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Chapter Twenty-One

". . . that you have been a very naughty boy!" I scolded.

That, of course, pissed it off but what was I risking? That it would destroy me and my world?

Oh please! That's the problem with every over-the-top Thing-from-the-bottomless-pit-of-Hell: there comes a point where you just can't ratchet it up any higher. And then what?

After it calmed down, it boomed: I DO NOT BELIEVE YOU!

"You're not being entirely truthful on that point, Bubba, but that's okay. Lots of people don't believe in me. That's what free will is all about."

YOU ARE NOT A REAL GOD UNLESS YOU COMMAND ABSOLUTE OBEDIENCE, ABSOLUTE DEVOTION FROM YOUR CREATION!

"Huh, somebody's never been a stay-at-home parent. Look, this is the crux, the whole tipping point—of religions, societies, governments, and personal self-actualization. It's no good if you have to force people. Even the leather crowd with their safe words and their nudge-nudge, wink-wink, smack-smack, knows that. A true God's power is measured in what He gives away, not what He hoards."

THAT MAKES NO SENSE.

"Pay attention, Feeler Face: God is busy so you're only getting five minutes of my valuable time. Then I've got to get back to throwing fireballs around the firmament. Here's the Big Celestial Secret: it's about puppetry."

PUPPETRY?

"Finger puppets, stick puppets, hand puppets, Muppets, marionettes, ventriloquist's dummies, the General Secretary of the United Nations . . ."

WHAT DOES A GOD WANT WITH PUPPETS?

"Exactly! That's why a real God gets out of the way and lets his creation choose. Lets there be consequences to those choices—"

PUNISHES THE DISOBEDIENT! DESTROYS TRANSGRESSORS!

"Slow down, Gangsta Wrath; it's all about letting people learn from their mistakes. Parents who always fix their kids' mistakes raise monsters. But the biggest mistake of all is taking away people's option to make mistakes in the first place. The more control, the more petty the dictator. The more petty the dictator, the smaller the god."

I DON'T—THIS—I AM POWERFUL! I HAVE DESTROYED A GREAT CITY AND MANY SMALLER ONES! I HAVE CREATED A NEW COASTLINE AND MOVED THE WATERS OF THE SEA!

"Can you create a rock too big for you to pick up?"

There was a moment of stunned silence and I silently thanked eight-year-old Scotty Steadman's Saturday morning wiseass debates. Cthulhu was dangerous but deranged. As long as I could keep him off balance just enough to—

WHAT DID YOU SAY?

"You want to pretend to be a god? Just answer my question: can you create a rock so big that even you can't lift it?"

HOW WOULD I DO THAT?

"Easy, Squidley; God can do anything."

CREATE A ROCK TOO BIG TO PICK UP? IF GOD CANNOT LIFT IT THEN IT IS A FALLACY TO SAY GOD CAN DO ANYTHING. PICKING UP THE ROCK IS EXCLUSIONARY. . . . 

"But a real God—that is I—can pick it up because I am God and, therefore, I can do anything." Yeah, priceless. . . . 

WAIT . . . YOU ARE SAYING THAT YOU CAN CREATE A ROCK THAT IS SO BIG THAT YOU, YOURSELF, CANNOT LIFT IT . . . YET . . . YOU CAN LIFT IT—A CLEAR-CUT PARADOX—BECAUSE ANY OTHER ANSWER WOULD VIOLATE THE DEFINITION OF OMNIPOTENCE?

"Of course. Because I am God. How about I create a rock too big for you to pick up and you can lift it to show me your omnipotence, too? Oh wait. You're stuck in a box."

I DESTROYED THE GULF COAST.

"So what's that supposed to prove? Destroying is easy. It's the provenance of children and idiots and madmen and the untalented. Creation—now that's a lot harder. Creating is performed by the big boys and girls—the talented and the capable and the disciplined and the visionaries and the powerful and the good and the wise. And God. It's the first line in the job description: Creator. How about you? Create anything beneficial lately?"

I CREATED THE INLAND SEA. IT REACHES NEARLY ONE HUNDRED LEAGUES INLAND.

"Yeah, about that. Why now? Your honor guard has had you in tow for the better part of half a year. Why wait until now to work with Marie Laveau on the storm and speed up the ground subsidence?"

