Short Story Collection

Cthulhu on a Tricycle

Cthulhu looked three years old, and he was riding a tricycle.

Exactly three months ago, on a sunny April morning, his mother Bobbie Bungey had a strange cosmic dream before she woke up pregnant with a rapidly growing fetus in her belly. However it got there, she had no idea. The last time she had sexual relations was in January at her cousin's wedding with an inebriated individual by the name of Franky Frocatlev, whose face she couldn't remember (never mind how she met him or where he went since).

She tried getting rid of the fetus by taking a very hot bath and banging on her abdomen with both fists. When that didn't work, she tried suctioning it out with an inverted vacuum hose. No luck. Finally, she jumped off the roof of her loathsome unpainted wooden house that she had inherited from her long-dead parents. To her immense disappointment, instead of stalling the growth process, she only accelerated it, and upon landing on the bed of green, slimy vines below, with a stupendous cry and an unbearable pain in her pelvis, she ejected a hideous creature that plopped on the ground and with a rubbery squeak proceeded crawling to the pond where it dunked its octopus-like head and took great gulps of stale, cloudy water. At the sight of this horror, poor Bobbie fainted. When she came to, the sun has set, and the baby was gone.

She found it in the kitchen, eating something looking suspiciously like a cockroach. It didn't exactly chew it; it simply slurped it up between the many wriggling feelers that comprised its face. While she stood in the door, holding on to the jamb for dear life and contemplating what to do next, the baby opened the fridge, pulled out a styrofoam tray full of chicken breasts, ripped open the plastic wrap with one sharp claw, and happily devoured the contents, then mopped up the juice on the floor by sticking its face to the linoleum and swishing it around in circles, snuffling in content. Bobbie worked hard on keeping the contents of her stomach down, then made herself turn the thing over. It felt cold and scaly to touch.

"It's a boy," she said. She'd forgotten she had a voice.

"Cthulhu fhtagn," the boy squeaked in response, and burped. A foul stench of putrefaction washed over Bobbie's face. No matter. She had been through worse before, when Dana Anne locked her up in the mortuary and turned off the light, and she had to grope her way out, bumping into naked corpses and sinking her hands into the hollows and cavities of their stiffened flesh.

Holding Cthulhu at a safe distance, she washed him, wrapped him in a blanket, and put him to sleep, and for the next three months, after quitting her nursing school on the pretext of uterine cancer, which was not far from the truth, fed him raw meat in increasing quantities, all the while watching with astonishment the process of his rapid maturation. What normal babies took a year to do, Cthulhu mastered in days. Today he was three months old, though he looked all three years, and on the last of her savings Bobbie bought him a tricycle to keep him from chasing Jenkin, the fat family cat she also inherited from her long-dead parents, which, so far, had miraculously managed to escape Cthulhu's claws, unlike the rats, the squirrels and the birds in the backyard.

Jenkin had seemed to sense at once that the baby was evil. His fur stood on end the morning he returned to the house. He slunk into the bedroom, hopped on the bed and hissed at the ugly, stinky thing that prominently occupied his pillow. Cthulhu clearly didn't appreciate such a rude awakening and reached for Jenkin's tail just as Jenkin snapped his jaws around Cthulhu's wrist. The noise that escaped the baby's throat caused Bobbie's heart to implode and her stomach turn a full three hundred and sixty degrees in an instant. By the time she reached the bedroom, hastily wrapped in a robe, her hair dripping, her feet leaving puddles of sudsy water on the creaky parquet, Cthulhu victoriously held Jenkin in one fist, dangling him upside down by the tail. It was a game to him, and the cat's pitiful cries were discordant against the sound of Cthulhu's inhuman cackling. Bobbie had no choice but to watch the feelers close around Jenkin's head, then his fat furry body, and then the paws trying to claw their way out in Jenkin's feeble attempt to preserve his feline dignity and his short, comfortable life. The last to go was the tail: Cthulhu slurped it up like a long spaghetti, and when his dark, beady eyes shifted to Bobbie and took her in, she didn't like the hungry gleam in them. Bobbie took a step backward, at which Cthulhu laughed so hard his scaly skin bristled, his feelers smacked, and in a jet of fetid, gooey drool, he disgorged the poor creature, half-alive with fright, right at Bobbie's feet. Then he slid off the bed and crept on all fours to the kitchen, without a backward glance.