Topaz Inn, East Main Street, Mesa Arizona
Good Friday, April 18th
Night had fallen in his absence, somewhere beyond the bounds of his consciousness, which was waning ever less wroth and ever more weak. He woke drooling on the window of a rattling carriage door, looked out, and saw on his right, boat and mobile home rental parks rolling bye. He groaned and looked left, to see a fine young fellow, somewhat unconventional in a green Joshua Tree Climb cap, driving the old Ford Pinto Fastback. The fellow had kind, penetrating eyes, bespeaking empathy tainted with a weird grit.
“Yes, you helped me?”
“Yes, Jon, and I checked you for I.D., found only an historic Social Security card and a bunch of cash—and a Hitching Post shot glass.”
“Sounds right,” he yawned.
“I’m driving around looking for a Cryptologist, named Rex. That is where you mumbled you were headed—in a mint 78 fastback—these things go for eighty grand! Never would have guessed by your suit.”
“My suit, yes—It was much different upon a fled time, the Pinto too…”
He yawned and spoke what visions came to his mind, “A purple well, drowning in… Oh, that is after… The before? Cryptologist Rex—a colleague of shared dream. He lives to my right, ahead, among a slanted collection of beige adobe homes, shaped like a trailer of the Pennsylvania hills, yet under stucco…”
He yawned, lurching back into inner space, the cadence of the fine young fellow working the clutch and down shifting putting him right.
The beige adobe houses came into view as the kind voice of Dan—perhaps out from Dannite Lands to help him—exclaimed, softly, “Well I’ll be. Thought I knew Mesa! That’s what I get. Here we are, Jon, The Topaz Inn, strangest darned motel I have ever seen—but rationally themed above all, what with detached rooms made of actual single-wide mobile homes! Do you have an address, Jon?”
“No,” he drooled. “A great tall man, a voice like an iron bell, an opinion like a gavel indicting the denizens of hell…”
Instead he heard his fatty throat rattle with a snore, coughing himself awake as the car eased to a stop behind an adobe trailer.
“Apologies, for falling asleep—you see I can’t drive, autonomous, mechanical motion sends me away—my old horse, Buddy included. I miss Buddy, a good Pinto, flanks near to red…”
“I think we are here, Jon,” said the soothing saint of a beatnik, might have been a redneck atime.
“How?” he mumbled, feeling he had failed in his guiding design.
Dan smiled, “Jon, I appreciate you. You are real, most real person I have met since losing my Guru to that hospital scam—they kept him, drugged him, killed him, took all thirty houses when they found out he had no heirs, wouldn’t let me near him. So, I figure, where else is a fat, eccentric, faɡɡot-slaying boomer in a bad suit and CSA beret going to be headed, but to the last trailer on the right?”
A great gong of silver rang in his mind’s ear and Jon R. Imbolden did rise from the grave within his harrowed hollows and declared, “By God, man, you have been heaven sent, an angel I do believe! Dismount and tether—eh, how does one get…”
“On the inside of the door, Jon, pull that small latch and then push the door.”
“Absurd, my man?” he said turning back to the fellow and not seeing him there. The door then opened of its own accord, the kind carriage phantom soon revealed as, Daniel his loyal footman, apparently his coachman as well, ‘How one does fall down the stairs of wicked time—but one servant to my name? So be it, head high—oh my, look at that paunch. Mother said playing poker with the Negroes would result in a malformed belly…”
“Thank you, Daniel.”
On instinct he reached for his shirt-pocketed money clip and slid out a $100 note occupied by that conniving printer and handed it to his man, “There you go, take it, Daniel. You have been with me through thick and thin until your hair has streaked gray. Now gently knock upon yon door, for a scholar of learned yore awaits within.”
Jon followed his man up the stairs, dressed nearly as an Indian in some shanty imitation of a breach cloth. Behind his slightly attired guide Jon stood, smoothing his shabby jacket, a jacket that might have once been rakish in some better time than this, where now footmen serve in rags and Indian rubber moccasins.
The door opened to reveal a giant standing within, a hint of a smile creasing the great face beneath eyes too dark with pondering to permit but few such expressions. The voice he knew of yore, “Jon! Welcome. Please, young man, come in and latch the door behind you. Such conclaves may never be taken too seriously.”
