Multiplex Fandango (9 page)

***

Something tugged on his leg.
Something soft, yet firm, tentative yet insistent.
Then it was gone.
He counted to twenty and had begun to believe that he’d imagined it, but there it was again.
He felt a series of gentle tugs against his naked ankles.
Momentary panic flooded his system until he realized it was the current.
Floating like a bobber on a fishing line, he knew that if something down there wanted him, he'd be jerked below the surface so fast he'd be lucky to catch a breath.

He treaded water with his hands, pushing across the waves in a gentle doggy paddle.
Occasionally a wave would crest and explode across his face, leaving him gasping.
Each time he’d wonder why he’d put himself in such a position.
He was too afraid to return to
Iraq
, but not afraid to tempt a god to eat him.
Perhaps it was because he’d seen the death
Iraq
represented.
He’d seen the body parts of his friends.
He’d watched as the light had fled from their eyes.
But the god beneath the waves, the old thing that ruled this solitary sea, he’d never seen, unless the statue had something to do with it.
Did he have to see death to be afraid of it?
Was that the lesson here?

Early this morning as he was preparing for his sacrifice, June had admitted to having talked to no less than twenty men over the last six months.
Six she’d convinced to bob and each one was eventually taken by what was beneath the waves.
She’d given him one last chance to leave, but he’d foolishly remained firm in his desire to prove his love and banish his fear.

“They have a tradition here that goes back a thousand years,” she’d whispered while they lay in bed the previous night awash in the sweat of their sex.
“Their god must be fed.
There once was a time when they’d feed those captured from other tribes, so they had wars, and captured victims to be sacrifices.
But the 20
th
Century came and peace overwhelmed them, as it eventually does when cultures become more civil.
So to appease the god, they began a tradition.
Three times a man could tie himself to the statue.
And three times he must survive.
And if this man survives, he gains a power over his own fear greater than any other man, because fear, more than anything else, controls and makes us a slave.
This process, this thing they do here on the
Sea
of
Cortez
, is a crucible of heroes.”

She’d been one of the only women to tempt the god.
She’d said that at first they wouldn’t let her.
She'd had to convince them.
She'd had to beg them to let her be a part of the sacrifice so she could banish her own fear.
In the end they’d relented.

Pain like a pin piercing his leg made him yelp.
This was followed by another and then another as something with teeth attacked his ankle.
He thrashed in the water, his legs kicking, one free, the other attached to the rope that held him to the undersea god.
The man beside him thrashed as well.
Their eyes met momentarily and he recognized his own terror in the bulging orbs of the other.

A scream erupted from farther down the line.
Thomas turned in time to see a man disappear beneath the water, but had no time to contemplate the other’s fate.
Something hard moved against his own leg.

Then he was jerked beneath the water.

He’d managed to take a breath and now held it as hard as he’d ever held anything.
Like a rope to freedom, the oxygen in his lungs was the only thing that kept him safe from drowning or... Panic electrified him as he finally saw the beast moving beneath him.

Or the
beasts
, to be more specific.
First came the shrimp.
Thousands of them.
Their pereopod and pleopod spines pierced his skin as they skittered over and around him.
The man on his left was completely covered, as if the crustaceans were feasting, their dagger-like legs rising and falling as bubbles escaped in an undersea cloud.
As the shrimp swarmed him, Thomas scraped his hands across his chest and arms, shoving them away, ignoring the pain as best he could.
He wanted to scream.
He wanted to cry at the surreality of the events that were transpiring, but he dared not.
Instead, he kicked and scraped and stared agog at the fates of the others.

Following the rope to where it was affixed to the statue, he saw that part of the statue had come alive.
Eight antennae from the gargantuan shrimp were whipping through the water like scythes through wheat.
Two men had been grasped around the waists and were being pulled deeper and deeper.
One had already died, his lungs filled with water, his eyes wide with lifelessness.
The other was determined to live and as he sought anything that might help him.
His gaze darting desperately around him, he spied Thomas.
He willed the man to hold his breath longer.
He willed his own breath into him.
He prayed that the great beast might forget about its human morsel and release the poor man.
But none of that happened.
Instead, Thomas watched as the air finally exploded from the man’s mouth when he was unable to hold his breath any longer.
Eyes that were at first wild with panic softened as the weight of life left him.
Then Thomas was released and he popped above the water like a bobber that had just been teased by a fish.
He gasped.
His chest heaved.
The man next to him and two farther down the line were gone.
There were nine of them left and he felt a little less human for the happiness he felt, glad it wasn’t him.

He remembered something June had told him.
“I used to think I was lucky that it wasn't me.
But then when I continued being so lucky, I couldn't help but feel guilty.
Why should I have all the luck?
What did I do to deserve to live when everyone else was dying?”

