ALL CHARACTERS AND EVENTS IN THIS FAN FICTION – EVEN THOSE BASED ON FICTIONAL PEOPLE– ARE ENTIRELY MADE-UP. ALL LOVECRAFT REFERENCES ARE RESEARCHED… POORLY. THE FOLLOWING STORY CONTAINS LEWD SEXUAL HUMOR AND DUE TO ITS LONG INTROSPECTIVE MONOLOGUES IT SHOULD NOT BE READ BY ANYONE. _|_|_|

Kenny

I consider myself good at a fair number of things, especially when it comes to interacting with people. I'm good at getting girls, and getting other guys with girls if they ask me to play wingman. I'm good at pleading for extensions on homework (sometimes). I'm really good at lying to my parents.

I suck at talking to people that don't like being spoken to.

For example: the Goths.

There's only one of them who ever gives me the time of day during the day. Otherwise, I've had to rely solely on midnight calls as Mysterion, which I've always needed to be sure are well-timed, and have a definite purpose. The Goths, for whatever reason, are okay with Mysterion, mainly because we've had, since I was in fourth grade, a bargain. They supply me with things they know about Cthulhu, R'lyeh and the Necronomicon, and I in turn tell them anything I remember about actually being in R'lyeh.

But here's the catch about that: I don't always remember. Or, at least, until recently I didn't. Hard to believe an eighth grade field trip changed that.

Death is strange, even to me. I know I've seen Heaven and Hell. I know I have. I've even been a ghost before. I get that it happens, and I know that somehow it all works out. The R'lyeh connection was harder to figure out.

R'lyeh itself is a sunken, ancient city under the ocean somewhere out in Polynesia. It is described in the Necronomicon as a barren land strooned about with mossy, decrepit columns, a dank green the primary color of the stone. It's a land inhabited by Immortals, ancient gods from another world that have been sleeping under the Earth since before man, all of whom are, for all intents and purposes, dead.

Except not.

Cthulhu, I have learned, is just the tip of the iceberg. He's like a priest for the other Immortals, keeping them and him alike 'dead but dreaming.' Or so the Goths have told me.

R'lyeh seems to be the ultimate destination for all Immortals, and I myself was once banished there (no thanks to Cartman, who at the time had teamed up with Cthulhu) along with everyone else in what was then known as Coon and Friends. Everyone else that mattered, anyway. When we arrived in that sunken city, the others were naturally scared, but I remember feeling the odd sense that I knew the terrain.

Only after I killed myself in R'lyeh did I start making connections between it and death.

Even for an Immortal like me, death needs to have rules. A body dies, and the soul has to go somewhere. And thanks to one of the Goths, I had recently (during my self-inflicted deaths, at least) learned how to choose which way I went. The whole point to that was looking for R'lyeh.

I guess this requires some explanation.

– – –

In eighth grade, shit got real. It all started on a field trip to a museum in Denver. I, like the other guys, was totally apathetic. If I'd had my way, I'd've spent that trip mercilessly hitting on my gorgeous classmate Red. Rebecca, nicknamed Red for the color of her straight, shoulder-length hair, ran with Bebe's crowd, was a cheerleader and tennis player, and had a cute smile and a tight ass. She could be a bitch, but what girl isn't, at least every once in a while, right? Plus, I like assertive girls. Better in bed. I think, anyway. But only one thing in the entire fucking world could distract me from the girl I was crushing on, and that thing was strooned all over that museum like graffiti on the back wall of the high school.

Books. Documents. Sketches. Sculptures.

A bas-relief of none other than the thing that had cursed me in the womb. Cthulhu.

The guys let me go ahead of them. Kyle warned me not to get too obsessive, but this was my history. On display! I read the plaque underneath the bas-relief. The collection was on loan from a town called Arkham, all the way in Massachusetts. I felt compelled to, right then and there, hitch-hike across the country and ask the New Englanders what was what. But I had this whole display, right at my fingertips.

Our chaperones gave us free roam over the museum, but I stuck to that exhibit. I think we were supposed to be studying Native American and Colonial Midwestern art or some shit, which was on display at another part of the museum, but I'd take the F if it meant I could spend all day taking illegal snapshots of things with my cameraphone and furiously jotting down descriptions in the spare notebook Kyle lent me because I'd forgotten mine.

