He found a bench and fell into it, gasping for breath. The apprehension was on him again, the neurotic, skin-crawling feeling that there were things going on all around him that he could not comprehend. Possum Crawl, goddamn Possum Crawl. It was like onion, layer upon layer of secrets and esoteric activities that you could never know nor understand even if you did. The unease flowered into terror as the darkness and silence seemed to crowd him. The sense that he was in an alien place amplified and he heard voices muttering in tongues that were guttural and non-human. In the glow of streetlights, he saw rooflines that were jagged and surreal. Castle Mountain above seemed to shudder. Fear sweated out of him as his brain whirled and his stomach rolled over and over again. He shivered in the night as a delirium overwhelmed him, squeezing the guts out of him until he became confused, not sure where he was or even who he was. The night oozed around him, thick and almost gelid.
He stumbled away, cutting through the crowds, getting turned around and around, hearing a high, deranged wailing and then realizing it was coming from his own mouth.
He was propelled in conflicting directions, taken by the crowd and carried along by them until he fell free into a vacant lot strewn with the refuse of Festival: paper cups, streamers tangled in the bushes, dirty napkins and broken bottles and cast-aside ends of hot dog buns. He lay there, face in the grass, until he calmed and a voice in his head said, I will not submit.
He sat up, lit a cigarette, thinking about Ginny and the night he had taken her from this madhouse of a town. As fevers sweated from him, he was not even certain it had happened. He was no longer certain of anything. There was only this awful place. The night. The cigarette between his lips. He touched the silver shell of the case and his fingertips tingled as if his hand was asleep.
The Preacher. He had to find The Preacher and do what was right, do the thing he had come to do which was becoming steadily convoluted and obscure in his brain. He began to fear that his memories, his mind, his very thoughts were being stolen from him. Shaking with panic, his identity fragmenting in his head like ash on the wind, a stark image of Gothra floated in his brain, rising, filling the spaces he understood and those he did not—a great monstrous insect, a primeval horror that was part spider-wasp and part mantis and wholly something unknown his feeble brain could not describe even to itself. In his mind, he heard what he thought was the insect’s voice, a buzzing/croaking chordal screech. I am here. You are here. Together we shall bring evil and madness into this world and make it our own.
No, no, no, that droning, wavering squeal…it could not be a voice. He was coming apart. His mind was failing. None of it was real. He heard maniacal laughter, the sound of sanity purging itself: his own. Running back out in the street, he was absorbed by the bustling crowds that carried horrible effigies of Gothra high above them. Faces were twisted masks. The stars blinked on and off like cheap bulbs in the sky. He could smell rotting hay and blood, manure and black earth. Voices jibbered and screamed and shrilled around him. Now the festival was reaching manic, hysterical heights as what he had been feeling for hours took hold of them, too, carrying them forward like a dark river seeking the sea.
“It is time,” a voice said at his ear. “Time to meet The Preacher.”
It was Squinny Ceecaw, yet it was not her at all. The voice was too mature, all velvet and spun silk, the sort of whispering smoothness one would acquaint with experience and sensuality. Certainly, this wasn’t the kid, not Squinny. But it looked like Squinny and as her hand clasped his own, he was certain that it was. Her nearness wedged a seam of pure terror through him. He wanted to throw her off and run. But he didn’t; he marched, he melded into the procession that carried pumpkins and flickering candles. It was happening, really happening. Festival was about to reach its terrible climax. The very thing he had anticipated and feared, was about to be realized.
Now no one was singing or crying out. They marched in orderly rows. Many carried pumpkins, but many carried other things—briskets of raw beef, pork loins, shanks of lambs, other primal cuts; dead animals such as rabbits and possum and coyote. Two boys led a massive hog on a rope. Some carried bags of what smelled like rotting vegetable matter.
All of it was so strange and alien, yet so uncomfortably familiar.
