Terra Insanus

by Edward Lee

  Yes, it is a grand day in hell. An eternal day.

  Monstrous penises rise in heady arousal, any available orifice plundered for carnal pleasure. Their luciferic seed spurts in endless, globular gouts–thick as marmalade—vesicles drained only to be immediately refilled for still more lusty revel. No registrant of this horde of the damned can be left out, and here there is no discrimination as to gender. Rectums are fastidiously plumbed, vaginas routed to the point of prolapsation, mouths jam-packed with veined members as long and stout as rolling pins, and uteri are set aside on hot rocks, to cook. Tender, pink brains are swallowed whole. Raw testicles are eaten like big jelly beans.

  And when it’s over, the ushers stand proud over the gorgeous carnage. Smiling ever faintly. Their bellies filled. Their groins slaked.

  Yes, then it’s over, only to begin again and again and again forever and ever, remuneration in aeternum , recompense without end. As the saying goes: Payback’s a Bitch. Well yes siree, it most certainly is.

  And one of the ushers steps forward then through the hot smoke of the jubilee, its black-slit eyes leveled, its forked tongue licking feces off its lips.

  Its inhuman hand slowly rises, and its finger points...

  (-talk show-)

  An old woman with clown-orange hair claims that she’s psychic. She predicts that Ross Perot will run for president and take 20% of the vote. Then she predicts that in 1993, a wave of genocide will explode in East Europe, that death camps and rape camps will reemerge. Some of the audience actually laughs at the absurdity.

  She talks about crystals, about Kirlian Photography and remote viewing and OBE’s and trance-channeling.

  And ghosts.

  “Our sins are ghosts, too. They always come back, and if you look closely enough, you can see them...”

  (-the ghost, part I-)

  That day. About 3 p.m. The writer was walking home from Treasure Island; he’d just been to Ricky T’s to take notes for a restaurant review assignment. Neat place, comfy outside bar; cool, dark inside. They had fried pickles. The owner, whose name really was Ricky T., would die some years later. He had a heart attack while eating in a competitor’s restaurant, God rest his soul. It’s possibly a Sunday when the writer–notes compiled and complete–was walking home under the gorgeous blaze of Florida sun. In the Year of Our Lord, 2002.

  He’d just missed the bus but walking was fine. M.R. James, and Lovecraft as well, were big-time pedestrians, walked miles per day, so if it was good enough for them, it was good enough for the writer. Perhaps some of their greatness might seep into his mediocrity. Or perhaps not.

  His daydream strides took him all the way down Coquina Way, past a seemingly endless row of houses of stucco and those curved-tile shingles. A woman’s voice drifts out from somewhere: “Hi, Lee...”

  He turns, unable to locate the source of the voice.

  “Yes. It’s me.”

  Who? he thinks.

  Still no source. Some of the houses were for sale and unoccupied; the writer squints as the dead windows, for some sign. The his heart jolts: did a pale shape, perhaps like that of a head, move ever so traceably in one of the windows?

  No, no. It’s just a curtain...

  Then the voice resounds again, and he’d never be sure exactly what it–or she–said, but it could’ve been, “Tonight.”

  A further tiny movement snagged his eye: a pale shape, disturbingly head-like. It seemed to have blond hair.

  The moment, and its inexplicable ethereal static, passes, leaving the writer to stand for a full minute more in the middle of the street. Squinting.

  ***

  That night. About 4 a.m.

  He drank a lot in those days, close to every night at the bar. But on the night in question, he’d been alcohol-free for a week or so...or perhaps less. Whatever the case, he would often ply this fact against other, grimmer possibilities, and suggest that alcohol hallucinosis proffered a low order of probability.

  He awoke–such a wonderful cliche!–in grainy darkness infinitesimally tinged by moonlight. It was either an after-plume of dream or his deeply mauled imagination, but he sensed a soundless motion move across the foot of his bed just as some impetus had opened his eyes. The motion had the possession of a shape that could only have been that of a human being. A shortish, thin human being, and a lighter blur where the hair would be: blond hair.

