“I am no longer so sure there is nothing to this but fanaticism and superstition, Professor Oldstone. Ever since I saw what I saw in those hospital beds—it is not easy for me to dismiss it as you do, as some unknown science.”
“Nonsense, my boy! It’s just like that Manson Family business forty years ago when that crazy man thought Armageddon would ensue if he sent some idiots out to stab Sharon Tate to death. Well, you and I are Sharon Tate, don’t you see? And nothing’s going to happen except that we die. Unless you have some plan?” This last he said with a hint of hope that he consciously denied himself. He thought he was merely being sarcastic.
“Professor, I believe something is starting to happen out there! Listen!” Indeed, strange drummings with intervals of flutes replaced the chanting. The crowd was hushed, itself something of a wonder given the circumstances. Suddenly, hands appeared and ripped away a bedspread that had covered a window looking down on the field. Someone evidently thought the captives should see what was coming. And something was.
There was a vague image illumined by the bonfire, much like a lowering cloud bank or a wall of smoke. But it appeared more solid than that. It was unstable, seemed to shake as if with a wind, though there was no other evidence of one. All this the two captives saw through the dulling emotional veil of impending execution. But new terror galvanized them when a sudden motion revealed the detail of a scaly and webbed claw. That was enough for Ah-Poh.
“That’s got to be their Father Dagon, don’t you see that?”
The door burst open, and here came the roughneck Bacharach, holding a knife that he manifestly could hardly wait to use. His face was of a naturally malevolent caste, but tonight it was transformed by religious ecstasy, that ecstasy in which the foulest deeds of murder look like pious sacrifice. He dragged both men to their feet and shoved them out onto the rickety platform. All eyes below were focused on the bulbous apparition looming above them, trying, probably, to discern some stable outline.
Apparently their blood had to be shed precisely on schedule, maybe no sooner than the first woman gave birth to her loathsome spawn over in the Women’s Center. So for the moment they had time to breathe. Ah-Poh stared at the thing he called Father Dagon, transfixed.
“Snap out of it! Don’t be like one of them! At least die in possession of your senses, man!”
“Perhaps I may do more than that,” answered the sweat-beaded Tcho-tcho. I have not told you that I was raised in the line of the high priesthood of the Sung religion. I incurred great guilt by turning my back on it and taking the path to the West. Still, they paid for my education, and my brother took the priestly office. Perhaps, though, our gods have not turned their backs upon me. Perhaps they may yet listen to the sacred summons that I know as well as my own name and genealogy. And they are no friends of the accursed Dagon. Cover your ears, Professor.”
That wasn’t possible, the hands of both being tied. But he decided he would oblige the man by trying not to listen. Oldstone figured he could do worse than pray to his own God, and he began with the Lord’s Prayer. Then he came up with some psalms. He reflected, with a nervous inner laugh, that this way, if they did manage to get out of this alive, the credit wouldn’t go to these Burmese gods alone!
Ah-Poh was reciting the praises of his lords Lloigor and Zhar, how they had in the past bested the enemies of the men of Sung, enslaving the gods of lesser nations. He bade them stir from sleep and come to the rescue. He detailed the blasphemies of the devils Dagon and Hydra, and their spawn. He begged his twin deities not to let their foes triumph this day, for their names’ sake to vindicate this, their priest.
There was more, but Oldstone was trying not to listen. Still, what he heard had a strange and powerful effect upon him. He began to doze and to dream, but with none of the usual transition. He thought he beheld a clashing of two, no three, vast forms, high above the earth. Occasionally he thought he saw anthropomorphic limbs, sometimes tentacles or crustacean claws. Sometimes it looked as if there were a giant Manta Ray among the combatants. But he felt he was seeing a kind of dream symbolism rather than a real visual representation. Would he see anything at all if he were awake? And like many dreams, it was not clear how long it lasted.
