Which reminds me, there was something I meant to tell you. A true story.
There was a ship, a-sailing on the seas. On a Pacific cruise. And on this ship was a magician, a conjurer, whose function was to entertain the passengers. And there was this parrot on the ship.
Every time the magician did a trick the parrot would ruin it. How? He'd tell them how it was done, that's how. "He put it up his sleeve", the parrot would squawk. Or "he's stacked the deck" or "it's got a false bottom".
The magician didn't like it.
Finally the time came for him to do his biggest trick.
He announced it.
He rolled up his sleeves.
He waved his arms.
At that moment the ship bucked and smashed over to one side.
Sunken R'lyeh had risen beneath them. Hordes of my servants, loathsome fish-men, swarmed over the sides, seized the passengers and crew and dragged them beneath the waves.
R'lyeh sank below the waters once more, awaiting that time when dread Cthulhu shall rise and reign once more.
Alone, above the foul waters, the magician — overlooked by my little batrachian boobies, for which they paid heavily — floated, clinging to a spar, all alone. And then, far above him he noticed a small green shape. It came lower, finally perching on a lump of nearby driftwood, and he saw it was the parrot.
The parrot cocked its head to one side and squinted up at the magician.
"Alright," it says, "I give up. How did you do it?"
Of course it's a true story, Whateley.
Would black Cthulhu, who slimed out of the dark stars when your most eldritch nightmares were suckling at their mothers' pseudomammaria, who waits for the time that the stars come right to come forth from his tomb-palace, revive the faithful and resume his rule, who waits to teach anew the high and luscious pleasures of death and revelry, would he lie to you?
Sure I would.
Shut up Whateley, I'm talking. I don't care where you heard it before.
We had fun in those days, carnage and destruction, sacrifice and damnation, ichor and slime and ooze, and foul and nameless games. Food and fun. It was one long party, and everybody loved it except those who found themselves impaled on wooden stakes between a chunk of cheese and pineapple.
Oh, there were giants on the earth in those days.
It couldn't last for ever.
Down from the skies they came, with filmy wings and rules and regulations and routines and Dho-Hna knows how many forms to be filled out in quintuplicate. Banal little bureaucruds, the lot of them. You could see it just looking at them: Five-pointed heads — every one you looked at had five points, arms whatever, on their heads (which I might add were always in the same place). None of them had the imagination to grow three arms or six, or one hundred and two. Five, every time.
No offence meant.
We didn't get on.
They didn't like my party.
They rapped on the walls (metaphorically). We paid no attention. Then they got mean. Argued. Bitched. Fought.
Okay, we said, you want the sea, you can have the sea. Lock, stock, and starfish-headed barrel. We moved onto the land — it was pretty swampy back then — and we built Gargantuan monolithic structures that dwarfed the mountains.
You know what killed off the dinosaurs, Whateley? We did. In one barbecue.
But those pointy-headed killjoys couldn't leave well enough alone. They tried to move the planet nearer the sun — or was it further away? I never actually asked them. Next thing I knew we were under the sea again.
You had to laugh.
The city of the Old Ones got it in the neck. They hated the dry and the cold, as did their creatures. All of a sudden they were in the Antarctic, dry as a bone and cold as the lost plains of thrice-accursed Leng.
Here endeth the lesson for today, Whateley.
And will you please get somebody to feed that blasted shoggoth?
III.
(Professors Armitage and Wilmarth are both convinced that not less than three pages are missing from the manuscript at this point, citing the text and length. I concur.)
The stars changed, Whateley.
Imagine your body cut away from your head, leaving you a lump of flesh on a chill marble slab, blinking and choking. That was what it was like. The party was over.
It killed us.
So we wait here below.
Dreadful, eh?
Not at all. I don't give a nameless dread. I can wait.
I sit here, dead and dreaming, watching the ant-empires of man rise and fall, tower and crumble.
One day — perhaps it will come tomorrow, perhaps in more tomorrows than your feeble mind can encompass — the stars will be rightly conjoined in the heavens, and the time of destruction shall be upon us: I shall rise from the deep and I shall have dominion over the world once more.
Riot and revel, blood-food and foulness, eternal twilight and nightmare and the screams of the dead and the not-dead and the chant of the faithful.
And after?
I shall leave this plane, when this world is a cold cinder orbitting a lightless sun. I shall return to my own place, where the blood drips nightly down the face of a moon that bulges like the eye of a drowned sailor, and I shall estivate.
Then I shall mate, and in the end I shall feel a stirring within me, and I shall feel my little one eating its way out into the light.
Um.
Are you writing this all down, Whateley?
Good.
Well, that's all. The end. Narrative concluded.
Guess what we're going to do now? That's right.
We're going to feed the shoggoth.
Neil Gaiman 1986
A "follow-up" letter appeared in Dagon #17 , April, 1987:
Nice to see "I Cthulhu" in print at last: the only other Lovecraftian article I plan on doing at some point is annotating some correspondence that has come into my hands relatively mysteriously. Which is to say, it is not generally known that the H.P. Lovecraft letters we know and love are incomplete in one important respect.
In the late twenties and early thirties a young English writer — who, like Lovecraft, thought little of writing twenty thousand word letters — was in New York , working on his own books and writing the librettos to musicals.
That Lovecraft, a devoted anglophile, was a fan of the man's work is unsurprising. That P.G. Wodehouse was a fan of Weird Tales is perhaps more so. How their lengthy correspondence got into my grubby little hands I do not wish to go into at this point. Suffice it to say that I possess not only their only collaborative novel (alternatively titled The What Ho! On The Threshold and It's the Call of Cthulhu, Jeeves ) but also fragments of their musical, Necronomicon Summer, in which the heroine is called upon to sing those immortal lines:
The similarities between the two authors — not only in names, but also biography, both of them having been brought up by aunts for example (one of a legion of similarities) leads one to ponder why the collaborations were a failure and covered up by both men, and why they conducted their work together in such secrecy. Certainly the novel throws a fascinating light on both their obsessions (the sequence in which Aunt Agatha is revealed to be Nyarlathotep, and the Wooster-Psmith expedition to the thrice accursed plains of Leng, enlivened by their running battle over Bertie Wooster's bow-tie, spring to mind immediately).