Gateways to Abomination (2 page)

Bill
, with one tightening hand, his left and weaker hand, held both of Elise's wrists together over her head. His right forearm strained toward the floor, her slender neck blocking it from its destination. He curled his hand into a fist and pushed his elbow down as if trying to close a paper cutter onto a ream of heavy stock.

He pushed harder, and her legs kicked and her midsection bucked. He closed his eyes, squeezing with one hand, leaning with the other.

He had never ridden a bull, not the flesh and fur kind, not the beer and bar and barrel kind, but he imagined this was what it was like:  to stay on, to persevere, to make the noise stop…and finally the struggle ceased. He pushed further, using every last bit of energy, and heard a terrible noise. The death rattle? The room filled with a horrible smell, ordure, urine, animal smells, coffee breath.

The enormity hit him and he fell backwards, his taut legs propped up by her dead legs, his arms thrown back, his jaw open wide, scary wide, like a tin can with a whisker for a hinge. He heard an airplane overhead somewhere.

Why had she said that to him? In a blast of reflection he realized she couldn't have meant it; she was simply asserting the fact that she held authority, not actually threatening to use it.

There would be time to think about that later. He let his mind flood with the facts of this woman, her life. She had friends, people she wrote to. An ex-husband, a kid somewhere in a city miles away, but who saw her for holidays. Accounts at social networking sites. Thoughts about the future.

He let all that wash over him, and then he let it go.

In times of great stress, he would sometimes picture himself as
an other, watching from somewhere else, calmly assessing, allowing himself to be entertained, even amused by what was happening to his lesser self. He was never so dramatic as to name this Other, never so self-deceptive as to think of it as alien or beast. It was just Bill, a Bill devoid of emotion, looking upon a scene as though it was happening in some depressing movie. Dispassionate.  Detached.

In this manner Bill's other, and then Bill in turn, began to think of this problem not as a living, breathing human problem, but as a logistical problem, a puzzle, to be solved. He imagined he would be caught, publicized, humiliated, and punished. But he allowed himself a glimmer of hope, that this problem might do nothing more than cause many nights of self-torture. A
self-imposed prison that still had cable and restaurants and streets.

Bill dragged the body into the bathroom and turned on the lights on either side of the mirror and the overhead light. He stepped into the kitchen and pulled a sharp blade from a drawer piled to the top with knives. He remembered only having only a few knives, and was momentarily puzzled. It threw him, actually, and he paused.

He shook it off.

Knowing from television that forensic investigators can find with special lights where blood has been spilled, Bill pulled Elise's body up so that she was draped over the toilet, her head lolling over the side. With his left hand he gripped her hair and with his right he pushed the blade of the knife into the delicate hollow of her throat. He pushed and twisted and gouged, expecting a torrent, a splashing, something. He heard only a trickle. He pulled the body to the side and saw only a dissolving spiral of blood, a deep red corkscrew fading to pink and hanging in the water like a ghost.

He felt a sudden and intense and specific physical shift in his guts and flung Elise to the floor. Her arm stuck up in the air awkwardly. He saw that at some point she'd scraped her elbow, saw the glimmering of her wedding ring. He shoved down his pants and sat and released, his head thrown back, his jaw taut.

After cleaning up and showering--he tried to avoid looking at the body through the haze of the translucent shower curtain liner--he stood over her, naked, drying himself with haste, feeling vulnerable and exhausted.

Somewhere in the house, a voice spoke.

Bill let out a shrill shriek and instinctively grabbed a towel and wrapped it over his midsection. His breath came in rasps, and he put his hand over his mouth and listened carefully.

The voice droned from somewhere in the house, and Bill heard soft music--it was the clock radio. He must have set the alarm, forgetting it was the weekend. Was it that late? He walked through the dark house cautiously, his collected furniture and books seeming to loom and threaten, the voice in the bedroom growing louder and more strident. He reached his shadowed bedroom, lit only by a reading lamp in the corner whose face was pushed to the wall to minimize glare.

The Plague of the Leech
, an insistent and insinuating voice bleated from the tinny speaker,
will start in the stomachs of your children. The schools will close. Schoolteachers will fall in the street and men will lean to help and be taken. Hospitals will be overwhelmed and overrun; they will host the Leech and the Leech will simmer in its tubes and conduits and its tanks...

