The Damned Highway (12 page)

“Good answer—so you don't believe that people like me are between men like you and the concentration camp. But Starry Wisdom
is
all that's keeping the world on course. So what you must not believe is that you are a man.”

“And if I'm not a man . . . it's okay to kill me, is it? Is that the nature of this visit? Is that the agenda for today?” I ramble, stalling for time so that I can calculate my next move. It's five against one. Haringa has a paunch on him, but the quartet of College Republicans look like they run down milk cows and eat them for breakfast. And then there's Betsy. She's feisty and obviously devoted to the cause. I'll need to depend on something other than fisticuffs to see my way out of this predicament.

“Men are but the dreams of gods, Mr. Lono,” Haringa says. “Nothing more. It has always been this way. And when the gods stop dreaming, what then of men?
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
. That is a very old language, Lono, and I don't expect you to understand it. I'll translate for you.
In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming
. What happens when he wakes up?”

Betsy steps back immediately—she's a well-trained girl. The Nixon Youth have manacles in their hands, and in one frantic moment I'm no longer at the table, but on it. I wonder how this has happened, and curse the mushrooms and their land of origin. Yuggoth's fungi have betrayed me. My limbs feel far away, and not just because they're stretched across the surface of the table, the chains somehow meeting underneath. Three of the rugby boys are surrounding me, so the fourth must be down below, tying knots in the chains with his meaty hands. I hope his fraternity ring gets caught in the links, and I tell him as much. If he hears me, he doesn't respond. Like Betsy, Haringa has trained him right.

The professor leans over me, smiling. His teeth seem too big, just like Mac's did in that diner halfway across the country. That seems so long ago now, but time is funny that way, especially if you are under the influence of psychedelics. Then I notice the knife in Haringa's hand. It catches the light just so, and I see myself reflected in the blade. Two things occur to me as I stare at myself in the blade.

One: I need a shave.

Two: I am in deep shit.

At that moment, I feel my old friends fear and loathing. They grip my heart and rape my soul. I think about my wife and son. I don't talk or write about them much, for they are rarely part of the story and some things should be kept private. But I miss them now. Why, oh why did I send them back to Washington, DC? Perhaps if they had stayed in Woody Creek with me, living amongst the fan mail and peacock guts, I'd have never gone on this journey in the first place. I wonder if I will ever see them again? It's not looking good.

“And what is Lono,” Haringa continues, “but the god of fertility? Indeed, one of the few gods who existed before the world itself was created. Then there was Captain Cook, whose arrival on Kealakekua under a white sail was taken as a sign. Are you a god, Mr. Lono, a dead god who lies dreaming? Did you take the name, when you decided to go undercover . . .
or did the name take you
?”

My head is swimming as he goes on and on, and the shrooms are playing my synapses like a harp. My nervous system snakes out of my skin in every direction, growing like twisted ivy, seeking something, anything. The knife is so big, the kind I'd use to hack open a pineapple back in Puerto Rico, the sort I'd sometimes find myself waving overhead, screaming as I tore down one hallway or other, in pursuit of a story or a source or a criminal or just good, clean fun. The ceiling disappears and the moon is in the coffeehouse, even though it was daylight outside. Jack Kirby's disembodied head comes flying toward me, originating from somewhere beyond my point of vision. He has bird wings where his ears should be, and his teeth are clamped down on a massive cigar. Kirby's flying head flutters around me, darting down and then soaring back up again. I try to speak, try to ask it where Nixon and Kissinger are, and why I'm not back beneath the White House again, but I've forgotten how to talk and my tongue doesn't feel like it belongs to me anymore. The head flies away, back to whatever subconscious depths it spawned from. I hear waves crashing on some unseen shore. I hear screams. I hear a whisper in the darkness and rats in the walls. Something is calling my name. I see a sign overhead for yet another Odd Fellows club, except that I am still in the Miskatonic coffeehouse. I smell fish and incense, feces and barley. Then those smells give way to the stench of motor oil and brine. My fingers scrape asphalt, dip into the sea. And the ground begins to shake. Something wicked slouches toward Arkham to be born. I gird myself, expecting great and terrible violence as the bowl of wrath is dumped upon us.

