The Damned Highway (10 page)

“They were back then,” he says. “Extreme, I mean, not that other nasty business with the wire. But nowadays, Starry Wisdom is just another so-called”—and here Haringa raises his hands and flicks his fingers as though putting quotation marks around his exhalations, the sort of habit that normally earns a body a nose full of my forehead—“
New Age
religion. They congregate in airports and other public places, mostly selling trinkets like the one that fellow had around his neck, or trying to get people to sign up for their newsletter,
The Yellow Sign
. They did away with human sacrifice in the twenties.”

We take our seats and the stewardess brings us our drinks, as though she knew what we were going to order. I have two double Wild Turkeys, a bottle of Heineken, and a fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice. Professor Haringa has a martini as dry as the stewardess can make it, which, Haringa declares after a whiff, “is not very.” Soon enough, the airplane rockets down the tarmac, and then we're in the air. I've never minded flying, but I don't care for taking off and landing, and I find I do better with a drink in my hand. Luckily, I have two hands and two drinks. I make quick work of them both. Then I chase them down with the beer and the juice. Finally, I lean back in my seat and close my eyes. I plan on sleeping until we've landed in Arkham. After that, I'll pick up the rental car and make my way to Innsmouth. I consider asking the professor for his perceptions of the Innsmouth race riots, but he is already snoring. Apparently, he's tired, too. Shrugging, I decide to join him.

Witch-Cursed and Legend-Haunted . . . It's a Two-Newspaper Town, but Ain't Nothing Worth Reading . . . This Is Radio Dunwich . . . Perky Coeds and Puppy Love . . . Strange Rumblings at Miskatonic University . . . Spaghetti Dinners with the Nixon Youth . . . Moloch! . . . Race Riots Delivered to Your Door, Courtesy of the Teamsters Themselves . . . Never Trust an Intellectual, Even If He Has a Nixon Bumper Sticker Emblazoned on His Soul . . . Speak Softly, but Drive a Big Truck . . .

——

Arkham has two newspapers, which is pretty amazing given that there can't be more than fifty thousand people living in the town, which is only forty minutes outside of Boston, itself the home of the mighty
Boston Globe
. Not to mention the fact that everyone in the town seems walleyed and illiterate, a legion of drooling hatchlings all fired up just in time for election season! How long, oh Lord, how long? For a pair of dimes, I get copies of both the
Arkham Advertiser
and the
Arkham Gazette
. I buy one of each from the newsstand in the airport, and then I pick up my rental car.

The travel writer Howard Phillips, who wrote extensively about the New England area back in the 1930s, once described Arkham as an “ancient, moldering, and subtly fearsome town” that was “witch-cursed, legend-haunted” and whose “huddled, sagging gambrel roofs and crumbling Georgian balustrades brood out over the centuries beside the darkly muttering Miskatonic River.” Sort of purple and wordy, but you get the gist, eh? If there's an American Nightmare anywhere in this Norman Rockwell region, it's here. I was curious to see if that description still held water forty years later, but after about twenty minutes of skimming the pages of the paper and sipping some river-water coffee—an inexplicable local delicacy—I decide that I've about had my fill of both the town and its newspapers.

I still don't know what's going on, other than that two opposing deities, Moloch and Cthulhu, seem hell bent on getting their political spawn elected. With this in mind, it's pretty easy to figure out that the
Gazette
is the local Cthulhu rag, and the
Advertiser
's editorial board is Team Moloch through and through. Arkham is a twisted little burg, half desiccated mill town, half college town, with a black river cutting right through the city and leading to Boston Harbor. Even the greatest moonshine-addled John Bircher knows that Massachusetts will go to the Democrats in November, so what could the story possibly be in this poisonous, inbred little pit of a town? Eagleton out, and who . . . in? Or was it a black op by the Republicans—Eagleton appeared in my vision just as he had appeared before me in what I'm having increasing trouble calling real life. Eagleton strapped spread-eagled, taking electroshock to his groin and nipples . . . Was he the key to Democratic victory somehow, or would he be a pawn in a Byzantine plan to throw the election to Nixon? Eagleton's a Catholic, like Kennedy was, and a Harvard man, but he's also a whimpering midwestern simpleton. And if he wasn't before, the Kirby acid should have done something to him. And the connection to Arkham . . .

