And their new heads. Like thistledown on the wind.
I heard what sound like that old familiar tune, but that can’t be ‘cause I don’t see Annabelle nowhere. But her voice be comin’ from under the ground, like song through dirt clod mouth. That honey-sweet song filled me with joy ‘cause I remembered them words, just likes the way mama chanted them in the days of the past:
Scarcely have they been planted,
Scarcely have they been sown,
Scarcely has their stock taken root in the earth,
But She merely blows on them, and they wither,
And the storm carries them away like stubble.
I hope Annabelle is ok. She must a gone a wiltin’ on some distant soil. I admit I was jealous regardin’ what a ruckus she be seein’. I know she be visitin’ soon enough.
Hope mama likes her.
Looks to be the good kind a harvest. Sometimes it’s hours a waitin’ for the blossoms to be all smiles.
The Illimitable Garden is all aflutter tonight.
INTAGLIOS
Sunstone was going to burst out of the sand on his motorcycle any moment now. Revenant come from Hell. Breath stinking of meth-rot, phosphorescent eyes glowing brighter than the ghost orbs of Oriflamme Canyon.
Straight out of the ground. Like the biker gang leader from Psychomania. That film scared Amy shitless when she was six.
But Sunstone and his teen bride Phoenix were miles away. Squatting in their beat up orange van. Dead motorcycle tied down to the roof.
Sunstone and Phoenix. Bad ass biker names. A smidge of hippy clinging to them, like the stink of patchouli oil.
Far from here.
Nobody was after her.
Except for that mysterious figure trailing behind. Always keeping their distance. A half-mile or so back.
Just some hitchhiker bringing up the rear. Antsy Amy shouldn’t have taken all those black beauties.
Sand stirred a few feet to her right. A lizard scurried across her foot.
Easy there Godzilla, she said.
Moonlight brushed the sagebrush fields, a vast carpet of straw colored foliage with traces of vibrant green in the younger ones. Amy’s backpack was heavy, her feet aching and raw, sunburnt shoulders peeling to expose fresh skin. The desert sun had scorched away that new growth as well.
I’m a fucking walking matryoshka doll. She said to a large bush that shuddered in response.
Hopefully just another lizard.
Layers beneath layers.
She found it liberating to be under the desert sky with nothing weighing her down except a backpack. She was glad she’d decided to travel from Eureka to San Diego on foot-knew the area like the back of her hand, loved the desert regions most of all. Lived for the nothingness broken up by the occasional Joshua tree.
But that person back there. What were the odds another hitchhiker would be out and about at this early hour? Nobody stopped to pick people up off the highway anymore.
And she kept hearing weird shit. Voices that didn’t belong in the desert.
She’d no moral qualms about partying with Sunstone and Phoenix earlier—they’d provided the free dabs and beer, when all she’d had on her was a teener. Not a fair trade, but they’d been accommodating.
Not likely to be Sunstone or Phoenix following. Amy couldn’t imagine either of them being up for trekking across the desert. And what would be the point when they had their orange van?
Nobody had driven by in awhile. She felt like the last person alive on the planet.
Someone began speaking again.
Rumbling voice, occupying more of the air than she thought possible for something not pressed directly against her ear. She couldn’t make out the words.
She’d heard something similar before, off the 15, past the town of Kelso, over the rolling dunes decorated with sporadic patches of scraggly dried grasses, deep into Death Valley. The vibration of shifting grains of sand had created a booming, brass instrument-like resonance. A weird geological phenomenon. She’d felt the sound in her torso.
Must be something seismic going on her as well. It just sounded like a person talking.
Or maybe radio waves. Transmission bouncing from satellites. Off the surface of planets.
Weird atmospherics picking up stuff.
What had Sunstone gone on about?
Unexplained shit in the desert.
Secret government projects, experiments instigating urban warfare, reverse engineering alien technology, Black Ops maneuvers, holes to the center of the planet.
Social manipulation.
Sunstone insisted the government faked the moon landing in Death Valley. Filmed the pick-ups on a secret Warner Bros backlot.
