Gateways to Abomination

by Matthew Bartlett

  The road does tend to hypnotize one, and it certainly did me. I fear I slept awake, dreaming and driving, for exactly how long I'm afraid to speculate. What woke me up, I thought, was drums...which is an odd accompaniment for pipe-organ music, to be sure.

  But then I looked to my right and saw two reined and harnessed black horses galloping madly alongside, kicking up gravel. The hooves were bass drums, the gravel tapping my window was tom-toms and snares. The nearest horse's eye rolled toward me...it was red-veined and wide, and full of terror. I hit the accelerator. Their muscled torsos strained in the moonlight as they began to pass me, their heaving sides, their lashing tails...and then a black stagecoach, shaped like a squared-off heart--a curtained window; a low, windowed door; another curtained window. On the roof, strapped-in luggage, ancient and tattered. My car swelled with sounds: pipe organ, rising, rising; the thundering hooves and ricocheting gravel, the creaking, clattering carriage; the hysterical whinnying.

  Then ahead, I saw a street sign, the first I'd seen in miles. It was a red, reflective diamond and it read, BUMP. My car, and then the carriage, hit what felt like a ramp. My car left the ground and slammed back down. I heard a tire go. Alongside, the carriage rose and descended. When it came down and hit the pavement, the door flew off, hitting the rear of my car and spinning into the darkness. Spokes cracked and flew from the tires, splintering as they hit the pavement. One speared a horse in the flank, and it shrieked horribly as blood spurted in a great arc. The trees blurred by, smudged thumbprints smeared over impenetrable thicket.

  Then the whole carriage leaned like a house of cards, squealing, nails popping, faults gaping between the boards. I saw with mounting horror what had been revealed when the curtains were torn from the windows. In the front, in the driver's seat, was a goat with nubs for horns and giant, gravestone teeth. I'm going mad, I thought. The goat wore a tall hat. A monocle on a chain sat over one eye. As he struggled, his hooves pummeling the wheel, I saw beside him another goat, shrieking, one ear soaked in blood, massive teeth, wide eyes. Lipstick was smeared ineptly about its lips. It wore a woman's frock and pearls. Then the horses began to gallop faster, and I saw into the rear window. Man and woman, human, middle-aged, freshly dead, their hair and jaws bouncing in time to the careening carriage, their purple tongues swollen, protruding from their mouths. Their teeth were shattered, their eyes staring, unseeing. As I watched, the carriage disintegrated, goats and humans spilling into the road like dolls in the wreckage. The couple was naked from the waist down. Suitcases skittered across the road, opening, spilling clothing. The wounded horse pushed out its front legs straight, and they broke with horrible cracking sounds. The horse collapsed, and the other dragged his partner hitchingly into the darkness, their shrieks echoing through the trees.

  I stopped my car and sat in silence. The radio was quiet, my heart beating madly, pushing at my ribs. I opened the door and stepped out onto the highway. It was suddenly so quiet and still...just the sound of one detached wheel rolling in decreasing circles at the shoulder of the road. And then I saw the faces...in and among the trees...children, mostly, some young adults. Their faces were white...a grim diaspora of the damned. The wind ruffled the leaves and their hair. They were whispering, all of them. It sounded like rain. I walked toward them, and they faded back into the woods as though the group all had slid quietly backward into the dark. I continued until I saw them again...and they faded again. And again. And again. I trod through the underbrush, my shoes squishing in the mud, until after about ten minutes I saw a dull yellow glow. I followed the glow into a small clearing. Ringing the opposite side, the faces hung in and among the trees, gape-mouthed.

  Before me hovered three goats bathed in moon-glow, the middle one slightly higher than the others. They wore dulled red and white robes, and their expressions were beatific. Flies buzzed around them, lighting and then taking off, lighting again. The middle goat's forearm was pointed at the sky, her hand the delicate, small hand of a young woman. Her middle and forefinger pointed up, the ring finger and pinky pointed down, against her soft palm. Her feet dangled from the bottom of the robe, toes wiggling absently. Her goat's mouth quavered, and then the jaw moved up and down as though she were speaking. I lent forward, but heard nothing except the filthy buzz of the horseflies. Her eyes, those queerly shaped goat pupils, fixed upon mine and held them. Then she grinned, all huge teeth and blister-flecked tongue. Her eyes blinked heavily.

