Gateways to Abomination

by Matthew Bartlett

  I found myself in a smallish room illuminated only by small bulbs in display cases and in glass-fronted shelves that lined the walls to my left and my right. Opposite the door I had entered was another door with a stained glass window that afforded a little more light, though muted.

  The case nearest to me contained an ancient looking box with wooden dials and metal switches. As I walked through the room, I saw that it was clearly the display-room of a collector of radios and radio technology.

  In the middle of a room was a radio in a highboy cabinet; beyond that sat transistors; some colorful plastic, some gray; and tabletop radios; then a series of walkmen; and a blue and white MP3 player that presumably contained an FM receiver.

  What was baffling, though, was the last two cases. They were large terrariums, one on either side of the door with the stained glass window.

  The one on the left had a floor of pebbles in tones of rust and sandstone, and a path of jagged rectangular brick-red stones leading to a flat, hollowed-out rock that looked like a child's wading pool made of marble. A thick thatch of ferns provided a bright green backdrop, and wee potted plants dotted the ground. In the back corner sat an antique chair, no bigger than your thumb, painted in exquisite detail. On that chair sat a fat black fly involved in a process that looked much like grooming. As I watched, two more flies emerged from the lush backdrop and hovered at the glass. It appeared as though they were looking at me.

  Unnerved, I stepped back and then started to cross to the other terrarium, when the door swung open to reveal what appeared to be a sparse waiting room. Not wanting to appear rude, I walked in.

  The room was brightly lit, causing me to squint through my fingers. The walls were bright white. There were no pictures on the wall, just a window with white blinds drawn tight. Before me was a squarish, low coffee table on which sprawled a haphazard pile of Newsweeks, Peoples, and Highlights for Children. Catty-corner, framing the table on two sides, was a pair of mismatched cheap couches, one industrial brown, one off-white to the point of being dingy.

  Ahead of me was a glassed-off receptionist area where a slender, redheaded girl sat. Her hair was tied into pigtails and she wore garish green eyeshadow. She scratched her eye and I saw that her left hand was without fingernails. Her eyebrows, it seemed, were nonexistent; instead two curved, thin arches were drawn on, one slightly higher than the other--by accident or design, I wondered. The left eyebrow was slightly smudged: I could see the whorl of a partial fingerprint. It reminded me of the lettering on the door.

  "You can have a seat," she said.

  "There's no paperwork for me to fill out?"

  She sighed wearily, apparently irritated that her statement was threatening to transition into a conversation.

  "No," she said conclusively, and turned to rifle noisily through a black file cabinet.

  Before I could sit, the door next to the receptionist area opened, revealing a very tall, gaunt man with deep set eyes and hair of black and silver that sat flat on his head and draped down behind his neck, curling up at the ends in an almost feminine affect. He wore the beleaguered face of an addict, red-eyed and deep-wrinkled, his eyes shining from dark hollows.

  "Mr. Stanton," he grinned, and I saw that his teeth were in shambles--browned, broken. I swore that I saw one tooth...a lateral incisor?...swinging from a sinuous pink thread from an expanse of red upper-gum. He wore a white jacket over a blue Arrow shirt, pressed khakis, and ostentatious cowboy boots whose toes ended in a narrow point. "I am Dr. Lisle-Pearl."

  I was about to open my mouth to invent some kind of excuse to leave, when his enormous hand clapped my shoulder and steered me down a short hall and into a room in which loomed a dental chair and the attendant apparatus. They seemed too big for the room. On one wall was the obligatory painting of a flowered landscape; on another a browned poster displaying a potbellied cartoon of a man, meant to be Asian, in profile. A series of horizontal lines led from the body to an impenetrably tight, smushed series of Asian characters--that kind of lettering that always looked to me like intricate illustrations of impossible houses.

  The doctor directed me to sit in the chair and told me pointedly to relax. Then in walked a hygienist with bulbous features too large for her small head. Her hair was pulled back so tightly that there were vertical lines on her forehead which, set against her natural lines, formed a painful looking crosshatch effect. Her name tag read "Sithyl” and her white coat was terribly tight and short, and it looked to me as though she might be wearing nothing under it. Her large (though muscular) legs were quite bare, and dark blue varicose veins pulsed at her ankles.

