Monk Punk and Shadow of the Unknown Omnibus

by Aaron French

  One sound was familiar: the mutual grinding of pocketed coins; I remembered this from Brother’s late gambling revels. But when I approached Blumenkrank’s door—no frame of light, and the hallway mute as snowfall.

  I resumed a pitiful mimicry of sleep, and returned to mentally completing a jigsaw puzzle, the pieces of which I’d recently imagined into new outlines...

  ***

  The next day, Mother, a depressingly healthy and stoic woman, complained of chest pain. She felt as though a hoofed machine had stood on her during the night. But she shrugged it off and got on with her chores.

  In the tenuous evening, the infernal discord whirred up again, with more coins jangling. I slid into the hallway; again, no light under the door and only silence, except for the chandelier tinkle-swinging as the house unsettled... we’d never figured out how Brother reached it, set the noose of ties just right, and finished himself off. It was as if he knew some esoteric ladder or staircase leading up through the air, ending at a portal to oblivion...

  When morning came, Mother was too ill to prepare breakfast. She’d aged decades in her sleep, and her bright green eyes had faded to pond scum. When Blumenkrank departed, I used my skeleton key...

  The cartographer’s hateful things were kept in meticulous, easily accessible order, as though he’d grown accustomed to fleeing with them at a moment’s notice. I spun the black globe on the windowsill. It was cold and whistled exactly like a decapitated weathervane falling through an abyss—a sound I clearly recognized, though I’d never heard it before. There was a note on the desk:

  Bedroom (1st)—quantahypsometric

  Bedroom (2nd)—transplanimetric

  I couldn’t guess what this meant. Was he a thief? If so, why would no items be listed, only rooms? Besides, we had nothing worth stealing, since Brother’s pilfering associates. Something wasn’t right. It is hard to trust a man who makes maps, who spends his nights shrinking the world to a size he can manage, condensing great spaces into inches that fold under his hands.

  Mother coughed as she stumbled to her uncharacteristically fragile feet. As I turned to leave, the globe seemed to have quietly exploded into an obscenely primitive orifice, sucking the sun from the air and leaving sickly phosphorescence in its place, a sort of star-vomit.

  In the hallway, my shadow cast in the shape of a dense circle—a stack of countless, impersonal shadows—round, without start or finish, endless. I told myself this was a hallucination produced by my exacerbated, neuropathic condition.

  ***

  Soon I began hearing curious noises at all hours, though at different intervals, throughout all areas of the house.

  These were of two general kinds:

  The first sounded like a creature made of lipless, gumless mouths filled with a range of yellowed, elderly teeth, connected by ligaments into an anthropoid shape, pacing an empty room, simultaneously smiling, grinning, and angrily grimacing itself back and forth, often changing direction, as though composed of warring sets of chattering, cavity-infected minds.

  The second produced the mental image of a wind-up Victrola with a single leg ending in a bull’s hoof, pounding a stony floor, its broad, dented horn broadcasting scratchy, screeching backwards messages from a poorly grooved, cartilage-covered record that skipped with tubercular spasms.

  ***

  Mother had been sick for weeks. One of her eyes was now interred within a shiny black skin and the other was two-thirds occluded. Her hands had begun curving back on themselves like dried fruits. Her hair grew at a fantastic rate and threatened to strangle her in the night. Her skin had paled to a shade darker than water. I took care of her as best I could—I don’t want to get into it.

  One evening I dreamed that a mosaic of small, clawed teeth clamped down on my uvula, suspending an enormous weight that displaced my viscera. I woke with my ribs twitching around under my skin like the partially-paralyzed limbs of a daddy long-legs trying to scramble their last inches beneath a foot about to squash... I couldn’t move, tears bleeding from my gaping eyes, until the pain stopped as suddenly as a psychiatric session. Something chomped itself in the hallway but I couldn’t get up until morning...

