Heresy and Hearsay: Four Apocalypses

[Doc Faustus]

Here's a four part story I recently finished. Thought I could use some feedback before sending it out.

Heresy and Hearsay: Four Apocalypses

I. The Man in the Film Noir Hat
His face is like a Calavera, mocking all serious evils with a sarcastic yet saccharine serpentine smirk. His eyes are beautiful, yellowy catseye green that still reflects like a makeup mirror. His suit is white with red stripes like a carnival barker’s, but his hat doesn’t match, that’s the thing. His hat is a wide-brimmed grey fedora like a gangster from an old movie with Edward G. Robinson or James Cagney. It’s just wrong wearing a hat like that with his suit. Where does he get off pretending to be a gangster?
He’s dashingly devastatingly distractingly handsome and when he walks into Beaumont’ s Café, Lucille the pretty young waitress almost forgets her new husband, a wild-looking musician that she’s been married to for three months. She has no clue who the man in the Film Noir hat is, but it doesn’t matter. She wants him to hold her, to breathe his breath (peppermint like his suit) in her hair, to kiss her until she can’t breathe at all. She sways her hips like Mae West and looks at him with thirst in her dark brown eyes. “Hmm” she says with her lips, but in her mind the sound amounts to a voracious “mmm”.
“What can I do for you?’ She says half-suggestively catching a drop of saliva with her tongue before it becomes too conspicuous.
He smiles, but doesn’t open his mouth at first, until he talks, his voice jingling jangling, tintinnabulations of a tambourine. It’s rhythmic melodic hypnotic in it’s qualities.
“Do you run this place?’
Lucille smiles. She knows it’s nothing like the calavera grin, nowhere near as horrifyingly comfortingly lovingly brutally softly warmly coldly seductive. She’s ashamed that she might be trying to seduce him back. What would her husband say? What husband? All there is right now is a man in a candycane carnival barker suit and a hat that doesn’t belong at all. He is what is there, so he is what is real.
“No. My aunt Jess does.”
The smile slides across his face like a blues man’s harmonica. It reveals glimmering gleaming teeth, sharp, but not like an animal’s, no. Like a vampire’s. Teeth to tear and torment.
“Really, that’s a surprise. I took one look at you and I said to myself “this pretty little lady runs the restaurant.” There seems to be an air of authority about you. Your carriage is very…” The word does not come, or else he delays it to make the forthcoming word seem more felicitous. His brow furrows as if he’s deep in thought. “Majestic.”
She blushes and her face turns reddish pinkish frostbitten scarlet. “Do you want me to go get her?”
“If it’s no trouble.” He says it like John Wayne or Clint Eastwood with a hypermasculine inflection. The smile comes back.
She sways her hips again, like Mae West or Peggie Lee or some similarly sultry figure.
Lucille walks into the kitchen where slightly haggard Aunt Jess Beaumont is scrubbing a pan caked with blueberry pie. The smell of Dawn permeates the room yet doesn't get rid of the noxious meatloaf stench around it. “There’s a man to see you Aunt Jess,” Lucille tells the middle-aged cook and proprietor of the café, “He’s cute, but he sounds like a salesman.”
“Tell him to go away.” Lucille doesn’t want him to go away. She clings to her aunt’s thighs like a child and begins to sob. After the tantrum, Jess does come out of the kitchen, but she’s awfully suspicious. Lucille is usually somewhat calm and down-to-earth, though she does go on and she’s certainly not the sharpest knife in the drawer. There’s some bad juju around this place and she just can’t put her finger on it.
Then she sees the man in the Film Noir hat and she smells the musk of beauty and corruption, of carcasses and violets and dead things and peppermints and…money. She too smiles at him. She too sways her hips, hips supporting her somewhat ample girth. She too hears “mmm” in her mind. Money, violets…she likes him and she can’t tell why. She’s have a worse tantrum than Lucille if he had to leave.
“What do you want?” she asks him. She’s trying to be the consummate businesswoman. She’s trying to sound like one sounds when dealing with a salesman. It doesn’t work on him, he knows she smells the violets and the money and the corpses. He knows she is “mmm”ing at the center of her gold-flecked-grey-flecked hair. Lucille is looking at him in silent worship, eyes as wide as an English girl’s at a Tom Jones concert.
“I’m an idea man,” he says, “I sell ideas.”
Jess’ ventures ponderously pensively to her chin. “How much are these ideas?” She asks. She’s only curious. Yes, that’s it. She couldn’t be taken in by some smooth-talking stranger selling something she didn’t want. Violets and money and…mmm.
“A dollar.” He says.
Jess takes out the dollar like one possessed and gives it to him. She mouths the words “I love you” but would never say them out loud. His calavera smile and his yellowy catseye green eyes say “I know you do.”
He stuffs the dollar in the jacket pocket of his candy-cane carnival barker suit. “Your coffee should be a quarter cheaper.” He tips his hat revealing a bald head decorated with pretty patterns like those of a Faberge egg. Each bizarre line and swirl forms the letters of an unwritten novel or the scenes of a film that won’t ever be screened. Lucille and Jess see in those patterns the blinding light of ingenuity and have a headache just from looking at the bare, bald head of the man in the film noir hat. Then he walks out, bathed in a light of pure and unrefined thought and leaving an olfactory trail of money and violets and corpses and peppermints. As stupid as what he suggested might be, it is positively epiphanous to Jess.
Four days Monday pass and he has gone from Maryland to New York on his flying carpet of dreamstuff. He gets a hotdog with Jess’ dollar and walks on to the UN building. He’s about to go in, when he is stopped by security. They stop him, but they don’t. They just don’t dare to make him state his business, because it must be too big to understand. They’re right.
Inside, the world is meeting. Population 200 and something. The man who is China is arguing with the man who is France regarding something neither one cares about. The man who is France took the man who is China’s parking space.
Everything stops when they see the man in the Film Noir hat. They smell the violets and peppermints and money and corpses. They all like the man in the Film Noir hat.
“What do you want?” says the man who is our great nation feigning frustration to obscure his interest in the man in the Film Noir hat.
“I’m here to sell you an idea,” the man in the Film Noir hat says.
“How much?” says the man who is Switzerland.
“A dollar.”
The man in the Film Noir hat takes Switzerland’s dollar and makes his suggestion: “This world is over. I say nuke the damn thing.”
Each one of them stops and thinks about it. And each one of them has to laugh at the absurdities they’ve lived with.
And everyone smiles. The world joins hands, wraps their arms around friend and foe alike….
And there is fire and screaming and crying children and melting cities and a mushroom cloud…
And the man in the Film Noir hat takes a leisurely stroll through the dust. His sister Calliope sings dirges for the slain in her voice that sounds something like Joni Mitchell woven with threads of great operatic sopranos, but they don’t live again. The man in the Film Noir hat smiles his calavera smile and heads off to another distant corner of reality. A muse’s work is never done.

