The Narrative of Allen Ginsberg PI, Part ONE

Those big Nazi bastards blew my brains out at dawn last Christmas. They burst into the room while I was trimming the mayor and cut loose with their Uzis. Sometimes you imagine your own death. You think of falling out of a tree house in soiled underwear. Or drowning in sludge with an anvil on your chest. Or getting crushed in a hog stampede at the county fair. But you never think you’ll get strafed out to tarnation while circumcising the mayor of a small Southern town. Shit happens, especially when the flush isn’t working and you’ve run out of asswipes.

I saw it coming. I mean I saw the bullet coming. It was just a black dot at first. Then it was a purple lozenge in phallic extension. Then it was a bronze shark-head looming gape-mouthed. I felt it tear through, felt it explode in cranial orgasm. When you get shot that way you stay shot. When your brains get blown out to palookaville they stay blown. And yet here I am a year later, live and intact, my brains back where they’re meant to be. How’d that happen? Don’t ask me. Ask Gyani if you ever find him, which you won’t.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Way ahead, right to the end. I ought to introduce myself first. My name’s Allen Ginsberg and I’m a thirty-three year old private investigator here in Snowdrop. There’s not much call for PI’s in this town but I became one anyway. On my thirtieth birthday I nailed a signboard to a picket and stuck it out by the porch steps of my new office. Back then the sign read: ALLEN GINSBERG, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR. Now it reads: ANUS GIN, PIT GATOR, some letters erased, a couple added.

I didn’t damage my own sign, natch. It was vandalized a while back, I really ought to get it fixed right off, soon, sometime, never. There’s no shortage of vandals in Snowdrop, ragass hillbillies looking to mangle or destroy. I pretty much know who messed up my sign but it doesn't matter. I can understand why they did what they did. In a town this small, this deep in the boonies, you have to get creative to stay amused. You have to push the envelope, go off the beaten track. That’s what I did. I pushed my beaten envelope and became a PI three years back. On my thirtieth birthday.

Three years isn’t very long career-wise but maybe it’s long enough for me. I’m not sure I want to be a PI anymore. I’m not sure of anything, if truth be told. Not after what I went through last December. That four-day ordeal before Christmas. Dying in hail of bullets Chirstmas day. I’ve been trying to forget it all, I really have. I’ve been working to push it to the back of my mind, make it hazy and distant. But I can’t. It’s still clear, every last bit of it. Vivid as a child’s nightmare. Sometimes I wonder if it really happened. Maybe it was a prolonged acid flash, I tell myself. A four day mescaline dream.

But that’s just wishful thinking. It was real alright. It’s never a mind trip when you want it to be. It happened sure as shit on diapers and I’m still trying to live it down, a year later. I think maybe I’m going to spend the rest of my life living it down. The Bale County Almanac listed me for the first time last month, under ‘P’ for Private Eye. I guess that makes it official, pretty cool in a way, but you won’t catch me celebrating. That mangled signboard out there says it all. It pretty much looks like I feel.

***

When I say I became a PI I mean I just decided I was one and stuck a signboard where people could see it. I’m not a true blue card-carrying gumshoe, a dick trained in the usual methods of detection. I’d be at a real disadvantage if I were. The usual methods wouldn’t work in this town. Down here, your rational approach would put you on a fast track to the nearest nuthouse. Suddenly you’re in a padded cell gnawing on a droolcup, insisting you’re Cleopatra.

That’s no excuse for operating without a license but around here no one gives a damn, least of all Billy Rain. Billy Rain’s the sheriff of Bale County, whatever the hell that means. No one knows how he became sheriff, or even what his job entails. He wears a wide brim khaki hat, drives around in a battered cruiser and chews Red Man baccy. That’s good enough for most.

I guess I’m the closest thing to a sheriff’s deputy. Or was. Billy Rain used to call on me about once every month, till last December. Gon need your swingin dick oane this one, he’d say, through a mouthful of baccy. Be right over, I’d say, after I’m through with my nap. For me, every call from Billy Rain counted as a PI gig. Most of those gigs were trivial but we worked some good ones.

