The Daughter of the Night Read online

  The Daughter of the Night

  or

  Cthulhu's Daughter in search of an orgasm

  by

  Julian Porter

  Copyright Notice

  © All rights reserved, copyright Julian Porter 2012.

  The intellectual property rights of the author have been asserted.

  Chapter 1: A bad day for Cthulhu

  Great Cthulhu was not feeling very happy. He'd had a bad day at work doing the usual things that he had to do to make sure that the planets moved in their orbits, stars burned hydrogen and all that stuff. And that reminded him. Time had been when he didn't have to do this bureaucratic crap. He went forth ravening and eating humans and Elder Things and Fungi and, well, everything really, and felt joy in his heart, not the constant low-level depression he felt now, and which the pills were doing nothing to shift, whatever his doctor may say. Oh dear, if he were only younger and not so tired all the time from a boring job and, well, less depressed, he'd eat that self-satisfied quack, if only for the pleasure of seeing the (brief) look of terror on her face as she went down. But the boss, Nyarlathotep no less, had told him that he needed treatment and recommended this doctor, who was meant to be the best in her profession. And she should be, the rates she charged: fifty human brains per session. Time was when he'd have eaten any human brains he could get his hands on, but now had had to hand them over to a flat-chested woman with a face like a prune, who proceeded to stick wires in them. He was just glad he had those photographs of the chief Fungus and the sperm whale, or else he'd never be able to pay her at all. And, now what had he been complaining about? Oh yes. It had all gone wrong when those bloody stars, that now he had to supervise every day, changed and R'lyeh sank beneath the sea and the boss had presented him with a new contract with the 'ravening and eating things' clause struck out and replaced by 'overseeing the proper functioning of the cosmos'. It's not as if he even cared about the proper functioning of the cosmos. As far as he could see, it could be rather amusing if, for once, a really big star didn't go nova and then turn into a black hole, but just kept on burning for ever, but when he'd submitted the memo it had been returned with 'might upset the natives' stamped across it. Which was ridiculous, he thought. Surely the whole point of the Great Old Ones, if so disparate a band of former trouble-causers could be said to have a point, was striking abject terror into the natives. But that was the old days, when the stars were right. Now the stars were wrong, and Great Cthulhu had depression, acid stomach and an indefinable pain in his back, and took more pills per day than he had used to eat humans.

  And that was another thing. His fellow Great Old Ones, Dagon, Shub Niggurath, but unfortunately not the strangely absent Hastur, who had always been his particular friend, dealt with the problem of hating their job by going down the pub every evening after work and getting hammered. But he had been told in no uncertain terms that given the weird cocktail of drugs he was taking, any alcohol would be death. And though Cthulhu was depressed, he wasn't yet that depressed, and, though he had tried really hard, the only thing that matching Dagon pint-for-pint with orange juice had done for him was kept him up all night with terrible indigestion. So his basic plan for every evening was to come home, put a human flesh substitute (quorn for the discerning cannibal) ready meal in the microwave and consume it while watching the television, in front of which he eventually fell asleep, waking the next morning with the indefinable pain in his back not so indefinable for the moment. He had fallen into such depths of despondency that he actually looked forward to the sheer mindless tedium of mainstream television, he who had frequented the art-house cinemas in his youth (humans tasted better flavoured with garlic), and so he was now watching one of his favourite shows: the two fungi. Or at least, he was trying to watch it, because he was being distracted. And though he knew he should be happy for something to distract him, so ingrained was his routine that he resented any interference with it, especially interference that said:

  'Oh daddy, I just don't know what to do,' wailed a voice which, Cthulhu reflected, might have been attractive had its owner not decided to cry forth her woe to the very stars which, he reflected again, would probably send him a damned memo about it causing them to vibrate, leading to magnetic storms, sunspots and premature red-giant-hood.

