Grotesquerie

by Richard Gavin

  Joyce rose and yanked the phone cord from its jack. She returned to the nook and lit a fresh cigarette.

  “Can I have one of those?” Morgan asked. There was no longer a need for pretence.

  Joyce flicked the pack across the table. Morgan felt as though she might be graded on her smoking skills. She cleared her throat and then confessed.

  “I wanted to know…know who she was.”

  “I told you, you can’t,” Joyce barked. “Do I have to engrave it on your forehead? You can’t and you won’t.”

  “But you knew her.”

  Joyce sighed. “Yes,” she said, “but I knew her before she fell into it.”

  “Well I wasn’t around before.”

  “I know you weren’t.”

  Smoking was evidently new to Morgan. Joyce noted the way her face was beginning to blanch.

  “Let me ask you,” Morgan began, “did you know your mother?”

  Joyce cleared her throat. “Yes.”

  “Have lots of good memories of her, do you?” Morgan’s voice was taking on a keen edge.

  “Some.”

  “Oh? You weren’t taken from her when you were still in diapers? How nice for you.”

  Joyce folded her hands before her. In her mind she counted the seconds until an appropriate pause was reached.

  “Did you know I once had two sons?”

  Morgan did not know how to respond.

  Joyce nodded. She was unaware of the fact that she’d begun to cry again until she felt a tear splash upon her still-folded hands.

  “Isaac and Caleb. Well, to be accurate, Caleb hadn’t been born yet, but I was in my ninth month. My husband Barry was a firefighter. Or maybe he still is. How can I know? Anyway, we’d just purchased our first house—a little place, a lot smaller than this house. Barry was working a lot, trying to pick up extra hours to pay for all the things we needed. I was trying to get as much unpacking done as I could, but Isaac was only three at that time, so trying to keep up with him and set up house while I was as big as a house myself, well, it tired me out. Plus, about that time Isaac had been suffering from…bad dreams. That must be how it got me…”

  Joyce’s voice dissipated like wind-scattered smoke. Several moments were spent on a vacant stare that made Morgan both heartsick and frightened.

  “I remember,” Joyce resumed, “I’d just put Isaac down for his afternoon nap. I was going to finish unboxing our kitchenware, but I was just so exhausted. I curled up right beside Isaac.”

  Morgan interjected with a rush of apologies. “You don’t have to relive this,” she told her.

  But Joyce’s recollection was immune to protest. “We had an antique clock,” she continued, “an heirloom. It was inside one of the open boxes in our bedroom. It was a pretty thing, with Roman numerals on the face and little brass chimes that rang on the hour. Anyway, the house was so quiet that day that all I could hear was the refrigerator buzzing in the kitchen and the ticking of that pretty little clock. As a matter of fact, I pulled that ticking sound into my dream.

  “I must have dozed off fairly quickly, and the nightmare came right away. In it, I was walking up a steep country road. The incline was so extreme that I could barely climb it. At one point my legs gave out. I fell down but I still couldn’t stop climbing. I began to crawl, to pull myself along the asphalt, looking up to the top of the road.

  “The sun was very white. It hurt to look upward, but I could just make out that there was a silhouette at the top of the hill. It took what felt like forever before I was able to make out what it was—a stuffed chair, a wingback, antique…but battered. The chair was turned away from me. When I got a bit closer, I could see that something was sitting in that chair. There were spiky tufts of hair sticking up above the back. The upholstery was blue with a very ugly pattern of gold running through it, a zigzag thing that made me nauseous if I looked at it for too long.

  “Standing next to the chair—and I’d forgotten all about it until just this very moment—was a little wooden table. There was a glass on the table, like a champagne flute. It was filled with this shining liquid. It was the colour of amethyst.

  “I almost made it to the top when I suddenly froze. I can’t remember exactly what it was sitting there, waiting for me, but I was overcome with…awfulness. I tried to turn around, to get back to the bottom of the hill, but there was a magnetic pull that was forcing me closer to that chair.

