The Damned Highway (16 page)

“Smitty, is there a pay phone around here?” I call out. “I want . . . nay . . . I
need
to call my editor.” I feel foolish shouting, but it's not like anyone actually seems to live in Innsmouth after all. It's radically depopulated. If Arkham and Miskatonic were desolate, then Innsmouth is absolutely barren. The rotting buildings are the epitome of silence and neglect. Innsmouth is nothing more than a giant, cancerous tumor, living and beating after the rest of the body has long since passed on. I tell Smitty none of this. I don't think he'd appreciate it. Instead, I say, “You don't understand how editors can be. They're vile, despicable creatures, but this one will pay me money and I'm a big fan of that. I have a deadline, after all.”

Smitty waves an arm and shouts back at me to not go too far. I don't tell him that I have no intention of doing so, simply because there's nowhere else to go, judging by the look of things. There is a pay phone at the end of the block, one of the older kind that still takes nickels and dimes but not quarters. I dig through my kit bag for change, take a half second to once again lament the end of the shrooms—my bag is still redolent of the damp, papery smell—and slip all the coins I can find in the slot. It's not a lot of money but it's also after business hours. I call the bar that my editor usually shuts down on weeknights and at first, I have some difficulty reaching him. It sounds like a noisy place, full of confusion and desperation, and the bartender doesn't understand who I'm asking for. I have to go through three other drunken editors before I find mine. I tell him the whole story. I'm off the campaign trail, trapped in Massachusetts as part of a supernatural cult war, and I've had drugs from another planet. My editor keeps thinking I'm saying
Yiddish
rather than
Yuggoth
, and I can tell he's getting offended. To a New York Jew any American with a firearm and a WASP surname is essentially a Nazi waiting for a führer to tell him what to do, and I can't blame him after what I've seen from strong Aryan New England stock this past day.

He tells me to get
something
in by my deadline,
anything
of
any
length, and hangs up. A huge wave kicks up somewhere in the night. As a raging narcissist, I should be happy. What every writer wants is not fame, not fortune, not large and unexpected royalty checks, not even the scoop that could bring down dynasties and destroy presidential ambitions. All we really want is a desperate editor who'll run anything we file and pay us for it relatively on time. But I'm not happy. I'm so terrified that my testicles have formed an escape committee, are even now plotting to steal a small dinghy and row for Boston Harbor. And I'm a fool—I should have used my change to call my lawyer. Now I need to call collect.

A word about my lawyer. So far, throughout this series of hazardous and madcap misadventures, I've said repeatedly that he is dead, and indeed, to the rest of the world, he is dead. The rumors vary. Some heard he'd been shot in Mexico and dumped in a fifty-five-gallon drum of lye. Others were told that he'd run afoul of Colombian drug runners and had ended up being chopped into fish bait onboard a boat loaded with cocaine. Some said he overdosed on amphetamines and whores in a dingy hotel room in Miami. And who knows? Perhaps one day soon, any one of these rumors may be right. But not now and not yet. The truth is that my attorney has made some powerful enemies since our last trip together, and he's gone into hiding, preferring for the world at large to think him dead. I play along with the charade because I owe him that, but I'm in a situation now that requires his special brand of services. I hate to call him off the bench, because he really has done a remarkable job of dropping off the grid. I think a fake death suits him. He's a good lawyer and a good street preacher, but amphetamines and LSD have rotted away his once-powerful mind, and these days, the big brown buffalo feels that he's doomed to martyrdom and destined to be a messiah. Both of those types always end up dead, so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But never mind that. Desperate times call for equally desperate measures. I am a fan of big guns, and it's time to bring in the biggest gun of all. I make a collect call to a phone number that no one else knows, and after a moment's pause, he accepts the charges. His voice is groggy and he sounds confused.

“Counselor!” I find that barking at him is the best possible response when he's in this state of mind. Drive the crazed brown buffalo into panic mode and let him mow everything down. “Remember the Manson family? Helter Skelter and the race wars and all those Frank Frazetta paperback covers that you love so much? Well, it's all going down. Get the next flight to Logan now and damn the cost. My editor will cover it. That's right, you bastard! Money! Your billable hours start now! Hurry, man. We have no time to mess around. We're going to save the world.”

