by Don Webb
“Of course,” said Burroughs. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
He regretted inviting them. Barlow felt it was a set-up. But who’s conning whom? Two years ago he happened across a small bookshop in Tlatilolco, a weird neighborhood for a bookshop. It was stuck between a barber’s shop and a taquería—it had books overflowing its ancient shelves. Mainly modern novels in English, French, and Spanish—random volumes from encyclopedias, books brought into the city by tourists, cheap occult books on palmistry and the lore of the tarot—in short, junk. Barlow had been about to leave when the shopkeeper, a well-dressed woman in her thirties, asked if he needed help finding anything. Her English had almost no accent, her skin tone was very light.
“No, I don’think you would have what I am interested in.”
“Señor, we do have what you are interested in, that I know. My uncle’s shop is a trifle unorganized.”
At that moment he spotted a fading copy of the June 1936 copy of Astounding Stories with Lovecraft’s “The Shadow out of Time” providing the (inaccurate) cover illustration. The Great Race of Yith (as faded as his Christmas tree) menaced a well-dressed white man. Barlow broke into a big smile and picked up the magazine, which lay atop a stack of books. Beneath it was the Codex Catamaco. The word “Codex” was a magnet to his iron. He snatched up the thin, light-brown, leather-covered book. The frontmatter had been torn away. It looked as if the book had originally about a hundred pages. The paper quality was poor, rough, and brown. It had probably been printed during the war. The last seventy pages were a Mayan codex with interlinear English translation. Like most scholars, Barlow assumed that the language would someday be deciphered, but certainly nothing like this level of translation existed. The book’s backmatter was mainly in place—including an index that included topics that were well known to any Mayaologist—and others of a more tantalizing nature such Charles Hinton, the mathematician who had done significant work on the fourth dimension. Of course, all such rogue references were conveniently pointing to the missing pages in the front. But if the volume were a hoax or a joke, it had been an expensive one—buying the type for the Mayan ideographs had cost a pretty penny. Trying not to look overly excited, he asked the book’s price. The young woman looked over its condition and told him simply to take it—her store didn’t sell damaged goods. He picked up a copy of Norman Mailer’s 1948 bestseller The Naked and the Dead, no doubt brought in as summer reading by a tourist, and paid a few pesos for it. It seemed wrong not to leave something.
Barlow had almost run home with the book. He came back the next day. He had expected the shop to vanish, or the “uncle” to be some seedy character from a Lovecraft story. He was a middle-aged businessman fond of Mark Twain with no idea from whom he had bought the codex. He tried to get Barlow to buy some books on palmistry. The shop lasted another year and either closed or moved.
The remaining book was in four parts. The first was the tale of the arrival of the death-god Ah Pook on Earth via comet 400,000,000 years ago. He fell in the northern polar regions where he fought two other death-gods, Kisin and Zushakon. The three divided deaths on this world. Ah Pook taught humans how to die in order to be reborn with their memories more or less intact. They had to be careful not to remember their deaths, or they would die again. Zushakon, a centipede god that lived in a lightless world, collected criminals—evil beings that were sacrificed to him in a grisly manner—whose souls he would use as a sort of garment. The text gave a dubious translation of Zushakon as the “Ugly Spirit.” Kisin was less picky. He/It simply fed on death and rot of all sorts. The three gods fought for over a million years, calling on the aid of other beings from exploded stars.
The second part dealt with the creation of humans and other races—the Insect People, the Vegetable People, the Fungus People, the Hairy People, and finally humans—by the death-gods as sources of food or “vessels” for their servants/allies. Each of these groups were given various worlds or planes of existence, but they could trade certain gems, drugs, and metals with one another—if they paid a high tax to the death-gods. Barlow had never read any mythological speculation of this sort; frankly, the “gods” were being treated as a sort of space alien. It certainly reminded him more of Lovecraft’s fiction than true mythology. Humans should love or fear their gods, but not be nihilistic toward them. He read with a start that the Fungi People had been given an extra-cold planet to live on. This was too close to Lovecraft. Why had that copy of Astounding been lying conveniently atop the pile of books? But that wouldn’t have meaning for anyone other than him in Mexico City. The effort to place it in a bookstore in a neighborhood that he had visited perhaps twice, and hope that he would spot the magazine and pick up the doctored book beneath, required millions-to-one odds.
