Gateways to Abomination

by Matthew Bartlett

  My elementary school, a few flat, one-story buildings connected by windowed corridors, lay across a narrow access road from the cemetery. A modest playground was situated by the inner curve of the road. I was making swirlies in the sandbox with my fingers when I first saw the tall man standing at the wrought iron fence. He was bald on top, long-haired, the hair a flat brown, damp. He wore tiny wire glasses that sat crookedly across a substantial and accusatory nose. A white shirt that showed shadowed ribs from under a dark grey waistcoat. He did not have to beckon with his long finger; his eyes, a brilliant blue, called me across the road. I was six. He could have been forty; he could have been fifty.

  How did I know that he was my father? I had known only that my mother was my mother and had been so for eternity. I had known forever that the man who lived with her could not have been my real father, though that was the charade. He treated me like a baffling stranger, and I was grateful for it.

  He was vaguely unpleasant, and one sensed he was somehow...off. The armpits of his white striped shirts were perpetually stained. He spoke bumblingly, in a dopey and sing-song voice. He worked at and for the church in some capacity I never understood, and The Lord came first for him. Perhaps only for him. He seemed removed. His conversations with my mother were hushed and muted and few. They would read most nights; she her romances and he his worn Bible.

  But the man at the cemetery was a vital man, a man who looked at the world with fire and at me with only embers, which I regarded as warmth. Warmth and excited recognition. The first time I saw him, as I said, I went to him across the road. He knelt and regarded me, grinning widely. I noted that behind his yellowed teeth was another full set of teeth--top and bottom, also yellow, also pointing this way and that. His gums were red and, below and above his canines, split to the bone.

  He said to me that day the following: You must always take what you want, however you can. You'll find, he said, that once you are known for taking what you want, you won't have to anymore. It will be given to you freely.

  Then he rose, not without effort, and strode away. I went back across the street and Mrs. Wisert looked at me quizzically and with trepidation. I shrugged and went in to fetch my coat and go home.

  The next time I saw the man was not more than a week later. It was drizzling rain. He was by the fence again, and I rushed to his side. He told me I knew who he was. He said, I have some history for you. Listen carefully and do not speak. You were not born alone. You had a twin. I knew that one of you was good and one of you was evil. Like in a fairy tale. I buried the evil boy next to the mausoleum.

  He gestured. The mausoleum was a small, windowless brick house with a pointed roof and a small crooked spire.

  I only saw him once more, years later, as I was showing my new wife my old school. She was in using the bathroom, and I turned and there he was. He was grinning at me, but he turned and strode away when I approached. He looked like a giant bird to me, somehow, as though black wings would sprout from his back, and he would leap into the air, blotting out everything. He didn't. He merged with the fog.

  I walked to where he had stood, and there was a transistor radio leaning up against the fence, rusted with age. A window revealed squarish white numbers along a gray line, a red line bisecting the 8s most of the way to the left. I turned it on and his voice spoke through a squeal of static. "It's an an-teek," he said, drawing out and tasting the word.

  When I was fifteen I went to the mausoleum and next to it found a patch of lighter colored grass. I had brought with me a shovel, and I dug as the crickets chirped all around me. The blade hit wood, and I pulled up a small box. I lifted the twisted, torn black clasp and raised the lid. The box was empty. But I remembered from long ago the inside of the box, the smell of varnish and the lines of light that glowed, glowed more faintly, and then disappeared.

  uncle red reads to-day’s news

  Hatfield residents report the most unfortunate birth and early death of a baby girl whose features rested not upon her face but on her trunk. The yellowed eyes were set low over the lower rib, nose below the navel, and the most horrid, distended mouth at the juncture of the thighs. The girl was said to have made grave and horrifying prognostications and provocations in a bygone but yet discernible tongue before bearing the wrath of both mother and townsfolk. The Minister refused to bury the abomination in the Lord's cemetery, so the infant was interred in fire in the veriest remote marshlands.

  Benjamin Throwbarrel of High Street reported a gaunt figure reclining in water drawn by his wife for her bathings. The intruder was fully clothed in greatcoat and a dark claret chesterfield, gaiters and doeskin gloves. Mr. Throwbarrel insisted that the man bore the bloated countenance, limbs and digits of the long-drowned, but that he reached from the clawfoot tub in a most suggestive and obscene manner.