[Doc Faustus]

II. The Long Way to Santa Mierda

Even if, I repeat, even if, you are dying of thirst, you stay out of Santa Mierda. You get tempted, boy, you sure get tempted. Your mouth is dry and your body is aching, and everything that functions calls out to Christ almighty to let it stop needin’ to work. But you just let those legs keep breaking and those feet keep blistering, because there is positively nothing for you in Santa Mierda. The desert is angry, an inferno during the day and an icebox at night, and I’d tell you to stay out of it, if I really thought you could.
When I was your age, the desert had just appeared. There were those who thought that it might have been raining sand, or that the Pacific Ocean was starting to dry up , but, far as I know, a desert just came to be, and I, a curious young man like yourself just had to know exactly what was out there. My father had tried to convince me I was a damn fool to try. My mother broke down crying. But, I couldn’t think about them and what they needed from me, I could only think that there was a desert and that desert might need me. Or I might need the desert, that is. (How could I have admitted that, though?) I ended up leaving them there and never seeing them again.
When I went out into the desert, at first I found other young men and women who had come to see where it came from and what there was to gain from it. But, after a few long days of travel, I found myself quite alone. Everybody else was too cowardly or too smart to venture so far out into the desert. It didn’t suit them at all to be out there finding only sand. Truth is, there is only sand to find, until sooner or later, you come upon Santa Mierda.
I know you’ve heard rumors by now, about folk who’ve set up shop out there, a group of intrepid pioneers continuing the ancestral tradition of manifest destiny. The young folks in the desert had talked about it, saying that it must be something, all the way out there and still stores and bars and a zoo. They said, “it must really be quite a zoo, all the way out there. I bet they’ve got animals we’ve never even heard of.” I had visions of pygmy elephants, of dogs the size of horses, and of birds of colors that had not yet been named. So distant, so far flung, so exotic was this place, that even after I ran out of water and food, I had to make my way to Santa Mierda.
Some cultures say hell is hot, others say its cold. I wondered if this indecisive desert just didn’t know what kind of hell it wanted to be. Blistering, dying of thirst, I had wandered three days before I saw the sign. Santa Mierda, ten miles. My beaten body suddenly got some vigor in it, and I took off in a run until I couldn’t run anymore and then I took off walking fast until I couldn’t walk fast anymore and finally I walked until I found myself at another Santa Mierda ten miles sign. I wanted to lay down and die by that sign, until, in the distance, I smelled food cooking.
The signs were a trick, made to separate the dedicated from the merely curious. I was dedicated. Starving and beat and demoralized though I was, I knew in the distance there was food and there was Santa Mierda, the city of joy in the desert. And sure enough, another hour and a half of walking and I was there. A neon sign shined the desert pink and made it glow with hope and promise. If I were a religious man I would have stopped and thanked god, but as I’ve never been one, this was all my triumph and I bathed in the neon glow, all warmth and brightness.
A sweet looking brunette placed a gentle hand on my shoulder and whispered with hot teasing little fingers of words:
“Congratulations, brother. You’re here and that makes you one of the elect.”
Tickling caressed me as I took in the words and her company. I turned around, and without a word, my lips were wrapped in a kiss. And one thing led to another. Soon my weak body felt strong and the growlings in my stomach were starting to vanish. The smell of the food in the distance seemed to by itself be enough to fill me, and filling her was filling me, too. Time disappeared and we rolled around and enjoyed each other, until we slept, and though the neon sign blazed hot it was easy.
I woke up in the morning and she was gone. I feared that at the end of the desert, I had encountered my first mirage and the night of pleasure was just insanity creepin’ in. I got up and followed the food smell to a little diner. You’d think from all the tricks and the girl who greeted me that there would be temptations and perfection and the most wonderful food you could ever smell. That ain’t true. There wasn’t a waitress under fifty, and the food was nothing but grease. The people couldn’t be the elect. Fat, sad, quiet, shoveling food down wide, joyless throats. I sat down and ate three of the worst cheeseburgers I’d ever had. My empty stomach was far from happy.
But I was determined that I my fate wouldn’t be the same. I was determined to make myself happy. I wouldn’t admit to myself that I should go home or that my days of wandering in the desert were a bad idea. I decided that perhaps I should try and do everything I loved from civilization here, since the desert would eat civilization anyhow. There were abandoned storefronts that looked like they might have once sold nice things, jewelry stores that had no jewelry, bookstores that collected dust, and a library whose doorknob had rotted clean off .All kinds of nothing to do that I had to convince myself could not be allowed to kill my spirit. At last, there came promise; at the edge of town stood the zoo.
I entered, crushed by row after row of empty cages, up until I heard the roar of the tigers. The zoo was made up only of two white, pristine Bengal tigers, noble and satisfied. With these two tigers was a surprisingly cheery looking old man who safely slid juicy steaks between their bars. I marveled at how much better the animals ate than the people. A smile
