The Land Is a Black Mass
By L. G. Merrick
Illustrated by Steve Morris
The car was going way too fast.
“Say, man, no rush. Chill on out.”
If honey had a sound, it was Micah Aaron Hogue’s voice. He was used to it setting people at ease. The chicks on the commune always told him he should be a singer (which he liked), and even back home, people figured his voice destined him to be a preacher (which was why he left).
But that honey had no effect on the driver. The car jumped ahead faster. Began to rattle.
The driver had long black hair like a wool sweater pulled apart. He never once turned to face Hogue, and he gripped the steering wheel like a bird clutching a branch in a storm. The sweat on him was thick as axle grease.
The driver repeated the only thing he’d said so far.
“You’re my backup, okay? Slats didn’t make it.” Then he sobbed, “Poor Slats!”
Bad trip. Hogue had seen a few.
He wished he’d noticed before he got in. But he hadn’t checked too close who was driving the dusty Fairlane with one operational headlight. Not with the sun setting. Not when he hadn’t seen but two other cars since the Buick that dropped him at that crossroads seven hours earlier. No, Hogue had tossed his duffel onto the pile of rope and shovels on the Fairlane’s backseat and told himself, Well, buddy, trust the cosmos.
Forty minutes later the cosmos were pitch dark except for the one headlight.
Hogue tried again. This time he ramped up the personal warmth.
“Did I mention, man, I’m hitching to Kentucky? First visit back in two years. Since 1969. Mama be real happy. Pops too.” Saying it, he felt a genuine longing to see them again. He knew he had hurt them by leaving. It would be a good visit. Maybe he’d stay a month. “But you know, we got two weeks till Christmas, my brother. No need to rush. We—”
The man flinched and cried out, as if some face — invisible to Hogue — had pressed itself to the driver-side window.
The car jerked, began to fishtail. A pickaxe in back slid to the floor with a thud.
“We’re close! They’re thick!” the driver yelled.
Hogue gripped the dashboard to hold himself in place. He felt sure the car would spin out or flip. He couldn’t bring himself to laugh at what popped into his head — which was Please God, get me out alive, I’ll do anything!
He saw how funny it was, though. Months on the commune evolving, and one hour with this loon had regressed him to his backwoods faith of fear and bargains and miracles.
And then, miraculously, the car did slow. The driver evidently expected something to come into view, and did not want to miss it. He leaned forward until his chin was over the wheel, as if those extra inches would give him just the notice he needed.
Hogue thought Trust the cosmos? No, trust the blood of Jesus! and this time he brayed nervous laughter.
Suddenly the driver pinned himself back, arms straight, jammed the brake. The nose of the car dove, the rear rose up. Shovels hit the back of Hogue’s seat. He bumped his head on the roof. Ahead, an empty railroad track crossed the highway.
The car shuddered to a halt. The dust in its wake swept on past.
The driver said, “Now the hard part.”
He sounded focused. Agitated, yes, but not spaced or freaked. Hogue, relieved the car had stopped, turned to get a better look at him.
The driver turned to Hogue, too, for the first time.
Hogue jerked back and uttered a grunt as if punched in the gut.
“Guh!”
The guy’s left eye was missing.
By the look of it, the eye had been clawed out. Tattered flesh rimmed the socket, crusted with dry blood. A dirty wad of gauze stuffed the socket itself.
“Keep her right here!” He jammed down the parking brake. “I’ll place the signs!”
He fished a fringed suede purse from the back floor, pushed open his door, and jumped out.
He hadn’t run twenty yards down the tracks before darkness swallowed him whole.
Hogue stared. The door hung open. Cold air filled the car.
Then it occurred to him he was sitting on railroad tracks. The trunk, at least, hung over them.
Hogue slid over and pulled the brake release, put her in neutral. Dude had taken the keys, so Hogue got out, braced shoulder against doorframe, and pushed, hand on the wheel to steer for the shoulder. He heard three or four hard knocks from the rear as the car rolled, arrhythmic and startling. Dammit if that fishtailing and ninety-to-zero stop cracked the torque boxes, or worse, bent a driveshaft joint. This was no place to be stuck.
He pushed the parking brake down and turned the headlight off, hazards on. Then stood in the middle of the road, assessing his predicament.
In all directions, the land was a flat black mass under a low ceiling of cloud. A cold wind blew without pause for breath.
He remembered his mother’s protest two years back:
“If you go to that California, you’ll mix with heathens! You’ll be at the mercy of nuts! And perverts. It’s a godforsaken place.”
