The Place of Dead Roads

  Kim needed to piss. He slid cautiously out of his hammock, picked up his shoes, and shook a scorpion out and killed it with the hard rubber sole. He put on his shoes and stepped out of the door into brilliant moonlight, with only his shorts and his belt with the 44 revolver. Facing the cliff he pissed a silver stream. The night air, balmy and cool around the edges, fanned his body. At that second the dogs started barking, somebody coming. The other boys were already out of their hammocks with weapons ready. A wall of cactus seals off the house. There is a narrow gate of barbed wire...

  "Advance and be recognized. And it better be worth all this horrid yapping." The innkeeper's son held up a lantern. A boy stood there cool and debonair. He had a revolver in a cartridge belt, a Bowie knife, and he was carrying a cane of whip steel loaded at the end.

  "I bring important message for Captain Carsons..."

  The gate was unhooked, the dogs rushed forward snarling.

  "Let me administer the correction. Otherwise the dogs hate you and will leap at your throat when you are sick or wounded, after the nature of their species...Back, hounds of Tindalos. Receptacles of filth." He lashed out with his cane and snarls turned to yelps and the dogs crept into their filthy warrens. The boy smiled and flexed his cane. "You see, Meester Carsons, I am a fellow dog-hater." He flashed the wild-dog smile.

  "What's so fucking important to wake everybody up with a hard-on?"

  "I am here to show you the way to the larynx fuckers..."

  He made a noise in his throat that set Kim's teeth on edge.

  "Yeah? Well I'm not sure I want to go..."

  "You forget your mission, Meester Carsons? Maybe somebody come remind you..."

  "All right all right, give me time to get dressed for chris-sakes..."

  Kim collected his gear and weapons, his 44 revolver, his spring knife, a 38 snubby and his wafer-thin 22 and a very light semiautomatic carbine in 45-caliber with a 14-inch barrel and a ten-shot clip, an ounce of morphine and an ounce of hash, first-aid kit, canteen and mess kit... The three boys, when he told them they were going very far to the east, decided not to go. Ten minutes later he fell in beside the boy and they were walking silently into the desert. They must have walked for three hours, both using the sorcerer's gait, leaning slightly forward. Finally they were challenged by a sentry...The boy gave the password. Dawn was on the way and in the gray light he could see the dirigible moored to a steel tower, bobbing in the rising wind...They quickly climbed the ladder and entered the cabin, which seemed to be roomy enough...

  There were three other men already there. The boy made the introductions.

  "Doctor Schindler, Kim Carsons."...The other two names he didn't catch. Kim was hopeless with names and he had a memory system of immediately turning a name into a picture or concept: Carsons: A car spits a baby out of the exhaust pipe. It didn't work with these two nameless assholes, but he knew the type...secret agents, assassins...gray neutral men with cold dead eyes.

  The motor hums and they take off with a wind behind them. They can walk around in the cabin and look out the observation windows.

  Three days later they land in an ancient yellow landscape. A jackal trots by and looks at them indifferently. They are somewhere in Arabia. They watch soberly as the dirigible rises into the air and heads back west.

  "Well what now?" Kim asks.

  One of the agents, whose name Kim now knows is Ahearn (Ah earn...for hire), says without conviction:

  "We're supposed to rendezvous with the Brits."

  And the other's name is Williams. Williams says:

  "Probably mucking about with Arab boys."

  "Ah, this must be our contact..." Ahearn points to a cloud of dust approaching from the east. Now they make out the car with huge wheels and tires. The car comes to a stop in front of them in a cloud of yellow dust.

  "Hello, you chaps." It's Tony Outwaite with shorts and sun helmet and swagger stick.

  "Major Outwaite M-5, Ahearn and Williams CIA, and Doctor Schindler."

  The CIA men are clearly outraged by this introduction, as Kim intends.

  "Well pile in. Want to get there before the sun gets any higher."

  Headquarters is a cluster of Quonset huts on a bare hillside. Kim finds himself sharing a hut with Tony and Doc Schindler.

