Nightmares From a Lovecraftian Mind

by Jordan Krall

  “Oh,” Gregory said, finding himself caring less and less about this man’s mother and her blindness or any blindness in the entire world.

  Xnoybis said, “What about your mother? Do you have a mother?”

  Gregory groaned. What possible reason would this Xnoybis have to need to know about Gregory’s mother? “Yes, I do.”

  “Do you have a picture of her?”

  Gregory sighed. “No, I do not.”

  Xnoybis put the photograph back into his wallet. “Well that’s just ridiculous. Who doesn’t keep a picture of their mother?”

  “I don’t.”

  Xnoybis smiled wide, wider than ever. “I know. You just said that.”

  “Well, I better get going,” Gregory said, getting up from the bench. A hand grabbed his arm.

  “Don’t go just yet, Greg.”

  “Let go!” Gregory said, flexing his arm back and feeling Xnoybis’s arm flutter like paper.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. No harm done, right?”

  Gregory shrugged and walked off.

  “No harm done!” Xnoybis called out from behind him.

  Gregory now knew the idea in his head had to come into fruition sooner rather than later. He had the plan. He had the knives.

  He was almost out of the park when a whimpering sound from behind him made him stop. Was the man crying?

  Gregory turned around to find Xnoybis biting into his wallet. He walked back slowly, apprehensive about the man and what possible plans he might have in store for Gregory.

  “Goddamnit, what are you doing?” Gregory said, approaching. He wanted to grab the wallet out of the man’s mouth but did not want to risk being bitten. Also, he actually found himself wanting to see what the man’s goal was. Did he want to consume the entire wallet, mother’s picture and all? Did he just want to take a bite of the faux leather simply to gain attention?

  Yes, that must have been it. Gregory had been tricked into walking back to the man. He slapped Xnoybis in the head. “Stop, will you? You’ll choke.”

  Half the wallet fell onto Xnoybis’s lap and the other half was quickly sucked into his mouth and swallowed.

  “Jesus Christ,” Gregory said, walking backward. He started to run out of the park. If he would have looked back at Xnoybis, he would have seen the man regurgitate his mother’s picture into his palm and put it back into his mouth.

  *

  When Gregory walked into his mother’s hospice room, the smell of leather slithered into his nostrils like warm death. Something was wrong.

  He saw his mother just where he had left her but she looked different. She looked flat.

  It didn’t look like she had lost weight but when he touched her, she simply felt flat. He saw something else that was different. Her clothes. They were all made of silk.

  Gregory fell backwards into the chair next to the bed and put his head into his hands. Were his mental facilities failing as much as hers? He rubbed his eyes and looked back at her. It was worse this time. She looked deflated, the silk garments resembling nothing more than purple death shrouds.

  He dropped to his knees and grabbed his mother’s weak, flat hand. For the first time in more than twenty years, he said a prayer. Then he left to get his knives.

  *

  Xnoybis Brown was throwing popcorn to the ducks when he felt something cold tickle his throat.

  The blade tore open his windpipe and kept slicing until there was a crimson deluge down his chest.

  Gregory stood behind the park bench, one hand on Xnoybis’s hair and the other eliminating the man’s throat. The blood that splashed down before him had no real effect on Gregory. He was neither pleased nor disgusted. The blood was just there like the rain or sunshine.

  Something fell out of the gaping throat wound and slid down to Xnoybis’s crotch. Gregory let go of the man’s hair and reached down to pick it up. It was the picture of Xnoybis’s mother. The elderly woman still stared at him with Germanic marble eyes but now she was clad in purple silk and there was a smile on her face as wide as the horizon.

  Through a broken throat, Xnoybis laughed. His body burped out his last words.

  “No harm done.”

  HAIL DESIRE AND BODIES OF COLD GENTLEMEN

  Pockets of cold air moved across the bedroom. I occasionally felt them while I waited for sleep. Oh, how I waited and was always disappointed.

  The pockets could be better described as invisible bubbles of frost. They came and went as I counted to ten, twenty, thirty, forty, and finally a hundred. No sleep came but I pretended to dream, to rekindle my nightmares with the movement of the cold air.

  My name is Henry Bertrand and I haven’t slept in fifteen years.

  That isn’t the worst of my troubles so I won’t pretend that it is just to gain sympathy or advice. It is simply the starting point of my narrative. Why is it the starting point? I’m not entirely sure but perhaps the reasons will reveal themselves to both me and you by the end of it all.

  The end of it all.

  That sounds so very final but that probably isn’t the case. Once the reading stops, the mind goes on and on and on until the details of the story disappear in some long term memory junk yard full of old names and plotlines from movies you’ve forgotten you’ve seen.

  So forgive me if I rush through the story or obsess on some small detail like the wallpaper on my neighbor’s bedroom wall. Just so you know: I could see the room from my own bedroom. My curtains are always open and so are my neighbor’s. I think they are intentionally left open as if to ask me to stare inside and observe my neighbor’s life. The wallpaper in the room is old-fashioned and of a floral design. It was so old-fashioned in fact that it didn’t seem real. Did someone really design that wallpaper? I couldn’t imagine a time when it would have been deemed modern. However, it wasn’t that my room was so modern itself but compared to the neighbor’s I was practically living in the future.

