Move Under Ground, Nick Mamatas [reading rainbow books .txt] 📗

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 just 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.

Out back was a huge expanse of blasted prairie. White wheat, smacked flat against the earth, crunched under my feet. Neal was easy to find, he was sticking right up and gesturing at the sky, and two girls were sitting on either side of him. Both of them were thin little things, thinner than he liked usually, with long ironed hair, one a dirty blonde, the other with glasses and hair like bootblack. They turned when they heard me but Neal didn’t. He kept his back to me, one hand on his hip and the left outstretched towards the sky. He knew me though and said “Hi Jack, look!” And I looked right over his shoulder and at his hand. His forefinger and thumb were crooked to look like the letter C, and I looked through them (the moon wasn’t bright, but I could see starlight glinting in his fingernails) and saw a star.

“So, which one of the stars on Orion’s belt do you want to see me put out? Huh? Don’t believe me? I can see you frowning, I have eyes in the back of my head.” He laughed and the girls chuckled supportively. Neal squeezed his fingers shut. Something sizzled, like a chick lighting a cigarette, but neither of them had one, and when Neal took his hand down, the star on the left end of the constellation was missing.

“Cute,” I said, looking up, squinting, trying to look for the tendril of cloud obscuring the star, but there was nothing. The sky was empty of anything but tiny white stars—even the tentacles, the wrathful face of Cthulhu and his burning moon-eye, were all gone. Just like that little star. It didn’t twinkle; it was gone.

“I put out a star. A few are missing, do you notice them, or, heh heh, do you notice not them? There’s a little poem for ya. Ever do astronomy in Boy Scouts, Jack?” Neal asked. I looked down, and the girl with the bootblack hair looked up at me and said, “It’s true. Look at the Big Dipper.” I couldn’t bear to crane my neck up that high; I just did not want to see what Neal was doing to the sky. “You’re going off the deep end,” I told him. “Listen. Don’t you remember the kids?”

“Oh yeah. Yeah, the kids,” he said, and he squeezed his fingers shut again, just like snuffing out a candle. “Poor kids, poor old things, but there’s no free ride out here, you know. The wheel just keeps on turning, and if in this life you don’t get a chance to fall into bed with a belly full of beer and a lovely girl, then maybe in the next, you know. Got to look at the big picture, the big paint-splattered action painting.” He turned to me, “The universe is a Jackson Pollock. I guess we’re all just a bunch of drips and—!” he said, and then the nervous heh heh hehs of Neal’s craziness ate the rest of his sentence. He turned back to the sky and went back to putting out stars.

Back inside I stepped over tangled messes of tramps and musicians with scraggly beards, kicking past comic books and bongo drums and empty bottles, and took up the steps to find Bill. He was up in his boyhood bedroom, sitting on the side of the bed like a bus was about to pull in and take him downtown to the Woolworth’s, reading a little pulp digest. He looked up at me with his wide and tired eyes, went “Hmph” and then turned back to his magazine.

“Neal is putting out the stars. He holds his fingers up and crushes the life out of them right up there in the sky. I stared at where one used to be; it wasn’t twinkling. He’s doing it.”

“Impossible,” Bill muttered. He licked his finger and turned the page.

“No, it isn’t! I saw it … “

“Co-in-ciDENCE!” he barked. Bill finally set aside his magazine, leaving it open face down like a tent so he could get back to the short story he was reading. I saw the cover. Something named Super Science Stories, it was yellowed and dog-eared (like Bill himself, already, his habit having stolen life’s best years) with a pin-up girl, naked except for a green sheet, on the cover. Lightning spilled from her fingertips and above her: a city-sized foo fighter drifted in space. “Look, there’s no way, no matter what powers Neal may