“Well, boys,” he said to the tigers, “I’ll be damned. I don’t know who looks hungrier. Maybe we should grill up one of these for this here stranger.”
I almost felt like cryin’ when he served me that steak. We sat and we talked for a few hours about things outside the desert and about what made us come to Santa Mierda. He had lost his wife to cancer and his children to apathy and he had nothing left but the two tigers. And when he heard that Santa Mierda had a zoo , he thought that maybe he should come out to the desert and see if they could use a pair of tigers. When he got there and found out that the last zookeeper had taken his menagerie and walked, he decided to settle in and do his best to give Santa Mierda a zoo. I wish I hadn’t asked what I asked him next. I asked him:
“What do they do in this town for fun?”
He looked at me awfully funny, and he said that everybody goes down to the saloon and they drink and mix and dance. That seemed as nice a prospect to me as it would to any other young man. I walked in and there were quiet, sullen young women seated all around and fat, balding men at the bar waiting for them, with weak attempts at lecherous looks. But things changed when I caught the eyes of every young lady in the bar. I danced with girl after girl after girl , danced until I was dizzy and then drank myself dizzier. I ended up going back to a round, friendly blonde’s apartment and staying the night. It was then that I realized I would never need to pay rent in Santa Mierda. After that, life was apartment after apartment , girl after girl. In the mornings, I went to the zoo and at night I danced.
After awhile the girls were starting to repeat. I was surprised that I was coming full circle, but on the other hand I wasn’t.
The real surprise came one morning when the zookeeper was leading the tigers through town. I ran up to him and asked what was happening.
“I’m leaving,” he said, “there’s gotta be a better place for me.”
“I hear the desert’s spreading. I hear it’s probably not safe to leave.”
The old man shrugged, took the tigers and ventured out into the miles of sandy oblivion. I never found out where he ended up.
I was sad to see him go, but I figured life went on and I went back to my apartments and my girls and my dancing. I found myself getting fat and I wondered where my hair was going. I realized with a heavy heart that the zoo was the only reason I stayed in Santa Mierda. The girls looked on me sadly and marveled that somebody else was going to leave and that they would have to wait for not only another zookeeper but another young man .
Last time, I checked boy, you’re not a zookeeper.
“So what do we do,” you ask.
Near as I can figure, we’ve got wood and nails and we’re just about strong enough to build us a town. I know the desert’s coming, I know it’s the future, but I say we try anyhow. And after that, we just wait for a man with two tigers.

[Doc Faustus]

III. The Words of Laughing Cat

They called me Laughing Cat because I was born with a smile on my face. They feared me because none of them knew why I smiled. None knew that in the womb I had been taught things that were funny to me when I was small. Things that are funny when you are small don’t stay funny when you grow bigger. My smile disappeared as I understood the weight of what I knew. The laughter they thought they had seen in me was gone, replaced by a need to scream out things that frightened everyone, things that cast me out of the village and left me alone in the desert with the dreams from the womb.
Others came. They wanted to know if the things that frightened me were real and if I could tell them when my dreams would come true. I couldn’t tell them when the dreams would happen, but I could tell them that I knew they were real and I knew they would come for everyone, not just me. I knew someday my dreams would be a plague that would drive men mad instead of showing them the light of hope. These others heard me grieve and if felt like less grief. Some began to dream my dreams. They dreamt of the same man and the same fate that I did. They called me a shaman, those who knew what made the Laughing Cat cry.
We will know him as the Impatient. He will scream at the rain to make the trees grow and they will not grow. When the herds go away, he will scream at them to return, but they will not. He will fear the night and long too much for morning. In his sorrow and his fear, he will beg the moon to leave him, but dawn will not come fast enough for him. He will see that the earth is slow. The seasons and the rain and the trees and the herds are not fast enough.
He will burn the trees and he will know that the rain will not come fast enough to put out the fire. When the herds come, he will be overcome by hunger and rage. He will devour the herds, picking clean their bones and plucking each hair from their hides. He will never sleep so that he misses neither the sun or the moon and all days will become one. Then he will wonder when the next day will come and in his rage at the earth, the beasts, the sun and the moon he will scorch the earth, devour the beasts and cover the sun in darkness, so the moon will be alone in her sorrow. It will be just her and the impatient and she will destroy with her judgmental glow.
From the sky, she will call a tide, an ocean full of new beasts and new trees. From this ocean depth’s, a new earth will grow, and the gentle sun will cast off his darkness our of love for it. He will shelter it with love and light until it grows strong and the moon will speak to the people, leaving them only one word to guide them: patience.
Now I have grown impatient and I want this beautiful world that emerges from an ocean in the sky, but I want to keep the one I have. The child laughs now at an old man’s indecision. Whichever world I want, I must only remember one thing: patience.