One time we busted a clique of hillbillies who liked messing with farm hogs in tubs of soggy bonemeal. They’d gotten someone to film their rollicks, a movie called Hog Hump Happy Hour. Billy and I trashed their game, nabbed them on two counts: illicit sexual congress and misuse of farm equipment. Billy still calls me once a month but I don’t respond. Can’t. I’m too busy recovering from last Christmas.

I didn’t always partner up with Billy. Sometimes he handed me gigs he was too busy to work himself. The Driessen case for instance. Norm Driessen’s a farmer who grows genetically modified corn on a plot of land outside Snowdrop. He visited his folks in Philadelphia one summer, married a distant cousin and returned home with his bride. Trouble was, the bride refused to sleep with him or even touch him anywhere except this one spot under his left armpit.

At first he figured maybe she was shy and religious the way Amish chicks tend to be before they wig out and go porno. But before long he got desperate and called on Billy who called on me. I’ll need to skulk around the farmhouse and take pictures, I said, pictures of Norm’s wife. Do what you have to, Billy said. We need to know what’s goin on.

I took some pretty useful ones as it turned out. Useful pictures. They showed a neanderthal with a buzz cut, missing eye-teeth and a nonexistent brow. The clincher was a close-up of outsize male genitalia and absent mammaries. Norm’s wife was titless and hung like a bear. Which is to say, Norm’s wife was a husband. He was disappointed with the findings, Norm, but not disappointed enough. He’s still married to the hump.

I also worked some Missing Persons cases for Billy. There was this preacher who went missing a couple years back. He checked into a local motel, left all his personal effects under the bed and vanished. So Billy Rain rounded up a search party and asked me to assist. You know these hills better’n the back o’ your ass, he said. If you cain’t find the sumbitch no one can. I did find him as it turned out. I found the preacher dead on the hillside two days later. He’d been savaged almost beyond recognition, his entrails draped over a dwarf pine. We all knew who’d done it: Elmer the East Yazoo Wolfman.

Elmer’s our local werewolf, a harmless schmuck though scary-looking in his polka-dot cassock, bubble-plastic brogans and cedar-bark busby. All Elmer ever does is bark at the moon, feed on cicadas and hump possum. He’s shy for a country werewolf, won’t mess with you if you don’t mess with him. But the preacher HAD messed with him as it turned out. He’d tried to spook the wolf out him with a hide-bound bible, an emerald crucifix, a black scorpion and a fresh lemon peel. Elmer had retaliated the only way he knew how: display mutilation. Cain’t arrest a wolfman for defendin himself, said Billy Rain, so we buried the preacher where we found him and left it at that.

It was fun while it lasted. Working with Billy Rain, doing the small-town PI thing. I should’ve remained content with that, but I didn’t. I started to lose my bearings, suffer delusions of grandeur. I started comparing myself to other PI’s in Bale County, guys like Big Ed Klytemnestra and Johnny ‘Jizzboy’ Johanssen and Perdido Centavos. I’m not as good as they are, I thought, but I could be. A major gig is what I need, a humdinger that’ll grow hair on my chest, that’ll make me feel like my life means something. I got what I wanted, sure enough. A big, nasty Christmas gift, a yuletide kick in the nuts. My old man used to say: be careful what you wish for, it might give you the drizzling shits. I should’ve listened.

Weirdo TWO: Allen Ginsberg, PI

Not all weirdos are foam-lipped, nystagmic nutcases. Some of them are charming, gregarious types with haloes around their heads. Ginsberg was definitely the latter kind, despite everything he'd been through. I didn't go looking for Al G. He came looking for me. Or rather, he contacted me through Chip Dooley, founder and editor of Alien Wreckage, a monthly print magazine dedicated to serious explorations of the paranormal.

Chip admires my sedulous pursuit of weirdos and their narratives. Surrealist subversion, he calls it. An incipient weirdo insurgency aimed at the squares, at all the assholes in suits fucking up the planet. He also digs the fact that I'm a former serial flogger who slaughtered over two hundred child abusers in less than six years. I find his admiration just a tad disturbing but he doesn't so it's fine.

