Chapter Seventeen
Snapshots of Fevered Minds
Outside, the night is ringed with whispers
The wind, it howls with winged shadows
Slow, the winds and minds are drifting
From caverns, let's make our souls to houses
Wind, break down all walls between us
Oh earth, build up a wall around us
Let beauty and truth like fire surround us
Keep us from the wolves who've found us!
from "Walls for Wolves"
by The Dark Shadows
Alex looked up at the dim light. He couldn't make anything out,
though the flickering pattern on the drawn blinds told him that they were
meeting by candlelight; not surprising considering whose home they'd chosen
to hold their little get-together at. Monica's apartment was sure to be
awash with the scent of patchouli and the sound of Enya... he shook his
head, suppressing a giggle.
He could picture the room in his mind. The trees on the wall, the
little altar, everybody gathered around the coffee table like they were
about to play "Risk" or something, maybe even smiling, laughing, having a
grand old time.
Alex hoped so. It would make everything so much easier if they did
this because they wanted to.
Monica would have no idea that he knew so much about her little
wicca-den; she had never been there on any of the occasions he'd chosen to
visit it. Primarily because he'd never have been allowed in had she been
present; but not a little because he simply liked to creep through windows
in the dead of night. He'd been called a "creep" often enough, to his face
and even more often behind his back (and probably even right this minute in
that very room, he thought to himself). But that was cool. He was who he
was, and he was happy with that.
Her apartment was on the second floor of a three story house in a
section of town where houses of the same style and vintage sprouted like
October mushrooms on practically every level spot of earth. Not a bad
section of town, but not particularly exclusive; senior citizens and
college students were her friends and neighbors.
The light flickered and pulsed. Somebody was moving around. He
tried to reach out with his mind, to get a sense of who it was, but he
couldn't raise any sort of signal at all. Damn that Monica! She'd made a
circle around the apartment, and, worse than that, one that worked! He
couldn't find a crack he could seep through anywhere.
Not that it mattered. Just the fact that they had chosen to get
together told him that the cogs he had set in motion were still grinding
furiously away.
He wished he could climb the stairs softly and silently and listen
outside the door, so much like a wolf peering through a keyhole; but that
would be counter-productive. It was too much of a risk, and Monica's
familiar spirits were sure to let her know that someone uninvited was
crashing the party. From where he was standing, about a block down the
street, the most they'd be able to get from him would be a vague sense of
being watched... and they'd expect that anyway, paranoid bunch that they
were.
How little they'd changed, in some ways... they had always walked
nervously, in the old days fearing the iron hand of the FBI or CIA was
about to fall on their collective shoulder, nowadays fearing, well, an
entirely different kind of "spook".
Demons and devils and Firths. Oh my.
Fire Brisbane thought about the phone call he had received earlier
that night and grinned. The others had gone home; they had spent a few late
nights with him the first weekend they were together, rehashing old times
over a few drinks, but their biological clocks were set to a middle-aged
sort of rhythm - sun up, head up; sun down, lie down. And the kid had
school; Fire didn't want any crap from Justin's parents about him
corrupting anyone's morals - no Socrates trip for Fire Brisbane, no sir!
Fire loved the night. Even when he had been working a day job he
kept the same hours and simply did without sleep. Probably one good reason
he never kept a day job. So when the call came at midnight, he was not only
awake, but was, in fact, just getting started on a night's worth of
creating.
The reunion was going very well. The old songs sounded strong, the
new kid really had the chops; but, more important, to Fire at least, the
inspiration had come for some killer new material. They'd tried a few of
the new songs already, and they were totally right; they kept the feel and
sound of the old Plasma Miasma, and added to it the hard-earned maturity of
the now forty-something Fire Brisbane. He hit a button on his recorder and
the sounds of that night's practice filled the room, stinging, electric,
alive. They weren't making the Great Mistake all other reunited 60's bands
seemed to make, trying to "update" the sound; Fire wouldn't have it. Nor
would Justin. The new Plasma Miasma picked up, musically, exactly where the
old one had left off.
And speaking of where they had "left off"...
