”

“Well, it’s not exactly a common name, is it? Nyarlathotep.

There’s not exactly going to be two of them, are there? ‘ Hullo, my name’s Nyarlathotep, what a coincidence meeting you here, funny them bein’ two of us,’ I don’t exactly think so. Anyway, so I’m trudging through them trackless wastes, thinking to myself, I could murder a camel hump . . . ”

“But you haven’t, have you? You’ve never been out of Innsmouth harbor.”

“Well . . . No.”

“There.” Seth looked at Ben triumphantly. Then he leaned over and whispered into Ben’s ear, “He gets like this when he gets a few drinks into him, I’m afraid.”

“I heard that,” said Wilf.

“Good,” said Seth. “Anyway. H. P. Lovecraft. He’d write one of his bloody sentences. Ahem. ‘The gibbous moon hung low over the eldritch and batrachian inhabitants of squamous Dulwich.’ What does he mean, eh?
What does he mean?
I’ll tell you what he bloody means. What he bloody means is that the moon was nearly full, and everybody what lived in Dulwich was bloody peculiar frogs. That’s what he means.”

“What about the other thing you said?” asked WIlf.

“What?”

“
Squamous.
Wossat mean, then?”

Seth shrugged. “Haven’t a clue,” he admitted. “But he used it an awful lot.” There was another pause.

“I’m a student,” said Ben. “Gonna be a metallurgist.” Somehow he had managed to finish the whole of his first pint of Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar, which was, he realized, pleasantly shocked, his first alcoholic beverage. “What do you guys do?”

“We,” said Wilf, “are acolytes.”

“Of Great Cthulhu,” said Seth proudly.

“Yeah?” said Ben. “And what exactly does that involve?”

“My shout,” said Wilf. “Hang on.” Wilf went over to the barmaid and came back with three more pints. “Well,” he said, “what it involves is, technically speaking, not a lot right now. The acolytin’ is not really what you might call laborious employment in the middle of its busy season. That is, of course, because of his bein’ asleep. Well, not exactly
asleep.
More like, if you want to put a finer point on it,
dead.
”

“ ‘In his house at Sunken R’lyeh dead Cthulhu lies dreaming,’ ” interjected Seth. “Or, as the poet has it, ‘That is not dead what can eternal lie—’ ”

“ ‘But in Strange Aeons—’ ” chanted Wilf.

“—and by
Strange
he means
bloody peculiar
—”

“Exactly. We are not talking your normal Aeons here at all.”

“ ‘But in Strange Aeons even Death can die.’ ”

Ben was mildly surprised to find that he seemed to be drinking another full-bodied pint of Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar. Somehow the taste of rank goat was less offensive on the second pint. He was also delighted to notice that he was no longer hungry, that his blistered feet had stopped hurting, and that his companions were charming, intelligent men whose names he was having difficulty in keeping apart. He did not have enough experience with alcohol to know that this was one of the symptoms of being on your second pint of Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar.

“So right now,” said Seth, or possibly Wilf, “the business is a bit light. Mostly consisting of waiting.”

“And praying,” said Wilf, if he wasn’t Seth.

“And praying. But pretty soon now, that’s all going to change.”

“Yeah?” asked Ben. “How’s that?”

“Well,” confided the taller one. “Any day now, Great Cthulhu (currently impermanently deceased), who is our boss, will wake up in his undersea living-sort-of quarters.”

“And then,” said the shorter one, “he will stretch and yawn and get dressed—”

“Probably go to the toilet, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”

“Maybe read the papers.”

“—And having done all that, he will come out of the ocean depths and consume the world utterly.”

Ben found this unspeakably funny. “Like a ploughman’s,” he said.

“Exactly. Exactly. Well put, the young American gentleman. Great Cthulhu will gobble the world up like a ploughman’s lunch, leaving but only the lump of Branston pickle on the side of the plate.”

“That’s the brown stuff?” asked Ben. They assured him that it was, and he went up to the bar and brought them back another three pints of Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar.

He could not remember much of the conversation that followed. He remembered finishing his pint, and his new friends inviting him on a walking tour of the village, pointing out the various sights to him “that’s where we rent our videos, and that big building next door is the Nameless Temple of Unspeakable Gods and on Saturday mornings there’s a jumble sale in the crypt . . . ”

He explained to them his theory of the walking tour book and told them, emotionally, that Innsmouth was both
scenic
and
charming.
He told them that they were the best friends he had ever had and that Innsmouth was
delightful.

