Whispers From The Abyss (8 page)

What did fishmouth say? Something about dead dreaming, and a city rising from the sea, all dripping angles, all right stars and everything else wrong.

Pedal to the metal. Tires devour asphalt, humming, almost enough to drown the static.

Sister’s in the dark, where he made us go when we were bad.

And we were always bad.

Blood-tacky flies, crimson-drunk, hum in the close air. There’s a dead man hanging from the ceiling, swollen cock ringed with barbed wire. There’s a bloated horse, round as the fucking moon. There’s Daddy, and he’s sobbing. Sad.
Mad. Bad. Look what we made him do.

I drive ‘til I see moonlight on water.

I screech to a halt; the powder-blue Caddy’s nearly burnt through. I grab the briefcase and run.

Sister always was the strong one. She never let Daddy break her. She broke herself first.

I’m almost to edge between sand and sea when the Old Man shambles up from the dark. His shadow buzzes, blurs.

“Fooled you,” he says.

I freeze. All this time I thought I was running, but I was going to, not from. Smoke and mirrors. Classic misdirection. It fools ninety percent of the people one hundred percent of the time when they want to believe. I wanted to believe.

The Old Man is stick thin, cancer-ravaged. But his teeth are still-wicked straight, his eyes sin-dark and gleaming. Another step and I see the thing behind him.

Sister.

Her dress is stained. One hand holds a sharp bit of glass. Her lips don’t smile, but her open throat does.

“A family reunion,” the Old Man says. “How sweet.”

A fit of coughing takes him. He spits phlegm on the sand, and it sizzles. The air smells like brimstone. It sounds like the shiver of wings.

“Whatcha got there, boy?” He points at the briefcase, wheezing.

Something in his eyes reminds me of the horse right before it was strung up from rusty chains. It reminds me of the drifter, smelling of sweat and cheap booze. He’s afraid.

The Old Man stretches out his hand. No blade glints in it, but the gesture is unmistakably the same: Bend to my will, boy. Give me my due.

Fuck that.

I look at Sister.

“Forgive me?” I say.

I have no right to ask. Maybe it’s my imagination, but I see the shadow of a smile.

Her words are just for me this time. “It’s okay.”

Faith’ll jab you in the eye nine times outta ten, but sometimes when you grow up with a head full of horror show, you can’t help but believe.

I open the briefcase. Sister takes the Old Man’s hand. Always the strong one, she holds him where sea meets sand.

The stone, wood, skin, whatever the fuck it is, burns. I cling for all I’m worth, which is shit-all in the grand scheme of things if I have my way. I don’t want to be the next coming of the Fly-Lord. Dying unremembered and unmourned sounds just dandy to me.

The Old Man howls with rage.

I raise the black idol high. The moon’s jaundiced eye rolls my way. It shifts from sliver to full then back again, a knife-edged grin. The sky ripples, stars aligning. Something darker than dark, all dripping angles dreams its way up from the deep.

Displaced water hulks black against off-color stars. The sea, the sky - everything holds its breath. Pain flays me star-sharp, hurtles me into the dark. Cold compresses my lungs, cracks my ribs. Just before I shatter, the waiting sea falls, crashing down on Dear Old Dad, snapping his bones.

The waves retreat, oily-slick. There’s nothing on the shore but me and salt-eaten footprints, fading with the tide.

A single, black spire - not skin, not wood, not stone - thrusts from the waves. Everything goes the color of a bruise. The sky melts, drips into the sea. The black needle lingers a moment, a middle finger raised, telling me how fucked I am if I dare disturb its sleep again.

Then it sinks. The cosmic eye shutters back to dreams.

I sit down hard. The tide kisses my feet. I laugh. Then I weep. I wipe tears from my eyes, and look toward the horizon where the faintest line of silver cracks the sky. Hollow, spent, I wait for the motherfucking dawn.

Often I do sit by myself on dark and windy nights, seated in my chair by the fire, its crackling speech giving warmth to the room but not my bones.  I do sit oblivious, my mind not in my parlor but up in the attic where the thing is held.  I sit now in my chair, pipe held idly between my teeth, the light of the dancing flames painting half my face orange yet giving me no heat.  The window is black.  Outside everything is draped in dark velvet.  The line between what is terrestrial and what is celestial has been blurred; outside is naught but void be-speckled by the faint, feeble rays of distant stars.  But I pay no heed to the blanket of shadows nor the stars, but only the thing in the attic.  The thing with onyx eyes.

