Nightmares From a Lovecraftian Mind

Jordan
Krall

Nightmares of a
Pampiniform
Mind
© 2011 Jordan
Krall
and originally appeared in the AKLONOMICON anthology.

His Candescence,
A
Reptant
Hell and Hail Desire
and
The Bodies of Cold Gentlemen ©
2011 Jordan
Krall
and were previously published in UNFRUITFUL WORKS but have been slightly
revised for this collection.

And You Should
Believe in Solar Lodges
© 2011 Jordan
Krall
and
was previously published in the COPELAND VALLEY SAMPLER.

Argon Seizure
©
2012 Jordan
Krall
and was originally included in
FALSE
MAGIC
KINGDOM
.

All
other material © 2012 Jordan
Krall
and our original
to this collection.

Cover art by Mike
Lamb.

Published by

Respectfully
Dedicated

to

Wilum
H.
Pugmire

CONTENTS

XNOYBISTIC FRAGMENTS FOUND IN AN INDUSTRIAL PARK

HAIL DESIRE AND THE BODIES OF COLD GENTLEMEN

AND YOU SHOULD BELIEVE IN SOLAR LODGES

I discovered the works of H.P.
Lovecraft
at the impressionable age of 12. That was about
around the same time my parents were taking me on countless vacations to
Atlantic City
,
New Jersey
. I even bought a copy of
Lurker at the Threshold
in a bookstore
on the boardwalk. It was at this time that I started to write a small amount of
horror fiction. Because of this I associate HPL with that city. Those towering
hotels strike me as very sinister as does the ocean across the boardwalk. I
also refuse to step foot in the ocean (though this is probably only partially
due to
Lovecraft’s
watery horrors. Since I was a
small child, I often worried about my father going too far into the ocean and
the possibility of his being lost terrified me). This information is just
background of my fearful nostalgia.

So from age 12 I was influenced by the hints
of cosmic horrors and the earthly cults that worshipped them. I think that was
the part that scared me the most: that there was the possibility that seemingly
normal people could harbor such infernal interests. These cult members could be
of an intellectual sort, both fanatical and educated. To me, that was and is a
frightening combination.

I did not begin to write fiction seriously
until I was in my mid 20s and by that time I knew I was not going to be able to
emulate the prose style of
Lovecraft
despite my
adoration of his work. But I never really thought I had to. I needed to have my
own style, my own voice, and try to pass on that feeling of dread and cosmic
otherness to the reader on my own terms. That’s what you are going to be
reading in this book: stories and prose poems that encompass my own fears of
personal, physical, and cosmic horrors.

I am fully aware there are
Lovecraftian
purists who snub their noses at anything that
deviates from their definition of what constitutes good
Lovecraftian
writing or anything that has the wee bit of sex or violence. This is the 21
^st
century and for a genre (or sub-genre) to stay fresh, we need to let modern
sensibilities seep through. But that is only my opinion.

As a warning, there is one story in this
collection that may offend some whose tastes are old-fashioned. That story is
Nightmares
of a
Pampiniform
Mind
which was written for the
AKLONOMICON anthology published by
Aklo
Press. Those
with weak stomachs may feel free to skip that one. However, if you are indeed
willing to read it, I ask that you do so with an open mind. You will not find
anything extremely gratuitous. Instead, you will find a writer trying to write
through the cosmic terror in his own voice, in his own way.

Also, you will
not
find a copious
number of
Cthulhu
Mythos references. There may be a
handful of references in one story (
Nightmares
of a
Pampiniform
Mind
) but as a whole, I have not
followed suit with most mythos writers. Instead, I tried to channel the
nightmares
Lovecraft
(and other
Lovecraftian
writers) has given me into something personal.

Well, here we go….into the ocean I am
terrified of, into the cosmic nightmares I truly know exist.

Jordan
Krall
,
East Brunswick
,
2012

Our shouting does
not open the gates for there are no gates. Our pleading does not pave the way
for there is no way. Our hearts do not beat for the universe for there is no
universe and we have no hearts.

As our voices lay
like concrete upon the weakening foundation of our father’s homestead, we
realize the prices we will have to pay are astronomical. Still, the omens we
speak, the ones we shout and declare, are simple ripples in the pond of our
insignificance.

But we still have
the omens.

They are our own.
They are ours to keep locked within our wooden skulls, the skulls some have
opened to reveal our brains and count the rings. Our brains, those simple grey
kites confused in the wind, playing pretend in morbid minstrel shows:
pockmarked dolls spitting and swearing for the amusement of those tourists
brave, or bored, enough to stop and stare at us.

Our brains tell us
our omens are true, but blanketed in false starts and illusionary symbols. We
cannot stutter forever…despite our tongues that are stiffened and paralyzed by
fear of the inevitable.

Our omens
must
be true.

Our own grey
matter
magick
would not deceive us.

