SPOOKTOBER STORY #17:

Fait Accompli, Chapter Eight.

My goose is fully cooked. Without supplies, I only have my floppy hat and my heater to keep me alive in this inhospitable place, and, importantly, neither of them are water.

For some reason, the queerness of my interaction with Harry has lessened my certainty that this all is a mortality-adjacent induced hallucination. Strange as our talk may have been, it was strange in a way that doesn’t feel like the vaulted anomalous interior of my mind. This makes the loss of my supplies doubly or trebly upsetting, as without them I am certain to reach that stage sooner rather than later.

I now feel eyes all around me, and I know Harry must not be the only one watching me. Friends, I announce, you have stolen my water, please return it so I do not die.

There is no response from the multiformity of unseen watchers. I mean you no harm, I say, and realize immediately how false my words ring, as I am starting to mean them some harm, because they are being impolite as all hell and have stolen that which might maintain my tenuous hold on life.

Friends, I announce again, but have nothing to follow it up with, so I let the word hang in the air like miasma.

Anyway, standing here talking to people who refuse to be seen isn’t doing very much for me, so I take action and start careening away, towards the Tower. At least I can see this damn thing and get my bearings, and maybe someone over there has some water, or better, hard liquor.

My ears are getting a workout. Each time I move, there is the sound of movement, of many feet trying to stay quiet against the sand. I pretend I do not hear it. My surreptitious glances to and fro do not reveal who my pursuants may be, so I decide to whistle a tune to show how calm and untroubled I am purporting to be. I decide to whistle “C’est Magnifique”, which I heard an Oriental gal warble her way through last week at the Tannery. She had an easy, sweet voice that made me smile without trying to. I try to capture some of her flourishes in my whistling, but I am not an accomplished whistler and fail to do anything but confuse the issue.

The image of the Tower slowly starts to consolidate through the heat haze as I approach it through the tent city. It seems taller than it was, the last time I looked, but that could just be distortion. The little ants are still moving all over it, and I’m almost certain now that they’re builders, working feverishly. I try to equate this image of a Tower-nubbin with the grand Tower I saw over the dunes, and can’t come up with anything (atmospheric distortion? I wish I’d listened to the University men’s babbling more sincerely). I redouble my whistling, the part of C’est Magnifique that I remember, and then stop, because it’s not really helping.

And then, from all around me, in thousand part harmony, a vast echo of my whistle. A variegated cacophony, an insane choir of whistles from unseen lips, surrounding me in a sea of C’est Magnifique. I gasp and spin around, pointing my iron uselessly at the tents, at what sounds like hundreds, thousands of Cole Porters, spitting my tune back at me with a cancerous hatred, a blind fury.

I am unable to stop my body from convulsively fleeing, kicking up sand with my borrowed boots, clumsily dashing away from the terrible sound. The sand catches my foot, twists my ankle, and I topple into the sand, my floppy hat falling off my head, trapping against a tent mooring.

There is something wrong with the placement of the hat against the stake. There is something already there, blistering against it, in the same place the hat is trying to settle. I can’t understand what I’m seeing. It seems pinched against itself, and the words that go through my head are: not alive, but dying, and from this crumbles, and then to sand, forever and ever.

The whistlers are getting nearer so I can’t spend a lot of time thinking about this, and clamber to my feet and sprint, as best as I can in the shifting sand. The whistling pierces something soft in my skull and my jaw aches like I just took a truck of a left hook. I want to throw up but now is not the time.

They are right behind me. I can feel their hands grasping at the air behind my neck. I dive.

My body hurls through space. I am disengaged for a moment, and when I look behind me, I see a blur that could be Harry. Harry alone couldn’t have made all that noise… could he?

I hit the ground and the world goes black.

SPOOKTOBER STORY #16:

Fait Accompli, Chapter Seven.

Knowing you're being watched is a feeling right up next to knowing you're coming down with a summer cold. There's nothing distinctly wrong, nothing physical that can't be ascribed to other, more obvious causes, but you can feel it hot and alive, somewhere deep in your chassis. You just know. I knew when the Duckys had their twin gunsels trailing me across the wharf, I know when the house dick is home when I go visit the hotel Annie Xiu lives at, and I know I'm being watched now. I can feel their eyes on the inside of my head.