[Doc Faustus]

IV. Suburbs of the Fourth Circle

Noah knew that the Sun would find nothing sympathetic about his depression, no common ground with a young man who wanted to sleep when it wanted nothing more than to rise. On this day he continued his losing battle, shutting his eyes tight, about to put the covers over his head again. But it was no use. The big, bright octopus reached one of its tentacles through his window and yanked him into consciousness. He squinted, but the light lurked behind his eyelids, too. The violent sun had come, tentacles of luminescence, painful eagerness and all and it had to take Noah with it into a day he was sure he’d be disappointed by. He practically fell out of bed instead of rising. The sun had not jarred awake his legs or his sense of equilibrium, only his heavy eyes and sluggish, disappointed brain. He chose one of five white dress shirts and one of five pairs of black slacks to show the rest of the waking world, which would be gathered in the kitchen to remind him of his grim little life.
The kitchen was an Ikea catalog still, empty save trendy, white Nordic furniture with unpronounceable names. It didn’t quite surprise him that at this time of day it was empty. Independence and social Darwinism reigned supreme in his family, nobody self sufficient dealt with anyone else. The only person who got any company was his sister, Caroline, who had always been sickly. CFS and anemia led her to more parental doting than either of her brothers got. But, then it was ingrained in them early that everybody does their own thing. If it hadn’t been for the houses of friends, he might very well have grown up thinking that a family was an assembly of people with completely divergent motives who shared an address and a series of genetic coincidences.
Kyle was probably smoking up. His mother was probably getting coffee as an excuse to avoid her sickly adult daughter, likely with a “friend” whose reputation she would decimate as soon as she was with another “friend”, and there was no doubt his father was working, though he wondered how often his father “worked”. They were off adding quotation marks to words that actually meant things to others. So, like many afternoons, it was just he and Caroline, and Caroline was awake about three hours a day. He walked out to get the mail, hoping there’d be something that could get him out of here. He’d had enough of his mother’s gossip, Caroline’ s tragedy, Kyle’s blaring TV and the ten-foot cloud of leave-me-the-fuck-alone that followed his father like a loyal little dog.
The sky was blank blue monotony like the eyes of the suburban blondes that walked around the mall. It looked dull and unreceptive and distant, doing nothing while the fluffy white clouds rolled across it. It was a bright, sunny day that wanted nothing more from itself than the chance for children to bike down the road and old people to nap on their porch. Nobody around him was going anywhere else. The bassethound next door stretched on its stoop, birds chittered their contentment, the soccer mom across the street returned from the grocery store the same time she always did; every life confirmed a happy stasis.
As he approached the mailbox, he knew that he would find not a generous yellow envelope, but one as tiny and bland as his town and his life. The envelope was filled with implied snickering as it told him that he was going about as far as his sister was.
“Stay in town”, they’d told him as Caroline got sicker, “we might need you around until we can adjust to this.” So, he went to the community college and got his As in their meager science classes in hopes of getting into a grad program somewhere good. As of yet, he hadn’t found a good grad program that agreed it had been a sensible plan. At this point, he was dead certain it hadn’t been. He had loved science because of the vastness of it, the all-encompassing nature of the thing. Having grown up in a paper bag of a town, he was excited by chemistry, the knowledge that the same elements that made up the French Riviera and the Galapagos Islands were around him. It was in his teen years and his time in community college, the only thing that kept him going. It was a lot less consolation in his twenties. In this little town, notions of vastness were tiny in their implications. “Far” was the Wal-Mart a mile and a half outside town, his younger brother’s surprising “B” average was unlimited potential.
In the end, he found himself back in his little beige sepulcher of a room, with his books and his darkness, the closest thing at this point to where he must have belonged. He looked up at the ceiling and thought about how it was his sky. No blue, no brightness, eternal beige. Above the ceiling no heaven and no space, only roof. He stared into the TV, considered turning it on and hesitated. He would not be like his brother who used it as just another drug, who shoveled it into his brain. He wouldn’t copy another’s suburban boredom. He might as well just listen and think about where he would go now, since nowhere wasn’t really an option.
“Fuck,” he said to himself, “If I could be a junkie like Kyle or a vegetable like Caroline, I’d be all set. All in all, they’ve got it fucking made.”
“Shit, shit, shit!” came the scream from across the hall, “stupid goddamn mud!”
Noah got up and followed the yelling, wondering what it was about, since it hadn’t rained for three weeks. He knocked on the bathroom door three times and there was no response. Pressing his ear to it, he heard running water and then the sound of his younger brother giggling like a little girl.
“Kyle? You okay, Kyle?”

