Boondocks Fantasy

by Jean Rabe

  The green flames sprang higher as if someone had turned on a gas tap. They curled toward Mo as if eager to consume her. The girl retreated, pouted, stamped her foot, and cried tears of anger. I thought I heard bitter laughter from over the surf.

  “It’s not fair,” Mo said. She was a teenager again.

  “What the hell is it with you freaking people?” I asked. I heard my voice rising to an unmanly squeak. “Are you playing some sort of game? Is this a TV reality show and it’s your turn to play at celebrity evil cult or something?”

  “The soulless aren’t evil. They don’t understand the concept,” the churchwoman replied. “They just have needs.”

  She looked at me thoughtfully. “Mo is right about one thing. You have put yourself outside the concord and so you are fair game. I have been lonely since my last man died and you are an attractive boy. Perhaps an arrangement can be reached? I am a real woman with a soul and I have a real woman’s needs.”

  I ran like the fiends of hell were after me until I reached my Aston Martin. I did not stop to collect my things. The yokels were welcome to anything they found in my room. Thank God the Aston Martin had a digital cardkey. My hands were shaking so badly that I could not have got an old-fashioned key into the ignition. The V12 started first time. I glanced in my mirror. Mo and the churchwoman were right behind, circling each other like alley cats. The boom of surf added to their shrill screams.

  I floored the throttle.

  I roared up the winding lane out of Morwenstowe with the engine howling and the tires shrieking. I took comfort in the sound of manmade power, with the emphasis very much on “man.”

  Those terrible, terrifying women! They made my lawyer-bitch, Jemima, seem like a pussycat. The simple country life had cleared my mind, all right! I was going back to London. The market would soon pick up. A punt on nickel or maybe the Dutch tobacco market would clear the debt. I would think of something. After all, was I not a Master of the Universe?

  JEFFERSON’S WEST

  Jay Lake

  Born under an eldritch sign on a remote Pacific island, Jay Lake now lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects. Recent novels are Green, Madness of Flowers, and Death of a Star-ship . His short fiction appears regularly in literary and genre markets worldwide. Jay is a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards.

  “Damn me for a Kentucky fool,” muttered Lieutenant William Clark.

  He and Captain Meriwether Lewis had climbed the crumbling white tuff for over an hour, finding momentary shade in tree-lined gullies before beetling across stone beneath the sun’s heated regard. They explored without aid as Charbonneau and the men of the Corps of Discovery were down by the Missouri River playing at rounders and roasting a pallid sturgeon Sergeant Glass had caught.

  Some things were best discussed between gentlemen first. Clark kept his knife close by. His old friend Captain Lewis had the expedition’s written orders straight from President Jefferson, but Clark had his own secret orders as well, whispered in the blood-warm darkness of a Virginia summer night.

  “Hot, William?”

  “Hot, yes, but that is the state of this interminable country at this particular season.” Clark wiped his face on the back of his sleeve, the wool scratchy and rank.

  “What makes you such a particular fool, then?”

  His friend’s voice was gentle, but Clark felt the barb. He tried to explain himself. “Your great, pale towers here upon the high shore, Mr. Lewis. In your journal you named them ‘the remains or ruins of elegant buildings,’ but up close they are just rocks. I am a fool for having held faith in them.”

  “Hmm.” Lewis grabbed hold of a struggling sage and stepped up to a narrow, flinty ledge. The distressed plant perfumed them both. “I had an angle of view from the river. These cliffs are deceptive, sir. In both their appearance and their altitude.”

  “Hence my foolishness.” Clark pushed past Lewis, and scrambled up a gravel wash to make the next rise. He glanced over his shoulder. Lewis’ face was lost in shadow beneath the wide-brimmed leather hat the commander had traded from the Mandan Indians the previous winter. For a moment the Captain looked to be a fetch, a shade of himself, some dark ghost risen in the noontime sun.

  Just as Jefferson had feared.

  There were no powders or perukes when Lieutenant Clark called at Monticello in the summer of 1803. The president was there, though the papers in Philadelphia and Washington City said otherwise.

