The Damned Highway (14 page)

Haringa doesn't speak. His jaw tightens and the side of his face begins to twitch as he grips the knife.

“Now what's this?” I say. “Pure pulp fiction, baby. Like something out of
Weird Tales
. Your enemy is helpless before you, held fast by a band of nameless stooges—” One of the Nixon Youth pipes up to introduce himself as Jason, and I say, “Oh, shut the hell up, son,” to him and then, to the room, “and you're going to complete a human sacrifice right here and now. Cut open my chest with a kitchen knife, right here in the fire hall—because that won't take twenty minutes and it'll make Betsy cry and strong men turn their heads—and hold my heart aloft and expect cheers and stiff-armed salutes? I told you before that you were dreaming, you brain-dead baboon, but now I know what dream you have. It's the dead dream of a fascist America. You and the rest of your kind. You're nothing more than this generation's fascists, dressed up as something else. Well, forget it, pal—real proud Americans are too cantankerous, ornery, and, frankly, dumb-ass donkey stubborn to be taken in by a silk-briefs-wearing lowlife water head like you.”

Haringa looks over at the crowd, and my eyes follow him. With a terrible, cold, sinking feeling in my gut, I suddenly realize that I am wrong. The local Democratic Party establishment—union shop stewards, ward bosses, dues-paying Irish-American patriarchs with beet-red noses and beer guts and enough adult kids to swing an entire voting district with just a word at the dinner table, shell-shocked Vietnam veterans with the DTs and haunted eyes, the sprinkling of black, Asian, and other racial minorities in this little New England city—is wanting a show. Smitty's head is in his hands. I can hear him sobbing. It's Betsy who stands up on the table like a Wobbly firebrand and shouts, “What's wrong with all of you numb nuts?” I suspect that
numb nuts
is not a phrase she would have used before coming into my vector. She shakes her fist at them. “Don't you people see? Wake up. The whole two-party system is a joke! A trap for the working class!” She jabs her finger at Haringa. “What that man is suggesting is that you all betray yourselves and your own interests for his sake and the sake of his extradimensional masters!”

“Yeah, where is . . .
Moloch
in all of this?” I ask. Betsy blinks, confused. She must have been absent from class that day. “Are you lot,” I ask the crowd, “really ready to risk the wrath of Moloch, to tie yourselves to some new master you've never seen, one you can't even conceive of properly? Is that what you're doing here?” Murmurs erupt from the crowd, as if in a film. My old friend, Professor Haringa, looks like he's just going to stick me and fling my entrails to the crowd, caring less about sacrifice than spectacle, but he decides he can still win this and turns back to the microphone on the podium. He clears his throat, and the room falls silent again.

“Good question; even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Where
is
Moloch in all this? Did you know that Allen Ginsberg once wrote a poem about Moloch?” If Haringa expects the name Ginsberg to mean all that much to this crowd—maybe he thinks America has shifted that much to the left, thanks to Red Chinese telepathy and hippie sex magic right out of the
Kama Sutra
, or maybe he really doesn't even know a blue-collar worker when he sees one—he has miscalculated. You can see it in their eyes and in their expressions. They pass right over “Beat poet” and even “homosexual” and “pederast” and alight instead on “Jew,” which the collective mind of Arkham could tell just from his name. Oh, don't get me wrong. They certainly know better than to fly right into an anti-Semitic rage in public—these are Democrats we're talking about, after all, and they are in the Northeast. But the discomfort is there all the same, an almost tangible presence hovering over them and filling the hall. The professor is seemingly oblivious to the change in the air. “And he wrote, among other things, that Moloch was a cocksucker!” Haringa says with a thump of his fist.

“Take off your shoe,” I tell him. “Smack the podium with it. The echo will last longer! Trust me. I've spoken on campus a time or two.”

