The Tell-Tale Heart of Madness 5

Chapter Three: And on the Worst Night of His Life, No Less…

            Edgar stumbled down the western slope of College Hill, his laudanum-besotted mind struggling to cope with untamable passions that besieged his mind and heart. “She has rejected me…” the whole of Apocalypse in those four words. The only woman he had ever loved (well, there was also dear Virginia, but she had had the gall to up and die on him, leaving alone and adrift in the cruel world.  Sarah was, alone, the only bright and shining thing left in his desolate and storm-ravaged world. But like a cruel and false island to a drowning sailor, she had tossed the flotsam and jettison of his love back into the merciless tides to inexorably drown.

            All of his heart, letter after several thousand-word letter, all of it had been so many feeble, ineffective waves dashed against her granite resolve. She would not be moved by anything he could say, and deed he could perform. Save one. Perhaps if he threw himself in to the river, then, then she would know how true his love was. Or had been. But what if then she realized what a prize she had passed on? What if his death broke her sanity and she joined him in suicide, hoping against hope they would find reunion in Heaven? No, for all his heartbreak, he could not consign her to such a fate. Her mother, yes. She could be thrown to the ravenous dogs for all he cared, or…or…walled up inside a remote dungeon!

            Torn between visions of deepest love and rabid dogs, Edgar was quite unready for the great machine that pulsed into view before his eyes. He looked furtively, up and down Angel Street for anyone whom he could call to for aid, but he was alone in the dark and rain-dampened night.

            The thing… (machine?) slowly came to fully inhabit the reality into which it had strobed, with a sound that could only be described as time and space reduced to sections and reassembled, only this time with a machine sitting in the middle of the street, at the top of the hill. It resembled a carriage of sorts, if such a vehicle was built to not go anywhere, for it lacked wheels or even sled rails. It had brass pipes and levers, flashing lights and tubes of all manner and otherwise creaked and groaned like a steam engine. A steam engine that slid sideways into reality, that is. At the, Edgar guessed, helm of it sat a man in clothes that were not the fashion of the day. More over his right sleeve was rolled up and his forearm bandaged from some great wound.

            “You are Edgar Allan Poe, yes?” shouted the man, in English, a fact that simultaneously comforted Edgar and yet, comforted him not at all.

            “Are you Edgar. Allan. Poe?” the man repeated, Edgar thought as if talking to an idiot. Sadly, all he could bring himself to do was acknowledge it with a shaky nod and an utterance that sounded more like “WUH?” than “Yes.”
            “Then get in,’ the man said, indicating the seat next to him.

            Edgar again said (sort of) “WUH?”

            “Do you wish to live? You are pursued by enemies you do not know.

            This took Edgar aback. Not that he had unknown enemies (he always had suspected so, but assumed they were jealous writers and dull editors), but that someone asked him a question about himself to which he did not know the answer. “I… uh, don’t know. If I want to live or die, that is” he tried to explain over his sudden feelings or great embarrassment.

            “Let me put it this way, then,” said the exasperated man, “Do you want your stories and poems to live on after you are gone?”

            “WUH, I mean, yes. Yes, I do want that.”
            “Then get it, man! There are unknown demons on our trail and we must be away!”

            Edgar wanted to ask how they would get away, or anywhere, without wheels, but then felt himself, for lack of better words, being sectioned and slid sideways across Time. He had managed to lean over the railings before throwing up his dinner into the swirling eddies of… whatever. The swirl was like the spinning of a room when Edgar drank too much, except not just the room, but the whole universe was spinning. Edgar threw up again. When he looked up, wiping his face on his sleeve, the man was looking at him with a grin and the strangest goggles Edgar had ever seen. The man had his hand out to him in greeting.

            “Nice to meet you, sir. My name is H.G. Wells.”

