The Nameless Dark: A Collection, page 17
This was something that should not be, death like this, from things like this. An impossible sight, ripped from fever dreams buried deep within the brain and deeper in the human race. Dark truths that retreated from superstition outside the caves, waiting and watching for those who remembered the Elder Knowledge.
Chilton shuddered from the inside out, feeling his grip on sanity loosening by the moment, helped in large measure by the fact that the things grabbing Chilton’s men and pulling them into the water made no sound at all. They massacred in silence and with a cruel efficiency. All he could hear was the one-sided screams of horror ripped from the throats of his crew, and the splash as they hit the water, carried down by the things boiled up from the deep. Young Wiggan called out to him for help from somewhere in the darkness, his high voice pleading, but Chilton stood frozen in place, his courage rendered down to glue that fastened his boots to the deck timber. He just stood and watched as the ship was cleared, one shrieking man at a time, until all were gone.
After several moments of terrible silence, a lone creature leapt down from the yardarm, landing heavily. It rose partially erect and looked in Chilton’s direction, then brought itself to its full height, thin muscles rippling strangely under its glistening skin. As if showing the man it could do it. It could stand like him, taller than him. It could beat him, and did. The face born at the bottom of the sea seemed vaguely human, in some respect. More than the faces of the other ones that had taken his men. Walking in an unnatural, loping manner, it approached Chilton, carrying something small and glittery in its webbed hand. It set it down in front of the captain, turned, and leapt over the rails, disappearing under the water without so much as a splash.
Chilton gazed down at the object resting at his feet.
The Sea Hag was empty. All that remained was the Captain, who stood on deck, waiting to go down with a ship that remained afloat.
To live is sometimes to die, to leave behind the world you once knew and to journey, transformed, into the Hell of displacement, separated from everything you knew and loved. This was the hero’s true journey, and the course on which Chilton was unknowingly traveling, as the Sea Hag sliced through the ocean waves toward that locus of nightmares.
Even before his equipment confirmed it, Chilton knew that he had arrived again at his destination, as his blood seemed to thicken in his veins and the sails suddenly hung limp. He was there, floating above the nest like a fly listing on the surface of a trout stream. This time, the ship lay empty at the start of his journey rather than at the end. This time, he was ready. He didn’t drop anchor, as he knew it would never find the bottom. Besides, the ship had stopped on its own.
Chilton went to the railing and discarded his pistol in the water, then the ocean chart he didn’t need, his sextant and compass, and finally his club, gripping one last time the piece of wood that had once been attached to his father’s body, before casting it into the sea. Everything from the land came from the sea, and everything from the land will return to the sea again. It was just a matter of when.
Chilton busied himself on deck, taking out various objects from his pack. Once prepped, he unmoored a cannon and dragged it to the center of the upper deck. He sponged out the bore and dried it with great care, then packed the chamber with an extra portion of black powder and wadding, before loading the heaviest ball on ship. He cut the wick of the slow match short and wound the strands tight.
Leaning against the cold iron of the neck, Chilton reached into his pack, pulling out a small metallic crown. By its size, it could have been a tin children’s toy, or the priceless diadem of a boy king, made of intricately intersecting threads of pure white gold. He removed the white feather from his lapel and stuck it into the top of the crown, before placing it on his head. Then he slowly disrobed, piling his unwashed clothing into a heap that he sprinkled with gunpowder and set ablaze from the lantern he had placed nearby. The oily wool fibers went up like tinder, billowing black smoke up into the dead sails.
His offerings made to the sea, and the signal fire set, Chilton waited.
It didn’t take long.
Just enough time for the sun to set over the land behind him, washing the thin clouds in pink and yellow, and once again merging sea and sky.
Then they were there, emerging from every concealed spot on the ship and standing in a loose formation. Like a military raiding party, dripping salt water onto the deserted deck.
Chilton got to his feet, his naked flesh shivering in the biting cold, and looked over the group of creatures. How pale and hairy he seemed in comparison to their colorful, smooth skin, flared with pops of red and stripes of yellow. Natural war paint, just like the natives. When he spotted the one that had given him his crown, he nodded. The creature didn’t nod back.
In a blur of activity, he snatched up the lantern and hopped atop the cannon, straddled the lip and forcing down the muzzle under the weight of his body. A monster iron phallus pointed down at the deck from between his legs.
Chilton shot a look at the tall creature. “The land will always rise.”
With a triumphant cackle, he smashed the lantern over the wick, and seconds later the cannon fired, sending its charge down deep into the guts of the Sea Hag that were packed with a Privateer’s fortune of gun powder.
The ship exploded like the floating bomb it had become.
A shower of wreckage descended through the dark water, drifting gently toward the waiting hive a mile wide and built of pearly gold, which was already marshalling for war. The land dwellers would not be prepared. They never were. This would be a revolution of a different kind.
Amid the debris, the small crown tumbled down, the white feather gone.
Transmission
Even this far out, away from the light and the bilge and the droning nouveau bullshit lounge music rasping from a purposely old LP, things were still sort of a blur.
