The Spectral Link Read Free Page A

most nights, our troubled standing with the state power system being what it is, and because there just ain’t enough tourist gold, as Clem likes to say, to keep the lights on as much as we’d like. We can make fire with our eyes sometimes, but nobody’s ever got rich doing that, least that I know. Which puts me in mind of those redskins used to live back here in the swamp with us before they got themselves plumb flush with them casinos, seems a white man can hardly get his due in this sun-don’t-shine state, God bless the confederate dead and them of us who’s among them with our good lord, including my little sister, sent up to heaven by our daddy’s squirrel-stick of a rifle went off whilst he was having his way with her, didn’t know the thing was loaded no more than he did when he was digging for that nostril meat he loved more than the family dog’s hind parts. Blowed his head so far off it went straight through the roof of our home and outhouse, which weren’t no loss, the rest of him putting us in Sunday dinners for weeks, waste not whatnot, fried in a pan of possum fat and we got us a feast, woulda been the envy of the neighbors if Clem hadn’t got to them some years past, sucked them into one of his dreams and left them there for the zombies most probably. We’d never been on good terms with those folk anyway. It was them or us. Sometimes we get mad at Clem for disappearing walking food when we’re half-starved. Meat’s meat and a man’s gotta eat, like the cannibal guy says in that movie we went to see back when we left you in the bus station shitter. He planted ’em in the ground up to their head, fed ’em till they was fat, then harvested ’em like turnips. They didn’t have a jew’s chance in a Baptist pitch-tent of worship. We tried to do much the same with a tourist fella called himself an anthropologist. He made for good company for a time, though, till he finally got us all agitated with his funny talk. He was yakking a blue streak whilst Clem and I was conferring on whether to use the ax to split him down the middle or fillet his pasty skin with the hunting knife and use his hide to fix up the roof where daddy’s head went through. That anthropologist fella kind of sounded like the guy gave me your address, name of Dealer. Odd type he was and not to be trifled with. Even Clem felt a queer horror of the man. Seemed to blink in and out before your eyes as you was talking to him. Called us metaphysical mutants, at least I think those were his words. Anywhat, he conveyed that you might appreciate a holler from your kin folks, sorry again how things turned out. Hope you don’t—
     
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    So ended what remained of the letter. I think the reader can appreciate from it not only something of my origins and heredity, but also the uncanny reference to the Dealer, still a figure of my dream occasions at that time but one that now filled my mind with a chilling perplexity, particularly with respect to mental phenomena transposed within a physical universe. This feeling was greatly deepened in the next session I had with Dr. O. I mentioned that I continued to have dreams of the Dealer, in at least one of which Dr. O’s name arose in a context I could not recall. Instantly, my therapist and guru went pale. He was also quite obviously at pains to force out his next sentence: “Did the Dealer say anything about an all-new context?”
    “I believe so,” I said. “He almost always does.”
    At these words, Dr. O visibly shuddered and the file on me that was on his lap nearly fell to the floor. He recovered the folder, however, and hastily wrote something before straightening its pages and securing it in a metal drawer. We then moved on to my meditation instruction, employing a new technique that was supposed to be more effective in quelling my incessant cogitation and, in turn, lightening my demoralized state as a human being who, like most human beings, had no focused idea of what it meant to