The Place of Dead Roads Read online

  Tom shakes his head..."This isn't the tenth century, Kim...Money abhors a vacuum...a few more years..."

  They ride into Clear Creek...rusty tracks overgrown with weeds...the water tower has fallen on its side...By the station an old Chinese is smoking opium...

  "They grow it here," Tom explains..."What's your friend's name? I speak a little Chinese..."

  "Ask him if Billy Chung is here."

  "Not yet. Clom soon."

  They draw up in front of the Clear Water Hotel. Tom points to a two-story red brick building across the street...

  "Pantapon Rose's cathouse..."

  Juanito jumps out and salutes like a bellhop...

  "Carry bags, Meester? See me fuck my seester?"

  "I think we'll bunk down with Pantapon Rose...The roof doesn't leak..." Tom says.

  Quite comfortable actually. They settle in. Fish in the river. Some Mexicans in the hotel. Thirteen Pima Indians occupy the general store. Juanito is half Pima and half Mexican and these are relatives. No trouble trading for supplies. The Chinese live in the station and keep to themselves.

  Kim was to make Fort Johnson and Clear Creek his base of operations for two years, with side trips as far as Mexico.

  Look at this picture from Tom's collection: the Indians and the one white are all related, by location: the end of the line. Like the last Tasmanians, the Patagonians, the hairy Ainu, the passenger pigeon, they cast no shadow, because there will never be any more. This picture is the end. The mold is broken.

  This final desolate knowledge impelled them to place phalluses, crudely carved from wood and painted with ocher, on male graves. The markers are scattered and broken. Only the picture remains.

  Notice the Indian fourth from the left in the back row: a look of sheer panic. For he recognizes the photographer: Tom Dark, who takes the last picture and files it "Secret—Classified." Only he knows exactly where it is in relation to all the other files, since location is everything.

  The picture itself is a cryptic glyph, an artifact out of context, fashioned for a forgotten purpose or a purpose blocked from future realization. And yet spelling out...

  Five passenger pigeons in a tree...CLICK: "The Last Passenger Pigeons."

  KAPOW! The birds drop and flutter to the ground, feathers drifting in dawn wind.

  The Hunter looks about uneasily as he shoves the birds into his bag. It's been a bad day. He turns to face the camera.

  CLICK: "The Last Passenger-Pigeon Hunter."

  Spelling out...August 6, 1945: Hiroshima. Oppenheimer on screen: "We have become Death, Destroyer of Worlds."

  "Doctor Oppenheimer!"

  CLICK.

  Hall reflected that he was himself the end of the Hall line, at least by the old-fashioned method of reproduction.

  "Waahhhh!"

  CLICK.

  "Awwwwwwk!!!

  CLICK.

  Kim makes up skits for the sex pictures. He is looking forward to moving film.

  Both are interstate champions in the International Undressing Contest. Tailors cater to this discipline and clothes are carefully designed for the celerity and grace with which they can be removed. They roll and twist on the bed, making high keening noises that set the windowpanes vibrating.

  Afterward the boy shoves some gum into his mouth and says, "You and I are going to have to talk about our relationship..." He blows a pink gum bubble and pops it. "Who aren't you?"

  Tom wants to re-create various erotic incidents from Kim's past life...

  "Well me and my Fox Boy made sex magic against old Judge Farris...He said I look like a sheep-killing dog and his horrible wife said I am a walking corpse...You can be the Fox Boy..."

  The set for this scene was a room in the old brothel with a worn green satin sofa and an erotic Japanese screen with flying pricks and an old man chasing them with butterfly nets. Kim finds it tasteful.

  Tom speaks in a circus barker voice:

  "We attempt the impossible: to photograph the present moment which contains the past the future. All art attempts the impossible. Consider the problem of photographing past time. We will now reenact Kim masturbating in front of Judge Farris's picture."

  It's a stock part, nasty-tempered old gentleman with purple cheekbones and clipped white mustache and mean bloodshot blue eyes. This picture will do, so nail it to the wall. This is Kim's basement workshop where he practices magic, a magic circle in red chalk on the floor. Action, cameras. Take over, chi-co. Kim takes off a red bathrobe and tosses it onto the green satin divan.

