Thirteen

Wild Willie's Homecoming

      Wild Willie Falcon looked through the windshield and smiled, despite himself.
      Right there, right over the antique wrought iron bridge spanning the dusky waters of the Miskatonic, right off of the next exit on interstate 93, was the one place in the world he'd swore he'd never set eyes on again. The one place in all of creation that he'd swore no power on Earth could have persuaded him to return to. Even if he had grown up there.
      Arkham, Massachusetts. It had a ring to it, all right, a sound of old Yankee farmers and Puritan manuscripts, of hooves against cobblestones and old tower churchbells. Sunday strolls through the campus and evenings at the tony restaurants. Crew races and sobriety meetings. Tours of historic houses. Witch trials and the occasional riots. New England. How quaint.
      Never again had he expected to set foot in this hell hole.
      But, even across time and space, Fire Brisbane still had the magical ability to get Wild Willie Falcon to do stupid things with a word. How long it taken, that surprise phone call, to change Willie's adamant "No way. Never." to "I'll be there Thursday." Fifteen minutes? Half an hour?
      Not nearly long enough to make a decision that could really, really mess you up for good.
      It had been good to hear from Fire, of course; they'd kept in casual contact over the decades, though they rarely had anything to say to each other. Their lives had taken such different tacks that there was really nothing in common between them now, and talk of the old days always became awkward, because of the...
      No. He wasn't going to think about that. The sixties were gone. No more Acid Test. No more.
      He could see the college from the highway, the sprawling bricks-and-ivy campus of Miskatonic University, where he had taken a few classes in between gigs in a half-hearted attempt to get a Bachelor's in something-or-other.
      And a less half-hearted attempt to get to know some college women.
      Ahh, higher education! In those days Wild Willie was far more high than educated. But what an exciting place to be! Always something going down, a protest, a concert, an experiment in free love... Good drugs everywhere, and, in those days, only "good" drugs... none of the crackstalized methdoherocaine that swept over the world like a black plague not long after.
      In some ways he really missed those days. Unlike many of his peers, he didn't regret his Wild Willie history. It was like a ride on a multicolored roller coaster that shot off the tracks into the clear orange sky...
      Of course, the crash wasn't so much fun.
      But that didn't really have anything to do with his lifestyle.
      Well, not much.
      He'd learned to play the game since then. He'd had to. No more drugs, not even the occasional reefer. These were the days of the "surprise drug test"; and that would, needless to say, be quite the career squelcher. He could drink all he wanted, ironically; but sad experience had taught him not to walk that path.
      No, when his students, "his kids", asked him about the hippy days, he'd give them what their parents wanted; talk about the "glorious ideals" and the "magic in the air", both real enough but he'd leave out the fact that a lot of the magic and the ideals came in little paper squares and odd-smelling hand-rolled cigarettes.
      Usually he avoided the subject altogether. It rarely came up in class, unless there'd been some news item the previous night, almost always somebody who'd died. Then a student would broach the subject, hoping to trigger a class-long digression that would keep the Coefficient of Linear Expansion at bay for another afternoon. He had a good rapport with "his kids", so he'd bite and paint a small whitewashed version of his glory days as a "rock star" ("You were in a band, Mister Falcon? No way!!") on the local circuit, sometimes tying it in to classwork by discussing Acoustics or Electrical Circuitry, but sometimes just giving them some old stories, warm, funny memories that really were pleasant to revisit now and again. What a bunch of characters they had been!
      And, always, some wise guy would ask about drugs. Willie would cough and switch gears. There were a lot of drugs around, yes.
      Weren't they a lot stronger than they are today?
      I wouldn't know.
      Did you do a lot of drugs?
      No comment.
      Aww, come on.
      There's no way to answer that, and you know it. If I say no I didn't you won't believe me, and if I say yes I did you'll cheer and I'll be booted out of here tomorrow. So, no comment.
      Did you know people who did a lot of drugs.
      Some.
      Ever see anyone freak out on acid?
      Pause. The room grows still. He can hear the scritching of chalk on boards in every classroom on the floor. It sounds like the fingers of a rat, desperately trying to tear his way through a wall as something black and large slowly draws nearer.
      As a matter of fact, yes.
      What was it like?
      I'd rather not talk about it.
      The tone in his voice would end the conversation there. There would be no more digression. The Coefficient would be discussed. The student who asked the question that stopped the show would be spitballed, or whacked with a rolled-up vocabulary booklet.
      But Wild Willie Falcon had a card up his sleeve. He knew how to teach. It was something he did well. He liked doing it. Even more than he liked playing bass. He knew how to make a lesson sink in.
      Five minutes before the bell he'd stop writing on the board. He'd sit on the edge of his desk. He'd make eye contact with everyone in the room.
