by Nick Mamatas
Neal knew too, once, in a burst of ecstatic prophecy, but now, back in the mundane world, he had to go see for himself. Bill and I just stood around, not saying much, while Neal yipped and ran off, collapsing in a heap, and then running off around the corner to where he thought the school was. A minute later, just as Bill was opening his mouth to say something or other, Neal ran by again like Harpo Marx, heading in the opposite direction. Bill shut up at that. I rubbed my wrists raw and waited--Neal would be fine. His special sight would show him the whirling blades that surrounded the school and he could pick his way through them, ducking and hopping and rolling, as easy as you please.
The looks on the corpses' faces were just unbearable. It wasn't even the fear that lasted like rubber cooling in a man-shaped mold with eyes and a nose, it was the disappointment. The cultists had told them, after all, they it would all be okay. No more empty spaces at the dinner table, no more empty Sunday School (heck, their prayers would be answered in a way they could point to for years later--"Yep, and then Clem was returned to us, just in time for chores, hale and happy as you please") and all they'd have to do is find two strangers and butcher them. That's what they were disappointed in, these bodies, the hard fact that life wasn't fair. One woman, Bill had shot her in the neck, so I could still see that her mouth was a line of desperate consternation, she had a novel written in her expression. Come on, Cookie, I could see her screaming in her mind, even as the bullets rained down and the other members of the Ladies' Auxilliary fell on either side of her. Kill them! Kill them with your blessed butcher's knife and the bullets will stop. Kill them and Alice will be home by the time I run back there, and we can all have supper like a family again. Life isn't fair, she finally realized as a bullet ate its way through her in a split-second. Life wasn't fair, and not because Neal and poor old me were trussed up and about to be skinned alive either. Life wasn't fair because even the soul-raped slaves of the Dreamer In The Darkness couldn't be counted on to keep their promises, and to let their babies go free, safe and sound.
Soon Neal came back eventually, when the moon was bright and high and his head low, hands in his pockets. He walked up without saying the word, and I swear, that was the first time I'd ever seen Neal sober and speechless at the same time. Even his head, when he lifted it, even his chin that drooped just a little more than usual, were sad. He was sad, his eyes that no longer reflected the cosmic madness he sought in the starry belly of Azathoth were sad. "I can't put that in my book," he told me. Bill scratched his nose and looked on.
"I just can't," Neal said. "It was just too much, you know. The little kids. They'd torn themselves to pieces, but you know a few of them tried to keep up their lessons. They did sums on the chalkboard. One of the little boys died with Huck Finn in his hand. His fingers were so stiff, his little toothpick hands . . . He was worried about a quiz, I could tell, because his little forehead was all furrowed like a scholar. How can I trivialize all this just by making it a story. They'd never understand," he said and he fell to his knees and wept hard toddler tears. I put a hand on his shoulder and waited, watching his long shadow sneak under my feet. Bill had left and then drove back up with a car, a great old Packard. He had our rucksacks too, in the front seat. The car idled and Neal knelt amidst the leaded smoke.
"They danced you know, the mayor did, and so did the sheriff and the pediatrician. Some kid drew that on the chalkboard too, the three of them dancing while baby stick figures cried and screamed." He looked up at me, his eyes large and star-crazed again. "The sheriff had on a cowboy hat and wore a crooked star over half his stick-line body, and they drew the doctor with a big old mirror on the top of his head, like in the movies. And they were smiling, those three characters, big crescent smiles that punched through the sides of their circle faces. But you know, it wasn't because of the pain. Cthulhu, He knows nothing of pain, or human suffering. Not any more than we know of bacterial suffering. Do they scream when we go to a doctor and take a pill? Oh, his servants danced all right, not because they loved the pain or were celebrating death, but just because not one of those poor men had ever heard so many kids scream for so long before."
Neal stood up and dusted off his knees, and then sneezed. Without a word he got into the backseat of the car and pulled our rucksacks back with him so I'd have to sit in the front with Bill, shotgun.
"Where are we headed?" I asked Bill.
