Gateways to Abomination (4 page)

LEEDS, Mass. - There were new details Wednesday morning about why a Hampshire County school bus driver lost his job.

The school system fired Stanley
Saltworth in May. According to Saltworth's personnel file, the former bus driver had numerous formal complaints lodged against him. He was terminated shortly afterward.

One parent said
Saltworth wept while picking up students. Another said that he demanded a female middle school student check his back for leeches. Other parents complained he played at top volume on the bus a radio station that was broadcasting obscene material. Saltworth insisted that the bus radio was defective.

WANTED DEAD: Guy RONSTADT, in shape resembling a man, he stands about 19 1/2 hands high, with tangled Hair, a patrician Nose, engaging Eyes, and unseemly Ears. Turn a deaf ear to his persuasions, as he has acquaintance with neither Truth nor Decency. He has more Devil in him than ever Rasputin had. He is a thief and a murderer and a defiler of the Dead. When he has been killed, insure that he is not interred in a graveyard, if he is, be certain to place him face-down and place large rocks on his grave, or he will be quick up again and slaughter the graveyard's
nighest neighbor.

I don't know if the house in the meadows exists. I'm almost certain I've seen it outside of my dreams, but not sure enough to swear to it, never mind to actually wager. I could tell you that one summer evening, at twilight, I was walking on a dirt road lined on one side by a dense wooded area, on the other by an expansive field dotted with leaning, decrepit barns suffering from decades of disuse. The only sounds were my footsteps in the gravel, underscored by crickets' hypnotic chirping.

And I could tell you that I happened to look into the woods and saw the unmistakable shape of a Victorian, tall and narrow, surrounded and impaled by dense trees and thicket. I stopped short and let my eyes adjust to the gathering darkness.

I could tell you that the front door hung open, and that there may have been a source of light somewhere deep within the bowels of the place, enough to illuminate a carpeted front hall and steep staircase. I could say that the treetops were punched right through the roof of the place, that an ancient desk hung at a dangerous angle some yards above the house, perched upon an expansive asterisk of thick, knotted branches. That some clothing--a corset, a waistcoat, some giant white knickers--lay higher up, sagging from bowed branches as though hung there to dry.

And I could tell you I pushed through the underbrush and nettles and clouds of mosquitoes and then stood, scraped and bruised and bitten, in the front hall. I could tell you what shambled down the stairs, swinging an ancient watch on an ancient chain wound around ancient fingers. I could tell you what it said to me.

I could tell you so much, but I couldn't look at your face while I spoke.

I could tell you that when I returned to town, the streets were piled with caskets, centuries old and crumbling. That bleached, bloated arms reached from some. I could say that some of those caskets were tragically small. That some held the drowned, and leaked rank water that was waist deep and rat-strewn under the overpass.

That bodies impaled upside down on stakes filled the courtyard of my tenement, like an inverted audience waiting for a speech from a demented demagogue.

I could tell you of a rain of bruised babies slamming sickeningly into the pavement of the roads and sidewalks of Leeds, bouncing in dizzying numbers from the roof tops and canopies and awnings.

I could tell you that I was now a part of an army of the dead, whose instructions were dispersed by coded messages on a radio station. I could tell you of our foul mission and of our multitudes of intended victims.

I could tell you these things, my invisible audience, only on the airwaves of WXXT.

WXXT. If it bleeds, it's Leeds.

My name is Benjamin Stockton. It feels so good to say that. I am Benjamin Scratch Stockton. I have been effectively mute for over a year, scratching in dirt, penned in by a fence of wood and wire, eating hay for my filet and water for my wine. My diatribe was a wavering yell, my thoughts a stifled mass of black thunderclouds.

But yesterday, the day of the rains, was a big day, a mighty day. I was taken, brought into the wet woods under a slate-gray sky, and, brothers and sisters, I was born again. Born in blood in a dingy apartment on Eastern Avenue. But first I was given a message by a hapless messenger before I dashed out his brains in the grass with his own cane, now mine.

I have an apartment now, three rooms, sparsely furnished with leaning chairs, a solid table, a basic bed. In that apartment I ate meat again, and I turned on the television and, good people of Northampton, I watched my stories.

Then I lay myself down in the bed but could not sleep for the excitement. I put on the radio, a small transistor on a simple nightstand. I rolled the wheel to WXXT. They were playing the sounds of cats brawling, with cello. For six
hours, I lolled happily in that hazy blur between awake and asleep.

