Gateways to Abomination (9 page)

The sun has fled to warm more worthy places, he said.
Quartus! Medad! Lemuel! (The names of his brothers, grown, dead, buried, gone to dust, all long before my birth. I had seen them only as wiry, sinister blurred men in cracked, black-clouded tintypes.)

The shapes in the pews began to quaver. I heard the
buzzing of flies, the splitting and tearing of flesh.

Through him, with him, in him...

The room, which had smelled vaguely of cedar, now filled with a mephitic stench: carrion, cancers, bubbling rot, exploding tumors, sour decay. Stinkhorn, collybia. Foul motes swarmed like ticks above the tea lights. The room went all green and I retched piteously.

I am quite mad, my uncle allowed. We must leave this place. There is an army to command, soldier, and I am for the earth. He paused, and then his eyelids lowered and his eyes rolled back. He grinned, his tongue flicking the corner of his dry mouth. What did she give you?

"Who, uncle?" But before I'd finished the question, I felt the weight in my coat pocket. I'd felt it since I'd got back in the car. I reached in and pulled out the knife. It curved and glistened, serrated to pull at innards when withdrawn--to mutilate, to devastate. In the green light, I felt my eyes sliced open and drained, and new eyes grew like mushrooms in their place. Somewhere back in the residential quarters, that mad percussive sound began anew. I turned and mighty horses stood before me, their eyes wild. One, paler, leaning, stomped irritably and shrieked.

To Leeds
, my uncle cried, and the building unfolded like a flower.

The man in the sopping overcoat fumed beneath an awning that drooped under punishing, pounding rain.  Even given the immediate circumstances, he looked pointedly desolate, perhaps despairing, most certainly far from home.  And far from home he was.  A freelance investigator contracted by various government agencies, he had been sent by representatives from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Federal Communications Commission from the hum of D.C. to this remote New England town for a very strange assignment indeed.  Strange and unprecedented. His having been caught in this downpour, blocks from his rented car, felt like what his father, now five years in the grave, would have called the bitter end.  Charming little town, though, yes, certainly, sure.  For three weeks and counting he'd eaten charming meals in charming cafes, browsed in charming boutiques, strolled a charming college campus, looked out charming windows at charming people.  He, Clem, for that was his name, was decidedly all charmed out.

For one, he could not locate on the dial the rogue radio station he'd been sent to investigate.  Not at 87.9, not at 88.3, nowhere down that lonesome, echoing end of the dial. 
And adjust that dial he did, by hair-widths and fractions, over a period of weeks, hearing only lead-voiced news anchors, tinny polka, or just static.  No ghostly voices, no whispered exhortations to murder the hotel staff, neither murmured incantation nor perversion of prayer.  Once he thought he'd found it, when he'd hit upon a humming drone that had rattled the speaker of his transistor radio.  But then the hokey tone of a banjo plinked, plonked, plinked and a hammy Henry and a simpering Liza began bickering exuberantly about the manner in which they might solve the problem of a defective bucket.  The voices, which bubbled and burbled as though the singers were gargling, seemed somehow to foul the room.  He'd switched off the transistor in annoyance...and fear?  Why would he feel a touch of fear?  He'd tried that station again periodically, something itching at the back of his brain, but it seemed to have the cloying little tune on a loop.  That must pull in the advertisers, Clem thought.  If they'd just announce the call letters or the frequency, he could report it, could actually have something to show his client, to indicate he was actually earning his keep.  There’s a hole in the bucket.  Dear Liza.  Dear Liza.  A hole.

One thing he
had
detected, in his monitoring of the local newspapers and the free weekly, was a very small but growing unease.  A lurid feature in the weekly exacerbated that unease, with its tales of disappearing sons and daughters, supposedly lured away by charismatic voices on the radio, voices that spoke reassuringly to outcast teens, promising spiritual succor illicitly entwined with libertine allures.  Absent a sample recording, Clem had nothing on which to proceed save the accounts in the paper. These accounts, if genuine, were proffered anonymously, and the reporters were predictably obstinate about protecting their sources.  Silliness, thought Clem. “Sources.”  These small time reporters dreamed daily of proudly blockading a government entity, and he was providing them, by proxy, the realization of that fantasy.  He worried that this city might soon have a hysteria on its hands.  He had followed with some interest the recent news stories of a small town in New York state, many of whose teens simultaneously began suffering convulsions and uncontrollable verbal outbursts.

