by Don Webb
She had painted a slogan on the ceiling in purple, “Music is divided for Love’s sake.”
She had slipped into the bathroom, slipping into something more comfortable. Larry spotted a framed page from a children’s book:
There was once a poor woodcutter who lived in front of a great forest. He fared so miserably, that he could scarcely feed his wife and his two children. Once he had no bread any longer and suffered great anxiety, then his wife said to him in the evening in bed: Take the two children tomorrow morning and take them into the great forest, give them the bread we have left, and make a large fire for them and after that go away and leave them alone. The husband did not want to for a long time, but the wife left him no peace, until he finally agreed.
“‘Hansel and Gretel’?” he asked as she returned in a short purple nightgown that matched the color of the quotation. “Why?”
She smiled. “It’s about splitting. Freud studied fairy tales for this. The young child has to split the image of the Good Mother and the Bad Mother. The kid’s tiny brain can’t deal with the Good Mother who gives him the tit and the Bad Mother who is angry when he poops himself. So he makes up two mothers. The witch in the gingerbread house is actually the regular mom. That is where humans get good and evil.”
“OK, but why frame it?” Larry was split between curiosity and horniness at that moment.
“Music is all about splitting. Rhythm is about breaks, notes are about breaks, and noise and sound are about breaks. All my lifework is about splitting things and putting them back together. You ever done X? It can help you see beyond splits. That can take you beyond Love and Fear. That’s my work; besides, it makes sex better.”
Larry, attempting to be cool, just smiled.
The sex was great. Supernova great. Hallucinogenic motherfucking awesome great. Mythic volcano erupting beyond Good and Evil great. She played weird music, and the drugs kicked in, and he had a million weird flashes like screwing atop a pyramid altar, or having sex with hundreds of women and men and fauns, or making love to his ex-wife, or having an erotic frolic with mermaids, or seeing stars explode. At some point they left the flat and walked to Sixth Street and milled among the costumed and the drunk and the horny—or maybe they had gone to a Black Mass in Hell or some mixture of both and the one clear memory was a snapping sound behind his neck and Chandra saying, “Well, Cinderella, your ball is over now.”
The next thing he knew was that he was lying in her narrow bed and was staring at the quotation on her ceiling. It was not the Sunday morning he had been expecting. It turned out to be Monday morning. Chandra had split, and he was famished. He went to his car and dove back to Doublesign. He got there about noon, and he was sure that he didn’t want to face his classes. Every now and again he seemed to see green or yellow lights shimmer at the corners of his vision. Doublesign had two stoplights and one actual apartment building, but Larry lived in a garage apartment belonging to Mrs. Irma Johnson, who also ran the FedEx store. He crawled up the stairs to his apartment, ate three bologna sandwiches, and crashed. Somehow he would make it right.
It was getting dark. He needed to drive home from the home. He would have to call his sister in Florida and tell her, but he couldn’t think of the words. He knew the guilt that filled him was irrational. Momma didn’t have a stroke because he had lied to his boss. He tried calling Chandra. When she answered he hung up and turned his cell phone off. No words for that either.
He didn’t remember the first nightmares. Suddenly it was 6:30 and his alarm was going off and he was scared. His bed was dank with sweat and his stomach too upset and it was Wednesday morning. Frost silvered everything; a front had come in during the night. He couldn’t remember what his lesson plans were. He remembered telling his principal that he was taking some time off for the funeral. Was it Thursday and Friday? Or just Friday? Were his actions too shitty to tell his friends? It was going to be a great day, he could tell.
Someone had told the kids. They kept their heads down. No joking around. Many of the girls made him little cards out of folded notebook paper and colored pencils. The para-professionals told him that they would remember his Mamacita in their prayers this Sunday. What was her name? The football coach bought his lunch. Someone left a white rose in a vase on his desk. Students whispered outside of his room.
His cell phone vibrated with messages of consolation. E-mail came from HR, Dr. Simms (the superintendent), the English department of the high school.
