1
Out on an empty highway, it called.
The Brakedown Palace was a junk gas station in the middle of a desert nowhere and looked—from the outside—as if coyotes guarded it. Tumbleweeds had grown like barbed wire where it edged the old highway, and rattlesnakes had dug tunnels beneath its garage bays. Had it ever thrived? Had the highway ever been so well traveled that the warped curio emporium had once been a popular stop? The jackalope statue—that perversity of taxidermy—an idea of rabbit hell that involved mounting a dead jackrabbit and thrusting the twin spears of antelope horns into its head as if this were some new yet alien creature. Had this attracted tourists? The scorpions in the individual killing jars, suspended in a thick clear liquid that made them glow green under fluorescent lights—was this a draw for the weary traveler at one time? The place even had a small statue of the Virgin Mary, stolen from some old churchyard, covered with the garlands of dried flowers in honor of those who had died in car crashes on the highway—those drunks and sleepers-at-the-wheel whose last moments were spent looking at this endless big empty, this wilderness of nothing, in the middle of the ass-crack of the universe. The cars—smashed or sometimes only slightly damaged, with broken windshields that still reflected death’s face—sat near the garages. I remember a red-and-white convertible T-bird, a classic, but inside the vehicle, rust and rot and that whiff of perfume and whiskey still staining its torn seats.
This was the place, the dumping ground of all things ruined and useless, that held the greatest attraction I would ever come to know.
The great unspeakable mystery! The dark wonder of the ancient world!
You wouldn’t think it would have any attraction, that place. You might have thought it was a “bad place” from the look of it.
Imagine it: an old dump of a gas station at the edge of hell’s highway in the desert, the one with the half-torn billboards nearby that read, SEE THE UNSPEAKABLE WONDER OF THE ANCIENT WORLD! WHAT IS THE ATTRACTION? WHAT MYSTERY DOES IT HOLD?
2
Watch the desert. It is out there. This abomination. Watch along the ridge, over at that mesa, after sundown.
You can hear it sometimes when it’s completely dark. So dark, even the stars have died out.
In the Southwest. In Arizona. Not among the cities and towns. Out where the scrub brush and ocotillo cactus take over the landscape. In those places where the tumbleweed blows through like a whisper of the past. The coyotes at twilight on the ridge of a mesa, their ki-yis sing of something sinister, something unnatural. The nest of rattlers in the shade of the overhanging rock has been driven out into the bare flat sunlight. And something there at sunset, scuttling along the dark lip of a cave—a crack in the wall of a cliff—some creature there.
Strange things live on the desert.
Strange people, too.
I heard from an old man over in town that some dogs had gotten torn up bad out on the mesa, right near where the new housing development was going in. Maybe it was just coyotes, or maybe even a mountain lion from up in the hills, driven down from its home by hunger and thirst. But it didn’t sound like it.
Someone said that they found a deep hole in the ground when they started to dig up an area for a new house and a swimming pool. They break up the earth, tear into it, and change it. They don’t think there’s anything in that desert earth, do they? They don’t think the something waits.
They’re idiots to expand this town out there, out where nobody in his or her right mind should live.
3
What are the demons that drive us?
For me, it’s the past. Memory is my demon. When we are young, we do stupid things. There’s no way around it. Perhaps we experiment with a drug that will hurt us. Perhaps we attach ourselves to the wrong people for us. Perhaps we take the one road off to the side of the main highway that may be the one road we should never have taken. Some of us die from our stupid things. Some of us survive and look back and regret our youths.
Some of us have a feeling of being damned from our stupid choices when young.
But I found out that every man can be redeemed. No matter how awful his demons are. No matter what he has done. Murder? Redeemed! Betrayal? Redeemed. Witness to slaughter? Redeemed.
But sometimes redemption looks a lot like hell itself.
And those demons are still there. We chase them down, whether we wish to do so or not.
What makes us pursue those demons, even when they destroy us?
It’s simply attraction. Once we get something in our eye, we want to see more of it. We want to own it.
Let me tell you about attraction.
Attraction makes us chase what, in the end, may chase us down. It is the shiny thing in the road that draws us, like crows, to our doom. Most times, the truck out of nowhere bears down on us and we end our lives in a flutter of dark feathers and scraped skin. Now and then, we nab the shiny thing and we fly with it. But there’s always one more shiny thing on some other road. Attraction is like that.
I know about attraction. It led me to bad places, but also to good.
Once, after a two-year love affair with the bottle, a failed suicide attempt, and a growing realization that my life was my own and didn’t belong to anyone else, I saw a woman walking down Main Street in Naga, Arizona, who looked like she kept two bobcats fighting under her dress. I followed her around town until she made it to her car, and then she turned around. I knew she was my redeemer the moment I saw her. It was more than attraction. It was something I didn’t think, then, could exist in the universe.
It was grace.
She had a face that made me forget everyone else I had ever met. I found her attractive, to say the least. I would have chased her to the ends of the earth if I had to, and given that Naga, Arizona, seemed like the end of the earth, I suppose I did. I was just twenty-three at the time, and living a crazy life. But she decided I was right for her. We ended up getting married, I became a better man, and after she died—too young—I went and built my home in a cavern out along a mesa, about ten miles off the new highway. I hated people, didn’t love the world, and preferred the company of jackrabbit and coyote to humankind. I had enough, and what I didn’t have, I scavenged and hunted and traded for. I wrote books, some of which have been published, but few have been read. Books with titles like, Abominations in the Ancient World, and The Lost Gospel of Hell. I know things that most men don’t, and I’ve tried to research all of it, to find out the truth of it. Sometimes, the visions themselves tell me the truth.
Sometimes, they lie.
I’ve seen a lot of strange things on the desert. I’ve seen a man who seemed to be turning into a dog. I’ve seen rains come out of nowhere, and from their pools, in the crater depressions of the mesa, strange fish generate from fossilized eggs. I’ve heard of a snake so large that it feeds on wild burros, and of a mountain lion that hunts only children.
But the one thing that is undoubtedly the strangest in my existence was something called Scratch, something that lay within a stone box in a glass case inside a gas station’s roadside attraction.
Let me tell you.