The call came from a Reid somebody-or-other. Fire didn't recognize
the name, of course, or the voice, but when he had identified himself as a
member of the Unconscious Collective back at Miskatonic U., well, the gears
clicked quickly into place.
They wanted to hold another Acid Test.
Fire had agreed almost immediately, not even stopping to think that
he ought to clear it with the other members. It was just such an amazing,
cosmic, perfect little idea that he couldn't conceive of anyone having a
problem with it.
They all had a problem with it.
Not Justin, of course. "Cool!" was his reaction, and Fire could
feel the grin exploding off of his face all the way down the phone line.
Willie and Danny, on the other hand... well, they took some convincing.
Obviously, this wouldn't be the same sort of situation that the old Test
had been; Christ, it's the nineties now, everyone's middle aged. Wasn't
this the sort of thing they reunited to do in the first place? But the
argument that worked with them involved the idea of "closure", which he
should have cottoned to right off the bat, as it fit in to both of their
fuzzy theologies, both Willie's twelve-step world-view and Danny's
twelve-disciples version.
Whatever. They were going to do it. That's what mattered.
To Fire there was no conceivable reason not to; in fact, it was
absolutely perfect, thematically. The sound of the new Plasma Miasma was
the sound of the old Plasma Miasma, as if they'd picked up where they left
off. And to emphasize that point, they would, indeed, pick up where they
left off.
And everything would flow from there.
Fire rewound the tape and listened to the song again, and grinned.
The world didn't know it, but it had been waiting for the Plasma Miasma
since 1968. And it was finally going to get it. And it was gonna be great.
Monica Holmes looked out the window and shuddered. Perhaps it was
just paranoia, but she thought she felt a presence down on the street, a
presence she had felt before and never liked at all, not even when it was
attached to its physical owner, Alexander Horowitz.
It wasn't attached to him now; but it had been, Monica was sure of
it. The little weasel - no, that was unfair to weasels - the little
sub-human had been spying on them, standing down the street in the shadows.
She hadn't sensed him earlier, but Monica and the rest of the Unconscious
Collective (excluding friend Alex, of course) had been in Circle, and
Circles tended to, well, scramble the signals that came onto her psychic
radar.
But now, in her dark and empty apartment, with passing headlights
casting odd elongating shadows against her closed blinds and the echoes of
earlier laughter still resonating in the walls, her mind had a clear path
on into the night. And it didn't take long to notice the decayed sense of
"Alex was here" twisting about like a patch of stale smoke in the
alley-ridden apartment blocks near the corner of Penderghast.
She didn't like it. If Alex knew they were getting together, it was
a safe bet that he also knew what they were up to...
...and, taking it a step beyond that, that he may have some hand in
bringing this all together.
In which case, he was playing them all as pawns. With their willing
acquiesense.
But to what end?
Monica's own sense was that this reunion, this resurrection that
they planned to undertake was not only a good idea, but also in some sense
mystically right. It was something that needed to happen, that should
happen, that must happen. And even though she understood that not
everything that needed to happen in the mystical sense was necessarily a
good thing in the mundane realm, that what serves the Gods doesn't always
serve Man, her gut told her that what they were doing would not have the
nefarious result that the first Miskatonic Acid Test did; that what they
were doing wasn't just Right, but also Good.
Monica went to her closet and stood up on the small stool that she
kept handy for reaching items on the top shelf. She slid a thin box out
from under a stack of board games and picture-puzzles, careful not to jar
or bump it excessively. She placed the box on the kitchen table and opened
it, unfolding the velvet cloth within and lifting a small sheet of black
glass from it by its edges. She placed the glass on the table before her
and lit a candle.
After a short ceremony, blessing the glass with the elements and
meditating briefly to center her mind and get her psychic forces flowing,
she began to look deep within the glass, deep into the scrying mirror,
seeing beyond the glass and off into the Other World, searching the watery
realms within the glass for a glimpse, for a hint, for a sign.
She saw shadows dancing in the glass, figures shaped in shades of
black and deep grey, amorphous yet tantalizingly semi-formed; hints of
faces, of bodies, of places... but nothing she could put her finger on..
Then, suddenly the mists cleared.
