Alectryomancer and Other Weird Tales

by Christopher Slatsky

  I was startled to see a rectangle of light appear on the cracked bricks of the warehouse wall. My gaze followed the dust mote filled cone of light back to a vintage Bell & Howell 16 mm movie projector tucked into a dark corner. The machine ran unattended.

  Images of various civilizations flashed on the wall, forgotten cultures whose iconography and architecture seemed otherworldly like something from a Zdzisław Beksiński painting. Maps appeared, Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris, a clay tablet chipped with cuneiform. A bag-head stood up from the crowd with an open book in their hand. He began to read and I found it odd that the plastic over his face not only failed to muffle his voice his words actually resonated throughout the room:

  Epidemiologists have known for decades that people who live in cities are twice as likely to become schizophrenic than those in rural areas. Neuroscientists have confirmed this hypothesis by demonstrating how the brain’s structure is altered in city raised organisms.

  The words were familiar but I couldn’t quite place them. I was transfixed by the flickering images of the film though I had difficulty processing any sort of narrative content.

  Not only has this biological change been conclusively shown, the evidence also suggests that the bigger the city the greater the risk for schizophrenia. The demiurge that constructed this architectural universe is intentionally altering the species to become conduits for dreams.

  I saw myself projected against the wall.

  I looked to be about 5-years old standing at the foot of my bed. The camera was shaky, my posture odd, limbs disproportionate compared to my torso. The film must have been edited with a clumsy jump cut for I suddenly materialized on top of the bed, my body violently convulsing. There was something wrong with the shape of my head, symmetries askew in suggestion of transmogrification. The camera jolted as if something had bumped it.

  As Fulcanelli said: "The secret of alchemy is this: there is a way of manipulating matter and energy so as to produce what modern scientists call ‘a field of force’. The field acts on the observer and puts him in a privileged position vis-à-vis the Universe. From this position he has access to the realities which are ordinarily hidden from us by time and space, matter and energy. This is what we call the Great Work."

  Julia stared in astonishment at something on the stairs near the ceiling. Tears streamed down her beet red cheeks. The kneeling bag-heads all stood at the same time, rising like a dingy yellow cloud from a ruptured fungus. I looked above to see what everyone was looking at but there was nothing there.

  I offer you the prisca sapientia of the Architect! I offer you the GREAT WORK!

  Shadows in the corner of the room closed in. Black tendrils dripped from the ceiling, from the chaotic architecture, across the cement floor to the center of the warehouse where muscular strands danced in anticipation of great things.

  I couldn’t fathom what I was seeing. I tensed in anticipation of scrabbling back out of the tunnel but my world seemed to slow down while the building’s internal geography hastened.

  The inky appendages quickly congealed into a giant, its head a mass of billowing trash bags, each malformed bubble expanding and deflating repeatedly. Its arms were thick sheets of glass crudely cut into half moon shapes like scimitars, the surface stained and milky as slag glass. The head moved in such a manner it blotted out the space it occupied.

  Time resumed. I began to crawl backwards but Julia pressed me up against the side of the tunnel. I couldn’t move.

  The monster vibrated with more intensity. Hairline fractures trickled across its glass arms. Its bulbous head wobbled like a liquid filled balloon caught in the runoff of a storm drain.

  The bag-heads sang. Plastic sacks sucked into hollow mouths then exhaled boisterous hymns with the voice of klaxon horns. My ears leaked bloody pus. The warehouse reverberated with the screams of a billion decaying cities.

  “Move, Julia!” Panic made my voice louder than I intended it to be.

  “I’m sorry, Carla.” She sounded sincerely apologetic, but continued filming whatever was going on in the main room.

  “Julia?”

  She grabbed my forearm with a fanatic’s strength.

  I was motivated by fear and adrenalin, consumed by an unthinking impulse to flee this situation. I elbowed my best friend with all my strength, felt something give. She rolled aside, both hands over her damaged face. I was crying with sorrow over hurting her and sobbing with rage that she had forced me to react this way.

