A dazed Kent was led gently upstairs and into the familiar study where he took another tumbler of whisky with as little effect as though it had been water. His sane, everyday world had collapsed about him. He was seized by a sudden fit of trembling and almost fell into the leather chair to which Carson led him.
He was not to know at that stage of Roberts’ obscene diary entries hidden in a recess of the desk or of the vile painting of some loathsome thing under the sheeted canvas in the studio.
And thereafter he could never bear the sound of running water.
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.