by Dorian Dawes
"What are you doing here?" Bartleby asked.
"Could ask the same of you." The man kept making nervous glances just over Bartleby's shoulder.
"I've been staying with my grandfather, but he died today. I'm Bartleby," Bartleby whispered. He couldn't take his eyes off the corpse dangling from the ceiling.
The man stared for a few more seconds before muttering, "Tombs, Harold Tombs. Listen, kid. You gotta get out of here. These people … there's something not right with them."
"And what were you here for, Mr. Tombs?" Bartleby's voice shook.
Harold glanced towards the corpse and made an involuntary shudder. "Grocery clerk went missing three weeks ago. Had plans to marry old man Marsh's daughter, and was going to invite his family down here for the wedding. Wedding never happened so they called me to investigate. Think I found my man."
"Fuck," Bartleby whispered.
Harold did a double-take. Maybe it was exhaustion overriding the paranoia but he found himself laughing a little. "You got a filthy mouth kid, ya know that?"
They were interrupted by the sounds of footsteps echoing through the caverns. They were heavy and many and coming closer. Voices droned, blubbering and scarcely passable as human. Harold stiffened and quickly moved between Bartleby and the open hallway, gun aimed down the corridor.
"I don't think they'll want to catch you down here," he whispered. "Hide, and don't come out until it’s safe."
Bartleby looked at him and his eyes widened in worry. "Don't do this. You'll die."
Harold gave a gruff chuckle. "Probably, kid. Be good. Do something cool with your life, I guess."
Bartleby said nothing. His eyes were itching and red. He turned and ran into the large room where he hid behind one of the sinister-looking statues. He sat there with tears streaming endlessly down his cheeks as the sounds of gunshots and screams echoed through the halls. He wondered if his ears would ever stop ringing.
* * *
Bartleby opened his eyes. He didn't even remember falling asleep. He was lying with his head propped up by a long brown coat cushioned beneath his head like a pillow. It was the coat that detective had been wearing. The book he'd left on the pew of the church was tucked beneath his arm.
He surveyed his surroundings through blurry eyes. It was a fog-enshrouded morning in Strathmore, and he was lying on the cold damp pier overlooking the sea. The salty air coming in on the morning breeze had a foul, rank odor.
Bartleby looked down at the coat lying under him. He wanted to see yesterday as nothing more than a terrible nightmare, but that coat wouldn't let him. He took it in his grip, wondering if perhaps Harold had survived the ordeal. That didn't sit right with him either; he couldn't imagine an adult being so irresponsible as to leave him out on the docks overnight.
A wide-shouldered man in black stood at the edge of the docks, looking out to sea. Bartleby stood quickly, grabbing the coat and the book and rushing towards him. He stopped a few feet away as the figure turned. He couldn't tell through the thick fog that had settled in, but that face was familiar.
"Grandpa?" Bartleby called.
It wasn't Obed, or at least it couldn't be. The skin was too stretched and thin and the figure wearing it too large and wide. It was like something had borrowed his grandfather's skin as a suit and was taking it out for a morning jog. Bartleby felt a churning sickness, yet he couldn't look away.
A loud shrill horn interrupted his gaze and he turned to find his parents' car waiting for him. When he turned back, the thing wearing Grandpa's skin had vanished.
Linda quickly approached him, cupping his face in her hands and turning him towards her. "Oh honey, we're so sorry about Grandpa, we would have come sooner," she said, embracing him. "My goodness, Shelby what did you do to your hair?"
"She cut it herself, looks like." Albert Prouse had crossed from the car and joined them. He picking at it at Bartleby's hair, muttering disgustedly, "Shelby, what were you thinking?"
"My name isn't Shelby." Bartleby ducked from beneath their probing fingers and turned on them. He clenched his fists, even though his voice shook with terror. "It's Bartleby. Call me Bartleby. I'm a boy now."
Linda's mouth dropped open. "Shelby, we'll talk about this later. Come on, I want to get out of here. I always hated this town, even when I was a kid. Don't know why Dad loved this place so much."
