Nightmares From a Lovecraftian Mind

by Jordan Krall

  One would think such an event would be frightening and disorienting but I find it a relief, something akin to an orgasm. There is a rumbling below me and I feel the bed drop out from under me and I am falling, the ceiling following me down along with the television. It is a dreamlike freefall. It cocoons my body in dust and noise. Every solid object turns to brown mist and I am engulfed in a noisy removal from the spider web of my existence.

  I should have known this would happen. Someone once told me the hotel was primed for demolition. But like always, I had responded with skepticism.

  NIGHTMARES OF A PAMPINIFORM MIND

  In the 1980s, blood and magick were darker and sweeter than they are now.

  Hundreds of VCRs were soaked in unholy redness while beasts indulged their fantasies of magnetic bliss. They became phantasms of broken humanity, casting and breaking spells simultaneously.

  In the 1980s, blood was as pure as the blood of magnetic angels.

  Osman couldn’t remember his first experience with it. It might have been around 1980 while he was cruising around Central Park. Nothing could have stopped his lust for holes and hemoglobin. Eight hours a day. Seven days a week. He was a full-time lust slut out for blood, mucus, and magick.

  It is now 1981 at a spot near Balcony Bridge.

  Two skinny punks in denim and leather wait for action. Osman is more than happy to oblige.

  The first wears a t-shirt with the words DEEP DENDO emblazoned upon it while the second wears a leather vest with nothing underneath. Bulges in their jeans are more than obvious. The drugs in their systems remix their pulses into rapid fire rhythms of jacked-up disharmony. Crash cymbals of furious blood cells create a din of psychic submission.

  These two are ripe and horny young things unknowingly presenting themselves as submissive prey for Osman’s murderous conjuration.

  Primeval dominance in the modern world.

  Osman likes them; they are such long, pink pigs. He smells their filthy anticipation from where he stands behind a tree. After a brief blood prayer, he approaches them.

  “Lookin’ for action?” he says.

  The two punks giggle. The one in the DEEP DENDO shirt grabs his crotch and spits junky phlegm onto the ground where it splatters and oozes along a deep-red ley line.

  The other one snorts something and says, “Why? You game?”

  Osman steps closer. “I’d like to think you’re the game.”

  “Cute.”

  Osman takes two more steps and the punks are freefalling through a blissful oblivion of bloodlust and sodomy. Their gaping city-boy holes are torn up with blasphemous force.

  But they feel nothing but pleasure.

  Leather and denim disintegrate within the pulsing sphere of Osman’s magick. Flesh, muscle, fat, and bone follow suit but not before he feasts on dark punk-blood.

  It is done.

  Osman is left in a pile of plasma and neon semen. It reminds him of Times Square: the multicolor glow of sin and back alley blowjobs next to garbage cans, cardboard boxes, and crack addicts. Osman is familiar with every filthy crevice. He enjoys watching metropolitan morals melt like baby-fat candles. The high life is destroyed with every violent fisting and greased evocation. It is something Osman lives for.

  But now it is time for the cleanup.

  Osman uses a branch to sweep the plasmatic mess into the water. He knows it will cause pollution resulting in a wide array of mutations in the local animal population. It is inevitable. Osman had seen foxes with legs like elephant tusks, feral cats with eyes like volcanoes, spurting dust and oozing fiery excrement, and dogs that had turned into dark masses of eyes and mouths that kiss, kiss, kiss in the inky darkness.

  When he is done with the cleanup, Osman trolls through the park yet again but finds no one of interest. He stops by a tree to defecate and feels a pain in his ribs. Something is poking him from the inside. As he purges his bowels, the skin on his torso rips.

  Something is trying to get out.

  Osman slumps against the tree, falls into the dirt, and counts the sparks in front of his face. Blood-tinted semen ejaculates into spirals of reptilian hieroglyphs. Osman mutters a blood prayer in Aramaic.

  And then he sinks into the chthonic soil.

  ***

  It is now 1983 and it’s wake-up time for Osman.

