Love and Panic at Uncle D’s Olde Fashioned Ice Cream Emporium - 7

And we were on the ground. Things were normal, for a given value of normal. Selene buried her face in the dirt and clawed her hands in.

“Don’t look.”

I closed my eyes and gravity switched directions. The ground became a dirt cliff and I was hanging on. A light of no color burned into my face and I pressed my face into the dirt. There was a sound I couldn’t hear and then it was over. I head a familiar sound.

“Mrrp?”

I open one eye, and the cat was looking me.

“I don’t have any food,”

“Mrrp.”

“Is over?”

I peeked an eye open and looked at Selene. The cat was pawing at her head. She lifted her head from the dirt and blinked.

“I guess so.”

I flopped over on my back and looked. There was nothing but a hole where the shed and pasture had been. Just a circular bowl carved out of the ground. I looked at Selene.

“What the hell was that?”

“Which part: where the universe folded in on itself or when Pan got killed by his women?”

“Both!”

“The Shed was an extension of Pan’s will and belief pushed into the real world. Call it a reality pimple. When Pan died, the pimple popped. This is…this is the scar, I guess.”

“Pan was a god, right? How can a god die?”

“Pan was an echo of belief. The cultists summoned him into the world with their belief, and he maintained that through the dairy and the brides. Once they woke up, every one of them wanted them only for themselves. They believed it so hard that his existence shattered, and my non belief destroyed him.”

“Non belief? You just killed him.”

“It’s learned skill.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Am I supposed to understand that?”

“A wizard did it.”

“That’s more like it.”

We sat and looked at the hole. I’d seem some weird stuff, but this was probably the winner. Selene looked pleased. She stroked the cat like a Bond villain.

“So why do it?”

“What?”

“This. Offering yourself up as a bride of Pan.”

She half smiled, shrugged.

“Somebody has to. Beside, I get extra credit at Misk U for this kind of thing.”

She got up and dusted off her make shift toga off. I scratched the cat’s head. Who he was, that’s a story for another day. Selene walked away.

“Hey.”

She turned.

“What would you have done if I hadn’t shown up while you were on the altar.”

She smiled and winked.

“I’d have thought of something,” she said as she walked away.

And you know what? I’m pretty sure she would have.

Love and Panic at Uncle D’s Olde Fashioned Ice Cream Emporium - 6

“Well,” I said to Selene, “It was nice knowing you. Except for the dying thing.”

“We’re not going to die.”

“Well, you might not…”

“Trust me, just watch.”

Behind Pan, who was still coming fast on our heels, the brides were rising up like a white wave. Before he could get to us one of his brides stepped in front of him. I was sure he was going to trample her down, but he stopped suddenly.

“Move.”

The wave rushed over him. He struggled and was lost in a seas of white flesh. They didn’t say a word, just engulfed him in nameless lust. I could see flash of red as they piled onto him.

“What’s happening?”

“Pan’s…let’s call it love…is lust and sex distilled down to it’s purest form. While the brides were still being milked, their urges were being kept in check. Now in the presence of Pan they’re letting it all out.”

“So they’re…”

“Fucking him to death, yeah. They’ll devour him in their desire.”

It wasn’t pretty. They were a seamless squirming mass of flesh, no way to tell where one began and another ended. It wasn’t sexy, it wasn’t erotic. It looked like maggots on dead flesh and somewhere in the moaning, Uncle D was screaming.

“Jesus Christ.”

“Has nothing to do with it.”

There was more red than I expected, and I realized that the brides were tearing each other apart, and more were rising from the beds all around us, not even needing Selene’s help. They were killing each other. One of them looked up at me with a shark’s smile and started to move forward. Selene struck her down.

“We need to go, now.”

“Terrific. Do you have any ideas about getting around the ravening sex beasts there?”

“I do. Come on.”

She went to the wall and began to chop at it with the sickle while the brides were still destroying themselves.

“This area is a four dimensional space pushed into a three dimensional space. So no matter how big it is, the walls are still…”

Moonlight came in through the wall. Fresh air, more or less.

“…the walls.”

I started chopping with my sickle and we managed to get a hole going. I smashed into it with my shoulder and kept going right through to the grass. Selene was right behind me.

“Are you just going to lay around all night or what?”

“What about them.”