  They rose, the three of them, up into the fog, and were gone. The grey faces faded back into the trees. Whatever this was, it was over, no word spoken. I returned to the car. It started, and I drove away, slowly, the radio off.

  Before long, I saw lights lining the highway ahead, and soon an exit sign. I walked into a Sunoco's too-bright food mart. On the radio a woman over-emoted to generic R&B. I went into the restroom and regarded myself in the mirror. My hair stuck up in spikes, and the familial dark circles around my eyes were darker than normal. Otherwise, I was me. For whatever that was worth. I splashed my face with water, grabbed a limp sandwich smothered like a murder victim in plastic wrap, and got back on the highway.

  An hour later I exited the highway in Central Vermont, the mountains looming high above me. I drove through a sleeping suburban complex of wide, white houses with broad porches, some surrounded by expansive and neat hedges, and turned into the driveway of Brookside Willow Pavilions. I got out of the car. My legs were shaky and I felt very tired and overwhelmed. It felt like a chore just to walk. I opened the double doors.

  The lobby was empty. A desk with a phone and a computer was angled in the middle of the room; to the left of that on a podium sat a guest register with a few scribbled names and times. There was no receptionist in sight. Somewhere down a hall echoed upsetting percussive sounds I could not identify. I signed my name and that of my uncle--Eltweed--and started down the hall toward the crashing sounds. The door to Section C, where my uncle resided in one of fifteen cheerless bedrooms arrayed around a grand piano and constellation of chairs, had a light brown hand-print on it. I somehow immediately identified it as butterscotch pudding. I opened the door, and the crashing sounds stopped.

  The lounge area, usually buzzing with residents reading the paper or nodding in front of half-done jigsaw puzzles or staring into space, was empty. I saw no aides or servers. Magazines lay fanned out on end tables. A dying flower sagged in an empty, dusty vase. Then I heard a titter from the dining area. I went around the piano and into the L-shaped room.

  My uncle sprawled in a large easy chair where the dining room table was supposed to be, clearly quite dead--a mannequin conceived in a madhouse. What was left of his grey hair formed a cloud around the back of his head. His jaw hung at his chest and his eyes showed only whites. He was clad in a fly-blown bathrobe and striped boxers whose front lay alarmingly open. Between his feet sat a transistor radio, spitting staticky gypsy jazz. Sitting on each of his wiry, bare legs was a dark-skinned aide. One was plump, in tight fitting grey sweats. The other, in an evening dress, was wasp-waisted and hard-faced. Both were Dominican, both grinning wickedly. The plump one looped her tongue over and around his large left ear, and then bit, hard. My uncle came to life, his eyes rolling back into place, and cackled. He stood, and the nurses clambered off of him and, holding hands, retreated, swiveling exaggeratedly through the double doors that led to the kitchen. "My boy," he said, softly. Then he clapped his hands.

  "Get this," he said, and he cleared his throat. The voice that came from him then was not that of my uncle, but was instantly familiar in its exaggerated officiousness: "I'm afraid your uncle's time at Brookside has come to an end."

  It was the voice from the phone.

  "Uncle L," I said. "What's..." I couldn't quite find the words. I think you'll forgive me.

  “Did they come to you?” he asked. His tone was one of whispered reverence. On the highway?

  "They did," I replied.

  Did she speak to you?, he asked, and it came rushing back. The words sp
oken by the goat, in the clearing in the woods by the dark highway, in the glow of the moon. I heard them now. I smiled.

  Come with me to the chapel to pray, he said, and reached out a hand red and blue, all the skin shrunk to the bone as though pulled taut and bruised in the process. His hand was, as it always had been, powerful, strong. It was like grasping some ancient scarab. He led me down a reddening hall.

