Trolley No. 1852 (9 page)

“I can feel it!” Miss Aheb
lewdly rejoiced. “Pouring into me!
Filling
me!”

The denouement wound down; then, the
motorman withdrew its carrot-like “cock” from the woman’s bowel. My
sister turned away, appalled.

“That was lovely, dear,” Miss Aheb
commended. She lay slit-eyed and grinning, the quaking orgasms
leaving her limp on the plush bed. “But now that I’ve had my
moment… You know what to do…”

The thogg stepped away, stuffing his sullied
organ back into his trousers; yet my sister, in motions that were
clearly gruelling, came round to kneel at the edge of the bed
between the madam’s upthrust thighs.

“I just can’t abide the idea of the thogg’s
jism being in me for long,” Miss Aheb remarked as Selina pressed
her lips to the plumbed sphincter and began to suck.

“There, good, good, dear. Suck it all
out…”

Numbed to stupefaction, all I could do was
watch as poor Selina engaged in the revolting process of evacuating
Miss Aheb’s rectal vault of the thogg’s semen. When her face came
away from the cleft, she wobbled on her knees.

“Swallow now, dear,” the madam dictated,
“and then you’d both best be on your way.”

Selina stared in the
chandelier’s sinister
unlight,
lips pursed as her mouth obviously remained full
of the creature’s spermatic void. She steeled herself, went tense,
then audibly swallowed.

I watched then as my sister rose to
listlessly redress herself and re-don the grim parchment mask.

Miss Aheb indicated the strange poles
standing to either side of the bed. “The carriers are full as you
can see. Take them now—the back stairs as usual, and be on your way
through the ingression brink.”

At this incomprehensible command, Selina
lifted up one of the poles while the motorman hoisted up the other.
These poles or rods or whatever they were continued to mystify me.
What exactly was the mass of shriveled, semi-lucent things adhered
to them? Again, I thought of wizened grapes…

Miss Aheb stood up, her nude body stunning
in its curvatures yet appalling in its discolor. “Go in glory,” she
oddly bid my sister, “and sing praise to our benefactors.”

Here was the only occasion for a vocal
utterance on Selina’s part. “Yes, Madam Aheb.”

“And have the trolley back
by bell-time. Soon our very generous guests will have had their
fill of the evening’s delights.” She grinned wickedly in the
shimmering light that was not light. “As we so have our fill
of
them…
”

Selina and the motorman departed through an
adjoining door and disappeared. I was able to detect the sound of
descending footfalls…

They’re going down a set
of ancillary stairs,
I realized,
to the trolley.

My own footfalls took me
in haste, down the sweeping main stairs to the atrium; I realized
the import of moving faster than my sister and the cumbersome
motorman, and was confident of this goal’s achievability. From each
stair-hall I detected the sounds of sexual traffic (moans, murmurs,
squeals of lascivious release) and was relieved to find the atrium
devoid of prostitutes and male suitors alike. At once I passed
through the large outer door to the decrepit courtyard, and in the
moon’s bedimmed light, I boarded the vacant trolley and piloted
myself to the rearmost seats of the second car, to hide myself.
Before I’d stowed my person behind the wood-slat seat, however, I
paused to take further note of that great archway of lichen-stained
blocks embrasuring the mammoth door of rusted iron beams studded
with rivets. Again I was perplexed by the almost mirage-like image:
a sickly colored
mist
that seemed impossibly oily, sifting beneath the great door’s
gap; and with it, evidence of some weird half-light that I was now
able to correspond to the indefinable shimmer of Miss Aheb’s
bed-chamber.

What could possibly be behind the door that
would possess such strange traits? This was New York City, for
goodness sake…

I ducked back down, as the footsteps I knew
would come had arrived. I heard my sister and her monstrous
companion clatter aboard the trolley. Exposing myself to an obvious
risk, I dared to steal a split-second peek above the seat-back’s
edge…

Selina and the
motorman—that
thing—
had planted the pair of mass-cloaked rods in mounts of some
sort or other, where they now stood upright as they had upstairs.
Selina tended to some flicking of switches on a control board, but
it was the motorman who dismounted and plodded toward the massive
arched door.