He didn't respond but I could see the answers all around me: he needed a closer proximity and he hadn't had it until this past week. Oh, he could whisper in feeble minds like Laveau's all he liked but to use the power of his will upon the physical world, he was limited to a much shorter range. Laveau could have done plenty of damage—especially if we hadn't been there to counter her efforts. But the quakes and the tsunamis and the sinking of the coastline couldn't have reached us from the icy depths of R'lyeh. He had to hitch a ride. And who knew how many generations of Deep Ones had been bred toward achieving that particular goal?

"C?"

WHAT?

"I want you to put New Orleans back."

PUT IT BACK?

"Put the city and the coast back where they belong."

MAKE ME.

I shook my head reprovingly. "Not what God does. Free will. Remember? It's something that you need to do."

WHY SHOULD I?

"Tule—may I call you Tule? Why do you think you've been trapped on this little backwater planet for so freaking long?"

BECAUSE MY ENEMIES BOOBY-TRAPPED MY STASIS POD AND SABOTAGED THE LAUNCH PORTALS.

"No. It's because you have some serious karmic issues to work out."

WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

"Be honest, Tule; if not with me, then at least with yourself. . . ."

WHAT?

"Are you happy?"

WHAT DO YOU MEAN?

"It's a simple question. Are you happy?"

AM I HAPPY?

"While I am omniscient as well as omnipotent, I'd really rather that you answer the question yourself."

NO ONE EVER ASKED ME IF I WAS HAPPY OR NOT.

Well, if it was this hard to get a straight answer, small wonder. But I didn't express that sentiment. The point was I had a gigantic insane ego at a tipping point and it was crucial to tip it in just the right direction at just the right moment. The two advantages I had right at the moment were: First, after untold generations of slipping inside other minds and dictating its own agenda, this was the first time someone had walked in on it and had control of the conversation. Second (and perhaps more importantly): I wasn't all quivery, shaky, fearful, or seemingly about to lose my mind. Been there, done that and, as Donald Trump would tell you, the "art of the deal" depends mightily upon projecting the image of absolute confidence and authority. Crazy Eights, here, hadn't had anyone stand up to it/him in about a hundred million years. Despite being all dementedly evil and powerful and evilly demented, he was a con artist's wet dream: lonely, impulsive, unstable, totally unaccustomed to resisting suggestion, and rife with dependency issues.

I HAVE BEEN STUCK IN A STASIS POD WHILE THE PRECESSION OF THIS PLANET'S AXIAL SPIN HAS CAUSED THE LAUNCH PORTALS TO WOBBLE OUT OF THEIR ALIGNMENTS WITH THE W'NAGF'HUP WORMHOLE. IT TAKES APPROXIMATELY TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND AND EIGHT HUNDRED OF YOUR SOLAR CYCLES TO BRING THE PORTALS AND THE WORMHOLE INTO OPTIMAL ALIGNMENT. EVERY TIME I FAIL TO ACCESS THE LAUNCH WINDOW I MUST WAIT NEARLY TWENTY-SIX THOUSAND YEARS TO TRY AGAIN. DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY TIMES I HAVE FAILED? DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS LIKE TO BE A PRISONER OF YOUR OWN FLESH WITHOUT EVEN THE HOPE OF DEATH'S RELEASE FOR MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS OF YEARS? SO, TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION: NO. NOT HAPPY. I CAN'T REMEMBER THE LAST TIME I WAS REMOTELY HAPPY. THOUGH THE THOUGHT OF DISEMBOWLING, BEHEADING, AND EVISCERATING HUMANS HELPS TO TAKE MY MIND OFF MY OWN SUFFERING.

"Transference."

WHAT?

"Classic transference. It's a psychological condition. On a subconscious level you try to transfer your pain to others. It may distract you for brief periods of time but you are still stuck with your own suffering—the suffering that stuck you here in the first place."

WHAT DO YOU MEAN?