It was the bas-relief that held my attention most. The sculpture was encased in glass, but I felt like it gave off an eerie, far too familiar vibe. Cthulhu was hewn into a stone very similar in color and texture to the natural land mass of R'lyeh, from what I could remember from fourth grade. It was a sickly kind of green, and looked like it could have been a free-standing photograph of the real thing.

Taking out the notebook, I jotted down the information the plaque gave me. The thing itself dated back to 1925, attributed to a mad artist named Wilcox. "Bas-reliefs such as this," the plaque read, in a note from the anonymous curator of the exhibit, "have also been found in the possession of a voodoo cult in New Orleans, as well as a society of monks in China."

New Orleans? New Orleans? I read over the plaque again and underlined the city's name furiously. I made a note to look into the Chinese monks, as well, because the Gulf crisis had hit upon, apparently, two big centers for Cthulhu Cults: New Orleans, Louisiana, and South Park, Colorado. Since the exhibit was from Massachusetts, I made sure I'd look into activity there, as well.

I could not believe my dumb luck. I was standing in an entire room devoted to the history of the Cult of Cthulhu. Curious, I read the curator's notes on the far side of the room, which stated that he (I assumed the writer was a 'he,' although 'he' remained anonymous) had begun bringing the collection together after the Gulf crisis roughly four years prior. There was a wealth of information stored at Miskatonic University, in Arkham, and the bas-relief had been sought out for the purpose of a visual. Most accounts of seeing Cthulhu and the other Old Ones, the curator's notes went on, had historically been dismissed as madness.

But when Cthulhu itself was televised during the Gulf crisis, many Cultists rejoiced, and most of the world was made aware of Cthluhu's existence. Things had, of course, gone back to normal after he'd been locked back in R'lyeh, but the Cult was surreptitiously rising again.

Wandering around, I finally saw it. The key to everything. The one artifact that could change the course of my search from then on:

The Necronomicon.

"Holy shit," I whispered to myself, rushing over to the case in which the ancient tome was displayed. It was a dusty old thing, encased in glass, opened to reveal two of the pages. On the left was illustrated a familiar scene: the great, strange stone pillars of R'lyeh, and the rocky terrain on all sides. Beneath the image, most likely an ink drawing, was written, to confirm, the word R'lyeh. The right-hand page displayed old, precise handwriting, also in ink; calligraphic in style and most definitely in Latin. Fuck. I couldn't translate it.

But I knew someone who probably could.

I glanced around and, seeing no security, snapped a photo with my phone. A quick glance at the screen told me that I'd snagged a good enough picture, and I figured, hey, I'd upload the photo onto the Mysterion computer at the base, and if security did catch onto me, with tapes or whatever, I'd just throw myself under a bus and not have to worry about getting caught for it. Stupid way out, yeah, but effective. For me, dead was always better than arrested.

The plaque underneath it provided basically the same information I already knew: "Written in 738 by a half-crazed man, Abdul Alhazred, the Necronomicon has been translated in to several languages, beginning with the first Greek volume in 950. Displayed here is a handwritten Latin volume based on the 1228 work of Olaus Wormius. While this version of the Necronomicon was considered missing since 1250, it has resurfaced time and time again in the hands of collectors. The Necronomicon itself is a dark and oft-studied volume detailing the lives of the deities Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, and others."

"Yog-Sothoth?" I wondered, peering at the open page to see if the name surfaced anywhere there. The handwriting was a headache to read under the awful museum lights that cast a glare off of the glass casing. I needed a better look at that thing. Maybe I could schedule a private viewing, I thought, as I stood back to write the name down.

Only the pen I had was out of ink.

"Motherfucker!" I shouted, scribbling the pen across the page furiously, trying to get even a light line out of it. No luck. And I had no clue where the guys were… I'd try to bum a pen off of the museum, maybe, or—

"Run out of ink?"

I stopped my frantic scribbling and whipped around to see the girl who had spoken. Immediately, my face felt hot, and I cleared my throat, embarrassed. Red. Who better to make an ass of myself in front of than the girl I'd been crushing on. This was sure to go well. "Hey," I managed, trying to keep cool. "Uh… yeah," I shrugged, holding up the pen, trying to make my plight seem like no big deal, "ran out of ink. But, y'know, just notes, right?"