“They…” she paused, a sad looking passing before being replaced with anger, “...they stopped being human as soon as Pan got to them. There’s nothing left for them.”

The shed started to shudder, and things changed. I felt like my head was trying to turn inside out and everything started to taste like the sound of purple. Selene grabbed my arm.

“og ot deen we” said she.

“Tahw?”

She gave up on me and started booking it for the edge of the little pasture the shed was seated in the middle of. The landscape blurred and Selene stretched out to the edge of forever. I wanted to look back but back was in front of me. Selene reached out with a hand a million miles long and grabbed me and pulled and…

Love and Panic at Uncle D’s Olde Fashioned Ice Cream Emporium - 5

“I have an idea.”

“Terrific, let’s do that.”

“Don’t you know what it is?”

“So long as it’s not give up and get goated to death, I’m in.”

“We need to go to the shed.”

Which wasn’t going to be a problem, since I didn’t know how to get anywhere else. We hit the wrongness of the field and Selene kept running, grabbing a sickle off the side of the shed. She grabbed another one and tossed it to me.

“Come on” she said, and tossed the shed doors open.

It wasn’t any better the second time around. Selene grabbed a sheet hanging near the door and did some kind of woman magic and turned it into a fairly passable toga. She shut the shed door, dropped a board in the slats to lock it. It probably wouldn’t slow Big Daddy D down for long, but what the hell. The sickle wasn’t as good as the hatchets I usually used, but it was passable. I gave it a few experimental swings. Not too bad. But still…

“I don’t figure these are going to do much to a god.”

“No,” she said, “they won’t. But they don’t have to.”

I feel Pan coming, a shuddering rising in my loins the smell of flowers blooming. Selene stood over one of the brides and slashed with the sickle, cutting the tubes carrying away their mother’s milk.

“Take the other side and keep moving”

I started chopping the tubes, the sickle sharper than I would have imagined. The brides started to stir as soon as I cut the wires, blinking away and looking at me in a way that might have been flattering and interesting if it weren’t so terrifying. Pure and unadulterated lust was something I was pretty sure that I never wanted to see again.

“Faster.”

I wasn’t sure exactly how many brides there were, but we were a good ways down the aisle when the doors turned into splinters. Uncle D stepped through the doors. It was like looking at one of those hologram things that had two images together. I was looking at the kindly old Uncle and the Great God Pan at the same time. He smiled, and wiped rocky road off his face, licked the melted ice cream off his hand.

“Ah, Rocky Road,” he said, “Some of my very best.”

He looked at Selene with a look that would have given a eunuch a hard on.

“My darling bride. Come with me and I will show you a night that you will never forget, I promise you that.”

Selene smiled. I was a little worried. I hope somebody had a plan that didn’t end in satyr rape. Then she gave him the finger.

“Bitch.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come and get me, goat nuts.”

I liked her more all the time. Pan came charging, still flickering between being the kindly Uncle D and the Great God. Selene went running. So did I.

Love and Panic at Uncle D’s Olde Fashioned Ice Cream Emporium - 4

The fact that all of Uncle D’s ‘brides’ beared a rather strong resemblance told me that Uncle D or whatever obscene entity was inhabiting him definitely had a type, and she was it. And presumably, next.

The problem is how do you tell someone that yes, the supernatural exists and oh, by the way, it wants to fuck you? Literally. As it turns out, that wasn’t going to be the problem that I thought it was.

“Yes, I know, now don’t fuck it up.”

“I know it’s crazy but…wait, what?”

She shook her head and looked at me like I was maybe the dumbest guy she ever met. Which, admittedly, was entirely possible. I certainly felt like I’d missed some part of the script. She took off her glasses, rubbed her nose and took a deep breathe.

“Sixty years ago, Uncle D was one of a group of occultist cum scientists who tried to impregnate a woman with the seed of the Great God Pan. They got it wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“The woman they used was, well, we’ll go with unclean and Pan was not amused. He killed everyone else and basically turned Uncle D into his flesh puppet. He started the dairy to try and get a foothold back on Earth.”

“Through the power of milk?”

“It does an evil nethergod good. It also gives him a little bit of control in every person who takes a lick of that ice cream. Every year, inch by inch, he gets a little more of his position in the world back. It’s a slow process, but he’s got nothing but time.”

