Gateways to Abomination by Matthew Bartlett Read Free Book Online

LOOKING," the man intoned leeringly, "FOR A GOOD TIME?"
    I have been asked that question, and variations thereof, as a boy, as a teenager, as a young man, and as a cipher of a man in middle age. I've been asked by a Cairo cab driver, a Panamanian pilot, a half dead priest in Prague, and a woman costumed as a koala bear on an impossible San Francisco incline. My answer has always been the same: No, but thank you.
    But in the Look Diner, under a blackened sky, as people around us ate and chatted and clinked their forks, as potatoes piled toward the dingy ceiling, asked by a man who had come in carrying his brain in his cupped hands, as the radio droned with muttering, insinuating voices, as I could smell the spectre of death rising in plumes from my gray coffee, I said Yes, sir, if it will make you go away, if I don't have to look at your blazing eyes, if I could just be crouched under bedsheets a thousand miles from this cove of dark histories, I am...I am...looking...for...a...good...time.
    He reached a long fingered hand into the inner pocket of his suit jacket and handed me a white flier folded in fourths. "Prepare for unspeakable pleasures," he cackled, and he plunged his face into the bowl. Slurping and snarling, he chewed and gnawed and gnashed, and his gray matter sprayed like ash, lighting on his browns, onto the counter. One sodden lump landed in my coffee and I slid from the stool and careened out of the diner, bellowing I know not what, the flier tubed up in my left hand, my right covering my eyes.
    Trucks blared by on the road, their lights filtered red through my fingers. Then the rain came. Then the rain came. Then the rain came.
     
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    At dusk I passed between the disused stone stanchions that once supported the gates to Mountain Park. A carpet of stony earth, an arch of orange leaves, an orchestra of pe epers and highway groans.
    There were streetlamps in the woods, among the trees, spaced as though lining both sides of a narrow road, though no road, no path, ran between them. Each was black iron, tall, topped by a light in an ornate glass cage clouded by mosquitoes and the occasional...bat ?...no. The bodies were long and tapered, wormlike, and light shone through the black wings as though they'd been constructed of wire and crepe.
    At length I felt and heard a beating bass line that made the forest floor vibrate.
    I walked, pushing aside branches, kicking up bramble and prickerbush, waving away mosquitoes, clambering over dead-falls and felled trees. I thought of my wife, four months in the grave. For three of those months I had felt she walked beside me, guiding me, blushing at my tears and offering silent solace. That had been lost. Where had she gone? Now I wondered if she followed at my heel. Was she warning me away, or was it my own self, knowing no good could come of this venture?
    Then, ahead, lights gleamed through the trees: pink and purple, red and orange, yellow and blue. I emerged into a clearing, in the center of which, angled oddly, sprawled a long, low building, the front of which was six broad garage doors with a horizontal line of frosted windows through which blurred colors pulsed in time with the punishing bass thrum. To my right, all the way past the last garage door, a narrow utility door stood propped open with a twisted, splintered crutch whose foot was buried in a cat litter bucket displaying a varietal garden of lipstick tinted cigarette butts.
    I entered….
     
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    …into a cramped area with a carpet piled with shoes of all varieties: oil-stained sneakers; bent high heels; flattened boat shoes; bedroom slippers; boots, some impossibly tall;