7. Orientalism
When he awoke, the first thing he noticed was that, thankfully, he was not tied up. Instead, he found himself in a bed in the University infirmary. As soon as a nurse checked on him and found him rousing, she darted back into the hall. In mere moments, here came a hoard of men in suits. For a split second, he feared it was more of the Innsmouth welcoming committee. Instead, it was a collection of campus security, town police, FBI, and Homeland Security Department officers. Oldstone’s was the ease of an innocent conscience, so he welcomed their thronging presence. No different, really, from one of his classes, though usually they were not squeezed into quite so tight a space.
They had their questions aplenty, but Dr. Oldstone was in no particular position to answer any, beyond the narrow sphere of what had happened to him and to his student. Come to think of it, the young Burmese was nowhere to be seen. “Can anyone tell me what happened to my student, er, Ah-Poh-What’s his name? If anyone got us out of that mess, it was he.”
The police sergeant replied: “He’s on his way back to Burma. Said he had made a sudden change in career plans.”
“Oh, I see. Well, he’s certainly good at what he does.”
“Dr. Oldstone, do you know what happened to the Innsmouth students?”
“What do you mean? They’re not… dead, are they?” He thought his question might raise dangerous suspicions, but he really had no idea what they meant. What could have happened to the whole bunch of them?
“They’re all gone. Just gone. You’ve been out for two days, Professor, but as near as we can surmise, the lot of Innsmouth students must have cleared out of here on signal for some reason. Funny thing is, they’re gone from all the other regional schools where so many of them had enrolled, too.”
“But there were plenty of other students at that rally, or party, or whatever it was. Surely they saw something…?”
“Sorry to say, not a one of them remained conscious through the thing. All hopelessly drunk. On what, I’m sure I don’t know.”
“I suppose you sent men to Innsmouth. Maybe the students just all went home. Some holiday we didn’t know about?”
“We did try that. They weren’t there. And, uh, neither was anybody else. The whole place was deserted. We even broke into all the old tenements with windows that had been boarded up for decades. I don’t care to tell you what we found there. There’s still a special investigation pending. But none of these students, that’s for sure.”
Professor Oldstone was actually asking himself whether these young men had been… vaporized or something once the Burmese deities had gotten the upper hand. But that must have been an hallucination, mustn’t it? But then, here he was alive.
“Ah, officers, what about the impregnated women? They were all due at the same time, were they not? Did any of them deliver? The Innsmouth boys were the fathers. No sign of them? No clue from the mothers?”
The head of campus security took his hat off and rubbed his forehead. “That’s not a pretty detail, I’m afraid. They all aborted, spontaneously. Don’t ask me how. And it gets worse. You may know that most of these young women had previous boyfriends who weren’t exactly pleased when their girlfriends left them to shack up with these balding, bugged-eyed foreigners. Well, let me just say, in the wake of this, they’ve revived the old college sport of goldfish swallowing…”
“But the girls themselves…?”
“In shock. No clear memory. One went completely insane.”
***
The next semester started on schedule with no real problems except for the sudden drop in student enrollment. The University missed the extra tuition, but the absence of the Innsmouthers made for less tension. No damage at all had come to the campus during the ill-fated Dagon rally. As Professo
r Oldstone had suspected, it had been a contest between Principalities and Powers on an etheric level. Something he had no theology to explain.
It was the first meeting of his course on Medieval Metaphysics, a dead course he had decided had best be revived. He was beginning to set the scene historically and culturally. Then a voice interrupted him. It was one of the new religion majors, and he was loaded for bear.
“It is only fair to serve notice, Professor, that if at least half the course is not devoted to the thinking of Muslim savants, I will be informing your superiors and perhaps even bringing suit against the school for betraying its much-vaunted ‘ecumenical’ policy.”
Oldstone shook his head. “Here we go again.”
Down By the Highway Side
Paul R. McNamee
Jeb Barksdale waited outside the terminal, stoically ignoring the sweltering Mississippi heat. The wide brim of his Stetson hat kept his neck shaded but he still needed sunglasses to deal with the early afternoon glare. His feet sweltered in their tight, polished cowboy boots. His hand moved to his throat, loosened his bolo tie, and undid the button at his throat. Too damn hot, after all.
