by Danielle Schatten
When I crawled out of the ocean, my tentacles dripping with seawater and my gelatinous skin reflecting a sun that had not glimpsed me since I had been trapped in my cyclopean tomb, the first thing I saw was the bald guy with the piña colada and a laptop, seated on a beach chair, asleep.
I could relate. I had spent the last few aeons asleep as well, dreaming of far-off planets and eldritch concepts from times immemorial, and although I did not have a piña colada in my subterranean tomb, I did have a device that functioned much like a laptop, on which I would send my dreaming cultists visions of apocalyptic futures and also browse Reddit. While I was curled into an amorphous blob underneath the Pacific Ocean instead of lying flat on a beach chair at an overpriced resort on whatever island my airline points had paid for this fiscal year, I, too, was less occupied with the state of the outside world than what I had to do when I woke up and had to get back to work.
My work, of course, was to bring the end to the era of humanity and unleash the Outer Gods’ divine chaos, while his was to process the quarterly reports and then text his ex-wife to make sure the kids hadn’t changed their fucking names again. But we had similar outlooks on the necessity of our objectives; namely, that they could probably wait a few more hours.
While many of the other visitors to the resort had fled in advance due to the green sky, the rising waves, the shrieking of damned souls emanating from within their own skulls, and the notice that the breakfast bar would close at nine instead of nine thirty, I was pleasantly surprised that when the bald man awoke from his slumber, instead of going mad from the mere glimpse of realities greater than he could possibly dream of, he adjusted his umbrella and flopped over onto his slightly extruding gut, mumbling something about “eight more minutes.” There were, of course, other people at the resort, mostly wearing scarlet robes with hoods or nude and covered in lash marks, chanting names of squamous figures whose memories ought to have been long dead and buried. Also there was a confused-looking resort employee who was trying to explain to the cultists that the beach was private and she may have to notify security if the robed figures did not produce their room key cards. But my favorite was still the piña colada dude.
I tried to recall the last time I had enjoyed a sugary intoxicating drink. I imagined it must have been when the universe was infantile, and only a few entities recognizable to its current inhabitants had been created, such as light, sound, ennui, the endless void of space, myself, and pornography of most of the previously listed items. My drink had been composed not of rum, pineapple, condensed milk, and artificial thickener but rather a distilled essence of the quintillions of prior universes churning and melding into each other, and it had not been brought to me by an overworked college student moonlighting as a bartender but rather by the Crawling Chaos that tended to the Blind Idiot Gods at the center of the toroidal universe’s black hole–lined den.
It did also have a little umbrella though, so I felt like Baldy could relate.
While I had been compared in the past to a mountain walking, stumbling from a past entirely unimaginable to the mayfly-like lifespans of pitiful mortals, apparently Bill—that was his name, even though he went by William to his employees, and Sam on Grindr—had been described as more like a sausage crammed into a business suit by his devout worshippers. I divined this information not from probing his thoughts and injecting my own nightmarish calls powerful enough to turn the most stalwart man into a gibbering horror, but by just listening to him for a few brief seconds, which apparently that bitch Sharon and the ungrateful rug rats never did.
Bill told me that we actually had a lot in common. Apparently people also feared and dreaded his very presence, even the mere thought of his existence, though instead of twentieth-century writers frightened of worlds beyond their imagining (such as the depths of the ocean, the far-off planets of Xoth and Yuggoth, and ethnic communities in New York City), the beings that were most terrified of Bill were snarky assholes on social media who apparently thought he had control over his business’s operations, or that he could wave a magic wand and stop investing in racist political candidates, nuclear-armed nations with a grudge, oil refineries off the coast of inhabited impoverished nations, or paramilitary operations in places he couldn’t pronounce. At first I was confused, but then I realized most of my worshippers also thought I could manifest great powers for my devoted, materialize within summoning circles that were, like, a thousandth of my size, cause an end to the religious strife of the world with fire and blood as I revealed what a true god could appear as, or pronounce “Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.” Unrealistic expectations abounded amongst our lessers, we learned.
So we chatted for a bit, him in his beach chair and I sitting in the now-dried space where much of the ocean had been, and we discussed the most fascinating ideas of both my time (the Great Race of Yith’s mental time travel, the angular pursuits of the Hounds of Tindalos, the fearful appearance of the colour out of space and whether it was too gauche for a kitchen nook, and the positioning of the stars heeding my summons) and his (the annual earnings statements of the companies in which he was a stakeholder, the racial makeup of the city in which he had a beach house, the increasing pressure on normal guys like him to just abandon everything they’d worked for because children were getting offended they couldn’t afford eggs, and the positioning of the stars heeding his ex-wife’s next bitch sesh). Bill was truly a powerful being, I gradually came to understand, from a time unimaginable to those who now inhabited his world (the 1960s), with powers on a scale beyond the comprehension of most (his black Visa card), and in a form that made most shriek in horror (the bald dad bod with a mustache he told me was actually quite dignified). He also had found himself in a world that communicated in ways he could not understand, though while I was puzzled by the fact that the denizens of this era lacked telepathy and time travel, he was more worried that their jokes just didn’t make any goddamn sense anymore and they couldn’t just do phone calls like normal fucking adults.
He taught me of a warding symbol, a powerful phrase, to evade these dangers. I was familiar with the concept; my followers had long been using the five-pointed Elder Sign as a geas to escape the moments of pure clarity of their role in the universe, and while they could never have comprehended its true power, the meanings held within the Sign, its use was functional enough that as a tool to save them from a vile fate, it was worth an attempt. So when he taught me about the word woke, I basically just nodded and didn’t ask follow-up questions.
He was midway through explaining that, as a member of late Generation X, the comparisons to the Baby Boomer Generation made him annoyed, which I was trying to rationalize as similar to the distinctions between Elder God and Outer God, when a hideous laughter echoed from beyond, emanating near us. Explaining it was his Minions ringtone, Bill answered the call and became dismayed; due to unusual weather conditions (radar reported skies were “evil”) his flight was leaving forty-five minutes early, and he would have to leave the beach. My typical followers had mostly departed by this point, either realizing the end of days would take slightly longer or that Bill was really not going to stop talking about his 401(k) no matter how many “yups” we gave him. I attempted to teach him my people’s traditional good-bye, but since he had his jaw on his face and couldn’t get it to his backbone, his attempt was somewhat clumsy, and he told me my handshake was girly. We left each other in a sad mood, two strangers, departing back to our own worlds.
Also the sex was genuinely quite mid.
Danielle Tamara Schatten (she/her) is a US American fiction writer and an MFA graduate from George Mason University’s class of 2023. Her work has appeared in 86 Logic and Uppagus. Her focuses include trans and queer themes in speculative and horror fiction, analysis of the political impacts of the World Wars and their effects on both human psyches and ideological rhetoric, and the dissonance between the cultural desires for an apocalyptic, nightmarish end of the world and an end to a current worldwide apocalyptic nightmare. Her favorite authors include Charlie Jane Anders, Jorge Luis Borges, and Kelly Link. She currently lives in Spain.
Kommentare