The Damned Highway (23 page)

Yes, indeed!

Absolutely.

Any minute now. My attorney, the brown buffalo, a sacred symbol as potent as Lono's white sails, will be along any minute now.

Any minute now . . .

Revolution Number Nine . . . Number Nine . . . Number Nine . . . In the Belly of the Beast, Eating Hors d'Oeuvres as They Come Rolling down the Chute . . . And We Won't Have Richard Nixon to Kick Around Anymore . . . Last Call . . .

——

I have no idea how much time passes before the bald man, not my lawyer, not even Smitty, comes to rescue me. Comes to rescue Hoover, that is. The old eater of dogs, Nixon's dragon himself, stands over me. This is the first time I've ever been this close to him, and it is easy to see why the man has the reputation he does. This is one scary badass, projecting waves of fear before him like a crawling chaos. He looks over at where Hoover's carcass must be, and he says the sign. “McGovern wears little pink girlie panties.” The countersign was one of the little bits of Hoover inserted into my gray matter during the procedure, so I know how to respond, and I do. “And Jane Fonda wears boxer shorts.”

“Congratulations, Director Hoover,” the bald man says. His voice is higher pitched than you might expect, yet melodious. He could possibly have a career in radio, should he ever tire of this game. “So, your body expired during the transfer?”

“And Lono with it, the reprobate.”

The bald man smiles and reaches behind his back to withdraw a snub-nosed revolver from his holster. Two taps to Hoover's head. My heart should leap with joy! Finally, the old tyrant got what he so richly deserved, and at the hands of a right-wing enforcer. But Hoover really did love this country, and our connection was in its own way as intimate as the one the fungus of Yuggoth had granted me back in Arkham, and plus, the man thought he was killing
me
. It is reckless; won't someone talk one day? An FBI corpse caulker or a black-bag man looking to make a publishing deal with Random House? “Yeah, man, they had Hoover all laid out, garters and everything. It wasn't a heart attack, no matter what was on the front page of the
Washington Post
. I know; I was the one with the spackle, the guy who had to mix gray paint and flesh-colored makeup till we got it just right.” But I suppose the bald man has a plan, and I am right, because a moment later he tells me what it is.

“Thank you, Director Hoover,” he says to me. I hunch my shoulders and stick out my chin in the hope of passing as an alien in my own body, someone awkward with limbs longer than a piglet's. “Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to be alone with you . . . uh, the body.” Then another flash of borrowed memory—Hoover was so confident that he had finally mastered the Mi-Go brain canisters that he'd made a bet. The bald man would get to fuck the skulls of any dead bodies the process left behind. Not the first, of course. They say Johnson did the same to Kennedy, while his corpse cooled on the tarmac. Still, I snicker as I collect the canisters. This guy's packing a .38 in his pants, is he? Just the sort of information that might need to be subtly leaked to the press as a psy op against this raving monster.

“I presume a car is waiting for me outside, and that you have made the necessary arrangements?” I ask the bald man, but he has no eyes for me. He's only interested in Hoover's corpse. His hands go to his belt. His breathing grows husky. I take my Mi-Go brain canisters and the little spaghetti-strainer setup, put them into the black bag by Hoover's body, and run.

I don't know everything that Hoover once knew. I don't know the names of State Department Communists or what really happened at Roswell or where in our national parks the Black Power movement conspired with hippies to interbreed marijuana plants with heroin poppies, but I know the basics of the plan, and why the bald man is in on it. The Freemasons are making an end run around the various cults infesting America, unspeakable and otherwise. Baldy was in deep—he sold his soul a dozen times over, and not even always to the highest bidder. When he got over his childhood fear of dogs by tackling one as it charged him and tearing out the dumb beast's throat—losing five of his own teeth in the process, mind you—he did so in the name of Baphomet, the secret god of the Masons. Hoover “rode the goat” long ago and claimed an easement on the bald man, superseding Nixon's claim. The bald man, who did so much of Nixon's dirty work, like taking out Leary on the astral plane and fixing the White House plumbing, is bound by geas and contract to turn against the president. But he isn't happy about it, and is furiously exorcising his frustrations on Hoover's brain box.