In the slim dossier given him by his contact, an Agent
Schwaller, were accounts of the disincorporation and subsequent flooding of several towns to make way for the Quabbin reservoir, and of the Mill River flood whose wrath all but destroyed several towns in the area.  There was also a brief history of occult activity in the area dating back to the founding of the town in the mid 1600s, though the connection with the immediate case was never stated.  The cases dealt largely with disappearances, ghastly incidents of cemetery vandalism, and frightful wraiths accosting travelers walking unaccompanied on lonely paths.  As the years passed, the incidents were fewer, or at least less frequently remarked upon, until they all but ceased in the mid-1970s.  Later in the town's history the local Insane Asylum had housed several townsfolk affected by these encounters.  But the Asylum had been closed during Reagan's reign, its inhabitants dispatched unceremoniously into the streets.  The last of the untenanted brick buildings had been cleared to make way for featureless condominiums, and their former denizens were either dead or doddering.  So Clem's focus was on the rumors of transmitters in the woods of nearby Holyoke, Williamsburg, and Leeds.  Apparently the wraiths had found the encroaching populations and the attendant construction made for fewer lonesome paths, and had turned to the airwaves.  Well, why not?

It seemed damned futile, though, searching the endless, storm-tossed woods for a transmitter, walking around with this hulking piece of equipment that looked like some manner of ancient Geiger counter.  The woods are beautiful but beauty, like charm, sustains one only so long.  To date there was no transmitter found and two pairs of shoes ruined, and by God he would expect reimbursement from
the Federal Communications Commission.  Reimbursement with interest...and a written apology.  As he smirked at the idea, a cold drop of water hit the back of his neck.  In a sudden fury he danced a ridiculous angry jig, his Brogans slapping the pavement, and at the height of his performance his glasses flew from his face, skittering across the sidewalk.  The rain applauded enthusiastically.  Too annoyed to feel shamed, he bent with a grunt to pick them up, wiped the lenses on his tie and placed them gingerly atop his nose...

...and on doing so he looked across the street at a two-story, brick commercial block.  Outside a glass door was a small array of books on a folding table getting soaked, ruined.  The sign above the door said ANNE GARE BOOKS.  Feeling as though a measure of altruism might salvage something in this day, maybe in the whole trip, he scudded, hunched, across the road, hoisted the table, and used it to push open the flyer-choked glass door of the book store.  A bell dinged as he pushed through.  He slammed down the table, heavy from the weight of the sodden books. Over the din of the rain, now muffled somewhat by the closed door, he heard laconic pipe organ music from the speakers at the corners of the shop.  Behind a counter ringed and towering with books and papers, he could just about see the back of a man's head leaning heavily forward, as though
he was dealing with something or another on the floor or on a low shelf.  The man's hair was long and tangled and wet.  He was probably taking off his shoes, Clem thought.

"Ho, hey" he called out, feeling foolish.  "Sir?  I brought in your books.  I'm afraid they're probably a total loss."  There was no reply.  He felt absurdly that he was somehow in an empty shop yet, at the same time, as though he had dared interrupt some clandestine colloquy.

More, and worse, he feared that if he walked over, peered behind the counter, looked more closely, that that stringy, damp hair would be hanging from the gape-pored plastic head of a limp mannequin propped up against a row of gilded encyclopedias.  But then the man grunted, and his head tilted slightly as he said something unintelligible, but identifiable as an acknowledgement.  Good enough.  Except that the muttering seemed to come from the speakers.  Well, he probably had a microphone back there, for closing announcements and such. 

Clem scanned the sun-faded books along the shelves at the shelf below the window and noticed that, back across the street, the awning under which he'd been standing had given way and was waving crazily in the wind, a tattered black flag.  Under that flag he saw a man standing. 
Slender, very tall, with horn rimmed glasses, arched brows, and a ball of gray hair at each ear.  A smartly blocked black hat rested atop the man’s head, and a pipe was clamped between his teeth at an aggressive angle.  He seemed unaffected by the rain, unshaken by the wind.  Clem thought the man was staring at him.  Not one to shrink away, he returned the stare.  The man did not react, just glared, in the pounding rain and the searing wind.  Smoke streamed from his pipe in bursts as he sucked in and frogged out his hollow cheeks.

Clem turned, disturbed.  The clerk still sat crouched behind his counter.  It was hotter than hell, and Clem removed his overcoat.  He folded it and lay it over the arm of a frayed easy chair on which a tower of art books leaned.  He loosened his tie and rolled up his shirtsleeves.  Then, from the sound of it, the air conditioning kicked in, but Clem felt no relief, no welcome rush of cool air.  He turned...it was not the AC after all; the rain had somehow gotten stronger, seething, roaring, blurring everything outside.  Thunder stuttered and chuckled.  Across the street the old man stood firm in the downpour, a blurred black line under a whipping black flag.  Clem turned and walked deeper into the store. An odor like a damp attic, like wet papers, permeated everything.  He saw a map that indicated the location of books, and noted that there was a local history section. 

