Gathered Dust and Others (16 page)

Thomas seemed to sense my stress, and thus I turned to look about the room, which had been decorated by his attempts at art.  I saw the many images of a faceless god that wore a triple crown.  “Admiring my deliverer, brother?  Ah, mighty Nyarlathotep.  What promises he makes.  Into what a depth of darkness he promises to sweep me, on the day of my happy death.”

“Don’t be morbid.”

“Pah.  I’m being existential.  I swim toward my inescapable doom.  Promise me, Jeremy, that you will toss my ashes from the heights of Mount Selta.”

“Don’t speak of death.  You may live for unnumbered years.”

Peevishly, he pouted.  “You still refuse to understand.  I sent you on a mission, and you performed with perfection.  You found the thing of which I read in some volume of misbegotten lore, a tome that I found in the tower at Sesqua Valley.  In that tower I was taught secrets by a fantastic beast, and learned of that which would help me expire in wondrous fashion.  No, there are no numbered years.  There is only now, this moment.  There is only this teak box, and the thing that nestled within it.”

Fear welled up within me, and he placed an emaciated paw upon my arm.  “I don’t want to do this,” I protested.  “Or if I must, I want to share your fate.”

“That you cannot do.  Damn you, you promised me this.  Don’t desecrate your vow.  Open that box, damn you, and take up the dead thing.  Yes, just so.”  He opened his heavy robe, and I tried not to stare at the lesions on his flesh.  “Now, place the dead thing on my chest, just above my heart.  There, so easy.  And now, my love, kiss your brother goodbye.”

Uncontrollably, I shook.  My eyes were dim with tears as I bent to him and pressed my mouth to his.  Gently, I placed a hand upon his chest, next to the thing from Sesqua Valley.  When I took my mouth away, his raspy breathing softened and grew still.  Floral perfume wafted about us.  I felt a sore beneath my hand smooth with healing.  With blurry vision I watched as the brittle flower began to alter,  to bloom.  There came from its petals a beautiful bouquet, and I gulped the waves of fragrance.  They seeped into my nostrils and sank to my pulsing heart.  I knew that organ’s thud inside my ears and felt it on my brain. 

And his.  I felt his heartbeat join mine, a brotherly palpitation.  I watched his stilled flesh drink in the flower’s substance.  I watched that flower melt into his meat, that husk of flesh that softened and became beautiful, unblemished.  Bending low, I kissed his hair, as my hand found the place above his breast whereon I had placed the magick bloom.  I could not take my hand away, and thus I felt that which tore my universe apart:  his final heartbeat.

He Who Made Me Dream

Did death, I wonder, carry with it some psychic odor, as opposed to its common stench?  Or was it the specter of long-anticipated tragedy that shocked my senses with fear as I touched the doorknob?  Some secret intuitiveness prepared me for the ghastly sight.  I pushed open the door, stepped into the gloom, felt as though I had walked into the lingering shot of some somber
film noir
; looked at the bed mat that huddled in its corner, the filthy sheets reflecting the blue glow of a digital clock.  I was aware of the shadowy thing that slumped in mid-air, but could not yet confront it.

Stepping to our fetish altar, I knelt before it and fingered the leather gear and razor blades, lit candles and burned musk incense.  I watched my shadow that was thrown upon a wall.  The curling spirals of smoke reminded me of him:  his smell, his pale skin.  I remembered when we had first made love, at some hidden swamp, where we had fucked to the music of its inhabitants.  I saw once more his saturated beauty, the water dripping from the black hair that clung to his face.  I heard his necklace of bones clatter with each copulative thrust.  Pushing memory away, I reached for the sheathed knife with which we had sliced ourselves while making love.  My fingers found the empty sheath.  Lifting my eyes, I acknowledged my lover.  The altar knife lay on the floor beside the fallen stool.  His corpse hung from a length of rotting rope that had been attached to one of the hooks we had fastened to the ceiling.  His tilted sunglasses covered the dead eyes.  The leather jacket and jockstrap, his only attire, caught the flicker of candlelight, and on his once-lovely mouth were the remnants of crusty blood.

Shutting eyes, I placed moist palms upon the floor and listened to labored breathing.  Waves of recollection washed my brain.  He knelt before me in an abandoned necropolis and massaged my face with cemetery sod.  I shoved stained glass, which had once been a representation of the Christ, into the back of his hand.  Dark blood dripped onto our nakedness.  He smoothed my mouth with wounded hand.

