The Mall of Cthulhu

This edition of
The Mall of Cthulhu
© 2009 by
Night Shade Books
Cover art by Scott Altmann
Jacket design by Darius Hinks
Interior layout and design by Ross E. Lockhart
All rights reserved
First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-59780-127-0
Night Shade Books
Please visit us on the web at
http://www.nightshadebooks.com

Laura woke up nauseous, disoriented, and covered in blood. This last fact was not immediately apparent to her, which is why she focused on Teddy, who was standing across the common room emptying a gasoline can onto the floor.

"Teddy?" she asked. Teddy? That kind of geeky kid who was Steve's roommate? The kid who wanted to study folklore? The one everybody in the dorm called "Shaggy"?

At the sound of his name, Teddy paused from his pouring and looked up. "Oh my God, Laura, are you alive? Are you okay?"

She had that feeling that she had just awoken from a really good dream. It was coming back to her. Camilla. Camilla had kissed her, had licked her lips, and had asked her, "Do you want it?"

Laura had assumed that the "it" Camilla had been referring to was the same "it" that kids in dorms all over campus were getting at exactly that moment. She had been about to say yes when everything went black.

As her mind fought through the fog of disorientation, it occurred to her that everything had actually gone red. She wondered what that meant. And now here she was, still on the red velvet couch in the Omega Alpha house, but with no Camilla and with Ted pouring gas on the floor.

"Uh, I guess I'm okay. What the hell's going on? Where's Camilla?"

Ted shook the last few drops of gas out of the can, stood up and looked at Laura. "She didn't bite you, did she?"

"Uh, I don't think so. I mean, I just wish, but . . . "

"I'm completely fucking serious, Laura. Did she bite you?"

"I don't remember. I don't think so. What happened to her? I think we were going to . . . I mean hey, it's Bitsy!"

Bitsy came through the archway into the Omega house common room looking slightly different than the last time Laura had seen her. For one thing, her eyes were not their usual ice blue. They appeared to be glowing red. Also, she appeared to be covered in blood, and a long string of drool mixed with blood hung from her suddenly sharp, unusually long canine tooth. She was also roaring, a fierce, deep-throated yell that Laura would not have believed could come from someone named Bitsy.

Bitsy lunged across the room at Ted. Well, she actually appeared to be flying across the room, but Laura told herself she must still be drunk or high or whatever she'd been before she blacked out.

Teddy, displaying strength and agility Laura would not have believed an hour earlier, dropped the gas can, fell to the floor, picked up a double-headed fire axe and swung it in a strong, graceful arc above him. Bitsy, Omega Alpha rush chair, senior communications major, and vampire, was cleanly beheaded.

Laura was off the couch immediately, screaming. "Jesus, Teddy, what the fuck? What the, what the, I mean you fucking psycho, what the fuck are you doing? You just killed Bitsy! Oh my God, you've been the Ivy Ripper all the time! "

Ted looked up. "I'm not the Ivy Ripper, Laura. It's them. The Omegas. They're vampires, Laura. Vampires. Did you ever see any of these bitches in the daytime?"

"Well, no, but, Jesus, if you're going to behead everybody who takes night classes . . . "

"I'm telling you, Laura, all the murders come back to this house, to this—" he gestured at Bitsy's beheaded form—"thing."

"Bitsy? Bitsy is the Ivy Ripper?"

"One of them. I mean, look at this and judge for yourself." Teddy picked up Bitsy's head by its long, blonde hair and pointed at the still gaping mouth. "That's a fang. With blood dripping off it. Q. E. fucking D."

Laura took in the grisly spectacle of a wild-eyed, sweat-drenched, filthy Teddy holding a head that did indeed possess a pair of bloody fangs, and her mind completely shut down. She just stared, hoping that the acid or whatever she was obviously on would wear off quickly and she'd be able to laugh about the horror-movie bad trip she'd had. Teddy holding disembodied vampire heads. Yeah, right.

Teddy stared at her for a moment, then tossed Bitsy's head into the corner of the room. "Look," he said, "I need to burn this place to the ground now. I don't have time for the garlic in the mouth and the running water, but I am pretty sure that beheading and fire will work just as well."

Laura decided to ignore the whole vampire thing and focus on reality-based questions. "Where's Camilla?"

"Camilla was about to turn you, from the looks of things. So I, uh, gave her the Bitsy treatment. Well, no. It wasn't as clean with her. She came after me. She's in pieces in the kitchen, if you'd like to go have a look."

Once again, Laura was dumbstruck. She did not know anything except that she had no desire to go into the kitchen and see Camilla's severed head. Teddy picked up the gasoline can and splashed the rest of it onto the floor.

"Okay, I need to commit a pretty serious act of arson here, and this place is going to be a crematorium in about a minute and a half, so you need to come with me now."

Teddy grabbed Laura's hand and pulled her up. She broke free from his grip and ran from the building as Teddy flipped open Steve's Zippo with Elvis on the side (Why did Teddy have it? Where was Steve?), and the common room of the Omega Alpha house burst into flames.

Laura stood on the sidewalk as Teddy came running out, straight at her. She got ready to run, or maybe fight, because she thought she could probably take him (but then, Bitsy had probably thought the same thing), but she saw that he was sobbing.

He threw himself into her arms, tears running down his face, crying hysterically, "So much blood, Laura, there was so much blood, why was it me, why did it have to be me, why was there so much blood, all I wanted to do was study folklore and get laid, why did it have to be me, Laura, why did it have to be me?"

Ted wiped his wand.

Michelle had been very clear about this point in training. "No muck on the wands! Customers don't want to see muck on the wands! Wipe your wand every time!"