Mars Curiosity and Spirit rover footage was fabricated in Red Rock Canyon, but not so convincingly the conspiratorially adept hadn’t found a lizard in a shot, miner’s helmet in another.
Even one pic of a woman sitting on a rock.
Paranoid rants. Amy had to give the hippy fucks credit for their tenacity. Especially Phoenix who’d been adamant about the conspiracy.
You do know that Mars is landfill now? You follow? Incinerator plants up there disguised as pyramids. Trash, cars, all kinds a waste dumped on the surface. Even advertising statues poking out of the Martian soil. Follow?
At the time Amy had been amused that the conjecture was based solely on the couple’s ignorance of paredolia.
But she’d listened politely, staring at the pale grit stuck to the grease between the folds on Sunstone’s wrinkled forehead. He’d looked like an old-timey borax miner straight out of the Boron Mine. Face made harsh and haunted by desert living.
Phoenix reminded Amy of an illustration of La Llorona she’d glimpsed between the pages of a kid’s ghost book long ago. Ratty white nightgown covered with stains. Long black hair, so straight and lustrous you could run fingers through it uninterrupted.
And her eyes.
She could’ve sworn they’d been all pupil, shimmering like motor oil when she was near the firelight, so it always looked as if she were on the verge of tears.
Amy had encountered their type plenty of times on her adventures; desert rats were all over the small ghost towns throughout California. At least these two hadn’t been L.A. weekend tourists flocking out here to ride three-wheelers across the landscape, tearing up the ground, disturbing the flora and fauna. Just a burnout hippy and his teenage fuck toy.
Amy imagined Charles Manson’s kids growing up to be like these two desert dwellers—though Sunstone had to have been too old, and Phoenix too young. She didn’t know for sure. She was no expert on Manson genealogy.
Then Sunstone had gone and confirmed Amy’s suspicions:
Free of the Jew here in the desert. And Black agitators.
He’d expounded on his racist philosophy, an ideology that was more a clusterfuck of 18th century pseudo-anthropology and paranoid conspiracy theories than anything remotely coherent.
Some races are the degenerate offspring of orangutans. Some the wicked progeny of chimpanzees and gorillas.
Phoenix had been over the moon at having a new pair of ears to explain how she and Sunstone had dropped off the grid a few years ago, to live in a deep hole in the desert. Let the race wars thin the herds. Pop back up beneath skies raining flakes of blood and winds blowing wet blood and they’d cleanse themselves in oceans of coagulated blood when the world was reborn with pristine blood red skies.
Amy thought that was a whole helluva lot of blood.
After the End comes we’ll wake up on another planet. Probably Mars. Only be white people living on the red planet. We’ll ride out to rescue the orphaned white babies left behind. We’ll be their saviors.
Reborn on that new planet.
Rebirth.
Repopulate.
Hadn’t the Manson clan also gone on about digging a hole so deep in the desert they’d hunker miles beneath the surface? Cut a big ol’ slit into the ground, crawl down with the huddled mass of idiot cowar
ds waiting out the End of Times they so fearfully, and joyously, anticipated. Fuck and snack on acid, sleep it off ‘til Armageddon rolls on by like a Rocky Mountain Double hauling hellfire.
Amy found it all too familiar.
She’d wanted to tell the racist fanatics to fuck off a few times. But she held back. She had a canister of pepper spray in one pocket, and a Blue Belt in Krav Maga in her muscle memory—she’d been confident she could take the wrinkly old scrotum sac and his bitch. Nothing to worry about here. Desert junkie trash. Partied with worse.
Goddamn Manson groupies. Sorry junkies probably squatted at Spahn Ranch and Barker Ranch at some point in their lives.
She’d attempted to placate the hostile mood by making a joke about whites, her own red hair, and Neanderthal genetics.
Descended from cavemen. Ha ha.
This hadn’t gone over too well.