It was always somewhat shocking when it happened... minutes of
staring at fluctuating fields of shapeless near-nothingness, then snap! it
came together like a tableau illuminated by a lightning flash. For an
instant she saw a room. There was a strange machine in a corner, and a cat.
The cat was looking at Monica with coal-red eyes. The machine seemed to
have no mechanical parts, yet it was in motion, two wheels spinning for an
unguessable purpose. A human stood in the center of the room. It looked
like Alex.
There was a knife in his hand. A drop of something dark dripped off
the tip of the blade and plummeted toward the floor. Alex was looking down
at something on the floor. There was a piece of furniture in the way;
Monica couldn't see what it was.
The vision disappeared as quickly as it had come. She tried to
assimilate the images she had seen and lock them in her memory without
forgetting something or, worse, subconsciously adding something.It was the
sort of thing one remembers, a hackle-raising sight, But even ten seconds
after she'd seen it she couldn't be sure of some details.
The mirror.
There had been a mirror on the wall behind Alex. She saw him
reflected in it, saw the excited expression on his face. Had it been there
at all, or was she adding it in herself? And why would her mind do that?
And why was there a figure standing in that mirror, right behind
Alex, though there seemed to be no corresponding figure in the room to cast
such a reflection, one that seemed to look out of the glass knowingly at
her, at Monica Holmes. A face she shouldn't remember all these years later
but whose hirsute visage had ingrained itself in her mind forever.
Professor Firth.
Daniel Hawthorne looked up at the ceiling and listened to the
tick-tick-ticking of the digital clock. Not a comforting old-fashioned
clock-tick, but a whirring sort of liquid crystal clicking. Sort of an
incessant irritation, but without it he might just as well have heard
nothing but the rushing of his own blood through the vessels inside his
ears. Instead he had the clock to focus on, to hold his attention. It was a
small blessing, but a blessing nonetheless.
Things were coming together. Earlier that evening, he had felt it
with every stabbing beat he'd struck on his kit, as if he were keeping time
to his own onrushing destiny. It was an ominous feeling, one that left him
feeling blanched and haunted. Before he had turned the light out and lay
back on the pillow, he had read from his Bible, but the beat still
tick-tocked through his head and the verses marched across the page to a
thumping kick drum rhythm and he had to slam the book shut (whap! in time
with that infernal beat) and place it on the nightstand (in time to the
beat) and click off the light (click!) and lie there in the ticking
darkness.
Nevertheless...
It had been fun, in a way.
Getting back behind a kit was a thrill. He'd played off and on
since the old days, of course, mostly jazz and a bit of gospel; still,
there was a bit of the old Rocker inside him. Sort of a little private
demon that he'd never quite fully exorcized, and wasn't really sure he
wanted to.
That was a sacrilegious thought. He tried to blank his mind.
At night, in the dark, was when the Tempter comes. Not as a shadow
on the wall, or a flickering face in the candle-flame, but as a ghost
disguised as a thought.
He was here for a purpose. God had called him. He would stand
against the Devil. The music was a means to an end. He couldn't let it
carry him away in its talons once again.
He remembered where that had led him. Too well, he remembered.
There was much about it that wasn't damned, of course. The company
of old friends. Hellbound though they may be, they were good enough people,
in their way. And the boy, Justin, he showed promise. With gentle nudging
in the right direction, he might come to the Lord, in time. Willie, too,
seemed to be near the Path; but he would have to find his own way to it,
Daniel knew better than to ever try to steer Wild Willie anywhere. Tamed he
might be, there was still an ornery fire behind his eyes. But he was close
to the light, Daniel could feel it. On his own, he would find it. On his
own.
Fire Brisbane was another matter entirely.
Damned for sure, that one was.
"Fire". What an accurate name Andy Brisbane had chosen for himself.
He'd be seeing flames aplenty in the Afterlife. Imagine! Still stuck in the
sixties! Still listening to the darkest music... still writing it! And, if
anything, the breath of the Devil was present in Brisbane's songwriting
more than ever... when Fire'd debuted his latest songs at that evening's
rehearsal, Daniel couldn't believe what he'd heard. Hadn't he learned
anything in these past decades?