  Cthulhu, in his television watching years, had become a fan of the golden age of Hollywood, and did spend quite a lot of time, well pretty nearly all the time she was with him, to be honest, comparing his daughter to one of another star, almost entirely to her disadvantage. He had long since given up hoping that she might model herself on Katharine Hepburn, if only because he simply couldn't imagine the divine Kate saying,

  'Are you listening daddy?' Well, she might have said that, but she certainly wouldn't have followed up with, 'How am I going to find a man who can satisfy me?' Bacall was out because of the shrill thing, plus his daughter was a dumb as dumb could be, added to which, though, as he could tell from the evidence which was, he felt, rather too thoroughly laid out for his examination, she was a sexpot, correction, a sexpot if you happened to be a human, which he wasn't, and in fact the sight of those weird globular protuberances and that ghastly tapering and bulging around her middle, which she, for some reason, chose to accentuate by wearing something he had heard called a corset, though he had always thought of it as underwear, anyway, the sight of all that nearly made him bring back his dinner for the second time of asking. So, if you liked that sort of thing, which Cthulhu emphatically did not, she was a sexy little bit, but, well, not a very sophisticated sexy little bit. Would Marilyn Monroe have worn her underwear on the outside? No. Would Carole Lombard have worn a dress so low cut it was amazing that the vee down the front of the bodice didn't meet the vee coming up the front of the skirt and cause it to fall apart? She would not. They had class. And brains. Realising that he was scraping the barrel, Cthulhu had hoped for the best, and tried to convince himself that he might be able to persuade his daughter to emulate Ginger Rogers. But then he had seen her dance. And, what's more, deeply unsophisticated and uninhibited though Miss Rogers may have been, even she would never have said, 'Oh daddy, how am I ever going to have an orgasm when all the men I meet die of heart-attacks after the first hour-and-a-half?' Cthulhu had never met Ginger Rogers. The mere news that a fifty-foot high green squid-monster was coming in her direction had sent her hotfoot to another continent (whereas Katharine Hepburn had invited him to dinner, spent the night beforehand robbing a morgue, so as to have some real human flesh to serve him, and had sent him a Walpurgisnacht card every year; in fact she still did, in spite of being dead). But he suspected that even she would not be quite that crass. Which meant that he had to face the facts. His daughter was a highly pneumatic, curvaceous, bubble-headed, sex-crazed blonde who couldn’t sing. Which meant she was Miss Piggy. Which was a terrible thing for a father to have to face, but face it he did. Though, he couldn’t help thinking, it would be a relief if she did something normal like falling in love with a giant frog, instead of going round saying, 'Oh why can't I find a man who can satisfy me? Can you find me a man who can satisfy me, daddy, you must know hundreds?' Oh dear, it was time to join in the conversation.

  'Well, my dear, technically I have know many men. Thousands, in fact. But only very briefly. I never really bothered myself about any of their qualities other than how much meat they had on them.'

  'Yes, but daddy, I don't eat people. At least not often. At least, only in ethnic restaurants. If I found a man who could give me an orgasm, why, I would never even consider harming something so precious. Though I might sacrifice him to Yog Sothoth. Do you think Granddad Yoggie would like that?'

  'If I found a man I loved, I'd treasure him forever.'r />
  'Shut up. Would Granddad Yoggie like a sacrifice do you think? In fact, would sacrificing some man to him make him give me an orgasm?'

  'Most likely not, my dear,' said Cthulhu, trying to think of a tactful way of saying that Yog Sothoth so feared his grand-daughter that he had been known to go and hide in the seventeenth dimension if he heard she was coming to see him. 'You see, these last few millennia, he's lost all interest in people. He leaves that sort of thing to Azathoth nowadays.'

  'But Uncle Azzie is bonkers.'

  'True beauty is of the soul, it requires not the intellect.'

  'Shut up. So I can hardly go to him and ask him for an orgasm. Even if I managed to get him to understand what an orgasm was, which is doubtful, he'd probably give it to someone else by mistake. Daddy?'

