Through Dark Angles: Works Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft (24 page)

“It is all over,” he announced.

Burroughs and the boys looked at him.

Barlow said, “As an old teacher of mine used to say, ‘The Unnamable.’”

“The boy may change his mind,” said Burroughs. “He’s just seeing what he is—and wants that monstrosity to reflect on you.”

Audrey Carsons asked, “What will you do now?”

Barlow said, “I used to be a publisher and writer. I’m going to do that again. And I think I’ll try my hand at magic.”

Burroughs and the boys stared. The wild boys had a hungry look; Burroughs had his mineral calm.

“The rite involves time travel. I think we should do it on New Year’s. Magic should always follow the path of least resistance,” said Barlow.

“What do you mean?” asked Guy Smith.

“New Year’s is a hole in time. It is a weak point between the year that was and the year that will become.”

Burroughs said, “This year was when the future started. L. Ron Hubbard gave us
Dianetics,
so we will be able to fight Control, and Dr. von Braun said that humans are going to the moon. Time became looser this year; maybe we can gain technology to make it looser still.”

Burroughs and the boys left, with Burroughs doing a routine about German pornography.

The festivities were well under way when the three returned to Barlow’s apartment. Burroughs was wet with a recent fix; the boys hungrily munched on chocolate, having smoked some tea earlier. Barlow looked like hell. Normally thin, he was now gaunt and pale. It looked as if he had not seen the light of day since they had been with him three weeks ago. He showed them into the library. The books were gone and huge sheets of white butcher paper hung on the walls covered in Mayan ideographs. Burroughs recognized some of them as god names: Ah Pook, Kisin, Zushakon, Ix Tab, Ix Chel. The guys were giggling and pawing each other. Burroughs motioned them to be quiet.

“All true magic begins in silence. Sound is about being controlled by another, silence is about controlling yourself.”

Barlow smiled wanly and motioned them to the four chairs set in a row. He went to his bedroom and returned with a clay pot filled with a smelly tar-like liquid. He signaled silence. With a small paint brush he painted a crescent moon on the floor around Burroughs and the boys, and then a trapezoid around his chair. He offered them a pipe.

“I found the recipe in the
Codex Catamaco.
It is a time-travel drug. It contains Diviner’s Sage and a hallucinogenic mushroom. Traditionally Mexicans eat twelve grapes at the stroke of midnight to bring good luck for the next year. We are going to use the church bells as a way to leave time.”

Burroughs lit the pipe and took a long drag. He gave it to the boys, and then to Barlow. Barlow turned off the light and went to his chair. The room was very dark, lacking any outside windows. A small amount of yellow light slipped in under the door to the first sitting room. Mariachi music blared up from three floors below. Fireworks were popping and yells of “¡Feliz año nuevo!” gave proof of the festive night. The smoke was nasty and disorienting. Red, yellow, and purple lights appeared as mini-comets in the room. Barlow began ringing small bells and chanting something in Mayan.

Everyone felt dizzy, sick, crazy. Sounds hurt, the lights burned their flesh. Then a few blocks away a mighty cathedral bell rang. The colored lights vanished. A man was standing in the room in front of Barlow, his shadow limned by the faint light.

Barlow spoke, “Howard, I gave your papers to Brown. Augie is publishing you and Robert and Smith and Long. I . . .”

Another deep bell sound, and the shadow vanished. The light seemed to pour back out of the room, the darkness became thicker, a dull dry vibration. Then everything came into focus: the four men were sitting on two pieces of worn yellow linoleum—three in a crescent moon, Barlow in his trapezoid. In front of them was a jungle scene of 400,000,000 years ago. The lush vegetation of the Devonian Age was populated by many crawling arthropods, but no birds flew. A few small four-legged creatures, looking more like fish than reptiles, crawled in the underbrush. About a hundred yards away, a mass of twisted, burnt metal three or four times the size of the
Hindenburg
was the center of a small village. Barlow rose and began walking toward it. The three other men tried to rise up, but found themselves paralyzed.

“I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I could not trust you. You came into my life knowing too much, knowing Names that you shouldn’t know. I don’t know if you are pawns of some fate that is moving me, or the magicians are making it happen. You are invited here as witnesses only.”