Yes. Yes, he had. He'd honed his craft, honed it to a razor edge.
Whereas Fire's songs in the sixties had been the ambitious strivings of a
talented teenager, his new songs were the work of a confident and mature
artist.
Damn him for that!
Daniel rubbed his hands over his tormented eyes. It was all
happening again. Only more so. God, give him the strength to ride it out!
Daniel Hawthorne clenched his hands and prayed, for help, for
deliverance, for the souls of his friends. And most of all, for sleep.
Reid Campbell had a disturbing dream.
He was once again in the hospital room, surrounded by beeping
machines. He saw himself lying on the bed, and had the strange dream-sense
of being both inside and outside his body. Nothing happened for moments;
the beep of the machines was incessant, insistent. He could hear his slow
breath, see the rise and fall of his chest beneath the sheet, count the
swift twitches of his eyelids that told him that his body on the bed was
dreaming. Reid reflected that he was dreaming of himself, dreaming; a new
koan for the man-or-butterfly crowd. The machines blatted on, his breath
hissed.
But within the beeping of the machine he heard an odd undertone, a
low dull throbbing that could only be his heartbeat. Gradually the beeping
faded, and the throb took over the foreground, gaining an echoing intensity
that became almost overbearing. It became nightmarish, like a slow-motion
jack-hammer sluicing into a tub of semi-frozen water, amplified by a
thousand Marshall amplifiers set on "11".
But that was just the start.
The hissing of breath caught his mind's attention then, and as it
came into focus the thumping hammer slid off into the background. The
hissing kept its own time, slightly higher in pitch for the exhale, deeper
on the intake. But as it grew in volume it changed in timbre; as it changed
in timbre, it changed in character, from the hiss of breath through the
nostril of an unconscious patient to the purposeful tounge-flicking hiss of
a great serpent.
And beneath that snake's hiss, a voice.
The voice seemed to be speaking a phrase, repeating it as though it
had some essential import to Reid's life, but he couldn't quite make out
what it was saying. "Shh... shii ... kkka". Slowly the words took a more
familiar form, "Ash... Acid... Black", finally becoming fully recognizable
as a sentence, repeated over and again.
"The past flashes back".
A chill rushed down his back, though he really wasn't sure why.
What did it mean? What could it mean? How did the past "flash" back, and
why should that seem so ominous?
A hand touched his shoulder. Reid whirled to face, once again, the
darkly gleaming eyes of Professor Firth.
"Do you remember a thought experiment I once proposed, Reid?" Firth
asked him. "If we had a pair of perfectly reflective mirrors, placed
directly across from one another, and stood between them and fired a photon
into one of them then instantly got out of the way, could the photon bounce
between them 'til the end of time like a stalemated game of Pong?"
"Get out of my dreams," Reid snarled, impotently.
"Believe me, I'd rather be in Pittsburgh. You think I enjoy this?"
Firth gestured at the figure on the bed. "Looking at you... on your
deathbed... again?"
"Then get lost."
"Me? Get lost? I always know where I am. No, I'm afraid it you
who've lost yourself, Reid."
Suddenly the steady beeping of the bedside machine turned into one
long, drawn out death-whine. Reid looked down in horror to see the sheet
being pulled across his face by unseen hands, and the room began to fade,
as Reid slipped away from the dream.
In the instant before he awakened, Reid heard the faint and fading
voice of Professor Firth, speaking in a sarcastic sneer...
"Tell me spirit, are these the shadows of things that will be, or
that might be?" And then his laughter, and one final phrase as Reid
Campbell's eyes pulled themselves open...
"Must be."
Gene Chandler couldn't sleep.
It was all just too much. One minute he had been struggling to put
together a band with some kids from school, yoking himself to their MTV-fed
idea of what rock music was all about, them seemingly overnight he'd
realized one of his impossible dreams, playing with one of the
greatest bands of the 60's. Not only playing with them, but joining them as
a full-time member, helping to craft new songs and working toward a new LP
(make that, "CD"). It was too much.
And now, the Acid Test.
