Gateways to Abomination Read Online Free PDF Page A

hollows.
    "Mr. Stanton," he grinned, and I saw that his teeth were in shambles--browned, broken. I swore that I saw one tooth...a lateral incisor?...swinging from a sinuous pink thread from an expanse of red upper-gum. He wore a white jacket over a blue Arrow shirt, pressed khakis, and ostentatious cowboy boots whose toes ended in a narrow point. "I am Dr. Lisle-Pearl."
    I was about to open my mouth to invent some kind of excuse to leave, when his enormous hand clapped my shoulder and steered me down a short hall and into a room in which loomed a dental chair and the attendant apparatus. They seemed too big for the room. On one wall was the obligatory painting of a flowered landscape; on another a browned poster displaying a potbellied cartoon of a man, meant to be Asian, in profile. A series of horizontal lines led from the body to an impenetrably tight, smushed series of Asian characters--that kind of lettering that always looked to me like intricate illustrations of impossible houses.
    The doctor directed me to sit in the chair and told me pointedly to relax. Then in walked a hygienist with bulbous features too large for her small head. Her hair was pulled back so tightly that there were vertical lines on her forehead which, set against her natural lines, formed a painful looking crosshatch effect. Her name tag read " Sithyl” and her white coat was terribly tight and short, and it looked to me as though she might be wearing nothing under it. Her large (though muscular) legs were quite bare, and dark blue varicose veins pulsed at her ankles.
    She was on me in an instant, reaching under the chair, her mountainous chest pushed up against my side. Her perfume was unbearable; it smelled of rotten fruit and incense. She pulled up a set of brown leather straps, clipping and locking the buckles over my forearms and stomach, then another over my ankles.
    I started to protest and the doctor wheeled around and jammed some kind of apparatus into my mouth. I only caught the merest glimpse over Sithyl's bulging shoulder, but it looked like some kind of multi-clawed, metallic insect with a body like an intricate drafting compass. It clamped onto my back teeth and then, as the doctor reached in and turned a dial, cranked open my mouth to the point I feared my muscles would tear. I tasted metal and my own blood.
    Then the body of the thing seemed to expand, pushing down my tongue and up against the roof of my mouth. I tried to protest again, and a cold sensation lightly tapped the back of my palate, as though a small arm had extended, and activated my gag reflex. I said, "GEH."
    "Try not to speak," the doctor said, grinning a benevolent grin under dead eyes. He opened a plastic door in the side of the chair and uncoiled a long corrugated tube with a curved triangular mask, which he fitted over my mouth and nose and then affixed with straps behind my head.
    "Too tight?" he asked, and I was instinctively, appallingly grateful that when I nodded, he actually loosened the straps.
    He flipped a switch and air pushed into my nose and throat. It smelled sweet, with a hint of almond. The music from the speakers in the ceiling, a barely noticeable Muzak, began to swell. An insistent cello rose up, accompanied by some kind of intense, whispered chanting. The hygienist put her chubby hand between my legs, staring lustily into my eyes. Against all my senses, I began to feel profound arousal as her hand began to undulate in a way that I would have thought physically impossible. It was as though she had fifty fingers. My jaw hung open. The doctor inserted a plastic tube that slurped out the saliva. My eyes filled with tears of gratitude and love.
    Then he pulled out a tray table. On it was a pile of rusted, wood-handled dental implements, some simple and familiar, some alien and alarmingly complex, like an eight-tanged set of scissors with four rubber grips, and a smaller set of shears with one blade and one long antenna that appeared to have been torn