A loud metallic
clang!
reverberated as a
bolt was thrown, then came the keening grind of old hinges as the
thing secreted beneath the garb of a transit motorman pulled open
the doors.

With half an eye over the seat-back, I
stared in utter befuddlement…

More stone blocks filled
the archway, rendering passage impossible!
What on earth?
I thought. Yet the
negating blocks were not of normal stone, as were those of the arch
and the courtyard’s walls…

They were of the same cryptic material that
comprised the stalactitical crystals of Miss Aheb’s chandelier, and
her and Selina’s pendants!

The trolley jerked; metal abraded as the
vehicle’s wheels squealed over the ancient rails, and it was
then…

Impossible!

Trolley No. 1852 rumbled
forward toward the
solid wall
within the arch and—

Ineptly, I covered my head with my arms,
awaiting what… I could never estimate.

The trolley, without so
much as a hitch,
passed through
the wall of outerworldly blocks.

There came a
noisome
sucking
sound, then one of soft grinding; I myself felt as though I
were being pulled through a range of sand, yet no physical
substance was observed; barely visible mist, however,
was
observed, akin to
the seeming mist I’d thought I noticed in the madam’s chamber. I
received the notion that the mist (warm and somehow oily) existed
in some direct or indirect relativity to that inexplicable
counter-luminescence, for that same trait now—that light which
was
not
light—held dominion over the queer space in which the trolley
now ranged.

And a queer space it was, indeed.

I sensed
barrenness
even before I
opened my eyes, and felt inordinate pressure as well as a peculiar
absence of air temperature; it was neither hot nor cold, just
simply
nothing.
I
thought of vacuities and voids, of inhuman realms and lost worlds.
It was then that I actually looked out of the trolley-car’s
vestibule…

Should this manuscript ever be found, I
suspect that by this point, the reader will have no choice but to
dismiss me as one fit for some refuge for the deranged. Translating
what I then witnessed into communicable lexicon would overbound the
skill of even the most preeminent writer. Sufficient words, you
see, simply do not exist. I will endeavor, though, toward a feeble
attempt…

I saw a sky hazy with the
anti-light, whose source could not be perceived as there was no
object of provenance, such as a sun or a moon. Yet beyond the
spectral shimmer, the nature of this phenomenon I can only think of
as a sky existed in layers, or
stratum,
the darkest being the most
elevated, the lightest being in the closest proximal relation to
the land, if indeed it could be called as such. Yet each strata
bore colours defying category; instead, they seemed gradient shades
of tone, bereft of what we’re taught to be primary and/or secondary
colouring which, when amalgamated, result in the visual character
of what our eyes perceive. Forgive my convolutedness, and I
apologize for any ensuant frustration. Alas, this is the only
description my anaemic grey-matter can generate.

Even more spectral,
though, than this “sky” was the terrain itself over which the
clattering trolley now traversed. The physical realm I now beheld
(what I mean is the solid ground) existed not as earth nor desert,
not as hillock nor woodland. It was merely flat, barren
space,
flat to
exactitude and extending as far as the eye could register retinal
images. I knew then that I must be on another planet, or (recalling
the forbidden mythologies of the ancient Ahebites) within some
other dimensional plane that existed in contestation with the three
aspects of dimensionality we are comfortable with; for the
Ahebites, led by the dread witch-priestess Isimah el-Aheb, were
worshipers and human physical agents for the drab, featureless
beings known as the Pyramidiles who did indeed inhabit a realm that
was not planetary and thereby could only be
para-dimensional.

This, I knew, was but grim
fable; or at least I’d always
thought
it to be…

How, though, could I deny
it
now?

More surveillance was
necessary for me to make a proper assessment of this
phantasmata
I was now
sitting in the middle of. I required a forward view, which would no
doubt expose me to the greatest risk yet. Nevertheless, I took my
chance, realising no other subsidiary manoeuvre.

I stood upright at the back of the
trolley.