  He stands naked in front of the picture...(One camera is taking the scene in profile, the other is installed in a hole in the wall just above the judge's picture.) Kim arches his body and rises on his toes, snapping his fingers above his head to evoke the Fox Boy. Tom as the Fox Boy, his body covered with red paint, slithers out from behind the Japanese screen. Kim looks over his shoulder and erases a portion of the circle with one foot. Tom squeezes in, picks up a piece of chalk between his toes, and closes the circle. "Get thee behind me, Satan, and do the great work," Kim quips. Now they both intone:

  Slip and stumble

  Trip and fall

  Down the stairs

  And hit the waaaalllllllllll.

  They howl it out and Kim shoots the Judge right in the crotch.

  Tom is planning a trip to Denver to pick up money transferred to a Denver bank from a New York client. Kim will recruit personnel.

  They are both dressed in "banker drag" as Kim calls it—expensive dark suits discreetly expensive. Tom chats up the manager about the future of moving film. The manager is impressed. How easy it is to deceive those who are already deceived. Tell them what they want to hear and they will believe it.

  They make a tour of dives and opium dens as Kim renews his contacts with the Johnson underworld, rod-riding yeggs and cat burglars, bank robbers on holiday...(Denver is a closed city. You don't operate here.) He pays a social call on Salt Chunk Mary and picks up some good backup: Marbles, a juggler, knife thrower, and trick shot from a stranded carnival: he can shoot the pips out of cards, put out candles, light matches and hit a silver dollar in the air. And Boy, who used to work with Jones on bank heists. Boy radiates a murderous vitality. A real Force, Boy, Kim decides. "They will be my baby-sitters."

  10

  guns gunsmithing

  The shop has an unsuccessful look. Somebody isn't trying. Behind the counter is a boy about sixteen, with flaring ears, yellow hair and an elfish smile.

  "Who owns this place?"

  "My Uncle Olafson, fucking squarehead Swede."

  "Think he might like to sell it?"

  "He'd jump at an offer. He wants to go back to Minnesota, says it's too savage here."

  "When will he be back?"

  "Tomorrow. Went to one of those Swede weddings..."

  Kim picks up a long-barreled 22 revolver...

  "That's got twice the hit of a standard 22..."

  "Who does the work here?"

  "I do. My uncle don't know shit about guns..."

  "Like to work for us?"

  "Sure. My name is Sven."

  His ears wriggle.

  Tom introduces Kim to Chris Cullpepper, a wealthy, languid young man of exotic tastes. He is into magic and has studied with Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn. They decide on a preliminary evocation of Humwawa, Lord of Abominations, to assess the strength and disposition of enemy forces...

  Since Humwawa is the Lord of Things to Come, he is the Lord of Confrontation, and of the Outcome of Battles...

  The invocation is conducted in a bare whitewashed room, the north wall missing, the room opening onto a walled courtyard...Marbles, Boy, Tom, Sven, Chris, and Kim take part—all in sky clothes of course. As soon as Chris begins the evocation the room turns icy cold...Demons writhe around them in a pantomime of vicious hate, imitating sex acts, flopping and kicking and dancing with tongues hanging down to the floor, twisting to show rectums, giggling out spirals of sepia vapors that burn like acid...Bu
t now they shrink back from the awesome breath of Humwawa, twisting in deadly ferments, spewing yeasty vomits, intestines ruptured by tearing farts, teeth and bones dissolving in body acids, tongues splitting and squirming like severed worms, they sputter out in nitrous smoke.

  More advanced and detailed incantations are carried out in the locker-room gymnasium of an empty school that Chris owns..."All that young male energy, so much better than a church my dead I mean my dear, all those whining, sniveling prayers..."

  Musty male smells drift from the lockers, from moldy gym shoes and yellowed jockstraps. Kim puts his gun on the upper shelf with a frayed football helmet...An oak bench smooth as amber, seasoned by generations of young buttocks, a smell of stale sweat, rectal mucus, and adolescent genitals rubs out with musk and hyacinth and rose oil as the boys sit down side by side: Tom, Chris, Marbles, Boy, Sven and Kim, watching each other for the moment when a leg is raised to shove down pants and shorts...

