by Don Webb
“Hey, I need to go to work now.”
“You don’t need to work. Abuelia dreamed we won the lottery.”
“There is no more lottery, my little bluebonnet.”
“Sometimes grandma says strange things.”
“She is just playing my little orchid.”
“What’s an orchid?”
“It’s a pretty flower like you.”
“I’m not a flower. I’m a girl.”
“Then I will call you ‘flower-girl’ because you smell so sweet.”
“The next time you go to ATX can you bring back some perfume so I really can smell sweet?”
“I will, Flower-Girl. Chanel Number Five.”
Today he was going to work in his cousin Tony’s field. Tony was bringing in a crop of corn, some tomatoes, and yerba de manso for sore throats. Even before the Rising weather was hot in Texas by April, and smart people didn’t work at midday. He woke up mamacita—“I am going to Tony’s today. I will bring you some tomatoes and a little oregano, OK?”
“You are a good boy, Juan.”
“I’m Nat, not Juan.”
“Be careful, Juan, bring us some chicken from that place on Goliad Street.”
He kissed Mama’s brown forehead. The light went out a little each day. He remembered that poem from Mrs. Phillips’s class, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Poetry made sense these days, history not so much.
At the edge of the village stood walls made of galvanized iron and plywood. Two men were watching the road. Doublesign had been a tiny town, hence its name. “The sign that says Entering and the sign that says Leaving are on the same pole.” It was a couple of miles to the fields. He drove. As long as they could get gas out of the tanks, they wouldn’t walk. It made for too easy a target. The guards were Father Murphy, a gray crewcut and a stained priest’s collar, and Nick Flores, a light brown man with a big gold tooth. Nick had a 512 tat and a People’s Nation star. They drank out of thermos, rifles by their sides.
They got off their lawn chairs and began to swing the gate open. Father Murphy waved him over. Nat rolled down his window.
“Nativiad Moreno—just the hombre I needed to see.” The Father’s Irish accent had not died away after twenty years in Texas. Nor had his potbelly shrunk in the last three years. He was the only fat man left in Doublesign.
“What can I do for you, Father?” asked Nat.
“You can do something for our little town.” The Father’s gray eyes were about to shoot out the guilt trip ray that only priests, nuns, and mothers can use. It could turn Nat into a teenager, into someone half his age.
“I do a lot for our little town. No one else makes the run into Austin since the flying things came.”
“You are a brave man, Nat. That’s why I thought of you. I need you to bring me something powerful. In Comesee there is a used bookstore. Eligio Mondragon told me that it has a curandero’s Bible. It has some of his charms and recipes written in it. As our supply of medicine runs out we need to know about oshá and Alamo tea. Some of the charms may be helpful against things.”
“Why don’t you go get it?” asked Nat. He knew the answer was because the priest is important and you are some peon, but he wondered how the priest would say it.
“Because I am afraid,” said Father Murphy.
“You think I am not?” asked Nat. “Fear and bravery are not enemies. But isn’t the book of a curandero taking from what you used to call the ‘other side’?”
“I am not making rash judgments these days. If I thought I could get the leprechauns to help us, I would be calling for them, my son.”
“Why is Eligio remembering this now? Wouldn’t this have been a good thing last year or the year before?”
“Psychology is not my forte.”
“I am not going to risk my life for a book.”
“If you bring me the book, I will make your life much sweeter.”
“How?”
“My son, I will allow Stephanie back into the church. I will let her stay there during the days, be in the storm shelter when needed. Your mother will not have to watch her during the day.”
This had been the first good news in so long that it almost puzzled Nat, as though he had lost his hearing and was suddenly greeted by the cry of a mourning dove.
He tried hard not to let his voice break. “You would do this for us?”
“The book is important.”
Jesús’ old Chevy Custom 10 dated from the Reagan administration; it had belonged to Dr. Chainey, that ran the cancer clinic. Nat could have got a new pickup after the Dying in Austin, but he didn’t like to steal from the dead. Comesee lay twenty miles to the south. No one drove there, because it lacked large grocery stores to loot; besides, as a small town it might still have people.