Amy didn’t know why she was a weird magnet. How she’d managed to stumble across Sunstone and Phoenix in the middle of nowhere, huddled around a campfire beside their orange van, well, this was another of life’s mysteries. Maybe it had something to do with her folk’s brush with the Manson cult. That decades old incident had left a residual curse on her. The tale was firmly entrenched in her family’s lore.
It was ‘69, her parents newlyweds spending a second night in their new home. Her dad woke up to the screen door tapping shut. He’d grabbed his shotgun and crept to the back of the house just in time to see two people slip over the fence down into the wash. Stepped back inside to realize the couch had been moved, and silverware scattered on the dining room table. He’d gone into the kitchen to call the cops.
Someone had taken a dump on the linoleum floor.
Years later her parents read about the Manson Family’s creepy-crawling expeditions. The Family shit on floors, moved furniture, wrote spooky poems on the walls.
All to create an environment of fear.
Amy had known her conversation with Sunstone and Phoenix wasn’t going to improve, so she’d thanked them for the high, then hightailed it out of there. They just watched her as she walked away. Sunstone’s weathered face set hard like dried clay, while something wistful touched Phoenix’s expression.
Amy noticed the figure following her about half an hour after she’d left the camp.
Something wasn’t right about any of this.
Few hitchhiked these days. FBI propaganda in the 60s had scared off a large percentage of hitchhikers. By the late 70s it had dramatically decreased in popularity.
Amy was well aware that she was more likely to be raped or killed by someone she knew than some random stranger giving her a lift. Didn’t accept many ride offers anyway; preferred to enjoy the scenery on foot.
No reason to stop now.
Seen a lot of things in California. Hiked to the Devil’s Postpile in Mammoth with a bunch of German tourists. Hoofed it over desert regions where rumors of one, if not several, MGM lions had met their final resting place. Explored the Tierra Blanca Mountains for any evidence that a long rumored Viking ship was buried there. No luck finding it.
Visited the Blythe Intaglios just off the 95. Ancient Quechan had removed the dark rocks on top of the ground to expose the lighter colored earth, creating petroglyphs of giant people. A few animals too.
That was a transcendent experience.
Mountain air flowed from the North, down into the desert, mingled with the hot and dry. Amy was cold but sweating. The night glinted with a blue sharpness. Numbed cheeks and chapped lips.
Rebirth. Repopulate.
It’s-a cold and-a dry out here! she shouted, intentionally misquoting her favorite movie to take her mind off the memory of Phoenix’s speech. That’s right, a lovely stroll in the desert. Tra-la-la, isn’t this fun?
Her outburst made her feel a bit better.
She glanced over her shoulder. The figure was still there.
No werewolves in these here parts.
Chupacabra maybe.
I’m a goddamn weird magnet.
Maybe there was a supernatural force that drew her to locations the Manson Family had lived, where his sycophants gathered, polluted the soil with their misdeeds.
Mapped out ley lines in blood and sand.
That’s just crazy talk.
She wasn’t some conspiracy nut like Sunstone and Phoenix, but she had a different way of looking at things. She wasn’t convinced that Manson ever commanded anyone to kill. Everything pointed to that psychopath Tex. The prosecutor had concocted a tall tale to paint Charlie in the worst possible light.
A witch-hunt.
Portray hippies, flower children and revolutionaries as social movements that threatened the status quo, as a violent threat. Same went for the propaganda about hitchhiking—the government had taken something innocuous, launched a campaign to vilify it, then scared people into acquiescing to authority.
All about perspective.
Like the giant intaglios she’d seen in Blythe. Have to be up in the air to fully appreciate what’d been created. Same for the Nazca lines in Peru—the immensity of their presence could only be understood from high above. They were even visible from space.
Scratch the surface and all kinds of new faces will greet you.
The hitchhiker had closed the gap.
Amy looked at her phone. There were no bars. Another patch of desert dead zone. It was 4:48 a.m.
A voice crackled in her ear:
WUR NEE REENG MRRS!
LANDYS ISS IMM NANT!
She frantically looked around. Sound carried far in the desert. Had to be a blaring radio miles away. It spoke again, more clearly:
WE ARE NEARING MARS!
LANDING IS IMMINENT!
