Fantastic Metropolis

The unlucky ones were still men and women, still normal. Far too normal, square as houses. What could they do but keep their heads down and pretend that their bosses hadn’t been driven mad, and hadn’t demanded that the mail room boys take off their foreskins with the sharp rocks he brought in from his driveway back in Westchester County? Cuddle up to the beetleman in bed next to you once a week? Sure, as long as he brought home his paycheck and a bag full of groceries. Better to close your girly little eyes and think of John Fitzgerald Kennedy while every hole in your body was probed by chitinous appendages, while the clicking laughter of the beast that was once your high school sweetheart ground into your ears like street glass.

New York, New York, a town so cool they damned it twice. The cult was strongest there; when Cthulhu awoke, the tidal wave of fear and change he burst forth from rose high over this land and finally broke over the purple, smog-choked sky of midnight Manhattan. Black rain fell like blessings, and coated the concrete and glass steel mountains of the haunted isle. Wall Street was ankle-deep in blood, Central Park a range where the livestock was all one succulent meat, all long pig. Get a job patrolling the border with a sharpened stick, why not? Better them than you, and besides, you got to sleep in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, away from the smell of horse shit from the fancy handsome cabs and the sound of bones crunching under the jaws of mile-long trains of maggots.

“Just settle in for the ride, boys” Bill would mutter to us in the back seat, as I wrestled Neal for the wheel, but he wasn’t talking to us, he was talking to the poor old New Yorkers who had bowed before the Dreamer, and let Him put the blinders on their souls.

Nick Mamatas is the author of the Bram Stoker Award-nominated short novel Northern Gothic (Soft Skull, 2001). His short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, mainstream publications like the men’s magazine Razor, the NYC-based monthly Wide Angle, and the underground zines The Whirligig, Ragshock, and Pablo’s Comics Extravaganza. When not writing fantasy and horror, which is 99% of the time, he writes about radical politics, publishing, digital art and fringe cultural phenomena. His reportage and essays have appeared in the Village Voice, Silicon Alley Reporter, Artbyte, Razor, In These Times, Clamor Maximum Rock-n-Roll, and the Disinformation Books anthologies You Are Being Lied To, Everything You Know Is Wrong and Abuse Your Illusions.

Move Under Ground will be published in May 2004 by Night Shade Books.