by Rudy Rucker
Meg ran outside, locking the door behind her. As soon as the door closed, she heard the heavy thud of the leech throwing itself against it. SPLANG. The door shuddered. SPLANG.
Pally’s big car was out there running, still feeding juice into the cattle prod’s disconnected cord. Cooter, a black guy Meg’s age, was sitting behind the wheel.
“What happened?” he yelled.
“The leech got Pally,” answered Meg, getting in the car. “We better get out of here.”
The door gave then, and the leech came speeding out. Cooter peeled out, but not fast enough. The leech flowed up over the car and the engine stalled. With the mass of sixty mues, the leech had them pinned in place. For a moment nothing happened, and then the creature’s hairy underside began sucking at the windows, trying to pop one loose.
“Don’t open the door, Cooter, whatever you do.”
Cooter unholstered his .45 and fired a few shots up through the car roof. Acid began drizzling in. Now the leech was thumping on the windows instead of sucking at them. A spiderweb of cracks spread across the windshield. Cooter leaned on the horn.
Suddenly the leech slid off them. All the noise had drawn the rest of Pally’s private army out of their barracks. Five beefy guys that looked like good food. The leech wolfed down two of them, and the other three headed for the river. Cooter got the car restarted, and sped across the wood bridge that led from Pally’s island to the shore.
“Stop here,” said Meg. “Let’s burn the bridge.” Moving quickly, they got a drum of gasoline out of the car’s trunk and slopped it all over the bridge’s planks. They got back on shore and fired the bridge up. The sudden WHUMP of ignition singed Meg’s eyebrows and threw her onto her back. In the firelight, they could see the leech racing along the island’s shore, looking for the other men or looking for a way to shore. It tried several times to go into the water, but each time the current forced it back.
“It’s too heavy to swim,” said Cooter. “And the water’s too fast and deep for it to wade.”
The great leech reared itself up by the shore and began silently swaying back and forth, jerky in the fire’s light.
“It’s worried,” said Meg. “Good. It’ll starve to death out there. Thank God it’s not big enough to splash across.”
They got in the car to drive on up the hill into the city. But the road was full of dark figures. Mues. The grex was telepathically calling all mues, and they were flocking down to the river. Meg and Cooter stopped the car and stared back towards the island.
One by one the mues launched themselves into the current and floundered over to Pally’s island. One by one they went and joined the body of the great leech. In half and hour it would be two or three times as big—big enough to crawl across the river.
Cooter put the car into gear and began edging forward through the torrent of mues.
“Where to, Meg?”
“As far as the gas’ll take us.” She leaned across and checked the gauge. “Let’s shoot for Richmond.”
Cooter eased the car up the hill that led down to the river. The mues thinned out at the top, and he stepped on the accelerator.
Bye-bye, Killeville, goodbye.
============
Note on “Bringing in the Sheaves”
Written in Spring, 1982.
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, November, 1986.
In the summer of 1982 I started writing Twinks, the only science-fiction novel which I never finished. I often dream that there is yet another science-fiction novel which I wrote quickly and had published in a small, fugitive edition. The elusive extra dream book is something like The Hobbit, and my hurried editor is Craig Shaw Gardner, who was my editor at Unearth. Well, that’s not Twinks in any case, Twinks was a punk post-WWIII book with radiation mutants. “Bringing in the Sheaves” is the slightly altered third chapter of Twinks.
Pally Love is of course modeled on Lynchburg’s then-famous TV evangelist Jerry Falwell, and the giant leech is his so-called Moral Majority movement.
The Jack Kerouac Disembodied School of Poetics
I got the tape in Heidelberg. A witch named Karla gave it to me.
I met Karla at Diaconescu’s apartment. Diaconescu, a Romanian, was interesting in his own right although, balding, he had a “rope-throw” hairdo. We played chess sometimes in his office, on a marble board with pre-Columbian pieces. I was supposed to be a mathematician and he was supposed to be a physicist. His fantasy was that I would help him develop a computer theory of perception. For my part, I was hoping he had dope. One Sunday I came for tea.
