by Nick Mamatas
Preacher Horror was nearly human now; impossible wrinkled and stooped over, eyes gone and sockets nearly endless in their depth, teeth thick as gravestones and brown besides, his leer fixed since he need not speak but only think his mad gibbering blasphemies to cement this union. Limbs, only four of them now, but the vestigal stumps from his transitional tentacles still swayed with the rhythm of his cant as they sunk back into his torso.
My fevered brain filled with the black clouds of this matrimonial horror, clouding out all sense and reason. I wasn't nearly drunk enough for this; I could feel the ritual pulling me in, like the musky taste of a woman on the edge of my lips. Bill did what my muscles rebelled against doing. He pulled out his gun and fired it right at the preacher. A bullet smacked right into the forehead of the man-thing and kept right on going, not breaking the skin or shattering bone (since the beast had none, being only viscous shadows and strangled, ancient spells) at all. Instead it burrowed in and slowly stretched the back of the preacher's head, first six inches, then a foot, then two feet, the little bullet struggling to finally pierce the preacher and lead a parade of brainy goop out the back of his head. Then with a whip-crack, the back of preacher's head snapped back into place, and Neal and his girl were named man and wife with a final swampy gibber.
"Women? I love, love, love women! I think women are wonderful! I love women!" Neal cried out, and he kissed his little china doll hard. Great beads of sweat fell from his forehead from pure excitement, but the girl was placid, her mouth just a slot for tongue. A cacophony of forks started up against the glasses.
"I think I'll shoot him instead," Bill said, cranking his arm to put the barrel of his pistol at the base of Neal's busy little head, but I grabbed his wrist. "No!" I told him. "All this nonsense just proves that Neal is still the key to all this somehow."
Bill lowered the gun, but kept it right on the table next to the salad fork. Neal and his girl were still going at it, to hoots and clapping flippers, but most of the humans (or mocking man-shaped shoggoths) had turned to their bratwursts (or mocking bratwurst-shaped shoggoths; I waited for Bill to take a bite before diving in myself).
"I feel like I lost a quart of blood. Neal is a goddamn asshole, and I don't care what he thinks or what the mugwumps think. I'd want to shoot him if we weren't knee-deep in dark dimensions."
Bill ate and drank with the abandon of a junky and a hobo combined, and I followed as best I could, and danced with a few of the human-seeming girls--some were monsters, others flesh and blood, one was just a fag in drag. Neal was a gun firing in every direction at once, as usual, leading a bunny hop, then swinging with his stonefaced but limber wifey. The music wasn't anything but the grinding of five-dimensional space against the floor of the world, but it had a beat and you could dance to it. I got tired quickly though, and leaned up against the wall to watch Neal. He was flailing his arms, cutting from one partner to another, kissing other girls while the little Mexican girl just looked on, standing stock still, 'til Neal touched her again and demanded some animation from her.
Clothes hit the ground with a sudden violence, and an orgy of men and monster was on--tentacles probing orifices, flesh caressed by scale and slime, fat men crawling from teat to tit and back again. Even old Bill was poking around (literally) the edges of the cluster. For a long moment I wished I had Memere's old rosary beads, but I couldn't turn my head away. Once again, I did the absurd thing and crawled into the mess myself. I didn't even need to take off my clothes. Inhuman limbs snaked under my collar and then into the waist of my pants, hungry for real American meat. I spread out my arms and legs and just floated atop the crowd; it held me aloft like I was in the Dead Sea, where the salt can keep anyone buoyant.
Of course, Neal's marriage lasted all of three days, of course of course. Bill and I were staying with some squatters, a family of Beats with a little beatnik baby even, in the sub-basement of a Greektown diner. I found myself worrying about the kid (I found myself thinking the word "rugrat") because the place wasn't well-ventilated, and if the smell of grease wasn't pushing its way down the creaky wooden steps from upstairs it was only because of the cloud of marijuana smoke that filled the place like those new Styrofoam packing peanuts. Bill spent most of his time in the corner, his ear cupped to a headset connected to a crystal radio set he found amidst the boxes. I entertained a parade of marginal sorts--fat Puerto Rican women with great pans of beans, cranky old men who still read the tattered racing forms from months ago though all the horses had been killed and eaten in lumpenprole bacchanals. The hungry, not the hip, ruled the tracks after all. I passed on the octopus salad.
