But in Fall the woods are foreboding and defiant. The brambles and bristles and thorns gather to hinder your progress, as though guarding a secret. As you pick your path and make your way through the trees, the day turns to night only yards in. In Fall, in the New England woods, it is always night. Leaves fall like dry, dead angels, piling up against the leviathan broken bones of storm-savaged trees.

It was
Fall when I went into the woods. I had been in the den, sorting through papers with the radio tuned to classical music from a local college. The cat jumped up on the telephone table and ran his tooth along the side of the radio, turning the dial a few notches to the left in the process. GodDAMMIT, I said, sitting up to re-adjust the radio.

I stopped, my hand poised over the dial. I listened. And then I took up my stick and walked out of my house. I turned onto Allyn Street. The traffic whooshed by, and the freezing rain struck my face like needles. I felt the ice
bouncing off of my eyeballs. A Stop & Shop bag fluttered desperately in a tree like a trapped ghost. I went into the woods.

I couldn't hear the road anymore when I saw the thin man. He was dressed in an old-style suit and a tall hat. I thought he might be distressed, but he moved through the uneven forest floor elegantly, as though strolling on a rain-slicked street.

When he got almost near enough for me to see his features, he bent suddenly, then dropped to his knees. His body whipped as though his spine were a snake snapped by a forceful hand. An ungodly gurgle bellowed up from his throat and he vomited a thick stream of wriggling worms. His body lurched again and he gagged, a thick crack, then drew in breath and let loose again, the worms pouring out as though propelled. I watched the folds of skin at his throat undulate. Then he took in a deep, retching breath and fell to the forest floor.

I rushed to him, my disgust giving way to pity and fear. When I got there, he looked dead, melted into the forest floor, reminding me of those pictures of soldiers
’ bodies engulfed in sand dunes at Normandy. His clothing twitched and writhed, and it was then I saw that the legions of worms had grown into snakes, with dripping fangs and black eyes. I smelled a sickly smell, of putrefaction and ammonia and venom. A wormy snake slid over my shoe, leaving a trail of black-green slime.

I fled the woods and the remains of the old man. Now I sit in my house. The power is out, and a fallen tree lets the rain into this dark den. It puddles at my feet. The cat floats by, its open eyes milky with cataracts, its body limp. The phone rings for a time, and then stops.

The door opens. I am not expecting anyone.

when
i was a boy – a broadcast

When I was a boy in Leeds, I had a friend named Christopher Dempsey who lived out on Cemetery Hollow Road. He had a younger brother named Alex and a backyard that emptied out into an expanse of woods that hid most of our boyhood exploits, which for a time were no less innocent than catching and eating frogs.

Christopher and Alex each seemed to be clothed in dirt. It smudged their faces at the corners of their mouths and settled into the cracked skin at their elbows and knees. Their toes were so encased in filth they were never once kicked out of King's Grocery for being shoeless; a glance at their filthy feet fooled most into thinking the boys had donned dense and dirty slippers.

Their mother, though not as obviously caked and clotted with filth as her boys, seemed to be filthy with secrets. She was thick-hipped and black-haired and wore huge glasses and colorful faded sashes tied at her waist. She favored dark denim pantsuits and she smoked up hand-rolled cigarettes one after the other. She was ugly and beautiful and fat and curved and she did not wear lipstick neatly like Mother wore lipstick. She spent hours behind the closed door of her room listening to monotonous and eerie orchestral music. She read strange books. She was quiet and sullen and cursed at her boys and humiliated and hated them. She took to me instantly, foisting her boys off upon me on many a hot afternoon and staring strangely after me as we fled into the woods.

I neither liked nor disliked Christopher and Alex. They were dim and easy to manipulate. Crimes I wished to commit they'd do at the mere suggestion. We committed acts of minor arson, and were cruel to frogs and otters and lizards, but not to cats. I once saw Christopher trying to strangle a tomcat and I jammed a thick branch into his ear until it spat blood and I handily convinced Alex to take the blame.

Before long, I became fixated on their mother. Her body was magnificent. Her ass was huge and hypnotic and I wanted to see all of it. The only naked images of women I'd seen were from drawings by my neighbor (and friend) Guy, and the lonely woman who lived next door and changed with the blinds not drawn. Guy had a talent for drawing wide, angular asses, and hers was like one he'd never dared draw, nor even imagine. I wanted to nestle in it like a cat in the crook of a tree. I wanted to inhale its mysterious dank odors. I wanted to sup at it, to beat at it with my balled fists, to set it on fire and burn myself putting it out, to roll in the ashes in leaves of burnt flesh like it was catnip in satin sheets. But I was but ten, and she had a long line of miserable unworthy suitors to tend to her musty desires.

