Nightmare Sequence I: Little Abomination
Gigantic homopterans in trench coats visited me last night. Carrying syringes and hypodermic needles filled with coded rants, cryptozoological musings, and obscure pseudoscientific trivia. They mainlined growth hormones through choice veins and smoked ritual tealeaves through smooth mahogany pipes and quartz hookahs to get to the size they are now. Still, when their needles broke skin and vein, I was lost.
It began with a black and white film starring a trio of gremlins sabotaging the WWII-era aircrafts of Allied pilots over the European and Pacific Theater of Operations. The spectacle was presented in an early-20s-era silent film format, set to a live Wurlitzer pipe organist. It was uncharacteristically gory for being a silent era skit. (At 12-18 frames per second, it was distinctly nauseating.)
In the film's closing moments -- amidst the burning rubble of crashed planes -- the gremlins joyfully collected the charred human remains of our pilots as if they were picking fruit at the supermarket, placing blackened hands, feet, torsos and heads into burlap sacks as snacks. One gremlin held up the smoking skin of a man's face, tied it around its neck by the hair, and wore it like a bib.
Gremlin mischief usually accompanied foo fighter phenomena, which began in 1944 with a report by the U.S. 415th Night Fighter Squadron. These reports were never adequately explained by military intelligence, according to the title cards.
Overcome by somnambulism, I dove through the fabric of the screen and into a heap of flammable nitrocellulose film. For a garden variety chimera, it was a conceit of osmosis between two realities that remained unquestioned. A pastiche of unrelated events all synonymous to a cadre of prevalent horror movie tropes not unlike the occultism that followed the end of the Production Code of America in 1964 (Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Omen, et al) and the cult success of low budget cannibal films and mondo zombie flicks in Italy.
Nonetheless, I'll be certain to recite the more traumatic of circumstances. Seven moieties of which are as follows:
1. Your bespectacled narrator’s svelte Bulgarian inamorata;
4. Pernicious lightning bolts;
5. A locomotive engineer;
6. His bestial 19th century locomotive opus; and
This nascent train of ours – it wasn’t your run-of-the-mill antique.
Mon petite amie stood akimbo by the floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the landing strips, idly watching our bird taxi towards the gate to kiss the aerobridge.
We stood shoulder-to-shoulder now, locking hands, fated for Sofia, Bulgaria -- airport security personnel fielding reports of puckish activity by a commercial-airliner-class of gnomish saboteurs: English gremlins armed with Vril-vitriol balloons. A Vril-derivative with a level of acidity strong enough to burn the equivalent of cigarette burns through the metal hull of a freighter.
A large crowd of boarders congealed into a serpentine line now.
“To qualify as a passenger, you will need your passport, papers of citizenship and legitimate ID," said a scratchy PA announcement.
The crackle of static was shrill enough to cause a few nosebleeds.
Synapses jingling and jangling like a choir of spurs. Good thoughts are inaudible; the bad ones are so loud. They move like semen in the body … unheard, encoded with unquantifiable life, mysterious, flagella-propelled microorganisms conspiring their escape from testicular halfway houses and the wet piping of urethras, the result a gooey, fugitive discharge carrying the potential to create, nurture or destroy human life.
An olfactory nightmare of a man with a Brooklyn-American Russian accent—pushing a shopping cart stuffed with miscellaneous verboten—approached me; threaded in thrift, bedraggled clothing drooping from his bony frame like old rayon hanging from a wire hanger. The transient was rank – uric acid impregnated every fiber of the oversized pinstriped blazer of a zoot suit he likely procured at the local secondhand during a leisurely stroll through Little Odessa.
This cosmonaut served as the vanguard to a baronial coterie of stately emus, made up in rococo cravats, wrinkled tuxedo jackets, bowties, and Windsor eyeglasses. Emus chanting their squawky incantations and non-sequiturs.
“Diaspora. Down undah. Flightless plight. Give us watah.” Their bodies looked like overused mops. “Diaspora. Ancients we aww. Flightless plight. Give us watah.”