"Here," said Red, extracting from the binder she was carrying an extra pen of her own. "I'm about done taking notes, anyway. The girls all went to the bathroom—" (okay, and, yeah, why do girls always go to the bathroom in groups, seriously?) "but I wanted to take a look around in here."

"You did, huh?" I wondered, adding, "Thanks," as I graciously took the pen and discarded the other one into my pocket. "You're into this kind of stuff?"

"Not particularly," said Red, glancing around. "It's weird, but if it's out there, we should know about it. This stuff was news, like, four years ago."

"Yeah, I remember that," I said, playing that I had much less interest than I'd actually invested in everything there. Red walked over, right beside me, and glanced down at the Necronomicon, tucking her hair back out of her face so she could look at the script inside. I turned around and stepped in a little closer to her. She didn't move. Nice. "So, uh… ever seen anything like that before?"

Red shook her head. "I've seen some super old books, but this one's, like… really old," she said. "I went to this one restaurant here in Denver, once… it had a bunch of old books lying around for atmosphere or something, like a library."

"That's cool," I said, noticing that, at this angle, I could see down her shirt. She stood back, though, so I snapped myself up as well, so as not too look all suspicious for that, but I was just as interested in the little look she gave me when our eyes met, for seemingly the first time. "So, uh, you did dinner around here once?" I guessed, words very quickly leaving my mind and making no sense.

"Yeah, wasn't too bad."

Before I could shut myself up, I asked her, "So, you want to, maybe… y'know, do that with me sometime? Dinner?" Fuck! Wow, that was… horrible.

"What?"

"Yeah," I shrugged, coming off way more awkward than I meant to (in my defense, at the time, I was thirteen), "you know. Like, no big deal, but like… and, not… not now, cuz… cuz this is kind of a field trip…" I was never this fucking awkward with girls. Ever. Then again, I'd never crushed on one like I had with Red; usually I just went for it.

Red laughed. "Kenny," she said, sweetly I thought, "are you asking me out?"

"Yeah, why not? Whatever," I said, again trying to make the whole thing seem like not that big a deal, while inside my stomach was doing somersaults. "If you want, it'd be neat sometime."

"Sure."

Come again? "Really?"

"Yeah. Why not?"

Oh, halle-fucking-lujah, I had a date. Too bad it wasn't going to happen, but I didn't know that yet. At the time, my insides had gone from somersaults to aerial flips. Fucking hell, I was thrilled. But I didn't show it. Last thing she needed was me following up the date confirmation by acting like a perv. And I mean, I am a perv, and I admit it, but you don't ever show a girl you like that side of you. Shouldn't, anyway. "All right," I said, grinning, "cool. Sometime this weekend."

"Sure," said Red, her face all lit up and perfect. At that point, Bebe and the rest of the girls came looking for her, so she gave me a small wave and left saying, "Don't run all the ink out of my pen, okay?"

"I reeeeally hope that's a euphemism," I muttered to myself after she'd gone.

Unfortunately for me, I was only able to jot down a few more things from the Necronomicon before we were ushered back onto the bus to South Park, but I asked one of the guards on duty at the entrance how long the Cthulhu display would be around.

He said, "Leavin' tomorrow, kid, sorry."

"Tomorrow?" I yelped, then bit the word back, since I'd come off as very obviously disturbed. Tomorrow? I don't have till tomorrow, I need this shit!

Well… I thought, between talking with the guys on the ride back and wondering how I was going to follow through with Red without getting all awkward again, maybe it isn't Mysterion's thing, but… who was to say I couldn't actually have what I needed?

After all, as someone cursed by Cthulhu, didn't I kind of have a right to it?

So, that evening, I printed the photo from my phone, donned my gear and set off in the direction of a house that I had never stepped foot in during the day, as Kenny, but which I knew very well from routine Mysterion visits. One room of it, anyway, which could be accessed by an old, knotted tree in the back yard. Muted Cocteau Twins music could be heard filtering through the window I climbed the tree toward, and the smell of clove cigarettes attacked my nostrils even out in the open, behind the closed glass.