  His heart tripped as his eyes become capable of more clarity. The thin figure moved quickly but yet falteringly, head down, arms at its sides. But even in the shifting darkness he was sure he detected the sweep of a modest bosom, and an inexpressible yet undeniable feminine air.

  The figure traversed the rest of the room and turned quickly into the bathroom where it was then submerged in utter darkness.

  Fuck, the writer thought. Fear clogged his throat like too much peanut butter. Some woman is in my fuckin’ apartment, and she must’ve broken in because I KNOW I locked the front door...

  He seemed to rise from the bed in slow-motion–too afraid, yes, to go into the bathroom–and slipped out to the front room and kitchen. He clicked on the kitchen light because it as the closest switch. The room bloomed in sudden light, then went black again.

  The bulb burned out! And it was one of those corkscrew kind that were supposed to last five years!

  He patted his hand against the wall, side-stepping right, then clicked on the living room light, though referring to this tiny cubby as a “living room” was farcical. Nevertheless, the light came on and stayed on, verifying his certainty that the front door was locked from the inside. The windows were all locked and unbroken.

  Some chick in is my bathroom and I want to know how she got in, he thought in a building ire.

  But did he really? Did he really want to know that?

  He spent the next dismal ten minutes just standing there, working up the courage to walk boldly into his bathroom and see who was there. But it was fear, of course, that kept his feet cemented to the twenty-year-old shitty carpet. You see, there was no light in the bathroom; the fixture was broken, and he’d never gotten around to telling the landlord. And he had no flashlight. Additionally, the bedroom light–one of those clamp-on Wal Mart jobs–stood in the farthest corner of the bedroom, and he didn’t want to think of what might reach out and grab him as he plunged through the darkness for the switch.

  More miserable minutes ticked by (a “misery of doubt,” to quote M.R. James) and then, seemingly without an engagement of his own will, he crossed the murky bedroom, turned right, entered the bathroom which was lit only by a trickle of moonlight, froze in place, stared with eyes that may as well have been lidless, and saw the ghost.

  (-the neighbor has a dream-)

  The bane of any writer is when non-writers ask the infernal question: “Hey, how’s the writing coming along?” Jeez.

  I was raking leaves decades ago in the front yard, a real pain in the ass. I had three book deadlines on my head, but I gotta blow off a day of writing to rake up and bag all these ridiculous leaves. Anyway, the guy across the street’s got nothing better to do than jack his jaw, so he meanders over with a beer, and I roll my eyes even before he says: “Hey, how’s the writing coming along?”

  “Uh, all right, I guess.”

  “Oh, man, you’ll love this,” he said next, “seein’ that you write all that horror stuff. Last night I had a dream that’d make your hair stand up. A real doozy.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I asked without much of a choice.

  “Yeah, man. I dreamed I woke up in my own bed, and I hear footsteps outside. So I get up real quiet ‘cos I don’t wanna wake the wife. And, anyway, I look out my bedroom window, out into my front yard, and I see this army guy down on one knee, all dressed up for combat. He’s got the paint on his face and branches sticking out of his helmet like he’s in Vietnam or something and he’s holding a rifle. And, get this—the guy’s guts are half-hanging out ‘cos someone had shot him in the belly.”

  I kind of raised a brow. “Tha
t’s it? That’s your dream?”

  “Oh, no, man,” my chatty neighbor laughed. “Not by a long shot. This army guy’s kind of looking around, like he’s scared, like he hears something. And then... I hear something too.”

  I wanted to groan. “What did you hear?”

  “Well, more footsteps. Only they weren’t as loud as his. Then all of a sudden he raises his rifle and starts shooting at someone coming around the side of my house,

  but—you know how dreams are—”

  Dreams, I thought.

  “—sometimes things don’t make no sense, and I guess that’s why his rifle didn’t make any noise when he was firing. I could see the muzzleflash, but—”

  “No sound,” I said.

  “Right. And then this army guy with the belly full of bullets drops his rifle on the lawn and runs away down the street, screaming.”

  “Screaming?” I asked. “But I thought you couldn’t hear anything.”

  “No, no, I meant I couldn’t hear the guy’s gun going off, but I could hear everything else, and this guy was screaming bloody murder.”

