Written By: Harley Lethalm

(For —,
coldly)

On N-- Ave., the dust traced the spinal column of a sidestreet, which itself gave on to a leisurely thoroughfare lately dubbed "Joint Shiver Road" by the rather unpleasant folks of the city of Forrestei, Connecticut, with the nomenclature newer than as might be suspected by one from without, especially from the nearer provinces of Asywerth, or Cusstmawe, where the newspapers are never printed regularly, or the people who cared to notice of them never did. However it might have been, the "Joint Shiver Road" became a favorite of loose transients, hack, slack-eyed devil-biographers, ruffians all the sort of that, aye. Also there was the bleary rumor of an infanticide, hot tears printed on the handkerchief of woozy Eternity, blood. The hobos of that bogus ville will say all sorts of things as goes the subject, though - consider, ye - that what makes the tongue of one man swift with animation and humoring society should render his fellow dumb with speech altogether, and that's decidedly why men drink themselves wholly into a semi-confusion, so that, despite each other's company, there can be any company at all.
Hence there were a great multitude out drinking that evening when, through a maniac indiscretion, the full-bosomed figure of Lucy Valn introduced itself to the room, fluidly elegant and with blond hair blond so very far enough, and going idly by a man encapsulated in idiot inquiry with what, only very determinedly, on her part, could well be his wife. They all loved a good gossip, a bunch of quidnuncs, they all. But to bear on the true description of Lucy Valn, to agonize even momently over the soundness of beauty, and leg, christ, the legs----Oh, how few of them could really even do it. As it were, as she stepped to seat herself at the big glasspane bar, a weird thing, from nothing but mist, seemingly, had there developed, and it was presently that just as her hand reached out to accept the slight snifter of sherry, a gentleman beside her noticed that on the outskirts of her sleeve, where the arterials glimpsed the cuff of the gauzy material, there was first an advertisement of blood, which, ignorant of any pathos of instruction, slinked down the sleeve, the cotton damp as topsoil with the finely red cerement. This gentleman, wondering and desperate at this unloveliness, called out to the woman that she had by and large suffered a gruesome violence. --And but then there was something else, too, it was in her voice, it cried out from her voice like one of Milton's "divorced angellia," itself a voice-in-itself, hating, hideous.
"I don't feel much at all like talking," saying this, Lucy Valn took to reservations and silences, and didn't turn up her head at the barkeep, who seemed to ask the same thing, with no scrupulousness toward a variation, but who finally dabbed the little red spot on the musty glasspane; Lucy Valn never once drew up her shirttail to review the offense, and some hours she whiled away there half in a dream or touched by a sequence of methodical hypnotisms, for she was quite plainly frustrated, psychically, and would admit nothing whatever of the insulted arm.

