Gateways to Abomination

by Matthew Bartlett

  Clem scanned the sun-faded books along the shelves at the shelf below the window and noticed that, back across the street, the awning under which he'd been standing had given way and was waving crazily in the wind, a tattered black flag. Under that flag he saw a man standing. Slender, very tall, with horn rimmed glasses, arched brows, and a ball of gray hair at each ear. A smartly blocked black hat rested atop the man’s head, and a pipe was clamped between his teeth at an aggressive angle. He seemed unaffected by the rain, unshaken by the wind. Clem thought the man was staring at him. Not one to shrink away, he returned the stare. The man did not react, just glared, in the pounding rain and the searing wind. Smoke streamed from his pipe in bursts as he sucked in and frogged out his hollow cheeks.

  Clem turned, disturbed. The clerk still sat crouched behind his counter. It was hotter than hell, and Clem removed his overcoat. He folded it and lay it over the arm of a frayed easy chair on which a tower of art books leaned. He loosened his tie and rolled up his shirtsleeves. Then, from the sound of it, the air conditioning kicked in, but Clem felt no relief, no welcome rush of cool air. He turned...it was not the AC after all; the rain had somehow gotten stronger, seething, roaring, blurring everything outside. Thunder stuttered and chuckled. Across the street the old man stood firm in the downpour, a blurred black line under a whipping black flag. Clem turned and walked deeper into the store. An odor like a damp attic, like wet papers, permeated everything. He saw a map that indicated the location of books, and noted that there was a local history section.

  He swiftly navigated the maze of towering shelves until he found the alcove in question, but blocking the shelves was a tall and bow-backed woman in a damp, limp blouse that hung just above her bare knees. She was dragging a dry finger across the spines of the books as though playing a giant harp. Clem noted red cracks in the flesh of that finger. Her head, slathered in flat, colorless hair, tilted like that of a curious dog. She was barefoot, pale and pink. Her unpainted toes drummed the carpet. Clem saw then that the back of her neck was patterned in diamond-shaped red welts, as though she'd been pushed against a chain link fence. He harrumphed and did a bit of a pantomime of trying to lean around her or look past her, but she seemed oblivious. Feeling irritation and a touch of unease, he turned and walked toward the door.

  But, wait. Across from the register there were stairs leading down to a sub-level. He walked over, and tacked to the molding was a laminated sign that indicated many more sections, including, he noted, a section called Local Lore and Legend. There, he thought, he might find a book or too that might flesh out the scant material in the dossier, or at least focus his search for the group behind the illicit radio station. He descended. When he reached the bottom he saw that the bookshelves extended far beyond the upstairs...below the adjacent pharmacy, certainly, and, I'll be damned, well beyond even that. Thinking on it, Clem surmised that the narrow basement, whose shelves were set up as to make two long corridors lined with books, went past the parameters of the building as well. A crudely drawn map on the wall indicated the categories. The section he sought seemed to be, of course, at the farthest point. He headed in that direction. He noted along the way an area with an oval rug ringed with easy chairs and old rusted tray tables. In one of the chairs, a long haired black cat snored nasally. It shifted its weight when Clem walked by, raising its head sufficiently to reveal a watchful, if cataracted, yellow eye.

  A few paces along, a book in the prodigious Occult section caught Clem's eye. It was tall, nearly reaching up to his hip, wedged in among dwarfed, moldy hardbacks, some green with biopredation. Abrecan Geist, read the name stretched along the spine in a jagged scrawl. The cover was devoid of art or word, but was a golden color, very finely tessellated, and intermittently tarnished with elongated brownish spots. The moment he grabbed the book to dislodge it, he felt it somehow contract. As he watched, wide-eyed, the whole surface of the book horripilated and flushed red. He flung it to the floor in disgust and horror. The cat started, wide-eyed, then put one paw over the other and set down his chin to resume his sleep.

  Let's get the hell out of here, Clem thought. Around the cat, up the stairs, past the clerk who, let's face facts, is a propped up corpse, avoiding the thin woman, out the door, dodging the ancient creep under the awning. Let's get drenched, but let's get to the car, and drive straight to DC, leaving the clothes and that damned dossier and these doomed and haunted towns forever.