[Doc Faustus]

“Come on in,” Kyle answered from behind the door. Was that his brother yelling in? It sounded garbled to Kyle, deeper, stranger. Noah didn’t talk like that. The cartoon duck in the mirror bashed himself in the head with his little hammer again. The source of the voice became inconsequential. If this had been on TV, it wouldn’t have been THAT entertaining. Kyle would have liked to believe that he was smarter than that, but the duck was right there. His head was swimming a little as he walked in and it only got worse when he went to wash his face. That’s when the little yellow duck showed up and the hand outside the door began to knock on it. Was his brother attached to it? He was too busy laughing at the duck in the mirror to think that the disembodied hand knocking on the door might be trouble. If his brother was here, he could just tune the loser out by watching the duck anyway. When Noah walked in, the duck knew it would have to work extra hard. It’s face got funnier, bigger buggier eyes with a histrionically large red Saint Bernard tongue sticking out of its mouth. It had a little beanie on its head with a propeller that lifted it into the air as it spun around. Noah saw none of this.
While Kyle remained riveted by the antics of the duck, Noah noticed that the water in the sink basin was a pale green and the sink was coated in tiny cakes of greenish mud. What the hell was this? It wasn’t muddy outside as far as he knew and if it was, the mud certainly wasn’t this color. Objects in the bathroom felt a bit more distant for Noah, less corporeal. Where did this stuff come from and why was it in the air?
“Kyle, what are you on? What is this shit? What’s all this this this…” the words were harder to reach.
“Fuck, I don’t know, Mr. Wizard,” he laughed, his brother was as funny as the duck , “you’re the scientist. So come on, Frankenstein, gimme a theory.” He fell to the floor. Breathing was starting to get difficult. He began to wish he could stop, but the duck flew out from the mirror and whirled around the room. Pellets of white cartoon duckshit dropped from the sky onto Noah’s head. The duck looked Kyle clear in the eye, putting a feathery finger up to its beak.
“Shh,” it quacked. The duck winked at him.
As Noah looked at all the fading, hazy objects in the bathroom, he saw them tinged with little specks of green. This is not what I’m seeing, he told himself, this is not what I’m seeing, Kyle brought some sort of weird shit and I must be getting a contact high. I’ve gotta find a way to think clearly. He stumbled over his brother, made his way to the window, which he opened. He breathed in the clean air, closed his eyes and sat down on the bathroom floor beside his brother, who was rolling with paroxysms of laughter. He wasn’t sure how much time passed before he felt right again, but the first thing he did was get a pair of rubber gloves and scrape the mud off the sink.
“Where did you get this?” his brown eyes blazed at his brother in a way that was both parental and bestial.
Kyle took in short gasps of breath before he answered. “I fell into a patch of this stuff. There’s a little patch outside. I just stumbled face first into this green shit and then I’m tripping balls. I fucking mean it, Noah. You can’t buy shit like this. I didn’t even get any in my mouth or anything.”
“You’re expecting me to believe that YOU, a pathological liar and purveyor of fine narcotics all over the neighborhood just stumbled into a patch of hallucinogenic mud in our backyard?”
Kyle huffed at the broken-down, gutless nerd who he’d been ashamed to call a brother. “I know last week I begged you to make me some meth with Caroline’s medications and some stuff I took from the pharmacy, but this time, I’m telling the truth. Your miscreant junkie little brother is not lying to you for once, Noah. It was an accident. I don’t take things if I don’t know where they came from. I’m not dead yet am I?”
Noah heaved a sigh. “Then show me where the patch is.”
The patch seemed at first glance to be just a continuation of the compost heap, but when Noah looked closer he saw how distinct it was. Its textures were quite distinct, clumpy in some places, watery in others, ranging from very solid to very liquid. It was only a small patch of mud, but it varied so greatly. Was it more than dirt or clay? The question didn’t hang in Noah’s or Kyle’s minds for long. They looked at each other; scientist and drug dealer, knowing they had made a discovery that could make them soar in their profession. They went back in for both freezer bags and gloves.
“So you study this stuff and I’ll sell it, right?” confusion and disgust dominated Noah’s sharp, stern face as Kyle set forth the suggestion, “you figure out what we can do with it and I’ll give you half of what I make on it. This is all profit. This is all for us.”
“And mom and dad? What about when they go out to the compost heap?”
“They already make me do all the composting. Why would they stop?”
Noah shrugged. He didn’t like the idea of being part of some scheme of his brother’s. On the other hand, he had a chance to present a pretty unique discovery. If this stuff had popped up elsewhere and he knew how to neutralize it, he’d be a hero. He’d be like all those scientists he saw on Super Scary Saturday when he was a kid, working night and day in his lab and finding a way to save the earth from an invader. Only this invader was only a patch of mud and the worst it could do is shake people with hallucinations. That part made him a bit disappointed. Maybe he wouldn’t be saving the earth, but people got into good grad school science programs for a shitload less.
“Okay, I’ll do it,” he said and took his freezer bag down to the cellar to examine it. It wasn’t hard to imagine what Kyle would do with the one he’d taken.
Kyle hadn’t noticed how pleasant the mud was when he had taken his fall. It didn’t feel clumpy to the touch; it felt soft, warm, squishy, friendly. It felt like a woman. As he rubbed it on his face, jokingly making stripes of it, like an Indian warrior or a quarterback, he swore he smelled pussy. Fresh, eager, musky, a scent somewhere between perspiration and a rich Italian dessert. The mud soaked into his skin and the smell called from the hallway, which was soft and pink and dark. Shapely shadows pirouetted on the wall, jumping down from it onto the wall opposite theirs, taking turns to shake seductively before his eyes and around him.
` He reached out for the tantalizing puppets, but they wouldn’t be touched. The shadows stopped at a large, gated cavern and bowed. The black became painted with color, flesh tones and otherwise. A neon green goddess bowed at his feet, while a blue one showed off her generous curves for his appraisal. Girls he longed for in high school kissed and embraced one another, grinding chromatic bodies and exploring with happy hands things he wanted to touch more than life itself. The cheerleaders and student council chicks who wouldn’t give him the time of day began to grind then reached out for a young, nude Susan Sarandon who clasped hands with a shimmering rainbow that was Jayne Mansfield.