Moss knew many things at that moment and knew nothing at all. He walked with Squinny, his mind cluttered, his thoughts muddled. The town was a trap. He knew that much. It had been a trap meant to ensnare him from the moment he arrived and he had stepped willingly into it this afternoon. Possum Crawl owned him now. Festival owned him. Squinny owned him. The people that walked with him owned him. He belonged to them and he belonged to this night and the malevolent rituals that were about to take place. But mostly, oh yes, mostly he belonged to Gothra and the rising storm of anti-human evil he/she/it represented. Now he would become meat and now his mind would be laid bare.
They marched out to a secret grotto beyond the limits of Possum Crawl and up a trail into the high country until the face of the mountain was right before them. And even this opened for them. They passed through a gigantic cave-mouth and into the mountain itself.
Moss began to tremble, because he knew, he knew: the mountain was hollow. Hadn’t it been this that he was trying to remember when he’d first drove into town? The mountain is hollow, the mountain is hollow. Yes, it was really just a sheath of rock and within, oh God yes, within…a high, craggy pyramidal structure of pale blue stone. It rose hundreds of feet above him, illuminated by its own pale, eerie lambency. Its surface was not smooth, but corrugated and carven with esoteric and blasphemous symbols, bas-reliefs of ancient words in some indecipherable language. The pyramid itself was old, old, seemingly fossilized by the passage of eons.
Now the procession moved inside and Moss heard what he knew he would hear—the wet, slobbering noises, the rustlings, the busy sounds of multiple legs, the chitterings and squealings, and, yes, rising above it all, that immense omnipotent buzzing, the unearthly droning of the great insect itself.
The pyramid was just as hollow as the mountain, its sloping walls honeycombed with chambers, many of which were sealed with mud caps. The women of Possum Crawl had gathered here. They accepted the gifts the men brought. No longer were they women as such, but hairless, pallid things that cared for the white, squirming grubs of the immense gelatinous insect, the Mother of Many Faces, the all-in-one, the progenitor that all in Possum Crawl worshipped for she brought life, she nurtured it, and filled the earth with crawling things and the skies with her primordial swarm.
Vermicular shapes squirmed at his feet, crawling about on their hands and knees, moving with a disturbing boneless sort of locomotion like human inchworms. He saw contorted faces and glistening eyes like frog spawn staring up at him. They touched him with flaccid, fungous hands.
And now Moss could see her—within the limits of the third dimension—surrounded by a veritable mountain of yeasty gray eggs that glistened wetly from her multiple ovipositors. She was a titanic, bloated white monstrosity, an elemental abomination that sutured time-space with her passing and whose origins were in some deranged cosm where the stars burned black. Her membranous wings spread like kites filling with wind, her thousand legs scraping together, her bulging compound eyes looking down at the offerings laid before her.
Her nest.
Yes, the Earth was her nest.
By then, Moss was on his knees, his sanity gone to a warm mush in his head. He had seen her before and she had erased his memories. Now he understood. He shivered there in her shadow. Ginny, Ginny, Ginny. Oh God, he had not stolen Ginny away from them after she was indoctrinated into the fertility cult of the Mother of Many Faces. No, no, she had escaped them and they called out to him, stealing his mind, and he had brought Ginny back to them. Yes, in the back of the car, tied and gagged, he had returned their acolyte to the hollow mountain.
But she was not what the Great Insect wanted.
No, Moss was spared, his memories subverted, his will possessed, so that he might bring that which the Mother Insect demanded, the expiation she hungered for.
And now his shaking hands were opening the silver case, fumbling at the locks, working the catches, and then it was in his hands, the reeking mass of meat in the shape of a shriveled infant. The fruit of his marital congress with Ginny. The offering the Great Insect anticipated from the beginning.
It was accepted and found pleasing by her servitors.
Then Moss waited there, his mind gone, his eyes glazed with terror, his stomach pulsing with revulsion. Squinny stepped before him and said, “Your place has always been here. Your destiny is to be meat because all meat has its purpose and all flesh is to be consumed.”
The Preacher.