  In a rare encounter, I passed Blumenkrank on the stair. As usual, I averted my eyes.

  “You are here,” he said fiercely—a strange condemnation.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said, wincing.

  He laughed curtly, a satisfied smile in his eye. As I walked by him he whistled, the plummeting sound of a decapitated weathervane down an abyss... I rushed up as he went out, and stepped on what might’ve been a piece of fallen plaster. As I was about to close myself in my room, I saw it was a gambler’s six-sided die—a normal enough find in the house—only rather than white, it was the green shade Mother’s eyes used to be, and the black dots set in its sides seemed to strain toward me like beggars’ pupils, shiny, tear-washed, too many eyes, impossible as too many mothers, or none. I kicked it off the landing.

  ***

  I ignored what I thought was Blumenkrank’s warning on the stair—stupidly mistaking a curse for admonition—I was too curious, and more importantly, I knew he was responsible for what was both killing Mother and harming me.

  I snuck into his room again, with a notebook. The black globe looked slightly larger than I remembered. But I had no time to investigate. I was searching for his maps.

  They were protected in great brass portfolios under Brother’s bed, clasps muddied with verdigris fingerprints in a disturbing variety of sizes. They were heavy; with difficulty I dragged them over the whiskey-stained floor and opened them.

  At first I didn’t know what I was looking at. The parchments were covered in practically amorphous symbols and strange-sided geometric shapes; indescribably odd ciphers, lacking any shared family resemblance, replaced the four common orientating directions. And there was no legend.

  I hastily sketched what I could, filling up several notebook pages before sliding the portfolios back. They were now lighter and easier to push, as though I’d removed something from them simply by copying the inky glyphs.

  I spent the rest of the day sealed in my room, reviewing my copies to determine their meaning. Were they star charts? No; I knew enough astronomy to be sure that wasn’t the case. In vain did I compare them to county, state, national and even world atlases—they didn’t correspond to any earthly geography. But I had been known (diagnosed, even) to spend months gnawing at one piece of a merely entertaining puzzle without giving in; now that life and death were involved, I pushed myself harder than ever to reach a solution.

  I spent several tormenting hours pacing the house from end to end, sheaves of paper in hand, working on the problem—trying to even determine the problem. At length I leaned against the banister of the second floor hallway and looked down at the chandelier Brother had used to swing himself to inviolable safety. I said earlier that the chandelier was now suspended much lower than it had been before the tragedy. It also cast stranger, squatter shadows that I hadn’t observed previously. One of these elongated, swampy dark spots called to mind a symbol I’d copied from Blumenkrank’s maps.

  I located this symbol in the pages of my notebook. Comparing it to the shadow beneath the chandelier, and relative to that point, I was able to relate certain other graphics and icons to other definite features of our home, such as doorways, rooms and windows. In addition, there were many symbols on the maps that didn’t correspond to any obvious, worldly domestic elements, as though portraying unseen portals or invisible yet palpable objects. Some of these appeared to represent points at ceiling-close heights—far from easy inspection. Other runes were randomly positioned in hallways or near corners.

  The sun was setting and Blumenkrank would soon return. I had just enough time to approach one of these seemingly random locations in my house, as indicated in one of my sketches. It was almost a foot shy of a certain corner in the kitchen.

  Standing in the spot represented, at first I noticed nothing
and decided my work had been in vain. But when I turned to walk away, the scuffing of my foot on the linoleum tile echoed as though I’d been standing at the mouth of an interminably bleak tunnel. I resumed my former position and turned again, hoping for a repeat of the echo. Just as I lifted my foot, a great weight pressed around it, as though it were immersed in nearly-dry cement. With great effort I pulled myself forward and almost crashed into the table. Behind me, I heard the faint sound of someone half-laughing and half-eating a thing too big for his mouth.