"Tule" was all primed and ready now, a "tool" in the broader sense of the word. I used a barrage of New Age psychobabble about left brain/right brain lateralization, inner child issues, and self-actualization, suggesting that his subconscious had stranded himself here, recognizing that he had a lot of issues to work out before he was ready to return to the larger universe and interactions on a grander scale. I threw in lots of catchphrases like synergy, empowerment, dysfunction, holistic, closure, win-win, codependency, breakthrough, proactive, integration, clear, paradigms, and well-being. I emphasized that, once "he" could learn to love "himself," then the love "he" so desperately wanted from others would no longer be blocked and could flow freely toward him.

Bottom line: it was his inner issues that sabotaged his attempts to access the launch window every twenty-six thousand years. That's what I told him. And that if he wanted his luck to change the next time that temporary launch window rolled around, he would have to change his external reality by altering his internal reality. And how was he to do that he wanted to know. "The secret," I told him, "is to act your way into thinking rather than think your way into acting."

WHAT DO I DO? WHAT DO I CHANGE?

"Newton's Law of Reciprocity," I answered. "As long as you are taking lives, your life is taken. It is only when you grant people power over their own lives, will your life start to be your own."

I SEE! There was an overwhelming sense of childlike glee and discovery. IT IS LIKE A LAW OF PHYSICS AND SYMPATHETIC MAGIC!

"I think you're beginning to get it!" I said, trying to throw all the encouragement I could into this new direction for him.

I had entered into this exchange by chance and, in the process, had hoped to uncover an advantage or weak spot. As the conversation had unfolded I had begun to see an opportunity to distract, even lure, Cthulhu away from further depredations inland. If such seems a bit farfetched to the clear-minded observer I would point out the difference in perspective between the average human with daily experience and intercourse with his fellow man and an isolated alien intelligence whose faculties of reason and judgment have been corrupted by a million years of madness.

AND YOU SAY THAT I MAY BREAK THE CURSE WHICH HAS SABOTAGED MY STASIS POD AND LAUNCH PORTALS WITH THIS SYMPATHETIC MAGIC?

"Well . . . I suppose that is one way of phrasing the inner dynamics of self-actualization. . . ."

AND IF HUMAN SACRIFICES ARE COUNTERPRODUCTIVE TO IMPLEMENTING SUCH MAGIC, NOT ONLY SHOULD I CEASE PERFORMING AND INFLUENCING SUCH INCIDENCES BUT, TO BETTER EMPOWER THE SPELL, LOGICALLY, I SHOULD PERFORM SOME SORT OF REVERSE SACRIFICE.

"Um," I said.

THE MORE POTENT, THE GREATER MY CHANCES FOR SUCCESS.

"Well . . . the important thing is to not screw up your next launch window, no matter how many thousands of years away it may be. . . ." 

IT WAS SIX MONTHS AGO.

Six months ago? That meant ole Sucker Lips would be waiting another twenty-five thousand, seven hundred ninety-nine and a half years for his next possible leave-taking. "Gee, too bad you can't time-warp to the future and give it a shot right now," I told him.

I doubted there was anything I could say that would keep him quiescent and well behaved for twenty-six millennia. But any delay, any bought time was some kind of victory. . . . 

I CANNOT PROJECT MYSELF FORWARD FOR SUCH GREAT DISTANCES THROUGH UNKNOWN AND UNEXPERIENCED CHRONOSPATIAL VERTICES. NEITHER CAN I CREATE A ROCK THAT IS TOO BIG FOR ME TO PICK UP.

Well, of course not.

HOWEVER I MAY PROPEL MYSELF ALONG A LIMITED CORRIDOR OF EFFECT RELATED TO THE CHRONOSYNCLASTIC VERTICES THAT I HAVE EXPERIENCED. THIS SHOULD SERVE BOTH PRIMARY AND SECONDARY GOALS THAT I WISH TO ACHIEVE RELEVANT TO THE REALIGNMENT OF MY INNER AND OUTER PARADIGMS.

In other words, there was "something" about "backing up" or "backing away" in the gist of that last little bit of sharing. And, hey, anything that gets the monster on your porch to head back down the sidewalk is gravy to me.

I SHALL GO BACK THESE SIX MONTHS AND TRY AGAIN.

And Dread Cthulhu began to recede.

Relative to our "meeting of the minds" he began to fade.

Back on the Nautilus I awoke to alarms and turbulence.

"What's happening?" I asked Samm who was pulling her hands out from beneath my shirt.

"I was checking your heartbeat."

