Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

ANOTHER FISH STORY

by

KIM NEWMAN

IN THE SUMMER of 1968, while walking across America, he came across the skeleton fossil of something aquatic. All around, even in the apparent emptiness, were signs of the life that had passed this way. Million-year-old seashells were strewn across the empty heart of California, along with flattened bullet casings from the ragged edge of the Wild West and occasional sticks of weathered furniture. The sturdier pieces were pioneer jetsam, dumped by exhausted covered wagons during a long dry desert stretch on the road to El Dorado. The more recent items had been thrown off overloaded trucks in the ’30s, by Okies rattling towards orange groves and federal work programs.

He squatted over the bones. The sands parted, disclosing the whole of the creature. The scuttle-shaped skull was all saucer-sized eye-sockets and triangular, saw-toothed jaw. The long body was like something fished out of an ash-can by a cartoon cat—fans of rib-spindles tapering to a flat tail. What looked like arm-bones fixed to the dorsal spine by complex plates that were evolving towards becoming shoulders. Stranded when the seas receded from the Mojave, the thing had lain ever closer to the surface, waiting to be revealed by sand-riffling winds. Uncovered as he was walking to it, the fossil—exposed to the thin, dry air—was quickly resolving into sand and scraps.

Finally, only an arm remained. Short and stubby like an alligator leg, it had distinct, barb-tipped fingers. It pointed like a sign-post, to the West, to the Pacific, to the city-stain seeping out from the original blot of El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora de la Reyna de los Angeles de Rio Porciunculo. He expected these route-marks. He’d been following them since he first crawled out of a muddy river in England. This one scratched at him.

Even in the desert, he could smell river-mud, taste foul water, feel the tidal pull.

For a moment, he was under waters. Cars, upside down above him, descended gently like dead, settling sharks. People floated like broken dolls just under the shimmering, sunlit ceiling-surface. An enormous pressure squeezed in on him, jamming thumbs against his open eyes, forcing liquid salt into mouth and nose. A tubular serpent, the size of a streamlined train, slithered over the desert-bed towards him, eyes like turquoise-shaded searchlights, shifting rocks out of its way with muscular arms.

Gone. Over.

The insight passed. He gasped reflexively for air.

“Atlantis will rise, Sunset Boulevard will fall,” Cass Elliott was singing on a single that would be released in October. Like so many doomed visionaries in her generation, Mama Cass was tuned into the vibrations. Of course, she didn’t know there really had been a sunken city off Santa Monica, as recently as 1942. Not Atlantis, but the Sister City. A battle had been fought there in a World War that was not in the official histories. A War that wasn’t as over as its human victors liked to think.

He looked where the finger pointed.

The landscape would change. Scrub rather than sand, mountains rather than flats. More people, less quiet.

He took steps.

He was on a world-wide walkabout, buying things, picking up skills and scars, making deals wherever he sojourned, becoming what he would be. Already, he had many interests, many businesses. An empire would need his attention soon, and he would be its prisoner as much as its master. These few years, maybe only months, were his alone. He carried no money, no identification but a British passport in the name of a new-born dead in the blitz. He wore unscuffed purple suede boots, tight white thigh-fly britches with a black zig-zag across them, a white Nehru jacket and silver-mirrored sunglasses. A white silk aviator scarf wrapped burnoose-style about his head, turbanning his longish hair and keeping the grit out of his mouth and nose.

Behind him, across America, across the world, he left a trail. He thought of it as dropping pebbles in pools. Ripples spread from each pebble, some hardly noticed yet but nascent whirlpools, some enormous splashes no one thought to connect with the passing Englishman.

It was a good time to be young, even for him. His signs were everywhere. Number One in the pop charts back home was ‘Fire’, by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. “I am the God of Hellfire,” chanted Arthur. There were such Gods, he understood. He walked through the world, all along the watchtower, sprung from the songs— an Urban Spaceman, Quinn the Eskimo, this wheel on fire, melting away like ice in the sun, on white horses, in disguise with glasses.

In recent months, he’d seen Hair on Broadway and 2001: A Space Odyssey at an Alabama Drive-In. He knew all about the Age of Aquarius and the Ultimate Trip. He’d sabotaged Abbie Hoffman’s magic ring with a subtle counter-casting, ensuring that the Pentagon remained unlevitated. He knew exactly where he’d been when Martin Luther King was shot. Ditto, Andy Warhol, Robert Kennedy and the VC summarily executed by Colonel Loan on the Huntley-Brinkley Report. He’d rapped with Panthers and Guardsmen, Birchers and Yippies. To his satisfaction, he’d sewn up the next three elections, and decided the music children would listen to until the Eve of Destruction.

He’d eaten in a lot of McDonald’s, cheerfully dropping cartons and bags like appleseeds. The Golden Arches were just showing up on every Main Street, and he felt Ronald should be encouraged. He liked the little floods of McLitter that washed away from the clown’s doorways, perfumed with the stench of their special sauce.

He kept walking.

Behind him, his footprints filled in. The pointing hand, so nearly human, sank under the sands, duty discharged.

At this stage of his career, the Devil put in the hours, wore down the shoe-leather, sweated out details. He was the start-up Mephisto, the journeyman tempter, the mysterious stranger passing through, the new gun in town. You didn’t need to make an appointment and crawl as a supplicant; if needs be, Derek Leech came to you.

Happily.

* * *

Miles later and days away, he found a ship’s anchor propped on a cairn of stones, iron-red with lichen-like rust, blades crusted with empty shells. An almost illegible plaque read Sumatra Queen.

Leech knew this was where he was needed.

It wasn’t real wilderness, just pretend. In the hills close to Chatsworth, a town soon to be swallowed by Los Angeles, this was the Saturday matinee West. Poverty Row prairie, Monogram mountains. A brief location hike up from Gower Gulch, the longest-lasting game of Cowboys and Indians in the world had been played.

A red arch stood by the cairn, as if a cathedral had been smitten, leaving only its entrance standing. A hook in the arch might once have held a bell or a hangman’s noose or a giant shoe.

He walked under it, eyes on the hook.

Wheelruts in sandy scrub showed the way. Horses had been along this route too, recently.

A smell tickled in his nose, triggering salivary glands. Leech hadn’t had a Big Mac in days. He unwound the scarf from his head and knotted it around his neck. From beside the road, he picked a dungball, skin baked hard as a gob-stopper. He ate it like an apple. Inside, it was moist. He spat out strands of grass.

He felt the vibrations, before he heard the motors.

Several vehicles, engines exposed like sit-astride mowers, bumping over rough terrain on balloon tyres. Fuel emissions belching from mortar-like tubes. Girls yelping with a fairground Dodg’em thrill.

He stood still, waiting.

The first dune buggy appeared, leaping over an incline like a roaring cat, landing awkwardly, squirming in dirt as its wheels aligned, then heading towards him in a charge. A teenage girl in a denim halter-top drove, struggling with the wheel, blonde hair streaming, a bruise on her forehead. Standing like a tank commander in the front passenger seat, hands on the roll-bar, was an undersized, big-eared man with a middling crop of beard, long hair bound in a bandanna. He wore ragged jeans and a too-big combat jacket. On a rosary around his scraggy neck was strung an Iron Cross, the Pour le Mérite and a rhinestone-studded swastika. He signalled vainly with a set of binoculars (one lens broken), then kicked his chauffeuse to get her attention.

The buggy squiggled in the track and halted in front of Leech.

Another zoomed out of long grass, driven by an intense young man, passengered by three messy girls. A third was around somewhere, to judge from the noise and the gasoline smell.

Leech tossed aside his unfinished meal.

“You must be hungry, pilgrim,” said the commander.

“Not now.”

The commander flashed a grin, briefly showing sharp, bad teeth, hollowing his cheeks, emphasising his eyes. Leech recognised the wet gaze of a man who has spent time practising his stares. Long, hard jail years looking into a mirror, plumbing black depths.

“Welcome to Charlie Country,” said his driver.

Leech met the man’s look. Charlie’s welcome.

Seconds—a minute?—passed. Neither had a weapon, but this was a gunfighters’ eye-lock, a probing and a testing, will playfully thrown up against a wall, bouncing back with surprising ferocity.