"The Reds are ready to drop the big one on us," Bill said, more than once, but always calm as parking lots. The days were cool and relaxing except for the frequent parades through the streets, full of puppet-string patriotism and flags with glowing eyes amidst the field of white stars. I was standing atop a box of pre-cut French-fried potatoes, staring through the bars of the window, when I saw Neal's dancing feet heading our way. In seconds, he was down in the sub-basement with us, declaring his blasphemous annulment!
"Friends! I melted the bitch!" Neal said, smacking his hands against his chest. "She didn't last through the consummation before dissolving like a sugar-candy skull in a hot Mexican mouth, I tell you!"
"Neal, shut it, I'm trying to listen to the news. Frisco is flooding," Bill said.
Neal ignored him and hugged me hard. He lifted me six inches off the ground, a feat formerly impossible for him. "You can't stop Neal," he said right in my face. "Pow! Zoom! Gookly gooky, Neal's a spooky! Poof, I'm outta here!"
"Well," Bill said, "now that we're all here again, let's get going. The world's already all bureaucracy and flood plains; I want to put some holes in the cult already. That is what we are supposed to be doing, right?"
I didn't know what we were supposed to be doing. Neal was such an imponderable. He left me baking with a Mexican fever once and now spent half his days cavorting with the enemy and I was still ready to ride shotgun on whatever car he felt like stealing, roll right up Broadway and do who knows what to save the world from the perils of desire.
"I had tons of problems with the in-laws too," Neal said. "So many demands. They're so hungry all the time, for a little flesh, a little soul. Just last night we were atop a skyscraper, right over the flaming lake, calling up the dark forces to further bind the populace to the blind chaos of Azathoth. Out over the horizon Cthulhu was rising as well--the two don't necessarily get along, I just realized this. Earth is like a Gettysburg pebble for the two of them really, as they lead mad and bloody charges against one another. But under the ectoplasm, they are brothers, truly. I was just standing off to the side with my girl, her little hand in mine, watching the ceremony. It was like a blasphemous roller derby, boys. I don't even know what we would have ended up experiencing--the salty embrace of Cthulhu or Azathoth's swirling wisdom; but then God showed up, like a ghost."
Bill finally looked up from his radio set. I wasn't sure what to say myself. "You know, George Shearing," Neal said. "He was white as a ghost, his fingers trembling. I don't know how he got on the roof with the rest of us--I'm damn sure I would have noticed George Shearing as we all squeezed our way up the stairwells--and that spark in him was gone. God had withered on the vine. He didn't even smell like beer in the way old jazz guys tend to these days, that sweet and hollow creamy fog of beer was gone. Replaced with the sweat of illness, decay.
"The man was a pickle," Neal said, giddy. "Briny and preserved. And it struck me then, you know, just how insignificant we are. George Shearing spent his life mastering, what, a musical instrument that is only a thousand years old, for an artform that is what, fifty years old, and already half-dead, so some people who are thirty years old can be happy for an hour. And we call this mayfly tinkling God, Jack. Let me tell you, tonight I really saw God--"
"Shaddup!" Bill demanded in the corner. He was back to his radio set, a hand cupped around the headphone at his ear. "They're
saying the big one hit San Fran. The Bay is reclaiming the city."
Then I knew it wasn't Neal. Not because the news didn't affect him, like it did me (I could only see Allen and his little fag friend drowning in the swiftly tilting sewers, the swinging lanterns outside Chinatown restaurants swallowed under black waves), but because he actually shut up. Neal never stopped talking on command, for anybody.
Shoggoth! The thought arced between me and the false Neal, and it showed its true colors right away. Neal didn't turn to face me, his face shifted to the side of his head and glared at me. Its jaw was already distending, fangs like sabers gathered up at the corners of its mouth. I did the absurd thing and dropped into my tired old three-point stance and rushed the transmogrifying beast.
It was like tackling a wave on the beach. Hard and blinding, and you, and by you I mean I, of course, ended up on the floor, soaked and stunned. Neal filled the room, I was drowning in him, flailing, gasping, spitting out mouthfuls of his liquid flesh. Bill was overwhelmed too, his ratty shoes and socks up in the air, the rest of him crumpled in the cut between floor and wall.
