Gateways to Abomination (5 page)

Yesterday at twilight in Haydenville, the town Constable did report the sound of a childe singing a ribald song and saying macabre things deep in the sodden forest. Further exploration revealed a circle of mouldering mahogany and leather chairs entwined in the high treetops and a charred bassinet stuck half into an ancient Oak. Also located at the scene was a set of vegetable ivory buttons bearing inscrutable inscriptions and unholy designs.

1

I was on a stool at the counter of the Look Diner, moving my scrambled eggs around the plate in the coagulating pool of ketchup and staring at my gray coffee, when the man walked in carrying his brain in his cupped hands.

The man wore a wrinkled gray suit over a pristine white Arrow shirt. He was of indeterminate age, with flattened dank hair and skin as white as his shirt. His mouth was agape, his eyes glazed with fear. He dropped down onto the stool next to mine, his legs slackening. Wordlessly, I slid over a bowl empty save a few tenacious flakes of dried oatmeal. Without acknowledging me, the man gingerly placed his brain in the bowl.

And so we sat as people around us ate and chattered and clinked their forks. Outside there was a violent stutter of thunder and the sky darkened as though somewhere a giant shade had suddenly been lowered.

I stole a glance at the man. The top of his head, just over the eye
brow, sat off kilter, like a hat just slightly askew. Blue stitches, inexpertly spaced, formed bridges over a thin wavering river of red bone. Tighter stitches toward the ear had squeezed out bubbles of brown blood, which had since hardened into beads.

A waitress rushing by stopped, and reached for the bowl. "Oh, I'm not quite finished," the man said in a polite purr, almost apologetically, and the waitress hurried on.

A cook with a broad brow reached up and spun the dial of the radio, which had been playing the greatest hits of the seventies, eighties, nineties and today, all the way to the left. The speakers thrummed with a low droning chord. The sky was blue-black. The clock read 8:05 a.m.

The man spun round on his stool to face me. Suddenly afraid, I stared straight ahead at the towering mountain of hashed potatoes. "ARE YOU LOOKING," the man intoned leeringly, "FOR A GOOD TIME?"

I have been asked that question, and variations thereof, as a boy, as a teenager, as a young man, and as a cipher of a man in middle age. I've been asked by a Cairo cab driver, a Panamanian pilot, a half dead priest in Prague, and a woman costumed as a koala bear on an impossible San Francisco incline. My answer has always been the same: No, but thank you.

But in the Look Diner, under a blackened sky, as people around us ate and chatted and clinked their forks, as potatoes piled toward the dingy ceiling, asked by a man who had come in carrying his brain in his cupped hands, as the
radio droned with muttering, insinuating voices, as I could smell the spectre of death rising in plumes from my gray coffee, I said Yes, sir, if it will make you go away, if I don't have to look at your blazing eyes, if I could just be crouched under bedsheets a thousand miles from this cove of dark histories, I am...I am...looking...for...a...good...time.

He reached a long fingered hand into the inner pocket of his suit jacket and handed me a white flier folded in fourths. "Prepare for unspeakable pleasures," he cackled, and he plunged his face into the bowl. Slurping and snarling, he chewed and gnawed and gnashed, and his gray matter sprayed like ash, lighting on his browns, onto the counter. One sodden lump landed in my coffee and I slid from the stool and careened out of the diner, bellowing I know not what, the flier tubed up in my left hand, my right covering my eyes.

Trucks blared by on the road, their lights filtered red through my fingers. Then the rain came. Then the rain came. Then the rain came.

2

WXXT

in association with

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The Gathering in the Wood

The Slinkiest Nymphettes

Grotesqueries and Obscenities

Pizza and Pie

Featuring Original Music by the Notorious

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Follow the Lights

The Walk

At dusk I passed between the disused stone stanchions that once supported the gates to Mountain Park. A carpet of stony earth, an arch of orange leaves, an orchestra of pe
epers and highway groans.

There were streetlamps in the woods, among the trees, spaced as though lining both sides of a narrow road, though no road, no path, ran between them. Each was black iron, tall, topped by a light in an ornate glass cage clouded by mosquitoes and the occasional...bat
?...no. The bodies were long and tapered, wormlike, and light shone through the black wings as though they'd been constructed of wire and crepe.

At length I felt and heard a beating bass line that made the forest floor vibrate.

I walked, pushing aside branches, kicking up bramble and prickerbush, waving away mosquitoes, clambering over dead-falls and felled trees. I thought of my wife, four months in the grave. For three of those months I had felt she walked beside me, guiding me, blushing at my tears and offering silent solace. That had been lost. Where had she gone? Now I wondered if she followed at my heel. Was she warning me away, or was it my own self, knowing no good could come of this venture?