Standing next to Daniel, Jon felt compelled to remind Rex, of the return of his long lost servant, “Rex, you do recall Daniel, my footman who we thought to be hopelessly lost with Bierce? Daniel, we are reunited with Rex Harrowgate, West Warden of Our Order.”
Rex seemed sad, and gave Daniel a look that bespoke welcome despite an apparent suspicion that beside Jon stood some other Daniel.
Rex’s voice thundered, “You are, a Daniel?”
“Yes, Sir. Was hiking The Supers. Unusual clouds and pending rain cover, I believe, gave shadows for the snake people, those whom God deprived of their lizard legs. I found Jon battling eight faɡɡots, definite homos, with bird bones, vulture-like aspects. I don’t know how he drove there, out to the Vista. He keeps passing out. The Hopi told me something was up—I’m just a spirit hiker and chem trail investigator, acupuncture once; lost my Guru to the medical system. That’s me, a drifter. I live out of my car, parked not far from here if this is private and I need to go.”
Jon gawked at this young hero soul and asked, “Please, don’t go, Daniel. I’ve missed you so.”
Rex placed a hand on both of their shoulders, a Samson of the mind among them, “Jon is our fiend finder. He has been losing his way, in all matters except for the seeking of his prey. You must know what this is about before I may, in clear conscience, accept you into our necessarily loose association.”
“Yes, I understand—it has been building, this sense that we are being drained and poisoned. I have friends who have gone missing, one who survived, ruffied at a party, mesmerized.”
Rex looked up and crossed himself upon the black t-shirt he wore. And there, from arm to arm and neck to belly, his great fingers left a stardust trace in the night black shirt, a cross, a Keltic cross, shining there like a constellation set in a vertical night sky.
Daniel said, richly, “Fuck yeah!”
Jon mumbled, “Amen.”
To these ascents Rex intoned like a strident bell,
“And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.
“And the devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will give it.”
-Luke 4: 5, 6
“Mathew 4: 8-11 supports Luke in this. Daniel, Jon has given much to the struggle against this force. We ask for your relative innocence, to be forged in a crucible of hate. Are you willing to tap that well within, beyond?”
“Yes,” exhaled Daniel. “This is no accident—I’m in.”
“Thank you,” whispered Jon, as he sat in a chair that was suddenly there and began to cry, “Rex, Mary found me—afraid the faɡɡots had me. I miss her so.”
“Just a while longer, Jon. You need to get organized—even I can’t keep track of you. We may never even know how many fags you’ve bagged.”
Those words still rumbled under the ceiling that but barley admitted Rex’s mighty head, in a “home” where he must duck through the door ways, where the walls were wondrously hung with crosses, rosaries, incense censors, maces, swords, shields, helmets, daggers, above shelved books of ancient illuminated kind, chained to the very walls.
As if in response, thunder rumbled on the mountain and wind whipped west along the highway.
“Is that so!” snarled Rex, seizing a two handed claymore from the wall, in one hand, and thrusting it through ceiling and roof, hilt, fist and all. The sheet metal roof groaned at this, then moaned among the falling stucco as Rex, with bloody hands, bent the shorn metal around the pummel. He then pointed to a kite shield on the wall, which Daniel dutifully grabbed and handed to him. The grip and strap were used to bind the sword pummel and make a crude bowl beneath the hole in the roof.
‘That must look like an affront to the power on the wicked mount,’ Jon mused, wondering if Mary knew he was safe.
The rain came as they repaired to a table with whiskey and glasses. Rex looked at Daniel, “You don’t drink—good, variation in resistant forms confuses the Enemy.”
The glasses poured, a distant thunder clap sounded as the rain rattled under the rumbling report and howling winds.
Jon was revived from his trance by the whiskey and hissed, “There is a Watcher on the rocks, the roosts are empty tonight, come to feed and plant their rot.”
They sat in silence, three thinking, two drinking.
The storm lasted for four tilts of the glass.
The roof did not leak.
Rex looked into him with those knightly eyes and, with that mighty voice observed, “Let them feed. Tomorrow, mere hours away, Jon Rye and Good Daniel, you too will seek.”
“Amen,” clanged three empty glasses, two dull with rye, one sharply dry.
