Gateways to Abomination
Matthew M. Bartlett
Copyright © 2014 Matthew M. Bartlett
Cover art: Katie Saulnier
Cover design: Standard Design
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1500346721
ISBN-13: 978-1500346720
For all who listened...
Contents
the woods in fall
when i was a boy – a broadcast
path
the ballad of ben stockton verse 1
notice – 1802
interview with emily lavallee -- september 2007
the ballad of ben stockton verse 2
wxxt news brief
wanted dead
the house in the woods
the arrival part 2
uncle red reads to-day’s news
the leech
the arrival part 1
uncle red reads to-day’s news
the gathering in the deep wood
uncle red reads to-day’s news
the sons of ben number 3
uncle red reads to-day’s news
the sons of ben number 2
the theories of uncle jeb
uncle red reads to-day’s news
the last hike
pharaoh
great uncle eltweed
the investigator
the ballad of nathan whiteshirt
accident
a world of lucretias and ledas
cat-tails and rushes
the first to die
the gossip hour
sermon
the reddening dusk
Don't startle or scare. Disturb. Upset. Remove the floor and dissolve the walls.
-Abrecan Geist, Sinister Mechanisms p. 45
There are four separate and distinct methods by which one may disinter and defile the hardened heart.
-Abrecan Geist, Sinister Mechanisms p.106
the woods in fall
are stark and open, the twisted trunks and gnarled branches standing out black against the gray wall of the sky.
The woods in spring and summer twitch and writhe with twittering birds and thick green life, even at dusk.
But in Fall the woods are foreboding and defiant. The brambles and bristles and thorns gather to hinder your progress, as though guarding a secret. As you pick your path and make your way through the trees, the day turns to night only yards in. In Fall, in the New England woods, it is always night. Leaves fall like dry, dead angels, piling up against the leviathan broken bones of storm-savaged trees.
It was Fall when I went into the woods. I had been in the den, sorting through papers with the radio tuned to classical music from a local college. The cat jumped up on the telephone table and ran his tooth along the side of the radio, turning the dial a few notches to the left in the process. GodDAMMIT, I said, sitting up to re-adjust the radio.
I stopped, my hand poised over the dial. I listened. And then I took up my stick and walked out of my house. I turned onto Allyn Street. The traffic whooshed by, and the freezing rain struck my face like needles. I felt the ice bouncing off of my eyeballs. A Stop & Shop bag fluttered desperately in a tree like a trapped ghost. I went into the woods.
I couldn't hear the road anymore when I saw the thin man. He was dressed in an old-style suit and a tall hat. I thought he might be distressed, but he moved through the uneven forest floor elegantly, as though strolling on a rain-slicked street.
When he got almost near enough for me to see his features, he bent suddenly, then dropped to his knees. His body whipped as though his spine were a snake snapped by a forceful hand. An ungodly gurgle bellowed up from his throat and he vomited a thick stream of wriggling worms. His body lurched again and he gagged, a thick crack, then drew in breath and let loose again, the worms pouring out as though propelled. I watched the folds of skin at his throat undulate. Then he took in a deep, retching breath and fell to the forest floor.
I rushed to him, my disgust giving way to pity and fear. When I got there, he looked dead, melted into the forest floor, reminding me of those pictures of soldiers’ bodies engulfed in sand dunes at Normandy. His clothing twitched and writhed, and it was then I saw that the legions of worms had grown into snakes, with dripping fangs and black eyes. I smelled a sickly smell, of putrefaction and ammonia and venom. A wormy snake slid over my shoe, leaving a trail of black-green slime.
I fled the woods and the remains of the old man. Now I sit in my house. The power is out, and a fallen tree lets the rain into this dark den. It puddles at my feet. The cat floats by, its open eyes milky with cataracts, its body limp. The phone rings for a time, and then stops.
