William S. Burroughs (14 page)

"He'd jump at
an offer. He wants to go back to Minnesota, says it's too savage
here."

"When will he
be back?"

"Tomorrow. Went
to one of those Swede weddings...
"

Kim picks up a
long-barreled
22
revolver...

"That's got
twice the hit of a standard
22..."

"Who does the
work here?"

"I do. My uncle
don't know shit about guns...
"

"Like to work
for us?"

"Sure. My name
is Sven."

His ears wriggle.

Tom introduces Kim
to Chris Cullpepper, a wealthy, languid young man of exotic tastes.
He is into magic and has studied with Aleister Crowley and the Golden
Dawn. They decide on a preliminary evocation of Humwawa, Lord of
Abominations, to assess the strength and disposition of enemy
forces...

Since Humwawa is the
Lord of Things to Come, he is the Lord of Confrontation, and of the
Outcome of Battles...

The invocation is
conducted in a bare whitewashed room, the north wall missing, the
room opening onto a walled courtyard...Marbles, Boy, Tom, Sven,
Chris, and Kim take part
—
all in sky
clothes of course. As soon as Chris begins the evocation the
room turns icy cold...Demons writhe around them in a pantomime of
vicious hate, imitating sex acts, flopping and kicking and dancing
with tongues hanging down to the floor, twisting to show rectums,
giggling out spirals of sepia vapors that burn like acid...But now
they shrink back from the awesome breath of Humwawa, twisting in
deadly ferments, spewing yeasty vomits, intestines ruptured by
tearing farts, teeth and bones dissolving in body acids, tongues
splitting and squirming like severed worms, they sputter out in
nitrous smoke.

More advanced and
detailed incantations are carried out in the locker-room gymnasium of
an empty school that Chris owns..."All that young male energy,
so much better than a church my dead I mean my dear, all those
whining, sniveling prayers...
"

Musty male smells
drift from the lockers, from moldy gym shoes and yellowed jockstraps.
Kim puts his gun on the upper shelf with a frayed football
helmet...An oak bench smooth as amber, seasoned by generations of
young buttocks, a smell of stale sweat, rectal mucus, and adolescent
genitals rubs out with musk and hyacinth and rose oil as the boys sit
down side by side: Tom, Chris, Marbles, Boy, Sven and Kim, watching
each other for the moment when a leg is raised to shove down pants
and shorts...

A sharp ferret smell
cuts incense and perfume, as the boys stand up naked to hang their
clothes in the lockers. Kim looks at Marbles and catches his breath,
lips peeling back to show one sharp front tooth. The boy's flesh is
like pink marble, the buttocks smooth and shiny as polished
stone...His perfectly formed phallus is cool and smooth to the touch,
his eyes a smoky slate color, his hair ash blond and curly in a tight
casque around his head...

Sven's nostrils
flare, his ears wriggle and turn bright red, and a smell of the north
woods wafts out: pine and woodsmoke, leather clothes slept in all
winter and stale beds in rooms where the windows are never opened...

Chris has set up a
stone altar in the old gymnasium with candles and incense burners, a
crystal skull, a phallic doll carved from a mandrake root, and a
shrunken head from Ecuador.

Kim leans forward
and Marbles rubs the unguent up him with a slow circular twist as
Chris begins the evocation...

UTUL XUL

"We are the
children of the underworld, the bitter venom of the gods."

Kim feels Marbles's
smooth cock slide in.

"One that
haunts the streets, one that haunts the bed."

The walls open and
Kim sees a red desert under a purple sky.

"Their
habitations the desolate places, the lands between the lands, the
cities between the cities."

Kim sees a city of
red limestone where naked men slump in a strange lassitude, waiting.

"May the dead
arise and smell the incense."

Slow rhythmic
contraction of the smooth shiny buttocks entering his body,
impregnating him...Tom is changing into Mountfaucon, a tail sprouting
from his spine, sharp fox face and the musky reek.

XUL IA LELAL
ΙΑ
AXA AXA

Tom, red and peeled,
his hair standing up, his eyes lighting up inside with sputtering
blue fire...And Chris, his flexible spine undulating like a serpent,
bitter venom of the gods gathering in his crotch, phallus
straining up
...
throats swelling vibrating,
voices blending in the larynx
...
Tom is a
shimmering pearly mollusk, and Marbles a living shell...He is riding
the contractions like a cheetah across the red desert to the city
where naked men with antennae jutting from their hairless skulls
slump against smooth stone walls and steps...

A reek of alien
excrement and offal clings to the ancient stone and rises from open
street latrines. The naked men are waiting their turn on the
latrines, which accommodate six at once, lead troughs welded into
stone. The men slump with dead eyes, waiting to void their
phosphorescent excrement...

"The creation
of ANUS, the foundations of chaos."

Kim feels something
stir and stretch in his head as horns sprout...He writhes in agony,
in bone-wrenching spasms, as a blaze of silver light flares out from
his eyes in a flash that blows out the candles on the altar. The
crystal skull lights up with lambent blue fire, the shrunken
head gasps out a putrid spicy breath, the mandrake screams:

IA KINGU IA LELAL
ΙΑ
AXAAAAAAAAA

On the way back to
Clear Creek they stop at the Overlook Hotel in Boulder. The hotel is
almost empty and they take the whole top floor...

