The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1 (5 page)

It is while they’re playing, anyhow, and while they’re enjoying their almost-fame. Getting ready for a gig is a different story. The Fillmore parking lot is the size of a postage stamp. The dressing rooms are even small. They get ventilation strictly by hearsay.

The guys change into their working clothes: embroidered pants, shirts with bellbottom sleeves, jackets halfway between Nehru and Napoleonic cavalry general. George sports ruffles at his throat and wears his jacket open to show them off. While they wait for their turn to have a sound check and work with the lighting guys, they smoke some weed. It makes the time goes by, and they play better when they’re mellow. They’re convinced of it.

When they go up on stage, another odor wars with the sweet smell of pot. It is strange and ancient-seeming: from beyond time and space, you might say. The house isn’t quite empty, even without people in the seats. A couple of winged, barrel-shaped Old Ones stand in the aisle to listen to rehearsals.

“Holy smoke,” Dave breathes. “I heard they liked the noise and the beat, but I didn’t know if I believed it or not.”

“Neither did I,” George says. “But they’re here, so I guess they do.” He feels like Sherlock Holmes for figuring that out. Weed may make you play better. It doesn’t necessarily make you think better.

Sitting next to the Old Ones is a tall, thin, white-haired man with a lantern jaw. His suit and stiff-collared shirt come straight from the 1920s. “Is that—?” Dave begins.

“It is.” Jeff, the new bass man, sounds awed. “It really is. That’s Howard Phillips. I’ve seen photos of him when he was younger. I’ve been reading his books since I was a kid.”

“Who hasn’t?” George puts in. Phillips has to be getting up near eighty now. He knows more about the Old Ones than anybody. He wrote the bestselling chronicle of the Miskatonic University Expedition forty years ago, and he’s studied and worked with mankind’s forerunners ever since. The comfortable-looking old lady with him must be his wife, Sonia.

A lot of the time, rehearsals are half-assed. You just want to get through them and making sure the lighting crew knows what to do when. Not when you’re playing for the Old Ones, though. HPL rocks the joint. The Old Ones spread their wings a little. Jeff gives a thumbs-up—that means they’re digging it.

Whether Howard Phillips is into psychedelic rock may be a different question. “Very … interesting,” he says after they do “At the Mountains of Madness.” He polishes his specs with a silk handkerchief. But if the Old Ones get off on the music, he’s too polite to show he doesn’t.

After the set, the other bands take their turns. HPL goes back to the dressing room. More jet fighters scream by, racing off to the west. There’s a radio in the room. George is about to turn it on and see what’s happening when the guy people call Kid Charlemagne shows up. He cooks the best acid in the world, bar none. No kerosene in the mix. No crap at all. Just pure, clean lysergic acid diethylamide. Next to that, nobody cares about the iceberg in the Pacific … or anything else.

Things get a little strange. If you’ve already dropped acid a few times, or more than a few, you start to get a handle on what’s real and what comes from the drug. When you’ve got to play a gig while you’re flying, you make the music you need to make and you groove on the sounds the rest of the band is making. Automatic pilot, you might say. And while your hands and your voice do pretty much what they’re supposed to do, the rest of you can trip on the things you’re seeing, the things that may or may not be there. If you feel as if God is more your assistant than your copilot, or if you think the whole world is coming after you with sharp sticks, that’s the drug talking, too. You try not to let it bum you out too much. Sooner or later, you’ll come down.

The place fills up. The swelling noise sounds like surf at the coast, or like the tigers roaring at the zoo, or … The more George chases choices, the more they skip away. Going after them seems like too much trouble. A lot of things seem like too much trouble.

Somebody sticks his head into the room. “Five minutes, troops,” he says. He looks a little like Howard Phillips, a little like an Old One. He does to George, anyhow. George doesn’t suppose he really looks that way. Kid Charlemagne’s acid is righteously potent.

There probably isn’t a yawning pit filled with fire between the dressing room and the stage, either. There wasn’t when the band went out for sound and light checks. Nobody but George seems to think there is now. All the same, he’s careful where he puts his feet. He doesn’t fall. He doesn’t burn. Maybe he’s snapping his fingers to keep the elephants away. Or maybe not. You never can tell for sure. You never can tell for sure what
for sure
is, either, not right after Kid Charlemagne comes around.