  I nodded. “Hmm. Pretty weird dream.”

  “Oh, but that’s not all. After this army guy runs away—”

  “Runs away screaming, with a belly full of bullets,” I reminded him.

  “Right, after he runs away screaming with a belly full of bullets, I finally see what he was shooting at.”

  “The footsteps you heard.”

  “Right, the footsteps coming around the side of my house.”

  It is then, presumably for effect, that my motormouth neighbor momentarily paused his story, looking at me with a wise grin.

  I tied up the last pain in the ass bag of leaves and decided to accommodate him. “All right, who was it?”

  “It was legs, man.”

  “ Legs? ” I ask.

  “That’s right. Legs. They looked like a girl’s legs, kinda slim and pretty. But anyway, that’s what I saw in the dream. Two legs walking across my front yard. And you know what they did then, these legs?”

  By then I was feeling a bit sick. “The legs followed the army guy, right?”

  “Well, no. That’s what you’d think they were going to do. I mean, that would’ve made sense, but... You know how dreams are.”

  “Sure.” I looked at him then, a light sweat breaking out on my forehead. “So what did they do then, these legs?”

  “Here’s the part you’ll love!” my neighbor guffawed. “They didn’t follow the army guy at all. Instead, the legs started walking across the street, to your house!” My neighbor, then, slapped me on the back. “Pretty weird dream, huh?”

  “Yeah, man,” I concurred. “Pretty weird dream...”

  (-number nine one four-)

  Time means nothing now... There’s only one thing left to do, when the only person I care about in this whole fuckin’ world is you. My blood sifts through ashes; all my muses are all dead, and your smile puts Glock 17 to my head. Little angel-eyes and a doomsday kiss. I’m Roquentin’s pallid La Nausée, I’m Nelson Algren’s crippled bliss. Solipsistic love but no more soul to sell. I guess I’m meant to stay here and smolder in this noon-blue, jubilant hell. The augurs all lied; the wasteland just gets bigger. I’ll go ahead and put the gun in my mouth, but would you please pull the trigger?

  (-butcher-)

  The conventioneer rushes to ready himself; he’s got a panel in forty-five minutes, and he wants to grab a beer first, with Dallas, in the hotel bar. Well, maybe two beers—panels make him a little nervous. He gets out of the shower, dries himself, hurries to the bedroom in the muffled hotel quiet.

  A pregnant woman is lying on the clean Scotch-Guard carpet. Her clothes have been torn off in shreds, what appears to be an off-white bustle dress like the kind of stuff women wore hundreds of years ago, only now it’s streaked bright-red with blood, and she has been butchered right there on the floor via a manner of demented expertise too diabolical to describe.

  The conventioneer stands slack-jawed. The image is teeming, stark and clear and sharp as a bezel in its clarity. Then the conventioneer blinks and, of course, the image is gone.

  But he remembers the last thing he saw:

  The woman’s face split by a Conoye warhammer.

  (-homecoming-)

  Ocean City, Maryland, 1991. Yeah, that’s where you and your pals went for a week in late-July. You drank a bottle of Sapporo while driving your brand-new car across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge (or perhaps more than one bottle). A straight shot down Route 50, and you’re there.

  Party hearty, man! Partyin’ on the beach! Bikini City every day, it’s enough to drive you nuts! And drinking in the Green Turtle every night—what a commendable way to live!

  You stayed at a high-rise called the Atlantis. It looked like something out of a Fritz Leiber story: tall and thin with gun-slit windows, a spire of drab-beige cement. One day you’re sitting on the can—what a deserving place for creative enlightenment—and you get an idea for a novel that you’re sure will make you a million. Little did you know then that the book would never sell.

  On Thursday night you wake up at exactly 3:15 a.m. (Wasn’t that the “cryptic” time from Amityville Horror? Over a decade later you would hear that the whole book and movie was bullshit.) Anyway, you can’t sleep. You have this funny feeling you’re being watched, so clichéd but so true. You go out onto the balcony in your underwear, sit down, light a cigarette. Forty-four floors up, you’re sitting there totally alone. The sky is drab, the color of disconsolation. A storm is coming. At times you swear you can feel the building actually move, and from somewhere you hear a washed-out voice yell:

  “Hey!”