Luck.

Guilt.

He didn’t care.
He was just happy to be alive.

He stared into the windows of the Black Dolphin knowing that June was there waiting for him.
He could go to her, sleep with her and tempt death two more times, or he could leave right now and never look back.
For a moment he thought the choice was between love and life, but then he realized that it was simpler than that.
His choice was about
choice
.
To stay would be to leave his destiny in something else’s hands.
June should have died in
Iraq
and was condemned to live with her own mortality, her destiny tied to the souls of the dead.
That RPG should have exploded, taking her with it, and she couldn’t deal with the fact that she continued to live.
She couldn’t live with that.
For all the living she did, she wasn’t living.

A carload of young men his age pulled into the parking lot of the Black Dolphin.
They piled out, falling drunkenly together in a gaggle of indefatigable fun and headed inside.
She’d take one, just as she’d taken him, and she’d sacrifice him.

Thomas remembered hearing something when he was in
Iraq
, and he couldn’t help but believe that it was connected to the tale she’d told him.
Somehow, someway, the insurgents believed that there were force fields around HUMMERS.
In an inspired sequence of insane determinations, they'd figured out that wrapping the explosive round with duct tape would allow the round to pass through the force field.
With this technique, the insurgents found immediate success and began to wrap more and more RPG rounds with the tape, as if they’d discovered a secret as important and necessary as cold fusion.
Thomas couldn’t help but believe that
their
belief in force fields stemmed from that singular RPG that had failed to explode June’s HUMMER in the city of
Haditha
, the insurgent gunner convinced his careful aim had been foiled by an American force field.

Thomas would never be sure, but the odds were in his favor, and the mystery of how unrelated events could be connected and reinvented in logic would become his coda until the day he died.

But for now he had a choice.

And he chose to go home.

And for a long time he forgot about his attempt to become a Don Quixote on the
Sea
of
Cortez
,
tilting
at sea monsters for the charms of a young woman.

But then sometime in the future it will come to him.
Perhaps even years later, standing in the aisle of a hardware store the memory will surface.
Thomas Greely Jones will reach for a roll of tape and return to the memory of his days in Puerto Peñasco: June; the holy duct tape insurgents wrapped around their grenades; the RPG that rang off June’s HUMMER that didn’t kill her but killed her spirit; the constant search for control they all had with death at every door; and the tentacled-truth of the god beneath the waves who promised to remove his fear, if only he’d play a celestial game of bobbing for apples.
He’d shudder at how close he’d come to dying so that someone else might live.
It might take a moment, it might take an hour, but eventually he’d collect himself, put the tape in his cart, pay for it and return home to his wife and children.
He’d use that tape to repair something mundane, something necessary, and think about how his life had almost been undone in his attempt to remove his fear and become the cavalier hero he’d always wanted to be.
Then his wife would call him to dinner and he’d sit with his family, his eyes occasionally distant as he remembered the Sea of Cortez as he sat and ate and reveled, happy to be alive, a contented cavalier whose windmills are such things in life that we all try and tilt.

***

Story Notes: There’s something about all Cthulhu Mythos stories that terrifies me and that’s the idea that we are some insignificant speck. I’d wanted to write another mythos story for a
while, and when I saw the 100 foot statue of the fisherman and the giant shrimp in Puerto Peñasco (yes there really is one), visions of Dagon swam through my mind. So I channeled Brian Lumley and added my particular American perspective. Please forgive me for the ending. The story was about choice, ultimately, and once someone makes that choice, well, the story is over. I allowed for a little denouement, just enough to allow Thomas’s decision to sink in, just enough to allow that it could be yo
u who made the same decision… or not.

NOW SHOWING ON SCREEN 4

Big
Rock
Candy
Mountain

Starring Jethro James as the messianic crack addict

and the Host of Heaven as intergalactic garbage men

“Porn, crack, angels and government conspiracies—this is the quintessential
Southern California
tale.”

–
The NoHo Reader

In 3D

In the Big
Rock
Candy
Mountain
,

it's a land that's fair and bright,

the handouts grow on bushes,

and you sleep out every night.

Old Folk Song

Jethro James tapped the last rock into his crack pipe and smoked it.
The memories of his third grade field trip to the Natural History Museum in Omaha and his first sexual experience with his third cousin Alice at the age of twelve sizzled, popped and extinguished as the toxic drug took hold of his nervous system and turned him into a human disco ball.
But that was okay, because smoking crack was his job; at least it was ever since the nice government men had gotten hold of him.

The van roared away, leaving him alone on the street.
Old buildings, some reaching seven stories, huddled together and swayed as the warm Santa Anna winds threatened to blow them away.
Graffiti covered every surface as unreadable as the small print on a drug bottle.
The smell of urine and garbage mingled to become a recognizable uptown aroma.
Cars sped by, driven by wild-eyed suburban drivers holding the steering wheels with double-handed, white-knuckled grips, afraid of those few who braved the urban walks.