  I left Julia behind writhing in the narrow passage, her moans of pain following me. I backed out faster than I thought possible and finally exited into the small dark room.

  I waited for her to come out. I wanted to beg forgiveness, shout at her for trying to keep us from escaping. Ask what was going on.

  The rattle of the chains being undone on the other side of the huge door snapped me out of my reverie. The links slipped through the gaps onto the floor.

  I ran down the dark hallway. Its curves and angles had mutated, its aberrant curvilinear design twisting and turning in such complex patterns I felt as if I’d covered miles before reaching the entrance. For one horrific moment the shutter refused to budge, and then it creaked and slid up. I stumbled onto the sidewalk, my eyes assaulted by the light.

  The world was drenched in white.

  The street was no longer asphalt and traffic signs but an expanse of wet gravel stretching off into a horizon the color of a blood clot. Rivulets trickled through the rocks where crosswalks used to be. The stifling atmosphere felt like a sheet of clear plastic had been stretched across the sky.

  Baffled, I knelt down and brushed my hand across the ground. My palm was covered in chalky silt. The land was coated with several inches of the substance. There were tiny broken shells mixed in. The powdery marine sediment of tiny diatoms and the silica their skeletons left behind.

  The city was dreaming of how it used to be.

  I suddenly remembered where I’d seen the images in the film. They were my sketches. The bag-headed narrator had been reading from my dream journal.

  I closed my eyes, resisted the lure of sleep. Even before I opened them I knew that the city’s body had risen from the ground, domiciles ascending into a pink sky born of some mysterious chthonic activity. I was surrounded by mile-high edifices spun from glass glowing delicately in the diluted coral sunlight. The city’s residents were active, peering at me with their unusual yet recognizable masks.

  The bag-heads caught up with me. Their hands rough as concrete, nails sharp as broken glass. I retched as they dragged me back into the warehouse away from the alien landscape. The odor of stale blood overpowered the fresh scent of my wounds. I caught a glimpse of Julia in the crowd. She was wearing a filthy yellow raincoat. I knew that the next time I’d see her she would have already donned a trash bag face. The thought filled me with a tremendous loss.

  They passed me down the long hallway into the heart of the Alexei church where that giant ragged shadow the color of waste clogging the drains leading to the sewers waited with outstretched gleaming arms. Its plastic bag gaze lingered like an old familiar face floating in all the world’s gutters, in every entrance anyone had ever forgotten to close.

  The city began to sing. My ears rang with the hymn of celestial horns and I lost the words to articulate what I’d once been and what I’d become.

  MAKING SNAKES

  Katryn was reluctant to talk to Alina about the powdery man. It had happened so long ago, and she wasn’t sure she could trust her sister anymore; her face had started to move around on the skull and her mouth no longer matched her words.

  “There was nobody there.” Katryn stood in the open doorway, hands clasped together. She spoke softly, as if afraid the unseen visitor might still be within earshot.

  “I don’t know how the reporters keep getting past the gate.” Alina said.

  “But there wasn’t anyone at the door.” Katryn was certain the powdery man had returned, but she wouldn’t burden her s
ister with her suspicions. She loathed her body. Repulsed by her thoughts. Her own voice disgusted her.

  Alina sighed with a heady mix of sympathy and frustration. “I’m sorry sis’, but the press can be far too aggressive. We all truly want to help you move on.”

  “My fault.” Katryn’s words felt childish and petulant in her mouth.

  “Oh dear. I don’t like it when you’re in this mood.” Alina sipped her coffee. Steam coated her glasses. Eyes transformed into orbs of fog. “You have to return that terrible agent’s phone calls soon. What is his name? No matter. You need to speak with him.”

  Katryn excused herself to the comfort of her bedroom. She slid her fingertips across the spines of her favorite books in contemplation of which to read again. But she knew she’d never get around to it. None of this mattered. Her vocation had ended just as quickly as it had ascended. She was now nothing more than grist for the Hollywood rags, a whipping post for the savage gossip of the Hedda Hoppers and Louella Parsons.