Interlude No. 2

            The Year is 1978 and Neil Perry has just had a series of dreams over the previous few days, each worse than the one before. It’s not even the lucidity of the dreams that plagued his nerves so, nor was it entirely due to the undeniable presence of some vast deity, its hideousness hidden behind a veil of stars, that caused him to urinate in his bed just to think of the dark, bat-wings that spanned the distance between galaxies. This was followed each night by the gaining of massive erection, followed by orgasms that shook his entire frame, his thrashing limbs sending waves of bed sheets in various directions. The orgasms kept happening until he was ejaculating blood. On the third morning, he didn’t even bother to disentangle his legs from the ruined sheets, but dragged them behind like some lunatic wedding dress, until they fell off and away. He then stepped up on a chair, looped the wire around his neck, which was attached to the top of the door jamb, and fell to the side, off the chair and barely felt the wire separate his head from his body.

            In 2002, Alexander Hartdegen is found slumped over in the driver’s seat of his own time machine. It appears he simply passed, perhaps from a heart-attack (though he was so young) but an autopsy is performed at the insistence of the insurance company. He is found to be quite empty of all his organs.

The Tell-Tale Heart of Madness 4

Chapter Two: …from the Diaries of Nameless, the Narrator

            “There are reasons I chronicle the exploits and eccentricities of my dear friend, C. Auguste Dupin, and reasons I remain anonymous as I write each entry. The rational for the former is far more interesting, I think, than the latter, as I have come to know him better. In doing so, I have come to appreciate the keen workings of his mind and it has been my privilege to facilitate him in his desire to be a great detective. And, of course, it is worth mentioning that, at the time we met (as he would recount the tale) while searching for the same rare book, it had been my intention to kill him.

            Dupin, more than any other man of his time and reality, has a remarkable ability to see, intuit, envision, that is to say, in all the ways possible, to know the connections between small pieces of a design, a clear picture if you will, of how they all fit. He senses their order, their sequence, how each fits the whole. He is every bit the Chess Master who sees multiple steps ahead, before even his opponent can. He possesses quite a thirst for knowledge and challenge, and that was how we met. As I overheard him talking to the manager of the obscure little library where we met, my blood froze when he mentioned that particular book.  I wondered if he could be one of the agents of the unnamable one, but in a rare coincidence that was merely that, he was looking for an ordinary copy of the Hortulus Animae cum Orantunculis Aliquibus Superadditis of Grüninger. He was looking for a prayer book, thank God. He did not need to die.

Over time, we became friends and I came up with the idea of renting a rather poorly-kept mansion, outside of the city, where we could read, debate, play chess and otherwise interact with the outside world as little as necessary. Him, for his reasons and me, for mine. But when I read of “the Extraordinary Murders” it was hard to conceal my shock and concern, not just for myself, but for Dupin. I knew this was the sort of locked-room mystery his mind thrived on, and he would not be dissuaded from investigating. I would be powerless to stop him unless I shared truths about myself I would rather he not learn. No, I would not be able to keep him away from it, so I had to find a way to mislead him towards any conclusion, but the truth. For I doubt that even C. Auguste Dupin could gaze into that void and not go immediately mad. I took it upon myself to guide him towards conclusions that would support a world view he could live with and thrive within.”

Interlude No. 1

The year is 1960 and the man portraying “H. George Wells” was practicing his lines when there came a knock at his dressing room door. Confounded by the losing of his place, the actor opened the door. What stood there… he had no words for the abomination that stood before him. It was a putrescent column of rot, all eyes and impossible limbs and so many teeth-filled mouths. His wonder and horror lasted only as long as it took for the monstrosity to casually flick an appendage, whose razored talon separated the poor actor’s head clean off at the neck. With that the murderous rot vanished like the remnants of a dream, except this dream left the actor quite dead.