  She was on me in an instant, reaching under the chair, her mountainous chest pushed up against my side. Her perfume was unbearable; it smelled of rotten fruit and incense. She pulled up a set of brown leather straps, clipping and locking the buckles over my forearms and stomach, then another over my ankles.

  I started to protest and the doctor wheeled around and jammed some kind of apparatus into my mouth. I only caught the merest glimpse over Sithyl's bulging shoulder, but it looked like some kind of multi-clawed, metallic insect with a body like an intricate drafting compass. It clamped onto my back teeth and then, as the doctor reached in and turned a dial, cranked open my mouth to the point I feared my muscles would tear. I tasted metal and my own blood.

  Then the body of the thing seemed to expand, pushing down my tongue and up against the roof of my mouth. I tried to protest again, and a cold sensation lightly tapped the back of my palate, as though a small arm had extended, and activated my gag reflex. I said, "GEH."

  "Try not to speak," the doctor said, grinning a benevolent grin under dead eyes. He opened a plastic door in the side of the chair and uncoiled a long corrugated tube with a curved triangular mask, which he fitted over my mouth and nose and then affixed with straps behind my head.

  "Too tight?" he asked, and I was instinctively, appallingly grateful that when I nodded, he actually loosened the straps.

  He flipped a switch and air pushed into my nose and throat. It smelled sweet, with a hint of almond. The music from the speakers in the ceiling, a barely noticeable Muzak, began to swell. An insistent cello rose up, accompanied by some kind of intense, whispered chanting. The hygienist put her chubby hand between my legs, staring lustily into my eyes. Against all my senses, I began to feel profound arousal as her hand began to undulate in a way that I would have thought physically impossible. It was as though she had fifty fingers. My jaw hung open. The doctor inserted a plastic tube that slurped out the saliva. My eyes filled with tears of gratitude and love.

  Then he pulled out a tray table. On it was a pile of rusted, wood-handled dental implements, some simple and familiar, some alien and alarmingly complex, like an eight-tanged set of scissors with four rubber grips, and a smaller set of shears with one blade and one long antenna that appeared to have been torn from a car and inexpertly soldered to the other stub where a blade had once been.

  The doctor grabbed a long tool with a circle of metal at one end. Suddenly his arms went all long and thin, like licorice. He plunged them into my mouth as Sithyl began some kind of new manipulation that caused my head to fall slowly back against the head-rest. At the ceiling, winged babies wheeled. Their wings were black gossamer and they gibbered with wet beaks of pink and purple. They had the eyes of goats. Their diapers bulged.

  When finally I looked back down, four of my teeth were on the tray table in a pool of blood. On a small washcloth--with a Comfort Inn logo--rested four new teeth. Two were of translucent glass. Of those, one contained what appeared to be a microscopic circuit board; the other a thin metal pole down the center.

  The other two teeth were white on the sides, but on the top looked like radio speakers.

  I looked back up to the ceiling. One of the babies was flitting against the ceiling tiles like a moth. A line of pink drool detached from its lower lip and lit across Dr. Lisle-Pearl's forehead.

  Sithyl's hand quickened, and I felt mysel
f release as though it had been years. Suddenly, shockingly, the doctor walloped her with a powerful backhand. She flew backward off of her stool and sprawled on the carpet, her mouth agape. I could now confirm that she wore nothing under her white coat.

  I averted my gaze, which I let slide right past the terrifying infant. I looked at the doctor's impassive face. He grinned, his teeth a decrepit bone-yard. Then he held up the eight-bladed scissor, his arm went thin and he thrust it into my throat, deep, deep, impossibly deep. My lips ringed the doctor's white-coated elbow. I tasted fabric. I blacked out.

  wxxt news brief

  LEEDS, Mass. - There were new details Wednesday morning about why a Hampshire County school bus driver lost his job.

  The school system fired Stanley Saltworth in May. According to Saltworth's personnel file, the former bus driver had numerous formal complaints lodged against him. He was terminated shortly afterward.

