“We are the chosen,” the man in the robe said. “What makes you so mirthful?”
“Hey, I’m only having the best time ever,” Lagrasse said. “This place is so interesting and now, with you guys here, it’s bound to get better. You’re a real trip. I like your robes.”
“So you have said,” the tall one responded, losing some of the deepness of his voice.
“Not exactly tropical wear,” Lagrasse added. “But nice. You sail all the way in from Idaho?”
The tall figure wiped his hidden face with his hand and it came back coated with sweat. “We are the Supplicants of Anarchy. We are the ones who have found the truth in the words of Lucre.”
Lagrasse’s attention wandered. He did a quick head-count and totaled nine survivors. Almost double the previous record.
“We worship the gods of the Necronomibok.”
That got Lagrasse’s attention. “The Necronomibok? Come on. You mean H. P. Lucre and all that stuff? I read those stories when I was a kid.”
The robed figure nodded as if his head were heavy stone. “We know the truth that is the Necronomibok.”
Lagrasse laughed. “All right! This is great! You guys really believe in that stuff?”
“It is truth, hidden in fiction.”
“Cool!” Lagrasse couldn’t be more pleased. Real wackos! What luck! In robes, no less, and trying to talk in real deep voices! This was going to be the most fun ever. “Wasn’t the Necronomibok just made up?” he teased.
“It is real.”
“I love those robes,” Lagrasse said. “Must be a lot cooler in Idaho than it is here.”
Rob Landsburg was getting very hot indeed in his Robe of Supplication, and he was distressed by all the deaths that accompanied their landing. He was also very annoyed by the frivolous man with the blood clot that covered half his head. “We are not from Idaho.”
“Says Idaho on your robe,” the strange man insisted.
“What?” Landsburg demanded, then snatched at the lapels of his robe and saw the words coming through the brown dye. Super Spuds From Friendly Idaho. Dammit, he had paid three bucks for that dye and it was already wearing off.
He couldn’t take all the scratching and sweating anymore, anyway. “Let us all disrobe,” he announced.
He was expecting resistance. They had all worked hard on their robes. Some were rich, dark velvet. Some were made from the denim of old blue jeans. All were dark brown in color. Somehow, it had never occurred to them that this was not practical worship wear in the equatorial Pacific. Now the robes came off in a flurry.
“You guys aren’t nearly so pretty now,” said the stranger.
“How we look does not matter,” Landsburg insisted.
“Then why’d you have us make these stupid robes!” asked a young woman named Sandy, whose rayon robe was a ball in her hand. Her mascara made black streaks on her cheeks and her T-shirt and gym shorts were drenched with sweat—all of the supplicants had been sweating profusely under their robes for hours. She was also bleeding from a gash that started at her temple and vanished in her bloodied hair.
Lagrasse was delighted to realize that he could see her breasts perfectly.
She burst out laughing. It wasn’t a pleasant laugh. “Your dye ran.”
Landsburg’s eyes flitted in panic. He ran to the wrecked hull and found some brightwork and tried to see his distorted reflection, which was stained with splotches of muddy brown. Cheap-ass dye!
He held back the outburst. He had to remain in control. This was his moment.
“Who the hell are you?” Sandy was asking the stranger. She wavered on her feet like a drunk.
“Henry Lagrasse of the United States Coast Guard at your duty, ma’am,” Lagrasse said. “Use to be, anyway. Now I’m just the local lunatic.”
“Why are you staring at my chest,” Sandy demanded.
“You guys are not in Idaho anymore. This is like some new freaky world and normal rules don’t apply,” Lagrasse said, looking her in the eye for the first time. “So I do whatever I want. Besides, you have a really nice rack.”
Sandy gave him an odd look.
“Let’s assemble for our march,” proclaimed Rob Landsburg, and rose to assemble his flock. He had rubbed at the brown splotches to spread them out evenly. He looked like he was in poorly applied blackface. “Krac’thlen awaits.”
The unrobed supplicants gathered around their leader, and even Landsburg had to admit they were a sorry-looking lot. They were all drenched in sweat and many in blood. “We have survived landfall on the island home of Krac’thlen where most others have perished. This is one of the few survivors.” He waved to Lagrasse, who felt like the man of the hour.
“Thank you, thank you. He’s right. You guys made the best landing of any boat yet. You did just the right thing, steering in the current and gunning it. Brilliant. I’d like to shake your pilot’s hand.”
“He was killed in the crash,” Sandy said. “How’d you manage to survive?”
“Used my head.” Lagrasse beamed and nodded his head forward to display the mass of clotted blood and hair.
“What happened?” Sandy asked.
“Pressure buildup. I started passing out and stuff. So I relieved the pressure with a piece of metal. His name is Sharpy.” Lagrasse showed them the sliver of aluminum scrap that he now carried everywhere he went. “You guys must really like H. P. Lucre.”
“Whether we like him or not is irrelevant,” Landsburg explained. “The fact is, he based his stories on a true but hidden mythology that we, the Supplicants of Anarchy, rediscovered in the Necronomibok.”
“I saw that movie a couple of years ago, Darkness over Sipplewich,” Lagrasse said. “It wasn’t nearly as good as the H. P. Lucre story, far as I remember. I haven’t read any of that stuff since eighth grade.”
“The movie is not relevant,” Landsburg insisted.
“You know the story when all those frog people come out of the ocean and mate with the people of Sipplewich. And Johnny Depp was reading from the Necronomibok to dispel the sea frogs. Didn’t work though. Johnny Depp ended up gettin’ frog mated himself.”
“I never heard of that one,” Sandy said.
“It was a while back. Johnny Depp looked like he just got out of high school. And man, that flick was a stinker. Must have gone straight to video.”
“It is irrelevant!” Landsburg insisted. “What is relevant is not the fiction, but the fact! The Necronomibok is fact.”
Out of his wallet pocket came the well-worn paperback. The cover said, “The book that H. P. Lucre wanted you to believe was a figment of his imagination is horrifyingly real!”
“This?” Lagrasse asked delightedly. “This is the basis for your whole cult?”
“That’s it,” said Sandy.
Landsburg was stricken by her tone. “Sandy, you have lost faith?”
Sandy sighed. “The truth is, I never believed a word of it. I just thought it was kind of exciting and all, Rob. So I went along with it. I thought it was all, you know, dramatic. Then, when we crashed, I realized you were taking this mumbo jumbo way too far. People got killed, Rob.”
“But it is not mumbo jumbo. This is truth.” He held out the Necronomibok.
“Rob, it was made up by some college kid in Dayton, Ohio, in 1974. It’s just a bunch of old alchemy books and manuals on leeching and stuff that he put together with Lucre gods inserted here and there.”
Rob Landsburg said firmly, “I have read his stories. They are there for a reason—to make people think the Necronomibok is false. It was repressed for centuries!”