Jesse wasn't sure what to do. Should he call out to the stranger, announce himself? What if the stranger had a gun? Didn't everyone in this place walk around loaded? Or was that just in the movies? Maybe it was a highway robber. But why would he be out here all by himself?
Maybe he wasn't even really there. Maybe he was a figment of Jesse's imagination. Maybe Jesse, fueled by the acid he'd just dropped, had simply plucked the enigmatic drawing from all those bottles of port and dropped it out here in the desert. Maybe all that was really standing there was a cactus.
No. No chance the acid had worked its way into his system enough to produce full-blown hallucinations like that. Not that quick. Whoever was standing out there, was really standing out there.
Jesse couldn't shake the feeling that the stranger was staring right at him. Studying him.
Without apparent cause, the stranger turned away and receded down a hill, seeming to Jesse to sink into the earth. A few moments later, Jesse heard the sound of hoofsteps on the desert floor, and the whinnie of the stranger's steed. A dust cloud kicked up over the hill, as though the Sandeman figure had disappeared into the mist.
Jesse's heart pounded. He took off in a full-bore sprint towards the lights of Bridgetown, motivated by a primal anxiety.
Who was that?
Jesse made a promise to himself right then and there: no more late-night wanderings through the desert.
Main Street grew nearer, and he grew more winded. Wind.
The wind cupped him, pushed him on a wave of supersonic air. He no longer felt agency over his own body. Time blurred. Every thought he had—the sentences he spoke to himself, in his mind—seemed constructed of preformed bits of semantic data. A globe of letter-adorned puzzle pieces appeared before his mind's eye. It clicked and clacked as the pieces slid into different configurations, each time forming another word out and appending it to the sentence being constructed in his head as he thought the words, in real-time.
His cognitive processes, pulled back and revealed to be what they were. All of his perception, all of his thoughts, the product of a machine. A biological clockwork. And like all machines, his mind was subject to periodic malfunction.
Again, Jesse considered the possibility of hallucination. That's all this whole time travel thing was, right? A bad dream. A delusion, a hiccup of insanity in an otherwise sane individual. And as these thoughts were constructed by the letter-globe, he calmed. He'd survive this trip, and all would return to normal. Soon, he'd awaken in the desert of 1970, surrounded by his acolytes, and Susanna, and Wayne. Not the rich, powerful Wayne who owned this land and pumped the oil from its veins and planted his seed in Jesse's lover, but the mewling, pathetic Wayne who lived in Jesse's shadow, as he always had.
No! No, that couldn't be. Jesse had never tripped like this before. It was too real, too literal. This was reality.
His foot caught on a rock. He landed face-first in the dry soil. The supersonic air wave was gone.
Silence.
Jesse's face throbbed. He got to his feet and was nearly blinded by the light of Bridgetown's Main Street. Surely there was no reason for this place to be so lit up at this late hour. But it was a gesture, wasn't it? That Bridgetown, under the dazzling genius and unyielding vision of Wayne Cole, had created daylight where there was none. A halogen-powered, chest-out defiant middle finger towards God himself. The light bulb.
Jesse wondered what Thomas Edison was doing at the moment, and if he had any dark intuition in the pit of his stomach that told him forces of fate larger than himself had replaced him.
A commotion broke out several storefronts down the street, kitty-corner from the general store that Jesse had entered hours earlier. Two strongarms threw a drunkard out the front of the building. The man sloppily tossed insults at the pair, who dismissed him with a wave and went back into the warm light of the building. The drunk stumbled away, punctuating the moment with a toe-kick in the dirt road.
Jesse gave it a moment, waiting for the man to leave the scene, then made his way towards the saloon. The amber tones of an old piano, and the rowdy laughter of patrons, drifted out past the doorway. He was a bit disappointed to note that there weren't any swinging double-doors, just a regular, and fairly narrow, brass-knobbed door coated in a deep red.
A painted wooden panel hung on a leather strap next to the doorway. Jesse squinted under the bare porch light's wavering glow to read what it said:
On the eighteenth of November, one year before,
Los Angeles cried, "Sabbath's dry, evermore!"
