Demiurge: The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales of Michael Shea by Michael Shea

Author:Michael Shea [Shea, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Dark Regions Press
Published: 2017-11-28T07:00:00+00:00

DAGONIAD

Dee guessed that being fifty-five meant that your thighs and your butt were just going to be a little thicker than you liked, no matter how much you strode up and down the hills of beautiful San Francisco. You just had to settle for being tight-muscled but no longer looking it so much. At least the aerobic high was the same as ever, powering the slopes, a nice blue flame of oxygen in your lungs. She was moving through the upper Haight now, aiming to cut across steep Buena Vista Park, thence steeply down to Divisadero. Her dear old friend Babs had told her to take a hike, that she would mind the store for the last three hours—a gift Babs offered frequently, and Dee too often accepted. She guessed she was having age issues. Testing and training her strength was a growing concern. Babs, five years farther along, was helping her through it.

Actually, Dee looked pretty good, if she only knew it. Had vigorous gray hair worn neck-length, and out of it thrust her strong face, wide intelligent gray eyes, her seamed cheeks gaunt, her mobile mouth quirky with thoughts as she strode along. And she had a walking stick, which gave her a certain style. She’d found it years ago in a Mission District thrift shop—a stout yard of hardwood headed with a brass knob and tapering to a weighty ferrule. It was a stick unmistakably, on hefting, weighted with a core of iron. A wonderful implement, she often thought, fraught with socioeconomic significance. She imagined a late nineteenth-century gent out for a long perambulation through Dickensian streets. Feral dogs and Cockney thugs stepped from foggy alleys, and the gent (she imagined him fifty-five years old, gray-haired but sturdy) was ready to deal with them. Dee liked dogs. She had an easy authority with them bred of her liking them, and she could pet and converse affectionately with big wandering strays of all breeds. But she could also imagine meeting a mean one and, at need, bashing it silly with a stroke of old Rod (as she’d named her stick). Could imagine bashing a thug, too, at need.

She carried Rod gripped low-center at present, like a cudgel, and she occasionally gave him a little twitch, as if thumping something. Although she’d been walking wanderingly for hours, getting her workout, drinking in her gorgeous City, this evening she had a destination. She was going to see Susy, her bedeviled ex-lover, still loved. Dee was always more or less pissed at Susy for her reckless living, but on most occasions tried to lighten up and just enjoy her company. This evening, however, Dee had to talk some hard truth to that sweet but silly bitch.

So she thumped the air for emphasis as she walked and, alone on a path through the park, said softly, “Just open your eyes, girl! Read the papers! Brutally murdered. A man you know! A pimp. You know a fucking pimp!”

Time was Susy’s trap too. She’d

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