Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron (45 page)

And mellowing in his world view too; for he no longer scowled nor spat in the direction of Betty Step-in-Time when he passed him on the pier, but nodded affably, and once was even heard to remark that it took all kinds of folks to make a world, and you really shouldn’t judge folks without you get to know them.

∇

Jihad over Innsmouth

Edward Morris

A
cold, black, liquescent fear laps at the edges of my heart as I approach the first gate in the long Caliph’s Maze of Airport Security.

Some darker force is trying to sway me unobtrusively away, to make me renege my retainer’s oath, cut my losses and run headlong to South America with the dwindling remains of my bank account.

Should I die on my quest, a first-class seat in Paradise awaits me. In my time, I have lived through every hell Shaitan could possibly devise right here on Earth, moving behind newspaper headlines which even Al-Jazeera fears to run. Enquiring minds want to know, but some truths are better left to the darkness at the center of the universe, to be drowned out by the skirlings of the blind piper and his retinue of idiot flute-players.

But the oath I took goes deeper than the contract I signed with the old black man in Oakland last week. It is one our folk call fatwa, and is not to be broken. Come flood or djinn or plague of insects, I will board this plane.

I carry no arms upon my person. I’m simply afraid of Americans.

This is a very hot land for me now. Every time I have to fly, I expect Justice Department agents in sober black suits and Agent Smith shades to surround me, barking on their surveillance headsets that I am under arrest for any one of a thousand occupationally hazardous reasons which I foreswore tabulating long ago.

No minions of the law shew themselves in the crowd. My fear settles back inside me and changes shape. For myself, I merely offer a silent prayer to Allah that my limited human perceptions somehow interpreted the recent stars incorrectly. If not, as the American GI’s I ‘consult’ with, put it, I’ll be in a world of shit.

They know they can batten down all the iron hooks of their ‘Patriot Act’ upon me for any number of ‘moving violations.’ If he were here, Dad would tell me I’m just being paranoid. But Dad’s in Gaza, on a contract of his own.

In any case, your William Burroughs writes that perfect paranoia is perfect awareness. In my line of work, selective application of that idea holds the potential to save one’s life. Under that lens, I realize that if They (definition subject to change without notice) felt like taking me out of the game, they could have done it by now. I can only assume I’m still in their good graces and travel at will, until a harsh and bracketed detainment at this pestiferous little airport, followed by an unspecified hitch in the Tombs, wherein New York’s Finest would perform upon my habeas corpus certain interrogation methods never proscribed by the Geneva Convention.

I’m afraid of Americans. But I keep forgetting that I’m an American, too. It seems an unlikely thing to forget, but one way or another, I’ve been a nomad all my life.

Under my real name, Hassan Sabbah al-Gazi (just call me Han, as people have since my sixth-grade year, the year of those ubiquitous
Star Wars
movies), I became a naturalized citizen when I was eleven.

Dad moved us over here from Jerusalem after things got a little tense between himself and a false friend in the Mossad, the Israeli Secret Service. Our people have long sworn that Mossad eat what they kill. But my father, in disappearing, was actually doing the operative a favor (albeit one of a nature that would never hold up in court.) But that’s another tale, for another day.

I approach the gate. A petrified-looking Lebanese guy with a chicken chest and a fake badge puffs up in my face at the first metal detector. The Marines have a wonderful idiom for his sort, an “empty uniform”. His is hanging on him like a drop-cloth! I stifle a laugh.

“Sir,” he barks in heavily-accented English. “Could you please remove your shoes?”

I drop to one knee, hands where he can see them, and do so, handing them up. He inspects them, then looks as though he may presently swallow his chin. As he reaches for his radio, I stay his hand so quickly he doesn’t anticipate the motion. Amateur. I address him softly in Arabic.

“Look, effendi, you push on the back and the heel fills up with air.” I show him.

He looks again, and groans at my Reebok pump gym sneakers that are probably almost as old as he is. “A thousand pardons, cousin. My boss, you understand, he asks that we—”

I sigh. “Yeah, yeah. You’re just doing your job. No worries.”

He scutters back to the X-ray conveyor, takes a long look at the screen, and hands me my bag.

“Shalom aleichem, habibi. Safe journey.”

I bow with my right hand over my heart. “Asayem aleichem shalom, cousin. Don’t work too hard.”

