Gateways to Abomination

by Matthew Bartlett

  And who knew, but I loved it. It became our weekend activity, surrounding ourselves with trees, brooks, deadfalls, cliffs--all with a soundtrack of chirping birds and who-knows-what bumbling through the underbrush. I saw the morning sun bounce along the treetops and the evening sun make the leaves glow like orange-green fire. After a while I even became less convinced that our fate was to be eviscerated by bears. Not once did I even see a bear, though I did see a beautiful fox once, and another time, from a distance, a small mountain lion. I bought a backpack, boots, a poncho, a compass...hiking socks. Hiking socks!

  Janet forbade our bringing phones, but she would bring a transistor radio, bless her heart. We would clear away twigs and brush and sit by the curve of a coruscating creek, eat peanut butter sandwiches, and listen to tinny classical music or operas from the UMASS station. It is only these memories of Janet--gone these many years--that I look back upon with anything like yearning. Not for her, sweet though she was, but for myself.

  It was the radio, not a bear or a fall or a heart attack, that killed the man I was and stole the man I might have become. It is easier, somehow, for me to blame the radio. The surprising heft of the thing; the square, rusted speaker; the red vertical line all the way to the left of the green glowing dial; the dented, crooked antenna. It wasn't the radio, of course, it was Janet. She and the shadow that loomed just over her shoulder...tuning the radio to The Voice of the Mighty Connecticut. The Black Heart of the Pioneer Valley. 87.9. WXXT.

  One week before we saw the man in the woods, we happened upon WXXT. We were enjoying a postprandial laze, listening to Handel's Tamerlano, when a wave of static washed over the music. Janet fiddled with the dial, easing it leftward until the aria resumed...only to be again obscured by white noise. A millimeter to the left once more and a voice spoke, clear and loud, as though the announcer were standing between us. I literally threw my iced tea into the air.

  MUSIC FOR THE SICK, bellowed the voice, resonant, compressed, with a slight echo. GATHER TO YOUR RADIOS! COME TO MY VOICE, ILL AND UNKEMPT, RIDDLED WITH CANCERS, CRAWLING WITH PESTILENCE! TOUCH THE SPEAKERS WITH YOUR HANDS! AH! THERE! YES! Then the voice sank to a conspiratorial tone, almost a whisper. Janet inched up the volume. All of you weary and morose, despondent and despised, pickled and petrified, abused and abandoned! You are listening to Willard Vincent Winklepleck of the Warwick Winkleplecks! Your healer and your servant, your shaman and your hero, your familiar...and your friend. My pulpit is your preserve, my altar your asylum, my chancel your comfort! Come to me! Step over the trancep... I shut it off.

  And Janet turned to me with seething hatred in her eyes, a thing I had never seen in a year of knowing her and did not care to see again. "Religious crap, " I said, with a whining, defensive tone in my voice that I was instantly embarrassed by. "What are we, in the deep South?"

  Listen, said Janet, with the whispered reverence of the zealot, and she turned the radio back on. It was music now, that fearsome voice gone--but WHAT music! Violin bows shrieked against untuned strings in a furious frenzy. Bass notes climbed and descended drunkenly, causing a dizzying, disorienting sensation that reminded me of an inner ear infection. Guitars were in play too, fighting off abusive, obtrusive hands and other...parts...and beneath it all a rising, implacable, impending drone that seemed to fill the woods, darken the sky, still the thrushes, curdle the cream in our cooler. I fainted dead away...

  ...and awoke with Janet above me, her face creased with concern. The only sound was birds. She touched her hand tenderly to the back of my head and drew it back with blood in the whorls of her fingertip, then she felt around and said she couldn't find a wound. I felt strange, off-kilter, but physically unhurt. Not saying much, we hiked home in the reddening dusk.

  * * *

  The next weekend we set out again, driving through Southampton and Westhampton and into the woods somewhere beyond Huntington. We parked on the curve of a deeply shaded wood, grabbed our gear, and started walking through an expansive field. At the field's end was a wall of impossibly tall pines, like a wall concealing a secret city. The treetops were a child's frenetically penciled scribble across an expansive painting of a bruise. The tree trunks were sprawled, glistening, mottled with black lichen in intricate patterns, looking for all the world like malignantly eschatological graffiti. The ground around them was thick with varicose roots twining through, around, and over soft mushrooms the size of chair cushions. Some of them were partially collapsed or split with gaping fault lines, revealing their inner craggy textures. They seemed to breathe out a pulsing fog, fetid, fusty. I pulled my shirt up over my nose. We climbed over the roots. At one point my boot slipped through and plunged into one of the mushrooms and I had to fight off nausea. We disappeared into the woods and whatever daylight had been evident disappeared along with us.