  Ye Gods, this rainy rotten morning brings nothing but horrid and ill-boding news. This day I will fetch my meals in a warm place, candle-lit and full of my fellow townsfolk. I will avoid the woods and the narrow paths and shall steer clear of the gray, featureless men who leer from the park's dark edges. I advise you to do the same, dear, dear listeners.

  You are listening to WXXT, the safe and secure home for your most impure thoughts. If we fail to mention the time and temperature at the top of every hour, no-one gives a diddling care, Mister Freddy Fungus-face.

  the sons of ben number 2

  I remember very clearly when my mother told me I was not adopted. The year was 1985. I was fifteen. I was standing in our yellow-green kitchen near the yellow refrigerator, staring at a painting of peaches and pears cradled in a wooden green bowl. "I am your mother," she said, plucking absently at her heroic perm. "Biological, and for real. Your father is not your father, but I am your mother."

  I suppose I should have known that she was my real mother. We shared a resolute nose and wide-set eyes that, if they were any closer to our ears, would have rendered us unattractive, if not freakish.

  What I don't know, even now, is the purpose of the deception in the first place. When confronted, she'd deflect the question or else proclaim that she "had her reasons." Presumably she had her reasons too for finally revealing the truth, and at that particular time in my (or her) life. I don't know if she thought through what the effect might have been. I hadn't quite reached the age where I was determined to find my real parents, and hadn't shown much interest. I was a quiet boy, liked trying to invent things, liked chasing animals around or proclaiming myself King of The Woods in a crown of construction paper, wielding a storm-tossed branch as some kind of vague weapon. But now I wanted to know about my real father. And there was no information forthcoming.

  My mother, I knew, had played folk guitar. She was an idealist, and one of those quasi-hippies always hopping from cause to creed to church in lengthening cycles. I knew she'd sailed through minor cults and major communes, but had never become tethered to any. Perhaps she'd met the man in one of these places. I was determined to find out, somehow.

  The night she told me, I dreamed vividly. I was lost, driving down a lonesome backwoods road in the dark of night, when through the trees I saw an orange glow. Cresting a hill, I saw that below me lay a massive city, not previously suggested by any signs or geography...just there, massive, in the leafy midst of the New England hinterlands.

  In a blink, I was driving on a deserted highway amidst tall black buildings with windows glowing red and shadows dancing somewhere within. Alongside the elevated highway raged and roiled a black river, bisected by ornate, spired bridges that passed somewhere below the road on which I drove. Looming above the arches and the terraces, a large skyscraper seemed to rise before me, tattooed with an enormous, neon red inverted cross. Below the cross sprawled unreadable letters that looked vaguely Arabic.

  The city was vast, lit red, save for blue lights that blinked in patternless intervals atop the taller spires and rooftops. Stone-winged cathedrals, with many stained-glass eyes, crouched like tarantulas amidst the skyscrapers. Cruel look
ing helicopters, noses angled low, roamed between the buildings like wasps. When I glimpsed the vapor-lit streets, I saw loose gangs of figures in strange configurations, several lone people scuttling like crabs into and out of crooked alleys. I saw shadows of things maddeningly large and unthinkably shaped where the corners of light met the shadows.

  I became aware of the car radio, then. Classical music played backward, while a timpani raged and a voice muttered darkly in what must have been Old or Middle English. I remember being afraid to look at the passenger seat. Someone was sitting there, and it seemed vital that I not look, lest...lest what?

  Would I lose control of the car and plunge into the oily river? Would I turn to salt or dissolve into corrosive sand? Would I go irretrievably mad? But I wanted to look. I thought that maybe my father sat shotgun, and that he knew where we were going. I looked, and there he was, tall, knees up, grinning at me through two layers of teeth under a voluminous mustache. He had short, neat hair parted severely on the side, betraying a thin line of grey scalp that curved like a scythe.

