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.