"My name is Bartleby," he repeated, quietly this time, but they were no longer listening to him.
While holding the coat in the car, his fingers found their way into its pockets. The lighter was there, as well as a wallet and identification card. It was Harold's. Bartleby's fingers ran across something cool and metallic in the other pocket and shuddered. It was the detective's gun. He almost began to cry again.
Bartleby took a look at the book with him. It wasn't the same book at all. While both were leather-bound, Bartleby found something off-putting about the texture of this book. There were small wrinkles in it and the color was wrong, having a distinctive pale flesh tone. Bartleby shuddered. He'd heard of books bound in human skin before, but had never seen one.
Emblazoned in gold stitching on the cover was the symbol of an eye encircled within an eight-pointed star, its bottom edges spiraling out into tentacles that wrapped around the edges of the book. Something about it felt familiar. He recalled seeing brief glimpses of a similar chaotic image nestled in corners of the stained glass windows within the church building.
The book's language was just about indecipherable to him, more like Aklo, that dreadful, abyssal tongue. Something changed as he continued to browse the pages, pausing on black and scarlet illustrations of mutilations and arcane symbols. It seemed that the more he read, the more he understood. Words were beginning to form on the page as the symbols became known to him. He couldn't shake the feeling that the book was longing to be read, its secrets yearning to be revealed.
"So, anything else exciting happen during your stay with Grandpa, Shelby?" Linda called to the back-seat.
He looked at her with furrowed brows. "My name is Bartleby."
Bartleby slammed the book shut and fixed a determined glare on the horizon.
Songs of Chaos
Justin Hughes was fucking thrilled be living on campus that year. It'd give him time to find some other place to stay after school was over. If he was lucky, he'd never have to see his bigoted father ever again or deal with any more mis-gendering by his capricious relatives.
A community music event was being held at the Stithyan University that year and after a brief audition, his band, The Crawling Chaos, had managed to land a place performing their unique sounds. He'd been careful to audition only with cover songs; safe choices that would make any otherwise wary person feel more comfortable with his unique appearance. He knew full well that being black, he was already at a disadvantage in that regard.
Black, goth, and trans. Those were a hell of a mix for making white people scared shitless. He was partially counting on that. The problem he'd found with shock-rock in the modern era was that it had become far too predictable.
Even after he'd finally come out of the closet about his gender, he still dressed much the same way as he did now: black skin-tight pants and fishnet shirts and crop-tops, and always with a full face of dramatic makeup. He was too proud of his winged eyeliner just to give it all up for someone else's standards of masculinity.
Justin resisted every urge to cackle as he stepped a platformed boot onto the stage. He wore nothing on his torso save for a sweaty binder. His shiny leather pants tightly showed off every sensuous curve of his waist and he made sure to accentuate his ass prominently with each swaying movement. Marching to the microphone, he stuck out his tongue to reveal a black studded piercing.
"Ladies and gentlemen of Wakefield," he whispered into the microphone, his voice low and seductive. "I'm Justin. I'm a trans man, and we are The Crawling Chaos. Let's get gender-fucked!"
The amphitheater audience looked about ready to rush the stage and murder him.
He could see the fire in their eyes. He wanted to give those fuckers a real reason to hate him. He fed off it, and turned that energy into the howling vocals of every lewd and vulgar lyric. If he never played another set again, this one had to count.
They performed their obligatory three songs, and it was possibly for the best that they hadn't been signed to do any more. Someone had called the police on them. Justin could see the dean, Richard Stanton, trying to explain the situation to a couple of officers while making seething faces occasionally in Justin's direction. It was likely that The Crawling Chaos would never perform anywhere near the Stithyan University again.
The dean finished with the cops before approaching Justin and his band as they were packing away their equipment and loading it into the truck. He might have put them all through a rather lengthy and uncomfortable lecture had someone not intercepted him - a queer-looking little man with glasses and a slightly disheveled necktie. He had bits of paper sticking out of his coat pockets and several books tucked underneath his arm. Justin smiled.