Maybe it's the angels watching me, ready to snatch my soul out of the desert air. Or maybe it's vultures who are waiting patiently for a dinner of offal and sweat-marinated fat. I decide to surprise them, whoever they are, and spin around on my bootheel.

A human head ducks down behind a tent, maybe eighty feet away. I shout hello and come out here, but they do not, which is impolite. I glower at them from afar.

I know that this is all likely simply delirium. I know that I am likely lying at the bottom of a dune, trembling, my eyeballs baking in my skull and the last of the water trickling out through my glands, my brain fevered and nearly boiling out of my ears. I will likely die before I figure any of this out.

Still, I get out my heater, just in case. I don't like all this sneaky business, hallucination or no, and I shout at the hidden figure, come out here, I want to talk to you, but it stays hidden. O well, if Muhamed won't go to the mountain, then the mountain must go to Muhamed, which is something Annie Xiu says a lot and I've never really understood.

I walk through the clusters of tents cautiously, holding the heater at my side. I let my bag of supplies fall into the sand so as to be less lop-sided and approach the tent I'm pretty sure was the one the head ducked behind, although as my perspective changes, I'm not so sure. The tents are almost identical, and blur together in their multitude.

Not just almost identical, I realize. That small tear in the canvas, down at the base near the door, the particular rash of weathering across the right side. They’re not almost identical, they are identical.

This is discomfiting, to say the very least, but no immediate action suggests itself to deal with this information so instead I continue towards the hiding place of the human head.

When I arrive, I peer around, cautiously, and find the human head attached to a human body. A young white man, his face worn and leathery, his blond hair caked with sand. He wears army fatigues, but not any army that I recognize, and they appear to fit him ill. He is gaunt and clearly malnourished, poses no threat, and I lower my weapon to show him that neither do I.

Hello, I say to him, and he looks up at me with hollow, terrified eyes. Hello, he says back to me, and I think well now we’re getting somewhere.

You’re hiding from me, I suggest. He nods. I tell him my name and he says I know.

How do you know that, I ask him. He shakes his head, and says, it’s too much. I can’t tell you, it’s too much.

I say O.K., whatever.

I ask him why he’s hiding from me and he says it’s his job. This doesn’t make sense so I decide to file it away and return to it later.

O.K. What is this place.

He tells me it is a camp, don’t I see the tents. I say yes I see the tents but I have never seen a camp with ten thousand tents in it, it seems excessive. He says it’s seven thousand, five hundred, and twenty eight tents. He indicates with his sunworn hand: the tents stretch towards the horizon.

I say wow, that’s a lot of tents. He concedes that it is.

His voice and mannerisms are queer to me. While we talk I attempt to figure out what it is that are odd. His accent doesn’t seem as if he’s foreign, I’d guess west coast or middle America, but there’s a lilting, tripping sense of naivety in it, a backwards sort of language construction that doesn’t sit right on my ears. I knew an enlisted cook who got a German bullet lodged right inside his temple who afterwards spoke in a similar fashion. I file this away too.

I say: why are the tents here.

The tents are here because they were brought here by Army men, he says. Are you an Army man, I ask? He looks shy when he says no. I think about the fire to the north and get an itching behind my ears. I ask why the Army men brought the tents here, and also if he’s not an Army man, why is he wearing some sort of Army fatigues.

He is nervous, and his eyes keep flicking towards my gun. I display it non-threateningly and explain that I am a detective from Frisco, sent here by the University to look for two missing men.

Who? He asks. His eyes stop flicking, and now settle on mine, level and cool.

I asked you a question first, uh. I realize I don’t know his name and ask for it. He tells me Harry and I say good to know you, Harry. I asked you a question first.

He closes his eyes. He seems exhausted from our brief conversation. Without opening them, he says, the Army men came here to build the Tower.

What tower, I ask.

Look, Harry says, and points to the south. I can barely see through the heat haze, but he’s right, there’s something there. There’s movement, dots that could be people like ants on a dropped ice-cream cone, and something larger. Little lines in the shimmering waves of heat, moving together, joining, slowly becoming vertical. There’s something beautiful about the coordination of the movements.

I turn around to ask more questions but Harry is gone. When I look around I see that someone’s stolen my bag full of supplies from the sand, and all my water and gin, too.

Well, I say out loud, to whoever might be listening. God-damn me, I guess.