  ***

  I knew Mother and I would die if we didn’t unravel the enigma of Blumenkrank, but all she cared about was that he provided us with an income. That night, as I sat up in my transplanimetric bedroom, listening to the diabolic commotion through my wall, I thought about it a great deal, and I knew why Blumenkrank always paid his rent, collecting coins at night that he exchanged for dollars each day: He was hosting an awful gambling business in Brother’s room, to beings from some other place, and the winners received maps of the house.

  Why?

  Obviously because the maps instructed them on how to find our rooms and drain our lives away. These were clearly creatures that couldn’t navigate through the usual senses and needed specialized graphic representations to get around our world.

  The next morning I determined to see what would happen if I followed the rest of the symbols on the map that didn’t correspond to any particular objects in our house. These spots must have had significance for Blumenkrank’s guests, and I now believed they aligned with the places where I’d recently heard the weird teeth-wandering and hoof-cranked, backwards record playing.

  As the front door closed behind Blumenkrank, I set to work.

  My experience solving puzzles helped me in this task. I paced about these locations clockwise, counter-clockwise, and then in other more complicated patterns. I began to feel dizzy and walls blurred as though seen through rising heat. Sunlight dimmed before my eyes.

  I soon found myself in a cold tunnel shaped like the inside of a Chinese finger puzzle. It was long as the space between the antennae of a V, dark as a blood clot, lined with fleshy spines that emerged erratically from the walls, waving like torch-flames and smelling like sewage and burning leaves.

  I consulted my copy of Blumenkrank’s map and saw certain characters corresponded to the positions of the dimly-perceived fleshy spines. I began piecing together the significance of these specific locations along the sides of the tunnel... I turned many rounded, rubbery corners and slid down chewy slopes, my footsteps suffocated like unlucky babies. Who knows how much time had passed when in the course of my investigations I lost track of my starting point, and standing in a phosphorescent, star-vomited dark embellished with rounded protrusions struggling to have faces, I once more looked to the map for help. I noticed that from where I stood, the symbols on the map exactly echoed the distances between the convex objects. Seeing another pattern arising, my passion for puzzles overriding my increasing dread, I walked from one to the next until I reached a narrow, low-ceilinged chamber. It was obvious this space was represented by a character which also depicted the largest rounded protrusion, that same glyph which had stood for one of the fleshy spines in the first area of this subterranean realm.

  This was a map of being lost.

  It precisely represented the inability to attain a place in the world. Wherever I stood, the map corresponded to my immediate location, which was the same thing as making no sense at all. It was the absurdity of the mirror which constantly negates itself, retaining no single image while reflecting any image back from it. Yet I had a powerful and terrible urge to follow this map, wherever it led. I could not ignore such a puzzling guide. I continued on my way and entered what I must inadequately describe as a low, cavernous, frigid hallway traversed by impossible, glittering webs of dust, fallen bridges that could never have stood.

  Filling the end of it from floor to ceiling was a huge black globe, fat with emptiness, which seemed to be rolling slowly closer like a painful laugh rumbling up from the bottom of a throat swollen with penitent, struggling meals. Or it may have been something else—a brother’s pupil flattened and monstrously expanded by unfathomable benthic pressure, the yawn of a hole that flinches at your touch, a nightmare marble in some nameless not-game of chance, or a slice of my wrongheaded shadow.

  Or it could’ve been the terrible period at the end of a sentence I cannot bear to utter, its gravestone, and simultaneously a lightless dead cloaca birthing a dynasty of awful realities...

  What it was didn’t matter in the slightest; existence is the merest possible thing. The only issue, the black nought of the matter, was that this inhuman, encroaching what corresponded to a symbol on my map, which had only just represented my location in the tunnel.

  ***

  Finally, I understood the meaning of Blumenkrank’s here on the stairway.

  How terrible to always know where you are.

