THE ONLY NAME FOR IT IS HORROR.
The doors of the Chevy swung open as though a giant had flipped them open as he raced by us. Wind, I told myself.
It wasn’t ordinary wind, however, which grabbed the two of us and hurled us out of the car. I tried to stand up and fight back, flaying uselessly against the furiously rushing air currents. I grabbed Andrea, pulled her against my chest and clung to her. Not all the Thunder gods in hell would take her from me. Lightning struck next to us, thunder rolled down the canyon walls like charging troops of cavalry. Again lightning sizzled all around us, spawning a thick, nauseous sulfur odor.
The Thunder gods wrestled with me for only a few seconds before they tore my love out of my arms and hurled her up the trail like a fragile cloth doll, tumbling head over heels in the air currents.
Then they swept me off the ground and pitched me up the mountainside after her. The maniac howling wind carried us through the air, like parachutists in free-fall back up the half-mile of steep trail, as the thunder boomed and the lightning crackled, and toward the main building and through the door, which opened just before we slammed into it.
A tornado?
They don’t have tornadoes in Arizona.
An especially severe thunderstorm at a high altitude? Were we not almost five thousand feet above sea level?
All right. Arizona thunderstorms can develop sudden and furious gusts of high-speed wind. But not strong enough to carry someone up a half-mile of mountain trail.
Might not the wind have slammed me into the Chevy and knocked me out? Might not everything else be the product of unconscious fantasies boiling up from the last several hectic days?
Possibly. I don’t think so. Not the events at the beginning of the horror anyway. The thunderstorm really happened.
Anyway, we were swept into the main building of the ghost town of Clinton and our hell began.
The thick black cloud was there already, licking its chops in anticipation. We were both slammed against the wall across the room and pinned against it, a couple of feet off the floor. Instantly the place was suffused with a terrible stench, a combination of all the outdoor latrines in the Philippines and the burning flesh and aviation fuel after a kamikaze hit the carrier next to us at Okinawa Jima. I thought I would suffocate with the stench. Before they were finished with us, I would wish that death might be that easy.
Invisible hands jabbed and poked at us, the way Indians were said to torture their victims before killing them. For a few moments I saw Andrea twisting and turning against the wall. Her clothes were ripped away. She was spun around and around as though she were being beaten by invisible whips. Then she disappeared in the inky darkness. Her screams continued for a long time, shrieks more terrible than those that had awakened me during our night in Globe; the anguished agony of a woman being raped, mutilated, murdered; the cries of a damned child pleading for the end of her suffering. Then they stopped.
What happened next seemed like the whole of eternity. In fact, it lasted at the most only a few hours, and maybe only a few minutes. It was like being tumbled down the side of a mountain in a landslide of nightmares.
My nightmares and Andrea’s fused and consumed us both. I was being destroyed by these combined nightmares and, even if I could no longer hear her screams, she was being destroyed with me.
My first accusers were the men I’d lost in VF 39—Rusty, Hank, Tony, Marshal, all the others. They circled around me, their dead distorted faces and empty eyes fading in and out in the blackness, screaming curses and accusations. I had cut short their lives, stolen them from their wives and sweethearts and from the children they never knew. I had sent them all to hell.
I shouted my innocence. I had tried to protect all my men, war was hell, casualties were inevitable. I had done my best.…
Either they did not hear or they did not care. They were dead and in hell and I was still alive.
And the heat of the wall to which I was pinned became with each accusation more like a frying pan.
Rusty turned into a tiny baby, gurgling helplessly as it was held under water; Tony changed into a sailor half of whose head had been bashed in. They too accused me of cutting short their lives.
“I didn’t kill you,” I shrieked. “She did!”
So much for taking care of Andrea.
My betrayal did not save me, the screams of outrage continued. My frying pan was now white-hot, my clothes were ripped off, the invisible hands tormenting me became more insistent and determined. I too was spun around to be tortured by the steel-tip whips, which tore off my flesh in great bleeding hunks. I was to be flayed alive and not permitted to die.
Then the new dead were replaced by the old dead—brown-skinned, primitive people from long ago; the timid, diffident Salados from their pueblos high above the river valley; Spaniards; Apaches; other Indians; Americans; my grandparents from Ireland, Jeremiah and Maggie Keenan, both drunk; men and women whom I did not recognize, from her past, not mine.
The Dutchman was there, a horrible grin on his ancient bearded face. And Peralta and Meisner and the Mexicans the Dutchman had killed. And the victims of the Apache massacre. And Clara Thomas—all the people in the legend, all come back to judge me guilty of their deaths.
