Move Under Ground - Nick Mamatas (best romance books of all time .txt) 📗

gin and slippery little fingers, a damn plate of spaghetti in a West Village dive, something of this world in me. Rye would do it, but if it wasn’t for the rye, I’d be ready to eat pages from Neal’s journal just to know that my insides were still there. At least, I thought to myself (as opposed to the dharma itself, which I now realized one could also think to, so I also thought to my last memory of Marie, her naked body falling like silks and leaving only a hovering bee behind) I was hungry for something rather than hungry for nothingness.

I was hungry for Neal, for our old conversations, for the big times we had and for all the folks who’d get caught up in our wake. I thought I was going to lose him to the crucible of prison or to the workaday world of dandling rugrats and frowning over report cards. But it wasn’t that. Neal was lost to some darker matter. We were the little eddies of life in the frothing wake of the horrible Nothing that had wrapped around the Earth. The pull was an inversion of gravity; I couldn’t turn my face from the sky even had I wanted to. I looked over at Neal, the buoy on this dark and writhing sea, his nose buried in his book, his fingers red and wrapped around his ball-point pen. He didn’t feel the pull, he had let those tentacles wrap around him and pull him up into the mad and starry space. But he came back, seemingly unscathed, and now he just sat and wrote whispered prophecies and pulp fiction like one of his rugrats scribbling with a wax crayon—I couldn’t believe he wouldn’t show me even a sentence of his book. As we rolled into the heat of tiny Goodland, Kansas, he silently decided to nap, and used his notebook as a pillow. The tramps smiled at him, not mean or with malice, but like Neal was their very own babe in arms.

The citizens of Goodland weren’t so sweet and gentle. When the truck pulled up to the weigh station and waddled out, nobody noticed his thick beetle jaws, or the head of writhing maggot hair that dripped into a squirming trail behind him, like the tramps and I did, but they just didn’t like him anyhow. Or they didn’t like us, the friendly old joes who had taken advantage of the somnambulant shuffle of the missile corps to get a ride into their quiet little oasis in the hot fields of this very square state. I even got a pair of frowns from the little birds who were working summer jobs behind the lunch counter. A blonde with hair piled high on her head and held there with bobby pins thick as handcranks flicked her wrist to toss a plate with an underfed sliver of pie on it in front of me. It spun and rang against the counter before settling down into the silence of the little establishment. The cook, a big old slab of pork, kicked his way through the swinging kitchen door and held up the far wall, just to stare at Neal and me. Except for a telltale coating of rancid sweat, he was a human, and so were the girls, and so were the grumbling farmers (even the fellow who must have lost four fingers to a thresher still had his soul intact, if gray and withered).

Neal noticed the nasty human stew we sat in and said a bit too loudly, “Whooee, now here is a town of people who go to church on Saturday nights too, isn’t that right?” It was too hot for a fight, so we didn’t end up in one, but I made sure to eat my pie in double forkfuls. (I’d been eating so much pie, just like last time I was on the road, but now the cherries were all strangely bitter.)

“You’re all going to die you know,” Neal said, not to the room. He sat on his stool and talked to an imaginary waitress, the casual flirtation of a madman. “Don’t think you’ll be allowed to survive, it just isn’t up to you. Specks of meat and time.” He quickly undid the buttons on his left cuff and rolled up his sleeve, fingers twisting and spinning quick like snakes. “Look, see?” he asked the air (and the air grew hotter and darker as the patrons’ grousing tainted the whole scene—it was the mumbles of war). “Look, do you see this? Do you see this FLAKE of skin? Does it get a vote if I throw myself into a wood chipper? No.” Calm again, he rolled his sleeve down and took his elbows off the counter. The big cook, preceded by his majestic paunch, was right up against us, his breath a furnace, all rotten beef rounds and huffs of steam. Neal slid off his stool and hugged the old bastard. It was a gentle, liquid hug too, around the fellow’s pear belly; cook’s meaty arms were still free, he could have crushed Neal’s head, or pushed him away or even just returned the hug in his manly little way, but he didn’t.

He started to cry. Neal smiled his own mother’s smile at the cook and then buried his head in the old man’s chest and squeezed. The murmuring and shifty-eyes of the few customers faded into the ogling of comic-strip slackjaws. Slowly, like continents drifting, the cook’s arms moved up and out, a shift with all the grace of Martha Graham but without the effort. Like his arms were made for this and nothing else, up and out. There weren’t a million lifetimes of cracked flint and strangled pigs and bricklaying and murder behind the design of cook’s limbs, there was just his embrace of Neal, bones and sinews all forged for just one hug.

