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he tunnel smelled like stale urine and cheap sauerkraut.
“We called you because you’re our go-to guy for weird.”
“How far do these go?” I asked him.
“No idea, they just seem to go on and on, maybe turn back on themselves, then join up with natural caves.”
“This isn’t cave country,” I told him.
“Tell that to the cave.”
We slouched along for a bit, following the beams of our lantern—this tunnel was carefully constructed, with a serious casing and strong supports.
Then we came to the chamber.
It was a vault, roughly made and corbeled, perhaps a hundred feet across.
There was a very large and well constructed stone table, eight feet long, four feet wide against one wall, a very sturdy post set opposite to it.
Both had rusty but business like manacles and shackles attached, a pair of unspeakable looking pincers leaned casually against the stonework nearby
“How old are these tunnels?”
“Very, very old,” I told him, “look there, in that jumble by the post, that’s a helmet called a morion cabasset, it’s from the 1600s.”
“Impossible! This area wasn’t settled then!”
“Not by the English, maybe,” I replied.
“The Spaniards sent expeditions east from their holdings in Mexico, and pretty early in the game—as well as blundering around in Florida for a while.
“They managed to kill off a lot of the indigenous population—mostly with diseases, but sometimes by trying to enslave them, or just for mean sport—they hunted them with dogs.
“These were real hard cases, cruel, greedy and ignorant—remember, those Gothic Kingdoms had fought the Moors for centuries, and just recently won the war.
“There were a lot of unemployed soldiers, like always, and long wars make people callous—the New World seemed like a perfect place to make your pile and if somebody got hurt, well, hard cheese for them.
“On top of that, Cortez and Pizarro found whole butt-loads of gold and gems, and that made the Spanish think the whole country was a treasure house, and Jamie Mack, the people holding the specie were naught but heathens!
“These guys tended to be unruly bastards, and they all had an eye for the main chance, so some of them were bound to wander off on their own, chasing El Dorado, the Fountain of Youth or maybe just a valley where they could establish and estate or a bandit kingdom.
“Those were unsettled times and a lot of history is a blank there, could be some renegade Dons set up shop here for a bit.”
“Yeah? And why did they dig all these tunnels, then, this must have taken a damn long time.”
“What do you want, it’s a guess off the top of my head.”
That night, I sat down at the computer and began slogging away at a research job I was doing for a police department in the mid-west.
They had just noticed a small group of the Latin Kings gang setting up shop in their town, and they wanted to know about Kingism.
So I began to review what I knew. |
Before I die, I want to write the definitive work on street level philosophy.
It’s amazing how people with recorded IQs so low that a tortoise could cheat them at cards can come up with convoluted and complex systems of belief that fool even serious intellectuals for a while.
Vincent Leaphart, aka John Africa, the founder of the anti-technological cult that came to be known as MOVE in Philadelphia scored borderline retarded on intelligence tests, yet, he was able to attract a very large following, amass considerable assets and generally confound the municipal authorities in Philly for years.
Fact is, he may not be dead—the man had a way of being elsewhere when the cheese got binding
Like Jim Jones, David Koresh and Charles Manson he was the darling of the bird-brained, bed-wetting liberal woo-woos even as he stockpiled guns and bombs, ordered killings and beatings and made whole neighborhoods nearly uninhabitable until a large bomb dropped by the Police Department (Move had killed a cop some years before and the Philadelphia PD was heartily sick of their antics) demolished their fortress.
Similarly, the Latin Kings had started as a social network for Hispanics working in the Defense industries of WWII, in Chicago.
A sort of manifesto declaiming a new religion based on five principals arose, and then some of the Kings began to see bright prospects in the drug trade.
All of these sociopathic belief systems are pretty much the same, influenced by smug and self righteous authority figures these poor folk encounter in school, the military and finally, in the prisons.
Mostly, they teach people to bellow catch-phrases and exhibit blind loyalty instead of thinking—even while being fooled into thinking they are thinking by circular logic and Big Lies.
An Austrian fellow used a similar system between the Wars, Hitler, ever hear of him?
Instead of the stiff arm salute, these people shoot complex gang signs to each other, and to the world.