“And please . . . please pardon my coarse language,” he tells the crowd, ignoring me. “But I have no problem saying that, even in mixed company, because, you know what, my friends? I speak the truth. It's absolutely true. This
storyteller
”—he says the word like one says
phlegm
—“is right about that much. Where is Moloch in all this? Didn't you give your souls and lives to Moloch, and the souls and lives of your children to Moloch, just for some safety and security? Wasn't the mill his church, the great steaming vats of dye his altar? But how many mills are still in operation in Arkham, or in Innsmouth, or in North Adams, or in Salem, or anywhere else in this great state? Few or none, my friends. Few or none. And I'll tell you something else. The same poet wrote that Moloch's eyes were a thousand blind windows. Well, the smashed-out windows of the mills along the river are certainly blind now, aren't they? Think about that for a moment, because the truth is this:
Moloch has abandoned you
. That might be unpalatable to hear, but it is true nevertheless. The sacrifice of your children no longer sustains him. He has taken his appetites elsewhere.”

The worst part of Haringa's speech is that he's right, in his own way. That's the unbelievable truth about Nixon and his acolytes—they're right, or at least not any more wrong than the Democrats, who are spending all sorts of furious energy making sure that they lose the election while their children are sacrificed in the jungles of Vietnam and campuses like Kent State. But no politician and certainly no academic or cult leader has ever gotten anywhere in America, in
the Republic
, by being so transparently right. The same holds true here in the fire hall, because everyone's confused now.

“No!” A shout from the crowd. Spaghetti hits the floor. A plate explodes into a hundred porcelain shards. “Moloch lives! You lie, professor!
Moloch lives still!
”

The crowd surges, and Betsy falls into it. I lose track of Smitty. Our mental link is at least temporarily severed. Haringa grabs the ward boss and puts the knife to his neck. He hisses something at the ward boss through clenched teeth, but I can't hear what it is. The Democrats surge toward the podium, but not in a rage. They're upset, weeping, like a bunch of spoiled children who have just been told that there ain't no such thing as Santa Claus after having spent an hour in line to get their pictures taken at the shopping center with the old cotton-bearded saint. They want an official denial, a careful hug, and a sprinkle of pixie dust, but all kids in that situation ever see is the undeniable truth of an old drunk in a stained suit, with an obvious erection and bad breath and a pair of cotton balls Scotch taped to his eyebrows for effect. But to Republicans, common workingmen and women in a group, riled in action, is threat enough, even if all they want is to be lied to again and put back to sleep.

The college boys holding me fast go pale, their hands ice cold on my skin; I can even feel the confidence leave the bodies of the two holding my legs through my pants. The last vestiges of the mushroom are leaving my body now, and despite the chaos around me, the realization leaves me a little sad. Man, I need to find some Cannocks tonight, if just for more fungus. The Nazi sophomore who calls himself Jason loosens his grip just enough for me to sweep my leg free and send him tumbling. He squawks like a pelican in heat and crashes into a folding table, sending cheap silverware and plates of half-eaten spaghetti to the floor. I twist out of the grips of the others and snag the other serrated knife that Haringa left lying on the table. He's a murderer, but he's no fighter. Hands up, he drops his knife, releases the ward boss, and backs off. The ward boss runs to the back door, which is just as locked as it was when I tried it. Sadly, his attempt doesn't send him falling to the tiles like it did me. I wave the knife around and shout, making sure I can be heard above the cries and protests of the crowd. “Okay, boys and girls. Which one of you melon heads wants to be opened up first? Let's see the homunculi inside you all, pulling the levers and twisting dials! Nobody, eh? Smitty!”

He's wrestling with a particularly large Teamster member. He pops the man in the mouth with his misshapen hand and turns to me. “Yes, Lono?”

“Get us out of here, pronto!”

“Sure thing, boss!”

I still don't know if I can trust him or not, but right now, I can't afford to be choosy. It's Smitty or the gallows, I'm afraid. Smitty runs to get the truck while his opponent totters back and forth on his heels, wiping blood from his mouth and staring at it as if disbelieving it belongs to him. A few of the man's harder union brothers finally show their teeth, armed with three-tined forks and blunt butter knives. Nothing's worse than a disillusioned believer, a bitter romantic, except for a bunch of them who've had their dinner interrupted as well. At that moment, I am filled with longing for my little canister of CS gas. Wonderful thing, CS gas. Most people know it as tear gas, but I've become something of an expert on it over time, as it's gotten me out of more than one hairy situation, and I know facts about it that the common man doesn't. I'm a big believer, you could say. I know that CS stands for Corson and Stoughton, the two American scientists who developed the chemical compound while at Middlebury College in Vermont. It occurs to me that Middlebury isn't that far from where I am now. Perhaps when this entire cursed escapade is over, and I've made all the bastards pay, I'll take a trip to the Middlebury campus—make a CS pilgrimage of sorts. I wonder if they have a memorial garden erected in Corson and Stoughton's honor. If not, they should.