I leapt from the branch to the ledge, and tapped twice on the upper panel. That had been our signal for quite some time. A minute later, the window slid open, and I jumped down into the clove-scented, candle-lit room. The window was slid shut behind me, and I looked up to see her, veiled in a cloud of smoke from her cigarette.

Henrietta.

Bradley Biggle's older (adoptive) sister, and only female Goth in town, Henrietta had been my only link to the Cult of Cthulhu for three years, at that point. She, a modest fifteen, was cloaked, as usual, in a spidery black dress that hugged her buxom frame, and her eyes were caked in black eyeliner, swirling in a decidedly Egyptian design. "What," she quipped down at me where I knealt, black-polished fingers drumming on her hips, "are you doing here?"

"Why do I ever come here?" I said simply as I stood. We were matched in height, but the Goth still looked down on me.

"But it's Tuesday."

"Right. Painful poetry night. Whatever. Listen, what if I told you I had some information that would be worth your while to investigate?"

Henrietta barked out a laugh, and took a long drag from her cigarette. "Right," she sneered. "Look, Mysterion, I'm not a goody-two-shoes conformist super P.I. like you or whatever. I don't investigate. I just want your R'lyeh stories."

"Yeah," I said, commanding eye contact. "And this is the best story yet. Drive with me to Denver."

"Um, no? Why should I?"

"If you do, this is what's in it for you," I told her, producing the photo I'd snapped of the leather-bound tome. Henrietta's eyes widened as much as they could under her thick makeup, and she bit her cigarette holder. Taking the damn thing out of her mouth, she asked, "Is that… is that a real Necronomicon?" With an acquired flourish, she snatched the photo from my hand, and studied the likeness of the book as she again brought the quellazaire up to her black-sheened lips. "Where is this?"

"It's at an art museum in Denver," I answered. "There's an exhibit there from Arkham, Massachusetts, all about Cthulhu and the other Old Ones. It's only there until tomorrow, so if we're going to break in, it has to be tonight."

"Break in?" Henrietta actually grinned. "You're growing on me, panty boy."

Under my mask, I probably flushed. My costume had always involved me wearing a pair of white briefs over my already tight pants. When I switched to boxers in middle school, I kept a stash of briefs around just for Mysterion purposes. "They aren't panties," I grumbled. (I will note that I ditched the briefs not long after that, replacing that part of the uniform with just a grey piece.)

"Whatever. Anyway, fine. But the others are coming, too."

"Why?" I wondered. "Wouldn't you rather have bragging rights over them? For nonconformists, you four are awfully tight."

She was, of course, referring to the three other South Park Goth kids. The two older boys were in were in tenth and seventh grade, respectively, at that point, and the younger was a classmate of Ike Broflovski (making the grade, then third). The Goths were a gang as easily spotted together as my own gang of four, completed with Kyle, Stan and Cartman. However tight Henrietta and her friends were, however, it was her help alone I needed, since she had been the only one to offer.

In fact, the way I managed to team up with Henrietta at all was due to our combined dislike of her brother Bradley. Check that. Mint-Berry Crunch.

That little fucker had stolen my spotlight during the last Cthulhu crisis in New Orleans, back in fourth grade. Not only had he barged in and single-handedly dragged the Dark God back to the city of R'lyeh below the sea, but he freed the rest of the team from that dimension AND he got the fucking hero reveal. We learned, during that ordeal, that Bradley was not from Earth at all, but from some stupid-ass planet in some stupid-ass galaxy that had something to do with motherfucking mint and berries and crunching. Or whatever. I hated that kid. That should have been my win. That had to do with my fucking life.

Well, now it was my fucking story, and it was time to really start getting into what this whole Necronomicon was all about.

It took some convincing, but eventually Henrietta conceded to driving me up to Denver alone. The less people around, the better. Even she couldn't argue that. The entire ride up, we did not speak. Henrietta's mother's car was a beaten old thing, but it got us from point A to point B, and it had a rattling stereo system that mercilessly thumped out Bauhaus, the Goths' collective favorite band. Henrietta muttered something awful at me when I made her turn the stereo down once we were coming up to the museum, but again, she went along with it, since at the end of the drive a real Necronomicon was waiting for her.

