"Yeh."
"One of the big four?
Sam laughed. "No. Not the big four. This gang calls themselves The Desolates, Cassie. They ride wild. Into some places I'm afraid to go."
That made me pause. There wasn't much on God's green earth that made Sam afraid. "What are they into, speed? Other stuff?"
"No, not just speed. Bad stuff, like the old days. In fact they're the reason I'm thinking about running. It's a big country. Even so, I'm afraid I might not be able to get far enough."
"I don't see what I can do about it, Sam."
"I've talked to him, and nothing I say makes any difference to him. And I thought ... " Sam opened another can of beer. "Just thought that you'd want to know."
"Right," I said.
"Then I'll be getting on my way. And whatever you decide to do, you be careful, now. You hear?"
#
In another life, I wouldn't have got knocked up at seventeen. I married Sam when we were both eighteen. Got married quick. But our little baby, Annie, didn't make it to her first birthday.
Then I guess I got a little wild. We both did. Me and Sam. Hooked up with some bikers, partied hard, trying to forget little Annie. And that coffin. Tiny, forlorn.
We were okay, me and Sam. Free and easy. Not a speck of jealousy between us. Or perhaps it was something else. Something that I can't name.
Up and down the Miskatonic Valley we went. And then we hooked up with the last riders. And they was strange. We partied hard, real hard. I don't remember much about those few weeks. Can't even remember the name of the gang; I was doing a lot of meth.
But I do know that when we ran, I was pregnant again.
In another life, a new baby would have healed me and Sam. Given us something to love. But when Kyle came along, it didn't work like that.
I always knew that something was not right with him. I never did feel the love for him that a mother should feel. Not even when he was a tiny thing. The sickness didn't help. Kyle was jaundiced, and he just wouldn't stop crying. And Sam was half crazed with fear that we was going to lose him. And I was sick with guilt that the drugs had gotten into the baby and damaged him.
Kyle's sicknesses did wear me out. It was just one thing after another. It seemed that we had to give up everything for him. Not that it was his fault. But the tests, the endless testing, scrabbling around to pay the bills, going cap in hand to the medical charities. And the doctors implying that I was making it all up to call attention to myself: Munchausen by proxy syndrome. That I was inventing diseases for him. But they never heard Kyle crying, thin and wheedling all the night.
And Sam couldn't stand it in the end. He moved out. I couldn't help looking at Kyle and blaming him for his daddy leaving. Except Sam wasn't Kyle's daddy. Perhaps he always knew that, although I never breathed a word to him.
So when Sam left, I had nothing except Kyle. In another life, I might have been a decent mother. I didn't harm him, neglect or abuse or anything. I just didn't love that baby. It was as if anything good I'd had in me was all bled out.
#
I took the Blue Valley Bus. It was a long journey, stopping at all the small villages, along endless fallow fields and worn-out farmhouses, isolated and lonely. I never much cared for the place where I lived.
Just before the Miskatonic River emptied into the sea at Kingsport, just before the end of the line, I changed buses and got myself to Mireslow, a dozen or so miles from Boston and not too far from the famous witch town. Most of Mireslow is built on swamp. I wandered the town's narrow twisting streets. It was like I'd turned back in time. But money had graced Mireslow at some time. Maybe there was still money, because I didn't see no trailer parks. But the money that had fed the town when it was a resort town had faded. You could see that in the peeling woodwork on the old colonial houses, in the top heavy, gabled houses of moldering gray wood, in the small windows of thick glass painted with grime. It seemed like nothing new had been built in Mireslow for a long time.
I found the abandoned rail line running along a street of medicine shops. I followed the line uphill leading out of town. It ended abruptly in the overgrown grass of a boneyard. A lone white-steepled church stood with its door open in invitation. But there was no comfort for me to be had there. I decided to eat my bag lunch in the boneyard before deciding what to do next.
I'd spent the journey thinking about Kyle. And Sam. And maybe blaming Sam. Rightly so, I reckon. If Sam had stuck around, been a daddy to him, maybe Kyle wouldn't have turned out like he did. And even though Sam had said he'd tried to talk to Kyle, I wondered how hard he'd tried. Sam had been odd, like he was hiding something from me.
