Move Under Ground by Nick Mamatas (guided reading books .txt) 📕
It got dark fast; there was hardly any dusk at all. And behind me, I heard the roar of a convoy, but they weren't old trucks coming my way. Instead, it was wagons, sedans, curvy Studebakers, and even a few old crank cars with rumble seats and shivering fabric roofs. Town cars driving five abreast in tight formation across only two lanes of highway, eating up the shoulders, headlights suddenly blazing a terrible, beautiful amber. I cut into the wood and watched them zoom past from a little ditch I happened to fall into. Above the
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- Author: Nick Mamatas
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“See!” Neal said, holding a weird wad in his hand. “Ten times folded! It’s a new world we’re living in. If we dream it, we can be it, all while the Dark Dreamer himself looks to kill the dreams of all humanity!”
“Great,” I said. I couldn’t look at him without seeing the blood speckled across his forehead, a huge pulsing cavity, a still-living heart within, where his chest would soon used to be. “We’re going to die now, I think.” And Neal laughed, an “ahahahahaha” almost like one of Allen’s, and ducked low. He slipped his arms between the rails and dug the fingers of both hands into the ground, then looked up and gave me that country smile, slanted on his face. “Watch!” he said and with that tore the country apart. The ground ripped like sails in the wind and the cops and cars and even the smog from a hundred rockets just went. Off into some non-being, a dark non-being, the black reflection of nirvana bliss. Just black, like space without stars. It lays under the earth like a lover under a blanket, naked and waiting. Then the rift was gone and the street just empty again, asphalt, concrete, then the brown grass of the tiny stripe of lawn in front of the porch.
“Lord God, you see that,” Neal said, standing up. He made to dust off his hands on his pants, but they were clean as though he’d never dug into the dirt. “That was beautiful. When the Buddha smiles, he’s opened mouthed, you know, Jack?” Neal nodded, more to himself than me. He was electric again, the world shifted a bit to make sure he was the axis about which it revolved. “White teeth are just a border surrounding a deeper dark portal, into … “
“Into the belly!” I said, then I blushed when Neal didn’t laugh, when he didn’t even hear. I shamed myself, a fool who lets his booze chatter away for him. I prayed for the bullet and the shower of blood now. Neal went on though, gracing me with presence and wisdom, the sort of thing I blundered into by simply following in his footsteps. “Something greater than the self, that’s what’s been missing. The mugwump slaves have been looking for it, but it was the Holy Fool who found it, ya know?” But if he was a holy fool, I was just a damned one, that’s what I figured anyway. Then he turned and embraced me, “Jack, Jack oh Jack, that is what I can write!” And with that, I just had to hug him back. “You still have to teach me, you know?” I didn’t know that, but why not, I thought. We went back into the party and slowly watched it dissolve. The pain of ending hung over it already, but the guests struggled against death like a note fading before the needle finally hits an absent groove and ends it all. Monsters lurked in the corners, just curious and getting a kick at being around a few folks who had their souls still sealed tight in their gullets. The true human stragglers didn’t make much of a spectacle of it, they drank till their bodies made them stop, and drifted into their solipsistic little dreamlands, the mommy and daddy dreams of someone who has never been beyond the veil where Great Old Ones wait and plot and go mad. That cute girl cut out when the cops came, one of the moptops told me, out the back door and back into the warzone of Denver.
In the morning, I woke up on the couch. A seven-foot-tall man, his head an anvil and eyes just slits, sat slumped in the corner, his knees as high as I am tall. The other guests had picked their way home. I got to the kitchen and brewed up some coffee and found some cheese and bacon for breakfast, and ate alone on the little tin table the whores had picked out of the garbage. Lurlene was in the backyard, body still as tough as a cigar store Indian’s, hanging up the sheets I’d sweated into for days. I’d miss her, even though we never talked. We knew one another, and that was enough. Who knows what I really gave her that night, in the language of friction and little kisses? There were no napkins so I just wiped my hands on my pants and went looking for Neal, and to say goodbye to Sarah. Hadn’t even seen her at the party. It wasn’t as good as the old days here in Denver; the magic was gone. All the old crowd had left years ago, or had desperate families holed up in little homes now. In the living room, the Mongoloid thing was gone too. I stood there in the empty room for a while, then walked out into streets painted orange and violet by the low-angled sun.
I spent the afternoon on a flatbed truck with Neal and a few old tramps who wanted out of town as bad as I did. In a minute or two, I think I would have been happy to stay because the argument on the bed was getting heated.