  What the hell happened? He doesn’t know. He regains consciousness in a burial chamber of dirt, bird bones, and pebbles.

  Osman’s time-eaten brain recalls the Central Park incident. It seems like it was only a minute ago but he knows better. He had been asleep for a long time.

  He digs himself out of the ground. When he gets to the surface, Osman finds himself in the midst of a gangbang.

  Thirteen young men surround a middle-aged slob who is fat, balding, and enjoying himself. All his holes are filled. His glasses are falling off his face while scum drips down over his mustache.

  Osman thinks he looks like a priest sans religious garb. Something about him screams HOLY MAN while he kneels down and takes hardened members inside him. The pain of stretched orifices melds with the pleasure of blasphemous penetrations by the unholy, unwashed, and uncircumcised tentacles.

  The group of men doesn’t see Osman until it is too late.

  Within seconds the gangbang turns into a slaughter with all thirteen men stripped of skin and devoured in the haze of a hungry ritual. Osman eats hard and fast, pumping his iridescent fist into everything like a malnourished child confronted with a platter of sweets.

  But the balding man is spared Osman’s obscure passion.

  Spirals of post-human trash explode like crimson fireworks. Osman opens his mouth to catch every bit of filthy DNA.

  “Get up,” he says to the man who is still kneeling and trapped in a pentangle of carnage.

  “Please….don’t kill me…..” the man says.

  Osman crouches down. “What’s your name?”

  “Kevin.”

  “You’re leaking, Kevin.” Osman dips a finger into the man and pulls out a gob of something thick and glue-like.

  “Please don’t kill me.”

  “You said that already, Kevin. I’m not going to kill you but you’ll have to do something for me.”

  “Anything. You want to screw me? I’ll let you screw me. I’m just a dirty pig.”

  Osman laughs. The man is a glutton for abuse both physical and psychic. The gangbang was a planned event and Kevin probably paid for it with a moist wad of cash culled from weeks of insubstantial paychecks. “You want to be a dirty pig, do you? Is that was this was all about? You like to be treated like a worthless beast?”

  Kevin sniffles. “Yes.” He cries. “My wife….”

  “Your wife?”

  “My wife doesn’t understand me.”

  “I don’t imagine she could,” Osman says. For a few seconds he feels bad for the woman who is married to the pathetic, balding loser in front of him. Here was a man afraid to embrace his soul and instead pays ugly hustlers to plug his holes. How many diseases are festering inside Kevin? How many of those diseases will be passed along to his beloved?

  Kevin sobs. “Don’t tell my wife.”

  “Why would I do that? I don’t care enough about you to do that. I won’t tell your wife nor will I treat you like a worthless pig. What I want from you is a few minutes with your mind.”

  “My mind?”

  “Inside your mind there are worms,” Osman says. “But don’t feel special. Every person has them. They’re older than the human race. Sometimes they speak to you but you don’t know the voices are theirs. You’re weak and they’re strong and I want to speak with them.”

  “What’s going to happen to me?”

  “You won’t die if that’s what you’re thinking. You’ll probably get sick or at least sicker than you are but you won’t die.”

  Kevin puts his face in his hands, cracks his glasses between his fingers, and cries harder. “I’m crazy.”

  “No, Kevin. You’re not crazy.” Os
man grabs hold of the man’s skull. “No one is crazy.” He chews into the fat man’s skull.

  The slob Kevin has never experienced anything like this. He has never done drugs but he imagines if he had dropped acid, this is what it would be like. Multicolored patterns, shapes, and ancient words flutter in front of his eyes and plaster themselves on the trees and the sky. Slimy and obscene sigils pulsate around geometric atrocities. Hairy creatures stomp out of monolithic tombs and rape-slaughter a clan of ghouls.

  Kevin feels two thin needles in his head. He feels a tongue flicker like an oversexed candle.

  Osman is speaking to the worms.

  He psychically devours the last two years of Kevin’s life. He takes in the secrets of the worms, the secrets he lacks despite having spoken to many skulls in his lifetime. He performs surgery as ancient as the pyramidal death rays of R’lyeh.