Our speech is lost
in the heavy breath of those oblivious deities we’ve ignored, those deities who
have despised us and our infantile projections, expectations, and rebirth. But
our omens must be true for they have brought us here.

They have brought
us back to the womb.

Our omens must be
true.

It began with a
visit to the doctor and ended with a trip to the moon.

Of course, our
father was scheduled to go to the moon well before his visit to the doctor. But
that appointment is what led him to believe that I,
his only son
, was
the cause of his long dormant insanity that had begun to manifest itself in his
erratic behavior. You may not have noticed this behavior because your
relationship with him has been strained over the years but if you had been
here, you would have seen it: his reading books in languages he did not
understand, ignoring life long friends he encountered on the street, dressing in
clothing that looked more eighteenth century than twenty-first. These are the
things he did in your absence.

And he blamed all
of it on me.

It was gradual,
this blaming, and if I had known what was to happen, I wouldn’t have even
driven father to his doctor’s appointment. If I had known this so-called
professional physician was going to reinforce or encourage the paranoid mental
processes of our father, I would have chosen another one. Why should I take the
blame for the disease of another person? It is clear his condition was a latent
one, gathering momentum throughout his life, before my birth and through his
marriage to our mother. Why should it be the son who is responsible for the
father’s mental and physical failures?

But I am not one
to complain. I can only make observations.

Before his
departure to the moon, father mailed me a large black envelope which contained
six hundred and five type-written pages. I have no doubt he typed them up all
himself on that archaic little typewriter mother had gotten him for an
anniversary gift so many years ago.

The paper he had
used was thin, almost translucent and apparently he did not believe in
traditional margins as the words came a quarter of an inch to the edges of the
paper as if he needed to squeeze in as much as on the skin-like paper as
possible.

You probably want
to know what our father had typed but I cannot sum the content up without
dizzying myself into some manic state of untranslatable insanity. He had typed
up English words, yes, but in such a blasphemous combination, a hypnotic code
of syllables and punctuation that was exhausting to read. I could not finish it
because I imagined father laughing to himself as he thought of my perusing his
six hundred and five page declaration of blame and I was unwilling to give him
the satisfaction.

I threw the
manuscript in the trash. If he was to ask me where the pages were, I was
planning to tell him I sent it to the moon, that it was waiting for him there.
I am sure he would not have appreciated my sense of humor.

But he never did
ask about it.

The day before he
was to launch, though, he telephoned me.

“I’m leaving
tomorrow, son.”

“I know.”

“You have anything
to say?”

“You called
me
. Do
you
have anything to say?”

No response.

Then I said, “I hope
you have a safe flight.” But I really didn’t mean it. I hadn’t cared either
way.

“No flight is ever
safe,” he said.

“Well then…”

“But you could
apologize.”

“Apologize for
what
?”

A
heavy sigh from father.

“For
what
?”
I repeated my question
even though I knew what I needed to apologize for.

“There’s iron at
the core of the moon, more than was previously thought, I mean.
Oceans, too, magma, something like pyramidal faces.
I’m
going to be seeing it all. I’m going to
study
them.”

“Do I need to know
this? Will this help me?”

“Nothing will help
you, son.”

“So why tell me?”

“Because
I have nothing else to say to you.
Nothing at all,
son.”

Then he hung up
the phone.

I did not watch
the launch on television the next day but I dreamt about it. I dreamt my father
went up there alone. He was dressed not for space but for some semi-formal
affair. His hair was slicked back and his mustache neatly trimmed. He had used
some extremely pungent mouthwash that made my dream-eyes water. When he reached
the moon, he explored a crater and found the black envelope containing the
manuscript he had sent to me. He chuckled and read it aloud in my dream and I
was forced to listen to every word.

The following day
I made an appointment with my father’s doctor. I see him this evening,
actually. I hope I can get to the bottom of this. I will insist the doctor
explain himself, to explain my father’s condition and why I was to blame. If
not, then I don’t know what I’ll do.

Truly,
I do not know what I will do
.

I. Revulsions of
the
Kyphotic

Before he could speak his father’s name,
Lucasse
needed to down a glass of cold milk and alcohol.
The combination of liquids soothed his chest, stomach, and bowels where it then
exited in a very brief but loud fecal exorcism. During that process, he was
able to utter the word that was the closest thing to a curse that was ever
expelled from
Lucasse’s
lips.

“Maurent.”

There. He said it. He spoke it into the broken air. He spoke
it into the corner of his room, the corner where the wallpaper was stripped
away by the insects and where layers stains of unknown origin combined to form
abstract pornography.

Lucasse
waited.

He waited for no specific result, no specific end to his ongoing
turmoil. Every incident in the past had been different, every result a separate
personal cataclysm independent from the last yet related by a similar set-up:
the
milk and alcohol ritual
. An outsider would not have thought each episode to
be linked but
Lucasse
knew better. He knew the truth.