The world doesn’t understand, or want to.
They communicate with graffiti like dogs peeing on posts, and fill their time with ever more complex rituals and games, with secret codes and languages.
Frankly, they resemble eight year olds, playing soldiers in a hideout in the woods.
With assault rifles.
And a Hell of a lot of money.
Kingism is a five pointed crown—which led some folks to totally misinterpret a popular auto air deodorizer, and the five principals of Kingism decreed that number
There’s a lot of shouting ‘Amour de Rey!’ when the Kings assemble, but the King’s Love is tough love indeed.
One chieftain, King Blood (the gang holds that all the members are Kings, so they all call themselves King something or other) was doing serious time, and got curdled with hate and envy.
He began ordering hits from inside on vague suspicions, rumors and moods—boredom, drugs and the power of life and death don’t mix well. Stalin is a perfect example of that.
These were the days of the Wild Urban Frontier, when police were still trying to develop procedures for dealing with the gangs—so King Blood’s faithful servants blazed away promiscuously with their new stack column magazine nine mils, set fire to buildings to get a single resident, beat, cut and generally raised Hell, far and wide.
King Mousy was accused of trying to make a set within the set—a clique—and King Blood wanted him whacked out.
Mousy scurried off to parts unknown after several determined attacks that left bystanders bleeding on the ground.
These near massacres finally saw King Blood locked up in solitary confinement for nearly half a century, forbidden any contact with the world.
Amour de Rey?
The tunnels were still a mystery.
Lisa went researching, and found some mention of sinkholes in the area—hey, for geology—so caverns were certainly possible.
The Green Room was astonishing.
It was discovered about six weeks into the exploration.
A vast open space, jagged with stalactites and stalagmites and all stained green, from pale celadon to deep emerald, a natural cathedral under the earth.
I’d visited a salt mine in Bohemia, and seen one of the underground churches the miners had hewn and lovingly decorated over the years, generations improving the fane with carvings and constructions in the salt.
This was natural, but just as magnificent.
This secret spelunking would have been exhausting, except for the fact that the whole system was easily walked through, upright.
Even the natural parts.
Bones.
Yes, there were bones.
Human bones, animal bones, bones from things like Andrewsarchus that had no business being there, bones of the appalling Terror Birds, bones that no one could seem to recognize.
Human bones cracked for the marrow, or savagely fractured again and again.
There was an altar in the Green Room, rough and rude enough to be overlooked as a natural formation, but, carven deep into it was the obscure glyph that is the sigil of the Dark Mother—Shub-Niggurath, Issingarab, The Goat With A Thousand Young.
I saw it, and kept my peace.
In the evenings, Lisa and I were working on that book of criminal theology and philosophy, somehow, it had taken on a life of it’s own.
Lisa had really gotten involved in our project, and this expanded it rapidly, her ability to research a subject was phenomenal.
That led us to visit the secluded town of Dingham, and the most successful biker gang in America, the Dingham Reamers.
The post Vietnam recession of the 1970’s hit York County hard, defense plants had been a mainstay of the areas prosperity.
When the factory that Dingham depended on—it made a type of artillery fuse that became obsolete—closed, the place began to dry up and almost blow away, U-Hauls creeping away like desert caravans, houses and stores abandoned and left behind.
One day, a villain who was called The Preacher rode into town on his chopper, bought a bottle of Coca-Cola from the last operating vending machine in the town and went for a little walk.
Harley-Davidson had bought the old Naval Ordinance bomb factory, succeeding AMF and the Navy—the Navy had made shells, AMF had made unsatisfactory motorcycles there—and The Preacher wanted to find a place close to the new Harley factory for his small club.
The Reamers had money, never mind how they got it, ignorance is not just bliss, it’s a good way to stay alive, and soon, they had a home.
Old houses transformed from ruins into dwellings, stores opened after years of being locked, a new supermarket appeared on the site of a bowling alley that had burned down, practically unnoticed, several years before.
The Reamers were there to stay.
Walking through Dingham, that was an education, not since the slums of Asia had I seen such a slow-motion riot.