Me, I have my own mind in my own body (thanks once again to the massive quantity of psychoactive substances I've consumed over the years), two examples of exquisite alien technology in my hands, and a car waiting for me outside. I can't help but notice that the driver is a broad, flat-faced fellow who, as he waits for me, sits with one hand leaning out the window and five fingers drumming against the Detroit steel of the driver's-side door. Five fingers, while his thumb rests in the trough of the rolled-down window.

“Are there any normal fucking people left in the world?” I demand. I smack one of the brain canisters against the roof of the car.

“You'd know better than I,” the driver says. He's a Cannock, of course. It's my old friend Mac. I recognize him from the diner. He still has a bruise on his head. “Wouldn't you, Dr.—”

“Mister. Mr. Hoover.”

“Whatever you say, chief,” he says as he gets out to open the back door for me.

“Yes, whatever I say as
FBI
chief. You know I'm Hoover, right, in Lono's body? It's very important that you understand that, because we're on a mission extreme in its peril and importance. Not the sort of thing you'd want to be driving a reporter to, not even in this Moloch-fueled monstrosity.”

He tips his hat and waves me in, his freakish hand waving like a scuba diver's webbed flipper. As I slide into the back seat of the limo, I notice something else disturbing. The small bar is entirely empty of any alcohol. There is sufficient glassware for a senator's daughter's wedding and even a bucket set into the armrest for champagne, but not a drop of any actual, God-blessed booze. The privacy guard is up, so I bang on it. “Hey, hey! The bar is dry back here!” I shout.

“FBI director's orders,” the chauffeur says. There's an intercom system somewhere, but I can't be bothered to figure out which button does what so I keep shouting. “That's madness!”

“Hey, chief, are you 100 percent sure there isn't some vestigial Lono in you?” he says through the intercom.

“As a matter of fact, no. You know what they say; each body part has a will of its own. The brain just thinks it's the boss, and the hand, and the eye, and—”

“And the . . .”

“And the liver. Anyway, this body,” I say, touching myself, trying to play up the foreignness of it all, “it has remembered cravings. It's been abused so long its needs are practically hardwired into the nervous system. The vehicle in which I ride needs whiskey, damn it! Now drive me to the nearest and skeeziest early morning bar now, before I crack your head open and eat your pineal gland!”

“Wait, by
vehicle
, do you mean the limo, or do you mean the body—”

“Just drive!” I slam both palms hard against the privacy barrier, and we are off. This being Washington, DC, half a block later we find a decent-enough bar. It's the usual sort of place that at one point probably attracted a better breed of clientele than ten a.m. drunks and doctors of journalism—a dark, oaken bar, clean glasses, a single bartender with sufficient dignity to nod once when I enter, even a jukebox and some taxidermy on the walls. I rush in and demand a Heineken, two Wild Turkeys, and a glass of grapefruit juice—the bartender shrugs and says that they're out of juice. A fish, stuffed and mounted behind the bar, stares at me, begging me to drink quickly for the sake of Innsmouth and the Deep Ones. God, that bastard Hoover. Genocide right off our own shores. The bartender offers me a small bowl of limes instead. This bar has definitely seen better days, I notice, as I give the stool I'm sitting on a spin. I had a fantasy that my lawyer would be pacing this bar or huddled up by the pay phone, shouting demands for my immediate release until he ran out of dimes. But there can be no rage in such a place; this is the pit of the noonday demon, keeping his own chronic buzz on with a steady supply of that basest of sipping liqueurs—the fermented souls of former bureaucrats, unseated civil servants, disgraced lobbyists, and current city-government officials. Is that the mayor of Washington, DC, masturbating in the shadows, so close to power and yet so far? Even the beer is warm and flat, like medicine.

My lawyer is surely in a rage if he's conscious, but he's probably trapped in a piss-stained holding cell fighting for his life to keep his shoes on his feet, bellowing with every haymaker, bobbing and weaving, but he's surrounded, and the other inmates are used to working in concert. They've had to share the single stainless-steel toilet jutting out of the far wall for three days and three nights already. And Smitty, he's long gone, likely half-dead of dehydration, so far from his ancestral waters, or stomped to a fishy pulp by that police horse. And then there's Betsy. Betsy did her work, for Hoover and for me. If the bald man didn't do her before coming to free me, she's probably already been sold to the Saudis for a sex ring. Too bad I'll miss it.