Lots of rolling papers around his place, and lots of what an American would take to be dope-art. But it was only cheap tobacco, only European avant-garde. Wine and tea, tea and Mozart. Oh man. Stuck inside of culture with the freak-out blues again.
Karla had a shiny face, like four foreheads clustered around her basic face-holes. All in all, it occurred to me, men have nine body-holes, women ten. I can’t remember if we spoke German or English—English most likely. She was writing a doctoral dissertation on Jack Kerouac.
Jack K. My main man. Those dreary high-school years I read On the Road, then Desolation Angels and Big Sur in college, Mexico City Blues in grad-school and, finally, on the actual airplane to actual Heidelberg, I’d read Tristessa: “All of us trembling in our mortality boots, born to die, BORN TO DIE I could write it on the wall and on Walls all over America.”
I asked Karla if she had weed. “Well, sure, I mean I will soon,” and she gave me her address. Some kind of sex-angle in there too. “We’ll talk about the beatniks.”
I phoned a few times, and she’d never scored yet. At some point I rode my bike over to her apartment anyway. Going to visit a strange witchy girl alone was something I’d never done since marriage. Ringing Karla’s bell felt like reaching in through a waterfall, like passing through an interface.
She had a scuzzy pad, two rooms on either side of a public hall. Coffee in her kitchen and cross the hall to look at books in her bedroom. Dope coming next week maybe.
Well, there we were, her on the bed with four foreheads and ten holes, me cross-legged on the floor looking at this and that. Heartbeat, a book by Carolyn Cassady, who married Neal and had Jack for a lover. Xeroxes of letters between Jack and Neal, traces of the long disintegration, both losing their raps, word by word, drink by pill, blank years winding down to boredom, blindness, O. D. death. A long sliding board I’m on too, oh man, oh man, sun in a meat-bag with nine holes.
Karla could see I was real depressed and in no way about to get on that bed with her, hole to hole, hole to hole. To cheer me up she brought out something else: a tape-cassette and a cassette-player. “This is Jack.”
“Him doing a reading?”
“No, no. It’s really him. This is a very special machine. You know how Neal was involved with the Edgar Cayce people?”
“Yeah, I guess so. I don’t know.” The tape-player did look funny. Instead of the speaker there was a sort of cone-shaped hole. And there were no controls, no fast-forward or reverse, just an on-off switch. I leaned to look at the little tape-cassette. There was a tape in there, but a very fine and silvery sort of tape. For some reason the case was etched all over in patterns like circuit diagrams.
”…right after death,” Karla was saying in her low, hypnotic voice. “Jack’s complete software is in here as well as his genetic code. There’s only been a few of these made…it’s more than just science, it’s magic.” She clicked the tape into the player. “Go on, Alvin, turn Jack on. He’ll enjoy meeting you.”
I felt dizzy and confused. How long had I been sitting here? How long had she been talking? I reached for the switch, then hesitated. This scene had gotten so unreal so fast. Maybe she’d drugged the coffee?
“Don’t be afraid. Turn him on.” Karla’s voice seemed to come from a long way away. I clicked the switch.
The tape whined on its spools. I could smell something burning. A little puff of smoke floated up
from the tape-player’s cone, and then there was more smoke, lots of it. The thick plume writhed and folded back on itself, forming layer after layer of intricate haze.
The ghostly figure thickened and drew substance from the player’s cone. At some point it was finished. Jack Kerouac was there standing over me with a puzzled frown.
Somehow Karla’s coven had caught the Kerouac of 1958, a tough, greasy-faced mind-assassin still years away from his eventual bloat and blood-stomach death.
“I was afraid he’d look like a corpse,” I murmured to Karla.
“Well, I feel like a corpse—say a dead horse—what happened?” said Kerouac. He walked over to the window and looked out. “Whooeee, this ain’t even Cleveland or the golden tongues of flame. Got any hoocha?” He turned and glared at me with eyes that were dark vortices. Everything about him was right except the eyes.
“Do you have any brandy?” I asked Karla.
“No, but I could begin undressing.”