When Kyle hit thirteen, all his sickness fell away, just as sudden as if a switch had been flicked. And it made me wonder if the doctors had been right all along, and he'd been faking it. Kyle got his first bike. He began hanging out with a gang of older bikers. He was a good looking boy, and he had a string of girlfriends. He got into trouble, I knew that. I know the kind of bikers he was hanging out with. But all my advice didn't mean a damn to him.
It was no surprise when he cleared off at fifteen. I went to the police, but they didn't find him. I don't suppose they looked too hard. I asked his friends, and all they did was laugh at me.
And then I was on my own, and it was too late to start again. Not like I wanted to. I just went to work, came home bone tired, flaked out with some beer in front of the TV. I've never been a looker. Men left me alone, and that was how I liked it.
And I thought I'd left Kyle behind me, written him off as dead, but like the tooth with a rotten cavity, I kept thinking about him. And although it was fair to say that I never loved him much, I felt the pull of it. Who was going to look after my no-good boy if I weren't?
#
I was trying to read the names on the crumbling tombstones when I heard the bikes. The roar from an incomprehensible throat. I wondered what they could be riding.
The sound grew closer. The sky grew darker. The sound of them nearer, and still, and still they hadn't reached me. I felt the urge to run, like me and Sam had ran all those twenty years ago, from the surging apprehension of their approach, like the harsh wind bringing the night.
They came. Stopping a dozen yards from the edge of the boneyard, sitting with their heads pointed in my direction. I couldn't see their faces (I didn't want to see their faces). Their heads were covered in leather masks of rawhide, with slits for their eyes and mouths. Lean men, looking like skeletons, covered in their leather. I must have stood a full five minutes staring at the bikes. I couldn't make out what they was. The feeble sun behind them dazzled my view. All I could make out was impressions. The bikers sat low, on bikes, like choppers, on black metal, languid and lazy as oil. Their rawhide gloves on the exhausts, revving the engines like the warning growl of a great beast. The air was full of fumes. When I glanced around at the church, I saw the doors had shut, and even that sanctuary was denied to me.
I stood, transfixed like a small critter about to be smashed into the tarmac, until the church bells rang out, discordant. The bikers turned and left, leaving me intimidated and small against the diminished sky.
And as they turned their backs on me, I saw the bikers' patches: the sign of the severed hand and the sign of desolation. I knew I would have to face them down if I wanted to talk to my son. And I remembered that I knew them.
#
I got myself a room in the cheapest boarding house I could find, all the time thinking it was a waste of money. Even if they let me speak to Kyle, I reckoned there wasn't much I could to do help him.
I wanted to think about the bikers, but my thoughts kept slipping off them. I unpacked. I found myself thinking about what outfits I was going to wear, as if I was on a vacation. I remembered that feeling of couldn't concentrate, after me and Sam had run from The Desolates twenty years ago. At the time, I'd put it down to the after effects of all the meth I'd taken. But now I wasn't so sure. Crank can mess up your head, make you psychotic,
make you see things that weren't there. But crank's not the only thing that can do that.
I wrote it down. I was afraid that if I stayed in my room too long, I'd forget all about them. So I tried to write it down, all the details I was thinking of.
Bikers. Oil. Crows. Skeletal Hand. Raw Leather.
And underneath I writ a reminder.
Where are the bikers are holed up?
Clutching that bit of paper, I made my way to the front desk, where a lean woman sat, biting the top of her pen, and reading a Harlequin.
"Help you with something?" asked the woman. Her lipstick just about all rubbed away, leaving her mouth colorless.
"I ..." My mind was blank. What was I supposed to be asking?
I looked at the paper. Bikers. Oil. Crows. Skeletal Hand. Raw Leather. I remembered what they fed me twenty years ago. I remembered when they planted Kyle inside me. And I never wanted them to take off the mask, never wanted to see underneath.
I looked at the paper again. "Where are the bikers holed up?"
The woman looked down hard at her book. She added a note in the margin in thin spidery script.
