“What kind of a fucked up person would give me a dog to eat?” Vinnie shoved his mug of beer disgustedly, like it was the offending chef.
“Now you see what we’ve been dealing with. The Church has their hooks in more than anyone could possibly imagine and there’s no way to know just how far they’re going to go.” Jack stood up and pulled his shirt up to his chest. It was filled with intricately carved scars, with a thick single scar running around the bottom of his belly, like a perverse belt. “They did this. They gashed their alien words into me and put something inside me. Something alive. I could feel it twisting as they held me in their hospital.”
“They have a hospital?”
“Haven’t you been paying attention? They’re all over the place. The ones that are actually demons and beasts you can see and run from. But they’re not the only members of the Church. They’re just the ones that were born into it. They have human converts. They come from all walks of life. They’re mailmen. They’re cops. They’re doctors and nurses. Any time you go to a hospital, any time you get pulled over, any time you get a burger, it could be them. And you could be doing exactly what they want you to.”
“What happened to the thing they put in you?”
“I cut it out. I damn near bled to death, but I got it out.”

A massive green tadpole, the size of a body-builder’s forearm slammed down onto the table and lurched upwards. Everyone but Jack flew backwards, reaching for something to hit it with.

“An dat’s what it looked like!” Abdul cackled and crossed his arms over his chest, as the stuffed tadpole wobbled around the table for a little longer.
“You fucking kept that thing?” August made as if to spit on the tadpole and then decided against it.
“Mostly, I just like throwing out to fuck with new guys.”
“You’re fucked up, Abdul. If I were to rate you, on a scale of 1 to 10 -”
“I’d be an eleven?”
“you’d be a … FUCKED UP!”

Abdul continued cackling as Vinnie picked his chair back up and took a good look at the monstrous amphibian. He couldn’t resist picking it up for a better look, but his brain screamed for caution, slowing his hands to a dreamlike float over to the sawdust filled creature. Once it was in his hands, his stomach twisted, as though they were imagining the tadpole swimming inside. He thrust his hands forward to drop it back onto the table but his fingers disobeyed briefly, letting it linger in his hands before finally releasing their demonic cargo.

“Looked like you were gonna make out with that thing for a sec,” Clark mocked.
“Man, fuck you. That thing’s pure evil.”
“Yeah, and so’s that bitch you banged back at the truck stop. She probably gave you an evil STD, too. You’ll probably have tentacles growing out of your junk tomorrow.”
“Whatever, I hear some chicks dig that. They’ll be all over me and my evil tentacle junk.”

August scoffed and leaned back in his chair, shaking his head.

“Why the hell do I hang out with you sick fucks?”
“‘Cause you love us?” Jack suggested.
“Hell no, fag.”
“‘Cause you love our mothers?” Clark joked.
“Fuck no. Your mom’s so dirty, she has crabs bigger than Jack’s tadpole.”
“Which would be a step up from the last chick you had.”
“Fuck. I hate you guys.” August started laughing and delivered a pair of single finger salutes to share among his friends. “Hey, Abdul, how about some more beer. … And how about getting your girlfriend off the table?” Abdul flashed his own salute and winged a bottle at the slender biker. He tried catching it gently, but the mad Arab had loosened the cap, and it went flying off. A jet of beer foam flew out before August could get the bottle into his mouth to save what beer he could.

“Aren’t you just making more work for yourself, Abdul?”
“Does it smell like I mop in here?”
“Yeah, I guess there is that.” August took another pull from his beer before deciding that it was probably out of danger of geysering beer everywhere. “So, what’s the deal, Jack? We gonna ride out and fuck those cultists up or what?”

Jack looked back with a malicious grin and flexed his meaty paws before rolling them into fists. “Yeah, they’re gonna have a real come to Jesus moment,” he joked. Vinnie looked puzzled until Clark volunteered the missing piece of the puzzle.
“Jesus is the name of his bat.”
“Steel baton. A bat won’t fit in my saddlebag.”
“What if it did?”
“I’d put a nail in it and call it something funny.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know! I don’t have a bat with a nail in it. I don’t feel inspired enough to make a name.”
“Or, you’re not very funny.”
“Maybe I’ll put a nail in you and call you something funny.”
“Fag. I knew you were trying to nail me.”
“Show of hands: who saw the gay joke coming?”
“You know who else saw me coming?”
“Holy shit! The bad jokes don’t stop.”

Clark leaned back in his chair and put his feet on top of the table before delivering the final verbal jab.
“Your mom.”

