The Freewayfayers' Book of the Dead Read online

  Harry sticks to his promise and gives Laudette the money, plus a generous bonus for her concern and trouble.

  However appreciative Swan is, he thinks that he is too old and Gloria too young to be caught alive anywhere near a seance. The next day, before Keinar is expected, he takes Gloria to the zoo.

  In the meanwhile, ever since she came home from Nussbaum Street, Sarah has been in bed, lying in chaos, conducting herself as disorderly as ever. She keeps making contact with, whatever-it-is, that swirl that puts a swell on her, by hiking up her badly worn and torn old robe invitingly and saying her prayers incitingly,

  Mambo, Sambo, Fee-faw-fambo,

  fetch my hairy purple ram beau.

  “Toodle-oodle-ooooo!”

  When Keinar and Laudette march into the bedroom, they find her lying in a puddle of cold sweat. She is awake enough to know that she doesn’t want them invading her privacy. Laudette stands by while Keinar puts her palms to her temples and her thumbs in her ears. Her eight fingers, pudgy antennae of flesh, point up and wriggle.

  Sarah struggles to her knees and pulls the curtains around the bed closing herself off. She whistles loudly in an attempt to complicate and obstruct the job the stubby medium is trying to do. But, however hard Sarah tries to get the curl to come to her, whatever rhyming and whistling she does, with the medium present, nothing seems to work.

  Finally, Keinar, as if she had been accumulating power, reaches her hands out into the air. “Come to me who made contact with you yesterday. Hounds of the dead, pound me instead.” She touches the bedpost, and wham! A hot, diamond white flash forms a clear, crystal egg in the room; then, almost instantly, before its presence even has a chance to fully materialize, the egg cracks. An explosion within blows the shell to luminous bits and looses a rainbow fire of vivid, burning hues and a cloud of purple smoke. The discharge is of such power and intensity that it causes the medium to fall to the floor and the heavy sitter to fly back, landing in a chair in the corner. Laudette shakes with fear and wonder and mixes unholy exclamations with her prayers. “Father in Heaven! Holy mackeral! It’s the devil himself. I guess Sugar wasn’t hellucinating after all, but fuck, bless my soul! Piss and damnation! Emanual! What is this shit?”

  Sarah sees the flash through the curtains and feels the waves of heat and energy in the room. The familiar smoky haze, that sulfurous and sage-smelling cloud, begins to seep into her nostrils. It perks her up from her snit, gives her enough energy to crawl forward on her belly and poke her head through a cleft in the curtains. In the center of the room, just in front of the fireplace, there is a rainbow fire in the haze of purple smoke, and in that fire is a silhouetted figure: a dancing, dark, monkey-man. He has broad, bulky shoulders, a bit of a hump on his back, a chubby belly, thin hips, and he’s bent forward at the waist. His arms, thick with some sort of wattle running from wrist to shoulder, move so fast he seems to have more than two, and they are almost as long as his legs on which he balances himself, bouncing from side to side.

  Superficially, the vision seems flat, as if it were projected on a screen. Neither the flames nor the figure in them have depth in the normal sense, that range which extends both length and width. Yet the image does not seem thin. It is impossible for the women to overlook the dimensions of mind involved in what they see. The depth of the presence lies in angles within them. The sphere this figure is from includes the one they are on, intersects it, but continues beyond their senses. As a cross-section of a more inclusive pie, it can only be taken in a slice at a time.

  Keinar remains on the floor beneath the vision, twitching in violent spasms, clicking her tongue, and cracking her knuckles. Laudette looks on in horror, alternately covering her eyes and peeking, blessing herself, praying, and cursing. The vision is like a beacon, yet for all his brightness the light is not as blinding, the heat not as searing, as when it lit on Sarah’s back. Sarah can face what she feels. As her eyes adjust to the marvel she begins to see some definition in the body. The nimbuses, the colored flames, are not so much surrounding the figure but coming from him. His fingers and toes shed light. His arms leave multi-colored wing trails in the air. His body is covered by a hazy purple nap that would be hair were the presence mere flesh and not a show of glow and incandescent glitter. There’s a fiery halo that rings his head, illuminating his crown of gold, jewels, bones, and flowers. He wears similar necklaces and girdle chains, and a tiger skin skirt covers his lower body. His face is obscured by the dance. Spinning as he does in the extended range of the mind’s eye, the form presents all sides at once. His facial features are mixed with the back of his head. Sarah puts her lips together and blows a soft high trill wanting him to turn her way. When he does she can look directly upon her mystery lover’s face for the first time.