Or rather the truth he wanted to believe: that his father’s
eyes would come back to look after him.

For years
Lucasse
had been a
guest in his Aunt
Eurice’s
home in a town he had
never heard of before coming to visit. The name of the town was generic and one
Lucasse
had a difficult time remembering. In fact,
there were times he had suspected the town did not even exist prior to his
arrival as if it had been invented simply to accommodate his needs.
Lucasse
normally
shrugged off that arrogance until the next time he took a walk around the town
and felt that same feeling of
newness
that was out of place in a town that looked so ancient, so colonial. Most of
the buildings were supposedly built two centuries ago yet they held a fresh
presence, an almost psychic weight of modernity that should have been alien to
such structures.

Lucasse
had once taken a walk through a small patch of woods that
led to a large farm house. Nothing seemed peculiar until he walked alongside the
house and felt a severe pain in his temple. At first he thought it was the
sunlight piercing his eyes but realized the sun was hidden by a bulbous cloud
like a child hiding from its mother. As the mystery of the pain swirled in his
head, all sounds of nature ceased. It was then that
Lucasse
knew it was the house itself that had somehow struck him. It was the house that
was telling
Lucasse
it was not what it seemed to be.
It was not an old house despite its appearance and its half-page of faux
history in the brochure available at the town hall. Through the giving of pain
it was spilling its ancient secrets, a newborn revealing its true nature
through anguished howling out of a mouth of blood. The house was a cranky
newborn made of wood and paint and its primal cries had pierced
Lucasse
, causing the pain in his head. After walking around
to the back of the farmhouse, he decided to knock on the door to see if anyone
lived there who could provide him with answers. If they couldn’t offer that,
then maybe they’d give him a drink of water or perhaps, if they were liberal
about such things, a small drink of alcohol.

Three knocks on the door brought nothing but a wind chime’s
weak song despite his feeling no wind.
Lucasse
opened
the screen door and stepped into the porch. It smelt of moss and blown-out
candles. Magazines were strewn across the floor. All of the titles had been
cleanly cut off with a razor.
Lucasse
crouched down
to pick one of them up but found it stuck to the floor by a yellowish gummy
substance.

He wiped his fingers on his shirt and stood up.

The door to the interior of the house opened on its own,
revealing a tenebrous chamber that was nothing like the inside of any house
Lucasse
had ever known. It was more like what he imagined a
stomach of a whale would look like: humid, dank, and dark with swollen shadows
that moved in waves.

“Hello?” he said to the blackness.

No voice answered. There was only the chimes again, brief
and weak but sinister in a way only soft sounds could be, like the footsteps of
a home invader or the sharpening of a butcher’s blade.

“Anyone here?” he said. “I was just wondering if I could
have a drink. I’ve been walking for a long time.”

No answer.

But the shadows at the heart of the room started to spread,
making everything darker.
Lucasse
didn’t think that
was possible: shadow within shadow within shadow within an even darker shadow.
An infinite black.

Then he found himself lying on the couch with an icepack on
his forehead.

“Where am I?”

A voice from behind him said, “You’re home.”

It was his Aunt
Eurice
. This was
her
house.

The shadows above him swayed with the sound of chimes.

“I’ll show you to your room,” Aunt
Eurice
said.

That is when
Lucasse
fell asleep.

II. Once When the Sky was Outnumbered

There was only one park in town and Roux spent most of his
time there. Though some citizens enjoyed taking walks, flying kites, or playing
with their children, Roux could usually be found in the park reading a book on
one of the wooden benches.

Before leaving his house to go to the park, Roux would run
his hands along his many shelves and take a book at random. He needed it to be
random. In fact, every night he rearranged the books on the shelves while
keeping his eyes closed. Making decisions was difficult for Roux and so he
decided to let chance dictate what it was that he read.

Book reading was not the only thing chance dictated. Roux’s
meals were chosen at random from random menus from various eateries that
delivered to his home. Roux did not want to have the responsibility associated
with such decisions. If a decision was poor, he’d rather be angry at the
silent, allusive god called Chance than at himself.

On this particular morning he was sitting on a bench
reading a book on the history of industrial parks. He hadn’t even remembered
purchasing the book yet he must have since it had been sitting on his shelf. He
had never received a book as a gift even when he had family who would be so
inclined to present him with such an item. Roux concluded he must have bought
it during one of his rare book-buying binges during which he would grab the
first few books from a random shelf and pay for them in a frantic display of
monetary irresponsibility. Still, he was surprised he hadn’t remembered
bringing such a title home. Oh well, he thought, it was surely just as good as
the rest of them.

It wasn’t a particularly sunny day nor could it really be
considered cloudy. It was, Roux thought, somewhere in between the two. The air
was neither warm nor cool. It was as if the air came from a yet undiscovered
season. No wind blew through the park; it was a morning of stillness and Roux
was terrified.