He also finds charming my addiction to cherry-flavored edible panties. He feeds my addiction by having a package delivered to my door every month. Once every week he shows up at my cabin in duck-hunting gear and we share a panty over breakfast. Chip is a proud Irishman who never fails to quicken my pulse with stories of the potato famine and the Irish freedom struggle. He also has the largest skull I've ever seen on a human.

Macrocephalic Reticulans were legion on the Mother Ship. I saw some monster skulls up there but none as large as the one Chip owns. Sometimes I wonder if he's an alien-human hybrid. Hyrbidity would explain the size of his skull. It would also explain his possum-skin testicle truss and his absurdly noisy blinking. Chip is one of the noisiest blinkers around, a sure indication of alien strains in his DNA.

A letter arrived at my cabin one day, a white envelope delivered by a midget in a gray confederate uniform. The midget cantered up on a piebald shetland pony and cantered off after tossing the letter on my doorstep. I recognized Chip's idiot scrawl on the envelope. Chip is one of the smartest, most literate dudes around but he handwrites like a genetically enhanced hamster with a taste for dimestore rotgut.

You've got to go meet Al Ginsberg, the letter read. The man is an amateur private dick in a town named Snowdrop and he has a story to tell, a real humdinger. Best of all, he's named after my favorite poet Allen Ginsberg. Did I ever mention I memorized Howl back when I was at Harvard? I still remember most of it, pretty hard to forget. Who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war. Great lines, boy.

I didn't think about it for too long. I hit the road a day later in my beatup station wagon. Chip's letter had included directions but I didn't need them. I'd been to Snowdrop before and I found it without difficulty on a fine winter morning in the year 2004. It was a pretty little town, very lush despite the season, with hills ranged around. It looked different from other small towns I'd seen in the South. It also felt different. I figured maybe it was my imagination but it wasn't.

I asked around and got directions to Ginsberg's house. It was a nice place up on the hillside, a wood and glass structure his old man built. I found Ginsberg lounging in his unfenced front yard. He looked like he'd been waiting for me. He greeted me warmly and I liked him right off. He was a big guy with shaggy blond hair and blue eyes that smiled even when his lips didn't. He wore white baggy pants, a white sports coat, a powder blue shirt and a black bowtie. The threads looked shabby but they suited him somehow.

After the usual pleasantries he fixed me a mug of hot chocolate and we repaired to a second floor loft with a large patio. The patio commanded a fine prospect with Snowdrop showing quaint and evergreen in the valley below. But Ginsberg didn't give me time to admire the view. He was eager to talk and he started in on his story almost without preamble. I had my tape machine out and running and that bothered him at first but he adjusted soon enough.

A blue-eyed feline appeared minutes into Ginsberg's monologue, a well-fed chocolate-point Siamese. I learned later that it was Ginsberg's beloved cat Little Boy. I also learned that Little Boy had played a significant role in Ginsberg's demented four-day saga. Chip Dooley had promised a real humdinger and that's what I got. Allen G really did have a story to tell, a damn good one. He insisted his story was true but he wasn't sure of its implications.

Weirdos tend to be painfully earnest but Ginsberg was skeptical, even ironic. I believed him nonetheless and he seemed relieved by that. I think you did save the world from a bunch of mutant Texans from Uranus, I said. And I think you really are who they say you are. He thought about that for a minute and said: I don't WANT to be who they say I am. I liked things just the way they were. Still, damned if this ain't a weight off my shoulders. I can't thank you enough.

I hung with him for the better part of the afternoon running over his story and exploring the woods around his house. He didn't want to see me go but I did nearabout sundown. Come visit me sometime, I said. You're a man I can talk to and I think we have plenty to talk about. Glad to hear it, he said with a grin. Chip told me where you live. I'll find you. He hasn't found me yet, but I have a feeling he will. Even world-saving avatars need someone to talk to. Things can get pretty lonely when you're battling hideously malformed dream assassins from a hostile planet.