  The chapel was small and lined with faded tapestries. It consisted of ten wooden pews facing an altar backed by a giant crucifix, shaped in such a way as to suggest it loomed over the room, the top wider than the bottom, fanning towards the corners of the ceiling. Atop the altar, something squirmed and pulsed under a white cloth. We knelt before the pew in the back. The room was illuminated only by scant track-lighting on the high ceiling and red tealights that lined the arms of the crucifix. I could see hulking shapes silhouetted in the pews, but could not identify them. My uncle spoke.

  The sun has fled to warm more worthy places, he said. Quartus! Medad! Lemuel! (The names of his brothers, grown, dead, buried, gone to dust, all long before my birth. I had seen them only as wiry, sinister blurred men in cracked, black-clouded tintypes.)

  The shapes in the pews began to quaver. I heard the buzzing of flies, the splitting and tearing of flesh.

  Through him, with him, in him...

  The room, which had smelled vaguely of cedar, now filled with a mephitic stench: carrion, cancers, bubbling rot, exploding tumors, sour decay. Stinkhorn, collybia. Foul motes swarmed like ticks above the tea lights. The room went all green and I retched piteously.

  I am quite mad, my uncle allowed. We must leave this place. There is an army to command, soldier, and I am for the earth. He paused, and then his eyelids lowered and his eyes rolled back. He grinned, his tongue flicking the corner of his dry mouth. What did she give you?

  "Who, uncle?" But before I'd finished the question, I felt the weight in my coat pocket. I'd felt it since I'd got back in the car. I reached in and pulled out the knife. It curved and glistened, serrated to pull at innards when withdrawn--to mutilate, to devastate. In the green light, I felt my eyes sliced open and drained, and new eyes grew like mushrooms in their place. Somewhere back in the residential quarters, that mad percussive sound began anew. I turned and mighty horses stood before me, their eyes wild. One, paler, leaning, stomped irritably and shrieked.

  To Leeds, my uncle cried, and the building unfolded like a flower.

  the investigator

  The man in the sopping overcoat fumed beneath an awning that drooped under punishing, pounding rain. Even given the immediate circumstances, he looked pointedly desolate, perhaps despairing, most certainly far from home. And far from home he was. A freelance investigator contracted by various government agencies, he had been sent by representatives from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Federal Communications Commission from the hum of D.C. to this remote New England town for a very strange assignment indeed. Strange and unprecedented. His having been caught in this downpour, blocks from his rented car, felt like what his father, now five years in the grave, would have called the bitter end. Charming little town, though, yes, certainly, sure. For three weeks and counting he'd eaten charming meals in charming cafes, browsed in charming boutiques, strolled a charming college campus, looked out charming windows at charming people. He, Clem, for that was his name, was decidedly all charmed out.

  For one, he could not locate on the dial the rogue radio station he'd been sent to investigate. Not at 87.9, not at 88.3, nowhere down that lonesome, echoing end of the dial. And adjust that dial he did, by hair-widths and fractions, over a period of weeks, hearing only lead-voiced news anchors, tinny polka, or just static. No ghostly voices, no whispered exhortations to murder the hotel staff, neither murmured incantation nor perversion of prayer. Once he thought he'd found it, when he'd hit upon a humming drone that had rattled the speaker of his transistor radio. But then the hokey tone of a banjo plinked, plonked, plinked and a hammy Henry and a simpering Liza began bickering exuberantly about the manner in which they might solve the problem of a defective bucket. The voices, which bubbled and burbled as though the singers were gargling, seemed somehow to foul the room. He'd switched off the transistor in annoyance...and fear? Why would he feel a touch of fear? He'd tried that station again periodically, something itching at the back of his brain, but it seemed to have the cloying little tune on a loop. That must pull in the advertisers, Clem thought. If they'd just announce the call letters or the frequency, he could report it, could actually have something to show his client, to indicate he was actually earning his keep. There’s a hole in the bucket. Dear Liza. Dear Liza. A hole.