The third part of the book was similar to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It explained death as a long journey begun at the invitation of one of the death-gods. It was a hazardous journey, where every mistake you had made in your life counted against you. The three gods were going to try and trick you, but if you slipped past them you were out of “time” and in eternity. Ix Tab, goddess of snares and hanging, tried to trick you by inverting future and past. You might be cagey enough to avoid two fornicating peasants thinking that as the road to be born as a peasant, but you could touch a rotting dog’s body and be sucked into the corpse to live the dog’s life in reverse. On one of the glyphs “Ix” was translated “Yig.” Now that had to be either a hoax or the biggest coincidence ever, because Lovecraft had made up that name as a god for one of his revision clients.
The fourth part of the book was about control, both magical and political. The Mayans used (and still use) a slash-and-burn system of agriculture. If you wait too long to burn the shoots, rains will make them too damp to burn. If you plant too early, drought can ruin your crops; if you plant too late, the big downfall could wash away your seeds. A few days either way and a year’s crop is lost. So the priests are given great control calendars—this way they will seem to be gods. The priests are instructed to have a continuous circle of festivals so that the population never learns how to read the signs of the year; thus they need the priests—that is probably why there is no number higher than twenty in spoken Maya today. After this realpolitik came a time-travel spell that enabled the priests to go back in time and make contact with the death-gods.
Barlow was ashamed of it, but he wanted to try. He had two questions for Lovecraft. One was about the real source of the Necronomicon. The other had been about boys—about sex with boys. Both answers had been disappointing.
Now Burroughs and his friends had mentioned Zushakon, a name not attested in the three “official” codices. Likewise (and more suspiciously) “Yig.” He knew Burroughs was an heir to the Burroughs adding machine company. He might have resources that could produce the book—but how could he have got it to Mexico in 1948?
Burroughs was a weird cat. He claimed to know another writer, Jack Kerouac, whose The Town and the City came out last year. Burroughs even said one of the characters in the book was based on him (Will Dennison). He had a wife, Joan—another book character for Kerouac, Mary Dennison—who was strung out on speed to contrast Burroughs’s fondness for opium products. Mexico was good for Americans with a monkey; even one of Barlow’s fellow teachers kept powdered codeine in a box of bicarbonate of soda and would add spoonfuls of it to his tea at staff meetings.
Barlow hadn’t been able to find out anything about Guy Smith or Audrey Carsons. They were young beautiful wild boys—they had Midwestern accents as well. All three seemed to be remittance men. Barlow had decided that he would spill the beans on the codex caper.
His apartment was huge. He had two sitting rooms, kitchen, full bath, and a large bedroom. He showed Burroughs and the boys into the inner sitting room, which served as a library. They were book people all right. Burroughs picked up and glanced at several anthropological texts as well as his collection of William Hope Hodgson and Arthur Machen. Barlow offered the
m Mexican hot chocolate and sweet tortillas. Small talk was engaged in largely until twilight fell. The boys had come at tea time.
“So, Professor, what can you tell us about Zushakon?” asked Guy Smith.
“He was a centipede god living in a dark realm beneath the earth—probably somewhere in the United States,” he added with a smile.
“America is an old and evil land,” said Burroughs. “There was serious shit there before the Indians came.”
Barlow continued. “When the priests convicted someone of a serious crime, they said the Ugly Spirit had chosen him. They didn’t want to piss off the Ugly Spirit, so they treated the criminal real courteously—until his execution. Then they would heat a copper centipede shell as long as the miscreant was tall. As they heated the shell, they skinned the criminal alive and then forced him into the shell, now glowing cherry-red. As he died great bells were rung that had a special property—probably due to infrasound—that made the room suddenly become black. When the anomalous darkness vanished, it was always found that the victim’s body was gone from the shell.”
At this point loud knocking came from Barlow’s outer door. He rose and, after closing the door to his library, answered the door.
Burroughs and the two boys could hear much of what went on.
On the other side a drunken male voice, high with anger, kept denouncing Barlow for “having made him this way” and saying he would “tell the dean” and be sure Barlow was “ridden out of town on a rail.”
The ranting became repetitive, so Burroughs began telling his friends about Bishop Landau, who had burned all the Mayan codices to kill their civilization. Burroughs said four codices escaped the fire. The whereabouts of three of them are known—Paris, Dresden, Madrid. The angry voice became more incoherent and Audrey Carsons said perhaps they should intervene. Burroughs said no. It sounded like a lovers’ spat.