  “I tried to resist. I pressed my fingernails into the asphalt until they broke off. I even tried to bite down into the ground. Somehow it worked. I’d managed to stop moving forward.

  “So, the thing in the chair came to me.

  “The chair came grinding down the sloping road. The sound was hideous, the shrill scraping sound of wood being dragged along the ground. I remember seeing the chair legs splintering and breaking apart. The closer it got, the worse it became. The upholstery was not patterned but stained with all these foul blotches. And I bet if you try really hard you can guess what the upholstery was made from.

  “And then the chair was right there.” Joyce held her hand before her face to emphasize her point.

  “The thing in the chair stood up and lifted me off the ground by my eyelids. I started to scream, and then the nightmare ended.”

  Morgan felt she should speak. She did not speak. “When I woke up,” Joyce added, “my babies were gone, and I was in a little townhouse with a different lot in life. The stranger who insisted he was my husband got tired of my hysteria pretty quickly. It took him less than a day before he had me hospitalized. I was stuck inside there for weeks. But I got out of that situation too, eventually. Anyway, something good came out of it. I kept the name Joyce. I used to love James Joyce’s story ‘The Dead.’ I really think I did…such a long time ago.”

  “I sent an email,” Morgan finally confessed. “I found an online service that claimed they could track down lost relatives. It was that day we argued last week, remember? I was angry at you, and hurt, so I emailed them to ask for information. But I’ll write them back and cancel, okay? I’ll tell them to forget it.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “No, really.” She reached for her phone, which sat charging in the kitchen wall socket. “I’ll do it right now.”

  “It won’t change a thing.”

  Morgan withdrew her hand.

  “What happens now?”

  Joyce said nothing for a time, then: “What happens is that everything shifts.”

  “How can you be sure?” Morgan retorted. “Nothing’s happened to us yet.”

  “Oh, it has. We just haven’t seen it yet. Everything’s always changing, in flux.” Joyce crossed her arms across her chest, a posture that made Morgan uncomfortable, so great was its kinship to the dead in their eternal rest. “I don’t know if there is a message in this whole thing, if there is any kind of lesson to be learned, but if there is, perhaps that’s it: that nothing is ever stable, that we’re never in control, no matter how much we believe ourselves to be.”

  Morgan was visibly deflated. Thinly, she asked, “Do you know how all this started?”

  “No idea. But I think this…nightmare, vision, whatever you want to call it, has been around forever. I don’t think we create the dream, we just experience it, get claimed by it. It takes from us, but weirdly enough, it gives to us too. I’ve had other children, other possessions. But I don’t choose them. I just kind of…observe them.”

  “Like in a dream?” Morgan asked.

  “Like in a dream. One thing I have figured out is that you had to have met someone in waking life before they can be pulled into this. Sort of like the way you dream about ordinary people, even the dead, when you dream. Your mother used to do my hair, as you know. That’s how she got dragged in.”

  Joyce’s subsequent shudder was so violent that Morgan asked her what she was thinking. “That man, the one in the yard…I think I saw him panhandling in the alley behind the house last week. I even gave him a five…”

&nbs
p; Despite her confusion, Morgan felt that further questions were futile.

  The room donned silence like a garment, flaunted it for too long. The doorbell’s chiming broke the spell. Morgan flinched, gasped, and then rose to answer it. Joyce reached across the table and gripped Morgan’s arm. “Don’t. It will be the police looking for witnesses to the accident. We’re not getting involved.”

  There was a knock, then a stillness that lasted well into the afternoon. By then Morgan had migrated to the living room, where she stared at the television with its volume deliberately high. Joyce remained in the kitchen, smoking until the package was depleted.

  Out of frustration and defiance Morgan rose from the sofa with a huff. She gathered her rolled mat and her petite gym bag.

  “Where are you going?” Joyce asked her.

  “Yoga. It’s Wednesday.”

  “You can’t.”

  Morgan shrugged. “I say I can.”

  The jangling of keys, the rattling of Joyce’s nerves; she bolted toward the front door. “Wait! Don’t go. It’s not safe, do you understand? Not safe!”

