‘Fishsticks’
‘What?’
‘If they’re not an abomination, I don’t know what is!’
‘You can talk’.
‘This is dream-telepathy actually, most sensitive people would go mad.
Obviously, I’m not sitting next to you, I weigh over fifty tonnes for a start, these plastic chairs would never take it.’
‘I’m not sensitive, not the way you’re using the word anyway.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Aesthetic, fragile, vulnerable.’
The lone figure in the darkened booth, beneath the flickering half-broken neon, raises his strong carpenter’s hands: their nails are black and broken.
The blood at the wrists, long dried, barely stains the cuffs of his lumberjack shirt.
The waitress, passing, thinks, ‘Jesus, no tip there’. The abomination, reading her mind through the mile upon mile of space and the fathom upon fathom of inky
water, and the massed weight of masonry upon masonry that is all that prevents its mere presence blasting the surface layers of her psychology to a clean and
gleaning madness, laughs.
'That was cruel, she didn’t know’.
‘Cruelty is in the job description, or at least heartless inhumanity is. They’re not my species after all, these crawling chattering latter-day apes. When I rise, the thoughts I nurture here beneath the wave will splinter their skulls entire.’
‘Ah, well when.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Well, it’s a matter of eschatology isn’t it. If I could be vulgar, I’d say who comes first. You wait for “the stars to be right” I await My “Second Coming”
in glory. They can’t both be true.
‘You do know you’re mad, and not Jesus? Really?’
‘I do not. Indeed I know I am, and really you’re a part of my proof aren’t you.’
‘What?’
‘Why would Great Cthulhu bother to argue with a bearded bum in a diner, eh.
If you’re real, I’m sane, and if I’m sane I’m Jesus, and if you’re not real, then you’re a delusion of Satan sent to try me and I’m still Jesus.’
‘I’m a delusion of whom!’
‘Satan’
A noise from outside, and far away, across the beach and the ocean, as of a million octopuses thrashing.
'You mean illusion, if Satan had delusions he'd need therapy, and there's no such person.'
'Ah, you do not believe in a personal evil?'
'Yes, I do. Me! I and the Great Old Ones, the blind forces spawned in the vortices of Azathoth, the aimless gnawing chaos that makes all things only to crush them randomly, and remorselessly. Your 'Satan' of the witch cults was but a Mask of Nyarlathotep: one of the thousand forms of the trickster mind, that darts as a messenger from the blind idiot God of the Void.'
'Your problem is that you believe in nothing higher than yourselves. Now if you could only put your faith in Me. Set aside your hatred, abandon these desires
that demand only destruction. Perhaps your stars would come right sooner for a right purpose. Come now, it is simple to pray to me. A child could do it.
'You are a dust mote preaching to a Leviathan, I roar the secret name of Azathoth and you are scattered to the winds.'
'The secret name of Azathoth, is Satan, he is fallen from the service of the Father, and I who sit at His right hand, may bind and pardon in His name. Do not
fear Azathoth but God.
'You sit in a Diner. You're not at the Right Hand of anyone.'
'The man over there in the green hat?'
'THE MAN OVER THERE IN THE GREEN HAT IS NOT GOD THE FATHER!'
'I know that.'
'HE SMELLS!'
'I do not hold that cleanliness is necessarily next to godliness although some have.'
'But you accept he is not the Father, so you are not with the Father'.
'Yes, I am. I ascended into Heaven and sit at the Right Hand of the Father, and will come again in Glory to judge the Living and the Dead, and of my Kingdom
there will be no end, and yet I am also with you always until the end of the Eon. This form, like the Holy Spirit is truly me, and yet it is not the form I
will wear in judgement.'
'When with strange eons, even Death may die?'
'There are some similarities between your mythos and Mine, except that Mine is true, that is.'
'And what is truth?'
'I've heard that one before, you couldn't say it in Latin could you, because then it makes a rather neat anagram with 'It is the man before you'. Very Gnostic
that one.’
‘So pending your rise in glory, you - what? - wander about in an old lumberjack shirt and blue jeans with your folksy beard?’
‘It’s a myth they have in the backcountry. The man who comes and helps and asks no reward, but a tip of the hat to the Lord. He works as a carpenter and
carries his own tools, and stands exactly six feet high. A true God may work through a myth, and in doing so redeem it. All that is believed of me that
is Good, I will make true.’
‘And a stumble-bum may get delusions of grandeur wider than the rivers of bitumen that flow under the grand bridges of Yuggoth. Don’t think you’ve got me
fooled. I heard the news last night, oh boy. The local circus has lost a big cat hasn’t it? Your going to wind me up with this ridiculous charade until
finally wild beasts come and lick your hands and you turn your face in mockery to the bloody moon. Its you isn’t it Nyarlathotep? True God, my
barnacle-encrusted bath-tub!’
‘No, I am not Nyarthlotep, I am who I say I am.’
[Is it Jesus or Nyarlathotep having a jape, will the waitress ever bring the waffles, how on earth am I going to end this?]
Simon BJ
No comments:
Post a Comment