"No, I mean with the boat?"

Which tilted to the starboard and we went rolling across the floor and up against a couch. I landed on top of her.

I closed my eyes and reached out for Cthulhu's mental signature. It was slipping away. Rapidly. My first impression was that a freak current was sweeping us past the sarcophagus and in toward the coast.

I started to get up and go to the view port. Samm held on. "Stay down," she murmured, "you could be hurt if there's more turbulence."

I looked in her half-lidded eyes and I saw more "turbulence" for sure. I jumped to my feet and ran for the wheelhouse.

A couple of minutes later, squeezed in beside Captain Dakkar, I found we were on a different set of trajectories. Irena, bringing the Cuttlefish back to dock, had observed the great black sarcophagus retreating along the path it had traveled, as if hastily returning to its point of origin. The decision of whether or not to follow however was taken out of our hands as the power systems of the Nautilus had begun to flicker and inexplicably die.

Dakkar used the last reserves of that power to blow ballast and bring us to the surface.

I told my story in the grand salon as we cycled fresh air through the open hatches and the kappa manned hand pumps in the engine room.

"And he really said: 'I shall go back six months and try again'?" Samm asked. "Sounds like our boy was thinking about doing a little time travel." She seemed a little sulky that I wasn't availing myself of the space beside her on the divan.

"A little time travel?" I echoed from my narrow and isolated stool.

"Beats jumping twenty-six thousand years ahead into the future."

"But does he actually have the power? And, if he's already running back the clock, how is it that we can talk about this? Wouldn't time run backward for us, too? Say he pushes some kind of big Reset Button that defaults everything back six months. Wouldn't we end up reliving the last six months none the wiser?" I shook my head. This was too much, too fast: debating time travel paradoxes after playing God for a mad millennigenarian E.T.

The rakshasa steepled his long, slender fingers. "There are conjures that do affect the ebb and flow of the various currents in Time's oceans. Even the great sorcerer Einstein spoke of clock paradoxes relative to universal constants and motion. Perhaps only Cthulhu, himself, was moved backward in time. Even if he altered his choices in the intervening half year, it's likely that all other events unfolded as they did before, hence we still find ourselves here."

"That seems a little farfetched," Samm mused.

"And problematic," I added. "The hurricane breached the levees and caused major damage along the coast as well as to New Orleans. But it was the quakes and subsidence of the coastal land mass that turned twenty feet of flood surge into hundreds of miles of inland sea, hundreds of feet deep. And Squidhead had to be in close proximity for that. If he doesn't show up, we got some major dox—a pair at the very least!"

And that was when the first quake hit.

 

Up on the outer deck of the Nautilus, we braced ourselves against the railing and broke out spyglasses to scan the horizon. Waves broke over the deck in increasing size and vitality and we were eventually forced to go below before the hatches were swamped and the submarine began to take on water. Before we did, however, we caught a glimpse in the distance, of a bubbling, churning wellspring on the ocean's surface. And the vision of a city rising from the sea.

 

Clouds came, scudding across the sky in jerky, high-speed, time-lapse photo-style run backwards on an IMAX dome projector: Hurricane Eibon backing up for a return engagement.

I was dimly aware that Dakkar had put the kappas on another set of pumps so that we might ride out the storm beneath the waves. I didn't much care: I spent a few hours in the head, alternately puking and voiding, my body seeming to go through a violent purge. A glimpse of my sputum revealed a grayish substance as if I were vomiting up all of the pencil tips I had licked or nibbled since the first grade.

The hurricane passed quickly. My misery lasted a bit longer, changing to cold sweats and hot flashes, a migraine, heart palpitations, aches and pains, intense hunger followed sharply by nausea.

And then, nothing.

I felt better. Normal. Although it had been so long I really wasn't sure what normal was supposed to feel like.

And about that time, the electrical power came back up and the Nautilus was able to maneuver again.

 

We spent a reckless two hours cruising the New Orleans harbor under the rakshasa's invisibility spell and listening to the wireless to determine that the Big Easy had, indeed, been thrown back in time to February, six months prior to the cataclysm that would wipe out nearly a half million of its citizens and triple that number counting the greater region round about.

We had been given a second chance.

And six months to avoid our doom a second time.