Leech was almost amused by the Charlie’s presumption. Despite his hippie aspect, he was ten years older than the kids—well into hard thirties, at once leathery and shifty, a convict confident the bulls can’t hang a jailyard shivving at his cell-door, an arrested grown-up settling for status as an idol for children ignored by adults. The rest of his tribe looked to their jefé, awaiting orders.

Charlie Country. In Vietnam, that might have meant something.

In the end, something sparked. Charlie raised one hand, open, beside his face. He made a monocle of his thumb and forefinger, three other fingers splayed like a coxcomb.

In Britain, the gesture was associated with Patrick McGoohan’s “Be seeing you” on The Prisoner. Leech returned the salute, completing it by closing his hand into a fist.

“What’s that all about?” whined his driver.

Not taking his eyes off Leech, Charlie said, “Sign of the fish, Sadie.”

The girl shrugged, no wiser.

“Before the crucifix became the pre-eminent symbol of Christianity, Jesus’ early followers greeted each other with the sign of the fish,” Leech told them. “His first disciples were net-folk, remember. ‘I will make you fishers of men.’ Originally, the Galilean came as a lakeside spirit. He could walk on water, turn water to wine. He had command over fish, multiplying them to feed the five thousand. The wounds in his side might have been gills.”

“Like a professor he speaks,” said the driver of the second buggy.

“Or Terence Stamp,” said a girl. “Are you British?”

Leech conceded that he was.

“You’re a long way from Carnaby Street, Mr. Fish.”

As a matter of fact, Leech owned quite a bit of that thoroughfare. He did not volunteer the information.

“Is he The One Who Will...?” began Charlie’s driver, cut off with a gesture.

“Maybe, maybe not. One sign is a start, but that’s all it is. A man can easily make a sign.”

Leech showed his open hands, like a magician before a trick.

“Let’s take you to Old Lady Marsh,” said Charlie. “She’ll have a thing or two to say. You’ll like her. She was in pictures, a long time ago. Sleeping partner in the Ranch. You might call her the Family’s spiritual advisor.”

“Marsh,” said Leech. “Yes, that’s the name. Thank you, Charles.”

“Hop into Unit Number Two. Squeaky, hustle down to make room for the gent. You can get back to the bunkhouse on your own two legs. Do you good.”

A sour-faced girl crawled off the buggy. Barefoot, she looked at the flint-studded scrub as if about to complain, then thought better of it.

“Are you waitin’ on an engraved invitation, Mr. Fish?”

Leech climbed into the passenger’s seat, displacing two girls who shoved themselves back, clinging to the overhead bar, fitting their legs in behind the seat, plopping bottoms on orange-painted metal fixtures. To judge from the squealing, the metal was hot as griddles.

“You are comfortable?” asked the kid in the driver’s seat.

Leech nodded.

“Cool,” he said, jamming the ignition. “I’m Constant. My accent, it is German.”

The young man’s blond hair was held by a beaded leather headband. Leech had a glimpse of an earnest schoolboy in East Berlin, poring over Karl May’s books about Winnetou the Warrior and Old Shatterhand, vowing that he would be a blood brother to the Apache in the West of the Teuton Soul.

Constant did a tight turn, calculated to show off, and drove off the track, bumping onto an irregular slope, pitting gears against gravity. Charlie kicked Sadie the chauffeuse, who did her best to follow.

Leech looked back. Atop the slope, ‘Squeaky’ stood forlorn, hair stringy, faded dress above her scabby knees.

“You will respect the way Charlie has this place ordered,” said Constant. “He is the Cat That Has Got the Cream.”

The buggies roared down through a culvert, overleaping obstacles. One of the girls thumped her nose against the roll-bar. Her blood spotted Leech’s scarf. He took it off and pressed the spots to his tongue.

Images fizzed. Blood on a wall. Words in the blood.

HEALTER SKELTER

He shook the images from his mind.

Emerging from the culvert, the buggies burst into a clearing and circled, scattering a knot of people who’d been conferring, raising a ruckus in a corral of horses which neighed in panic, spitting up dirt and dust.

Leech saw two men locked in a wrestling hold, the bloated quarter-century-on sequel to the Wolf Man pushed against a wooden fence by a filled-out remnant of Riff of the Jets. Riff wore biker denims and orange-lensed glasses. He had a chain wrapped around the neck of the sagging lycanthrope.

The buggies halted, engines droning down and sputtering.

* * *

A man in a cowboy hat angrily shouted “Cut, cut, cut!”

Another man, in a black shirt and eyeshade, insisted “No, no, no, Al, we can use it, keep shooting. We can work round it. Film is money.”

Al, the director, swatted the insister with his hat.

“Here on the Ranch, they make the motion pictures,” said Constant.

Leech had guessed as much. A posse of stuntmen had been chasing outlaws all over this country since the Silents. Every rock had been filmed so often that the stone soul was stripped away.

Hoppy and Gene and Rinty and Rex were gone. Trigger was stuffed and mounted. The lights had come up and the audience fled home to the goggle box. The only Westerns that got shot these days were skin-flicks in chaps or slo-mo massacres, another sign of impending apocalypse.

But Riff and the Wolf Man were still working. Just.

The film company looked at the Beach Buggy Korps, warily hostile. Leech realised this was the latest of a campaign of skirmishes.

“What’s this all about, Charlie?” demanded the director. “We’ve told you to keep away from the set. Sam even goddamn paid you.”

Al pulled the insister, Sam, into a grip and pointed his head at Charlie.

Charlie ignored the fuss, quite enjoying it.

A kid who’d been holding up a big hoop with white fabric stretched across it felt an ache in his arms and let the reflector sag. A European-looking man operating a big old Mickey Mouse-eared camera swivelled his lens across the scene, snatching footage.

Riff took a fat hand-rolled cigarette from his top pocket, and flipped a Zippo. He sucked in smoke, held it for a wine-bibber’s moment of relish, and exhaled, then nodded his satisfaction to himself.

“Tana leaves, Junior?” said Riff, offering the joint to his wrestling partner.

The Wolf Man didn’t need dope to be out of it.

Here he was, Junior: Lennie Talbot, Kharis the Caveman, Count Alucard—the Son of the Phantom. His baggy eyes were still looking for the rabbits, as he wondered what had happened to the 1940s. Where were Boris and Bela and Bud and Lou? While Joni Mitchell sang about getting back to the garden, Junior fumbled about sets like this, desperate for readmission to the Inner Sanctum.

“Who the Holy Hades is this clown?” Al thumbed at Leech.

Leech looked across the set at Junior. Bloated belly barely cinched by the single button of a stained blue shirt, grey ruff of whiskers, chilli stains on his jeans, yak-hair clumps stuck to his cheeks and forehead, he was up well past the Late, Late Show.

The Wolf Man looked at Leech in terror.

Sometimes, dumb animals have very good instincts.

“This is Mr. Fish,” Charlie told Al. “He’s from England.”

“Like the Beatles,” said one of the girls.

Charlie thought about that. “Yeah,” he said, “like the Beatles. Being for the benefit of Mr. Fish...”

Leech got out of the buggy.

Everyone was looking at him. The kerfuffle quieted, except for the turning of the camera.

Al noticed and made a cut-throat gesture. The cameraman stopped turning.

“Hell of a waste,” spat the director.

* * *

In front of the ranch-house were three more dune buggies, out of commission. A sunburned boy, naked but for cut-off denims and a sombrero, worked on the vehicles. A couple more girls sat around, occasionally passing the boy the wrong spanner from a box of tools.

“When will you have Units Three, Four and One combat-ready, Tex?”

Tex shrugged at Charlie.

“Be lucky to Frankenstein together one working bug from these heaps of shit, Chuck.”

“Not good enough, my man. The storm’s coming. We have to be ready.”

“Then schlep down to Santa Monica and steal... requisition... some more goddamn rolling stock. Rip off an owner’s manual, while you’re at it. These configurations are a joke.”

“I’ll take it under advisement,” said Charlie.

Tex gave his commander a salute.

Everyone looked at Leech, then at Charlie for the nod that meant the newcomer should be treated with respect. Chain of command was more rigid here than at Khe Sanh.