My grandmother—her head, composed of canvas and paint, hangs still over my mantle—brought the thing from somewhere far away where heathens still yet lived in noble savagery.  She had gone with her husband, my grandfather, on a voyage to distant shores: whether it be that
Dark Continent or an island in the deep Pacific, I know not.  There she found the thing–that thing with onyx eyes–in an evil shrine in the heart of some forsaken jungle.  There amidst foliage that steams in eternal green twilight, she found the thing of profane proportions and there she took it.  Or rather, the thing took her.  My grandmother returned from that strange voyage alone—as alone as I am now—with that thing among her luggage.  All who saw it, and they were few, beheld it with repulsion and disgust.  But my grandmother was the only one who treasured it, placing it on her mantle; holding it always close; carrying it with her when on rare times she left her home.

That crone stayed ever locked in her dwelling, hating any who came to her door.  We would visit her rarely, and when we did, us children found her house a creaking, unwelcoming den of strange rooms and locked handles.  But most of all, we hated the parlor where the thing dwelt.  It was made of sickly earth which must have been formed by stubby, childish fingers in a vain effort to represent some god-creature that had descended from the black oceans above the world many eons ago.  We feared that blasphemous glyph gouged into its cranium.  Its sinuous limbs emerged like tendrils of smoke from its earthen essence; beneath its sharp and baleful eyes hung hideous appendages like the limbs of a squid or some other dreadful creature, and two dysmorphic things—you could barely call them wings—sprouted like unwanted growths from its ill-made shoulders.

When my grandmother finally shucked off her fleshly burden, all her hated objects, safely encased in crates and boxes, were moved into this house of mine.  All were locked tight in the attic, to be forgotten.  But that thing, that thing with onyx eyes that yawn like cavern mouths, did not want to be forgotten or lost.  My mind began to think and ponder about that corrupted thing; that misshapen cur of bulbous cranium and eyes like wells became lodged stubbornly in my mind.  When I stalked through the halls of my house, I sometimes thought I heard whispering or some godless chant drifting on imagined threads of air down from the attic, whose words I could not quite discern nor did I want to.  I was repulsed yet strangely drawn–as one is oft drawn to that which he should not know–to the slithering whispers that reached my ears.  I never dared to enter into the unlit recesses of my attic for fear of what I was to find, but did often loiter around the way leading up, searching for those ancient chants and whispered dreams.

So here I sit, cold and alone, thoughts swirling like ocean currents around this thing, this work of ancient blasphemy.  My eyes linger on the stairs, some dark, primitive part of my mind desiring to climb those steps and ascend into the attic; the other part of my mind, that which loves warmth and fire and flees from dark places, wishes to stay here and huddle by the fire.  I sit here in my pensive mood until the light of the fire had all but burned itself out and my pipe lay forgotten in my lap.  The first rays of the all-seeing sun were just peeling back the velvet curtain that covered the world when I heard once again that alien stream of words doing a macabre dance through my mind.

I felt my legs begin to move of their own accord.

After I died, I went wandering about the town. Stars littered the sky like diamonds, and the moon was a curved blade. I reveled in the freedom of ghostliness. No longer would a mangled and deformed body imprison me. I floated along the black alleys strewn with trash, past a crowd of rats gnawing a severed hand. One of the beasts looked threateningly at me as I passed by, its eyes gleaming like minute lanterns. I laughed and willed myself higher, rising above the cracked pavement and the black rooftops of condemned buildings. The town snored below me, a neglected, dying organism rotting in its own filth. A heavy rain fell, passing through my ethereal self, and distant thunder rolled across the flat, grey horizon.

Among the slumped roofs and crumbling towers stood the abandoned factory, a shriveled heart that had once pumped lifeblood into the town. When it had finally ceased operations, years after the industrial accident that crippled me, the town began to diminish. Then came the corpse-like rot. I looked out my window every morning at its boarded windows and rusted gates, wishing that it had closed down before it had ruined my body. Where it used to produce intricate copper components and bulky industrial machines, its only products now were dust and decay. What surprised me were the watery lights shining from the factory’s windows.