  Jefferson and Clark took their ease on a small brick patio looking down the hill. A fat moon sailed the horizon, full-bellied and satisfied. Distant dogs barked as Negroes chanted around a pinprick fire visible through shadowed trees.

  Clark wondered why he had been summoned to the plantation. Alone, no less, without Captain Lewis, who was deep in preparations back at the capital. This visit was passing strange and piqued his curiosity. He was equally fearful of being found out for coming here in secret.

  “The War Department drags their heels at your promotion, Lieutenant,” Jefferson said slowly.

  “It is their way, sir.”

  “Meriwether is doing his best for you.”

  “I’m sure, sir.”

  Jefferson’s teacup clinked against its saucer. Mosquitoes and larger insects buzzed in the dark around them as the chanting down the hill reached some crescendo before dying off into laughter.

  Clark wondered again exactly why he had been called to this place.

  “I am a rational man, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There is certainly a Deity, a Creator. No man could deny that, simply from witnessing the sheer complexity of the universe.” The president sighed. “His intentions with respect to our lives on this earth, however, are entirely a matter of interpretation.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Ten days ago I had a dream. Do you dream, Lieutenant?”

  “I suppose so, sir.” Clark’s dreams were rarely recalled and seemed mostly to involve grappling with angry phantoms. It was as if he dreamed the idea of a dream, rather than the jumble of thoughts and images others spoke of.

  “Every man dreams. Some remember more than others.” The saucer clinked again. “And there are those rare dreams possessed of such a compelling verisimilitude—a reality, Lieutenant, as sure as any waking journey through the hallways of your own home.”

  Clark’s neck began to prickle. Down the hill, the dogs and slaves had fallen silent. “Sir?”

  Jefferson’s voice was sad. Tired. “An angel came to me, Lieutenant. In my rooms. He—no, it. It was black. Not ‘black’ as we speak of our Negro slaves being, but black as my boots. Black as a Federalist’s heart, sir. Its wings glittered like stars, or perhaps coals in a furnace, and it spoke to me in a voice of iron.”

  The night remained silent. Even the moon seemed to have paused in her rise. Clark’s curiosity finally overcame his discretion. “What did the angel say, sir?”

  “I do not know. It spoke the tongue of Heaven, perhaps. I did not know the words in my dream, and I do not know them now. But in one hand it held a bloody knife, in the other a broken arrow. And mark this, Lieutenant Clark ... the dark angel had the face of Captain Lewis.”

  The words slipped from Clark before he could consider them fully. “Do you fear betrayal?”

  Jefferson laughed without any tone of amusement. “Betrayal? From Meriwether? Sooner would I be betrayed by my own fingers. I have already entrusted him with various affairs of state, and make no second thoughts about it.” A pale hand shot out of the shadows to grab Clark’s arm, nearly startling a scream from him. “But watch over my captain, Clark. Watch for the broken arrow and the bloody knife. Be my wits out there past the frontier.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Then the slaves chanted again, and the dogs barked, and the moon moved once more across the fetid Virginia sky.

  Clark stared up at the crumbling whit
e towers set on the flat peak they had just climbed. They were real after all, these buildings, made of the same pale stone as the cliffs below. Brush and gravel obscured the bases of the towers, but there were large openings higher up, of no particular plan or symmetry that he could see.

  He tried to imagine dark angels flying in and out of the high windows. Though it was hard to tell with their state of disrepair, there seemed to be a paucity of ground-level entrances.

  Lewis sucked in his breath. Clark knew without looking that his captain would be idly chewing on his lower lip. “Burr came to me just before we left,” Lewis said.

  Clark was shocked. Simply conversing with the Vice President was close to an act of treason among good Democratic-Republicans. Jefferson had not taken kindly to Burr’s Federalist maneuverings during the contesting of the election results. That Lewis would talk to Burr at all was amazing. That he would admit such a conversation to Clark was inconceivable.

  “Offered me ten thousand pounds on deposit in London, in exchange for certain reports.”