All the buggies were painted. At one time, they had been given elaborate psychedelic patterns; then, a policy decision decreed they be redone in sandy desert camouflage. But the first job had been done properly, while the second was botched—vibrant flowers, butterflies and peace-signs shone through the thin diarrhoea-khaki topcoat.

The ranch-house was the basic derelict adobe and wood hacienda. One carelessly flicked roach and the place was an inferno. Round here, they must take pot-shots at safety inspectors.

On the porch was propped a giant fibre-glass golliwog, a fat grinning racial caricature holding up a cone surmounted by a whipped swirl and a red ball cherry. Chocko the Ice Cream Clown had originally been fixed to one of the ‘requisitioned’ buggies. Someone had written ‘PIG’ in lipstick on Chocko’s forehead. Someone else had holed his eyes and cheek with 2.2 rifle bullets. A hand-axe stuck out of his shoulder like a flung tomahawk.

“That’s the Enemy, man,” said Charlie. “Got to Know Your Enemy.”

Leech looked at the fallen idol.

“You don’t like clowns?”

Charlie nodded. Leech thought of his ally, Ronald.

“Chocko’s coming, man,” said Charlie. “We have to be in a state of eternal preparedness. Their world, the dress-up-and-play world, is over. No more movies, no more movie stars. It’s just us, the Family. And Chocko. We’re major players in the coming deluge. Helter Skelter, like in the song. It’s been revealed to me. But you know all that.”

Funnily enough, Leech did.

He had seen the seas again, the seas that would come from the sundered earth. The seventh flood. The last wave.

Charlie would welcome the waters.

He was undecided on the whole water thing. If pushed, he preferred the fire. And he sensed more interesting apocalypses in the offing, stirring in the scatter of McDonald’s boxes and chewed-out bubblegum pop. Still, he saw himself as a public servant; it was down to others to make the choices. Whatever was wanted, he would do his best to deliver.

“Old Lady Marsh don’t make motion pictures any more. No need. Picture Show’s closed. Just some folk don’t know it yet.”

“Chuck offered to be in their movie,” explained Tex. “Said he’d do one of those nude love scenes, man. No dice.”

“That’s not the way it is,” said Charlie, suddenly defensive, furtive. “My thing is the music. I’m going to communicate through my album. Pass on my revelation. Kids groove on records more than movies.”

Tex shrugged. Charlie needed him, so he had a certain license.

Within limits.

Charlie looked back, away from the house. The film company was turning over again. Riff was pretending to chain-whip Junior.

“Something’s got to change,” said Charlie.

“Helter skelter,” said Leech.

Charlie’s eyes shone.

“Yeah,” he said, “you dig.”

* * *

Inside the house, sections were roped off with crudely lettered PELIGROSO signs. Daylight seeped through ill-fitting boards over glassless windows. Everything was slightly damp and salty, as if there’d been rain days ago. The adobe seemed sodden, pulpy. Green moss grew on the floor. A plastic garden hose snaked through the house, pulsing, leading up the main staircase.

“The Old Lady likes to keep the waters flowing.”

Charlie led Leech upstairs.

On the landing, a squat idol sat on an occasional table—a buddha with cephalopod mouth-parts.

“Know that fellow, Mr. Fish?”

“Dagon, God of the Philistines.”

“Score one for the Kwiz Kid. Dagon. That’s one of the names. Old Lady Marsh had this church, way back in the ’40s. Esoteric Order of Dagon. Ever hear of it?”

Leech had.

“She wants me to take it up again, open store-front chapels on all the piers. Not my scene, man. No churches, not this time. I’ve got my own priorities. She thinks infiltration, but I know these are the times for catastrophe. But she’s still a fighter. Janice Marsh. Remember her in Nefertiti?’

They came to a door, kept ajar by the hose.

Away from his Family, Charlie was different. The man never relaxed, but he dropped the Rasputin act, stuttered out thoughts as soon as they sprung to him, kept up a running commentary. He was less a Warrior of the Apocalypse than a Holocaust Hustler, working all the angles, sucking up to whoever might help him. Charlie needed followers, but was desperate also for sponsorship, a break.

Charlie opened the door.

“Miss Marsh,” he said, deferential.

Large, round eyes gleamed inside the dark room.

Janice Marsh sat in a tin bathtub, tarpaulin tied around her wattled throat like a bib, a bulbous turban around her skull. From under the tarp came quiet splashing and slopping. The hose fed into the bath and an overspill pipe, patched together with hammered-out tin-cans, led away to a hole in the wall, dribbling outside.

Only her flattish nose and lipless mouth showed, overshadowed by the fine-lashed eyes. In old age, she had smoothed rather than wrinkled. Her skin was a mottled, greenish colour.

“This cat’s from England,” said Charlie.

Leech noticed Charlie hung back in the doorway, not entering the room. This woman made him nervous.

“We’ve been in the desert, Miss Marsh,” said Charlie. “Sweeping Quadrant Twelve. Scoped out a promising cave, but it led nowhere. Sadie got her ass stuck in a hole, but we hauled her out. That chick’s our mineshaft canary.”

Janice Marsh nodded, chin-pouch inflating like a frog’s.

“There’s more desert,” said Charlie. “We’ll read the signs soon. It will be found. We can’t be kept from it.”

Leech walked into the dark and sat, unbidden, on a stool by the bathtub.

Janice Marsh looked at him. Sounds frothed through her mouth, rattling in slits that might have been gills.

Leech returned her greeting.

“You speak that jazz?” exclaimed Charlie. “Far out.”

Leech and Janice Marsh talked. She was interesting, if given to rambles as her mind drifted out to sea. It was all about water. Here in the desert, close to the thirstiest city in America, the value of water was known. She told him what the Family were looking for, directed him to unroll some scrolls that were kept on a low-table under a fizzing desk-lamp. The charts were the original mappings of California, made by Fray Junipero Serra before there were enough human landmarks to get a European bearing.

Charlie shouldered close to Leech, and pulled a magic marker out of his top-pocket.

The vellum was divided into numbered squares, thick modern lines blacked over the faded, precious sketch-marks. Several squares were shaded with diagonal lines. Charlie added diagonals to the square marked ‘12’.

Leech winced.

“What’s up, man?”

“Nothing,” he told Charlie.

He knew what things were worth; that, if anything, was his special talent. But he knew such values were out of step with the times. He did not want to be thought a breadhead. Not until the 1980s, when he had an itchy feeling that it’d be mandatory. If there was to be a 1980s.

“This is the surface chart, you dig,” said Charlie, rapping knuckles on the map. “We’re about here, where I’ve marked the Ranch. There are other maps, showing what’s underneath.”

Charlie rolled the map, to disclose another. The top map had holes cut out, marking points of convergence. The lower chart was marked with inter-linked balloon-shapes, some filled in with blue pigment that had become pale with age.

“Dig the holes, man. This shows the ways down below.”

A third layer of map was almost all blue. Drawn in were fishy, squiddy shapes. And symbols Leech understood.

“And here’s the prize. The Sea of California. Freshwater, deep under the desert. Primordial.”

Janice Marsh burbled excitement.

“Home,” she said, a recognisable English word.

“It’s under us,” said Charlie. “That’s why we’re out here. Looking. Before Chocko rises, the Family will have found the way down, got the old pumps working. Turn on the quake. With the flood, we’ll win. It’s the key to ending all this. It has properties. Some places—the cities, maybe, Chicago, Watts—it’ll be fire that comes down. Here, it’s the old, old way. It’ll be water that comes up.”

“You’re building an Ark?”

“Uh uh, Arks are movie stuff. We’re learning to swim. Going to be a part of the flood. You too, I think. We’re going to drown Chocko. We’re going to drown Hollywood. Call down the rains. Break the rock. When it’s all over, there’ll only be us. And maybe the Beach Boys. I’m tight with Dennis Wilson, man. He wants to produce my album. That’s going to happen in the last days. My album will be a monster, like the Double White. Music will open everything up, knock everything down. Like at Jericho.”

Leech saw that Charlie couldn’t keep his thinking straight. He wanted an end to civilisation and a never-ending battle of Armageddon, but still thought he could fit in a career as a pop star.

Maybe.

This was Janice’s game. She was the mother of this family.