Gallant emus were followed by a grazing procession of domesticated llamas, which had nothing to say in particular. They preferred smiley muzzles and bubbly jowls. They were a ripe smelling homogeneity of dams, crias, alpacas and guanacos.
Malodorous merchant nudged me. His stink lines broke a pleasant airport-induced coma. People watching interruptus. My attempts to appear casual and ruminative irrelevant:
“Fresh from Machu Picchu, these llamas be,” he began. “One thousand rubles each. They make for great companions and fellow mountain climbers. And they’re always smiling. What do you say … перспективными?”
“Sorry buddy, I’m tapped out,” I confessed.
“What a shame. Next time, perhaps.” He curled his long, grimy fingers around the shopping cart’s handle.
“I must admit,” I ceded, levying a target on alternate clientele. “These are some pretty goddamned charismatic emus.”
“State the obvious, wayfarer. 200 American dollars, per emu. Perhaps your подруга might have an interest. They make for great bedtime story orators, and are martially trained to protect neonates from sadistic pink flamingos and porch gnomes.”
“I don’t have any children,” I admitted. “But if I did, a literate emu in a spiffy cravat would be—no, will be—my first investment, I assure you.”
“Don’t jinx the future mother of your cribbed offspring on my account, boy.”
“Are you a passionate man, merchant?”
“Emus represent a sentimental place … right here,” the merchant shared, touching the sternum over his heart.
“I recognize their plight. The injustices inherent to their genus--their ancestry.”
“To be honest," I began. "They appear to have been waylaid from their homeland and forced into slavery, by an ex-солдат no less.”
“I haven’t achieved an erection in five years. It merely dewlaps between my legs like a flap of old leather. That is a statement that makes as much sense as what you just alleged.”
“Then I apologize. How did you procure these dashing emus?”
The merchant cackled. The carbon dioxide that resulted was so feral you could see it in comic-strip tendrils. “I singlehandedly manumitted their surviving ancestry from ritual genocide, led by the chieftains of The Lost Village of Cannibalistic Aborigines. 18th century historians, 20th century anthropologists and 21st century archeologists have a tendency to obfuscate the documentation that supports it. It's almost apocryphal now. By the 1960s, most of the old sacred aboriginal stone tablets were destroyed by a sect of CIA operatives that still worship ancient Egyptian deities. They’ve discredited remnant aboriginal scripture, reducing the tribe to a sub-Jungian myth. All we have left is speculation and the skeletal detritus of neutered anti-government theories. But I’ve seen them. In fact, I’ve killed a few of them. I am selling the chieftains’ skulls for 1,000 rubles apiece. Interested?”
“Think I’ll pass. But thanks.”
“My emus are flightless birds. Their plight is no flight. The sheer number of inadvertent suicides off of cliffs and towering Karri trees alone is perplexing. These emus are a subspecies of the Ancients. While leading a brigadier resistance against the aboriginal emucide, I discovered them in a Tasmanian, subterranean citadel in 1786. The European settlement, as you may know, occurred shortly thereafter, setting the stage for their extinction. Some of our hunters still poach them for their meat, oil, and leather. I merely wish to preserve their ancestral lineage. The modern emu can no longer speak as eloquently as its hirsute ancestor. Centuries of inbreeding to purify the blood, I suspect.”
“If I had the rubles, I’d—”
“I trust that you would, passenger,” the merchant said.
The smile that followed was a graveyard of rotting periodontium and plaque-caulked enamel. “When you have the resources to consider one of my llamas or emus, you’ll know where to find me.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Looks like the boarding process is underway. See you soon, merchant.”
“Amen. Oh, a kindly caveat, boy. Be wary of the Gatekeeper. He’s got a foul habit.”
“Dapper of your environs, passenger.” His voice grew deeper—vocal cords now enduring decades of cigar smoke—fisheye image of a red tendon snapping out of place—a woman’s face under a horned-nose Venetian mask of hardened clay—a patina of giggling moss moving over stone tables, bedding severed brine-soaked swine heads that brown and crackle under a patient fire:
“Love as unpopular is chic. I miss the ‘60s. You nary have to feel bad for what you did. What may the Black Dog tells you. Pay little mind. He is not your friend.”