In the haze of ectoplasm another face formed before me. Neal again, but white and desperate, begging. His face was a mask fading into a broader darkness, a mouth of madness. Teeth the size of my head solidified about me and the flimsy mask of Neal. I heard the liquid whisper of "Help me help me Jack, they have me in New York . . . "
The teeth were a crushing vise, looking to push the last bit of air from my lungs. Bill's pistol floated by; I grabbed it and fired. The shock of report rippled through the ectoplasm but the bullet did nothing but drill itself, almost leisurely, through the fluid atmosphere of the shoggoth. Potatoes, a watch, Bill's crumpled hat, floated by as a pulse, a flex of plasmic muscle. I was pinned against the wall, far from Bill, who was just about as bad off as I was but skinny and shriveled (were his ribs broken) and upside-down, against the opposite wall. The teeth, arranged in two arched rows, smiled in the middle of the flux.
Absurd, absurd, do the absurd thing! It's hard not to think clearly when you see your death eight feet away, slick as tusks. I kept doing sensible things; my fingers skittered along the wall, looking for some crack or handhold, legs pumping and trying to swim, sensible and useless like pantyhose. Really, there was nothing absurd to do, once jammed up against the wall. Except!
Except tucked in the corner, in the little bit of the room not yet flooded with the translucent crushing flesh of the monster, was a little can with a thin spritzing wand. Bug spray. I slipped towards it, not pushing against the blob, but squeezing between the wave of Neal and the smooth basement wall. I grazed the wand with a finger, then a second. I had it, and squeezing the trigger in my fist, started pumping the spray into the gelatinous mass that had me pinned. The bug dust swirled in the suspension, filling it with a pinkish fog. For a long moment nothing happened, the pressure was still nearly unbearable, and my consciousness would have dimmed around the edges if not for the bennies I'd been chewing all afternoon. Finally, the roomful of jelly spasmed and began to shrink and scream, a quiet scream though, the scream of a room nearly out of air. The teeth crumbled into icicle shards as the ectoplasm deflated--I was draped over it like a bean-bag, then finally I was on my feet squeezing the last few puffs of bug dust into the shriveling mass. And along the surface, I saw Neal's white reflection, his face tortured and tired, the Divine spark enslaved to this monster. "New York, New York" he mouthed, "Save me in New York."
"Marriage and women ain't nothing but trouble," I said. Bill scrambled to his feet--he was covered in slime.
"What did you do?"
"This," I said, holding up the canister. "The absurd thing. The unexpected. Bug spray."
"Well, it isn't that absurd," Bill said. He was wiping his slimy hands onto his slimy pants, or maybe trying to wipe the slime from his pants with his slime-coated hands. Either way, he was having a rough go of it. But he was right. "The mugwumps, beetlemen. They're all insectoid. What's so absurd about having a similar chemical weakness?" Bill pulled out a soaked hanky and tried that on his hands, then his pants, giving himself an even coating.
I was pretty moist myself.
CHAPTER TEN
Maybe exterminating an insectoid shoggoth with bug spray wasn't absurd. Perhaps the rational was finally beginning to reassert itself. "Or maybe," Bill said, "it's a trap. To make sure we traveled to New York. All your other cross-country trips just petered out, after all." It was absurd to travel to New York now--every face belonged to Neal. He melted in and out of the expressions of the people we hurried past, his visage slipping around the back of heads, nestling in hairdos and flowing over sweating red necks to stare at us. Sometimes he was gloating, his eyes burning with a nameless evil, other times his face was plaintive and biblical, like some prophet watching his ancient city reduced to rubble by his angry loverboy God.
"Sympathetic magic. Sometimes it is Neal, sometimes his doppelgangers, animated by horrible marionette magics." Bill was on his back, in the train yard, speaking through raspy gasps. What was really absurd was our attempt to escape Chicago. It's just twelve hours on a flatout night run to Manhattan, but we couldn't lift a car to save our lives. Maybe it was Neal at work, his great criminal mind finally turned to the service of keeping cars where they were parked, rather than liberating them. Hangers, slide hammers, nothing worked. Some of the sweetest rides were under guard, cultists snoozing within, crumpled in the front seats, fogging up the windows. We didn't have any money for gas anyway. It was absurd, almost as absurd as trying to hop the rail with William S. Burroughs in tow.
