The Gods of HP Lovecraft Read online

  Women pray to Shub-Niggurath to be made fertile, but this is a perilous course, for when the goddess grants this prayer the things that are engendered in their wombs are apt to be abominations unfit for the light. They grow with unnatural rapidity, and their strength is uncanny. In form they lack a just proportion, but are grotesque masses of flesh that refuse to die. Many maids who pray to Shub-Niggurath end their own lives after slaying the things that emerge from between their thighs while they are able—for if they hesitate too long their issue waxes in strength and cannot easily be returned to the filth from whence it arose.

  Men pray to this goddess for strength, for health, but most of all for virility and the power to engender sons. As the sap rises in the trees, so do their virile members rise up and drip with lust when Shub-Niggurath touches them, and she fills the minds of men with all manner of lustful thoughts both romantic and perverse. She cares not what form desire takes so long as it is strong in its expression and fulfilled in its purpose. She is the goddess of violent rapes and the deflowering of virgins. She cannot abide a fallow womb.

  The song of Azathoth is realized in flesh through the womb of Shub-Niggurath, where the intervals of vibration become material forms. All things that come into being are birthed through her womb of limitless dimension. The very Earth itself is her daughter, which she brought forth groaning in cosmic travail through the gate of Yog-Sothoth. In this act of birth the world fell screaming in agony to this corrupting sphere of matter, and all that crawls upon her face owes its form and being to Shub-Niggurath.

  The Apotheosis of a Rodeo Clown

  Brett J. Talley

  The biker they called Tonto was already helping Hog drag the girl down into the mine by the time I decided what I needed to do. Tonto means stupid in Spanish. I can’t say much else about the Sons of Dagon, especially much of anything positive, but they had a way with names.

  As I looked down at my fake stump hand, covered in fake stump blood, I made the decision to save the girl. That was the clown code, after all.

  But I probably better back up and start at the beginning.

  I’m not like most people. I’m a full-time rodeo clown. A real professional. Not one of these kids looking to score a few bucks when the show rolls through town on the weekend. Been doing it the better part of my adult life. Hell, I clowned with Mr. Flint Rasmussen himself, and that still means something in certain parts of the country.

  Clowning wasn’t always my dream. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a bull rider. I was going to be the one to finally score the Perfect Ten. Had some talent for it, too. Started out with calves, like most of the young’ns. Then when I was fourteen years old, I rode my first bull, a charbray by the name of Bodacious.

  Now Bodacious was one clever son of a bitch. He had this trick he’d pull where he’d throw his legs up in the air in such a way that threw you forward. Then he’d jerk his head back and smash you in the face. Weren’t too many that rode Bodacious who didn’t have a broken nose to show for it.

  They warned me about that when I got on him. I told myself, “He ain’t going to get me in the face.” And by God, he didn’t. Course, when he bucked forward and I pulled back instead of letting my body weight go with him, I completely lost control. He threw me alright, and landed a back kick right in my spine, like something from a Saturday-morning cartoon. I didn’t break my nose, but I did break my spine.

  Nothing too serious, as back breaks go. I’m not a paraplegic or anything. But they did tell me no more bull riding. And that was that. The end of a dream. So I decided I’d do the next best thing. If I couldn’t ride the bull, I’d fight the bull.

  That’s the rodeo clowns true name—a bullfighter. Yeah, we wear the face paint and the silly pants and a shirt that would look good in a San Francisco gay pride parade, but we are warriors at heart. And like all good warriors, we have a code. And rule number one of the Rodeo Clown Code is that you never leave an innocent in harm’s way. Not when you can step in front of whatever’s coming for them.

  Which brings me to the girl.

  We’d been doing a show in Lone Pine, a little town in California’s Owen Valley, resting in a dale between the Alabama Hills. Sounds picturesque, but it was a parched town in a dry desert where water never flowed, except through the aqueducts that headed south to Los Angeles so the city could drink up Lone Pine’s future, present, and past.

