Fran burst through the door and into a nearly dark stairwell. A strange blue light suffused the stairs, and in her adrenaline fuelled flight she hurtled down the first flight with no concern for her naked body's safety. She paused only a moment at the landing to look up and see why the strange light filled the passage-there was no roof covering the stairwell. A few jagged beams spiked the night sky and the edge of a full silver moon was peeping down at her.

Then she was down to the bottom exit door. It stood partly open, giving a view of the alley beyond.

She slammed into the door with her shoulder, and felt a sharp jolt through her upper body at it's resistance. But it gave enough that she could slip through.

She stood in the moonlit alleyway, terrifyingly unsure as to what to do next. The initial horrific sense of just wanting to fly as heedless and fast from there as possible was being replaced with a mix of terror and wonder.

The town of Dagon had never been what it seemed from the moment they pulled in.

She wheeled around. The buildings, including the one from which she'd fled, were in disrepair usually seen in decades-dead ghost-towns. There were no electric lights anywhere. She ran to the alley entrance, looking back nearly every step of the way. But the hideous creature that called itself Nyarla Jean Thotep wasn't scuttling or slithering out of the exit behind her.

The street told the story more fully-to her left she saw a late 1980's model sedan sitting in a smashed shop window. A police car was stopped in the middle of the street. It had old-fashioned conical bubble lights and not the rollers seen on modern police cars.

And in the dark she thought she could see a shape in the driver's seat. Wan light shone through what was left of it's head.

Fran wanted to scream. Scream till she could no longer speak. Scream and lay down and wait for the thing from the hotel to come and devour her or whatever it did. What she did do was run.

She heard the chanting as she neared the square. She didn't think for a moment about the sight she must have presented-a wild-haired, terrified nude woman running as if in the race of her life.

The chanting stopped her.

She backed up against the ruined store-front-remembering how they'd passed it walking to the hotel and she'd noted nothing but the display of Halloween kitsch in the window, tastefully arranged. What had appeared a normal but closed and darkened establishment now showed itself to be a burnt-out shell.

This thing, whatever it was, managed from the moment they entered the town limits to shield the reality of everything they saw.

Fran hunkered down in the shadow, smelling humid night air, a kind of musty undertone like that found in a long-unopened room. She forced her mind to work. If the thing could control so much before they'd encountered each other, why was the real, dead town now being revealed?

That meant whatever Nyarla Jean was, she was not completely omnipotent.

The chanting was loud but she could make out no words. It was semi-sung, in hollow fifths-male and female voices joined in a throaty sort of drone.

Fran realized-Ren.

He was around here somewhere.

The chanting...

Had she run for the nearest road out, had she run up the sloping hills outside the town, she would have considered herself still sane. What she did next though proved that she had lost her fucking mind completely.

Not entirely sure why, or what she would do with it, Fran began looking for a weapon.

�Open the Gates! YGNAII THOTH! OPEN THE GATES! I�! Nyarlathotep, I�! I�!�

Ren tried to raise his head, to see the source of the chanting. A now-familiar face whipped snakelike into view, forcing him to lay back.

Nyarla Jean. The hair the same, the face still human-the eyes had lost their pupils and irises and were simply the same shade of pale glowing blue. The lips, still a rich, bloody red, curled into a hideous grin, revealing tiny, chitinous teeth-each one sharp as a razor and curled sickle-like inwards. Ren wondered how he still possessed a penis or balls after that thing had been on him. In fact when he'd passed out the last thought he'd had was that she was simply eating him, starting there.

"Dear boy..." she hissed-words clear even over the hoarse chanting, " I would have been glad to swallow you up right then and there..."

She read his thoughts-dear God-

"But you and your little lady friend fit certain requirements we've been trying to fulfill here for a while."

"Fr-Fran..."Ren croaked-

"Shhhh...." whispered the creature, "Don't you worry that handsome little head about Miss Frannie-she's havin' a right good time all her own..."

Suddenly for a moment it was as if Ren was in the same room with Fran and Nyarla Jean.