Sunrise outside, the
nacreous pinks and mother-of-pearl streaked with semen and roses,
pirate casks full of gold pieces and jewels, Tom's mouth opens,
gasping the alien medium of Kim's body. Kim picks a piece of bacon
from between his front teeth, his face blank and absent as the
polished blue sky behind him.

Doves fucking in the
morning and Tom leaps out of bed with a snarl of rage, grabs a tennis
racket that he finds in a corner and rushes onto the balcony,
slashing right and left. Bloody pigeons cascading to the street five
floors down. He draws the curtains and puts the tennis racket back in
its corner.

"Thus perish
all enemies of the human race," says Kim.

Tom's eyes glitter
in the darkened room...

Kim recruits a band
of flamboyant and picturesque outlaws, called the Wild Fruits. There
is the Crying Gun, who breaks into tears at the sight of his
opponent.

"What's the
matter, somebody take your lollipop?"

"Oh
senor,
I
am sorry for you...
"

And the Priest, who
goes into a gunfight giving his adversaries the last rites. And
the Blind Gun, who zeroes in with bat squeaks. And the famous
Shittin' Sheriff, turned outlaw. At the sight of his opponent he
turns green with fear and sometimes loses control of his bowels.
Well, there's an old adage in show biz: the worse the stage fright,
the better the performance.

Kim trains his men
to identify themselves with death. He takes some rookie guns out to a
dead horse rotting in the sun, eviscerated by vultures. Kim points to
the horse, steaming there in the noonday heat.

"All right,
roll
in it."

"WHAT?"

"Roll in it
like dogs of war. Get the stink of death into your chaps and your
boots and your guns and your hair."

Most of us puked at
first, but we got used to it, and vultures followed us around
hopefully.

We always ride into
town with the wind behind us, a wheeling cloud of vultures
overhead, beaks snapping. The townspeople gag and retch:

"My God,
what's that stink?"

"It's the stink
of death, citizens."

Kim had now gone
underground and in any case the days of the gunfighter were over. So
far as the world knew he was just a forgotten chapter in western
history. He was d-e-a-d. So who would move against him, or even know
about the Alamuts he was establishing throughout America and northern
Mexico? He had in fact taken pains to remain anonymous and dispatched
his henchmen to remove records of the Fort Johnson Incident from
libraries, newspaper morgues and even from private collections of old
western lore...So who now would know where he was and reveal
themselves by moves against him? He decided to wait and see. The
first settlement, a resort hotel at Clear Creek, demonstrated
that they did know and were already dispatching their agents to
intercept the project. It's rather like bullfighting, he reflected.
If the bull can get a
querencia
where he feels at home, then
the bullfighter has to go and get him on his own ground, so the alert
bull sticker will do anything to keep the bull from finding a
querencia.
In fact some unethical practitioners have small
boys posted with slingshots...

Well things start to
go wrong. Right away there are delays in shipments of material. These
were traced to a warehouse in Saint Louis and a certain shipping
clerk who was later found to be suffering from a form of
petit mal
with spells of amnesia. A small boy brought charges of
molestation against the foreman of construction. When the boy became
violently insane the charges were dropped, but not before a drummer
had attempted to incite the townspeople to form a lynch mob.

But an old farmer
who was one of our own said, "You live hereabouts, Mister?
Wouldn't say so from your accent...
"

"Well I live
north of here...
"

"You a country
boy?"

"Well I
was
...
that is
..."

"From Chicago,
ain't you?"

A murmur from the
crowd. The drummer is losing his audience.

"We have
children in Chicago too...
"

"Well whyn't
you stay up there and protect
your
children stead of selling
your lousy war-surplus hog fencing down here?"

Kim now realizes
that
they
can take over bodies and minds and use them for
their purposes. So why do they always take over stupid, bigoted
people or people who are retarded or psychotic? Obviously they are
looking for dupes and slaves, not for intelligent allies. In
fact their precise intention is to destroy human intelligence,
to blunt human awareness and to block human beings out of space. What
they are launching is an extermination program. And anyone who
has sufficient insight to suspect the existence of a
they
is
a prime target.

He listed the
objectives and characteristics of the aliens...

1.
They
support any dogmatic religious system that tends to stupefy and
degrade the worshipers. They support the Slave Gods. They want blind
obedience, not intelligent assessment. They stand in the way of every
increase in awareness. They only conceded a round earth and allowed
the development of science to realize the even more stupefying
potential of the Industrial Revolution.

2.
They
support any dogmatic authority. They are the arch-conservatives.

3.
They
lose no opportunity to invert human values. They are always
self-righteous. They have to be right because in human terms
they are wrong. Objective assessment drives them to hysterical
frenzy.

4.
They
are parasitic. They live in human minds and bodies.

5.
The
Industrial Revolution, with its overpopulation and emphasis on
quantity rather than quality, has given them a vast reservoir of
stupid bigoted uncritical human hosts. The rule of the majority is to
their advantage since the majority can always be manipulated.

6.
Their
most potent tool of manipulation is the word. The inner voice.

7.
They
will always support any measures that tend to stultify the human
host. They will increase the range of arbitrary and dogmatic
authority. They will move to make alcohol illegal. They will move to
regulate the possession of firearms. They will move to make drugs
illegal.