Lymph nodes ballooned. Muscles sang with pain. A furnace that emanated pneumatic heat, catering a sizzling fever; entering my nasal cavity, bolting along my vibrating spine and branching out into my nervous system—a liquid circuit, (no), a hairless demon (disguised as an orgasm, perhaps).
“It sleeps in the belly of the train. The train is its subterfuge. Underneath the vertebrae, you will find him. You will meet with him, soon.”
And with that, the merchant turned for his departure—the calm promenade of his quadruped and two-legged contraband ambling tautly behind.
Are my lips moving? Or am I thinking? Can you hear me, darling? Did you cut your cheek on my stubble?
The line ahead of us deliquesced rather quickly. After scanning over my documentation, the boarding attendant instructed me to pass with a simple nod. Inamorata and I fondly locked eyes.
A pleasant interstice if it were not interrupted by the rude bite of something nasty.
I snarled. The pain was bright and hot.
Bespectacled eyes scanned all vestiges.
The attendant had kindly hammered a carpenter’s nail through my hand, cleanly puncturing the metacarpus … traversing muscle, tendon, cartilage—clear to the other side. Some kind of note was attached to the head of the nail. Its penmanship obscured by a soft-focus smear. It was like reading through an eye glazed by the secretions of a ripe chalazion.
The pain was now unrealistically manageable (on par with the initial discomfort of an installed IV). Purplish bruising developed in seconds. The entire hand grew twice its size, like an overgrown eggplant with curious digits and knuckled deformities. An infection began rather quickly, the veins embanking the wound fluctuating between violet and green. A grotesque iridescence followed. The septicity spreading in fast-forward.
In a panic, I removed the nail. Blood spurted from the hole it left behind like water from a lawn sprinkler. I fell back into a chair, hyperventilating. Vision gray. Color toppling out of my eyes.
The bleeding stopped. Coagulated blood like the overcooked pasta sauce on the glass tray of a microwave oven. A thick, black locust squeezed itself out of the wound, shook its wings, and buzzed off in an imperfect figure 8.
“Removing your nail is against airport policy,” the boarding attendant said.
“It doesn't really hurt anymore.”
“Your arm is going to rot and the infection will pass into your bloodstream. Would you like me to contact an emergency response professional?”
“Where is my girlfriend?”
“In a few minutes, you will go into septic shock. Might I interest you in an airport policy PDF?”
“First there was a locust, now there are ants. Lots of red ants.”
“Don’t worry, that’s normal.”
Lightning Bolts and Telekinesis
Cue the expansive, gunmetal vista of a generic open landscape with a nondescript road cutting through the center of it. On the horizon, lightning bolts were caroming from a bruised sky.
The lightning had a jittery, rickety quality to it, as if the spinning reel of film conjuring the spectacle were missing a few key frames.
The train conductor and I were sitting on the grass watching the light show. Thunder crashed like the footfalls of Nephilim approaching. Increasingly becoming uncomfortable with their proximity, we moved to Plan B: Control lightning with our minds—their path to the earth.
Our minds invoked an ironworks factory that stood on top of a sepia marsh where we ran through obstacles of moving machinery and indecipherable parts and rotaries – in search of a lever whose sole purpose was to power down electrical disturbances in the clouds.
Deuteronomy 18 would be displeased.
But we understood this to be a vision. A metaphor. Not sorcery.
And with some trial and error, we eventually succeeded in our telekinetic feat.
The bolts wrinkled then winked out of existence, the clouds turned black, like stretched cotton swabs dipped in black ink. Plan B was a success.
An absolute darkness followed. I could feel a hot breath against the back of my ear.
