Move Under Ground by Nick Mamatas (guided reading books .txt) 📕

And she did that for months, waiting for some man to just eat the salad without making a fuss, and when she couldn’t find one, she left Chicago and came down here for a new life, trying to find a real man or two. “You’re a real man, Jack,” she told me. I laughed (ah, and that hurt my ribs, even up against Sarah’s soft body) and said that she should have just dated one of the waiters at the restaurant.

Neal came in occasionally, sometimes with hangers-on. Beats with wiry beards, young kids in Levi’s, and girls, almost always a girl, some of them even wearing blue jeans or all black like bad college poets. They’d mutter and talk and compare notes while I drifted between reality and dreamland, where shoggoths still lurked with Marie’s face. I never jolted myself awake before the animated ichor of their limbs—a foul discharge both solid and liquid at the same time—wrapped themselves round me, but Neal was always at my bedside on time to prod me awake or cackle and attract my blurry gaze. He always smelled like booze now, the cheap gin and rum of the biker and down-and-out miner. “Jack, you simply must see the outside world. It’s like a thing alive and growing, changing every day. Bloody and screaming, like a newborn or a gook in a rice patty, I couldn’t even tell you which. Tonight though, the grim survivors of this alien regime are gonna have a party. You’re the guest of honor, Jack, so I hope you make an attempt to sit up if you can. All the arrangements are in hand though, and everyone is looking so forward to meeting you. You’re a light unto the dharma, they say. I’ve gotten Lord knows how many drinks and invitations for a quiet little roll on a creaky mattress thanks to the book. You’re destined to be the biggest thing to hit this town since the Rockies!” Then he’d dash out again, talking to himself instead of to me, about how he needed to go to one end of Capitol Hill and make this girl, then come back round the block to meet with some Veiled King and yipping army of man-bats. How he’d need to find a blood-filled bone horn to summon the goblin legions who would carry him in a sedan made of the ribs of babes to the hidden onyx-paved roads that led to the temple of The Blasted One. What can you say but “Good luck!” and wait for the party to start.

And it was pretty good. Most of the guests were human or almost-human toadfolk who slobbered into their own beers (they brought their own keg too; I passed on an offered mug) or Mongloid giants who peered into the apartment through the glass transom and smiled till I wandered over to open the door for them. They just sheepishly went to the corners of the living room and watched. A mugwump named Doc appeared and played poker with himself, a winning hand clutched in each of ten spindly spider arms. A few of the old drunks who knew Neal back when he was a little kid (“I was a real rugrat!” Neal announced as he shoved an old feller named Howie at me, and Howie smiled and showed off a gap in his teeth big enough for a harmonica) joined in the game, foolishly forgetting the old rule never to play cards with anyone who called himself Doc.

I thought a few of the old crowd were there, including Neal’s old girl from the first time I met Neal back when the world was young, but it was just a shoggoth sent here to drive him mad. She shimmered on the edges and smelled like a swamp, her eyes were slick as fish. Neal didn’t care though he cut across the room like a happy moth and cornered her with a divinely inspired grift. They left together, his arm on her waist and hers stretching like tar on the end of a stick to wrap around his shoulders once, then twice. I eased down next to some little kids who were sitting around a hi-fi in haphazard half-lotus positions, some propped up against the wall, drumming their heads against the thin plaster. New songs, short and simple, bam bam bam on a guitar and drums. Rock-n-roll ain’t nothing but strangled blues made squeaking and pale by alien death-grips, and I told them so. They didn’t say much in return, but one of them, a boy with eyes blind from bangs and drooping lids called me “Daddy” and then snorted and choked a tiny laugh. They were too limp to do much more than lift the needle (literally, every one of these characters had skinny white string bean arms, the six of them together couldn’t generate enough disgust to take the head off my beer) and put on another episode of tribal thump and wail, so I stayed, sitting and listening for whatever love might be between the scarce notes. There wasn’t much, but I could sense the heartbeats around me falling into the 4/4 rhythm of the tune, and even my own, still fluttering from a handful of bennies washed down with brew, stumbling and seizing to join them. When a record would end (little 45s, is there even room for art on those few grooves) the pasty little nuggets wouldn’t even talk about the song, or nod or say how good it was. They just put on another, like librarians alphabetizing books. So I up and left, caught in the wake of some young thing with legs up to her neck, butter blond hair down to her knees and a walk like a cowboy. She was in boots in jeans so tight she must have been greased when she slid them on that morning. In her pocket was a dog-eared paperback. I caught up with her, slipped the book out and into my big palm and held it in front of her. Pretty girl she was, she smiled small, showing just a few rounded teeth between her full heart lips.

