“I’ll have nightmares forever.”
“Well, I think maybe I can help with that. You need a bath, John. A shave. Come on.” They walked off across the plaza toward a group of humans, all dressed in much the same garb as Stipe, even the women. Some of them looked to Detwiler a little peculiar, as if maybe their parents had been spadefoot toads. Stipe explained to them that Detwiler was a surviving member of Beckman’s group. The others oohed and aahed as if he was a lost treasure. They welcomed him to New R’lyeh.
Eventually Stipe dragged him off for a tour of the facilities.
“What’s New R’lyeh?” Detwiler pronounced.
“It’s what Cthulhu renamed New York. The parts he’s had rebuilt, anyway.”
“What happened to Old R’lyeh?”
“I think it sank into the Pacific. Anyway, this is where we all are now.”
“Home, sweet ph’nglui.”
Stipe chuckled. “Hey, you remembered some of the words from the ceremony.”
“One or two.”
As they entered through a gaping doorway, Stipe asked, “So, like, what d’you have in the bag?”
“Toothbrush,” replied Detwiler.
“Right.”
The inside of the place was just as rough and knurled. No surface was either exactly horizontal or vertical. The light came from more phosphorescence.
“Lichen,” Stipe explained.
As they walked, something huge, brown, and repulsive flew by. Its stalked eyes turned to observe them. Its leathery wings flapped heavily. Then it shat something green and noxious. “Oh, great. Can we go another way?” Detwiler asked.
“It’s just
“I’d say this whole
“Aw, don’t be like that. We’re gonna score hugely here, man, now that you’re back.”
“No kidding,” Detwiler replied. “How do we define hugely in the universe of flying tentacled beer barrels?”
Stipe explained that Cthulhu’s human followers were already hoarding all kinds of treasures: great works of art, things lifted out of what had been the Met and the MOMA: jewelry, gold, silver, anything that seemed like it might one day represent wealth for a new ruling class.
“Like that cash you made off with.”
Stipe shrugged. “Yeah, that didn’t play out too well. Why I had to rejoin the overseers.”
“So where are they keeping all this wealth-to-be?”
“Inside the monuments. Well, underneath them, really.”
“Like the tunnel I just came from?”
Stipe’s eyebrows raised. “No wonder they nabbed you. Cthulhu’s got a thing for tunnels. Loves ’em.”
“Why? He’s the size of the moon. He couldn’t fit his left nut in one.”
“And you know what else?” Stipe confided. “Some of the other groups showed up with more seals.”
“Seals like Beckman’s, you mean?”
“Absolutely. A shame Beckman’s book got smushed.”
“How so?”
“Well, see, that’s the only translation that was accurate, just like Beckman claimed.”
“So nobody can work the seals.”
“Nope, and now they’re not gonna get the chance.”
“Why not?”
“Well, Cthulhu doesn’t want anyone to have them.
Every time somebody’s shown up with another one, it’s confiscated.”
“He doesn’t want to open the rest of the gates?” Stipe shrugged. “Not yet, I guess. Probably wants to finish remaking the world in his image so he can show it off to the other gods.”
Detwiler glanced around at the carved interior, the canted doorways, vaulted ceiling, rough and narrow steps. “Seems to be having some success with that.”
“I got a place picked out we can move everything till we need it.”
“Place?” Detwiler asked.
“Yeah, awhile back I found an old abandoned subway line that I don’t think has been in operation since like forever. The tunnelers covered it up to bore one of Cthulhu’s tunnels, but I made sure to leave one way into it. It’s so close to the Temple of Yuggoth, though, that nobody else’ll go near it.”
“Why not?”
“You haven’t been there, have you?” asked Stipe.
“How would I know?”
“’Cause if you had you’d be a gibbering mess now.
The place exudes cosmic dread like a noxious gas. You hallucinate loathsome star clusters, and feel your very atoms come apart in slow motion, in agony so terrible that most people hurl themselves to their death at the very start of it.”
“Yeah, I think I’d remember that.”
“We only get together and chant there like once a year.”
“How is it anybody’s left?”
Instead of answering, Stipe went on, “I figure we can pull whatever we want out of the other temples, store it down under there. Sell it back to them if we have to, but otherwise we sit it out till we need some capital. Then we bargain.”
“You’re talking about the seals.”
Stipe smiled broadly. “You always were a smart guy, Detwiler.”
“Not smart enough.”
“That’s why you got me.”
Detwiler closed his eyes and said nothing.
And so they’d spent days worshipping Cthulhu and his inhuman underlings at various sites around New R’lyeh, and their evenings scouting each elephantine temple and slimy tunnel until they’d located the collected Seals of Kadath, a matter made harder by the repeated denials they heard, mostly from the Cthulhulians themselves, that the seals had never existed at all.
With the stone pulled out, the two slipped into the unguarded vault beneath the Temple of Ultimate Chaos, which Detwiler observed looked like a greenish-black intestinal polyp.
They filled the duffels with the five seals, and Detwiler took time to add as many of the rough- cut diamonds as he could scoop up before Stipe nervously said, “They’ve stopped chanting.”
It had indeed grown silent overhead. But no one was making their way down the Stygian stairways to this vault either. Detwiler snatched a few more jewels.
Stipe grunted as he hauled his duffel over to the hole. It took the two of them to lift it up and over, and lower it down the outside. The weight of the bag almost pulled Stipe out the opening. They repeated the act with the other two before climbing out. Stipe was dirty and sweating. Detwiler imagined that he looked much the same. “We’re gonna have to come back for the third one of these.”
“Just to the end of the tunnel for now,” said Detwiler.
“You’re crazy.”
“I must be.” He lifted his duffel and started walking, bow-legged and slow. Stipe followed him. At the mouth of the tunnel, Detwiler set his bag down and went back in for the third one. He carried that with less trouble, and set it on top of Stipe’s bag. They looked out into the night. This was the part of the journey that presented the most peril. The duffels had to travel to the subway entrance, a good half a mile away. But Detwiler had worked that all out. After checking to be sure no one was watching from outside the glowing tunnel, he crept off into the dark and returned a few minutes later with a dinged up wheelbarrow.
“Where’d you find that?” Stipe asked.
“I used to move with it before your Twinkies caught me.”