It's all in the newspapers. It always is. You can divine things from newspapers the same way you can from tea leaves or star patterns or a bloody pile of chicken guts. You just have to know what you're looking for. Reporters know how to read the hidden column inches, the grafs cut from the bottom and hidden from the gaping eyes of the upright, clueless citizen. The placement of ads, the pseudonyms used on the letters page, the increasing contamination of “op-ed” pages, almost all of which are written directly by Dick Nixon himself, that pathetic, pig-raping Quaker, always with an eye toward fairness and balance and the whole story, so long as the whole story is all about himself and his dark plans for America. The
Gazette
is a broadsheet, the
Advertiser
a tabloid—neither of them breaks the brains of its readers in the vocabulary department, but the former paper at least licks a sixth-grade reading level. My old friend Professor Haringa will probably be very pleased to sit on the commode reading the Saturday edition, a tune-up match for his manful tussling with the Sunday
New York Times
at brunch the next day. The
Gazette
's front page is a mix of Boston news and denunciations of the campus hippies and freaks, while the
Advertiser
leads with unemployment statistics and photos of dead boys in their dress blues. Nam has chewed up and spit out a full English of Arkham boys from the lower orders this past week: kids named Maciej, Pilonovsky, Serrano, and even a Negro named Washington.

But one curious thing catches my attention. It is the sort of thing that makes the hair on my arms tingle and gets my curiosity jiggling deep down in my journalistic loins. The papers have something in common—horoscopes with signs of the sort I've never seen before. Symbols are printed next to the signs in black and white. They are strange, eldritch things. Apparently, my sign is the Hound, and today's horoscope, which went to press just about the time I was squeezing Smiley's balls back in the airport, reads as follows:

Gazette
: Today the stars are right to discover that you are a part of something greater than yourself. Do away with the narcissism of the modern age and embrace your role in the universe.

Advertiser
: Hungry hounds today would do well to eat out; treat yourself to a spaghetti dinner or even some midnight pancakes tonight.

Hey, hey! A spaghetti dinner, just the sort of thing the Essex County Democratic Party Committee would throw in order to shore up the troops on the ground. And, lo verily, I spy an ad inviting “all and sundry” to just such a dinner. I should have packed a bib. Six p.m. at the village fire station. I've plenty of time to burn until then and not a lot of town to burn it in, so I decide to follow up on the only other lead I have—Miskatonic University. Professor Haringa gave me his card when we parted at the airport, and college campuses are still college campuses, after Austin, after Columbia, and even after Kent State. Perhaps more so now.

Miskatonic University was one of the also-rans for children of the wealthy too inbred and silly for the Ivy League, and its original curriculum was simple—law, clerical studies, and the classics of Greek and Latin. How to be bourgeois in four easy lessons, the first being simply the practical expression of that timeless recipe for success—selecting and then being born to wealthy, white, Protestant parents. Lacking the cachet, and the business college, of Harvard or Princeton, Miskatonic University's twentieth century was shaping up to be as dark as the rest of the town, Unspeakable Cults or no. But when the sixties swept through America, and when on a warm summer day in August several years ago, a former marine named Charles Whitman killed his wife and mother and then mounted that tower at UT–Austin and fired his opening salvo in the war against history by killing sixteen people and wounding over thirty more, Miskatonic was unmoved. Down in Morningside Heights, blocks from simmering Negro Harlem, the sons and daughters of privilege took to the barricades and threatened Aristotle, Spinoza, and Hume with expulsion, to be replaced by Marx, Lenin, and Mao. Miskatonic finally let up on its collar-length-hair rules in the same year. And when members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire into a crowd of student demonstrators, when campus quadrangles across the country went mad with the fever of revolution and dissent, Miskatonic, or at least one Professor Madison Haringa, who had certainly achieved tenure just at that very moment, found himself more interested in another shape: the trapezohedron—both the symbol of the Starry Wisdom Cult and, flattened as if by a rolling pin, the outline of the Miskatonic University campus.

I know this because I have been paying attention. I am not some talking head, some corporate toady filing empty bylines approved by the party of choice. No, I am something different. I am a writer, and a practitioner of ancient Gonzo wisdom.

My old friend, Professor Madison Haringa, is a member of the Starry Wisdom Cult; of that I have no doubt. My instincts are finely honed after years on the Freak Power beat; that he had found me was too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence; that he was so forthcoming with his invitation that my arrival would be the last thing he expected, that he was so loose with esoteric information that there must be another 777 layers of occult truth in the stacks of the special-collections room. Oh, he is good. He is crafty. But I am better. On the airplane he drank and then immediately napped, just like a faculty advisor would. On the streets of Arkham, in this rough proletarian district, any bald-headed Smiley would be torn to shreds by a mass by burly hardhats in the throes of a homosexual panic. Those geeks have to be holed up in a dormitory somewhere, contemplating the mysteries of the cosmos and praying that their finals will be graded on a curve.