“So wait, how do you know all this? If all the cultists died?”

“I go to Miskatonic. We know things.”

“So you’re here to…?”

“Become one of Pan’s brides and send him back to the half formed realm of the collective unconscious from which he was summoned.”

“How, exactly?”

“The power of focused unbelief channeled into Pan as he reveals his true form for the, ahem, marriage.”

“You’re going to unbelieve him to death?”

“It’s complicated.”

She put her glasses back on and told me to get the hell out of there and not blow her cover. I didn’t, which is why I was booking it through the labyrinthine fields of fences holding a sex stunned naked intern and being pursued by sex god who was going to rape one or both of us.

“Hey. HEY.”

“What…what happened?”

“You tell me. Your focused unbelief didn’t seem to be working. If he hadn’t gone chasing the cat out of there I’m pretty sure you’d be “married” by now.”

“He’s…he’s substantially more real than I anticipated.”

“Terrific. Do you have any other ideas?”

“Well, you can put me down.”

“Sorry.”

Running alongside a beautiful naked woman is distracting, but the rape god behind us was an excellent way to concentrate my attention. The last time I had to fight a god, I had the means to control it. Here, I pretty much had the means to die horribly

Love and Panic at Uncle D’s Olde Fashioned Ice Cream Emporium - 3

Uncle D’s winds around and around until it opens up into a small field with a small red shed in it, pails hanging on nails in the wall, and no air movement at all. I didn’t like it. The whole place just felt wrong, and stepping foot onto the nicely trimmed grass felt like a violation. Looking up, I couldn’t the idea out of my head that I was looking at the wrong stars.

But the meowing continued, and it was very definitely coming from that shed. Which meant that, naturally, I was going into the damn shed. It was locked, of course, but not locked enough. The Cat kept meowing.

The shed was…different on the inside. Bigger, for one thing, stretching on as far as I could see, and the smell of sex and milk wafted out. Row after row of bed stretched out in an endless interior space. Every bed occupied by a beautiful young eight breasted woman.

Eight. Udders would not be the wrong term here. Everyone hooked up to what I was pretty sure was a milking machine. The woman didn’t seem to mind, being in, near as I could tell, a permanent state of near orgasm. It was maybe the worst thing I ever saw, and I’ve been to Barry Manilow concerts.

The Cat said ‘Mirp’.

I said “Oh, fuck me.”

Uncle D said “Aren’t they beautiful?”

I didn’t jump out of my skin or, despite what The Cat might claim, scream like a little girl. I’ve had way too much training for that, but hearing the cheerful voice of a thousand television commercials right behind was slightly startling.

He draped a heavy arm across my shoulders and walked me across the threshold, smiling all the while. The air in the room felt wrong, and I still couldn’t see the far wall. I was fairly sure that if I turned around I’d find no wall behind me either, so I didn’t.

“Now, see, son, you weren’t supposed to see this,” Uncle D said. He was taller than I expected, grey hair slicked back and a face as red and smooth as a televangelists, but the body under the suit was pure old farmer, muscle overlaid with fat that was as hard as oak. He never stopped smiling.

“Now, I could,” he said, squeezing my shoulder hard enough to cause me knees to quiver “tear your overly curious head off and leave your body for the magala.”

“But I hired you for a reason, Hatch, and that was not your dubious musical talents, though god knows I do appreciate music. I hired you because of the incident with…well, let’s call it my cousin. You kept that quiet, and I appreciate someone is both discreet and well versed with the more unusual parts of the world we live in.”

He turned me then, and I was still powerless to resist. He out both hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes. His eyes were both a regular bright blue and the golden horizontal eyes of a goat.

“All of these are my brides, Hatch, everyone a blessed treasure to me. But it costs so much to keep them happy. So I had to make a deal with this…farmer in order to provide that. If people knew where Uncle D’s ice cream came from, well, that just wouldn’t do. “

So that was the agreement. I didn’t tell anyone about this and remained the watchman, and Uncle D didn’t kill me. Supposedly. I suspected that I was probably going to be necessary for some sort of arcane ritual, as that’s how this thing usually went. I would have and should have ran into the hills and never looked.

Shoulda, coulda, woulda. The problem, of course, was Selene.