Bill didn't even look at me as he shifted and stepped on the gas. "New York. We have to save the world. Only Beats and grifters and bums and junkys are immune to the Call." New York, oh how I missed her, but couldn't bear to even dream what might be happening in her valley streets. I closed my eyes and tried to extinguish the self, so that I could act without thought, but Neal shattered my arrogant meditation.
"They danced, not because they were taken over by dime-novel demons who love to listen to people suffer," he said, finally able to talk again. "They danced because the tiny bit of their brains that remained human wanted everyone to be happy and everything to be normal. And that little human bit of the brain just told their bodies that the kids were singing and would be happy if they danced, so they did."
CHAPTER EIGHT
Once, in Northport, I found myself down by the water, walking through the flat old park. I'd like to sit on a bench, shake a hand or two, and maybe wait for someone to invite me in for a drink or for a night of bracing conversation. There were some cool artists in Northport--it was close enough to Manhattan, but the houses were large and cheap, good space for studios, so painters were drawn to the little burg. Me, I was drawn to the water (this was long before I knew what horrors waited for us all in the depths of the salty seas) and to the men who worked it for their daily bread. One guy, a round little man, the kind of joe you'd say was built like a fireplug if you thought fireplugs were a lot thicker around than they really are, was an ace with a net and a rowboat. George never failed to drag in a net full of porgies or blues, even when the other fishermen would just stare at their feet and swing empty buckets as they walked through the park and up the hill to their little homes. And George's fish were peaceful; they'd try to breathe the poison air, huffing and staring from within the lattice of his old net, but they never flopped or twitched. They were coming home, they knew.
George would clean his fish right on the shore, scaling them but never hacking off the heads or tails, while flies circled him and his catch like black snow. There's more than one unsold painting of him tucked into racks in Northport attics. The artists would wait, along with the flies, for the first traces of a red-streaked sunset, because they knew that that was when George would be coming home.
Mostly I just watched George scale, gut and sometimes fillet his fish right on the spot. He was a swordmaster with his sharp knife, black with age with a worn wooden handle. He could scale a fish in two strokes, gut it in one, and then take just an extra second to cut it into filets or steaks. Nobody could touch him for speed or grace, neither machine nor dancer could do George one better. The painters never even bothered trying to capture his real speed on canvas, instead they just went abstract on him--George's head floating above a swirl of red rain, a great white streak cutting through the sky, or just the park at dusk, George-shaped hole where he had been standing, and nothing but flies and fishguts littering the damp grass at the bottom of the canvas.
With the first fish, George would always cut out the sweetest meat and throw it away. "Leave something for the flies," he explained to me, or if I was sitting too far away, to nobody but the flies themselves. "Go on, eat your own," he'd tell them as he pulled another thick bluefish from his net, but they just kept swarming and buzzing, smacking into his head or hands, or landing on his shoulders. I swallowed more than one big horsefly myself that summer.
"You like fish?" George would ask, and I would offer to pay him, but he'd just hand me fresh-gutted fish wrapped in newspaper and wink at me, because he knew I was watching him the way I'd listen to jazz, with a heart full of love and desire. He neve
r seemed to remember that sure, I do like fish, especially the porgies grilled still in the skin. Memere would take off the heads and tails for us first.
Three days went by and there was no George. On the first day, the painters stayed till the sun sank into the sound waiting for him to come in, but he'd never been out that day. On the second day, fewer people came, and fewer flies too. On the third day, it was just me, waiting for George, drinking a beer out of a paper bag while on my little park bench a few yards from the pier, but I didn't see him until I decided to head for home by way of the bar. He was inside, working a cat's cradle with thin white wire.
"Look, Jack," he told me. It was the first sentence I'd ever heard him say that didn't talk about fish. "Look at this." His voice was deep and dead. And George shook the wire from his fingers and into my outstretched palm. The wire was …soft. Like nylon, it was nylon, a strand thinner and tougher than I'd ever seen.
"That," George said, nodding to the mess of twists and knots in my hand, "is the future. I retire now. They'll make nets from that stuff one day, nets five miles long, and they clean the sound from Montauk to Brooklyn." I snorted, too dazed to comprehend him--I thought poor George was joking till he slammed a fist against a table. "No!" he shouted, and damn sure if his voice was the only one left in the bar, or even the town. "They will! The oceans will be lined with huge nets, they'll drift on the currents and sweep up all life. The tuna, the shark, jellyfish, porpoises . . . WHALES!" Some dumb drunk tittered way in the back of the room, but George didn't even have to turn around to shut him up. George inhaled sharply, and the heckler swallowed the rest of his giggling.