So at Bridgetown rendezvous,
Raise a glass and put up yer shoe,
For here ye may pay penance with a whore.
Issuing a snort, Jesse entered the warm light and warmer air of the saloon. It was a long, narrow, stuffy brick oven of an establishment. The bar ran lengthwise along the left side. A bartender with a thoroughly impressive waxed mustache and a rather dapper vest busily served up a line of patrons in bowler hats and three-piece suits. For a bunch of rowdy drunks, these guys sure weren't cutting any sartorial corners.
The floor was covered in spent peanut shells, and the air hung thick with smoke that wafted up from around the five card tables packed with men playing games. A staircase of treacherously tall steps drew Jesse's eyes upwards, to the sensuous mysteries of the second floor, from which a brilliant red light emanated.
Jesse noticed, too, that there was something of a culture divide in this place. The first group was typified by the men at the bar, in their bowler hats, engaging in a kind of general ribald merriment. These men were of the age to have families, to be feeling the wear and tear of a hard life's work on their knees and shoulders; they were here, no doubt, to lubricate their hardscrabble lives in this dusty place beyond proper civilization.
Then there was the second group, which hung closer to the dark recesses of the saloon. These men were younger, dressed in dark dusters and ponchos and seeming to have all the humor of an undertaker's convention. Their hair was long, their faces rough with dark stubble. They kept amongst themselves, only occasionally giving shifty glances in Jesse's direction. A few of them sat at one of the tables, playing a mostly-silent game of poker. The rest kept by a closed door at the rear.
A bordello girl came down the staircase, emerging from the bath of red light of the upstairs. She wore a bodice that pushed her chest up front and center, and a long trailing dress. She wore her hair up, and even in the ambient darkness, Jesse could see just how much makeup she wore. She approached one of the men in the back, the grim men of the second group, with the kind of casual familiarity that suggested he was one of her regulars. When he saw her, his po-faced seriousness gave way to a slight grin he paired with a nod of recognition. She took him by his hand that wasn't holding his drink, and he gave no resistance. She led him up the staircase and they disappeared around the bend. The others resumed their quiet murmuring.
Jesse turned his attention towards the bar. He found a free space between a couple of patrons and flagged the bartender with a wave. The bartender gave him a nod that said he'd be with him just as soon as he could.
Waiting, Jesse's eyes came to rest on the ornate Victorian wallpaper that covered the wall behind the bar. Its vine-like patterns shifted and grew, slowly but infinitely. The lysergic acid had its hold on his perception. He was so transfixed by the illusion, he almost tuned out the man shouting in his left ear:
"Not gonna find a good time like this back in ole Los Angeles, are ya?"
"I'm sorry?" Jesse said.
"No, sir—not any more," the man said. He had a ruddy, bulbous nose that, in Jesse's present state, appeared to expand and contract with a bellows-like rhythm. A prodigious grey moustache kept his upper lip safely under wraps.
"You want real frontera spirit these days," the man went on, unprompted, "You gotta come to Bridgetown. Though for how much longer that'll be the case, I can't say." The man issued this lament with a huff. "Earl McInnis." He stuck a sausage-fingered hand out.
Jesse shook it.
"Jesse."
"Pleased to meet you." Earl took a sip of his outland grog.
Jesse turned his attention back to the bartender, seeking to re-up his beverage contract with another lock of the eyes. Earl, however, had different designs. He shook Jesse's arm, tugging the way a 200-pound toddler might at his mother's dress.
"Yessir, it's a mighty shame."
Jesse took the bait. "What's a shame, Earl?"
"Money. Don't get me wrong, I like money. I like having money. But these grave robbers from the east are going to wipe us off the map."
"How's that?"
"Mr. such-and-such up there on the hill, living in his glass palace. Taking peoples' land from right out of their hands!" He thrust his open palms up to Jesse's face, as if hoisting an invisible roast.
"You're talking about Wayne Cole, aren't you?"