Ventura
,
California
.
Once infamously known as the Porn Capital of the World, was now just another
Los Angeles
suburb where malls and prefab houses sprouted overnight like mushrooms on a shit pile.
Who knew that the end of the 1980s meant the decline of hair metal, the
Soviet Union
and pornography as a capitalistic way of life?
Sure, remnants of all three still existed.
Ratt still performed in Northern Pennsylvanian VFWs to long tables of retired soldiers who remembered partying when Reagan was president.
Russian government officials still had their dachas and dreamed of the return of a society where everyone was equal, and they were just a little more equal.
The
I
nternet resurrected the world's wet dreams allowing one-click viewing of anything and everything, in all time zones, and any position.
And for those who desired a more permanent solution, videos could be rushed to their door in nondescript brown wrappers.
But gone were the blockbuster porn movies.
Gone were the triple-X theaters with thousand-bulb marquees illuminating the darkness like nightlights for the perverse.

Porn in
Ventura
had been as common as corn in
Iowa
.
Porn and corn.

Jethro liked the way the two words sounded together.

Corn.

Porn.

Corn.

Porn.

The porn fields of
Iowa
.

He broke into crack-addled giggles as he imagined Ma and Pa Iowa harvesting fields of Ron Jerem
y
s.

And in the
Kingdom
of
Ventura
, there was a time when Jethro had been king.
He'd starred in one hundred and twenty seven movies and videos.
He'd had every woman in the industry at least twice.
Men wanted to be him.
Woman wanted to be done by him.

But no more.

Crack was now his life.

The juicy rush as the raw smoke shot past his gums, terra-forming the surface of his lungs, exciting the vessels to turbo-charge the drug through his system and into his brain, until even his vision sizzled
,
was better than anything life could give him.
Like now, normal sight had been replaced by a fusion of colors, gyrating in three dimensions like an epileptic kaleidoscope.
His glistening eyes revealed the world as a chaos of Crayola.
A poodle and an elm tree could glow pink as easily as not.
Cars shown blue, their reflections in storefront windows bright yellow.
Ochre streets ran beneath an umber sky.
Purple and violet buildings cast green shadows from an orange sun.
Telephone wires and power lines pulsed red like the veins of a great beast.
People moved about, their solid colors random by assignment, yet vibrant with their mystery.

But it was one specific color that Jethro James sought.
He swayed, the effects of the drug as it clenched tighter causing him to stumble.
He steadied himself on a golden parking meter, and noticed off-hand that the time had expired.
After fumbling in his pocket for a moment, he
thunked
down a dime, then pushed himself away from the meter like a boat casting off.

And then he saw it, a single white presence.
Dressed as a postman, the nephilim strode down the sidewalk, as unaware of its stalkers as the surrounding pedestrians were of the true form of the postman.
Jethro squinted past the brightness enough to make out that the nephilim was a middle aged black woman.
Her forward-leaning gait, combined with the uniform of a postal worker, lent an inculcated officiousness that deterred people from bothering her.

Jethro began to giggle.

“J-Dog, this is Asylum.
Cut out the chatter,” the voice came through his earpiece.

Jethro continued to giggle.

“J-Dog, have you spotted a target?”

Jethro managed to enunciate despite his drug-induced jubilance enough so that they knew he'd seen one.

“I think he’s crazy,” a voice said.

“That may be, but that crackerhead hasn’t failed us yet.
Return to Asylum, Jethro.”
And to the others Asylum said, “Establish triple canopy surveillance.
I want to know everyone she touches and everywhere she goes.”

“So you really think she’s one of them?” asked a voice.

“Definitely.
You should get ready, because if we’re lucky we’ll find their hive before nightfall.”

“Then I’ll finally get to see one?”

“Just like in the fucking Bible.”

***

Jethro had been seeing them for months, now.
He’d thought they were his own personal versions of pink elephants.
He'd never known they were real until the day he was scooped up in the government net.

Nearly two dozen of his fellow crackheads were blindfolded and taken to an underground classroom.
He reasoned it had to be the abandoned Skunkworks.
Not far from
Ventura
, the old top
-
secret military installation was the crucible from which the SR
–
71 spy plane had been born.

Twenty-one wooden chairs filled the room.
Twenty faced forward in four rows of five.
A single empty chair had been placed in the front of the classroom facing the rear.
Upon each of the twenty chairs sat an addict in different stages of withdrawal.
They’d been held in separate cells for at least forty-eight hours, so some were already shaking uncontrollably, yellow bile seeping from between cracked lips as they herked and jerked against the chains that bound them.

