The Daughter of the Night Read online

  'It's a good thing you said man,' said Shub Niggurath, as the regulars applauded dutifully, for no-one wants to be turned into fish-food, and under the right circumstances they could have had a good bicker about that – after all they had before, many, many times – but this time was different. Dagon had a bee in his bonnet, a burrower beneath in his porridge, and was on a mission from – well, himself presumably. So he dismissed this sally and said,

  'So, anyway, children is what you do, right? And I don't have children, but I've got the Deep Ones, Azathoth preserve me,' he sighed at the thought of his terribly over-enthusiastic underlings. He kept on telling them that they wouldn't enjoy going up onto dry land or mating with humans, but that never seemed to stop them. Why did they have to be so stupid? And so very, very earnest in their unaccountable to desire to conquer regions that could be of no earthly use to them, given that they tended not to be covered in water. Now Cthulhu had it made, with the clever clogs, who were never happier than having a nice think about some problem so abstract and abstruse that probably the only other people who understood, or cared, what it was they wrote about in their learned journals were the Great Race of Yith, and they, he reflected sourly, were interested in everything. If you're an Ocean God, Dagon, why didn't you stay in R'lyeh when it sank, Dagon? Why is your house air-conditioned and dehumidified, Dagon? But Dagon, why did you agree to become the Ocean God if you're hydrophobic? And so on and so forth. Bloody nosey-parkers. He felt so aggrieved that he was moved to enact another of those exciting conversational shifts, and said, 'Bloody know-alls,' with considerable feeling. Shub Niggurath, who was, for some reason she couldn't quite put a finger on, not feeling at her most acute, wasn't up to telepathy, so she chose to take offence and said,

  'I resent that. My children are all perfectly respectably young Star-Goats and nobody ever accused goats of being know-alls. Eat-alls, yes, but your basic goat doesn't really care about much apart from what it's going to eat next. It's a, a, you know, that thing about survival of the fritters.'

  'Fritters? Here I am complaining about the bloody Yithians and you're talking about food? Anyway, fried stuff gives me indigestion.'

  'Ha, you're getting more and more like Cthulhu every day. Mark my – why did I just spill my drink – no don't answer that it was a rhetor . . . rhetor . . . thing question. Where was I? Oh yes. Mark my words, that's it, if you don't stop getting indigestion and start eating deep-fried squid, you'll end up spending your evenings watching Strictly Come De-braining. Want another?'

  'Why not? But I think that's a bit tactless of you. I mean, poor old Cthulhu's always been a bit sensitive about his relatives. Wouldn't want his friends to go eating them. Not nice. Not that they are his relatives, really, of course. It's more convergent, convergent wossname. Thing. That's it. You know what I mean.'

  'No, not really. Unless it's something about geometry. I leave that stuff to the Elder Things. Here's your drink.'

  'Thanks. But you know what?'

  'I do wish you'd stop saying that. Couldn't you say something, like,' she pondered for a moment then said, 'The depths of the ocean are as black as the stygian depths of Great Cthulhu's soul.' That is, if he had one. That'd be much more interesting than,' she made a not very successful attempt to imitate Dagon '”You know what?” See what I mean? It's boring, boring, boring. What's this drink I ordered? It tastes filthy.'

  'Well pardon me, because I'm going to tell you anyway. What I don't get is, millions of years, old Cthulhu's been happy as a cephalopod being the only one of his kind, with nothing but his cultists to keep him company. And then, and then, and then, out of the blue he goes and gets himself a daughter. And not another giant squid thing, oh no, but a little slip of a girl with all those strange bulges and bendy bits and . . .'

  'Hello Auntie Shubbie! Hello Uncle Dagon!' said a terribly familiar voice and the two of them froze before, very, very slowly, turning around to see if the terrible thing they feared had indeed come to pass. It had. There, at the entrance to the bar, waving madly and wearing a happy smile, was the subject of their conversation. Shub Niggurath was the first to find voice: after taking a fortifying swig of the whatever it was and grimacing at the awful taste, she said,

  'Oh my God, isn't it disgusting? Will you look at those weird hemispheres she's got stuck on her front. I hate to think what they're for, but they look . . .'

