Nightmares From a Lovecraftian Mind (3 page)

Maurent
thought his brother had been ungrateful and Roux could not
help but agree. He had said terrible, terrible things and his brother had
written terrible, terrible words. Those words opened up a pit of psychic
masochism:
Maurent
falling into despair over his
printed pages while Roux agonized over his verbal destruction. It was a stormy
period of mutual torment.

But why had Roux thought of his brother at this moment?
What about the park (and his impending death at the hands of one or more
“strangers”) was rekindling those sour memories? Roux has occasionally
entertained the idea that his brother would ultimately cause his death but had
always believed it was just his paranoia running rampant in the funhouse of his
ritualized mind.

There was a connection there for sure. Everything that was
going to happen was somehow tied to his brother. Roux fell forward onto the
ground, his knees digging into the cement.

“
Maurent
.”

He spoke the word into the air, hoping the wind would
finally come and carry it into oblivion.

His eyes moved to the three figures at the edge of the park
that were now slowly making their way towards him. A faint scent of burning
wood moved passed his nostrils. Was the wind back? Roux hoped so. But what was
that smell? He looked around the park but saw nothing on fire.

“Quack!” a voice said from behind. Roux turned, thinking it
was the little girl again but it wasn’t. It was a young man he had never seen
before.

Normally Roux would not speak in this situation but he
found himself strangely compelled to say, “I wish I knew what you were talking
about.”

Over the young man’s shoulder hung a messenger bag. Roux
watched as the man opened it up, rummaged through it, and brought out a fistful
of tulips.

Roux then knew the origin of the burning smell. It was the
flowers, the iridescent tulips being gripped by the young man’s pale fingers.
He turned away, stood up, and started running.

From behind him, a voice said, “Quack!”

Roux didn’t stop. He didn’t wait for an explanation because
he didn’t need one. Deep down somewhere in the crusty layers of his
consciousness, he knew what was happening and why. The figures that had been
walking from the edge of the park were nowhere to be seen. No doubt the young
man had been one of them. But who were the other two and where were they now?

Children’s voices swirled around his ears and that is when
he fell hard into the ground, face first in a small patch of tulips.

Roux rolled around in them, submitting to their iridescence
and burning-wood smell. His eyes flickered into the petals and into the past.
Roux’s father was throwing malformed wood into the fireplace and then looked
over at his two sons.

“You know, boys, things are going to be a lot different
when I’m away.”

Roux nodded as did his brother
Maurent
.

His father went on. “It’s like what I told you about, that
stuff that happened when I was a kid, how I gave birth to that
damned
garden.” The flames behind him sprouted dark tendrils. “And that damned garden,
your damned mother, gave birth to you two boys. It’s probably not pleasant to
think about, I know, but it’s where you came from and the way I figure it, a
person can’t be ashamed of where they come from because most of the time they
can’t help it. They didn’t have control. I know I didn’t. Hell, I’m beginning
to think no one has any control over anything.”

Roux’s father walked over to his sons, patted them on the
back, and grabbed his luggage. “And if you ever meet….
her
….tell her
there’s nothing I could have done either way. I could only have taken two….and
you are the two I chose.” The boys watched their father disappear into the
snowstorm outside. They waited an hour before standing up and going into the
kitchen to get something to eat. Roux drank water and while
Maurent
had milk and alcohol.

Roux has finished his water when his brother said, “When I
have a son, I will never just up and leave like that.”

“How do you know?” Roux said.

“Because I’m not a fool like he is.”

Roux’s reply was a shrug. He could not care less how his
brother raised his future offspring. In fact, he wasn’t planning on having any
contact with them whatsoever. Being an uncle, or a father for that matter, was
not in his life plans. He did not want to risk the chance of someone looking up
to him. There were too many chances of being a disappointment and the only
person Roux was willing to disappoint was himself.

The tulips sang, startling Roux and bringing him to his
feet. He spat out a mouthful of petals. There was the taste of something dark
and insignificant as if his teeth had given up and faded into dust.

He was surrounded now, pushed to the limits of psychic and
physical masochism, a mere puppet on display in an average park in an average
town.

Or was it average?

The town was a harsh whisper in a conspiratorial
conversation of society, pockmarked with decrepit houses, with false histories
and imaginary foundations. So why
was Roux concerned
there were people around him who were going to snuff him out of existence? He
did not fear death, no, but only the departure of this, his false place of
birth. He wasn’t sure he wanted to leave just yet.

Roux vomited a vile concoction: milk and alcohol. It had
been his brother’s drink of choice.

Something else, too: a bulbous form the size of a child’s
fist. It fell to the ground, opening up like a malformed flower. Brilliant
shades of color enveloped the chunk of meat. It blinded Roux and sent him into
a talkative delirium, begging for answers.

A woman’s voice said, “It’s your fault father left me, left
us.”

Roux’s memory snapped, letting in images of his sister.
Where had she been in all of this? Where had she been during his life?

He said, “My fault? He left for his own reasons.”

“And what of
Maurent
?
I guess his writing those foolish articles isn’t your
fault either?”

“I had no hand in that,” he said. The bloody meat-form
below him cooed. It was a neon rock of flesh pulsating and beckoning him. “He
does what he pleases just like always. You don’t remember?”

She scoffed. “And the rape had nothing to do with it?”

