Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

At the first public performance of the Canticle, Professor Kettle stood at the back of an underground arena, hot and dark as the womb save for the fluorescent lights that lorded over the boxing ring, and sang to the two heavyweights as they bounced off the ropes in their respective corners. Reginald Peters and Luis Cabron blinked and shook their heads, as if their ears were clogged with water, but neither stopped the fight. They were would-be Champions after all. Professor Kettle did not share the Canticle of the Hunter with the crowd, but their inborn energy still bolstered the song: amplifying its crests, deepening its valleys. The fighters, pre-selected for their ruthlessness, grew bolder and bloodier. In the end it was Luis Cabron who punched his opponent into unconsciousness, and then into death. He tore into the corpse, broke two ribs, and swallowed three mouthfuls of Reginald’s deflated lungs. At his murder trial, Luis would claim that voices in his head had forced him to kill Reginald. Due to the cold and clinical nature of human society, there was no consideration of his claim, and Luis was sentenced to death by electric chair.

“Hum, hum,” said Hyperon Talta with infinite patience as he sat cross-legged upon the cabinet of vestments. “Azathoth responds to roars, not screams.” And so the Church learned that mass action would be needed to please their new God.

In 1994, a small Church mission traveled to Parkidi to pay tribute to the Summer Olympics and perform a second recitation of the Canticle. They chose an early soccer match between two small nations with no love lost between them, thanks to a history of arbitrary and inconvenient colonial boundaries, and from high in the stands unleashed the Canticle of the Hunter. This time, they sang to the crowd as well as the players. For fifteen minutes there was no increase in the number of red cards thrown at players, no unusual noises from the crowd. And then, for what must have been a second but seemed to be an hour, all things aligned for the missionaries, and the ravenous minds of one hundred thousand spectators and athletes were lassoed within one heavenly burning crown.

And then the Church of the Holy Star lost control. To conduct so many souls who had shown so little disposition toward following the weakest of rules was a greater challenge than they had anticipated. The crowd ripped free of the Church’s restraints but absorbed the Canticle’s rage, and as the noble Canticle splintered into a million shards of petty human anger, the crowd used this psychic bomb to set the stadium and the city on fire. The shock waves from the massive bleeding heart that was the Parkidi Olympic Stadium could be felt hundreds of miles away. Players bludgeoned other players, fans threw their seats at other fans, and the referees, symbols of the dying light of human civilization, ran.

The Canticle of the Hunter is intended to be a missile, not an IED. The Church’s missionaries were shoved and beaten in the brawls that followed, and they returned home bruised and ashamed at what they perceived acutely to be their failure. But when they pushed open the doors of their church at midnight, they found Hyperon Talta smiling, cross-legged, at the pulpit.

“I am proud of you,” said Hyperon, and the missionaries wept.

At the midsummer inflection point of the year 1995, Hyperon Talta gathered the members of the Church of the Holy Star around him and made an exciting announcement. “You are finally ready to escort Azathoth into the world,” said Hyperon. A few congregants fainted. Just imagine their joy and pride! “But first we must find Azathoth a host.”

Azathoth the Ultimate would need the best athlete their little mudball planet had to offer. Several were considered: basketball player T. J. Folger, swimmer Lana Denali, figure skater Choi Ji-Yung. Luis Cabron would have been another strong candidate, with his unworldly ability to withstand assaults upon his person, but he was shackled on death row. Ji-Yung was so very like St. Sasha in her tiny build and steely demeanor that she was nearly chosen, but just as the Church attempted to enter her country, she retired from figure skating — she was getting old, at twenty-two — and shut herself up in her lonely penthouse with no desire for any more quadruple loops nor ice-flowers nor glory. So in the end, the Church elders with Hyperon’s approval selected Felix Nordlund, widely regarded as the best tennis player of all-time. Felix not only displayed effortless physical mastery of the court, but an unrivaled intelligence surrounding the game and indeed, motion itself. Other players had beautiful backhands, powerful forehands, unreturnable serves — Felix Nordlund had everything. He had won sixty-three major tournaments since he turned sixteen. He was number one in the world. His dominance was so thorough, and his fashion sense so rococo, that tennis fans were beginning to tire of him — but Azathoth would love him and his command of physics, of this the Church was sure.

Felix was due to play at Mercatilly, the nation’s premier tournament. The Church of the Holy Star decided it would meet him there. They waited all the way until the final round, in order to give Azathoth the most impressive entrance: Center Court in the half-light, tucked away in a perfectly-manicured artificial forest, the stadium a perfect serving bowl for Azathoth the Ultimate. It was good weather for a God’s landing. At the bottom of the bowl, two lonely gladiators spun their titanium rackets.

Felix was competing for his fifth title at Mercatilly against Drew Stephens, a national. Given the events that followed, we must remember that Drew Stephens, too, was a contender of high athletic caliber, one who had been enrolled in tennis lessons by his fierce mother-coach when he was four years old. Though he had won twelve major tournaments, Drew had never won Mercatilly. In fact it had been seventy years since any national won Mercatilly, much to the ache and angst of the screaming youth in painted flags and the elderly listening on the radio. But as the Church of the Holy Star had always known, patriotism does not assure athletic dominance. Of that there is no guarantor except for talent, labor, and the mystical touch of divine grace. Drew was the best tennis player his nation had spawned in decades, but he was also temperamental, spoiled, lacking in creative game strategy. Yet his greatest failing, the one that prevented him from bringing honor to his homeland, was to have been born a few years after Felix Nordlund. He had been cursed to toil in the shadow of another man’s golden era; that was not his fault.

The Canticle of the Hunter was performed at exactly 6.34 in the evening, at the beginning of the third set. Felix had won the first two sets and was calmly eating a banana, staring straight ahead at the scoreboard that clearly reflected his superiority. Drew was muttering to himself, occasionally yelling random words at his mother and coaches who sat biting their knuckles in his player’s box. After the players jogged to their respective ends so that Felix could prepare to serve, the members of the Church of the Holy Star stood and began their song. The chair umpire attempted to silence their devotional but could not — for how could this passion, inspired as it was by the height of human greatness, be denied?

It was their finest hour. The crowd was enraptured. With mouths agape, they rose in their seats as one and slipped their necks into the leash of the Church. The few who resisted — Felix’s wife, both players’ coaches — had their consciousness slammed into a metaphysical wall, and liquefied. The chair umpire made a foolish attempt to call for help through his radio, as if Hyperon Talta would not have blocked all such signals and protected Center Court from outside interference. The two players ran toward each other at the net; the Church assumed they had moved to greet Azathoth, though they looked extremely fragile, and extremely frightened. This is how the Church discovered that even Champions can be overwhelmed. The swarm poured onto the court, threw the chair umpire from his perch and trampled him flat, then took both players in hand. The Church held its breath, anxious to see Felix Nordlund lifted to the sky, to Azathoth.