  "Those spooks make me nervous with their bloody trade craft," Tony says.

  "What's the date?" Kim asks.

  "December 23, 1984."

  "I would have sworn it was the twenty-second...So what exactly are we doing here?"

  "Haven't the haziest notion. . It's something about the human voice as the ultimate weapon...Can't let the Yanks run

  away with a thing like that...Have us all-chewing gum, what,

  and eating Wheaties...Well the Larynx Rubbers are somewhere in the area, it's our job to find them...After that it gets technical..."

  The doctor polishes his glasses with liquid lens cleaner...

  He indicates the bottle..."It's quite hard to get, you know...

  Cut into the tissue monopoly and they didn't like it one bit...Put the whisper out. You go into a drugstore and ask for spot lens cleaner and they look at you like you asked for cocaine...My original training was as a linguist. Then I did some fieldwork in South America and went on to specialize in interspecies communication..."

  "I'd say all communication was interspecies." Tony puts in.

  "Of course. But you don't get a navy appropriation saying things like that...The theory is when flying saucers or whatever kind of spacecraft land I'll be able to communicate with them through a breakdown of communication units..."

  "Maybe they've already landed in the human brain and nervous system," Kim says.

  The doctor nods..."Same problem...You've got an alien inside you, how do you communicate? Find out what he wants...make him leave...You have to find him first, and you find him by inference units...study of the larynx people could give us a vital clue...a way to descend into our own minds and confront the intruder on what he is trying to make his home ground."

  "Well let's get on with it..." Tony walks over to a map.

  "Now I think we've spotted a settlement in here, there's a valley closed at both ends...and water...We could get in by parachute or helicopter."

  "Out of the question," says the doctor..."We have no way of knowing what effect this might produce on these people..."

  "We could use hang-gliders or balloons...Climbing is out of the question."

  "The Yanks plan to go in with a chopper—"

  "They must be stopped!"

  "They've been stopped for the moment"—Tony holds up a piece of metal—"but we'd best get started before they start jetting in parts and spook the area...Find our Larynxes all dead of fright like so many minks..."

  They climb into the Sand Bug..."Balloons and gas tanks," Tony said, indicating crates of equipment..."That's how we get in and hopefully get out."

  The Sand Bug took off in a splatter of stones. They were climbing precipitous mountain roads, little more than trails in some places, cut into red sandstone that gives the area its name: the Red Lands. Several times the buggy skidded inches from a sheer overhang drop of a thousand feet, the tires spattering stones into the abyss. But Tony was an expert driver with a feel for the car like his own skin.

  THUMP. A stone clanked against the bottom of the car.

  "Just hope those gas cylinders don't go up on us."

  Tony grumbled. "It's a hell of a thing to reassemble oneself after an explosion."

  The road ended in scrub and cactus. Twenty yards away they could see the edge of a crater. Tony consulted his map.

  "This must be it."

  They got out. Kim noted bright red cactus blossoms like blood against the red stone, which suddenly writhed in front of his eyes.

  "Back, " Tony snapped. Kim saw a tiny snake the exact color of the red stone. It was a foot long and thin as a pencil. "Kill it."

  "If you say so." Kim drew his smoothbore shot pistol and blew the snake t
o bloody writhing fragments.

  "It's Kwakiutl," Tony explained..."Horrible death...Erotic convulsions...die spurting blood out of your prick."

  "How folkloric."

  They walk over to the crater and Kim stops about six feet from the edge (he is very squeamish about heights) and peers down. The crater is about three hundred yards across and roughly egg-shaped. Two thousand feet down Kim can see a silver ribbon of water and a smudge of green...

  "Well we might as well get on with it before we have the afternoon wind to cope with..." Tony's voice trails off. He is walking along the edge of the crater, much closer than Kim will venture. Kim follows with a wider margin.

  "I'm looking for an overhang...Can't have the balloons bumping against the cliff...sharp spine of quartz...Ah, here we are...Run the Bug over here..."

  "I can't drive."

