The Damned Highway by Nick Mamatas Page B

7 pay phone. Lono speaking.”
    It’s my editor, and he has another assignment for me. Luck and happenstance are mine again. A plane ticket is waiting, he says. My per diem, in cash, is at the airport’s Western Union and currency exchange. I have thirty minutes to get to the plane. My assignment is to travel to Arkham, Massachusetts, and cover some problem with the Democratic Party’s rogue county committee. A rental car, paid for by my editor, will be waiting in Arkham. I’m instructed not to wreck it, but I barely hear the reprimand because my mind is making connections and swimming in synchronicity. Arkham, it just so happens, is very close to Innsmouth and a town called Dunwich. I don’t give a damn about the latter. It’s the former that interests me. Suddenly somebody is paying for this little journey into America’s dark and twisted heart. Luck and happenstance, my friends. Happenstance and luck. Lines within ley lines. Synchronicity and such. Ho ho, hey hey. I’d started out going to Arkham. Then I had set my sites on Innsmouth. It looked like those plans might have been stymied when I missed my bus, but now here I am, on the road again and on someone else’s dime, and continuing onward to the same destination.
    Looking back, it occurs to me now that I should have just killed myself then. Things would have been far easier that way.

FIVE

    The Third Eye . . . Keep on Truckin’ . . . The Ballad of the Human Guinea Pig . . . The Good Doctor Meets the Professor and the Starry Wisdom Wacko . . . The Nutcracker . . . Please Wait Until the Captain Has Turned Off the No-Smoking Sign . . . No Sleep till Innsmouth . . .
    â€”—
    With only thirty minutes to get to the airport, I don’t dawdle or even wash my hands, especially because I do not want to be there when the weirdo motel manager recovers his senses. Sticking around for such an eventuality would only lead to more great and terrible violence or a visit from the police, or both, and I am in no mood for such nonsense. I have a job to do, damn it, and a plane to catch. The hash has leveled me out some, but I still feel edgy and wired. I want to eat another shroom, but experience has taught me that those things are dangerous. I can’t afford to get sucked into another vivid nightmare, only to wake up in a gutter somewhere along the side of the road and nowhere near the airport. Not now. Besides, the previous one has left a nasty aftertaste in my mouth, as if I’ve bitten into a gorilla’s stomach. My tongue feels like it has hair on it, and the insides of my cheeks are dry. My head throbs slightly, right in the center, and I wonder if the hallucinogen has somehow affected my pineal gland.
    A strange thing, the pineal gland. Oh, the human body has many strange things inside our workings, most of them nothing more than leftover tissue that evolution has made obsolete; the appendix, tonsils, and adenoids serve no useful purpose anymore, yet still we have them. The pineal gland is a different sort of organ. It’s in charge of our waking and sleeping patterns, makes melatonin, and helps our bodies adjust to the changing seasons, but some people believe that it serves another, more metaphysical purpose. Some people believe that the pineal gland is where the human soul resides, and who knows? Maybe they are right. That old Frog philosopher René Descartes believed it to be so, but he also believed that the external world didn’t exist, and he also had a hard-on for God, so he is not to be trusted. Never trust a man who works from his bed, especially if that man is French. I have worked from many strange places, including beaches and my kitchen, but I have never written in bed. But never mind that. Many other cultures give special significance to the pineal gland, as well, believing it to be a third eye, of sorts, and that if one learns to utilize it properly, one could then see into the future and all sorts