Burroughs tried as hard as he could to move. He realized that this was a mental construct; they weren’t “really” sitting in chairs behind a smear of some magical tar; that was how their minds had reacted to the drugs and the incantation. As Barlow walked forward their perspective changed. They seemed to drift after him always about ten feet behind. They heard the buzzing of the jungle, but occasionally sounds of New Year’s Eve seemed to issue from the trees.

Near the village was a cultivated area. Dark green vines ran everywhere. They looked like the gourd vines Barlow knew from Florida except that they grew dark green people. The vegetable people moved feebly. A group of red-skinned dwarves scurried around them, extracting a thick blue fluid from their veins. Closer to the village were insect people—human-looking, but with the heads of praying mantises and insect pincers instead of hands. These creatures lived in huts that looked like spun silk, possibly somehow extruded from their bodies. They were engaged in worship, their high whining insect voices forming words very similar to the chant Barlow had uttered to get here. Barlow advanced to the ruined spacecraft. He put his hands on its metal surface, and pictures began to form in their minds. The ship had escaped a nova, taking with it criminal creatures that were almost indescribable. These felons ate addictions—addictions to sex, to magic, to death, to hatred. These were a form of parasite that humans called “gods”—but they had not yet put on human forms. No nice smiling Zeus, no Jesus on the sticks, no Thor throwing a hammer. These creatures were ugly. They were making vessels to be born in—the insect people, the vegetable people, the fungal fliers, even mewling weak humans.

Something stirred inside the spacecraft. It beckoned Barlow inside. Inside was dark, cold—outer space dark, the dark It needed because of the fear and pain that had been associated with the nova light. In the darkness a mass of centipedes crawled ceaselessly upon a shapeless god. The god talked to Barlow inside his own mind. “I NO DIE. YOU NO DIE. I TAKE YOU HERE BEFORE I GIVE DEATH TO YOUR RACE. You serve me in the future. There you die maybe a million times. I sleep while you die making your world hotter. Eventually you will make your sun go nova, then we move on. I ask nothing for my gift except a few million deaths, and the scared remains of your world.”

Barlow felt sick with the touch of the other mind. This was too alien. No wonder man had invented the god-idea not to see the criminals. He didn’t want this bargain, but he realized he had accepted it long ago on Earth. He had been a Mayan priest writing the forbidden codex. He would be this again writing the words that this creature needed to control its human dogs, its vessels. He turned to go, but something exploded from the centipede mass. Black, thick liquid with a nitrous smell. It smelled like jism in the back of a YMCA, like furtive nasty sex. The black stuff fell over him, each spot becoming an eye—sometimes human, sometimes faceted insect eyes, sometimes an octopus. Deep red erogenous sores appeared around each eye, filling him with ugly desires, lusts that had nothing to do with the sane life of Earth. The fetor was overpowering. Some of the eyes began to weep a yellow matter.

“YOU DIE MAYBE A MILLION TIMES THAT IS WHY WE MADE YOU.”

Barlow turned to go, looking very inhuman as the eyes grew and blinked and wept. He could feel egg-like masses forming in his groin. This was what evil meant—a totally alien impulse toward living as something foul and eternal. This creature, this Death and Control god, had been running the whole rotten game on Earth for millions of years. The roulette wheel was fixed in the house’s favor. Any priest, any magician who came along and asked for immortality was a source of the virus that would wipe out everything. It didn’t matter if the priest was some Madison Avenue advertising magician or an inbred rural local such as Howard liked to write about. He left the spaceship. The insect people ran up to him and licked the dripping yellow matter from his eyes with black, thin, whip-like tongues, thrilling the sores on his being. Soon he would be addicted to that pleasure. He pushed on, seeming to walk toward his three witnesses in their chairs. As he approached they seemed to recede. He understood that he must walk them back to the original coordinates so that they could return to Mexico City. Burroughs had half risen from his chair, sticking his right hand beyond the magical barrier. Some of the black jism had spattered on him as well. A tiny dot. A cancer for his soul. As Barlow walked past the vegetable people, they smiled idiot smiles, opening their mouths to laugh at him, a thick green saliva drooling from their green lips, the red-skinned dwarves urging him on with menacing gestures. He was upsetting the calm of the vegetable people, spoiling the blue drug they were collecting. Barlow walked back to the place where they were.