  * * *

  In the intervening week I had become a devoted listener to WXXT. I did not tell Janet. I don't know why. She had seemed so intent on making me listen that day in the woods, but had not brought it up since I passed out. I'd leave for work, call in sick from the car, park on the shoulder of 202, and listen all day. I heard Captain Calumny's Rockabilly Riot; twisted, imperious, impious sermons by a crusty-voiced preacher named Ezekiel Shineface; prolonged psycho-sexual confessions by announcers with names like Benjamin Stockton, Guy Stanton, Rivven Stallhearse, and Rexroth Slaughton. One day I listened for four straight hours to a four word mantra repeated over and over again (I forget what it was). On another day I listened to an hour of someone very realistically pleading for his life, set to jaunty polka music. Occasionally there were percussive bleats that made it sound as though the victim was being violently assaulted with an accordion. I heard dirges and Satanic hip-hop, monologues and weeping. I heard strange and upsetting news items read by an Uncle Red. Thursday, a day of crashing thunder and strong winds, I heard only whispers. I could not make out the words. I listened all day.

  I'd arrive home at my usual hour, as though I'd been to work. We'd plod through our evening rituals: take-out, television, video games on the Wii. I was withdrawn and distant. My head was swimming with the day's broadcasts. Janet was patient, affectionate, almost doting. I thought it was she who suspected nothing.

  * * *

  We hiked through the late morning through deep deep woods, up and down steep inclines choked with dead branches from the October snowstorm. We inched along a dizzying cliff edge with coiled chains and disused, leaning stanchions the only protection from a surely fatal fall. The roaring river below was muted to a whisper. At one point a cat fell into step with us. He was black with a white throat. He looked up at me companionably then, after twenty minutes or so, split off into the underbrush. Janet began to rhapsodize about nature's violent beauty and I listened raptly--it sounded like a monologue one might hear on WXXT. We ate in a clearing. I was ravenous. My sandwich and crackers gone, I wet my fingers and pulled up crumbs from the cooler. "Try these, they're OK," Janet said, plucking a few violet, bulbous berries from a string of black vines. The vines wound abundantly around the base of a fat-trunked conifer, appearing to squeeze the tree into an almost feminine shape. I ate the berries and they burst soft and bitter in my throat. They tasted finer than the finest wine I'd ever drunk.

  I stood to survey the area--and I saw the man at the far edge of the clearing. He was standing on a flat rock, like a boatman on a raft on a still river. He was tall, very tall, thin. The wind kicked up the dead leaves around him but his herringbone ulster hung lifeless. From a distance his eyes were black circles without pupil or sclera. His mouth was hidden in a slack grey beard. He raised his long arms and I heard that familiar rising drone. Janet had put on the radio.

  The man's fingers were long and many-jointed. They bent this way and that, forming staircases and many sided shapes and lightning bolts. They danced, and the leaves danced. The wind ululated in time and the clouds thickened and metastasized and wheeled, wheeled, wheeled like eddies in brackish water.

  I am Willard Vinc
ent Winklepleck of the Warwick Winkleplecks.

  More men emerged from the trees, grey men in grey coats with grey faces.

  I am Janet Combs-Tonkin of the Prescott Tonkins.

  The man shed his clothing and the other men followed and they were cobwebbed and cadaverous and carrion-curdled.

  I am Benjamin Scratch Stockton of the Swift River Stocktons.

  The cat from the path meandered among the men, rubbing his tooth on their grey knees, and the men began to chant.

  I am Jebediah Blackstye of the Enfield Blackstyes.

  We walked towards the men, across the windswept clearing, shedding our clothes.

  Of course, we weren't called WXXT in those days.

  As we approached, we saw that the grass was wet with blood.

  We were a ragtag band of miscreants, dopers, murderers, witches, bitches, baristas, smugglers, thieves, bandits, veterinarians, panty-sniffers, harlots, Jews, pederasts, dim-wits, and sneaky-Petes.

