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The Summer of Lugubriosity

by M. T. Lee

 

We did the ritual on a Wednesday. Josh brought the candles, I brought the book, and Deek brought the lamb. We’re still not sure where he found it.

“Reckon it’ll work?” The beach wind was chilly, and Deek’s voice was muffled beneath his coat.

“Duh,” I said, taking out the Necronomicon we’d found in the Halswell Community Library three weeks ago. But actually I had no idea ‘cos even though the demon goatfish stuff had gone really well, this one was at the end of the book and written in blood or maybe crappy red ink. Really, this was all Dad’s idea. “You boys should do something with your holidays instead of playing on the TV all the time,” he’d said. I brought this up the next time we hung out. “We boys should do something with our holidays instead of playing on the TV all the time,” I told them. This was mostly because they were playing Mortal Kombat III which I wasn’t really good at and I got bored watching them, but also because when I thought about the holidays ending I always felt kinda sad, so I thought it’d be cool to do a big one before we had to go back to school. Anyway they murmured Yeses from their bean bags so here we were, summoning an ancient sea god from the fathomless abyss.

We arranged the stuff. I had to do the virgin blood since I was born in September, and then we draw a crappy pentagram on A3 paper and made the lamb stand in it. It grazed mournfully on seaweed as we started chanting. There were cool words like omnia and noctis like the opening bit from Final Fantasy VIII, but after a while we had to restart ‘cos we forgot to pull our hoodies down to look evil.

We went on for half an hour. It got colder. The waters rose. The moon shone. The lamb tried to eat the tome. No ancient sea gods emerged.

“Maybe it’s the candles,” I suggested.

“Where the fuck does it say it can’t be lavender scented,” Josh said testily.

“Come on, guys. This is lame. Let’s go home.” Deek paused. “Where’s the sheep?”

We turned to look at the lamb, who was gone. We circled around calling out Lamb and Baa and other things until we saw a trail in the sand that led all the way to the edge of the sea. The bubbles frothed red.

Then a wet femur flew out and bounced one two three times on the sand. In the distance a great wave was forming beneath the blood-red moon. We held our breaths in anticipation. Then we had to start breathing again because the wave was taking a while.

Deek was wondering which one we’d get. I reckoned He Who Knows The Fate Of Stars would be cool but Josh wanted The Twilight Pharoah because he’d recently watched The Mummy. Then Deek said he wanted The Bloated Black Goat Of Endless Wailing which set us up for a killer your mum joke. Then the big wave loomed closer and we had to run up the beach, and when it receded it left a rugby-ball-sized thing squirming in the sand. We leaned closer and poked it with sticks. The thing was squidlike with several tentacles and a mouth of tiny fangs. Its skin was spotted slimy green, and it gazed at us dickishly with a single red eye.

“Mrwro’gh’graba!” it said. We pondered.

“Is that Latin?” I asked.

“It’s French,” said Deek confidently. His family had gone to Europe last year. “Bonsuwahhhh. Quel — est . . .”

While they were having a conversation Josh poked the thing with a stick again and it bit it in half. I didn’t want to say it but this kind of sucked. It didn’t look like any of those cool guys we mentioned. Its name might as well have been Maurice. We had wanted something awesome that would destroy the schools so summer break would last forever and we thought we could sit on its head and make it eat dickheads like Billy Morris, but now we saw that if we sat on its head we would just squash it and this made us sad.

We huddled. Josh reckoned we should biff it back into the ocean and this time tomorrow we could be playing Mortal Kombat III. I was forced to point out that it would probably grow and that it had eaten the lamb so we could also get it to eat Billy Morris if we learnt French. Eventually we agreed to not biff it back into the ocean but also that I had to take it home because I did not have pets or siblings and they did not want theirs to be eaten, which I guessed was fair, so we rolled it inside a plastic bag that smelled like puke and biked home with it in my basket. It bumped around and swore in French before settling down, and when I got home I tucked it with some towels in a cardboard box under my bed.

The next day I woke up late. Mum and Dad were at work and I biked down to the park with Maurice in the basket. Deek wanted to know if I had been driven mad by secret knowledge and I told him I was just the regular kind of mad because it ate three spoons over breakfast. He looked disappointed. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Then maybe to show off his knowledge of sea god things he asked me if I was feeling more lugubrious than usual, and then Josh said that I looked a bit lugubrious, so I had to agree that maybe I did feel a little more lugubrious than usual because it sounded cool, even though I wasn’t sure what it meant.

It was a nice sunny day. The swimming pool was still closed because of the demon goatfish infestation, so we got fish ‘n chips from Mr. Woo Sing and ate it on the swings. We let the sea god out to play on the grass and it sort of crawled around and tried to eat birds. Sometimes we’d toss a chip at it and it would snatch it up with a tentacle, which was cool and made us feel better about our decisions. We talked about how school was starting in a few days and how maybe we could do a sleepover tonight and get games and popcorn from the Blockbuster’s. Then Deek told us that once his brother snuck in the curtainy adult bit and told him all about the hot ‘n dirty stuff he saw there. Josh nodded knowingly so I nodded too, also knowingly, and thought secretly about how cool it would be to do hot ‘n dirty stuff when I was older.

