For a moment, he was under waters. Cars, upside-down above him, descended gently like dead, settling sharks. People floated like broken dolls just under the shimmering, sunlit ceiling-surface. An enormous pressure squeezed in on him, jamming thumbs against his open eyes, forcing liquid salt into mouth and nose. A tubular serpent, the size of a streamlined train, slithered over the desert-bed towards him, eyes like turquoise-shaded searchlights, shifting rocks out of its way with muscular arms.
Gone. Over.
The insight passed. He gasped reflexively for air.
“Atlantis will rise, Sunset Boulevard will fall,” Cass Elliott was singing on a single that would be released in October. Like so many doomed visionaries in her generation, Mama Cass was tuned into the vibrations. Of course, she didn’t know there really had been a sunken city off Santa Monica, as recently as 1942. Not Atlantis, but the Sister City. A battle had been fought there in a World War that was not in the official histories. A War that wasn’t as over as its human victors liked to think.
He looked where the finger pointed.
The landscape would change. Scrub rather than sand, mountains rather than flats. More people, less quiet.
He took steps.
He was on a world-wide walkabout, buying things, picking up skills and scars, making deals wherever he sojourned, becoming what he would be. Already, he had many interests, many businesses. An empire would need his attention soon, and he would be its prisoner as much as its master. These few years, maybe only months, were his alone. He carried no money, no identification but a British passport in the name of a newborn dead in the blitz. He wore unscuffed purple suede boots, tight white thigh-fly britches with a black zig-zag across them, a white Nehru jacket, and silver-mirrored sunglasses. A white silk aviator scarf wrapped burnoose-style about his head, turbanning his longish hair and keeping the grit out of his mouth and nose.
Behind him, across America, across the world, he left a trail. He thought of it as dropping pebbles in pools. Ripples spread from each pebble, some hardly noticed yet but nascent whirlpools, some enormous splashes no one thought to connect with the passing Englishman.
It was a good time to be young, even for him. His signs were everywhere. Number One in the pop charts back home was “Fire,” by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. “I am the God of Hellfire,” chanted Arthur. There were such Gods, he understood. He walked through the world, all along the watchtower, sprung from the songs—an Urban Spaceman, Quinn the Eskimo, this wheel on fire, melting away like ice in the sun, on white horses, in disguise with glasses.
In recent months, he’d seenHair on Broadway and 2001: A Space Odyssey at an Alabama Drive-In. He knew all about the Age of Aquarius and the Ultimate Trip. He’d sabotaged Abbie Hoffman’s magic ring with a subtle counter-casting, ensuring that the Pentagon remained unlevitated. He knew exactly where he’d been when Martin Luther King was shot. Ditto, Andy Warhol, Robert Kennedy, and the VC summarily executed by Colonel Loan on the Huntley-Brinkley Report. He’d rapped with Panthers and Guardsmen, Birchers and Yippies. To his satisfaction, he’d sewn up the next three elections, and decided the music that children would listen to until the Eve of Destruction.
He’d eaten in a lot of McDonald’s, cheerfully dropping cartons and bags like apple seeds. The Golden Arches were just showing up on every Main Street, and he felt Ronald should be encouraged. He liked the little floods of McLitter that washed away from the clown’s doorways, perfumed with the stench of their special sauce.
He kept walking.
Behind him, his footprints filled in. The pointing hand, so nearly human, sank under the sands, duty discharged.
At this stage of his career, the Devil put in the hours, wore down the shoe-leather, sweated out details. He was the start-up Mephisto, the journeyman tempter, the mysterious stranger passing through, the new gun in town. You didn’t need to make an appointment and crawl as a supplicant; if needs be, Derek Leech came to you.
Happily.
* * * *
Miles later and days away, he found a ship’s anchor propped on a cairn of stones, iron-red with lichen-like rust, blades crusted with empty shells. An almost illegible plaque read Sumatra Queen.
Leech knew this was where he was needed.
It wasn’t real wilderness, just pretend. In the hills close to Chatsworth, a town soon to be swallowed by Los Angeles, this was the Saturday matinee West. Poverty Row prairie, Monogram mountains. A brief location hike up from Gower Gulch, the longest-lasting game of Cowboys and Indians in the world had been played.
A red arch stood by the cairn, as if a cathedral had been smitten, leaving only its entrance standing. A hook in the arch might once have held a bell or a hangman’s noose or a giant shoe.
He walked under it, eyes on the hook.
Wheelruts in sandy scrub showed the way. Horses had been along this route too, recently.
A smell tickled in his nose, triggering salivary glands. Leech hadn’t had a Big Mac in days. He unwound the scarf from his head and knotted it around his neck. From beside the road, he picked a dungball, skin baked hard as a gob-stopper. He ate it like an apple. Inside, it was moist. He spat out strands of grass.
He felt the vibrations, before he heard the motors.
Several vehicles, engines exposed like sit-astride mowers, bumping over rough terrain on balloon tyres. Fuel emissions belching from mortarlike tubes. Girls yelping with a fairground Dodg’em thrill.
He stood still, waiting.