Suddenly the last cathedral bell rang. It was the New Year, and they were all in Barlow’s library. He sprang out of the chair. The eyes were gone; he was simply the pale haunted gringo he had been before the magic. He ran from the library back into his bedroom. They could hear him opening a bottle of pills. They could hear a faucet turned and off. They still couldn’t move. A few minutes later they could hear him lie on his bed. After an hour the paralysis slowly left them. Burroughs went into Barlow’s bedroom. On the stale dirty bed, Barlow lay fully clothed and dead.

“We couldn’t move until he died. He held us in place by the spell,” said Burroughs. He went to the phone and called the Mexican police to tell them that they would find a dead American professor, a suicide. The three left the apartment, not closing the door behind them.

It was two in the morning, and in certain sections of the city parties for gay ex-pats had just begun. Burroughs’s wife stirred in her sleep, dreaming a dream that humans weren’t meant to have.

(
For Nick Mamatas
)

It was the last time I shot fireworks professionally. It was the last time for many things. For my friends it was the year they started to say, “Something’s not right about Rob.” It was the simultaneous gaining and losing of
certainty
. In the big picture the change of the worldview of a restaurant-and-book critic in a Texas town is not very cosmic, unless it is the flap of the butterfly wings that They use to bring about a human hurricane. But I think that I am a rather small butterfly indeed.

For almost thirty years I reviewed the restaurants of Austin and the books of its astonishingly large literary crowd for the local free paper. I bet if you look around your library you’ll find a couple of sentences on some book that bears my praise. Check out your Austin titles: Caroline Spector, Bruce Sterling, Don Graham, Neal Barrett, Brad Denton, Walt DeBill, Lawrence Person, Rex Hull, Bill Spencer. Yep, Rob Kenyon, that’s me. Of course it might just say
Austin Chronicle.
I also do the Day Trips section, occasionally movie and band reviews (we are the Live Music Capital of the World). And I write
Ron’s Ramblings.
I write about stuff I do, I began before blogging. :)

My friend Ragan Falconer has a small-time pyrotechnics firm. He shoots little shows with his brother Clyde. You, if you live in a city of any size, have never seen a hand-lit fireworks show. Mainly they’ve gone the way of the dinosaurs. You’ve seen an electronically fired show. They’re safer. They’re faster. They cost more money, but not
that
much more money. Each shell sits in its own cannon (a length of black PVC pipe) and has an electric fuse that runs to its quick-match fuse. Flick a switch, it lights. The outer part of the shell explodes and flings the inner shell, the one with the stars in it, into space. Shells fly up about one hundred feet per inch of diameter. Three-inch shells go up three hundred feet, four-inch shells go up four hundred feet, and so on.

In a hand-lit show, the pyrotechnic team buries the cannons in the earth rather than in a sand-filled trailer. A lighter walks alongside the row of cannon carrying a lit fuse, one of those red flares that come in auto safety kits. He or she lights each firework’s quick-match fuse, and
bang!
off it flies. As the fireworks launch, a runner from the ground crew drops a new shell in the empty (and smoking) cannon. A crew consists of lighters, runners, and folks who watch the ready boxes, picnic coolers dragooned into once-a-year pyrotechnic purpose. Ragan’s crew had shot shows for three years when he first called me to be a runner. Some cousin had the flu or some son had a headache or something. Anyway, I knew Ragan and I had always wanted to shoot a show. We had to drive to the small town of Flapjack, Texas—one of those little dying towns in the Texas hill country. Flapjack lay twenty minutes to the southeast of Austin. Most of the residents worked in Austin; those who didn’t seemed either to sell antiques to those who did or Dairy Queen frozen custard cones to one another. Decades ago, between the World Wars, Flapjack had had a minor boom as an agricultural center. The town had a few grand homes from that period, and not all of them had become bed-and-breakfasts.

Flapjack could afford a $5,000 dollar show; that meant thirty minutes of show—“No black sky!” hand-lit. The Falconer brothers liked their shows in those days to be hand-lit. It’s exciting. It’s fun. It’s dangerous. Everyone on the crew risked life and limb for seventy-five dollars and a ton of hard work. But we would have done it for free. So would you. I am talking
professional fireworks
here.