  'Yes, they are lovely, aren't they?' said Unity. 'I'm ever so proud of them. Loads of people say they should be counted as the eighth wonder of the world. Which is why I like to show them off to everyone. Who am I to deprive people of the sight of them? What I say is, if I can bring a bit of joy into people's lives by wearing low-cut dresses, not to mention make even more people want to sleep with me, which must improve my chance of having an orgasm, mustn't it, Auntie Shubbie? Where was I?' Shub Niggurath was too drunk for complex sentences like that – she'd lost track of things round about the eighth wonder of the world. And Dagon was still incapable of speech, lost in horrified contemplation of what forcibly reminded him of giant sea urchins – a breed of animal he had never been very fond of. Only not so knobbly. And a disgusting pinkish white instead of good, healthy green. So, faced with a silence which she, with her enormous powers of empathy once more on display, took as only a fitting response to suddenly coming face-to-body with the second sexiest thing in the multiverse after Ga!binga, Queen of the Ant People of the back garden of 7, Mayflower Avenue, Hemel Hempstead, she said, as she undulated across the bar towards them,

  'So how do you like my dress?' A quick check having shown that Dagon was still out of it, Shub Niggurath realised that it was up to her to try to balance her usual scrupulous honesty against the risk of annoying Great Cthulhu's daughter, something which could carry a penalty ranging from the minor inconvenience of Cthulhu eating her, all the way up to having the girl turn into a soggy, tearful mess and then being forced to spend hours (a) making up implausible compliments, (b) listening to her tearful confidences about her hopes and fears in life, (c) having to listen to a blow-by-blow account of all the recent occasions on which she had almost, but not quite, had an orgasm: once had been quite enough. So, choosing her words with care, she said,

  'It's very, it's very, er, there isn't very much of it, is there?'

  'No, there isn't, is there?' said Unity happily. 'Backless, strapless and more or less frontless. It covers just enough to stop me from getting arrested, but it lets everyone know what I've got to offer. Which is loads.'

  'Mindless copulation is nothing. Does it lead to spiritual enrichment? Does it lead to truth? And anyway, you always get rid of them afterwards. It's very hard for me to meet a nice man I can love if within fifteen minutes of saying hello you're fornicating with them and then throwing them away. You might think of me sometimes. That's all I ask.'

  'Oh shut up, Nina. All I ask is an orgasm. And a drink. Uncle Dagon, would you like to buy me a drink?'

  Dagon shuddered and brought himself back from the dark place to face the objective fact that yes, she was there, along with her non-knobbly giant sea-urchins, and there was nothing he could do about it. But as he was not entirely up to speed on the recent history of the conversation, he said what had been very much on his mind, which was,

  'How does it stay up?'

  'What?' said Unity, 'I was asking you for a drink.'

  'That thing you're wearing. How does it stay up? There's no straps to pull it up. There's no back or sides to hold it up. It should fall off and leave you looking even more rep . . .'

  ' . . . rehensibly lovely,' put in Shub Niggurath hastily, anxious to avoid the whole upsetting the girl thing for the reasons already stated. But now she was interested, so she said, 'So what is holding it on, then? Is it magic?' Unity laughed and said,

  'Everyone thinks that. No, it's very clever. I got the Elder Thing to make some fabric that clings to my skin, but comes away if I pull at it. Would you like me to show you?'

  'No!' shouted Dagon, and Shub Niggurath, always mindf
ul of the threat of blubbing, said,

  'Oh no, you're so, er, beautiful that even with your dress on it's almost too much to bear.' Unity smiled and said,

  'Oh that's sweet. It's a great dress. It clings like anything, and it's skin-tight, so you can see all my curves and things and . . .'

  'We know,' said Dagon hollowly. Choosing to take this as a compliment, Unity continued,

  'Of course I couldn't tell the Elder Things I wanted it for a dress. Nowhere nearly high-minded enough.'

  'So what did you say?' said Shub Niggurath, interested despite herself.

