Leary smiled at the teen’s naivety. ‘JFK smoked pot and took cocaine, which was his favourite. But the important point here is that he turned on to acid. Mary arranged several trips for him. He was expanding his consciousness … starting to see the way the world really works.’
Gabe looked as if he might be sick. ‘My dad … I mean JFK … He really did this? I’m sorry. I’m starting to get confused.’
‘The day after JFK was assassinated, Mary called me up.’ All traces of showmanship had been replaced by a deep unease. These were her exact words: “They couldn’t control him any more. He was changing too fast. He was learning too much … They’ll cover everything up. I gotta come see you. I’m scared. I’m afraid.” They’ve left Mary alone so far, but she’s still living in fear.’
‘You’re saying JFK was assassinated because he dropped acid?’ Church couldn’t hide the note of incredulity in his voice.
‘Not because he dropped acid — because he began to understand some universal truths. I’m saying he was a charismatic, influential and powerful person who, although flawed, was starting to open his eyes. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking metaphorically or not — “spider-people” is a good way of describing those who buy into the whole Anti-Life agenda — kind of like the pod people in that Body Snatchers movie. The spider-people are everywhere, and every year that passes they control more and more of the world. But they have to carry out their business from the shadows, because otherwise they’d ruin the illusion of what they’re trying to create.’
‘How do you recognise them?’ Gabe said anxiously.
Leary thought about that for a moment, and then said simply, ‘You don’t.’
6
‘I know what you’re doing, Tom,’ Church said when they were back at the apartment. ‘You’ve learned a lot of manipulation skills out there in the Far Lands. But if you think you can get me back wasting my life in a fight I can’t win, you’d better think again.’
Tom shrugged and acted as if Church was speaking nonsense.
‘Especially now you’ve told me I’m supposed to be fighting some kind of universal god of darkness. It’s just insane.’
With infuriating aloofness, Tom ignored Church completely, dropped an LP onto the record player and turned the volume up full.
7
In July, author Ken Kesey took his first Magic Bus Trip to New York on an LSD-fuelled quest to discover America, at the same time as President Lyndon Johnson was signing the Civil Rights Act.
On the night of 19 July, Niamh dragged Marcy into the apartment. Blood streamed from a gash on Marcy’s head and Niamh had a stunned expression that Church had never seen before.
Gabe ran to help. ‘Who did this?’
‘The police,’ Niamh said. ‘They came at us as if we were vermin being driven from a sewer.’
Marcy sat in a chair in the kitchen, clutching a towel to her wound. ‘It was a Congress of Racial Equality protest in Harlem,’ she said. ‘The cops went crazy. Shot one guy dead, hundreds more injured. There was blood all over the sidewalk.’ She stared into the middle distance with an expression of mounting horror. ‘We only wanted a voice, just black people saying who we were.’ She smiled weakly at Niamh. ‘Sorry for dragging you into it, darlin’.’
‘Do not apologise. I need to see these things.’ She rested a hand on Marcy’s shoulder. Church could see that a bond had grown between them similar to the one between Gabe and himself.
‘We need to get out of this city,’ Gabe said, demoralised.
‘No,’ Marcy replied defiantly. ‘We need to fight.’
They buried their differences for the rest of the summer and into the autumn. But then in October, as the cold winds blew harder, Tom came across a small article in the newspaper. Timothy Leary’s presidential contact, Mary Pinchot Meyer, had been murdered as she walked along the Chesapeake and Ohio towpath in Georgetown. It looked to have been the work of a professional hit man. The first bullet was fired into the back of her head, and when she did not die immediately, a second shot was loosed into her heart. The evidence showed that in both cases the gun was almost touching Meyer’s body when it was fired.
Immediately afterwards, Church, Niamh, Tom, Gabe and Marcy left town and headed west.
8
While President Johnson was outlining his Great Society, they were holed up in a leaky warehouse in St Louis. By the time the US had started bombing North Vietnam in earnest on 8 February 1965, they had moved to slightly better surroundings in an old meat-packing plant in Chicago.
There was no sign of the Army of the Ten Billion Spiders anywhere near their lives. Church couldn’t make the guilt go away entirely; he knew they were being left alone because he had chosen to walk away from the battlefield. With the lamp containing his stolen Pendragon Spirit still safe in his bag, he could claim to be little more than an average person, trudging through life below the radar of the forces that controlled everything.
On 21 February, black revolutionary leader Malcolm X was shot and killed. Marcy cried all night and there was nothing Gabe could do to drag her out of her growing despair at the worsening political situation.
All around them the misery continued to mount. On 6 March the first American soldier officially set foot on Vietnam’s battlefields, and two days later 3,500 marines landed to protect Da Nang airbase. In between, Alabama state troopers attacked 500 civil rights workers preparing to march, and by the end of the month the Ku Klux Klan had murdered another civil rights worker in the same state. At home and abroad, the spider-people — in metaphor and reality — continued to take control, spreading despair, crushing hope.
‘Existence needs its king to lead its troops,’ Tom said to Church as he browsed a day-old paper one morning. Church gave his standard response: it was somebody else’s job now.
Over the months, to Tom’s annoyance, Niamh had sided with Church. She pointed out that people were fighting back of their own accord. Martin Luther King Jr. and 25,000 supporters took the fight for civil rights back to Alabama. A further 25,000 marched on Washington in April to protest against the spiralling Vietnam War.
‘Music is the voice of hope,’ she pointed out to Tom as he listened to his growing record collection, and he had to agree: Phil Ochs, Joan Baez and Judy Collins joined the anti-war marches, and the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan spread the message of discontent.
On 5 September, writer Michael Fallon applied the term ‘hippie’ to the San Francisco counterculture in an article about the Blue Unicorn Coffeehouse where campaigners for sexual freedom and the legalisation of marijuana met.
And on Christmas Day 1965, the Libertarian came to town.
9
‘You don’t get it, Gabe. Standing up and fighting for what you believe in is the only way. Malcolm was right. If you turn the other cheek they’ll just keep slapping it.’ Marcy had changed more than all of them in the months they had been together. She’d developed a flintiness as a defence against the attacks that were coming from all quarters.
She trudged through the snow towards the convenience store in her boots and ragged jeans, a thrift-store coat pulled tight for warmth, annoyed at the childish frivolity of Church and Gabe who had stopped for a snowball fight.
‘If you get involved in violence and confrontation you’re just as bad as the people you’re opposing,’ Gabe protested. ‘There’s always a peaceful route. JFK could have bombed the Communists like all the hawks in the White House wanted, but he talked his way out of it and saved the world in the process.’
When she was trying to keep her anger inside, Marcy always held her head in a way that made her appear haughty. ‘This is a war, and you’re on one side or the other. There’s no room for sitting on the fence. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Sooner or later you’ve got to choose, Gabe.’