[Doc Faustus]

. He was scared, but frightfully curious when the shapes began to splash together. The smell of lust grew unbearably strong and he felt a tightness in his crotch, a pain and power that he swore threatened to rip through his jeans. The women faded into waves of paint colors cascading down to the floor, into a puddle that gathered at Kyle’s feet. Two hands, shimmering, pale flesh colored hands emerged from the pool, moving up his legs. Like a picture painting itself, a shape began to appear. Arms, then shoulders, a neck, a head, a face. When he saw the face he became eager for the rest to appear.
“Marilyn,” he whispered, “the movies, the Playboy, I saw you…”
Her breasts came into focus, a phantom shape almost outside geometry for him, something between pearls and fruit. Her thighs were thick and delectable, her ass a kind of sun, vast, bright, gorgeous, pulsing with energy and potential. The divine body had come down from Heaven, slid out of dreams to greet him, hold him, kiss him.
“Not here,” she said and indicated the doors. Kyle nodded, opened them and passed the great gate into an elaborate bedchamber. Marilyn seemed to vanish for a moment, but then was there, waiting for him. She lay down, smiled and spread her legs . There was light between them, soft, but incendiary. It burned at first, squeezed a little, but molded into place around him as he entered her. The shadows on the wall were beautiful again, his sex symbols cheering him on as he merged himself with the legend. He was a legend now, he was a star, he was a real big man inside a sweet little miracle. She squealed in delight as he rubbed the mud on his hands onto her face, the few little clumps he had left. He didn’t want her to miss out on his discovery. He knew she’d love it. He knew she loved the drugs, like all the chicks he picked up. This was the newest and the best and the thing that would make him a star. This is what you get when you’re a star.
When he was done, he shambled to the shower to clean off. Marilyn came with him, giggling, touching him. When he got out, he saw that the trip had lasted three hours. Fuck. Don’t mix business with pleasure yet. Still got phone calls to make. He made them. He hated doing business with his folks home, but he could get a lot of money for this stuff and he wanted to get it fast. At first, his clients didn’t believe what they heard over the phone, but he had them curious enough to at least come over and try it out. Within ten minutes, five kids carrying a couple hundred bucks on them each were smearing the mystery mud on their faces and tripping like they never had before.
As usual, Noah’s evening was less fun than Kyle’s, although Noah wasn’t altogether unstimulated. He had been down in the cellar with the meager chemistry equipment he’d purchased over time and kept from his community college days. For hours, he sat there staring at the mud as if it had eyes to stare back, and secrets for those eyes to betray to him. He had already heated, cooled, poked and prodded the stuff and it seemed even less likely to respond than a regular clod of mud. He’d only learned two things about it: one, that it was immutable, though the patch outside had varying textures, there was no freezing or burning it. It remained as it was, an unsightly green muck that seeped in through the pores of skin it touched, and two, that it emitted a gas when water was added to it. Other than picking it up and moving it someplace else, there was no disposing of this stuff and if you got it wet then you’d end up with a whole room full of its side effects. He had a hard, icy feeling in his stomach and it didn’t warm up any when he went outside to check on the mud patch. It was about a foot longer and wider and had started to drip onto the compost heap.
“Jesus,” he said to himself, “you’re starting to see things. There’s not more mud here now. There couldn’t be…”
He took a deep breath, turned away from the mud and decided this was his imagination. This wasn’t the Blob or the Smog Monster or something from those drive-in classics he shared with his little brother back when they were too young to know they had no respect for each other. This was just a strange patch of psychoactive mud, and as strange as psychoactive mud was, it wasn’t a monster. He still didn’t know where it could have come from or why it was capable of doing what it was, but he decided he would dismiss it, though he knew, like the adults who deny the cries of “monster!” from screaming teenagers must have known that his dismissal could end up being a mistake. It was an odd position for him to be in, half scientist hero, and half doubting establishment. He went in and grabbed a beer from the fridge. It was the only drug he ever dealt with.
The next day Kyle woke Noah up around noon, an hour and a half earlier than he was used to getting up. He didn’t mind because Kyle had three hundred fifty dollars for him. He perked up almost instantly, counting the money to himself over and over again. It had been awhile since he’d gotten a chunk of cash like this. The part time jobs he’d held for weeks at a time left him with about half that much most of the time. He now understood why Kyle never got a job.
“You got all this from the mystery goo by the compost heap?” he couldn’t believe it. Seven hundred dollars for a few big clumps of something that was coming out of the ground. But then, wasn’t that how all the drugs were? Everything people smoke, every pill they take was something from somebody’s back yard. Maybe it wasn’t so strange. Maybe they just had the best back yard.
“I’ve been looking into this stuff,” Noah said, feeling like there was something useful he needed to do to deserve the cash, “I think you should know that this stuff is really unique among drugs. It has serious potential. I figured out that all you need to do is add water, and you can fill a whole room with this stuff, or, well, a diluted version of it. When you were washing the stuff off your face, I walked into the bathroom, and I was tripping on it too. Not as hard as you were, but pretty hard. So, we’ve potentially got a hell of a party brewing out back. Not to mention the fact that not a cop in the world would know you’re up to no good when it looks like you’re sitting just adding a few drops of water to a baggie of mud. It might confuse ‘em, but they won’t know it’s something illegal.”
“Couldn’t smoke it , could you?” Kyle asked .
“No, Kyle, you can’t smoke it. It doesn’t burn, melt or freeze. Can’t smoke it or freebase it. You can add water or you can smear it on yourself. I think people will take the water myself.”
Kyle nodded. “I’ve got calls to make and calls to take. See ya. Could you go out and do the compost and harvest the shit?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Noah went outside with a big bag of garbage, gloves and some freezer bags and got ready to bring in the drugs. He didn’t want to do it, but he wanted to prove two things. He wanted to prove that he could contribute, maybe not to science right away, but to something. And he wanted to prove to himself that he wasn’t scared of the stuff, that it was only dirt and water or clay and nothing more. He wanted to know that what he’d seen the previous night wasn’t true. Not growing, it wasn’t growing. And yet, it was. As he looked around for the compost heap to throw the trash on, he knew damn well he’d entered the Twilight Zone. Where the compost heap once was, was another massive lump, a small hillock of the green mud. If he’d known what to tell Kyle or who to actually tell about this, he would have run in screaming, but instead he just resigned himself to the mud. He took the clods and put them in the bags and without another thought he went inside . Five twentysomethings from the Community College were in Kyle’s room and they were each looking for a little bit of the new miracle mud.
“Hey, Noah, I don’t think that’s enough, you wanna go out and…”

