Nightmares From a Lovecraftian Mind Read online

  His eyes moved to the three figures at the edge of the park that were now slowly making their way towards him. A faint scent of burning wood moved passed his nostrils. Was the wind back? Roux hoped so. But what was that smell? He looked around the park but saw nothing on fire.

  “Quack!” a voice said from behind. Roux turned, thinking it was the little girl again but it wasn’t. It was a young man he had never seen before.

  Normally Roux would not speak in this situation but he found himself strangely compelled to say, “I wish I knew what you were talking about.”

  Over the young man’s shoulder hung a messenger bag. Roux watched as the man opened it up, rummaged through it, and brought out a fistful of tulips.

  Roux then knew the origin of the burning smell. It was the flowers, the iridescent tulips being gripped by the young man’s pale fingers. He turned away, stood up, and started running.

  From behind him, a voice said, “Quack!”

  Roux didn’t stop. He didn’t wait for an explanation because he didn’t need one. Deep down somewhere in the crusty layers of his consciousness, he knew what was happening and why. The figures that had been walking from the edge of the park were nowhere to be seen. No doubt the young man had been one of them. But who were the other two and where were they now?

  Children’s voices swirled around his ears and that is when he fell hard into the ground, face first in a small patch of tulips.

  Roux rolled around in them, submitting to their iridescence and burning-wood smell. His eyes flickered into the petals and into the past. Roux’s father was throwing malformed wood into the fireplace and then looked over at his two sons.

  “You know, boys, things are going to be a lot different when I’m away.”

  Roux nodded as did his brother Maurent.

  His father went on. “It’s like what I told you about, that stuff that happened when I was a kid, how I gave birth to that damned garden.” The flames behind him sprouted dark tendrils. “And that damned garden, your damned mother, gave birth to you two boys. It’s probably not pleasant to think about, I know, but it’s where you came from and the way I figure it, a person can’t be ashamed of where they come from because most of the time they can’t help it. They didn’t have control. I know I didn’t. Hell, I’m beginning to think no one has any control over anything.”

  Roux’s father walked over to his sons, patted them on the back, and grabbed his luggage. “And if you ever meet….her….tell her there’s nothing I could have done either way. I could only have taken two….and you are the two I chose.” The boys watched their father disappear into the snowstorm outside. They waited an hour before standing up and going into the kitchen to get something to eat. Roux drank water and while Maurent had milk and alcohol.

  Roux has finished his water when his brother said, “When I have a son, I will never just up and leave like that.”

  “How do you know?” Roux said.

  “Because I’m not a fool like he is.”

  Roux’s reply was a shrug. He could not care less how his brother raised his future offspring. In fact, he wasn’t planning on having any contact with them whatsoever. Being an uncle, or a father for that matter, was not in his life plans. He did not want to risk the chance of someone looking up to him. There were too many chances of being a disappointment and the only person Roux was willing to disappoint was himself.

  The tulips sang, startling Roux and bringing him to his feet. He spat out a mouthful of petals. There was the taste of something dark and insignificant as if his teeth had given up and faded into dust.

  He was surrounded now, pushed to the limits of psychic and physical masochism, a mere puppet on display in an average park in an average town.

  Or was it average?

  The town was a harsh whisper in a conspiratorial conversation of society, pockmarked with decrepit houses, with false histories and imaginary foundations. So why was Roux concerned there were people around him who were going to snuff him out of existence? He did not fear death, no, but only the departure of this, his false place of birth. He wasn’t sure he wanted to leave just yet.

  Roux vomited a vile concoction: milk and alcohol. It had been his brother’s drink of choice.

  Something else, too: a bulbous form the size of a child’s fist. It fell to the ground, opening up like a malformed flower. Brilliant shades of color enveloped the chunk of meat. It blinded Roux and sent him into a talkative delirium, begging for answers.

  A woman’s voice said, “It’s your fault father left me, left us.”

  Roux’s memory snapped, letting in images of his sister. Where had she been in all of this? Where had she been during his life?

  He said, “My fault? He left for his own reasons.”

  “And what of Maurent? I guess his writing those foolish articles isn’t your fault either?”

  “I had no hand in that,” he said. The bloody meat-form below him cooed. It was a neon rock of flesh pulsating and beckoning him. “He does what he pleases just like always. You don’t remember?”

  She scoffed. “And the rape had nothing to do with it?”

  Roux looked his sister in the eyes. She was, just as his memory suggested, a frozen shape in the guise of a woman. He didn’t answer her despite the glowing blue glare of her eyes. He realized at that moment that his sister possessed no emotion but anger. She could not love, could not forgive, could not nurture even a flower. Even a simple tulip.

  She nodded to another person, a young man who looked very similar to the other one, so similar in fact they could be interchangeable. Identical parts of different machines. Roux realized all people were the same in this park as they stood before the glory of the neon meat of his body.

  A cacophony of voices started to speak in waves of babble. Roux thought the whole park much have been watching him. All those people, all those innocent looking people just waiting for him to make a move.

  He thought about his book.