Jack threw his hands up and sighed. “Man, August is right; you guys suck.”

“At any rate, I just spilled my guts to you guys and I know just about nothing about you, ‘cept that you seem to know what’s going down in tentacle town. How ’bout a little story time?”

Clark slid his chair slightly to better regard Vinnie, without taking his feet off of the table. “Well, if you really want to know what’s going on, I guess fair’s fair. I’ve only been at this monster hunting deal for a couple years. But, I’ve known what’s going on for damn near my whole life.

“You know the old creepy dude in your old neighborhood? The one that you always thought was fucked up and had a haunted house? Every neighborhood’s got one. Usually, the gramps is just cracked from seeing too much of life. Or maybe everything he does makes perfect sense, it’s just that no one stops to ask why they might be standing on their roof at night or poking around their lawn with a spatula.

“I had one of those in my old place. Old Man Derleth was fucked up. And he did have a haunted house. Shit, everything he did had a reason, but it just wasn’t one that you wanted to know, you dig? When most of us kids in the neighborhood were creeping up inta our teens and thinking about shit to do to impress the chicks, we sparked on this genius idea of about bustin’ into this dude’s place, just to show who had the most balls.

“Lemme back up here a sec. When I say this dude was fucked up and had a haunted joint, I’m not bullshitting you. In a neighborhood of cookie cutter, pastel-colored suburb houses, with bright green lawns that couldn’t have possibly changed since one of the Roosevelts were in office, this cat had a fucking Dracula castle. It took up two lots and had three dark gray stories. The place hadn’t had the walls or lawn cleaned for decades. It didn’t look so much like it had been built, so much as grown in the spot. The home owner’s association tried to call it an eyesore and slap fines on him, except it turned out that he wasn’t a member. Because his joint was even older than the rest of the ‘burb. It was a national monument of some sort. I couldn’t even tell you what the fuck it was, even though I read the plaque once.

“The place was three stories of Hell, basically. Once we got it into our heads to sneak in, we started coming up with all kinds of stupid shit to do once we got in there. We could creep in and jack something. No idea what was inside, but everything in there had to be crazy, right? Anything we took had to be obviously from there, right? So then we came up with a little contest: who could take the craziest shit? I mean, everyone has stuff that’s just so messed up that they stuff it away and forget about it. What would his stuff look like? If the stuff he used everyday and had laying out was nuts, then the stuff that even he didn’t want would be goat fucking crazy!

“So we did it. Six of us climbed over his fence and another two bolted when the fence made the most god-awful fucking racket. It cried teeth shaking, wrought iron murder when we were on it. I don’t know how it supported our weight, but it did. My best buddy Jimmy cut himself on one of the spikes up top and started swearing until I got my hand over his mouth to shut him up. But, after I got close enough to clap him up, it became really obvious that while he was spitting a lot of f-bombs and s-hammers, half the shit coming out of his mouth wasn’t English.

“At first I thought, ‘Is that fucking Hebrew? He can’t possibly be that into that Jewish chick at school to be picking up another language, can he?’ But after his eyes started whipping around his skull and all the swearing in English was replaced by the growling g’s and th’s, it was obvious to me that he had been possessed by something and that this thing wasn’t going to go anywhere. I drug him to the front gate and as soon as I got him outside the fence, he shut up and dropped to the cement.

“He passed the fuck out in my arms and I lowered him to sidewalk as gently as I could. I had joined the Boy Scouts two years before, so I knew what CPR was. But, he didn’t need it. He was breathing OK and his heart was beating. The cut he had wasn’t even bleeding any more. Everything I knew about medicine said he was fine and just taking a nap. But twelve year old boys don’t just start spitting out dead languages and pass out for nothing. I had no idea what was going on, but I did know that the other four boys had gotten into the place and I wasn’t even inside the fence right now.

“I didn’t want to leave him behind, but I didn’t want to be a pussy more. To this day, I know that I made the worst choice of my life that day. I opened a door in my mind to shit that I’ve been trying to escape for the past twenty years and I left my best friend to die. Coroners called it tetanus, but that’s bullshit. I looked it up in every medical journal I could get my hands on. Every medical book. Every quack with a license. Tetanus can’t kill in hours. It takes days and weeks. I know now that the coroner back home was a cultist. They covered up Jimmy’s death with fast-talking and cock-sure medical jargon that I couldn’t understand at the time. All the crazy language was just painful muscle spasms causing his words to come out strange, is what they said. It’s bullshit. His mind had been stolen and replaced with something else. Something from beyond Earth.