What faced me were the
backs of my sister and the aberrant motorman; nothing could be more
imperative, I knew, than to prevent them from seeing me. Yet
I
was the one who needed
to see. And
see
I
did…

To my unabating horror.

Past the shoulders of
Selina and the
thogg
there stretched a vista so strange, so unutterably alien,
that the very glimpsing of it fleeced the breath from my lungs and
instigated a slugging of my heart. It was a horizon of sorts,
extending to sheer endlessness, a screaming, demented infinity that
transcended all manner of measure. Sounds like wicked wind blended
with some
human
aspect seemed to shriek from all directions; and dust (though
dust that glittered) flitted through the ultra-terrestrial haze,
filtering a purview of impossibility. The only apparent “natural”
objects in view were the two track-rails extending in perfect
linearity for incalculable miles ahead.
Who could possibly have lain them?
I
wondered in fascinated terror.
And just
how long do they extend?

These and myriad more
questions overflowed in my struggling and shock-wearied mind. This
land and sky of undefected planes, I knew, could not exist via any
known laws of nature or relativity, nor could the trolley’s very
passage—a vehicle with no perceptible mode of power. But my
unblinking eyes bloomed then, when the flat, vacuous void ahead at
last relinquished some of its unfathomable homogeneousness, the
blistering panorama’s monotony finally breaking to reveal the
tiniest eruptions of some facet of
feature.

Pyramids!
I realised through a headache-inducing
squint.

Yes, miles or hundreds of miles distant,
their ranks rose as the trolley approached: a morass of
pyramid-shaped objects whose angles all existed in perfect
uniformity. Some spired higher than others, but beyond that, they
were all of the same, and I knew now what they could only be…

The Pyramidiles.

That hideous race of
faceless, immobile
anti-beings
so decadently and blood-thirstily revered by the
Ahebites of pre-dynastic Egypt.

It’s true! It’s all
true!
my palpitating thoughts
screamed.

The myth of the Pyramidiles was no myth; so
then neither could be their principal servitor on earth, the
witch-priestess Isimah el-Aheb, now known as Madam Aheb of the 1852
Club…

And it was into the midst of these appalling
parasites of undying turmoil that the trolley ventured. God only
knew what would happen once we arrived.

Whether it was hours which
lapsed, or days, the prospect was beyond my mental potency to
estimate. Neither Selina nor the noxious motorman moved from their
forward posts, but eventually, the range of minuscule pyramidic
eruptions grew larger as more distance was gained; then, hours or
days later… they
loomed,
and in their looming I stood utterly paralyzed.
The smallest of them stood hundreds of feet high, yet the tallest
easily spired thousands of feet into the obscure, unilinear stratum
above; each Pyramid was indeed a colossus; and being cognizant that
each of these things were alive made the observation all the more
horrific. That incessant living wind-like screaming rose in pitch
as the trolley clattered directly into the thick of the things. I
could see them and their mammoth flesh-walls; could
see
the most horrific
trait of all: whatever it was that covered their living pyramidal
bodies (presumably some foreign laminae that served as skin) was of
a wet, sickly white, like that of a bullfrog’s belly, tessellated
with an even more sickly green.

Just like the skin of Miss Aheb and
Selina…

It was an uncontemplatable
labyrinth that existed between the bases of these horrid, titan
creatures; and through that labyrinth the trolley now wended. I
thought of a lone skiff coursing betwixt glaciers, or the most
meager train locomoting between the most enormous mountains. The
Pyramidiles’ “skin” made me physically ill to behold, yet now,
given their size when compared to our proximity, it was all I could
see to either side. The slimy dermis shivered as we passed, showing
revolting dilating pores that shuddered as if via some mode of
respiration. Great hoselike lines swerved in every direction,
pulsing—and I knew that these could only be the things’ veins. But
in veins flowed
blood,
circulated by
hearts,
and it was the nature of such that I would’ve
preferred to kill myself than to speculate or, worse, bear witness
to. Just as frightening queries, however, did race mad through my
mind; for one: How much space did these appalling hulks of flesh
occupy? Dozens of square miles? Thousands?
More?