Gateways to Abomination Read Online Free PDF Page B

and steep staircase. I could say that the treetops were punched right through the roof of the place, that an ancient desk hung at a dangerous angle some yards above the house, perched upon an expansive asterisk of thick, knotted branches. That some clothing--a corset, a waistcoat, some giant white knickers--lay higher up, sagging from bowed branches as though hung there to dry.
    And I could tell you I pushed through the underbrush and nettles and clouds of mosquitoes and then stood, scraped and bruised and bitten, in the front hall. I could tell you what shambled down the stairs, swinging an ancient watch on an ancient chain wound around ancient fingers. I could tell you what it said to me.
    I could tell you so much, but I couldn't look at your face while I spoke.
    I could tell you that when I returned to town, the streets were piled with caskets, centuries old and crumbling. That bleached, bloated arms reached from some. I could say that some of those caskets were tragically small. That some held the drowned, and leaked rank water that was waist deep and rat-strewn under the overpass.
    That bodies impaled upside down on stakes filled the courtyard of my tenement, like an inverted audience waiting for a speech from a demented demagogue.
    I could tell you of a rain of bruised babies slamming sickeningly into the pavement of the roads and sidewalks of Leeds, bouncing in dizzying numbers from the roof tops and canopies and awnings.
    I could tell you that I was now a part of an army of the dead, whose instructions were dispersed by coded messages on a radio station. I could tell you of our foul mission and of our multitudes of intended victims.
    I could tell you these things, my invisible audience, only on the airwaves of WXXT.
     
    WXXT. If it bleeds, it's Leeds.
     
    the arrival part 2
     
    My name is Benjamin Stockton. It feels so good to say that. I am Benjamin Scratch Stockton. I have been effectively mute for over a year, scratching in dirt, penned in by a fence of wood and wire, eating hay for my filet and water for my wine. My diatribe was a wavering yell, my thoughts a stifled mass of black thunderclouds.
    But yesterday, the day of the rains, was a big day, a mighty day. I was taken, brought into the wet woods under a slate-gray sky, and, brothers and sisters, I was born again. Born in blood in a dingy apartment on Eastern Avenue. But first I was given a message by a hapless messenger before I dashed out his brains in the grass with his own cane, now mine.
    I have an apartment now, three rooms, sparsely furnished with leaning chairs, a solid table, a basic bed. In that apartment I ate meat again, and I turned on the television and, good people of Northampton, I watched my stories.
    Then I lay myself down in the bed but could not sleep for the excitement. I put on the radio, a small transistor on a simple nightstand. I rolled the wheel to WXXT. They were playing the sounds of cats brawling, with cello. For six hours, I lolled happily in that hazy blur between awake and asleep.
    This morning, I roam the town, seeing its changes, the ventures and enterprises that failed, the ones that are trying for the first time. Men and women walk the streets, the vulnerable and the damaged live there. They walk and they sit and they scream at passers-by but no one listens.
    This morning , I watch a man drive a silver Impala from Pleasant Street, across Main, to King. He takes a left into the lot behind the Hotel Northampton. I cross at the crosswalk and enter the carpeted lobby. Sitting on a small, green-striped divan under a massive chandelier, I watch a ginger-haired, tall man lug two cases and a laptop bag to the front desk and check in. He glances my way and, momentarily disturbed for a reason I'm certain he cannot name, finishes the arrangements with the girl at the desk. A bellman takes his bags and stores them behind the counter, and he exits.
    Now he walks, taking the measure of the morning, taking the temperature of the town.
    I