      We talked about drugs earlier, and I just wanted to leave you with one thing before you head off to lunch, or gym, or whatever.
      It was a good time, then. People had a lot of fun. I had a lot of fun.
      But the people on the seventeenth floor of the skyscraper heard Alvin the Optimist talking to himself as he plunged past them toward the street below. What do you think he said?
      "So far so good." That's what he said.
      Think about it.
      Willie felt a pang of uneasy anticipation as he rounded the curve of the exit ramp and merged with the steady traffic over the Penderghast Bridge. This was it. No turning back.
      Of course, in a literal sense, there was always "turning back". Once across the bridge he could simply turn the car around at the first Gas 'n' Go and zip right on back across, and goodbye Arkham! but he knew that that wasn't really true, what mattered was the symbolic bridge crossing and once he was rolling over the water on a plank of asphalt and steel, then there was really "no turning back"; he'd have done it, he'd have returned to Arkham, he couldn't take it back.
      He felt queasy, and dizzy, and - God help him! - excited.
      A moment later he was above the water.
      He took a quick glance over the side of the bridge at the sparkling water of the Miskatonic. Far away, it was, running slowly to the sea...
      What was it they said about vampires? That they couldn't cross running water?
      Ha. Not the spiritual kind.
      For the past three decades they had followed him around, draining his soul, haunting his dreams. He had tried to hide from them in the mundane world, in the disguise of a high school science teacher; they found him, they tracked him down, they tormented him from the corner of his mind.
      They weren't real, of course; they were vampires in a metaphorical sense only. And he never saw them as three-dimensional hallucinations, not in the way poor John Symonds did. They were flashes, glimmerings, shadows, all tricks played on him by his mind, flashback ghosts, post-traumatic stretches of time and imagination, all puppetry and pangeantry but no less nerve-wracking for it, not at all!
      Now he was heading into their nest, their home-town, the villa where they kept their coffins for daylight sleeping, caskets sprinkled with the dust of their homeland. Arkham, Arkham, city of flasks and dancing caskets!
      No, no, calm down. He was doing a "flip", as his kids described it when he became manically effusive on a particular subject. Mister Falcon's doing a flip about quantum mechanics again. Mister Falcon's doing a flip about his free period again. Mister Falcon's doing a flip about the lunch menu again...
      He reached over and popped open the glove compartment, removing a small plastic vial. Valium. That's what he needed. He shook a pill into his palm, awkwardly, trying to keep his hands on the wheel.
      He kept a "sports bottle" of spring water on the seat next to him for just such exigencies; pulling up the top, he chased the pill with a swig of the warm liquid, then made a face.
      Arkham, you bring out the best in me....
      But that's what happens when you don't burn your bridges behind you; you wind up crossing them again, sooner or later. In this case, later, but not later enough.
      His front wheel touched down on pavement that was no longer suspended over water; and he was back in Arkham. Yippee.
      But what was he getting all worked up about, anyway? He had indeed left his demons behind him; he had a life, a career. Not like Fire Brisbane, who apparently had spent the past three decades moping about listening to their old albums. Willie shook his head. Imagine! Trying to re-form a group that nobody remembers, that never went anywhere, whose members had either quit music or gone insane. Crazy.
      Yet here he was, bass guitar in hand (actually, in the trunk).
      He took a left on Red Hook Lane and drove about a half a mile on Ulthar. Strange how all the old landmarks came back to him. It was like he'd only left yesterday. Like the town was stuck in some sort of time warp.
      But that wasn't really true. Some of these "landmarks" couldn't have possibly been here in the sixties, yet they seemed as familiar to Willie Falcon as the sound of his own breath; had he, indeed, been walking these streets in his dreams?
      Crazy. That was crazy. He believed in science now; no more room in his mind for the notion of astral travel than there was for dowsing, astrology, crop circles or Bigfoot. He was just experiencing simple deja vu; just another little trick of the mind. Distracting and disconcerting, but no stranger than cryptoamnesia or mnemonism.
      And no crazier, really. Crazy was reuniting a forgotten band 'cause some kid on the internet thinks it would be a good idea. Crazy is letting that kid play in the reunited band 'cause the real guitarist is in the Nut House. Crazy is living for lost glories, imagined though they may be.
      Crazy is driving halfway across the country to follow someone else's crazier dream.
      He took the turn onto Ashton, almost forgetting that he could turn right on red in Massachusetts. Yeah, it was crazy. Probably the craziest thing he'd done since those "Wild Willie" days had come to such a screeching screaming halt. But also the coolest.
      He felt his heart pounding, and the feeling there wasn't apprehension but excitement. He couldn't wait.