  Contemplating the irrelevance of resuming her acting career lessened the pain, eased her despair somewhat. She’d never entertained the notion anything was waiting beyond the veil; all she had to look forward to was the very same eternal abyss that loomed before conception.

  What did one more film project or theater role matter? Antitrust rulings and the overwhelming influence of the National Legion of Decency had hindered here career opportunities. It mattered little; art was a conceit, another distraction from the banality of living. Everything ultimately ended.

  Later that evening, long after Alina had locked all the doors and retired to her own room, Katryn saw movement beneath her door. She pressed her cheek against the floor and watched the fleeting shadows of bare feet running past her room.

  Girlish voices whispered in the hallway, faded as they ran out the kitchen door into the woods, crashed through the foliage. They injured their soles on the forest floor and their cries floated above the nocturnal clicks and hums of insects.

  Katryn was just a child when she first encountered the powdery man. She’d been playing in the abandoned lot, a dumping site where all kinds of interesting trash was strewn about in the yellow thigh-high grass, brittle and itchy.

  A jalopy had pulled up, parked on the outskirts of the field. She distinctly remembered the truck’s presence disturbing the grass, a spreading ripple in a peculiarly textured wave, stalks shaking like broom bristles. The driver had shouted something but Katryn hadn’t been able to make it out. She’d walked closer to the vehicle.

  The man’s eyes were deeply set in a wrinkly face powdered with stage makeup, like an actor from the silent era. A cigar dangled between his gray lips. He spoke in the high pitched voice of a prepubescent boy.

  Wanna make snakes?

  Katryn hadn’t known what the powdery man meant by this, much less why it terrified her.

  She screamed.

  He’d tossed his cigar into the dry grass, stepped out of his truck, gestured for her to approach. His eyes and skin had fouled the air with something more threatening than physical harm, a portent of apocalyptic dread that lingered in Katryn’s memory to this day. He’d removed his tweed cap. His bald head had been white with powder.

  His hands stretched impossibly long, fingertips flowing into keratin tipped darts. He’d moved towards her with an awkward gait, stiff, as if learning to walk with prosthetic legs.

  Katryn ran from the lot. She didn’t stop until she’d reached her front porch and any further details of the experience were lost in a fog of distant memories.

  “I think our house is haunted.” Alina raised an eyebrow conspiratorially. She stirred her black coffee until the liquid spiraled on its own. “Isn’t that delightful?”

  Alina’s hair was a miasma of black fog jiggling around a puffy sleep deprived face. Katryn hoped this was due to the indigo window casting a shadow above. She couldn’t be sure; there was more stained glass in her childhood home than she remembered and the walls and floors were painted in floral hues that changed their brightness and shade inconsistently.

  “I’ve heard nothing.” Katryn was grateful for her sister taking her in when she needed help, but she was ashamed at how easy it had become to lie to her. Her hands felt swollen. She moved the larger of them away from her cup. Hid the offending extremity beneath the table top.

  “You believe in spirits?” Alina asked.

  “No. Nothing more than this.” Katryn rapped the table with her fingers. “All we can do is make believe the spurts in our heads are more meaningful than pebbles smoothed by a stream.”

  “I don’t understand. You never make sense, sis’. I thought you artists were all mystics and poets.” Alina gave a reassuring smile. “Ghosts and luck and ‘break a leg’ and all that.”

  Katryn thought about the girls running between the trees, over brambles and jagged branches. They might be lost. Maybe they were being chased by the powdery man.

  There must be someone who cared about them, worried about their well being. She suddenly realized she’d been about her daughter’s age when she’d last played in the field.

  She’d scampered up the back yard’s cherry tree (these days it was barren and withered like the backdrop for some gothic stage production), dropped down on the other side of the fence. Traced her familiar path to the empty lot. She hadn’t been concerned about the powdery man showing up then; she’d kept to the edges of the field close to her well worn trail home. This was her secret playground. She hadn’t even considered relinquishing it to anyone.