"Where they at?" I asked again.
"Oh they come and they go, with the wind," she said. "Honey, you best to stay away from them."
I saw a picture locket round her neck with a photo of a young boy. "That your son?" I asked.
"Yes, ma'am."
"Nice looking boy," I said.
She smiled. "He's doing real well at school. He's a good boy."
"My boy, he's with the bikers. My son, he ain't such a good boy, but still I want to talk to him. You can understand that, can't you?"
She went pale. "They holed up at the old Bass Shore Hotel on the north side of the lake," she said. "But ..." She picked up the locket between her finger and thumb, rubbed it like a talisman.
"It's okay. I just want to talk to my boy." That was natural. That a mother would want to talk to her son once in ten years. And for all their costumes and paraphernalia, their codes, and their lifestyle, their silences and intimidations, they was men, and they had all had mothers. Sentimental sometimes. They'd let me in, I'd have a word with him, do what I could, and then I'd be on my way. I kept telling myself that.
#
In a different life, I'd have stayed with The Desolates, twenty years ago. Instead, me and Sam had jumped on his bike and hightailed it out of there. And me carrying Kyle in my stomach. But all of my life they were there, in the shadows of my life. They colored me, scared me. They spoiled me. Like rotten meat. They spoiled me. Perhaps I wasn't here for Kyle. Perhaps I was here for a taste of what I'd had. Like an old addict whose longing never goes away.
#
The burnt out shell of the hotel rested right at the lake's edge. The Bass Shore Hotel had been grand once. A seven story block of rooms topped with towers. At the east and west sides there was a hall with a gabled roof. But the roofs were nothing more than slats, the rooms inside open to the elements. I had the feeling that the hotel was contaminated, tainted with something more than age. And the quiet lake was deep, black waters still as a dark mirror. In the distance, the gray peninsula was scattered with massive rocks, out of place like a lake henge of unknown purpose.
I walked along the broken promenade looking for a way inside. When I saw the two dozen bikes parked outside the east wing, I backed off. The bikes repelled me, the strange oil and haft of them. I quickly retraced my steps to make my way round the back of the hotel, where I met an old man, sitting down on the ragged patio, his back against the hotel wall. When he saw me, he laughed, a ragged wheezing through his broken meth mouth.
"Come," he said. "All are welcome here. Especially a woman." His eyes were dilated, the eyeballs yellow. He laughed again. His eyes rolled back in the sockets. When he started shaking, I walked away quickly.
I found my way into the hotel easily enough. All the doors were gone or dangling off their hinges. A quick step through a moldy guest room led me into the long hotel corridor. I heard the noise of a throbbing beat, and I followed it to the east wing.
Once it was the ballroom. Now it was a throne room where the gimp-masked bikers stood in attendance to an ancient, thin man, sitting on a throne made from the carcasses of bikes. And I had the feeling that their owners were no longer around. On the wall was a patchwork of colors, bikers' vests stitched together, a flag of a kind, a trophy. A low throbbing music thudded into the room, an ominous sound that seemed to shudder through my bones. In one corner was a vast pile of weapons, guns, Uzis, even antitank weapons. In the other corner a couple of men hunched over lab equipment, cooking something that smelt both chemical and meaty. I walked with trembling legs to the man on the throne of bikes.
"Say what you want to say," said the man on the throne.
"I want to talk to my son, Kyle," I said. "I've heard he's your road sergeant. I just want to talk to him."
A rippling laughter broke through the men.
"That's all. I'm not interested in anything else you're doing here. I just want to talk to my son."
The king man raised his hand. "Clyte!" he shouted. One of the men cooking, walked over and held a saucer towards me.
"Can I offer you a little something?" asked the king man.
There was crystal in the saucer, but it wasn't white like meth, it was amber, oozing, sweating. The aroma of meat mixed with a chemical tang made me want to gag. I took the saucer. "What is it?" I asked.
"A sacrament," said the king man. "And you took it a long time ago."
"I'd never take this," I said, though I guess I couldn't remember.
"They unwind the thread and let you go so far, like flies on the line, but then they twitch and you come back."