“I’m sorry you’re going to die,” Neal said, soft like a child. And the old cook nodded his elephant head. “Don’t feel bad.” He was solemn, wistful, and his accent sounded like a steel-pedal guitar’s plaintive wail, the song after last call. “You’re going to die too.” And with that I cut to the door but it was chained shut. Behind the counter my waitress pulled the key to the thick old padlock from her cleavage and offered up a sad little pout. Sorry to see us go, I guess. Neal and the old cook still embraced as the others collected their hats or dug in their pockets for tipping dimes. Everyone seemed pretty bummed out; they were the folks who didn’t get the last piece of cake, or maybe the Little League team lost to their rivals in tiny Goodland Junction. These folks weren’t murderers or slaves to the red stars of Azathoth (how many threads of fate did the new constellations burn in their nuclear fire?), they were just suncrazy and pulled a short straw or two somewhere along the line. Me too.

“It’s okay, Jack,” Neal told me. He was still hugging his new friend. “Everyone dies. The soul is immortal. This isn’t even real; it’s an illusion. The world, it’s a mad dream of a blind god. These poor fools do not know what they are in for.” For a moment, the truth was enough. The stasis of the roadside diner collapsed into the shimmying of spinning atoms, of the spirit wave chi made flesh and stone through nothing other than half-wit conception. We beg for the world of matter, then weep when we get buried under it. Didn’t stop my heart from rattling around my rib cage like a crazed rat though, and two strong men had to grab my arms and twist them around my back while the waitress opened the door. She grabbed Neal’s gun from the inside pocket of his jacket when he passed, arm in arm with the cook.

They marched us across town (Kansas isn’t flat; we dipped and soared, crippled birds being put out of our misery by some tom cat) and tried to explain themselves in low tones. It wasn’t them, not them at all. It was the others, the folks who work in town at the bank and the insurance company, the mayor and the police, they were to blame. They were the ones with beetle lips. One day they just surrounded the little brick schoolhouse and would let the kids come home. “They’re safe now,” they said, mandibles clicking between words, a sound loud as an axe sent into rotten wood. The big farmers on their outskirts of town were no good either; they had their kids safe and sound except for the greenish-black taint on their skins; like those damn kids and their folks who drank too much swamp water. Jimmy Barber went down to the school with his rifle to get his little girl back, but he didn’t make it within a hundred yards of the place before the air turned to razor wire and cut him into luncheon meat.

And all the new town fathers and mothers wanted was a pair of drifters of our peculiar description, down at the square, to be sacrificed at dusk. The old cook, speaking conversationally enough to Neal, told him that he had been a butcher boy back before the war (“Which one?” Neal asked. The coot just laughed and said “The war to end all wars.” Neal asked if he meant World War II then, and the cook just laughed and said “Nope, prior to that ‘un.”) and that he’d do well by us. “No pain, no muss. Your wallets won’t even get damp. I’ll do you boys in a slice and send you to a better place than this. I’m terrible sorry about all this, but I know you’d do the same.”

And Neal said, “Oh yes. I’d do anything for my children too, I know it. Lord knows I should have settled down much sooner than now. They’d be better off, and damned if I don’t know that I would too.” I wondered about little Jan but felt nothing but death in my chest. I didn’t see her but for a few minutes last year—moon face and dark hair, that was her. What do you say to some little person like that? “I’m your poppa, well, see ya around!” That’s what I said, I guess, and would have left it at that, but my own blood told and my agent cuts checks on account of me cutting out.

I raised my head and looked about. We were heading to the town square. The same old clapboard houses and storefronts that pimple this land, but different. Weird, like Dal�, some of the buildings were melted around the edges, huge drops of wood puddling on the corners. The dirt blowing ‘cross the road was redder than rubies, and the road, damn. To use a clich�, it really did flow like a river. The men yanking me along didn’t even move their feet, but just floated and bobbed as the road took us where we were headed, our final reward I bet.

“Where are the beetlemen?” I asked.

“Too close to sunset. They only come out under the sun.” He chuckled. “Maybe they’re scared of the dark,” and for that, the lump of a man on my right shoved me into the talker. I made a pretty fair elbow, because the talker returned the favor and pushed me into his pal. Like two kids, they started jerking me around as he we flowed down towards the center of Goodland, yukking it up and snorting. Finally, the old cook turned around and barked, “Hey! Respect for the dead!”

And we were there, the sky just about to purple. Neal went right up to his stake and smiled at the old woman with owl-eye glasses who tied him with old twine. I got smacked up against