Twenty or so miles away, the sky was tinged the color of void and chasms, and a man named Kromer, really of that aforementioned street variety, rantipolish and waggish, a cigarillo clenched fast to his mouth, saw not a little ahead of his way something that decidedly ought not to have been there; or, if it ought to have been there, then to hell with G-d and penance and prayer missals, for, encroaching now on the suspicious wedge of something ----Kromer could discern nothing of the phantasm, if it be phantasm ---- he felt sordidly, and just as soon braced his advance; from his position he could but little hear that anything had come out from the ruined piles of shadow.
He smoked another cigarillo. He wondered over his ratiocinations, not sufficiently repulsed by the gambits of logic which he had had to use in order to bypass the very shuddering hard-won fact that there was, just as his cigarillo had clunked to the ground, a sort of faint noise, peculiar, somehow peculiar.
A radium fold of moonlight had by now centered on the dark trail and to Kromer, as he, resolved now by degrees to effect a knowledge of the thing, walked a few paces this/that way, etc., when finally he came upon the thing: shock-blond ringlets of infant's hair poked out from a stroller. What had before surprised him as a novelty he now knew for the hoarse panting of lungs that were flimsy as tape-reel, and which Kromer could see through hole-punches in the babe's throat. A section of nose had been excavated from the face, however crudely, and whatever there was of teeth in the babe's gums had so unnatural and disquieting an effect on Kromer that he lapsed thereby into a complacent huddle on the rotted earth, miserable with the thought of it all. When he awoke, the poor babe was dead. Kromer viewed it with ineluctable shuddering; he saw-- the mouth hung apart in a rictus that seemed to glide off the proportions of the face and Kromer recalled all the laughter of his childhood, then, all the birthday cakes and yes, all the birthday cakes ----hadn't he remembered blowing out the big numbered candles, one after the other, signifying graceful ascent up the climes of ages, frosting, much frosting and the laughter of friends eager to present small wrapped gifts, and he accepting them, the feeling warm as a lozenge in his brain.
This desiccated thing in the stroller couldn't know to reach out for those gifts, and its mouth would never defeat the burning of a candle, grinning afterward at that big numerical mass piked to a halt on the frosting: 4...5...6...7...and so forth, the wax number as significant and signifying as an xmas tree in the parlor.
The miniature hands seemed to reach out for sustenance or explanation or----Kromer had nothing to do but wipe obvious sweat from his brow and light a cigarillo. A dash of nicotine coursed up to his brain and he felt suddenly very groggy, as before, somewhat, while the wind tippled the slight stroller and there was the sound of the wheels shifting,and there was no other sound, and he tamped out the cigarillo with a mute stamp of his bootheel.
He made off to a telephone and dialed the local Forrestei police. "No," he said to the line, "I can't reckon either that that baby had fuckin' teeth, man." He sat there in the shy dawn, wracked with inveterate longing for bright sparrows over the whole territory of his life, while the babe sat rigid and lonesome in the crummy stroller, heinous with the churning pollutions of Death.
"Nihil est, nihil est," Kromer said to the sudden slip of sunshine that snaked through the slop of day, himself draining another Cheyenne because he no longer felt good about anything, and when at last a responding police unit jutted into frame, he pointed glumly to the sullen artifact, and obediently two officers divvied up rank, or so Kromer speculated, so that, all said, the younger of the pair walked frustratedly up to the stroller while Haplen, the other of the two, talked to Kromer with his fists encircling his pants-pockets, looking, maybe, for something with which to distract himself from both ruffian and that rough miniature ahead; all of this did Haplen do ineffectually, for he broke and wept a little later on, just as medical entered onto scene; what captivated him so far down into the easy dupe of melancholia was the babe's pacifier---- it was produced from a small flap in the stroller, and the rubber nipple appeared as though tormented by a singularly rabid violence, half shorn, as it were, from the plastic tempering. ("Aghk, what the, what in the damned...' said one of the med techs on observing the babe in the stroller. Probably it was all that could be mustered to say by anybody, then, sure as shit, and really the other med techs didn't dare to hazard any attitudinal guesses as to how the babe could have survived so long with [they'd estimated correctly of this] thirty-seven punctures or puncture-like features along the neck and none felt especially plum about the mottled skin, either, with someone penciling in: contusions x--4, contusions preferring cranial control x--/, and all the whole bunch of them feeling quite suckered into something so preciously sad that for a while nothing was said but that all there condoled each other for this sickish humanly calumniation.)
Later on Haplen conducted the junior officer to the rear of the Maria with a look of harrowing fright; the older of the pair by some fifteen years, Haplen was used to filling in the greenhorn crowd whensoever he had the chance, and here he efforted to first condole his partner on the egregiousness of the situation, the invincible upset produced by the miserly picture of the babe, but his consolations were not vastly committed to language, for his tongue was stuck on one fact, discrete from the rest of things, and that was that he, Haplen,was quite sure of the babe's name, for he'd driven the mother to a polyclinic in the middle of a damnably hot night just a few weeks before; what struck Haplen as funny was that he could hear that woman (what was her name?) shrieking still from the passenger's side, shrieking about hobgoblins in her belly, and he had waited with her in the maternity ward while she'd lain there in a morphinic stupor, and as he was telling this to the junior officer, he recalled that night more clearly than ever.
"G-d dammit," he said to his partner. "Wha----?" "I didn't stay for long, y'know, just happened to catch a cup of decaf and only went in there while I had an hour or so on shift," Haplen leaned on the trunk of the Maria, attentive as ever to the wavering and puttering that had by now qualified his voice; to his left, he saw that the (what was her name?) junior officer was sifting through a notion in his mind, and he rather fancied that this little story of his might do terribly little to improve the spiritus maladum of his partner, but fuck it to distant hell, Haplen thought, here it was, anyhow. "What I remember, Spitz, is that woman, er, is that that woman had been seriously mentally beshitted, if you please, and there's just another teeny little annoying caveat to this thing, please you..." "Sure, w'sat?" "The way she held those two babies, those hobgoblins, as she favored it." "Twins..." They both sat back against the Maria before Haplen could make his way to the walkie to call in an MRP on the second babe, and added, nearly breathlessly (what was her name?), "Valn, Lucy, probably thirty y/o, whereabouts unknown, 601 receive...."