Ted had snickered and looked to the group of Queequeg's trainees around him, looking for somebody else who might be amused, somebody else to whom he might say, "That's actually a high quality piece of advice in other aspects of life as well!" but he had only found the blank stares of the artists and students ten years younger than him and the earnest, attentive stares of the immigrants looking for the bottom step of the American Dream ladder.

So he'd kept his joke to himself and tried to pay attention as Michelle went on about how you can't just leave a pitcher of steamed milk sitting there and keep reheating it—you have to get fresh milk, and if it took longer to move the customers through, well, they'd thank you when their espresso drink didn't have that weird, thrice-steamed milk taste. And he pretty much kept to himself during his shifts at Queequeg's; of course he still had enough hush money from the university that he didn't need this job, at least from a financial standpoint, but once, in a former life, he had been a good student, and in this life, he still had enough desire to please the teacher that he wanted to avoid Michelle's wrath. The best way to do that was to keep your head down and your wand clean.

The customers in this particular Queequeg's location—across from the Suffolk County Courthouse in downtown Boston—were not chatty: they were on their way to the office, or to court, they were already late, maybe they were hung over from trying to drink away the emptiness of their lives last night, and they wanted their lattes five minutes ago, goddammit, and they were always on their cell phones anyway, talking to real people while barely making eye contact with their caffeine-pushing servants.

But this was, except for the ten o'clock lull, a busy location, which gave him less time to think, which was good. He'd spent a lot of time over the past ten years thinking, and it was an activity he really didn't enjoy. Because what was there to think about? The Omega house, and the blood, and the way the axe had resisted slightly when it hit their necks? Or the unfairness of the fact that he was the one who'd had to deal with the vampire problem, that there were plenty of other people, bad people, stupid people, mean people who'd been on the same campus and were now happily cranking out babies and pumping money into retirement accounts, while he, who'd never so much as been in a fight, had to become a killer and wake up screaming every night. Well, no. He didn't have to. He could have wasted a lot of time running around trying to convince other people that what he'd found out was real, and then Steve would have been turned and Laura would have been turned, and it wouldn't have been long before they came for him and either turned him or drained him. So he'd been the one with the axe and the gas can and the Zippo. And for what? To save a bunch of people who would think he was insane if he ever told them that he'd saved them?

Still, it had been a decade. Why couldn't he put anything like a life together? It's not like he could go to therapy or a support group for traumatized vampire slayers or anything, but he doubted that would help anyway.

So he pulled lattes at Queequeg's and woke up screaming every night at three, and on the nights when he couldn't go back to sleep, he made a pot of coffee he got at a somewhat stingy employee discount.

Ted checked his watch. Laura was due at ten, and it was only nine-forty. Norah Jones blared from the speaker above his head, wondering why she didn't call for the fourth time that morning. Ted was wondering why she didn't just shut the hell up. The lights above the small, uncomfortable blonde wood tables gave off a feeble glow. The two comfy chairs next to the front windows were occupied by bald, bespectacled men typing on their laptops. Everything in here was muted—the music, the décor, everything but Michelle, a six-foot-tall, pear-shaped abusive whirlwind of stress who belied the fake serenity of her surroundings.

Right now Michelle was in the back, and Ted realized he should just sit back and enjoy the fact that the ten o'clock lull had come early today.

But all he could do was watch the seconds tick by on the timers on the coffee urns. He couldn't wait, and he hated himself some more for having only one friend. Ted thought that many guys would be happy to have a beautiful woman they'd known since college in their lives, a woman to whom they could tell anything, a woman who knew the very worst thing they had ever done and loved them not in spite of it but because of it.

Actually, he knew most guys would love to have Laura in their lives, because every time he'd ever been around her and other men, he saw the envy in their eyes as they looked from the raven-haired petite professional with the killer rack to his gangly, goofy self. If they only knew.

Ted was happy to have Laura in his life. It's just that she would never be in his life like those envious guys thought she was, not unless he became a woman, and probably not even then.

Ted sighed and glanced at the urn timers again. In twelve minutes he'd have to dump the Yirgacheffe, and, two minutes later, the Columbia.

"Ted!" Jean-Marie yelled. "Large skim latte!"

"Sorry, sorry. Large skim latte comin' up." Ted hadn't even noticed a customer coming in. He grabbed the cup and had no idea what name Jean-Marie had written on the side. He couldn't even guess male or female.

He made the espresso, steamed the skim milk, and mixed them perfectly, slightly off the Queequeg's approved ratio, but perfect according to the formula he'd been secretly working on for the last few months. He looked up and saw that several more customers had come in. So much for the lull. Using both hands, he reverently placed his creation on the counter. He imagined a spotlight shining down on it and a choir of angels singing. It was possibly, he reflected, the perfect latte, the very platonic ideal of a latte, the latte against which all other lattes would forever be measured. He hoped that whoever consumed it would appreciate it, would take a few minutes to savor it and not just gulp it down on their way to court.

"Uh . . . " he said to the three or four customers assembled by the counter. "I'm sorry . . . I can't read this. I'm gonna guess Rachel? Maybe Rowena? Rodney? Richard? Something that starts with an R, or possibly a K? Large skim latte?"

A tall woman with short auburn hair and a black, sleeveless shirt came to the counter. "It's actually Rhiannon," she said.

Ted looked at the cup again. "No, I'm pretty sure your name is Rodney." He braced himself for the onslaught of abuse, but instead he got a small laugh. "See, it says it right here."

She took the cup and squinted at it. "Hmm. I think it's actually Ricki. That's at least a little more unisex than Rodney. And thank you for not saying anything about Fleetwood Mac."