by Matt Cardin
The experience was invested with a clear visionary character, as opposed to a merely hallucinatory one, and I am not nearly as ashamed as I would have expected when I admit that after the celestial monstrosity had receded and the stars had returned to their normal configuration, I reached up to feel my own face with a sense of quickening dread.
CHIMERAS & GROTESQUERIES [unfinished]
by Philip Lasine
Just when it had first occurred to me to start assembling monstrous human effigies from the garbage that littered the alley floor outside my grotto, I could not say. I only knew that this was how I spent most of my waking hours, the ones not otherwise devoted to scrounging for food and drink in the wasteland of alleyways and trash bins that made up my world.
Occasionally there were other activities to distract me. I was obliged at times to fend off, flee from, or otherwise respond to the vicious attacks of the animalistic young men who in recent years had found a new form of entertainment in beating and sometimes killing street dwellers like me. But I was more fortunate than many of my fellows, since my appearance and demeanor effectively deterred would-be assailants. Perhaps it was my size, for I was tall and hulking, and made for a singularly imposing figure as I stalked the streets in the frayed tweed overcoat that I had fished from a dumpster one icy-wet New Year’s Day.
Or perhaps it was my face with its striking disfiguration, like the soft pink remains of a melted rubber mark. The feral youths who ventured downtown to the back alleys in search of their brutal amusements maintained a respectful distance from me, and I suspected it was as much their horror at my appearance as their caution at my size that kept them at bay. On the two occasions when a group of them had approached me with clubs and broken bottles in hand, I had simply stood to my full height and raised my face to greet them, freezing them in their tracks and then turning to re-enter my solitude.
The heart of that solitary existence was the pointless rigidity of my daily routine. Each morning I awoke in my grotto and lay motionless beneath my covering of newspapers until hunger or thirst impelled me to move. Then I crawled into the alleyway, climbed to my feet, and went in search of food. After that I wandered the streets for a few hours, following a circuitous path dictated by impulses that I could not fathom. People gave me a wide berth whenever I emerged, as I sometimes did, from the labyrinth of side streets and alleyways into the brightness and broadness of a sidewalk bordering a well-traveled boulevard or avenue.
After each day’s travels I returned to my alley, where I scraped together heaps of trash, seated myself against the wall, and began to assemble doll-like, human-shaped figures. These were always grotesque in one way or another. A mass of grimy, shredded newspaper, impaled on the neck of a broken beer bottle, became a head whose fluttering fringe recalled the monstrous Medusa of ancient mythology. Oily flaps from the peel of a rotten banana, when attached to holes punched in the sides of an old cracker box or tobacco can, suggested arms like octopoid tentacles. The effect was especially vivid when the box or can was topped with a moldy, withered orange to serve as a head whose distorted face formed a miniature parody of my own. Sometimes I secured the pieces together with bits of string or wire. Other times I simply propped the assembled figures against the wall or laid them gently on the concrete floor of the alley in concentric half circles around the entrance to my grotto, where they often remained intact for hours or days before a stray breeze began to scatter them back into their original, unpersonified parts.
I spent endless hours assembling these shapes, which I began to think of as my “little ones.” The activity seemed strange even to me, for whom it was so very familiar, and I could only imagine what it must look like to my fellow derelicts, who, on the rare occasions when our paths crossed, regarded me with expressions of fear and awe.
It was only the unfamiliar ones, the ones who were either new to this part of the city or new to street life itself, who ever dared to venture near the entrance to my alley. And there were also the ones the others referred to as “the crazies,” the mentally muddled and addled, who muttered or ranted at the empty air, who soiled themselves and twitched with various tics and convulsions. I sometimes wondered what the other street-dwellers were thinking during our occasional brief encounters, which invariably ended with their flight and my resumption of my perpetual solitude and miniature demiurgic activities, and I was especially curious about the crazies with their fractured perceptions and diseased mental processes. For I thought it would be fascinating, and in fact grand, to see myself through their eyes, and to discover what their faulty faculties made of me and the domain I had created for myself.
When I tried to calculate the span of my rootless existence, I could not remember whether my memory encompassed a month, a year, or longer. At the far point of my recollection there was only a blankness, a gray and featureless barrier like a plaster wall. Or sometimes instead of a wall it carried the imaginal appearance of an inner absence or emptiness, as if I were missing a psychic organ or limb, or as if an anterior network of branching corridors in my soul had been demolished and buried beneath a mountain of dead earth. Occasionally I had the impression, so intense it bordered on a physical sensation, that behind my eyes and brain there existed a gaping hole. At such times I would reach around and probe the back of my head to verify the intactness of my skull. Then I would touch my face, brush my fingers over its smooth, pink rawness, and contemplate with wonder—never with despair—at the source and meaning of this strange disfiguration.
Other psychological dislocations occurred as well. I would start occasionally from a light doze or reverie to find myself confused and disoriented. If it were night and I had crawled into my grotto to sleep, I would emerge and gaze at my surroundings: the alleyway with its bleakness and grit, my little ones scattered sleeping all around, the strip of dark sky shining down from between the high brick walls. And although I knew this was the shape and these were the circumstances of my life, besides which I had never known any other, I would intuit deeply and sharply, with a burst of unaccountable longing, that somewhere there existed another, truer mode of existence for me.