He did not fight when the yellow-eyed image of the girl came for him, the avatar of the Mother of Many Faces, when her barbed tongue took his eyes so that he would not look upon the holy rite of birth, the spawning and renewal. He did not even cry out when she jabbed her stinger up between his legs and into his body cavity. He squirmed, he writhed, but no more. Then gray waves of lethargy washed through him and there was only acceptance. He was tucked, not unlovingly, into one of the cell-shaped chambers and sealed in there as food. A flaccid, dreaming, unfeeling mass, he did not even flinch when the eggs began to hatch and the wriggling young of the Great Insect began to feed.
The Old Man Down the Road
Arinn Dembo
The night before they left for Tennessee, they slept in a double bed on Striver’s Row. Traffic slashed through the autumn rain below as they wrestled in the sheets, chasing away anxiety with love-making. James drifted off with sweat drying on his belly, his lover’s breath blowing warm on his shoulder.
Hours later he woke alone in the cold bed, his bare feet curled back to find shins that weren’t there. For a panic-stricken, half-asleep moment he found himself thinking he’s gone.
He sat up, white sheets pooling over dark thighs, and saw Tommy standing by the window. The rippling sodium light flowed down his pale skin like molten copper.
James reached for his glasses on the night table. Even in this surreal moment of broken sleep, he still could drink in the sight of his lover’s body.
Thomas Newcombe Baird. The only white man he had ever seen naked, outside of a medical textbook or a muscle magazine. The curve of head and neck as Tommy stared down past the fire escape. His shoulder-length shag had been clipped just this morning; the fat man with the trimmer laughed about giving White Jesus a haircut. Tommy’s shy little smile, eyes downcast as the brown silk fell like feathers from his Teutonic skull.
The angelic spread of his shoulders. The long, liquid muscles of his back and legs. The way his chin and chest lifted as he ran down the gravel paths in the park, stride extending into effortless thoroughbred speed. The sculpted line of his spine, the dimples just below his lean waist.
Tommy turned his head, a skull with two eye-pits of shadow. “You should sleep.” He spoke softly. “It’s hours ‘til dawn.”
“Me? You’re the one who has to drive.”
Tommy turned and pointed his chin at the storm sweeping the gutters below. “He’s back again.”
James felt a chill. “At this hour?” He stood up, wrapping the sheets around his waist and throwing the tail over his shoulder like a toga. He went to the window and saw the ominous figure on the corner, water streaming down the dome of a black umbrella. “Is it the same guy…?”
“Hard to tell, with the coat and hat. I reckon they dress that way so you can’t tell ‘em apart.”
James hugged himself with a shiver. “I’ve never been ‘staked out’ before. I don’t like it.”
Tommy put a bare arm around his shoulders and drew him close. As always, his skin seemed to radiate an envelope of seductive heat; James leaned into him like a sparrow huddled in the glow of a street lamp.
“You must be important.” Tommy’s voice was low, half-amused. “The FBI doesn’t follow nobodies, right?”
“They follow nobodies just fine,” James replied acidly. “The somebodies get shot.”
He felt the silent wave that passed through Tommy, the quickening of the heart, the tightening of the arm around his shoulder. “They’re going to have to go through me first. That’s all I can say.”
James shook his head sadly. “Is that why you’re coming on this trip? Because you think they won’t ‘go through you’?”
“No.” The arm was tighter now. “I grew up down there, hon. Ran away from that place a long time ago. I know what happens to folk who get in the way.”
James turned, letting his chest and belly flatten against Tommy, reaching up to touch his cheek with a cupped hand. “You know I have to go. Lena and Walt are counting on me to help with voter registration. They’re covering three counties this year. There’s no way they can do it on their own—and they’re my friends. I can’t let them down.”
Tommy closed his eyes, tilting his head to let his cheek lie in the palm of his lover’s hand.
“But really, Tom…there’s no reason you have to come.” He spoke as gently as he could as he dropped his hand. “I know you don’t want to go back.”