The door opens. I am not expecting anyone.
when i was a boy – a broadcast
When I was a boy in Leeds, I had a friend named Christopher Dempsey who lived out on Cemetery Hollow Road. He had a younger brother named Alex and a backyard that emptied out into an expanse of woods that hid most of our boyhood exploits, which for a time were no less innocent than catching and eating frogs.
Christopher and Alex each seemed to be clothed in dirt. It smudged their faces at the corners of their mouths and settled into the cracked skin at their elbows and knees. Their toes were so encased in filth they were never once kicked out of King's Grocery for being shoeless; a glance at their filthy feet fooled most into thinking the boys had donned dense and dirty slippers.
Their mother, though not as obviously caked and clotted with filth as her boys, seemed to be filthy with secrets. She was thick-hipped and black-haired and wore huge glasses and colorful faded sashes tied at her waist. She favored dark denim pantsuits and she smoked up hand-rolled cigarettes one after the other. She was ugly and beautiful and fat and curved and she did not wear lipstick neatly like Mother wore lipstick. She spent hours behind the closed door of her room listening to monotonous and eerie orchestral music. She read strange books. She was quiet and sullen and cursed at her boys and humiliated and hated them. She took to me instantly, foisting her boys off upon me on many a hot afternoon and staring strangely after me as we fled into the woods.
I neither liked nor disliked Christopher and Alex. They were dim and easy to manipulate. Crimes I wished to commit they'd do at the mere suggestion. We committed acts of minor arson, and were cruel to frogs and otters and lizards, but not to cats. I once saw Christopher trying to strangle a tomcat and I jammed a thick branch into his ear until it spat blood and I handily convinced Alex to take the blame.
Before long, I became fixated on their mother. Her body was magnificent. Her ass was huge and hypnotic and I wanted to see all of it. The only naked images of women I'd seen were from drawings by my neighbor (and friend) Guy, and the lonely woman who lived next door and changed with the blinds not drawn. Guy had a talent for drawing wide, angular asses, and hers was like one he'd never dared draw, nor even imagine. I wanted to nestle in it like a cat in the crook of a tree. I wanted to inhale its mysterious dank odors. I wanted to sup at it, to beat at it with my balled fists, to set it on fire and burn myself putting it out, to roll in the ashes in leaves of burnt flesh like it was catnip in satin sheets. But I was but ten, and she had a long line of miserable unworthy suitors to tend to her musty desires.
Christopher and Alex and I would play hide and go seek in the yard and I would sneak to the bedroom window to see her, face down on the couch while some boney, scaly drunk's bone-white tiny ass whipsawed up and down. Hours later in my own bed I would hear all the sounds, the voices and the sounds of flesh and I would ejaculate into my cupped hand, my mouth wrenched open in horror and revulsion and ecstatic erotic joy.
Over the months of summer I saw the teacher Mr. Craston kicking rocks in her drive
way, I saw some of the lean, hoodlum neighborhood kids smoking sullenly on her porch, and once I swore I saw my father emerge shamefully from her house and slink off behind their garage, but it couldn't have been. He was at work. But there were more, many of them, scores of them.
One day I arrived at their old house to find Alex and Christopher lashed to a tree in the back with a length of rope encrusted with something greenish brown. Christopher was howling, straining against the ropes, his fists balled, blood seeping from between his fingers and a swinging pendulum of brown drool clinging to his bruised and chapped bottom lip. Alex was opposite him, fast asleep, the corner of his tongue poking from his mouth like a swollen worm, a metronomic rasp the only sign of life. I noted that his shirt was yanked up where the rope pushed into his flesh and his little belly lolled. I noted that he had an outie.
I turned to leave and She beckoned me from the doorway. She was wearing a ratty pink robe that hung open obscenely. Its browned sash curled like a snake at her feet. I seem to remember--though it cannot be--that a newly lit cigarette jutted from between her disturbingly large big toe and its curled neighbor, sending a seductive tendril of smoke up past the webbed blue veins of her thighs, past the sweaty cramped horizons of her belly, past the glitter stuck in clumps between her ample, dangling breasts, past her eyes, one of which twitched, past her hair, which was greasy and brown and frayed. I turned again to run and fainted dead away.