“Hot damn!” he shouts, waking up now and ready to stumble back into the world.

“And one more thing,” I say. “When you get here, call me Lono.”

I can't tell whether it's my lawyer roaring like a lion or the newly restive ocean. Something slams hard against the glass of the phone booth. A white, six-fingered palm.

——

Which candidate will earn the Innsmouth vote? I doubt Haringa's propaganda would go over very well here, but the fishy mien of the town, and of its citizens, does suggest a tendency toward Cthulhoid Republicanism. Innsmouth isn't a mill town, but a fishing burg with a few struggling canneries on the shore. Not quite Moloch territory either. Innsmouth is a swing district, but one plagued with chronic economic depression, FBI infiltration, and explosive race riots between the fisher folk and the inlanders. And the riots have been about race in a way that no race riot in the history of the United States has ever been—the fisher folk aren't all human, not quite factory-model
Homo sapiens sapiens
.

Smitty can pass, or at least can pass for now, as long as he doesn't stick around too long, but some of the members of the older families look like they were birthed right into a vice—narrow heads, bulging eyes, Mongoloid noses. Six fingers is a pretty common, but not universal, trait. They all shamble except for Smitty and some of the young men. They'd shambled right up to me, some of them with obvious gills running down their necks like wayward double and triple chins and . . . showed me to a musty hotel room in the building shared by the Odd Fellows. Here I sit, writing this out longhand in my most careful print, waiting for my lawyer, waiting for salvation. It is cold out here, and the pages in my notebook grow damp. The ink runs like black blood . . . or perhaps ichor.

Smitty called something up from the waters, something not native to this hemisphere and likely not even native to this Earth. I'd been informed of Moloch, had heard rumors and whispers about Cthulhu, but I was
introduced
to a Deep One. He was a huge, fish-headed being, white bellied with webbed hands. Sort of like Hubert Humphrey, actually, but more kindly and charismatic than our thirty-eighth vice president ever was or will be. And the Deep Ones are aggrieved. It seems that back in the 1920s, their underwater city of Y'ha-nthlei, hidden under Devil's Reef right offshore here in Innsmouth, was torpedoed by the federal government. Neither Y'ha-nthlei nor Innsmouth ever recovered financially. This is one of the reasons why Smitty has brought me here. It is his belief that given my countercultural leanings, I might like to write about what happened here, exposing the cover-up and showing people the truth.

With a deep bass voice that would occasionally break into a high whistle, not dissimilar to a whale's song, the Deep One gave his own version of Nixon's famous gaffe, “
North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that
.”

“We brought fish and gold in exchange for a few human lives, but when the humans killed us, they gave us nothing in exchange at all.” He went on to explain that the local ritual of bearing or siring Deep One hybrids more than makes up for the numbers lost in our “slow mammalian reproduction protocols.” Smitty and a few of the locals who saw the flare and came running took it all in with the sort of enthusiasm and purely uncynical belief that McGovern would rape children for. The Deep One was something to behold, all right, a Disneyland robot that smelled like sewage, but the Innsmouthians must have been truly desperate to obey it, to worship it, to spread for it on command. And for nothing but the same catches of fish nearby Gloucester hauled in for free, and some golden trinkets too grotesque to sell on the open markets.

I don't know what Smitty was trying to prove with what he called forth. I wasn't awestruck by the being, not after it opened its mouth and spoke in everyday English from a set of prepared talking points. Terrified? For a moment. Impressed? I still am. But not awestruck. In the end I simply felt pity for these monsters of Innsmouth, both the ones who lived under the waves, soggy in their immortality and desperate for human companionship, and the citizens of the shell-shocked and moldering city. If they war against Arkham it's likely out of jealousy and raw hunger, not any political or metaphysical chess game.

