Nightmares From a Lovecraftian Mind (5 page)

Someone once told
me the hotel was primed for demolition. Like always, I had responded with
skepticism.

I have never seen anything
get destroyed. I have never seen anything ruined or in any state of decay.
Perhaps I have lived a sheltered life but for all I know, every object, person,
and idea is immune to any form of degeneration or decay. People, objects, and
thoughts are frozen in time but allowed to move just enough to give the
impression of progress, of an eventual movement towards some destiny far off in
the future. It will be a future of sameness and of an unchanged maturity.

But, like I said,
perhaps I have lived a sheltered life.

When I arrive at
the hotel, I find out that my room is on the top floor for which I am pleased.
Despite not liking water in general, I am looking forward to a good view of the
ocean. It is better than looking out at the city with all its buildings puffing
smoke, noise, and artificial light. There are too many people in the city, too
many busy people who live to work and work to live. The ocean provides a blank
slate for my thoughts whereas the urban landscape provides nothing but a
reminder of the unnatural state of things, at the chaos that eats away at the
very soul of a human being. Of course, it is not something I have ever
witnessed personally but I have heard stories about cities and I wish to see no
decay…..only stillness and some form of purity. I do not even want to catch a
whiff of urban putrefaction. So this is why I was glad to have the view of the
water.

Upon entering the
hotel room, I see that the housekeeper must have spent a good amount of time
getting it ready. Everything is immaculate, even the television remote control
which, from what I have heard, should be the filthiest thing in the room.

I sit on the bed,
exhausted from the trip but not exhausted enough to lie down and nap. Sleep
would be needed eventually but not yet. Things have to be done before I can
give myself the luxury of dreaming.

The windows appear
freshly washed. It is as if there is no glass separating me from the outside. I
stand up and walk over to check for sure that there is something protecting me
from falling out of the building. I put my hand out and touch the warm
smoothness of the glass. I am worried its temperature will soon rise to the
point of melting. I do not want to be burned by fiery glass. I do not want to
fall out of the window.

I pull my hand away
for it is like touching a warm corpse.

Still, I stay put,
looking out and watching the dark green sea as it ripples and pulsates. After
staring into its surface for a few minutes, I go back to the bed and turn the
television on with the freshly cleaned remote control.

Television
provides me with life outside of my thoughts. But maybe I just like the noise.
It produces sounds I don’t have to take part in, voices I don’t have to respond
to. It is a way of being a part of society
without
actually taking
part in society
.

Therefore I have
little need of real friends or family. Instead, I let the television programs
act as the outside chaos that would otherwise engulf my senses and emotional
stability. Television broadcasts never decay. They are, in a way,
eternal
.

I never followed
any particular program, though. I don’t make any effort to have the television
on at any particular time. I let my whim dictate my interactions with the
shows. The randomness of my viewing exposes me to a myriad number of life
experiences. I never know what the day will bring.

This particular
hotel room television is ancient. I am sure one of the dust-covered speakers is
blown out because the noise sounds lopsided and muffled which makes everything
that comes out of it resemble slow ocean waves. I am soothed into a state of
calm.

It is during this
state of calm that the hotel starts to collapse.

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.

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.”
Osman
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.