Gateways to Abomination (8 page)

When the call comes, it's never at a convenient time. In this instance, it was at 4 p.m. on a rainswept Saturday in late November. My great uncle, having lived to the improbable age of 102, had apparently finally worn down the staff at Brookside Willow Pavilions with his increasingly loud and incoherent and doleful jeremiads, and the Board of Directors had voted to unceremoniously "release" him. I argued on the phone, employing every cliché (where is he supposed to go, you can't do this, etc.) and inventing some new ones.

But I understood from the start the effect on people my uncle could have, even when well. After all, as long as I'd known
him, his ideologies and religious affiliations changed like the New England weather, and each change came with an oft-repeated speech. The man couldn't go a month without a new epiphany. And rather than gather the family 'round, he'd corner you at a reunion and regale you with the speech you'd heard him give Aunt Asenath at breakfast. Verbatim almost, but with each new iteration a change here and there...a comedian "improving" his act. He'd even execute a self-deprecating laugh or a knowing shake of the head...at the same spot each time.

The person on the other end of the phone was a dispassionate, obdurate bureaucrat with a resonant voice--an old time broadcaster's vibrato. No, the decision had been made and was final and I, as the sole heir to this particular misfortune, had no choice but to drive from New York up through to central Vermont to fetch my great uncle and his meager belongings. Now. And he had no one left but me.

A few phone calls to work and family across the ocean, and I was off. I drove between the sodden trees and frowning awnings lining East 79th Street and wended my way through the drizzle-hazed, Creamsicle-coned streets, and onto the FDR. By the time I hit 95 North, the drizzle had stopped but all was still black and white. The radio--alternating between talk and music--kept me company and awake during the first part of the trip up through Connecticut, then I added a strong, large coffee somewhere south of Hartford. A duo, I thought, coffee and radio, working to keep my car on the road.

But then, a few miles before the border of Vermont, the radio bailed on me. A rental car without satellite or a CD player is what you get when you call at 4:30 p.m. on a weeknight, and that's when I'd called. So now, as night really settled in, and the coffee began to wear off, I settled into a serious fret. I needed more coffee, but I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen an exit, or
a highway sign for that matter. But I resolved to keep going, and I did, pretty much until the point when I realized that going back to the last exit with Food signs would put me too far off schedule...and I wouldn't be able to do it anyway until another exit came along. So, if no coffee...I spun the radio dial back and forth melodramatically, finding only varying keys of buzzy static. I cranked the volume, hoping the static might form into music or words.

I didn't care what I would find--talk, sports, any kind of music. Just a voice, please, or a musical note. A zither's strum, an accordion's bleat, the plastic thump of an electronic drum...a goddamned SOUND. For five minute
s straight I begged the radio aloud, just to hear my own voice...and then the dissonant chord of a church organ sounded so clearly and loudly that I briefly lost control of the car. Someone watching would have thought I'd had a stroke, I thought, but the idea of someone watching in the middle of nowhere, from the towering woods...well, that was something I didn't want to think about. I wrested the car back into the travel lane with one hand and spun back down the volume with the other.

"Through him...in him...with him...in the unity of the
holyyyy spiiiiiriiiii..." warbled a male tenor, a very familiar doxology, though I hadn't been in a Catholic church since the age of thirteen. Then the priest's voice faltered, rasped, and disintegrated into a violent coughing fit...wet, hacking, productive coughs, by the sound of it. On and on it went, until the reel-to-reel at the station must have begun to fail. The cough slowed to a low, monotonous drone, then sped up slightly, faster, chirpily fast...then reversed...backward coughing for a time, then backward singing, with that lispy, hissing sound like the tongue of a serpent caressing the microphone with unspeakably foul intent. Then the loop stopped as though the reel had been violently dispatched, and after some thumping and clacking, organ music resumed, a climbing, sing-songy, carnival tune. Occasionally it reversed for a time and then righted itself, providing a disquieting soundtrack as I drove through the dark night, the walls of the woods rising higher and higher on either side of the unlit interstate. I still hadn’t seen any highway signs. Even the painted stripes were gone. Blacktop, woods, moon.