Roux looked his sister in the eyes. She was, just as his
memory suggested, a frozen shape in the guise of a woman. He didn’t answer her
despite the glowing blue glare of her eyes. He realized at that moment that his
sister possessed no emotion but anger. She could not love, could not forgive,
could
not nurture even a flower.
Even a
simple tulip.

She nodded to another person, a young man who looked very
similar to the other one, so similar in fact they could be interchangeable.
Identical parts of different machines. Roux realized all people were the same
in this park as they stood before the glory of the neon meat of his body.

A cacophony of voices started to speak in waves of babble.
Roux thought the whole park much have been watching him.
All
those people, all those innocent looking people just waiting for him to make a
move.

He thought about his book.

It was a strange thing to think about under the
circumstances but Roux figured it must have been a defense mechanism. But the
book did not want him. It did not want to be read, to be experienced, to be
digested by his intellect. In fact, Roux thought the book would have rather
been thrown into a furnace than to have been read by him.

There was a good chance he would die at the hands of one or
more of the people standing before him. It might be his sister. It might be one
of the young men who were like twins but not twins. It might be one of the many
strangers that surrounded him as they looked on with eyes of neon marble. They
were all iridescent blemishes on a plague victim left to rot in an average park
in an average town. They were only banal throats just waiting to be cut.

“But so are you,” the voices said.

And Roux realized they were right.

V. The
Ubiety
of Some Hell

The last sane thing Franco remembered was the smell of
Eurice’s
high heels as they trampled him into the hardwood
floor as if he was a nearly worthless rag in some fetishistic ritual. Then it
was a whirlpool of tulips, his body in vertigo, controlled by some sanguinary
puppetry. He thought he might have been wearing black gloves. His right hand
had held a razor while his left held the neck of a man.

There had been bloodshed in a park.

A voice said, “What have you done with Roux?”

Franco sat in the living room of the house he had come to
in order to sell magazine subscriptions. His hands were trembling: marionette
limbs covered with blood and pollen. An empty glass sat on the table in front
of him. His magazine catalog was torn into pieces and glued to the floor.

He was alone in the room.

Where had
Eurice
and her nephew
gone? Franco felt uneasy in the house
without the owner present. He felt like a
harageous
intruder bent on destroying the sanctity of
Home Sweet Home
.

Franco walked into the kitchen hoping to find someone there
but he was completely alone with every bit of paranoia squeezing from his pores
like salty, psychotic sweat.

He absentmindedly checked the cabinets but found nothing
but strips of old newspaper and oversized mousetraps. The refrigerator was
next. Franco opened it and found it empty but for broken wind chimes. He opened
the freezer and stared at the contents: a carton of milk and a bottle of
alcohol.

He pulled them out but almost dropped them due to the cold.
Setting them down on the counter, he looked closely at the containers,
wondering if there was an expiration date on the milk and if the alcohol was
still good despite the small bits of black material floating in it.

Franco unscrewed the alcohol and poured it into the milk.
He shook the carton, threw his head back, and swallowed most of the liquid
down. His stomach was soothed as so was his mind. Sparks of recollection
illuminated the kitchen and Franco saw his black gloved hand holding the razor,
slitting the throat, and watching the spurting blood shower the tulips as he
danced in the windless park like a crazed,
satyrical
assassin.

Eurice
and her nephew
Lucasse
were
right there beside him, laughing and tearing up a book that had been at the
feet of the bloodied man. Franco saw the words in the book as they danced
incoherently across the pulpy pages. They formed no real language, no real
communication. The book was as ancient as bloodlust and fatherhood.

Franco then knew all communication was false and incoherent
at the very root of the world. He wondered: is this what loop panic feels like?
Are
imperium
waves disrupting my thought patterns?
What nonsense drives us to do these things? What nonsense drives us to do
anything
?

Did
Eurice
order any magazines
subscriptions?

What now?

Too many questions.

Franco pulled on the wrist of his right hand, digging his
nails into the skin to take off the black glove which he no longer wore.

Soon the skin dropped to the floor like ancient wallpaper
revealing a gold, mechanical hand. The fingers curled into circles, glistening
in the light coming through the smudged windows of the kitchen. Eyes stared up
at him through each circle: yellow irises around red pupils.

Blinking, blinking,
blinking
.

Franco extended his metallic fingers and heard his false
knuckles crack loudly, echoing through the house like an organic doorbell. The
thirst beckoned him again and his mouth turned to sour cotton.

Franco picked up the milk carton and put it to his nose,
inhaling the sharp alcohol smell mixed with milk. He brought it to his lips and
swallowed more of the liquid as he thought about the dead man in the park and
why he had helped annihilate him.

Why, indeed.

The eyes on the floor combined to make one giant, pulsating
mass of color. It stared at Franco like the eye of a silent father figure.
There was disapproval, yes, but also a sort of love. But hadn’t his father left
him when he was still a baby? There was no memory of the man except in blurry
Polaroids
. Franco felt it through the haze of the alcoholic
milk. He had disappointed his father and his father’s father but he was still
of their flesh and of their mistakes.

Several generations of arcane disapproval and buried
anxiety climaxing in one moment of Franco’s life: in his standing in the
kitchen of a house he had no business being in all because he had ventured into
the house in the hopes of selling magazine subscriptions and acquiring just a
few more dollars to add to his meager savings.