"You're damn right I am," Earl said. "We've got people who planted their stakes in this ground fifty years before that bastard ever showed his face. And next thing you know, the sheriff's on their doorsteps with a piece of paper, and, an'—" Earl was visibly red in the face, shaking his fists in little tremulous bursts.
"You're saying he...took your land from you? Wayne did?"
"Not I. But every one of those infernal black machines out there, all around us, pumping and sucking that tar from the earth. Each one's another story." Earl leaned back, past the climax of his excitement now. "But I don't have to tell you that, do I?"
Jesse furrowed his brows.
Earl wore a knowing, coy sort of expression. "I see you come in here, another unfamiliar face. Eying the fellows over there in the back, by the cellar. You're just waiting for someone to give you a sign. To confirm that you're in the right place." He leaned in close to Jesse for effect, again clutching Jesse's arm. Jesse could smell the whiskey on his breath. "That's them, all right. The Lotus Boys."
Jesse, of course, didn't know what Earl was going on about. But he could put the pieces together well enough to start to form a picture. A resistance group, right here in little ole Bridgetown. A resistance against his very own brother, no less! Wayne really had made the big leagues. The Lotus Boys. It sounded fascinating. Jesse decided the best way to satisfy his curiosity would be to play along.
"Oh," he said, with a knowing nod. "You're one of the Lotus Boys."
Earl's eyebrows sloped up with a kind of telegraphed mournfulness. "Aye, if only," he said. He opened up his coat and spun around enough for Jesse to see that his right leg was cut off beneath the knee. In its place was a crude wooden peg. It seemed old-fashioned, even by this place's standards. "But I support the cause," Earl said. "I support the real people of Bridgetown. The lights in the sky o'er Bridgetown shine brightest at thee."
This recitation struck Jesse. "The lights," he repeated.
Earl nodded. "Oh, those blessed, beautiful lights that dance before Devil's Peak! Nowhere shall you find a more striking affirmation of the glory of God." His eyes were far off now, far beyond Jesse or the walls of the saloon. "Those lights alone can drive a man closer to the Truth of the world, the Truth in his heart. I've felt it, any man who's looked up to the sky and felt their electrifying presence knows this. Mr. Black knows the secrets of this place, that's why he fights to protect it."
Mr. Black. The leader of the Lotus Boys?
Earl continued. "You know that strange feeling that hits you in the gut when you look up at night and see Devil's Peak, and understand in your heart of hearts that the mountain's staring right into your soul? Black is bonded with that power, he is of it." The man seemed almost to be in a trance now. "He's not just a man, but a mystic. Descended from the union of the Spanish and the Gabrieleno over a century ago."
His voice went quiet, so low Jesse could barely hear him over the din of the saloon. "Some even suggest he's immortal."
His fists clenched as they had a minute earlier. His awe was replaced with an impassioned zeal. "Black and his Lotus Boys will fight back against the scourge of Wayne Cole. Against Cole's money, and his smokestacks! Our waters shall not run rusty with his factory's poisons. Why, just today the Lotus Boys bombed a hole in the side of that monument to human folly Cole's erecting on our soil…"
But Jesse was no longer listening to Earl. He was too preoccupied by what the one-legged man had said a moment earlier. This 'Mr. Black'—if he truly knew the secrets of the strange phenomena around Devil's Peak, he could be Jesse's way back home. Was there even a chance Jesse could return to the Los Angeles he knew, with Susanna at his side? Could this all be undone?
"Earl," Jesse said, interrupting the old man's soliloquy.
"Hmm?"
"Do you think it's possible that Devil's Peak might be—well, how do I put this?—a gateway of some sort? That it could take you to another place, or another time?"
"The only certainty I harbor is that where Devil's Peak is concerned, anything is possible."
"And if this were the case, you believe Mr. Black would know about it?"
"Undoubtedly." Jesse considered the old kook's words. He had no rational reason to believe him, but then again he'd had no rational reason to believe a mountain could swallow him whole and deposit him in the past.
That led Jesse to another thought: even assuming this Mr. Black was the desert mystic Earl claimed he was, there'd be a tit-for-tat involved. Jesse would have to give the hermit a reason to trust him.
