The Damned Highway (19 page)

My attorney is so weak and numb from cold that he can't undress himself. I have to do it for him. Nothing smells worse than a five-hundred-pound Samoan lawyer who's been traveling on an airplane and is exuding alcohol and cocaine from his pores after swimming in seawater with a Deep One, all without the benefit of soap or shampoo. I get him cleaned up as best I can, and then I stick him under the covers. He babbles contentedly to himself while I get out my tablet and work. I write:

1. The Cthulhu-worshiping Republicans, led by Nixon, need to win all fifty states, thus handing the world over to Cthulhu and issuing in a new dark age.

2. The Moloch-worshiping Democrats are no fucking better, but I'll deal with them another day.

3. Haringa and his cronies want to sacrifice me as part of some bizarre, pagan ritual to help cement Nixon's election victory, and thus, Cthulhu's reign on Earth.

4. My attorney wants to kill Nixon, and thus, stop them before they succeed.

5. I'm along for the ride, because this is where the story is taking me, and also because it beats sitting at home and wading through more fan mail and dead peacocks.

6. How the hell does J. Edgar Hoover figure into this, and how does his attack on the people of Innsmouth and Dagon's spawn tie in? Ah, that's the rub, isn't it? The million-dollar question. Whose side is he on, really? Moloch's? Cthulhu's? Or is he playing both sides against each other in pursuit of his own demented endgame? After all, he's served both Republicans and Democrats in his time, as well as other masters. So the question is, who gave Hoover the order to dynamite the Deep One's city? One of the political parties, or maybe one of the shadowy groups working within those parties? And for what purpose? My instincts are no good on this one. Part of me wants to find out who would have benefited most from the federal government's raid on Innsmouth, but another part of me suspects Hoover might be a dead end, and not connected to this in any way. A red herring, perhaps, but if so, then an intentional one, or simply happenstance? What's your story, J. Edgar?

“He doesn't matter,” my attorney says, and I don't realize that I've been speaking aloud until he does.

“What's that?”

“Hoover. He doesn't matter. She told me.”

“Who told you?” I ask, but I already know the answer. I just want to keep him awake and talking until the whiskey arrives and I can get it down his throat.

“Mother Hydra,” he says. “She told me while we were swimming. Did you know he's a fruit?”

There had been rumors that Hoover was homosexual dating all the way back to the forties, and like all good journalists, I'd heard those rumors, and I said so.

“He likes to dress up like a woman,” my attorney says. “High heels, stockings, frilly dresses with lots of lace. He's not just a queer . . . Hoover goes whole hog. He's a thirty-third-degree Mason, too.”

“So what's your point?” I stub my cigarette butt out in the ashtray and light two more. I give one of them to my attorney and smoke the other. “What are you suggesting? That we blackmail Hoover with this information in the hopes that he helps us expose the cultists?”

He inhales a lungful of smoke, coughs, and then inhales again. His color is returning, and the ice in his hair is beginning to melt. He no longer resembles a frozen buffalo, instead looking more like a drowned wharf rat with each passing moment. “No,” he wheezes. “I'm saying that Hoover doesn't matter. He's a dead lead. Literally. She told me that he'll die later on this year.”

“Assassination? Serves the bastard right!”

“No . . .” My attorney shakes his head. “Heart attack, brought on by high blood pressure. It happens this May.”

“Do you believe her?”

“She told me when and how I was gonna die, too, man. You don't understand. It's like I told you before. She knows everything and she told me all of it. There's no way I can repeat it all to you. We don't have enough time. One hundred years wouldn't be enough time. And we don't have a hundred years. We have until election day, and that's why we need to kill that fucker now. What are we waiting for?”

There is a timid knock at the door. I grab my CS gas canister from my kit bag and creep across the room. Then I fling the door open and scream, trying to startle my opponent so that the element of surprise is on my side, but it is only the clerk from downstairs, and he has a bottle of bourbon for us and some dry clothes for my attorney. I smile and nod, assuring him that I greet all visitors this way, and then stow the tear gas and take the proffered items, telling him to put them on my bill. After his footsteps have shuffled down the hall, I hand the bottle and the clothes to my lawyer.