The red lights showed not 6 a.m., the time he would
wake for work, but 3:17; Bill's vision suddenly doubled, creating a dim, ghostly 3:17 below the real one. He shook his head and it was still there. He switched the radio off, but the voice continued. Then he saw that, in fact, the clock radio sat precariously upon another clock radio.

The disease will roil in your stomachs and minds and your churches will burst like bellies of brick and glass...
The voice rose in pitch and the music, an orchestral drone, deepened. Bill shoved the top radio aside and turned off its twin. Will this be the nature of my torture, he wondered.

He tried to separate from himself, look at the situation coldly from elsewhere, but he could not pull himself away. Bill was stuck in this, stuck in himself, and he was certain that the voice would rant again of death and plagues in a mad chorus of stacked radios teetering madly upon his dresser. He was certain he would be caught, and for a moment he wanted to be caught, to confess in mad sobs, gripping the phone so hard the plastic would crack.

He fought panic.

And then he separated. Parting from the whimpering man in the small house on the small street, pushing himself up above the trees like a swimmer pushing to the surface of a lake, Other Bill knew that daylight would come soon and that he must act. Bill remembered a place, a shadowed path in the meadows, and a dense and vast wood where as a
teenage boy he'd once found a stash of rain-dampened, swollen pornographic magazines. He remembered their smell, and it somehow brought him comfort. The path must be narrow enough for his modest car. He would bury her deep in the ground and hope that was enough.

He walked out of his room, his emotions and senses at rest. In his head, he was already on the shadowed path. Behind him the bedroom began to glow red, and a deeper red, and a mad voice began to speak, and double, and triple, and multiply.

As Bill stood over the body, which now seemed to him impossibly small, he realized he possessed no carpet in which to wrap it, and neither the tools nor the nerve necessary to dismember it.

Again, his heart began racing. His breath jumped into his throat in bursts. He feared each burst might be the last, that he might die here, collapse onto the small body curled on the floor and be found with her in a grim embrace, two silent cadavers awkwardly entangled, slowly stiffening and melting into the linoleum under an undulating umbrella of flies...

...and then he clenched his fists and again rose through the ceiling, through the attic, into the blue-black sky. He watched from above as his body pulled the comforter from the guest-room couch, bumped the body on top of it, and rolled the whole thing up into a bulging tube. He watched as he used packing tape to roll and tighten the ends. He smiled patiently as he came to the end of the roll, tearing cardboard off with the last strip of tape, and then rummaged through the junk drawer, finally locating a new roll. "You're doing fine," he whispered down to himself, a smile in his voice. "This will all be over soon."

Once he had awkwardly shuttled the body to the back seat of the car, he descended down into himself, coughed wildly, and started the engine. The defogger seemed to take forever. He avoided looking in the rear view, and clicked on the radio for distraction. The news was on, something about a bank robbery done by old men in topcoats, and then the vertical red line slid from the middle of the FM band to the left, voices and music and static flickering by, until it nearly disappeared behind the left-hand border.

...was the DeJackal Sisters with "Loosen My Bowels,"
a booming, echoing voice intoned.
Baphomet and bath mats; ravens and rape kits, strychnine and spikenard--the Hour of the Leech continues. Through your system like needles, blackening and crushing your cells, reshaping your synapses, tartening your tongue and boiling your brain in its skull...

Bill reached to switch off the radio; the dial was as hot as fire--he drew back his hand and stared at the blisters boiling on his finger and thumb.

As the voice continued its rant, across the dashboard a series of radio dials lit up, turning the interior of the car a sickly glowing green, and the voice zipped around his head like a trapped insect. He looked up and the roof of the car was teeming with black radio speakers, bulging along with the booming voice. They were crawling with spiders. One of the speakers burst, spraying blood and tissue onto the passenger seat. Radio dials lit up along the door panels, on the steering wheel. Bill covered his ears, squeezed shut his eyes, and screamed.

When he opened his eyes and lowered his hands, the cacophony had abated. A low drone came from the speakers and the radio dials, still glowing from all around him, pulsed softly with green light.  The befouled passenger seat sizzled quietly as the gore ate away like acid at the fabric.