"Bartlebro's got this," he said, alerting his band-mates. "Let's split."
Helena Han, the keyboardist, and Kara Lynch, the drummer, shrugged their shoulders as they made a beeline for Kara's jeep. Helena did send one or two nervous glances in the professor's direction, but he appeared to be handling himself just fine.
Professor Bartleby Prouse was indeed taking care to distract the Dean long enough to let Justin and the two girls escape. There were long-winded speeches about something exciting he'd just found in the library, as well as theories about the founders of the island and their true purpose in settling the nearby town of Oakridge. All the while, Bartleby kept making eyes in the direction of the fleeing youths. By the time Dean Stanton managed to pull away from the history professor's excited findings, The Crawling Chaos had escaped. Stanton stared, watching the jeep squeal its way out of the parking lot.
Bartleby smiled. "I'm sorry, Richard. Was I keeping you from something?"
Richard Stanton, a man twenty years Bartleby's senior, fixed him with a glare. "Those kids are tarnishing the reputation of this school."
"The school has to have a reputation to be tarnished," Bartleby said gruffly. "There're too many skeletons in the water-closet as it is … both literally and figuratively. Some students taking pride in their sexuality and gender-identity may provide the positive atmosphere this school needs."
Stanton folded his arms over his chest and sneered. "I run this school, freak."
"I don't need reminding," Bartleby retorted. "For a decade you've run this school, and in that time there have been eight missing students and six on-campus deaths, and those are just the ones we know about. All things considered, I'd say you're a step up from your predecessors."
"Get out of my sight." Stanton shoved the little man aside and marched back to the amphitheater.
"Enjoy the rest of the music!" Bartleby waved. As soon as the Dean was out of earshot, he muttered under his breath, "Fossilized old bigot."
Professor Bartleby stood by himself for a moment, clicking his tongue and shaking his head. He'd enjoyed everything about his students' performance, even the brazen way Justin had chosen to come out to the community. Bartleby's own transition had been more private and conservative, but this was a different age. Perhaps an extreme was needed, to shake the minds of those far too rooted in their prejudice.
Only the name of the band itself bothered him. It was unsettlingly familiar, though he couldn't quite place it; maybe something he'd read while perusing ancient texts. The thought that his students might have been exposed to those texts aggravated those twitching nervous impulses in the back of his head. There was no cause for alarm … yet.
* * *
The Roasted Dog was an outdoor diner of mixed reputation. The small concrete building was one health inspection away from being shut down for good, but was known for its sinfully delicious milkshakes, burgers and fries; it had become a common stomping ground for Stithyan University students looking to socialize and enjoy cheap, artery-clogging meals. On weekends, the benches and tables would be full, with even more students leaning against the building or sitting on their haunches in the small parking lot. Justin and his friends knew the peak busy hours, and when it was safe for those who wished to avoid human interaction.
Helena Han had met Justin and Kara the day she enrolled at the Stithyan University. She was quieter then, sadder - the type who looked like she didn't have a friend in the world. Maybe that's all she'd needed.
Helena dressed more conservatively than her friends but, after a frustrating evening, of dealing with creepy men taken by 'yellow-fever', had shaved her entire head and decided she liked the bald look. She'd gotten particularly sick of seeing Asian women in western media exclusively depicted with short black hair and one stripe dyed a funky color. Something about it gave her the creeps and made her never want to have hair ever again.
While they ate, she remarked to Justin, "I can't believe you outed yourself to the whole damn town. Isn't that … dangerous?"
Justin shrugged, scrunching his face and breaking a fry in half. "I wanted to make a statement."
Kara Lynch, self-identified white trash, stopped sipping her milkshake to give him a bored but incredulous expression. "Justin, you're making the full-of-shit face."
She was usually dressed in a black sun dress and biker boots. She liked her reputation as the fat goth lesbian who'd gladly punched Ernie Bernstein for calling her a dyke in the high school cafeteria three years ago. That was when she'd met Justin, who'd been wanting to deck Ernie all year.
