Chapter 11

Actually, I remember nothing about this last final drive to Carcosa, or even most of the day afterwards driving through Nevada, Utah and into northern Arizona on our getaway.

I remember laughing as I delivered the packet of blackmail information details to the FBI office and then we drove north out of town. It was more than a bit crowded in the car; Tanya was up in the front with me and Abigail and the four drugged women were all stuffed somehow into the back like cordwood, but I don't remember anyone complaining. We all burst into laugher once we drove past the Leaving Las Vegas road sign as we knew that we would never be returning.

I sort of remember the difficult drive up that terribly bad mountain road in our overloaded SUV but I remember making it there and seeing that absolutely nothing was left of the town. Even the wreckage of the miner's trailers had now been cleared away without leaving much of a trace. After a bit of digging, I found a trap door underneath were the trailer of my miner acquaintance had been. The opening lead to a vertical mineshaft that had iron ladder rungs inset into the stone so that I could climb up and down relatively safely. My voice had told me that the shaft would be there, waiting for me.

I think I remember telling Abigail to remain in the car, as Tanya was fast asleep in the passenger seat. However when I took the fourth and last unconscious girl down the underground ladder and into other waiting arms I found that Abigail had come down the ladder with me. She was smiling and holding on to my hand.

"I've dreamed of this place." She softly murmured. "My sister and my cousins will have new husbands here and they will learn the old ways ... that which is now lost or hidden, and has been forbidden. There shall be a feast and our eyes shall be opened."

I almost think I remember that Abigail shared the forbidden feast with us together, seated in that dimly lit cave with the ancient dark race and their new, docile and compliant brides. There she willingly accepted the dreadful gift of the ghouls, that perfect knowledge of the 'Now', knowing every unspeakable secret of the present and the recent past. This frightened me and I tried to stop her but my own voice, now stronger with the fulfillment of my dark oath, soothingly told me that this was 'necessary' and that a greater good would result from this, but my heart was still unsettled.

With the first light of dawn, this pair of two too wise owls left the caverns of Carcosa forever, never to return. The ancient and ghoulish race would be moving soon to a new home under other mountains far away, traveling ancient routes far underground forgotten by the race of surface men.

Tanya was still sound asleep when Abigail and I returned and we left Carcosa without a word of comment and without a single look behind in regret. They had left me with a few parting gifts however; a few bank sacks of old 1880's Carson City silver dollars and seventeen reels of old silent era movies rescued from the old Carcosa movie theater before it was destroyed in 1926, including the two unique reels of Unaussprechliche Kulte, which I now suspect is more of a documentary film than a work of fiction. Also included, was another famous lost movie "The King in Yellow", with three of the four reels listed. Naturally, the final reel was the missing one. Still, a good start for a legendary missing film.

Before we left, one of the ghouls passed me an old manuscript, saying "Read my eldritch and forbidden history and know ... then consign it to the flames should you find it too terrible for the eyes of mortal men. I didn't have a chance to look at this old leather bound collection of papers for several days, but when I finally unwrapped it and read the frontpiece, I discovered that this was A. S. Matthews' original manuscript of "Myths, Legends and Folk-Tales of the Spanish and Mormon Settlements of Lincoln County, Nevada", albeit with significant later hand-written changes and additions. It seems that Mr. Matthews survived that 1957 fire and managed the hard journey to Carcosa, where he rejected the surface life forever to live as one of the near immortal ghouls, sharing their hunger for forbidden knowledge and human flesh.

I have not read this book. Even my inner voice is disturbed that the thoughts of what unwholesome revelations this forgotten work will likely contain.

We took our time driving through the great American Southwest, enjoying (if that is the right word) the heat of early summer in the desert. We all had good, top-notch, fake ID's that would pass any detailed police inspection so we were in no hurry to get to our final destination whatsoever.

In fact, we had not even established a final destination. I asked my inner voice, and it told me to ask Abigail, so I did. She was curled up comfortably in the back seat reading one of my reference books on early cinema and she smiled and opened the book to a page that she'd marked, showing an old art deco movie theater somewhere in rural Texas.

"This one!" She said excitedly. "We need to go here, to this theater ... it's very important. Something tells me that we have to go there or something important will go very terribly wrong!"

What better answer was there?

"None" My inner voice said, and I'm sure I felt it smile.

It was a long drive to Lovett, Texas but Abigail didn't seem to mind when we regularly stopped for frozen treats and souvenir stands every couple of hundred miles. Tanya, I was discovering, very much had a fetish for genuine Indian turquoise jewelry and was soon building up a nice little collection. She tried to get Abigail interested too, but after a necklace and a pair of earrings the young lady declared herself to be 'shopped out'.

"I don't want to get too confused." She confessed to me a while later while we were waiting for Tanya to return from a restroom break. "I look at my hands and I see a ring that isn't there. I don't have that ring yet, but it will find me sooner or later. Sometimes I see the future mixed with the present, but it's messy and not clear, but I think it will be soon, or at least I hope so or I will probably go mad."

Later, while having a brief private moment during dinner in Carlsbad, I jokingly asked my daughter what she saw in my future, but she just looked sad and turned her eyes away from me. Tanya's return to the dinner table changed the subject to happier ideas, the thought of touring the famous caverns in the morning. Abigail vetoed the idea. She'd seen enough of the underground world in Carcosa to last her a very long time.

Lovett was nothing at all like what I had expected, and I hadn't expected much. The first three gas station road maps I bought didn't even show Lovett on the map. Finally, once we were in Texas I bought a big state road atlas that showed Lovett to be a small town very near the coast, south of Port Lavaca and north of Corpus Christi.

Accordingly, I mentally prepared myself for a tiny rural town that had one blinking traffic light, a boarded up gas station and an old decrepit movie theater that had probably burned down ten years ago without anyone noticing it. Instead, I found a town that was probably livelier than many parts of Vegas.

Certainly the nude beach, crowded on a Saturday afternoon, got my complete attention. Even Tanya chuckled.

"I like this town already!" She giggled.

The short drive into the town proper only took about five minutes, but signs of recent development were nearly everywhere. There was a local software company that was raking in money faster than they could spend it, but they were sure giving it a good try. Anything that didn't move had recently received a fresh coat of paint, transforming what had been a sleepy little town that time had mostly forgotten into vibrant and active community.

The movie theater we had driven fifteen hundred miles to see was worth every second of the drive. Built apparently in 1926, the theater enjoyed a heyday for a few years before closing after the start of the Depression. Not long after closing, the theater became the Church of the New Celestial Wisdom but it closed after just a few years. Looking at the front façade, I could see where the old church signage had been mostly torn off. Apparently at least someone was very happy to see the church gone.

The idea of encountering two different churches, in two states both with 'New Celestial' in the name in the space of one week, struck me as not a coincidence at all. The idea that there were more of these wacked-out cults hiding out elsewhere in the country suddenly seemed rather likely, and more than a bit disturbing. The bright yellow neon façade lights had been recently restored and much of the original building was now being refurbished and movies were being shown here again on weekends, but frankly the building still gave me the creeps.