Kerouac and I exchanged a glance of mutual understanding. “Look,” I suggested, “Jack and I will go out for a bottle and be right back.”
“Oh all right,” Karla sighed. “But you have to carry the player with you. And hang onto it!”
The soul-player had a carrying strap. As I slung it over my shoulder, Kerouac staggered a bit. “Easy, Jackson,” he cautioned.
“My name’s Alvin, actually,” I said.
“Al von Actually,” muttered Kerouac. “Let’s rip this joint.”
We clattered down the stairs, his feet as loud as mine. Jack seemed a little surprised at the street-scene. I think it was his first time in Germany. I wasn’t too well dressed, and with Jack’s rumpled hair and filthy plaid shirt, we made a really scurvy pair of Americans. The passers-by, handsome and nicely dressed, gave us wide berth.
“We can get some brandy down here,” I said, jerking my head. “At the candy store. Then let’s go sit by the river.”
“Twilight of the gods at River Lethe. In the groove, Al, in the gr-gr-oove.” He seemed fairly uninterested in talking to me and spoke only in such distracted snatches, spoke like a man playing pinball and talking to a friend over his shoulder. Off and on I had the feeling that if the soul-player were turned off, I’d be the one to disappear. But he was the one with black whirlpools instead of eyes. Kerouac was the ghost, not me.
But not quite ghost either; his grip on the bottle was solid, his drinking was real, and so was mine, of course, as we passed the liter back and forth, sitting on the grassy meadow that slopes down the Neckar River. It was March 12th, basically cold, but with a good strong sun. I was comfortable in my old leather jacket and Jack, Jack was right there with me.
“I like this brandy,” I said, feeling it.
“Bee-a-zooze. What do you want from me anyway, Al? Poke a stick in a corpse, get maggots come up on you. Taking a chance, Al, for whyever?”
“Well, I…you’re my favorite writer. I always wanted to be you. Hitch-hike stoned and buy whores in Mexico. I missed all that, I mean I did it, but differently. I guess I want the next kids to like me like I like you.”
“Lot of like, it’s all nothing. Pain and death, more death and pain. It took me twenty years to kill myself. You?”
“I’m just starting. I figure if I trade some of the drinking off for weed, I can stretch it out longer. If I don’t shoot myself. I can’t believe you’re really here. Jack Kerouac.”
He drained the rest of the bottle and pitched it out into the river. A cloud was in front of the sun now and the water was grey. It was, all at once, hard to think of any good reason for living. At least I had a son.
“Look in my eyes,” Jack was saying. “Look in there.”
I didn’t want to, but he leaned in front of me to stare. His face was hard and bitter. I realized I was playing way out of my league.
The eyes. Like I said before, they were spinning dark holes, empty sockets forever draining no place. I thought of Edgar Allen Poe’s story about some guys caught for days in a maelstrom, and thinking this, I began to see small figures flailing in the dark spirals, Jack’s remembered friends and loved ones maybe, or maybe other dead souls.
The whirlpools fused now to a single dark, huge cyclone, seemingly beneath me. I was scared to breathe, scared to fall, scared even that Kerouac himself might fall into his own eyes.
A dog ran up to us and the spell snapped. “More trinken,” said Jack. “Go get another bottle, Al. I’ll wait here.”
“Okay.”
“The player,” rasped Jack. “You have to leave the soul-player here, too.”
“Fine.” I set it down on the ground.
“Out on first,” said Kerouac. “The pick-off. Tell the bitch leave me alone.” With that he snatched up the soul-player and ran down to the river. I let him go.
Well, I figured that was that. It looked like Kerouac turned himself off by carrying the soul-player into the river and shorting it out…which was fine with me. Meeting him hadn’t been as much fun as I’d expected.
I didn’t want to face Karla with the news I’d lost her machine, so I biked over to my office to phone her up. For some reason Diaconescu was there, waiting for me. I was glad to see a human face.
“What’s happening, Ray?”
“Karla sent me. She saw you two from her window and phoned me to meet you here. You’re really in trouble, Alvin.”