The notion of a meddlesome Demiurge was a key factor here. He's commonly known as the Sandman -- or Ole Lukøje, first addressed in Hans Chrisitan Andersen's 1841 folk tale of the same name. But Andersen was only half-right about Ole Lukøje. The Sandman is a temperamental creature; he's as much a bringer of good dreams as he is of bad ones. Derr Sandmann -- written in 1816 by German author E.T.A. Hoffmann in a book of short stories known as Die Nachtstücke (The Night Pieces) -- first depicted the mythical creature as malevolent. There, Ole Lukøje would sprinkle the dust of sleep on the eyes of restless children. Shortly thereafter, their eyes would fall out, and Ole Lukøje took the disembodied peepers to his iron nest on the moon, and used them to feed his offspring.
Today, the Demiurge is a found-art sculptor, employing papier-mâché mash-ups or collages of the contemporaneous (sometimes loosely archetypal) detritus imbued by modern journalism and the media. The truth-cum-untruths metastasizing out of the blogosphere; Web site user commentaries the size of skyscraper manifestos; popular culture; mainstream filmdom; celebrity “acropolises” in Hollywood; the commercialization of intellectual property.
Ole Lukøje was in a foul mood when he put me to sleep.
One begins to suspect that celebrities are augmented humanoids crafted and programmed in laboratories underneath Kodak Theater by vasectomized stem-cell researchers and gene therapists in Tyvek suits and uncomfortable latex underwear.
“It all began with Toberman,” a voice said. “In 1886, Harvey Henderson Wilcox purchased 160 acres of land at the foothills of Cahuenga Pass, a ranch that would be incorporated as a city of Los Angeles in 1910. Seven years prior to that, Hollywood Boulevard was transformed from a humble amalgam of homes and agricultural businesses to the thriving theater district of the coming decades by real estate developer and Freemason lodge brother Charles E. Toberman. In 1903, Freemasons began a series of rendezvous in a lodge that occupied the exact location of present day’s Kodak Theater. There, accompanied by certain key Theosophical Society members, they facilitated these meetings with the purest descendant of an Aryan subterranean Vril-ya race, who held the code for a key gene that would serve as the master splicing agent for many of film history’s biggest celebrities, including their lineages.”
Once upon a time, a railway engineer summoned a mechanical cryptid with his mind. It was an industrial-to-postindustrial rail-transport-era steam locomotive, which with some research lead me to Cornish inventor Richard Trevithick, proud arbiter of the first successful steam-powered locomotive on February 21, 1804—which ran on the tramway of the Penydarren ironworks in Wales.
Here, my surroundings were as simple as the open road motif from the previous episode. This time, I was engulfed by a rusty, toasted heath.
The sterile terrain underneath me entirely twilit, as if set afire by phosphorescent magma and gigantic subterranean filaments. The heat was comforting.
The ice water in my veins thawing.
An indescribable discomfort suddenly chaffed like fevered skin.
Something was here. The constant blip of an unseen presence winking on the radar of a vast, submarine nothingness. The ground under me shook.
Starboard, loomed an incredible locomotive cryptid, and it was nothing short of Cyclopean.
It was a crossbreed of steam-engine parts; Walschaerts valve gear; black sinew; a museum’s hodgepodge of preserved viscera; and cartilage: all filigreed on the outside. It was deceptively inanimate, though. The laced and various categories of organic matter were cause for brow-furrowing concern. Tree-root thick tendons and oversized veins clutched black metal like desperate Vitis clinging onto red brick and grout, palpitating with the indisputable flow of pumped blood and ticking nerve endings. Charcoal flakes of black membrane salting the barren earth. It was not unclear: this steampunk vertebrate Franken-train was a living, restless organism, spewing blackened smog through its various smokestacks and uncorked orifices. I didn’t question it. One just had to roll with it.
An overactive Demiurge requires cadenced patience. Like a bothersome ulcer after a peppery meal … the jutting pause before those two tablets of antacids kick into action.
With little to no prologue … the Victorian monstrosity started to move, the broken coma of its Walschaerts valve gear squealing like stuck pigs.
It groaned flatulently as the birth of its massive anatomy edged into a state of prickling sentience.
