Gateways to Abomination Read online

  Whittier, an obstinate, thick dud of a man, began frantically reciting a fractured version of the Lord's Prayer:

  Our Father

  Who aren’t in Heaven

  Hollow be thy name

  Thy kingdom done…

  I held up a hand and he stopped, but began gulping rapidly. I could only stand stunned, and a nurse who had been watching from the treeline bolted forward and plunged down into the cellar. She grabbed the baby and helped it pull at its stinking black rind. She was sobbing, and her eyes were red. I accompanied her to the offices of my family doctor, the venerable Dr. Gladmost Alespiller. He took in the infant, and set up a room for him in a nursery that had been meant for his own son, who had died in childbirth, dragging Mrs. Alespiller with him back into blackness.

  The nurse took up residence with the young doctor. It was quite a scandalous arrangement for the time, an abominable coupling with an abomination for a child. They seldom left the house, and not long after, the good Doctor stopped seeing patients. Walking by at night became a hobby for the curious. Sometimes the sounds of the couple's lovemaking could be discerned, and it was all shrieks and curses and mutterings. The next window over was that of the nursery. It glowed warmly, as though beckoning to cold travelers. No one knew what happened to the boy until much later, of course.

  the first to die

  On 12 November 1923, an overcast, drizzling day, the Bridge Street Cemetery was empty of living souls, save an elderly couple visiting the grave of their daughter, the victim of a ghastly murder as yet unsolved. At length they rose carefully from their knees, clasped swollen, liver spotted hands, and walked the grounds at a snail's pace, shoulder to shoulder, heads down.

  As they passed a large mausoleum, the old man heard a crack, as that of an aged planck of wood being forcefully split. His companion heard nothing. As they rounded the curve on the walk, he spied a thin tombstone split down the middle in a cloud of dissolved stone. Then suddenly, shockingly, a splintered and bowed oak coffin launched forth from the earth like a rocket, in an explosion of sodden dirt and rocks and roots. For a moment it seemed to hang in the grey sky, then it landed hard acrost a wrought iron gate, spilling its grim contents heavily onto the wet ground.

  The body, thirteen weeks under, was trembling with the crude and squirming purple denizens of the deep ground. Grey flesh clung to and hung from the dirty bone of the collapsed face. Incredibly, the thing clasped at the top of the gate and pulled itself to a crouching position.

  It then began taking horrific, shambling, shaking steps in the direction of the stunned elders, each step shaking loose showers of dirt and beetles from its torn suit. Its jaw hung open obscenely, busted at its leftward hinge and bouncing brokenly as the thing lurched and pulled and limped forward.

  And as I neared them, they at once turned and broke into a miserable parody of a run, the woman emitting, "Oh...oh...oh..." I laughed and it sounded like rocks pushing insistently against a shit-covered wall. As I approached the fleeing couple my femur cracked wetly and I tumbled to one knee, which broke loose at the hinge and splayed me out across a flat grave marker. I began dragging myself still forward. I found another fence and pulled myself up as the car shuttled away the mortified seniors, its engine attempting to roar but mostly belching and farting out rancid grey clouds. Thus thwarted, I turned...

  ...to find four venerable and familiar men standing in a half circle before me. "Benjamin," I said, my dry tongue pushing upward through black mud. "Be still," said Guy and pulled from his vestments a thick volume with a cracked spine and water bloated brown pages. The men, my friends, spoke in unison in an unfamiliar tongue. At length I felt myself crumple and fall, and yet I still stood. I looked down upon my shattered, rotted remains as though they were foul robes dropped at my feet at the commencement of some dark orgy. I looked back up at my companions, my saviors.

  Minutes later, sauntering downtown, we came upon a motorcar on its side, its wheels spinning vainly. The old man from the cemetery was pulling himself from the wreck through a fetid stew of his wife's shredded bowels and broken glass and a lake of blood. We gathered around him and tore him to pieces. Benjamin was cackling and it shot fear through me and shutters and blinds closed and horses reared and the ghostly sun took shelter in an ancient elm and my throat was full of blood and dogs barked like an insane chorus and I was home and new born and ready to fuck.

  the gossip hour

  In early 1904 rumors began circling in the taverns and restaurants of an increase in occult dabblings amongst certain town officials in collusion with the strange and silent men sometimes seen gathering on corners and in parks and schoolyards. Unconfirmed reports of inexplicable happenings circulated in the sewing circles and poker games and barber shops.

  There was the story of the Whately baby born with gossamer black wings that grew from its shoulder blades and folded intricately behind its tiny pink back, and how the cursed thing, brought to the church to be blessed and cleansed of sin, flew up into the rafters and micturated blood upon the altar and the preacher and the congregation...

  ...and of the house which, when chopped with an axe, sprayed forth a fountain of blood...

  ...and of the boy with the head of a pig seen digging furiously at the ground in cemeteries or snorting madly at passing carriages...

  ...and of the child of but two who murdered her parents and chewed out their throats...

  ...and of the double headed worms burrowed into bread and uncooked meats that poisoned and made madmen out of several Hatfield townsfolk...