House lights are still up. George cases the front rows for cute ones. There are some, so he hopes he’s seeing what he thinks he’s seeing. He takes his place. Damned if Howard Phillips and Sonia and the Old Ones aren’t still there—unless it’s a flashback from this afternoon.

No. Or he doesn’t think so. He can smell the Old Ones, along with pot and cigarettes and perfume and people who could use a shower. Acid doesn’t usually play tricks with—play tricks on—his sense of smell. But
doesn’t usually
is as much as he can say. Acid does what acid does. You’re just along for the ride. That’s the fun of it. Once in a while—not too often, but once in a while—that’s the terror.

Down go the lights. Scattered whoops and cheers from the crowd. The voice of the Lord (well, actually the voice of the house emcee, amped enough to impersonate Him) booms from the sound system: “Folks, give a warm Fillmore welcome to … HPL!”

More whoops and cheers, still pretty scattered. If they were the Airplane, now, or Big Brother or the Dead, people would be screaming their heads off. That’s what everybody in all the bands wants. Fame. The rush that goes with it. The cash that goes with it.

HPL is opening for two other bands that want it but don’t have it.
Don’t have it yet
, they’d say. So would George. Everybody starts out opening for somebody else. If you’ve got it, pretty soon some other band is opening for you.

HPL goes into “Wayfaring Stranger.” It’s a good song to jam on, and everybody in the band can play. A lot of groups sound fine in the studio, where they can do as many takes as they need (as many takes as they can afford, anyway) and the recording engineers can fix their flubs. Sounding fine live—doing it right the first time every time—is a whole different ballgame. HPL is in that league, even when everybody’s tripping.

The jam goes where it goes. They let it. On the album, “Wayfaring Stranger” is a two-and-a-half-minute track. Here, it runs four times that long. When it finally winds down, the hand they get is bigger. Next on the set list is “The Drifter,” which also, well, drifts. “It’s About Time” is tighter. Maybe they’re coming down a little.

After that comes “The White Ship,” which has to be the most talked-about track from the album. Then they’ll do “At the Mountains of Madness.” George looks forward to that, as much as the acid lets him look forward to anything. He wants to introduce Howard Phillips and the creatures from the real Mountains of Madness to the Fillmore crowd. It’s not a chance he ever dreamt he’d get.

He doesn’t get it now. HPL is halfway through “The White Ship” when the house lights come on again, all at once. It’s like a bomb going off. The band staggers to a ragged stop, everybody squinting and staring at everybody else.

“May I have your attention, please?” the house emcee thunders. “May I have your attention,
please
? The Antarctic iceberg has come ashore near the zoo. There are shoggoths loose in the city. I repeat—there are shoggoths loose in the city! All public assemblies have been banned by the San Francisco Civil Defense Command. Please exit and return to your homes in an orderly fashion. Thank you!” He starts to repeat himself.

Faint in the distance, sirens scream. At first, George figures he wouldn’t be hearing them without the acid. Then he realizes they’re part of the warning system against Russian bombs and rockets, the one that gets loudly tested at ten in the morning on the last Friday of every month. But things worse than Russians—older than Russians, anyhow—are loose in San Francisco now.

Down front, Howard Phillips gesticulates at the Old Ones. He looks like a man with ants in his pants, and fire ants at that. The Old Ones, though, created the shoggoths—created them, and then let them get out of hand. Maybe they know what to do about the ones rampaging here now. Or maybe they have no idea.
Do not call up that which you cannot put down
is a good rule, but it seems to have slipped past them when they got into the shoggoth business.

Also faint in the distance, and then not so faint, comes automatic-weapons fire. What will a .50-caliber machine gun do to a shoggoth? Kill it? Or just piss it off?

Up till now, people leaving the Fillmore have been pretty orderly. The gunfire sets them screaming and running and pushing, though. Right up here on stage seems the safest place the band can stay. Howard Phillips and his wife and the Old Ones don’t go anywhere, either. One of the weird creatures from the Mountains of Madness gestures back at Phillips. He nods thoughtfully, as if he’s learned something interesting he didn’t know before.