  He is as terrifyingly ugly as he is brilliant to behold. Indeed, as she felt him when he was on her back, he presents portraits in sheer baboonishness and black buffaloonery. His chops take the cake for bloody slaver and crustiness. He has wolfish teeth, fangs really, a piggish snout, horns, and pricked-up dog ears. His eyeballs are glowing, red-hot, blood-shot coals that pop out as they look at her. Despite the grisly and horrible sight, Sarah is engrossed. She can see stars in those sore eyes, a smile on those gory lips. For a moment that seems like an eternity she contemplates the beauty and radiance of the flaming dark face and sees there is a third eye set like a diamond deep in his brow that shines at her with passion, concentration, and wisdom, giving her a deep abiding moment of satisfaction, like a snatch of the snug, light, happy days she enjoyed after a round of lovemaking with Corn Dog.

  She whistles again and the tiger skin flares up. A red sheath of fire erupts from his smoky loins. There, front and center, ready to rollick, is a bright red hot rod. The opening at its tip has the same diamond radiance as his third eye gaze.

  Sarah’s moment of contentment passes. She feels great desire for the beast, passion that is as beatific as beastial. She rolls on her stomach and spreads her legs. In spite of the rawness of the skin on her back, her legs are still quite white, her sex is still pretty and pink. She starts calling every dog in her black magic books to lead the beast to froth in her heart of darkness, but his eyes move from her to the floor by the foot of the bed where old Keinar is jerking, quivering, and rolling her tongue in and out of her mouth with an incoherent song. As she did on Nussbaum Steet, the medium drops her hands from the temples of her mind to go gunning in her nether region. This time she pulls her dress up, revealing a soiled slip, saggy hose, wrinkled knees, and flabby thighs, marred with a system of purple veins that are very close to the surface. She is not wearing underpants and her genital area, overhairy and pronounced, is clearly visible. The scene of the two women vying for this monster’s attention is as ugly as sin to Laudette. She begins to pray loudly and in earnest. Not feeling the heat, Sarah takes a peek. Horror of horrors! As sad a sack of femininity as there is to see, yet Keinar has the fiery-eyed presence gazing longingly at her. Rankling that the medium is outdoing her for the part of bride of the monster, Sarah raises her voice, begging to be burned but intead of jumping her, the powerful presence gets down on all fours and lays hold of the quaking lump of ugly duck on the floor.

  The touch sets Keinar shivering like an out-of-tune engine; her nervous system misfires, her spine goes herky-jerky under a great flag of electronic fire. The terrible figure holds the medium’s head between his fuzzy thighs, and starts to bump and grind his buffalo-sized barb until its tip spews its lubricating waves of red-hot, heaven-scented body heat on her left ear. The heat is intense, the prick is long and sharp. He gives a light thrust to start and her scream is blood-curdling. When he rams his spectral scepter home, plunging down her ear canal to her throat, the medium’s eyes crackle with the charge of the wavy gravy.

  “Burn, baby, burn,” says Sarah. “It serves you right to suffer. It’s what you get for coming between us!”

  Laudette, cringing at each new turn of this horror, does not read minds, or believe in
gods other than the One True One, but she thinks she knows trouble when she sees it. She comes forward, clearly terrified, “Emanual, give me strength,” she says, then kneels down next to Keinar to help her. But a wind storm of radiation, a huge wave of energy that runs the gamut from ultraviolet to infrared, sweeps through Keinar. For a flash every bone in her body is visible through her skin and clothing. Laudette shrinks back. “Sugar,” she says, “this medium is too hot to handle. Should we call the fire department or an ambulance?”

  The jilt-edged zombie queen, perched on the bed, hisses, “Call the undertaker, I should hope!”

  Keinar tries to say something through the static storm, but the best she can do is growl, snarl as if there were a wild beast caged in her voice box. “I think it’s trying to tell us something,” says Laudette, getting down on all fours at a respectful distance to listen. “‘Help!’ It sounds like,” she interprets. “‘Get me a glass of transmission fluid before I croak!’”

