Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival (12 page)

Maybe he wasn't even really there. Maybe he
was a figment of Jesse's imagination. Maybe Jesse, fueled by the
acid he'd just dropped, had simply plucked the enigmatic drawing
from all those bottles of port and dropped it out here in the
desert. Maybe all that was really standing there was a cactus.

No. No chance the acid had worked its way
into his system enough to produce full-blown hallucinations like
that. Not that quick. Whoever was standing out there, was really
standing out there.

Jesse couldn't shake the feeling that the
stranger was staring right at him. Studying him.

Without apparent cause, the stranger turned
away and receded down a hill, seeming to Jesse to sink into the
earth. A few moments later, Jesse heard the sound of hoofsteps on
the desert floor, and the whinnie of the stranger's steed. A dust
cloud kicked up over the hill, as though the Sandeman figure had
disappeared into the mist.

Jesse's heart pounded. He took off in a
full-bore sprint towards the lights of Bridgetown, motivated by a
primal anxiety.

Who was that?

Jesse made a promise to himself right then
and there: no more late-night wanderings through the desert.

Main Street grew nearer,
and he grew more winded.
Wind
.

The wind cupped him, pushed him on a wave of
supersonic air. He no longer felt agency over his own body. Time
blurred. Every thought he had—the sentences he spoke to himself, in
his mind—seemed constructed of preformed bits of semantic data. A
globe of letter-adorned puzzle pieces appeared before his mind's
eye. It clicked and clacked as the pieces slid into different
configurations, each time forming another word out and appending it
to the sentence being constructed in his head as he thought the
words, in real-time.

His cognitive processes, pulled back and
revealed to be what they were. All of his perception, all of his
thoughts, the product of a machine. A biological clockwork. And
like all machines, his mind was subject to periodic
malfunction.

Again, Jesse considered the possibility of
hallucination. That's all this whole time travel thing was, right?
A bad dream. A delusion, a hiccup of insanity in an otherwise sane
individual. And as these thoughts were constructed by the
letter-globe, he calmed. He'd survive this trip, and all would
return to normal. Soon, he'd awaken in the desert of 1970,
surrounded by his acolytes, and Susanna, and Wayne. Not the rich,
powerful Wayne who owned this land and pumped the oil from its
veins and planted his seed in Jesse's lover, but the mewling,
pathetic Wayne who lived in Jesse's shadow, as he always had.

No! No, that couldn't be. Jesse had never
tripped like this before. It was too real, too literal. This was
reality.

His foot caught on a rock. He landed
face-first in the dry soil. The supersonic air wave was gone.

Silence.

Jesse's face throbbed. He
got to his feet and was nearly blinded by the light of Bridgetown's
Main Street. Surely there was no reason for this place to be so lit
up at this late hour. But it was a gesture, wasn't it? That
Bridgetown, under the dazzling genius and unyielding vision of
Wayne Cole, had created daylight where there was none. A
halogen-powered, chest-out defiant middle finger towards God
himself.
The light bulb.

Jesse wondered what Thomas Edison was doing
at the moment, and if he had any dark intuition in the pit of his
stomach that told him forces of fate larger than himself had
replaced him.

A commotion broke out several storefronts
down the street, kitty-corner from the general store that Jesse had
entered hours earlier. Two strongarms threw a drunkard out the
front of the building. The man sloppily tossed insults at the pair,
who dismissed him with a wave and went back into the warm light of
the building. The drunk stumbled away, punctuating the moment with
a toe-kick in the dirt road.

Jesse gave it a moment, waiting for the man
to leave the scene, then made his way towards the saloon. The amber
tones of an old piano, and the rowdy laughter of patrons, drifted
out past the doorway. He was a bit disappointed to note that there
weren't any swinging double-doors, just a regular, and fairly
narrow, brass-knobbed door coated in a deep red.

A painted wooden panel hung on a leather
strap next to the doorway. Jesse squinted under the bare porch
light's wavering glow to read what it said:

On the eighteenth of November, one year
before,
Los Angeles cried, "Sabbath's dry, evermore!"
So at Bridgetown rendezvous,
Raise a glass and put up yer shoe,
For here ye may pay penance with a whore.