  Most of the guys hated shows like that, in little places soon forgotten. They dreamed of the big time in Amarillo or Tulsa or Cheyenne. But not me. People in little towns like that, they ain’t got nothing. So when we come, we are the world to them. For a few precious hours, we can bring them joy. Real joy. Yeah, the Lone Pine fairground was broke down, the termites had eat up the wood of the fence, and the sign didn’t even light up anymore, but it was magical to me. So I didn’t even notice the guys in leather cuts with “Sons of Dagon” sewn in great, red letters across the back, hanging around the gates.

  We did our thing. Danced our dance with the bulls. Nobody got hurt and the crowd, small though it was, enjoyed it and roared their approval. A good evening’s work, with not much to do after but get drunk and think about the next night’s show.

  “Yo, clown!”

  I didn’t hesitate to look up, as if the guy was actually calling my name. Dude was big, but not fat. Thick around the chest and the middle, bald head but full beard. Basically he looked like he’d stepped off the set of Sons of Anarchy. Hell, maybe he had.

  “Got a proposition for you.” He spit a line of tobacco juice into the dust. “You interested in a little side work?”

  “Depends,” I said. “What you got?”

  Two other men in the same leather cut-off jackets appeared beside him. One of them was tall, skinny, and shook like an alcoholic after a bender when the money runs out. I would learn later that he was called Tonto. Never learned his real name. Never learned any of their names. I’m not sure even they remembered them. The other guy was as chubby as Tonto was skinny, a big ol’ boy who didn’t seem like he’d be all that comfortable on the back of a motorcycle. The hog is supposed to be the bike. And, in fact, that was his name. Hog. I’d learn all that later, of course. For now, they didn’t talk. Just the one in the middle did that.

  “Rodeo. Small, private event. Couple hundred in it for you and for anybody else you get.”

  He grinned. Something about it I definitely didn’t like. I’d say I should have listened to my instincts, but fact is, I needed the money. Professional rodeo clowns aren’t exactly highly paid, and the benefits are for shit.

  “Alright,” I said. “I’m in.”

  “Think you can get a few of the boys to come along?”

  “Sure thing. As many as you need.”

  “Not too many. Just a couple. And another thing, this is sorta a Halloween-type event. So you think you can bloody it up a bit?”

  It was June. Strange, but people had asked for stranger.

  “Sure.”

  “Hell yeah,” he said, slapping me on the back. “We’ll pick you up tomorrow. This time. Right here.”

  The three men turned and walked off into the gathering dark, the thin one cackling all the way to the parking lot.

  It wasn’t hard to find volunteers. Two hundred bucks for a night’s work was unheard of. Sure, there was probably something else to it, but when the money’s good, who gives a rip?

  They returned the next night, just as they had promised, as our last show was coming to a close. They pulled up in a van; the muscular one was driving.

  “No bikes?”

  He scowled at me, and the look made me wonder if he’d ever killed a man. “What,” he said, “you wanna ride bitch?”

  I laughed. He did not. “Guess not,” I said. “What’s your name, anyway?”

  “Piston. And that’s all you need to know. Get in the back.”

  “Hey!” Tonto stuck his head out the window. “You’re supposed to be dressed up for Halloween.”

  I held up a plastic b
ag. “We’ll change in the back.”

  He grunted, which I took as a sign of approval. I climbed in the back of the van, and two of my buddies followed. They were young guys, not locals exactly but Californians who worked the season when the tour came through.

  There were no seats other than the two in the front, so we made ourselves as comfortable as possible and hoped that Piston was a more conscientious driver than might be expected. Hog was passed out in the bed of the van, fortunately out of our way.