He’d kept his reply in line with her highest hopes for his piety, yet also made it a rebuke, and self-serving as hell: “Mamma, God has forsaken no part of this world.”
Secretly, though, he had wanted to lose his faith. Had headed West specifically to lose it. Or remake it, anyway, into something a Kentucky mind could not recognize. Find a God made of love. A life in harmony with the benevolence of nature. Expanded horizons of awareness. Sex without the hang-ups.
He supposed going after the driver was the decent thing to do. And the Christian thing, dammit.
He listened to the click-clack of the hazards as they splashed red-orange glimmer down the steel rails. He thought of what that empty land might hold, if not empty. The Manson Family. A Zodiac Killer. As Mamma warned. He did not want to leave the car.
But the Kosmik Konnekshin commune was itself in the Mojave. So he knew the desert to be a place of beauty and creativity. Many times he’d run the dune buggy out to the ancient Indian site on the edge of Joshua Tree, sat on the rocks with beer and weed, sometimes in the company of June or Earth-Girl. Always achieving a serenity, surrounded by pictographs of the sun and tortoises, cut into the cliffside by those old Indians. Deserts were peace. So what had him freaked — the dark?
Yeah, and that torn-out eye.
But if the guy was high enough to gouge out his own eye, then he needed a friend more than anyone else Hogue had ever met.
Hogue started down the tracks.
He estimated from his own experience that the acid-fueled mind would follow patterns, and this line of track was the only pattern around. So the guy would stick to it. Follow the tracks a mile or two and there he’d be, fetal and shivering.
For a short while the hazards cast Hogue’s shadow before him in flashes. After he’d exceeded that light’s influence and it was not remotely visible over his shoulder, he depended on starlight. This was scant. It descended only because sporadically the rushing cloud cover parted in long narrow rents, as if raked by an enormous claw. Then were distant hills lit, or there sparkled upon his immediate surroundings an indigo glow — one soon to speed off and wink out, as those gaps above swept on and closed. Throughout, the wind came ceaseless and grainy with sand, which pelted his face and made tiny ticking sounds along the rails.
Kicking through yet another scrub brush between the ties, it occurred to him this track had fallen out of use. No wonder there’d been no gate back at the crossing.
He supposed he had walked a mile. Hard to know. The desert distorted distance. He kept moving.
This guy is like a cop’s idea of a hippie, he thought. Dropping acid and going so crazy, he plucks out his own eye.
That can’t be what really happened, though. . .
Suddenly the wind reversed direction. It hit him from behind. He thought something solid had crashed into him, it hit so hard — a wind as severe as a train roaring down the rails he walked between. He staggered, arms flailing, and nearly fell.
Then the blast faded. The steady, lesser headwind resumed pelting him.
What the hell was that?
He had to admit, this desert felt different than his Mojave. The Mojave was next to L.A. and Big Bear. This desert, whatever it was, surely met only more desert.
To either side of the track, now he saw with some surprise, stones arose. A few close. Most farther out. A line of them stretched away, in an arc. They stood like pillars, momentarily exposed against a star-filled rift in the clouds. Silhouettes, regularly spaced. He wondered what process of erosion —
One moved.
No. No, that was imagination. It stood thirty feet tall. It had to be stone. It was hard to see and he’d made a mistake.
The desert distorted everything.
He wished he had a flashlight.
Abruptly it struck him, what if the driver had run into nowhere — off the rails, as it were — and had already gone back to the car and driven away?
Hogue quickened his pace as if to undo the idea. Beyond the towering black forms there now rose low hills or mounds. He had a sense he was watched. The Mansons, the Zodiac.
Rescue the driver, keep your karma right, he told himself. Get the ding-dang car keys and bug the hell out.
He seemed to be approaching the center of vast concentric circles of stone pillars, arced out a half mile — a quarter mile? The desert distorted.
All at once he felt his gut tighten, and his mind went blank. He felt coldly certain that he had crossed into a place on Earth that did not know God. A patch His will had never touched, His eyes never beheld. This spot was to God like that one under the trestle back home where automobile radios always fuzzed to static. There could be no reception of Him here, no presence.
Hogue’s hands shook. I am in the absence of the Creator.
The temperature had dropped ten degrees in his past five paces, and it continued to drop as he progressed. Ahead he saw a tattered bag of garbage scattered across the tracks. He decided to go that far and turn around.
It was not garbage. It was — when he stood over it — a hand. Fingers clenched as if in agony, half a forearm attached and the rest cut off. More pieces. It was a person. Torn up.