  It was a strange thing to think about under the circumstances but Roux figured it must have been a defense mechanism. But the book did not want him. It did not want to be read, to be experienced, to be digested by his intellect. In fact, Roux thought the book would have rather been thrown into a furnace than to have been read by him.

  There was a good chance he would die at the hands of one or more of the people standing before him. It might be his sister. It might be one of the young men who were like twins but not twins. It might be one of the many strangers that surrounded him as they looked on with eyes of neon marble. They were all iridescent blemishes on a plague victim left to rot in an average park in an average town. They were only banal throats just waiting to be cut.

  “But so are you,” the voices said.

  And Roux realized they were right.

  V. The Ubiety of Some Hell

  The last sane thing Franco remembered was the smell of Eurice’s high heels as they trampled him into the hardwood floor as if he was a nearly worthless rag in some fetishistic ritual. Then it was a whirlpool of tulips, his body in vertigo, controlled by some sanguinary puppetry. He thought he might have been wearing black gloves. His right hand had held a razor while his left held the neck of a man.

  There had been bloodshed in a park.

  A voice said, “What have you done with Roux?”

  Franco sat in the living room of the house he had come to in order to sell magazine subscriptions. His hands were trembling: marionette limbs covered with blood and pollen. An empty glass sat on the table in front of him. His magazine catalog was torn into pieces and glued to the floor.

  He was alone in the room.

  Where had Eurice and her nephew gone? Franco felt uneasy in the house without the owner present. He felt like a harageous intruder bent on destroying the sanctity of Home Sweet Home.

  Franco walked into the kitchen hoping to find someone there but he was completely alone with every bit of paranoia squeezing from his pores like salty, psychotic sweat.

  He absentm
indedly checked the cabinets but found nothing but strips of old newspaper and oversized mousetraps. The refrigerator was next. Franco opened it and found it empty but for broken wind chimes. He opened the freezer and stared at the contents: a carton of milk and a bottle of alcohol.

  He pulled them out but almost dropped them due to the cold. Setting them down on the counter, he looked closely at the containers, wondering if there was an expiration date on the milk and if the alcohol was still good despite the small bits of black material floating in it.

  Franco unscrewed the alcohol and poured it into the milk. He shook the carton, threw his head back, and swallowed most of the liquid down. His stomach was soothed as so was his mind. Sparks of recollection illuminated the kitchen and Franco saw his black gloved hand holding the razor, slitting the throat, and watching the spurting blood shower the tulips as he danced in the windless park like a crazed, satyrical assassin.

  Eurice and her nephew Lucasse were right there beside him, laughing and tearing up a book that had been at the feet of the bloodied man. Franco saw the words in the book as they danced incoherently across the pulpy pages. They formed no real language, no real communication. The book was as ancient as bloodlust and fatherhood.

  Franco then knew all communication was false and incoherent at the very root of the world. He wondered: is this what loop panic feels like? Are imperium waves disrupting my thought patterns? What nonsense drives us to do these things? What nonsense drives us to do anything?

  Did Eurice order any magazines subscriptions?

  What now?

  Too many questions.

  Franco pulled on the wrist of his right hand, digging his nails into the skin to take off the black glove which he no longer wore.

  Soon the skin dropped to the floor like ancient wallpaper revealing a gold, mechanical hand. The fingers curled into circles, glistening in the light coming through the smudged windows of the kitchen. Eyes stared up at him through each circle: yellow irises around red pupils.

  Blinking, blinking, blinking.

  Franco extended his metallic fingers and heard his false knuckles crack loudly, echoing through the house like an organic doorbell. The thirst beckoned him again and his mouth turned to sour cotton.

  Franco picked up the milk carton and put it to his nose, inhaling the sharp alcohol smell mixed with milk. He brought it to his lips and swallowed more of the liquid as he thought about the dead man in the park and why he had helped annihilate him.

  Why, indeed.

  The eyes on the floor combined to make one giant, pulsating mass of color. It stared at Franco like the eye of a silent father figure. There was disapproval, yes, but also a sort of love. But hadn’t his father left him when he was still a baby? There was no memory of the man except in blurry Polaroids. Franco felt it through the haze of the alcoholic milk. He had disappointed his father and his father’s father but he was still of their flesh and of their mistakes.

  Several generations of arcane disapproval and buried anxiety climaxing in one moment of Franco’s life: in his standing in the kitchen of a house he had no business being in all because he had ventured into the house in the hopes of selling magazine subscriptions and acquiring just a few more dollars to add to his meager savings.

  Another swallow from the carton and his mind is crumpled like the page of an unwanted manuscript. His thoughts fell around him: discarded words from the page of an out-of-print book on industrial parks that had been translated into an unknown, superfluous language. Ideas spread out like flames throughout the kitchen.

  Like an obsolete automaton, Franco used his mechanical hand to grip the milk carton and bring it to his mouth. He drank the rest of the liquid, feeling it ooze down his throat, burn through his stomach, and invade his bowels until the bottom half of Franco’s body exploded in a brief but loud exorcism of blood and finality.

  Before he died, Franco was able to utter the word that was the closest thing to a curse that was ever expelled from his lips.

  “Father.”

  XNOYBISTIC FRAGMENTS FOUND IN AN INDUSTRIAL PARK

  V.