The sun looked like the sun today, which Nat always felt was a good sign. He left on FM 1193. The first three miles held no surprises. About four miles on he saw one of the webbing cities. Roaches, the kind called palmetto bugs in Texas, had increased in size after the Rising. They were about as big as his fist and their shiny black carapaces were marked with bright green angular signs. They built cities. On the last day CNN had been on the air, there had been some remarks about them as the “Great Race.” Nat couldn’t see anything great about oversized bugs. People knew that they weren’t a thing of nature because their web cities were illuminated at night. The city took up the better part of what used to be a cotton field, so Nat knew it was at least forty acres in size.
He couldn’t see any of the bugs, which made him feel better. One time a couple of them flew into town and seemed to be checking everything out. Mr. Franks had run inside his house and grabbed a bottle of Raid and ran after them spraying the air. They stopped and sort of hovered. The poison seemed to do no harm, but after thirty seconds Mr. Franks just sank to the ground. His skin showed angry red blotches in the shape of the angular designs on the bugs’ wings. He never came to and passed on a few hours later. Now when a bug flew by, people ran indoors.
As he continued south the sky changed from blue to the color of lead. Comesee was a little Anglo town; in the old days (which seemed so far gone) it survived by its junktique stores that sold to the Austin tourists on weekends. Nat hadn’t thought about the town since the Rising, even though it was just a few miles away. You just assumed anything that could be bad was. The billboards still welcomed folks in the name of the Lions. Historic Denton’s BBQ still promised the best Elgin sausages and brisket. Even the Dairy Queen was up ahead nine blocks on the left. A few burned-out cars were on the highway, but the passage into town looked clear. Nat glanced at the pair of loaded Glock 37s on his passenger seat. Bullets worked against most things. If it didn’t hurt your eyes to look at it, generally bullets would hit it. He slowed up as he came into town, waiting for signs of humans or of the Change.
It was the latter.
The Chevy dealership was covered with gray mucus. Nat could see angular things of metal that jerked inside. He gave it a wide berth and drove on into the center of town, the corner of 2nd and Main. Calabazas—what do they call them? Jack-o’-lanterns stood in front of every business on Main. It was spring, no place for fresh pumpkins. At least it was spring back in Doublesign. Father Murphy said he had to look for Two Guys From Texas Books. Time was pretty leaky these days.
There it was. Middle of the block between to the karate place and Hickerson’s Video and Game Rental. It had big plate glass windows. It wasn’t covered in slime; it looked normal. Maybe there was a healing book inside. He hated getting out of the truck. Nothing swooped or buzzed or squelched. The air smelled clean and hot. He left the motor running. He walked to the door. It was dark inside; faded reds and pinks dominated the window display. The Rising had happened in February, and many places still commemorated a faded Valentine’s, when Earth’s old lovers had come back. The door was locked. He got a cinderblock out of the back of the pickup and smashed the glass. All the jack-o’-lanterns had rolled closer to
him while his attention had been elsewhere. Reality was melting; he would have to be quick. Dr. MacLeod had explained to them that the “Otherness” had to seep in through “liminal” things, Nat thought that “liminal” meant scary. He kicked two of them away from the door, grabbed a flashlight, and went in, careful not to slip on the broken glass. The store didn’t smell right—it didn’t have that acid tang of Tia Rebecca’s yellowing romances. It stank of fire and copper, but the books looked OK.
There it was. The Bible. It sat on a shelf beneath diet books, with other Bibles, and Books of Mormon and old Methodist hymnals. But it was big and black with gold lettering Biblia Santa. It had a nice heft in his hands, but as he picked it up something laughed in his head. Voices in the head weren’t unusual, but they made him miserable. Outside the shop the jack-o’-lanterns weren’t round or orange anymore; they were becoming one of those clear snot-looking things that seemed to have rusty machinery and mercury inside. They were dumb but fast. He grabbed some paperback novels and flung them on to the street. It formed several eyes that focused on the books and squelched off in their direction. Swallowing hard, he ran toward it, since he needed to get to his truck. It didn’t turn until he was inside. He threw the truck in reverse and pulled into the crossroad. It had sensed him. And shot out two long runners of snot to pull itself toward the backing Chevy. It grew mouths. Some yelled “Tekeli-li!” Others made the sound of the fire engines and turkey buzzards. One mimicked a reporter from Channel 42, “Tex DOT has no explanation of the mysterious slime on I-35.”