  'Oh, that I wanted to make a special bag to put sacrifices in that they couldn't get out of. But anyway,' she shook herself, causing Dagon once again to fall into the put of despair at the sight of the sympathetic vibrations that passed across her body, 'Do you really think I'm lovely and beautiful and all that stuff you said, Auntie Shubbie?'

  'Why yes,' said Shub Niggurath cautiously. Cautiously, because she wasn't entirely sure where thus was going, but as she couldn't see any harm in admitting to simple fact – not of course that the girl was lovely or beautiful, far from it, but it was undoubtedly true that Sub Niggurath had said those things, so that was all right – she decided to go with the flow for now. Unity brooded for a moment and said,

  'And do you think I'm sexy too?' Now that was a tough one. Shub Niggurath was to all intents and purposes a goat. A supernatural goat with immense powers, reproductive and otherwise, but basically, when push came to shove, an alcoholic goat. Which meant that she was interested in five things: food, other goats, alcohol, alcohol and more alcohol. And the girl wasn't another goat, alcoholic or otherwise: even in her state of advanced inebriation Shub Niggurath was quite clear about that. And though she was technically speaking food, there was the minor fact that she would never hear the last of it from Cthulhu if she ate his daughter, plus the girl was younger, not drunk, and had faster reflexes, so if Shub Niggurath did try to eat her, there was a reasonable chance that she might end up dead. Which struck her as being a really bad idea. All of which went to show that, in as far as 'sexy' meant anything to a lady goat, to whom it was basically a synonym for 'gentleman goat', the girl was not sexy. But Shub Niggurath had been around humans long enough to know that they valued young women who undulated like the rolling hills and had bits shaped like very funny mountains, and given that she desperately wanted to avoid the attack of the tearful woman, she said,

  'Well, I suppose so, yes. You are rather sexy, aren't you?' Unity coloured and looked at the floor, where one of her feet was drawing a proof of Pythagoras' theorem.

  'In that case,' she said, 'I was only saying to Daddy just now that if I'm ever going to have an orgasm I need to broaden my horizons, do things I've never done before, drink pleasure's cup to the bottom. And I've never had a goat before. Well, I have to eat, but not to have sex with. So, Auntie Shubbie, do you want to make love with me?'

  There were two shrieks and a sound of shattering glass. Taking them in order, Nina had screamed and then, at the top of her voice, said,

  'Bestiality! You're proposing bestiality? I won't have it. It's my body too, whatever you say, and I will not let you pollute it!' Next in order came Shub Niggurath's horrified bleat as she saw, too late, the horror she had opened herself up to. And the shattering glass was that which had contained Shub Niggurath's drink, which she had been raising to her lips when she received this foul proposition. Unfortunately for her, Unity took the bleat and the dropping the glass as evidence of excitement, not horror, and moved up to the terrified goat thing and started to rub her body up against her, saying,

  'Ooh, yes, that's good. Do you want to take me here, or shall we go somewhere more private?' Shub Niggurath, sobered and energised by the terrible threat, thought faster than she had since the day one never to be forgiven Turk had invented the shish-kebab. Very quickly she pushed her way past the disgusting human body, suppressing her desire to gag, while babbling,

  'Terribly sorry, but I've just remembered I've got to take some of the kids to see an execution. They've been looking forward to it for weeks, and though I'd love to make love with you, I can't disappoint them, can I?'

  'Well, how about tomorrow?' said Unity, disappointed at losing her prey.

  'Tomorrow? Why not tomorrow? Because, tomorrow I'm being initiated as a member of a secret society. It was founded by a mad robot and its goal is to kill all humans, so members have to kill every human they meet. And I'd hate to have to kill you my dear, so I'm afraid this is goodbyeeee!' with which she pelted through the door, leaving a frustrated Unity, a (in so far as anyone could tell) relieved Nina and Dagon, to whom Unity turned and said,

  'Well, Uncle Dagon . . .' Well, that got him going at last.

  'No, girlie,' he said, 'I won't make love with you. Never, never, never. Is that clear?'

  'My name is Unity,' she said icily, 'And anyway, I don't like fish. So even if fucking you was the only way I could get to have an orgasm, I still wouldn't. Bastard.'