Then, ahead, lights gleamed through the trees: pink and purple, red and orange, yellow and blue. I emerged into a clearing, in the center of which, angled oddly, sprawled a long, low building, the front of which was six broad garage doors with a horizontal line of frosted windows through which blurred colors pulsed in time with the punishing bass thrum. To my right, all the way past the last garage door, a narrow utility door stood propped open with a twisted, splintered crutch whose foot was buried in a cat litter bucket displaying a varietal garden of lipstick tinted cigarette butts.

I entered….

3

…into a cramped area with a carpet piled with shoes of all varieties: oil-stained sneakers; bent high heels; flattened boat shoes; bedroom slippers; boots, some impossibly tall; slingbacks, clogs, and mules; sandals, birkenstocks, and flip-flops. To the pile I added my ancient bluchers. I opened a white, graffiti littered door and entered

Bay 1

In the center of the first bay were sprawled Chevrolets whose roofs had been sheared off. I looked up and saw that the roofs had been stapled to the upper walls and ceiling with huge, industrial sized bolts. Painted on the car roofs was artwork whose quality ranged from toilet stall stick figures with ungrammatical captions to stark, colorful, obscene Raphaelian frescoes to elaborate Carravagistian murals.

On one, a goat lay on his back in a lightning-veined thundercloud high above a vast, brown
Mideastern city. The goat's navel was a dome light. Its jaw was slack, revealing long, wood-like teeth; its sinewy, muscled limbs were akimbo, its jutting sex about to be set upon by seven goggle-eyed cherubim with pink, pudgy, clutching hands.

At the corners, aged angels averted or covered their eyes, their expressions betraying distress or disgust. One had yellow streams of vomit shooting from her nostrils, her liver
-spotted, heavily veined fingers entwined tightly over her mouth.

I made my way along the edge of the room toward a passage marked with bright blue duct tape. Through the doorway I thought I caught a furtive movement. My wife, leading me forward? The proprietor of the garage, delighted or repelled at its condition? The organizer of the heretofore missing "gathering" hinted at in the flier? I ducked through into

Bay 2

whose
floor was piled high with discarded piles of clothing. Jeans dropped, forming a pair of empty eyes. Skirts and brassieres and crumpled tops, corsets, waistcoats, vests and undershirts. The walls here were lined with books whose spines spoke their titles in languages unknown to me. The few English titles appeared to be collections of aphorisms and/or instruction manuals by an Abrecan Geist. Moving toward the next doorway, opposite the last, I marked a few other upsetting titles in English.

Bastions of Disquiet
, by Rangel Bantam

Violent Rigor
, by Phillip Rippingcoat

Systems of Savagery
, by Skelton Tornweather

Vistas of Carrion
, by Carp Tarscallion

Aligning the Architectures of Deviltry
, by Vasterian Cull

Suddenly a light finger touched my shoulder and I whirled 'round. No one was there. I tucked in my chin and glanced rightward, and on my shoulder spied a house centipede the length of an unsharpened pencil on my shoulder. Its long legs danced as it scuttled toward my neck and I brushed it away with disgust. I looked up, and the ceiling was writhing with the foul creatures, a field of elongated, living burrs crawling on and over and around one another. I fled into

Bay 3

where finally I saw people--but these were children. None appeared to be over the age of five. Two boys were engaged in a solemn game of towering and then toppling blood-red blocks. A girl crawled over a large, flat book with blank pages, leaving blue ink hand and foot prints. An expansive crib rocked wildly, crowded with cooing babies. Strangely, the room was fairly quiet.

Across I saw a boy of about four in a striped shirt who looked vaguely familiar. He had wide-set eyes, light brown bangs drawing a fiercely straight line across his forehead, and small mouth set in concentration to match his furrowed brow. He was arranging on a green plastic podium an eight-limbed stuffed bear.

"What is his name," I asked.

"Tickles," the boy said. A line of pink drool swung
between his lower lip and the bear's round, gray ear.

"RUG-UH-HUM," a voice bellowed out over the diminutive crowd. "RUG-ugh-ugh-ugh-HEM," and I saw a boy of about 9--older by far than most in the room--hawk up a mass onto the white plastic table at which he sat, his knees up at his chin.

I set off in his direction, clamoring over children, toy dinosaurs, and navigating around a good sized pile of turds topped with a conical yellow party hat, rakishly tilted.

The boy looked up at me expectantly, eyes wide. The mass he had expectorated trembled on the table. It was pale gray and lined with what appeared to be pinkish veins. Though I addressed the boy, it seemed wise to keep a careful eye fixed on the thing on the table. This I did.