We were discussing boobs and related things when I heard the bike bells ring and my stomach fell to my butt. There was Billy Morris riding up like a black knight and behind him rode Morgan Jones and Craig McNeil like regular knights.“Hey, look, it’s the losers!” yelled Billy Morris. “What are you losers up to? Losing?”

The bike tyres screeched to a halt. Billy spat menacingly. He wore scruffy jeans with holes in them and a mean-looking chain looped round his belt. They surrounded us.

“Hey, Josh, can I have a chip, bro?” said Morgan, all friendly, but then he slapped the pack so chips went flying everywhere. One hit me on the nose.

“Leave us alone,” said Deek.

“Leave us alone,” copied Craig McNeil in a shrill girly voice. “You’re such a loser.”

“Loser.”

“Loooo-ser.”

“And look, they’ve got a dumb little dog with them!” said Billy, pointing to the creature described in the Necronomicon as hailing from the thrice-damned eldritch realm of forgotten stars. Craig McNeil threw a rock at it.

“Graaargh,” it said, angrily, as the rock bounced off its head.

“What a dumb sound,” said Morgan Jones.

“Yeah,” said Billy Morris. “Sounds like French.”

I wasn’t about to let them have this one. “It does not,” I said, turning to avoid Deek’s look of shock.

“Hey, Billy,” said Craig McNeil. “I bet if you kicked it you could clear that rugby post.”

“Yeah, I bet I could,” said Billy, angling himself. “Say goodbye to your stupid dog, losers.”

Smirking, Billy raised his leg into the air. The single eye glowed blood red. Dozens of tentacles shot out and grabbed Billy’s other leg. There was a horrible chomping noise. Morgan and Craig ran screaming towards their bikes, but the tentacles tied around their ankles and arms and dragged them into the gaping maw. Blood and bone and metal bike bits rained all over us like the roof spike Fatality from Mortal Kombat III. Then when the screaming was over, the sea god spat out a bone, closed its eye, and fell into a deep slumber.

We huddled. We agreed that this was Pretty Wicked and that Josh was wrong for wanting to biff it back into the ocean and that for this I would get the first pick of video games at the Blockbuster’s. But as we got less excited we remembered that probably Billy, Morgan, and Craig had families who might be upset and call the cops or possibly even the principal and then we’d be really getting it from our mums. We started kicking the ground miserably and I felt extra miserable because this was kind of my idea, and Billy Morris might’ve been a dick but being eaten seemed like it would suck, and then Deek mentioned quietly that Morgan Jones had actually lent him Metroid on the Game Boy once and then we all felt really bad.

“We have to biff it back into the ocean,” Josh said again. He was kind of like that sometimes. But then we looked at the bloodstains around its mouth and thought maybe that wouldn’t be a great idea because it was a pretty far bike ride and what if it decided to eat us on the way too? But we couldn’t just leave it there because then it’d start eating random people, and we couldn’t lose the park as well after losing the swimming pool.

But then I saw the chip that had hit my nose. “I have an idea,” I said.

 

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Mr. Woo Sing looked at us suspiciously when we came into the fish ‘n chip shop. “Why you covered in blood?”

We had forgotten about that. “It’s orange juice,” I said.

His eyes narrowed. “It’s red.”

“It’s cranberry flavoured. Anyway we would like some squid rings, please.”

“Told you earlier. No squid rings.”

“I know.” I put the sleeping sea god on the counter. “We brought our own.”

In the end it took some convincing because it turned out that Mr. Woo Sing was deeply versed in eldritch lore, and he informed us that Maurice was actually the Thrice-Scorned Eater of Blackened Souls and Knower Of Things Unknown, and though its mortal will could not be contained in this earthly form, Mr. Woo Sing wanted his business untarnished with the sin of godslaying, especially with Inland Revenue already breathing down his back, but then we found seven fifty between us and he caved. As he salted the sea god and sharpened his cleaver, Maurice opened its one red eye and gazed at us, less dickishly this time, and for a moment I felt really bad, but then the cleaver came down and thumped off all its tentacles, which we ate outside on the bench without saying anything.

Later, as we bazookaed each other in Worms: Armageddon, I thought about how weird that had been. Not the taste. That had actually been quite good with some tomato sauce. But after eating it I felt very strange in my brain. It was like my head had opened up and I suddenly knew all sorts of things about the future and the destinies of the stars and that lugubrious just means kind of sad. I even knew all about the videos they had in the hot ‘n dirty section and I understood why I always felt sad at the end of summer holidays and why I thought we had to do something instead of playing on the TV all the time. But then these thoughts went away and I was just me with my normal thoughts again. I looked at the others and I thought maybe they felt the same but didn’t want to say anything, because it would have sounded lame.

When I got home the next morning Dad was reading the papers and Mum was fussing over the kitchen counter. “Hey, kid. What’d you get up to? Had fun?”

“Yeah, it was cool.”