The first dune buggy appeared, leaping over an incline like a roaring cat, landing awkwardly, squirming in dirt as its wheels aligned, then heading towards him in a charge. A teenage girl in a denim halter-top drove, struggling with the wheel, blonde hair streaming, a bruise on her forehead. Standing like a tank commander in the front passenger seat, hands on the roll-bar, was an undersized, big-eared man with a middling crop of beard, long hair bound in a bandanna. He wore ragged jeans and a too-big combat jacket. On a rosary around his scraggy neck was strung an Iron Cross, the Pour le Mérite and a rhinestone-studded swastika. He signalled vainly with a set of binoculars (one lens broken), then kicked his chauffeuse to get her attention.
The buggy squiggled in the track and halted in front of Leech.
Another zoomed out of long grass, driven by an intense young man, passengered by three messy girls. A third was around somewhere, to judge from the noise and the gasoline smell.
Leech tossed aside his unfinished meal.
“You must be hungry, pilgrim,” said the commander.
“Not now.”
The commander flashed a grin, briefly showing sharp, bad teeth, hollowing his cheeks, emphasising his eyes. Leech recognised the wet gaze of a man who has spent time practising his stares. Long, hard jail years looking into a mirror, plumbing black depths.
“Welcome to Charlie Country,” said his driver.
Leech met the man’s look. Charlie’s welcome.
Seconds—a minute?—passed. Neither had a weapon, but this was a gunfighters’ eye-lock, a probing and a testing, will playfully thrown up against a wall, bouncing back with surprising ferocity.
Leech was almost amused by the Charlie’s presumption. Despite his hippie aspect, he was ten years older than the kids—well into hard thirties, at once leathery and shifty, a convict confident the bulls can’t hang a jailyard shiwing at his cell-door, an arrested grown-up settling for status as an idol for children ignored by adults. The rest of his tribe looked to their jefe, awaiting orders.
Charlie Country. In Vietnam, that might have meant something.
In the end, something sparked. Charlie raised one hand, open, beside his face. He made a monocle of his thumb and forefinger, three other fingers splayed like a coxcomb.
In Britain, the gesture was associated with Patrick McGoohan’s “Be seeing you” on The Prisoner. Leech returned the salute, completing it by closing his hand into a fist.
“What’s that all about?” whined his driver.
Not taking his eyes
off Leech, Charlie said, “Sign of the fish, Sadie.”
The girl shrugged, no wiser.
“Before the crucifix became the pre-eminent symbol of Christianity, Jesus’s early followers greeted each other with the sign of the fish,” Leech told them. “His first disciples were net-folk, remember. ‘I will make you fishers of men.’ Originally, the Galilean came as a lakeside spirit. He could walk on water, turn water to wine. He had command over fish, multiplying them to feed the five thousand. The wounds in his side might have been gills”
“Like a professor he speaks,” said the driver of the second buggy.
“Or Terence Stamp,” said a girl. “Are you British?”
Leech conceded that he was.
“You’re a long way from Carnaby Street, Mr. Fish.”
As a matter of fact, Leech owned quite a bit of that thoroughfare. He did not volunteer the information.
“Is he The One Who Will...?” began Charlie’s driver, cut off with a gesture.
“Maybe, maybe not. One sign is a start, but that’s all it is. A man can easily make a sign.”
Leech showed his open hands, like a magician before a trick.
“Let’s take you to Old Lady Marsh,” said Charlie. “She’ll have a thing or two to say. You’ll like her. She was in pictures, a long time ago. Sleeping partner in the Ranch. You might call her the Family’s spiritual advisor.”
“Marsh,” said Leech. “Yes, that’s the name. Thank you, Charles.”
“Hop into Unit Number Two. Squeaky, hustle down to make room for the gent. You can get back to the bunkhouse on your own two legs. Do you good.”
A sour-faced girl crawled off the buggy. Barefoot, she looked at the flint-studded scrub as if about to complain, then thought better of it.
“Are you waitin’ on an engraved invitation, Mr. Fish?”
Leech climbed into the passenger’s seat, displacing two girls who shoved themselves back, clinging to the overhead bar, fitting their legs in behind the seat, plopping bottoms on orange-painted metal fixtures. To judge from the squealing, the metal was hot as griddles.
“You are comfortable?” asked the kid in the driver’s seat.
Leech nodded.
“Cool,” he said, jamming the ignition. “I’m Constant. My accent, it is German.”
The young man’s blond hair was held by a beaded leather headband. Leech had a glimpse of an earnest schoolboy in East Berlin, poring over Karl May’s books about Winnetou the Warrior and Old Shatterhand, vowing that he would be a blood brother to the Apache in the West of the Teuton Soul.
Constant did a tight turn, calculated to show off, and drove off the track, bumping onto an irregular slope, pitting gears against gravity. Charlie kicked Sadie the chauffeuse, who did her best to follow.
Leech looked back. Atop the slope, “Squeaky” stood forlorn, hair stringy, faded dress above her scabby knees.
“You will respect the way Charlie has this place ordered,” said Constant. “He is the Cat That Has Got the Cream.”