He looked down at his book. The words on the page were
jumbled. They were begging for wind, begging for something to move it away from
Roux’s hands which were too smooth, too unused. The letters, which were
previously all English, had somehow been transformed into insidious shapes and
sigils foreign to any alphabet Roux had ever seen.

Roux knew the book wanted to disown him. It had altered
itself (or had let itself become altered by some outside force invisible to
Roux) just to distance itself from him. The book had become an outsider in his
hands.

Or, Roux contemplated, it had made
him
the outsider.

There were other people in the park and Roux knew they were
trying to hide their suspicious looks.

He also knew one of those people was going to kill him.

How he knew this, he didn’t know. It was a question Roux
could not or would not answer. If the explanation was there inside his mind it
was hidden under some unconscious blanket of fear and self-illusion. It was a
truth worth hiding from his awareness. It was not a truth that was going to
manifest itself like some quant introspective epiphany. Roux simply knew that
someone in the vicinity of the bench was going to extinguish his life right
there in the park.

But he also knew he could not
leave
the park.

Leaving would upset things, upset the order that had been
predestined by whatever powers moved destinies around like shells in a
confidence game. Roux’s fate was sealed in a windless park with a book no
longer readable while he was surrounded by people who looked upon him like a
pariah. Perhaps they were right in their judgment. Perhaps he was something to
be shunned, feared, and slaughtered. Perhaps he was, as he knew some people
referred to him as, the “freak on the bench.”

Roux had never considered himself a friendly person or even
minimally a social one. His interactions were always brief and without
ceremony. He could not remember the last time he had sincerely wished someone a
“good morning” yet he could remember dozens of times within the last month in
which others had wished him that very thing. His lack of social skills had long
ago ceased to bring guilt but he sometimes regretted not being successful in
trying to
avoid
those interactions so that he would not have to meditate
on his obscene lack of conformity.

And perhaps now the chickens were coming home to roost, as they
say. He was finally going to reap the rewards of his lifestyle: his complete
and utter aversion to being
bothered
.

Roux’s eyes perused each potential assassin in the park.
There were two sets of grandparents with their boisterous spawn-of-their-spawn.
Could it be them? That would be a nice trick, sending out the least
intimidating murderer. Oh, but that would be too obvious, wouldn’t it? No, it
was unlikely to be the grandparents. They were too old; you couldn’t count on
them to move quickly enough.

But could it be the grandchildren?

There were five of them. It was difficult to tell their
ages but Roux thought two looked under three years old while the other three
looked to be between ten and twelve, a suitable age to contemplate killing
someone like Roux. Children that age often could not separate fantasy from
reality and could make very capable assassins. Yes, it could very well be one,
or more, of the children.

He wondered how he would react if it was indeed one of
them. Would he embrace death at the hands of a child? After all, who better to
exact judgment upon him then a person who is innocent and full of hope and
potential? They would simply be making room in the world by snuffing him out.
Would they actually comprehend their actions? Would they think it was all a
game and that Roux’s death was simply the end of the round? Would they expect
him to get up after they had plunged a knife (or pulled a gun’s trigger) and
caused his extinction? Roux wondered all of this and found himself even more
frightened than before. Youth had never seemed so terrifying.

He looked back down at his book.

He was on a new chapter but could not read it due to the
previous transformation. To compensate, he imagined it was a chapter about the
distribution of goods and how that affected building types in industrial parks.
Some of the foreign words were fading on the page while others were blinking to
an unknown rhythm. Perhaps they were signaling the return of some wind which
would come by and rescue the tome from Roux’s hands.

He wished that was not the case. Despite the danger he knew
he was in and the obscurity of the words, he still wanted to read, still wanted
to finish the book he had chosen at random on the shelves he had set up
randomly the night before. If he was to die before reading the book, he would
feel incomplete. Death itself would feel incomplete.

Death would feel
unfair
.

Roux figured if he was patient and accommodating despite
his terror, then maybe things would work out in a complete way.

There was a sound behind him, something that resembled the
rustling of leaves. Had the wind returned? Roux looked over his shoulder
quickly as if the sound had startled him even though it had not. A part of him
wanted to startle the wind so he may have the upper hand in the proceedings.

But it was not leaves being scattered by the wind. It was a
young mother with her child. The child, a young girl of about five years old,
was taking small toys out of a plastic bag. That it is the sound Roux had
heard: small hands grabbing for toys in a plastic bag.

It reminded him of
his last surgery. The doctors had searched through his body looking for
something, anything, to justify his excruciating pain and their extravagant
fees. According to them, they found nothing. That didn’t prevent them from
billing Roux in the amount of four-thousand dollars and eighty-three cents
which was approximately four-thousand more dollars than Roux really had to
spend.