But then a shrill, eldritch sound comes from outside—or perhaps from Outside.
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
: the hideous piping makes George’s long hair try to stand on end in terror. The Old Ones, understanding more, also fear more. They spread their membranous wings and flap up through the smoky air toward the ceiling.

Too late! With resistless force, a shoggoth smashes in through the wall. The lights flicker, then go out. Before they do, George sees enough of the black-slime-coated amorphous monstrosity to haunt his nightmares forevermore. A new stench, fouler than the Old Ones’ odor, fills the Fillmore.

Crashes and thuds declare that the ceiling is not high enough to let the Old Ones escape the fury of the thing whose kind they created to be their slaves. A shriek of mortal terror bursts from Howard Phillips’s throat, and then a shriek of mortal agony. Sonia Phillips also screams, and goes on screaming.

The shoggoth oozes out through the opening it made, leaving behind only its filthy fetor. More gunfire hammers outside. Muzzle flashes spear the night. As if they were bolts of lightning, George tries to use them to see what has happened inside the Fillmore. They are too stroboscopic, too soon gone, to let him learn all he wants, but what little he can make out prints fresh horror on his shuddering brain.

San Francisco’s defenders prove to have more than rifles and machine guns in their arsenal. A good thing, too, for none of those seems to slow the shoggoth. But a fighter plane dives to no more than rooftop height. It drops its load of jellied death on the monstrosity and thunders away.

Flames outside cast steadier light into the ruined hall. Not even the shoggoth’s unnatural integument is proof against napalm. “Burn, baby, burn!” someone out there yells: whether soldier or passerby, George never learns.

And burn the shoggoth does.
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
it pipes one last time, now in tormented despair. As it falls silent, fierce, triumphant human shouts fill the smoky, stinking air.

Yet the vile thing has wreaked at least a measure of revenge against the creators of its kind. The barrel-shaped bodies of both Old Ones sprawl, ungainly in death, across smashed seats. Greenish ichor pools beneath them. Their starfish-like heads have been torn away.

And poor, scholarly Howard Phillips has suffered a like fate. The blood under his lifeless body is of an honest scarlet hue. Sonia Phillips screams on and on, her hands pressed to the sides of her head, and who can blame her?

“Wow!” George hears someone say, as if from very far away. With drugs and terror chasing each other through his veins, he needs two or three heartbeats to realize the voice is his own. “Oh, wow!”

A soldier with a flashlight trots into the Fillmore through the hole the shoggoth made. He slips on its vile slime trail, but stays upright. “Anybody in here?” he shouts. Sonia Phillips’s anguished cries should give him a hint, but no doubt he is following some higher-up’s orders.

“Yes,” George calls from the stage, to make it official.

“Well, get the hell out, then,” the soldier says. “This dump is on fire.”

Did some napalm splash onto the Fillmore? Did the thrashing, burning shoggoth brush against it? George wonders if anyone knows. He also wonders why he cares. He and Dave jump down from the stage together. They bring Sonia Phillips with them when they leave.

“Howard was no Old One!” she sobs, over and over again. The shoggoth either thought otherwise or, animated by some mad viciousness of its own, simply did not care.

Out on Fillmore Street, chaos is compounded. People who escaped from the concert mill in shock and confusion. That most of them are stoned can’t help. Soldiers try to push past them. Fire engines pour streams of water on the blazes the air strikes and other combat started. The air smells of pot and wood smoke and diesel exhaust and shoggoth and charred shoggoth.

“What do we do now?” George wonders out loud.

“Hope we get paid,” Dave answered. “Hope there’s anybody left alive to pay us.” As the Fillmore burns behind the band, those both seem forlorn hopes. Nothing worse than this has happened to San Francisco since the 1906 earthquake. And that, at least, was a natural disaster, not one precipitated by perverted, malevolent intelligence.

“Youse guys! Uh, youse guys and the old lady—c’mon! Over this way!” A corporal gestures with his rifle. HPL and Sonia Phillips numbly go where he points. It’s only too obvious the kid with the stripes on his sleeve will shoot them if they do anything but exactly what he tells them.

More soldiers shepherd them along. A few blocks north of Geary and a couple of blocks east of Fillmore is Lafayette Park. George had no idea it was there. Now he huddles on the grass with his bandmates and the scholar’s widow and hundreds—no, thousands—of other people who, like him, will worry about anything but being alive some other time.