  Kicking at corroded pipes and pieces of broken furniture had been sufficient entertainment until she came across a stained toilet tilted on its side. She’d peeked inside the bowl.

  A little girl’s head stared back at her.

  Skin greasy like crinkled wax paper. Hair lopsided as if wearing a filthy wig that hadn’t fallen all the way off. Insect activity convinced Katryn it wasn’t a mannequin.

  The corpse’s eyes were wide open. Opaque. Beautiful opalescent pearls.

  This world, Katryn thought, this ugly world. At that moment, at that tender age, she knew that everything was destined to end up waste abandoned in places nobody visited anymore.

  Something subtle changed in the air. An engine roared. She knew it was the powdery man’s antique vehicle. She’d sprinted away as fast as she could.

  “Penny for your thoughts?” Alina gently touched her sister’s arm. Her voice brought Katryn back to the room, back to her large hand touching the smooth warm surface of her cup.

  Katryn shook her head.

  Alina rubbed her neck in exasperation. “Please. I’m here for you. I really am. But please,” she said in a tone Katryn had never heard her use before.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “We just want you to get back to work on the set. The production needs you. You can’t keep blaming yourself. Little girls and accidents, well...”

  “Everything’s an accident.” Katryn finished her coffee then returned to her room. The faucet dripped onto the broken ceramic basin in the bathroom. Her sister had removed the barbiturate bottles and taped up the cracked sink to prevent any further injuries on the sharp edges.

  Katryn had always known that the powdery man waited for her.

  Vibrating between the wrinkles in this world.

  Waiting for her to become a parent, to become successful on the stage and screen.

  Waiting for her to reach her darkest hour before making his grand appearance. For the drugs to make her so weary she could no longer fend him off.

  The last time she’d seen him was in her old home in the Pacific Palisades. Hovering in the corner of her bedroom, his cigar’s cherry the only splash of color in that dismal space. Wet lips opening and closing like the tearing of a birth caul.

  Wanna make snakes?

  This was all he’d say.

  Repeatedly.

  Fingers wriggled like snakes. Elongated into darts that stretched through the dark to caress Katryn’s skin. Her sheets
had retained the warmth and shape of her daughter who’d swallowed far too many pills and was sleeping far too peacefully and all Alina had been able to say was I am so sorry far too many times to be of any consequence.

  Katryn spent the early evening reading scripts in her room. A flash of white outside the window caught her attention.

  The girls ran across the yard.

  They wore flimsy tattered garments. Hair scraggly and wild. They were all barefoot. The flesh on their damaged feet trailed behind like ribbons, shining wetly in the waning light.

  Katryn walked quickly yet quietly through the house past her sister’s bedroom. Alina was breathing in a ragged rhythm. She slipped out the front door and gently closed it behind her.

  She ran after the girls.

  They raced through the woods, mutilated feet further torn by thorns and sharp stones. Ran over open dusty fields and barren landscapes. Passed through back yards, the houses’ windows glowing with odd light.

  They circled back to Katryn’s childhood secret field. The land was surrounded by a rusty fence. Several sections had been stomped down by those who’d continued to dump trash. The girls slipped across the field like wisps of fabric in the wind.

  The sky was red. The air filled with cicadas singing a dry song. Katryn couldn’t explain how she knew, but she was certain there were hundreds of little girl’s decomposing heads buried in the landfill.

  Her eyes watered at the intensity of the late sky. The garbage and the decay of this place filled her vision. The lot looked as false as a plywood backdrop propped up by fragile two-by-fours.

  The insects ceased their noise. Nothing moved save for the subtle shuddering of the long, stringy weeds growing from beneath the flat tires of a long abandoned derelict truck.

  The buried heads began to whisper to each other.

  Pale flakes of makeup fell from Alina’s face. Someone had failed to light the room properly; her lips were an unhealthy color. The shade of a sickly flame behind a gray glass candle sleeve.