Bill could only push forward. He drove out onto the main road, which was now somehow crowded on both sides with trees, behind which the dark windows of the silent houses watched. The treetops met above the road, muting the bright light of a spectacularly starry night. He drove for a time on the road, absent from himself, lost in the drone and the driving, unthinking. Eventually he turned the car onto the long dirt road that led through the woods to the path...

...to find himself in a procession of cars. The clock said
4:24 a.m. Who were these people? Where were they going? He felt compelled to shut his headlights, and did. So did all the other drivers. The road darkened in front and behind, leaving only the green glow that lit all the cars' interiors. Peering ahead, and whipping his head around to look behind, all he could see in the cars were silhouettes.

Slowly the somber parade turned onto the path and bumped along the forest floor. Before long, the procession halted. Bill hoisted himself out of the car, hearing the other car doors open as he did so. He turned and opened the rear door, dragging the comforter to the leaf-strewn ground. He shut the door and heard the other doors shut. How many? He could not tell. He looked down the line, and saw an endless procession of haunted men, each standing over a blanket-bound bundle. The nearest man to him was round faced and expressionless, though the green lights revealed an incarnadine face, splotched and tear-soaked. Bill felt tears on his own face.

The men in the woods pulled shovels from the trunks of their cars and hoisted their burdens over their left shoulders. All of the radios came to life, filling the morning with the drums of a military march. Birds joined in, chirping high and multitudinous. They scuttled through the treetops in the hundreds of thousands, their wings like thunder, the treetops hissing at their passage.

The morning was coming, the deep blue above the trees lightening, shooting down dusty shafts of blue through the trees. The ground was thick with earthworms, the vegetation blossoming, exploding, filling in the gaps of the forest. Bill struggled forward with his burden; he sobbed, he gibbered, he wept. To his left and to his right, men shouldered their way past the trees and underbrush, lugging their burdens.

All the men wept.

Then the sound of crashing, splintering trees, of wailing sirens, and a squadron of police cars bouncing from all directions through the burgeoning underbrush, some getting caught in the brambles, or upended by trees bursting up through the forest floor, blue and red lights dancing in the trees. Bill felt as though he was spinning in a tornado of light and noise. The body slipped from his shoulder. He sailed up into the funnel. It began to rain. His burden lay below. The other men rose around him, spinning slowly into the sky into the rain. Up, up they went. Bill looked down and picked himself out of the crowd. He looked so small down there. The smell of carrion followed him, the smell of gunpowder,
the smell of morning rain soaking the earth.

Then the worms rose, and the leeches. They followed the men into the morning, eating the rain, the leaves,
the sky.

When in the Spring of 2010, I moved from Woodburn, Oregon back to New England, from whence my family came, among the first of my many tasks was to locate a dentist.

My new job at a publishing company offered dental insurance, a benefit I'd not been afforded for five years. I had let my teeth go to an extravagant extent, having lived in what could be generously termed "reduced circumstances." Though I had dark dreams about periodontal disease, I was not a prodigious eater of sweets and sugars, so I did have some little hope of having gotten away with something.

I looked through the HMO's online list of participating dentists and looked for a name that I would find sonorous. I happened upon Dr. Francis Styrax. Perfect. A hell of a way to select a dentist, I know, but I tend to save things like research for academic matters. I had recently defended my thesis, entitled "Solipsism and Egoism in Satanic Cults" and was keen on keeping my nose out from between book pages for an amount of time that was yet to be determined.

My first appointment was early on a Monday morning before work. The office was in a small strip of medical buildings including an emergency clinic and a Planned
Parenthood. I signed in at the desk and filled out the appropriate paperwork. Then I flipped through an issue of
People
until I was called.

The hygienist was young and raven-haired, with dark, sculpted eyebrows. Her body was the very picture of the hourglass shape. Very attractive. Her name tag informed me before she could that her name was Angel. She executed a perfect cleaning, during which I stole frequent looks at the smooth, utterly unblemished white skin of her throat and breastbone. If she saw me, she didn't catch on, though her face bore an expression of bored bemusement.

