“This?” I said, “It’s a spatula…”
Vasnir, Father of Bottomless Dark, gazed on unimpressed. His single, great fish eye immobile and cold.
I held up the spatula, more from habit than any attempt at piercing the veil of his understanding.
“See?” I said.
He jiggled his great head and made a sound- something between a caw and a gurgle and the deep moan of a dying star. Likely his native tongue, if there was such a thing. Scales clacked against tentacle hair, adding seashell wind chimes on a lonely cliff.
He seemed angry.
I had a feeling that if Vasnir, Father of Bottomless Dark, got angry, it would be decidedly worse for me than when Mr. Kenny got angry. (Mr. Kenny was the part owner, full time manager of the Burger-Champ where I worked, usually right now. This is the last time Mr. Kenny will be mentioned in this story for reasons that are obvious).
“WHAT…DOES IT… DO?”
“... the spatula?”
He nodded.
I wanted to vomit.
“Well… scoop food, mainly? Patties, onions, the occasional egg. Sometimes helps get-at the crusty bits if you’re closing shift.” The vacuum quivered. I kept rambling- as though keeping the train of words on the rails would save me from the mandibled fear trailing in its wake. “Say,” my voice a cough, “how exactly did I… uh… get here?”
“YOU DIED,” said Vasnir, Father of Bottomless Dark.
“Oh… so. This is like…Hell?”
If he heard the question, he showed no sign of it. The things on the sides of his great anchor of a head might have been genitals for all I knew. There were dozens of them, like little holes in a sponge.
His single, great fish eye was fixed, placidly on the black rubbery implement in my hand.
At first, the spatula had dripped burger grease, but the terrible cold of this place had solidified the goop into globules of thick white wax which now, unnervingly, reminded me of frog eggs.
He held out a seven-tentacled hand for the spatula. I gulped. It disappeared into his writhing mass of fish flesh and reemerged pinched between two a dozen delicate threads of viscous white that seemed to lick more than lift the spatula aloft, darting little snake-tongues likely tasting it’s soul.
Then the sound of snapping mandibles and the eye moved back to me.
“THIS,” it said, wiggling the borrowed Burger Champ spatula (that I likely would not get back) “IS NOT THE HEAD OF PENTAMOS THE BETRAYER…”
“Whelp,” I said, my best attempt at joviality, “I always thought when I died I’d meet Tupac, soooo I guess we’re both kind of disappointed…”
Silence again.
Silence for so long. Silence that dried throats and eyes. Silence that sat like death upon my chest. Silence that crumbled mountains, bit by bit, until they disappeared into the hungry, yawning sea. I wasn’t sure if it had been minutes, days, weeks, lifetimes.
Generations.
There was nothing in this blackness to mark the swell and shrink of time. Nothing to gauge my days by. Nothing to watch besides the eerily still mass of Vasnir, Father of Bottomless Dark.
Finally, desperate, I hazarded a question, a request, a plea.
“Suppose… it’s too much to ask for you to send me home?”
Something like a sigh tickled my ears. Cold wind blew as his great bulk faded from view, a face sinking beneath the dark water of a pond, “YOU WILL GO BACK,” he said, “YOU WILL BRING THEM WORD OF MY COMING.”
I sweated, gasped, feared, but managed to wheeze out, “But… I was thinkin’ I wasn’t your guy?”
My palm tingled. I looked down. The spatula was miraculously (infernally?) back in myc clenched fist, only now, it was green and thin, forged from cold, crude steel, branded in some kind of twisting lines, a sygil older than time and blacker than death.
“A MISTAKE WAS LIKELY MADE,” said Vasnir, now only a whisper in my head, “BUT… YOU WILL DO…”
My ears began to bleed from the sound he made then. Something more dreadful than can be described in the words of human tongues.
Somehow, I realized, he was… chuckling.
“YOU WILL DO.”
___
Morlock, high priest of Vasnir, Lord of Bottomless Dark, stomped into the dusky club, his bloody hand gripping dark strands of greasy hair–the head of Pentamos The Betrayer. He breathed a ragged breath into his polypy lungs, wheezed on the great sack of air, and in a sick troubadour's lilting caw, bellowed: “It is I, oh Lord! And I bring with me the head of…”
His voice died off, confused.
The table of eclectic poker players looked up from their game, bored and a bit miffed at the interruption, but still… this was new. Kurt Cobain giggled. John Lennon prodded Elvis in the side of his lithe, little belly to point to the newcomer with wide eyes. Elvis flicked his sleepy lids and leaned over Jimi Hendrix for a better view.
“The fuck is this?” said Tupac.