Issuing a snort, Jesse entered the warm light
and warmer air of the saloon. It was a long, narrow, stuffy brick
oven of an establishment. The bar ran lengthwise along the left
side. A bartender with a thoroughly impressive waxed mustache and a
rather dapper vest busily served up a line of patrons in bowler
hats and three-piece suits. For a bunch of rowdy drunks, these guys
sure weren't cutting any sartorial corners.

The floor was covered in spent peanut shells,
and the air hung thick with smoke that wafted up from around the
five card tables packed with men playing games. A staircase of
treacherously tall steps drew Jesse's eyes upwards, to the sensuous
mysteries of the second floor, from which a brilliant red light
emanated.

Jesse noticed, too, that there was something
of a culture divide in this place. The first group was typified by
the men at the bar, in their bowler hats, engaging in a kind of
general ribald merriment. These men were of the age to have
families, to be feeling the wear and tear of a hard life's work on
their knees and shoulders; they were here, no doubt, to lubricate
their hardscrabble lives in this dusty place beyond proper
civilization.

Then there was the second group, which hung
closer to the dark recesses of the saloon. These men were younger,
dressed in dark dusters and ponchos and seeming to have all the
humor of an undertaker's convention. Their hair was long, their
faces rough with dark stubble. They kept amongst themselves, only
occasionally giving shifty glances in Jesse's direction. A few of
them sat at one of the tables, playing a mostly-silent game of
poker. The rest kept by a closed door at the rear.

A bordello girl came down the staircase,
emerging from the bath of red light of the upstairs. She wore a
bodice that pushed her chest up front and center, and a long
trailing dress. She wore her hair up, and even in the ambient
darkness, Jesse could see just how much makeup she wore. She
approached one of the men in the back, the grim men of the second
group, with the kind of casual familiarity that suggested he was
one of her regulars. When he saw her, his po-faced seriousness gave
way to a slight grin he paired with a nod of recognition. She took
him by his hand that wasn't holding his drink, and he gave no
resistance. She led him up the staircase and they disappeared
around the bend. The others resumed their quiet murmuring.

Jesse turned his attention towards the bar.
He found a free space between a couple of patrons and flagged the
bartender with a wave. The bartender gave him a nod that said he'd
be with him just as soon as he could.

Waiting, Jesse's eyes came to rest on the
ornate Victorian wallpaper that covered the wall behind the bar.
Its vine-like patterns shifted and grew, slowly but infinitely. The
lysergic acid had its hold on his perception. He was so transfixed
by the illusion, he almost tuned out the man shouting in his left
ear:

"Not gonna find a good time like this back in
ole Los Angeles, are ya?"

"I'm sorry?" Jesse said.

"No, sir—not any more," the man said. He had
a ruddy, bulbous nose that, in Jesse's present state, appeared to
expand and contract with a bellows-like rhythm. A prodigious grey
moustache kept his upper lip safely under wraps.

"You want real
frontera
spirit these
days," the man went on, unprompted, "You gotta come to Bridgetown.
Though for how much longer that'll be the case, I can't say." The
man issued this lament with a huff. "Earl McInnis." He stuck a
sausage-fingered hand out. Jesse shook it.

"Jesse."

"Pleased to meet you." Earl took a sip of his
outland grog.

Jesse turned his attention back to the
bartender, seeking to re-up his beverage contract with another lock
of the eyes. Earl, however, had different designs. He shook Jesse's
arm, tugging the way a 200-pound toddler might at his mother's
dress.

"Yessir, it's a mighty shame."

Jesse took the bait. "What's a shame,
Earl?"

"Money. Don't get me wrong, I like money. I
like having money. But these grave robbers from the east are going
to wipe us off the map."

"How's that?"

"Mr. such-and-such up there on the hill,
living in his glass palace. Taking peoples' land from right out of
their hands!" He thrust his open palms up to Jesse's face, as if
hoisting an invisible roast.

"You're talking about Wayne Cole, aren't
you?"