  I saw that a leech was clasped onto his neck near the adam's apple, and it was pulsing. Jesus, Dad, I said, and reached over. I worked my fingers under the side of the foul thing, peeling it off of his cold skin, leaving a pattern of blue bruises. My father looked at me and gestured with his eyes. I put the leech onto my neck and felt it latch on, felt it beat like a fat black heart.

  I blinked and he was gone, again, and he was back. He pointed, then flickered and faded away.

  I followed the direction in which his bony finger had indicated, and ahead a bright light shone in the road, up where the lane split. I drove on, and between the north and southbound lanes a construction crew worked under daylight-bright industrial lamps. I saw them through a gauzy fog of dust and strong light...they wore blood-red vests and hardhats and massive goggles, and as the road sank I saw that the workers were bone thin, with skeletal jaws and long teeth. They labored on platforms over gaping holes in the earth, and among the men, piled atop rickety pallets, lolled babies, piles of them, in ashy cerements. I could not tell whether the crew was excavating or burying them.

  The leech pulsed at my neck. I looked at my arms and they hung in flaps over my bones. I looked down and my legs were bones jutting under my jeans.

  I snapped awake.

  My mother stood above me. "Your father GAVE you those dreams," she said. "Learn from them."

  I looked at her and closed my eyes again, fading against my will back into the dream. Now I drove in morning light on a curving road through verdant valleys and soft, lush hills. The passenger seat was mercifully untenanted. I heard a thundering sound in the distance, and as I crested the next hill I saw a herd of goats galloping madly over the grass, ridden by gaunt, decrepit angels with crushed and singed wings. The goats' eyes burned and seethed; the angels looked stunned, exhausted. Their faces were the faces of the demented and the doomed: shadowed, creased, despondent. Their eyes were black orbs that showed no whites, their slack lips thin and blue.

  I tried to swerve, as did the herd, but try though I may I crushed two of their number under my wheels, and again I woke.

  My mother was sitting beside my bed in her nightcoat, gnawing on her fingernails. Through her fingers she told me that my father's brother had died, and that we were to undertake what she termed a "purging" of the house.

  the theories of uncle jeb

  We used to sit with Uncle Jeb, Earl and I, and listen to him talk.

  If you’d never seen a picture of a human skull, you could just gape at Jeb’s visage--the skin was as though painted on, and a poor job done of it to boot. His frame was so narrow and slight that clothes seemed to weigh it down. Though he’d shiver like the dickens in winter, he never wore much beyond a pair of once-white overalls and a white tee with the sleeves torn off and the neck stretched out, as though at one point Jeb had had a trunk rather than a twig for a neck. His feet were twisted, repulsive abominations, purple and bulged, the toes elongated and bent to the right, the big toe all the way back against the swell of the forefoot, it’s nail a pointed horn, like a goat’s horn, textured and multicolored tapering into string almost all the way to the swollen red heel.

  He’d tell us of his father, who would flatten frogs from the brook behind the house, and blow glass around their perfect-circle bodies, forming dinner plates. At first, he said, you could see the features of the frog, the division of arms and legs, the squashed eyes and tiny nostrils. Then it would deteriorate in its glass tomb, displaying the entire spectrum of colours. Then there would just be a pattern of gray dust. Once enough time had elapsed, he claimed, there would be nothing left. Just a glass plate. A LOCK’D ROOM MISTRY, he’d cackle. WHOLE STOLT THE FRAHGGY?

  Jeb liked to tell us of his theories, and they were many and they were grim. He would hold up Gram’s old Bible to the ulcerations on his pooched stomach, mark down the words that were bespeckled with blood, and tell us THAT was the real Bible, the hidden Bible, that God was Cancer and it spread through Man to help him but only destroyed him, and if Man only knew the Hidden Bible as he, Jeb, did, you could live forever with…and AS…cancer.

  I AM Cancer, he’d intone, and he’d grasp the folds of his stomach, gaping wide his navel, which had never been properly tied off (according to Father), stretching it wide, a hole you could pop a child’s head into (if you were of a mind), and the smell was low tide and sprawling arrays of fungus sprouting in the folds of a field of mildewed clothing, of dank basements and bile-strangled wells, carrion and the faeces of the squatting dead. I AM Cancer, he’d say again, AND I CANNOT BE BEAT. THE WORLD’LL BLACKEN AND SHRIVEL and be GONE.