He remembered his nightmare that night.
He was sleeping in his childhood home in Amarillo, Texas. He was wearing pajamas, his blue fuzzy pajamas so it would be when he was in junior high, and Momma had been so ill from her hysterectomy. She was calling from her bedroom. “Larry darling, I need you! I need you!”
He ran down the hall. She stood by her bed. Well, something stood there in the dark. A column of some thick liquid that kept re-forming itself. It seemed to have tiny feelers. Its mouth was vagina-shaped, near the center of its body. Some of the feelers, near where a human’s hip should be, held onto something, possibly the Cthulhu doll. “Larry, you can’t shut me out. You have to love me.”
He must have been thrashing about on the bed. The dank sheets held him. He was so confused by their wet restraint that he couldn’t tell when he passed from nightmare into the waking world. His room stank. He thought for a moment that he might have shit himself. The alarm clock read 4:32. It was Thursday morning. In theory he was flying to the funeral.
He would have to leave town. Doublesign was small; if he were out and about this weekend, everyone would know. He got up, got dressed, and drove into Austin. He would stay at the Motel 6 near his mother’s nursing home. Maybe if he spent some time with her—serious, focused, loving time—it might help her. And he didn’t care how she felt about the damn stuffed toy—it was headed for the trash. He didn’t even turn the sheets back in his hotel room; just lay his dressed sweaty self on top.
His phone woke him at noon.
His mother had passed away. He was horrified at the relief he felt.
She had a prepaid funeral policy with Blackwell Brothers in Amarillo; the home was going to make the call. Did he want to view her body before they arranged for transportation?
With the sick thought that everything would work out now he drove off to the home.
“She’s at the end of the hall.”
She’s not at the end of the hall. A body is in a room at the end of the hall.
Music, sort of spacey Muzak, came from the end of the hall. Larry heard one of the old men reading poetry. They probably have to have these little impromptu services all the time. It wouldn’t be like a hospital where the scandal of death had to be hidden.
The poem was ending as he entered:
“The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Yeats’s “The Second Coming” seemed the most inappropriate poem that could possibly uttered at a mother’s funeral, but Larry’s revulsion was held in check by the sight of Chandra playing some sort of electric lyre strumming something complicated—some twelve-tone melody with angular tonalities.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
His mom lay on the bed, dressed in the pants suit she wore when he moved to Austin three years ago. She held the Cthulhu toy like a baby. The old people were shocked by the profanity and began to shuffle out. He was unsure which of the men had been reciting the poem.
“I do volunteer work here on Thursdays,” said Chandra.
“What are you doing?” Larry asked.
“Hey, a little respect: this is your mom.”
“That was my mom, and where do you go on Monday morning?”
“I work for a living. I tried to wake you up.”
“Why are you here? Why were y
ou with me?”
Chandra said, “I am doing my art. You can take it or leave it.” She had stopped her weird music and was clearly about to leave. Larry thought about stopping her physically and then stopped himself, surprised at how far he had changed in less than a week.
She looked at him and responded as though she had read his mind. Probably easy enough to read his face. “You haven’t changed. You’re just noticing how you really are because you heard my music. You are seeing some of the monstrous you that you have learned not to see. But the real world is split further away from your views than you know. If you want the Real, go with what you are beginning to see.”
“What’s your real name?”
“Same as your mom’s, dummy. Hannah. I was born Hannah Maria Nibiru.”
She walked out, and suddenly the real shock of his momma’s death hit him. He crumpled into a chair and cried and forgot his excuse of strange drug trips with mystic musicians.
Somehow in the next hour, he called his sister and the funeral home and booked a flight for tomorrow. He didn’t give a damn about gossip and drove home to his Doublesign apartment.
That night he had the last nightmare.