  A sharp ferret smell cuts incense and perfume, as the boys stand up naked to hang their clothes in the lockers. Kim looks at Marbles and catches his breath, lips peeling back to show one sharp front tooth. The boy's flesh is like pink marble, the buttocks smooth and shiny as polished stone...His perfectly formed phallus is cool and smooth to the touch, his eyes a smoky slate color, his hair ash blond and curly in a tight casque around his head...

  Sven's nostrils flare, his ears wriggle and turn bright red, and a smell of the north woods wafts out: pine and woodsmoke, leather clothes slept in all winter and stale beds in rooms where the windows are never opened...

  Chris has set up a stone altar in the old gymnasium with candles and incense burners, a crystal skull, a phallic doll carved from a mandrake root, and a shrunken head from Ecuador.

  Kim leans forward and Marbles rubs the unguent up him with a slow circular twist as Chris begins the evocation...

  UTUL XUL

  "We are the children of the underworld, the bitter venom of the gods."

  Kim feels Marbles's smooth cock slide in.

  "One that haunts the streets, one that haunts the bed."

  The walls open and Kim sees a red desert under a purple sky.

  "Their habitations the desolate places, the lands between the lands, the cities between the cities."

  Kim sees a city of red limestone where naked men slump in a strange lassitude, waiting.

  "May the dead arise and smell the incense."

  Slow rhythmic contraction of the smooth shiny buttocks entering his body, impregnating him...Tom is changing into Mountfaucon, a tail sprouting from his spine, sharp fox face and the musky reek.

  XUL IA LELAL ΙΑ AXA AXA

  Tom, red and peeled, his hair standing up, his eyes lighting up inside with sputtering blue fire...And Chris, his flexible spine undulating like a serpent, bitter venom of the gods gathering in his crotch, phallus straining up...throats swelling vibrating, voices blending in the larynx...Tom is a shimmering pearly mollusk, and Marbles a living shell...He is riding the contractions like a cheetah across the red desert to the city where naked men with antennae jutting from their hairless skulls slump against smooth stone walls and steps...

  A reek of alien excrement and offal clings to the ancient stone and rises from open street latrines. The naked men are waiting their turn on the latrines, which accommodate six at once, lead troughs welded into stone. The men slump with dead eyes, waiting to void their phosphorescent excrement...

  "The creation of ANUS, the foundations of chaos."

  Kim feels something stir and stretch in his head as horns sprout...He writhes in agony, in bone-wrenching spasms, as a blaze of silver light flares out from his eyes in a flash that blows out the candles on the altar. The crystal skull lights up with lambent blue fire, the shrunken head gasps out a putrid spicy breath, the mandrake screams:

  IA KINGU IA LELAL ΙΑ AXAAAAAAAAA

  On the way back to Clear Creek they stop at the Overlook Hotel in Boulder. The hotel is almost empty and they take the whole top floor...

  Sunrise outside, the nacreous pinks and mother-of-pearl streaked with semen and roses, pirate casks full of gold pieces and jewels, Tom's mouth opens, gasping the alien medium of Kim's body. Kim picks a piece of bacon from between his front teeth, his face blank and absent as the polished blue sky behind him.

  Doves fucking in the morning and Tom leaps out of bed with a snarl of rage, grabs a tennis racket that he finds in a corner and rushes onto the balcony, slashing right and left. Bloody pigeons cascading to the street five floors down. He draws the curtains and puts the tennis racket back in its corner.

  "Thus perish all enemies of the human race," says Kim.

  Tom's eyes glitter in the darkened room...

  Kim recruits a band of flamboyant and picturesque outlaws, called the Wild Fruits. There is the Crying Gun, who breaks into tears at the sight of his opponent.

  "What's the matter, somebody take your lollipop?"

  "Oh senor, I am sorry for you..."