  The wallpaper was, like I said, floral and old-fashioned. It looked ancient and stained with yellow circles. Parts of it were falling down in strips. Each night I noticed the strips getting lower and lower until I could see the wall beneath. The wall consisted of faded drawings of horse-drawn carriages and men with tall hats and whips. Truthfully, I was probably jealous of the wallpaper. Though it was indeed old-fashioned (like I mentioned several times before) it held some significance, some depth of character that was surprising since it was only wallpaper. I got it in my mind to someday ask my neighbor about it….

  Wait. I hear the neighbor now.

  “But I don’t know any foreign films. Seven Winds? Never heard of it.”

  Who are they speaking to? There is never anyone else in the house. They live alone. They do not own a telephone.

  “Was it something about footprints? There’s no park around here.”

  There they are again. Who are they talking to? Don’t they know I’m trying to sleep? Maybe they do know and maybe they don’t care. That would be unkind.

  “He’s talking to someone. Who could he be speaking to?”

  It would probably be best if I close my curtains now. I will close my curtains and pretend to sleep on the floor. My bed might not be safe and besides, it is not that comfortable. The sheets haven’t been washed in God-knows-how-long. The blankets are made of some sort of heavy wool and they, too, have been left unwashed. My whole bedtime experience is quite uncomfortable. I could probably remedy that by washing the sheets and blanket but I always seem to forget. Is that why I cannot sleep? Are the germs (my own personal germs) stimulating the cells of my body, keeping them awake, forbidding the act of sleeping, of dreaming, simply because it is in their primitive germ-minds to do so? They should know I am not their enemy.

  My floor on the other hand is quite comfortable. I don’t have a carpet. It’s just your typical hardwood but somehow it seems to adapt to the contours of my body. It could just be my imagination. It probably is. But regardless it is still a comfortable spot to rest especially
after I got rid of the ants.

  The ants invaded about a year ago. I might have told you about it before.

  They were just regular black ants. I don’t know the species but they weren’t special in any way other than being incredibly annoying to me. I had tried plenty of store-bought ant traps but they only ended up working for a few days and then the ants would be back. Finally I discovered that talcum powder worked. I sprinkled it along the wall and on the floor and it made the ants run crazily around the floor as if in some sort of hallucinatory panic. Though I did not revel in their feverish demise, I had no choice but to deter them from ever stepping foot in my room again.

  There were no doubt plenty of the things in the walls and under the floor but I never saw them after I put the talcum powder down. It was, for all intents and purposes, magical powder.

  I remember when I was sprinkling the powder down my neighbor saw me through the window. Surely I looked like a lunatic pouring the powder all over my room looking like a man in the middle of a cocaine orgy. But my neighbor’s judgment of me was the least of my concerns. I probably could have waved and explained what I was doing but it just didn’t seem appropriate. My neighbor would have thought I was unstable. They would probably not believe me no matter what I had said.

  So I kept tons of this magical powder all over my house just in the event of another invasion. I suppose it makes me sound strange keeping all that powder nearby just in case of some ants but I like to be prepared.

  Hence the cassette player by my bed.

  Though I haven’t had a real dream in fifteen years, I’ve had my share of false dreams. They come to me without notice and so I needed something easy to operate in order to archive them. Once the false dreams came on, I reach over and press the PLAY and RECORD buttons at the same time. The built-in microphone captured it all.

  Wait, my neighbor is talking again. But with whom?

  “The moon is tight. Is he talking to a machine?”

  I have several dozen cassette tapes strewn around my room, in my hall closet, and on the kitchen table. I listen to them when I’m not working and that is most of the time. Some of things on those cassettes, well, some of them I just don’t remember recording to begin with. Sometimes I think that perhaps I do sleep and dream. Maybe those are recordings of my sleep-talking. But that really can’t be it because I have memories of sitting near the recorder and talking. I just don’t have any memory of what I had actually talked about.

  There’s my neighbor again.

  “Yes, insects…..some archives, still talking.”

  I crawl along the floor and place the tape recorder on the windowsill. I press PLAY and RECORD. It is as much for my neighbor as it is for me. I want to hear what they have to say.

  “Do we have any milk? Alcohol?”

  *

  At breakfast, I play the cassette. As I eat my pancakes, I listen to my neighbor’s nocturnal soliloquy.

  “The wallpaper in his house curls up whenever I look at it. It’s as if my mind controls it. It’s very bizarre. He’s always staring over here and I wonder if he’s checking to see if my wallpaper does the same. No, it doesn’t. But why must he stare? Ever since his mother died, he’s been creeping around. Yes, part of me feels sorry for him but…he’s just making these meetings more awkward. There must be something in the night table drawer that will….”

  Then there is static. I don’t know where the static came from but when it leaves, I hear my neighbor’s voice again but this time it is quieter, more conspiratorial.

  “Something like sleep, yes. Oh, the cold is still there of course. We’ll capture it in due time. Just a few more things we need. It’s all in the book.”