Now, normally, I would have been completely against theft. I would have turned someone else in for doing what we were about to do. But nobody had to know. I needed what was in there if I was ever going to start to understand.

Henrietta, already fit for midnight vigilantism in her standard Goth attire, drove me around to the back of the museum, where we came upon a team of nondescript white vans, parked and prepared to move the Cthulhu display to its next location. With any luck, men would be around and leaving doors open. Unfortunately, that meant that security was also stepped up.

I'd been four years active as Mysterion by that point, however, and was no stranger to the shadows. During some of our training sessions, Kyle and Token had even rigged up a labyrinth of sensor-alarms, so I had a couple tricks up my sleeve in case I had to take some detours.

The back parking lot supplied me with ample shadows through which to travel; I slipped unseen from Henrietta's station wagon though the lot to the back brick wall, which, luckily, provided an open duct I could enter the building through. Prior to the trip, while waiting for the Necronomicon photo to print, I'd gone onto the museum's website to take a brief look at the floorplan. Had I had Ike or Kyle helping me out, then, I probably could have gotten full blueprints, even for the duct lines, but I'd been in a rush. So, trusting that I could work myself out of the piping somewhere on the first floor, where the book was being kept, I climbed in.

I unclipped a flashlight from my utility belt, clicked it on and held it in my mouth for visibility through the small crawlspace. I slinked through relatively easily, though turns were a bit of a bitch, and eventually found myself over the right room. Through the grate under my hands, I could scope out the still-unmoved display, and noticed a robed figure leaving the room.

So the Cult itself is curating this traveling collection, huh? I thought to myself. This was certainly getting interesting.

I unscrewed the grate and carefully set it aside in on the floor of the duct, peered out to make sure I was indeed alone, then dropped down into the room and tucked my flashlight away as soon as I was standing once again in the presence of the dusty old Necronomicon.

"Hey, there," I whispered to it, glaring at the thing. "You're gonna take this curse away from me."

Of course, I didn't yet know how that was going to happen, but I was confident that it would. So, using a trick Toolshed had taught me, I picked the lock on the display case, drew from the lining of my cape a square of black cloth that Henrietta had supplied me with prior to our setting out, wrapped the Necronomicon in it, and made a run for it. If the man in the cloak could move about freely, it was most likely that the alarms would not trigger. It sucked that I couldn't hang around and take a look at the rest of the display again, but I figured, if I could get a solid partner out of Henrietta, who was part of the Cult herself, I might have a chance of coercing the display back Colorado-ward again.

Everything was going swimmingly until I got back out into the parking lot.

"All right," someone said from the direction of the vans, "let's get some light out here."

No, no, no, bad idea, no light, really bad idea, I repeated over and over in my head, my heart pounding as I kept to the shadows on the way back to Henrietta's car. Luck left me, though, and a bright spotlight flooded the parking lot with the intensity of a harsh artificial sun. I was exposed.

"Hey," another man said, taking a few steps toward me and pointing in my direction, "who the hell is that kid?"

"Kid, what's that in your hands?" still another shouted over at me.

"'Evening, gentlemen," I said, backing away so I could cover as much ground as possible before they'd surely be after me. "Just here checking in. I'll be going now."

"Checking i—hey, what's that thing you have?"

I backed away further, just as another cloaked Cultist burst out of the back door yelling, "It's gone! The Necronomicon is missing!"

"Right," said the first man who'd noticed me, drawing a pistol and aiming straight at me.

"Shit," I couldn't help myself saying. The man fired, and I was off as soon as I'd dodged the bullet. The probability of me surviving the night was looking pretty low, since no less than ten men took chase, so no matter what, Henrietta had to get her hands on that book.

Tucking the Necronomicon under my arm, I took out a couple Roman Candles and my lighter, struck the fuse and lit up the small fireworks. As I slid the lighter back into its holster on my belt, I chucked one of the explosives at the men chasing me, and it burst into a distraction of flashing lights. The other I tossed off to my left, then kept running.

Only to feel a bullet catch me right in the fucking lung.

I stumbled, but pressed onward. Just a few more yards. I took in a deep breath for one last push, my vision already blurring. Fuck. I really hadn't wanted to die that night. It had been such a great day, too.