"You're damn right I am," Earl said. "We've
got people who planted their stakes in this ground fifty years
before that bastard ever showed his face. And next thing you know,
the sheriff's on their doorsteps with a piece of paper, and, an'—"
Earl was visibly red in the face, shaking his fists in little
tremulous bursts.

"You're saying he...took your land from you?
Wayne did?"

"Not I. But every one of those infernal black
machines out there, all around us, pumping and sucking that tar
from the earth. Each one's another story." Earl leaned back, past
the climax of his excitement now. "But I don't have to tell you
that, do I?"

Jesse furrowed his brows.

Earl wore a knowing, coy sort of expression.
"I see you come in here, another unfamiliar face. Eying the fellows
over there in the back, by the cellar. You're just waiting for
someone to give you a sign. To confirm that you're in the right
place." He leaned in close to Jesse for effect, again clutching
Jesse's arm. Jesse could smell the whiskey on his breath. "That's
them, all right. The Lotus Boys."

Jesse, of course, didn't
know what Earl was going on about. But he could put the pieces
together well enough to start to form a picture. A resistance
group, right here in little ole Bridgetown. A resistance against
his very own brother, no less! Wayne really had made the big
leagues.
The Lotus Boys.
It sounded fascinating. Jesse decided the best
way to satisfy his curiosity would be to play along.

"Oh," he said, with a knowing nod. "You're
one of the Lotus Boys."

Earl's eyebrows sloped up
with a kind of telegraphed mournfulness. "Aye, if only," he said.
He opened up his coat and spun around enough for Jesse to see that
his right leg was cut off beneath the knee. In its place was a
crude wooden peg. It seemed old-fashioned, even by this place's
standards. "But I support the cause," Earl said. "I support the
real people of Bridgetown.
The lights in
the sky o'er Bridgetown shine brightest at thee
."

This recitation struck Jesse. "The lights,"
he repeated.

Earl nodded. "Oh, those blessed, beautiful
lights that dance before Devil's Peak! Nowhere shall you find a
more striking affirmation of the glory of God." His eyes were far
off now, far beyond Jesse or the walls of the saloon. "Those lights
alone can drive a man closer to the Truth of the world, the Truth
in his heart. I've felt it, any man who's looked up to the sky and
felt their electrifying presence knows this. Mr. Black knows the
secrets of this place, that's why he fights to protect it."

Mr. Black.
The leader of the Lotus Boys?

Earl continued. "You know that strange
feeling that hits you in the gut when you look up at night and see
Devil's Peak, and understand in your heart of hearts that the
mountain's staring right into your soul? Black is bonded with that
power, he is of it." The man seemed almost to be in a trance now.
"He's not just a man, but a mystic. Descended from the union of the
Spanish and the Gabrieleno over a century ago."

His voice went quiet, so low Jesse could
barely hear him over the din of the saloon. "Some even suggest he's
immortal."

His fists clenched as they had a minute
earlier. His awe was replaced with an impassioned zeal. "Black and
his Lotus Boys will fight back against the scourge of Wayne Cole.
Against Cole's money, and his smokestacks! Our waters shall not run
rusty with his factory's poisons. Why, just today the Lotus Boys
bombed a hole in the side of that monument to human folly Cole's
erecting on our soil…"

But Jesse was no longer listening to Earl. He
was too preoccupied by what the one-legged man had said a moment
earlier. This 'Mr. Black'—if he truly knew the secrets of the
strange phenomena around Devil's Peak, he could be Jesse's way back
home. Was there even a chance Jesse could return to the Los Angeles
he knew, with Susanna at his side? Could this all be undone?

"Earl," Jesse said, interrupting the old
man's soliloquy.

"Hmm?"

"Do you think it's possible that Devil's Peak
might be—well, how do I put this?—a gateway of some sort? That it
could take you to another place, or another time?"

"The only certainty I harbor is that where
Devil's Peak is concerned, anything is possible."

"And if this were the case, you believe Mr.
Black would know about it?"

"Undoubtedly." Jesse considered the old
kook's words. He had no rational reason to believe him, but then
again he'd had no rational reason to believe a mountain could
swallow him whole and deposit him in the past.