  That, Jeb said, would be the Kingdom of Heaven. Everything eaten by cancer, and the cancer eats itself, and then there’s nothing and no one no more. Paradise, he’d whisper, his eyes squeezed shut.

  When Jeb was in his cups, which thankfully was not often, he’d grab his overalls in a fist and yank them asunder. Then from his unders he’d pull out his I-can‘t-say-it, a confused grey mass of you-know-what, held together with a wet and reeking shoelace. THIS, he’d bellow, IS THE SOURCE OF ALL THE PROBLEMS IN THE WORLD. I USEDTA THINK IT WAS WOMAN BUT ITS THIS. He’d yank from his deep pocket a meat tenderizing mallet, heavy and dirty, and demand that we hammer his mess. I’d give a meaty whack or two, looking away in horror, to placate the lunatic. Earl, though, took to it. He’d wheeze his asthmatic wheeze and swing that hammer like a he-man at a carnival. Trying to ring the bell. BAMM, he’d yell. BAMM BAMM.

  And Jeb would wince and groan and even cry, shuddering with every sick impact, but the whole time he’d be laughing, holding on with one wizened hand to a the rung of the chair behind him, the other hand digging ruts into the porch with its thick nails. Ah, he’d sing to the sky, ah, these’r good boys, and they’ll take this town and make it their Kingdom. Then, sometimes, he’d vomit black tar that would roll down his chest like a waterfall and pool in his lap, and he’d pass out, and Earl and I would go down to the brook and kneel and say our prayers.

  And the brook would be blood, and veined tumors would bob heavily in its roiling eddies.

  uncle red reads to-day’s news

  Damnable days and dank dusks darken old Leeds in this foul Year of Our Lord Nineteen and Eleven. The cool nights provide little in the way of relief, what with muttering voices on the wind and ashy, two-heeled footprints on the hearth. My tea is an unnatural red color and my milk turns before it's a day cold out of the cow. It's enough to beat the Dutch.

  Truth be told, I'm still a touch corned. And underslept. But I've been charged with telling you what's what and by devil, that's what I now shall do.

  At the end of a thick trail of blood was found a Greenwich man with low-hanging dungarees and threadbare beard pushing a blood-sodden pram the contents of which cannot in good conscience be described. The man claimed the contents as his own son, somehow birthed without the womb of a mother. And bedamned if his torn and tattered shirt didn't reveal a bell
y dirked beyond exfluntication--hollow of organ or gland. His eyes, my friends and townsfolk, had no whites. And his tongue was a furrowed and chapped thing more dead than alive.

  Old Margaret Melinda complained agin of a stranger on her porch, proffering a bouquet of rusted distasteful trinkets. Narrow of chest and wide of belly, the man, she claimed, was clad in dank overalls and, worse, head-to-toe lousy with split and fruiting toadstool mushrooms. From behind his ears and under his arms they extruded, reported poor Margaret, and bulged from belly to groin to wide-set toes. Some were grained like wood and splitting; some bubbled with pinkish spittle and emitted malodorous and unspeakably foul spores that sickened the good woman and parched and wilted the flowers that hung from the eaves and filled the garden. The man was polite and well-spoken, and claimed to inhabit the cellars of the town.

  A tortoise-shell cat in the Holyoke flats did kill Mr. Henry Floret, who before he expired exclaimed that the beast bore the eyes of man and spoke to him in prophecies of danger and ruin. Floret was bled dry and his corpse blew away in wisps and sheets on the heavy winds before the coroner could fetch it.

  My tea is on the boil and it's been off the heat this whole time. The world is curdled and my shoes are all of the sudden too tight. I'm off to my nap. Don't come near me. Don't come near me.

  the last hike

  God save us from girls who are into hiking, I used to say, until I met Janet. I resisted for a long time; I let her hike while I lounged on the couch; I gave her my old line about being an avid indoorsman...and she laughed it off, grabbed my hand, and dragged me in to the Massachusetts woods kicking, as they say, and screaming.