Somewhere, eyelids sheathing cataractal corneas cracked open by the sticky slits.
This thing was hibernating for a long time.
I looked down at my body: I was uniformed in a black-and-white, striped train conductor’s uniform.
From a helicopter’s POV, I was a walking barber’s pole in the middle of a boundless sepia wasteland.
Charlie the Choo Choo lapped concentric paths around my body, its wheels and colorless muscle cranky at first, then moving fluidly, contrails of desert dust lingering behind it like flagella.
Did I design this awful thing? Imagine the cadavers it burns as steam … crumbling into loose heaps like the flicked cylinder of ash from a cigarette.
Its playful veneer almost coerced a smile, but underneath its coy, Calliope deportment, a trace of malice came through in the air like a hint of halitosis that you just couldn’t ignore.
As far as the harmlessness of Charlie’s intentions went, I had trust issues.
A question like the chewing gum in your hair. It just had to be resolved.
Rather than wait to find out, I experimented with telekinetic feats recent yore, as I had with our friendly brigade of lightning bolts. In increments, the telekinetic advances of the mind started gaining some traction, and I was able to loosely steer against the train’s more destructive routes. The control I had over steering its girth, however, wasn’t perfect. Quotidian at best.
It wasn't difficult to ascertain the cryptid's desire to run me over.
The shaman-grip I had on it grew faint. In moments of weakness, it rushed me like a prodded bull seeing red. Sidestepping its intent to shred me into gory ribbons, I could hear the reverberant sitcom laugh-track of an audience I could not see.
At random, the cryptid would change course in an attempt to flank my better judgment and take a bath in my guts. I knew that I couldn’t do this forever, not without running out of breath, and getting killed in a rather unsightly way. I'll be damned if I let gremlins use my viscera as snacks. I had an audience to consider, after all.
At this precipice, I unearthed something rather critical.
Ostensible to this grotesquery’s peculiar menagerie of organs were some rather large, yellow, bioluminescent discs … animate accouterments beating like a frog’s gullet. They glowed like the light seen through a sheer lampshade.
I needed to remove these wafers. Not only that, I needed to unscrew them.
This, as I hypothesized, would disable the beast. Or at least irritate him.
They felt like hot coals in my hands. The more I unscrewed its discs, the more ferocious the cryptid became. Its ferocity, nonetheless, was in vain. The cryptid got smaller … and smaller … with each extraction.
Closer inspection revealed a telling stasis: a half-digested freemartin, gorily regurgitated by a jumbo, cannibalistic heifer with blood-soaked corneas, which suddenly leaped into a blinding lens flare, disappearing.
My retinas stung with flung javelins of light. I closed my eyes. Residual tie-dye petals blossomed underneath my eyelids.
Now it shared the likeness of a midget rhinoceros with coils of black smoke rising from its gelatinous nostrils.
To one side, the tiny, bloodstained skeleton of a rook lounged, its mouth opening and closing, like cheesy B-movie animatronics.
To the other, the lopped head of a hippopotamus idled on the parched earth, its mouth pried open with two stirrups. Its eyes were gouged out and a small black bird picked bits of carrion from between its gapped teeth.
Lastly, it settled upon a domestically sized quadruped.
Anecdotally, removing the yellow discs had revealed a truer essence.
What I had before me was an amorphous, black dog with Rorschach eyes.
Its oculi trembled like a hummingbird’s wings. It was a three-dimensional graphite sketch. A charcoal lithograph with body; ammonia stink; dried school-glue textures. A famished street urchin, dipped in crude oil fondue, dragging through its last days. Its fur clumped together by blood-engorged stools. Its doubtful corporeal integrity a sebaceous mixture of petroleum and lard. Its penis was large, sharp and priapic.
This was its true essence.
The heath—which, theretofore, served as the backdrop to my recent performance—had now become a picturesque field with rolling mammary hills courting a brilliant lilac sky.
A plastic barnyard in the distance obscured by ghostly veils of ignis fatuus. Something beneath the topsoil ... rotting.