The moon was nearly full, and in the pale moonlight both of his new friends did look remarkably like huge frogs. Or possibly camels.

The three of them walked to the end of the rusted pier, and Seth and/or Wilf pointed out to Ben the ruins of Sunken R’lyeh in the bay, visible in the moonlight, beneath the sea, and Ben was overcome by what he kept explaining was a sudden and unforeseen attack of seasickness and was violently and unendingly sick over the metal railings into the black sea below . . .

After that it all got a bit odd.

Ben Lassiter awoke on the cold hillside with his head pounding and a bad taste in his mouth. His head was resting on his backpack. There was rocky moorland on each side of him, and no sign of a road, and no sign of any village, scenic, charming, delightful, or even picturesque.

He stumbled and limped almost a mile to the nearest road and walked along it until he reached a petrol station.

They told him that there was no village anywhere locally named Innsmouth. No village with a pub called
The Book of Dead Names.
He told them about two men, named Wilf and Seth, and a friend of theirs, called Strange Ian, who was fast asleep somewhere, if he wasn’t dead, under the sea. They told him that they didn’t think much of American hippies who wandered about the countryside taking drugs, and that he’d probably feel better after a nice cup of tea and a tuna and cucumber sandwich, but that if he was dead set on wandering the country taking drugs, young Ernie who worked the afternoon shift would be all too happy to sell him a nice little bag of homegrown cannabis, if he could come back after lunch.

Ben pulled out his
A Walking Tour of the British Coastline
book and tried to find Innsmouth in it to prove to them that he had not dreamed it, but he was unable to locate the page it had been on—if ever it had been there at all. Most of one page, however, had been ripped out, roughly, about halfway through the book.

And then Ben telephoned a taxi, which took him to Bootle railway station, where he caught a train, which took him to Manchester, where he got on an airplane, which took him to Chicago, where he changed planes and flew to Dallas, where he got another plane going north, and he rented a car and went home.

He found the knowledge that he was over 600 miles away from the ocean very comforting; although, later in life, he moved to Nebraska to increase the distance from the sea: there were things he had seen, or thought he had seen, beneath the old pier that night that he would never be able to get out of his head. There were things that lurked beneath gray raincoats that man was not meant to know.
Squamous.
He did not need to look it up. He knew. They were
squamous.

A couple of weeks after his return home Ben posted his annotated copy of
A Walking Tour of the British Coastline
to the author, care of her publisher, with an extensive letter containing a number of helpful suggestions for future editions. He also asked the author if she would send him a copy of the page that had been ripped from his guidebook, to set his mind at rest; but he was secretly relieved, as the days turned into months, and the months turned into years and then into decades, that she never replied.

V IRUS

There was a computer game, I was given it

one of my friends gave it to me, he was playing it,

he said, it’s brilliant, you should play it,

and I did, and it was.

I copied it off the disk he gave me

for anyone, I wanted everyone to play it.

Everyone should have this much fun.

I sent it upline to bulletin boards

but mainly I got it out to all of my friends.

(Personal contact. That’s the way it was given to me.)

My friends were like me: some were scared of viruses,

someone gave you a game on disk, next week or Friday the 13th

it reformatted your hard disk or corrupted your memory.

But this one never did that. This was dead safe.

Even my friends who didn’t like computers started to play:

as you get better the game gets harder;

maybe you never win but you can get pretty good.

I’m pretty good.

Of course I have to spend a lot of time playing it.

So do my friends. And their friends.

And just the people you meet, you can see them,

walking down the old motorways

or standing in queues, away from their computers,

away from the arcades that sprang up overnight,

but they play it in their heads in the meantime,

combining shapes,

puzzling over contours, putting colors next to colors,

twisting signals to new screen sections,

listening to the music.

Sure, people think about it, but mainly they play it.

My record’s eighteen hours at a stretch.

40,012 points, 3 fanfares.

You play through the tears, the aching wrist, the hunger, after a while

it all goes away.

All of it except the game, I should say.

There’s no room in my mind anymore; no room for other things.

We copied the game, gave it to our friends.

It transcends language, occupies our time,

sometimes I think I’m forgetting things these days.

I wonder what happened to the TV. There used to be TV.

I wonder what will happen when I run out of canned food.

I wonder where all the people went. And then I realize how,

if I’m fast enough, I can put a black square next to a red line,

mirror it and rotate them so they both disappear,

clearing the left block

for a white bubble to rise . . .

(So they both disappear.)

And when the power goes off for good then I

Will play it in my head until I die.