I’m pretty sure I passed Yog-Sothoth on the street.
My first clue was the tentacles. Most people don’t have slimy appendages with toothed suckers skirting the pavement they walked over. Also most people don’t have three mouths and screech “Cthulhu fhtagn” in eldritch voices that spoke of realities and dimensions that man was not meant to know of. He was eating a Double-Down from KFC. No, two of them. He had three mouths, like I said, so they were doing the eating; the other one was screaming.
It was morning, and I was walking along University Avenue, on my way to class. I had Victorian Lit with Professor Bjornsson. Today we’re looking at conceptions of the gothic. Oh friggin’ joy, right?
The air was too cold and the light was too bright. It bounced off the office buildings and aimed square into my retinas. My eyes were groggy from staying up late reading Haruki Murakami. They felt like when you reheat coffee and no matter how hot it gets, you still taste the age on it.
Yog-Sothoth, for his part, did not look tired at all. Granted, considering the calories in the Double-Down he was eating, he had no reason to be tired. He was just walking down the street, eating and screeching. There was a magazine in one of his tentacles, presumably to read after he finished his morning feast.
I wanted to talk to him. How often do you see a nameless Elder God walking down the street? There weren’t any groupies or papparazzi either. It was the perfect scenario to strike up a conversation, to mention how I admired him, how I thought non-Euclidean geometry was the absolute bomb.
Instead shyness got the better of me, and I walked past him. One of my eardrums burst from the decibels of the shrieking, but the doctor at the U of T health centre told me I’d be fine in a week.
I should’ve talked to him. He seemed like a cool guy. He could’ve told me about the cosmic infinity and the terrifying nature of a universe where the closest thing to God was born of chaos and darkness the likes of which we have never seen. Maybe we would’ve been friends.
Or maybe he would’ve consumed my soul and sent me to the dreaded void, where Azathoth the demon-king sits with his amorphous, dancing pipers.
Either way, it beats Victorian Lit with Professor Bjornsson.
