I did not realize how screwed up we humans are until I released Cthulhu. Honestly, I thought most people are attached to reality. But almost everyone sees either a male with orange hair and a female with a strained insincere smile and I cannot believe it. Would anyone believe that Cthulhu is up there, debating itself, three tentacles at one podium and four at the other and people are at each other's throats.

The people who see what's really there are either in hiding, in their survival bunker, deepening their attachment to substances or have been admitted to psych and drugged to the gills.

I know everyone sins, but I really have fungked things up.

So I call the Magnificent Seven. I don't know what Cthulhu has done with H. M won't be available until January, right, yeah, I know. It's going to take a while raise E. I suppose it's not fair to use one in office, they are busy. So that means I have to raise two. I get hold of R.

"What?" she says.

"Uh, H. is missing."

"H. is not missing."

"Uh, that's Cthulhu's tentacles. Cthulhu has H."

"What? Someone released Cthulhu again?"

"Uh. It was me."

"WHAT? WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?"

Well, that's a silly question. I thought enough people were attached to reality that we would unite the world against it. Instead, it's going to be president.

"I thought we were ready."

"Obviously you were wrong." For an spectacularly nice woman, her voice can drip scorn and "what an imbecile" with the best of them.

"I am calling upon the Magnificent Seven to help to stop Cthulhu." I have to use the formal phrases.

"If H. is missing, there are only three of us alive."

"H. is probably alive. We'd have to get her back. And M. will be free in January. Can't we get her as soon as she's a lame duck? We have to raise two more."

There is a long silence.

"That's not Christian."

"Yes, well, neither is Cthulhu. And what about Methuselah and the others? Come on, aren't some of them really alive and the death was faked?"

Longer silence. "We will be using your life energy to contact two of them and then to trap Cthulhu, of course."

"Well, yeah. Of course. That's why I called."

"All right. I will contact the living. And you get to do some homework and think about which dead you want to raise."

"Yes ma'am." And I am off to read some history.



for Grisly Ghouls from Every Tomb: The 2016 Halloween Horrorquest