Cthulhu Wakes

Deep in the drowned city of R’lyeh, Cthulhu rubbed his head and opened his eyes. He wasn’t happy.

Cthulhu had a hangover, a bad one.

The party Nyarlathotep had thrown had gone a little too far. Cthulhu groaned when he remembered the wine. Made of mermaid tears, it tasted like distilled Great One essence but packed a punch like an angry colossal squid. Cthulhu, deceived by the flavour, had downed several tankers full. He had no real idea of how he’d returned to his home in R’lyeh, just hazy memories of stumbling through the ooze, falling several times from the effects of the booze.

Cthulhu groaned again. It wasn’t the first time he’d got so drunk and it would certainly not be the last. However, usually he could sleep it off and be fine in a few weeks. Not this time, though.

Something had awakened him. Cthulhu scratched his head with one of his tentacles, accidentally knocking off some of his favourite sea lice, and wondered what it could have been. Even as he wondered, it came again.

Distance had deadened it, the distance that lay between him, in the drowned city of R’lyeh, and the surface far above. It came in waves of pressure, sound and radiation, smacking into his delicate sensory endings, threatening to set his migraine off on top of the hangover. Cthulhu rolled himself into a foetal ball and waited for it to be over. It wasn’t.

Even as he cowered, it came again, blasting at his tentacles and extremities. Cthulhu groaned, loudly enough to set off an earthquake and a small tsunami. Lumbering to his feet, he began rising towards the surface, his great limbs pushing the water back slowly.

A sinking ship or two fell on him, bounced off and disappeared into the depths. Cthulhu ignored them. Sinking ships were nothing to him. He’d sunk a few himself once.

Long before he’d got to the surface, the booming and the radiation he’d felt had faded away. But in their place now, his sensitive tentacles found another source of intense annoyance, this time electronic, blaring across the spectrum of sound and vision.

Furiously, and many years after he’d started out on his journey, he surfaced. The electronic screaming was much, much louder now. One sort, in particular, angered him to frenzy. Striding across the ocean, a relatively short walk brought him to land, each step – or stumble – assaulting him with more and more infuriating electronic mayhem.

Cthulhu had been angered a little too much this time. He’d had his moments before, when he’d been tempted sorely into rising and smiting the world down. Like when that bearded little twerp’s corpse had come sinking down to him as he was rising from R’lyeh, had introduced its late owner as Ossummuh Binlaaden and had asked him to join Alka Eda,  whoever that might be, in the jihad, whatever that might be. But it hadn't been a patch on this.

It was night when he reached land. Lights flashed from all around a stage where several two-legged creatures in big hairdos and brightly coloured costumes jumped and flailed about and screamed as though they were being castrated alive. In front of the stage, many thousands of other two-legged creatures, mostly female, also jumped and screamed and waved their hands or pieces of underclothing, in the air. And the electronic blast from it was the type which had infuriated Cthulhu to frenzy.

Cthulhu rose, He rose to his entire mountainous height, threw his head back and shrieked at the sky. He reached out with his fingers and picked out the jumping-est of the brightly-coloured big-haired castratos and held it up to his face.

“What the hell do you people think you’re doing?” he shouted. “What can’t you let me sleep? What part of ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn can’t you understand?”

The little creature looked back at him. “Hey man,” it said. “What a voice! I’ve got a proposition for you...”

And thus was born the phenomenon of Cthulhu, the new singing sensation.

His duet with Lady Gaga, Spawn This Way, is up for the Grammys this year.