This morning, I roam the town, seeing its changes, the ventures and enterprises that failed, the ones that are trying for the first time. Men and women walk the streets, the vulnerable and the damaged live there. They walk and they
sit and they scream at passers-by but no one listens.

This morning
, I watch a man drive a silver Impala from Pleasant Street, across Main, to King. He takes a left into the lot behind the Hotel Northampton. I cross at the crosswalk and enter the carpeted lobby. Sitting on a small, green-striped divan under a massive chandelier, I watch a ginger-haired, tall man lug two cases and a laptop bag to the front desk and check in. He glances my way and, momentarily disturbed for a reason I'm certain he cannot name, finishes the arrangements with the girl at the desk. A bellman takes his bags and stores them behind the counter, and he exits.

Now he walks, taking the measure of the morning, taking the temperature of the town.

I follow at an unobtrusive distance, taking the measure of the man, taking the temperature of the threat.

The man from the FCC has arrived. But so have I.

To-day on Petticoat Hill Road a half of a man split down the center edged from the woods weeping, reports Henrietta Swaggle. The man was baldheaded and emaciated, and left behind him a trail of teeth and innards. The most prudent and modest Henrietta says that the man asked in a most pitiful small voice for a cup of coffee before expiring in a state of inconsolable agitation and terror. A search of the woods turned up no additional remains.

Crestlawn Cemetery: the entire population of dozing denizens, numbering in the high tens, was apparently disinterred betwixt eventide and the Devil's Hour, rousted from their repose and removed, presumably, to parts unknown by an unidentified ghoul or ghouls. Gaping holes and yawing caskets remain, and the many footprints in the mud paint a most grim and unspeakable picture.

Among the most ghastly sounds a man can hear is the sound of a voice in what he thought was an empty house. That is what Todd Wessen heard on an early morning in his remote cottage on the edge of a tall wood. He woke before he knew what woke him, woke with a chill that ran from throat to bowel and back again.

Then he heard it again, heard it awake, a guttural sing-song, a wavering creak. Up he jumped, hitting every light as he passed from bedroom to sitting room, sitting room to hall, hall to parlor. Then at the doorway to the front room his foot stepped in wet. Before him in a patch of moonlight teetered a tall, silhouetted figure, bloated and awkwardly posed.  It stepped into the light.

The man was purple, blue, black. His eyes were swollen shut; his nose a pimpled stone; his lips a blue ball bisected by a black blister of a tongue. A gray knot of bone jutted from his leg at the knee. He raised to the ceiling in an unfathomable gesture gnarled hands with fingers fused together with mold and rot. "We live deep down in the underwater towns," the figure burbled. "Our screams are bubbles, our fortunes drowned."

Then the abomination slowly opened a gummed eyelid.
Its red eye harbored a cloudy cataract that searched the room and found Todd's own eyes.

"I'm terribly sorry," the thing belched. "Can you point me toward the road to Prescott?"

Todd started to take a step backward, but something on the bottom of his foot prevented it reaching the floor. His foot flew out from under him, his left leg kicked up, and for a fleeting moment he was hanging in space. He landed on his back, hard.

Presently he regained his breath and propped himself up on his elbows. The empty room was bluish with dawn light, the floor dry.

A movement at his foot and he bent his knee to look. Clinging to his foot was a purple, bloated leech. It humped obscenely at the arch slowly, foully. It shrank and pulled, puffing up like the throat of a frog. He felt nothing at his foot, but he swore he could feel all the blood in his body pulsing towards his legs.

The next thrust pulled down his love, the next his memories, the last his mind.

He detached himself from the thin white man and inched along the floor, fat and round and deliriously full. The spines of his books loomed large above him like buildings in a cramped city, each letter too massive to read. He wept and he pulled himself forward and forward and then a shadow fell over him. He reared back his flat head and saw a pale foot descending. The thin, translucent membrane that was his skin burst and everything went red.

The thin, pale thing in the house gibbered and shook and trembled. It rose and opened the door and shambled down the walk.

DAILY HAMPSHIRE GAZETTE - Four men with ties to an occult group linked to human trafficking and ritual murder were apprehended by State Police yesterday in the Hockanum Meadows and charged with cruelty to animals and environmental crimes. The men were in possession of packets of dried herbs and powders that have been sent for testing, and of "The Libellus Vox Larva," a centuries-old book all copies of which were thought to have been destroyed by the 1930s. Also discovered in the clearing were the mutilated bodies of three of the four goats recently stolen from the Whipotte Farm. A fourth goat could not be located. The men will be arraigned at the Northampton courthouse on Friday.