“You'll have to forgive me,” Haringa says. He doesn't notice the rumbling, or the strange smells, or Jack Kirby's head, or my limbs extending off to the horizon in the four directions, or if he does, then he's too full of the sort of hubris generally only found in movie villains to comment on them or look out the fucking window to see for himself what's approaching. “Well, I'm speaking figuratively. Forgiveness really doesn't play into this. What I'm doing is beyond forgiveness, beyond good and evil. Academics like myself aren't much for practical endeavors, but you know that already, I am sure. I meant it when I said that I was an admirer of your work. I hope there are no hard feelings. In truth, I'm reasonably sure this won't even work, but when an opportunity like this presents itself, one must get one's hands dirty. You're just a man, almost certainly, but the cosmic resonances should count for something, just as they did for Cook, for Cortés, whom the Aztecs believed to be Quetzalcoatl, for—”

And then a huge white sail bursts through the wall. Bricks and mortar erupt like a volcano. I'm on my side, and the table is splintering against my back. The moon is gone and it is daylight again. Betsy trips right over me and I end up under her skirt. White cotton panties, another sail. I can see her outline beneath them, the petals of an exotic yet poisonous flower. Someone steps on my palm, back where it belongs at the end of my ordinary mortal left arm. And . . . ho, ho! The chains are gone. Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, I am free at last! The visions cease, dissipating the way a dream does shortly after you wake up. I pull myself to my feet and there, in the scattered remains of the little campus coffeehouse, I see the cab of a black tractor-trailer that has been driven through the wall. The engine idles like a dragon, and behind the wheel sits Smitty, his eyes as wide as twin moons.

“I'm here for you!” he bellows. He raises his palms like a supplicant, and I notice something wrong with his hands. “Lono, I am here for you! Don't be afraid!”

“Sweet Jesus . . .” I cough, and it hurts my chest to do so. When I gasp for breath, I inhale dust and smoke.

Betsy takes my throbbing hand. I confirm that she has five fingers instead of six, and then I allow the gesture, wondering to myself if she changes sides every time someone new enters the room. She's American, so probably—a dandelion seed on the wind. Cheering for and whoring herself out to whoever is the winning team this week. A light fixture creaks overhead, swinging back and forth, dangling from its wire. Dust swirls in the air. Haringa and the Nixon Youth have fled amidst the carnage. I didn't even see them leave, but when I check beneath the rubble, hoping to find their mangled remains, there's not even a bloodstain. I do, however, find some cast-off newspapers amidst the wreckage. One of each, this morning's editions, just like the ones I threw away and then burned. Fate is smiling down upon me once again. I roll them up and stick them in my back pocket. Then I pull out a crumpled cigarette pack. To my dismay, it is empty. I turn to Betsy and say, “You got a cigarette?”

“No, Mr. Lono. I don't smoke.”

“We'll fix that. There is trouble ahead, and probably bloodshed, and if you're going to be my assistant, you'll need to carry a pack on you at all times.”

She nods, and then asks, “What do we do now?”

“Are you hungry? I'm hungry. Eating mushrooms and saving the world helps one work up quite an appetite.”

“Um . . . I know where some good restaurants are.”

“No need. I am in the mood for spaghetti.”

——

Smitty's ability to drive is something deeper than a skill; the fungus from Yuggoth has written it into his veins. I'm next to him, checking the newspapers and pointing. Betsy sits next to me, but she doesn't spend any time off campus, so has no idea where the firehouse is, or what sort of people will be at the spaghetti dinner. I notice a nub on the blade of Smitty's right hand as he makes a hard right up a hill. The truck is way too large for Arkham's tight corners and seventeenth-century streets, but somehow Smitty does it. I try not to think of what I see: that he's growing a sixth finger on at least one of his hands, and that his body is already adjusting by giving him the dexterity to navigate the doglegs and dead ends of this witch-cursed town. Either I'm still hallucinating, and at least half of this isn't really happening—a possibility that is entirely possible, and sort of comforting—or Smitty is turning into a Cannock, the poor bastard.

“You're really taking this in stride,” I say to Smitty. It takes me a moment to realize that he just said the same exact words, at the same exact time, to me. The shrooms, of course. Has to be. There's no other explanation.