“Drink this for me,” he whispered, cupping my balls with his other hand.  “I am the Erection and the Life.”  Smiling, I tightened my mouth around the ruddy wound and sucked, as he bent low and wound his lips around my aching phallus.  Salty elixir  spilled into our mouths. 

My eyes opened, and I crawled to his hanging form.  Rising clumsily to weakened knees, I stretched toward his dry dead hand.  Blood had thickened on its new wound.  Taking hold of it, I bathed it with tears and kisses.  A folded sheet of yellow paper peeked from where it had been stuffed into the pouch that hugged his prick.  Releasing his heavy hand, I buried my face into his crotch, drinking in the pungent smell of urine.  I took hold of the yellow paper and smoothed it against my face.  Its violet letters wavered in the gloom.  The words were from his beloved Baudelaire, in Clark Ashton Smith’s translation:

“…Despair

Weeps, even as Hope, and dire, despotic Anguish comes

To hang her stifling sable draperies everywhere.”

The words had been kissed with bloodstained lips.

I lost it then.  Clutching his limbs, I shook with grief, as hopelessness chilled my numb flesh.  Misery churned my little soul.  It choked my burning throat.  Sorrow vomited from my heaving mouth.  But his soft hand embraced the scars of my shaven head, and familiar lips pressed against my ear.  We fell upon the floor, locked in union, as his mouth bit into my own.  I licked the thick blood from his lips, gazed into his eyes, begged for poetry and passion.

“Death is a soul eater,” he sighed.  “A cherry razorkiss.  A fuck dicktator.  The black sun surgeon cuts into my angst, and poesy pours forth, a mental masturbation.  You lick it up, you cow.  I am your Venus Psyclone, your sea of stormy love, on which you wreck.  I tempest-toss your dick within my fanged Godbox until you beg for clemency.”

On and on the words assaulted, as jagged teeth tore into my flesh and drooled into my brain.  His rough wet tongue licked my throat, my nipple; it fondled my pulsing heart which he sucked in time to cosmic rhythm.  He was the wild beast of romance gone mad.  My eyelids flapped open. 
I watched his whispered wordplay whirl around us in the smoky air.  His tattered visage rose before my own, a dim yellow thing wrinkled with woe.  The blinking eyes dripped blots of blackness into the scarlet slit that was his mouth.  Oh, how that crimson void split with torment.  The room was splattered with wet red nightmare.

My bones shuddered.  Orgasm stung my phallus.  Desperately, I hugged him to me and wound my fingers into his matted hair.  His heavy corpse weighed me down with remorseless reality.  Dreaming died.  Gasping, weeping, I gazed at the broken rope that hung above us.  Nasty shadow drifted downward, mocking me until candlelight extinguished.

Cool Mist

Night seeped into the early evening sky and made it black.  I remember wandering that realm of ink in search of perfect solitude, hunting for one uninhabited place where I could sit undisturbed and weep for the soul of my young lover, dead by his own hand.  Finding my way to the waterfront, which was near to the punk artist’s co-op that was my unruly home, I walked in wind that pushed the stink of Puget Sound into my sensitive nostrils.  I heard the plash of water on rocks and approached that liquid song.  The somber expanse of water spread before me, seeming like some living thing; reminding me of the mortal elixir that once flowed within my lover’s veins, those vital stems into which he pierced a needle and heralded his junky doom.  He had mocked my quaint abhorrence of drugs and booze, and I suppose he would laugh to know that I had procured some outlawed absinthe from my Autumn Sister and drank it in bitter memory of our love.

Night’s chill shook me from my morbid reverie.  Shoving hands into pants pockets,   I felt the chunk of cheese that I had wrapped in plastic.  It had been Todd’s habit to feed cheese to the waterfront rats, and I had decided to continue this tradition in his memory.  As I began to unwrap the substance, I heard a human sound above the wind and waves.  A voice of song.  I hesitated, not wanting to meet anyone; but as I listened something in the sound beguiled my senses and seemed to beckon.  My boots crunched on pebbles as I trod upon the path that led beyond the rocks and water; and my footfalls must have carried to the singer, for suddenly the song went false.  I looked and saw a shape kneeling on the ground, a blanket enshrouding its shoulders.  It rocked to and fro, and as I cautiously approached I could detect the soft singing of an esoteric melody. 