“Not possible.” He chuckles and waves me through. I start looking for Gate 11.

∇

The thought of hitting Boylston Street in Boston around dinner time makes me salivate. De gustibus est non disputandem, especially after the Swanson frozen fare in first class. From what I hear, the Combat Zone has been strip-mined of most of its red stoplights and dive bars, so further recreation is probably best left out. I wish I had time hit the old MTA Pneumatic Railway tunnels down there and see if there are any new leads for me on the corkboard in the lobby of the other Pickman Gallery.

But there’s no time to schmooze with the denizens, let alone the citizens. I am to meet with my contact on Boston Common an hour after we land. Transportation has been arranged. We will drive much further north from there, along a particularly fierce section of the Massachusetts coastline. Most maps have forgotten our destination, simply listing it as an unincorporated township on a dead, played-out reef. But the old brain-cases living on Supplemental Security in Arkham and Kingsport still call it Innsmouth.

Innsmouth. I can taste the word in my throat like raw calamari. My skin goes hot as my sweat goes cold. The word, and the memory of the word, fills my nostrils with the smell of cold boom town gone bust, mine-dumps leaching sulfur into the water table, sad rotting houses covered over with Z-Brick, with living denizens and permanently bolted doors.

The word smells like Kreutzfeld-Jakob’s Disease, leprosy, cannibalism and a hundred other kinds of runoff from inbreeding that science does not yet wish to name.

I’m going back. The mere thought makes me better understand, in this moment, the Hakkagure of the ancient Japanese samurai. It is the same with those of my faith who ply my trade. Behave as though the flesh is dead. Then… and now more than ever… one does not lose his mind when confronted with the dark.

In place of fear, my thoughts turn to wrath as Gate 11 looms large, just down the way a bit on the right. Several screaming children twine around me like cats for a moment. I consult my watch. I know I’m not late.

Wrath. The denizens of Innsmouth deliberately flout my faith. The Prophet teaches us that Man evolved from clots of blood. Our learned men of this age teach also that somewhere between blood clot and H. sapiens sapiens, we crawled out of the sea. This is not to be doubted.

But Innsmouth follows an infidel faith. Their own Shaitan, whom Islam has called Dagon since Babylon, has performed a miracle of fish unto any and every hard-luck sailor dumb or amateur enough to steer his tired old Downeaster Alexa into the waters off the town’s own Devil Reef.

Since the 1920s, decapod mating patterns in that part of the Bay, and migratory patterns of just about every aquatic species that ever turned a buck, have climbed steadily with no spike in sight. Of course, the corporate fisheries were in there first. But the fish are so thick you could practically walk on the water like Yeshua. Dagon apparently shares and shares alike.

By hypothetical evidence, (which, being based in the supernatural, can neither be proven or refuted in court) rock-ribbed Protestants in every hamlet for miles around Innsmouth, are slowly being swayed to the notion that there might be other fish in the sea. To harvest said fish, their mad TV preacher boasts, you must devolve back to the blood clot, to drown beneath the waves of our own DNA, to crawl back to the womb and die.

The Prophet cast out Dagon with all the other false gods. My business with the debased tornado-bait of Innsmouth is nothing more or less than jihad. One may work full-time during Ramadan for such a purpose, it is written. I just hope it’s over with quickly.

My contact is a rich writer from Bangor, only a few years my junior. Mr. Bachman is to outfit me with the necessary ordnance and artifacts. Dick also holds a private pilot’s license. All the paperwork has been taken care of through my Oakland liason.

When did they start calling this section “Business Elite”, I wonder? Was “First Class” too classist for these people? These funny, half-blind, blissfully oblivious, cell-phone-babbling, off-in-their-own-little-world Americans? It’s their world. We’re all just living in it.

Long might some of them live to think so. I sigh, stepping hurriedly on board. The pilot looks like a whippet with an elaborate mop of gray hair, prescription shades and a thick mustache. He grins a set of teeth like the white keys on a piano.

“Welcome aboard! Happy holidays!” He briskly shakes my hand. I notice a bead of cocaine-colored snot twinkling just beneath his right nostril. Pilots are all alike. In Arabic, I tell him he’s an idiot and he’s going to get us all killed. He smiles and nods and herds me in.

I slide up through Coach, glancing at the seat number on my ticket. C-4. Very funny, Boss. You want me blown up that bad, do you? Freak. I can’t help but chuckle.