“Here. This is what we were waiting for. Medicine. As your doctor, I advise you to start drinking heavily.”

He doesn't protest. Instead, he upends the bottle and takes a long guzzle. Whiskey dribbles down his chin and pools in his chest hair. The rest of his color returns, and I am confident we've passed the danger of frostbite. I take the bottle from him and pour myself a glass—five fingers. I wonder if Cannocks ever ask their bartenders to pour them six fingers? But that way lies madness. I cannot ponder Cannock culture right now, no matter how fond I'm becoming of the Innsmouthians. I hand the bottle back to my attorney and he resumes drinking.

“You need to harden the fuck up,” he says, and I tell him that's a great slogan and he should put it on a cock ring. He scowls at me and then spits a mouthful of bourbon in an arc across the bed. “Fuck you, man. I'm serious. We need a goddamned plan. You don't want to kill him. Then come up with something else! All you ever do is write, write, write. Fuck that. Writing won't fix things this time. We need action! How are we gonna stop him from taking all fifty states?”

“I . . .” My gorge rises and I grit my teeth to keep it down. This is one of those situations I loathe . . . admitting that I have no clue what to do next, no plan, no ideas. It's a terrible and desolate feeling when your wits and powers have abandoned you, and all you are left with is the looming prospect of total and absolute failure, barreling straight toward you like a swarm of buckshot from the business end of a sixteen-gauge shotgun. “I don't know,” I admit. “I'm working on it. I'm writing notes.”

“Writing ain't gonna do shit for us right now! Don't you understand what's at stake here?”

“Of course I understand, you bloated hyena!” I thunder across the room again and fling my notebook at him. It lands on his prodigious gut with a sort of squelching sound. My attorney picks the notebook up and frowns, staring at my list dumbly. “This is how I work, and I'll be damned if I'll let a half-crazed brute like yourself push me into some action before I'm ready. That's how people get killed. I'm no fan of getting killed, at least at the hands of others. The fish-woman told you when you're going to die? Well, bully for you, shit eyes! I'm not ready to die yet, and since I'm betting she didn't reveal the details of my death to you, I plan on sticking around a little while longer. And I'll tell you something else . . . I am not going to die at the hands of Nixon and Kissinger or their little cronies like Haringa. I'll eat a bullet first. I'm prepared, you know! If you doubt me, then you're a fool. I prepared for that eventuality a long time ago. I even had Ralph draw up a diagram of what I want for my memorial—a giant fist, two hundred feet high. Death doesn't scare me. Well, maybe a bad death scares me, but so what? I just don't want to die yet. Not until this is finished.”

“She didn't know,” my attorney murmurs, so softly that at first I can't understand him. He has to repeat it two more times before I do. “She didn't know when or how you'd die. Think about that, man. She knew everything. She told me there used to be people living on Mars. She knew about Atlantis and Lemuria and who drew those lines out in the desert of Peru. She taught me about demons and angels, the Old Ones and the Elder Gods, and all the things in between. She told me about the secret language of plants, and the secret names of people, and what really happened to the dinosaurs, and how Moses and Jesus and Muhammad and Buddha and Krishna and John Lennon are all just reincarnations of the same thing, a spirit, and how that spirit is always—always—destined to be sacrificed or martyred in some way. She knew how big the universe is. I mean in a mathematical, definable fucking way, man. She told me about the Plateau of Leng and the unknown cold wastes of Kadath and the fucking dreamlands. Yeah, that's right
. . . dimensions that we go to when we dream or trip. And she told me about this guy named Carter who used to travel back and forth between them, and how on certain nights—”

“Get a grip on yourself, goddamn it! You're babbling like a madman. What's your point?”

“Man, don't you see? She knew all of that shit, but she didn't know how or when you were gonna die. She said you are the Variable.”

“The Variable? What the hell does that mean?”

He shrugs and says, “I don't know, but as your attorney, I advise you to start taking this shit seriously and come up with a plan. And I don't mean just writing.”

“Well, I've been a little distracted trying to keep your toes and fingers and pecker from falling off.”

My lawyer tilts the bottle to his lips again and polishes half of it off. Then he sighs, a big, loud groan of satisfaction, and smacks his wet lips together. “I still think we should go to Acapulco.”