I almost regret calling for my lawyer now. He's a ruiner of reputations, a despoiler of economic systems. Who knows what he'll pack—knives, subpoenas, methadrine, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher courtesy of some of his old friends in the Red Army Faction . . . that last would probably have to be checked as baggage. Fraudulent deeds to all the residential, commercial, and municipal property of Ipswich, just so he'd have a town to eat and then shit out all over downtown Innsmouth. He is surely on his way now. The first cab that roars down the main drag will be him. I'm only glad he is on my side, and not Nixon's.

Half-frozen, I spend a few hours in the library. They open it for me, despite the fact that the sun isn't even up yet. I smoke cigarettes and drink hot, black coffee laced with generous helpings of whiskey, and read through old newspaper clippings and town history books. Founded in 1643, Innsmouth was renowned for shipbuilding before the American Revolution. It prospered throughout the early nineteenth century, but the War of 1812 and the loss of a number of sailors in a series of shipwrecks left it floundering economically. By 1828, the only fleet still sailing to the South Seas for trade was one that belonged to Captain Obed Marsh, the patriarch of the town's leading family. Desperate to save his town, Marsh started a cult in 1840 called the Esoteric Order of Dagon in the building now ever-so-casually marked
Odd Fellows
. Although Marsh learned of Dagon from a group of Polynesian islanders he met during his travels, Dagon really seemed to get around, and was worshiped by other cultures, as well. He started out as a fertility god, but then the Hebrews got their hands on him and made him a god of fishing. The Amorites and the Philistines worshiped the old bugger, too. However the Polynesians learned of him, it was Marsh who brought Dagon to America, and when he did, Innsmouth's fishing industry exploded, becoming more profitable than ever before. The townspeople loved Marsh—and Dagon—as a result, but what Marsh didn't tell them was that he had entered into a pact with the Deep Ones. Ever the businessman and capitalist, that Obed Marsh. The deal was this: the Deep Ones brought the town plenty of fish and gold (which they kept at the bottom of the sea) in exchange for Marsh keeping Dagon in human sacrifices. It didn't end well. These things never do. Marsh had trouble keeping up with his new god's appetite, and Innsmouth ran scarce on living inhabitants, so they had to start preying on travelers and residents of other towns, especially nearby Ipswich and Rowley. Marsh and his followers were arrested in 1846, and with them went the sacrifices. Dagon and the Deep Ones were unhappy with this turn of events, and the Deep Ones retaliated, putting the fear of Dagon into the townspeople's souls. Soon enough, the sacrifices started up again, and the cult grew strong once more. Maybe there weren't enough eligible bachelors left or maybe the Innsmouthians were just depraved, but whatever the reason, they began interbreeding with the Deep Ones, which led to obvious deformities and mutations. After that, anybody with half a brain went out of their way to avoid Innsmouth, until 1927, when the town came under investigation by the federal government for bootlegging.

Now here is where it gets good. The department in charge of the investigation was the Bureau of Investigation, the precursor to the FBI—specifically, the General Intelligence Division, which was headed up by good old J. Edgar Hoover himself. Calvin Coolidge had appointed Hoover as the director of the Bureau of Investigation three years before, after the previous director, William Burns, fell under suspicion for his involvement in the Teapot Dome scandal. Even back then, Hoover had it in for radicals, subversives, freaks, and other ne'er-do-wells. His first order of business upon accepting the job of director was to fire agents who he thought “looked stupid like truck drivers.” Ah, the irony, eh? Of course, that type of behavior is typical of Hoover even today. How many times over the years has he overstepped his bounds, both in his role at the FBI and during his time with its predecessor? The German and Japanese scares, the Verona Project, his complete and total bungling of the investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and his plan during the Korean War to suspend habeas corpus and round up twelve thousand American “dissidents” suspected of disloyalty. Hell, just last year, we learned about the abomination that was COINTELPRO, which came about because of Hoover's frenzied certainty that communists lurked behind every door, especially if those doors were in Hollywood or the print district. Why, then, would it come as a shock that Hoover, prior to his position with the FBI, was in charge of an operation in 1927 in which the government blew up Devil's Reef and the Deep Ones' abode, and then arrested most of the locals? That's par for the course for Hoover. Business as usual. Hey ho!