  One parent said Saltworth wept while picking up students. Another said that he demanded a female middle school student check his back for leeches. Other parents complained he played at top volume on the bus a radio station that was broadcasting obscene material. Saltworth insisted that the bus radio was defective.

  wanted dead

  WANTED DEAD: Guy RONSTADT, in shape resembling a man, he stands about 19 1/2 hands high, with tangled Hair, a patrician Nose, engaging Eyes, and unseemly Ears. Turn a deaf ear to his persuasions, as he has acquaintance with neither Truth nor Decency. He has more Devil in him than ever Rasputin had. He is a thief and a murderer and a defiler of the Dead. When he has been killed, insure that he is not interred in a graveyard, if he is, be certain to place him face-down and place large rocks on his grave, or he will be quick up again and slaughter the graveyard's nighest neighbor.

  the house in the woods

  I don't know if the house in the meadows exists. I'm almost certain I've seen it outside of my dreams, but not sure enough to swear to it, never mind to actually wager. I could tell you that one summer evening, at twilight, I was walking on a dirt road lined on one side by a dense wooded area, on the other by an expansive field dotted with leaning, decrepit barns suffering from decades of disuse. The only sounds were my footsteps in the gravel, underscored by crickets' hypnotic chirping.

  And I could tell you that I happened to look into the woods and saw the unmistakable shape of a Victorian, tall and narrow, surrounded and impaled by dense trees and thicket. I stopped short and let my eyes adjust to the gathering darkness.

  I could tell you that the front door hung open, and that there may have been a source of light somewhere deep within the bowels of the place, enough to illuminate a carpeted front hall and steep staircase. I could say that the treetops were punched right through the roof of the place, that an ancient desk hung at a dangerous angle some yards above the house, perched upon an expansive asterisk of thick, knotted branches. That some clothing--a corset, a waistcoat, some giant white knickers--lay higher up, sagging from bowed branches as though hung there to dry.

  And I could tell you I pushed through the underbrush and nettles and clouds of mosquitoes and then stood, scraped and bruised and bitten, in the front hall. I could tell you what shambled down the stairs, swinging an ancient watch on an ancient chain wound around ancient fingers. I could tell you what it said to me.

  I could tell you so much, but I couldn't look at your face while I spoke.

  I could tell you that when I returned to town, the streets were piled with caskets, centuries old and crumbling. That bleached, bloated arms reached from some. I could say that some of those caskets were tragically small. That some held the drowned, and leaked rank water that was waist deep and rat-strewn under the overpass.

  That bodies impaled upside down on stakes filled the courtyard of my tenement, like an inverted audience waiting for a speech from a demented demagogue.

  I could tell you of a rain of bruised babies slamming sickeningly into the pavement of the roads and sidewalks of Leeds, bouncing in dizzying numbers from the roof tops and canopies and awnings.

  I could tell you that I was now a part of an army of the dead, whose instructions were dispersed by coded messages on a radio station. I could tell you of our foul mission and of our multitudes of intended victims.

  I could tell you these things, my invisible audience, only on the airwaves of WXXT.

  WXXT. If it bleeds, it's Leeds.

  the arrival part 2

  My name is Benjamin Stockton. It feels so good to say that. I am Benjamin Scratch Stockton. I have been effectively mute for over a year, scratching in dirt, penned in by a fence of wood and wire, eating hay for my filet and water for my wine. My diatribe was a wavering yell, my thoughts a stifled mass of black thunderclouds.

  But yesterday, the day of the rains, was a big day, a mighty day. I was taken, brought into the wet woods under a slate-gray sky, and, brothers and sisters, I was born again. Born in blood in a dingy apartment on Eastern Avenue. But first I was given a message by a hapless messenger before I dashed out his brains in the grass with his own cane, now mine.

  I have an apartment now, three rooms, sparsely furnished with leaning chairs, a solid table, a basic bed. In that apartment I ate meat again, and I turned on the television and, good people of Northampton, I watched my stories.

  Then I lay myself down in the bed but could not sleep for the excitement. I put on the radio, a small transistor on a simple nightstand. I rolled the wheel to WXXT. They were playing the sounds of cats brawling, with cello. For six hours, I lolled happily in that hazy blur between awake and asleep.

