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

After. Or waiting for my show to begin. At the bar. With a drink. Tasted like broken glass, like warm ice that won’t melt. Tentacles, flippers, hot human hands patting my back as if to say “Better luck next time, chump.” Once after drinking sixty great rounds in 1942 I found myself wrapped around a porcelain toilet, vomiting so hard that I didn’t just stain the bowl, I chipped it. I spat up my soul and stayed tied to the commode like a dead vine while three days and nights of winos and sailors did their business over, around, and on me until I was entirely encased. I could have stayed there ‘til this day and just woke up this morning and walked into a whole new world that had already passed me by. Then I’d expect someone to walk up to me in shimmering space armor or a Mao jumpsuit and tell me, “Better luck next time, chump.” Not today though, not when I was in _The New York Times, _ not when I had the word visionary stapled to my name like a second head. Something from my drink was sharp against my tongue. I reached into my mouth and pulled out the swift triangle of a Stanley blade. I put the point to my wrist and cut, up—

“Aigh!” Bill cried out, throwing his hands and elbows up into his face, “I can’t stand this goddamn car.” I lolled my head and lifted one eyelid. The yellow road lines were drifting into the view of my window on the passenger side. Quite a trick. Bill was a better driver than I thought, going sideways and all.

A million Greek relatives spun in lazy snake circles, out the door of the VFW and then back in to the hoots and gasps of the few white friends Memere invited. Stella was radiant but I really wanted to marry the puddle of sticky whiskey at the bottom of my glass. Bouzouki music trilled endlessly under stomping and applause and tinkling glasses and forks. I looked down, my rented lapels were out to here; I could have flown off and escaped if I had a running start out in the parking lot. The purple tentacles in my salad writhed suggestively to me, but I couldn’t find the proper fork to stab them with. I never wanted a formal wedding, too square even if the dances were all group rounds. I could die right here, hand my soul to Stella and have her eat it with the cake. She had a tv, she had some money, she had a couch. I’d be fine. _Just leave me alone, _I’ll tell her five days a week, and two days a week I’ll lay her and that will keep her quiet and purring, so I can die in the living room, a moment at a time, like I want to.

Gin poked me hard and got my full attention. His hand wasn’t in front of my face, it was somewhere in the inside of my face, his fingers in my eyes and nose like they were the triple holes of a bowling ball. I could still see though, see those deep-set coal eyes demanding my whole world from me. “The cut-up is a random event, but that doesn’t mean you have to accept any snowflake lattice of word and image, Jack. You’re still in the driver’s seat, you and Bill together. Remember what Neal did to your old immortal town of Denver; he tore it apart right in front of you. So are the beings from beyond—he’s nothing but the teeniest phalange of their might and chaos, a finger dragged along the dust of an antique market.” He pushed the knife into my hand and nodded towards the newspapers. “Cut again.”

The clicking of the blinker woke me again for a moment. “How long have you been trying to turn?” I muttered to Bill, who explained that the road was a spiral sinking away from the surface of the planet and that it was only headed in one direction. Down. He’d been making a left-hand turn for hour after hour. Our land was being torn apart, its remains washed away in a rain of black spirits from the darkening sky. Reputation aside, I never traveled directly from end to end of this great country—there were always false starts at rainy bus stops, big times missed thanks to some cotton picking adventure, or a premature end to my journeys thanks to fistfights and fevers. My trip through the American Dream was never made in a bee-line, how could it be?

Marie’s secret enlightenment, her last-minute whisperings, saved me again. Do the absurd thing. I looked in the glove box and found an AAA map in folded tatters. I tore the pieces apart and shuffled them atop the dash. Bill didn’t even look at me, he was leaning over the steering wheel like The Red Baron in his Fokker. I built Ohio and Pennsylvania a new system of veiny highways, and I cheated. I threw half the map out the window, extinguishing hundreds of miles; it would have been bad news for thousands of ordinary folks if they weren’t all mugwump slaves already.

“Make the next right, Old Bull,” I told Bill, and suddenly, like a spotlight on a dark stage making that golden saxophone shine, there was a right turn to be made. We hit the turnpikes in Pennsylvania and Jersey and I paid the tolls in bewildering haiku. My _kireji _ shocked the poor late-night bastards. “Earth burns, becomes smoke,” I told them, then I said a secret line that explained it all. I don’t remember those seven syllables to this day, but it beat trying to pay with tainted change. One toll booth operator looked like a mandibled Neal but old Bill just screamed like a woman, floored it and blew right through the gate, taking the yellow and black beestriped guard arm with us for half a mile after. “How ya like that, you goddamn sumnabitch! This is my fucking world, and I’ll stomp my feet wherever I like, over and through every magic circle your Wall Street wizards make! Notional boundaries, conceptual traps, I’m destroying all rational thought, and taking your ugly shit stalls with me!” The next booth, this one also holding a Neal doppelganger, Bill just rammed right into over and over, and when it collapsed we drove over it. “Now that, my friend,” I howled, “is the spirit!”

That was a fine truck we stole.

I drew new highways in the blood from my well-chewed fingernails on the glove box’s map and scraped a free road from central Pennsylvania and parallel the Jersey Turnpike. No man’s cosmic enthusiasm could endure that labyrinthine road, but the force of Buddha’s palm guided us along a new path. It steadied our backs. Up through the pine barrens, past the flaming chemical plants that really burned earth into poison smoke (and made us beg, each and every day, for more plastic marvels, more disposable moments, more dead tv dinners), and into the squalid Negro cities. By dawn, we were in Hoboken, where the air smelled of factory coffee from Maxwell’s down on the far end of Washington Street.

We switched off again and drove us through the mile square city. The dregs of society lived here; Negroes were but shadows and the poor whites starving Dachau ghosts. The bars never closed in Hoboken; I could taste beer on my tongue with every breath. Morning ferries were pulling out, loaded high with miserable drunks trudging back to Manhattan—they came here at two when their bars closed and stayed ‘til dawn, then shuffled to Charon’s own barges. Back to their newsstand kiosks to hawk disaster for two bits. To Bowery factories, to slap together industrial ovens. Floors needed sweeping, shirts needed stitching. You want a night sweeter than wine, you pay for it in the morning, with a hangover, a stiff workaday shift, and a little chunk of soul carved right out of you with a sharp Stanley knife.

But across the river, topping the brown Hudson like a crown, was Manhattan. Buildings stretched to the heavens, whose brothers the mountains are. It was not like any city on earth, for above purple mists rose towers, spires and pyramids which one may only dream of in opiate lands beyond the Oxus. Majestic above its waters, its incredible peaks rising flowerlike and delicate from pools of mist to play with the flaming clouds and last stars of morning.

But threaded through this beauty were the dark tentacles of great Cthulhu. He had beaten us home, the prize was in his grasp already. The heart of the world, concrete and fleshy, green money blood pouring in and out from every corner of earth though arteries of commerce and culture, all but choked up and poisoned with the madness of dead gods’ dreams. I wanted closure, I wanted to walk on the water and run howling through my old streets, looking for the last big time but instead all my senses screamed a single word—_Horror!_—an oppression which threatened to master, paralyze, and annihilate me.

Bill parallel-parked badly and rubbed his eyes. He left the truck behind without a word and followed his nose to some hash browns and scrapple. Turning away from the skyline I remembered I was hungry for breakfast too, and followed Bill into the diner.