“He came out of the desert,” Charlie told the old woman. “You can see the signs on him. He’s a dowser.”

The big eyes turned to Leech.

“I’ve found things before,” he admitted.

“Water?” she asked, splashing.

He shrugged. “On occasion.”

Her slit mouth opened in a smile, showing rows of needle-sharp teeth.

“You’re a hit, man,” said Charlie. “You’re in the Family.”

Leech raised his hand. “That’s an honour, Charles,” he said, “but I can’t accept. I provide services, for a fee to be negotiated, but I don’t take permanent positions.”

Charlie was puzzled for a moment, brows narrowed. Then he smiled. “If that’s your scene, it’s cool. But are you The One Who Will Open the Earth? Can you help us find the Subterranean Sea?”

Leech considered, and shook his head, “No. That’s too deep for me.”

Charlie made fists, bared teeth, instantly angry.

“But I know who can,” soothed Leech.

* * *

The movie people were losing the light. As the sun sank, long shadows stretched on reddish scrub, rock-shapes twisted into ogres. The cinematographer shot furiously, gabbling in semi-Hungarian about “magic hour”, while Sam and Al worried vocally that nothing would come out on the film.

Leech sat in a canvas folding-chair and watched.

Three young actresses, dressed like Red Indians, were pushing Junior around, tormenting him by withholding a bottle of firewater. Meanwhile, the movie moon—a shining fabric disc—was rising full, just like the real moon up above the frame-line.

The actresses weren’t very good. Beside Sadie and Squeaky and Ouisch and the others, the Acid Squaws of the Family, they lacked authentic drop-out savagery. They were Vegas refugees, tottering on high heels, checking their make-up in every reflective surface.

Junior wasn’t acting any more.

“Go for the bottle,” urged Al.

Junior made a bear-lunge, missed a girl who pulled a face as his sweat-smell cloud enveloped her, and fell to his knees. He looked up like a puppy with progeria, eager to be patted for his trick.

There was water in Junior’s eyes. Full moons shone in them.

Leech looked up. Even he felt the tidal tug.

“I don’t freakin’ believe this,” stage-whispered Charlie, in Leech’s ear. “That cat’s gone.”

Leech pointed again at Junior.

“You’ve tried human methods, Charles. Logic and maps. You need to try other means. Animals always find water. The moon pulls at the sea. That man has surrendered to his animal. He knows the call of the moon. Even a man who is pure in heart...”

“That was just in the movies.”

“Nothing was ever just in the movies. Understand this. Celluloid writes itself into the unconscious, of its makers as much as its consumers. Your revelations may come in music. His came in the cheap seats.”

The Wolf Man howled happily, bottle in his hug. He took a swig and shook his greasy hair like a pelt.

The actresses edged away from him.

“Far out, man,” said Charlie, doubtfully.

“Far out and deep down, Charles.”

* * *

“That’s a wrap for today,” called Al.

“I could shoot twenty more minutes with this light,” said the cameraman.

“You’re nuts. This ain’t art school in Budapest. Here in America, we shoot with light, not dark.”

“I make it fantastic.”

“We don’t want fantastic. We want it on film so you can see it.”

“Make a change from your last picture, then,” sneered the cinematographer. He flung up his hands and walked away.

Al looked about as if he’d missed something.

“Who are you, mister?” he asked Leech. “Who are you really?”

“A student of human nature.”

“Another weirdo, then.”

He had a flash of the director’s body, much older and shaggier, bent in half and shoved into a whirlpool bath, wet concrete sloshing over his face.

“Might I give you some free advice?” Leech asked. “Long-term advice. Be very careful when you’re hiring odd-job men.”

“Yup, a weird weirdo. The worst kind.”

The director stalked off. Leech still felt eyes on him.

Sam, the producer, had stuck around the set. He did the negotiating. He also had a demented enthusiasm for the kind of pictures they made. Al would rather have been shooting on the studio lot with Barbra Streisand or William Holden. Sam liked anything that gave him a chance to hire forgotten names from the matinees he had loved as a kid.

“You’re not with them? Charlie’s Family?”

Leech said nothing.

“They’re fruit-loops. Harmless, but a pain in the keister. The hours we’ve lost putting up with these kids. You’re not like that. Why are you here?”

“As they say in the Westerns, ‘just passing through’.”

“You like Westerns? Nobody does much any more, unless they’re made in Spain by Italians. What’s wrong with this picture? We’d love to be able to shoot only Westerns. Cowboys are a hell of a lot easier to deal with than Hells’ Angels. Horses don’t break down like bikes.”

“Would you be interested in coming to an arrangement? The problems you’ve been having with the Family could be ended.”

“What are you, their agent?”

“This isn’t Danegeld, or a protection racket. This is a fair exchange of services.”

“I pay you and your hippies don’t fudge up any more scenes? I could just get a sheriff out here and run the whole crowd off, then we’d be back on schedule. I’ve come close to it more’n once.”

“I’m not interested in money, for the moment. I would like to take an option on a day and a night of time from one of your contractees.”

“Those girls are actresses, buddy, not whatever you might think they are. Each and every one of em is SAG.”

“Not one of the actresses.”

“Sheesh, I know you longhairs are into everything, but...”

“It’s your werewolf I wish to sub-contract.”

“My what? Oh, Junior. He’s finished on this picture.”

“But he owes you two days.”

“How the hell did you know that? He does. I was going to have Al shoot stuff with him we could use in something else. There’s this Blood picture we need to finish. Blood of Whatever. It’s had so many titles, I can’t keep them in my head. Ghastly Horror... Dracula Meets Frankenstein... Fiend with the Psychotropic Brain... Blood a-Go-Go... At the moment, it’s mostly home movies shot at a dolphinarium. It could use monster scenes.”

“I would like to pick up the time. As I said, a day and a night.”

“Have you ever done any acting? I ask because our vampire is gone. He’s an accountant and it’s tax season. In long shot, you could pass for him. We could give you a horror star name, get you on the cover of Famous Monsters. How about ‘Zoltan Lukoff’? ‘Mongo Carnadyne’? ‘Dexter DuCaine’?”

“I don’t think I have screen presence.”

“But you can call off the bimbos in the buggies? Damp down all activities so we can finish our flick and head home?”

“That can be arranged.”

“And Junior isn’t going to get hurt? This isn’t some Satanic sacrifice deal? Say, that’s a great title. Satan’s Sacrifice. Must register it. Maybe Satan’s Bloody Sacrifice. Anything with blood in the title will gross an extra twenty per-cent. That’s free advice you can take to the bank and cash.”

“I simply want help in finding something. Your man can do that.”

“Pal, Junior can’t find his own pants in the morning even if he’s slept in them. He’s still got it on film, but half the time he doesn’t know what year it is. And, frankly, he’s better off that way. He still thinks he’s in Of Mice and Men.”

“If you remade that, would you call it Of Mice and Bloody Men?”

Sam laughed. “Of Naked Mice and Bloody Men.”

“Do we have a deal?”

“I’ll talk to Junior.”

“Thank you.”

* * *

After dark, the two camps were pitched. Charlie’s Family were around the ranch-house, clustering on the porch for a meal prepared and served by the girls, which was not received enthusiastically. Constant formulated elaborate sentences of polite and constructive culinary criticism which made head chef Lynette Alice, aka Squeaky, glare as if she wanted to drown him in soup.

Leech had another future moment, seeing between the seconds. Drowned bodies hung, arms out like B-movie monsters, faces pale and shrivelled. Underwater zombies dragged weighted boots across the ocean-floor, clothes flapping like torn flags. Finned priests called the faithful to prayer from the steps of sunken temples to Dagon and Chthulhu and the Fisherman Jesus.

Unnoticed, he spat out a stream of seawater which sank into the sand.

The Family scavenged their food, mostly by random shoplifting in markets, and were banned from all the places within an easy reach. Now they made do with whatever canned goods they had left over and, in some cases, food parcels picked up from the Chatsworth post office sent by suburban parents they despised but tapped all the time. Mom and Dad were a resource, Charlie said, like a seam of mineral in a rock, to be mined until it played out.