"Fishing, it's not an art anymore," he said. "It's war. It's the gas hissing into the showers at Auschwitz."
It was war. It's war now. There was a drift net, just like the one George told me about those years ago, ethereal and rising from the Pacific, dragging its way across America. Whole towns were falling into its haunted tangles, the souls of their resident fools the catch of the day. And me and Neal and now Bill, all piled into a Caddy Neal found parked in Goodland's local Methodist Church, were trying desperately to outrace the tide. We'd be ahead in one town, then stop for the night under a cracking moon, and in dreams I could see the dark strands drift across the night, taking whatever little town we were holed up in with it. In the morning, mugwumps ruled and the air tasted of salt and scales.
We learned to drive at night, and to head only to the cities, where there were nooks and crannies to hide in, bars a human being could still get a drink at. We moved under ground, through sewers and into basement pads with those few people, usually dharma bums and older Beats, or wild women with ironed hair, who knew enough to resist or dodge Cthulhu's inexorable reach.
Tramps and hoboes poured into the cities behind us, trembling with stories of life on the road and rails. Great beasts twenty feet long were strapped down to flatbeds and screaming their way across the country, the beetlemen drivers happy to rip off and consume their own ears just so they wouldn't have to hear the wailing, wailing that could kill a man. Wheat fields burned under waves of green fire; it was cold and flowed like heavy ocean water, and left no smoke behind. "You don't burn up in it," one fellow told me, "you drown in it." He'd seen his woman go down under a wave of the stuff, and then come up, green spurting from her nose and mouth; then she went down again. "I waited for her to come up again, you know, because you're not a goner 'til you go down three times in normal water, but with this stuff you don't get no second chances." Then he cried until Neal's new girl for whatever that town we were in, Mandy or something, took him to a couch and fed him jelly-jar wine 'til he was able to sleep.
Driving was insane. Neal never slept anymore, and always wanted the wheel. He drove is in a wild route--up to Omaha for a horrible afternoon tour of a city in flames, then he pulled a massive U-turn, smoking the back wheels nearly off the back of the car, and sent us hurtling back towards Springfield. Bill was mostly on the nod--though I could never catch him making the connection, he always found his horse, no matter what lonely highway we were traveling down--so I'd have to wrestle Neal for the wheel one-on-one. I was slower than he was, and he knew the tricks of prison infighting: the knee to the balls was just a feint, I'd jerk away and right into where his thumb was waiting for my throat--but I learned a few tricks from the sutra Kilaya left me with, and sometimes I could grab that thumb and bring Neal to his knees, then start heading East again, back onto Route 66. And in the backseat, halfway between dreamland and pipe dream, Bill would mumble and prophesize of the horrors that awaited in New York. Men transformed as they strolled down the street, then scuttled up buildings with their new claws, or the tentacles with a thousand kissing suction cups, and there nested and bred for the new Reich. Babies born hideously deformed, they shattered mama's hips on the way out, all head and horns plopped atop corpse bodies. Bill called them the lucky ones.
The unlucky ones were still men and women, still normal. Far too normal, square as houses. What could they do but keep their heads down and pretend that their bosses hadn't been driven mad, and hadn't demanded that the mail room boys take off their foreskins with the sharp rocks he brought in from his driveway back in Westchester County? Cuddle up to the beetleman in bed next to you once a week? Sure, as long as he brought home his paycheck and a bag full of groceries. Better to close your girly little eyes and think of John Fitzgerald Kennedy while every hole in your body was probed by chitinous appendages, while the clicking laughter of the beast that was once your high school sweetheart ground into your ears like street glass.