I cannot describe what was happening to me when I woke. It was my dream come true and my nightmare. Her face pushed into me everywhere. She pulled from me pleasures I'd never imagined and pulled and bit at my skin angrily until I shrieked and pulled away in pain and shame. Cigarettes lay broken and smoking in ashtrays all over the room. There must have been scores of them, providing ample light to see the faces watching us from all the corners of the room. I thought I saw Guy grappling with my father over scraps of raw meat. I remember a clock whose face was an obscene caricature of a black man, another whose hands were crudely rendered pricks. I remember a dog rolling on a milk-soaked carpet, its belly a mass of grotesque breasts. She saw me looking frantically about the room and covered my eyes with her hand, which smelled of sex and nicotine.
There was music playing, I remember, and there were whispers and bursts of jeering laughter. I think at one point a dog lapped at the bottom of my foot. I endured a cigarette burn whose ghost still haunts my eyebrow. I remember the sounds of someone vomiting. But mostly there was her, from every angle and in deep in every fold. Our bodies roiled and boiled and pushed into each other unspeakably. I was terrified of her, and terrified that it would end. I was sure I would die, for there were long stretches of time when her flesh filled my throat and seemed to be on the verge of somehow invading my very lungs. I wanted to die, and I wanted to go on forever.
But I did not die, and I did not go on forever. After innumerable hours--days?--I was pushed naked into a shower and held against the wall so I wouldn't collapse. I was washed my many rough hands. I was fed stale bread and thin soup. After, I staggered out onto the lawn, drunk (for at one point she had spat vodka down my throat and slapped my face with a massive slipper). I collapsed, inhaling the smell of grass and healthy dirt. I was in love and in pain and in lust and I was ashamed.
That night I burned down the house with kerosene and rags and father's whisky bottles. All the Dempseys died that night. Mr. Craston must have been there, because he never came back to school. The firemen and investigators swarmed the sooty, scorched mess for days after. I heard rumors of their findings, things in the basement, carcasses and cocoons and collections of obscene antiquities and rusty metal sexual apparatus that could not have been designed for humans. There were sixteen bodies found, but no one save Mr. Craston missing from our town. Old pages and parts of books in unfathomable languages. I saw them drag out the belt I'd worn during my hellish visit. I saw three-eyed spectacles and a bucket full of feet. Maybe I didn't see these things.
Maybe I dreamed them, or maybe I'm misremembering them.
Every woman after was but a shadow of her. I scared them all away anyway, what with my screams and my mutterings and my cruel and impossible demands. She was my First and my Last. She was a gateway to abomination.
You're listening to WXXT. You are not sure how long you have been listening. Your stomach drowns out the sounds of your radio. A wind howls. The batteries die. Infants mewl at your feet.
Up next, the swinging sounds of Dino Paul Crocetti. You know him as Dean Martin.
path
Bill, with one tightening hand, his left and weaker hand, held both of Elise's wrists together over her head. His right forearm strained toward the floor, her slender neck blocking it from its destination. He curled his hand into a fist and pushed his elbow down as if trying to close a paper cutter onto a ream of heavy stock.
He pushed harder, and her legs kicked and her midsection bucked. He closed his eyes, squeezing with one hand, leaning with the other.
He had never ridden a bull, not the flesh and fur kind, not the beer and bar and barrel kind, but he imagined this was what it was like: to stay on, to persevere, to make the noise stop…and finally the struggle ceased. He pushed further, using every last bit of energy, and heard a terrible noise. The death rattle? The room filled with a horrible smell, ordure, urine, animal smells, coffee breath.
The enormity hit him and he fell backwards, his taut legs propped up by her dead legs, his arms thrown back, his jaw open wide, scary wide, like a tin can with a whisker for a hinge. He heard an airplane overhead somewhere.