“I wouldn’t know any of this until later. In the meantime, Lin had picked the lock on the front door and the rest of the kids were inside, trying to find something strange to take. I scampered back inside. It was dumb to run when my footsteps made so much noise on the wood floors, but I was a stupid kid, just racking up the mistakes that day. The racket we were making woke something up. Not Old Man Derleth. Something older and something much, much worse.

“We were rummaging through his library downstairs, our flashlight beams zipping everywhere. Five dumb kids making shit tons of noise and shining lights everywhere; it was more like a rave than a home invasion. We were fucking stupid. Yeah, there were plenty of crazy books, mostly written in languages we couldn’t even recognize, but if the first floor was like this, what was there upstairs? One of the other kids, Colin, lost his nerve and swiped something from the kitchen instead of heading upstairs. He was saying that he found something that took the cake and he tucked it under his jacket and ran. I never did find out what it was. His house burned down the next day, with his whole family in it. I don’t know if it was something the cultist found worth killing for or if what he took was just so … packed with evil that he turned the place into an inferno.

“Then there was just the three of us; Lin, me and Sandy. We were on the second story landing and it seemed like the whole level was just one big empty room. Then, the place shook like the entire building had gotten up and taken a step. Damn near knocked us all off our feet. Fucking scary is what it was. We all froze and Sandy had the bright idea of turning his light off. I didn’t want to be in the dark, I don’t think any of us did, really, but fear, combined with peer pressure made it happen. The lights went off and there was nothing. There were windows up here. I knew there had to be, ’cause we could see them from the outside, but the street light wasn’t shining in up in the second story.

“No one had taken a step yet. We were all scared of breathing hard. We couldn’t see anything, except the stairs below us. It was was all so very, very dark. I could sense Lin and Sandy standing near me, but it seemed as though they were sliding away from me, until I couldn’t feel their presence anymore. Soon, it became obvious to me that I was all alone in the night.

“No. Not alone. The blackness held a secret from me. I could hear it on the floor and the ceiling at the same time. It was making sucking noises as it crawled forwards. I’ve never heard anything like it and I pray that I never will again. It squished and slurped ever closer to me and I became aware of a barely visible green light from it that looked like even the darkness was repulsed by the thing and refused to cover it. My fear of being caught had finally been beaten by my fear of the house and I took a step for the stairs. What should have been a step down was nothing but uneven floor. Stone floor. I took another step. More floor. I lit my flashlight and flailed it in front of me.

“The stairs were gone. Just fucking gone. I spun around in case I had just gotten turned around, but I wasn’t in a giant, empty room on the second floor landing anymore. I was underground, in some sort of a cave and whatever the green glow was ate my flashlight’s beam. Just as the dark fled from its tar-like body, the light was utterly devoured by the formless pillar of evil that went from floor to ceiling. Its body rippled with a billion eyes opening and closing, growing and popping. Insect eyes. Human eyes. Animal eyes. Eyes from things that I’ve never seen before. It reached for me with an oily black tentacle.

“I ran.

“I didn’t know where I was or where I could run to, but I had to run. Terrified minutes of running through a maze of subterranean corridors left my lungs burning and my legs weak and trembling. Either through terror or thin air, this place was breaking me down. Leaving me fucking feeble. As much as my fear tried to force me to move, my legs were jelly. I fell on my face, my flashlight shattering on the ground. There was a rush of air both in front and behind me, smashing me in both directions.

“I rolled over, expecting to be crushed by more of the inky eye things and instead the cave exploded into burning bright light. There was a metal scream, like someone was raping the Eiffel Tower and then nothing. I woke up at home, with this in my hand.” Clark pulled back his shirt to expose a branch made of gold tied to a leather cord around his neck.

“What’s that thing?” Vinnie pointed at the branch.
“According to some geologist dude that went bat shit crazy in Antarctica, back in the Great Depression, it’s something called the Elder Sign. It’s supposed to be a charm to ward off evil, like the swastika was before the Nazis turned it into something fucked up.”
“Does it work?”
“I haven’t ran into another tar monster since, so I guess so.”
“So, some other monster saved you?”
“I’d say it was an angel, except from the flash that I remember, it didn’t have no wings and looked like a starfish mixed with a walking piece of celery.”
“Hahahaa! What the fuck? You’re fucking making this shit up!”
“Fuck off. That shit was scary. Hell of a lot more intense than getting laid and puking up Lassie’s foot.”
“Am I gettin’ shit talked to by a fucking boy scout?”

The table was filled with laughter as everyone turned towards August, prompting him to go next.