The buggies roared down through a culvert, overleaping obstacles. One of the girls thumped her nose against the roll-bar. Her blood spotted Leech’s scarf. He took it off and pressed the spots to his tongue.
Images fizzed. Blood on a wall. Words in the blood.
HEALTER SKELTER.
He shook the images from his mind.
Emerging from the culvert, the buggies burst into a clearing and circled, scattering a knot of people who’d been conferring, raising a ruckus in a corral of horses which neighed in panic, spitting up dirt and dust.
Leech saw two men locked in a wrestling hold, the bloated quarter-century-on sequel to the Wolf Man pushed against a wooden fence by a filled-out remnant of Riff of the Jets. Riff wore biker denims and orange-lensed glasses. He had a chain wrapped around the neck of the sagging lycanthrope.
The buggies halted, engines droning down and sputtering.
* * * *
A man in a cowboy hat angrily shouted “Cut, cut, cut!”
Another man, in a black shirt and eyeshade, insisted “No, no, no, Al, we can use it, keep shooting. We can work round it. Film is money.”
Al, the director, swatted the insister with his hat.
“Here on the Ranch, they make the motion pictures,” said Constant.
Leech had guessed as much. A posse of stuntmen had been chasing outlaws all over this country since the Silents. Every rock had been filmed so often that the stone soul was stripped away.
Hoppy and Gene and Rinty and Rex were gone. Trigger was stuffed and mounted. The lights had come up and the audience fled home to the goggle box. The only Westerns that got shot these days were skin-flicks in chaps or slo-mo massacres, another sign of impending apocalypse.
But Riff and the Wolf Man were still working. Just.
The film company looked at the Beach Buggy Korps, warily hostile. Leech realised this was the latest of a campaign of skirmishes.
“What’s this all about, Charlie?” demanded the director. “We’ve told you to keep away from the set. Sam even goddamn paid you.”
Al pulled the insister, Sam, into a grip and pointed his head at Charlie.
Charlie ignored the fuss, quite enjoying it.
A kid who’d been holding up a big hoop with white fabric stretched across it felt an ache in his arms and let the reflector sag. A European-looking man operating a big old Mickey Mouse-eared camera swivelled his lens across the scene, snatching footage.
Riff took a fat hand-rolled cigarette from his top pocket, and flipped a Zippo. He sucked in smoke, held it for a wine-bibber’s moment of relish, and exhaled, then nodded his satisfaction to himself.
“Tana leaves, Junior?” said Riff, offering the joint to his wrestling partner.
The Wolf Man didn’t need dope to be out of it.
Here he was, Junior: Lennie Talbot, Kharis the Caveman, Count Alucard—the Son of the Phantom. His baggy eyes were still looking for the rabbits, as he wondered what had happened to the 1940s. Where were Boris and Bela and Bud and Lou? While Joni Mitchell sang about getting back to the garden, Junior fumbled about sets like this, desperate for readmission to the Inner Sanctum.
“Who the Holy Hades is this clown?” A1 thumbed at Leech.
Leech looked across the set at Junior. Bloated belly barely cinched by the single button of a stained blue shirt, grey ruff of whiskers, chili stains on his jeans, yak-hair clumps stuck to his cheeks and forehead, he was up well past the Late, Late Show.
The Wolf Man looked at Leech in terror.
Sometimes, dumb animals have very good instincts.
“This is Mr. Fish,” Charlie told Al. “He’s from England.”
“Like the Beatles,” said one of the girls.
Charlie thought about that. “Yeah,” he said, “like the Beatles. Being for the benefit of Mr. Fish.
Leech got out of the buggy.
Everyone was looking at him. The kerfuffle quieted, except for the turning of the camera.
Al noticed and made a cut-throat gesture. The cameraman stopped turning.
“Hell of a waste,” spat the director.
* * * *
In front of the ranch-house were three more dune buggies, out of commission. A sunburned boy, naked but for cut-off denims and a sombrero, worked on the vehicles. A couple more girls sat around, occasionally passing the boy the wrong spanner from a box of tools.
“When will you have Units Three, Four, and One combat-ready, Tex?”
Tex shrugged at Charlie.
“Be lucky to Frankenstein together one working bug from these heaps of shit, Chuck.”
“Not good enough, my man. The storm’s coming. We have to be ready.”
“Then schlep down to Santa Monica and steal... requisition... some more goddamn rolling stock. Rip off an owner’s manual, while you’re at it. These configurations are a joke.”
“I’ll take it under advisement,” said Charlie.
Tex gave his commander a salute.
Everyone lo
oked at Leech, then at Charlie for the nod that meant the newcomer should be treated with respect. Chain of command was more rigid here than at Khe Sanh.
All the buggies were painted. At one time, they had been given elaborate psychedelic patterns; then, a policy decision decreed they be redone in sandy desert camouflage. But the first job had been done properly, while the second was botched—vibrant flowers, butterflies, and peace-signs shone through the thin diarrhoea-khaki topcoat.
The ranch-house was the basic derelict adobe and wood hacienda. One carelessly flicked roach and the place was an inferno. Round here, they must take pot-shots at safety inspectors.
The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 02] Page 31