The bus rolled in with a stink of diesel and asthmatic brakes, wheezing and squealing to a stop. A faded, mildew spotted sign on the side of the bus advertised "Thrills in Vegas!" A few travelers staggered off the bus, blinking in the sunlight. They all looked rumpled and groggy. One or two lit cigarettes and greedily smoked.
Barksdale remembered those days. They were not far behind him. Cold turkey on the plane, on the bus, in the smoke-free hotel rooms. Nearly leaping out of his skin to get outside where he could smoke. Or hide in a bathroom stall where he could do worse.
Barksdale continued to remember it as worse, not better. He shook his head and turned his attention elsewhere before any craving started. His body was clean now. They kept telling him it was all in his head, now. His behavior and his choices would be his own.
He started humming a Hank Williams tune, and then thought about how Williams had died drunk in the backseat of a car, so he hummed something by Johnny Cash instead. At least Johnny had conquered his demons well enough in the end.
The driver, a short and stocky Hispanic man, finished unloading the bags, took some tips in a callused hand. The arrivals walked off into the Jackson afternoon, muttering about cold drinks, lunches, and their plans for the afternoon and the evening.
The driver eyed Barksdale and his one small suitcase.
"You it?"
Barksdale looked around. He hadn't really noticed. No other passengers milled outside and no one emerged from the air-conditioned building. No one else had arrived to share his lonely vigil. Looking up at the windows of the bus, he saw no remaining faces in the vehicle. No holdovers would be continuing on from Jackson.
"It appears I am," Barksdale said.
"I'll take your bag, sir."
"Much obliged."
Barksdale handed over his ticket. The driver stuffed it in his oversized pocket. He looped a paper luggage tag through the handle, ripped off the claim number and gave it to Barksdale.
Barksdale took it with a small laugh.
"Expecting a crowd?"
The driver shrugged.
"Policy. Besides, Memphis is a popular destination. Never can tell."
Barksdale boarded the empty bus. He chose a window seat in the middle of the bus for no particular reason, other than to watch the countryside roll by. The seat felt cushy for his posterior but with his lanky frame no bus seat would ever be comfortable. When traveling, Barksdale only found comfort in first-class airplane seats, and those days were long gone.
Barksdale gazed out the window, saw a tall man standing outside the terminal door. The thin, tanned-skinned man stood straight as a pine tree. His bus line livery fitted him as royal attire. He regarded the bus with a baleful stare. Then the regal man turned and entered the terminal. Barksdale thought the man must be a bus line official of some sort. Manager of the terminal, perhaps.
The driver shuffled up the stairs. His brown eyes regarded Barksdale in the hanging mirror. Then the engine coughed to life, and the bus rumbled out of the Jackson terminal.
A normal drive up 55 to Canton, Mississippi would have taken a mere thirty minutes. But buses took their time, and summer road construction added to the travel time. Barksdale fidgeted in his seat. He scolded himself, told himself he just needed to get through today. When the fidgeting continued, he told himself he only needed to get to Memphis in a few hours and then he could take it from there. Finally, he reminded himself beyond Memphis there would be money, and whether he wanted sobriety or he wanted substances, either way he had no money for it now. The stint at the Copper House in Jackson had run his last savings account dry.
He tried to bring songs and lyrics to mind. That always helped for distraction, too. Outside the window, old flat rural roads still crossed each other. They had been the major roads before the interstates had arrived. One particular cross road grabbed his attention. Bare and desolate, marked only by one of the largest, fattest girthed tree Barksdale might ever had seen. The gnarled tree threw strange patterns of shade and sunlight on its rough-barked surface. Barksdale almost saw faces in the bark of the trunk. Tortured faces and evil countenances.
