I once owned a violin, covered with green silk, wrapped in gold and
gauze, bound with iron chains and hidden in a teak-wood cask. It was an
odd way to keep a violin, I’ll admit.
The violin was beautiful,
almost iridescently grained, but as useless to me as an ostrich plume on
a seal-clubbing expedition. No blow I could strike had any impact, and
no stroke of my bow brought forth anything more pleasant than the
aggrieved tones of a feline suffering an unpleasantly soapy delousing,
with all the associated indignities. I always assumed it must have been
some flaw in the varnish, some hidden fissure within the maple, that
caused such raucous reverberation. For that matter, I suspected the
strings had been gutted from an improperly tuned cat.
On the odd
occasions I took it out to admire, I held it reverently, horsetail bow
hovering no closer than a half inch from those catgut strings, lest one
should inadvertently make contact with the other and misery ensue. So
when the Tufted Capuchin monkey knocked upon my door and asked in a
perfectly-articulated accent, “I believe you are in possession of a
rather unusual violin, which I would most obligingly wish to see,” I did
my best not to register any visible surprise.
“I don’t recall,” I said, “advertising a violin.”
“Ah,” said the monkey, “but undoubtedly you misunderstand. I said nothing about having encountered an advertisement.”
“Then
I utterly fail to understand your speech,” I replied, “on more than one
account. But your words are enchanting, so if you would like to come in
and entertain me while I have another drink, I’d welcome the
diversion.”
The monkey cocked an eyebrow and whistled, and then
said in the same affected voice, “Utterly fail? No, you have only
misunderstood the nature of my capacity for speech. That is a single
account. I am now quite certain that you clearly understood my meaning.”
With that impertinent response the creature flung itself through my
door, and scampered down the entryway toward my coat closet.
“A moment ago you were saying I undoubtedly misunderstood,” I called, as the monkey disappeared behind the door.
“Undoubtedly,”
said the monkey, in a voice that sounded a little gruffer than before. “But that was before you invited me inside.”
“I don't see—” I began.
“Clearly you don’t,” said the creature, in a voice tinged with bass undertones, hard liquor and nicotine.
As
the closet swung open, my eyes tried to focus in the approximate
vicinity of where the monkey’s eyes should have been. It took me a
moment to realize I was staring at an unanticipated set of spindly
ankles, the most visible of which was covered in a mixture of shaggy
hair and opalescent scales.
The crowning touch was the red,
glitter-covered stiletto pump that graced the foot. No, the crowning
touch was that there was only one shoe. The other foot—if it was indeed
a foot—ended in something resembling a flipper. And the other other
foot had something that was probably a chitinous exoskeleton.
“You aren’t a monkey,” I said.
“No
shit, honey-bunch,” said the creature. “And your violin isn’t a violin,
either. Now, be a dear… I believe you said something about a drink?”
“A drink?” I echoed.
“And make it stiff, please,” she added. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen it, I suspect I’ll need a bracer.”
§
As
I wrapped myself around equal parts lemon juice, ginger-currant wine,
vanilla vodka and seltzer water, my friend wrapped herself (look, she
was wearing a red stiletto pump, okay?) around one of my dining room
chairs. Literally. Tentacles wove in and out of the spindles supporting
the Windsor back, leathery wings folded demurely across what might have
been a trio of shoulders, while scales and fur seemed to blend
seamlessly between the wooden seat and the tile floor. Every surface
they touched seemed a part of them, and made it difficult to focus.
In
all fairness, equal parts of the aforementioned ingredients may have
contributed to that last impression. They also helped me to cope with
the apparent presence of a high-heeled Elder God, so I felt fully
justified in pouring myself something to go along with hers. And by “hers,” I mean the red plastic gasoline can from which she was drinking,
using the spout as an obscene straw.
“You can really put that
stuff away,” I said. “Are you sure you still want to talk about my
violin? I could just as easily run down to the quickie mart and fill up
your glass.”
“You’re sweet,” she said, a single oversized eye sizing me up, “but dense as a desiccated Ankylosaurus. I must see the—”
“Dense as a what?” I slurred.
“Oh, sober up,” she said, and I did. Immediately, and with no discernible after-effect.
“How did you—” I started to ask.
“Please,”
she said. “Spare me. I get thoroughly sick of having to explain the
intricacies of metabolic inhibition and carbohydraturia whenever I sober
one of you up. You were pissed. Now you’ll piss. Ultimately you feel
better, which is better for me, because I need you coherent enough to
focus. It’s remarkable enough that you aren’t freaked out by my
appearance.”
“Speaking of, I was going to ask how you made
yourself look like a Tufted Capuchin,” I said. “Sobriety I can accept,
because I live with it three days out of every week.”
“Hmm,” she said. “You are an unusual one. Perhaps that’s why it felt safe here with you.”
“Why what felt safe with me?” I asked. “The violin?”