There was a tattoo joint the size of a hardware store—in fact, it had been a hardware store, years ago, a saloon doing rip-roaring trade at 11 AM, and a knife and gun shop with a placard in the window that encouraged patrons to ask for things they didn’t see on display.
That probably meant that the machine guns, rocket launchers and switchblades were in the basement, discreetly displayed and ready for sale with the blackjacks, knuckle dusters and grenades
A couple of brassy chicks, missing some teeth, laughing like burros and teetering on four inch heels came out of the bar, and noisily tried to cross the street.
They almost didn’t make it, even though a knot of choppers braked to a stop for them—one fell on her ample butt in the lane of traffic.
We passed the main clubhouse—it had been an Eagles lodge, once, now it was marked with the Harley eagle badge.
“Lover,” Lisa said in a low voice, “This place makes me intensely uncomfortable, what say we decamp?”
I trust Lisa’s instincts, so we booked.
Later, we hammered out a chapter in record time, and celebrated with a bone-jarring tumble in our bed.
A rough map of what we were calling, “The Diggings” was taking shape.
The Green Room was roughly in the center, with tunnels, galleries and chambers orbiting around it.
From a door in the cellar of a very old and long abandoned farmhouse, the diggings formed a deep complex spread over two square miles—cubic miles, actually, since the depth of the thing seemed to be inexhaustible, it just went down and down.
Our book was a lot like the tunnel, it kept getting more and more convoluted.
We pinned a map of the world to the wall, and began to draw in the interlocking web of criminal gangs and conspiracies.
Lovecraft had remarked on the mercy of not coordinating all the contents of the mind.
To paraphrase Yoda, whistling Dixie, he was not.
We had known all this, but never put it together.
Start anywhere—Triads in China, spreading world-wide, Japanese Yakusa with their Korean counterparts, MS 13 in Latin America and the States, Russian Thieves In Law, Jewish Syndicates, Crips, Bloods, La Eme (that used to be the Mexican Mafia), El Rukhn out of Chicago, the interlocking complexity of the biker gangs, prison gangs, racist hate-mongers, sex mongers, slave traders, and confidence artists run amok on the Internet, it goes on and on.
That bicycle your kid lost is on it’s way to Africa, vouchsafed there by Nigerian gangstas, your car may be headed for Israel the next day, in the same sort of way.
Sicilian, Corsican and Sardinian mobs run much of the underground economies of Europe, and the drugs that flow out of South Asia and Indochina are the mainspring that makes it all go.
As far was we could tell, the Antarctic doesn’t have any organized crime, but the penguins may wise up any time.
Kidnapping for ransom is an epidemic, with the particularly dreadful bomb kidnap scheme still common.
The Spanish and Sardinian crews like this wheeze—take someone, attach a bomb to them, then give them a brief time to produce their own ransom in exchange for the bomb being defused.
Not that regular kidnapping, especially of girl children is any less popular.
You get the choice of giving up the mazumah, or having your sweet doe eyed angel given over to drug addiction, abuse and whoredom most vile.
If you seem reluctant, a Polaroid of the wee darling, naked, chained and covered with welts and bruises is usually enough to untie those purse strings.
Drugs, a very useful threat, always waiting to ambush that son or daughter away from home, or the menace of a skilled homosexual seducer.
The whole world around, so many ways to get a dishonest dollar.
And by our best calculations, the Diggings were about a mile deep and plunging on.
As we hiked out one day—it was soon time to install a mini-railway, it was taking too much time to get to unexplored territory and slowing things down, Lisa looked at me and said,
“Did you notice, the deeper we go, the more complex this gets, more tunnels, more galleries?”
“Now that you mention it...”
“That’s the opposite of a normal mine, lover, even a very old one.”
“So you think...”
“It was dug from below, lover. It came up instead of going down.”
“Holy Sheep-shit!” I was stunned.
Lisa’s old editor died, and we had to go to Scotia for the funeral.
Scotia was another town that had nearly died, and been saved by death itself.
Once, it had had a small population of woodworkers and cigar makers, most of them employed in nearby Red Lion, Windsor and Yoe.