  ‘Unity's a stupid name. I told your father he should have called you Cthulhette. It's nice. Unlike you.’

  'Why thank you. I find your suggestion that I'm no more than a copy of Daddy insulting. And it doesn't reflect that fact that, much though I regret it, I have this thing following me around and claiming to be some kind of lodger. I am Unity, because I'm the one, I'm the real me, she's just a hanger on. And she calls herself Nina, for reasons that I just don't understand, but most likely because . . .'

  'It's pretty. It suits my personality. Sweet and submissive.'

  'Or, as I was going to say, but less graphically, because she's a moron. So up yours Uncle Dagon. If you won't fuck me that's your loss, but at least you can buy me a drink.' So with relations established on their usual friendly basis, Dagon said,

  'What are you having?'

  'Oh, I thought you'd never ask. A gin and tonic, please. Make it a double.'

  'And a small sherry.' Dagon raised the scaly patch over one of his eyes,

  'Sherry? How is she going to drink it, not to mention, I thought she disapproved of alcohol. What's she trying to do, get drunk, meet guys and get laid, 'cos if so, unless she's loosened up other standards, she's in trouble, as I'm the closest thing to human there is in here.' Unity didn't seem impressed. She drew herself up to her full height, stuck out the flesh globes, to Dagon's astonishment, as he wouldn't have thought it possible, even further, and said,

  'May I point out that I am human? Sure, I have,' in a sudden tone of loathing, 'her, but surely you can see that I am all woman. I can show you all of the woman if you don't believe me.' She made as if to remove her second skin, but Dagon, who was quite happy being unable to focus on her and intended to stay that way, even if he did end up with another case of acute alcohol poisoning, feared that much as he had drunk, there was no drink, no matter how potent, that could blot from his mind the sight of Unity in the altogether. Fish, he reflected, looked perfectly okay nude, as, for that matter, did goats and giant green squid things. But humans: Unity as minimally clothed as she was was an outrage against all that was beautiful; unclad she could well make the stars, if not go wrong, as they were already, almost certainly go into such a terminal decline that the chances of their ever going right again would diminish from merely unlikely to totally impossible, meaning that he, Cthulhu, Shubbie and Hastur, wherever he had got to, would never go forth ravening. With which, his line of thought was broken, for something like an earthquake seemed to have broken out about two-thirds of the way up Unity’s front. Which was strange, as they usually happened on the ocean floor, in Dagon's experience, and were quite large-scale affairs. One localised to a pseudo-human's bumpy bits was definitely unexpected. He was about to comment on it when Unity excitedly said,

  'Ooh, it's happening again. That means I must be getting closer to an orgasm! What did you do, Uncle Dagon? Were you thinking of taking my beautiful naked body in your scaly arms and then thrusting passionately with . . . with,' she looked, puzzle
d, at the total absence of any dangly bits anywhere on Dagon's entirely exposed anatomy, and continued, 'With whatever it is you use to make . . . Uncle Dagon, are you sure you're a boy?'

  'Yes, my dear,' he said, not knowing whether to be glad at the though that at least he knew what tonight's nightmare was going to be about (making a pleasant change from dreaming that Cthulhu had turned on the Elder Races, was eating them one by one, and had saved him for last), or to be even gladder that Unity seemed to have managed to steer the conversation, all on her own, away from such frightful topics as her getting naked. Which reminded him, she had asked him a question. He took a draw at his beer, looked owlishly at Unity as if wondering how he had ever got to the state where he had to talk to well-fleshed humans as opposed to eat them, and said, 'Well, you see, the thing is, the thing is, the thing is, I may look like you. Well, not like you, because I don't have those . . .' he gestured vaguely, not having the words to adequately describe her figure, 'lumps and bumps, thank goodness.' Unity was looking displeased, so he rushed on before she could interrupt him, 'But basically, I'm a fish. And fish don't do all that weird, sick stuff you humans get up to. We just release our roes and milt into the water and we're done.' Unity considered this for a moment, while Dagon drank some more beer.