  And that’s when my false dream kicks in. I start babbling about the weather and about the insects and about how they might come back as monstrous creatures, mutated by the talcum powder, ready to crush me beneath their feet. I also mention something about my childhood, about my cat Humphrey dying, about how my mother warning me about sex and how when you have intercourse with one person you are having intercourse with every person they have ever had intercourse with. The false dreams become more bizarre: I must have gotten really close to the tape recorder’s microphone as I start to describe a giraffe on a bicycle and a man dressed as an Indian chief who has a cantaloupe in his mouth. The cantaloupe expands into a planet and the planet turns out to be a germ on my unwashed bed. It envelopes me and sucks the health out of my body. The germ wants all the dreams to itself and that is why I cannot truly dream.

  Then my neighbor’s voice again.

  “Turn the tape recorder off. Turn it off!”

  I nearly choke on my pancakes.

  I turn the tape recorder off and throw it down the basement steps.

  *

  Now I sleep in my mother’s old room.

  The bedding is clean (for now) and the wallpaper is neither distracting nor boring. In addition to the change in rooms, I do not record my false dreams anymore. The cassette player is in many pieces at the bottom of the basement stairs. Occasionally I open the door and look down at it. I believe the small mechanical destruction should be left there like sacred runes.

  So now my bedtime ritual is this: I get a warm blanket and snuggle in bed with a pillow. The patches of cold are in this room as well. That’s one thing I can’t escape. Then I put on a foreign film on the television and I keep a watchful eye out for invading ants. It is not the most comforting ritual but it has gotten me through a few nights during which I believe I might have slept two or three minutes. While trying to fall asleep, I can also smell my mother’s perfume: Seven Winds.

  The films I watch do a lot to distract me from the disturbing static I had heard from the tape recorder as well as the fact that I no longer have the machine to explore my archives. I find that the static still clings to my mind more than any other sound. It’s like snow made of glue lingering around my head, attempting to block my thoughts.

  Still, I concentrate on being warm and following the butchered subtitles of the foreign film. They are talking about a woman being sick with fever and a gong is being struck. Someone is running through the snow.

  From the new room I can occasionally hear my neighbor but the voice is very faint this time.

  “New room now. The cold is going to take him now….just like his mother.”

  ARGON SEIZURE

  Someone once told me the hotel was primed for demolition. Like always, I had responded with skepticism.

  I have never seen anything get destroyed. I have never seen anything ruined or in any state of decay. Perhaps I have lived a sheltered life but for all I know, every object, person, and idea is immune to any form of degeneration or decay. People, objects, and thoughts are frozen in time but allowed to move just enough to give the impression of progress, of an eventual movement towards some destiny far off in the future. It will be a future of sameness and of an unchanged maturity.

  But, like I said, perhaps I have lived a sheltered life.

  When I arrive at the hotel, I find out that my room is on the top floor for which I am pleased. Despite not liking water in general, I am looking forward to a good view of the ocean. It is better than looking out at the city with all its buildings puffing smoke, noise, and artificial light. There are too many people in the city, too many busy people who live to work and work to live. The ocean provides a blank slate for my thoughts whereas the urban landscape provides nothing but a reminder of the unnatural state of things, at the chaos that eats away at the very soul of a human being. Of course, it is not something I have ever witnessed personally but I have heard stories about cities and I wish to see no decay…..only stillness and some form of purity. I do not even want to catch a whiff of urban putrefaction. So this is why I was glad to have the view of the water.

  Upon entering the hotel room, I see that the housekeeper must have spent a good amount of time getting it ready. Everything is immaculate, even the television remote control which, from what I have heard, should
be the filthiest thing in the room.

  I sit on the bed, exhausted from the trip but not exhausted enough to lie down and nap. Sleep would be needed eventually but not yet. Things have to be done before I can give myself the luxury of dreaming.

  The windows appear freshly washed. It is as if there is no glass separating me from the outside. I stand up and walk over to check for sure that there is something protecting me from falling out of the building. I put my hand out and touch the warm smoothness of the glass. I am worried its temperature will soon rise to the point of melting. I do not want to be burned by fiery glass. I do not want to fall out of the window.

  I pull my hand away for it is like touching a warm corpse.

  Still, I stay put, looking out and watching the dark green sea as it ripples and pulsates. After staring into its surface for a few minutes, I go back to the bed and turn the television on with the freshly cleaned remote control.

  Television provides me with life outside of my thoughts. But maybe I just like the noise. It produces sounds I don’t have to take part in, voices I don’t have to respond to. It is a way of being a part of society without actually taking part in society.

  Therefore I have little need of real friends or family. Instead, I let the television programs act as the outside chaos that would otherwise engulf my senses and emotional stability. Television broadcasts never decay. They are, in a way, eternal.

  I never followed any particular program, though. I don’t make any effort to have the television on at any particular time. I let my whim dictate my interactions with the shows. The randomness of my viewing exposes me to a myriad number of life experiences. I never know what the day will bring.

  This particular hotel room television is ancient. I am sure one of the dust-covered speakers is blown out because the noise sounds lopsided and muffled which makes everything that comes out of it resemble slow ocean waves. I am soothed into a state of calm.

  It is during this state of calm that the hotel starts to collapse.