Here is how it worked, or didn't work. A train growled up to life, and slowly squealed down the tracks. We waited behind some crates, looking for an inviting train car, and then ran for it. I matched speeds, flung myself into the gap, and scrambled onto the car. Then I turned back to see wheezing Bill, arms flailing, trying to keep up. "Jack, Jack!" he called out to me. "Can't do it!" I jumped off the train and tumbled back onto the gravel of the yard. Bill finally made it up to me, swayed dramatically, and then crumpled to his knees. We did that 'til about two o'clock in the morning, for train after train.
The leaving trains were getting scarcer so I took to grabbing Bill by the collar and the back of his pants and running him up to the train. The idea was to throw him aboard and then jump after him, but we either got our legs tangled and the two of us just collapsed into a dusty heap while the train pulled away triumphantly, or otherwise I mistimed the throw and ended up tossing him against the side of the train car rather than through the gaping open door of one. Then he'd bounce off, seeing stars, and fall into me, arms and legs akimbo. So that's why Bill was on his back, explaining the metaphysics of Neal's kidnapping and Cthulhoid physiology to me. The concussions of enlightenment, there's nothing like them in the world anymore. I threw Bill up against another hulking turtle of a train car, but by dawn he wasn't getting any smarter. "Good Neal, or evil Neal? Which one are you even trying to save . . . or to destroy? There's a battle in each of us, you know. Reason versus madness, base matter and dreamy illusion, perception and memory. He's transcended the real now, you know. We can't go to New York to save Neal, for he is all around us, sitting naked on our forks with every bite of meat--" Eventually he nodded off.
The flats heated up quickly under the sun. We hid under a tarp as the few night shift guards sauntered out and were replaced by an army of foremen, Pinkertoon goons (real goons with black pebble eyes and arms as long as apes') and freight haulers. I briefly considered sauntering on up to a gang of workers and blending in, then hopping a freight, but I was sporting a few too many bruises for that, and Bill had even more, plus his wrinkled pimp suit. "Just act natural," I could tell him, and I knew he'd blow our cover in a minute with some obnoxious rant or mouthful of vomit landing on the wrong goose-stepping boot.
It was Neal who found us. Some thug of a man, more fireplug than primate, shuffled up to our hiding place backwards, and on the back of his head was Neal's fac
e. The worker's hand ducked behind his back and wiggled its fingers at us, like a television maître d' looking for a few bucks in exchange for a decent table. I made to move but Bill put a hand on my shoulder. "You're still a mark for that character, you know? You don't know whether this mugwump might lead you--right to the slaughterhouse as likely as anything. Are you ready to be Vienna Beef, eh? The mark inside is the mark you can't beat, Jack. Neal knows it, now the damn mugwumps know it."
"We can stay here 'til we get caught by someone who doesn't even pretend to be friendly," I reasoned. Then I laughed out loud. It was horrible. Bill and I were every movie serial hero and sidekick. "It's a trap!" some underfed faggot actor cries (his voice cracks professionally, so the rubes who paid their two bits for a picture show will think he's a kid), but the square-jawed protagonist can only squint into the distance and declare, "That's a chance I have to take." Cut to titles, then on to the newsreel. Denver is now the West Coast, millions lost beyond the sea, their souls imprisoned on old R'lyeh. Sounds like something Neal would crib for his book. So I went and Bill followed, muttering and wiping dust from his knees. Was this the feature, or just the cartoon?
We were led to a distant corner of the yard, Neal's plaintive face stamped into the hair of the shuffling fellow we followed. He brought us to a funnel flow tank car, the sort of thing you might use to transport kaolin clay slurry, molten sulfur or the horrid ichor of the earth's very bowels, and in his weird backwards way gestured for us to climb and see if we couldn't squeeze in through the top valves.
Even if the car were empty now (Bill rapped on the side of it experimentally, but didn't come to any conclusions) it could be filled at any stop. We'd be alone in the dark, huddled together, probably bruised and battered from rolling around all over the slanted belly of the tank, when corn syrup or even hot asphalt pours in. We might not even be awake for it. But Neal, oh Neal . . . I looked at what I could see of his eyes, which weren't much as they were just molded hair on the back of some mugwump head. Would he really betray me so utterly? Wanderlust is what led him to dump me down in Mexico years ago; he ran off, following women and his muse while I broiled alive with a fever on a stained cot. And from that expression, even obscured by the media of skull and hair, I knew this was the real deal Neal, not just some haunted chimerstry. But, he did drive off and leave Nelson to die, when was it--a week ago? two?