"What the fuck?" I finally heard my Gothic chauffeur say. I hadn't even realized I'd made it to her car. She kept the back seat of the station wagon down, to give it a more hearse-like feel whenever she stole it from her mother; kind of ironic that I'd gotten a ride in the thing only to die after the fact.

"Take it," I growled, shoving the shrouded Necronomicon into her hands.

"You're kind of dying."

"No shit," I coughed. My lungs were burning. God fucking dammit, I hated slow deaths like this. At this point, all I wanted was for one of those assholes chasing me to shoot me through the neck or head or heart or something to make it quick. Either that or tell Henrietta to run me over on her way back to South Park.

Fuck, I'd become so damn apathetic about death. I wanted it to either come for good or live in fear of it like everybody else.

The rest of my life for that night comes to me still in a bit of a blur. I was definitely shot again, at the base of the skull. That last bullet shattered my spinal cord and I was dead in less than a second. I—my soul or mind or whatever—drifted through darkness for a bit, but rather than immediately see a void of stars and then rise up to Heaven or plummet back down to Hell (the Hell count was a fuck of a lot higher), I found myself in a barren, seemingly solid place that stretched on for miles and miles on all sides.

Well, now. Purgatory, eh? That was new.

Just as I was about to explore, I saw the usual light that meant I was going back, but before my eyes opened to the living world in my bedroom again, I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, a small patch of black, like a tar pit.

I wondered about that black pit all the following day, right up until English class, where I caught up with Red to give her back her pen. She acted as if we'd never spoken. "How'd you get this?" she wondered, staring at the writing utensil.

"I, uh… you lent it to me yesterday," I said, hoping to spark something. That was the worst. I was already too heartbroken to ask her out again. It had taken everything to ask her in the first place, and even then I'd acted awkward as hell. Goddammit.

"When was that?"

"During the…" I sighed, giving up. "You dropped it. During the field trip. I borrowed it to finish up some notes, hope you don't mind."

"Oh. Sure. Thanks for giving it back, but it's just a pen."

"'Kay." It hadn't been, to me, but… oh, well.

I got so pissed off after that, I didn't talk to anyone for the rest of the day. The guys were naturally worried as much as they ever were when I'd get weird after a death no one remembered, but I knew they'd get over it. And I'd get over it. After school, I poured over my notes, to find that at least those had stayed intact. Sucked the same couldn't happen for memories.

The weird thing was, people usually just lost memory after me dying. They'd remember other events. I mean, obviously, the field trip had still happened. Maybe it had something to do with the Cthulhu shit we'd been around when I'd asked Red out. I was so damn angry at that entity, I was starting to come up with a list of ways I'd try to gut and skin it.

That evening, I, as Mysterion, paid a visit to Henrietta, who I found alone in her room, lighting black candles. "Knock," she commanded when I let myself in through the window.

"I'm having an off day," I said in return. Henrietta groaned and lit a cigarette on the candle closest to her. "Listen up, not much time to explain, but—"

"Explain what? Yesterday?"

I paused to take in a breath. "Yeah," I confirmed, eyeing her cautiously. "What do you remember about yesterday?" Henrietta said nothing. "Okay, some background," I began for the countless time. "I can't die." No reaction, but she turned and stared at me through half-closed, grey-shadowed judgmental eyes. "Ever since I can remember, I die and come back, die and come back. Long story short, I died again last night, but I want to know whatever you took away from yesterday or if I'm just sounding stupid."

"You died, huh?" Henrietta wondered, tapping out the ash from her cigarette into a half-full tray on her desk.

"I understand if you don't believe me."

"Oh, I'll believe you," said the Goth, her tone no-nonsense and sharp.

My heart skipped. "You will? Why?"

Henrietta grabbed something off of her desk, set down her quellazaire, and walked over to me. In her hands was a book wrapped in a black cloth, and she unwrapped the folds to reveal the Necronomicon underneath. That's right—I'd gotten it out of there and given it to her; this was the best streak of luck I'd had in a very long time. "Cuz I remember you telling me about this. I don't remember getting it, but it's kinda obvious you're an Immortal," Henrietta said.

"Right," I confirmed with a nod.

Our eyes met for a few seconds, and then Henrietta wrapped the book back up and said, "Dunno about the other guys, but I'll say I owe you for this, if I can keep it."