He was sleeping in his little bed at home. It was cold, he could hear the gas heater turn on and the Santa Fe train in the distance, and so it must have been about ten o’clock when the train rattled through town. Beyond the curtains he could see the Christmas lights at the Casey house, and his room smelled of gingerbread. He could hear Momma crying and he could hear his sister in her tiny bedroom snoring lightly. Sissy had had breathing problems in the old house, and it was always so cold. Momma called out to him, “Where is my little man? Where is Larry? Come help me, Larry. Come help me!”
He sat up and (with the ease that such changes happen in dreams) he was his adult self. “Momma, you don’t need me! You need Sissy!”
“Sissy can’t help me no more. She can’t see me!”
“Momma, she can’t she you because you’re dead! This is a nightmare and I am sorry that I said you’re dead.”
“Baby, baby. That’s one of those fake splits you make. There is no line between Dead Momma and Live Momma and Good Momma and Bad Momma. Now come to me, baby. Don’t you love me anymore? After all I have done?”
So Larry got out of his bed and walked down the hall. In her room, Sissy was sleeping in her childbed, but it was the adult sister and somehow he knew that they slept in this house every night. And Momma would always be in this house, where she had been sick and the family had been poor. Not the nice house, not the nursing home.
Momma was saying, “There is no line between Dead Momma and Live Momma and Good Momma and Bad Momma,” and he heard Sissy mutter in her sleep, “Iä! Shub-Niggurath!” Which also made sense. Fear and Love. Guilt and Innocence. Curves and Angles.
At the end of the hall, Larry opened the door to his mother’s bedroom. It stood there in the darkness with a voice coming from the middle of column and the stench of vomit and decay and this time it was holding something squirming, not a Cthulhu plush toy, and Larry knew it was him as a baby. Little Lawrence Derby Ellison, and he could tell by some reflected points of crazy Christmas lights from next door that Momma had too many eyes in the wrong places. “Please look at me, baby, please know.” He could hear Chandra’s melody off in the distance.
Despite his best intentions he reached back and flipped on the light. They say you can’t turn a light on in dreams, but they are wrong. And Lawrence Derby Ellison saw what his mother really looked like and what he looked like and what the world really was. Before he merged with his mother and was born again, he heard the last notes of Chandra’s music, which he realized sounded flute-like.
The next morning, his landlady, who had heard of his mother’s death from her cousin, who was the janitor at James Bowie Junior High, knocked on the door of his apartment. When there was no answer, she opened the door and went in. The coroner later said heart failure, but Irma said she will think of the poor boy’s expression the rest of her days. Some things aren’t meant to be seen.
(For James Wade)
Emily’s Rose Window
We were all sad when Emily inherited her uncle’s place. He was a bad man who expressed his badness in things given. Once he gave the mayor a little ivory whistle. Said it was a duck call. The mayor hunted, we all hunt, but the mayor had the balls to hunt on Ephraim Bishop’s land. So Ephraim tells him, he’ll draw more ducks with the call. It works. The mayor was beside himself. Shooting and eating ducks all the time. His mainly bald head grew shiny with duck fat. It was illegal to hunt that much, of course, but the mayor of Kingsport was above the law. He came to the Lodge many nights, Masonic Lodge 118—one of the oldest in the great state of Massachusetts. Always wanting us to go hunting. We have day jobs, Mr. Mayor. He went out more and more and we’d hear that whistle—didn’t sound a damn thing like a duck—and then blam! Then he started hunting so much, he was never in his office, so he lost the election. But he didn’t care, got grossly fat on ducks—or whatever he was shooting. We wouldn’t see him for days, just hear the whistle. Finally at the Grandmaster’s suggestion we paid a call and his house was smelly with feathers and blood and no Mr. Mayor. We still hear the whistle sometimes at night when there is no moon, we hear the shots sometimes too, and that’s been thirty-five years.
So like I says, we was disappointed that Ephraim had left her the house. It stood on Central Hill and was old enough to have a plaque, but we didn’t give it one. Built by one Edward Crane, who spent most of his days in Europe. After he died in 1723, the house stood vacant until the Bishops bought it in 1758. It had a bad reputation, witchcraft and such. But it didn’t really bother anyone until Ephraim fixed the place up, but I’m getting ahead of myself or beside myself, I wanted to talk about Emily Bishop.