Then the feeling would fade, and I would know there was only this life on the streets, this bulky body with its grotesque glyph of a visage, and this dark alleyway that I called home, where an incomprehensible inner compulsion drove me to assemble an ever-widening congregation of miniature monsters to worship at my feet.
At the far point of memory, I had first awakened while staggering through the streets of the city, dressed in the same rags that I later continued to wear, and filled with a fluttering sensation in my breast, a strange electrical exhilaration of joy and terror, while my face burned with an agony like acid and flame.
After what might have been hours or days of this half-blind odyssey through the city streets, I had blundered into an alleyway formed by the rough outer walls of two brick buildings, where the shadowy coolness felt like a balm. A battered gray garbage dumpster squatted next to me at the entrance. All manner of refuse—scraps of paper, shards of glass, strips of metal, the rotted remains of rats and insects and what had once been foodstuffs for humans—carpeted the alley floor. At the far end a wall of pitted wooden planks formed a barrier past which I could see nothing but distance and dimness, crossed by coils of mist.
I felt the contours of my soul expand instantly to claim and conform to this blissful haven, and my sense of belonging received further confirmation when I crept forward into the alley and sighted a promising feature ahead: a hole punched through the base of the right-hand wall. It proved to be three feet high and wide, with chalk-jagged edges where the bricks had shattered. Without a moment’s thought, I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled inside.
My gropings revealed a cramped, square-cornered cave formed by three rough concrete walls. I brushed away the chunks of brick and mortar on the floor and then lay down, finding the cave just large enough for me to stretch to my full length.
I lay there for hours,
listening to the faint murmurings of the city and reaching up from time to time to touch my face and wonder at its rapidly vanishing pain. This was my home, my grotto, as I instantly thought of it in a burst of inspiration that was as incontrovertible as it was unaccountable.
The uncanny metaphysical breakdown in the world at large, which took over the life of the city soon after I awoke to my strange existence there, was heralded by a brief outburst of what the newspapers, quoting the solemn verdicts of psychiatric professionals and government offices, dubbed “mass hysteria.” It took the form of what one prominent mental health authority described as a “hallucinatory disfiguration” of the city’s religious architecture.
For a period of two minutes on a weekday afternoon, the city’s human inhabitants saw the façades of churches, temples, synagogues, mosques, and meditation halls transmogrified into humanoid faces frozen in expressions of horror. The event made itself known in a ripple of panic that radiated outward from those buildings and through the crowds like waves on a lake. Every person who laid eyes on such a structure at that moment saw the alteration occur, and all were overcome by a frenzied psychosis in which they witnessed the world turning to nightmare.
Some blanched and stared in mute shock. Others groaned and screamed and covered their heads. Still others fell to their knees or fainted. Some vomited and went into convulsions. Later, the story that emerged from these tens of thousands of witnesses was uniform in its assertion of the unearthly influence those impossible visions had exerted. The sheer spectacle of the grotesquely twisted visages had, as one man phrased it, “flooded my eyes” and “rotted my gut.” Countless people told the same story of experiencing an overpowering sense of mingled terror and revulsion that seemed to bloat their visual sense and then “spill” or “burst” or “flood” into other parts of their bodies—stomach, bowels, genitals, limbs—and bring with it an excruciating illness.
The vision vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, and in the ensuing days and weeks more than one artist attempted to paint or draw a semblance of those spectral faces. Invariably, the attempts fell short, at least according to the people who had seen the originals. I examined several of these drawings and paintings myself, as I leafed through the scattered pages from newspapers that came fluttering down the street and creeping on stray breezes into my alley, and they were indeed hideous in the extreme, with mouths, eyes, brows, nasal ridges, and underlying skeletal structures displaying a strange perversion of proportion that rendered them utterly noxious. The exact qualities that achieved such a striking effect proved impossible to isolate. In some of the pictures the eyes were blank and white, staring blindly without irises or pupils. In others they were rendered demonic by pupils in the shape of serpentine slits or goat-like wedges. Still others featured the bulbous black eyes of an insect or the berry-cluster eyes of a spider. In all the pictures, the mouths gaped wide in screams of torment, but again the details varied. Some revealed reptilian rows of fangs, others a foul nest of mucus tissues lined with rotten sores like leprosy. In others, the throat behind the tongue was replaced by a strange stone tunnel with an arched entrance, suggesting a coiling journey downward, inward, toward a pit of inconceivable darkness.
