Gateways to Abomination

by Matthew Bartlett

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

  the arrival part 1

  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.

  Along 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.

  uncle red reads to-day’s news

  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.

  the gathering in the deep wood

  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 eyebrow, 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

  Annelid Industries International

  Presents

  The Gathering in the Wood

  The Slinkiest Nymphettes

  Grotesqueries and Obscenities

  Pizza and Pie

  Featuring Original Music by the Notorious

  EZEKIEL SHINEFACE QUARTET

  and

  DJ FESTERLY BOYLE

  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 peepers 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.

  uncle red reads to-day’s news

  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.

  the sons of ben number 3

  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.