Strange Stories

Eduardo Capistrano

StrAnGe

StoRiEs

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1st Edition

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Babelcube

2019

Cover and illustrations: Eduardo Capistrano.

Typography: "Euphorigenic" by Ray Larabie (http://typodermicfonts.com).

Translated by: João Lopes.

Cataloging In Publication (CIP)

Provided by the author

Summary

Horribile Dictu

Umbilical

Paradiso

The Egg, Broken

The Spot

Captor

Overprotector

Apostasy

All Saints’ Day

Wyrd

Mammon

Pinus

Horses

Horribile Dictu

Death hunts even those who flee.

— Horace, Odes, Book III, 2, 14

The cold night wind whistled and blew my hair. My skin seemed to stiffen as I glimpsed the astonishing sight before my eyes. The smoke from my cigarette seemed reluctant to dissipate, like the decaying house that stubbornly stood. I looked in my pocket for the paper that informed me about the place.

The cold metal of the object in my pockets reminded me that I should not be there.

On paper, written in soft language, some boss I would never find could have signed my death certificate. I revenged myself silently incinerating its empty words with my cigarette. Before I dropped the paper, consumed slowly by the flames, I babbled the last Latin words of the letter: "horribile dictu."

The building was archaic and impressive, its walls of long black wood boards impregnated with a scent of old age, loathsomeness and death. The windows cried darkness, the curtains animated by the winds gesticulating as if they wanted me inside. I would have to satisfy them.

The stone wall that surrounded the house was completely disintegrated. The blocks, one day cut into cubes with proud edges, were now blunt, with rounded corners and cracks, forming a distorted trail leading to the double arched door. I would not fail to participate in your game, my hostess. I danced in the air, skipping over the blocks and landing on the small walkway in front of the door, which I soon noticed was half open.

Like a lover with a light touch, I pushed the door, which disappeared into the darkness with a groan. The seeming serenity of darkness was disturbed only by the silvery rays of the moon, which dared to project a circular spot around a vase of flowers on a table there.

In the distance, behind me, I heard the winds talk in howls. Coming in or not, your end comes today. My hand searched, tentatively, for the glass bottle I had stored somewhere. How long have I consumed the liquid? Was it an enemy or friend of my terminal condition? It did not matter. At that moment, on the label, for me, it was written death. The glass and the yellowish liquid found the floor before my lips. My feet in black leather merged with the shadows of the place that offered to be my grave.

The flowers were long dead; its perfume lost in the ages, its nonexistent colors still faded by the cold blue of the moon. Yet they were now my only light through the sea of darkness in which I had voluntarily cast myself. I reached for the rotten petals lying on the bent wood of the table, which crumbled at the slightest touch. Like a hungry beast, the icy puff of night consumed dust through the windows.

Clouds on the horizon announced, with noisy thunders, that a storm was approaching. I skirted the table, still bathed in the light, and before reaching the window, my weight fragmented something under my feet. The shards were of glass, but not of the window; under the table, a picture frame, with its face turned to the floor, refused to show its memories.

The frame dropped the last fragments of the glass that it had before and revealed an image of distorted happiness, which nevertheless was displaced in that obscure hell. The blur of what looked like a girl was ahead of what was surely her mother, a young woman, with brown hair pinned to the top of her head, with a face that exuded life. The lady's right hand held what appeared to be another hand, grotesquely swollen, deformed and blackened, but that was the only indication of its owner. The rest of the man — or whatever that was — had been torn. It seemed more appropriate to me, for the owner of that hand would certainly not do justice to the company.

Where the hands of the peculiar couple met, they seemed to hold together a curious object, spherical and vitreous, being twice the size of the girl's hand. Her face and appearance seemed to indicate her displeasure at the touch of the artifact. In turn, the monstrous hand gripped the globe as if life seeped through its fingers.

The image came out of the frame into one of my pockets just before I heard something cracking in the yard. The broken window did not stop my access to the stone stairs which, flanked by columns, descended to the gray, brittle grass of the decrepit mansion's gardens.

From the barren land, the dwindling trees could not get sustenance. They writhed like monstrous arms of the earth, pleading with the heavens for help. In the middle of the spacious grounds, stood a building that once had glass walls. The greenhouse door was double and wide open. Inside, the plants had carelessly grown, before they encountered the macabre force that hovered over the whole place. But it was not just negligence and decrepitude that allowed that place. The growth of the plants had been corrupted by something that made them prickly and sickly, their delicate textures replaced by massive and coarse fibers, verdant life annihilated by gray death.

My eyes found, however, a red that resisted. A scarlet rose such as I had never seen, fully bloomed, on the end of a stalk with horrendous curved spines. My hands almost reached the pristine wonder, when a whispered voice echoed through the place, startling the few birds still there.

I see you enjoyed my roses.

The voice made me look around and ask for its owner, at least three times before it returned, this time originating from behind the roses.

You came here to steal them?

I fixed my gaze on what I thought was the source of the sound, but then I realized that the rose was the last survivor in a tangle of thorns, around something on a stone table in the center of the greenhouse. I tried to discern what was there, but in an instant my eyes focused on a silhouette that came to meet me, gradually acquiring the outline of a woman. The woman in the photo.

Her beauty and life seemed to have been left in the picture. Her clothes, however, were the same, stained with dirt. One of her hands was on her back, and on the other she held a rose identical to the one in the garden, which she approached to her face to inspire its scent. Then her eyes without pupils stared at me.

