Joey Krantz appeared on the other side of the counter to unload some dirty glasses and trickle a fistful of coins for him. Nate thanked him with a nod, put off by the grin on Joey’s face, and continued into the phone: “No, Acker. I don’t remember the first name. Wilmarth or something ridiculous like that.”
Joey marched away with a tray, left a couple of beers along the way, and went on to drop the lunch special and the straight whiskey at the detectives’ table by the window, where their Weimaraner sat tall on the seat, scouting other people’s plates with the loftiness of a Zagat critic.
“Here we are—rice and beans,” Joey announced, serving the lunch special for Kerri while she helped herself to the whiskey from his tray. “Anything else?”
“Thanks,” she said, vaguely sketching a smile. “We’re fine.”
Andy, sitting across from Kerri, waited until Joey had drifted away before resuming the pep talk.
“So, anyway, I think we’re doing fine,” she said, while Kerri gulped down the whiskey with barely a chance for it to graze her tongue. “I mean, we got here twenty-four hours ago and look where we are now.”
“Nearing a nervous breakdown?”
“Yeah, that too, but…with what we gathered from Dunia, and Copperseed, and the dissection, we made some progress.”
“No, we didn’t. All we did was obey an anonymous message, almost get killed by a lake creature, and then poke at its carcass with a stick.” She held the empty glass. “I need another one. And a cigarette.”
Andy chose to adjourn the motivational talk and stayed silent, watching Kerri sit curled up in the booth nibbling at her nails, ignoring the steaming food Andy had ordered for her, much to Tim’s wide-eyed indignation.
Nate rejoined after five minutes. He addressed Kerri: “How do you spell Thtaggoa? T-h-t?”
“I don’t know, Nate; it was Copperseed speaking; there were no cheerleaders to spell it.”
“Right. Look, I just talked to Professor Acker in Arkham.”
“Is he your shrink?” Andy asked.
“No, he’s not staff, he’s one of the nutjobs.” He spread out the notes he’d scribbled on napkins over the table. “He used to teach anthropology; he’s familiar with all this stuff, and he knows the name. This thing, Thtaggoa, and the lake creatures; they exist. I mean, they exist in literature.”
“Flying monkeys exist in literature, Nate,” Kerri said. “Horror writers who get laid exist in literature.”
“Just fucking listen for a second, okay?!” he shouted, bringing this and two conversations in other booths to a stop.
Tim raised an eyebrow disapprovingly. Nate went on, this time below the background of Top 40 pop hits.
“We just killed something none of us, possibly no one outside mental hospitals, believed to be real. You just spent an hour examining its corpse; is it such a damn stretch to accept there might be other things out there?”
“Okay, Nate,” Andy soothed him. “Go on. We’re listening.”
Nate swallowed, leaned closer, and lowered his voice a little more, down to Italian job planning volume.
“Okay. There is a sort of literature cycle, a loose collection of texts written in different countries and eras, going as far back as Gilgamesh times, that recounts events that supposedly took place before recorded history began, about races that roamed the world and calamities that occurred before the dawn of men. That’s not uncommon; all civilizations have their genesis myths; what’s uncanny is that many of these works mention the same fallen gods and sacred places by name, both the ancient sources from the Fertile Crescent and the modern ones written by rogue alchemists, accused sorcerers, demon worshippers, and plain madmen. And in these sources, something called Thtaggoa exists. And a race of amphibian monsters called the spawn of Thtaggoa exists.”
He exhaled, amazed to have made it this far without an interruption. The frown on the girls’ faces could pass for belief.
“Have you read these texts?” Kerri asked.
“No. I tried, but the older ones require fluency in Koine Greek or Uto-Aztecan languages, and others only exist in a few private collections. Too much of it was destroyed for being ‘too disturbing,’?” he fingerquoted. “But at the turn of the century, when the occult fad was in vogue, several high fantasy and horror authors in America and Europe discovered this material while searching for obscure mythological references they could use. They borrowed the names and some fragments, either verbatim or wildly distorted. Then others came along and built upon those foundations, and thus tidbits of mythical history ended up in pulp paperbacks.”
“But that’s exactly what you used to read,” Andy said. A second later she noticed the loose ends she was supposed to tie.
“That’s why you read Cannibal Nymphs from Pluto and Conan in the Desert of Shub-Niggurath?” Kerri asked.
“Indirectly, yes,” Nate answered. “In Debo?n Mansion I saw a lot of those books. I didn’t know back then, but they were extremely rare, practically mythical, all blacklisted: owning such a collection would have put you in a bonfire not two hundred years ago. So while I was there I read names, memorized words. Later, when I returned home after that summer, and we’d caught Wickley and everything was supposed to be right, but it wasn’t, I hit the library. Because that’s what you would have done,” he said to Kerri. “And you’re the smart one. So research led me to Victorian occultists who mentioned this material, and Gothic authors who quoted it for the sake of verisimilitude, and pulp writers who quoted the Gothics, and comics based on the pulp stories, and video games based on the comics, and so on. There is quite a subculture around the whole thing—many aficionados trying to piece it all together. Also, in the end I developed a taste for the stuff,” he admitted, glancing away.
Tim yawned and laid his head on the table, wishing someone would remember him, or the lunch special, or ideally both.
“God.” Kerri squinted at her cousin like she would at a door in her house she had never noticed. “I always thought you just…shut yourself in your Dungeons and Dragons world because that was your way to cope.”
“It was,” he said. “Kerri, all we do is try to cope. I coped by studying it. Like when you were six and didn’t like bugs, so you read everything there was about bugs and now you’re a biologist. I did the same.”
“I didn’t cope with Sleepy Lake that way,” Kerri said. “I just ran away.”
“I ran away too,” he tried to comfort her. “It’s one thing to study it; it’s another thing to be on the same coast with it. Look, I’m just trying to apply reason here: according to Copperseed, the Walla Walla have a story about the things in Sleepy Lake featuring Thtaggoa. And I am telling you that Thtaggoa also appears in short stories by Bob Howard, in a forbidden book by a Swiss monk from the seventeenth century, and in a Mayan crypt in Palenque.”