  Morgan pretended that the woman’s blubbering, her clinging grip, didn’t faze her. “I’m not going to sit here and rot like some prisoner.”

  “Well then, I’m coming with you.”

  *

  Joyce stationed herself upon a bench against the yoga studio’s far wall. She was like a stoic bird watching emotionlessly as the women reached and twisted their bodies in mimicry of beasts, and then, at a turn, in reverent imitation of the holy ones who prostrate themselves on sajadas facing Mecca.

  The studio was warm and the score that leaked from hidden speakers was a lullaby of chimes and babbling water. Joyce felt buoyant, cleansed. Her guard seduced, she allowed her heavy eyelids to draw shut.

  The nightmare did not grab her until after she was awoken. The yoga instructor who’d nudged her offered a warm smile and said something that Joyce didn’t hear. The studio was empty.

  Joyce rose and began asking about Morgan. The instructor’s nonplussed expression spoke volumes. Numb, Joyce slipped out of the studio.

  Dusk was thickening around her. The streets were a pale haze, the people mere moving props. Joyce found her way home by instinct. She fully expected her key to no longer fit the lock, but in the end, she did not have to test it, for upon her arrival she found the house’s front door slightly ajar. She pushed it open and stood in the vacant frame.

  To the uninitiated the disruption to the house would have been viewed as a robbery, but Joyce was keenly aware of the incongruous details: the thick coating of dust that suggested years of neglect despite the fact that she had left the house only hours earlier; the indentations in the carpet where a furnishing had once sat; the ceiling fan that dangled from its wires, as if something immense had recently stormed through the confining room.

  Joyce ducked under the destroyed fixture. Chunks of plaster crunched beneath her soles. She followed the tracks in the carpet, which led her to the stairway.

  The chair that was missing from the living room had been dragged to the top of the stairs. It was facing the top of the landing, its back to the steps.

  Joyce felt herself moving backward. She pressed her back against the foyer window.

  The figure that was seated in the chair was, Joyce reasoned, designed to seem familiar, much the way recognizable forms pass through one’s dreams.

  “Morgan…” Joyce whispered, knowing how desperate her guess was, how foolish.

  The shape in the chair rose, swelled. The chair was cast aside and went tumbling down the steps until it finally became wedged between the wall and the banister. Its upholstery was shimmering wet. It reeked foully.

  What had once been seated now stood. The thing was colossal, tangled, yet it moved with a grace that defied its size and its anatomy. Every time it lowered one of its lumps onto the next carpeted step there came a thunderous knocking, metallic and deep and echoing endlessly. The creature began to contort itself, to flaunt its non-humanness by halting for a second or two so that Joyce could absorb each repulsive asana.

  Joyce shut her eyes.

  Weeping, she sputtered, “Now I lay me down to sleep…”

  Notes on the Aztec Death Whistle

  It was the dream home for which you’d always been yearning, and at last, after many years of patient drudgery in the halls of academe, you found yourself able to purchase it. But your freedom came at a dear cost. You’d only truly managed to garner wealth after winning such a high degree of fame and fortune thanks to your unsanctioned archaeological dig in Tlateloco, Mexico.

  Yet even before you connived your way into the historian’s limelight, you had already done quite well for yourself, hadn’t you? For years you’d drawn a handsome salary as a tenured professor of Cultural Anthropology at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada.

  But this was not enough for you…not nearly enough. You just had to be noticed, be revered, be perceived as the one who had done that which couldn’t be done: you ‘discovered’ the notorious Aztec Death Whistle.

  Of course, the newspapers that ran your story around the globe didn’t know about the ruthless tactics you’d employed in order to make that discovery, did they? Even the most diligent journalists who covered the story were unable to dig up the ugly facts about it that you buried: your engaging a gang of mercenaries to raid the little village near Tlateloco, the way you’d watched them torture an elder to death just so you could obtain the location of the secret ceremonial pit where long ago the Aztecs buried their human sacrifices.

  No, what you showed the world instead was a charade, the mirage of the humble scholar whose painstaking research had led him to that pit of the dead. It all appeared so innocent.