 

Or maybe not.

If Doc Ock could set the clock back six months, maybe he'd set the clock forward again if my pep talk failed to live up to his eventual expectations. And it would, of course: it was (ahem) only a matter of time. . . . 

There were two things that had to be prevented if New Orleans was to survive the coming August: Hurricane Eibon and the great cataclysmic earthquakes that would sink the coastline and return the great Delta region to the sea.

If (when) Cthulhu changed his mind it would all begin again. Once the Deep Ones reached R'lyeh, retrieved his stasis chamber, and brought it close enough to the coastal fault zones for his enhanced psionic abilities to trigger the pressure zones. That had to be prevented. Dakkar's mission was to stop any avenue of possible return.

Irena, Samm, and I came ashore on Lake Pontchartrain via the Cuttlefish while the Nautilus made all haste for the Lovecraft and Derleth coordinates in the frigid waters of the South Pacific near the Antarctic Ocean. As the sarcophagus had moved backward in time, its trail along the sea floor had erased itself. Dakkar intended to use every advantage time would give him to eliminate as many of the retinue of Deep Ones as possible. And, perhaps, find a way to make the city of R'lyeh inaccessible, itself. I didn't have much hope for a nineteenth-century submarine on the latter but then its captain was a rakshasa, a sorcerer empowered by Vishnu, Himself, so who knows?

Our mission was simpler and more complicated at the same time: stop Marie Laveau from calling up a supernatural hurricane six months hence.

Mama Samm D'Arbonne might have a chance in a throw down with Marie Laveau if she caught her unprepared on neutral ground and without any supernatural allies like Gregor "The Energizer" Rasputin to upset the balance of power. But that hoodoo mama was up in the northern end of the state while her future self, all discharged and unarmed was no match for a cranky tarot reader much less the nearly two-hundred-year-old voodoo queen of New Orleans.

Me? I was on every demesne's wanted posters and wouldn't get anywhere near Laveau before her minions had me shrink-wrapped and chained in some dungeon. Or worse.

And Irena—well—we weren't sure what would happen if she met her six-month-previous self coming-while-going but the results would be embarrassing at the very least and possibly catastrophic on a grand scale at the very worst. Either way we didn't want to find out.

But we had to risk it.

The plan was simple. We checked into a room at the Rose Manor Bed & Breakfast. Two cute young chicks and a slightly older rumpled looking guy. Nobody raised an eyebrow: this was the Big Easy, after all.

As soon as the door was closed I expected a little monkey business. There was none. Everyone was professional as we discussed the plan.

Irena was ditching classes early for Mardi Gras break and had returned to discuss her degree path with her father and stepmother. Samm was a nonstarter but if traced to Irena, she was a classmate who had tagged along to the city and was staying in a hotel room with her older boyfriend. The only person who had a chance of making the young slender black girl for the older, more expansive Mama Samm might be Marie, herself, who had known D'Arbonne when she was younger. No point in risking any encounters when Samm wasn't much good for anything but babysitting for the time being.

I was doing the ride-along in Irena's head while Samm made sure the maid service didn't disturb my "sleeping" body back at the hotel.

Once upon a time I had a code of ethics about invading other people's minds. It should have bothered me to probe Irena's thoughts as we caught a cab across Mid-City and down to the Orpheum, made our way to the basement, and down into the labyrinthine tomblike corridors of the Elder Things.

Irena knew she was delivering me to her stepmother. Though we hadn't discussed it she had to know I couldn't let Marie Laveau live to repeat her dread incantations in another six months. She was willingly participating in an assassination of the woman who had saved her and her father.

Bad enough. Her father made it murkier. Jorge Pantera not only loved Marie but, given the undead and lycan political picture, her death would likely be his death warrant as well. Hard enough to betray the woman who had rescued you and your father from the Bad Things and had taken you in. But to sacrifice your father, as well?

Nearly half a million lives, she kept thinking. Then a million and a half. And after Dread Cthulhu is brought unto his throne? How many then? How many after that?

It ends here!

And her thoughts would turn to a noble face with golden eyes, wise and kind; a pattern of orange and white fur, striped with black . . . 

We entered Marie's chambers, utilizing the family keys and circumventing her wards while the sun was approaching its zenith.