He didn't really know much about the original Miskatonic Acid Test;
it had been mentioned briefly in the Plasma Miasma entry in the "History of
New England Rock" book, and it'd been mentioned in passing in "Psychedelic
Babylon", that stupid best-seller about how every evil in the world was the
fault of those damn hippies, from teen pregnancy to the Internet. It was
one of those things he wanted to ask Fire about but wasn't sure if it was
something that he wanted to talk about.
Fire certainly had no qualms about doing it over again, that was
for sure. But maybe it was a case of exorcising the demons of the past.
Whatever the case, Gene was totally into it. I mean, a genuine 60's style
happening!?! Too cool.
Hopefully no one would die.
Gene laughed, and reached for his guitar. He ran through some
scales, the unamplified strings sounding tinny and ghostly in the darkness.
He imagined himself on stage, bending strings, striking a guitar hero's
pose, women intrigued, men envious. He imagined the way it would be, with
the light show swirling behind him and the scent of weed and patchouli
hanging in the air, and the long-haired crowd twirling and waving their
serpentine arms, and the sound so loud it makes minds stream and waver...
Of course, he caught himself, of course it won't really be like
that, that's just an image out of some old movies. The smell of beer and
sweat, the spike haired skate punks hurling empty cans at the stage; that
was a more likely scenario.
Still, even that had a perverse appeal; to play before an
unappreciative crowd and pull the applause out of them. He had a vision of
a horde of nodding mosh-boys suddenly transformed by the electric ripples
of sound pouring out of his amp, tearing off their backwards baseball caps
to reveal streaming pouring yards of hair, their clench-fist smash dance
suddenly fading off into a transcendent mass twirl. Beautiful.
And about as likely as the first scenario.
Well, whatever, it was still gonna be the coolest thing that he'd
ever been a part of, and probably ever would be a part of... his very own
Monterey, his Woodstock, his Fillmore West. He finished off the guitar run
with a blistering high note leading into a power chord (imagine what that
would sound like with echo and heavy Fuzz!) and fell back onto the bed
while visions of sugarcubes danced in his head.
hr>
Nancy Bishop woke up screaming. Silently.
That is, she dreamed she was screaming, and woke up quietly, eyes
wide to the cold dark room around her. From nearby came the slow rise and
fall of Frank's breath, from the floor by the darkest corner. From
everywhere around her came the insidious thumping of her heart, her red,
unstoppable heart.
Good God! What could she have been dreaming?
The sense of well-being, the sense of security had left them after
they had left Monica's, and stepping out of her building was like stepping
into a maelstrom of invisible oppression; it felt like there were forces
swirling all around her, like infuriated hornets. Frank felt it too, she
could sense it, even though neither of them mentioned it on the ride back
to the motel. It was as the mere act of reuniting the Unconscious
Collective (damn that dippy name!) had really, really pissed something off
in the unseen Nancy Bishop omniverse, and it meant to let her know about it
in no uncertain terms.
The whole ride back had been a nightmare. She felt so
overwhelmed... it was like something horrible was about to happen at any
minute. The air around her was so electric, so thick and ominous that she
seemed to be constantly on the verge of breaking into a fit of twitching.
She began to see things moving at the periphery of her field of vision...
several times she stomped on the brakes because she thought someone
(...thing?) had just darted in front of the car. It was a good thing no
other drivers were around; they would have thought she was drunk. Hell, she
wished she were.
Frank hadn't seemed to notice her eccentric driving; he kept
staring straight ahead, his right hand absently rubbing the amulet that
Monica had given him in parting. She had wondered then if he was actually
deriving some sort of protection from it; her own, sitting on the dash in
front of her, seemed to be mocking her. It was a small, shiny stone, but
the pattern of whorls that time had etched into it seemed to give it a sort
of striated face. A gleefully smiling face.
The temptation to simply whack the damned thing off the dash and
out the window, but Nancy had a feeling that the unease she was feeling at
that moment was nothing compared to the ratcheting terror she would feel
without the amulet.
They reached the motel safely enough, and Nancy hadn't commented
when Frank placed a chair under the knob of the door. If he hadn't she
would have.