The intercom speakers blare into life, “GOOD MORNING. HAPPY HOLIDAYS.” I part the curtain and venture into “Business Elite,” my eyes slightly ahead of me.

“FLIGHT 180 WILL BE DEPARTING LAGUARDIA IN JUST A FEW MINUTES. YOUR—”

“Oh, shit.” I look down fast. A soccer mom two seats ahead glances back at me like I’m about to pull out a box-cutter. Right now, she’s the least of my worries.

We Sufi have a kind of prayer for times like this. No matter what the Creator hands you, be it a hundred dollars or two broken legs, you smile as broadly as you can and say Thank You, Sir, May I Have Another? And you laugh. Thus, the worse something gets, the more important it becomes to deflect it.

But… my God… if… the man… if such he can be termed… who I was hired to find in …Innsmouth and kill is… seated… right beside me on… this plane?

I committed the photograph to memory before I rolled a hashish spliff with it and smoked it to the head. This is a spot-on match. This is a practical joke. This is…

Why, this is going to be a long flight. I smile, grit my teeth and sit down, trying not to look at him. But to hear him slurp and slobber over that sushi box, sucking on his mucilaginous webby fingers, a green rill of wasabi wending its way down his vestigial chin—

My mind spools out its quiet dossier, calming my restless hands that want to make my shoelaces into garrottes. Reverend Irving Waite, in the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful. The false prophet I have been promised ten million U.S. dollars (half up front), and flown all the way from Oakland, to smear from the skin of Space and Time. You can hear about something until the teller is blue in the face.

But seeing it sitting beside you is another matter entirely. He looks something like the jazz singer Mel Tormé, if Mel were to commission a bust of himself as a horror-movie latex appliance by Tom Savini. As the Marines say, he stinks like low tide took a shit in his pants. And then there’s the reaction-time thing. Lovely dinner company.

I have been charged to end this creature. At present, I must somehow summon up the ingenuity to sit still for an hour-plus flight and act as though I had no idea who he was. I shove my bag under the seat and give up.

“How’s the sushi?” In my head, I’m humming an old family chant to harmonize body functions. My sense of smell cycles down to almost nothing.

Waite’s long, peeling head swivels like a newt’s. His eyes are all wrong. I knew an autistic kid once, in Jerusalem, a beggar’s son, whose eyes were almost that shade of gold. But the cataracts in Waite’s eyes (or whatever they really are) make the effect somehow more alarming. The tail of a shrimp hangs from his thick lower lip until he sees me looking and snaps it back.

Most people would assume the black patches are squamous melanoma, flaking and coruscating at the sides of his wattled neck. Said neck, like his head, is home to alarmingly random patches of scraggly nicotine-colored hair.

Anyone would think the Reverend was taking chemotherapy. I know better. He’s getting ready to go join the Eternal Family Reunion out on Devil Reef. He’s getting ready to grow gills, and use them.

He’s getting ready to clot.

“Ehhh.” The Rev rumbles back in a voice like a shovel over wet cement. “Tastes…two days… old. I c’d…get better’n this at home.” His metabolism is probably so slowed-down by now that he took this long to register my presence.

That’s an article of his faith too, you see. With immortality comes icthyic serenity, and thus their human shells are swallowed in Devonian slime. I smile and nod.

“I’ll bet you could.” The conversation is left dangling.

To the left of us, in C-2, some punk kid is asleep with his shaven head against the window, blocking the view. He’s dressed fairly nice for his sort, in an all-black suit with no tie, a rack of hoop earrings and a stud in either nostril. He looks exhausted.

A crewcut flight attendant, who looks and swishes alarmingly like Dr. Smith on the old
Lost In space
show, pops up. “Would you care for a beverage, after we get rolling?”

“Green tea. No sugar.”

“Very good, Mr. Sabbah.” He blinks at Waite. “And we’ll bring your clam juice for you, too, Reverend. I’ll check on him,” he jerks a thumb at Punkboy, “Later.”

Behind and above us, the tastefully-concealed speakers drone on, “PLEASE DISCONTINUE THE USE OF ALL CELL PHONES DURING THE TAXI PERIOD. FLIGHT ATTENDANTS, CROSS-CHECK AND AISLE CALL, PLEASE.”