“Look, it was her decision to lend me that machine. I’m sorry Kerouac threw it in the river and ruined it, but …”
“He didn’t ruin the machine, Alvin. That’s the point. The machine is waterproof.”
“Then where’d he go? I saw him disappear.”
“He went underwater, you idiot. To sneak off. It’s the most dangerous thing possible to have a dead soul in control of its own player.”
“Oh man. Are you sure you don’t have any weed?”
I filled my knapsack up with beer bought at a newsstand—they sell alcohol everywhere in Germany—and pedaled on home. The seven- kilometer bike-ride from my University office to our apartment in the Foreign Scholars Guest House was usually a time when I got into my body and cooled out. But today my mind was boiling. The death and depression coming off Kerouac had been overwhelming. What had that been in his eyes there? The pit of hell, it’d seemed like, a vortex ring sort of, a long twisty thread running through each of his eyes, and whoever was outside in the air here was variable. The thought of not being able to die terrified me more than anything I’d ever heard of: for me death had always seemed like sweet oblivion, a back-door to the burrow, a certain escape. But now I had the feeling that the dark vortex was there, full of thin hare screamers, ineluctable whether or not a soul-player was around to reveal it at this level of reality. The only thing worse than death is eternal life.
Back home my wife, Cybele, was folding laundry on our bed. The baby was on the floor crying.
“Thank God you came back early, Alvin. I’m going nuts. You know what the superintendent told me? He said we can’t put the dirty Pampers in the garbage, that it’s unsanitary. We’re supposed to tear them apart and flush the pieces, can you believe that? And he was so rude, all red-faced and puffing. Jesus I hate it here, can’t you get us back to the States?”
“Cybele, you won’t believe what happened today. I met Jack Kerouac. And now he’s on the loose.”
“I thought he died a long time ago.”
“He did, he did. This witch-girl, Karla? I met her over at Diaconescu’s?”
“The time you went without me. Left me home with the baby.”
“Yeah, yeah. She conjured up his ghost somehow, and I was supposed to keep control of it; keep control of Kerouac’s ghost, but we got drunk together and he freaked me out so much I let him get away.”
“You’re drunk now?”
“I don’t know. Sort of. I bought some beer. You want one?”
“Sure. But you sound like you’re off your rocker, Alvin. Why don’t you just sit down and play with the baby. Maybe there’s a c
artoon on TV for you two.”
Baby Joe was glad to see me. He held out his arms and opened up his mouth wide. I could see the two little teeth on his bottom gum. His diaper was soaked. I changed him, being careful to flush the paper part of the old diaper, as per request. As usual with the baby, I could forget I was alive, which is, after all, the only thing that makes life worth living.
I gave Cybele a beer, opened one for myself, and sat down in front of the TV with the baby. The evening programs were just starting—there’s no daytime TV at all in Germany—and, thank God, Zorro was on. The month before they’d been showing old Marx brothers movies, dubbed of course, and now it was Zorro, an episode a day. Baby Joe liked it as much as I did.
But there was something fishy today, something very wrong. Zorro didn’t look like he was supposed to. No cape, no sword, no pointy mustache. It was vortex-eyed Kerouac there in his place, sniggering and stumbling over his lines. Instead of slashing a “Z” on a wanted poster, he just spit on it. Instead of defending the waitress’s honor during the big saloon brawl, he hopped over the bar and stole a fifth of tequila. When he bowed to the police-chief’s daughter, he hiccupped and threw up. At the big masquerade ball he jumped on stage and started shouting about Death and Nothingness. When the peasants came to him for help, he asked them for marijuana. And the whole time he had the soul-player’s strap slung over his shoulder.
After awhile I thought of calling Cybele.
“Look at this, baby! It’s unbelievable. Kerouac’s on TV instead of Zorro. I think he can see me, too. He keeps making faces.”
Cybele came and stood next to me, tall and sexy. Instantly Kerouac disappeared from the screen, leaving old cape ‘n’ sword Zorro in his place. She smiled down at me kindly. “My Alvin. He trips out on acid but he still comes home on time. Just take care of Joe while I fix supper, honey. We’re having pork stew with sauerkraut.”