“I
already told you that it isn’t a violin,” she said. “But it looks like
one to you, in pretty much the same way I looked like a Tufted Capuchin
when you first saw me.”
“Well, now you look like something out of
a Sam Raimi film, if Sam Raimi was trying to film the Cthulhu mythos.” It didn’t seem like that much of a stretch. I could almost picture Bruce
Campbell holding up my end of the conversation.
She laughed. “You see my physical dimensions. You can’t see past that. I’m a lot more
massive than any monkey, and a lot smaller at the same time. If you
took out all the empty space, so are you. Call it a costume, if you'd
like.”
“Like Halloween?” I asked.
“Hardly,” she responded. “But you’ve at least stumbled into the same vein of thinking, more or less.”
“So
my violin isn’t a violin, and it’s just wearing a costume. Seems a
little far-fetched, if you don’t mind my saying so.” Frankly, what she
was suggesting seemed more than “far-fetched,” but that seemed like the
safest level of disbelief to confess.
“It was good enough at
hiding,” she said, “that finding it again was a real challenge. But it
had also been through a lot, so I’m guessing it just got tired enough to
curl up into a safe shape and sleep it off.”
“You’ve completely lost me,” I said.
“Cthulhu, sweetheart,” she giggled. “Didn’t you ever wonder why you felt compelled to bind it up and lock it away?”
§
As
we crept up the stairs (all right, I crept and she sashayed, if
something with a hairy foot, a flipper and a chitinous
whatever-the-heck-it-was can sashay… the tentacles definitely gave
that impression, though) I had an uncomfortably sobering thought. If we
were really going to face down Cthulhu, wasn’t he one of the Old Ones,
capable of driving anyone who looked upon his visage mad, and a being of
unspeakable horror?
“You’ve really studied that crap, haven’t you?” she said, doing a fair semblance of reading my thoughts.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
A tentacle rubbed the spot where her eyebrow would have been, if any eyebrow had been over that one large eye.
“Look,” she said, “you only saw enough of the violin shape whenever you took it out to
drive you slightly batty, and I’d be willing to bet you pickled your
brain before you unwrapped it, every single time. This time,
I’ll unwrap it, and you won’t have to do a thing. And I know what to
do, so that it won’t squall and fuss. Nothing to worry about.”
“Your confidence is reassuring,” I said, although my bladder felt less than reassured.
We
had reached the top of the stairs, and as we crossed the threshold of
my generally unused guest room, she spoke again. “You keep Cthulhu in
your guest room? No wonder you live alone.”
Other-dimensional
snark could be answered in kind. “Isn’t he my guest? For that matter, so
are you. And pardon me for being a little nervous about what we’re
about to do, because it isn’t every day that I knowingly face down one
of the Old Ones, who may or may not still be holding a grudge against
the other Elder Gods.”
“You do realize all that Elder God hokum
was straight out of a hack writer’s imagination, right?” she asked. “The
bit about inducing madness in unprotected humans is true enough, in
certain circumstances, and that Lovecraft fellow got a moderate dose,
but all the rest was about as accurate as if a colony of ants tried to
describe the antics of a cat scratching at the anthill.”
“Cats don’t scratch at anthills,” I said. “At least, not in this dimension. Cats have better things to do with their time.”
“Do
they?” she asked. “To be frank, my perspective is a little skewed as
well. We’ve known for a while that humans are approaching sentience, and
we can communicate with you to some degree, but I’m not giving away any
major secrets by admitting that the flow of information is mostly
unidirectional.”
“I suppose it must be,” I said, “although I’m
not sure about your analogy. Cats and ants?” I lifted the teak-wood cask
onto the guest bed, and my fingers started numbly fumbling at the iron
chains.
“Whales and shrimp, if you prefer,” she said. “Either one
is close enough, and still out-of-scale by an order of magnitude. Here,
let me do that.”
I stepped aside. Although I had been in this
same room countless times, it was suddenly an alien realm, and the most
familiar presence was waving tentacles and wearing a red stiletto heel.
Plus I was sober.
She plucked delicately at the bindings, until
gauze and gold lamé lay upon the bedspread in an untidy heap. After a
few moments longer, her tentacles cradled a small, green silk-swathed
package.
I drew a sharp breath. “Are you sure you want to do
that? I mean, I understand that thing is from your world, and to you,
it’s probably harmless, but before today I never had any idea how
dangerous my violin was. Even if it isn’t dangerous to you, and even if
most of what I think I know about Cthulhu is hokum, that’s still a Hell
of a lot more scary than I’m accustomed to dealing with.”
“No it isn’t, sugar-britches,” she said, “not by a long shot. You see wars, and social injustice, and disease every day.”
“None of them are wrapped up in green silk, in my guest room, where they could kill me,” I muttered.
“But
any of them could be,” she said, “and in that, we aren’t so different
after all. The scariest things are the ones we never see coming.”