“Do you know where all our spoons went?” Mum said. I shrugged. Dad gave me a strange look.

“You all right?”

“Yeah. I just feel kind of lugubrious.”

Now Mum gave me a strange look. “That’s a big word.”

“Well, he’s a big kid now. Aren’t you?”

I don’t know. So I went to my room and sat on my bed and thought about all the things I knew before and after eating the sea god squid rings. Then I thought about how this was the last week of the summer holidays. Maybe school would be really exciting. Maybe I’d remember some of the things I didn’t know. Then, if not, maybe uni would teach me those things about boobs and the destinies of the stars. But maybe it’d take me longer than that, and somehow this knowing-not-knowing made me scared.

But then I thought, I’m a big kid now, not because I summon sea gods or use big words, but because I made something out of my holidays instead of playing on the TV all the time, so maybe it’s actually okay. Because probably big kids felt like this all the time, this knowing-not-knowing, and they just kept doing stuff anyway, and probably they hadn’t even eaten magic squid rings, or known things they weren’t yet meant to know.

This thought was nice. I fell asleep in the breeze and dreamt of distant stars.

 

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Host Commentary

…aaaaand welcome back. That was “The Summer of Lugubriosity” by M. T. Lee, and if you enjoyed that then he’s set up a website specially for you fine folk to be able to keep track of what else he does from here on out! So trundle yourself on over to emptylee.com—that’s “empty” as in “not full”, e m p t y l e e .com

M. T. sent us these notes on his story, too: This story was originally written as an exercise from Le Guin’s “Steering the Craft” about writing only in sentences of seven words or less, which somehow lent its way to laconic, Kiwi-styled humour (this was later edited for flow, but you can see some remnants of it in the opening paragraph). Originally, the story ended at the fish and chip shop, but when I sat down and revised it a couple years later I was pleasantly surprised to see it grow into something more poignant. The setting draws very specifically on my experiences growing up in Christchurch, New Zealand in the late 90s, biking around with my friends and being stupid together, and I’m quite happy it ended up as my first published piece. I hope you enjoyed it.

Thanks, M. T., for the story and that background. It is a rare delight, and a compelling one, to read something with such a specific sense of place and time as this has, even as it also deals in non-Euclidian places from outside this plane and time beyond measure or knowing. But it is also about being an awkward adolescent who knows hardly anything but cannot ever, due to a terror beyond anything mere cosmic horror can induce, actually admit to that; about needing, desperately, to feel like an adult in control, and about needing, desperately, to hang on to the last shreds of summer break and, whisper it, childhood. Contrary to the rumours I did only grow up once, and that was as an awkward adolescent in a seaside town in the late 90s, so despite being set in the actual antipode of my home town this felt uncannily familiar and written almost specifically to appeal to me, someone who has also had a Lovecraft piss-take run on PodCastle.

I may be biased, then, but I think growing up at the seaside, with all the wide dunes to adventure on, building fires and hanging out and thinking we were pulling one over on the shops when they actually sold us cider (even though, in hindsight, they absolutely knew, they just didn’t care), then wandering back into town and getting chips from Eptons down Chip Pan Alley—other chip shops were for tourists, locals knew Eptons was best—before killing an hour or two playing House of the Dead 2 in the Pier Arcade… there’s no finer place for the small misadventures of youth than the seaside, I promise.

And as if all the specifics of an adolescence 25 years and 11,000 miles away weren’t also uncanny enough, there’s that central fear, too… not the unknowable horrors, cos whatever, y’know, when you’re 13 you can’t imagine life ever ending, mortality’s just a rumour, but the knowing-not-knowing, the not being sure even as everyone around you seems so sure, and worse the not knowing when you will know. And that unsettles me more than anything, cos, y’know… I still don’t know a lot of this. I don’t know what I want to do with my life, I don’t know how to be the person I ought to be, I don’t know how I can do the things it feels like I need to do in a world so unjust and miserable that I might be able to help with, and I don’t know how to work any of this out or when I will, and I turned 40 last year, I’m past halfway, there’s less time before me than there is behind and I still don’t know. I don’t even know if it’s okay that I don’t know, cos although I can sit here, with the benefit of 2 decades’ hindsight and assert that anyone who ever showed a shred of confidence as a teenager alongside me was either an idiot who really believed their own myth or were just bluffing all along, faking it till they made it, I don’t know that about the other adults alongside me now! I expect I’ll get to 60 and look back and go gods, everyone who looked like they had their shit together in their 40s even as they tried and failed to deal with kids and elderly parents and their own Health Issue Bingo cards and careers and marriages and maybe, somewhere in the cracks of all that, the stuff they actually thought they’d do with their life, I’ll look back and I’ll realise everyone was still bluffing then, and none of us ever know, and that’s why we have each other, in the hopes that our gaps and our answers overlap and that’s how we make it through… but right now I’m still in the middle of it, and still knowing-not-knowing, and all I can do is keep doing stuff anyway.

But at least I finally know about boobs. 13 year old me would be well chuffed to hear that, at least.