  It ran in rivulets between our toes.

  Obliquely worded news-paper advertisements led us into the woods on that September day, written by no-one knows who but designed to draw precisely the crowd it drew.

  I spoke words in a language I did not know.

  Over 100 years later, well beyond our bodies' meager lives, we broadcast the Word from the woods of Leeds.

  I slipped in blood and fell onto a discarded topcoat that wriggled and hissed, alive with fat pink worms.

  I am Guy Stanton of the Shutesbury Stantons.

  Then six black vans motored out of the woods, their engines roaring over the deafening drone of the radio. The windows were tinted. Three of the men hoisted me from the ground. They lifted me over their heads, these deranged, dead-eyed pallbearers, and propelled me toward the nearest van. I tilted my head back, upside-down, and saw Janet. She was standing on the flat rock, the grey man behind her, his hands on her shoulders. They were both grinning, their eyes aflame. The family resemblance was unmistakable.

  Then I was in the van's pitch interior. It smelled of pungent sweat. I sat in one of the seats. It was damp against my bare skin...not damp, waterlogged. A young man was seated beside me, stunned and wall-eyed, more young men behind me in the darkness. The driver, clad only in huge mirrored sunglasses, turned and grinned a toothless grin. I saw my face and other faces, angled and elongated in the reflection. He said, "Anyone mind if I put on the radio?"

  You are listening to WXXT, Wormtown's Winningest Wadio Station. Join us after the break for the Silvery Sounds of Silverfish Slinkard and his Slippery Symphony.

  pharaoh

  The boy stood at the edge of the playground, his thumb worrying the corner of his mouth, the fingers of his other hand squeezed into the diamond-shaped hole of the chain link fence, his red hair tousled by the wind. Like that he stood for some time and then quite suddenly and for no discernible reason turned and ran, kicking up dirt clouds, like the devil was chasing him. He nearly collided with Mrs. Haggerty, who was standing by the swing-set in a stance expressly designed to stave off disorder. Aside her, three girls swung up high, swooped down, and up again, laughing, their little feet kicking at the clouds.

  "The pharaoh has a dust on his head," the boy announced.

  Mrs. Haggerty bent and put her hand on top of the boy's head and rearranged his hair. "Stanley," she said. "Do you know what a pharaoh IS?"

  Stanley knew this one. "A bird!" he squawked, in that childish way that sounded like "a bowed."

  "Is the bird hurt, Stanley?" she said, emphasizing the "r" sounds in the third, and then for good measure the fourth, word.

  One shrieking boy chased another between them and she grabbed the chaser by his sweatshirt hood. "That kind of laughter swiftly turns to tears," she said in practiced sing-song, letting him go, then, again, to Stanley, "Is the bird hurt?"

  "No, he's over there!"

  Stanley turned and pointed, and Mrs. Haggerty stood and put a horizontal hand to her brow to block the afternoon sunlight. Beyond the chain link fence, at the edge of the woods, a man in a bird mask stood. He was wearing a matted overcoat and large boots, his hands concealed in long grey gloves. She adjusted her hand slightly and gasped. The mask was startlingly realistic. Layered brown and black feathers, a wide yellow-white beak that ended in a sloped point, piercing round green eyes. The man's head twitched in the mask, looking all about, like a few frames had been edited out of the film. As the boy had indicated, a long tendril of dust lay across the top of the head, down over one eye, its end floating dreamily in the air.

  As she watched, the man turned and strode into the woods, struggling not at all with the tangled underbrush. Mrs. Haggerty felt a chill. Stanley tugged at her sleeve. "The pharaoh said it's all ending," he said.

  "Wh..." Mrs. Haggerty started. Not at what Stanley had said, but at the silence. The playground was empty. She looked and the children were all walking into the woods, their colorful clothes fading as they entered the darkness. Red dust fell from the treetops and the birds in the woods began to screech as though panicked.

  A cloud smothered the sun and the shadow slid over the swing-set, the see-saw, the spring riders, the slides and climbers, until all was shaded and dark. The trees shook.

  Mrs. Haggerty turned to run to the school and the bird man was there, behind her, right behind her. He raised his arms and opened his beak and the sound was that of the end of the world and her voice rose to meet its timbre and it was a shrieking duet of death.