Fait Accompli, Chapter Six.

That boy was acting pretty queer, I think to myself, and wonder how he got all the way out here into the desert. I got all the way out here and it damn near has killed me. I think maybe he was a hallucination borne of heatstroke and hooch, but no, there's the soft divots of his footprints in the dune, already filling up with the gently shifting sands.

I climb the dune, already so hot it burns my palms. I cuss and spit and when I get to the top of the dune I look off at where the boy should be but he's not there, and neither is the tower. Instead I see something unexpected (although I suppose not terribly more unexpected than a tower and a boy fifteen miles into a desert) and I almost fall flat back down the dune.

The desert, completely barren a few moments ago, is now suddenly populated with a sea of identical canvas pup tents, spread across the sands like headstones in a vast graveyard. Some are more ably erected than others, and they don't seem to follow any logical layout, no rows or columns, no obvious paths through their multitude. The camp (or city, considering the number of residences visible) appears to be abandoned.

There is, of course, a reasonable explanation for this: the gin and dehydration have combined to give me acute brain poisoning, and I am hallucinating as I die, which is too bad for me. I feel sorry for myself a little and start to wander around the tents.

I wish upon a star I hadn't come out here, I think, peeking inside a tent at random (empty but for a rough wool blanket, which looked like the ones they gave us back in the Army), and I wish upon a star I wasn't dying out here either. I am afraid of dying, but I guess I'm not alone in that. I climb inside the empty tent and immediately am relieved by its shade.

I take out my notebook to write a good-bye to Annie Xiu and her terrible children, and I do an O.K. enough job, considering my state. Then I write a go-to-hell to the University men Besmont and Rahey, and a thanks-for-the-boots-keep-the-sawbuck to Dinnick.

Finished with my letters, I consider sitting around and waiting to croak, but it doesn't seem to be exceedingly imminent, so I decide to leave the tent and explore the deluded mirages of my collapsing consciousness. I readjust my floppy hat and head back out.

An abandoned tent-city in the middle of the desert is a pretty odd hallucination. I'd always heard people saw oasises and big roast turkeys and things of that matter. I poke around some and see the tents all seemed to be laid out in the same manner, same wool blanket inside. Annie always put a lot of weight on the meaning of dreams, she was always talking about dragons and mirrors and stuff, and I guess this is a type of dream. I can't for the life of me figure out what a tent city would mean, though.

My eye catches a glint, some movement. I turn towards it, and see a distant fire, belching black smoke into the cloudless sky. The source is hidden by the waves of heat shimmering off the sand, and as I squint and try to figure out what I'm looking at, that's when I feel it for the first time.

I'm being watched.

SPOOKTOBER STORY #14:

Fait Accompli, Chapter Five.

The boy in the sand is doubled over, holding his stomach. He is silent as I approach him and I am thankful for his silence and I use the time to catch my breath and settle the turmoil of my body's sickly creature.

I say hello and when he looks up his eyes are white and wide. He seems very afraid of something or maybe me, so I make soothing noises and try to appear nonthreatening, although I am certain it does not work. Covered in sand and vomit, dehydrated, drunk, blistering in the sun, I likely look like a ghoul.

Children and I are not very friendly. Annie Xiu has two children and they find me repulsive and my very existence offensive. I can't disagree.

I try to think of something reassuring to say, but I can't think of anything good so instead I say hello again. The boy is blistered too. I look around for where he might have come from, towards the tower, but to reach the boy I have climbed down a dune and there is a boiling haze rising from the sand that obscures anything past maybe twenty feet, and I can no longer see what I had seen from above.

Where did you come from, I say, but the boy continues his silence. He just stares at me.

Do you have parents somewhere, I say. You didn't come here alone.

I say: um.

I offer him whatever's left of one bottle of water.

He doesn't take it and instead he says it's you it's you. I say you're right but I don't think I know you. Who do you think I am. And he says they said they said it I didn't know it was today I didn't they said I didn't oh no oh no oh no father.

And I think O.K. this kid doesn't make any goddam sense but it sounds at least like he has a father somewhere. And then I think he's not calling me father, is he. And I look at his face and I cannot be sure, so I say: I'm not your father.

And he says no, you're not my father, my father is dead.

And I say when did he die. The boy's eyes are glassy, his face bruised with sun and sand. And he says something that doesn't make very much sense to me.