  And the Priest, who goes into a gunfight giving his adversaries the last rites. And the Blind Gun, who zeroes in with bat squeaks. And the famous Shittin' Sheriff, turned outlaw. At the sight of his opponent he turns green with fear and sometimes loses control of his bowels. Well, there's an old adage in show biz: the worse the stage fright, the better the performance.

  Kim trains his men to identify themselves with death. He takes some rookie guns out to a dead horse rotting in the sun, eviscerated by vultures. Kim points to the horse, steaming there in the noonday heat.

  "All right, roll in it."

  "WHAT?"

  "Roll in it like dogs of war. Get the stink of death into your chaps and your boots and your guns and your hair."

  Most of us puked at first, but we got used to it, and vultures followed us around hopefully.

  We always ride into town with the wind behind us, a wheeling cloud of vultures overhead, beaks snapping. The townspeople gag and retch:

  "My God, what's that stink?"

  "It's the stink of death, citizens."

  Kim had now gone underground and in any case the days of the gunfighter were over. So far as the world knew he was just a forgotten chapter in western history. He was d-e-a-d. So who would move against him, or even know about the Alamuts he was establishing throughout America and northern Mexico? He had in fact taken pains to remain anonymous and dispatched his henchmen to remove records of the Fort Johnson Incident from libraries, newspaper morgues and even from private collections of old western lore...So who now would know where he was and reveal themselves by moves against him? He decided to wait and see. The first settlement, a resort hotel at Clear Creek, demonstrated that they did know and were already dispatching their agents to intercept the project. It's rather like bullfighting, he reflected. If the bull can get a querencia where he feels at home, then the bullfighter has to go and get him on his own ground, so the alert bull sticker will do anything to keep the bull from finding a querencia. In fact some unethical practitioners have small boys posted with slingshots...

  Well things start to go wrong. Right away there are delays in shipments of material. These were traced to a warehouse in Saint Louis and a certain shipping clerk who was later found to be suffering from a form of petit mal with spells of amnesia. A small boy brought charges of molestation against the foreman of construction. When the boy became violently insane the charges were dropped, but not before a drummer had attempted to incite the townspeople to form a lynch mob.

  But an old farmer who was one of our own said, "You live hereabouts, Mister? Wouldn't say so from your accent..."

  "Well I live north of here..."

  "You a country boy?"

  "Well I was...that is..."

  "From Chicago, ain't you?"

  A murmur from the crowd. The drummer is losing his audience.

  "We have children in Chicago too..."

  "Well whyn't you stay up there and protect your children stead of selling your lousy war-surplus hog fencing down here?"
r />   Kim now realizes that they can take over bodies and minds and use them for their purposes. So why do they always take over stupid, bigoted people or people who are retarded or psychotic? Obviously they are looking for dupes and slaves, not for intelligent allies. In fact their precise intention is to destroy human intelligence, to blunt human awareness and to block human beings out of space. What they are launching is an extermination program. And anyone who has sufficient insight to suspect the existence of a they is a prime target.

  He listed the objectives and characteristics of the aliens...

  1. They support any dogmatic religious system that tends to stupefy and degrade the worshipers. They support the Slave Gods. They want blind obedience, not intelligent assessment. They stand in the way of every increase in awareness. They only conceded a round earth and allowed the development of science to realize the even more stupefying potential of the Industrial Revolution.

  2. They support any dogmatic authority. They are the arch-conservatives.

  3. They lose no opportunity to invert human values. They are always self-righteous. They have to be right because in human terms they are wrong. Objective assessment drives them to hysterical frenzy.

  4. They are parasitic. They live in human minds and bodies.

  5. The Industrial Revolution, with its overpopulation and emphasis on quantity rather than quality, has given them a vast reservoir of stupid bigoted uncritical human hosts. The rule of the majority is to their advantage since the majority can always be manipulated.

  6. Their most potent tool of manipulation is the word. The inner voice.

  7. They will always support any measures that tend to stultify the human host. They will increase the range of arbitrary and dogmatic authority. They will move to make alcohol illegal. They will move to regulate the possession of firearms. They will move to make drugs illegal.