  I emptied the contents of the bag on the floor—mostly fake blood and cheap bandages—and passed them around to Sam and Jake, the other two clowns that had joined me. I call them clowns, but they were of the new set that eschewed the classic getup in favor of a traditional cowboy look, so I was the only one wearing paint. I’d gone with the more John Wayne Gacy approach—white face, blue triangles over my eyes, red mouth painted to points. That’s the thing about Gacy; any clown could have told you he was a bad dude. Real clowns outline their paint in nice, gentle curves. It’s less aggressive, sends the signal that no, we are not actually going to kill you. Points are aggressive. Sharp angles, frightening. Should have known Gacy was a killer. He wore it right there on his face.

  Tonto leaned over the back of his seat and gawked at us. He watched us squirt fake blood and black paint into our hands and spread it across our clothes, our arms, our faces.

  “Whatcha doin?” Tonto said.

  “You wanted Halloween, right? We’re zombies.”

  Tonto giggled stupidly. “Zombie clowns.” He giggled some more. “Whatdaya think about that, Piston? They’re clown zombies.”

  Piston didn’t answer. He seemed to be a man of few words. Tonto turned back around, but every now and then I’d hear him giggle to himself again.

  The only windows in the van were in the back, so I leaned against the wheel well and watched the place we’d just been slip into the past. The Alabama Hills rose around me, named by Southern sympathizers for the mighty warship that was the pride of the Confederacy. I wondered about those people, Southerners who’d come west in ’49 looking for their fortunes. By definition, then, they didn’t own slaves, couldn’t legally in the territory they were headed, even if they could have afforded them. Like so many their loyalty was to the Southern earth, the states that had given them birth, the rivers that divided them. I wondered how they felt when the Alabama was sunk off the coast of France. Not everyone was disappointed. Just beyond the Alabama Hills lay the Kearsarge range, named after the ship that sent her to the bottom of the sea. What a country.

  “So where are we going?” I asked.

  “Mining town,” said Piston. “Up in the mountains.”

  “You guys go up there a lot?”

  “Yeah. We go up there a lot.”

  “Do people still live there?”

  “Nope. Abandoned.”

  That wasn’t a surprise. The Alabama Hills had once drawn men with little money and big dreams from every part of the country and even the world. Only one in a hundred made it. Ten times that ended up dead, while the rest were just broken. Then the big conglomerates came through and bought up the hills. That’s when the mines went deep and towns sprung up around them. I call them towns, but they were little more than camps for the men—a saloon, dry goods store, maybe a brothel if they were lucky.

  “This town got a name?” Piston caught my eye in the rearview. I couldn’t see his mouth, but I knew he was smiling.

  “Sure it does. They called it Sutter’s End.”

  Sutter’s End. So that was it. I began to wonder if I’d made a mistake. Easy money always comes with a price, and the old saw about something that seems too good to be true is more often than not on target.

  Sutter’s End had a nasty reputation. The mine had closed some fifty years before, and the town had died with it. The story that everyone knew was that the main shafts were running dry, but the bosses wanted to squeeze a few more million out of the hole. So they ordered the men to blast a new shaft down from the main one. Of course blasting when you were that deep already was nothing short of taking your life in your own hands, but back in those days that sort of thing went. Still does if we’re being honest with each other. So when the charges detonated, down came the supports—and the walls and ceilings with them.

  That was the official story at least. Tragedies like that always have another, one more shrouded in the twice-told and the unsupported. And Sutter’s End had a doozy. The story, as the folks who lived at the bottom of the Alabama Hills told it, was that the charges worked just fine. Better than fine, even. That when they went off, they opened something more than just a new shaft. Nobody was ever quite so certain or so specific as to what exactly that something more was. But whatever came out of there took the miners. The people of the town, the ones who made it out alive, fled. Left everything behind and just went. So it stayed for years, till time dimmed the fear enough that enterprising grave robbers stripped the town bare. But even now, whispers would sometimes float down from Sutter’s End, and no one dared to go up there at night to find out where they came from. No one, it seemed, but the Sons of Dagon.

  And us.