  He stopped. Breathed. He was on the clock, and that horrid book was clearly planted there to throw him off the trail. It's effects, he thought madly. Special...special effects. He left the book on the floor and continued toward the dimly lit reaches of the basement. He reached the end where books were piled sufficiently high to block the lower shelves. Others were fanned across the floors. The books here seemed to consist mainly of European history and pictorials. He looked vainly for a local section, and then saw that the wall was not, in fact, a wall, but a densely packed shelf behind which another set of stairs descended into darkness. There was no "NO ADMITTANCE" sign, no chain, so Clem felt along the wall and then above his head until he found a string. He pulled it and saw a faint orange glow from somewhere below.

  Nowhere to go but down, he thought, and descended. The stairs were narrow, grazing his shoulders on both sides.

  The lowest room was not much bigger than a walk-in closet. There were two waist-high bookcases and a sagging loveseat between them. What little light there was glowed from recessed lights in the prodigiously cobwebbed stone ceiling. One of the bookcases seemed to consist of books, many disbound or slant-spined, by local poets and authors; the other shelf was the one he sought. He did notice on the lowest shelf of the former a fat, mouldering old tome bearing the name Abrecan Geist, but the binding proved nothing more than buckram, and the pages were yellowed and fragile, rendering the text and illustrations quite impossible to read. Turning back to the Local Lore section, he noted among whip-stitched chapbooks a thick tome entitled "Western Massachusetts Witch-Cults and Covens," authored by a Rangel Bantam. He plucked it out and fell backward into the loveseat.

  The frontispiece was a photograph of a group of men congregated on stone steps familiar to him as those of Northampton's City Hall, a building that looked to him like some kind of boxy medieval castle, complete with balistraria and Norman towers. The men were gravely countenanced and pit-eyed, affecting postures of arrogant defiance. All wore smirks suggesting shared secrets. They were dressed in formal topcoats. Several men wore top-hats; two sported monocles. Tiered surnames in script at their feet identified the men above: Whiteshirt, Slaughton, Gare, Dither. Morphew, Lusk, Stockton, Ronstadt, Geist. Geist! The author of that horrible skin-bound book was a bald, stout man whose cheeks were stippled with acne scars. He wore a patterned ascot and a vest.

  The other figure that struck him was that of Stockton. Taller than the other men, and positioned prominently, his face was lined, brows thick and furrowed, lips thin. Angled across his torso was a walking stick with a cat's head grip. The fingers clasping the walking stick were long, almost feminine, each encircled with several rings forged in the shapes of mystical symbols. There was something in the man's eyes...it seemed as though the man in the picture was looking across time up from the book at Clem, challenging, cajoling...glaring. In a familiar way. His jaw hanging, his eyes wide, Clem flipped to the table of contents: An Incident in Southwick, The Monson Magicians, The Warlock of Williamsburg, The Magi of the Second Laugh, Anna Gare and The Hilltown Ten.

  The name pecked at his brain. Gare. The name of the store. He flipped back to the picture. He had missed her the first time: among the men, mostly obscured, stood a thin woman in petticoats: Anne Gare. Her hair was slack, one of her bony hands resting on the shoulder of Stockton. A flaw in the printing or in the photography distorted her features, though--her lower face appeared bulged, lips almost a perfect circle topped by an upcurved, flattened nose and slits for eyes.

  Clem realized that he had been, for the last few moments,
hearing a dribbling sound, a low and burbling trickle. He placed the book down on the cushion next to him and stood. As he approached the stairs, he saw that a thin stream of water was dribbling down the steps and puddling in the cracks and crevices in the concrete floor. It smelled dank, brackish. Then, suddenly, the entire stairway was flooded with bright light. Wincing, Clem squinted, hand at his brow, up the stairs. They were wet and reflected the light back at him. He could make out a thin black, jagged shadow culminating three steps from the floor in the shape of an elongated jutting pipe and an upside down hat. He looked at the top of the stairs, but all he could see was a slender silhouette framed in blinding light. "There's a HOLE in the BUCKET," it sang out in a gurgling, insinuating voice, "Dear LIZA, dear LIZA."

  Clem knew what was coming next, but before he could turn, a high-pitched bubbling voice gurgled directly behind him. "Well FIX it, dear HENRY, dear HENRY, dear HENRY!"