The front door slammed. There were five minutes of pure silence, then Barlow appeared at the door. His face was white as the chalk he taught with.
He walked in and slumped down in a large rattan chair.
“It is all over,” he announced.
Burroughs and the boys looked at him.
Barlow said, “As an old teacher of mine used to say, ‘The Unnamable.’”
“The boy may change his mind,” said Burroughs. “He’s just seeing what he is—and wants that monstrosity to reflect on you.”
Audrey Carsons asked, “What will you do now?”
Barlow said, “I used to be a publisher and writer. I’m going to do that again. And I think I’ll try my hand at magic.”
Burroughs and the boys stared. The wild boys had a hungry look; Burroughs had his mineral calm.
“The rite involves time travel. I think we should do it on New Year’s. Magic should always follow the path of least resistance,” said Barlow.
“What do you mean?” asked Guy Smith.
“New Year’s is a hole in time. It is a weak point between the year that was and the year that will become.”
Burroughs said, “This year was when the future started. L. Ron Hubbard gave us Dianetics, so we will be able to fight Control, and Dr. von Braun said that humans are going to the moon. Time became looser this year; maybe we can gain technology to make it looser still.”
Burroughs and the boys left, with Burroughs doing a routine about German pornography.
The festivities were well under way when the three returned to Barlow’s apartment. Burroughs was wet with a recent fix; the boys hungrily munched on chocolate, having smoked some tea earlier. Barlow looked like hell. Normally thin, he was now gaunt and pale. It looked as if he had not seen the light of day since they had been with him three weeks ago. He showed them into the library. The books were gone and huge sheets of white butcher paper hung on the walls covered in Mayan ideographs. Burroughs recognized some of them as god names: Ah Pook, Kisin, Zushakon, Ix Tab, Ix Chel. The guys were giggling and pawing each other. Burroughs motioned them to be quiet.
“All true magic begins in silence. Sound is about being controlled by another, silence is about controlling yourself.”
Barlow smiled wanly and motioned them to the four chairs set in a row. He went to his bedroom and returned with a clay pot filled with a smelly tar-like liquid. He signaled silence. With a small paint brush he painted a crescent moon on the floor around Burroughs and the boys, and then a trapezoid around his chair. He offered them a pipe.
“I found the recipe in the Codex Catamaco. It is a time-travel drug. It contains Diviner’s Sage and a hallucinogenic mushroom. Traditionally Mexicans eat twelve grapes at the stroke of midnight to bring good luck for the next year. We are going to use the church bells as a way to leave time.”
Burroughs lit the pipe and took a long drag. He gave it to the boys, and then to Barlow. Barlow turned off the light and went to his chair. The room was very dark, lacking any outside windows. A small amount of yellow light slipped in under the door to the first sitting room. Mariachi music blared up from three floors below. Fireworks were popping and yells of “¡Feliz año nuevo!” gave proof of the festive night. The smoke was nasty and disorienting. Red, yellow, and purple lights appeared as mini-comets in the room. Barlow began ringing small bells and chanting something in Mayan.
Everyone felt dizzy, sick, crazy. Sounds hurt, the lights burned their flesh. Then a few blocks away a mighty cathedral bell rang. The colored lights vanished. A man was standing in the room in front of Barlow, his shadow limned by the faint light.
Barlow spoke, “Howard, I gave your papers to Brown. Augie is publishing you and Robert and Smith and Long. I . . .”
Another deep bell sound, and the shadow vanished. The light seemed to pour back out of the room, the darkness became thicker, a dull dry vibration. Then everything came into focus: the four men were sitting on two pieces of worn yellow linoleum—three in a crescent moon, Barlow in his trapezoid. In front of them was a jungle scene of 400,000,000 years ago. The lush vegetation of the Devonian Age was populated by many crawling arthropods, but no birds flew. A few small four-legged creatures, looking more like fish than reptiles, crawled in the underbrush. About a hundred yards away, a mass of twisted, burnt metal three or four times the size of the Hindenburg was the center of a small village. Barlow rose and began walking toward it. The three other men tried to rise up, but found themselves paralyzed.
“I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I could not trust you. You came into my life knowing too much, knowing Names that you shouldn’t know. I don’t know if you are pawns of some fate that is moving me, or the magicians are making it happen. You are invited here as witnesses only.”