"Excuse me," he said. Without further elaboration, he headed towards the rear of the bar. The floor continued to bend and ripple through the lens of the acid fog.
As he walked, he began to formulate his plan. He'd convince the Lotus Boys here at the bar to take him to Black. He'd tell Black the truth of his identity; and he'd offer to be a mole for the gang. And in exchange, Black would help him get home.
He could feel the eyes of every one of the Lotus Boys on him. Who did this guy think he was, crossing the invisible barrier that demarcated their private haven?
He passed their poker table—no need to interrupt their game. He went straight over to the group of four remaining by the back door. The men were difficult for Jesse to differentiate in the dark, their features blending together in a motif of scruffy beards, scowling mugs, and sunken-in cheeks complemented by their charcoal attire. But they all seemed young, younger than Jesse.
"Gentlemen," Jesse said, "I have information I think Mr. Black would be very interested to know. But I can only share it with him. You can pat me down, make sure I'm clean, and then I'd like very much to speak with him."
The four gangsters glanced amongst one another. It was clear to Jesse none of them quite knew what to say. At last, the one nearest the back door stepped forward, and put both hands on his belt, feet apart in a wide stance. His face puffed and shifted in its dimensions.
"You don't go to Black," he uttered with a Mexican accent. "He comes to you."
A real charmer, this one was. He was the paragon of a nameless, disposable henchmen. Which made Jesse wonder—what was in it for these guys? Sure, maybe this Black really was a desert mystic opposed to Wayne's factory because it was built on an Indian burial ground or whatever, but how was he getting these hard-drawn banditos and orphaned small-time crooks to do his dirty work for him?
"Okay," Jesse said. "Okay, I get it. But tell him that if he'd like to do business with someone who's currently residing inside Wayne Cole's mansion, he should come find me."
The gangster said something brief to Jesse, but Jesse missed it. He was experiencing an auditory hallucination, sounds clipping and repeating themselves over and over one another in a snowball effect. Everything was turning to white noise. The acid was taking hold at last.
He turned on his heels and began walking towards the saloon doorway, trying hard to do so in an inconspicuous fashion. Earl gave him a nod and a tip of his glass. To Jesse, his face appeared to be rippling with intense microvibrations.
Jesse passed the doorway and found himself on the midnight of a deserted Main Street. He began
to run. His mind was sputtering, the way it had whenever his alarm clock woke him mid-dream with a chatterbox radio broadcasting from deep within his thalamus. His dream logic was a runaway train. My feet are moving because my muscles are expending energy because I ate a cheeseburger that had energy because it was once a cow that ate grass that had converted energy from the sun that created energy in a fusion reaction that happened because of the diffusion of matter and energy in the Big Bang. The energy I am burning off through the movement in my legs, sending scattered kinetic impulse into entropy has channeled through the universe since the beginning of time. My actions are not my own.
He saw himself running then. A bit player. A marionette puppet on the strings of cosmic tragicomedy. He tried to outrun a black tide of ego loss that, like a tsunami, was at his back.
He had to get back to the ranch. Back to bedsheets, and a roof over his head. Someplace he could close his eyes and not worry about being eaten by a coyote. The stars danced and vibrated as they radiated their cosmic energy towards him, endless messages in bottles that made it across eons to smash into the photoreceptors at the back of his head.
Did the journey to the ranch house take him minutes? Hours? Days? He had no idea. But he saw the house. He staggered up the hill. It hadn't been this steep before. No way.
He fumbled in his pockets for the keys. The lights were off. He walked past the front gate, past the garage that housed Wayne's cars and up to the side entrance that attached to the kitchen.
He walked as quietly as he could up to his room, creeping so as not to arouse the attention of others.
He entered his room, undressed, and climbed into the unfamiliar sheets. They were cold. He pulled them tight around himself. It was comforting enough.
On the other side of the wall, Jesse heard something. Rhythmic thumps, over and over again. A creaking bed frame.
Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival Page 9