The light struggled to free itself from the fissured brick walls, seeping through cracks in the boarded windows. Floating in the heart of the storm, I realized a magnetic attraction to that dilapidated place. The sensation became a raging hunger, amazing to me since I no longer had need of any food or drink. It was a hunger of the soul. Who could be in the old factory lighting fires or installing generators to shed light down its decrepit hallways?

My phantasmal form slid through the rain toward the speckled walls as lightning flared. Like a wisp of smoke I glided through an ivy-smothered wall and entered the musty bowels of the factory. Orange flames belched from a line of soot-stained furnaces. Silent forms bustled about a collection of worktables. They wore black smocks with heavy hoods. Their faces were indistinguishable in the shadows of these cowls, but I saw that opaque goggles shielded their dim eyes. Gloves of dark rubber covered their hands, and they worked feverishly to assemble some arcane product that made its way down the line. Hundreds of workers lined both sides of the tables, and as I floated near crimson drops spilled from the tables’ edges. They were not working with metal, this odd and faceless crew.

Had a new meat-packing plant moved into town? If so, shouldn’t they have cleaned the rust, mold, and filth from the walls and floors? Weren’t there federal guidelines for such things?

I looked over the workers’ shoulders; they seemed completely oblivious to me. They were not cutting meat. They were assembling something, some unknowable architecture composed of variously shaped chunks of raw meat. At the next table black-gloved hands chose pieces from a pile of shattered bones. Blunt fingers shoved the jagged bone bits into the fleshy sculptures and passed their handiwork on to the next table, where blankets of blistered skin were stretched over the grotesque forms. When these misshapen sculptures of meat, bone, and skin reached the final assembly table, new personnel hung them from metal hooks on rusted lengths of chain. The chains did not hang from any ceiling, but instead depended from a swirling sea of darkness that tossed and heaved above the sculptors’ heads. I expected the dark waters to fall at any moment upon them like a massive, oily tidal wave; but this never happened.

I hovered above the manufacturing tables, an unseen spirit watching the grisly work, and a deep horror surged to fill my bodiless form. What were these bloody sculptures and who were these faceless drones? What gruesome purpose did this installation serve? I imagined a work force of mass murderers engaged in the hopeless endeavor of reassembling the bodies of all those they had slain. But that could not be the case because the final products of their industry, hanging bloody from the hooked chains, came nowhere close to resembling human bodies.

Yet I did notice that after a time suspended in the charnel air of the factory, each of the meat sculptures began to
quiver
and
twist
on its hook. If they had mouths, I was sure they would be screaming in agony. Eventually, each of the twitching oddities was drawn upward on its chain and disappeared into the inverted sea of roiling darkness.

I could not watch this process any longer, so I willed myself to float out of the insane factory. Then I discovered that I could not pass back through the sweating walls. Passing into the factory had been easy, yet now I was trapped inside, and I wanted only to glide out into the churning freedom of the storm outside. I tried again and again, but I felt my airy form growing heavier and denser, and soon I stood on the gore-slick factory floor.

I looked at my hands, gleaming ghostly before my intangible eyes. My translucent wrists bore deep gashes, spiritual recreations of the fleshly wounds I had inflicted upon myself. I had used a shaving razor to make bone-deep cuts, and my life had flowed from these cuts drop by drop. At first, it was a glorious liberation, this death of mine. But now I felt drawn toward a terrible confinement far more horrible than the broken body that I had fled. Why could I not leave this scene of deathly industry? This was not what I wanted when I murdered myself.

A hand grabbed my shoulder and turned me about. One of the hooded assemblymen stood before me. His face was lost behind some sort of gas mask or antique breathing apparatus. He motioned for me to follow him.

“I don’t belong here…” I told him. But he only motioned again for me to follow, and pointed toward a doorway where a set of cinderblock stairs led upward. He held something out for me to take, and I peered at his gloved hand. A red, glistening chunk of meat pulsed in his palm. It was a human heart, still living, squeezing the last few drops of warm blood from its interior chambers.

I don’t know why, but I accepted the throbbing organ. As the blood ran down my forearm, I noticed that I was no longer transparent. My flesh had returned, and my body was no longer crippled. A dark thrill excited me, and the hairs along my new arms stood up. The masked worker signaled that I should mount the stairs alone, so I did.