  'Yes,' said Cthulhu cautiously, only too aware that at any moment she might ask him to give her an orgasm, and fearing both the prospect of having to admit to his loving daughter that there were some things that even he couldn't do, but more significantly, that he found her so hideous that he would sooner live through the Albigensian Crusade again than even touch her. But no, she was, for now at least, not about to suggest a spot of tentacular miscegenation. Instead, she said,

  'Do you think I might have an orgasm if I made love with girls? I've done it once or twice, and it was more fun than with men, so perhaps if I didn't kick them out when they asked me to return the favour, but let things build to a climax, I might.'

  'I really don't know, my dear. You must understand that as I am one of a kind, the concept of sexual reproduction is alien to me, let alone the many unusual variants that you humans come up with.'

  'Love is between man and woman. Only that can be true love as ordained by God.'

  'Oh shut up. You know perfectly well that the only God we have round here is so dumb he probably doesn’t realise that there are such things as men and women. He probably thinks we're a kind of teapot.'

  'I'm afraid Unity has a point, Nina,' said Cthulhu, wishing for the thousandth time that the interactions between his genes and those of the woman he had got Herbert West to inseminate for him, had not been so, well, peculiar. The globular things on the front he could live with at a pinch, though he'd prefer it if they were covered up, but the mysterious disembodied voice that followed her around everywhere and insisted on being called Nina? Cthulhu didn’t have a disembodied voice (apart from that time Nyarlathotep had ordained that all of the Great Old Ones should be accompanied by a spirit that repeated ‘Remember, thou art immortal’ as a way of reminding them of their new contractual terms and conditions). The woman had, he had been assured, not had a disembodied voice. Even Herbert West, though he often spoke to invisible people, had never knowingly received a reply, not that that was strictly relevant, even if it had turned out later that he paid the woman to sleep with him, because no woman would voluntarily subject herself to the stench of chloroform and partly decomposed corpses that followed poor Herbert wherever he went. Cthulhu set aside his dark suspicions as to who else's DNA had gone into that egg along with his own, and tried to reason with what was, if possible, the less favourite of his two semi-daughters. 'You see, this universe is technically speaking controlled by Azathoth, that's right, Uncle Azzie, but as he's totally mindless, he has to have other people to run it for him. Which is what we Elder Races do. And, to be honest with you, Nina, none of us could care less what you humans get up to so long as you don't annoy us too much and let us eat you every now and then. Or borrow your brains, if it's the Fungi we're talking about. So if Unity wants to have sex with women, why shouldn't she?'

  'But there must be standards,' said Nina. 'And while we're on the subject, why is wearing that immodest dress? True religion demands chastity and modesty, not going round showing everything you've got to everyone, and then doing things I won't even speak of with them afterwards.' Cthulhu was beginning to lose his temper. He often did when dealing with Nina. While Unity was simply annoying and worrying, in a 'what will she do next?' kind of way, at least she lived in the real world. Cthulhu wasn't sure what universe Nina inhabited, but it wasn't the same one that he did, and he wasn't entirely convinced that it was one that Yog Sothoth knew about: she seemed to be certain that there were rules and standards and norms and conventions that were somehow inherent in the structure of space and time, while in fact all there was was a crawling chaos. Cthulhu's old friend Aleister Crowley had put it very well when he had said 'Do what you will is the whole of the law', because it was true. True religion, as far as Cthulhu was concerned, meant not interfering and making absolutely sure that the goat you were about to tuck into was not one of Shub Niggurath's thousands of offspring, because if it was then the rest of your life was going to be very exciting, if short.

  Ignoring his own personal views on aesthetics, Cthulhu had to assume, from the avidity with which men and women sought to couple with Unity, despite the complication of having to put up with Nina trying to persuade them that what they were doing was sinful, that his daughter was, to use the vernacular, a bit of all right. And Unity's dress-sense must be okay, at least by human standards, given how many magazines kept on voting her best-dressed woman of the year, and how depressingly often she turned up on the television showing off some fresh bosom-baring creation. So, his sympathies, such as they were, were all with Unity on this one, especially as it was, after all, Nina, and not Unity, who was the disembodied voice, and Unity, and not Nina, who actually controlled the body. So he proceeded to say, as diplomatically as he could.