Ah, CS gas, my best friend, why did I leave you behind in the kit bag? Journalistic ethics, perhaps? The editorial demand for disinterested objectivity? What horrifying mind rot. The plain truth is that the Kissingers of the world should be strapped down and dosed, over and over, with questions about Vietnam and the bombing of Cambodia and the Bilderberg Group and Soviet Jews, and Mamie Van Doren machine-guns at him until he confesses between big, froggy sobs. It doesn't even need to be me manning the gas canister; I could train Frank McGee and Barbara Walters to do it in five minutes. That's how easy it is. And McGee would do it, too. He's a born sadomasochist. Ask anyone in our line of work. But I digress, and as one of the apelike Democrats feints at me with a fork, I poke at him with Haringa's knife, and then run out into the night, gibbering like a loon. Smitty has undone his tractor from its trailer and is ready, cab doors hanging open. I hop in and without a word, we roar off into the dusk as the Arkham branch of the county committee pours out of the fire station after us.

“I hope that cargo you were hauling wasn't too precious,” I say.

“It's fine,” Smitty says, “the trailer was just full of Innsmouthians.” He nods toward the rear-view mirror on the passenger side and I look into it to see a massacre on. The Innsmouthians, squat and hunchbacked, and resembling bloated human frogs, have pushed into the Arkhamite swarm in a perfect V formation, outnumbered but never outmuscled.

“Sweet Jesus . . .” I want to say more, but this is one of those rare moments when I am confronted with something that leaves me speechless.

“That was the worst dinner I ever had, Lono,” Smitty says. “I get invited to a lot of them, you see. People in this country, they like truckers. They think we're the salt of the earth. The Essential Saltes from which some proletarian Golden Age can be resurrected—”

“What?”

“Huh?”

“Do you often use words you don't understand?”

“Just started recently, Mr. Lono, since I met you. I think you're a good influence on me.”

“Me . . . or the fungi?”

“Oh, you, Mr. Lono. Definitely you.” He licks his lips. “I wish I'd stayed in college instead of going to Nam. That Betsy was a piece of . . . She was something, don't you think?”

“She can fill out a sweater,” I say. “That seems to be an Arkham trait.” Now that the adrenaline dump has worn off, my arms and legs are trailed with bruises, most of them resembling more the marks left behind by a squid's suckers than fingers and palms.

“It sure ain't an Innsmouth trait,” Smitty says. “And that's where we're headed.”

“Oh, are we?” I glance down at the knife. The trucker is a good guy, and he's in this mess only because I slipped him a mickey and blew open the doors of consciousness as payment for giving me a lift, but I could still do him. Somewhere deep down inside of me, I'm sure I have it in my heart to grab the clutch, slam my foot on the brake, and gut another human being without flipping over the truck I don't know how to drive and don't have the stamina for. I know I can do it because I know I'm still human, and humans can do anything they put their minds to, the poor fucking bastards.
Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night wind, and play by day amongst the catacombs of Nephren-Ka in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile. I know that light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gaiety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid; yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage.

“What?” Smitty barks.

“Huh?” I say.

“You just said a whole bunch of things about Egypt and whatnot. Mocking and friendly ghouls?”

“Oh,” I say. “Never mind that. What is going on with you, Smitty?”

“What do you mean, Lono?”

“I mean . . . I don't know what I mean, damn it, and that's the frustrating part. These shrooms. They're aggravating, aren't they? I can't tell fantasy from reality anymore, and that's not a good state for someone like me to be in all the time. I need my wits about me, for there is dirty work ahead. Everything keeps changing.
You're
changing . . .”