  On a hunch, big Miss Lord runs down to the icebox and comes back, sweating, straining on the stairs, holding a tall cone of amber liquid. She takes a deep breath and summons up the courage to bring help to the medium flailing between the hairy spook’s knees. Into the cosmic waves she goes, and holds the foamy head under Keinar’s nose. Some spills and sloppy sips slip into one long, deep gulp; the body of the beer disappears, leaving its sudsy surface as a coat of effervescence around the medium’s tongue. At the same time the ear-bugger disappears, like a genie going back into its lamp. Puff! It goes entirely inside Keinar’s head causing her face to turn several shades of hot rod red and royal purple. Her tongue stretches, panting blue smoke. Laudette sees that she is trying to get up and speak, and helps her to her feet and into a chair by the fire.

  What comes from her mouth next is not language exactly, nor even a voice in the organic sense, but a fulminating thunder like a pipe organ in the bass register. At the same time it rumbles inside both Sarah and Laudette, an intelligible blanket of ideas, a telepathy that outshines letters, forms crystal clear pronouncements to them, but which we, as uninitiates, must rely on Art in Heaven to translate.

  “Sweet Bharani, Hairy Puna, Black Rose of Empire City …”

  The once and future beauty Sarah sees her love in her mind’s eye and hears his double talk. “Do you mean me?” she says.

  “Yes. The door is open! Thank you! With this medium meeting me half-way I won’t have to travel so far to be with you, and with a group of like minds ready to pick up the gist of the transmission, I’ll be able to stick to the shorter wavelengths and higher frequencies and leave my means of physical reproduction at home.”

  To Sarah, that doesn’t sound like the same hell hole lot of fun. She wants to say so but her tongue seems thick, paralyzed, and disobeys her mind. “Whooooo?” she hoots.

  “I am called everything from the Prime Mover to the Bending End, from the Hairy Tuna to the Holy Smoke, from the Happy Honeymooner to the Lone Cowpoke. I’m the Hero with a Thousand Nicknames, the Zero with a Thousand Milk Dames, the Knight of Knights, the Self Before It Said ‘I’, the Representative of the Unrepresented, the Voiceless Voice, the Anonymous Author, the Magic Mountaineer, the Killer of Death, the Master of Right and Wrong. In past lives I had yoga poses down pat and practiced breath control until I was called Blue-in-the-Face. In this incarnation I am Z Bharavi, Purple Monkey Sage, Lord of Khundyalinga, Pingp’yangpoong. But don’t let those fancy titles fool you. I’ve been a fool most of my life.”

  The women feel a tale uncoiling inside of them.

  “I was born with a lower-middle caste background, defective, deformed, and ugly as an ape. Yet at an early age I began to have intimations that I was the Incarnation of God and went off on my own to learn the secrets of Great Liberation. I vowed to go beyond the Between, to annihilate the nothingness, and return with the prize of immortality and the power of the cloudhopping stride. I would forgo personal transcendance to become the skipper of the Great Vehicle, the Craft that carries others to a similar state of perfection.

  “Of course I was sidetracked by sex. Who isn’t? I had desire, but decent women would run from ugly me, and I had no money to pay for it. However I met a sorceress who saw something in me. ‘Mother Goose’ was her Craft name, and her game was to establish a secret cult of women who would reach enlightenment through ritual intercourse. She beguiled me, and promised me the attainment of the goals I sought if I would become her slave. I went along with her for a while, but when I found out she wanted to sterilize me, that broke the spell. I began to look upon Mother Goose as my nemesis. Frightened and confused, I took a vow of celibacy and began to live as a solitary high holy ranger.