  "Oh uh quite...Should have given you the pill...Well..." He signals to Schindler, who is examining a cactus blossom with a magnifying glass...Schindler drives the Bug within fifteen feet of the edge. They unload the balloons and gas cylinders and a parachute for the extra cylinders, which are designed to lift them back out of the crater.

  "First things first...We have to be sure the cylinders are down there...Lend a hand, you chaps... One...Two...Three...

  The cylinders weigh several hundred pounds but they manage to swing them out over the edge. The parachute opens. Tony looks down through binoculars..."There it is, right by the stream...Now for the balloons."

  The balloons are pink, presumably for camouflage against the red rock of the cliff...

  Tony was reading the directions on the cylinder...

  "Let's see...It screws on just here...Be sure gasket is firmly attached before opening gas valve..."

  There is a hiss of gas and the balloon starts to inflate...And now it floats free like a great pink erection...

  Kim says, "Bravo."

  Kim puts on the harness and Tony attaches it as the balloon floats above him. He can feel the tug pulling him up and a lightness in his limbs. This must be like walking on the moon...

  "You weigh about seven pounds now...Get the feel of it..."

  Kim heads away from the crater and jumps rather cautiously. He is catapulted thirty feet in the air and drifts down...He stands poised on his toes like a ballet dancer...

  "What an entrechat I could do with this on me..."

  Tony and Schindler are now ready...

  "All right chaps, I'll go first..." Tony picks up a collapsible aluminum pole seven feet long...

  "In case you get too close to the cliff...Now watch..."

  He steps to the edge and braces his feet...

  "Jump up and OUT." He pushes his feet like a high dive except he goes up forty feet in the air then slowly settles into the crater.

  Kim jumps last. At first he is exhilarated, balancing himself in the air like a tightrope walker and nodding graciously to an imaginary audience. He can almost smell the peanuts and the elephants. Below him he can see the other balloons floating down like the Goya picture...

  He is going down slower and slower. The air is getting thicker and thicker, like water. He remembers that pressure will crush a diving bell, it's one of the limitations to exploring the ocean floor where these special fish live.

  He is settling into some heavy viscid medium untouched for millions of years. It clings to his body, suffocating him. He takes a deep breath...Something is lacking in this air...not oxygen but something almost as essential, some life-sustaining element that this gummy stagnant air doesn't have...No one can live here, he decides.

  At last his feet touch the ground. Tony is driving an aluminum mooring peg into the ground with a light sledgehammer...

  "I think it might be wise to put in the extra gas right now in case we have to lift off in a hurry..."

  "Not a breath of air...'Where the dead leaf fell there did it rest.' " No leaves, though. Just misshapen bulbous bushes six to eight feet high bearing a purple fruit covered with soft down.

  "There is something here that is just awful," Kim says.

  The balloons are moored and inflated with extra gas. Tony shows Kim and Schindler how to let out gas and bring the balloon down when they are clear of the crater. They leave the harnesses on so all they have to do is hitch up and cast off...Kim looks at the three pink balloons. Rather like a hitching rail. Kim remembers his "strawberry." Quite suddenly the equine went berserk and attacked him, ears laid back, teeth bare, striking out with its front hooves...Kim pivoted to the side and shot the beast in the neck, severing an artery. The blood spattered him as the animal sank to its knees, eyes wild. Another shot in the side of the head and it rolled sideways, kicked three times, and died.

  Tony is sweeping the crater walls with his binoculars. Schindler is examining the flora, which, even to Kim's untrained eye, seems remarkably uniform...The plants are growing along the riverbanks. The stems are covered with fine purple tendrils exuding a crystal gum. Kim steps to the riverbank. The water is sluggish. He sees no sign of fish or frogs or water spiders.

  Schindler is taking specimens..."A completely unknown species...And what is more remarkable it seems to be the only or certainly the predominant flora... Usually in a valley like this, no matter how inaccessible, there will be some variety of plants...seeds dropped or defecated by birds..."

  "What birds?"

  "Uh...yes..." Schindler looks about uneasily...Not a sound or sight of bird or animal or insect, just the slowly moving water and the bulbous plants...