  Obsidian asphalt painted with parallel ley sigils reflected on glass doors, washed and unwashed of handprints young and old, some smeared, some unblemished. Locks broken. Fluorescent hymns from bulbs and air ducts chorusing, wind sounds. These are songs of existence and the rebirth of repetition.

  VIII.

  Obsidian spaces with large beasts of burden moving forward, backward, and relieving themselves of fecal gold to fill the spaces in between atoms and oblivion, cosmic kings and queens in masks slithering within air conditioning ducts. Oblivion defined as: our clear minds. Oh, what pain we extract from our business here and such fuzzy recollections of the rebirth of repetition and reiterations.

  X.

  The swallowing up of our business, our business here. We arrive at our jobs, we arrive at our primal disappointment. I fear for our lives in the basements of those buildings, ancient and modern antidotes to our frivolous existence. The shadows in the basement tell me their name… I commit them to memory. I commit them to my nonexistence. So soon our businesses will be obsolete and our faces erased by the last flicker of the fluorescents.

  XIII.

  The latrines need cleaning, the ceilings need repairing, the walls need repainting. Outside, the sigils are faded and there are automobiles everywhere: unfortunate puzzle pieces out of sync and sinking into the obsidian scum under floodlights. Cleaning crew arrives soon and the oblivious vacuums in the closet and elevators and the silence that is like dark cotton in our ears. You should not commit to anything. You should not sign your name to some skeletal contract beneath the worms.

  XV.

  Everything closed…locked…overflowed…primeval chemicals leak through the roof to floor two and floor one and into the basement where my fears live, where those talkative shadows gather and spread across the stone, brick, cinderblock, plaster, sheetrock, and old machines, old files, old shelves, old desks, old names, our names, those things, our names.

  XIX.

  Obsidian asphalt painted with parallel ley sigils reflected on ceilings, washed and unwashed of scum young and old, the closet and elevators. Fluorescent hymns from bulbs and vacuums chorusing, wind sounds. These are of chemicals of existence and the rebirth of repetition. The swallowing up of our business, the swallowing up of us…

  His Candescence

  Gregory met the man at the park on Thursday and decided then and there that he should kill him.

  The man introduced himself as Xnoybis Brown and claimed to be an importer of silk. Gregory believed none of it, but that didn’t matter for soon this Xnoybis Brown character would be importing nothing but decay.

  They had literally bumped into each other while taking laps around the lake.

  “Oh, excuse me,” Gregory had said.

  The man smiled and put his hands up. “No harm done.”

  Gregory nodded.

  The man put his hand out. “I’m Xnoybis Brown.”

  “Gregory Myers.” They shook hands and spoke briefly and awkwardly, exchanging random bits of personal information much to Gregory’s dismay. Finally, he had to end the conversation. “Well, I do have to get doing. Have a nice afternoon,” he said, continuing on his jog.

  He didn’t like the look of Xnoybis’s face. It held a perpetual smile as if the man was incapable of being unhappy. Gregory hated that. It took much self-control not to vomit during the short conversation they had had.

  Gregory hated the fact that there were people who could force joy into their countenance no matter what the occasion. He knew the man would probably smile through a hurricane. He would have probably smiled through the Holocaust, telling everyone everything would work out for the best. Unadulterated joy and positivism angered Gregory to no end.

  Gregory could tell that about the man just by one interaction. It sickened him. He needed to do something about it. Though he’d never been violent before (not unless you include the time he stabbe
d a classmate with a pencil in elementary school) Gregory had a plan formed in his head about how he would kill this man, this Xnoybis Brown.

  Now it was Saturday and after checking on mother, Gregory went to the park again. He brought some popcorn to feed the ducks and sat down at one of the benches in front of the lake.

  The ducks approached him and soon so did Xnoybis Brown.

  Gregory nodded at the man, swallowing the bile that was rising up his throat and threatening to flood his mouth. “Morning.”

  “Yes,” Xnoybis said. “Good morning.” He had a seat next to Gregory on the bench and pulled out his wallet.

  Gregory watched as the man flipped through small scraps of paper, sugar packets, and raggedy dollar bills until the man seemingly found what he had been looking for. He pulled it out and held it in front of Gregory’s face. It was a photograph of poor quality, one a person might overpay for at tourist spots where they have to step into a booth and smile awkwardly at an unseen camera.

  “This is my mother,” Xnoybis said.

  Gregory grimaced at the photograph. An elderly woman clad in a blouse almost as white as her face stared at him. There was no smile to break the wrinkles that had been carved on her face. Gregory was surprised no one else was in the picture with her. Why would the elderly woman get into the photo-booth by herself?

  “Lovely,” he said.

  Xnoybis moved the photo closer to Gregory’s face. “Just lovely? Look at her eyes. She has beautiful eyes. My father said they were made of marbles, beautiful marbles, imported from Germany.”

  “You don’t say?” Gregory looked at the woman’s eyes and saw that they were indeed beautiful, yes, but also frightening. They stared at him accusingly, like a witch-hunting judge.

  “She was blind, you know. Couldn’t see a thing. Didn’t know what her children looked like. Quite sad.”