Best Little Witch-House in Arkham. Mark McLaughlin
quite follow you,” I said. One of the goat-headed, fly-eyed, snail-antennaed centipede-creatures began to sniff at my penny-loafers, so I shoo’ed it away.
Reginald crossed to an alcove on the far side of the cave, where he rummaged around for a while in an old trunk and finally produced a time-yellowed scroll.
“Unhallowed centuries ago, my ancestors engaged in numerous hideous acts of carnality with the dread primordial nature-god Shub-Niggurath, who is known as the Goat with a Thousand Young. This fiend is endowed with both male and female…properties. Months later, my female ancestors—and I blush with mingled horror and embarrassment to tell you this—unnaturally spawned the eggs that eventually hatched into the grotto-dwelling spawn you see before you!”
“So you are related to these loathsome beasts?”
“Don’t rub it in. And actually, they are called blogdoths.” He unrolled the scroll and held it out for my inspection.
“It looks like…” I studied the charts, the graphs, the pictures of little feet, the curved lines, and all the bizarre mathematical formulas and musical notations. “…like some sort of ancient…dance lesson.…”
* * * *
Suddenly we heard a great shuffling of feet. “Reginald,” I whispered, “are more of those blogdoths heading this way?” Then I realized that the noise was coming from the tunnel to the house.
Imagine my surprise when my faithful butler Lars and his musical group, The People of the Village, emerged in full costume from the tunnel’s mouth.
“Hello, boys,” I said cheerily. “What brings you to the Grotto of Grotesqueries?”
“Well, in the middle of rehearsal, I realized you’d been gone an awfully long time,” Lars said. “Nobody answered the phone when I called Reginald, so we all decided to rush over and see if old Reggie had gone crazy and slaughtered you like a pig. Oh, hello, Reggie. Say, where did all the blogdoths come from?”
“You know about blogdoths?” Reginald exclaimed.
All of The People of the Village nodded. “Sure,” Calvin said. “We’re all descended from good, hearty Lower Belgravian stock!”
“Astonishing!” Reginald enthused.
Horatio nodded. “Yes, we met at a meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Lower Belgravians over in Arkham a few years ago. We found out we shared a love of singing and dancing, and the rest is history.”
“I wish I’d known about that society,” Reginald said. “Especially since it’s dedicated to people from my home country!”
“But aren’t you British?” Lars queried. “Heck, I thought you were in line for the throne.”
“Look at all these blogdoths,” Gregor said. “I was just telling Theodore the other day, what a pity we don’t have access to some blogdoths and the Dance Lesson Scrolls of Shub-Niggurath. Why, we could, according to old Lower Belgravian legends, control an eldritch force of unspeakable power. Isn’t that right, Theodore?”
Theodore nodded.
“What a mind-boggling series of coincidences!” Reginald marveled. “For here…here in my hands…I hold those very Dance Lesson Scrolls!”
“Quite a coincidence indeed!” Lars said. Then he turned to me. “Well, Wintergreen, we’d better be heading home. You’re long overdue for a pedicure.”
“Wait a minute,” Theodore said as we all turned to leave the cave. “Reginald, can you dance?”
“In my youth, my friends called me Twinkle-Toes.”
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’” Theodore grabbed the scroll. “Why, if the six of us—Reginald and The People of the Village—followed the instructions on this scroll, we could harness the power of the blogdoths, and who knows, maybe even the cosmos! But can someone refresh my memory? What part do the blogdoths play in this ancient ritual?”
Reginald rushed over to the alcove and brought out what appeared to be an ancient oil-lantern with a directional visor on one side. He took some matches from his pocket and fired up the wick inside the lantern. He then handed me the relic. “The blogdoths will huddle together to watch when the dance begins. Shine the Lantern of Th’narr directly into their eyes.”
I trembled with anticipation. “Wow. My first ancient ritual.”
And so it began.
* * * *
The six men of Lower Belgravian descent consulted the scroll, and then started the complex dance, complete with hand gestures and hip swivels. At several points in the proceedings, they spelled out S-H-U-B-N-I-G-G-U-R-A-T-H one letter at a time by shaping the letters with their hands, arms and occasionally even legs.
As per instructions, I directed the light of the lantern into the shiny fly-eyes of the huddled blogdoths. Thousands of beams of multi-colored light reflected off of those multi-faceted orbs, onto the gyrating dancers. I was a little disappointed I couldn’t join the dance, since I wasn’t from Lower Belgravia—but hey, somebody had to work the lights.
I think the glow of the lantern hurt the eyes of the creatures, because they soon began to cry out, some high, some low, in a complex series of otherworldly rhythms that created an effect not unlike a rather snappy pop tune.
The whole spectacle was pretty entertaining. But then that toe-tapping good time turned into a horrific, soul-freezing nightmare from the mephitic depths of the Devil’s own bowels.
For suddenly, the cave walls began to fade away, transforming into the star-spattered darkness of outer space, while the cave floor turned from damp gray stone into a hard black surface spinning beneath us.
“Great Caesar’s enema bag!” I bellowed. “What is going on now?”
The spin of the black surface, which was disturbingly etched with grooves, threw me right on my backside. But I still managed to hold onto the lantern. I looked up, and saw—saw—
There are some visions that no human eyes were ever meant to see, just as there are certain odors that the human nose was never meant to sniff. Above me towered one such sight, and it reeked of one such scent.
It was a gigantic, goat-headed, snail-antennaed, titanic deejay with a multitude of furry legs, and it was pumping those hairy, behooved limbs as it rocked to the beat of the song created by the mewling blogdoths, who now were scampering all over the giant record which the grotto had become. Reginald and The People of the Village were also stumbling around, vomiting in time to the blogdoth-music as they nauseously danced in circles.
I knew then that the ancient deejay had to in fact be Shub-Niggurath, the stinking Goat with a Thousand Young—and so I set the lantern by my side and began to grovel—grovel before the primordial god of getting one’s groove on…
I guess all my groveling must have paid off, because suddenly I was wearing the Black Leisure Suit of High-Priestliness, and Shug-Niggurath was giving me a big thumb’s-up—or rather, hooves-up—and the nature god bid me to dance, to show my true talent so that I might become the ultimate power of the Universe. And just as I began my disco-dance of triumph—
I accidentally kicked over the oil-lantern.
The giant record caught on fire, flaming blogdoths were running around bleating, The People of the Village all caught fire, too, since their costumes were made of flammable man-made fabrics—it was just a mess.
Shub-Niggurath waved goodbye with his hooves as the grotto reverse-faded back into place. I found myself standing on damp gray stone again, surrounded by a variety of charred, dead bodies.
The visor from the broken lantern was resting at my feet.
I picked it up and sadly looked at my reflection in its shiny surface—
And ran.
I ran from the grotto,