  Why, even your research notes exuded studiousness. See? I have set them here upon your marble-top desk. Beside these pages is the worn satchel of pig leather you used to cart your notes around Mexico. It is hand-stitched and is branded with a strange mask in profile; the Nahuatl words “Huehue Ichtacatlatolli” (meaning “Ancient Secrets”) embossed in careful one-inch characters just above the satchel’s clasps. Wreathing this tantalizing message is a mosaic of images—gods in profile, potted fires, skulls whose expression is almost gleeful. Many of the images have been woven into the leather with a variety of colourful threads, making this object as much a tapestry of mythology as a case.

  Set beside this satchel is a stack of pristine white pages, each one marked with handwritten script, crisp and focused. I have no doubt that this is the most careful text you’ve ever penned…

  NOTES & OBSERVATIONS COLLECTED DURING MY EXPERIENCES WITH THE AZTEC DEATH WHISTLE

  Tlatelolco, the Ruins of the Aztec City State:

  The Aztecs developed their notorious Death Whistle before the Mithraic Mysteries, before humanity looked for the meaning of life in arcane scrolls, before the resurrection of a Saviour.

  The process of the whistle’s creation would commence with the careful selection of sleek, firm bones, ones that had once sat nestled in living meat but had since been flensed by the cruel hands of time. Only the choicest parts would be culled from the fly-swarmed mound that festered at the bottom of the death pit in Tlatelolco.

  These bones would be placed upon large slabs of stone. There, they would be hammered into nuggets. The nuggets would then be plunked into mortars and pummeled into a fine dust.

  River water would be collected and carried to the place of seclusion. Earth taken from those places that had been blessed by the gods would also be ferried there. The warlocks, called ‘nahualli’ in their native tongue of Nahuatl, would then blend these elements to form a slimy clay. Into this mixture the bone dust would be swirled and folded. Finally, this morbid clay would be scooped up and shaped by the skilled fingers of the nahualli. Skulls would be formed, with gaping jaws and eye sockets like the pocks on the face of the moon, or like the conch shell of the lunar god Tēcciztēcatl.

  It was through the shriek-wide mouths of the skull
s that the precious noise of the whistle would escape.

  Once purified and made firm by midnight fires, the whistles were then decorated with suitably gruesome adornments; snakes or squiggly lines of pyre smoke, hexes, all brushed on with a paint made from poisonous berries and from dung.

  On ceremonious occasions, the dates for rites whose character is too extreme to hew with the timid mindset of contemporary man, these whistles would be blown.

  The sound they would emit was the very voice of the damned in Mictlān, the Aztec Underworld.

  Or such is the tale the elders tell. The whistles become a ligament between this realm and theirs, a terrestrial tool the damned can use to lend voice to their otherwise unheard cries. The whistle’s scream is the song of torment and torture, unimaginable and unending.

  How can one even begin to describe the sound? A piercing sine? The sound of fingernails scraping across old tin? It is a hideous, most unmusical noise, yet its power is all-encompassing and immediate. Once one hears it, one is owned by it to one degree or another.

  This is a sound that rouses and wrests. Settled dust is stirred by its piping. Hidden shapes are lured out. Latent wishes spring up like fresh weeds in the mind of the hearer. Mictēcacihuātl Herself is said to smile when the Death Whistle blows, and the priests’ blades are drawn and raised.

  Until this past century, when a team of archaeologists with which I was involved accidentally disinterred one from its resting place amidst the ruins, the Death Whistles were believed to be mythical. We’d gone to the site in search of villagers’ relics, which, based upon years of research, were believed to be in the area. We were shocked and excited by our happening upon one of the Death Whistles. News of our find spread like wildfire.

  Human nature being what it is, the lone discovered specimen was quickly molded and replicated. These cheap copies were exported to line the shelves of trinket shops around the planet for no other purpose than vulgar, unvarnished greed. No stock was placed in the whistle’s sacred nature or its powers. It became, like all things to modern men, a toy.