“How is going to Acapulco going to help us right now?”

“Kissinger is in Acapulco. Didn't I tell you, man?”

“You may have. I don't know. I've been a little distracted by Deep Ones and high-priest professors and other high jinks.”

“Kissinger always goes to Acapulco this time of year. He's got a little love nest down there. I say we go to Acapulco, kidnap Kissinger, and hold him hostage until they give in to our demands. We'll exchange him for Nixon, but then we'll pull a double-cross and kill them both.”

“I think your swim with Mother Hydra turned that once-fine legal mind of yours into a popsicle.”

This time, we hear the footsteps coming down the hall before the new arrival knocks. They are different footsteps, not the shuffling, limping gait of the boarding house's counterman, but of someone different. Haringa has tracked us down, of course, and I'll have that fucking clerk's fish eyes for telling him where we are. I grab my gun from the kit bag and toss the canister of CS gas to my attorney. He may be drunk, half-frozen, and out of his mind, but his motor skills and reflexes are still sharp. He catches it with one hand and slides out of bed effortlessly. The knock comes a second later, strong and sure. This is not a timid knock. This knock is not fucking around. It lets us know that it has purpose and meaning. It is self-assured, and it occurs to me only as I grab the door handle that Haringa would most likely not knock on the door, and if he did, it wouldn't be like that. He would just have Jason and the rest of the Nixon Youth break the door down, and then barge in and say hello. Well, I can say hello, too. I open the door, and before the figure outside can react, I grab him by his shirt and yank him into the room. He squawks, so I kick him. Then, I kick the door shut and jam the handgun under his chin, and say, “Got you, shit eyes!”

“Mr. Lono . . . ?”

It takes me a moment to recognize Smitty. The poor bastard's metamorphosis is accelerating at an alarming rate. It can't just be his proximity to his hometown that's responsible for this. Maybe it's the combined reaction of the shrooms and being in Innsmouth? Maybe the fungus has sped up the natural process? Whatever the case, things look grim for my favorite truck driver. His skin is pale white now, and I imagine Smitty won't be spending much time in the sun anymore; he is beyond albino. The rash on his neck is now clearly a set of reddish-pink gills, and his eyes have grown larger since I last saw him. The nubs on his hands are now clearly fingers, but he's also sprouted webbed skin between each digit. His nose has flattened, more nostril than flesh at this point, and when he opens his mouth again to speak, I see that he's begun to lose his teeth.

“Smitty!” I pull the gun away and flash him a sheepish grin. “We were just talking about you. This man is Oscar. He's my attorney. Oscar, say hello to Smitty. He's been helping me out with the story.”

“Jesus,” my lawyer gasps, “the fuck happened to you? Did you fall into a vat of chemicals or something?”

I rap my lawyer on the knee with the pistol's handle and bark, “Manners! Smitty is our guest. He's going to help us, because it's partly his fault that I'm in this mess. Isn't that right, chum?”

Nodding, Smitty takes a seat on the edge of the bed. The springs creak, but not as loudly as they do a second later when my lawyer scampers away from him.

“Any sign of our friend the professor?” I ask, crossing the room and parting the yellowed, dusty blinds with my finger. I peer outside, but the streets are deserted—status quo for Innsmouth. Everybody must still be at the Odd Fellows hall, drinking eggs and beer for dinner. Eggs and beer, it does a body good! Puts hair on your chest, as the old-timers back in Kentucky would say when I was younger. Except that in Innsmouth, hair on the chest is probably the last thing growing boys want. Sweet Jesus, can you imagine going through puberty in this town, knowing that when the time comes, instead of your first whisker or wet dream, you'll turn into a goddamned fish and spend your time swimming up the Manuxet River or frolicking out past those rotting wharves, the sand-choked harbor, and the long black line far beyond the breakwater that is the ruined remains of Devil's Reef? No wonder the town is deserted! If I had grown up here, I would have run away the first chance I got, seeing as how my options were getting sacrificed to Dagon, having sex with a Deep One, or turning into a Deep One myself. No thanks, Mom and Dad. I'll take my chances out on the road. Which, in a way, was what Smitty had done. But blood always calls to blood, and here he is again, the returning hero, fucked.