  Clem wheeled around and fell back against the stairs. It was the thin woman from the Local History section--it was Anne Gare. He now knew there had been no flaw in the printing, no flaw in the photograph. She opened her mouth as if to speak, revealing wide, flat yellow teeth, and then her jaw appeared to unhinge, her chin falling slack against her chest. Water poured from her grotesque mouth in a reeking rush, and behind Clem more water poured down the stairs in seething, stinking, roiling waves. The foul, bubbling water engulfed Clem and engulfed Anne Gare, in an instant filling the small room and climbing the stairs like a living thing. Clem was pulled from his feet. He held his breath for as long as he could. Then he let go, wrenching open his mouth in the vain lust for air, and the water filled his throat and lungs like a fist opening inside his chest. His body wrenched once, twice, then hung limply, bubbles rising from his slack mouth.

  In the cloudy water, in the rippling bluish lamplight, Clem and Anne Gare danced a slow and majestic dance, her blouse twirling languidly at her thighs, his overcoat forming a cape that fluttered dreamily above him. Floating, floating, they circled each other among the books that rose from the floor and the shelves and fluttered about them like winged things.

  the ballad of nathan whiteshirt

  NATHAN WHITESHIRT remained unmarried for the whole of his fifty years. He lived in a two story house with a detectable tilt. Cats were frequently seen in the windows. He kept an unknown number.

  NATHAN WHITESHIRT was thin, tall but stooped, his eyes bold and colorless under long, low brows. He was often the subject of rumors, particularly, but not exclusively, among the children of the town.

  William Chesterfield, 8, claimed he saw NATHAN WHITESHIRT sitting high in a treetop, weeping.

  Cynthia Blamefoot, 10, said she hears NATHAN WHITESHIRT singing obscene songs outside her window at night.

  Robert Rutherford, 11, said that he saw NATHAN WHITESHIRT attack a dog and bite into its belly until a great flood of blood sprayed forth.

  Michael Stark, 38, swears he saw NATHAN WHITESHIRT climb the venerable churchtower like a nimble spider.

  Richard Wren, 72, won't speak aloud the name of NATHAN WHITESHIRT for fear NATHAN WHITESHIRT will murder his wife.

  Stanley N. Toothburgle, 89, claims that NATHAN WHITESHIRT humiliates him by pulling obscenely at his pajamas when he makes his slow and painful way down the long hall for a piss at night.

  It was rumored that before Winnifred Williston was found deceased in her bathroom, she had seen NATHAN WHITESHIRT when she pulled back the curtain to enter the bath.

  When Father Ezekiel Shineface murdered a parishioner with whom it was rumored he was having an affair, some said that he had caught NATHAN WHITESHIRT and she engaged in an act of execrable obscenity in the confessional.

  accident

  "Look at the dead girl," Marie said, or that's what I thought she said. I replied--mm'hm--and the moment was past.

  We were eating at Webster's and the girl and her parents were in the booth across from ours or, rather, the parents were in the booth. The girl, maybe nine or ten, was twirling in the aisle like a ballerina. "Look, mom," she kept saying. "Look!"

  The parents didn't spare her so much as a glance. They looked haggard, and ate in silence. The man, balding and pale, had a look of concentration on his face. He ate voraciously and noisily, but betrayed no enjoyment. The woman was plain, her hair crowded into her face. She winced at the girl's entreaties, but otherwise looked as blank as the grille of a car.

  I looked again at the girl, trying not to stare openly. I wondered if I hadn't misheard Marie. The girl looked wispy and somehow transparent, like a moth whose wings have been rubbed free of dust. She was so pale as to seem almost translucent, but betraying on her arms intricate webs of pale blue veins. There were dark circles around the girl’s eyes, most times obscured by ringlets of hair so blond it looked almost white. Her hands were bony and looked fragile.

  "She's a little sparkplug," Marie whispered. I'm sure that's what she whispered.

  Suddenly there was a burst of static from the restaurant's speakers, which 'till then had been playing some local station too low to hear. The lights in the restaurant brightened, the girl spun madly in the aisle, and a thrumming surf music riff seemed to pass from the back of the dining room, over our table, to the front. A loud, low voice murmured something unintelligible, shaking the plates and glassware on the tables.