Just to get everything out, I asked, "Why?"

"If you're an Immortal, you can go to R'lyeh," said Henrietta. Her eyes were grey and hungry for answers of her own. "Once I get this translated, I can get you there. The Necronomicon lets humans pray to the R'lyeh gatekeeper, Yog-Sothoth, but it's Cthulhu I want to know more about. That little pussy did nothing during the Gulf crisis, and my stupid little brother was a total dick to me about it afterward."

I couldn't suppress a laugh. "You'll help me to get back at your brother? And Cthulhu…?"

"Look, if I can get Cthulhu to crush that little skidmark, I'll do it," the Goth growled. "Humans can only get to R'lyeh if an Immortal sends them there, and you can't get to R'lyeh as an Immortal unless you die, since I guess you die all the time."

"I've even told you that before," I muttered.

"Well, I don't remember you telling me."

"But you believe me."

"Good enough."

And thus, we began our strange partnership. Henrietta began hand-translating the Necronomicon from Latin to English, and over the next couple years, leading us back to the present, had to make a few revisions to the script, but by the time I started sophomore year, we were able to start experimenting with trips to R'lyeh.

During one of those experiments, I found myself back in Purgatory. This time, I was given a little more time, and I even ignored the light of home in time to rush toward that black pit I'd seen back in eighth grade.

And then I was in shadow. Or darkness. Or nothing. Wherever I was, it was black, muggy, and smelled like fog on a lake. The scent became more like a bog as I stood there in the nothingness, and the humidity intensified.

A moment could very well have been a day by the time my eyes came into focus, as if waking up for the first time, not to the sight of my plain old bedroom, but to the familiar greenish, hazy, rocky terrain that was R'lyeh.

…R'lyeh…?

"How the fuck'd I get here?" I wondered aloud.

Only a few steps in, though, and I saw the light again. I took a long look around before the light became so oppressive I had to follow it, but I still could remember no other instances of stepping foot in R'lyeh prior to the time my friends and I had been banished there during the Gulf crisis. It felt very familiar when I was there, and that tar pit wormhole in Purgatory, or whatever it was, just seemed to prove that I had the ability to get to R'lyeh again.

Even so, when I came back to Earth, my mind was filled with currently unanswerable whys.

Such as why I hadn't woken up in my bedroom. It was more like I came to after being passed out for a long time. I'd been in plenty of comas before, too, during which I'd moved through the afterlife as a detached soul, but that time I had been, no question about it, dead. Like, shot myself in the trachea dead. And I'd shot myself right in front of Henrietta, in her room (which had, by that time, become like an office away from the base to me).

"Wow," I heard the Goth saying. "It worked."

"Worked?" I sat up with a jolt, disturbed to have found myself elsewhere, and still dressed appropriately as Mysterion. I coughed; breathing was a little difficult, and it hurt to keep up Mysterion's tone. "What worked? What'd you do?"

I scanned the room for Henrietta, and discovered her sitting on one of her two newly acquired Victorian velvet armchairs, the Necronomicon on a side table to her left, an ashtray and quellazaire holder on a table to her right. "I read aloud," said Henrietta. "Where'd you go?"

"Purgatory," I told her, "and then… I found R'lyeh."

Henrietta almost smiled. "Thought so," she said, patting the dusty old leather-bound book with her left hand. "There's a passage in here that can open the Gate. I doubt I did that, but I think I did get through to Yog-Sothoth, the Gatekeeper. I get now that we've gotta get through Yog-Sothoth before we can get to Cthulhu."

Yog-Sothoth, the entity I'd read about back on the field trip, had been an enigma only until Henrietta had cleared up the hierarchy for me. There were apparently many Old Ones, and Cthulhu acted as their priest. To pray to Cthulhu, as the Cult did, was to invite the influence of all other Dark Gods as well. Cthulhu was the one, though, the Cult was sure, to bring about the End Time, as they called it. The Gulf crisis wasn't good enough for the End Time, so Henrietta and I had both figured out that something bigger was on the way, something that would attack the entire world.

At the moment, though, I was only concerned with my recent journey.

"But… but the last time I was in R'lyeh," I recalled so that Henrietta could hear, "I had to kill myself to get out. How'd you do that? How'd you read me out?"