Her father, Ephraim’s brother, was a good banker, regular Mason, and as honorable a fellow as you would want to know. William Bishop was a solid, uninteresting guy; he was unlike his brother Ephraim, who always had a different beautiful woman on his arm and too much cash in his hands. William didn’t drive too flashy a car. He gave to charities and good works and he let his wife drag him to church every Sunday. She was a Southern woman and made him some sort of Baptist. She and Ephraim took a hate to each other at first sight. He sent her a tall blue vase with thirteen white roses in it. We told her not to take any gifts from him, so she had her driver take it back and gifted Ephraim with some book by Billy Graham. We took a liking to her at once. She had met William at Miskatonic University. He had majored in economics and she had taken an MRS degree, if you catch my drift. Her family was dirt-poor. Came from Savannah, Georgia, which is almost as old as Kingsport.
Ephraim’s next volley was to invite brother and missus to the family house. It was one of the oldest structures in Kingsport; some of its thick walls were laid down in 1700. I went to the house as a boy when Ephraim and William were growing up, and after Ephraim’s death and after what happened to poor Emily.
How would I describe it?
Even though the house was not huge, we kept getting lost in it, that day we broke in to see after Emily. The sheriff said it had a labyrinthine structure. His English minor at Miskatonic seems to have stood him in good stead.
Ephraim had begun remodeling the house in the late 1970s. His ancestors had built over a large window that marred the house’s classic lines. For some reason Crane had shaped the top of his home to resemble an octopus head. His claim was that he wished to “frighten the superstitious” and “amuse the fearless.” This had led to rumors of the house being a sort of American version of Francis Dashwood’s Hell Fire Club—with the drinking and the sexing and devil worship, but no dressing up like monks and nuns. Crane was after all an American, although he could apparently stand to be in his house only twice a year, at the ends of October and April. But he did always bring beautiful women on those occasions. For the most part lovely foreigners who were never seen again.
In the center of
the octopus’s head was a strange convex lens about seven feet in diameter. It was the color of milk tinged with blood. It should have been a healthy pink, illuminating the naughtiness of Crane’s Black Masses perhaps, but something about the shape suggested a diseased or even blind eye. The first Bishops had certainly done the city a favor by covering the monstrosity. When Ephraim had dislodged the false wall that had covered it, there was talk in the city of having it covered, but Ephraim’s lawyers found an obscure easement that Edward Crane had obtained. It seemed that, because of some rather large fee he had paid, the city would simply mind its own business about his architecture. Ephraim must have put a light in his upper room, which was an oak-paneled library, since the window seemed to glow slightly at night.
Anyway, as I was saying, Ephraim made a big deal of inviting William and what was her name?—Marie—to his home. She was a looker. Ephraim’s cook and his butler put on a great spread; Ephraim talked peace and invited William and Marie to spend the night. Some neighbor found Marie that night wandering among the back alleys at the base of the hill. Poor thing was wearing only a thin nightgown, and the New England winter had harmed her flesh. She had no idea how she got there, and William had somehow slept through the night unaware of his missing wife. We all thought that Ephraim had won that round and that she would be packing her bags for Georgia. However, she proved to be of sterner stuff and not only stayed that terribly harsh winter but also gave William his daughter in July.
Emily—well, Emily was a disappointment from the start. She had been born with extreme curvature of the spine and (it was said) a tail. Her flesh was a waxy white that flushed pink when the baby cried. And she cried almost all the time. William had money, so the nannies and nurses were hired and the series of surgeries began. William was a good man but not a strong man, and a crying and ugly daughter seemed to be a bit much for his nerves. He spent as much time as he could at the Lodge, and many thoughtful hours at the bank and too many hours at a tavern called the White Ship.