  One thing he had detected, in his monitoring of the local newspapers and the free weekly, was a very small but growing unease. A lurid feature in the weekly exacerbated that unease, with its tales of disappearing sons and daughters, supposedly lured away by charismatic voices on the radio, voices that spoke reassuringly to outcast teens, promising spiritual succor illicitly entwined with libertine allures. Absent a sample recording, Clem had nothing on which to proceed save the accounts in the paper. These accounts, if genuine, were proffered anonymously, and the reporters were predictably obstinate about protecting their sources. Silliness, thought Clem. “Sources.” These small time reporters dreamed daily of proudly blockading a government entity, and he was providing them, by proxy, the realization of that fantasy. He worried that this city might soon have a hysteria on its hands. He had followed with some interest the recent news stories of a small town in New York state, many of whose teens simultaneously began suffering convulsions and uncontrollable verbal outbursts.

  In the slim dossier given him by his contact, an Agent Schwaller, were accounts of the disincorporation and subsequent flooding of several towns to make way for the Quabbin reservoir, and of the Mill River flood whose wrath all but destroyed several towns in the area. There was also a brief history of occult activity in the area dating back to the founding of the town in the mid 1600s, though the connection with the immediate case was never stated. The cases dealt largely with disappearances, ghastly incidents of cemetery vandalism, and frightful wraiths accosting travelers walking unaccompanied on lonely paths. As the years passed, the incidents were fewer, or at least less frequently remarked upon, until they all but ceased in the mid-1970s. Later in the town's history the local Insane Asylum had housed several townsfolk affected by these encounters. But the Asylum had been closed during Reagan's reign, its inhabitants dispatched unceremoniously into the streets. The last of the untenanted brick buildings had been cleared to make way for featureless condominiums, and their former denizens were either dead or doddering. So Clem's focus was on the rumors of transmitters in the woods of nearby Holyoke, Williamsburg, and Leeds. Apparently the wraiths had found the encroaching populations and the attendant construction made for fewer lonesome paths, and had turned to the airwaves. Well, why not?

  It seemed damned futile, though, searching the endless, storm-tossed woods for a transmitter, walking around with this hulking piece of equipment that looked like some manner of ancient Geiger counter. The woods are beautiful but beauty, like charm, sustains one only so long. To date there was no transmitter found and two pairs of shoes ruined, and by God he would expect reimbursement from the Federal Communications Commission. Reimbursement with interest...and a written apology. As he smirked at the idea, a cold drop of water hit the back of his neck. In a sudden fury he danced a ridiculous angry jig, his Brogans slapping the pavement, and at the height of his performance his glasses flew from his face, skittering across the sidewalk. The rain applauded enthusiastically. Too annoyed to feel shamed, he bent with a grunt to pick them up, wiped the lenses on his tie and placed them gingerly atop his nose...

  ...and on doing so he looked across the street at a two-story, brick commercial block. Outside a glass door was a small array of books on a folding table getting soaked, ruined. The sign above the door said ANNE GARE BOOKS. Feeling as though a
measure of altruism might salvage something in this day, maybe in the whole trip, he scudded, hunched, across the road, hoisted the table, and used it to push open the flyer-choked glass door of the book store. A bell dinged as he pushed through. He slammed down the table, heavy from the weight of the sodden books. Over the din of the rain, now muffled somewhat by the closed door, he heard laconic pipe organ music from the speakers at the corners of the shop. Behind a counter ringed and towering with books and papers, he could just about see the back of a man's head leaning heavily forward, as though he was dealing with something or another on the floor or on a low shelf. The man's hair was long and tangled and wet. He was probably taking off his shoes, Clem thought.

  "Ho, hey" he called out, feeling foolish. "Sir? I brought in your books. I'm afraid they're probably a total loss." There was no reply. He felt absurdly that he was somehow in an empty shop yet, at the same time, as though he had dared interrupt some clandestine colloquy.

  More, and worse, he feared that if he walked over, peered behind the counter, looked more closely, that that stringy, damp hair would be hanging from the gape-pored plastic head of a limp mannequin propped up against a row of gilded encyclopedias. But then the man grunted, and his head tilted slightly as he said something unintelligible, but identifiable as an acknowledgement. Good enough. Except that the muttering seemed to come from the speakers. Well, he probably had a microphone back there, for closing announcements and such.