Jethro felt his teeth growing.
His heart beat tom
-
toms through his eyes.
He'd been focusing on the smell of his index finger for an hour and swore it reminded him of cotton candy.

Glancing at the others in the room depressed Jethro.
Part of him wanted to be away from these rejects.
Gaunt faces.
Malnourished bodies.
Ruined and rank clothing.
But then another, less kind part of his Samaritan psyche reminded him that he looked just like them.
When he was high he could trick himself into believing that everything was cool.
But he wasn't high now.
He was sober and ashamed to be among them.

He began to notice a sulfur smell.
It took a few moments, but he finally detected the narrow ribbon of brimstone circling the empty chair in the front.
The smell and the brimstone reminded him of a movie he'd done with Dirk Dong and Mulva Darling where he and Dirk had been traveling exorcists and Mul
v
a was a poor misunderstood succubus.
She'd been trapped in a circle of brimstone and it was up to them to save her soul.
And as was the norm in his chosen profession, salvation came from fucking, front, back, top, bottom and sideways.

Before he could return to the mystery of the brimstone, his attention was stolen when a fight broke out between a Filipino He-She and a man Jethro recognized as having once been a fellow actor.
Sean was his first name, but he'd gone by the name Snake Foreskin, his oddly thin and impossibly long member propelling him through celluloid hits like
Escape from New Jack Off City
and
Escape from Lost Ambulance
.
Sean had been what they'd termed a
geek
in the industry.
For the most part he'd done intros and extros like on the set of
Ali Baba and the Forty Knees
, the film had opened with him blowing on a flute like a snake charmer, his penis rising as a nearly invisible monofilament line pulled it into the air as if it were alive and hypnotized by the music.
But now the He-She had Snake's head in both hands, bouncing it off the floor as he-she screamed over and over, "You no touchee me!"

Government men in black jumpsuits, helmets with face shields and rubber gloves rushed into the room and separated the pair.
Within moments they'd rearranged the addicts so that Snake and his adversary sat at opposite ends of the room, breathing heavily, and sweat dripping from their brows.
They looked pathetic.
They needed some of their dignity back.
They needed some crack.

No sooner had the thought crossed his mind when six government stooges wearing orange hazmat suits entered the room, two carried trays like holocaust butlers, the remaining four held sub-machine guns and arrayed themselves in the corners, their reason for being stunningly clear.
Move and you die!

"Welcome to the Skunkworks," a voice came from a speaker in the ceiling.
"You all have been invited to participate in a brand new program to save the world."

The proclamation was met with giggles and a few groans, but nothing more.

"My assistants will be passing out crack pipes for your smoking pleasure.
Please accept them in an orderly manner.
No pushing or shoving will be allowed."

Suddenly all eyes snapped to the men with trays as they began to pass out small unadorned pipes.
Each was accepted by greedy shaking hands.
Many of the men wept openly, effusive with gratitude as they cupped the pipes in their hands.
A hair-lipped Hispanic with wiry arms and collapsed veins barked his impatience as he leapt past an old war vet.
Two of the orange-clad government men opened fire, three round bursts stitching the man in place.
He spun, then collapsed, his arms and legs folding in upon themselves like those of a dead spider.

"Please stay in your seats."
The calm voice was pure Mr. Rogers.
"We won't allow disorder."

Jethro glanced around recognizing the barely contained glee in everyone's eyes as their dreams came true.
All their midnight prayers and begging had finally delivered to them what they so desperately craved.
His eyes lingered once more on the empty chair amidst the brimstone circle.
Was it for one of them?
What did one have to do to sit there?

A sticky net of melancholy entrapped him as he realized how far he'd traveled from his life in
Iowa
.
He could have stayed with his family, he could have been part of a heritage first ground into the soil two hundred years ago, but instead he'd followed a dream fueled by rock music, porn mags and impossibly long-legged girls.
He'd found happiness and fame for a time between their legs, but when the industry had crumbled beneath the enlightenment of the 1990s, he'd nowhere to go.
He couldn't go home.
For him Iowa was a clean place, a place where his family had grown for generations, and a place where people rarely even kissed in public, much less...

He didn't want to finish the thought.
At least he had the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
Unspoiled and unpopulated, it was his heaven and a place that even his sordid history could not spoil.

Two orange-clad men entered the room from the door at the rear, and drug the body away.
A third mopped up the blood trail, backing out the door so that the only evidence that something had gone wrong was the empty seat.

When the drug tray came to Jethro he tried to be cool, but couldn't stop his hands from shaking with anticipation.
Putting the pipe to his lips, he inhaled deeply, tasting the unlit crystal resting in the bowl as he hummed a string of song
–
There's a lake of gin, and we can both jump in, and the handouts grow on bushes
.