Of all those who stood within sight of a religious structure when the visions struck, I alone failed to see the faces. It happened while I was out on one of my daily tours of the city, following the unfathomable but undeniable dictates of that inner leading, which seemed designed to send me shuffling on a different route each day for the purpose of taking in the city sights in a different spatial and temporal configuration, and which on that day had brought me out of the back streets and into the open, on a sidewalk populated by many pedestrians and bordering a great, black-paved avenue. It ran past a great, gray, stone cathedral, and I was standing directly before and beneath the façade of the sacred structure, watching the crowd part around me with averted eyes, when they all began to scream and clutch their neighbors. Curious but strangely unmoved, I looked to their faces to learn the source of their panic and found them all staring wild-eyed at the church. A glance at it myself showed only the same spires and arches rearing toward the pale blue sky, and the same massive mazework of stained glass glinting in the afternoon sunlight. But it was evident that the individuals around me were seeing something much more, something far other, something that was even then causing them to fall and thrash, to gasp and retch, writhing in fits of supernatural sickness. And still I saw nothing. Within seconds I was the only one left standing, a rag-wrapped figure surrounded by shuddering, supine forms that struck me as wormlike and obscene.
For many nights afterward, when the newspapers had begun to report on what had happened and offer their useless interpretations and assessments, I pondered this event as I lay inside my grotto and felt the darkness breathe. I could not divine whether my failure to see the faces indicated a deficit or a surplus of spiritual sight. Many times I reached up to feel my forehead, cheeks, eyes, and mouth, and each time I was seized by the mental image of that great cathedral shuddering and twisting and transforming itself into a polished mirror upon whose silvery surface I saw my own reflection screaming in unbounded horror.
Not long after the appearance of the faces, the breakdown in things was signaled in more personal fashion by the incident of the man who bled to death through his eyes. It occurred during my daily journey, when I was at one of the farthest points away from my alley and tracing an unwonted path through a part of town where people wore newer clothing and drove shinier vehicles, and where the tall buildings gleamed with the freshness of new-cut stone and polished glass.
It was the screams that drew my attention and initiated the event. They came in a male voice, ragged and piercing, and were so very sincere in their expression of frantic horror that I thought they would surely shred the throat of whoever was voicing them. Like everyone else within earshot, I turned to look, and quickly located a man in a gray business suit standing at the open door of a taxicab and clutching his face with both hands. Blood spurted from between his fingers, which were capped over his eyes.
The sight exerted a preternatural power over the crowd, mesmerizing them into frozen silence. They stared as he shrieked in agony and horror. They gaped as he doubled over and vomited on his black leather shoes. They remained motionless as he fell into the crook of the cab door and began clawing at his eyes while his legs kicked spastically.
Then they heard the sound, the one that had been obscured by the initial commotion and the man’s screams. It was a whispery hiss, like the melting of ice on a bed of hot coals, and it suffused the atmosphere of the avenue with an unnatural volume and vividness. After a moment, its source became evident.
The blood from the man’s eyes was sizzling and burning like acid. It was eating at the flesh of his hands and face, the fabric of his suit, the leather of his shoes, even the yellow paint on the door of the taxi. Where it had spattered on the street, it bubbled like oil in a hot skillet, emitting a curling white plume of smoke and carving bowl-like indentations for itself in the pavement.
Pandemonium ensued. The explosion of panic that had been temporarily held in abeyance by horrified awe now detonated with all the more force. People fled with shrieks and shouts. I alone stayed near to watch what happened as the man’s body began to collapse in on itself.
Later, when I arrived back at my alley, I crawled inside my grotto and lay there motionless for the rest of that afternoon and deep into the night, letting the events of the day replay again and again in the theater of my mind’s eye. While the stars were still out and visible in the strip of sky above, I crawled out and gathered materials to make a new congregant in my church of little ones. A discarded length of rubber tubing, strapped to a body made from a rusty old gasoline can, produced the appearance of entrails protruding from a metallic abdomen. Holes punctured in the top of the can with a nail formed black, empty eyes gazing ever upward in agonized awe and a mouth screaming eternally and soundlessly in perpetual to
rment. I arranged the ugly figure with his fellows and settled back against the opposite wall to let them return my gaze while my mind wandered where it would, tracing the contours of a bottomless mystery that invaded the conditioned human self and corruptible human form with an absolute reality that it could not contain or abide.
More such events began to multiply throughout the city in the ensuing weeks. Even I, in my seclusion, caught wind of the horror that had begun to spill into the world through every crack and seam.
On a bitterly cold morning, when a crust of ice coated every exposed surface, an unknown variety of flower sprang up and bloomed in the city’s largest public park. A policeman watched it erupt from the frozen sod, staring in astonishment as the strange shoot broke through the icy crust and rose to a height of two feet before unfolding velvety black petals clustered around a lemon-yellow core. He approached in wonder, removed a black glove, extended his hand, and brushed the petals with trembling fingers. He died later that day of a raging fever, but not before telling a doctor that the flower disintegrated into ash upon contact with his skin.
A few blocks north, a car ran over a blind man’s dog, injuring it grievously. The man fell to his knees and cradled the dog’s head in his lap, weeping wretchedly as his canine guide shrieked in agony. But then the bestial shrieks underwent a shocking alteration and became a human voice issuing from the inhuman mouth, begging the man not to let the dog die there in the street, howling an obscenity of mangled speech formed by lips, tongue, and throat that were never intended for such a purpose. The man strangled his dog in a burst of horrified fury, and then sobbed over and over to the shocked onlookers, “It couldn’t live. It couldn’t live.”