He swiftly navigated the maze of towering shelves until he found the alcove in question, but blocking the shelves was a tall and bow-backed woman in a damp, limp blouse that hung just above her bare knees.  She was dragging a dry finger across the spines of the books as though playing a giant harp.  Clem noted red cracks in the flesh of that finger.  Her head, slathered in flat, colorless hair, tilted like that of a curious dog.  She was barefoot, pale and pink.  Her unpainted toes drummed the carpet.  Clem saw then that the back of her neck was patterned in diamond-shaped red welts, as though she'd been pushed against a chain link fence.  He harrumphed and did a bit of a pantomime of trying to lean around her or look past her, but she seemed oblivious.  Feeling irritation and a touch of unease, he turned and walked toward the door.

But, wait.  Across from the register there were stairs leading down to a sub-level.  He walked over, and tacked to the molding was a laminated sign that indicated many more sections, including, he noted, a section called Local Lore and Legend.  There, he thought, he might find a book or too that might flesh out the scant material in the dossier, or at least focus his search for the group behind the illicit radio station.  He descended.  When he reached the bottom he saw that the bookshelves extended far beyond the upstairs...below the adjacent pharmacy, certainly, and, I'll be damned, well beyond even that. Thinking on it, Clem surmised that the narrow basement, whose shelves were set
up as to make two long corridors lined with books, went past the parameters of the building as well. A crudely drawn map on the wall indicated the categories. The section he sought seemed to be, of course, at the farthest point.  He headed in that direction.  He noted along the way an area with an oval rug ringed with easy chairs and old rusted tray tables.  In one of the chairs, a long haired black cat snored nasally.  It shifted its weight when Clem walked by, raising its head sufficiently to reveal a watchful, if cataracted, yellow eye.

A few paces along, a book in the prodigious Occult section caught Clem's eye.  It was tall, nearly reaching up to his hip, wedged in among dwarfed, moldy hardbacks, some green with
biopredation.  Abrecan Geist, read the name stretched along the spine in a jagged scrawl.  The cover was devoid of art or word, but was a golden color, very finely tessellated, and intermittently tarnished with elongated brownish spots. The moment he grabbed the book to dislodge it, he felt it somehow contract.  As he watched, wide-eyed, the whole surface of the book horripilated and flushed red.  He flung it to the floor in disgust and horror.  The cat started, wide-eyed, then put one paw over the other and set down his chin to resume his sleep.

Let's get the hell out of here, Clem thought.  Around the cat, up the stairs, past the clerk who, let's face facts, is a
propped up corpse, avoiding the thin woman, out the door, dodging the ancient creep under the awning.  Let's get drenched, but let's get to the car, and drive straight to DC, leaving the clothes and that damned dossier and these doomed and haunted towns forever.

He stopped.  Breathed.  He was on the clock, and that horrid book was clearly planted there to throw him off the trail. 
It's effects, he thought madly.  Special...special effects.  He left the book on the floor and continued toward the dimly lit reaches of the basement.  He reached the end where books were piled sufficiently high to block the lower shelves.  Others were fanned across the floors.  The books here seemed to consist mainly of European history and pictorials.  He looked vainly for a local section, and then saw that the wall was not, in fact, a wall, but a densely packed shelf behind which another set of stairs descended into darkness. There was no "NO ADMITTANCE" sign, no chain, so Clem felt along the wall and then above his head until he found a string.  He pulled it and saw a faint orange glow from somewhere below.

Nowhere to go but down, he thought, and descended.  The stairs were narrow, grazing his shoulders on both sides.

The lowest room was not much bigger than a walk-in closet.  There were two waist-high bookcases and a sagging loveseat between them.  What little light there was glowed from recessed lights in the prodigiously cobwebbed stone ceiling.  One of the bookcases seemed to consist of books, many disbound or slant-spined, by local poets and authors; the other shelf was the one he sought.  He did notice on the lowest shelf of the former a fat, mouldering old tome bearing the name Abrecan Geist, but the binding proved nothing more than buckram, and the pages were yellowed and fragile, rendering the text and illustrations quite impossible to read.  Turning back to the Local Lore section, he noted among whip-stitched chapbooks a thick tome entitled "Western Massachusetts Witch-Cults and Covens," authored by a Rangel Bantam.  He plucked it out and fell backward into the loveseat.