He was watching Fran kiss her while the other woman adroitly massaged Fran's pussy. In spite of everything a sick pulse of jealousy filled his stomach. Jealousy and great sadness.

Then that hideous face was back in front of his. And now he could see that it hovered on the end of an impossibly long, sinewy neck-the flesh of the neck more akin to the hide of a great python than a human.

"Now what we gone do with you boy is hang on for a while, until MY boyfriend arrives. Then we are gonna have us a big ole party like you never imagined!"

Ren passed out. But not before hearing, as the chant seemed to grow louder, the high, sickly girlish giggle of the creature that had entrapped him and Fran here in hell.

Fran found her weapon on the sidewalk, on the opposite side of the courthouse from the park where they'd originally come to a stop in a dead Hyundai.

It was the top 3 feet or so of a simple street sign mounted on a metal post. At some point, perhaps during what must have been the terrible and disastrous death of this town, the street sign had been twisted in half. Fran crouched down to study it in the silver light of the fully risen moon. The point where the sign had been twisted was a mass of twisted sharp metal. The sign was somewhat rectangular in shape, the lower part of one side appeared to have been sheared off somehow. If Fran had let herself think about it the condition of the sign alone would have spoken volumes about what had happened here.

She never did notice the jumbled mass of bones and rotting clothing that was gathered at the base of the sign post still left in the concrete, the body of some unfortunate who had been impaled on the stub of metal.

She picked up the sign and swung it experimentally.

Fran was not a small woman-5'10", only a few inches shorter than Ren, and she'd always been in good shape. The sign hung in her grip like an axe.

It would have to do.

She crept towards the park and the shifting shapes within. She could hear the chanting clearly now-sounding like a perverse twist on the works of the monks from Santo Domingo, with women's voices thrown in.

Fran was keeping to the storefronts along the plaza that led into the entrance through which they'd rolled in the Hyundai what now seemed an age ago. Somehow, the dropping of the facade over the true condition of the town and the absence of some hideous thing stalking her convinced her that her approach was not known.

She understood only a few words of the chant, the others were nonsense, much like the names of people and places they'd encountered on their way into town and once there.

�Open the Gates! YGNAII THOTH! OPEN THE GATES! I�! Nyarlathotep, I�! I�!�

Gates. What gates?

Something caught her attention about the way light was falling. She looked up.

Above the area in the park where the shadows of the chanters were gathered, something odd was happening in the sky.

Fran paused and stared. It was like watching water swirl when something was beneath it, ready to come to the surface.

Only this was in the sky, above the park.

And the chanting was getting louder.

"Come on, baby-you need to get up!"

The thing that called itself Nyarla Jean whispered to Ren in an awful parody of southern hospitality.

"My man Cthulhu is nearly here!"

He opened his eyes and she was there, close enough to smell. But he didn't want to smell her, knowing he'd vomit.

It was at that moment Ren had one of the most strangely inspired ideas of his life.

He inhaled through his nostrils, deeply.

Fran stood behind a tree, her heart hammering in her chest. Her stomach was empty or she would have been retching.

What she saw was straight out of the worst imaginings of hell.

The former residents of this town, Dagon, were still there.

After a fashion.

In fact, from what Fran could tell they were having an orgy. Every shape she saw was attached to another shape in an undeniably sexual manner-standing coitus, doggy style, oral sex, kneeling in front of the partner. And they all moved with the rhythms of sex. Each mouth that wasn't filled with something was chanting; �Open the Gates! YGNAII THOTH! OPEN THE GATES! I�! Nyarlathotep, I�! I�!�, and the rhythm of the chant was informed by the various thrustings going on.

The moonlight was clear enough to see one thing, though-these shapes were all of the same flesh. As one great fungus will be the bed for thousands of tiny offshoots in a wet woodland, the same grotesquely shiny hide sprouted these shapes.

Whatever it was it had eaten them all. But apparently they were still somehow, in a way, alive...

