Nightmares From a Lovecraftian Mind (4 page)

Another swallow from the carton and his mind is crumpled
like the page of an unwanted manuscript. His thoughts fell around him:
discarded words from the page of an out-of-print book on industrial parks that
had been translated into an unknown, superfluous language. Ideas spread out
like flames throughout the kitchen.

Like an obsolete automaton, Franco used his mechanical hand
to grip the milk carton and bring it to his mouth. He drank the rest of the
liquid, feeling it ooze down his throat, burn through his stomach, and
invade
his bowels until the bottom half of Franco’s body
exploded in a brief but loud exorcism of blood and finality.

Before he died, Franco was able to utter the word that was
the closest thing to a curse that was ever expelled from his lips.

“Father.”

XNOYBISTIC FRAGMENTS FOUND IN AN INDUSTRIAL PARK

Obsidian asphalt painted with parallel
ley
sigils reflected on glass doors, washed and unwashed of handprints young and
old, some smeared, some unblemished.
Locks broken.
Fluorescent hymns from bulbs and air ducts chorusing, wind sounds. These are
songs of existence and the rebirth of repetition.

Obsidian spaces with large beasts of burden moving forward,
backward, and relieving themselves of fecal gold to fill the spaces in between
atoms and oblivion, cosmic kings and queens in masks slithering within air
conditioning ducts. Oblivion defined as: our clear minds. Oh, what pain we
extract from our business here and such fuzzy recollections of the rebirth of
repetition and reiterations.

The
swallowing up of our business, our business
here
.
We arrive at our
jobs,
we arrive at our primal
disappointment. I fear for our lives in the basements of those buildings,
ancient and modern antidotes to our frivolous existence. The shadows in the
basement tell me their name… I commit them to memory. I commit them to my
nonexistence. So soon our businesses will be obsolete and our faces erased by
the last flicker of the fluorescents.

The latrines need cleaning, the ceilings need repairing,
the
walls need repainting. Outside, the sigils are faded and there are automobiles everywhere:
unfortunate puzzle pieces out of sync and sinking into the obsidian scum under
floodlights. Cleaning crew arrives soon and the oblivious vacuums in the closet
and elevators and the silence that is like dark cotton in our ears. You should
not commit to anything. You should not sign your name to some skeletal contract
beneath the worms.

Everything closed…locked…overflowed…primeval chemicals leak
through the roof to floor two and floor one and into the basement where my
fears live, where those talkative shadows gather and spread across the stone,
brick, cinderblock, plaster, sheetrock, and old machines, old files, old
shelves, old desks, old names, our names, those
things
, our names.

Obsidian asphalt painted with parallel
ley
sigils reflected on ceilings, washed and unwashed of scum young and old, the
closet and elevators. Fluorescent hymns from bulbs and vacuums chorusing, wind
sounds. These are of chemicals of existence and the rebirth of repetition. The
swallowing up of our business, the swallowing up of
us
…

Gregory met the
man at the park on Thursday and decided then and there that he should kill him.

The man introduced
himself as
Xnoybis
Brown and claimed to be an
importer of silk. Gregory believed none of it, but that didn’t matter for soon
this
Xnoybis
Brown character would be importing
nothing but decay.

They had literally
bumped into each other while taking laps around the lake.

“Oh, excuse me,”
Gregory had said.

The man smiled and
put his hands up. “No harm done.”

Gregory nodded.

The man put his
hand out. “I’m
Xnoybis
Brown.”

“Gregory Myers.”
They shook hands and spoke briefly and awkwardly, exchanging random bits of
personal information much to Gregory’s dismay. Finally, he had to end the
conversation. “Well, I do have to get doing. Have a nice afternoon,” he said,
continuing on his jog.

He didn’t like the
look of
Xnoybis’s
face. It held a perpetual smile as
if the man was incapable of being unhappy. Gregory hated that. It took much
self-control not to vomit during the short conversation they had had.

Gregory hated the
fact that there were people who could force joy into their countenance no
matter what the occasion. He knew the man would probably smile through a
hurricane. He would have probably smiled through the Holocaust, telling
everyone everything would work out for the best. Unadulterated joy and
positivism angered Gregory to no end.

Gregory could tell
that about the man just by one interaction. It sickened him. He needed to do
something about it. Though he’d never been violent before (not unless you
include the time he stabbed a classmate with a pencil in elementary school)
Gregory had a plan formed in his head about how he would kill this man, this
Xnoybis
Brown.

Now it was
Saturday and after checking on mother, Gregory went to the park again. He
brought some popcorn to feed the ducks and sat down at one of the benches in
front of the lake.

The ducks
approached him and soon so did
Xnoybis
Brown.

Gregory nodded at
the man, swallowing the bile that was rising up his throat and threatening to
flood his mouth.
“Morning.”

“Yes,”
Xnoybis
said. “Good morning.” He had a seat next to Gregory
on the bench and pulled out his wallet.

Gregory watched as
the man flipped through small scraps of paper, sugar packets, and raggedy
dollar bills until the man seemingly found what he had been looking for. He
pulled it out and held it in front of Gregory’s face. It was a photograph of
poor quality, one a person might overpay for at tourist spots where they have
to step into a booth and smile awkwardly at an unseen camera.

“This is my
mother,”
Xnoybis
said.

Gregory grimaced
at the photograph. An elderly woman clad in a blouse almost as white as her face
stared at him. There was no smile to break the wrinkles that had been carved on
her face. Gregory was surprised no one else was in the picture with her. Why
would the elderly woman get into the photo-booth by herself?

“Lovely,” he said.

Xnoybis
moved the photo closer to Gregory’s face.
“Just lovely?
Look at her eyes. She has beautiful eyes. My
father said they were made of marbles, beautiful marbles, imported from Germany.”

“You don’t say?”
Gregory looked at the woman’s eyes and saw that they were indeed beautiful,
yes, but also frightening. They stared at him accusingly, like a witch-hunting
judge.

“She was blind,
you know.
Couldn’t see a thing.
Didn’t know what her
children looked like.
Quite sad.”

“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.”