The Narrative of Wilhelm Wanderlust: Part ONE

I raise the knife slow and solemn, place the point over my left tit. It's a Southern Baptist sacrificial knife with a curved blade and a whalebone handle, sharp and cold as a snake-fang on ice. Last week Benny Santeria used it to slit open his stomach in a neo-Fauvist death orgy on a floodlit helipad atop one of the Sacher-Masoch Towers a half mile south of Churchtown, a million miles south of sanity.

His acolytes garotted him with his own guts, tenderized him with a bout of rawhide stroppado, set him ablaze with a blue sapphire torch and slung him out into the night with a customized trebuchet. It’s how he wanted to go, his final tribute to the Meister, got to come up with something better when it’s my turn. Benny’s last words were: now and forever praise be, my life with Thrill Kill Cult.

Trotjohn laughed so hard he pissed himself, which made me laugh so he pissed on me, his boot-heel digging into my ribs, and I figured he’d drop a turd on my cheek like he sometimes does and say: here’s some soap to go with that golden shower, or maybe jizz in my hair and say: that’s all the shampoo you need, lather up, bitch, but all he did was whizz in my ear, he was in high spirits that night watching Benny Santeria do his thing.

That Sacher-Masoch blowout was a tribute to the Meister like I said and Benny, his guts smoking between his knees, bloody mess, looked at me and bawled: Willy gets my knife! Willy gets my fucking knife!

I’m Willy, Wilhelm to you, and this is Benny’s knife, but I don't plan to eviscerate myself tonight, not a chance. I have people to do, things to kill. I mean me and Trotjohn and the Wald and Monk, we few, we happy few in obeisance to our Meister Buford Aloysius Howell, Lord Baron of Pain.

So here, now, it's the knife-point over my left tit, the flat of the blade mirroring my left nostril, dark lumen leading up to my forebrain, a spot of light showing at the far end. Light in a pulsing orb, my Third Eye coming awake, bright with murder. The knife point flickers in a short arc, blood wells in a red smile and I smile back, good to see you too, strange weather we’ve been having, nice night for us hellions.

I have five other cuts arranged symmetric, bleeding gashes poulticed with rose petals and ginger mulch. This one here makes six, the Meister’s number, his sacred Numeron oozing ichor as I scoop up ginger paste with the crook of my finger, smear it on a rose petal and press the petal to my wound. Six cuts symmetric and I set down the knife, reach with my right hand and brush the pink, clitoral knob of the Voltburn Unit.

There's a mute crackle, a blue flash and the juice rips through me whitehot as clenched and shuddering I adjust my headset and press PLAY. Brrroooom: grindcore slashervox, Lem from Angstfuhrer screaming in on a distortion tidal wave going: snake-eyes, death-dream second sight; blood rain, storm fire, dark arctic light...

And something blazes up from the root of my brainstem, fanged mouth in a soundless howl and I’m laughing.

***

I inhale deep, raise my lids. Quiet now, just the sound of my breath and I’m still on the couch crosslegged, my boner in steady throb, my pores wisping fulgent smoke. Above, a pair of bioplast buttocks fixed to the ceiling beam down a spotlight through a rectal orb and I’m in that spotlight gashed naked, my hair matted sweatcold, my pecker straining up from the rictus of my lap.

The Voltburn Unit sits on a low tripod just ahead. It’s a recent model: a pink, glandular flatworm with a blue dendritic spine encased in a clear hyperconductive gel. I’m wired to the Unit via nipple clamps and a metal sheath capping my peckerhead.

Once every few minutes I touch the Unit’s clitoral knob and the glandworm crackles blue-white, juice ripping through me like lucent shrapnel, smell my toasted areolae, a charred ring around my glancap.

I’m priming myself for another hit, reaching for the Voltburn knob when the dildo lights up with a high-pitched buzz. It’s the phone I’ve had since last year, a mammoth bioplast dildo set in a scrotal base, buzzing now with its head glowing red, veins on the shaft squirming purple. I lean over, grab the dildo and press ON.

Yeah?

He doesn’t talk at first. He hums instead, a toneless croon that raises my hackles. He hits a low note, soars in glissando, pauses abrupt.