Frank had crawled over to the corner of the room farthest from the
door and curled into a ball and gone straight to sleep. Nancy had tried to
talk to him about the evening's events, but he'd simply waved her off. She
understood, of course... the effort of speaking took energy away from your
defenses, sapped your concentration, made you just that much more
vulnerable to whatever was trying to destroy you. She understood, but held
to her own opinion that normal human sounds, chatter, conversation, drove
the uncanny away. Prattling about nothing cast about you a magic sphere of
blandness.
She thought that TV might possess a shred of the same mediocre
magic, but the demons seemed to have infected the set; every face she saw
seemed to have a strange diabolic tint (especially on the Christian
channel, oddly enough); every channel she clicked to seemed to have an
image of violence or horror. She clicked it off and went to sleep.
And dreamed of screaming. And snatched herself awake, clutching for
the light switch.
Once again, it would be a long, cold night.
So far, so good.
Willie Falcon looked out at the lights of Arkham. His motel room
overlooked the river; beyond it were the houses and streets of the suburbs,
the ever-rumbling highway, the rolling hills of Massachusetts. Behind him
was the city proper, not a particularly large one as these things go, its
economy driven primarily by the college and tourism. The aforementioned
college would be somewhere off to his right.
Who'd have ever thought he'd see these lights again?
So many nights they'd flickered in his dreams like inverted stars,
their man-created patterns forming strange new constellations like Rialto,
the Movie Theater, and Boulevard, the Main Drag.
He had no idea what insane astrology this new Arkham zodiac would serve as
template for; but damned if he couldn't see his own fate reflected in it.
You will return, Willie Falcon, you will return...
It was foreordained. Mars was trined with Saturn and The Keyboard
Player was in Willie's House of Stupidity.
Yet Willie was getting a good feeling off of this project despite
all of his initial reservations. The music sounded good and it was fun to
be playing with the old gang, or most of them, anyway. And he liked the way
the sound was both old and new; it was still the same old Plasma Miasma
sound, rendered fresh by Gene's youthful energy. Having Gene along for the
ride was like having a portal through time, a living, breathing, rocking
version of the teenage kids they'd all been thirty years ago. Watching Gene
play, throwing himself into a solo, gave Willie a feeling not unlike the
feeling he got sometimes when looking at his kids in class, a sense of
potential, of possibilities in wait, and also a hope, forlorn perhaps, that
Gene would avoid making the same mistakes Willie had made. Nor discover new
ones.
But who was Willie to talk, anyway? Here he was, about to repeat
what could be considered the biggest mistake of his life.
And he didn't feel apprehensive, not really. He felt exhilarated.
Something was reawakening within him, a part of himself that he had
buried long ago. No, not buried, not really; in a sense, it was a spirit
that had stayed behind when he'd crossed that Miskatonic River Bridge way
back when, heading the other way, heading out. Like a vampire, that spirit
couldn't cross running water, apparently. But all these years it had waited
for him, patiently. Waiting for him to return, waiting to rejoin him.
Willie Falcon looked out at the lights, and from behind his eyes
Wild Willie Falcon looked as well, and grinned inside him. I've missed you,
my man, Wild Willie said to his tamer self.
"It's good to have you back," Willie replied, softly, beneath his
breath.
The walls were humming, thought Frank Fontaine, the walls were
singing to themselves. "Help mee to get out of myy miinndd..."
Frank's eyes snapped open, awake, but as always the dreams went on.
The room was drifting in and out of focus, the darkness concealing and
revealing walls that were and were not there, a room that was and wasn't
perched somewhere on the edge of time and space, surrounded by stars and
congealing shadows. Faces formed among the stars, eyes amidst the
constellations staring down at Frank Fontaine with acute interest.
Frank closed his own eyes and tried to go back to sleep. It was
worse than ever now, sometimes, just like it was in the old days, the days
after the... thing that happened. Why, oh why did these people, these
madmen with the faces of ancient friends, want to resurrect that infested
corpse? And why did the infested corpse that wore the face and mind of
Frank Fontaine so giddily smile and say "Oh yes, let's do it, let's dive
back into the cesspool, let's fetch lit dynamite with our teeth." They were
madmen who thought they were still somewhat sane, that was their excuse;
but Frank, what was his? He was a sane person who knew he'd gone mad, he
should know better.