I tear out the horoscopes and stuff them into my pocket. Then I toss both papers in a nearby trash can, and finally, after sucking my cigarette down to the filter, throw the still-smoldering butt into the receptacle, as well. The cigarette tasted better than that useless cup of coffee did. I stand up, wincing at the stench wafting off the river. A moment later, wisps of smoke begin billowing out of the trash can. As I walk away, there's a good old-fashioned bonfire going, fed by the official periodicals of Team Moloch and Team Cthulhu, and the air begins to smell like burning garbage. The odor is much preferable to that of the river. I return to my rental car and drive away with the windows down, despite the freezing temperatures. The cold air washes me clean.

Renewed, I roll up the windows and turn on the heater and the radio. As warm air flows over my ankles and hands and defrosts my windshield, I scan the dial, sampling the local flavors. There are lots of stations out of Boston, playing everything you'd expect—soul and rock to country and western. I spin the dial faster, eliciting a bizarre, high-speed mix of Frank Sinatra, Sly and the Family Stone, Led Zeppelin, Trini Lopez, Neil Diamond, Mac Davis, and Vivaldi, along with hog and farm reports, stock updates, and news. I find an interesting local call-in show at 580 on the AM dial, a station identified as broadcasting from nearby Dunwich, yet another decrepit town whose populace are poor, inbred, uneducated, and very superstitious. The announcer, who identifies himself as Ned Derleth, takes call after call from locals offering items for sale—refrigerators, cars, clothing, unwanted toys, fresh produce. If it can be fetched down from the attic and turned into a buck, they're offering it on the radio. Ned's voice is a deep and sonorous baritone. The accents of the callers set my teeth on edge, but I listen, unable to change the dial. My heart bleeds for these people. The desperation in their voices, the emptiness of their lives . . . It's all too much. A young woman who says her name is “Roberta Price from down near Kingsport” tells Ned that her infant daughter has passed away—crib death—and she's looking to sell the child's clothes, crib, and high chair. She gives her phone number, and Ned takes the next call. A farmer named Gilman is selling four tires. Ned has the man give his phone number so that interested buyers can reach him, but then Gilman launches into a bizarre and rambling monologue about a dream he had the night before. Ned politely cuts him off and moves on to the next caller. It's a man named Whateley, and he's looking for his Uncle Wilbur. I get the impression that old Uncle Wilbur must be the town drunk, and is currently sleeping it off up at some place called Sentinel Hill. Anyone who has seen Wilbur is asked to call. After a commercial for Tremblay's Chevrolet (with locations in Dunwich, Innsmouth, and Arkham, the jingle says) the show returns, but I am gone, unable to take any more. I turn the radio off and listen to the wind instead. It howls off the river like some mythical wendigo, intent on running me off the road and ripping the roof from the rental car. Gritting my teeth, I light another cigarette and struggle against the wintry gale. The car responds well, and I decide that I like it. Not my usual type of vehicle—not sporty or fast enough—but dependable and sturdy, all the same.

I drive through a cluster of desultory strip centers, mostly vacant, their dusty windows dotted with signs advertising
commercial space for rent
. Then I make my way through street after street filled with those “huddled, sagging, gambrel-roofed, crumbling Georgian balustrades” that Phillips wrote of. The travel writer was correct. The houses do brood over the centuries here. They have nothing to look forward to, and looking back on their past—at least the past of the last few decades—is an exercise in both futility and madness. And speaking of madness, there's the Arkham Sanitarium. A quick look seems to confer that the architect who designed it was most likely inspired by the Danvers State Insane Asylum. Not much else to tell. It is as decrepit and huddled as the rest of Arkham's buildings. I see something out of the corner of my eye, some
thing
on the doorstep of the sanitarium, but then the traffic light changes and I am moving again. When I glance back, the thing on the doorstep, whatever it was, is gone. Unnerved by the experience, but unable to articulate why, I focus on the bucolic businesses and buildings that surround me—a gas station, Forringer's Foreign Currency and Coins, a grocery store, the local VFW and American Legion halls, a sporting-goods store, Pickman's Motel, a hardware store, a Ruritan Club, the Arkham Historical Society, a used bookstore, the Future Farmers of America, a haberdashery, a bar called the Barrens, another tavern simply called Joshi's Place, and an assortment of other merchants and social clubs. All are just what you'd expect in any town the size of Arkham, albeit quieter or more desultory. There are a number of small offices, belonging mostly to lawyers, dentists, doctors, and accountants, and a few abandoned factories and mills, their chainlink fences rusted and their once-towering chimney stacks leaning like non-Euclidian Towers of Pisa. For some reason, the image makes me think of Smitty's fevered mushroom hallucinations, and his ramblings about R'lyeh, the submerged city rising from the Pacific Ocean at some point in this planet's future. I drive on, because there is nothing else for me to do.