Nemo Me Impune Lacessit

"Nemo Me Impune Lacessit" is a short Cthulhu Mythos story by the late American author Michael Shea.
==Synopsis==
At his sprawling mansion, a two hundred-year-old warlock seeks revenge on a group of amoral people who wronged him in the past. Using his powers to invoke Mythos entities, he tailors each one's fate to their individual personality.
==Characters==
*Monty, a sorcerer who has lived for over two hundred years, presumably by calling on his knowledge of the Cthulhu Mythos entities. He claims to have "wrested man’s deepest lore from its thousand crypts," but presents himself as an "oddball, bookish...Old World-ly man of late middle age."
*Koboldus, Monty's servant, who appears as an "elderly, thick-set little man." His true form features "scales and talons." He does not speak in front of outsiders, because "that which he is in truth possesses a Voice that may not be disguised."
*Valerie, porn star and ex-wife of Monty's. She has a "long-limbed flamingo strut" and russet hair. Monty describes her as "born to money, and college 'educated,'" and as a "fidgeting, self-adoring gypsy." She dies in a climactic ritual involving the Hounds of Tindalos, a spider-creature called Araknadd, and the Outer God Azathoth.
*Kamin Quartz, porn star and Valerie's new partner. He has "a drifting walk, a cool bodily denial of effort, and ...hold[s] his handsomeness still and unwrinkled." He dies in the same ritual as Valerie.
*Bo Beck, a pornographer with designs on producing snuff films. He is fat--"the teasing, malevolent type of pachyderm"--and "glossy-bearded like a Neronian senator." He is killed by a Shoggoth.
*Natalie, Natalie's sister and production assistant on her porn films; she has an over-inflated sense of her own intelligence and an "aggrieved sense of personal worth." Described as a "leggy stork." She dies under the attentions of carnivorous Yuggothian roses.
*Roger, the producer of Valerie's porn films. He is taken to another dimension by an entity older than the Earth that drains him of his blood.
== Setting ==
The story takes place at Sternbrucke, Monty's mansion in an unnamed European nation. (The name is German for "Star Bridge.") Its "upper structures are scarcely more than three hundred years old"—the original living quarters having burned down in ""an unfortunate local disturbance at the turn of the seventeenth century"--while the extensive dungeons below "date from the tenth century, if not earlier." Its "ultimate, deepest corridors" were dug by "workers and artisans from the sea, some five miles distant."
==Publication History==
"Nemo Me Impune Lacessit" was first published in horror periodical Whispers in March 1982. It has since appeared in the collections of Shea's own works The Autopsy and Other Tales (2008), Copping Squid and Other Mythos Tales (October 2009), and Demiurge: The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales of Michael Shea (December 2017). It has been translated into German.Internet Speculative Fiction Database, "Title: Nemo Me Impune Lacessit."
==Trivia==
*The title is Latin for "no one provokes me with impunity"--or as S. T. Joshi translates it, “No one hurts me and gets away with it”Demiurge: The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales of Michael Shea, "Introduction" by S. T. Joshi (Dark Regions Press, 2017).--and is the motto of the nation of Scotland as it stands within the United Kingdom.
== References ==
Category:Expanded Mythos Works
Category:Michael Shea works