Shards of mutilated bodies littered the steps: ears, eyeballs, lips, fingers. Each one twitched horribly as I made my way upward. I passed a tall, gleaming mirror. I stopped, staring at myself in the glass, but it did not reflect my newfound flesh. It showed only my grinning skull and the skeletal network that existed beneath my fresh skin. I watched, fascinated by my fleshless reflection, and dropped the beating, bloody heart into the center of my empty rib cage. A great ecstasy filled me, and the world swirled like dark waters.

The heart beating wildly in my chest, I walked
out
of the mirror and continued up the stairs. I stared again at my skeletal hands, glad to see that the deep gashes had disappeared along with my new flesh. The wounds had reminded me of my old body, and I had not liked seeing them. But now I was glorious—the purity of gleaming white bone without a single ribbon of flesh. Except for the red, pulsing heart that floated within my skinless breast.

My feet clicked against the slimy stone of the stairs as I ascended, emerging onto a wide balcony overlooking the production floor where the hooded workers feverishly assembled their sculptures of flesh and bone. I paused at the railing for a second, looking down upon the flurry of activity. Then I looked up, and saw a sea of darkness rolling and heaving right above my head. Staring into its whirlpool, I experienced a great vertigo, and suddenly I was staring down into those dark waters. Since I could do nothing else in this precarious position, I fell.

The darkness swallowed me, and I sank like a stone. Leviathan forms swam past me, and tiny eyes like drops of flame swirled about my skeleton figure. Far below,
which had once been above
, I saw the roof of a great palace rising from the sea floor. The sand about its base was black as obsidian, and the towers were curved and pointed like scimitars or hooks. A forest of chains floated upward from the many windows of the wicked palace, and some of them were being drawn down
into
the structure, hauling in the squirming creations of flesh and bone assembled in the deathly factory.

I sank to the dark sand before the towering gateway. It was built from tremendous ebony blocks stained with flowering fungi. The figures of smiling fiends were carved across the walls, arabesques of tortured victims writhing across the green-black stone. Two soldiers stood before the gates, fleshless skeletons like me, but wearing suits of ancient armor flecked with coral. Their empty sockets stared at me from beneath horned helmets, and they pulled the gates open, moving aside their hooked spears so I could enter.

A host of living skeletons stood within, some draped in the robes of ancient Rome, others garbed in Grecian style, some in stranger garb from unknown lands, while others stood naked with phosphorescent bones gleaming in the deep waters. They stared at me, applauding as I walked a path of crushed rubies. Their bony hands made no sound in the thick depths, but I sensed their approval, their welcoming. I was expected here, and they were glad to see me. Suddenly I felt important, yet completely lost.

The Bone Queen waited to receive me on her throne of skulls. She wore a crimson gown, and her grinning skull face was set with two great diamonds. Two superb eyeballs had nested there in ages past, bright as sapphires. Her crown was a loop of dancing silver flame, blazing eternally, even in these abysmal waters.

I knelt, and kissed the bare bones of her feet.

“Welcome,” she said. “We have a special place for you.”

Her beauty was terrible to behold. It pierced my throbbing, naked heart. She had no flesh to spoil the purity of her immaculate essence, nothing but bleached bone that seemed to glow with the glory of jade.

I knew her. How I had dreamed of her, all those years sitting crippled in my darkened room, ignoring the dead factory rotting beyond my sealed shutters.

“I am your slave,” I said.

“As are
all
here,” she replied.

“How may I please you?”

“I am told you have…industrial experience,” she said. “We have a factory for you to run.”

I screamed then, and tried to tear the hammering alien heart from my rib cage, but the skeletal guards grabbed me and prevented this. They carried me away from the black palace and the terrible beauty of the Bone Queen.

They gave me a dark smock, with a heavy hood, and gloves of black rubber to wear. They conducted me back to the assembly tables and showed me to my glass-walled office overlooking the production floor.

“Is this…Hell?” I asked.

In voices of grating bone, they reminded me that I had a quota to fill.

*     *     *

So I sit and dream of her beautiful, fleshless face.

I keep the production lines moving.

And I remind myself:

Now and forever, I do the work of the Bone Queen.