  This morning, I roam the town, seeing its changes, the ventures and enterprises that failed, the ones that are trying for the first time. Men and women walk the streets, the vulnerable and the damaged live there. They walk and they sit and they scream at passers-by but no one listens.

  This morning, I watch a man drive a silver Impala from Pleasant Street, across Main, to King. He takes a left into the lot behind the Hotel Northampton. I cross at the crosswalk and enter the carpeted lobby. Sitting on a small, green-striped divan under a massive chandelier, I watch a ginger-haired, tall man lug two cases and a laptop bag to the front desk and check in. He glances my way and, momentarily disturbed for a reason I'm certain he cannot name, finishes the arrangements with the girl at the desk. A bellman takes his bags and stores them behind the counter, and he exits.

  Now he walks, taking the measure of the morning, taking the temperature of the town.

  I follow at an unobtrusive distance, taking the measure of the man, taking the temperature of the threat.

  The man from the FCC has arrived. But so have I.

  uncle red reads to-day’s news

  To-day on Petticoat Hill Road a half of a man split down the center edged from the woods weeping, reports Henrietta Swaggle. The man was baldheaded and emaciated, and left behind him a trail of teeth and innards. The most prudent and modest Henrietta says that the man asked in a most pitiful small voice for a cup of coffee before expiring in a state of inconsolable agitation and terror. A search of the woods turned up no additional remains.

  Crestlawn Cemetery: the entire population of dozing denizens, numbering in the high tens, was apparently disinterred betwixt eventide and the Devil's Hour, rousted from their repose and removed, presumably, to parts unknown by an unidentified ghoul or ghouls. Gaping holes and yawing caskets remain, and the many footprints in the mud paint a most grim and unspeakable picture.

  the leech

  Among the most ghastly sounds a man can hear is the sound of a voice in what he thought was an empty house. That is what Todd Wessen heard on an early morning in his remote cottage on the edge of a tall wood. He woke before he knew what woke him, woke with a chill that ran from throat to bowel and back again.

  Then he heard it again, heard it awake, a guttural sing-song, a wavering creak. Up he jumped, hitting every light as he passed from bedroom to sitting room, sitting room to hall, hall to parlor. Then at the doorway to the front room
his foot stepped in wet. Before him in a patch of moonlight teetered a tall, silhouetted figure, bloated and awkwardly posed. It stepped into the light.

  The man was purple, blue, black. His eyes were swollen shut; his nose a pimpled stone; his lips a blue ball bisected by a black blister of a tongue. A gray knot of bone jutted from his leg at the knee. He raised to the ceiling in an unfathomable gesture gnarled hands with fingers fused together with mold and rot. "We live deep down in the underwater towns," the figure burbled. "Our screams are bubbles, our fortunes drowned."

  Then the abomination slowly opened a gummed eyelid. Its red eye harbored a cloudy cataract that searched the room and found Todd's own eyes.

  "I'm terribly sorry," the thing belched. "Can you point me toward the road to Prescott?"

  Todd started to take a step backward, but something on the bottom of his foot prevented it reaching the floor. His foot flew out from under him, his left leg kicked up, and for a fleeting moment he was hanging in space. He landed on his back, hard.

  Presently he regained his breath and propped himself up on his elbows. The empty room was bluish with dawn light, the floor dry.

  A movement at his foot and he bent his knee to look. Clinging to his foot was a purple, bloated leech. It humped obscenely at the arch slowly, foully. It shrank and pulled, puffing up like the throat of a frog. He felt nothing at his foot, but he swore he could feel all the blood in his body pulsing towards his legs.

  The next thrust pulled down his love, the next his memories, the last his mind.

  He detached himself from the thin white man and inched along the floor, fat and round and deliriously full. The spines of his books loomed large above him like buildings in a cramped city, each letter too massive to read. He wept and he pulled himself forward and forward and then a shadow fell over him. He reared back his flat head and saw a pale foot descending. The thin, translucent membrane that was his skin burst and everything went red.