It took scarcely three and one-half hours ere Lucy Valn was discovered, voiceless and blood-encrusted, on a nameless route near the rusticated boundary of Asywerth, which held all the old frosts of old Januaries in its stately fir trees, so that it was decidedly very cold and the hills over which endless dales gave on to expansive estuaries seemed like mouldered couch-cushions propped up on the slight sorrowful horizon.
Haplen accosted her first, and asking her name was so much of an extraneous idea that he eschewed it altogether, but looked on her fascinatedly, her eyes narrowed to flat withes, her face a masque of insinuating uncertainty; he had had to manage himself with the discretion of a preeminent sort of lawman in order to wield properly those properties of language which cannot irritate but encourage, instead, the suspect to a full admission of guilt.
--Hardly was all that necessary, however, as Lucy Valn was at a glance indissoluble from her grief, and the grief of that thing which Haplen had, to his knowledge and the fastidiousnesses of police procedure, perceived as her child, her murdered, obliterated child.
But when he brought her in very close to him, so as in order to pat her for materials, weapons, etc., he grokked a most miserable thing: where henceforth there was blood dribbling from her evening gown, he detected almost preternaturally a sense of something else, because ----hell, he couldn't help but to recognize the handsomeness of her bosom ---- there was yet something incongruous with her presentation, and just as he pulled her down to the ground with the object of restraining her, one of his hands brushed against her breast, and, sure as shit, a hard prosthesis faltered from her brassiere and there it was, without -- not a prosthesis, a comically small ligament, maybe a bone cutting through the flesh like a fibrous rapier. And what was this, then, if not the beginnings of the body of the second babe, stuffed all pell-mell in this woman's brassiere? No divine thing is ever shocking, only angelic, or else Haplen had remembered the quotation incorrectly; but even so, why had he to tell his confreres back at the station that that woman had amputated her breasts, so much the better to conceal the dismembered babe; and Zekel Hayker chuckling under his lousy fucking breath and sipping coffee with the gingerly nonplussedness of a Cynic.
"Yeh," Zekel Hayker proffered, "and how'd that doub mastect go on, anyhow? Some pretty hard work tuh get 'at done, I wise."
Haplen merely shook his head. He couldn't tell them that the Valn woman had started to explain to him that the hobgoblins had suckled her tits raw, raw as peppercorn, perhaps, that they told her things, Satanic things, amid chokes and "sucklessucklessucklessuckles" as she had so insistently reiterated; and he couldn't tell them that she had deliberately removed her own teeth and emplaced them in the babe's mouth, the one in the darkened stroller. Not for want of credulity, rather for that very simple reason that the Valn woman had told him that the babe itself had plunked out her teeth, to, as she had so neatly put it, "facilitate the speech of lonesome Azathoth and whomever may roam to Him whose face is a thousand live corpses..."
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Harley LETHALM currently writes under Dyophenes of Rhodes and bridges, etc. and currently has been published in CLEAVER , Radvocate (issue#14/15) , Brickplight, Artefact Nouveau, The Portland Dirt (may'26);etc. records under ambient/dsbm onemanproject DHAMPYR

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