Move Under Ground. Nick Mamatas

said, “I’m coming down.” He moved out of the way, I leapt down and hit the concrete of the tunnel a little harder than I thought (it wasn’t even remotely wet, that’s why I didn’t hear Allen splashing around beneath me) and hugged Allen. He smiled, hahahahaed one more time, stuck his flashlight under his chin for the scary camper look and then put his fingers to his lips. “Have you been outside,” he asked softly, and I told him I hadn’t. Had I seen the Beast in the sky—the tentacles, snaky scales, the deep burning eyes? Oh yes, under the full moon and everything, “All the hipsters can see him,” he said. “Squares can’t, and that’s the trouble. That’s why we have to move under ground now,” Allen told me, and he led me on. There was a downward slope, and the smell of old wet mulch. It was a sewer, but smaller and hotter than I’d always thought sewers would be like. And after we walked a few yards and went down the slope, the walls were old brick and the supports fancy arches.

      “Pre-quake sewers,” Allen told me. “There’s not one system, but dozens, all messed up, running into one another, or into walls of petrified shit. A lot of the tunnels are collapsed, but in North Beach, most of them are okay and connect to all the streets.”

      “What do you know of Cthulhu?” I asked and he laughed again. “Ahahahaha, I always called it cthew-loo. He’s on the money.” With that he dug into his pants pocket and pulled out a bill, then shined his flashlight on it. The dead president faded away under the light, replaced with the hideous tentacled head of the Great God, and in an alien font, one barely English, I could see his name carved into the depths of the flat bill. And Cthulhu turned to me, his tentacles dripping off the cameo frame and the borders of the money to reach out to me.

      “Where did you get your pronunciation?” Spontaneous enlightenment in a honeybee’s buzz, I told him, and then repeated the inhuman name; it was only the second time I’d said it aloud, and realized how weird it was, like my diaphragm had rolled up like a blind and started flapping around. And that was just the syllable with the K in it! Allen tried it and choked on his tongue; I patted his back hard. “Not for the poet’s lips, I guess,” he said, then he waved the flashlight in my face. I don’t think he ever liked my poetry. He shoved the money back into his pocket. That worried me.

      Allen led me through a circuitous route under the city. The sewers were a wide shimmy, back and forth and stupid corners built around god-knows-what; and we danced under the whole town it seemed, but at times I wondered if we just weren’t walking a dark spiral under North Beach. Even under ground, I could smell the Pacific after a while, when the tunnel began to cool. Allen stopped me in front of a ladder.

      “Up up and away,” Allen said, “oh hahaha, wait ’til you see the town proper. There are lots of access holes, lots of manholes,” he said with an obnoxious wink “ ’round here, so if you run into any mugwumps, you can dive rather than take a dive. Oh Jack, hahahaha, it is great to have you back!” He doused the torch and gave me a hug, and slipped a small crowbar into my hand, “For the sewers. The old sewers, the ones you want, have a sort of trapezoid-shaped manhole. Don’t bother with the main sewers, nothing but trouble and shit down there.”

      “Can’t you just tell me what’s going on?” I asked him and he winked like a trickster and started shuffling backwards down the tunnel. “Would you believe me?” he called out, hollow-voiced and echoing. He was right. I want to see everything for myself, travel every excessive road and collect a smile from every girl and a story from every tramp I see. So I climbed the ladder and gave the sewer covering a shove, then snaked through the portal and into the street by the piers. There was only a drizzle of traffic, which was insane. Where were the stevedores walking off to the bars or walking off their afternoon drunks? The trucks, filled up like a baby with stuffed cheeks, nowhere at all. White-shirted cultists with mandible faces were wispy like ghosts and then it struck me that I could see the bugfaced ones about me, but to one another they were just old pal Harry or Tim the deadbeat who never chipped in for the office Christmas party. Life is drenched with spirit. It rains spirit, we couldn’t live without it. But there wasn’t a cloud in the sky (just those terrible flailing tentacles and burning eyes covering the dome of the world, so clear, so incredible, why couldn’t they see?) and this block anyway was full of walking statues, mockery of men.

      I spent the better part of the afternoon picking through a few neighborhoods. It was like in San Santo, the bums and tramps and beatnik kids seemed to have souls, some of them were even aware that the mugwumps had taken over so much of the rest of the town. And families, some of the families were all right. Fat Italian mothers and their screaming kids had souls, there was life in flabby biceps, housedresses and great breasts dipping over open windowsills, and in the kiddly shrieks of joy and pain. Some of the Negroes had souls too, old ones embedded in well-worn faces, or in the swirl of strutting shoulders, but I was surprised how many were in the cult too. I saw a storefront church crammed with black cultists, their skin slick with scum and scales, mumbling instead of whooping it up, blood on their hands from palm cuts, puddling on the floor. They didn’t notice me. To them, I was the one who was out of step, the fly in the rot too small to even buzz and annoy.