  Time slows for him. It takes only ten minutes for Osman to speak for decades with the worms.

  Kevin is enjoying the visions of young cocks in the gym, straddling him, destroying him, sowing seeds of secret flowers within his cheeks, down his throat and into his stomach where they will bloom into enteric incantations. Neon mouthwash is used to cleanse him of his clandestine acts.

  “What do the worms say?” Kevin asks. He pulls himself back from the visions in order to ask this question.

  Osman does not answer. He is too busy curling his psychical tongue around worm breath.

  Osman stands up. “I’m done.”

  “I can go?”

  “Yes.”

  “Am I hurt?”

  “You’re bowels looks worse than your head,” Osman says. “Go to a hospital.”

  “I can’t. My wife will find out.”

  “Then get a divorce.”

  “But I’m hurt.”

  “Then get a band-aid, Kevin.”

  Osman drifts away on the night wind in the direction of Times Square.

  ***

  Ghosts of spent scum are tattooed on the skin of hustlers and junkies.

  Osman smells every bit of rancid ink and remembers the time when debauchery was hidden in acherontic castles and crypts, hidden within pleasure/pain rituals. Now everything is out in the open.

  Everything is on display.

  Neon signs tell Osman there are live girls available for peep shows. These shows are familiar to him. It had been a novelty at one time but now it is a familiar vice.

  He walks inside one place that claims to have the hottest girls in the city. Osman knows this is a lie but he is willing to give them a chance. The ceiling and walls are covered in skin-candles and white flames. They are being pumped, massaged, worshiped, painted, and blown out. In between these fleshy rites are strands of hair and chipped nail polish falling like a blizzard of black, blue, and pink. Rows of VHS tapes, harbingers of arcane summoning, strange-form darkened rows. The magnetic hiss penetrates Osman.

  He walks up to the counter and inquires about the peep show. The man behind the counter answers with a heavy sigh and points to the booths in the back of the store. “There,” he says.

  Osman nods.

  The booths are dark and smell like urine and Coca-Cola.

  A short, black woman stands in front of the nearest booth. She blows him a kiss and beckons him to come over. “Hey sweetie,” she says.

  “Hey,” Osman says.

  “Want a show?”

  “I think I would.”

  “Come on,” she says, leading him into one side of the booth while she goes around the back to get into her glass enclosure, her cage.

  There is a handwritten sign telling Osman to insert money into the slot. He puts his hand over it, mutters a few words in German, and watches as the girl is revealed. Her eyes are dizzied and dark blue.

  She struts and gyrates. She sits on a barstool and flexes the muscles of her inner thighs as if to tell Osman she would make a good partner. There is no doubt in Osman’s mind the girl is willing to do anything for money. But he isn’t there to judge her.

  Though he has watched thousands of women dance before him throughout his lifetime, this black woman fills Osman with melancholy. He searches the ancient cells throughout his brain to figure out the reason for this but comes up empty handed. There is no reason why he should feel such a connection with this short, black woman who is now revealing her unkempt womanhood.

  She moves it so close it is practically touching the glass. Osman thinks he can see it expel a cloudy mist as if it is trying to tell him it is alive and ready for salvation, for release, for freedom from its imprisonment in the nether regions of this desperate woman.

  Osman strokes the glass in front of the vagina and mutters a spell. The womanhood retreats back into its folds. The shade goes down, blocking out the woman. Osman does not touch the machine to have another show. Instead, he walks out of the booth and back outside to the city street.

  His eyes are now dizzied and dark blue.

  ***

  Flakes of drug-addled skin sputter into tendrils and fly into loops down the alleyways. They make their way to the sidewalk where they are stomped upon by street people, scum punks, weekend cocksuckers, and wayward salary men.

  Microscopic blood drifts through the air and Osman sticks out his tongue to taste the environmental storm of redness. He is fueled by the ingestion.

  He is startled by a voice that says, “There’s something wrong with you.”

  Osman turns his head to see the source. Standing to the side of him is an extremely hairy dwarf in a t-shirt that says DEEP DENDO.