They all died horribly: tortured, scalped, raped, butchered, ravaged by disease; men burned at the stake; women cut into tiny pieces that were then roasted over campfires; children whose heads were smashed against the rock walls of the canyon.
They all accused me; I was the master murderer, the true Hitler of all history. I was the death that had slain them all.
“No! No!” I screamed. “I didn’t do it! She did! She is death, not I!”
Even then the one or two sane cells that still were working in my brain wondered when the Japanese whom I had undoubtedly really killed in aerial combat would come to accuse me of their murder.
They never showed up.
The dead and the dying faded into the blackness and the blackness itself slowly lifted, to hover like the threat of pestilence beneath the ceiling. Then the dead returned to dance.
They whirled and spun, leapt and cavorted, jumped and gamboled as if they were celebrating a graveyard Mardi Gras, all the time performing unspeakably lascivious acts on each other. I was pulled off the wall, like a prize trophy, and made to dance with them. Why not? I would soon join them, if I had not done so already.
It was as real as the Compaq 286 on which I am setting down the story of Andrea King.
Maybe the horror was on a different plane of reality (whatever that means) than my micro, but it was still real. More real.
Why am I alive then? Why did I receive a several-decade—still indeterminate—stay of execution?
I don’t know. Not for sure. Anyway, they didn’t get me that night in the Superstition Mountains. Or, obviously, I wouldn’t be writing this story.
The dead left me, with a strong promise that they would be back in a little while. I was still pinned against the wall in total blackness. I shouted for Andrea, but she did not or could not reply.
Then I heard a clink beneath my feet, coins falling on the floor. Despite the darkness I could see the glint of gold. Hundreds, then thousands of gold coins piled up beneath me, around me, rising rapidly to my throat. I was being buried in gold.
I pleaded with the horror to spare me. I had not come looking for gold.
But you did, the darkness screamed, you wanted to search for the mine of the Dutchman.
Only as a joke.
The clinking stopped.
Then the Dutchman again. Not the Flying Dutchman. The Lost Dutchman, though he did not think he was lost. And he wasn’t lost. It was the mine that was lost.
Jacob Walz was only dead.
He was a tall, cadaverous old man with a bald head and a dirty white beard. He told me where his mine was. All the searchers are totally wrong about where it might be.
More gold than in South Africa and Russia put together. A mountain, quite literally, of gold. I know exactly where it is.
The Dutchman disappeared with his hoard of gold and the dead—the other dead—returned for more dancing. The men of VF 39 and Andrea’s half-headed husband and drowned baby were with them.
They told me there was going to be a trial. I was guilty, no doubt about it, but I was going to be tried officially and formally before my sentence of eternal damnation was passed.
The charge? Violating the sanctity of these sacred mountains by fucking a cunt who had already been damned to hell.
Andrea’s husband was the judge, her little girl the prosecutor, the dead from VF 39 were the jury. Maggie Keenan, my grandmother, of all people, was the defense attorney. And she was roaring drunk.
They turned on the light of the full moon. Andrea’s body, flayed, but still breathing, a twisted, squirming mass of agony and disease, was staked out on the floor in front of me.
“Fuck my mommy now,” the baby screamed. “Is she a good lay when she’s rotting flesh?”
“No, no,” I pleaded.
“Not till he’s convicted,” her grotesque, one-eyed father cautioned. “But let him know that he is already damned to screw a skinless corpse for all eternity.”
The men of VF 39 cheered enthusiastically.
The trial was quick. Instant replays were flashed on the wall of the dance hall. My love was made to seem a hideous obscenity.
After each terrible scene, Andrea’s husband chanted mechanically, “Your witness, defense counsel.”
“Let’s all drink a toast to the damned!” Grandma Keenan would shout.
Producing bottles of wine magically, they all drank, “To the damned, long live the damned!”
Andrea’s baby summed up the evidence, “He fucked the cunt who murdered my father and me, her husband and her daughter.”
“And violated our sacred hills because of his greed and lust,” the thunder boomed out.
“How do you find, officers and gentlemen of the jury?” shrieked the hideous judge.
“Guilty!” my shipmates shouted gleefully.
“Hey, can’t I defend myself?”
“Guilty!”
They began to dance again. I was dragged into the dance, forced to pair with Andrea’s repulsive body. I searched for some sign in her eyes.
But there were no eyes, only empty sockets.
I knew I was going to die. The danse macabre was for me. I spun faster and faster as I was passed from one set of obscene hands to another. I teetered on the brink of an eternity of hell, where the torments of my dance of death would endure forever.