It just happened to sound like Sunstone’s voice. This bothered Amy on a level she couldn’t fully rationalize.
Mars.
Some regions of the desert did look like Mars’ surface, craggy and pitted and cinnamon red. Aztec Sandstone outcrops, nearly 200 million years old, suffused with vibrant shades of vermillion. Sunstone had certainly thought Red Rock Canyon looked like the fourth planet from the sun.
The figure had gained on her. Amy walked faster.
This is so fucked up.
Mars.
I’m walking on another planet.
She was spooking herself. Between the racist hippies and the weird radio broadcast and this hitchhiker, she was all nerves. At this pace Amy estimated they’d catch up in 15-minutes or less. It was past time to take evasive action.
She cut off the main highway along a shallow path that ran into the desert. Set her backpack on the ground, kneeled behind a clump of scrub brush.
It didn’t take long. The figure arrived, trotting at a fairly good pace. Stick thin legs looked barely substantial enough to sustain their weight. Amy tried to make herself smaller, to blend into her surroundings. She peeked between the branches of sagebrush.
It was Phoenix.
Why is she after me?
She inhaled a breath in preparation to call out.
Then paused.
Phoenix was nude. Her bare skin slick with a cottage cheese-like substance.
Like a newborn covered in vernix.
Rebirth.
Amy crouched back down.
Where was Sunstone? Why wasn’t he pulling up in that filthy orange van of his? She hadn’t seen any vehicles for a suspiciously long time. It was early, but truckers used this route and some should’ve driven past by now.
Phoenix continued up the highway.
Amy waited until she was certain she was far ahead. Only then did she sling her backpack on, kept low, walked as close to the tops of the scrub brush as she could to avoid silhouetting herself against the waxing crescent moon. It was difficult what with the backpack’s weight and her weariness, but she managed to keep Phoenix in sight.
She walked parallel with the road, about 40-feet into the desert, a mottled hill of dark boulders to her right. She was ready to drop on a dime if Phoenix turned to
look back.
Repopulate.
A hill moved.
Amy let out a surprised cry, immediately clamped her hands over her mouth.
A few weeks ago she’d visited the Ubehebe volcanic crater, cut across the Teakettle Junction to the Racetrack Playa—a dry lake bed surrounding a rock monolith called The Grandstand. The tan-colored clay looked like an alien planet’s surface. Here she’d seen the traveling rocks.
Of course she hadn’t caught anything in the act; the rocks slid at a glacial speed, probably due to the lakebed freezing, winds nudging them along imperceptibly over time. The stones had left smooth depressions in the cracked surface, like slug trails.
But rock formations this large couldn’t do that. Hills and mountains didn’t move.
Her exhaustion wasn’t helping oxygen reach her brain efficiently. She’d breathed in some nasty desert varnish infected with spores, now multiplying in her lungs, spreading through her bloodstream, invading her brain.
Oh shit, maybe I have Valley fever.
But she felt fine. Her aches and pains were perfectly normal. No cough, no fever. Just traces of the drugs and the desert playing with her head.
I’m not that woman in the Mars Rover photo.
Now why would that even occur to her?
She continued walking.
A nimbus of light softened the horizon. The land became clearer, more distinct against the backdrop of a violet dawn. The world clotted into a tangible image, as if God had scratched away a stratum of dark gravel to reveal lighter soil underneath. An intaglio etched into existence by an unseen hand.
A towering bird-headed humanoid towered before Amy.
An RV-sized rooster stood at its side.
Several giant sentries looked out over the desert.
Amy’s first instinct was to run, but the titans didn’t reach out for her. Didn’t move at all.
Phoenix’s shape slipped into the shadows cast by the huge figures.
Amy almost called out to her but hesitated. She tentatively approached.
A 30-foot tall astronaut greeted her. He was holding a silver rocket ship in his large hands. She recognized him as the famous Gemini Man.
Fiberglass statues. Her relieved voice carried softly in the air. Shouldn’t you be on display back east?
Alectryomancer and Other Weird Tales Page 16