The Kensington Horror

BTW, this is an AU story - arising from a challenge I was issued some while ago - "What if Freddie Mercury had gotten married and started a family? Can you write something like that?" Enter Tianna Mercury......

This is supposed to be funny and kind of scary all at once, with a twist ending. Any religious references in the story are NOT intended disrespectfully, please don't take offense. None is intended whatsoever.

Just as an aside, Zoraster (I hope that's right) was the first to propose that the universe could be divided in absolute good vs. absolute evil. It very much ran contrary to the prevailing ideas of that time, which held that the gods and goddesses each had their good and bad aspects, but both were contained in one being. The latter is what Maddy, our resident Witch, holds to.

Abdoul Alharazed was an early pen name of HP Lovecraft's, one he later used for one of his recurring characters, who is never seen but much talked about. Lovecraft was an Anglophile as well as a lover of all things ancient Egyptian. Also, like the late great Freddie Mercury, he was a cat lover.....

Warnings for language and sexual references, as well as Witchcraft and general weirdness

Disclaimer - Only the original characters are mine. The rest, to borrow a phrase from a friend of mine (hi, Aries!) are merely people in my head who bear more than a passing resemblance to the Gods of Music....

Enough talking. On with the fic!

"The Kensington Horror"

Dedicated, with love and apologies, to HP Lovecraft. The Cthulhu Mythos is his masterful creation, as is the Necronomicon........


"WHOAMAMA!!!!!!!!!" The voice belonged to a chunky dude in a t-shirt priminiming BIG BEEFY MAN and tan painter's pants that had been considerably more flattering several sizes ago. "They do nekkid stuff! Whoa! Yeah! Partyman wanna go get him some of that nekkid stuff! Partyman wanna get nekkid and PARRRRRRRRRRTY!!!!!!"

"God and Goddess----" his reluctant companion, a cute and slightly plump young woman with a mass of dark curls, sighed. "Carlton, cut it out. For one thing, the correct term is skyclad, not naked---" With her Southern accent, it came out closer to "nekkid," though. "---- and more importantly, it isn't what you think."

Carlton wasn't listening, as usual. "Whoamama! Nekkid! You think you could get me in one of those all-sexy little girly-girl nekky-nekkid covens?! Then Partyman really gonna party NEKKID!" He dropped the book he was holding to pound his chest and bellow "NEEEEH - EHEHEHEHEHHHH - EHEHEHEHEHEHHHH - EHEHEHEHHHHKIDDDDDDD!!!!" at the top of his lungs.

"Maaaan----" Maddy sighed, giving up entirely. Once upon a time Witches had faced the threat of public execution for practicing the Craft. Now it was public humiliation - at the hands of her own cousin, nontheless. He was now dancing around the Mystic Grove playing bad air guitar and singing (well, maybe,) "Nekky nekky nekky nekky nekkid! Nekky nekky nekkid nekkid nekkidy nekky nekkid nekkid-----" She sighed, rolled her eyes and went back to looking at quartz crystals.

"Love, what's ----" Brian May paused, frowning at a small bottle labeled Ylang-Ylang Essential Oil. "Why-lang why-lang?" Maddy was his fiancé.

"Lang-Lang," she corrected. "The "Y" is silent. It's a tropical flower. It's really nice." She took another bottle from the display and handed it to him. "Here's the tester."

He sniffed. "Mmmm. is is nice. What do you use it for?"

"Love spells, mostly," she replied, looking through bottles for sage and lavender.

He recapped the tester and leaned over to kiss her cheek. She was just over a foot shorter than he was. "It seems to be working, love. Is that what you did to me?"

She looked around into his warm, emerald-flecked hazel eyes. If, last year at this time, someone had told her this man would be saying those words to her, she would have laughed. Well, probably not laughed, but she wouldn't have believed it. "It doesn't work like that. You can't cast a spell to make someone love you. It wouldn't be right."

"Nekkid dance, nekkid dance, Partyman gonna get nekked and do the nekkid dance! Nekkid nekkid nekky nekky nekkid! Butt raving nekky nekky nekkid!" Carlton was still performing his air guitar serenade.

Maddy looked disbelievingly at her cousin. "Butt raving nekky nekky --- naked?" It still came out more like nekkid.

"Darlings, look! It's Bilbo Baggins' little sword!" Freddie Mercury exclaimed. He was holding up a beautifully made double-bladed ceremonial knife. "Isn't it exquisite?!"

"It's called an athame," Maddy told him. She pronounced it to rhyme with "sammy."

"It isn't sharp, dear," he said.

"It's not supposed to be," she pointed out.

Freddie admired it - or perhaps his reflection in it - for a moment more. "Does it turn blue in the presence of Orcs, dear?"

"Whoamama! What's this bad stuff! Nasty! Yeah! Rock on! Party!" Carlton was eagerly - almost too eagerly - leafing through a book. "Nasty nasty nekky nekky nekkid! Yeah! Partyman gonna get him nasty nekky nekkid and PARTY!"

"Carlton, what are you reading?" Maddy said

Freddie looked at her. "Reading is perhaps assuming a bit too much, dear. I think he's just looking at the pictures."

"Nasty nasty nekky nekky! Yeah! Butt raving nekky nekkid!" Carlton enthused.

"What do you have?" Maddy sighed, thinking this would be good training for when she and Brian had children, although she hoped theirs would behave better. She let out a squeak when she saw the book. "God and Goddess, Carlton, put that down!"

"What is it? Nasty Nekkid spells?" he inquired.

