Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

“What up, little dude,” Merk said. He looked older than my dad, and drunker than my mom. He had long, bleached blond hair and tattoos of women who looked like whores. His eyes were kind of saggy and red. He had a can of Bud in one hand and a blunt in the other.

I remembered that this Merk was hanging around the Fourth of July barbecue. He had a can of Bud in one hand and a blunt in the other then, too.

Mom, sitting real close to Merk, didn’t look that happy to see me. “I thought you were out with Bebe.”

It was hard to hear Mom talking over the ringing in my ears.

“She’s . . . Bebe went home.”

I could tell I wasn’t supposed to be there so I went for a walk. The sky over the avenue was way overfull of stars. I didn’t think all of them were supposed to be there. Sometimes they slipped around and made the shapes of faces. When I looked at the ground, I seen slitherers slipping by. My ears were still ringing.

I seen something else, too.

It was standing out in the field between the park and Mr. Tillinghast’s house — it was a two-legged thing and it had this big fan of spikes around its neck like some guy in a metal band, and it had toothy tongues for fingers and it had a face like a goat but sort of dinosaur, too. It was about a hundred feet from me.

It looked at me with eyes like a goat. Looked right at me. I could feel it seeing me.

But then the ringing in my ears stopped and that thing went away, too. Just blinked out.

I was only scared of it after it was gone. I ran back to the Cumberland Glory and found Bebe on her front steps. I sat down below her and told her a little.

But not everything.

I almost didn’t go back to Mr. Tillinghast’s. I got more scared the next day, from what I seen in his attic. It was like, the night I seen it I wasn’t feeling like I was real, right then, and after, so I couldn’t be scared, because what could hurt you if you weren’t real.

But that was wrong.

I was real and they were real.

I thought, later, maybe it was like seeing stuff on dope. That happened the two times I smoked pot, the squirmy stuff that wasn’t really there.

But I didn’t think it was like those little weed hallucinations like wallpaper moving. And I wanted to know what it really, really was. There was something wicked cool about it. And I didn’t want to be in the trailer park because, what was there anymore? A month after that night, Bebe’s mom took her away. They just pulled up and moved out. Bebe texted me for a while but then my phone broke and my mom couldn’t get me another one right away.

I didn’t have any other friends around there. And that dude Merk was there most of the time. He was swallowing his blue pills and smoking and banging my mom in her bedroom. They didn’t care if I was in the trailer anymore they just shut the door and turned up his Van Halen.

So I went back to Mr. Tillinghast. “Can I help?” I asked when he came to the door.

“I am quite relieved to see you, my boy. Would you like to join me? I have a simple repast prepared.”

“A what?”

“Hamburgers. Would you care for one? I can easily make another for you. Afterward we can discuss electronics. I have some books to show you.”

It’s more than year since I wrote all that earlier stuff.

Merk is still here, living in the trailer now. When he takes off his shoes, his feet stink bad. He doesn’t wear socks. He has this really girly sounding laugh when he gets high or when he’s trying to laugh something off.

About eight months ago I told my mom I saw him feeling up a drunk lady at the bowling alley and she asked him about it and he made that laugh and then he came outside, when I was out there on the steps and he said, “Kid you don’t fuck with me, I won’t fuck with you. But if you fuck up my thing I’ll fuck you up. You know?”

I laughed and he slapped me on the back of the head, hard.

I jumped up and tried to hit him back and he pushed me over. I got up and backed away and then I just left.

So I went to Oswald’s house. To Mr. Tillinghast’s laboratory.

We worked on the blueprints and I fixed the resonator with him. He needs my help for soldering. His eyes aren’t that good up close. He won’t go to an eye doctor. He doesn’t like how they write things down about him.

Oswald used the resonator many times. We went to the Alternating World, and some of it came to us. Spot, my slitherer, seems like he waits for me. He knows me good, and sometimes I hear his thoughts. He says he will always be my friend, that it was intended by the stars who speak.

Me and Oswald have learned we can breathe the air over there, in the Alternating World, and Oswald believes we can find things to eat there if we want longer trips.

Oswald showed me his bestiary, he calls it, of that world. He drew it himself. It has really good pictures of the flappers and the slitherers and the crepuscules and the linkages and the akishra and the dancing monoliths and the weeblers and the thing he calls the Baphomet. I looked up Baphomet online and I told him, that’s not exactly what it looks like to me. And he said, “I know, my boy. But it seems like a relative. The diabolic goat man, don’t you know.”

“Kind of like a dinosaur, too.”

“Rather more intelligent, I believe, than a dinosaur, in a malign sort of way. Fortunately we have the counter rings.”

The counter rings are actually more like bracelets. We put them on our wrists and they give out a resonance that keeps the Baphomet from getting too close when we’re in the resonation field. The Baphomet comes a little ways off and looks at us like he wants to taste us but he doesn’t come any closer. Sometimes if I look at him too long, he comes closer to me. Once I thought, “I wish you’d go behind something” and he did. Like he would do what I would think.

Here it is, almost Christmas. I am getting more used to the Alternating World, and less used to ours. Cars and cigarettes and televisions and cell phones all look sort of strange to me. When I saw people looking into their cell phones it was like I could see an eel coming from the cell phones, licking their brains, and it’s wearing their brains down like a hard candy. They didn’t know it was there, but I could see it.

One night last week I told Oswald about this eel thing, as we worked over a new amplification circuit, and he looked worried.

“Oh dear. That was a crossover beast.”

A crossover beast is one that can come into our world for a little while. To feed on things. Normal people can’t see them. There aren’t very many.

He scratched his nose and said, “It was an akishra. You shouldn’t be seeing such things in our world, without the resonator going — or without having used it quite recently.”

“I told you I saw them before without it.”

“But that was soon after you’d used it — you saw the akishra three days after you were here last! And out of the blue!”

“Yep.”

“So there it is. Well we may have to embrace the transition, after all — if you choose to. I will not make up your mind for you.”

He was going to tell me about the transition but then my new cell made a text ding. I should have said I gave my mom most of the money that Oswald gave me but not all of it. I made her get me a new cell phone with some of it. It’s pretty tight.

“My mom says I have to come home.”

“We shall speak of it later.”

So I started walking home, across the field.

I could see Christmas lights blinking on our trailer, over there. And lights in the little fir tree in the middle of the Cumberland Glory turnaround. Greel puts up those lights every year.

I knew Merk was there and I was fantasizing again about feeding him to the Baphomet. I could lure him up to the attic when Oswald wasn’t home. Dude, there’s shrooms up in that attic. Tillinghast grows ’ em. You can get high.