The same blurry party with the same blurry people with annoying hipster headgear and piercings and tattoos and post-ironic t-shirts and uniformly blurry beards. The off-brand bottle of blurry liquor in his hand. The blurry, slurry skank that he had seen before but never recognized, pressing in too close, breathing all of his air.
The shouting. The broken furniture. The fight. The blood. The weaksauce ghetto insults hurled from a safe distance as he ran out of the blurry room in the blurry house on a blurry street in a forgotten Midwestern city that blurred brown and green but mostly brown under a thousand jumbo jets every single day.
A blur. All of it. And none of it worth a single fuck.
Max scratched at the crusted gash on the side of his face and concentrated on the tunnel of pavement opening foot by foot ahead of him, trying to clear the blur from his mind as he drove west, ever west, in a last ditch effort to outrace the smudge of his past. This was it, he felt. A wagon train of one, fueled by a last hope for blessed clarity waiting amongst the swaying palms of the Pacific coast. Failing that, he’d drive off the end of the goddamn continent and drown in the murk of the darkened deep.
Max blinked his eyes and lit up a cigarette, checking the cheap plastic compass he picked up at a truck stop in Grand Island, Nebraska, stuck lopsided to the dash of his shitty late model Dodge. West, the bobbing arrow assured him. West. He was still heading in the right direction. At last that much was certain.
Max knew he stayed too long at his last stop. He had gotten lazy, and worse than that he had gotten hopeful, figuring roots would sprout from the bottoms of his shoes if he just loitered in the same place long enough. Anchoring him to a piece of ground at last. But the roots never came. Only rot. And that’s when he knew he had to get out. That night. That second. By whatever means necessary no matter what collection of beards and bows were in his way.
And so he did.
It made no difference that he had a belly full of poison and eighty-seven dollars to his name. He just knew it was time. And so it was.
And so he went.
Max would keep moving this time, for as far as his shitty late model Dodge would take him. He was pretty sure he had hurt some people pretty badly, maybe even fatally, during his abrupt exit from the blur two nights ago, so going backwards wasn’t an option at this point. He just had to keep his head down and keep grinding that wheel, fueled by the last hope of finding his destiny out yonder under western skies, as so many eastern souls had done before him. Get his hands on a bit of true clarity in the fairytale hills. He’d change his name, maybe grow his hair into Viking braids and take up surfing. But most importantly, he lose himself in the crowded anonymity of the city of nearsighted angels, where everyone is too busy squinting into the mirror to spot the disheveled fugitive sitting across the bar.
It wasn’t his fault, this wanderlust. It was congenital, ancestral, born out of a thirsty Caucasian soul and dissatisfaction with nearly everything around him, combined with the certainty that new lands conquered would quell all inadequacies and establish contrived dominance in one fell swoop. So Max became a human tumbleweed from the first time he learned how to thumb a ride, spinning from city to hamlet to dusty campsite, in search of something bigger than himself to tie him down and make him want to stay, to become part of something outside of himself. Some people looked for God. Some quested for love. Max just searched for meaning, starting with the self and working outward from there if he had time. All of everything that was and would someday be. There had to be a point—a greater purpose—to the entirety of this terribly self-important but most likely utterly meaningless nonsense, and the answer had to be out there somewhere, around the next bend, over the next rise in the road.
But he never found it. Not yet. In all those miles and all those late hours, he’d just found more of the same. He just found more blur.
So here he was, knifing down Highway 50 west of McGill, Nevada, as the last two days and nights—hell, the last thirty-two years—melted into just another portion of an unbroken line of bleary days and blurry nights spent doing nothing with a thousand nameless nobodies, all bored to panicked tears hidden behind masks of sardonic bullshit. Somehow, without knowing exactly where or exactly why, Max had drifted off of I-80, that great tentacle of government-issue cement that stretched the length of this vast, savage land. But it didn’t matter. His cheap plastic compass assured him that he was heading west, and that was good enough for Max. That certainty was enough for now. Small victories in the war against the unknown.
Exhaling a small nimbus cloud of smoke into the windshield, Max sat back, and for the first time in what felt like forever, he relaxed and opened the window, allowing the cool dry air to clean out the car. The blur had begun to recede, which allowed him a smile. He was moving again, had been for two sunrises, and the road behind him was growing longer. He was carving a proud wound into the hide of the central Nevada desert, and no one could force him to do otherwise. Max had regained his footing about the time he hit the Rockies, and with the great peaks of the continental divide doing just that between where he currently was and what he had left behind, he found himself feeling the music again, the rhythm of pavement as the highway danced for him beneath the floorboards.