Fran had a moment of clarity before things happened. This creature had overtaken everyone the same way it must have her and Ren, too-with their basest needs. The need for boogeying. The heart had always been that 'massage parlor.' And it kept them functioning in a way, by continuously providing the sexual communion.

She had a moment to let the truth sink in, to let it horrify her past what she thought possible-

Then hell really broke loose.

The thing was speaking as Ren filled his lungs; "We been lookin' for you pretty young folk, you see-you wouldn't believe how hard it is nowadays to book my boyfriend a flight in here-the sacrifices that have to be made..."

He felt the nausea swirl. He pushed air out and inhaled deeply again through his mouth and nose. The odor was past fetid-it was shit, sewers and open graves, it was large beasts by the roadside at high summer, two days dead-

"I mean, I had my own little party goin' on here but now that I need my baby here to help keep it goin' I realized I had to find me some fresh young blood. And let me tell you, the children inside will be so happy to see you!"

The children inside...

Ren puked then, and puked hard. In the monster's face.

Fran saw Ren at the exact moment he launched a stream of acid vomit into the creature's face. The thing that gripped the pedestal on which his body lay was the same thing she'd seen wrapped around the massage table as she ran from the hotel, but larger. It's tentacles held Ren in place. It's body seemed to pour out from behind the pedestal (barely visible at the foot of the pedestal was an inscription honoring some lost confederate regiment,) and the flesh erupted into the shapes of the former townspeople all around her-no more than human shapes now, though, probably most vestiges of their former selves long vanished inside the monster.

As the vomit struck Nyarla Jean's face the long neck rippled and whipped backwards.

The chanting, a dull gravelly roar all around them paused, as if the needle had been lifted. The swirling in the sky directly over the pedestal even paused, leaving a shimmering rainbow effect. Fran was aware of all this, and it only reinforced what she'd concluded-the thing could at least be distracted to let it's guard down.

But now It was mad. A tremendous warbling cry rose out of it's throat as it seemed to rear back intentionally, Ren's upchuck dripping from it's face. Fran, running, could see even at a little distance the tiny scimitar teeth that filled it's mouth.

Fran felt something hard and muscular whip past her, felt one of the proto-human lumps rising from the monster's flesh seem to reach out for her.

She ran up the steps to the pedestal and just as Nyarla Jean's head began what looked like a killing return arc, very much like a huge snake striking, she swung the rusted street sign.

The bad edge of the sign itself collided with the monster's face and a terrible wail went up, seemingly from everywhere. The edge of the sign collided with the open mouth, and Fran felt the sick sensation of the it sticking.

This however confirmed she was dealing with a creature that could be hurt. Fran pulled back on the weapon hard as the things head whipped away again. At the same time she heard Ren cry out, a strangled sound. The tentacles that had held him firmly tightened around his wrists and ankles further. Fran caught this and realized she might have just made a terrible mistake.

She scrambled atop the pedestal, planting her feet firmly to either side of Ren's captive body. The monster had lost all it's ability to patter in that sickly absurd down-home way-purple goo dripped from it's rent face. The pale blue eyes seemed on fire now. The head hovered at the tip of the neck, seeming unsure as to what to do next.

Fran was more sure. She looked down at the part of the creature that lay on the opposite side of the pedestal. It first appeared to be no more than a huge lump of pale shapeless flesh. There was moisture on the surface of the thing, and Fran could see it rising and falling.

It breathed.

With no thought for the intensely suicidal nature of what she was about to do, Fran jumped.

Ren knew he'd hit the mark. It might only be a distraction, but he'd puked in the thing's face and pissed it off, startled it enough that it had to take a moment to regroup.

When Fran came running in, naked as a baby, wielding-a street sign?-he felt absurdly like laughing. He doubted at this point they'd get out alive, but what a story this would make over 10 or 20 beers with close acquaintances who would not remember later if they did survive.

Then she did connect with the thing and the tentacles began to crush him. He lay there as Fran climbed atop his body.