He says: Forever.

Then he leaps to his feet and sprints, away from me, towards the tower I had seen rising above the dunes.

— A 'Fait Accompli' Interlude, Followed By Q&A —

-how many skeletons💀 does it take to change the lightbulb

-no bones about it, it takes a skele-ton! now that's humerus!!! 🤣

Q&A WITH THE AUTHOR

Q. For the past four days your Spooktober Story anthology series has been taken over by a longer form short story entitled "Fait Accompli." Can you speak to that?

A. Well, I've been doing these Spooktober Stories for six years now, and I felt that changing things up and creating a larger story with more room for character and plot development might make an interesting change for some of this year's posts. I'm not abandoning the bite-sized, more, uh, more digestible format, but I had this idea for a cool little high-concept short story that I wanted to explore regardless, and wanted to see how it would fit into the Spooktober Story framework.

Q. How do you respond to criticisms that it's "long" and "nobody's going to read it" and "nothing scary has happened yet?"

A. I don't think people are saying that. Are people saying that?

Q. Oh, yes.

A. I mean... uh... I mean I'm just... it's long, but it will pay off, hopefully, so it'll be... worth... worth the... you need time to build tension, and maybe they'll go back and read it, sort of, you know.

Q. 'Hopefully?' You mean you don't know?

A. Well I'm using it as a sort of pantsing - that's the term for writing by the seat of your pants -

Q. Uh huh.

A. -...uh, I'm using it as an exercise... and... uh... I mean, I haven't written... that's why there was an interlude t-today, the second half-

Q. The second *half*?

A. ...it's... it's not written yet, I need a few days to outline it, there's some sort of, god I say 'sort of' a lot, god that's annoying, I need a few days to outline it just so that it, I want to be able to focus on the storytelling rather than the narrative m-mechanics and-

Q. I see. How do you respond to criticisms that you're a failure, both personally and professionally, and that you disappoint and hurt everyone you love?

A. W-what?

Q. You've never accomplished anything worthwhile. Do you feel that by abandoning this short story, you're simply adding to the monumental list of your own failures, that define you as a useless vestigial clump of cells that should be scraped out of society with an oyster shucker?

A. An oyster shucker!?

Q. How do y-

A. I'm not abandoning the story! I just need a few days to outline the second half! It's really complicated for- for reasons I can't get into because they're spoilers!

Q. Surely, you must understand that a short story doesn't need that level of care. You just don't want to finish it. Maybe you shouldn't finish anything. If you finished a creative project, you would be judged on the merits that everyone, whether they say it or not, suspects is true. That you're a hole without any light inside of you. You fat fucking failure. You piece of dogshit. You worm.

A. I want to leave.

Q. You shit stain. You leech and poison.

A. I'm not getting a signal. Why am I not getting a signal?

Q. There's nowhere for you to go.

A. Pl

Q.

Fait Accompli, Chapter Four.

I leave some paper for the room on the old gal's table and dip out through the back door with my bag of supplies and the boots and floppy hat that I took from the sheriff.

A gale of desert wind rips at my face and pants legs like a wolf. The cold is somehow even worse than the heat was. I've gotten a few nips of sleep but it's 3 ay em now and a doozy of a hangover is knocking at the door, my internal body temperature is dancing merry hell, all my structural elements are threatening to collapse. And now this wind.

I huddle against a corner and set fire to a match, use the light to refer to my notebook. A wind like this I'd expect to howl, but the desert it rushes over is flat and dead and there's nothing for it to catch on and howl off of so instead it just sings whispers into the sky and that's worse.

In a few hours this place is going to blister with heat and so am I, if I'm not grabbed and hanged by the affronted populace first, so I decide to eschew the ceremony and leave Dinnerset. The moon is in the sky now and it casts an O.K. light so I don't have to worry about tripping over rocks and brush and things of that nature. My compass shows me where west is and I go there.

Dinnick and I worked out that it would take about four hours to get to the spot, maybe five (because I'm a wet pork dumpling), so starting around 3:00 would get me there by 8:00 at the latest and then I'd be able to avoid the worst of the sun. This time of year, should just start coming up around seven, he guessed. I said that was fine by me.