Why had she said that to him? In a blast of reflection he realized she couldn't have meant it; she was simply asserting the fact that she held authority, not actually threatening to use it.
There would be time to think about that later. He let his mind flood with the facts of this woman, her life. She had friends, people she wrote to. An ex-husband, a kid somewhere in a city miles away, but who saw her for holidays. Accounts at social networking sites. Thoughts about the future.
He let all that wash over him, and then he let it go.
In times of great stress, he would sometimes picture himself as an other, watching from somewhere else, calmly assessing, allowing himself to be entertained, even amused by what was happening to his lesser self. He was never so dramatic as to name this Other, never so self-deceptive as to think of it as alien or beast. It was just Bill, a Bill devoid of emotion, looking upon a scene as though it was happening in some depressing movie. Dispassionate. Detached.
In this manner Bill's other, and then Bill in turn, began to think of this problem not as a living, breathing human problem, but as a logistical problem, a puzzle, to be solved. He imagined he would be caught, publicized, humiliated, and punished. But he allowed himself a glimmer of hope, that this problem might do nothing more than cause many nights of self-torture. A self-imposed prison that still had cable and restaurants and streets.
Bill dragged the body into the bathroom and turned on the lights on either side of the mirror and the overhead light. He stepped into the kitchen and pulled a sharp blade from a drawer piled to the top with knives. He remembered only having only a few knives, and was momentarily puzzled. It threw him, actually, and he paused.
He shook it off.
Knowing from television that forensic investigators can find with special lights where blood has been spilled, Bill pulled Elise's body up so that she was draped over the toilet, her head lolling over the side. With his left hand he gripped her hair and with his right he pushed the blade of the knife into the delicate hollow of her throat. He pushed and twisted and gouged, expecting a torrent, a splashing, something. He heard only a trickle. He pulled the body to the side and saw only a dissolving spiral of blood, a deep red corkscrew fading to pink and hanging in the water like a ghost.
He felt a sudden and intense and specific physical shift in his guts and flung Elise to the floor. Her arm stuck up in the air awkwardly. He saw that at some point she'd scraped her elbow, saw th
e glimmering of her wedding ring. He shoved down his pants and sat and released, his head thrown back, his jaw taut.
After cleaning up and showering--he tried to avoid looking at the body through the haze of the translucent shower curtain liner--he stood over her, naked, drying himself with haste, feeling vulnerable and exhausted.
Somewhere in the house, a voice spoke.
Bill let out a shrill shriek and instinctively grabbed a towel and wrapped it over his midsection. His breath came in rasps, and he put his hand over his mouth and listened carefully.
The voice droned from somewhere in the house, and Bill heard soft music--it was the clock radio. He must have set the alarm, forgetting it was the weekend. Was it that late? He walked through the dark house cautiously, his collected furniture and books seeming to loom and threaten, the voice in the bedroom growing louder and more strident. He reached his shadowed bedroom, lit only by a reading lamp in the corner whose face was pushed to the wall to minimize glare.
The Plague of the Leech, an insistent and insinuating voice bleated from the tinny speaker, will start in the stomachs of your children. The schools will close. Schoolteachers will fall in the street and men will lean to help and be taken. Hospitals will be overwhelmed and overrun; they will host the Leech and the Leech will simmer in its tubes and conduits and its tanks...
The red lights showed not 6 a.m., the time he would wake for work, but 3:17; Bill's vision suddenly doubled, creating a dim, ghostly 3:17 below the real one. He shook his head and it was still there. He switched the radio off, but the voice continued. Then he saw that, in fact, the clock radio sat precariously upon another clock radio.
The disease will roil in your stomachs and minds and your churches will burst like bellies of brick and glass... The voice rose in pitch and the music, an orchestral drone, deepened. Bill shoved the top radio aside and turned off its twin. Will this be the nature of my torture, he wondered.
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