Gateways to Abomination (3 page)

WHEREAS Permilia, my wife, has for some time past behaved herself in a very unbecoming and threatening manner, abusing and ill-treating me--her lawful husband--biting and scratching like a cat gone mad, without any just cause or provocation, and hath run me considerably in debt, and hath committed the crime of Adultery in the bed of AMASA MILKERTON with an excess of Eight Men, and has joined with the Amalekites in the Worship of the Leech, this is to forbid all persons from trusting her and harboring her on my account. I will pay not any bills of her contracting. Reward for her return in a mortal condition or for clews as to her whereabouts.

Q: What happened Tuesday night?

A: There was a frantic knocking at our door, late. My husband bolted up out of his chair and I told him, don't answer it. Call the police. He's so trusting. He was so trusting.

Subject cups face in hands.

Q: What happened next?

A: John opened the door. At first I thought it was...it looked like the creature from the Black Lagoon...scaly, or something, and wet...though it wasn't raining. It burst into the foyer, and there was a muffled screaming.

Q: Did it say anything? Could you make out any words?

A: No, just this muffled screaming. Then one of the scales detached itself. It was bloated...it was a leech. It looked like a frog's...you know, a frog's throat when it expands? It was purplish. Horrifying.

Q: What did it do when it detached?

A: It unfolded these wings, and then it tried to fly...there was this horrible, loud buzzing...then it hit the corner of the coffee table and kind of... (Long pause) It exploded. There was blood in my coffee cup...one of the wings was fluttering on top of a book...

Q: What was John doing at this point?

A: He was getting a lighter from the kitchen. He flicked it and put it on one of the things...on the man's face. I swear to you that the thing screamed. It screeched and then it...sort of undulated. Have you ever seen a cat throw up? It was like that, like someone was turning a lever...

Q: It was regurgitating into the wound.

A: Ugh. Ah.

Q: What happened next?

A: I just started pulling the things off, prying them up between their heads and their tails, sliding my hands back and forth. John did too. We cleared the man's neck, and part of his face. I think. I think he. I think he was dead. Those things were holding him up. They all started fluttering their wings. The ones we'd pried off were struggling to fly, or crawling around blindly.

Somewhere in there John must have called 911. The police came. They had no idea what was going on. John and I just got down on the floor and put our hands over our heads. They shot the man. He wouldn't fall. He just wouldn't fall.

Q: How do things stand now? What happened next?

A: We told the police everything they told you. An ambulance came, and then a pest control service. Slaughton's Pest Control, I think they were called. They declared the house uninhabitable until further notice, and the police contacted the Red Cross and got us a room at the Best Western by the highway. We were allowed to pack.

Q: And then?

Pause.

A: John was undressing to shower when he found it. He started screaming for me, and when I came in...It was like John was hanging in midair...face towards the ceiling. He was breathing in these...in jagged rasps. A leech had him, see? It was burrowed into his chest. It was huge...like a giant fat fly...its wings were a blur and it had him. John looked at me, but his eyes...he couldn't see me. His mouth opened and it was...it was like the sound of static, like bursts of static, and then some horrible laugh, and this voice. This dripping, venomous voice.

Q: What did the voice say?

A: It said, "It worked. It works. It has begun."

I found myself in a smallish room illuminated only by small bulbs in display cases and in glass-fronted shelves that lined the walls to my left and my right. Opposite the door I had entered was another door with a stained glass window that afforded a little more light, though muted.

The case nearest to me contained an ancient looking box with wooden dials and metal switches. As I walked through the room, I saw that it was clearly the display-room of a collector of radios and radio technology.

In the middle of a room was a radio in a highboy cabinet; beyond that sat transistors; some colorful plastic, some gray; and tabletop radios; then a series of walkmen; and a blue and white MP3 player that presumably contained an FM receiver.

What was baffling, though, was the last two cases. They were large terrariums, one on either side of the door with the stained glass window.

The one on the left had a floor of pebbles in tones of rust and sandstone, and a path of jagged rectangular brick-red stones leading to a flat, hollowed-out rock that looked like a child's wading pool made of marble. A thick thatch of ferns provided a bright green backdrop, and wee potted plants dotted the ground. In the back corner sat an antique chair, no bigger than your thumb, painted in exquisite detail. On that chair sat a fat black fly involved in a process that looked much like grooming. As I watched, two more flies emerged from the lush backdrop and hovered at the glass. It appeared as though they were looking at me.

Unnerved, I stepped back and then started to cross to the other terrarium, when the door swung open to reveal what appeared to be a sparse waiting room. Not wanting to appear rude, I walked in.

The room was brightly lit, causing me to squint through my fingers. The walls were bright white. There were no pictures on the wall, just a window with white blinds drawn tight. Before me was a squarish, low coffee table on which sprawled a haphazard pile of
Newsweeks
,
Peoples
, and
Highlights for Children
. Catty-corner, framing the table on two sides, was a pair of mismatched cheap couches, one industrial brown, one off-white to the point of being dingy.

Ahead of me was a glassed-off receptionist area where a
slender, redheaded girl sat. Her hair was tied into pigtails and she wore garish green eyeshadow. She scratched her eye and I saw that her left hand was without fingernails. Her eyebrows, it seemed, were nonexistent; instead two curved, thin arches were drawn on, one slightly higher than the other--by accident or design, I wondered. The left eyebrow was slightly smudged: I could see the whorl of a partial fingerprint. It reminded me of the lettering on the door.

"You can have a seat," she said.