It was the color of the clouds, that's what it was.
There were clouds all around him these days; there had been since
he had re-awakened as this maddened caricature of himself after the Lost
Months of the early seventies. Not literally clouds, it was more of a
metaphor his mind used to make some sense of the new way he'd perceived
reality. The Clouds were clots of transparent force that hovered around
him; not malicious, and neither benevolent, they seemed to be aware without
really being conscious; they weren't "things", like the demons or the night
gaunts or that damned Firth, they were more like "conditions" or "states",
although that didn't really describe them either.
But they were around him always, never fully visible but never
really transparent either; never obstructing him, never interfering for
better or worse, yet neither did they ever leave him alone.
The color, though, that was the thing...
He sensed them as a deep gray, almost black, the color of
thunderheads. And thunderheads were what they reminded him of, vast,
ominous, terrible. Some days the darkness was deeper than others, some days
the cloud-things seemed to take on a faded gray tinge, others they seemed
on the verge of roaring into pure shadow. Those were scary days, days when
it seemed that anything bad could happen.
But...
Once the subject had come up, the idea of re-forming the
Unconscious Collective and throwing another Acid Test, there had been a
change, a very real change. A silver change. The clouds turned silver.
Glorious, radiant silver. It felt strange, exciting, wonderful. The fear
remained, the unnameable things still undulated at the periphery of his
vision... but the clouds had turned silver! What did this portend, what
could it portend?
Frank decided that he had to find out. For best or for worst, he
would see this all through.
He reached into his pocket and gently caressed the talisman stone
that Monica had given him. It was black to the eye, but inside it glowed
silver, brighter that a new-born sky. The shadows melted to the deepest
corners of the room. The clouds smiled in at him.
As dawn began to creep fingers of light under the curtains, Frank
Fontaine finally drifted off to sleep.
It's started, it's started, my mind and I have parted. John Symonds
hummed the little bit of doggerel, which he had formed into a sort of silly
song over the past few days. Over and over it would echo through his mind,
popping up at the oddest times, catching him in the middle of deeper
thoughts and waking him in the night singing. At first it was amusing, then
annoying, and finally maddening... get out of my head! He'd shout at it,
inside his head, and it would run but then it would creep back again and
pop up on him when he least expected it.
It's started, it's started, my mind and I have parted. Stop it!
He'd shake his head violently, and it would go away for a time. But it
always came back.
The demons looked down on him, shaking their horned heads. This is
it, Dr. Splitfoot would scowl down at him. He's gone for good. The visions,
the shaking, the screaming; that's all nothing. He's got sing-song
schizophrenia now. It's incurable.
Can't we just shock it out of him? Dr. Lucy Ferocious asked her
compatriot. Wire him up to the bug zapper and sting him 'til he smells of
sulphur?
Oh Lucy, Splitfoot chuckled, you're always ready for current events.
Then Dr. Firth looked in, no demon but no doctor neither. Mr.
Symonds is already electric, isn't that right, Mr. Symonds.
"I don't know what you're talking about," John replied. It's
started, it's started, my mind and I have parted.
Don't you? Firth replied, removing his medical whites to reveal
academic tweed beneath. Don't your fingers even now itch for the strings,
your ears hunger for the raw shimmering amplified steel?
"I don't play any more," Symonds answered.
Firth leaned in closer, his bespectacled eyes looming like oncoming
headlights. But you feel it, don't you? A hollow place inside you,
throbbing like the ghost of an amputated limb. Come on, you can still taste
it, can't you? Run your tongue across the roof of your mouth and it's
there, isn't it; the taste of metal. The taste of distortion, the taste of
electric power, the heavy pulse of a sustained chord. The guitar is just
your voice, John Symonds; you are electric.
"I'm flesh," Symonds replied, "Flesh and I am pulsing with
chemicals. Not electric, not at all. You're wrong, and it's started, it's
started, my mind and I are parted."