The road does tend to hypnotize one, and it certainly did me. I fear I slept awake, dreaming and driving, for exactly how long I'm afraid to speculate. What woke me up, I thought, was drums...which is an odd accompaniment for pipe-organ music, to be sure.

But then I looked to my right and saw two reined and harnessed black horses galloping madly alongside, kicking up gravel. The hooves were bass drums, the gravel tapping my window was tom-toms and snares. The nearest horse's eye rolled toward me...it was red-veined and wide, and full of terror. I hit the accelerator. Their muscled torsos strained in the moonlight as they began to pass me, their heaving sides, their lashing tails...and then a black stagecoach, shaped like a squared-off heart--a curtained window; a low, windowed door; another curtained window. On the roof, strapped-in luggage, ancient and tattered. My car swelled with sounds: pipe organ, rising, rising; the thundering hooves and ricocheting gravel, the creaking, clattering carriage; the hysterical whinnying.

Then ahead, I saw a street sign, the first I'd seen in miles. It was a red, reflective diamond and it read, BUMP. My car, and then the carriage, hit what felt like a ramp. My car left the ground and slammed back down. I heard a tire go. Alongside, the carriage rose and descended. When it came down and hit the pavement, the door flew off, hitting the rear of my car and spinning into the darkness. Spokes cracked and flew from the tires, splintering as they hit the pavement. One speared a horse in the flank, and it shrieked horribly as blood spurted in a great arc. The trees blurred by, smudged thumbprints smeared over impenetrable thicket.

Then the whole carriage leaned like a house of cards, squealing, nails popping, faults gaping between the boards. I saw with mounting horror what had been revealed when the curtains were torn from the windows. In the front, in the driver's seat, was a goat with nubs for horns and giant, gravestone teeth. I'm going mad, I thought. The goat wore a tall hat. A monocle on a chain sat over one eye. As he struggled, his hooves pummeling the wheel, I saw beside him another goat, shrieking, one ear soaked in blood, massive teeth, wide eyes. Lipstick was smeared ineptly about its lips. It wore a woman's frock and pearls. Then the horses began to gallop faster, and I saw into the rear window. Man and woman, human, middle-aged, freshly dead, their hair and jaws bouncing in time to the careening carriage, their purple tongues swollen, protruding from their mouths. Their teeth were shattered, their eyes staring, unseeing. As I watched, the carriage disintegrated, goats and humans spilling into the road like dolls in the wreckage. The couple was naked from the waist down. Suitcases skittered across the road, opening, spilling clothing. The wounded horse pushed out its front legs straight, and they broke with horrible cracking sounds. The horse collapsed, and the other dragged his partner hitchingly into the darkness, their shrieks echoing through the trees.

I stopped my car and sat in silence. The radio was quiet, my heart beating madly, pushing at my ribs. I opened the door and stepped out onto the highway. It was suddenly so
quiet and still...just the sound of one detached wheel rolling in decreasing circles at the shoulder of the road. And then I saw the faces...in and among the trees...children, mostly, some young adults. Their faces were white...a grim diaspora of the damned. The wind ruffled the leaves and their hair. They were whispering, all of them. It sounded like rain. I walked toward them, and they faded back into the woods as though the group all had slid quietly backward into the dark. I continued until I saw them again...and they faded again. And again. And again. I trod through the underbrush, my shoes squishing in the mud, until after about ten minutes I saw a dull yellow glow. I followed the glow into a small clearing. Ringing the opposite side, the faces hung in and among the trees, gape-mouthed.

Before me hovered three goats bathed in moon-glow, the middle one slightly higher than the others. They wore dulled red and white robes, and their expressions were beatific. Flies buzzed around them, lighting and then taking off, lighting again. The middle goat's forearm was pointed at the sky, her hand the delicate, small hand of a young woman. Her middle and forefinger pointed up, the ring finger and pinky pointed down, against her soft palm. Her feet dangled from the bottom of the robe, toes wiggling absently. Her goat's mouth quavered, and then the jaw moved up and down as though she were speaking. I
lent forward, but heard nothing except the filthy buzz of the horseflies. Her eyes, those queerly shaped goat pupils, fixed upon mine and held them. Then she grinned, all huge teeth and blister-flecked tongue. Her eyes blinked heavily.