He turned his truck toward Doublesign. The creature was gaining speed. It had made some of the strands into tentacles that were holding on to his tailgate. He put the pedal to the metal. 40, 50, 60; at 75 the main mass couldn’t keep up, but there was about a gallon of the goo that had managed to plop itself in the bed of his truck. It was making little green eyes that looked like zits and little centipede legs to scuttle across the bed. It slimed its way up his back window and its little eyes just spun around. Two mouths formed, their voices were thin and high like a kid that has breathed in a helium ballon. One yelled, “Tekeli-li!” and the other said, “¡Si usted ve un soggotho escaparse!” Nat laughed: that was—what’s his name on KHHL out of Leander. Man, he was funny.
Before.
Yeah, before.
Nat tried to concentrate on his driving. He rolled his window up as far it would go. A tiny thick tendril was pushing itself against the window, a tiny eye forming at the tip. He didn’t want to take it into the village. He had some bug-spray, a Crip-blue bottle of Raid(r) Flying Insect Killer. He braked hard and leapt out the passenger side window and let the loathsome mass have it. Jesús, Maria, y José. It pulled itself into a dirty white ball and flung itself on the asphalt. It was rolling away. Some days you got the bear; for Steph’s sake he hoped the bear would never get him. Dr. MacLeod said that all life on earth came from the shoggoths. He said they never had gone away, just “hidden up the spiral staircase of DNA.” All the things that showed up three years ago were always here, most humans couldn’t smell them or hear them or see them. When that city had Risen in the Pacific, we could touch them and they could touch us.
The sky looked blue, hazy, but not dangerously so. The sun was white and some turkey buzzards were flying off to the west. The ground had grass and a few late-season bluebonnets on it. Guess it’s not against the law to pick them now. Nat gathered a few, and one Indian paintbrush for contrast. He put them in his truck, on the passenger’s side next to the Bible. He decided to open it, to look for cures. Father Murphy had disgusted him by suggesting that some curandero bullshit would be good against the Otherness. Real crosses and real rosaries hadn’t worked. At his worst moments Nat thought that the campo santo of the Church didn’t really work either. Some day They would come, some ally of the Thing in the Pacific. Doublesign was a small village. It couldn’t feed them the fear and misery they drank like wine.
He opened the Bible to find that it too was a trick.
The book had been hollowed out. There were no curandero’s herbs, no list of spells against the coming of the night. It was a little spiral-bound book from Lulu.com. The chapters made no sense to Nat:
Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy in the Ryleh Text, Mircea Eliade.3.
Divinatory deep structure in Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan and the Yi Ching.4.
Prophetic Patterns in Innsmouth Jewelry, Ellison Marsh.5.
A selection from “Crave the Cave: The Color of Obsession.” Esther Harlan James. Diss. Trinity College, 1996, pp. 665–70.6.
A selection from “A Refutation to Shrewsbury’s ‘Elemental Schema.’” Mary Roth Denning. Diss. University of Chicago, 2007, pp. 118–26.7.
A selection from “Fieldwork with the Brujos Ocultados of Barret, Texas.” Carlos Cesar Arana. Diss. UCLA, 1973, pp. 93–118.8.
Cthulhu in the Necronomicon, Laban Shrewsbury.9.
The “Black” Sutra of U Pao in relation to Left Hand Path Cults of South East Asia. Patrica Ann Hardy. Diss. MIT, 2001, pp. 23–40.10.
The Prehistoric Pacific in Light of the ‘Ponape Scripture’ (Selections). Harold Hadley Copeland.11.