  About the author: Erik T. Johnson’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Static Movement’s Flash! anthology, Electric Velocipede, Shimmer, Space & Time Magazine, Tales of the Unanticipated, Crossed Genres, Morpheus Tales, the British Fantasy Society Journal, Best New Zombie Tales Volume 3, Box of Delights from Aeon Press, and Dead But Dreaming 2 from Miskatonic River Press, among other publications. You can learn more about his work or contact him at www.eriktjohnson.net.

  To Unsee a Thing

  Richard Marsden

  The difference between a sane and insane decision is one that I find a matter of perspective rather than unequivocal truth. Truth and sanity are subjective matters and so when Thomas Pembroke sewed his eyes shut the community called it an act of ‘spontaneous madness,’ while I called his actions entirely rational and deliberate.

  I met Thomas at the Sun West University Library perusing sections of literature that were deemed by the more academic members of the school as ‘unsavory’ in the extreme. There are, as some open-minded individuals will tell you, histories and religions that are so ancient as to barely be mentioned in modern works. Seven thousand years before Christianity was even a thought, there were, in Europe, various religions whose rituals, practices and beliefs remain virtually unknown by today’s mainstream scholars. One only finds mention of these tremendously ancient practices in the ‘unsavory’ books, whose authors have been callously discounted as outright liars or raving lunatics.

  The books of these supposed madmen do exist, and Sun West had the fortune of having what I would consider an extensive library on the ancient and hidden mysteries of prehistory Europe. They had three books. I had read Lord Halwith’s The Lie of Reality: History of Lost Germania, and I had made as much sense of Jean-Baptiste E’lay’s poetic Cultes de Temp, but I had yet to delve into the final ‘unsavory’ book whose title I shall not repeat.

  When I sought out this particular nefarious tome, I was profoundly surprised to find a wispy man in firm possession of the book. Like a cat watching a mouse, I gazed at his lanky frame from afar as he sat huddled on a footstool, shrouded by the darkened aisles of the library, the ancient book in his hands, clutched at with seeming desperation. He looked like a patient in a mental asylum, with walls on all sides but one, as he rocked back and forth mumbling at times, voicing aloud whatever esoteric word he was currently laboring over.

  I perhaps, in hindsight, should have left the library and come back another day to read that final book in the ‘unsavory’ collection. The librarians, in their covetous ignorance, incidentally did mankind a favor by not allowing such old works to be checked out. They could be viewed freely, but could not leave the fortress of literary knowledge. The book was going nowhere, yet I was compelled to watch this stranger for a time. Few delved into the ancient histories and I was naturally curious if the thin figure huddled in the corner was a kindred spirit. The number of students of ridiculously old events is a small one, filled with true scholars, pseudo-magicians, occultists and a healthy dose of paranoid fanatics.

  My w
atching was ignored, so I decided to introduce myself.

  I gave my name and was as pleasant as possible, not wishing to startle the man. Contrary to my fears, Thomas was amiable, offering his name in return before giving me a questioning stare. His almost cheerful greeting had me curious. It was not typical for those delving into the unknown histories.

  “Did you read the other two?” I asked. If Thomas was as versed as I, then he would well know of what I spoke.

  “Yes, she told me of them. I’m afraid I found Halwith’s work somewhat lacking. Or rather...” he trailed off and tilted his head.

  Thomas was playing the same verbal game, as we determined one another’s interest in occult lore. I smiled smoothly. “Rather polluted with Nazi ideology? There is a reason the British government hanged him. However, there are snippets of truth amongst his trash. His section on the blood-rites of the Earth God are very plausible and noteworthy.”

  “She said as much,” Thomas replied and stood up from the stool, tucking the book I desired under his arm. Pale fingers drummed against its black cover. “Perhaps we can go to one of the tables. I don’t mind sharing.”

  We had, like sniffing dogs, determined we were of like mind and could form a friendship, or at least a shared academic understanding. I had my reasons for prying into Sun West’s ancient lore; I did not know what Thomas’s were. The first question I had for him as we walked to the lonely table was, “Who is this she?”