Bitch, he goes, you there, bitch-dawg? His voice. Trotjohn.

Been here forever, I go, slut.

He chuckles soft, breathy. You ready asshole?

Ready as a boner, baby. Blue steel. Throb throb.

He snorts. You gon' have to hold on to that hard-on awhile, sweetheart. We start at seven.

I frown. Seven?

Damn right. Seven on the clit. Seven on the napalm nipple.

I feel my teeth grit. That's a whole fucking HOUR from now.

He whistles. Dang. Bitch can count.

The Meister didn't say WHEN, I snarl, He NEVER does.

No. I'M sayin. We ride at seven. Seven dark. You know us and the Dark, we've had it goin so long, hot and heavy...

I cut him off, drop the dildo. There’s a vein throbbing on my brow, an image forming. A lizard in slow bleed, dragging mangled guts over shattered glass under a neon sun.

HATE! I yell, HHHAAATE!!!

The room in echo, my vision quaking.

I wait motionless, seconds passing in slow drip. Then I bend, grab the REM Corticon with both hands and hoist it off the floor.

The REM Corticon is a bioferric casque studded with green synth crystals. It resembles an old-time war helmet and induces visions via synaptic fibrillation, high risk of permanent psychosis en route to brain death, all part of the thrill.

I raise the Corticon with both hands, push it down over my head. The synth crystals light up, I can see them in the mirror across, green pupils in a panoptic orb.

The Corticon tightens, bolts pressing in hard around the rim, and my eyes water some, tears of pain, but I won’t need eyes for what I’m about to see and the pain’s just extra flavor, an old friend.

A moment passes grimacing, teeth clenched. Then the Corticon comes on with a shudder, humming toneless, and some larval plasm in my hindbrain twitches awake, my vision fragmenting in brilliant mosaic.

There’s a rush of black wind, a sound of hollow laughter and I’m swept out over an abyss, out and down and down...

Walking barefoot on white tiles slippery with blood, through a forest of chains hung from a halogen sky, torn flesh impaled on rusted meathooks. Someone’s moving ahead slow and unsteady, a girl. A kid girl in a blue dress, a stained ribbon at the small of her back.

I call out in wordless echo but she doesn’t pause, doesn’t look back. I break into a run, a slow dream lope, and the chains swirl clinking, part sudden.

I’m on a tiled expanse shading off into darkness. The girl stands ahead in partial profile holding a headless doll. Her bare feet have left red streaks on the tiled whiteness of the floor and a black trickle runs down the inside of her leg, her straw hair parted around a tumor.

The tumor pulses and squirms but I’m not looking. My gaze cuts past the girl, following her line of sight. A giant cylindrical vat looms ahead, a glass silo full of phosphorescent gel.

The gel holds a pair of spermatozoids in suspension. Outsize spermatozoids joined coital, albino tadpoles with human heads, coiled tails writhing.

The zoids have pegs driven through their skulls, a fibrous cord rising from each peg. The cords ascend in double helix to an enormous eyeball floating high above, its blue iris staring up into a nighted void.

I want to follow the eyeball, see what it’s seeing but I don’t get the chance. The girl is turning, her lidless eyes white, her smile sewn shut with catgut. Nailheads wink on her brow, her leper’s hand rising in accusation.

I drop to my knees with a mute cry, pleading in a language I don’t understand. But it’s too late. Bloody wasps erupt from a hole in her head, a dark swarm winking red as her smile curves in towards me, bright pincers aimed at my throat and I’m screaming...

Weirdo ONE: Wilhelm Wanderlust

For me, a weirdo isn't just an odd person. A weirdo is someone with a radically different, impressively detailed worldview. Someone with an immense, fantastically strange narrative. I've heard a number of outlandish stories over the years, but the one Wilhelm told me stands out in my mind. It's easily one of the most bizarre and disturbing tales I ever heard, though 'tale' isn't the word. Wilhelm's narrative was reportage of a kind, a recounting of events in another world, another time.