"I guessed."

"But you guessed correctly."

"Because you're an Immortal. I kinda figured it out."

"It?" My heart was pounding. I'd fucking worship the crazy Goth girl if she'd cracked the code.

Henrietta held up the Necronomicon, took a drag from her cigarette, and began to read: "The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen."

"Right," I said dully, mulling over the cryptic words. "And translated into English?"

"I'll read the Latin," Henrietta threatened, narrowing her swirling Egyptian eyes. "It took two years to get it this good."

"Would you just simplify it for me?"

Henrietta groaned, got up, walked over, and blew smoke in my face to spite me. "It means that if you're an Immortal, you're not living or dead. Because you were born to human parents, I'm assuming, you get to walk around on Earth and age like a normal person. But you can be killed and come back, which means you're never 'dead' in the full human sense. Meaning you can walk through spaces humans can't see. Purgatory."

"Yes," I urged her on. "I just saw Purgatory. And then a black pit, and then I was in R'lyeh…"

"So you found the 'between' space the book talks about," said Henrietta. She eyed me oddly, then added, "Nice scar."

"What scar?"

Henrietta indicated to my neck with her quellazaire, so I took off my left glove and felt for the spot. My eyes went wide and I gasped in a breath. There was indeed a scar, right where the bullet had sailed through. An awful bump on my neck marking the fact that I'd endured a trauma.

I'd never scarred after a death before. I'd always come back totally fine, brand fucking spanking new. But this scar proved I'd died and returned. Henrietta had found a loophole. We had found a fucking loophole.

"What the fuck?" I sputtered nonetheless. Shocked and a little traumatized, I had a bit of a backlash. Long story short, the scar opened up, I choked on my own blood, and a while later I woke up in my room, in a shirt, my old orange hoodie, and a beaten pair of jeans. I'd been waking up in that same outfit for about a year now.

Setting a hand on my throat, I discovered that the scar was gone, meaning I'd come back to life by usual means, even though I couldn't remember much of the interim. I still remembered my brief visit to R'lyeh, though, and I later had Henrietta confirm that she remembered me coming back, but she didn't remember the scarring and me dying again. But she remembered something, and she'd started up a deal with the Gate.

Through it all, I was stoked. I had never found a loophole to death before other than the couple of odd comas. And I hated comas, they took too long.

Ever since that experiment, I'd tried out other forms of dying and coming back, and had successfully made the trip between Purgatory and R'lyeh around seven times. Whether I had been there prior to that time during the Gulf crisis I still did not know, but I had the feeling I would soon find out.

Working the route with Henrietta, and having her remember a few details of those deaths she had read me back from, had established a connection between me and the Cult, hopefully without the rest of the Cult catching on. Now it was just a matter of getting more out of them.

There was also the matter of keeping myself refreshed on the contents of the Necronomicon. The more I understood about that book, the more I'd understand the Cult, and the more I'd eventually understand myself.

And I was so close to a victory now, I could almost taste it. Just hoped it wouldn't leave a bloody aftertaste.

– – –

– – –

Authors' Note:

South Park is -c- Matt Stone and Trey Parker!

Hope the flashbacks weren't too confusing for everyone… ^^; I love writing the logistics of the Mysterion Mythos…

Speaking of the Mythos, much of what is discussed in this chapter is part of the 'Lovecraft research' that we put in our disclaimers… XD Yog-Sothoth is a creature right out of H. P. Lovecraft's stories, and the quote Henrietta reads is from Lovecraft's tale The Dunwich Horror. Arkham, MA, as well, is a Lovecraft invention (as is the university). The artist Wilcox and his bas-relief are the first stepping stone for the narrator of Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu. While Lovecraft's stories are the basis for the Mysterion Mythos, we are glad he left quite a bit of his own Mythos open for interpretation as well.

We take this project cereally. D:

Kenny narrates again (back in the present, haha) next week, on Wednesday, August 3rd!

And we want to thank you all so much for over 600 hits on this story! We're really enjoying working on this, and are thrilled it has reached so many readers! Thanks as well to those of you who have favorited the story; it means a lot to us! If you're enjoying what you read, we'd love to hear your feedback, too! ^^

~Jizena and Rosie Denn~

– – –