"There's no paperwork for me to fill out?"

She sighed wearily, apparently irritated that her statement was threatening to transition into a conversation.

"No," she said conclusively, and turned to rifle noisily through a black file cabinet.

Before I could sit, the door next to the receptionist area opened, revealing a very tall, gaunt man with deep set eyes and hair of black and silver that sat flat on his head and draped down behind his neck, curling up at the ends in an almost feminine affect. He wore the beleaguered face of an addict, red-eyed and deep-wrinkled, his eyes shining from dark hollows.

"Mr. Stanton," he grinned, and I saw that his teeth were in shambles--browned, broken. I swore that I saw one tooth...a lateral incisor?...swinging from a sinuous pink thread from an expanse of red upper-gum. He wore a white jacket over a blue Arrow shirt, pressed khakis, and ostentatious cowboy boots whose toes ended in a narrow point. "I am Dr. Lisle-Pearl."

I was about to open my mouth to invent some kind of excuse to leave, when his enormous hand clapped my shoulder and steered me down a short hall and into a room
in which loomed a dental chair and the attendant apparatus. They seemed too big for the room. On one wall was the obligatory painting of a flowered landscape; on another a browned poster displaying a potbellied cartoon of a man, meant to be Asian, in profile. A series of horizontal lines led from the body to an impenetrably tight, smushed series of Asian characters--that kind of lettering that always looked to me like intricate illustrations of impossible houses.

The doctor directed me to sit in the chair and told me pointedly to relax. Then in walked a hygienist with bulbous features too large for her small head. Her hair was pulled back so tightly that there were vertical lines on her forehead which, set against her natural lines, formed a painful looking crosshatch effect. Her name tag read "
Sithyl” and her white coat was terribly tight and short, and it looked to me as though she might be wearing nothing under it. Her large (though muscular) legs were quite bare, and dark blue varicose veins pulsed at her ankles.

She was on me in an instant, reaching under the chair, her mountainous chest pushed up against my side. Her perfume was unbearable; it smelled of rotten fruit and incense. She pulled up a set of brown leather straps, clipping and locking the buckles over my forearms and stomach, then another over my ankles.

I started to protest and the doctor wheeled around and jammed some kind of apparatus into my mouth. I only caught the merest glimpse over Sithyl's bulging shoulder, but it looked like some kind of multi-clawed, metallic insect with a body like an intricate drafting compass. It clamped onto my back teeth and then, as the doctor reached in and turned a dial, cranked open my mouth to the point I feared my muscles would tear. I tasted metal and my own blood.

Then the body of the thing seemed to expand, pushing down my tongue and up against the roof of my mouth. I tried to protest again, and a cold sensation lightly tapped the back of my palate, as though a small arm had extended, and activated my gag reflex. I said, "GEH."

"Try not to speak," the doctor said, grinning a benevolent grin under dead eyes. He opened a plastic door in the side of the chair and uncoiled a long corrugated tube with a curved triangular mask, which he fitted over my mouth and nose and then affixed with straps behind my head.

"Too tight?" he asked, and I was instinctively, appallingly grateful that when I nodded, he actually loosened the straps.

He flipped a switch and air pushed into my nose and throat. It smelled sweet, with a hint of almond. The music from the speakers in the ceiling, a barely noticeable Muzak, began to swell. An insistent cello rose up, accompanied by some kind of intense, whispered chanting. The hygienist put her chubby hand between my legs, staring lustily into my eyes. Against all my senses, I began to feel profound arousal as her hand began to undulate in a way that I would have thought physically impossible. It was as though she had fifty fingers. My jaw hung open. The doctor inserted a plastic tube that slurped out the saliva. My eyes filled with tears of gratitude and love.

Then he pulled out a tray table. On it was a pile of rusted, wood-handled dental implements, some simple and familiar, some alien and alarmingly complex, like an eight-tanged set of scissors with four rubber grips, and a smaller set of shears with one blade and one long antenna that appeared to have been torn from a car and inexpertly soldered to the other stub where a blade had once been.

The doctor grabbed a long tool with a circle of metal at one end. Suddenly his arms went all long and thin, like licorice. He plunged them into my mouth as Sithyl began some kind of new manipulation that caused my head to fall slowly back against the head-rest. At the ceiling, winged babies wheeled. Their wings were black gossamer and they gibbered with wet beaks of pink and purple. They had the eyes of goats. Their diapers bulged.

When finally I looked back down, four of my teeth were on the tray table in a pool of blood. On a small washcloth--with a Comfort Inn logo--rested four new teeth. Two were
of translucent glass. Of those, one contained what appeared to be a microscopic circuit board; the other a thin metal pole down the center.

The other two teeth were white on the sides, but on the top looked like radio speakers.

I looked back up to the ceiling. One of the babies was flitting against the ceiling tiles like a moth. A line of pink drool detached from its lower lip and lit across Dr. Lisle-Pearl's forehead.

Sithyl's
hand quickened, and I felt myself release as though it had been years. Suddenly, shockingly, the doctor walloped her with a powerful backhand. She flew backward off of her stool and sprawled on the carpet, her mouth agape. I could now confirm that she wore nothing under her white coat.

I averted my gaze, which I let slide right past the terrifying infant. I looked at the doctor's impassive face. He grinned, his teeth a decrepit bone-yard. Then he held up the eight-bladed scissor, his arm went thin and he thrust it into my throat, deep, deep, impossibly deep. My lips ringed the doctor's white-coated elbow. I tasted fabric. I blacked out.