Fantastic Metropolis

Important: The novel excerpted here is a work in progress. As such, the text in these pages is still subject to editing and rewriting, and may even be omitted from the finished novel. Please bear this in mind when reading the excerpt, and do not quote any part of it in reviews without first checking against a published copy.

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“America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.”

—William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

Move Under Ground is the Lovecraftian Beat road novel.

Close your eyes and think of what the Lovecraftian Beat road novel—a pastiche, not a parody—might be like. It’s just like that.

—Nick Mamatas

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It was war. It’s war now. There was a drift net, just like the one George told me about those years ago, ethereal and rising from the Pacific, dragging its way across America. Whole towns were falling into its haunted tangles, the souls of their resident fools the catch of the day. And me and Neal and now Bill, all piled into a Caddy Neal found parked in Goodland’s local Methodist Church, were trying desperately to outrace the tide. We’d be ahead in one town, then stop for the night under a cracking moon, and in dreams I could see the dark stands drift across the night, taking whatever little town we were holed up in with it. In the morning, mugwumps ruled and the air tasted of salt and scales.

We learned to drive at night, and to head only to the cities, where there were nooks and crannies to hide in, bars a human being could still get a drink at. We moved underground, through sewers and into basement pads with those few people, usually dharma bums and older Beats, or wild women with ironed hair, who knew enough to resist or dodge Cthulhu’s inexorable reach.

Tramps and hobos poured into the cities behind us, trembling with stories of life on the road and rails. Great beasts twenty feet long were strapped down to flatbeds and screaming their way across the country, the beetlemen drivers happy to rip off and consume their own ears just so they wouldn’t have to hear the wailing, wailing that could kill a man. Wheat fields burned under waves of green fire, it was cold and flowed like heavy ocean water, and left no smoke behind. “You don’t burn up in it,” one fellow told me, “you drown in it.” He’d seen his woman go down under a wave of the stuff, and then come up, green spurting from her nose and mouth, then she went down again. “I waited for her to come up again, you know, because you’re not a goner ‘til you go down three times in normal water, but with this stuff you don’t get no second chances.” Then he cried until Neal’s new girl for whatever that town we were in, Mandy or something, took him to a couch and fed him boxed wine ‘til he was able to sleep.

Driving was insane. Neal never slept anymore, and always wanted the wheel. He drove is in a wild route—up to Omaha for a horrible afternoon tour of a city in flames, then he pulled a massive u-turn, smoking the back wheels nearly off the back of the car, and sent us hurtling back towards Springfield. Bill was mostly on the nod—though I could never catch him making the connection, he always found his horse, no matter what lonely highway we were traveling down—so I’d have to wrestle Neal for the wheel one-on-one. I was slower than he was, and he knew the tricks of prison infighting: the knee to the balls was just a feint, I’d jerk away and right into where his thumb was waiting for my throat—but I learned a few tricks from the sutra Kilaya left me with, and sometimes I could grab that thumb and bring Neal to his knees, then start heading East again, back onto Route 66. And in the back seat, halfway between dreamland and pipe dream, Bill would mumble and prophesize of the horrors that awaited in New York. Men transformed as they strolled down the street, then scuttled up buildings with their new claws, or the tentacles with a thousand kissing suction cups, and there nested and bred for the new Reich. Babies born hideously deformed, they shattered mama’s hips on the way out, all head and horns plopped atop corpse bodies. Bill called them the lucky ones.

The unlucky ones were still men and women, still normal. Far too normal, square as houses. What could they do but keep their heads down and pretend that their bosses hadn’t been driven mad, and hadn’t demanded that the mail room boys take off their foreskins with the sharp rocks he brought in from his driveway back in Westchester County? Cuddle up to the beetleman in bed next to you once a week? Sure, as long as he brought home his paycheck and a bag full of groceries. Better to close your girly little eyes and think of John Fitzgerald Kennedy while every hole in your body was probed by chitinous appendages, while the clicking laughter of the beast that was once your high school sweetheart ground into your ears like street glass.

New York, New York, a town so cool they damned it twice. The cult was strongest there; when Cthulhu awoke, the tidal wave of fear and change he burst forth from rose high over this land and finally broke over the purple, smog-choked sky of midnight Manhattan. Black rain fell like blessings, and coated the concrete and glass steel mountains of the haunted isle. Wall Street was ankle-deep in blood, Central Park a range where the livestock was all one succulent meat, all long pig. Get a job patrolling the border with a sharpened stick, why not? Better them than you, and besides, you got to sleep in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, away from the smell of horse shit from the fancy handsome cabs and the sound of bones crunching under the jaws of mile-long trains of maggots.

“Just settle in for the ride, boys” Bill would mutter to us in the back seat, as I wrestled Neal for the wheel, but he wasn’t talking to us, he was talking to the poor old New Yorkers who had bowed before the Dreamer, and let Him put the blinders on their souls.

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Nick Mamatas is the author of the Bram Stoker Award-nominated short novel Northern Gothic (Soft Skull, 2001). His short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, mainstream publications like the men’s magazine Razor, the NYC-based monthly Wide Angle, and the underground zines The Whirligig, Ragshock, and Pablo’s Comics Extravaganza. When not writing fantasy and horror, which is 99% of the time, he writes about radical politics, publishing, digital art and fringe cultural phenomena. His reportage and essays have appeared in the Village Voice, Silicon Alley Reporter, Artbyte, Razor, In These Times, Clamor Maximum Rock-n-Roll, and the Disinformation Books anthologies You Are Being Lied To, Everything You Know Is Wrong and Abuse Your Illusions.

Move Under Ground will be published in May 2004 by Night Shade Books.