  “I turned to a meditative life to escape my woman troubles. My problems, however, didn’t come from women but from my overextended male ego and low image of myself. Though practicing great deprivations and self-denial, I made no progress in realizing my dream of walking on the air. After years of sitting with a supersensitive erection, my mind was still mud. Crushed under a sense of personal failure, I was on the verge of a desperate do-or-die try, fly away off the cliff, or kill myself on the rocks below trying, when a black cloud shaped like seagoing bark floated by. It had a voice aboard. It belonged to a ghost, I learned, by the name of Ulysses McLennon. A sailor in life at sea in the afterlife, he was still looking for the way back home. He had the Pu Mountains confused with the God-Heights of the Attic tradition. And, in a clear case of mistaken identity, he misread me, wretched failure, divine pretender, as a Higher Power, the Earthshaker, the Cloud-gatherer, the Lightning Hammerhead, Father Justice Himself, and put a plea before me. He said, since his own return was such a long time coming, he wanted the hand of God to deal out what his wife and her lover deserved. Lo and behold, as he prayed a whole scene formed in front of me: a faraway place, a big house with an enormous bed where a bat-faced man and beautiful butterfly woman fluttered in the gaslight on satin pillows and silken sheets. I was excited by the pictures’ content, and took their existence as proof that I was advancing on a positive path of spiritual attainment. Ulysses cried about how he was murdered on his homecoming, and I saw and heard the shooting. Amazed by the display, I did not comment that it looked more like self-defense than homicide. Although dead, the wily Ulysses refused to go into the Light. Adrift in the Between with a jealous eye on earth and a vengeful appeal to heaven that some higher power would wreak vengeance, he was prepared to stay stubborn and angry, seasick forever if need be, broadcasting his troubles, until he saw what justice he thought should be done.

  “Instead of reading Ulysses The Poongi Book of the Dead and advising him to turn off his mind, relax, float downstream, and dissolve in yonder sea of stars, I was flattered that he mistook me for the Big Boatsman in the Sky and afraid that if I told the truth, that I had not a whit of psychic go-power, this open channel I had to the dead and to the lustful living would close. I committed a terrible sin by leading this unhappy ghost to believe I would look into settling the score with his wife for him. He wanted to believe and I never told him otherwise. I told myself it was all for the greater good, that while I was contributing to the unhappiness of one ghost, I would learn to fly the Great Vehicle, and save countless thousands of others.

  “And so, on the subtle level, by allowing the ghost of Ulysses to believe in me as his God, I took him on as my co-pilot, my mate. We were bad company for one another. Ulysses a veteran seafarer, I a fledgling starsailor, were on the same lame duck wavelength. We communicated in polluted streams of consciousness, screwed-up, complicated. He saw in me some ideal father figure and I saw pictures in my mind of the labyrinths in his. He continually beseeched me to hurl a thunderbolt at the bad Penny and the wife-stealing Homer or at least put emnity between them, and I could see them perfectly clearly but I couldn’t touch them. Were I to get through, would I be obliged to do harm? I didn’t know. I was not an evil sort, only lost and misguided. Hooked on the pictures which lit my mind from his, like a Peeping Kazruti, I really did
n’t want to go any further. For years we stayed locked in a vicious circle. Depending on my subject for vision, I withheld the truth. Depending on me, his Lord, to mete out justice, Ulysses’ mind was an open book. How I worried that he would see my powerlessness, vanish, and take the peep show with him!

  “Just as I failed cloudhopping on my own and as Mother Goose’s flunky, I fared no better with Ulysses’ help. Worse in fact, for my mind was bogged down in the mess of Ulysses’ ghostly goals and regrets, his hopes and fears, his anger and anguish. I lived only for what I depended on, and hadn’t the privacy for suicide.

  “In time Penelope and Homer died on their own accord. They passed away serenely and peacefully after a life together of love and happiness. I saw their souls, like a bat and a butterfly, fluttering off. Ulysses wailed. He said he thought adulterous lovers were supposed to go to hell, not be rewarded by an eternity of bliss. I saw how badly he suffered. No fun peeping on an empty nest, I could no longer ignore my own faults. I tried to tell Ulysses the truth and brush him off, but the old seadog said he would never give up on me. I had allowed him to believe in me, and now I could not lose him, ever. My sin was my punishment.

  “Plagued by the ungrateful dead, at my wits’ end in a premature Between Life crisis, I sought the counsel of my ex-lover and archenemy. Mother Goose was happy to see me. She said she could not free me of Ulysses’ ghost, but would let me in on a secret that would allow me to free myself. Would I vow henceforth to love, honor, and obey all women? ‘I do,’ I said, and as she slipped me into her Goose stream, a rush of energy such as I never felt before added dimension to my physical being. Wrapped in soul, either my body grew bigger or the world shrank until it was inside of me. I slouched forward, and as the outside came in, my insides poured forth into the river, and thence the ocean of Light. I was Lord of the Air after all!

  “In my glory I gained immense respect for Mother Goose. I fell on my knees and pledged myself as hers forever. She laughed, honk honk, and said she just wanted to be friends. She predicted that one day a beautiful white goddess who calls all dogs would be my mistress, and then she vanished, leaving me to cope with my newfound power alone.