Walking is easy to start off with. The boots the Irishman gave me fit and keep the sand out O.K. The wind pushes me around a little, but with things as flat as they are, as long as I keep heading west I should find the spot I'm going. Getting back should be fine too, even if I get off course I go east long enough, I'll hit the road that runs north-south, follow that I can get back to Dinnerset. Fine.

What I know of sand is walking on the beach, which works your calves and sticks to your skin, but is generally not something you spend a lot of time worrying about. Something about this sand is different, it's finer, fine enough you might breathe it in if you're not careful. The wind whips it around and it stings my face and hands and I say ouch and goddamit and sonofabitch which doesn't make it feel any better but I do it anyway.

Luckily there's not very much of it. It's blowing in from somewhere but what I'm walking across is almost all flats so it's going fine. I check my compass and keep an eye out for snakes hidden in the moonlight. I make sure my iron is in my pocket in case I see a rattler, although I don't know if the Mojave has rattlers. I try to think what Dinnick told me about the local fauna but my head is cloudy from the hangover and I can't recall with any real sense of clarity.

In addition to the water flask the Irishman gave me, I filled the two empty gin bottles with water before heading out. I drink some water from one of them, and I drink some gin from one of the full gin bottles, to help with the pain in my head and the sick in my gut. They both help a little.

I start to think about what probably happened to my quarry. Dead, I'd guess, of heatstroke, maybe, or fallen into a ravine. Got by coyotes or scorpions or rattlers. Maybe just lost, wandering forever in the desert. This thought gives me the shakes and I take another gin break with water chaser. This one doesn't help.

My legs are already crying out for me to stop, it's been three quarters of an hour, maybe. I'm drenched in sweat and so cold my teeth knock together like a busted textile machine.

I consider turning back. If I get out to the spot and there's nothing, no shade, I could croak out here. This paycheck is O.K. but it's not worth a one-way-trip. But I guess if I get out there and there's no shade I could always turn back and get to Dinnerset around noon. I could hack that. I'm fat and useless, but I could walk in the sun for a couple hours without dying. At least, I hope.

Anyway, I made a promise. I checked in on the families before I left Frisco. They were pretty busted up about the disappeared men, Dr. Palmer's mother and his wife and his five kids, Mr. Scmitt's new bride, only three months in but already showing signs of being in the family way. There were a lot of waterworks and I promised and promised again I'd find out what happened just to extricate myself from the tears and grasping hands. I don't welsh on my promises, although now, I wish to God I did.

It's two hours in, still heading due west, and I realize that when the sun comes up it's going to rip open the back of my neck with sunburn unless I get this hat on presently, so I do. My stomach hurts. My calves have been screaming at me for a while, but now my thighs and knees join in three part harmony. The flats are now host to small ambulatory waves of sand that bluster against my trouserlegs, and I am filled with fear and hate and pain.

I throw up a little in my mouth, gin and water, but not wanting to lose hydration, I force myself to swallow it and wash it down with more gin and water. I feel like I'm already dead. My bones are chilled, my skin is damp and clammy, I can feel the hollows under my eyes and my tongue sits thick and lifeless in my mouth, coated with sand from the open-mouth gasps I resort to when snorting in air through my nose no longer feels sufficient to keep my brain alive.

Then, at around two hours and a half, I hit something of a stride. Everything hurts, everything is terrible, I actually do throw up a gulletful into the sand, but the process of walking becomes somewhat automatic, the pain doesn't lessen but retreats to somewhere in my mind where I can ignore it. I let my mind wander, thinking of all the great and wonderful things I'll do with the money from the University men when I get back to civilization.

I picture a warm bath and a cool fan. I picture laying in my bed and drinking mixed cocktails. I picture a great desert falcon swooping down from the sky, lifting me up in its claws, and carrying me gently through the dry air to deposit me gently at my destination.

This goes on for about another hour and then I realize I have been asleep while walking. Terror rushes through me. I check my compass, but there it is, still due west, I have not strayed from my path.

However, the blowing sand has, gradually, over the past hour, overwhelmed the flats, and I now find myself trudging through shifting dunes. The sand sucks at my boots, and I have to high-step to extricate myself, slowing my progress, creating sharp, shooting pains in new and exciting bundles of muscles.

I consider laying down and dying here, but after a brief session of vomiting and weeping and gnawing dryly at the air, I decide I should at least get to my destination, because I said I would and maybe there's a rock to huddle under until nightfall.