I finish my round and realize that I have no money. There is a pay phone in the corner though, so I take a chance and call my editor, collect. The conversation is extended, one sided, and brutal. I would have thought that his executive assistant would have handled the incoming faxes, but no. With a five-page blank in the feature well, the editor made the error of grabbing what I'd sent right off the top of the tray of his industrial Mojo Wire—those five pages being from
Unspeakable Cults
. Guttural Latin and Aramaic and languages older than human tongues spill out the receiver. Even a shrieking editor usually sounds tinny and far away on a pay phone, but now his voice is within me, reverberating in my very bones, attempting to once again reprogram my brain in direct competition with Hoover, with bourbon, with my own sense of holy mission. I don't so much understand the words—well, except for “deadline” and “kill fee” and “you smegma dump”—as I simply consume them. This is not the season of Lono, the god of peace. Now is the time for work to be done. It is the season of Kü, god of war. I realize I'm not going to be getting any cash from my editor—how does one even say Western Union in the language of the Elder Things, and could those words mean anything other than me, a god coming from the burning mouth of the setting sun, in a union with a once-formidable enemy, to slay a great evil? I'll need a presidential pardon from Nixon to forgive my tab and also the stuffed marlin on the wall. I drop the receiver and run at the bar, vaulting it easily. The editor's howl of
Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!
drives me on. I wrestle the baseball bat out of the bartender's hands and jam its butt in his throat. Like an ax I hold it over my head and swing. Glasses sing as they shatter and the great mirror behind the bar back crumbles. The marlin atop the bar eats four or five shots before it finally falls from its display panel. Is that the mayor of DC, looking up from his frantic wanking, awed to see a man alive, a god with a great war club whooping and pounding the stuffing from the mighty fish? The head comes off fairly easily. Everything smells of chemicals and blood; my palms are raw and burning from my grip. I drop the bat, and as my editor finally regains the ability to speak English and shrieks, “Lono, you're dead! Dead for what you've done!” I place the marlin head on my own as a war helm, take another Heineken for the road, and leave the bar.

My chauffeur stumbles out of the limo when he sees me and salutes with his crazy, six-fingered hand, then rushes to get the door for me.

“Like the chapeau, junior?” I ask him.

“I have to say it suits you, sir.”

‘That's a good boy,” I say.

In the car he lowers the window between us and asks, “Are you really going to wear that to meet with the president? Won't he . . . suspect something?”

“Doesn't Nixon always suspect something, ace?” I ask. “Isn't he essentially a paranoid schizophrenic along the lines of Joseph Stalin? And don't you know that the only man Stalin ever trusted was Hitler?” I finish my beer and let the bottle drop to the floor. The limo is on the bald man's credit card anyway, or, more likely, the card of some eighteen-year-old Georgetown coed he waylaid the night before. “Well, we all know how well that worked out.”

“Huh?”

“We won! America won! The American Dream!”

“Well, all righty then, doctor.”

I spy myself in the reflection of the tinted glass. “Maybe I'll leave my new totem in the car. It'll give me something to look forward to when I get back.”

——

The appointment is at the Watergate, right on the river. The complex is monstrous, curvilinear, nearly non-Euclidean, its construction funded by the Vatican and its design the brainchild of Luigi Moretti, formerly patronized by Mussolini. It's a horrifying stack of offices, hotel suites, sprawling luxury penthouses for the power brokers, and leaky efficiencies for first-term representatives from Kentucky and New Mexico. Watergate East is leaky enough to be called the Potomac
Titanic
by wags with a better sense of meter than humor, and that's where I'm meeting Nixon for a sit-down discussion about the American youth movement. Maybe I should wear the marlin after all; I might need the gills. In the parking lot I decide against it.

One of Nixon's secretaries meets me at a bank of elevators. This is usually where I'd get some sour look or a gasp of astonishment, and that's even without my hair all matted from the ichors and preservation fluids, without days of unrest scratched forever into my features, without my usual inability to finish a sentence without descending into cement-truck grumbling, without sudden twitching movements, without the
axis mundi
aligning with my chakras. This one, a young fellow probably only six months out of Princeton or Miskatonic, doesn't even ask me what I'm a doctor
of
. He knows. I decide to let him know something else, once we're in the elevator.