The situation was exacerbated by cooking smells wafting up from the film camp, down by the bunkhouse. The movie folk had a catering budget. Junior presided over a cauldron full of chilli, his secret family recipe doled out to the cast and crew on all his movies. Leech gathered some of Charlie’s girls had exchanged blow-jobs for bowls of that chilli, which they then dutifully turned over to their lord and master in the hope that he’d let them lick out the crockery afterwards.

Everything was a matter of striking a deal. Service for payment.

Not hungry, he sat between the camps, considering the situation. He knew what Janice Marsh wanted, what Charlie wanted, what Al wanted and what Sam wanted. He saw arrangements that might satisfy them all.

But he had his own interests to consider.

The more concrete the coming flood was in his mind, the less congenial an apocalypse it seemed. It was unsubtle, an upheaval that epitomised the saw about throwing out the baby with the bathwater. He envisioned more intriguing pathways through the future. He had already made an investment in this world, in the ways that it worked and played, and he was reluctant to abandon his own long-range plans to hop aboard a Technicolor spectacular starring a cast of thousands, scripted by Lovecraft, directed by DeMille and produced by Mad Eyes Charlie and the Freakin’ Family Band.

His favoured apocalypse was a tide of McLitter, a thousand channels of television noise, a complete scrambling of politics and entertainment, PROUD-TO-BE-A-BREADHEAD buttons, bright packaging around tasteless and nutrition-free product, audio-visual media devoid of anything approaching meaning, bellies swelling and IQs atrophying. In his preferred world, as in the songs, people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made, worked for Matthew and Son, were dedicated followers of fashion and did what Simon said.

He was in a tricky position. It was a limitation on his business that he could rarely set his own goals. In one way, he was like Sam’s vampire: he couldn’t go anywhere without an invitation. Somehow, he must further his own cause, while living up to the letter of his agreements.

Fair enough.

On his porch, Charlie unslung a guitar and began to sing, pouring revelations over a twelve-bar blues. Adoring faces looked up at him, red-fringed by the firelight.

From the movie camp came an answering wail.

Not coyotes, but stuntmen—led by the raucous Riff, whose singing had been dubbed in West Side Story—howling at the moon, whistling over emptied Jack Daniel’s bottles, clanging tin plates together.

Charlie’s girls joined in his chorus.

The film folk fired off blank rounds, and sang songs from the Westerns they’d been in. ‘Get Along Home, Cindy, Cindy’. ‘Gunfight at O.K. Corral’. ‘The Code of the West’.

Charlie dropped his acoustic, and plugged in an electric. The chords sounded the same, but the amperage somehow got into his reedy voice, which came across louder.

He sang sea shanties.

That put the film folk off for a while.

Charlie sang about mermaids and sunken treasures and the rising, rising waters.

He wasn’t worse than many acts Leech had signed to his record label. If it weren’t for this apocalypse jazz, he might have tried to make a deal with Charlie for his music. He’d kept back the fact that he had pull in the industry. Apart from other considerations, it’d have made Charlie suspicious. The man was naive about many things, but he had a canny showbiz streak. He scorned all the trappings of a doomed civilisation, but bought Daily Variety and Billboard on the sly. You don’t find Phil Spector wandering in the desert eating horse-turds. At least, not so far.

As Charlie sang, Leech looked up at the moon.

* * *

A shadow fell over him, and he smelled the Wolf Man.

“Is your name George?” asked the big man, eyes eager.

“If you need it to be.”

“I only ask because it seems to me you could be a George. You got that Georgey look, if you know what I mean.”

“Sit down, my friend. We should talk.”

“Gee, uh, okay.”

Junior sat cross-legged, arranging his knees around his comfortable belly. Leech struck a match, put it to a pile of twigs threaded with grass. Flame showed up Junior’s nervous, expectant grin, etched shadows into his open face.

Leech didn’t meet many Innocents. Yet here was one.

As Junior saw Leech’s face in the light, his expression was shadowed. Leech remembered how terrified the actor had been when he first saw him.

“Why do I frighten you?” he asked, genuinely interested.

“Don’t like to say,” said Junior, thumb creeping towards his mouth. “Sounds dumb.”

“I don’t make judgements. That’s not part of my purpose.”

“I think you might be my Dad.”

Leech laughed. He was rarely surprised by people. When it happened, he was always pleased.

“Not like that. Not like you and my Mom... you know. It’s like my Dad’s in you, somewhere.”

“Do I look like him, Creighton?”

Junior accepted Leech’s use of his true name. “I can’t remember what he really looked like. He was the Man of a Thousand Faces. He didn’t have a real face for home use. He’d not have been pleased with the way this turned out, George. He didn’t want this for me. He’d have been real mad. And when he was mad, then he showed his vampire face...”

Junior bared his teeth, trying to do his father in London After Midnight.

“It’s never too late to change.”

Junior shook his head, clearing it. “Gosh, that’s a nice thought, George. Sam says you want me to do you a favour. Sam’s a good guy. He looks out for me. Always has a spot for me in his pictures. He says no one else can do justice to the role of Groton the Mad Zombie. If you’re okay with Sam, you’re okay with me. No matter about my Dad. He’s dead a long time and I don’t have to do what he says no more. That’s the truth, George.”

“Yes.”

“So how can I help you?”

* * *

The Buggy Korps scrambled in the morning for the big mission. Only two vehicles were all-terrain-ready. Two three-person crews would suffice.

Given temporary command of Unit Number Two, Leech picked Constant as his driver. The German boy helped Junior into his padded seat, complementing him on his performance as noble Chingachgook in a TV series of The Last of the Mohicans that had made it to East Germany in the 1950s.

This morning, Junior bubbled with enthusiasm, a big kid going to the zoo. He took a look at Chocko, who had recently been sloshed with red paint, and pantomimed cringing shock.

Leech knew the actor’s father sometimes came home from work in clown make-up and terrified his young son.

The fear was still there.

Unit Number Two was scrambled before Charlie was out of his hammock.

They waited. Constant, sticking to a pre-arranged plan, shut down his face, covering a pettish irritation that others did not adhere to such a policy, especially others who were theoretically in a command position.

The Family Führer eventually rolled into the light, beard sticky as a glazed doughnut, scratching lazily. He grinned like a cornered cat and climbed up onto Unit Number One—actually, Unit Number Four with a hastily repainted number since the real Number One was a wreck. As crew, Charlie cut a couple of the girls out of the corral: the thin and pale Squeaky, who always looked like she’d just been slapped, and a younger, prettier, stranger creature called Ouisch. Other girls glowered sullen resentment and envy at the chosen ones. Ouisch tossed her long dark hair smugly and blew a gum-bubble in triumph. There was muttering of discontent.

If he had been Charlie, Leech would have taken the boy who could fix the motors, not the girls who gave the best blow jobs. But it wasn’t his place to give advice.

Charlie was pleased with his mastery over his girls, as if it were difficult to mind control American children. Leech thought that a weakness. Even as Charlie commanded the loyalty of the chicks, the few men in the Family grumbled. They got away with sniping resentment because their skills or contacts were needed. Of the group at the Ranch, only Constant had deal-making potential.

“Let’s roll, Rat Patrol,” decreed Charlie, waving.

The set-off was complicated by a squabble about protocol. Hitherto, in column outings—and two Units made a column— Charlie had to be in the lead vehicle. However, given that Junior was truffle-pig on this expedition, Unit Number One had to be in the rear, with Number Two out front.

Squeaky explained the rules, at length. Charlie shrugged, grinned and looked ready to doze.

Leech was distracted by a glint from an upper window. A gush of dirty water came from a pipe. Janice Marsh’s fish-face loomed in shadows, eyes eager. Stranded and flapping in this desert, no wonder she was thirsty.

Constant counter-argued that this was a search operation, not a victory parade.

“We have rules or we’re nothing, Kaptain Kraut,” whined Squeaky.

It was easy to hear how she’d got her nickname.

“They should go first, Squeak,” said Ouisch. “In case of mines. Or ambush. Charlie should keep back, safe.”

“If we’re going to change the rules, we should have a meeting.”

Charlie punched Squeaky in the head. “Motion carried,” he said.

Squeaky rubbed her nut, eyes crossed with anger. Charlie patted her, and she looked up at him, forcing adoration.