  Then the power went out. Once my eyes adjusted, I could see everything fairly well, thanks to the streetlights, which were still on. People at their tables were looking around. Some stood and looked at the windows towards the shadowy turnpike. The family across from us continued to eat, as though nothing had happened. But now the girl was seated with them, staring agape at her plate, where a breaded king crab floated in a miasma of oil like a crusted bug in a long abandoned wading pool.

  a world of lucretias and ledas

  In a copse of trees near the river a young girl plays with a grey, exsanguined doll, bending its arms and balling its hands into fists. The doll's head hangs limp, a swollen purple tongue protruding from between black lips.

  In the river is a man on a boat. The boat bobs in the water. The man can hear the sounds of the water lapping on the shore. The sun hangs high in the sky, enveloped in morning haze. A bird screeches. The man sits, hugging his knees, shivering. His breaths come in rasps. Suddenly he stands and steps silently off of the boat, slipping like a knife into the water. The ripples rock the boat slightly, then fade. The surface is again still. The boat drifts slowly towards shore.

  I am standing on the banks of the river in my topcoat, leaning heavily on my cane, acorns and incarnadine leaves falling around me like rain. My kerchief, stuffed into my side pocket, is soaked with saliva and vomitus. I can feel it through the fabric. My shoes are caked in red mud. Somewhere behind me the town is waking, people wandering out onto the streets, shopkeepers uncloaking displays and unlatching doors. Somewhere, a woman is screaming as she runs barefoot through shattered glass to an empty crib.

  I had awakened early, in darkness, my cat Leopold stretched across my stomach. I shoved him aside, went into the bathroom to evacuate my bowels. My stools were deep black and long, like spears. I dressed by lamplight and walked out onto Elm St. The sky was black. As I walked through and past the town, the sky went a deep blue that signaled the coming of dawn. There were clouds though, long and black and pointed. The clouds looked like murder.

  This has been Jebediah Blackstye with the WXXT traffic report. Up next, Ben Stockton with the weather. WXXT, the Valley's only Real Radio.

  cat-tails and rushes

  In 1818 a fire tore through St. Feuster's Nursery on Elm Street in Northampton, Massachusetts. A cook in the kitchen had been seized by fits, and had flung a lit wooden match into a pile of soiled aprons. The nursery had housed 32 baby boys and girls, watched over by a staff of nine. Strangely, the women who fled saved all the girls; no men or boys survived, at least not in the recognized sense of the word.

  I was part of a crew charged with cleaning the site. Armed with sled
gehammers, pickaxes, shovels, buckets, chemicals and solvents, we resolved to destroy or remove all that remained, leaving only the stone cellar, scorched, but, it was hoped, salvageable. After three days we had cleared what remained of the walls and ruined floors from ground level, and had in front of us the recovery of the bodies from the rubble in the hole that remained.

  The work was difficult, the task strenuous and grim. I was regularly short with my wife and my boy, and I slept fitfully. In some stretches of sleep I'd dream. In one dream a wooden box with a rusted metal grate told me in a slurred voice that I could count on nothing. Then worms poured through the grate like living liquid. I tried to flee, and it was as though I were running through water. In another dream angels hovered among leafless treetops at dusk. I watched from a hammock made of muscle and sinew which swung dreamily over an expanse of smoldering ash. I saw that the angels bore the rotting faces of dead goats, their toothy mouths ringed with green mucous. One hovered almost above me, head lolling heavily. Horribly, I could see up its gossamer frock; past its twisted-toed feet and knotted, gnarled legs; up to its abominable sex. What I saw I will not describe, but it filled me with panic, horror, and hopelessness.

  The morning it happened was grey and cold and humid. Roderick Whittier, who had been sweeping ash from atop cabinets, scrambled up the blackened, tumbled bricks, cracking his fingernails, shrieking and cursing. Something had moved in the ash. I looked and a baby blackened like seared meat emerged from the wreckage. Brilliant blue eyes opened in the blackness of the ruined face. They seemed possessed of a knowledge, or an intelligence, that was impossible. Its tiny hands raised and it began peeling from its head blackened strips of burnt flesh, as blood poured down its visage. It did not cry. It did not make a sound. It only stared.