It was like a change of green screens. A Chroma key, if you will.
From the barnyard, the grunting sounds of coitus trickled through the cracks in the boarding.
The flimflam of animals mating, perhaps.
The chirruping of a cricket’s hind legs scraping against each other.
The sky ablaze with Van Goh stars, casting bone and sheen over innumerable blades of grass, creating a collective glow not unlike the luminous spell of a full moon. The kind that pulls on your teeth and makes you go mildly batshit.
I acknowledged the conductor, but he did not respond. His face affixed to the twinkling sky. He was smiling, but it didn't look like he wanted to.
I looked at the sooty canine more closely. Its deformities, while vague, were considerable.
Its face shook violently. The froth of its saliva stippled my lips. The camera technique employed here wasn't anything new. It was first seen in 1990 in Adrian Lyne's psychohorror film, Jacob's Ladder, which would've been amusing if it didn't manage to unsettle me. Like looking through a camera's lenses in the back of a pickup truck over a gravelly road, my eyes finally drew the rough draft of a rawboned muzzle. A loosened piece of its brain fell from its snout and a gaggle of large parasites shimmied out of its ear canals to schmooze with the discarded gray matter on the grass.
The scattered encephalon on the ground had the look of oatmeal and albino inchworms. The bloated critters moved and grated themselves going the wrong way against the larger blades of grass. Pricked, they burst into imperfect globules of porridge. Their evisceration sounded like burning Fall leaves in my ears. Like a crackling log in a fireplace stuck in my head.
My hands were white-knuckled ballpeen hammers. Eyes glassy and dry. I uncoiled my fists and found balls of dark earwax. I dropped them in disgust. My gums seeping with trivial hints of blood. The faint taste of pennies in my throat.
We sat there in silence for some time.
"Look everyone, look at the beautiful stars," I said -- an attempt at conversation.
The train conductor did not respond. He preferred the crickets; his elbows glued to his knees, eyes buried in the shade underneath the bill of his cap.
The black-eyed dog, conversely, spoke in the croak of a voice: “Don’t you feel bad for what you did?” I could hear two voices. One going forward, the other going backwards. But I could not decipher the latter.
“What have I done?” I inquired.
“Don’t you feel bad for what you did?”
“What did I do?” I asked, pleading.
Its double-voice dripped from its muzzle right against my ear. “Don’t you feel baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad for what you did?”
The ashy blur of its paw against my knee, its oily eyes leeched my own. “Heaven.” The double-voice in my ear said.
“Heaven.” It said again. Then: “You think they are still watching?”
I was bilious here. I looked at my hands, turning them on my skinny wrists to and fro, from palm to knuckle. Gray in the light.
The clumpy scar tissue where the carpenter’s nail had been was gone. But inside, a hemorrhaging panic grew. I took a moment to ask the train conductor a question. When I turned to him, he was no longer there.
“Your friend is gone,” it said.
A scratching sound followed. Like a brush with metal bristles against a maple tabletop. The demon was closer now.
The both of us were alone; its colorless sketchbook eyes … fixed on me ... magnets for pupils sucking the iron out of my blood. I turned my face, closed my eyes. Wished it away. Opened them. Looked at my side. The demon was still there, rooted like a weed, immobile.
Something flickered in its grainy face.
The itchy-sweater silence that presided over this moment might as well have been a blaring siren. It was the noisiest silence I’ve ever had the displeasure of not hearing.
You could call it sleep paralysis. But for all intents and purposes, I was awake.
With little-to-no preamble, the faerie choked me. The muscle fibers along my spine tensed. Enter tachycardia, stage left. If it's fight-or-flight, flight was winning. Still, I almost preferred it over the deafening silence that preceded it, where you could swear by the electromagnetic pull of the world in the pit of your stomach, and the oiliness of the earth's atmosphere in your palms.
Large, callused hands with black, fungal nails around my neck that belonged to a desperate man with an unfortunate case of giantism. It was like breathing through a stir stick -- and it was the perfect time for this place of wraiths to go black.
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