Hogue went light-headed. He knelt. Fought not to pass out.
The rails glistened where he knelt. Blood, wet.
So this had happened recently. Whatever animal had attacked would be close —
He had to find the driver fast. He stood to call out.
His yell choked off when he saw the head.
The head stared with one mad eye. The head lay on the ground where it had been thrown beside the tracks. Some torso and an arm were attached. The rest severed by a diagonal cut that crossed from the point of one shoulder to beneath the opposite armpit. As if the driver’s top had been sliced off by a sword —
Oh.
Not a sword. As if the driver had fallen on the tracks — and steel wheels had rolled over him.
Hogue ran.
He ran for the car. He ran as if chased. He ran terrified, irrationally certain that some phantom train was bearing down behind him, borne on the wind. But he would not run off the tracks. He knew then he would become irretrievably lost. There’s no train, he told himself, no train! But he knew what he had seen, so he ran.
By the time the glow of the hazards came into view, he no longer felt sure what he had seen. He slowed. Be rational.
He had not seen a one-eyed head. Probably a plastic bag with a bottle cap caught in it. The hand was a latex glove. Garbage. He had freaked out. He would sleep in the car. The driver would appear at dawn. At a truck stop they’d compare stories and laugh over pancakes. He felt so much better now that he could see the blinking taillights.
He stopped short of the road.
The car’s trunk was open.
He stood rooted a long time, desperate to catch his breath. To be silent.
Then he realized — obviously, the driver had come back. Had opened the trunk to get a flashlight.
Now he’s out looking for me!
Yet Hogue stood on the opposite shoulder for long minutes, staring.
Liquid had pooled behind the car. Streaks led away from the pool. The liquid glimmered with each flash. Oil?
There were smears on the side of the car. As if someone with dirty hands—though they were not clearly handprints — had forced the trunk open from inside and flopped out onto the pavement, laid there pawing the car, crawling to the side of it, used the car to pull themselves to their feet. Smears of blood? He could not see red in the lighting he had. Maybe only dirt.
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, He maketh me to lie down in green pastures,” Hogue began to recite automatically as he inched toward the car.
The trunk light was on. The trunk looked wet inside. A bloody rope looked gnawed through. And painted on the trunk floor was a sort of — star, formed by two skewed squares. Squares? No, it had only seven points. It was a disorienting shape, not symmetrical. It dizzied him, the situation did. The star was big enough to set someone inside of it. If they were tied up.
Thoughts of the Manson Family were a klaxon blare in his head. He moved for the driver’s seat. Who had been in the trunk? The driver had taken someone out here to kill — then got hit by a train? And the victim escaped?
There was no train. There was only garbage.
Hogue knew how to hotwire a car. Any boy worth two bits in his hometown could. He reached under the dash, pulled the ignition wires, got a spark.
The engine caught on the third spark and he closed the door and locked it, killed the hazards, and exhaled in enormous relief. He could leave.
But shouldn’t he try to find whoever had been in the trunk? Some girl — poor thing.
Of course, he’d look. He’d use the headlight. He switched it on — and there she stood. In front of the car. In a white gown painted in blood.
She flinched from the light with a squawk, shielded her eyes.
Then angrily banged her bloody hands down on the hood. He jumped.
What was wrong with her hands — what was —
She slammed them down again. The windshield cracked, a silvery vein up its center.
She opened her mouth — he thought to yell —
The purple tongue that slid from between her lips came forked and slipped all the way across the hood to flicker at the windshield.
He screamed.
She raised her hands to bang again and he understood now how her hands were wrong. Each had three fingers as long as her forearm. A long thumb sprouted below each wrist. She had hands like an enormous bird.
He jerked the car into drive and he floored the gas, and when the car hit her she was knocked backward and staggered and she turned to run, and he steered to get her. She went down, and he felt the left front tire bump up over her, he heard a crunch, and a frenzied inhuman shriek cut through the windowglass and bound itself to his spine in a way that never left him, not ever, but instead became the most important part of him. He sped away at top speed.
When he got to Kentucky, his mother was happy.
A decade later, she felt proud indeed that everyone spoke so highly of him — as a preacher.
“There’s no other with his impassioned speech,” her nearest neighbor once remarked. “Anybody listens to one Micah Aaron Hogue sermon? They feel in their bones, here’s a man whose nightly dreams surely echo with the tongue of God.”
Silently, though, his mother had misgivings. For to her, Micah Aaron did not seem a God-fearing man. He seemed quite the opposite. He seemed a man consumed by fear of quite the opposite.
The end