  'Nina, my child, you have to accept that the body is Unity’s. You’re just a, a, a . . .'

  'A parasite,' burst in Unity. 'You live off me. You follow me around. I take you places. I even take you to church, though I have no idea why. I keep on telling you that Jesus was Nyarlathotep having a joke, but will you listen? No. It's my body, and I'll do what I want with it. And what I want, what I want so badly it hurts deep inside here,' her voice began to shake as she pointed at a small dimple in her amply exposed flesh, whose purpose Herbert West had tried to explain to Cthulhu, but had given up, leaving the Great Old One with the vague notion that it was some kind of spigot for decanting blood, should you ever need to sacrifice in a hurry, 'What I want is an orgasm. Is that too much to ask? All around me men and women in their millions are having orgasms. My lovers boast of how many orgasms they've had and how many their partners have. But never me. I'm the sexiest woman alive, but I might as well be a virgin for all the good it's done me.' She started to cry, and while Cthulhu tried to think of a way of comforting her without having to touch her, Nina, who had no scruples at all when it came to upbraiding sinners, burst in and said,

  'Well, what do you expect? It's a punishment for your loose life. Now, I don't know anything about orgasms, but I do know that the mystery of love, and its greatest joy are reserved for those who have been joined in a bond of holy wedlock. Only if God approves can the act be joyful, but your acts are foul in the eyes of God, so . . .' Well that got Unity going all right. She stopped crying and said,

  'Right, that does it. Daddy? Do you know how to perform an exorcism?' Cthulhu considered.

  'Well, I don't myself,' he said, ‘I’m generally the cause of demonic possession, not its cure. But if you feel like having a go at the Elder Things, it's the sort of useless thing they would know about.'

  'Father,' said Unity firmly.

  'Yes?'

  'I am not going to sleep with a plant with delusions of grandeur that looks like a giant starfish. So you can forget that right now.' Cthulhu was appalled.

  'My dear, I didn't mean that at all. I meant that if you politely explained that you wanted an exorcism, then . . .'

  'Oh I see. But what's the use,' she became lachrymose again. 'I have the body of a goddess – one of the good goddesses, not Auntie Shubbie – but I have the soul of a nun.'

  'That,' said Nina, 'Is the first sensible thing you've ever said. Let us to a nunnery!'

  'What, you mean to fuck all th
e nuns?'

  'No! For a life of quiet contemplation. Where we can eternally thank God for having saved us from unholy ways, and where he will reward us by giving us life eternal.' Cthulhu decided to step in before Unity revived the exorcism idea.

  ‘Well, as far as I know, you’re immortal, or so Herbert says. Then again, Herbert told me that television would never catch on, so perhaps not. But like I said, Azathoth really doesn't care. In fact, he can't care. Not enough brain cells. In many ways he reminds me of a jellyfish – bright enough to open his mouth when he sees food and that's about it.'

  'But he is not the true Lord.'

  'Well no, of course Yog Sothoth is in charge of the multiverse, but when the stars changed, and R'lyeh sank beneath the waves he decided to give up on this universe and the whole being the gate and the key thing, and took to reading books about epistemology instead. I tried one of them once. All about whether 'rabbit' means rabbit, which is obvious, I mean, of course it doesn't: it's the name of the Mistress of the Killer Whales. But there you go. So, no, sorry, no God. Just me, Dagon and Shub Niggurath. Oh, and Hastur, wherever he's got to. Haven't seen him for years.'

  Nina was getting ready to have a good whimper, when suddenly Unity said,

  'Wait Daddy, something's happening.' Which it was. Ripples were moving back and forth across her flesh globes, causing them to undulate in a fashion that, to Cthulhu's eye, made them look even more unattractive than usual. Averting his eyes, he said,