Constant turned the ignition—a screwdriver messily wired into the raped steering column—and the engine turned over, belching smoke.

Unit Number Two drove down the track, towards the arch.

Squeaky struggled to get Unit Number One moving.

“We would more efficient be if the others behind stayed, I think,” said Constant.

Unit Number One came to life. There were cheers.

“Never mind, li’l buddy,” said Junior. “Nice to have pretty girlies along on the trail.”

“For some, it is nice.”

The two-buggy column passed under the arch.

* * *

Junior’s feelings took them up into the mountains. The buggies struggled with the gradient. These were horse-trails.

“This area, it has been searched thoroughly,” said Constant.

“But I got a powerful feeling,” said Junior.

Junior was eager to help. It had taken some convincing to make him believe in his powers of intuition, but now he had a firm faith in them. He realised he’d always had a supernatural ability to find things misplaced, like keys or watches. All his life, people had pointed it out.

Leech was confident. Junior was well cast as the One Who Will Open the Earth. It was in the prophecies.

Unit Number Two became wedged between rocks.

“This is as far as we can go in the buggy,” said Constant.

“That’s a real shame,” said Junior, shaking his head, “’cause I’ve a rumbling in my guts that says we should be higher. What do you think, George? Should we keep on keeping on?”

Leech looked up. “If you hear the call.”

“You know, George, I think I do. I really do. The call is calling.”

“Then we go on.”

Unit Number One appeared, and died. Steam hissed out of the radiator.

Charlie sent Ouisch over for a sit-rep.

Constant explained they would have to go on foot from now on.

“Some master driver you are, Schultzie,” said the girl, giggling. “Charlie will have you punished for your failure. Severely.”

Constant thought better of answering back.

Junior looked at the view, mopping the sweat off his forehead with a blue denim sleeve. Blotches of smog obscured much of the city spread out toward the grey-blue shine of the Pacific. Up here, the air was thin and at least clean.

“Looks like a train-set, George.”

“The biggest a boy ever had,” said Leech.

Constant had hiking boots and a back-pack with rope, implements and rations. He checked over his gear, professionally.

It had been Ouisch’s job to bottle some water, but she’d got stoned last night and forgot. Junior had a hip-flask, but it wasn’t full of water.

Leech could manage, but the others might suffer.

“If before we went into the high desert a choice had been presented of whether to go with water or without, I would have voted for ‘with’,” said Constant. “But such a matter was not discussed.”

Ouisch stuck her tongue out. She had tattooed a swastika on it with a blue ball-point pen. It was streaky.

Squeaky found a Coca-Cola bottle rolling around in Unit Number One, an inch of soupy liquid in the bottom. She turned it over to Charlie, who drank it down in a satisfied draught. He made as if to toss the bottle off the mountain like a grenade, but Leech took it from him.

“What’s the deal, Mr. Fish? No one’ll care about littering when Helter Skelter comes down.”

“This can be used. Constant, some string, please.”

Constant sorted through his pack. He came up with twine and a Swiss army knife.

“Cool blade,” said Charlie. “I’d like one like that.”

Squeaky and Ouisch looked death at Constant until he handed the knife over. Charlie opened up all the implements, until the knife looked like a triggered booby-trap. He cleaned under his nails with the bradawl.

Leech snapped his fingers. Charlie gave the knife over.

Leech cut a length of twine and tied one end around the bottle’s wasp-waist. He dangled it like a plum-bob. The bottle circled slowly.

Junior took the bottle, getting the idea instantly.

Leech closed the knife and held it out on his open palm. Constant resentfully made fists by his sides. Charlie took the tool, snickering to himself. He felt its balance for a moment, then pitched it off the mountainside. The Swiss Army Knife made a long arc into the air and plunged, hundreds and hundreds of feet, bounced off a rock and fell further.

Long seconds later, the tumbling speck disappeared.

“Got to rid ourselves of the trappings, Kraut-Man.”

Constant said nothing.

Junior had scrambled up the rocky incline, following the nose of the bottle. “Come on, guys,” he called. “This is it. El Doradio. I can feel it in my bones. Don’t stick around, slowcoaches.”

Charlie was first to follow.

Squeaky, who had chosen to wear flip-flops rather than boots, volunteered to stay behind and guard the Units.

“Don’t be a drag-hag, soldier,” said Charlie. “Bring up the freakin’ rear.”

Leech kept pace.

From behind, yelps of pain came frequently.

Leech knew where to step, when to breathe, which rocks were solid enough to provide handholds and which would crumble or come away at a touch. Instinct told him how to hold his body so that gravity didn’t tug him off the mountain. His inertia actually helped propel him upwards.

Charlie gave him a sideways look.

Though the man was thick-skinned and jail-tough, physical activity wasn’t his favoured pursuit. He needed to make it seem as if he found the mountain path easy, but breathing the air up here was difficult for him. He had occasional coughing jags. Squeaky and Ouisch shouldered their sweet lord’s weight and helped him, their own thin legs bending as he relaxed on their support, allowing himself to be lifted as if by angels.

Constant was careful, methodical and made his way on his own.

But Junior was out ahead, following his bottle, scrambling between rocks and up nearly-sheer inclines. He stopped, stood on a rocky outcrop, and looked down at them, then bellowed for the sheer joy of being alive and in the wilderness.

The sound carried out over the mountains and echoed.

“Charlie,” he shouted, “how about one of them songs of yours?”

“Yes, that is an idea good,” said Constant, every word barbed. “An inspiration is needed for our mission.”

Charlie could barely speak, much less sing ‘The Happy Wanderer’ in German.

Grimly, Squeaky and Ouisch harmonised a difficult version of ‘The Mickey Mouse Marching Song’. Struggling with Charlie’s dead weight, they found the will to carry on and even put some spit and vigour into the anthem.

Leech realised at once what Charlie had done.

The con had simply stolen the whole idea outright from Uncle Walt. He’d picked up these dreaming girls, children of post-war privilege raised in homes with buzzing refrigerators in the kitchen and finned automobiles in the garage, recruiting them a few years on from their first Mouseketeer phase, and electing himself Mickey.

Hey there ho there hi there...

When they chanted “Mickey Mouse... Mickey Mouse”, Constant even croaked “Donald Duck” on the offbeat.

Like Junior, Leech was overwhelmed with the sheer joy of the century.

He loved these children, dangerous as they were, destructive as they would be. They had such open, yearning hearts. They would find many things to fill their voids and Leech saw that he could be there for them in the future, up to 2001 and beyond, on the generation’s ultimate trip.

Unless the rains came first.

“Hey, George,” yelled Junior. “I dropped my bottle down a hole.”

Everyone stopped and shut up.

Leech listened.

“Aww, what a shame,” said Junior. “I lost my bottle.”

Leech held up a hand for silence.

Charlie was puzzled, and the girls sat him down.

Long seconds later, deep inside the mountain, he heard a splash. No one else caught the noise.

“It’s found,” he announced.

* * *

Only Ouisch was small enough to pass through the hole. Constant rigged up a rope cradle and lowered her. She waved bye-bye as she scraped into the mountain’s throat. Constant measured off the rope in cubits, unrolling loops from his forearm.

Junior sat on the rock, swigging from his flask.

Squeaky glared pantomime evil at him and he offered the flask to Charlie.

“That’s your poison, man,” he said.

“You should drop acid,” said Squeaky. “So you can learn from the wisdom of the mountain.”

Junior laughed, big belly-shaking chuckles.

“You’re funnin’ me, girl. Ain’t nothing dumber than a mountain.”

Leech didn’t add to the debate.

Constant came to end of the rope. Ouisch dangled fifty feet inside the rock.

“It’s dark,” she shouted up. “And wet. There’s water all around. Water with things in it. Icky.”

“Have you ever considered the etymology of the term ‘icky’?” asked Leech. “Do you suppose this primal, playroom expression of disgust could be related to the Latin prefix ‘ichthy’, which translates literally as ‘fishy’?”

“I was in a picture once, called Manfish,” said Junior. “I got to be out on boats. I like boats.”

“Manfish? Interesting name.”

“It was the name of the boat in the movie. Not a monster, like that Black Lagoon thing. Universal wouldn’t have me in that. I did The Alligator People, though. Swamp stuff. Big stiff suitcase-skinned gator-man.”