When the jobs dried up, the town became a husk, and the shanty town sections soon fell into ruins.
The Galleries, a tangle of well constructed but plain economy apartments survived, and stayed occupied by welfare mothers, disabled vets and retired people.
Still, the town was so moribund that it was about to turn off the few stoplights and fold up, when the Big Fire came.
The flames made a melancholy glow for three nights, the smoke marred the daytime sky for three days, and every fire company in the county was engaged to some extent.
Finally, a soaking rain quenched the inferno, and left behind a blackened, stinking moonscape.
The ramshackle buildings had no cellars, though there were privy pits and some crawlspaces.
Dennis Scobie saw an opportunity.
He bought up the charred ground for a song, sometimes just for back taxes, and brought in heavy earth movers from the nearby Caterpillar tractor factory and graded it flat, seeded it and let the green grass batten on the ash-rich soil.
He planted the ground in corpses.
Cemeteries were filling up rapidly all over the area, and Scobie had his eye on an empire of the dead.
He secured contracts to establish several potter’s fields for nearby cities, made contacts with the Veteran’s Administration, built a crematorium, put up mausoleums, even reserved space for Jewish burials of varying degrees of orthodoxy, and differing traditions.
The complex of chapels and mortuaries could provide any postmortem procedure required , from simple embalming to a forensic autopsy at the Coroner’s office, and the hearses began arriving on the first day.
They never stopped.
Teddy Scobie continued the enterprise, he even sold the Reamers a separate section to plant members who had nowhere and no one, and that was a lot of their membership.
The new necropolis even swallowed up two existing burying grounds that had been there since before the Revolution, and the churches that consecrated them.
I contemplated this while the Masons carried out a farewell rite, after a mind-numbing eulogy delivered by a hired preacher, and the gray steel box was lowered into the neatly cut grave.
Lisa was crying her eyes out, so I was glad to skip watching them fill it in, get her into the car and head off to get a bite to eat.
Terry Scobie stopped me for a moment—he was the new owner of this operation, his brother Teddy had died suddenly about six months before, and his wife had been unfaithful, so he’d returned from DC to his childhood home to lick his wounds.
“I have to talk to you about something,” he said, “not now, but soon, very soon.”
I knew him from my days with the Company, he was one of their lawyers, and if he needed to talk it was no small matter.
I agreed to call him.
“El Rukhn is back to being the Black P something or other.” Lisa said, in a tone of utter disgust.
She was crouched on the living room floor, wearing nothing but a Henley shirt and a black thong, her half glasses perched on her nose, papers spread around her like the aftermath of a car bomb.
“How in Hell am I going to keep these people straight when they keep changing their names?”
“That’s the idea, Lisa.” I told her, “It helps keep the cops confused.”
“Like they need help with that.” she said sourly. “And look at these flow charts—they look like a Jackson Pollack painting!”
“Now you know why they’re still around.”
“Some of these operations don’t seem to have any leaders—but they still function with no lack of purpose, Hell, they make money by the bushel basket.”
“Remind you of any jobs you’ve had?”
“Are we going to finish this any time soon?”
“Is there a rush?”
“Lord, yes, lover, it changes so fast we won’t be able to get it into print fast enough to still be current!”
“OK, lots of strong tea, and no sex breaks, we’ll put this baby to bed.”
We got reports from the Diggings—it just kept going deeper.
About the time we had the book off to the publisher, we happy few that shared the secret of those dark and dismal depths met to make decisions.
I think it was the dimetrodon skull that decided us.
It wasn’t fossilized—it was fresh, polished white, but fresh bone.
“This is too weird.”
“Y’think?”
Lisa made a long face, “This has to go away, just go away, no more digging around in here, no scientific expeditions, no visits to see what’s changed, just oblivion.”
As usual, she was right.
So we filled in that original passage with rubble until it was blocked solidly.
Then concrete was poured.
Finally, the site was graded over.
I’d like to say it was forgotten about, but sometimes, my dreams take me to the Green Room.
And I see the sign of Issagarrab, graven deep by who knows what uncouth and contaminated hands.
Then, I know it will not stay buried forever. |
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