Burroughs tried as hard as he could to move. He realized that this was a mental construct; they weren’t “really” sitting in chairs behind a smear of some magical tar; that was how their minds had reacted to the drugs and the incantation. As Barlow walked forward their perspective changed. They seemed to drift after him always about ten feet behind. They heard the buzzing of the jungle, but occasionally sounds of New Year’s Eve seemed to issue from the trees.
Near the village was a cultivated area. Dark green vines ran everywhere. They looked like the gourd vines Barlow knew from Florida except that they grew dark green people. The vegetable people moved feebly. A group of red-skinned dwarves scurried around them, extracting a thick blue fluid from their veins. Closer to the village were insect people—human-looking, but with the heads of praying mantises and insect pincers instead of hands. These creatures lived in huts that looked like spun silk, possibly somehow extruded from their bodies. They were engaged in worship, their high whining insect voices forming words very similar to the chant Barlow had uttered to get here. Barlow advanced to the ruined spacecraft. He put his hands on its metal surface, and pictures began to form in their minds. The ship had escaped a nova, taking with it criminal creatures that were almost indescribable. These felons ate addictions—addictions to sex, to magic, to death, to hatred. These were a form of parasite that humans call
ed “gods”—but they had not yet put on human forms. No nice smiling Zeus, no Jesus on the sticks, no Thor throwing a hammer. These creatures were ugly. They were making vessels to be born in—the insect people, the vegetable people, the fungal fliers, even mewling weak humans.
Something stirred inside the spacecraft. It beckoned Barlow inside. Inside was dark, cold—outer space dark, the dark It needed because of the fear and pain that had been associated with the nova light. In the darkness a mass of centipedes crawled ceaselessly upon a shapeless god. The god talked to Barlow inside his own mind. “I NO DIE. YOU NO DIE. I TAKE YOU HERE BEFORE I GIVE DEATH TO YOUR RACE. You serve me in the future. There you die maybe a million times. I sleep while you die making your world hotter. Eventually you will make your sun go nova, then we move on. I ask nothing for my gift except a few million deaths, and the scared remains of your world.”
Barlow felt sick with the touch of the other mind. This was too alien. No wonder man had invented the god-idea not to see the criminals. He didn’t want this bargain, but he realized he had accepted it long ago on Earth. He had been a Mayan priest writing the forbidden codex. He would be this again writing the words that this creature needed to control its human dogs, its vessels. He turned to go, but something exploded from the centipede mass. Black, thick liquid with a nitrous smell. It smelled like jism in the back of a YMCA, like furtive nasty sex. The black stuff fell over him, each spot becoming an eye—sometimes human, sometimes faceted insect eyes, sometimes an octopus. Deep red erogenous sores appeared around each eye, filling him with ugly desires, lusts that had nothing to do with the sane life of Earth. The fetor was overpowering. Some of the eyes began to weep a yellow matter.
“YOU DIE MAYBE A MILLION TIMES THAT IS WHY WE MADE YOU.”
Barlow turned to go, looking very inhuman as the eyes grew and blinked and wept. He could feel egg-like masses forming in his groin. This was what evil meant—a totally alien impulse toward living as something foul and eternal. This creature, this Death and Control god, had been running the whole rotten game on Earth for millions of years. The roulette wheel was fixed in the house’s favor. Any priest, any magician who came along and asked for immortality was a source of the virus that would wipe out everything. It didn’t matter if the priest was some Madison Avenue advertising magician or an inbred rural local such as Howard liked to write about. He left the spaceship. The insect people ran up to him and licked the dripping yellow matter from his eyes with black, thin, whip-like tongues, thrilling the sores on his being. Soon he would be addicted to that pleasure. He pushed on, seeming to walk toward his three witnesses in their chairs. As he approached they seemed to recede. He understood that he must walk them back to the original coordinates so that they could return to Mexico City. Burroughs had half risen from his chair, sticking his right hand beyond the magical barrier. Some of the black jism had spattered on him as well. A tiny dot. A cancer for his soul. As Barlow walked past the vegetable people, they smiled idiot smiles, opening their mouths to laugh at him, a thick green saliva drooling from their green lips, the red-skinned dwarves urging him on with menacing gestures. He was upsetting the calm of the vegetable people, spoiling the blue drug they were collecting. Barlow walked back to the place where they were.