The Damned Highway by Nick Mamatas

first to harness the active elements of the plant, and they use it to pick their way across the otherwise-trackless jungle. To the Pygmy every puff of wind through the vines is a street sign, every leaf a traffic signal. My hope was, really, that a few of the more ambitious reporters would put down their bourbons, even for a moment, and try some Ibogaine themselves. It would only take one to dip his head into the Great Known—no un typed here, no un meant—and come out the other side ready to deliver a burning bushel of fragrant truth. But the little nerds just copied their notes from the blackboard and collected their A-double-pluses from their employers and the marks. Me, I got a good eight and a half minutes of fame, and a mission. I am untouchable now; even Nixon can’t pull the strings like I can.
    The media were too easy. I could do it to them again at any time. Even the marks that finally wised up would have to report something— Deranged Lunatic Insists Mind Parasites Control Election Outcome . One could prefix the words deranged lunatic insists to any headline, and only increase its accuracy. It’s practically implied, and the reading public would hardly read the little phrase as a disclaimer these days. Success comes easy at a time like this; to really accomplish something I’d have to cut through the underbrush of ink and wires, to get to the real center of Americanus Assholius.
    It occurs to me that Innsmouth is close to our final destination in Arkham. Yes, Innsmouth, home of the most violent and weirdest race riot of recent memory. Not an inner city, not don’t-call-me-nigger-whitey rage, and oh so close to those dark New England woods where Muskie first went mad with wild tears, in New Hampshire, if not in Maine. That is where the American Nightmare truly started. That is the dark source. And that is where I’ll start my own campaign, a campaign to save the world.

FOUR

    Weird Memories . . . A Final Judgment on All Mankind, Hastily Rendered . . . John Lennon Is AWOL . . . We Don’t Have Negroes, but We Do Have “Cannocks” . . . Something Fishy around Here . . . Bob Dylan Was Right in “Ballad of a Thin Man” . . . Fun Guys Go to Hell, Revisited; or, I Dose Heavily with a Fungi from Yuggoth . . . Tentacle Sex with a Z-Grade Vixen
    â€”—
    Riding this bus has me thinking of other bus trips I have taken. Political buses are the worst. Anyone can follow a campaign, month to month, whistle stop to whistle stop. But if campaigns are wars, and they are, the real story is in the aftermath, when strange things grow from the scorched earth left in the wake of the candidates’ passage. It is time to plant a seed. Luckily, my bus has a bathroom, and it is a very long trip, so I position myself toward the back, where the smell is the rankest, and make conversation where I can. What I discover isn’t very shocking in its presence, but its intensity unnerves even me.
    â€œWhat do you think of McGovern?” I’d ask the barrel-shaped man next to me, a Joe Lunchbox type that supposedly makes up the base of the Democratic Party electorate in the Midwest. “He’s the Democrat, right?” the guy might say. “Ipso facto, he’s a cocksucker.” Then, as his eyes suddenly turn beady, he adds, “Are you a cocksucker too?” I ask about the other Democratic hopefuls, but he can only remember “that nigger lady.” Hubert Humphrey, Ed Muskie, none of these fellows even ring a bell. I long for stronger drink.
    And it’s the same along the whole trip across the ironed-over territory of middle America. “Is it an election year?” one old woman responds. She clutches my arm with her taloned fingers as if I’ve just casually mentioned that the Schutzstaffel would be boarding the bus in a few minutes to measure noses and brows with ice-cold calipers for signs of Yid contamination of the local germ plasm.
    Nixon is on