When I entered the black doorway in the smooth cave wall, I was truly startled by the inside. I’d expected something cavernous and dank like the rest of the cave that I’d encountered since I arrived on the moon. But the inside of the cave was the interior of a barbershop.
Nyarlathotep sat in one of the four chairs, turned facing me at the entrance as I looked all around myself with shock. I looked back in the direction that I’d entered, and instead of the black rectangle in stone that I had emerged through, there was a glass door between two large windows that overlooked a busy parking lot.
“What’s up my nigga?”
I stared at Nyarlathotep for the first time and even sitting in the chair, it was obvious how tall the man was. His long legs were stretched out before him and he wore baggy pants and Timberland boots. His bare arms were crossed casually across his muscular chest that bulged under a black tank top. His skin was an ashy black, like he was made of recently extinguished embers and I expected smoke to be drifting off of him, though there was none. His face was dark and I could only see the bright off-white forms of his eyes and the black void of his mouth that seemed to move on his face as he talked.
“I heard that shit you said to the Moon Beast,” Nyarlathotep continued. “Yo, my man, that shit was real. ‘I have never been a slave!’ I felt that shit, yo, for real. Me neither, my nigga.”
“You’re Nyarlathotep?” I asked. I had expected something different. I imagined that the thing the Moon Beasts venerated would be as otherworldly and foreign to me as the Beasts, but this man was very familiar to me.
“The great and powerful,” he said proudly. “You shocked that the worst monster these white people can think of is just a thuggish black caricature?”
When he explained it that way, it made sense.
“I ain’t no monster, man. It ain’t my fault them ugly things on the moon like me so much. I was just chilling with my homies, smoking some dank ass weed, fell asleep, and I ended up out this way, wherever the hell it is. And I saw all this crazy shit, so I was freaking the fuck out. Next thing I know, all this shit is scared of me and worshiping me, speaking in weird languages and digging up rocks. It’s all crazy, but it’s fun being a god every time I get high.”
I laughed. His story felt familiar to my own, and the release of the tension that had been built up to this encounter made me almost light headed and giddy. All I could do was laugh and I doubled over before the great Nyarlathotep who stood and glared down at me.
“The fuck you laughing at, dog?” he asked in his deep voice that was gravely in anger.
It took me a while to contain myself and by then Nyarlathotep was on edge, like I had insulted him.
“It’s just, I’m wandering just like you,” I tried to explain. “We’re both just lost here.”
“Nigga I ain’t lost,” Nyarlathotep barked, “I run this shit!”
He punched me so hard that I flew back through the glass front of the barbershop, through the cave and past the Moon Beast that had brought me there, and I guess I eventually tunneled my way through the rocky body of the moon because eventually I was tumbling through space and crashing down somewhere in the Dreamlands for the second time.
When I gathered myself, I was amazed that I was still intact. My body ached, but I wasn’t in great pain as I stood to get a sense of my surroundings. It was like I was in a crater in a vast stretch of dry desert.
Then Nyarlathotep descended on the desert and stood inside the crater with me.
“Sorry about that, man,” he said. “But I don’t like niggas disrespecting me.”
“I wasn’t disrespecting you, you idiot!” I yelled, unable to control my anger. “Where the hell am I now?”
Nyarlathotep charged at me, and I ran faster than I knew I could in the opposite direction. The desert seemed so vast and the harder I ran, the more apparent the heat became to me. There was a sun shining down overhead and I could feel it zapping energy from my muscles and making it hard for me to maintain my speed. But every time I looked back, the vision of the angry Nyarlathotep eager to hurt me for my perceived insults, spurred me forward.
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