Falling Idols

and there. How much better for him — o damnable geezer! — had talk of my australopithic studies not awakened within him the curiosities of his ancestral hills, whose netherbowers sang of mysteries beyond space and time. How much better for you, my reader, if I just cut to the chase.

Knowledge of Arkham’s variegated streets was written deep within my mentor’s pickled brain, taking us along skewed lanes rarely traversed by those free of portentous motive. How I now wish that we had never disturbed the dust of the curio shop where we uncovered our prize whose cost has proved beyond reckoning: a lone — and curiously slim — volume of the dreaded Necronomicon, penned by that mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, at great personal peril and many a rumored grumpy night.

I console myself that our experiments might not have been performed with such urgency had the shopkeeper been more nimble of finger, but his delays returned us outside only after our cart had somehow overturned, sending our renegade crustaceans scuttling through the streets and back to the inky waters of Innsmouth they called home.

Lest the ravages of our imminent destitution overtake us, we fled to the hills outside of Arkham, where yodeled those cyclopean families beneath a gibbous moon, and where the inhuman ears of things ancient even by saurian standards listened with a gnashing of antediluvian teeth. By the baleful light of our fire, we called on the Great Old Ones, our barbarous words the keys to dimensional doors better left unjiggled.

Hideous to behold, their vast, terrible majesties inspired in me a polysyllabic glossolalia. They capered beyond our protective circle, their stertorous ruckus sufficient to shake every rafter within miles, until we could no longer bear the din of all the adjectives they demanded.

“The banishings!” I screamed. “Send them back!”

He shook his hoary head. “In a paowerful pickle now, we be! Thar’s no banishments t’be fount, nowhere! I calc’late they was never here, whatall!”

He blew the dust from the leather binding, and like chilled penguins did we shudder at the words revealed:

Reader’s Digest Condensed Edition.

Graphic Arts

The kid — who couldn’t have been ten years old — was lean, mean, and fast. Accent on the fast. Leo swore that the kid must have been some hybrid form of city life, a mutant cross between human and cheetah, particularly adept at quick getaways. Leo saw a chainlink fence stretching across the width of the alley up ahead, and he figured if the kid could climb half as well as he ran, this two-block chase had been a colossal waste of time, energy, and lungpower.

His chest was beginning to burn out with thick, dull fire when the boy slipped. Wet garbage, probably, rotting underfoot. Too dark to see for sure, but no matter. The kid suddenly went sliding on one foot like an out-of-control skater, a greasy skidmark streaking behind him. His other leg flailed as uselessly as his arms, and in the light bleeding in from the streetlamps not yet shot out, Leo could see the kid’s toes bursting from the end of that extended sneaker. Finally the kid pinwheeled into the fence as if to shear through. It rattled him more than he rattled it, and sent him tottering backward.

By then, Leo had him by the shoulders.

“Leggo me, motherfucker,” the cheetah-boy said. Clenched teeth a downturned crescent against the black of his skin. The two-block wind-tunnel treatment had done little to wash the smell of gasoline from his clothes.

“What the hell were you trying to pull back there?” Leo said between wheezes.

“Who, me?”

Leo tightened his grip as the kid began to squirm, trying for a crotch kick that Leo barely dodged. “Why the hell would you want to burn down a building in your own neighborhood?”

The kid cursed. Repeated his demand for release. Called him every dirty name for a white man Leo had ever heard. Came up with a few more Leo hadn’t known about. Kid belonged in a chainmail bag with twenty milligrams of Valium shot in his rump.

He was just about to say Hell with it and turn the boy loose when the moon broke through the overhanging stack of charcoal clouds. Illuminating the green paint smeared along the inside of Leo’s forearm.

“Hey,” said the kid, and he stopped squirming. “You the painter, right?”

Leo gulped air, dousing the firepit in his chest to a dull glow. “Yeah. That’s me. I’m the painter.” Relaxing his grip.

The pale crescent showed in the kid’s face again, this time upturned. A step in the right direction. “I like your pictures.”

“Glad to hear it. You almost torched one.” Leo, relaxing even more. “So what’s your name, anyway?”

“Calvin.”

“Okay. Listen up, Calvin. I let you go, you promise not to run away? All I want to do is talk to you a minute. That’s all.”

Calvin’s luminous eyes rolled, mouth in a faint smirk. After a moment he nodded.

Yeah, and the second I let go he sets a new record for the hundred. But he couldn’t hold the kid captive forever. He released Calvin’s bony shoulders, and wonders of wonders, the kid didn’t bolt. They turned together, began to walk toward the mouth of the alley, the street.

“You want something to eat?” Leo asked. A deli was still open down the block, one of the last streetside livelihoods that hadn’t yet scrolled down steel latticework to button up for the night.

“Got a cigarette?” said Calvin, and Leo gave him one.

As he lit up, a large rat scuttled along in the shadows of the building to the right. Waddling, even. Their neighborhood was bountiful, every day a feast. This one held a tin can in its twitching muzzle. It disappeared into complete darkness, progress marked only by the clinking can. Urban cowbell.