  ...and of the beetles the size of dinner plates that attached to the heads of unfortunate patients of the Northampton Lunatic Hospital, collapsing their skulls and liquefying their tortured brains.

  The Gazette's reporters tried to provide logical explanations for the disturbances and rumors thereof, but the wild talk continued unabated, as wild talk might in a small New England town nestled by a restless river.

  sermon

  Brothers and sisters, the Lord God has left me in silence. My calls for His words and guidance echo back to me in this hollow cave with its tuneless organ, its cracked and colored windows, its inhospitably tilted pews. I seek His throne and find it empty save for splinters. I seek His eyes and they are milky with cataracts. I reach for His hand and it crumples in mine like rotten fruit. I seek His footprints and they fill with black blood.

  The Lord, in a word, has stopped speaking to me.

  The rectory is cold and dank, my sermons degenerate into gibberish, and His rod and His staff skewer me, fixing me to the ground in this colorless land of wheeled and windowed tombs.

  And so I turn to you, my weary congregation, meek and humble, your Sunday best not quite good enough, with holes in your shoes and in your suits, your fabrics alive with flies, your buttons askew, your tongues swollen to black and bursting. I implore you to raise your cracked voices to the Lord and beg His return. The microphones are open and we are on the air. Clear your throats of beetles, of mud and decay, and open up your hymnals to page 40-12. Our listening audience awaits. Be sure to project.

  the reddening dusk

  In the high heat of August I hobbled along the secluded path which veined through the reedy meadows, through the bluets and the crabgrass, farther and farther from the clamor of downtown, to The House. A big black bird tittered in a barren tree. My bad leg thrummed and throbbed in rhythm with my bad teeth, jolting me to twitches.

  Still I propelled myself forward, for my Master had promised that he would bring forth from the grave my sweet Sylvia, whole and upright and real, so that I might finally have her for my own, in The House, Alone and No One Else.

  My Sylvia! Her eyes, impossibly green! Her softness and pink fat! Her bonnet and her dress and its flounces! Her secret parts a hidden pond in which I swum majestic and free! Her mouth, so small, but so shrill! Her hands, which did thrice betray me but did then stroke me until I could only forgive! Her eyes again, in terror and each reflecting my livid visage and the g
lint of my knife! My sorrow! My sorrow!

  GONE THESE MANY YEARS, I bellowed, and the cicadas kicked up a creaky chorus!

  BACK TO ME FOREVER, I cried, and a cloud of birds shot up through the treetops bleating!

  FORGIVE ME SHE WILL AND FOLD IN MY EMBRACE, I hollered, and the moon fair swung in the sky like a watch on a chain!

  HAPPY DAYS AND...

  "Shaddap!"

  I stopped cold. Who was out here in this waning hot afternoon, this reddening dusk?

  "Shaddap and get in the house!"

  The House! I now saw through the wall of trees the yellow rectangles flickering like candles. I pushed through the underbrush. It tore at my clothes, poked through my ribs, scratched around my eyes and tore at my trousers. Things inside me pulled and broke, bright white pains galloped through my joints, hot knives pinwheeled through my guts, but I pushed my way past the trees and through the crooked door into a cold foyer of dark wood and cobwebbed chairs.

  And now, down the stairs came my master, arms aloft, as though an angel descending in a ray of sunlight. So young, I thought. So young and cruel-eyed. A wispy halo of yellow hair and a lipless scar for a mouth.

  "Fuck you yelling about?" my master sang and I bowed in supplication. But then my elation, my anticipation, turned into terror. What if my master had failed me? What if my Sylvia did not await me, as promised, in this Hidden House?

  My master regarded me with a slack mouth and eyeballs like blue yolks. "LOOK at you!", he whispered. And, "Guys!", he yelled, and two young men, whip-thin and long of hair emerged from a doorway to my right. One of them looked at me and shrieked. The other picked up a small round table and jabbed it in my direction, the cobwebs tickling at my face with each thrust. The boy's breathing was ragged, his moon-face white and weathered.

  "Goddammit," I croaked. "WHERE IS MY SYLVIA?" And my master's minions rushed at and then around me, the one boy jabbing the table at me, creasing my skull. I went to my knees and saw blood dash onto the floorboards...but, no. Not blood. A spray of dirt, in which fat pink worms writhed like limbless pigs. Before I could make sense of this, the table walloped me again and I heard the boys break through the door and struggle through the underbrush, shrieking and weeping.

  My master now stood over me. "In the side room," he said, and fled after his friends. I rose, with some difficulty, and went into the room from whence the boys had come. A couch, bowed and faded, its flower pattern barely discernible under a blanket of dust. A flat, low table with an ashtray piled over with ash...so much ash...grey and piled and spilling over the edge...and reaching up through the ash a diamond ring and a painted fingernail. My Sylvia.

  I hoofed it out the door, sobbing and gibbering and bellowing.

  GONE TO ME FOREVER, I cried, and a whimper came from somewhere!

  WAKED AND BETRAYED AND BEATEN, I bellowed, and my master lay beneath me with purple ankle and foot set wrong!

  AND ALONE AND ALONE AND ALONE, I hollered, and I opened my master's belly and did crawl inside as the night crashed down and the trees screamed!