  “Reports of what?” Clark asked. The bribe was a magnificent fortune, enough for a lifetime of a gentleman’s ease and most likely his heirs as well.

  “He had a list. I said no, of course, but I still remember what he wanted to know of. It was fantastical. Old Testament, if you will. Giants, woolly mammoths, angels.”

  Angels?

  “Lost cities,” Lewis continued.

  “’Tis definitely a city,” said Clark, nodding at the towers before them. “And ’tis definitely lost.” Then, because he could not help himself, “Did you tell the president?”

  “He would not listen.” Lewis shrugged. “Burr’s ambitions are not a mystery to those who know him. Our vice president would be king of the West. I will not scout for him.”

  The two of them pushed forward, down into the brush that grew around the towers—sprawling junipers and close-set berry vines, for one, cluttered with sage and a dozen other bolting bushes and flowers. There was water up here then, at least at certain times of the year.

  Was this what Jefferson had feared, Clark asked himself. Had Burr been the dark angel with Lewis’ face?

  They came upon a wall hidden in the brush. It was worn with age and erosion, a dragon-backed thing marked mostly by gravel where once had risen an imposing barrier. Wordless, Lewis headed to the right, so Clark continued to follow. He wondered why neither the guide Charbonneau nor the voyageur’s Indian wife Sacagawea had made mention of this place.

  The gate was before them soon enough. It was an arch formed of a pair of ivory tusks that swept up fourteen feet or more, though whatever barrier had once stood between them was long gone.

  “This gate faces east.” Lewis pointed downward. “And look here ...”

  At their feet was a flat stone, much scorched by flame.

  “‘So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden,’” quoted Lewis. “ ‘To work the ground from which he had been taken. After He drove the man out, He placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.’ From the third book of Genesis.”

  “I know that,” whispered Clark, his hand more firmly on his knife. Hair stood up all over his body, prickling harder than it had even that night in Virginia. He could almost hear Jefferson’s slaves chanting. “Come away from this place, Captain. It is not for us.”

  Lewis sounded bemused, or perhaps enchanted. “But the president set us to explore the West. If we walk through this gate, we will be heading West.”

  Drawing his knife against some nameless foe, Clark grabbed Lewis by the elbow with his free hand. “I do not know if this is Eden or not. But that doesn’t matter.” He tried not to let his rising desperation seep into his voice as the blade shook. “Come back to the river. Forget this. Tell the men we saw tall rocks. The Republic isn’t ready for this, Meriwether. The human race is not ready.”

  The Captain tried to shake Clark off. Clark wouldn’t let go, so Lewis stepped into him, chest to chest, ready to shove, except that he stepped into the blade of Clark’s knife.

  “Oh, Lord, no!” shouted Clark.

  “Oh, Lord, yes,” said Lewis with a tinge of surprise and disappointment, as the arrows of the Teton Sioux began to rain around them.

  In the summer of 1805 Captain Meriwether Lewis’ body was recovered at St. Louis by two Negro slaves scraping paint above the waterline of a river barge. They told the sheriff, and later the territorial governor, that a little canoe had just sort of bobbed up and nudged them where they stood waist-deep in the water. Despite the automatic suspicion of Negro involvement in the death of a white man, their story was eventually believed. The slaves ran away up the Missouri shortly after the inquest, however, which reopened the question and considerably delayed official reports to Washington City.

  When the canoe was brought to shore, the Captain’s hands were folded over a black feather almost as long as he was tall, which glinted in the sunlight and was later seen to glow pale red under the night’s moon. He was otherwise unclothed, making it clear that he had died of grievous wounds. His body was accompanied in the tiny boat only by the corpse of his dog Seaman and a single gigantic tooth fit for the mouth of Leviathan—or at least a mastodon.

  God didn’t send anyone else from the Corps of Discovery home that year. Lieutenant Clark eventually returned to the Republic a very changed man, accompanied by Lewis’ servant York, Sacagawea, and an army of Indians and Negroes. When they finally came they hunted justice with rifle and bayonet.