Max turned on the radio, switching immediately from the dead FM presets of his last layover to the strange anonymity of AM. A veteran of the road, Max loved to scan the monophonic dial when moving through the most remote areas of the country. Amplitude modulation radio in major cities was the cozy bed of blustery right wing shitsuckers, sports broadcasting, and Madison Avenue country pop. But out in the forgotten hinterlands, especially in the desert southwest, the bedfellows become more strange, inhabited by a disparate mix of yammering Spanish, mournful cowboy crooning, random snatches of Chinese, thunderous Evangelical sermons, and UFO whistleblowers who always seemed to concentrate in the dried out, forgotten places, using the AM airwaves to vent their spleen and warn the ignorant masses about the alien entities already moving amongst us. The desert seemed ideally suited to a curious collection of castoffs, eccentrics, weirdos, and sociopaths naturally drawn to the dusty fringes. Meth cooks, anti-government militias, New Agey art nuts, murder cultists. All headed to the sandy heat like Jesus himself, looking to face down their demons, or possibly create them, away from the prying eyes of the better irrigated. Owing to the circumstances surrounding his exit from his last stopover, perhaps Max should join this sun-blasted freak show, he thought. Get lost amongst the lost. But he knew something else was out there for him, waiting far beyond the arid wasteland, where the mountains and trees sprang up again along the ocean cliffs, trying to slow the momentum of western trajectory before all frustrated life again ended up in the sea.
Max pressed “scan” and skimmed over an offering of MexiCali accordion music and a low rent advert for industrial shedding, arriving at what he loved the most—the Born Againer martyrdom rant against the encroaching forces of the Antichrist, who was always some eastern hemisphere powerbroker carefully selected and re-christened by each new generation, and then watched like a chicken coop eyes a hawk—albeit a hawk two thousand miles away. No matter what latitude or longitude traveled, Max could find cold comfort in the certainty of religious zealotry flooding AM airwaves in the forgotten places of North America, stoked by paranoia, bigotry, xenophobia and a sort of gleeful fatalism that would have chilled Nietzsche to his knickers. Land of the free. Home of the brave.
“And so the days of the tribulation are nigh, my brothers and sisters,” roared the firebrand, buzzing Max’s tiny speakers. “And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that ye be not troubled, for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet here. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in diverse places. All these are the beginning of sorrows!”
The signal faded a bit, but came back strong a few seconds later, allowing Max to continue his front row seat to the theatre of holy fear. “The signs are everywhere, if one knows how to look with the eyes of Jesus and the mind of God! The return of the Chosen Ones to their ancient land, the gathering of crows, the massing of armies…” Hoots and hollers from the unseen audience gave credibility to these ravings that would be deemed insanity in the western world if spewed under a different banner, or no banner at all. “It’s all in the Word, and the Word shall come to pass!”
The Word. Max chuckled and lit up another cigarette, shaking his head at the dead-ass certainty of the Evangelical blowhard. How can one be so assured of anything? Faith aside, if this were a country settled by Bronze Age Norsemen and founded on the teachings of Odin and his hammer-wielding sprat, Americans would have a totally different outlook on the afterlife, and pine for bloody laurels while ascending to the Halls of Valhalla after being split in two on the field of battle. But this wasn’t that country. Thanks to Rome, then Columbus and Cabot and Cortez, pious Americans from every bloodline under the mongrel sun got the longhaired peacenik from Galilee as their redeemer, who Max surmised was more dope smoking flower child than gun wielding capitalist. Luck of the historical draw, as all the books that mattered to posterity were written by the victors. How many times had Max roared some version of this half-baked pundit screed into various living rooms and barroom bathrooms the past ten years like a C-list Beatnik? How many times had no one given a solitary fuck what he was saying? Gospels aside, the Son of Man probably experienced the very same thing, albeit to a better tanned crowd.
Max pushed himself back from his annoying existential meander just in time for the signal fade from the Bible thump. He sighed and pressed scan again, starting the lottery anew.
Outside his bug-painted windshield, the sign for “Fallon, NV – 30 Miles” whizzed past. Max barely glanced, concerned only with how far he was from the Pacific, where his future would be made or broken on the chewed coastline of California. The place of childhood soft drink commercials and 80s beach comedies. Paradise under an eternal sun that didn’t burn or wither but lit everyone to camera-ready perfection. He just needed to get through the desert, and he’d be fine. The answers would be waiting for him at the water’s edge. They had to be. What was the meaning of life for a flyover boy? California, your honor.
As the radio scan continued to cycle through dead air, Max looked out into the night around him. The range of his headlights hinted at an endless stretch of dried-out nothingness, colonized by scrub grass, creosote bush, cacti, and probably a fair share of bleached bones of varying size and species. Forty days and forty nights in all direction. This wasn’t land that had recently gone dry. It looked like it was born dry, shot malformed from the ocean to land under a misanthropic sky that refused to grant it any relief, any taste of that wet place where it was formed.
This backcountry was broken by the occasional squatty house, built low and set far back from the highway, as if the structure itself was trying to run from civilization and—reaching the end of its tether—collapsed glumly onto the dusty ground in defeat. Max could never figure out why anyone or anything with any sort of viable option would choose to live in such a God forsaken environment. No appreciable water, daytime heat that could kill a man, and a bloodthirsty landscape populated entirely by flora and fauna that was either poisonous or covered in deleterious thorns, or both; a brutal ecosystem crafted with an eye on repelling or murdering any non-native species that was stupid enough to wander into the neighborhood. And yet, softheads came out in droves to parched places such as this to restart their ridiculous lives, pumped in borrowed water, set up artificial air conditioning, and hunkered down inside their suburban pillboxes, waiting out each day as if they lost a bet.
