“Of course,” I said. “And so does Ronnie.”
“I don’t take drinks from people who try to kill me,” said Ronnie.
I sat at the table and motioned for him to do the same. “Here’s your next lesson. When Temple Finn offers to make chocolate of any kind, you say yes.”
“One for me, too.” Annette yawned as she joined us in the kitchen.
“You sleep through the whole magical battle in the hall, but as soon as Temple mentions chocolate, then you show up?” My heart wasn’t in the banter. Ever since Temple had mentioned shoggoths, I’d been fitting the pieces together and dreading what they revealed.
“I woke her,” said Temple. “I wanted you both to hear this.”
Annette looked at the scraps of tinfoil on the floor and the fresh welts on Temple’s throat and forehead. “What happened?”
I let Ronnie fill her in on the fight. My thoughts were on the other side of the country and decades in the past.
Too quickly, Ronnie reached the end of the story. “Temple thought I was something called a shoggoth,” he said. “Whatever the hell that is.”
“Extraplanar leftovers from before the Big Bang,” I said, before Temple could explain. My words were numb. “Imagine giant black slugs covered in eyeballs.”
“They’re not truly black.” Temple handed me a mug of hot chocolate topped with whipped cream as tall as the mug. He gave two more to Annette and Ronnie. “Our eyes just can’t see most of the colors. The pattern is like a banana with mottled brown spots, only instead of yellow and brown, they’re the color of time moving sideways with spots the color of forgotten stars. If you look at them closely, you go mad. Shoggoths were servants and not particularly intelligent. Slaves, really. It’s said they were builders, if you can believe that.”
“Lovecraft wrote about them, yes?” asked Annette.
Temple openedStuart Littleto a section titledAt the Mountains of Madness. The illustration showed a mouse fleeing a glistening, tentacled horror. I flinched, not at the sight of the shoggoth but at the memories it stirred.
“How many books do you have saved in there?” asked Ronnie.
“Eleven thousand and four. I’d have more if certain people weren’t so stingy with their stock.”
Annette jabbed a finger at the book. “Keep that thing away from the store.” To Ronnie, she explained, “It literally eats other books. Devours them like a paper piranha. It’s not allowed in the shop or within ten feet of the stock room.”
Ronnie pointed to the picture, keeping his finger clear like he was afraid the book would bite it off. “You were just dreaming, though. That thing wasn’t really here, was it?”
“Yes and no.” Temple emptied his mug and wiped whipped cream and chocolate from his moustache. “Sage’s pills contain essence of shoggoth. It’s why Slimey was unaffected by my slowsand.”
“What the hell is Slimey?” asked Annette.
“That’s what I named the goo I extracted from one of the pills.”
He was more animated, energized by the prospect of extradimensional incursions. Or maybe he’d just been flirting with Margaret again. Either way, I was glad to see it.
“Shoggoths existed before time and space,” he went on. “Many of the rules of our universe don’t apply. Even trapped in a jar, it must cast a kind of shadow into our universe. I think I’ve got it locked down now, though. Shadow and all.”
“You’re saying the stuff in those pills is alive?” asked Ronnie.
“As much as your blood or mucus is alive, yes,” said Temple.
Annette pushed her mug away. “And people are voluntarily putting that in their mouths?”
Ronnie leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. “Just tell me how we kill them.”
“Fire usually works,” I said. “Eventually. The other option is to banish them back to their plane of existence.”
“You’ve fought shoggoths?” Ronnie asked with what almost sounded like respect.
“You look remarkably sane for a woman who’s faced these creatures,” said Temple. “Even gazing upon one in a dream was enough to break my grip on reality.”
“I’ve had a lot of therapy. And Prozac.” I got up to refill my mug. I couldn’t put it off anymore, but this conversation was going to take alotof whipped cream. “I was seventeen and on a break from Felipe and the Guardians Circle. It was the first of several splits with them. My father had died, and I needed time to just be human.”
