The Cool Girl
A horror trifle I wrote in two hours, flexing my Lovecraft muscles. Slightly NSFW.
Lexi wanted to be one of the cool kids at Miskatonic Prep.
The Cool didn’t call themselves that, of course. The not-cool had named them that. The Cool had the latest clothing, the hottest haircuts, the most current buzzwords, activities, and interests. Their coolness didn’t come from socioeconomic status, or intelligence or social savvy. If Lexi could articulate the quality, it was as if some deity had touched them with her/his/its fingers, elevating them above the rest. Those who were cool knew they were cool, and it gave them an easy grace in the world. They were the ones those cup of life was filled to brim. Those they gave their favor to were touched by their magic, and in time, they might become cool as well.
Lexi was attractive, intelligent, had a wealthy pedigree, but she was not one of the cool ones. Her family had moved to Arkham eight years ago and were still seen as newcomers, while the cool ones were oldbloods. If she was honest with herself it was for a lack of concentrated effort. She had an inner revulsion to whoring herself to her betters in the hope their specialness would rub off. But it was also because she suspected she didn’t have any potential to be special, and so didn’t even try.
It was a fact of life at Miskatonic Prep that the Uncool whispered often about the Cool, and what the Cool had supernaturally given or taken to get that status. There was a rumor of caverns beneath the school, accessed via secret tunnels in the dormitories’ laundry room, and also of ceremonies in the woods. Other rumors were of spells chanted into bathroom mirrors marked with blood. Lexi scoffed at these, but one night, drunk on stolen liquor, heartsick for a Gitane-puffing Cool boy who didn’t know she existed, she crept out of the room she shared with her roommate and headed for the girl’s bathroom down the hall.
As the crickets chirped through the open window she scratched her arm with a safety pin, daubing the blood on her reflection’s forehead, lips, and chin, the glow of her cell phone serving in lieu of a candle. “Mother of Mayhem,” she intoned, “Shub-Niggurath, ai’a, ai’a, tz’nei mueg o kadhu vaschsh kadhu migou.” She swallowed, relieved that the difficult words were past. Now to her desire. With her thumb she smeared the blood to form the symbol passed from girl to girl on folded notebook paper. “I want to be cool,” she intoned. “Ai’a, ai’a, kadhu migou. Let me be one of the Cool Ones.”
She waited.
Nothing!
What a waste of Grey Goose vodka. Disappointment thudded inside her.
Then the crickets stopped chirping.
Lexi digested the sudden silence. Before she could wonder why, the mirror exploded in front of her, not in pointed shards but in a dozen extended tongues of silver, as if it was not glass but liquid mercury. Lexi opened her mouth to shout but the tongues shot past her face, past her ears, and gripped the back of her head, sucking her off her feet and through the surface.
She fell on a metal grate. Oh my god, I’m naked! Not a stitch of her pajamas remained on her. She scrambled to her feet and looked around, noting she was in a vast cave… factory…spaceship… filled with tubes and cables and strange machines. As she took this in rough, scaly arms grabbed her from behind. She screeched. She couldn’t see who it was, but they were pushing her forward, to a silver frame that looked like a giant toasting rack. It held a number of steel cuffs, all of which snapped open as she approached.
Into this device she was manhandled. Lexi screamed, the shrill outburst echoing off the hissing apparatuses around her. “Stop it! What are you doing!”
Her hair flew into her face as she struggled, but it was no use. Wrists, ankles, waist, neck, all the cuffs locked themselves in place. She was held upright, legs closed, arms at her sides. When she saw her assailants she screamed again, full-throated. They were not humans but papery-looking, bee-like creatures that walked on two legs, buzzing at her in droning voices, scraping her flesh with their crab-like claws. Her bladder voided itself in terror, the urine spattering thickly on her thighs and disappearing through the grate.
A final band closed around her forehead, holding her head immobile. Still screaming, eyes rolling in panic, she was lifted in her frame to a metal sarcophagus emitting plumes of cold vapor. Her frame tilted to the horizontal, and she was lowered inside.
A short time later the rear of the device opened. A mute, frozen Lexi emerged sealed in a block of ice, a look of horror forever frozen on her pretty face.
The Mi-Go buzzed between themselves: this young female was a winner. They would receive a lot for her at the markets on Yuggoth, where slaves of all sorts passed between dimensions for the titillation of the Old Ones, and the Not So Old Ones who fraternized with and worshipped them.
A pair of tongs lowered from the ceiling, gripping the block of ice with the clink of cold steel. The entombed Lexi was lifted and carried away to the refrigeration hold, where hundreds of other humans were already stored in cryogenic suspension. Without ceremony she was placed in the next available niche. Frost soon rimed the clear surface of the ice, hiding her face and identity from view. Her mind for the most part was offline, not realizing her horrible destiny. But below the surface a single screed ran racetrack, repeating itself over and over:
I wanted to be cool, I wanted to be cool, I wanted to be cool…