[Doc Faustus]

“Why don’t you do it?” Noah replied. He vanished into the hallway and then his room where he sat staring at the walls and wondering what he was dealing with, what he and his brother had unleashed and what it was that made him able to proliferate it. Was something wrong with him? Was he dead inside or just not alive enough? His friend and his enemy, his hope for the future, his cash cow and everything he thought a monster was were one and the same. He thought about the things that made science intrigue him so much, the idea that the same elements were everywhere. When all these thoughts came together, congealing like the mud itself, absorbing supplanting the native soil in his head, he cried. Even with all the despair and hopelessness of his home, he could still seldom bring himself to cry. This was worth the tears, the understanding that science as he knew it applied to the discovery outside was too much. If it lived, he had to find out how to kill it, if it didn’t, he might very well have to die himself.
Kyle came in and it was on his shoes, on the cuffs of his pants, soaking through to his shins and ankles. There was a dripping trail leading up the stairs, bits of a green, disgusting mess in the front hall. He opened the door to his room, handed out the baggies, took the money and waved goodbye, following the shadowy sirens down the moist pink tunnel to Marilyn, the moist pink tunnel to bliss. Again, he ventured through the gate, again he found her waiting and again and again and again, he took in her skin, felt the paradise inside her and left some of him there too. He heard her little moans, but he wondered why they turned into screams. The gates to the bedchamber burst open and standing there was the ogre, ten feet tall, wide as a truck with a face somewhere between that of a pig and a bear, green, tusked and bestial.
“Help me, “ Marilyn cooed, “help me…”
“Don’t worry, don’t worry, baby…” he whispered tenderly, he kissed her once before he opened up his desk drawer and reached in for the hunting knife he carried for protection every now and then. The blade was three feet long, a sword of lambent energy, glowing blues and reds. He held it over his head, screaming death at the monster, screaming his love and his power and his indomitable spirit, striking again and again. He thought the ogre would defend itself more, using the black, wicked claws that it would rip apart his angel with, but it didn’t. It merely gave out an awful bellow as it fell dead. He hid and waited for the footsteps coming up the hall, and hid behind the door, knowing that trouble would come.
The creature’s mate was smaller and more wiry. It lacked the imposing musculature, but he was sure that some kind of speed and ferocity had to lurk in its firm, ropy frame. The body was covered in thick, draconic scales as black as the long, oily hairy on its misshapen head. For a moment, he thought from something in its eyes that it had to be a person. But he couldn’t let the hag’s black magic fool him, it was surely just another of the monsters that had come for his lover. He didn’t let it fill him with false remorse as he jumped it and wrestled it to the ground. Nor did he let its muffled pleas for mercy confuse him. He opened its throat and watched with delight as the ink sprayed from it.
When Noah first heard his father yelling, he thought nothing of it. There wasn’t much time for words though. The yell got cut off abruptly as his mother’s high heels clicked down the hall. There was no denying it after the second set of screams. Kyle wasn’t just struggling or screaming or tripping balls in front of his parents, something was up. He couldn’t call the police about this mess. This wasn’t anything they would ever have touched, this wasn’t anything they’d believe anyway. He reached under his bed for the hammer he’d been keeping there and ran to Kyle’s room, hoping things had resolved themselves.
He should have known he was being set up when the door just opened. It hadn’t been locked, in spite of whatever had happened. He didn’t have time to raise the hammer and defend himself. There was only time for shock and the pain from the knife in his stomach. There was only time for one last thought to run through his head. It was the thought that the dirt beneath us is everywhere, that the air we breathe is everywhere, that protons, neutrons and electrons are everywhere and there is no stopping that. Not Steve McQueen, not Godzilla, not John Agar can stop Hell bubbling to the surface, can stop the need for pigs to wallow in mud or the will of the ground we walk on. The mud was the ground beneath and it was going to be everywhere.