Progress is so slow and excruciating that over the next indeterminate amount of time I barely notice the rise of the sun, the cessation of the wind. I stare at the compass, I stare at my feet, my eyes blur with tears and sweat and pain, and I do not know at what point I look up and first see the thin vertical line piercing the horizon, and a small blob of shadow below it, in the sands.

I stare at these two objects for a time. Neither of them are sand or the sky, that's for sure. I try to think what else they might be, and I go through the list. Are they a tree. No, neither one is a tree. Are they desert brush. Maybe the little one, but definitely not the tall vertical line. Also the little blob is moving in a way that makes it seem alive, so probably not a plant. An animal, then. A snake? My hand instinctively reaches for my shooter. A coyote? I fumble idly at the holster while I think. The blob doesn't seem like a snake or a coyote. In fact it seems very familiar, like something you might see back in the city. What could be both out in the city and here in the desert? I strain, trying to gather all the facts, fight against my sick and my bone-deep exhaustion and use pure logic to undo this knot.

Then, unprompted, it comes to me all at once. Two words:

TOWER.

BOY.

Fait Accompli, Chapter Three.

When I wake up I can't remember who or where I am for about a quarter of an hour. The old gal who I guess lent me the room raps on my door and tells me what time it is (nine thirty ay em) and would I like some breakfast and I say yes please. She gives me toast and runny undercooked eggs that look how I feel. I say thank you ma'am. She says I'm welcome and am I a University man too.

I say no ma'am but why do you ask. She says Dinnerset is a sleepy town and almost nobody comes through but the postman, and yet they've had two strangers from the University come through in the past month. One of them, a Mr. Schmitt, slept right where I'm sleeping now and ate eggs and toast too, right where I'm eating them.

I estimate the old gal to be O.K. and so I tell her I'm not a University man but some University men sent me to check on the fellows that came through Dinnerset. I lean in, confidentially, and she leans in confidentially back. She's having fun and so I start having a little fun too. They've gone missing, I tell her, and the profs put me on the case.

O, she says, o goodness, I hope they're O.K. I ask her about them and what they said they were here for. She says they said they were checking out a site out in the desert to erect a radio transmitter tower tall enough that the whole state could listen to KDZK or KOJ if they wanted. I tell her, wow. That's pretty tall. She says yup.

We get the facts established. The men came through a month apart, no family, no assistants, each carrying a cart of radio equipment (or something that she believed to be radio equipment, she excuses herself, for she is not an educated woman, although she does know how to read). Mr. Schmitt was calm and bookish and very pleasant to the old gal, Dr. Palmer stayed over at the Fifs House and so she didn't know what he was like outside of the gossip, although from what she heard he was a drinker and maybe more, and I say what does that mean, and she indicates that she heard that those at Fifs House had suspected that the missing Dr. Palmer was an indulgent in laudanum. I say oh boy and she says oh boy too.

After a day of preparation, they each of them in their own respect had left Dinnerset to the West, heading into the desert with their equipment. Then nobody had seen them again.

I ask her whether either of them had been strange, and she says no more than anybody else from California, and I tell her that's fair and we both laugh. We talk about the desert for a while and she gives me some more sage advice that I write down in my notebook next to the advice from Dinnick. Then I say thank you ma'am and I pay for the room and I go out to look at the town.

I get outside and already I know it is a mistake. My body feels like it is boiling inside my clothes and the sun is nowhere near overhead. The packed sand that makes up the town's roads creaks beneath my shoes, like it's going to crack beneath my weight and I'm going to tumble endlessly into a forever pit.

First I find the Fifs House and ask those staying there about the missing University men, but they tell me the same story as the old gal, although they add enough gory personal details on Dr. Palmer that I decide that I'd like to attend a clam-bake thrown by the rip-roaring egghead.

By the time it is noon I am drenched in sweat, the sand has penetrated all the folds of my skin, I feel like a being of grime. Every movement of flesh against flesh on my flabby body is either unexpectedly slimy or an awful sandpaper dragging sensation. I decide it is high time to start drinking.

I get myself drunk enough to function. I interrogate everyone I run into in the town. They all seem genial and pleasant but have nothing more to tell me: the men came into town for one night, headed out towards the desert, and they never saw them again.