  "They look like seaweed," Kim says.

  "As a matter of fact..."

  Schindler is setting up his camera tripod and snapping pictures...

  "I say, you chaps," Tony calls..."I saw something move..." He points toward the crater walls... "Over there."

  Schindler points his camera with telescopic zoom lens...He picks out what looks like a red-ass monkey about eighteen inches in height... foetal, almost transparent, he can see the black viscera through soft crystalline pink flesh...he makes out something attached to the creature just below the navel...hummmm, he remembers an Egyptian bas-relief with erect penis, the penis high, located just below the navel...What he saw was a sort of bladder or balloon floating in front of the monkey...Click click...They are advancing cautiously toward the crater wall... One specimen, which had apparently been foraging, retracts the bladder into its body and scampers for the cliff.

  "My God, hundreds of them." Click click..."My God, what's that STINK?"

  Tony sniffs appraisingly..."Rotten blood...I smelled it in Belsen...We were moving in, trying to intercept a top S.S. war criminal...slipped by us...The S.S. had machine-gunned the inmates they were piled up three-deep soaked in blood...many of them had been bayoneted or killed with knives...Been there three days...There's no stench like it...It seems sweet, at first. You wonder what sort of flower could smell like that...You take a deep breath and puke your guts out...It's rotten and musty and the sweetness catches in your throat...Not a sharp smell, like carrion...It's smooth and it creeps into you...Even after work crews in gas masks had taken the bodies away and swabbed the floors down with carbolic solution the smell was still there...Once you smell it you never forget it. This is close enough..."

  And now they hear it...The voice of that smell...a thick slimy whisper that sticks to them like rotten garbage .. . an ancient evil crooning sound that stirs and twists in their throats, the converse between the creature and the bladder.

  Along the crater walls they see warrens worn smooth by countless years...Here the monkeys have taken refuge, peering out with dead undersea eyes...

  Click click click click...It comes to Kim in a flash. The Museum of Natural History in New York...life cycle and preserved specimens of a certain deep-sea fish that lives in lightless depths. (This is the Lophiform Angler fish. The female is about fifty times larger than the male.) During intercourse the male gets attached to the body of the female and is slowly absorbed until only the testicles remain protruding from the female
body...He remembers the sick horror he felt...so much worse than spiders or scorpions that simply eat the male on the spot...He can see the whole life cycle...The bladder is the female that slowly absorbs the male...The bladders are in fact immortal, using male after male.

  "Should we attempt to capture a specimen?" Schindler asks doubtfully.

  "Shit no," Kim says..."Let's get the fuck out of here."

  "All right...Just let me finish this roll..." Click click click.

  "Ten-second intervals...You go first, Kim."

  Kim doesn't argue. It's like one of those flying dreams where you soar up like a rocket...Looking down at that deadend pool of rotten blood he didn't even feel curious to know more.

  "Je n'en veux rien savoir..."

  Now he is clear of the crater, drifting thirty feet above the ground. He can see the car beneath him as he opens the valve to release gas and the balloon settles.

  As soon as his feet touch the ground he steps free of the harness and opens the valve all the way and moves quickly out of the way. The balloon jets fifteen feet in the air and collapses on the ground in a heap, like one of those awful bladders.

  They are all assembled and the balloons deflated...

  "I move we leave this shit right here..." Kim says, pointing to the balloons..."God knows what they may have sopped up... Our clothes too, we should burn every stitch as soon as we get back to base..."

  As they drive back Kim hears choppers overhead...

  "Put your little foot put your little foot put your little foot right in," Kim hums.

  It's a long hot dusty ride and Kim concocts a poem to allay the discomfort and boredom...

  The heart of the rulers is sick

  And the High Priest covers his head

  For this is the song of the quick

  That is heard by the ears of the dead

  The widows of Langley are long in their wail

  And the idols are broken in the temples of Yale

  And the might of the asshole unsmote by the

  sword

  Hath melted like snow in the glance of the bored.