“Eldritch. Means weird. Peculiar. Bloody odd. That’s what it means. I looked it up. In a dictionary. And gibbous?”
Ben shook his head again.
“Gibbous means the moon was nearly full. And what about that one he was always calling us, eh? Thing. Wossname. Starts with a b. Tip of me tongue . . .”
“Bastards?” suggested Wilf.
“Nah. Thing. You know. Batrachian. That’s it. Means looked like frogs.”
“Hang on,” said Wilf. “I thought they was, like, a kind of camel.”
Seth shook his head vigorously. “S’definitely frogs. Not camels. Frogs.”
Wilf slurped his Shoggoth’s. Ben sipped his, carefully, without pleasure.
“So?” said Ben.
“They’ve got two humps,” interjected Wilf, the tall one.
“Frogs?” asked Ben.
“Nah. Batrachians. Whereas your average dromederary camel, he’s only got one. It’s for the long journey through the desert. That’s what they eat.”
“Frogs?” asked Ben.
“Camel humps.” Wilf fixed Ben with one bulging yellow eye. “You listen to me, matey-me-lad. After you’ve been out in some trackless desert for three or four weeks, a plate of roasted camel hump starts looking particularly tasty.”
Seth looked scornful. “You’ve never eaten a camel hump.”
“I might have done,” said Wilf.
“Yes, but you haven’t. You’ve never even been in a desert.”
“Well, let’s say, just supposing I’d been on a pilgrimage to the Tomb of Nyarlathotep . . .”
“The black king of the ancients who shall come in the night from the east and you shall not know him, you mean?”
“Of course that’s who I mean.”
“Just checking.”
“Stupid question, if you ask me.”
“You could of meant someone else with the same name.”
“Well, it’s not exactly a common name, is it? Nyarlathotep. There’s not exactly going to be two of them, are there? ‘Hullo, my name’s Nyarlathotep, what a coincidence meeting you here, funny them bein’ two of us,’ I don’t exactly think so. Anyway, so I’m trudging through them trackless wastes, thinking to myself, I could murder a camel hump . . .”
“But you haven’t, have you? You’ve never been out of Innsmouth harbor.”
“Well . . . No.”
“There.” Seth looked at Ben triumphantly. Then he leaned over and whispered into Ben’s ear, “He gets like this when he gets a few drinks into him, I’m afraid.”
“I heard that,” said Wilf.
“Good,” said Seth. “Anyway. H. P. Lovecraft. He’d write one of his bloody sentences. Ahem. ‘The gibbous moon hung low over the eldritch and batrachian inhabitants of squamous Dulwich.’ What does he mean, eh? What does he mean? I’ll tell you what he bloody means. What he bloody means is that the moon was nearly full, and everybody what lived in Dulwich was bloody peculiar frogs. That’s what he means.”
“What about the other thing you said?” asked Wilf.
“What?”
“Squamous. Wossat mean, then?”
Seth shrugged. “Haven’t a clue,” he admitted. “But he used it an awful lot.”
There was another pause.
“I’m a student,” said Ben. “Gonna be a metallurgist.” Somehow he had managed to finish the whole of his first pint of Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar, which was, he realized, pleasantly shocked, his first alcoholic beverage. “What do you guys do?”
“We,” said Wilf, “are acolytes.”
“Of Great Cthulhu,” said Seth proudly.
“Yeah?” said Ben. “And what exactly does that involve?”
“My shout,” said Wilf. “Hang on.” Wilf went over to the barmaid and came back with three more pints. “Well,” he said, “what it involves is, technically speaking, not a lot right now. The acolytin’ is not really what you might call laborious employment in the middle of its busy season. That is, of course, because of his bein’ asleep. Well, not exactly asleep. More like, if you want to put a finer point on it, dead.”
“ ‘In his house at Sunken R’lyeh dead Cthulhu lies dreaming,’ ” interjected Seth. “Or, as the poet has it, ‘That is not dead what can eternal lie—’ ”
“ ‘But in Strange Aeons—’ ” chanted Wilf. “—and by Strange he means bloody peculiar—”
“Exactly. We are not talking your normal Aeons here at all.”
“ ‘But in Strange Aeons even Death can die.’ ”
Ben was mildly surprised to find that he seemed to be drinking another full-bodied pint of Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar. Somehow the taste of rank goat was less offensive on the second pint. He was also delighted to notice that he was no longer hungry, that his blistered feet had stopped hurting, and that his companions were charming, intelligent men whose names he was having difficulty in keeping apart. He did not have enough experience with alcohol to know that this was one of the symptoms of being on your second pint of Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar.
“So right now,” said Seth, or possibly Wilf, “the business is a bit light. Mostly consisting of waiting.”
“And praying,” said Wilf, if he wasn’t Seth.
“And praying. But pretty soon now, that’s all going to change.”
“Yeah?” asked Ben. “How’s that?”
“Well,” confided the taller one. “Any day now, Great Cthulhu (currently impermanently deceased), who is our boss, will wake up in his undersea living-sort-of quarters.”
“And then,” said the shorter one, “he will stretch and yawn and get dressed—”
“Probably go to the toilet, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”
“Maybe read the papers.”
“—And having done all that, he will come out of the ocean depths and consume the world utterly.”
Ben found this unspeakably funny. “Like a ploughman’s,” he said.
“Exactly. Exactly. Well put, the young American gentleman. Great Cthulhu will gobble the world up like a ploughman’s lunch, leaving but only the lump of Branston pickle on the side of the plate.”
“That’s the brown stuff?” asked Ben. They assured him that it was, and he went up to the bar and brought them back another three pints of Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar.
He could not remember much of the conversation that followed. He remembered finishing his pint, and his new friends inviting him on a walking tour of the village, pointing out the various sights to him. “That’s where we rent our videos, and that big building next door is the Nameless Temple of Unspeakable Gods and on Saturday mornings there’s a jumble sale in the crypt . . .”
He explained to them his theory of the walking tour book and told them, emotionally, that Innsmouth was both scenic and charming. He told them that they were the best friends