Firth stepped back, grinning triumphantly. "No, you are electric,
your body is wired like a city, and everything you do or think or say
travels through you as current. Flesh is electric, life is electric, turn
up the voltage and fly fly fly!
"Turn up the voltage and fry, man, fry," Symonds shook his head. "I
was electric, now I'm singed and powerless. Don't crank me up, I'm on
'standby'." And he laughed at the thought of himself as an amplifier, 'til
Firth said:
Ahh, but you are that, my boy, you are just that exactly. You're an
amplifier.
"What do you mean?" Symonds said, but then he was alone in the room
again.
It's started, it's started, my mind and I have parted.
The Demon Sloucher. The Sloucher, and his cat. Wheels were
spinning. Faces formed in the padding on the wall; faces familiar and none
the less demonic for all of that. Some he knew by name, these were friends,
electric friends, Fire and Willie and Danny; older, haggard. It's started,
he thought, the Plasma is flowing. They're back together.
John Symonds stood up on his bed and screamed. "Why? Why?" as if
he'd get an answer. He was locked in here, but they outside had gone
insane! Something was coming now, something bad; something large and
horrifying was shaking the sleep from its dead eyes.
John looked at the wall, and they all looked back, and they
grinned, and their teeth turned to candy ; and then armies of lizards
crawled out from their throats and ate the teeth, and they bit down on the
lizards with blunt red gums, and blood trickled down their chins and pooled
on the floor, and he looked down into the pool and saw his face reflected,
eyes wild, hair wild, John Symonds, wild child.
It's started, it's started shut up shut up SHUT UP!
He had to do something, did John Symonds, he had to do something.
Make a stand. Stop it, stop them, stop everything. Stop the wheels.
How? He was a prisoner, trapped like a man in an ironic mask.
Strapped down, locked in, shut off. Return to Zenda.
His mind ticked like a jack-in-the-box crank handle.
Clickety-clack-clack-clack. Any second he expected the answer, the
solution, the escape clause to come springing up out of his subconscious
with a diabolic grin and a loud SPROINGGG.
But nothing happened, the crank just kept turning and turning with
maddening inevitability.
"Why can't I get out of here?" Symonds asked the walls.
Oh, you can, Firth replied, his ghost voice an ubiquitous whisper.
When the time is right.
"How will I know that? Will you tell me?"
No. But you'll know.
"How?"
You'll know. Trust me.
John Symonds expelled a skeptical burst of hot breath. Trust him,
he says! A ghost, a fiend, a demon! "I'd sooner take the word of Satan
himself!" Symonds cried, a voice filled with false bravado.
Would you like to discuss the matter with him, then? I can set it up.
Symonds didn't know if the ghost was serious or not, then decided
he really didn't want to know at that. "Ahh, your word's good enough for
me. Good ol' Firth."
The room made no response to that, and John relaxed back onto his
pillow. Getting out. Soon, if Firth was on the level. Free air, fresh
grass, the soft feel of wind through hair... beautiful.
It's started...
That was it, of course. The Miasma were back together, he'd felt
that a few moments ago. He reached into his mind and Knew more; there was
going to be another Acid Test!
They were so mad, yet he was the one in the madhouse.
That was why he had to get out; that was why the ghosts and demons
were going to help him escape. He had to go into the world, and stop the
Acid Test. Before it happened again... before it went all the way.
He knew he was up to it; he'd kept in shape, despite the
confinement. Oh, he had a thin and wasted look about him, couldn't be
helped, what with all the visions and all. But he was full of sinewy
strength, and stamina. He could take on whatever Hell had to spit up at
him. "Bring it on!" he shouted, eyes to the sky beyond the ceiling.
Somewhere, across the pre-dawn mists that were slowly rising from
the ancient Arkham causeways, the Demon Sloucher stirred in his sleep.
Something was about to happen. The cat woke up, and stared across space at
Symonds, in his room so many miles away. There was an aura of expectation
about its gray head, he was sure of it.
Something was about to happen. He didn't know what, but not long
after Symonds caught himself singing a bit of soft doggerel, whose meaning
eluded him, though he knew the tune at once.
"Hey Crowe, where you going with that paper in your hand?"