The woman entranced in Laveau's bed bore no resemblance to the stick-limbed, scarecrow figure we might face on the roof of One Shell Square a half year from now. She was a great beauty with a lush figure and a face that might have launched a thousand ships in another time and another place.

She had just fed the evening before and a jeweled drop of ruby blood gave a long red wink in the dim light as we leaned over her recumbent form. It was all I needed. She had taken its greater portion into her body in feeding and so this drop served as the bridge, a stepping stone as focal point: I was out of Irena's mind and into Marie's in a single eye blink.

The ancient vampire's thoughts were confused with madness and torpid with sleep. I had the advantage in catching her at the nadir of her faculties but also I had grown in my capacity for control of my hosts. I mean, what sort of opposition was she likely to offer after my close encounter of the fourth kind with a giant alien who could turn back time and make the earth move under your feet? Come to think of it, that doesn't sound so much badass as a mutant cover of a Cher/Carol King songfest.

At any rate, I helped Irena gather up the spell books and the Al Azif into a bundle so that they wouldn't fall into the wrong hands and we slipped back out the way we came.

Irena went out into the daylight first. I watched her hail a cab and head back to the hotel where we were all supposed to rendezvous. I would still get there ahead of her.

And I didn't want her to watch what came next.

I moved toward the light on the other side of the glass entryways. Had my hand on the crash bar that would open a door to the street and close a deadly path to the future.

"Domo Laveau!" said a familiar voice. "Where are you going?"

We turned, Marie Laveau and I, and I made her mouth smile in a friendly and suggestive manner. "Gordon. My faithful watchdog. Come here; there is something that I want you to watch."

He came up to the door squinting against the glare of the noonday sun that penetrated these few feet into the gloom of the Orpheum's sheltered lobby.

"What is it, Madam? What do you wish me to see?" he asked gruffly. And not a little afraid. Rebellions start early and I knew that Gordo must have been plotting betrayal much earlier than six months prior to our confrontation in the trunk of a '68 Rambler Rebel.

"Let's do this right," I said, grabbing his face and kissing him on the mouth before he could react. One of Marie's fangs sliced his lip and blood began to seep down his chin. He had barely broken free before I had locked an arm through his and thrown Laveau's weight against the crash bar.

He yelped and started calling for help as I dragged him out into the carnival daylight of New Orleans. It was already warm and balmy though only February—that's the Gulf Coast for you—and the temperature began to rise almost immediately.

Marie was of two minds now, not counting the one I had put in the mix. On the one hand the sunlight was pushing her deeper into her daytime trance state. On the other, the fact that her two-hundred-year-old flesh was starting to burn was beginning to wake her up. I worked as hard as I could to drag her to the middle of the street before she could become more participatory. It wasn't easy, dragging a struggling two-hundred-pound lycanthrope to boot.

The other vampires on the premises were all still asleep and would remain so for a number of hours but Marie's death throes were starting to intrude upon their dreams. Gordon's cries for help, however, had brought other weres running: several faces were pressed to the glass doors, now, taking in the peep show out on the street.

Smoke was pouring off of the Voodoo Queen's preternatural flesh and here and there the skin was starting to char and peel. I tried to block the pain as much as possible for as long as possible but it was getting to be downright impossible. When Gordo broke free of my grip, Marie went down. The flames started then and she really started to wake up.

I let her.

That's when I wanted to leave. Never mind Exodus 21:23–25 or 22:18 for that matter, I stayed through the agony and the horror because leaving would have meant rolling the dice on nearly two million lives or more.

It was not an empty gesture. This burning, flaming, human-shaped torch actually stumbled and crawled back across the street, all the way up to the doors of the Orpheum and reached a fiery hand toward a handle before falling again and collapsing into a pile of glowing, sooty ashes.

I would have stopped her at any point if necessary. In the final searing moment we both saw that the weres on the other sides of the doors were bracing them so they could not be opened from the outside.

The revolution had begun early.

And then I was floating up above it all like a balloon on a string, the promise of open skies above and the colorful patchwork quilt of a world whose problems and woes were suddenly small laid out below.

I turned from the rapidly receding stain of burnt sacrifice and began to fly back toward my body with the knowledge that my family and friends were finally safe.

 

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