Christopher and Alex and I would play hide and go seek in the yard and I would sneak to the bedroom window to see
her, face down on the couch while some boney, scaly drunk's bone-white tiny ass whipsawed up and down. Hours later in my own bed I would hear all the sounds, the voices and the sounds of flesh and I would ejaculate into my cupped hand, my mouth wrenched open in horror and revulsion and ecstatic erotic joy.

Over the months of summer I saw the teacher Mr.
Craston kicking rocks in her driveway, I saw some of the lean, hoodlum neighborhood kids smoking sullenly on her porch, and once I swore I saw my father emerge shamefully from her house and slink off behind their garage, but it couldn't have been. He was at work. But there were more, many of them, scores of them.

One day I arrived at their old house to find Alex and Christopher lashed to a tree in the back with a length of rope encrusted with something greenish brown. Christopher was howling, straining against the ropes, his fists balled, blood seeping from between his fingers and a swinging pendulum of brown drool clinging to his bruised and chapped bottom lip. Alex was opposite him, fast asleep, the corner of his tongue poking from his mouth like a swollen worm, a
metronomic rasp the only sign of life. I noted that his shirt was yanked up where the rope pushed into his flesh and his little belly lolled. I noted that he had an outie.

I turned to leave and
She beckoned me from the doorway. She was wearing a ratty pink robe that hung open obscenely. Its browned sash curled like a snake at her feet. I seem to remember--though it cannot be--that a newly lit cigarette jutted from between her disturbingly large big toe and its curled neighbor, sending a seductive tendril of smoke up past the webbed blue veins of her thighs, past the sweaty cramped horizons of her belly, past the glitter stuck in clumps between her ample, dangling breasts, past her eyes, one of which twitched, past her hair, which was greasy and brown and frayed. I turned again to run and fainted dead away.

I cannot describe what was happening to me when I woke. It was my dream come true and my nightmare. Her face pushed into me
everywhere. She pulled from me pleasures I'd never imagined and pulled and bit at my skin angrily until I shrieked and pulled away in pain and shame. Cigarettes lay broken and smoking in ashtrays all over the room. There must have been scores of them, providing ample light to see the faces watching us from all the corners of the room. I thought I saw Guy grappling with my father over scraps of raw meat. I remember a clock whose face was an obscene caricature of a black man, another whose hands were crudely rendered pricks. I remember a dog rolling on a milk-soaked carpet, its belly a mass of grotesque breasts. She saw me looking frantically about the room and covered my eyes with her hand, which smelled of sex and nicotine.

There was music playing, I remember, and there were whispers and bursts of jeering laughter. I think at one point a dog lapped at the bottom of my foot. I endured a cigarette burn whose ghost still haunts my eyebrow. I remember the sounds of someone vomiting. But mostly there was her, from every angle and in deep in every fold. Our bodies roiled and boiled and pushed into each other unspeakably. I was terrified of her, and terrified that it would end. I was sure I would die, for there were long stretches of time when her flesh filled my throat and seemed to be on the verge of somehow invading my very lungs. I wanted to die, and I wanted to go on forever.

But I did not die, and I did not go on forever. After innumerable hours--days?--I was pushed naked into a shower and held against the wall so I wouldn't collapse. I was washed my many rough hands. I was fed stale bread and thin soup. After, I staggered out onto the lawn, drunk (for at one point she had spat vodka down my throat and slapped my face with a massive slipper). I collapsed, inhaling the smell of grass and healthy dirt. I was in love and in pain and in lust and I was ashamed.

That night I burned down the house with kerosene and rags and father's whisky bottles. All the
Dempseys died that night. Mr. Craston must have been there, because he never came back to school. The firemen and investigators swarmed the sooty, scorched mess for days after. I heard rumors of their findings, things in the basement, carcasses and cocoons and collections of obscene antiquities and rusty metal sexual apparatus that could not have been designed for humans. There were sixteen bodies found, but no one save Mr. Craston missing from our town. Old pages and parts of books in unfathomable languages. I saw them drag out the belt I'd worn during my hellish visit. I saw three-eyed spectacles and a bucket full of feet. Maybe I didn't see these things.

Maybe I dreamed them, or maybe I'm misremembering them.

Every woman after was but a shadow of her. I scared them all away anyway, what with my screams and my mutterings and my cruel and impossible demands. She was my First and my Last. She was a gateway to abomination.

You're listening to WXXT. You are not sure how long you have been listening. Your stomach drowns out the sounds of your radio. A wind howls. The batteries die. Infants mewl at your feet.

Up next, the swinging sounds of Dino Paul Crocetti. You know him as Dean Martin.

BOOK: Gateways to Abomination

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