They rose, the three of them, up into the fog, and were gone. The grey faces faded back into the trees. Whatever this was, it was over, no word spoken. I returned to the car. It started, and I drove
away, slowly, the radio off.

Before long, I saw lights lining the highway ahead, and soon an exit sign. I walked into a Sunoco's too-bright food mart. On the radio a woman over-emoted to generic R&B. I went into the restroom and regarded myself in the mirror. My hair stuck up in spikes, and the familial dark circles around my eyes were darker than normal. Otherwise, I was me. For whatever that was worth. I splashed my face with water, grabbed a limp sandwich smothered like a murder victim in plastic wrap, and got back on the highway.

An hour later I exited the highway in Central Vermont, the mountains looming high above me. I drove through a sleeping suburban complex of wide, white houses with broad porches, some surrounded by expansive and neat hedges, and turned into the driveway of Brookside Willow Pavilions. I got out of the car. My legs were shaky and I felt very tired and overwhelmed. It felt like a chore just to walk.
I opened the double doors.

The lobby was empty. A desk with a phone and a computer was angled in the middle of the room; to the left of that on a podium sat a guest register with a few scribbled names and times. There was no receptionist in sight. Somewhere down a hall echoed upsetting percussive sounds I could not identify. I signed my name and that of my uncle--
Eltweed--and started down the hall toward the crashing sounds. The door to Section C, where my uncle resided in one of fifteen cheerless bedrooms arrayed around a grand piano and constellation of chairs, had a light brown hand-print on it. I somehow immediately identified it as butterscotch pudding. I opened the door, and the crashing sounds stopped.

The lounge area, usually buzzing with residents reading the paper or nodding in front of half-done jigsaw puzzles or staring into space, was empty. I saw no aides or servers. Magazines lay fanned out on end tables. A dying flower sagged in an empty, dusty vase. Then I heard a titter from the dining area. I went around the piano and into the L-shaped room.

My uncle sprawled in a large easy chair where the dining room table was supposed to be, clearly quite dead--a mannequin conceived in a madhouse. What was left of his grey hair formed a cloud around the back of his head. His jaw hung at his chest and his eyes showed only whites. He was clad in a fly-blown bathrobe and striped boxers whose front lay alarmingly open. Between his feet sat a transistor radio, spitting staticky gypsy jazz. Sitting on each of his wiry, bare legs was a dark-skinned aide. One was plump, in tight fitting grey sweats. The other, in an evening dress, was wasp-waisted and hard-faced. Both were Dominican, both grinning wickedly. The plump one looped her tongue over and around his large left ear, and then bit, hard. My uncle came to life, his eyes rolling back into place, and cackled. He stood, and the nurses clambered off of him and, holding hands, retreated, swiveling exaggeratedly through the double doors that led to the kitchen. "My boy," he said, softly. Then he clapped his hands.

"Get this," he said, and he cleared his throat. The voice that came from him then was not that of my uncle, but was instantly familiar in its exaggerated officiousness: "I'm afraid your uncle's time at Brookside has come to an end."

It was the voice from the phone.

"Uncle L," I said. "What's...
" I couldn't quite find the words. I think you'll forgive me.

“
Did they come to you?” he asked. His tone was one of whispered reverence. On the highway?

"They did," I replied.

Did she speak to you?, he asked, and it came rushing back. The words spoken by the goat, in the clearing in the woods by the dark highway, in the glow of the moon. I heard them now. I smiled.

Come with me to the chapel to pray, he said, and reached out a hand red and blue, all the skin shrunk to the bone as though pulled taut and bruised in the process. His hand was, as it always had been, powerful, strong. It was like grasping some ancient scarab. He led me down a reddening hall.

The chapel was small and lined with faded tapestries. It consisted of ten wooden pews facing an altar backed by a giant crucifix, shaped in such a way as to suggest it loomed over the room, the top wider than the bottom, fanning towards the corners of the ceiling. Atop the altar, something squirmed and pulsed under a white cloth. We knelt before the pew in the back. The room was illuminated only by scant track-lighting on the high ceiling and red tealights that lined the arms of the crucifix. I could see hulking shapes silhouetted in the pews, but could not identify them. My uncle spoke.