I found Wilhelm in the South, no surprise. The American South produces an inordinate number of weirdos, a fact Southerners ought to be proud of. Weirdos are genuises by definition. That means the South produces more geniuses than any other part of the country. Wilhelm didn't contact me directly. His doctor did. An East Indian doctor from Snowdrop, a small town in North Alabama.

I found the Dixie Way motel off the interstate a few miles from Dothan. It was an overcast day in the fall of two thousand and four, gray and cold and a bit wet, nature coming through with a bit of pathetic fallacy for the tale I was about to hear. I drove into the motel lot and saw a pink stucco facade, hacienda style arches. The motel rented rooms by the hour, a hump haven if I ever saw one.

The man at the desk seemed a weirdo in his own right: a fat, red-faced guy with a yellow beard and small, moist blue eyes. He wore a white bunny suit with big floppy ears and held a large mason jar of pickled carrots. He set down the jar when he saw me and reached for a twelve gauge shotgun. You Jackanape? he asked, aiming the gun at my chest. No, I said, I'm Zorn Altheus. I'm here to meet Doctor Trivedi.

He seemed to relax a little. You here to meet Doc Amrish? That's right, I said, he called me here. The man nodded, lowered his gun. Doc's here, he said, he's been waitin on you. A side door opened just then and a small, dapper-looking man walked out. He wore a dark blue suit and brown patent leather shoes and he carried a burled walking stick with a polished brass knob. His beard was trimmed, his graying hair combed back.

The man walked in and paused, scowling at the fat guy in the bunny suit. Dex, he said, have you been threatening this gentleman with your gun? The fat guy's face changed. He looked like a kid caught with his pants down, pecker in hand. It's alright, I said, not a problem. I've had worse. A lot worse. The little man scowled some more. Then he turned, hand proffered. You must be Mister Altheus. I am Doctor Amrish Trivedi. My apologies for meeting you at this disreputable establishment. My patient has chosen to reside here against my wishes.

No apologies needed, I said, it's all the same to me. The doctor nodded. Very well then. Let us proceed without further ado. I followed the doctor into the front lot and around the side of the motel to the back. The back of the motel recalled a pair of unwashed buttocks but I was too keyed up to notice. I tend to get keyed up before meeting weirdos but this was more intense than usual. There was a different vibe here, intimations of something abyssal and alien.

The doctor paused at Door 6 and threw me a look. It was an odd look, something like dread showing there. The door was painted blood red with runes etched on its surface with a blade. The window beside it was blacked over with duct tape. There is a young man in this room, said the doctor low-voiced, a very peculiar young man. He calls himself Wilhelm Wanderlust but I suspect that is a pseudonym.

No one seems to know who he is. He was found by our sheriff two weeks ago. The boy was standing stark naked in the middle of Route 9 at midnight. Completely disoriented of course. It seems to be an extreme and extraordinary case of psychosis but I hesitate to pass judgement. Something very strange is at work here. I will be very frank with you Mr. Altheus. I am afraid for the boy and I am afraid of him. That is why I have allowed him to remain here, away from the care of specialists.

I understand, I said, you called on me because you felt you had nowhere else to turn. The doctor nodded. Precisely. I heard that you have some experience in such matters. That is why I called on you. I am relieved that you are here. It has been difficult for me to handle the boy alone. Not that he is unruly, no, not at all. Quite the opposite. During his stay here he has, on more than one occasion, entered a trancelike state of suspended animation. When it first occurred I thought he had died. But then I detected a pulse, very slow and faint.

In my home country, advanced practitioners of yoga enter a state known as samadhi. During samadhi the beating of the heart slows down or stops altogether. But the boy is not experiencing samadhi as far as I can tell. He insists that his trance states occur when he travels to another world or another time in the future. He claims to inhabit a city called Churchtown. There is a Churchtown not far from here but it bears no resemblance to the city described by him. The boy seems to suffer psychotic episodes that are prolonged and remarkably vivid. But again, one hesitates to pass judgement...