"It's my dad," Justin said. "Before I moved out, he threatened to out me on some days, and then others he said if anyone ever found out about me, it'd reflect badly on him. Said he'd kick me out. It was hell, man. Soon as I could get out, I started planning this. Sorry for not telling you, was kind of afraid you'd stop me."
Kara punched him on the shoulder after a few moments' silence. "That's cool, Justin. I'm proud of ya."
"When do I get to kill your old man though, that's the real question," Helena said. "I'm voting on a vat of acid."
Kara raised a finger. "If I may, we could build a catapult and fling him into Strathmore."
"Isn't Strathmore underwater now?" Justin raised an eyebrow, struggling to hold back laughter.
Kara's eyes gleamed and she let out her best version of a wicked cackle. "Exactly!"
Darkness fell. The conversation drifted gradually into those dangerously soft and intimate places. Kara talked about how sick to death she was of people saying she wasn't fat and that she was beautiful, as if she couldn't be both. She was both. Helena ranted about boys and their 'yellow fever', always having this image of what it was like to date a cute Asian girl, running up to her and speaking broken Japanese they'd 'taught' themselves after watching too much anime.
"I am fucking Korean! I don't even know Japanese!" She threw her hands in the air. "I just …" and words gave way to exasperated groaning.
There was still laughter, but the unspoken acknowledgement that what bound each of them was a place where they felt safe. Safe spaces were uncommon and fragile. They often preferred meeting in Helena's garage. Meeting out here in the open was dangerous and left them vulnerable to being harassed by any old asshole. It made them nervous, cautious, and tightly-knit. They practically locked arms wherever they walked.
A tall stranger stepped out of the shadows. He was wearing a hood that covered his face, and rather tight form-fitting clothes. He pulled down his hood as he stepped up to their table, and gave them a reassuring smile. They flinched at his presence.
The man was an intimidating beauty. He had traces of stubble around an angular, narrow face of perfectly smooth brown skin. He had an aristocratic brow and pronounced cheekbones, but most striking were his intense golden eyes.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to startle you," he said. "I caught your show earlier. Your music is lovely. Might I join you?"
Justin struggled t
o place the man's accent; it was distinctly foreign. The closest he'd heard to anything like it was a man from Cairo he'd briefly flirted with over the Internet, but there was something else there, something alien. Whatever it was, the distinct intonations were pleasing to the ear - seductive, even.
"Um, sure." Kara quickly made room and sat on the other side of the table next to Helena.
Smiling, the beautiful man sat next to Justin.
"Well, we introduced ourselves at the show." Justin coughed. "Mind telling us your name?"
The man leaned close to Justin, propping his elbow on the table as his eyes looked dreamily towards the heavens. "I've been going by Pharaoh as a moniker lately. I think it has a regal mystery to it. Kind of like Prince, rest his soul."
Helena snorted. "Prince was his actual name, dipshit. Don't you think that's a bit pretentious?"
Pharaoh shrugged. "For all you know my name could be Pharaoh Rogers Nelson, and then wouldn't you feel guilty?"
Helena scowled. "All right, but I'm guessing it's not."
"No, it isn't." Pharaoh shook his head, chuckling a little. "Anyway, Justin. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the matter. Do you think the moniker's a bit much?"
"I don't have too many feelings about it either way," Justin said. "It's a bit out of the ordinary, sure, but I've got a thing about people respecting identities lately. If someone wants to be addressed as Big Bubba Ho-Tep and insists they identify as a toaster, you either respect them enough to respect their choices or you don't. They're not hurting anyone and there's bigger things in the world to be concerned about."
"So you don't think that someone's personal identity or choice to brand themselves a certain way isn't a sign that something might be wrong with them?" Pharaoh raised an eyebrow. "For example, what if I told you I was a tentacled horror from beyond the stars, walking in the skin of an ancient prophet?"