His small face was that of a child, but his eyes were not young – they gleamed with hostility as they held my own.  His dark hair was kept short except for two tufts dyed red and shaped into horns.  Spiked dog collars choked his throat.  His face contained a kind of ravaged beauty, and it terrified me.  There was something in his dark sparkling eyes, a weird kind of crazy rapture that chilled the heart of he who looked upon those slanted orbs. 

I knelt a few feet from him.  Fearful as I was, I wanted to listen to his tune.  The guttural language that he softly uttered was like none I had known; it amazed me that a human mouth could shape such alien words.  He turned away from me as I listened and sang to distant water.  Trying to think of something to say, I held to him the chunk of cheese.  “Care for some?  I like feeding the sewer rats, they get so hungry this time of year.”  I thought I detected a sort of smile.  And then he turned his merciless eyes toward mine and opened his mouth in song – a loud wailing sound.  I felt stabs of icy terror creep into my flesh.  Those weird words of his cacophony filled me with a kind of panic.  I leaned upon my hands so as to push myself erect and stalk away. 

His singing stopped and he gazed toward the water with frantic eyes.  I followed his gaze and at first saw nothing – and then it was there, a patch of mist that floated toward us in dark aether.  I thought at first that it reflected moonlight, but then I realized that its odd illumination came from some other, some unknown, source.  But what kind of light could form such outlandish hints of hue in the body of dull mist?  And what were those colors that writhed obscenely and shaped themselves outlandishly?

Once more the child-like creature sang.  The mist wormed nearer.  It pulsed inches from my face, and a wisp of it drifted to me and smoothed itself against my brow.  Vision blurred and blood thickened.  My skull throbbed with pain.  The boy’s decadent singing sounded as though it emanated from some other place, some other time.  Cold oppression seethed inside my skullspace and spilled toward my heart.  Like a drunken thing I tipped and slammed against the ground.

Awareness came as an ache and sense of dull fear.  His strong hand helped me find my balance.  How unyielding was the hand that held my own.  He saddled nearer and pressed his body against my own.  I could taste his rancid breath on my lips.  And then I noticed, floating above his head, the patch of mist, that monstrous substance that spilled toward and enveloped our conjoined hands.  His fingers tightened in their clutching.  I could just make out the muted image of our joined hands as the boy opened his mouth in chanting.  I watched in horror as the flesh of our locked hands began to ripple and discolor; how it began to shred and dissolve.  The mist grew opaque with crimson cloudiness.

Overwhelmed with searing pain, I shut my weeping eyes and tried not to lose consciousness.  Lips kissed my hair and pressed against my ear.

“It does get hungry this time of year,” his little voice mocked.  That was when my mind snapped, and I lost myself within an hysteria of screaming as my companion sang and sang.

Descent Into Shadow and Light

I awakened in my windowless tower, to the smell of ancient books and those worms with which they were infested, and swept the pale winged things from where they had nestled in my coiled hair.  Pushing the silken coverings from me, I stood and stared at the white sphere of soft illumination that hovered just above my elongated shadow – the sphere that has been, always, my companion.  By its light I have devoured the words found within the ancient books, syllables that I could taste when they were spoken.  I cannot quite remember how it is I learned the art of reading, but I have a dim semi-recollection of she who danced in my dreams and always held onto a white book, showing me its illuminated leaves and carefully moving her silent lips so that I could comprehend the words that they formed.  It was this woman in white who, at the climax of one vision, dissolved into a globe of light that followed me out of slumber and dwelt with me in the lonesome tower; and it was this sphere of radiance that accompanied on my day of resolution, when I determined to vacate the tower and explore the surrounding forest.  Thus I departed from the tower room that had been my home for all of memory, stepped down the winding steps of stone and crossed the arched threshold to the floor of silent earth, where all was dark except for the places that were kissed by the glow of the sphere that followed me.  I breathed into the icy air and light mist floated through my lips and drifted toward the dark mute trees of the inarticulate forest.  Although there was no sound, I imagined that I could detect sly movement behind distant trees, and thought perhaps the pale winged things that nestled in my hair at time of slumber were surreptitiously shadowing my steps.  I did not mind – I liked their smooth cold forms when they wove their way into my coiled hair and kissed my scalp.