  The sun was setting by the time the town came into view. A thick cloud of dust rolled down the hill as we drove up, and when we pulled into what remained of the town, we saw why. It was chaos. When you’ve spent as much time clowning as I have, you’ve seen just about every type of man, and you learn quick not to judge them too much by what you see. But as I watched men bigger and meaner-looking than Piston spinning around the town square on giant bikes of shimmering chrome, metal bars shaped like bones, skulls with devil horns curving off of them between the handles, I was afraid. I glanced at Sam and Jake and saw the same look on their faces.

  The van came to a stop. Piston threw open the rear doors and we hopped out. It was a party alright. There were bikers everywhere, sporting the leather cuts that read Sons of Dagon across the back, with some sort of emblem beneath it that I didn’t recognize, like something out of one of those monster movies that comes on the television after midnight. I didn’t like to look at it, so I didn’t examine it for long. It was a face of sorts, one with evil eyes and what looked like tentacles that hung down where the mouth should be.

  There wasn’t much left of the town, and it didn’t seem like there had been that much there to begin with. One central street with buildings on either side. At the end they’d erected a stage where a band was playing, heavy on the metal guitar with drums that sounded like thunder. The arena was set up off on the other end, and I recognized a cowboy leaning up against a cattle carrier next to it.

  “Dan Travis,” I said, walking up and taking his hand with the one I hadn’t wrapped in bloody bandages.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Same thing as you, I guess.”

  “Part of this circus, too, huh?” He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one. I declined. “If I had it to do over, I might have passed.” The rumble of a bike and a hollered obscenity punctuated the thought. He looked at me and squinted. “You supposed to be dead or something?”

  “Something,” I said. “When’s this show getting started anyway?”

  “They said we was waiting on you. So I guess any time now. Suits me just fine. I’d like to get the hell clear of here before it gets too dark.”

  I looked around at our surroundings. The town wasn’t on a hill, precisely. More like a high canyon with low craggily walls on the sides. All and all, that meant the sun seemed to set faster than it should, and the darkness was more complete when it did.

  “Yeah, I hear you. Any idea who’s in charge?”

  “That would be me.”

  I turned to see a man, older, but just as firmly built as Piston, standing behind me. He wore sunglasses, even though the day was long on gone, and his gray beard came to a point below his chin in a way that reminded me of the devil.

  “I’m Goat,” he said, o
ffering his hand, and as I took it I thought that name worked with the beard too. “I run this show. Thank you boys for coming.”

  “Happy to be here,” I lied. “Where’d you guys find this place?”

  Goat snorted. “I own it. My granddaddy bought the land after the mine died. He needed a place for his family to have some privacy. As you can see, that family has grown.” He swept the area with his hand, as if asking us to take it all in. And we did. About that time, the band fired up again.

  “We take all kinds,” he said, looking over his shoulder as the drummer hammered away. “Me, I prefer what you boys do. So that’s why you’re here. We’ll get started in fifteen minutes. Be ready.”

  He started to walk off, but then he turned and pointed at my stump hand.

  “Love the zombie getup.”

  Fifteen minutes later, we were in the ring, ready to go. And I can tell you this, I’ve never been more afraid.

  The band still played, but we were now the show, and most of the gang had made its way over to the makeshift corral. It was rotten wooden slates literally strung together with twine and bailing wire. A half-decent bull would have broken straight through and killed us all. But these bulls weren’t half-decent. They were, in fact, the saddest I had ever seen, ten years past their prime if they were a day.

  There were no riders, no real ones at least. The Sons of Dagon took turns. The crowd at the edge of the makeshift ring urged them on. Cursing, screaming, firing guns into the air. I doubted they had permits. I spent as much time dodging bottles as I did dodging bulls.

  The energy in the air was foul and full of bloodlust. The crowd pulsated, seeming to squeeze in on us. Their shouts rose from a din to a roar till they seemed to cover all. They were pagan, visceral, somehow harkening back to a time of man’s darkest age. One of the drunkest ones leapt the fence and ran toward a bull even as it struggled with its rider. The poor thing was terrified.

  Over and over they rode them, till I was doubled over, hands on my knees, exhausted. But still, they rode.