Tommy shivered. “I might still have….family, down in Carolina. Looking for me.”
James nodded. “Abel and I can manage.”
Tommy snorted. “Abel and you will do what, exactly? Hitch-hike to Tennessee?”
James drew in a long breath. “We could get bus tickets. I can afford it.”
“Money can’t always buy safe passage, hon.”
James rolled his eyes. “We wouldn’t even have to sit together. We could ride down quietly and pretend not to know each other. Like perfectly respectable folks.”
It was Tommy’s turn to unsheathe the edge of his tongue. “With you sitting in the back of the bus? Like ‘respectable folks’?”
James stiffened. “If need be. Yes.” He raised his chin defiantly. “I choose my battles. You know that.”
“I do.” Tommy shook his head. “I’m sorry, James. I don’t want to go down South. I’d do anything if you’d stay with me. But if you’re going…I just…can’t let you leave me behind.”
“I wasn’t! Tom, I would never—”
“You would. You were going to try.” The words shook as he spoke. “And I cannot bear it, James.” Tommy opened his arms, still perfectly nude, palms open. A gesture of surrender. “Please don’t leave me here alone.”
James looked up and saw light follow the tracks of silent tears. “Tom… come on, now…” He was moving forward, the sheets forgotten and tangling around his legs.
Tommy’s arms closed around him. The bigger man was shaking now, crushing him close. “I’m scared.” A high boyish whisper. “What if something happens down there?”
James swallowed twice before he could speak. “If something happens…? Then you’d be safe. Tom…”
“No. You can’t leave me, James. If anything happens to you…it has to happen to me. It has to.” His voice broke. “I cannot live if you’re gone.”
“Tom. Tommy.” He murmured the name over and over again, stroking the smooth back and shoulders, punctuating his caresses with “It’s all right” as if the words were a mantra.
I know you love me. I love you back, he wanted to say. I won’t ever leave you. But those words would not come.
In two years, he had never said anything like that aloud.
***
He opened the door at dawn to find Abel Feinman standing on the front step with his suitcase. Feinman was wearing Moroccan brown slacks and a green Paisley shirt…and still hadn’t cut his hair.
James looked him up and down, silently disapproving of his rabbinical beard and luxuriant mane of oily black curls. He held the silence so long that Abel pushed up the bridge of his glasses and cracked a nervou
s smile. “What, am I at the wrong house or something? Let me in already.”
James invited him in with a sarcastic wave of his hand. “You couldn’t find a barber, man?”
Abel set down the suitcase in the foyer. “Sorry, James. Couldn’t go through with it.”
James rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I bet. What did Joanie say, exactly?”
Abel had the grace to look down at his loafers. “Aaaaah…she said something about Samson and Delilah. And told me I was going to look like a baby-faced narc….”
“Who’s a narc, now?” Tommy came around the bend of the curving stairs, a suitcase in each hand. He was already wearing his Sherpa jacket and aviator glasses. “Better not be talking about me.”
Abel looked up and laughed out loud. “Jesus, Tom. What’d you do, enlist?”
Tommy smiled and stepped out the open door. “I’ll just bring the car around.”
James gave Abel another look over the golden rims of his glasses. When he had full eye contact, he deliberately dropped his gaze to the avocado-green suitcase on the floor. Then back up into Abel’s eyes, lips pursed.
“Anything I need to worry about in there?”
The beatnik could read his mind. “Aawww, c’mon James…”
“C’mon my ass. You already proved you can’t listen to instructions. I told you to clean yourself up.”
“I did!” Abel flapped a hand defensively up and down, indicating his new JC Penney ensemble. “This is all brand new! Everything in my suitcase too! I spent twenty dollars, man!”
“That’s not what I meant. And you damn well know it.” James cocked a fist on one hip, and put out the other hand palm up, making a “gimme” gesture. “You look like Phineas Freak, Abel. Nothing I can do about that now, but I’ll be damned if I’m riding with your dope.”
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