"I just want to talk to Kyle."
"Such a shame when a mother doesn't recognize her own son."
"Kyle?" I took a step forward to the man on the throne, trying to see to recognize him. How could this old man be Kyle?
"It's me, Mother. Would you like me to take off my mask?"
"No, don't do that," I said quickly. It was Kyle. But he was so old. So changed. "Kyle," I said. "Let me talk to you alone."
"As you wish, Mother." It was clear he had a position of power in this place. As he climbed slowly off the throne and walked towards the door, the heads of the masked men followed him. I had a feeling that they weren't real at all, simply puppets, skeletons covered in denim and leather.
At the door, Kyle turned and said sharply, "Mother, join me."
Perhaps I could talk some sense into him without the audience. We left the throne room and walked along the hotel's long corridor.
"What are you doing here, Kyle?" I asked.
"We ride, Mother," said Kyle. "We take their sacrament and most of all we ride." He took a piece of the crystal from the saucer and rubbed it over his lips. "You've always wanted to ride, Mother."
"I always wanted to ride," I said. "I've always wanted that freedom."
"But we ride not in freedom," said Kyle, "but in bondage."
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"We're going to fetch our rides, Mother." Kyle smiled. "I'm so glad that Sam sent you to me."
"Sam would never do that."
"Why do you think that we let him go? On the arrangement that he go to you, to bring you here. Oh, he didn't like it here, Mother. But I think you will. Poor Sam, running, running all his life. But no one goes for long. They twitch the thread and all return."
I thought about how shifty Sam had seemed when he'd come to see me. In another life, Sam wouldn't have betrayed me. I walked along the corridor with my young/old son. This was a bad scene. The worst scene. But I couldn't run. It was something that had to be played out to the end. "Why did you want me here, Kyle?"
"You're my sacrifice, Mother."
"You're going to kill me?" Perhaps this is what I'd always sensed, when he'd been a little baby. Perhaps I'd sensed the seed of my murderer in the baby.
He laughed. "Not matricide. There's
a season for violence, but the demands of family demands something more intimate."
"I don't understand."
"Understand that we are The Desolate. Understand that we are the riders. We praise them," he said, "in every kill we make, in everything we do, in every time we ride, dark or light, and eat up the road. The universe is a big road, and we can only see the smallest part of it. Others have travelled here long ago. And every moment of our lives we call to them, riding on metal or on flesh."
"And what do they give you, Kyle?"
"Give us? They give us nothing. Don't you understand that they are so far beyond us that they are not to be bargained with?"
"I don't understand." But I did understand, somewhere deep and dirty in my soul. "What you're doing isn't clean, Kyle. And it's killing you. This is madness."
"I am one of them, born of them. And when I was in your belly, Mother, I fed that to you."
"What are you going to do to me?"
"I'm going to make you my sacrifice."
"It isn't a sacrifice if it doesn't mean much to you," I said.
He laughed. "Oh Mother, Mother. All my life I wanted your love, and you never could give it to me. And all the time I hid myself."
My withered heart had never bloomed in love for Kyle. It was a stunted seed. But now, in this dark, derelict, mad temple, I felt something for this child of mine, this flesh of mine. The tides slowly moving in the emptiness of my heart.
My son intended me harm. Yet I walked with him, listened to his delusions. All was too confusing to understand. All was bad/good/sideways and meaningless. I was not smart enough to understand. All I felt was the unwinding road of emotion. And Kyle was happy. And did not a mother only want her child to be happy? A true mother, one who felt love.
"I came here to save you," I said. "I did wrong by you." In another life, I would have saved him. But there is no other life. Nothingness. I wish I could have been better.
We'd reached the end of the long corridor, and walked into the empty west wing. The room was littered with a trail of bones. The roof was gone, open to the sky. And the host of The Desolates waited for us, wearing their skin masks. They were a fellowship, and that was something. The bikers opened their throats in an obscene chant, building and building. And I thought that they have fellowship. In their obscenity, they know that others are like them.
That Ain't Right: Historical Accounts of the Miskatonic Valley (Mad Scientist Journal Presents Book 1) Page 16