“Man-fish,” said Charlie, trying to hop on the conversation train. “I get it. I see where you’re coming from, where you’re going. The Old Lady. What’s she, a mermaid? An old mermaid?”

“You mean she really looks like that?” yelped Squeaky. “The one time I saw her I was tripping. Man, that’s messed up! Charlie, I think I’m scared.”

Charlie cuffed Squeaky around the head.

“Ow, that hurt.”

“Learn from the pain, child. It’s the only way.”

“You shouldn’t ought to hit ladies, Mr. Man,” said Junior. “It’s not like with guys. Brawlin’ is part of being a guy. But with ladies, it’s, you know, not polite. Wrong. Even when you’ve got a snoutful, you don’t whop on a woman.”

“It’s for my own good,” said Squeaky, defending her master.

“Gosh, little lady, are you sure?”

“It’s the only way I’ll learn.” Squeaky picked up a rock and hit herself in the head with it, raising a bruise. “I love you, Charlie,” she said, handing him the bloody rock.

He kissed the stain, and Squeaky smiled as if she’d won a gold star for her homework and been made head cheerleader on the same morning.

Ouisch popped her head up out of the hole like a pantomime chimneysweep. She had adorable dirt on her cheeks.

“There’s a way down,” she said. “It’s narrow here, but opens out. I think it’s a, whatchumacallit, passage. The rocks feel smooth. We’ll have to enbiggen the hole if you’re all to get through.”

Constant looked at the problem. “This stone, that stone, that stone,” he said, pointing out loose outcrops around the lip of the hole. “They will come away.”

Charlie was about to make fun of the German boy, but held back. Like Leech, he sensed that the kid knew what he was talking about.

“I study engineering,” Constant said. “I thought I might build houses.”

“Have to tear down before you can build up,” said Charlie.

Constant and Squeaky wrestled with rocks, wrenching them loose, working faults into cracks. Ouisch slipped into the hole, to be out of the way.

Charlie didn’t turn a hand to the work. He was here in a supervisory capacity.

Eventually the stones were rolled away.

“Strange, that is,” said Constant as sun shone into the hole. “Those could be steps.”

There were indeed stairs in the hole.

Constant, of course, had brought a battery flashlight. He shone it into the hole. Ouisch sat on a wet step.

The stairs were old, pre-human.

Charlie tapped Squeaky, pushed her a little. She eased herself into the hole, plopping down next to Ouisch.

“You light the way,” he told Constant. “The girls will scout ahead. Reconnaissance.”

“Nothing down there but water,” said Junior. “Been there a long time.”

“Maybe no people. But big blind fish.”

The Family crowd descended the stairs, their light swallowed by the hole.

Leech and Junior lingered topside.

Charlie looked up. “You comin’ along, Mr. Fish?”

Leech nodded. “It’s all right,” he told Junior. “We’ll be safe in the dark.”

* * *

Inside the mountain, everything was cold and wet. Natural tunnels had been shaped by intelligent (if webbed) hands at some point. The roofs were too low even for the girls to walk comfortably, but scarred patches of rock showed where paths had been cut, and the floor was smoothed by use. Sewer-like runnel-gutters trickled with fresh water. Somehow, no one liked to drink the stuff—though the others must all have a desert thirst.

They started to find carved designs on the rocks. At first, childish wavy lines with stylised fish swimming.

Charlie was excited by the nearness of the sea.

They could hear it, roaring below. Junior felt the pull of the water.

Leech heard the voices in the roar.

Like a bloodhound, Junior led them through triune junctions, down forking stairways, past stalactite-speared cave-dwellings, deeper into the three-dimensional maze inside the mountain.

“We’re going to free the waters,” said Charlie. “Let the deluge wash down onto the city. This mountain is like a big dam. It can be blown.”

The mountain was more like a stopper jammed onto a bottle. Charlie was right about pressure building up. Leech felt it in his inner ears, his eyes, his teeth. Squeaky had a nosebleed. The air was thick, wet with vapour. Marble-like balls of water gathered on the rock roof and fell on them, splattering on clothes like liquid bullets. In a sense, they were already underwater.

It would take more than dynamite to loose the flood; indeed, it would take more than physics. However, Charlie was not too far off the mark in imagining what could be done by loosening a few key rocks. There was the San Andreas fault to play with. Constant would know which rocks to take out of the puzzle. A little directed spiritual energy, some sacrifices, and the Coast of California could shear away like a slice of pie. Then the stopper would be off, and the seas would rise, waking up the gill-people, the mer-folk, the squidface fellows. A decisive turn and a world war would be lost, by the straights, the over-thirties, the cops and docs and pols, the Man. Charlie and Chocko could stage their last war games, and the sea-birds would cheer tekeli-li tekeli-li...

Leech saw it all, like a coming attraction. And he wasn’t sure he wanted to pay to see that movie.

Maybe on a re-run triple feature with drastically reduced admission, slipped in between Night of the Living Dead and Planet of the Apes.

Seriously, Hello Dolly! spoke to him more on his level.

“The Earth is hollow,” said Charlie. “The Nazis knew that.”

Constant winced at mention of Nazis. Too many Gestapo jokes had made him sensitive.

“Inside, there are the big primal forces, water and fire. They’re here for us, space kiddettes. For the Family. This is where the Helter Skelter comes down.”

The tunnel opened up into a cathedral.

They were on an upper level of a tiered array of galleries and balconies. Natural rock and blocky construction all seemed to have melted like wax, encrusted with salty matter. Stalactites hung in spiky curtains, stalagmites raised like obscene columns.

Below, black waters glistened.

Constant played feeble torchlight over the interior of the vast space.

“Far out, man,” said Ouisch.

“Beautiful,” said Junior.

There was an echo, like the wind in a pipe organ.

Greens and browns mingled in curtains of icy rock, colours unseen for centuries.

“Here’s your story,” said Constant.

He pointed the torch at a wall covered in an intricate carving. A sequence of images—an underground comic!—showed the mountain opening up, the desert fractured by a jagged crack, a populated flood gushing forth, a city swept into the sea. There was a face on the mountain, grinning in triumph—Charlie, with a swastika on his forehead, his beard and hair tangled like seaweed.

“So, is that your happy ending?” Leech asked.

For once, Charlie was struck dumb. Until now he had been riffing, a yarning jailbird puffing up his crimes and exploits, spinning sci-fi stories and channelling nonsense from the void. To keep himself amused as he marked off the days of his sentence.

“Man,” he said, “it’s all true.”

This face proved it.

“This is the future. Helter Skelter.”

Looking closer at the mural, the city wasn’t exactly Los Angeles, but an Aztec-Atlantean analogue. Among the drowning humans were fishier bipeds. There were step-pyramids and Studebaker dealerships, temples of sacrifice and motion picture studios.

“It’s one future,” said Leech. “A possible, maybe probable future.”

“And you’ve brought me to it, man. I knew you were the real deal!”

The phrase came back in an echo, “real deal... real deal”.

“The real deal? Very perceptive. This is where we make the real deal, Charles. This is where we take the money or open the box, this is make-your-mind-up-time.”

Charlie’s elation was cut with puzzlement.

“I’ve dropped that tab,” announced Ouisch.

Junior looked around. “Where? Let’s see if we can pick it up.”

Charlie took Constant’s torch and shone it at Leech.

“You don’t blink.”

“No.”

Charlie stuck the torch under his chin, demon-masking his features. He tried to snarl like his million-year-old carved portrait.

“But I’m the Man, now. The Man of the Mountain.”

“I don’t dispute that.”

“The Old Lady has told me how it works,” said Charlie, pointing to his head. “You think I don’t get it, but I do. We’ve been stashing ordinance. The kraut’s a demolition expert. He’ll see where to place the charges. Bring this place down and let the waters out. I know that’s not enough. This is an imaginary mountain as much as it is a physical one. That’s why they’ve been filming crappy Westerns all over it for so long. This is a place of stories. And it has to be opened in the mind, has to be cracked on another plane. I’ve been working on the rituals. My album, that’s one. And the blood sacrifices, the offerings of the pigs.”

“I can’t wait to off my first pig,” said Ouisch, cutely wrinkling her nose.