  You're listening to WXXT. Now, the Swift River Sallies with their stirring rendition of "Shall We Gather at the River."

  great uncle eltweed

  When the call comes, it's never at a convenient time. In this instance, it was at 4 p.m. on a rainswept Saturday in late November. My great uncle, having lived to the improbable age of 102, had apparently finally worn down the staff at Brookside Willow Pavilions with his increasingly loud and incoherent and doleful jeremiads, and the Board of Directors had voted to unceremoniously "release" him. I argued on the phone, employing every cliché (where is he supposed to go, you can't do this, etc.) and inventing some new ones.

  But I understood from the start the effect on people my uncle could have, even when well. After all, as long as I'd known him, his ideologies and religious affiliations changed like the New England weather, and each change came with an oft-repeated speech. The man couldn't go a month without a new epiphany. And rather than gather the family 'round, he'd corner you at a reunion and regale you with the speech you'd heard him give Aunt Asenath at breakfast. Verbatim almost, but with each new iteration a change here and there...a comedian "improving" his act. He'd even execute a self-deprecating laugh or a knowing shake of the head...at the same spot each time.

  The person on the other end of the phone was a dispassionate, obdurate bureaucrat with a resonant voice--an old time broadcaster's vibrato. No, the decision had been made and was final and I, as the sole heir to this particular misfortune, had no choice but to drive from New York up through to central Vermont to fetch my great uncle and his meager belongings. Now. And he had no one left but me.

  A few phone calls to work and family across the ocean, and I was off. I drove between the sodden trees and frowning awnings lining East 79th Street and wended my way through the drizzle-hazed, Creamsicle-coned streets, and onto the FDR. By the time I hit 95 North, the drizzle had stopped but all was still black and white. The radio--alternating between talk and music--kept me company and awake during the first part of the trip up through Connecticut, then I added a strong, large coffee somewhere south of Hartford. A duo, I thought, coffee and radio, working to keep my car on the road.

  But then, a few miles before the border of Vermont, the radio bailed on me. A rental car without satellite or a CD player is what you get when you call at 4:30 p.m. on a weeknight, and that's when I'd called. So now, as night really settled in, and the coffee began to wear off, I settled into a serious fret. I needed more coffee, but I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen an exit, or
a highway sign for that matter. But I resolved to keep going, and I did, pretty much until the point when I realized that going back to the last exit with Food signs would put me too far off schedule...and I wouldn't be able to do it anyway until another exit came along. So, if no coffee...I spun the radio dial back and forth melodramatically, finding only varying keys of buzzy static. I cranked the volume, hoping the static might form into music or words.

  I didn't care what I would find--talk, sports, any kind of music. Just a voice, please, or a musical note. A zither's strum, an accordion's bleat, the plastic thump of an electronic drum...a goddamned SOUND. For five minutes straight I begged the radio aloud, just to hear my own voice...and then the dissonant chord of a church organ sounded so clearly and loudly that I briefly lost control of the car. Someone watching would have thought I'd had a stroke, I thought, but the idea of someone watching in the middle of nowhere, from the towering woods...well, that was something I didn't want to think about. I wrested the car back into the travel lane with one hand and spun back down the volume with the other.

  "Through him...in him...with him...in the unity of the holyyyy spiiiiiriiiii..." warbled a male tenor, a very familiar doxology, though I hadn't been in a Catholic church since the age of thirteen. Then the priest's voice faltered, rasped, and disintegrated into a violent coughing fit...wet, hacking, productive coughs, by the sound of it. On and on it went, until the reel-to-reel at the station must have begun to fail. The cough slowed to a low, monotonous drone, then sped up slightly, faster, chirpily fast...then reversed...backward coughing for a time, then backward singing, with that lispy, hissing sound like the tongue of a serpent caressing the microphone with unspeakably foul intent. Then the loop stopped as though the reel had been violently dispatched, and after some thumping and clacking, organ music resumed, a climbing, sing-songy, carnival tune. Occasionally it reversed for a time and then righted itself, providing a disquieting soundtrack as I drove through the dark night, the walls of the woods rising higher and higher on either side of the unlit interstate. I still hadn’t seen any highway signs. Even the painted stripes were gone. Blacktop, woods, moon.