A
long a line of reeds bent in a downpour, in the meadows between the Connecticut River and the City of Northampton, stands unsteadily on thick, slightly cow-hocked hind legs a buck goat. Two horns jut from matted white fur and curve to point back at his prominent shoulder blades. A third, center horn spirals toward the sky in a thick ribbon. He is loosely clad in dark trousers, a white shirt soaked and translucent against the gray fur of his chest, a dark vest and topcoat. A necklace bearing an inscrutable emblem and ruby stone hangs at his chest. His eyes betray bemusement, triumph, and a touch of animal irrationality and volatility. His pointed beard is soaked into an inverted triangle, curled at the end. From the beard drips water and maybe a touch of blood, metallic and brown.

He takes a tentative step, now without trees to lean against for passage. Like a toddler finding his feet for the first time, he lurches headlong, his legs pushing into the earth as he propels himself along a raised path, then leaning back as he descends a grassy hillock down to the cul-de-sac that punctuates Eastern Avenue.

Down to even ground, as the rain lets up from a roar to a whisper, he walks more steadily, only a slight unevenness in his gait to give him away. He reaches the walk, and grins. Then he brays, a wavering tenor shout, his exposed teeth like a set of cracked wooden doors guarding a desecrated church.

He leans briefly on a silver Hyundai Accent, and then puts his upper lip to the antenna. His mouth opens as he takes in information. Then he moves
East towards Williams Street.

A car speeds by in the rain, then brakes, shimmying, fish-tailing,
coming to a rest with its front wheel up on the curb. One can imagine the driver adjusting his mirror. Then the car bumps down off the curb and speeds away south, tires squealing. The goat yells after it, eyes ablaze, cataracts reflecting the pulsing brake lights. He crosses Williams and continues past a long hedgerow, approaching a long, three-story row house with broad porches, each sharing two doors.

Onto the third porch from the second door limps a man, shabbily attired in a hooded sweatshirt and matted, worn corduroys, torn at the right knee, big white sneakers. The man is bearded, slender, with thick black eyebrows like caterpillars. He propels himself with a knotted, heavy walking stick with a gold handle approximating the body of a crouching panther with sharp teeth bared. The man laboriously descends the stoop, grimacing with each step.

He turns and faces the approaching goat, and he grins. "The agent arrives in the morning," he says. "At the Hotel Northampton."

The goat opens his mouth, his jaw nearly detaching,
his mouth a gaping narrow cave. Inside is red and raw, the pink tongue, lined with fine tiny white hairs, vibrating as he cries out. The man's expression, previously one of perverse anticipation, falters. The goat raises one hoof, and the hoof bursts open in a pink cloud, sole and nail crumbling, raining down on the walk, revealing a pallid, prodigiously veined hand with gnarled nails encased in filth. The goat reaches out and grabs the walking stick by its handle, flipping it in the air and catching its tip.

He dashes it across the man's forehead, hard, shearing
down a large flap of bloody flesh, baring an expanse of skull-bone. A waterfall of blood pours down the man's face and front as he pinwheels his arms and crumples to the ground, spitting out bloody shrieks. The goat tilts his head inquisitively. "Help me," the goat cries out in a cracked and choked voice. "Don't leave me!"

Then he swings the walking stick sideways with a powerful arm, tearing open the man's cheek and sending teeth flying. The man looks up through all the redness but can't see the cane raised for the final blow. He feels his head come apart. His brains spray out on the grass. The goat pulls the body up by the hood of the sweatshirt and thumps him up the porch and into the dark apartment. The brains blacken with the rain. The blood washes into the grass. The neighborhood is silent again as the rain abates and dusk approaches.

Hours pass, from the apartment comes the sound of flesh tearing, muted screams. Finally, in the glow of the moon, a man stands naked, blood soaked, in the hall, piled at his feet are curved walls of furred flesh, horns and hooves, scattered ribs and broken legs and burst brisket. The slender man steps out of the carrion and enters a small bathroom. A toilet, a tub and shower, a towel hung over the doorknob. Moments later, he stands under the cascading water, blood and fur and bits of flesh swirling in a pink pool at his feet.

He steps out, pulls the towel around him. He regards his face in the mirror. His eyes are odd, each of his pupils a black, horizontal line. But he is young, or younger than he was when the FCC had sent their secret department's agents, who had discovered and destroyed WXXT's antenna; and their Sorcerer, who had taken away his voice and his humanity on a dark March night and banished him to a pen with idiot goats who stared and occasionally rammed his flanks with their hard heads.

"I am Ben Stockton," he tells the mirror.