Smitty says that he didn't know where he was . . . No, scratch that, that he didn't know where anything else in the universe was except for himself, and for me, when he woke up and I was gone. “So I came looking for you. I reckoned you'd be an easy man to find, provided I looked in the right place, and sure enough, here you are! Ain't it grand? We're linked now, you and me. We've shared communion. You were right about those mushrooms, Lono. You really opened my eyes to things. I'm here to help, if I can.”

“I appreciate it,” I say, and I really do. “I owe you one, and that is a rare thing.”

Time has slipped sideways on us once again—another side effect of the psychedelic mushrooms. There is no possible way Smitty could have driven the distance in the short amount of time since I've last seen him, and yet here he is, and who am I to argue with the space-time continuum? My right hand still throbs; I hope it's because Haringa stepped on it when he ran off and not because I'm budding a new appendage. The shrooms could be the source of Smitty's new finger. Ingesting them could be what's turning him into a Cannock. I think of the vagrant back at the bus station in Denver. Was that what had happened to him? Could he have partaken of a fungus from a Yuggoth junkie and grown his tentacle as a result? I try to remember how many fingers he had on each hand, but I can't. Jack Kirby has eaten that time away from me. Sweet fucking Jesus, don't let me turn into one. There are enough people in this world, editors included, who already think I'm a brain-damaged geek without me having six fingers on each hand or sprouting tentacles from my face. Although it does occur to me that an extra penis might be fun . . .

Betsy's quiet but even as I think that she begins to speak again. “I'm sorry, Mr. Lono, I—”

“Please, call me
Uncle
Lono. And no, I understand. I read your notes, remember? It must be hard for a young woman, so far away from home for the first time, encountering a strong, charismatic fellow who claims to have all the answers, and who smells like a fine, peaty Scotch. I almost fell in love with Professor Haringa myself. He's a charming bastard.”

She buys it and smiles. That takes care of that, for the time being at least. Now, what other business do I need to attend to? What else needs sorting out? Dare I start thinking about how to dump Smitty, who was kind enough to roar across a quarter of the country, breaking the laws of physics to save my life and my soul from some bloody pagan sacrifice, especially given that the trucker can most likely read my mind, and is almost certainly at this moment figuring out a way to separate Betsy from me so that he can sneak a roofie or two into
her
spaghetti dinner when we find the fire station and take her back to the Midwest—next thing she knows she's popping out six-fingered Cannock children and living in a depressing, rundown industrial town that doesn't happen to have a college in it. This is the future of America. I know. I can see it. I have special powers. Nightmare found, the New Normal perceived and tangled with, mission accomplished. But no, Smitty wouldn't do that, would he? Just because he's about to have an extra finger on each hand, that doesn't mean he'd betray me. We are linked, as he said. These damned drugs have made me paranoid. I need to focus.

“So,” I ask, turning to Betsy once again. “What's the real deal here? Tell Uncle Lono a story.”

“The plan is this,” Betsy says. “Infiltrate the Democratic Party with secret Republicans. Maybe it's too late for 1972, but it won't be in 1976. If a Democrat wins, it'll be a Southern conservative. To the people, he'll appear different, but he won't be, really. And then we keep up the illusion of the two-party system, and all the while, it's really just us. If, in time, we eventually end up electing a black president, or a Hispanic, or a woman, they'll be conservatives too. But to sell it to the masses, they'll
look
liberal; they'll smell the way liberals smell.”

“How do liberals smell? Like marijuana, maybe?” I ask, but it's Smitty who answers. Our mental connection must not be complete, as his answer surprises me. “Liberals smell like the perfumes you can't afford, and that queasy nauseated feeling you get when you realize that you did something wrong, but trying to fix it won't help.”

He's talking differently now. Whatever changes are occurring inside of him are altering more than just his body chemistry. His language centers have been impacted, too. There wasn't an
ain't
or a
reckon
in that entire speech. He sails over a ridge and the truck rumbles hard. Smitty hits the air horn and shouts, “Gooks! Gooks! Gooks!” Then he howls like a wounded beast, a once brave and muscled bull whose leg has gone lame and whose calves have been torn to shreds by waiting hyenas in the bad distance just too long to reach. “There, I said it and I like saying it and I don't like having to pretend that everyone around me is a human being because the plain and simple fact of the matter is that most of them aren't!”