O.K. I think. A little too consistent. There are secrets left to be revealed, and there is a conspiracy afoot in Dinnerset to keep me from the truth. Maybe the men saw something they weren't supposed to see. Maybe a labor dispute got out of hand and they got caught up in the middle of it. Maybe this is a stopover for hooch runners and the mob buried them out in the sands. Maybe a corrupt mayor didn't want news of his crimes leaving the town. Maybe Dinnerset murders out-of-towners under the full moon. Maybe a blood ritual to Ba'al. Maybe a portal to Hell.

But I know that I am just trying to find an excuse to not walk out into the Mojave. Still I keep drinking and investigating and drinking and investigating until night falls and the temperature starts to drop and I can breathe again.

My investigations have not been going so well. In fact I am getting the sense that I have spent my good-will in Dinnerset over the past six hours pretty completely. Even when I retire to the old gal's little house, I can feel her souring to my presence, a cant to her face that lets me know that to her I'm revealed as a bad and broken thing.

I will have to steal away in the dark, and walk out on the sands hours before sunrise. Everything has gone wrong. I wish Annie were here, she'd know how to smooth things out with the old gal, with the people of Dinnerset. I wish Annie were here. She'd know what to do.

There is no moon. The desert looks like a hole, and hungry.

Fait Accompli, Chapter Two.

My gal's name is Annie Xiu and she lives catty-corner off Commercial Street and Grant and she owns a car. She comes from money but hasn't had as much since 1906 when the city burned up.

I ask to take her car to Nevada and she says no. And calls me a lousy bum and a no-good louse and says last time she saw me she told me to climb onto the roof of the Shell Building and take a long walk. I remember a little of the night she's describing, and start to feel the feeling I always get in my stomach when I start to remember things like this, like a dog's kicking me from the inside.

I leave Annie's apartment and go buy the meatball sandwich the Polish signmaker told me about, and it's pretty O.K., but I can't enjoy it.

I pack the necessaries for a week and buy a rail ticket that takes me across the border to Fernley. I fall asleep most of the way. The Sheriff there is a damp eyed Irishman I knew from back in my Army days. His name is Dinnick and I ask him how about he tells me about where I'm headed and how he's doing these days since taking up Sheriffing.

He tells me Sheriffing is fine and Fernley's been good to him especially since the transcontinental highway came through, although the markets last year had hurt Fernley just like it hurt everybody, he supposes, although it seems like it hurt Fernley a little less since they're on the transcontinental highway and the Southern Pacific line and people around here don't trust the banks anyhow, so most of the money didn't disappear, although it probably got a little better hidden because people have been being mighty protective about what they have and don't have since strangers roll through town on their way to California or heading back East, and they have had some fights and even a few killings, which he was able to clean up O.K. but he doesn't know how the next few years are going to shake out but he supposes neither does anybody.

I point to the place I'm going to on the map. He says it's in the Mojave and I say I know. He asks if I've ever done any desert-hiking and I ask can't I take a car there and he says no. I can take a car to there (he points at a little smudge on the map) but after that it's a ten, eleven mile hike to there (he points to where I'm going).

This makes me want to throw up just thinking about it. This makes me want to lay down on the floor of the room and die. I curse the University men. I curse Dinnick for telling me. I curse the sun and the moon. I haven't walked ten miles in ten months. I'm soft and fat and lazy and full of bad humor, and now I am going to get fried to a red button and crisp from dehydration and my skeleton will crumble into the hot sand and I will be forgotten for today and endless tomorrows.

I get over it and we figure out a way together for me to get there. He gives me advice. I write it down in my notebook. He gives me a good pair of boots and a water flask and a funny looking floppy hat, and I give him a sawbuck as insurance that I'll bring them back.

I regret giving him the sawbuck but with the money the University men gave me up front I can afford it. I'm just tight. I say good-bye and he says good-luck.

I hitch down to Tonopah with a truck carrying jarred fruit in bales of straw, sharing half a bottle of gin with the driver - the dry air already leeching the breath out of my lungs - and I hitch the rest of the way with a farmer (of what? I think, looking out over the barren arid plains) to the smudge on the map (which I find out is called Dinnerset) for the rest of the gin.

I congratulate myself on packing four bottles, which at the time I considered might be excessive.

By the time I get to Dinnerset it is already the freezing night of the desert and I am blind with sleep. I ask around and find a room someone is willing to rent to me for the night. As I lay down I realize I am so tired I cannot remember the name of who rented me the room, nor their face.