Alles nahe werde fern—Everything near becomes distant. Goethe
As usual, Nat did not know who was tricking whom. The small black book with its thin simulated leather bindings had probably been one of those books college kids buy for a class. Juan had bought one for his Southwest Life and Literature class and another for his HVAC class at the community college. Juan had been working in Dallas when the Rising had occurred. Mama loved Juan better; he was the gang-free smart son. Nat smiled at his brother’s favorite joke, “What do you call two Mexicans playing basketball?” “Juan on Juan.” Nat started to throw the book away, but who was he to judge? Certainty went out of the world three years ago. Daymares and nightdreams were the scaffolding of reality now; parallel lines actually and loved ones walked into the sky. He opened the hollowed-out Bible, on the flyleaf someone had written two verses in heavy pencil: Genesis 28:16-17 And Jacob awoke out of his sleep, and he said, Surely Jehovah is in this place; and I knew it not. And he feared, and said, How terrible is this place! this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. And Job 3:8 May those who curse days curse that day, those who are ready to rouse Leviathan.
He drove on to Doublesign. Felix Washington stood on guard duty. He was the Rev. Jackie Jones’s uncle. Felix was a very popular man, and at seventy-eight certainly the oldest. He had been a jazz pianist in the day, played gigs in Austin as little as five years ago. He had also saved a coffee can full of marijuana seeds. It was good buzz and good for trading with some of the other little towns that still remained, like Thalia. He still tickled the ivories at the Kuntry Kitchen, and Nat had seen his name on yellowing posters for The Soft Machine and The Mahavishnu Orchestra. He liked to piss people off by saying, “Cthulhu ain’t no worse than white people.” Felix opened the gate and waved him on.
Nat drove to Santa Cruz. Father Murphy sat at the wooden picnic table near the entrance. He had his pocketknife out; he looked for all the world to be carving something in the rotten wood. He indicated that Nat should sit beside him.
Nat realized how angry he was. His heart pounded. The fat bastard had had him risk his life for a book. A book wasn’t going to solve their problems, certainly not the Bible. Hadn’t we seen hundreds of people using the Bible to lay It back in the sea? Who was this fat Irishman telling his family and friends what to do for the last two decades? He had preached against his cousin Cody’s queerness, so Cody had run off to Houston to live in the gay community there, sealing his death when the waves that came with the Rising wiped Houston off the globe. He denied the Mass of the Dead for the scores of suicides, saying the Rising was God’s test of our faith. As though the death of millions was a little algebra quiz. Nat wanted to start smashing him with the Bible—hit that red uneven face that always reminded him of a potato. Nat couldn’t sit.
“I brought your damned b
ook.”
“Thank you, my son,” said Father Murphy.
“It’s hollow.”
“Many people find the Bible hollow these days.”
“No, I mean it is really hollow. You sent me there for nothing.” Nat took out the little book from inside and tossed it in front of Father Murphy. Murphy showed no surprise. Murphy continued his carving, some complicated sign.
“My son, when did you really know the human world was over?”
“Three years ago, like everyone else.” Nat wanted the guy to finish. He looked at the church door.
“Oh, she’s in there with the others. I am as good as my word. I understood the world was over when the bishop sent me here. I was sent to this little hellhole as a punishment. The Mother Church doesn’t like its priests to stick their dicks in altar boys’ cherubic little mouths. Did you know that? So they sent me here and I knew the world was over when I saw Christ’s face in there. All that look of suffering. He had been mutely telling the human infestation for years and years.”
Nat didn’t like it that he had had the same thought as this kid-fucker.
“You’re a fucking pedophile?” Nat felt his stomach heave.
“I never liked fucking them; anyway, age has taken care of that. Besides, I don’t really like brown boys as much as blond ones. Do you know why the Rising happened, my son?”
“¡Chingada!”
“Remember all those talking heads on TV? When the stars are right, they said. They know nothing. The great priest Cthulhu took a little nap, and a great deal of what is hidden by matter slept. We are the alarm clock. The shock. We figure out things, and as our tiny brains correlate the contents of our minds their shock, their agony at glimpsing the true cosmos sends out a nice jolt. There are so many things waiting to Waken still, roses in your garden wanting to sing weird songs, pebbles wanting to shoot forth stony blossoms. Human time is done.”