He wanted to think he'd go with one last look at her ass there above him, an avenging, saving angel-then he saw the sky above them all was...open.

And something was looking through the rent, shimmering.

She held the sign like a javelin. At the moment Fran felt her feet contact the soft, damp flesh of the thing's center she followed through with all her body weight behind the gnarled bottom of the signpost. It drove into the center of the rising and falling flesh, with a sick squelching sound.

Fran stood back, out of breath, as more purple stuff oozed out of the wound around the sign. For the first time she looked back up. The creature they'd first met as Nyarla Jean Thotep had raised it's now broken face toward the sky. And above them all there was a shimmering hole in the sky.

What looked through that hole never left Fran's nightmares after that. It was dark and indescribable-it seemed to broadcast by it's very appearance the deaths of millions. It was something that scourged existence as it was known by any human creature. It had two huge slanted rows of eyes, and each was the same brilliant shade of neon green. It was reaching through the hole, down...

Fran was no heroine in that moment. She screamed in abject fear, and felt urine warming the insides of her thighs.

She knew it was all over then. The thing would come in and take them all, even it's fellow creature from beyond hell, and the end would be horrible.

She was collapsing when Ren's arms caught her. Powered by an adrenaline rush of unsurpassed strength Ren pulled Fran forward, and they were running.

Ren never remembered finding the spare key in the magnet keeper under the Hyundai, never remembered starting the car as if it had never failed, never remembered the squealing tires as he and Fran raced out of that town.

They both remembered the amazing crack of lightning that filled the otherwise clear moonlit night. Fran remembered in a fractured way looking back and seeing the hole in the sky over the park snap closed, and seeing a rain of what could very well have been human bodies from that space...as if the poor people Nyarla Jean had absorbed were not permitted to follow her up into that oblivion, and had been shat out as Nyarla Jean went back to her 'boyfriend.'

They both remembered being pulled over by a Georgia State Trooper near dawn and taken in for questioning because they were both nude, bruised, and looked as if they'd lost 2 weeks of sleep.

They remembered very well their respective sets of parents flying down to come get them, and the subsequent weeks of court-mandated psychological counselling.

Ren hated small towns. The big city was more than fine with him. He never ventured outside the Washington DC beltway-why bother?

It had been nearly 7 years since he and Fran had finished that mandated counselling, and he had not spoken to Fran in 4. Even then, they had never mentioned Dagon Georgia.

That was why it was strange when he came in that night and listened to his messages, to find one was from Fran.

"I know it's been a while. But you really, really need to call me. It's urgent."

He knew the tremor in her voice. Certain memories are utterly permanent, and the sound of fear in Fran's voice was an ineradicable audio file in his mind.

Ren stared at the phone for nearly an hour before he picked it up and dialed the number. It was a Massachusetts exchange.

"Hi."

"Thank god. How are you?"

Ren shook his head. "You didn't call just to see how I was doing, I am certain of that."

There was a pause, and he could see her thinking, looking down the way she would, lips working. "No. It's just that...you were the only person I could call."

Ren felt a little puzzled, then the inference in her words caught him. He felt his balls tighten up, his stomach clench. "Um, where are you?" he asked.

"Arkham Massachusetts. I teach at a little university here."

"Go on." Ren could tell she was trying to tell him something she didn't want to talk about.

"The other day, on the news...they were interviewing some protesters. They were protesting..."

Ren's teeth clacked together. "Tell me it's environmental, or something."

"No." Fran sighed. "No-they were protesting in the red-light district downtown."

"The red-light..."

"Yes. Recently some-massage parlors have opened."

Ren said nothing.

Fran sighed again, and there was a ragged edge to it. He wondered if she was crying. "So, they were interviewing some protesters, who were saying these places were just fronts for legal prostitution, you know, and then, they interviewed an owner of one of the places..."

Ren ran a hand across his face, sweat beading on his forehead.

"It was her, Ren...wearing a sarong, speaking with a clipped Boston accent...and it was her..."

Softly, Ren hung up the phone.

It rang several more times, and he never answered it.