New York, New York, a town so cool they damned it twice. The cult was strongest there; when Cthulhu awoke, the tidal wave of fear and change he burst forth from rose high over this land and finally broke over the purple, smog-choked sky of midnight Manhattan. Black rain fell like blessings, and coated the concrete and glass steel mountains of the haunted isle. Wall Street was ankle-deep in blood, Central Park a range where the livestock was all one succulent meat, all long pig. Get a job patrolling the border with a sharpened stick, why not? Better them than you, and besides, you got to sleep in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, away from the smell of horse shit from the fancy hansom cabs and the sound of bones crunching under the jaws of mile-long trains of maggots.
"Just settle in for the ride, boys," Bill would mutter to us in the backseat, as I wrestled Neal for the wheel, but he wasn't talking to us, he was talking to the poor old New Yorkers who had bowed before the Dreamer, and let Him put the blinders on their souls.
In St. Louis the Cadillac gave up the ghost. We left it on the street and walked three abreast right down Pershing Avenue. Bill was alert for a change, though his face still twitched--he blinked rapidly like a boy made slow from too much self-abuse. I almost didn't believe him when he nodded at some scorched-out ruin and said, "I was born there." Neal was strangely quiet; he kept peering up at the sky, watching the stars only he could see. We walked past the old John Burroughs school, then turned onto Price Road. "My folks have a little place up here," Bill said.
It was a damn mansion on five acres. Neal didn't even look at it, he just kept his neck craned towards the sky and twitched whenever I asked him something. The house had been trashed; a hobo jungle reined within. Steel drums littered the lobby and the roof above dripped soot like the night sky did these days. There were bottles all over the floor, and most were empty. I had to kick over seven before I found one with a little canned heat left. It was cold in the house, colder than it should have been for a sultry August evening. The drift net was passing overhead, making sure every last little guppy of a man was captured and made ready for the soul-killing knives of mugwumps. We weren't escaping, I realized. We were just being gutted and tossed aside, for the flies.
Burroughs's home was a bit of a lightning rod for every hep cat and grifter in town now. They had their stories and their battle scars (missing ears, black tongues from speaking the profane words they once overheard, eyelids sliced open with straight razors j
ust so a body wouldn't be scooped up in his sleep), and not much more left. They didn't laugh anymore, and I missed the old lungs full of guffaws and corny old jokes. They just lay around the rooms among the cracked-up furniture, pissing and snorting and sometimes just grabbing for anyone new, someone who hadn't heard their stories a hundred times before. And we were new, so we got an earful. There was this cat named Chinese Charlie--he wasn't Chinese, but he'd been to Hong Kong and spent six months there before stowing his way home--and he told me about this girl he saw walking down a country road, her breasts big and hanging out of her nightgown. "I'm no raper of women," he told me, and his voice was painted with cheap rum and loathing, "but these days it seems I'm the only one. So I walked up to this girl, not because she was a stack of hotcakes, but because she was lost in a daze, just walking down the side of the road with her arms out to her sides, like a flying Wallenda on a circus tightrope, but I walked up to this girl see, and on her breasts she had faces! Little baby faces, like the stillborns' heads in formaldehyde jars!" Chinese Charlie was so earnest and solemn about it, laying there in the corner of the room, I just had to laugh. I cracked up like that was the funniest punchline I'd ever heard in my whole life, and the great dining room shook with my laughter.
"Oh Lord, did you get a look at what her real face looked like? Was there a family resemblence?" I asked him. Chinese Charlie frowned at me and poked a big sausage finger right in my chest. "You're cruel, you know that? You're a cruel man. Selfish and uncaring. The world is falling into the shitter, and you're here, taking some primrose path. Kickin' back. Traveling, not living. Kitchen gets too hot, you're the first one out the door. Think of that poor girl for one minute! What's she gonna feed those babies if her tits are the babies? You gonna marry that girl? Gonna give her a home and spending money for formula and food to keep those babies strong? Or are you just gonna lay her, and then tomcat right out the door into the dark of the night? She's eatin' for three, damn you!" With that Chinese Charlie folded his arms across his chest, tucked his chin in and rolled over, his back to me. All the rest of the men in the joint did that too, each turning away from me in turn. Some of them turned smartly like soldiers, others just swayed, or sat and stared right through me. I had gotten what I wanted, finally, to be left alone. No longer a shining star, not the swirling center of every big time. It wasn't all it was cracked up to be, so I ran off to find Neal, and I did, out back.