The Tell-Tale Heart of Madness 3

CW: as much violence as in te original "Murders in the Rue Morgue"

Chapter One: The Night She Rued the Day She Knew
           

Madame L., hurried home as fast as her aged and arthritic legs could move her. She told herself the noises she made were from the exertion of the brisk pace, punctuated by spurts of actual running, and not from the increasing terror she felt, that threatened to freeze her lungs and fix her to the very spot. Menace was everywhere, in every face and every shadowed alley. There! Didn’t that man just look at her with assassins’ stilettoes in his stare? And the woman pushing the infant carriage, didn’t she have features like a fish, dead of emotion, and so very pale? Madame L. actually leapt over a shadow spilling out of one doorway because she was sure she saw it curl and flex, a monstrosity, reaching for her.  When she finally reached her own residence, she fumbled with keys that seem to leap from her numb fingers, going everywhere but into the lock. When she finally got the door open, she slammed it again, as soon as she was inside, turning every lock and deadbolt, even barring the door with a thick oak board.  An utter sense of exhaustion pulled at her, but she mounted the stairs to the apartment she and her daughter shared, and once inside, locked that door, too. “Cammile! We must leave this place! We are not safe!”

“Mamma?” came the sleepy voice in the bedroom.

“Wake, child! Grab only what you can carry and cannot leave behind! We are not safe, and our lives depend on us going very far away, as quickly as possible!”

“But, Mamma, why? This is Paris, and no one cares if you tell fortunes.”

“Don’t you think I know this? I do not have time to explain. I saw something at the Lady’s house that I should not have. A letter, a terrible letter. And ever since, I have not ventured from the house, but that I feel cruel and evil eyes upon me. When I went to her again, earlier today, there were Gendarmes there, as well as ill-looking men that looked at me as if with recognition. I ran before they could ask me their questions. But I know the look of murder in men’s eyes, and we are not safe. I stopped at the bank on the way home and requested they bring us all our savings. Once we have that, we will hire a carriage to a boat, and that boat to anywhere that is far from here. Now go and pack!”

Madam paced the floor of the apartment she shared with her daughter. Fretfully pulling on the fingers of one hand with the other, she swore softly to herself, “Damned LeBon, where is he? He knows I wait for him! Damn him, and damn banks that take so long to give a person their own money! And damn that I ever read that damned letter! And damn Madame L’Espanaye and damn me for telling fortunes!” She fell to her knees, “Oh God, oh Jesus, please protect us!”
            When the knock came at the door downstairs, she let out a scream, she almost immediately muffled. “Who is there?” she said to the door, trying to sound brave, and not succeeding.
            “Madame, it is Mssr. LeBon, from the bank. I have what you requested. May I be allowed to enter?”  After some moments, and the sound of deadbolts thrown, and locks turned, the door opened enough to reveal part of the woman’s face. She looked at him, but mostly her eyes darted here and there, as if she expected menace in every shadow and passerby.

            “Here, give it to me.” she reached out her hand. Once he handed her the satchel, which took both her hands to hold onto, she kneed the door closed, nearly in his face.

            “But Madame, you need to sign…” But all he heard were deadbolts, locks turning, and bars being set across the door, “the receipt…?” Though he knocked again, and again, the door went unanswered and, eventually, he returned to the bank.

            With a strength borne of nervous energy and fear, Madame L. carried the bag upstairs, where she returned to packing only what was essential to her and her daughter, then further getting rid of less essential things. We must travel light, she thought, we must move fast.  She nervously eyed the corners of the room, save for the two she had been able to add plaster to, until they were no longer corners, with their sinister angles. She does not clearly remember doing this, nor why, but it seemed very important. But that was but two corners, and this room held so many of them. Too many to stay. “Will you hurry please?” she yelled to her daughter in the next room.

            Her daughter came out of her bedroom with a bag packed. “You are rushing me! “

            “You are moving too slow!”

            “And you both are too late anyway…” said the tall, pale man, with the almost sunken eyes and a cruel, jagged blade held lightly in his hand. But that was not what made the two women scream with fear, well past hysterical. It was what lurked behind him, and the noises it made that were not of this world. Afterwards, as the man delicately picked his footing through the wreckage of the furnishings, he bent at the old woman’s body and, using his blade, cut her throat and then slashed her several times. Meanwhile, the nameless horror that was the man’s companion, stuffed the daughter’s body up the chimney, upside down, using appendages of its body that were a little like arms, covered with little mouths.  Then, together, they walked through a door that wasn’t there before, and wasn’t there after they closed it behind them.