"Erm," I said, and then I stopped, unsure of precisely how to continue.

"Are you looking," the boy grinned toothlessly, "for a good time?"

I gaped at him.

"They are outside," he said. "The grown-ups. In the wood."

I looked back down at the table. The mass was gone. The lights seemed to brighten.

All the children, except for the sleeping ones, were looking at me, their eyes swimming with secrets.

I stood and headed for the exit.

Stolen from the Millside Church of the Most Holy Redeemer by the Hampshire and Hampden Canal: one (1) crucifix, two (2) pews, fourteen (14) hymnals (spines and covers only), three (3) jugs Holy Water, and the Private and Personal effects and papers of the venerable Father William Garrett Shineface; substantial reward for the return thereof, and for secrecy concerning the contents of the most holy and incorruptible Father Shineface's personal papers and diaries.

It always happened at the craggy precipice of sleep, so I never knew if it was a dream or a memory. I was swimming in brown water, terrified I might be swimming down...away from the surface. But then I would emerge, bellowing out breath, the water crumbling to dust around me, a flat steel sky with black-painted clouds above. I would crawl, then, through an askew city of rounded, flat, windowless buildings carved with unfathomable graffiti.

My elementary school, a few flat, one-story buildings connected by windowed corridors, lay across a narrow access road from the cemetery. A modest playground was situated by the inner curve of the road. I was making
swirlies in the sandbox with my fingers when I first saw the tall man standing at the wrought iron fence. He was bald on top, long-haired, the hair a flat brown, damp. He wore tiny wire glasses that sat crookedly across a substantial and accusatory nose. A white shirt that showed shadowed ribs from under a dark grey waistcoat. He did not have to beckon with his long finger; his eyes, a brilliant blue, called me across the road. I was six. He could have been forty; he could have been fifty.

How did I know that he was my father? I had known
only that my mother was my mother and had been so for eternity. I had known forever that the man who lived with her could not have been my real father, though that was the charade. He treated me like a baffling stranger, and I was grateful for it.

He was vaguely unpleasant, and one sensed he was somehow...off. The armpits of his white striped shirts were perpetually stained. He spoke
bumblingly, in a dopey and sing-song voice. He worked at and for the church in some capacity I never understood, and The Lord came first for him. Perhaps only for him. He seemed removed. His conversations with my mother were hushed and muted and few. They would read most nights; she her romances and he his worn Bible.

But the man at the cemetery was a vital man, a man who looked at the world with fire and at me with only embers, which I regarded as warmth. Warmth and excited recognition. The first time I saw him, as I said, I went to him across the road. He knelt and regarded me, grinning widely. I noted that behind his yellowed teeth was another full set of teeth--top and bottom, also yellow, also pointing this way and that. His gums were red and, below and above his canines, split to the bone.

He said to me that day the following: You must always take what you want, however you can. You'll find, he said, that once you are known for taking what you want, you won't have to anymore. It will be given to you freely.

Then he rose, not without effort, and strode away. I went back across the street and Mrs.
Wisert looked at me quizzically and with trepidation. I shrugged and went in to fetch my coat and go home.

The next time I saw the man was not more than a week later. It was drizzling rain. He was by the fence again, and I rushed to his side. He told me I knew who he was. He said, I have some history for you. Listen carefully and do not speak. You were not born alone. You had a twin. I knew that one of you was good and one of you was evil. Like in a fairy tale. I buried the evil boy next to the mausoleum.

He gestured. The mausoleum was a small, windowless brick house with a pointed roof and a small crooked spire.

I only saw him once more, years later, as I was showing my new wife my old school. She was in using the bathroom, and I turned and there he was. He was grinning at me, but he turned and strode away when I approached. He looked like a giant bird to me, somehow, as though black wings would sprout from his back, and he would leap into the air, blotting out everything. He didn't. He merged with the fog.

I walked to where he had stood, and there was a transistor radio leaning up against the fence, rusted with age.
A window revealed squarish white numbers along a gray line, a red line bisecting the 8s most of the way to the left. I turned it on and his voice spoke through a squeal of static. "It's an an-teek," he said, drawing out and tasting the word.

When I was fifteen I went to the mausoleum and next to it found a patch of lighter colored grass. I had brought with me a shovel, and I dug as the crickets chirped all around me. The blade hit wood, and I pulled up a small box. I lifted the twisted, torn black clasp and raised the lid. The box was empty. But I remembered from long ago the inside of the box, the smell of varnish and the lines of light that glowed, glowed more faintly, and then disappeared.