"Carlton, stop it. You don't want to mess with that book," Maddy said, taking it out of his hands. He started to grab it back but Brian intervened, taking the book and holding it out of Carlton's reach.

"Stop it, Carlton," he said. "Behave."


"Look, darlings! It turns blue in the presence of stupidity!" Freddie still had the athame.

"Now don't you start---" Brian warned, trying, and failing, to keep a straight face. He looked at the book he now held. "What is this?" It did look nasty. It had a leatherbound k cok cover with a strange symbol over the title. "Necro--Necronomicon?"

"Yeah, it means nasty nasty nekky nekkid stuff!" Carlton made another grab for the book.

Freddie let out a startled squeak and nearly dropped the athame. "The---the what?! Are you serious?!"

Brian showed him the cover of the book. "You know about it?"

The singer had put his free hand over his mouth, unconsciously holding up the athame in a protective gesture. "Dear, put that down. Get rid of it."

"It is nasty nekky stuff! Lemme see!" Carlton made another grab for it, but Brian easily held it out of reach.

Maddy reached up. "Bri, let me see for a sec."

He handed her the book. Carlton moped, but knew better than to try to take it away from his cousin.

"It's the John Dee translation," she said after a moment. "And Freddie's right. You do not want to mess with it." She put the book back on the shelf. "Come on, guys. I have what I need." She looked at the athame Freddie still held. "That is nice, though." It was a silver blade with an ebony handle set on each side with a moonstone. It was also more than she could afford.

Freddie smiled. "If I can find Phoebe and my credit card, it's yours, dear."

She blushed. "Freddie---"

"Now now, none of that. I've made up my mind, dear, don't confuse me with the facts. Phoebe, darling?" He looked around.

~*~

"By the way, love, what was the deal with that book was your cousin looking at?" Brian was asking later. They were over at Tianna and Freddie's place, sitting around the living room, talking.

"Book?" She looked at him.


"At Mystic Grove. The one you told him to leave alone."

"That book is nothing but trouble, darling," Freddie said, coming in. "You don't want to know."

Maddy looked at him. "The Necronomicon was written by a man named Abdoul Alhazared. He was --- " She looked at Freddie. "Was he a student of Zoroaster or a follower?"

"I don't know, dear. I've heard it both ways," Freddie replied, sitting down.

"So have I,\e ade admitted. "He was either a student or an associate of the man who founded Freddie's religon. At any rate, he eventually broke with Zoroaster and went on to write that book. In it he talkes about beings from out of space and time he calls the Great Elder Gods who he claims once ruled the universe and will rise up to rule again when, as he puts it, "the moon and starts shall come to their right houses again."

Tianna, who'd been watching Jada make short work of a bottle, looked around. "Isn't that the Cthulhu cult?" She pronounced the odd name "Kuh-THOO-loo."

"Part of it," Maddy said.

Tianna nodded. "My grandfather told me about that."

"About what?" Brian was even more lost.

Tianna put a towel over her shoulder and arranged the baby, then started patting her little back. "It was something that happened back in New Orleans in the 1920s. A group of about twenty or thirty people were arrested after police were called about a disturbance that turned out to be some sort of ritual. Among the things they uncovered was a small statue of something kind of like an octopus, but with hundreds of tentacles and just a really strange kind of look about it. There were letters on the bottom of it - C-T-H-U-L-H-U. The lead investigator, a man named John LeGrasse, called my grandfather for help because he had no idea what he was up against. My grandfather was familiar with it because he'd met up with a couple of other groups back in Jamaica who worshipped this --- entity. Cthulhu is apparently the leader of these Elder Gods."

"Didn't something happen around Antarctica about that time?" Maddy asked.

"There was a shipwreck where the men told wild tales of something rising out of the ocean, and of course the polar expedition where three men came back completely insane and the other two wouldn't talk about it," Tianna remembered.

"Did your grandfather study the occult?" Brian asked. "I thought you said he was a signpainter."

"Hs a s a signpainter. He was also one of the most powerful voodoo priests in the islands," Tianna replied, then looked around at the baby. "Hey munchkin, are we ever going to get around to burping?"

~*~

He was wandering the streets of some unnamed and unnameable city, with great towering blocks and monoltihs looming above him, all dripping with some sort of green ooze like algae or seaweed. The gray-black basaltic stone was covered with strange hieroglyphics, frighteningly unreadable. A stench of the ages, of seawater and ancient decay hung in the air, mixed with something alien, something sharp and fishy and not smelling like fish at all. He pauseookiooking around. From somewhere underneath came a chant, of words but not of words.... "Cthulhu fhtagn......R'lyeh.....Chtulhu fhtagn...."

Brian awoke with a violent start and sat up, hands pressed to his chest, heart pounding. It took a moment for him to remember where he was. He shuddered. The dream didn't seem like it should have been scary, but there had been such a feeling of forboding, as though it wasn't a dream at all, but a vision......the worst part was, this was hardly the first time.

"Bri?" Maddy looked up sleepily, then sat up, alarmed. "Are you all right?"

"I just had that dream again," he said shakily.

"The one about the ancient city?" She pushed the pillows back agaisnt the headboard and sat back, pulling him into her arms.

He nodded, leaning against her, still trembling. "Only this time I heard voices in it. Chanting or something."

"What were they saying?" She looked at him closely.

"I don't know. I'm not even sure it was a language. But it sounded like that thing Tianna was talking about earlier----" He shivered and nestled closer. "Maybe I shouldn't eat pizza before bed, huh?"

Maddy ran her fingers through his dark curls, but didn't reply........