The Tell-Tale Heart of Madness 2

Prelude No.2: Howard Makes a Friend

            Howard burst through the front door of the apartment in Brooklyn Heights, with all the fury of an approaching storm. His long, equine face was contorted in rage, which he took out on the letter in his hands, savagely gripping it in his tightened fist. His latest story had been rejected by that bastard, Farnsworth Wright, again. “As if Weird Tales was the stuff of the Great Library at Alexandria, and not made of the same cheap pulp it’s printed on!!!”  But, the rage melted away as he realized his apartment door was ajar, kicked open with such force as to partially tear one hinge. Thieves has stripped his apartment bare. He wanted to sob, and several tears made the long, sloped trip down his face. This, on top of everything else. Howard felt his tipping-point weighing heavily on his shoulders, urging him to just give up. They had taken everything. He wanted to scream, but it died inside him, drowned in the inexorable waves of the repression he had grown up with, an ocean where everything that was him was drowning. His life was shit. He was shit. His writing was shit, this letter proved so, didn’t it? His marriage was… not what he wanted it to be, his wife relocated to the Midwest where she tried to revive the fortunes of her hat business. They hadn’t lived together for a while now, and so he found himself in this cheap and tiny first-floor apartment in Redhook. Coming to New York was a mistake, and not for the first time, he regretted ever leaving Providence.  

Dreams came that night, and the nights afterwards, night visions that whispered of that which would break the human mind to even look upon. When he woke from one such dream, he found he had scribbled the framework for a story. A terrible story full of such horror as filled his dreams. But this apartment, this place, this whole town, was the wrong place to give this story—no, these stories, these many stories—the kind of birth they deserved. He finally decided he must move back to his hometown, and purchased train tickets as soon as his next allowance check arrived in the mail.

As he sat on the northbound train, he wore the kind of smile that made others find a different seat, but soon the train filled and some unlucky someone had to take the seat next to the odd-looking man and his unnerving smile. The poor man, a clerk in an accounting firm, on his way to visit his mother, tried to start a conversation at one point, as much out of hating the way the silence between them (and how it seemed a living, breathing thing) as any other desire, “Are you on your way to Providence, then?”

“On my way there? My dear man… I AM Providence!”

The clerk could find nothing to say to that, and as he silently thought of the many good reasons one does not talk to people who smile like that, and found something extremely interesting in the financial newspaper, for as long as the train-ride took. Howard, for his part, continued to smile and dream of world where madness could pass for physics, and geometry possessed a maddening degree of nonsense.
            And the train rode on into the night, while Howard dreamt of what the moon brings.

The Tell-Tale Heart of Madness 1

Critiques more than welcome...

Prelude No.1:  A Book is Printed; Later a Deal is Made

There are days that arrive masked, a disguise that gives them the appearance of another mundane collection of mortal hours measured out by the two-dozen. They do not wear signs around their necks that read, “This day may seem but a bell tone: simple and ordinary.” But sound reverberates and travels and never truly dies, echoing out from its birthplace, through the earthly atmospheres, then traveling out into the void between stars. Who know what is out there that listens?