After a time I was asked to rinse, and had the dubious pleasure of watching shards of tartar circle down the tiny circular sink. Watching them swirl down in eddies of blood stirred something in me, some memory, and I clenched my whole body in a panic. The hygienist mistook my agitations as squeamishness or dental anxiety, and allowed me a few moments to gather myself.

After the cleaning she put a heavy vest over my chest and had me bite down on a hard, plastic apparatus that dug into my gums. After some adjustments--I apparently have a narrow, high palate--the X-rays were done and she informed me the doctor would shortly be in.

Dr. Styrax entered the room glowering at a clipboard. He was a bulky man with a squarish face, topped by grey hair swept to the side and a forehead crowded with horizons of deep wrinkles. His eyes were kind and slightly haunted, the former being a quality one might hope for in a dentist. "There is a shadow I'm seeing in your X-ray that is causing me some concern," he said. "I'd like to refer you to an oral surgeon who will take a closer look."

"Could it be cancer?" I asked, and he chuckled darkly.

"The classic first question," he said. "Cancer is not what concerns me." He handed me a folded sheet of paper with a phone number and a name: Dr. Goldmast Lisle-Pearl.

Later that day I called the number and a diffident sounding receptionist with a flat affect insisted I come in right away. She gave me an address in Holyoke. I received supervisory permission to take the afternoon off, and took the bus south.

On the bus I realized that Dr. Styrax had not quite answered my question.

The building was a tall, narrow, dilapidated high-rise on a long, featureless street. Most of the other buildings appeared to be vacant manufacturing facilities, and I saw no cars. The building was of gray stone, and dirty and cracked blinds were drawn in all the windows. I entered through a heavy, windowless oak door into a checkered floor lobby. An elevator with rusted doors was to my left, a stairwell to my right.

I pressed the button for the elevator and heard a shrill, metallic shriek somewhere up above, and then what sounded like debris tumbling through the elevator shaft and down to some unknown depths below. The elevator doors shook and strained, and then they parted, leaving a gap of about three inches and then shuddering to a halt, one of them becoming comically crooked in the process. Peering in, I could see only thick steel wound wire.

I started up the stairs. As I turned at the first landing, I heard strange footsteps echoing down the stairwell. Boom-slap, boom-slap, boom-slap. At the next landing I looked up and saw a man dressed as a clown coming down, navigating the stairs with drunken deliberation. He looked like he’d been doused with a bucket of water, unnaturally red curls flattened to his forehead below an absurdly tiny hat. He wore a polka-dotted smock sopping with moisture. His makeup was smeared to the degree that I could not tell if he had started the day a happy clown or a sad clown.

He avoided my gaze as he passed, and I turned and had something of a shock: his back was
porcupined with long metallic needles. They sprung from between his shoulder blades in a patternless proliferation. A crescent of needles frowned from his lower back. Below that, he was wearing a set of plastic buttocks, tied around his waist with a grey wet string. There was no blood that I could see.

My rationality has always been there for me. In arguments it has been my weapon; when the world has come growling at me with teeth bared, it has been my shield. I held onto it now. If Dr.
Styrax had recommended an oral surgeon, I must be headed to see an oral surgeon. It is just that...my family, my background. There is a history of strangeness about which I don't want to speak. I can only say that I fled that strangeness as a boy of sixteen. I changed my last name, cut off all ties, moved across the country. My life has been the very picture of normalcy since then. So my guard was up, but so was my determination to look after my health. I continued.

As I rounded the next landing, a goat rounded the one a flight up, a stricken look on its narrow face. It clomped down the stairs at an awkward angle, back hooves left, front hooves right. It glanced at me guardedly and, I swear, groaned, and continued past. At the next landing I opened the heavy door and found myself in a nondescript hall that smelled of cedar and new paint. Wooden doors with frosted glass panels lined the hall. My folded page indicated 13-18. I read the stenciled lettering on the doors as I walked. 13-3 BARNET COLLEGE DEPARTMENT OF THEOSOPHIC STUDIES...13-12 DR. WHELAN GEIST FATES THERMAL AURICULAR THERAPY...

The door for 13-18 said DR. GOLDMAST LISLE-PEARL in letters worn and chipped, and then ORAL SURGEON in letters that shone black and new. I touched my finger to the "O" and the door swung open at my touch. I looked at my fingertip, and it was blue-black. The "O" on the door was smudged.