Move Under Ground | Page 6

We had lived in a tent and waited
around for her brothers to get me a job collecting manure and selling it
to the local cotton farmers, but then I got the itch and headed out on the
road again. And now she was there before me. Nipples like brown

plums, quiet eyes and little cesarean scars running up her tender belly.
For a wrong moment I followed my desire, and her face exploded into a
huge gaping Venus flytrap mouth with tentacled teeth. Sweet Jesus, if
my boot heel didn't pick that very serendipitous second to split and land
me on my derriËre, I'd have been meat that night and fertilizer today.
But I fell under the snapping and squiggling mouth and kicked hard at
Terry's knee. Top-heavy from the snapping head, now atop a whipping
stalk of a neck, she fell backwards, but was replaced. A huge wall of
Neal's faces, some smiling, some winking, others distracted and even
bored rolled up to me. I skittered backwards on my palms, but sweet
earth betrayed me, turning warm and viscous then collapsing into a pit.
The thought-forms were shambling towards me now, a mass of Neals
and Memeres and my poor old brother like he would have looked had
he been grown. The coach from damn Columbia and Allen too and
stupid Chad and Terry's brother Chavo, and goddamn even Marie with
preying mantis limbs as long as she, they were all there surrounding me,
with snake bodies or flat snake faces simply plopped atop cockroach
legs.
Shapeshifters. The formless given form by thought or evil deed.
Shoggoth. I knew the word now, somehow, but not from some
half-remembered bongo drum poem or off the back of a jar of Ovaltine.
Marie-The-Bee had told me on the way out the door, bless her.
Stilt-Marie sliced a wandering churchlady in half with a swipe of
scythe-arm, and chittered at me, but I couldn't hear her over the
splattered meat smacking into what I might as well call the ground.
And then I remembered the buzz in my ear from when I left the cabin
and the sweet perfume of green grape and sage.
The Master had gathered the students into the courtyard one day and
held aloft a butcher's knife, a simple and base act that alone would
require a week of ritual cleansing. Worse, then, he drew his other hand
from behind his back and held up a cat by the scruff of its neck.
"Stop me," Master said, "from killing this cat. Stop me from performing
this base act of barbarism."
The timid semi-circle of saffron-robed students looked up at Master in

stunned silence, and with a practiced move, Master lopped off the cat's
head. It fell to the ground like an overripe pomegranate. And it came to
pass that later a student who had been out gathering alms returned to
the temple and, hearing the gossip of the day, confronted his Master.
"And what would you have done?" the Master asked.
The student took off his sandals, placed them on his head, and walked
backwards from the room.
Master called after him, "You would have saved the cat!"
So when false Marie dipped her head low into the pit and unhinged her
jaw to show me her long tongue with its little face, its little scowling
General Eisenhower face, I did the absurd thing and took her cheeks
into my hands and rubbed my lips against her hanging horselip. I
stroked her wet straw hair and whispered "Oh Marie, sweet sweet
Marie," and soulkissed the shoggoth. She melted in my arms. Really. A
keening rose up from among the rest of them, and the slick jelly under
my feet once again turned to rocky earth. Some retreated, others gave
up the ghost entirely and just imploded, sucking themselves into their
own pits of dark nothing. Poor Marie sizzled and smoked around me,
making my pores tingle. She was trying to gain a more physical entrÈ,
but I was safe for now. The fog that enveloped me smelled of landfill,
and it felt for a long moment that I was in between. Not Dreamland, not
old terra firma, just the waking-up-in-the-morning world of blurry
shapes and voices. Then the sun pierced the fog, with great holy rays. It
was dawn. I was alone again, right at the edge of the bluffs. I felt the
ocean on my face.
It took me only a few minutes to scramble down the shore where I
found the squares again. They were dead, to a man and woman. Some
bashed against the rocks after a great fall, others bobbed in the surf,
face-down, bloated and burnt all at once. A few dozen of them there
were, maybe a hundred, all in the finest clothing