  “Do I know you?” Osman says.

  “You probably should.”

  “Okay then.” Osman steps towards the hairy figure.

  “You gave birth to me,” the dwarf says, pointing to Osman’s torso.

  Osman runs his hand along his body, feels the soreness. “Seems like it. That explains a lot.” Osman aches with maternal-paternal confusion.

  The dwarf says, “After I left you I explored the crimson abyss. I rode the plasma through eons of neon atrocities to the cold wastes of cloudy glass.”

  “Sounds like you had a good time,” Osman says. “Very adventurous of you.”

  “This is not a joke. I wished you would have been there. I ate and drank from the very hands of the Queen in Red.”

  “So my offspring made such great strides. I should be so proud, huh?”

  “Yes,” says the dwarf. “But there is something wrong with you. Nightmares perhaps? Nightmares of a blossom you cannot expel. Nightmares of a hole you cannot dig.”

  “I don’t think so.” Osman shakes his head. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to feed on the city?” the dwarf says. “I would like to.”

  “Are you asking me to become your master?”

  “No,” the dwarf says. “I am asking to become yours.”

  Osman laughs and his voice echoes through the trash, waking up the homeless sub-humans, their wine mucus spilling out into occult shapes of primordial inspiration. They will have countless days trying to dispel the desires to reconstruct lost idols out of cardboard and whiskey bottles.

  “My master?” Osman says.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve given birth to a joker.”

  “You think so?”

  “No other explanation. There’s no way you can be my master.”

  “Stranger things have happened.”

  “Indeed.”

  The dwarf approaches quickly. Two of his yellow fingers strike. Osman’s alchemized veins tremble and squirm like thirsty worms after a rain of LSD.

  “What are you doing to me?”

  “Nothing you will not do to yourself in time,” the dwarf says. “In time.”

  Osman melts through the asphalt and into the sewer system.

  ***

  In the sewers there are ancient beasts.

  Osman knows the stories about them: the plague-eaters, the fecal dog-flowers of Leng imported by a Tibetan immigrant in 1866.

  O
sman falls into a pile of them. They cry out in a language older than civilization, a language like the violent expulsion of tortured cows: obsidian mantras of rage.

  Their leaves and thorns dig into his pale flesh and try to drink of his power.

  “I have no business with you,” Osman says.

  The plant-matter beasts speak his language now. “Then eat,” they say, loosening a lotus flower that falls onto Osman’s lips. He takes it into his mouth and swallows.

  The dwarf stands in front of him on a pedestal of glass, bone, and frozen blood that is both ancient and inhuman.

  “Father,” he says. “Call me master.”

  “No.”

  The dwarf digs his hand into the squirming plants and pulls out a bulbous skull.

  “Who is that?” Osman says.

  “Don’t you mean who was it?”

  “Who was it?”

  “It was you.”

  Osman sees the resemblance. It is indeed him. “How?”

  The dwarf laughs. “How!”

  Leaves fall from the sewer’s ceiling and the water below bubbles into brown spheres of filth. The bubbles surround Osman. They tickle him. They entice him. They poison and pervert him.

  Vines drop down and pull him to the surface.

  Osman is pulled through the asphalt and is standing face to face with a New York City police officer.

  ***

  “Got I.D.?”

  “No.”

  “Turn around.”

  But Osman has no intention of complying. He stares the cop down. There is no way in hell he is going to be handcuffed.

  “Turn the hell around, faggot.”

  “No.”

  Nightstick strikes abdomen. Osman barely feels it but he is so drained that he falls to the ground. He is handcuffed and put into a patrol car. The backseat smells like overtime sweat and abuse of power.

  Sleep comes fast.

  Sleep……

  ***

  False bloody sunshine oozes down through florescent lights and illuminates police work. Paper shuffles around, pens scribble, typewriters go: click, click, click, tap, tap.

  And Osman is cold on the cell floor. His nose bleeds wasted nutrients. He wishes for a chance to strangle the dwarf but then remembers it is his son or at least some form of offspring.