The Perpendiculars, Book one, Part one -- excerpt

“Char me the trunk of a giant redwood, give me pages of white cliffs to write upon, magnify me thousands of times and replace my trifling immodesties with a titanic megalomania… then I might write large enough for our subjects.”

-- Charles Hoy Fort, the Book of the Damned

1 - THE RETURN OF THE MUMMY’S HAND

A late October morning, see-your-breath cold. Frost on the ground and the dirt track feeling stiff underfoot. A morning for quiet contemplation of the coming winter, for watching the pinking east through a cloud of coffee-steam… or for staying in bed, cozy, until the sun softened things, chased off the frost.

Without coffee and without a bed – I’d rolled up my rim about twenty kilometers back on the highway, and my blankets were two chilly hours behind that – all I had on that country morning was a mission and a message, a bagful of mojo dynamite. I fingered the battered satchel at my side, feeling my own flimsy hocus-pocus over and around the dark and ancient secrets within. It felt transparent; only a lazy idiot could fall for this gimmick. Lucky for me, I guess, that laziness and idiocy are powerful constants in this unpredictable world. What else can you count on?

The house itself was unremarkable. Hardly the pulp-novel image of a wretched hive or a royal refuge, which was of course the whole point, since it was both. Vinyl siding, cedar deck, tar shingles… just another ranch-style farmhouse on a medium-sized acreage in a typically pretty chunk of some run-of-the-mill geography. A retirement plot, exactly.

Except this particular piece of Freedom 55 – Freedom 5,500, if you want to get cute – was a long way from country-kitchen fantasies of thanksgiving with the grandkids. I could smell it from the foot of the drive, mystic stink overpowering the molecular diesel aroma of Addy’s idling Rabbit, the Brave Bunny. Scent of decay, mouldering mansion… something majestic gone sick and wrong. Piss in the corner of a palace, a cathedral repurposed as a dungheap, and through it all a whiff of incense, of camphor, of clean reeds from my bag. I pumped as much will as I dared into my metaphysical odor-eater; I didn’t want the shitdwellers scenting the disinfectant. Not yet.


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