“It smells like shit!” Neal said, and that was that, a tentpeg pounded into the earth. One of the fellows though, an archetypal tramp, a guy who wandered out of dreamland with a bindle and pants baggy enough for two, just wasn’t having any of it. “Smells like money,” he pronounced, with a lifetime of road lore and an eye for cattle to back him up.
It was shit, the shit in streams and sumps and coating the asphalt of our poor, half-shattered highway out of Colorado. Ranching territory stinks to high heaven, and it isn’t just the dung, but the very air around the cattle. The old tramp joked that if Neal lit one more cigarette just to throw the cherry-red butt out into the wind, the whole half state would go up in a bellowing holocaust. “Hamburger for everyone!” he said and laughed a hollow little laugh. The other tramps murmured not so much agreement as they did a general sentiment that a hamburger would be quite nice right about now.
Tramps and hoboes were drawn to the languid shit swirl of Colorado’s ranches, but only the hoboes would work, bailing hay or twisting nasty barbed wire into mile-long swirls. The tramps took after their bug-eyed fly brothers, filching a cooling pie there, shoveling sloppy handfuls of cool pump water into their cave mouths here. There was cash to be had too, all you had to do was cut the pocket of a hobo on siesta and get to the highway and to a passing truck before the hobo got to you. Not even the greatest of tramps would dare beg or molest one of the ranchers these days though, they’d as soon shoot you as look at you the old man said, and crush your corpse under the hooves of their Arabian horses and feed the meat-sauce mess to their prize milk cows.
“Ain’t the milk been tastin’ funny lately?” he asked another tramp, one who probably hadn’t had a cool glass of milk since the Depression was on. “Now you know why!” Our second tramp, a man with a two-axle spare tire and pants split in the front nodded. “Yep. The ranchers have burrs in their asses these days, The cattle too, they’re all ready to stampede. You can see it in their eyes.” Neal just snorted though and nodded towards a few fat cows chewing their cud off the highway. “They look pretty placid to me,” he said, and flicked a cigarette butt off the bed with his speedy fingers. Then he was back to his journal, scribbling away and muttering about how it did so smell like shit, shitty money even.
I looked at the cows, my eyes focused past them at the fading horizon so that the Third Eye could peer into their little animal souls. Sweet and innocent they were, not even their shit was tainted with the rot of the Dreamer yet. The lighthouse was another story. “What the heck is that?” I asked the wise old tramp and he told me with the clarity of a sage, “A lighthouse.” Fatty knew a bit more of the story, as he sang for his supper among the masons who had put it up over the past few weeks. “A gentleman from Providence, a jaundiced fellow it seemed to me, he came out here some weeks ago and ordered it built. He had men working around the clock, under huge and roaring bonfires so they could see in the night and labor unmolested by the swarms of biting insects who usually feed on the cattle in the night fields. Taciturn man, like Yankees tend to be. He didn’t have much time for an old tramp,” he said, his voice resigned but still lyrically thick. He could spin a tale when he had to, a tramp doesn’t get that fat otherwise. “But one time, I did get up the courage to walk up to him. It was a prime opportunity, because it was a Friday and even Mr. Love gave his workers a bit of a break for some cool beers on Fridays, though he never drank himself. But he had a half-smile and tip of his hat for all the boys, so I knew he might have a word or a coin for me. I didn’t get a coin when I introduced myself and told him my particular tale of woe, but I did get a word when I asked him why on earth he’d spend a whole wheelbarrow full of gold just to build a lighthouse a thousand miles from the nearest ocean.”
The fat old tramp sucked on his gums then, and gave the little tuft of hair on his gut a scratch. “And he had just one word for me. He looked at me, his eyes so round like a frog’s, opened his lip less mouth and said ‘Wait.’ Just like that: ‘Wait.’ An eviction notice for the West.”
Neal laughed at that one. “Oh, that is rich, friend! That is going into the book! Finally, the big one will hit and California will fall into the sea. I read all about that when I was a kid. The whole state will fall to pieces. Fissures of fire tearing apart the streets!” he said, and without another word, he was back in his pages, composing paragraphs on the spot.
My stomach shifted uneasily, and not due to the shit in the air. The road had taken on a little downward slope, and the tramps and I all gave into it and slid like little kids a foot or two down the length of the flatbed. Neal stayed rooted in his full-lotus, notebook in his blossom lap, writing away. He even ignored the inevitable ritual of the bottle. Cheap rye burned my throat but eased the electric jangle of my poor nerves and muscles. My whole body was hungry, every pore was pulsing and crying out for something. A lay, a pill, a bath of
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