There was only silence when the last of the monsters fell dead and the solace of Marilyn’s warm smile. There was the comfort of her body and the light of her love and the only addiction he would ever need fed again. There was nothing better than this. The mud that gave it to him was a gift from God, a share of the wonders of Heaven that outdid the best of his stuff. As his brother had earlier, Kyle cried as he understood the mud. The earth had given him pot, opium, and mushrooms, but now it gave him Heaven. For a moment, he wondered when he would stop tripping, but he realized he would have to dismiss this from his mind to be truly able to enjoy it. He gave himself to Marilyn and the mud and not for a moment could he feel his hardon go soft.
When his eyes were his own, he saw four corpses and he was lying on top of one of them. His sister was all blood, bruises and shattered bones from hours and hours of rape. Numb, defenseless Caroline’s living death was over and she was given at last the mercy of the real thing. So too had Noah, and his mother and his father. Alone in the house with two dead women and two dead men, the gifts the mud had given him were clear. He felt the harshest sobriety he’d ever felt before, a clear mind twice as heavy as it used to be. He had hated life without drugs because there was nothing to challenge him and now he saw that great things moved against him. Even with the harshness of his awakening, it didn’t take him long to figure out what Noah had, to remember that the mud had eaten the compost heap, and had crept around the back door to the front steps. With all the mud that had soaked through his pants, he’d been in it deeper than ever, seeing on the clock that it had been more than just a few hours, it had been almost half a day. He stared out his window not wanting to see what he knew he would.
The front steps were the beginning. The mud was next door, at the house across the street, and at the house next door to that one. People filled the muddy streets, covered in chunks of the plague of dreams that had infected Kyle and caused the death of his family. The mud had bubbled completely to the surface and the town belonged to it. He hoped that some would avoid it, drive over it, see it coming, but that hope waned when drops of rain beat against his window. The mud and the gas were everywhere, the air people breathed as well as the earth they trod on. He stepped outside and he felt like screaming to them, seeing if even in their state they could hear him and gain some sense.
So he stepped outside, and he did begin to yell. He wasn’t sure if he should yell “go back inside” or “get out of town” or “get help”, since he wasn’t sure which one would do any good. None, it seemed, since as he yelled, they still continued to gather, called to mass by some unseen churchbells. Their eyes had grown wide, all pupils, obsidian marbles bulging from their heads, watering like their ravenous mouths. He knew what they hungered for, after all their years of boredom and all their failed attempts at satisfaction. It was the same thing that his mouth had watered for, the taste, the sweet, alien taste of experience. The gas began to take him as he saw in the distance, where they marched to.
At the center of town, the earth had opened up, and the mud bubbled to the surface in great, rippling pools. None of them were shy about it, none had reservations, none waited to see if the water was fine or the mud too high to survive in. The mud did not drag them in, as he thought it would. He had hoped it would be as simple as drowning. It shifted, molded itself to accommodate their bodies and make sure there would be room for all. Each person had a place, a little rippling pool of their own that squeezed and melded together with the other pools as they entered. Perhaps it was the beginning of the gas, but it looked like little hands were rising from the mud to help the mesmerized townsfolk rip off their clothes. They reached out for another, embracing and fighting, strangling and groping. The principal of the elementary school was holding the man who ran the grocery store’s head under as he scratched at his sides, two gas station attendants wrestled with and fondled the old lady who ran the Goodwill store, the minister swam and splashed around before gleefully coiling his body up with a pregnant cheerleader’s. There was no town left, just a blur of mud and flesh. In the wet, green, swampy crater at the center of town all of its citizens were becoming one awful, gooey mass. If the will of the earth was unity, it had achieved it. Kyle’s shock faded as Marilyn walked down the stairs and out the door to join him. Half of her face was Caroline’s, beaten, bruised and contorted in her final screams. But somehow to Kyle, she never looked more beautiful. She offered her hand and he took it, joining all he knew of family and community.

[Horror_Writer]

A lot of alliteration in the beginning which is generlly a detractor.

[Doc Faustus]

The first part's is more expressionistic and atmospheric than plot oriented. The noise is almost more important than the words themselves.