            Johann Grüninger roused himself from a warm bed to begin his day. This took more effort bed. It was the last, unevaporated vestiges of a dream he had had, a very dark dream. Never since he was a young child had he felt this way- like a child again, that jumped at shadows and what unimagined dangers they could contain. He poked the embers in the tile stove until the coals glowed and added a few pieces of wood. But he could not bring himself to eat, not with how he still carried the feeling of the dream in his stomach. “I might as well just begin work, get my mind off this damnable dream.” With that, he went to his printshop, and after his preparations, set himself to printing out the small prayers books that made him the bulk of his living. He had been working so single-mindedly that he did not notice the passage of time, until the bell above the door rang out, startling him, and for a moment he wanted to scream, though he knew not why.
            A man (Grüninger thought this, based on the bipedal form that stood before him, wrapped in a cloak and scarf, under a wide-brimmed Berett, all of which served to hide the person within. This more than anything else unnerved the printer.) “This is… printing shop, yes?” said the voice that issued from within the darkness created by the scarf and hat, “You are the maker of… these?” With that the gloved hand held up one of the small prayer books.
            “Yes,” said Grüninger, with an impatience he wished sounded less like rising fright, “And they are quite available for purchase in many places throughout the town. Now, if you please, I must return to my work.”
            “Ah,” said the figure, “But, I have need of… special order. Book. You print on skin, not just paper… this is so?”

            “You mean Vellum,” said Grüninger, hoping that was what, indeed, the figure meant.

            “Yesss… just as you say! Now, here is what I require…”

            Afterwards, Johann Grüninger had little clear memory of the rest of the conversation, indeed of the rest of the day and a few days afterwards. He found himself, standing in his printshop, the same figure before him, no recollection of the time passed. In his hands, wrapped in protective velvet, was a single copy of what appeared to be the same, simple prayer book as he had printed hundreds of times before. Afterwards, a few things would stay with him for the rest of his life: the terror he felt, not knowing what the patron looked like (and the greater terror he imagined, should he have known), the slightly wrong feel of the vellum the patron had provided him (oddly…warm to the touch), and the lucid dreams of something very big and very bad, passing close by. Though paid handsomely by the mysterious patron, he buried and never spent the strange gold pieces, with the baleful face struck on their surface. Days later, he realized whatever plates he must have used on the special book job were missing as well, though he had not the heart to look for them.

            He died in 1533, though some records say 1531. If he had been asked, the printer would have insisted his death had begun the day the tall figure had entered his print shop. And, as far as he or anyone else knew, the book vanished from history.

            

Exposed

I enter this room
with eyes sewn shut,
finding out the edges of the threads
with fingers rolling desperately,
bleeding tears and perspiration
until I could be open

listening to voices
bodies that have gone before me,
they speak of rock bottom and
awakening.
I see through the stinking fog,
I was already there,
miles beneath the surface.
broken shovels strewn
among the tough surface,
my hands clutch a boring drill.

broken rock
vomits in my face from beneath
I take from stones laid to rest
demanding these spirits speak
powering through the blood
of my ancestors, hungry,
unsatisfied
I chew through rocks
and call it good, noble, worthy.
burning my lips
proud to distance myself from anyone's kiss.
I rake the charred rubble
into a bed.
I fall asleep and dream.

I awake and the smoke has cleared.
and the first quakes emerge
slowly ripping the ground below.
swallow me now, I beg,
earth shredding this rocky bottom
my life crashes in the violence
I pray to find a seed within
to grow from this broken ground

4+5+6/30

(tw for self harm/abuse, the past month has been really rough hence all the trauma and mental illness poetry, I'll move on eventually)

6/30

undoing last night’s 3 am relapse

put the two year ring on and keep it there

hold your hips like you love them

suck the blood back into the disappearing cracks

let the elevator take you down

like the sea if the sea

could not drown you

put it down

don’t pick it up

hold your gauzy whispers

what did I do what the fuck did I do

cry at two years of unbleeding

gone

dissipating like a flock of crows

cry

please cry

drown the red in saltwater

text your friends

shit

don’t keep going because

you never started

and this was never home

and you were never hurt so bad

you had to tear all of it apart

5/30

how do I live in this same body

with this same ghost

tiptoeing through me

screaming the unundoable

4/30

so let me tell you of the room,

the mattress in the corner,

the white walls

let me tell you of the men,

their beards and million fingers,

each of which loved me

or what they could take

tell you of the tripod,

standing like a cellphone tower,

telling no one

of the clothes,

his undershirt,

my red leotard,

the one with the strips

of rainbow gauze,

the bright morgue

the ceiling,

how I fell

up into it