  To your left the waves crash but you can barely hear them because it’s so windy. And to your right...

  Another high-rise. Dark. Not one of its hundreds of windows are lit. But by now your eyes have acclimated to the gloom. You’re staring at the other building . . .

  And you see someone.

  The tiniest figure. It seems to be standing on the opposing balcony. Just... standing there.

  It’s so weird. You stand up, grab the binoculars someone had brought to scope the girls on the beach in their bikinis and sweat-shellacked cleavage and tart-fat cameltoe. You’re leaning out over the steel rail, focusing on the figure.

  It’s a boy, a seven or eight years old. But not dressed in beach garb. He’s wearing long pants, a long-sleeve shirt buttoned at the collar, big clunky shoes.

  He’s holding a bookbag, staring right back at you with a face bereft of eyes...

  Then he hobbles away and disappears.

  (-the railroad tracks at Ulmerton and Lakeview, 10-31-2011-)

  You wouldn’t learn the story of the railroad tracks until much later, almost exactly seven months later, as a matter of fact. But you were taking your garbage to the waste-can at the bus stop because...who wants to pay garbage men? Dusk was just beginning to bleed into the horizon this Halloween night. You couldn’t wait till it got fully dark and walk the neighborhood looking at decorations. Any other Halloween you’d be in a bar, drinking beer but you all but quit drinking a year ago Labor Day. Beer suddenly tasted like shit! (Well, except Sapporo. And, several years later, your beer of habit would become Tsingtao, which is actually still brewed in China, whereas Sapporo is brewed in Canada on a Japanese “license”–oh, but why do I encumber you with these useless and unfitting details!) Anyway, as you made your regular trek to the garbage at the #59 bus stop garbage can–as you crossed the train tracks–you glance to your right, to the perimeter about two hundred yards off, where you’d buried your ex-girlfriend’s rabbit. It was a big ass rabbit and Kathy had put the poor bugger’s corpse in the freezer so it wouldn’t rot before you could get down to St. Pete to pick it up. You remember riding the bus back–the #4–and breaking into laughter in front of everyone because in your satchel were two orders of friend clams from the 4th Street Shrimp Store and a big-ass frozen bunny. You wondered if anyone, anyone in
all of human history, had ever traveled similarly with these two things in their satchel. Anyway, you buried the rabbit about two hundred yards off Ulmerton, on the railroad tracks. And as you’d walked back, you could’ve sworn you heard footsteps pacing you from the thicket, and even forms that could’ve been faces grimacing at you out of the foliage. At one point, you think you even heard footsteps running after you as you neared the road.

  But of course, there was nothing. It’s all that M.R. James you read!

  Anyway. Back to the train tracks. Halloween night. You stuff your garbage in the can, then head back home. All Hallow’s approacheth. You can see camp fires in the woods along the tracks–bums, you know, junkies, drunks, oh, the compassion!–but you see them as witch-fires as lucifer’s servants revel in preparations for sabbat conjurations. Just as your Wal Mart sneakers take you across the tracks, a voice calls out, distantly while also emphatically clear: “You there! Who are you?”

  It seemed the oddest thing for someone to call out to a stranger. Or perhaps it wasn’t a stranger because oddest of all is that the words were called out in your voice.

  ***

  What is . . . that?

  A figure in the dark?

  Footsteps?

  Is it me?

  Or is it getting hot in here?

  ***

  The novelist shuts his computer down. He just got it and he hates it. He hates having to own one because writing seemed much more real on a manual typewriter. There’s something obscene about all that technology existing between his brain and the paper. Anyway, this is retrospective now: the early ‘90s.

  Progress.

  He lights a cigarette and polishes off a Heineken, then looks out the window.

  It’s a beautiful night.

  He gets ready, listening to This Mortal Coil and The Teargarden, puts on heather-gray slacks, a Lord & Taylor shirt, decent shoes, then he leaves. He’s walking down desolate M Street with his pals, gearing up for the D.C. beer-snob bars and strip joints.