“Any good? It’s good to see a girl read around here, I’ll tell you that. Sometimes I wonder if girls want anything to do but marry, you know?” She nodded, her eyes glancing away from me like a little bird. “Yeah, I like it. Everyone’s reading it these days. It’s very—” She sucked in mile-high mountain air, then conjured up her adjective. “—inspirational. It’s what led me here to Denver.” Excited now, her girlish hand squeezed my arm. “I love this city. Can you believe this party, just like the one in the book!” I turned my wrist to look at the cover (probably should have done that first) and it was my book. I couldn’t help but smile. “Heh, I think the party is a bit different these days, what with the strange characters here now.” She snuggled up to me and turned to one of the pages with a folded-over corner. “No, look. See?” And there it was, in my book, the mugwump poker, the dumb mods huddling in a corner, Neal, his pants down to his ankles, taking his piss out into the heaven-upturned bowl-mouth of a shriveled woman no longer than a foot tall.

“Read me some,” I told her and put the book to her chest, “out on the porch.” I hustled her out of the pad like a nun on a truant schoolboy. There were sizzling rocket trails netting the skies, some headed up, others down and around, tracing the oval of earth. Even in Denver, you couldn’t see the stars anymore through the streaks of smoke and flame. Purgatory had snuck up somewhere between heaven and earth. Even the moon was reduced to a scattering of haze, but there was an old bulb on the porch roof that you just had to turn (and just had to go “Ah!” and pull your burnt fingers away after it sparked to life, and I did both) to get light so she could read to me her favorite passages. And she read them. The showdown with the cult deep under ground, a pulp fiction shootout, ol’ Moriarty crying over his writer’s block till his eyes ran black with blood (he’d made his soul a gift to the wrong muse, it said). I just didn’t remember writing any of this yet, and didn’t remember reading it for big wads of cash before auditoriums full of serious-minded young men and women, the sorts who ironed their collars just to look neat when the time came for them to wear iron collars. But I let her keep reading, because her voice was honeyed and just so interested, she brought out the secret reasoning behind every clumsy word. She sang the stuff really, and so well we didn’t hear the sirens until they circled the block like Indians. In the red-and-white moment of the police lights I looked up and saw the new brute squad. Street thugs in burlap sack and hubcap armor over business pants and smart cop shoes (black but not dusty, they shone in the otherwise smoky haze of night), and a mix of ten-gallon hats and paddy caps. “Uh oh, I don’t think they’re here for the party,” my honey girl said but I couldn’t think of another reason for them to show up. She put the book back in her jeans before I could filch it from her and walked backwards on her awkward heels till she was inside. I just smiled and gripped the porch’s railings and called out howdy while they carefully took up positions around the house, behind convenient cars and across the street.

“Anything I can help you with, officers!” In my mind’s eye, I saw that they were all human, not a trace of the mugwump in them. Neal was at my side, holding up a piece of typing paper, “Check this,” he said, excited as if he’d finally gotten around to writing something. He folded it in half, lengthwise. The cops, or maybe just dress-up civilians making do, as they didn’t stand like cops, dug into their weird costumes for their revolvers. Some of them had little snub-nosed .38s, others held big monster guns, the kind the old Denverites liked to show off, cradled in big callused hands like sweet babes. Neal folded the paper in half, and then in half again. “I don’t really think this is the time for an old magic trick,” I said. Someone blew Neal’s mind once, back in reform school, with the old saw that you can’t fold paper in half nine times. Near every time I’d finally sit him down in front of a typewriter, I’d leave him alone for an hour and come back to a room full of flapping little pieces of paper, all blossoming out from his half-hearted folds.

The Keystone kavemen kops surrounding us were half-hearted too, but it doesn’t take a murderer to make a killer, and I was starting to grip the porch a bit too tightly, flecks of paint melted into my palms. I tried calling out to them again, but they ignored me utterly. Neal folded the paper twice more; it was a tiny little block now held between fingers and thumbs. “Watch, Jack, watch me,” he said, like a little boy. He folded it again, easily really, though it was a stiff accordion pile in his little fingers now. I wished I’d brought my beer out here, my throat was too dry to say a word. I could only see them shooting Neal first (because I had to be alive to see him fall) and a bullet cutting through that stupid piece of paper, blasting it to dust and flakes to drift dramatically over our blood-Pollack faces. Neal was whoopin’ about something and two of the cops had rushed up