Barksdale had been a country singer all his life. He had made a life of it, as ragged as that life might have become. But now a song from his youth came unbidden to his mind. A blues song. He had heard plenty of blues, too, along with everything else growing up in the hill country of Mississippi.
Standin' at the cross road, believe I'm sinkin' down
Peculiar that song should jump in his head after all those years. Barksdale supposed the imagery triggered the memory of the song, but it disturbed him nonetheless. He sure had sunk down. Oh, he had sobriety but nothing else. Was sobriety a great thing when there was nothing else? No more hiding from his mistakes and failures. At least in a haze of booze and drugs he had pretended otherwise.
Bad thinking. Dangerous thinking.
Barksdale's hand reached into his pocket, and his fingers rested on the square metal shape of his cigarette lighter. Damn fool for that, he thought. A smoke wouldn't be far off and after that? He cursed himself for holding on to it after rehab. But, like his pocket knife, he'd owned the lighter since his teenage years. They'd been through so much together. If it wasn't in his pocket next to his knife he got jumpy, felt wrong. Even rehab hadn't erased the sensation.
He swore to himself he'd pawn it off in Memphis, if he had time.
His mind scrambled for other songs, he couldn't find any. His brain had stage fright.
"Hey, driver, sir!" Barksdale raised his voice over the street rumble but did his best not to be too loud. "You got a radio on this bus?"
"Yes, sir."
Barksdale requested a Jackson country music station, and cringed when some pop singer came on and pretended she knew about trucks and twangy guitars. Eventually a few more tolerable songs came into the mix, but most of the songs were still too far from country roots for Barksdale's liking. Still, the songs were perky and proud and almost enough to shake off the dark blues.
Standin' at the cross road, dark gon' catch me here
Almost enough.
The bus turned off 55 into Canton and pulled into a local motel parking lot which served for the terminal. Stops away from the bigger cities and towns lacked dedicated terminal buildings. A few people waited to board the bus.
Barksdale stared out the window, and one passenger caught his attention. A young black man, dapperly dressed in a suit coat and tie, banded fedora on his head, guitar case in his hand. The other passengers lined up their baggage, got their claim tickets and boarded the bus. The man in the fancy hat waited until everything had been loaded and then he talked with the driver. The driver paused, considered, nodded and shrugged.
The driver wrapped the baggage claim ticket around the handle of the guitar case, tore off the stub and gave it to the man separately and left th
e guitar case with the man. The man stuffed the stub into the lefthand pocket of his suit coat and passed some amount of cash bills into the driver's hand. He tipped the fedora to the driver in appreciation, and boarded the bus with guitar case in hand.
The man shuffled to the empty row of seats in front of Barksdale. He put the guitar case on the aisle seat, and took the window seat for himself.
"That must be one special guitar," Barksdale said.
The young man smiled. "Oh, yes. I never let it out of my sight if I don't have to."
"But I saw the driver hand you a stub," Barksdale said. Suspicion flashed in the young man's eyes. "Sorry. Just saw it out the window. People watching, not spying."
The young man's countenance brightened again. "Yes, well. I do that just in case I need to stow the guitar after all. I will if I need to, but I don't like to. Could be too crowded by the time we get to Memphis. Though, I think we'll be okay today." He glanced around the still nearly empty bus to make his point.
"Will you get your money back of the guitar goes with the rest of the luggage?"
"Reckon not. A little bit of a gamble, but would I be a bluesman if I didn't gamble?"
"Ah, the blues." Barksdale nodded. "Have you been out on the road long?"
"Playing my way up to Memphis," the man said. "Are you a musician?"
"Have you ever heard of Jeb Barksdale?"
The young man thought about the name. "Country music singer, right?"
"Right," Barksdale smiled. Country music fans barely remembered him, never mind some young blues player. He had faded years ago and stayed out of sight and out of mind thanks to his addictions. "I am Jeb Barksdale."
"Well, ain't that something. Mister Barksdale," Thompson began to say.
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