“Wait a minute," I said, as she began to unwrap the violin. “You guys—gals?—still have wars and social injustice?”
“And
disease,” she said, shaking her head and causing a third of her
mouth-tentacles to sway. “Don’t be so surprised. We may be able to
do a lot of impressive things in your dimension, but we Elders aren’t
omnipotent. As easily as I sobered you up earlier, I could also have
rearranged your insides so thoroughly that no human physician would ever
recognize you again… but there are still some things we don’t
understand about our own physiology, any more than you do.”
“Elder Gods have physiology?” I asked, dumbfounded.
Her tentacles did a little ripple. “Elders got everything, buttercup.”
The
green silk had fallen away as she spoke, and I saw the exposed neck of
my violin. A shiver crept up my spine as I recalled the ghastly sounds
those strings could produce.
“As you see it, Cthulhu is a monster,” she said. “As I see it, Cthulhu is my __ .”
And that’s just what it sounded like. There was a blank space in her words.
“Your what?” I asked.
“Oh,
that one doesn’t work in English, does it? I’m not sure how to explain
it, because you wouldn’t quite think of the relationship in the same
way. It’s sort of like ‘pet’ and sort of like ‘mate’, and from the way
you just wrinkled up your face I can tell that isn’t getting any
sympathy.” She trailed off, as a tear fell from the single large eye and
trickled down a tentacle, to splash upon a the fingerboard of the
violin.
The violin shivered.
I flinched.
“Did you see that?” I shouted.
“Of course I did. It’s waking up.” She stroked the strings.
A
hum began to fill the room, as more and more notes took their place in
the unexpected swell of sound. There was no way to get those notes from a
violin. Not from my violin, or anybody’s.
She stood there, foot,
flipper and whatever-it-was splayed to give herself support, cradling
her __ and crying, one tear at a time. “Shh,” she whispered. “It’s
all right.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“It’s been sick,” she said.
A question was dancing in the back of my mind, trying to get out. “It hid…” I began.
“Because it was afraid I would suffer,” she said. “We had come here to
enjoy your world together, long ago, when we first learned what was
happening.”
The violin shivered again, and the neck drew up into a
ball, before it flipped and inverted. Catgut strings hummed into mouth
tentacles, and soundholes reshaped themselves into a pair of eye sockets
as the face stretched into an oversized grotesquerie. As if someone had
pulled a handkerchief from the underside of the violin’s body, another
body began to emerge, and expand, and stretch.
Wonder of wonders, I did not go mad.
At
the time, I didn’t bother to marvel at how we all three fit in the
guest room, although I suppose I would have any other day. Maybe it had
something to do with what she had said before, about being much larger,
and much smaller, and empty space. No, I marveled at the beauty of the
thing: The Dread Chtulhu was suffering, and had hidden itself away so
that someone it loved wouldn’t suffer as well… and that someone loved
right back, and pursued, and persevered, and said it didn’t matter,
because it was still her __ and always would be.
For a long
time we stood there as they held each other. I think they might have
even forgotten I was there, until finally I couldn’t take it any more,
and spoke.
“How long do you have?” I asked.
“No one knows,” she said, tentacling away a tear. “We have good doctors, though. And we have each other.”
That
put me at a loss for words. I was scared to be in that room, and at the
same time, scared for them, and for their uncertainty.
“I don’t know what to say,” I said.
“No one ever does,” she said, “but that works.”
§
They
left in the afternoon. She helped Cthulhu to shuffle along, and it
(apparently the Dread Cthulhu wasn’t exactly a “he,” but I’m not sure if
whatever it was would translate anyway) leaned on her for support.
As
they reached my front door, she turned, and pulled something out of
what I’m guessing must have been a pocket or a purse, although I still
haven’t figured out where she was hiding it all that time. She held it
up to Cthulhu, and Cthulhu used one long, bony claw to scratch upon the
surface for a moment, then rested its head upon her shoulder again.
She
handed it to me, and said, “For you.” Then they shuffled out the door,
onto the barren sidewalk, and down the street, leaving me holding the
odd object.
It had six sides surrounding a wide surface, and a
ridge that joined two opposite corners on the underside. On the largest
flat face was an image that must have been the other-dimensional
equivalent of a photograph, of Cthulhu, holding something that looked
for all the world like an inside-out cat tucked beneath its chin, with
the tail rigidly stretched out toward one bony wrist. Smoke swirled
behind small, leathery wings, and the other clawed hand held what looked
as much like a flaming chainsaw as a bow.
In characters that
could have just as easily been burned into the surface with acid,
Cthulhu had scrawled an inscription. In Roman letters. In English. And
the words said, “Thank you for the music.”
Now, if I only had a way to play the damned thing.
M.
David Blake is the sole acknowledged byline amid a legion of pseudonyms
by which the writer and erstwhile editor entertains himself, whenever
he’s not working at the public library or foraging for mushrooms. He
still has the record.
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