Before falling asleep, I take my notebook and I write down the price of the train ticket, the room, the bottle of gin, so as to later expense the University men. After an hour of fitful sleep, I rise, and add the price of the meatball sandwich.

The slumber I then sink into is of the deepest wells from which I have ever supped.

Fait Accompli, Chapter One.

It's two people who get ahold of me from the University, a dean of one of the colleges whose name I can't hear over the crackle of the bad connection, and Dr. Abraham D. Besmont, a professor of anthropology that clears his throat before every protracted sentence like an engine gunning up.

I'm sick from gin and the thing that's been going wrong with my back, but I need the money, so I agree to meet with them at their off-campus offices in half an hour. The taxi ride is longer than I expect. I don't have enough to pay the guy, so I leave him cursing me with the entire contents of my trouser pockets in his lap. I climb three flights of stairs. It's an old building and there's a lot of water damage on the second floor, from a pipe on the third floor bathroom that burst last month, I learn from a Polish signmaker who gives me his card even though I can't really afford a sign and I don't know where I'd put it anyhow. He also tells me where to get a good meatball sandwich, and I write this down in my notebook.

I take notes on account of I don't remember too well without notes, and what I like to do is keep a notebook in one coat pocket and write on it and tear out the pages of the notebook when it's done and put them in the other pocket, and then when I get home I take the pages and I arrange them on a couple of stainless steel memo stabbers or in folders or just on my desk. It's not a perfect system but it works O.K. for me.

I figure the University has some beaucoup bucks to spend so before coming over here I got out a fresh notebook and laid down my hair with a comb and washed my face. I walk into their offices and they don't have a girl on the front desk to greet me so I just keep walking and into the office with their shadows moving around inside and I say hello and shake their hands.

The dean whose name I couldn't hear on the telephone is a big old balled fist of a man with a drinker's gut and a beard and is called Rahey. Dr. Abraham D. Besmont is short and hairless and remains seated the whole time I am there, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and blinking with his big and heavily lidded eyes, sometimes at me, sometimes at Rahey, sometimes at a blank wall.

I feel sick strong again but I always feel sick so I tamp it down and listen. I take notes as they talk. Two associates of theirs, from the anthropology department at the University, have gone missing. Their names are Dr. Leonard Palmer and Amos Schmitt, who is a graduate student and a mentee of Dr. Palmer. Dr. Leonard Palmer went missing last month, Amos Schmitt went missing early last week.

Some questions: Did you know them well. Have you inquired as to their whereabouts from their families and companions. What did the bulls have to say or not say that made you come to me.

These questions were expected but they don't yield any interesting results. They knew them O.K. but not socially. Their families and companions didn't know boo. Their disappearances were both after they traversed across state lines (California into Nevada) so the bulls shrugged and said Not our business, we've got our own problems, pal.

I am distracted by a light playing in the windows across the street. They say it is a reflection of a fire that some grime-layered roustabout on the rooftops keeps starting, a danger to them and theirs, they say. He cooks hot dogs and his own mustard up there, they say, and sells it on Columbus Avenue. I realize I am hungry (my stomach growls like a sick lion) and think about the restaurant with the meatball sandwich that the Polish signmaker recommended. I want to ask if they have any opinion on the matter but instead ask about what's in Nevada.

My notebook gets a workout. They talk about ley lines and telluric currents, they talk about the Gila River Valley and Blythe Intaglios, they talk about thermionic valves and the photoelectric effect, they expect me to know what the letters LFW mean in this context, and about the current research on cathode ray diodes, they let me examine several projections of the Desert Southwest with arrows and Latin and calculations scribbled all over it that I don't get anything out of. They use the word antediluvian several times. It is my measure that they have completely forgotten about their missing colleagues in the course of this conversation.

Anyway, a couple of kooks. I start to lose hope that the University is backing this expedition after all, and try to adjust my expectations accordingly.

O.K. I say. So what do you want from me. And it's easy. They want me to find these gentlemen and return them safely home, and if I can't do that, find out what made them go missing in the first place. I give them my fee and they say O.K.

Well, I've dealt with the Duckys in the dockyards. I can probably find a couple of missing bookworms.

But first I'm going to need to get to Nevada.