“I’m going to be so freakin’ famous.”

“Famous ain’t all that,” put in Junior. “You think bein’ famous will make things work out right, but it doesn’t at all. Screws you up more, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t, Mummy Man,” spat Charlie. “You had your shot, dragged your leg through the tombs...”

Squeaky began to sing, softly.

“We shall over-whelm, we shall over-whe-e-elm, we shall overwhelm some day-ay-ay...”

Charlie laughed.

“It’s the end of their world. No more goddamn’ movies. You know how much I hate the movies? The lies in the movies. Now, I get to wipe Hollywood off the map. Hell, I get to wipe the map off the map. I’ll burn those old Spanish charts when we get back to the Ranch. No more call for them.”

Constant was the only one paying attention to Leech. Smart boy.

“It’ll be so simple,” said Charlie. “So pure. All the pigs get offed. Me and Chocko do the last dance. I defeat the clowns, lay them down forever. Then we start all over. Get it right this time.”

“Simple,” said Leech. “Yes, that’s the word.”

“This happened before, right? With the Old Lady’s people. The menfish. Then we came along, the menmen, and fouled it up again, played exactly the same tune. Not this time. This time, there’s the Gospel According to Charlie.”

“Hooray and Hallelujah,” sang Ouisch, “you got it comin’ to ya...”

The drip of water echoed enormously, like the ticking of a great clock.

“I do believe our interests part the ways here,” said Leech. “You yearn for simplicity, like these children. You hate the movies, the storybooks, but you want cartoons, you want a big finish and a new episode next week. Wipe it all away and get back to the garden. It’s easy because you don’t have to think about it.”

He hadn’t lost Charlie, but he was scaring the man. Good.

“I like complexity,” said Leech, relishing the echo. “I love it. There are so many more opportunities, so many more arrangements to be made. What I want is a rolling apocalypse, a transformation, a thousand victories a day, a spreading of interests, a permanent revolution. My natural habitat is civilisation. Your ultimate deluge might be amusing for a moment, but it’d pass. Even you’d get bored with children sitting around adoring you.”

“You think?”

“I know, Charles.”

Charlie looked at the faces of Ouisch and Squeaky, American girls, unquestioningly loyal, endlessly tiresome.

“No, Mr. Fish,” he said, indicating the mural. “This is what I want. This is what I want to do.”

“I brought you here. I showed you this.”

“I know. You’re part of the story too, aren’t you? If the Mummy Man is the One Who Will Open the Earth, you’re the Mysterious Guide.”

“I’m not so mysterious.”

“You’re a part of this, you don’t have a choice.”

Charlie was excited but wheedling, persuasive but panicky. Having seen his preferred future, he was worried about losing it. Whenever the torch was away from the mural, he itched lest it should change in the dark.

“I promise you this, Charles, you will be famous.”

Charlie thumped his chest. “Damn right. Good goddamn right!”

“But you might want to give this up. Write off this scripted Armageddon as just another fish story. You know, the one that got away. It was this big. I have other plans for the end of this century. And beyond. Have you ever noticed how it’s only Gods who keep threatening to end the world? Father issues, if you ask me. Others, those of my party, promise things will continue as they are. Everyone gets what they deserve. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet because what you give is what you get.”

Charlie shook his head. “I’m not there.”

Squeaky and Ouisch were searching the mural, trying to find themselves in the crowded picture.

Charlie’s eyes shone, ferocious.

“Our deal was to bring you here,” said Leech, “to this sea. To this place of revelation. Our business is concluded. The service you requested has been done.”

Junior raised a modest flipper, acknowledging his part.

“Yeah,” said Charlie, distracted, flicking fingers at Junior, “muchas grassy-asses.”

“You have recompensed our friend for his part in this expedition, by ensuring that his employers finish their shoot unimpeded. That deal is done and everyone is square. Now, let’s talk about getting out of the mountain.”

Charlie bit back a grin, surprised.

“What are you prepared to offer for that?”

“Don’t be stupid, man,” said Charlie. “We just go back on ourselves.”

“Are you so confident? We took a great many turns and twists. Smooth rock and running water. We left no signs. Some of us might have a mind to sit by the sea for a spell, make some rods and go fishing.”

“Good idea, George,” said Junior. “Catch a marlin, I bet. Plenty good eating.”

Charlie’s eyes widened.

After a day or so, the torch batteries would die. He might wander blindly for months, years, down here, hopelessly lost, buried alive. Back at the Ranch, he’d not be missed much; Tex, or one of the others, maybe one of the girls, could be the new Head of the Family, and would perhaps do things better all round. The girls would be no use to him, in the end. Squeaky and Ouisch couldn’t guide him out of this fish city, and he couldn’t live off them for more than a few weeks. Charlie saw the story of the Lost Voyager as vividly as he had the Drowning of Los Angeles. It ended not with a huge face carved on a mountain and feared, but with forgotten bones, lying forever in wet darkness.

“I join you in fishing, I think,” said Constant.

Charlie had lost Constant on the mountain. Later, Leech would formalise a deal with the boy. He had an ability to put things together or take them apart. Charlie had been depending on that. He should have taken the trouble to offer Constant something of equal value to retain his services.

“No, no, this can’t be right.”

“You show Charlie the way out, meanie,” said Ouisch, shoving Junior.

“If you know what’s good for you,” said Squeaky.

“One word and you’re out of here safe, Charles,” said Leech. “But abandon the deluge. I want Los Angeles where it is. I want civilisation just where it is. I have plans, you dig?”

“You’re scarin’ me, man,” said Charlie, nervy, strained, near tears.

Leech smiled. He knew he showed more teeth than seemed possible.

“Yes,” he said, the last sound hissing in echo around the cavern. “I know.”

Minutes passed. Junior hummed a happy tune, accompanied by musical echoes from the stalactites.

Leech looked at Charlie, out-staring his Satan glare, trumping his ace.

At last, in a tiny voice, Charlie said, “Take me home.”

Leech was magnanimous. “But of course, Charles. Trust me, this way will suit you better. Pursue your interests, wage your war against the dream factory, and you will be remembered. Everyone will know your name.”

“Yeah, man, whatever. Let’s get going.”

“Creighton,” said Leech. “It’s night up top. The moon is full. Do you think you can lead us to the moonlight?”

“Sure thing, George. I’m the Wolf Man, ahhh-woooooo!”

* * *

Janice Marsh had died while they were under the mountain. Her room stank and bad water sloshed on the carpets. The tarpaulin served as her shroud.

Leech hated to let her down, but she’d had too little to bring to the table. She had been a coelacanth, a living fossil.

Charlie announced that he was abandoning the search for the Subterranean Sea of California, that there were other paths to Helter Skelter. After all, was it not written that when you get to the bottom you start again at the top. He told his Family that his album would change the world when he got it together with Dennis, and he sang them a song about how the pigs would suffer.

Inside, Charlie was terrified. That would make him more dangerous.

But not as dangerous as Derek Leech.

* * *

Before he left the Ranch, in a requisitioned buggy with Constant at the wheel, Leech sat a while with Junior.

“You’ve contributed more than you know,” he told Junior. “I don’t often do this, but I feel you’re owed. So, no deals, no contracts, just an offer. A no-strings offer. It will set things square between us. What do you want? What can I do for you?”

Leech had noticed how hoarse Junior’s speech was, gruffer even than you’d expect after years of chilli and booze. His father had died of throat cancer, a silent movie star bereft of his voice. The same poison was just touching the son, extending tiny filaments of death around his larynx. If asked, Leech could call them off, take away the disease.

Or he could fix up a big budget star vehicle at Metro, a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award, a final marriage to Ava Gardner, a top-ten record with the Monkees, a hit TV series...

Junior thought a while, then hugged Leech.

“You’ve already done it, George. You’ve already granted my wish. You call me by my name. By my Mom’s name. Not by his, not by ‘Junior’. They had to starve me into taking it. That’s all I ever wanted. My own name.”

It was so simple. Leech respected that; those who asked only for a little respect, a little place of their own—they should get what they deserve, as much as those who came greedily to the feast, hoping for all you can eat.

“Goodbye, Creighton,” he said.

Leech walked away from a happy man.