The doctor turned, rapped the door with his knuckles. There was no response. The doctor knocked once more, then turned the knob and entered. I stepped in after him. At first I thought the room was on fire but it wasn't. It was full of incense smoke. The smell of jasmine was strong but not strong enough to kill the stench of stale food and vomit. There were two single beds with cans and cartons littered around. A pale, emaciated figure lay on one of the beds, apparently naked under a sheet. The TV was on, the screen snowed over with static, the sound cut down to a soft hiss.

He looked like a heroin addict in his late teens, a kid with smooth dark hair, a gaunt, parchment-pale face and eyes with dilated pupils, though 'dilated' doesn't quite cut it. Those pupils seemed to fill his eye-sockets, saucer shapes sheened iridescent. I figured the kid had to be in one of his trances but he wasn't. He spoke without turning, his voice surprisingly strong and even. Sit down, he said, sit down and listen. You can record me if you want but don't talk.

I stared down at him, my flesh in slow crawl. You know who I am, I said, don't you. The kid blinked, but didn't turn. I know things you wouldn't believe. Things you can't begin to imagine. Now sit down, pull out your little tape machine and hit the record button. I'm going to tell you what happened last Friday in Churchtown. I'm going to tell you what my fellow disciples and I did for the Meister. All you need to do is listen. If you talk, it's over. I'll leave and I'll never come back.

The doctor was already seated on the other bed. I sat beside him, pulled out the tape machine from my knapsack, hit the record button and waited. The kid was silent for a minute, motionless on his bed. It was like looking at wax dummy, a consumptive corpse in replica. He didn't blink and I couldn't tell if he was breathing. My name is Wilhelm Wanderlust, he began all of a sudden, and I'm not from around here. There's no point asking me who I am or where I come from. My answers won't make any sense to you.

All I can tell you is what we did last weekend for the Meister. What I and Trotjohn and Monk and Wald did for our Meister, Buford Aloysius Howell, Lord Baron of Pain. We wandered in sacrifice and that's what I'm going to tell you about. It was that time of year and we wandered in sacrifice extracting and storing the elixir, and when we had enough we approached the Meister on bended knee and he accepted our sacrificial offering and that's what I aim to speak of. Know that this is precious testimony, words birthed in the torment of sacrifice. Know and listen and understand. So let it begin.

It took him three hours to get done. Or maybe it took a lot longer, there was no way to tell. I sat mesmerized, lost in a poisonous swirl of sound and image. The kid's words flowed clear and without pause, his voice unflagging. No one stirred as I recall, not the doctor, not Wilhelm, not myself. I had the distinct impression the words were echoing in my head via direct transmission, the kid's lips not seeming to move. And I was with him while it lasted. In his world, living his nightmare. He talked like it was happening now, in the present. He'd said it was from the weekend but he spoke like he was there once more, living it in eternal recurrence.

That's what it was in truth. An endlessly recurring nightmare. The kid was living through nightmare events occurring in ceaseless iteration, or so it seemed to me. His narrative was, nevertheless, coherent for the most part, with very little of the fracture and derangement that characterizes your average REM trip or psychotic episode. And I understood, as I listened, why the doctor had expressed doubt and fear. Something strange at work, he had said. But it was more than just strange. It was profoundly disconcerting. Or better yet, terrifying.

The kid finished at last and fell silent, staring at the dead TV screen. No one moved or spoke. I noticed my tape machine wasn't running anymore, no surprise. It'd stopped hours before and I'd been in no position to flip the tape over or replace it. We remained seated for what seemed like a long time, no sound but the hiss of TV static. It was the doctor who broke the spell. We must leave now Mr. Altheus, he said rising. Wilhelm must rest. He is suffering from exhaustion. I noticed then that the kid had his eyes closed, his breath gone slow and ragged.

I got out of there as fast as I could. I had the overwhelming urge to run and keep running but there was Doc Amrish to think of. The man seemed more in need of help than his patient. I agreed to meet the doctor at his clinic over the weekend but we never did meet. He called a day later with news. Wilhelm has disappeared without a trace, he said. The sheriff is conducting a search with help from local residents. Don't bother, I said, you won't find him. You seem rather sure of yourself Mr. Altheus, the doctor said. I AM sure, I said. The kid is back where he belongs. Roaming the hell-scape of Churchtown.