Then, from the depths of my being, so deep down that I doubted there could be any reality there, something powerful, indeed indomitable, began to struggle to break free. I lost it, groped for it, found it, lost it again, and then had it thrust unceremoniously into my hands. What was it? A magic sword? A massive pike? A deadly lance? An eighteen-inch gun from the Yamoto? An FH-1, the jet I had flown in Hawaii?
All of these and more.
Made bold by the surge of courage which that mighty weapon gave me, I informed my tormentors that they could jolly well fuck off.
Well, I was using the same language they used.
“What do you mean, you poor damned fool!” Andrea’s little girl screamed at me. “You are going to hell for screwing my mommy, that goddamned cunt!”
I told the child and the rest of them I was very sorry, but I was not about to join them on their return trip to Hades. I didn’t belong there. Purgatory maybe, but not hell. So the bus would have to leave without me.
They didn’t like it. The violins screeched more wildly, the dancers whirled more insanely. Jeremiah Thomas Peter Keenan, USNR, dug in his heels. “No. And I mean no.”
“All right, we’ll take her.” John King glared furiously at me from his single bloodstained eye.
“She’s the one we want anyway,” the men of VF 39 shouted barbarously. “You took our women, we have come to take your cunt to hell with us forever and ever. Amen.”
Fine. You can have her. She belongs in hell.
They tossed me back to the wall and continued their feverish gavotte. Andrea’s skinless, mutilated body was caught up in their dance. She shrieked in her terrible agony but danced with them, tossed from one to another, because this was an assigned part of her eternal torment.
“Yes, she is the one we want. We will come for him later.”
“It’s all right with me. I thought she looked like she was dead the first time I saw her. Take her and you’re welcome.”
Exhausted, burning with heat, terrified, ready to die if only to escape the madness, I thought about my decision.
The magic sword was still in my hands. “Coward. Use it for her.”
“I don’t want her. I never wanted her.”
“Your life will be empty without her. You know it.”
How did CIC get in this courthouse?
“Never mind, I’m correct as always. Take her away from them.”
“Your name and rank and specialty, CIC.”
“Michael, Seraph, wars in heaven. Now get her back, you stupid bastard. We’ve put a lot of work into her.”
“Really?”
“You’ve known all along that she’s special.”
“I guess. Did you guys make her such a good lay?”
“Who else? Now stop this stupid discussion and get her back before you really upset us, you worthless, gutless, frigging son of a bitch.”
“You betcha, sir. Right away, sir.”
Never argue with a seraph.
“Wait a minute, guys; I’m the hero of this Western. I’ve just made up my mind you can’t have her either. Why not? Because she’s mine, not yours, that’s why not. I have staked my claim on her. The Dutchman can have his damn mine. I’ll take her. The matter is not subject for discussion.”
“Who says so?”
“CAG One says so! Pilots, man your planes!”
“You can’t have her. She is already damned.”
“Sorry, that judgment has been reversed on appeal.”
“No one reverses our appeal.” The Dutchman again.
“Someone does. And He’s on my side.”
“You don’t believe in Him!”
“That’s irrelevant. It has been ruled on appeal that she gets another chance.”
“Fuck him! We’ve got her.”
“Fuck you! I’m taking her back.”
Many years later I wondered if what came next really was a war in heaven.
Leyte Gulf on a bigger scale. Between good and evil. Was she that important?
At that moment, despite my pain and fear and near madness, I had no doubt. No one was ever more important.
Whatever it was, the struggle for Andrea King—if that was her name—was titanic. Not a debate, not a trial, not an argument, but a furious tug of war, a war in heaven. I wanted her and they wanted her. I loved her and they hated her. We fought all night. Often I gave up and consigned her to their mercies for all eternity. Equally often I stopped them at the last moment and, with a mighty stroke of my magic sword or a burst of flame from my FH-1, I recovered her flayed body from them.
Or so it seemed.
Sometimes I thought I had won her. Other times I thought the black cloud had defeated me and carried her off. Sometimes I hated her. Sometimes I loved her. Sometimes I wanted to be rid of her permanently.
The last time, when I was finally willing to give her up and, out of weariness and discouragement and a desire to be done with all this foolishness, to consign her to hell for eternity, CIC appeared momentarily, or so I thought. He was a blond-winged giant in navy dress whites and the five stars of a fleet admiral. He carried a Browning automatic rifle under his arm.
“Where the fuck have you been?” I demanded.
“She will be part of your soul forever.”
“If you say so. But let’s get rid of these guys first.”
I imagined I heard the BAR rumble.
Then someone turned off the light of the full moon. Darkness settled in on me, permanently, it seemed. I was not sure whether I had won or lost.