Love and Panic at Uncle D’s Olde Fashioned Ice Cream Emporium - 2

. Selene had a habit of working very late into the night, studying the goings on of Uncle D’s while there was no one there to disturb her. The Cat, apparently, had decided she was also an excellent source of food and warm spots to doze, and had adopted her as well.

I had half a tuna fish sandwich for The Cat and went out looking. Selene had half a turnkey sandwich and the same idea.

“Oh!” she said, “You must be the nightwatchman.”

“Hatch.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve seen…”

“A big ball of fur that thinks he owns the place?”

“Yes.”

“Mirp.”

The Cat was sitting in between, licking his lips and looking liked he’d been there the whole time. Selene would come over after that whenever her eyes started to bleed from staring at Uncle D’s legendarily disorganized books, and we would shoot the shit while The Cat basked in our adoration.

Frankly, if I’d been a little less attached to the fuzzball, I wouldn’t be running for my life from a sex crazed god. Of course, there’d be no one around to save Selene, either, so I guess I owe the critter for that, but I would like to just once, ONCE, have a job that didn’t end up with me nearly being killed, possessed or otherwise personally violated by supposedly mythical beings.

What happened was one night, The Cat didn’t show up. He had just about got me trained the way he wanted me, so this was a little out of the ordinary. I went out looking for him.

“Yo, Cat?”

What do you want? He was The Cat, I never did name him. I was answered by what sounded like a faint meowing. And now I was worried, because The Cat didn’t meow, and this meow sounded like the kind you get when a cat is scared and wants a human lackey to do something.

The grounds of Uncle D’s headquarters are pretty sprawling, encompassing both a dairy farm and the actual place where they make the world famous ice cream, and the damned meowing seemed to becoming from just ahead, no matter how far it went.

Before I knew, I was deep, deep into the labyrinth like interior of Uncle D, making my way to dark territory, where I wasn’t supposed to go and where cameras didn’t reach. If I were a good employee, I never would have been there. On the other hand, if I were a good employee, I never would have been here at all.

Love and Panic at Uncle D’s Olde Fashioned Ice Cream Emporium - 1

As the door to the ice cream parlor burst open, I briefly considered the naked intern on the table in front of me and guessed that the agreement was probably off. The bargain was this: I could either keep the secret of Uncle Dio’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream or I could die.

But seeing as I was right in the midst of snatching Selene, Miskatonic intern and latest ‘bride” from her place on the sacrificial altar/ice cream counter, I figure I’d moved into the “or die” portion. Well then, I was going down swing. I reached down into the ice cream tray, grabbed my weapon and nailed the Great God Pan right in one weird goat eye with a double dip of Rocky Road.

He was not amused.

This problem was the intersection of two of my longstanding problems. One, I can’t help but fall ass long into trouble. Two, I’m a sucker for a pretty smile. Selene had the kind of lo side grin that made my heart (and, possibly, parts south) stand up and take notice.

In my defense, she wasn’t JUST cute. She was a grad student at Misk U. and she already had two degrees, one in some kind of agriculture, the other business. Her grad studentry focused around, not surprisingly, agribusiness.

Uncle D’s isn’t agribusiness in the same sense that the massive conglomerates that provide most of the food in the country are, but I guess the growth of the company from a family farm to a chain with more than two hundred locations and a presence in many of your fancier grocery stores was worth looking into for Selene’s masters thesis.

Me, I was just the nightwatchman. I was looking for something nice and relaxing after the thing with the Thing on the coast. All I had to do was make sure that nobody tried to bust in, and seeing as no one had ever tried, this looked like an easy job. I’d even get time to catch up on my reading.

Except, of course, for the cat. I have a soft spot for cats, and this cat, the cat who walks through secure security perimeters, was a big fluffy bruiser with a chewed up ear and a snaggle tooth. He came ambling up to the secure office one night, completely non plussed by the locked doors, motion detectors and chainlinks fences. I still don’t know how he got inside. He jumped right up on my desk where I was definitely dozed off, set his broad butt down and said.

“Mirp.”

Not a meower, but that was fine by me. I gave him half my lunch and he curled and slept the rest of the night. He showed up every night a little after I got disappearing or sleeping as it suited him and going wherever the hell he damn well pleased. If it weren’t for the piles of cat hair I had to clean up every night, I might have thought I was imagining him.

I wasn’t the only person getting visited by The Cat.