  The Bible was wrong in a few other particulars as well. Eden only had one river, not four, and it was the Missouri, not the Euphrates. But God had made His point just like Clark and his army would someday, and later on Aaron Burr made his point as well in Spanish Tejas.

  The West was never the same.

  BLACK RIDER

  Brian A. Hopkins

  Four-time Bram Stoker Award winner Brian A. Hopkins is the author of The Licking Valley Coon Hunters Club, Wrinkles at Twilight, These I Know By Heart, El Dia de los Muertos, and Lipstick, Lies, and Lady Luck. His short stories have appeared in Weird Tales, Historical Hauntings, Sol’s Children, A Walk on the Dark-side , Mystery Scene Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Black Gate, Cemetery Dance, Haunted Holidays, Postscripts, Renaissance Faire and others. Brian has been a finalist for both the Nebula Award and the Ted Sturgeon Memorial Award for science fiction, as well as the International Horror Guild Award. Brian lives in Oklahoma City. After a multiyear hiatus from writing, Brian returns with this story of coming to terms with grief and despair. Visit his webpage at www.bahwolf. com.

  My grief lies all within,

  And these external manners of laments

  Are merely shadows to the unseen grief

  That swells with silence in the tortured soul.

  There lies the substance.

  -Richard II, Act 4, Scene 1

  La Boca del Diablo

  At the top of the ridge, I take a moment to raise my helmet visor and wipe the sweat from my eyes. I need to open the vents in my leather jacket, but there isn’t time to remove it and get to the zippers on the back. Idling in the heat, the fans on the Kawasaki’s 1200cc engine kick on. The inline four thrums smoothly beneath me, inexhaustible, eager for the plunge into the valley.

  I don’t know the name of this valley out in the middle of nowhere—I christen it La Boca del Diablo, because its appearance strikes me as a symbolic scream from hell, the visual manifestation of an auditory overload, all those billions of souls crying out at once until the landscape becomes the gaping mouthpiece to their torment—but it’s as wide and barren as an ocean, rippling in heat waves to the horizon, where I imagine the clouds sizzle as they touch the red earth. La Boca del Diablo is choked with arroyos and short, decapitated mesas, but there’s not a single sign of civilization: no gas stations or rest stops or precisely arranged tract homes, just that ribbon of highway vanishing into the distance. It could be a
snapshot from Arizona or Utah, and the name I’ve given it does have a piquant southwestern flair to it, but I started my ride less than an hour ago from Oklahoma City, where roads as twisty and steep as the one I just climbed do not exist, let alone terrain such as that spread out before me.

  It’s nearly a straight shot down—just three tight switchbacks and then the bottom, the sort of grade on which you expect to find runaway truck ramps. But it’s a road for which the Kawasaki was made. It would be an easy ride were it not for the rider coming up the road behind me. If I can beat him to the bottom, I can tuck down behind the sportbike’s windscreen and open her up, leaving him behind on that long, straight stretch of asphalt. Though I’ve never had this bike over one twenty, they say she doesn’t quit pulling until somewhere around one eighty-five.

  My pursuer’s bike is half the size of mine, which makes it infinitely more maneuverable in the tight stuff, but much slower in a straight line. Though at times he’d been just a bike length or two behind me coming up the hill and I’d gotten a good look at him in my mirrors, I couldn’t identify the bike’s make or model. It’s nondescript and black, as is the rider: black leather and an even blacker helmet with an impenetrable visor, a screaming hole in reality behind me. I’d only beaten him to the crest of the ridge by accelerating faster out of the corners, riding well beyond my previous limits, spinning and sliding my rear tire as if I thought I was World Champion Valentino Rossi, then going full throttle up the straight stretches to the next switchback. All of which meant I was last-minute-hard-on-the-brakes coming into each turn, my front end near washing out, my stock brakes fading more and more after the first ten minutes of abuse. Even now, I can smell where the pads have literally been cooking against the discs. I’ve no idea if they’ll hold up going down the steep grade before me, if I’ve already warped a disc or over-stressed the stock lines. I’ll have to use the engine for most of my braking, dropping the Kawasaki into ever lower gears while she screams in the upper ranges of her tach.