Catherine?

Mom...

Christine. You're Christine, then...

She was silent and then stared at the floor, sliding slightly to the side, letting the moonlight illuminate the stone table. The rose left her hand but I never saw it reaching the ground.

The roses grew on a skeleton dressed just like her. The right hand of the skeleton held the stem of the rose that persisted alive. Christine stepped toward me with gardening scissors. She was already under my gun sight. I walked backwards firing all the bullets from the gun, but that only made her fall. I reached for the scissors, opened its blades as much as I could, and like a guillotine, I decapitated Christine. Black blood flowed from the wound, death finally dragging over the corpse the decay that had been denied.

I left the cursed greenhouse for the gardens. I got the first drops of rain on me, and from somewhere on the top of the house I heard a howl of pain. The winds seemed to want to carry me, like the cigarette I did not even notice was gone. I walked slowly up the stairs, through the window, beyond the dead flowers. The lightning struck the inner demons of the house, enlightening the broken stairs.

My tortuous path ascended through broken boards. One false step, one dry crack. My life was hanging from the railing on which I had clung, my body floating on the balustrade. A horrid, monstrous laugh seemed to force me down. A nearby tapestry saved me, which tore and was swallowed by the whirlwind in the darkness that called my name.

The corridor lined with red curtains stood imposingly, a throat that ended at the entrance to the stomach of the beast into which I thrusted myself. The doors to the main room of the house were wide open like those in the greenhouse, inviting me to accept its silent challenge and make the same mistake. I made it.

As I entered, the doors closed behind me. Immediately my revolver jumped to my hand. The huge bedroom opened onto a balcony through wide, glazed doors. The panels of intact glass were neatly covered by delicate white curtains that allowed the ghostly moonlight to pass through. A laugh began, loud and wild, thick and inhuman. Between the laughter, the guttural voice spoke.

You broke into my home.

Mr. Shore?

The laughter and all the other noises, no matter how small, immediately fell silent at the name. A flash of lightning lit up the rest of the room, but I could only make out a large covered bed on the far right, and a bulky figure in front of it.

This man is dead.

The figure stepped out of the shadows with a heavy step, one of his feet falling like a dead man on the floor. Whatever that was, it was not human anymore. He was about two and a half meters tall and the silhouette showed one... two... THREE arms...

Mr. Shore, I came to help you.

With a movement toward me, which looked more like a starving creature's lunge, the creature stopped bending over with one of the arms pointed at me, before gasping, groaning and continuing to speak.

I'm beyond any help... anything you can offer me... except one. Yes, you can help me with one thing...

One of the hands of the being lifted an object that gleamed visibly. The globe of the photo. I moved toward the bed and then to the windows, in search of light, of air. I turned and saw his back covered by lumps and pustules covered with a viscous liquid.

Mr. Shore...

The creature turned and threw himself furiously upon me, riding on the carpet like an animal. The bullets from my revolver hit him, making him squeal. What had once been a man caught me and crashed through the windows with me, making me fall on my back over the stone porch floor. He lifted me by the wrists and pressed them against a wall, over a ravine. Tens of meters below, the waves collided in white foam against the rocks.

Fetid liquids sprayed over my face. Now I glimpsed the face of the creature. The face was emaciated, with no eyelids, lips or nose. The orbits of the eyes exposed as if eternally goggled, a hole in the middle of the face, the teeth in the permanent smile of the skull. The skin had pustules that grew and exploded constantly. I felt on my own body his icy blood fading.

The man... who you seek... has died... but it will not... finish... so...

The monster regurgitated a large amount of a nauseating gall, which ran down our cheeks. His hand tried to painfully approach the glass globe to my right hand. The effort seemed Herculean, but the beast fell to his knees and then back. The globe freed from his hands and rolled across the balcony floor, stopping at the edge of the long fall. Like the object, as soon as I broke free from the creature's claws I pulled away.

I saw, horrified, that some of the wounds of the abomination were closing. He was dragging himself to the sphere, but when he got close to it he found it under one of my feet. Glancing at me with his grotesque eyes full of tears, the creature raised three hands in supplication, one holding a paper.

You came... to help me... Mr. Shore...

I looked at the paper. It was the other part of the picture. In it, Shore's face, still intact, atop the monstrosity he had become, the corruption he had accepted.

This man died, I said, pushing the glass ball with my foot.

A few moments later, a crash broke out from where the ball fell. Immediately the creature agonized and convulsed, howling until it melted into a pool of dark, fetid liquids as I watched from the room to which I returned.

The torrential rain came, cleaning the stones, carrying the portrait with it to the sea.

Umbilical

Sour, sweet, bitter, pungent; everything must be proved.

— Chinese proverb

He listened for the umpteenth time to that damn straw-drinking noise. As if the liquid entered one of his ears and passed towards the other, frantically, through an empty tube. This same emptiness persisted even after his meals. He finished eating and seemed to have done nothing. More and more hunger.

He got up from the two armchairs he occupied in the hospital's barren hall and out the visitor’s door. He walked slowly through the streets, but he hated the calm, that forced dullness. He wanted to run lightly, the wind blowing his face. He also wanted to have hair, to feel the wind in them.

He reached the doors of the house, a weary, familiar sigh leaving his lips as he groped himself after the keyring. Easy to get lost in all of this, one acquaintance had said one day. Finally he found the metal ring with the keys, the keyring with a plastic prism imitating crystal. He opened the door and struggled, turning his body.

He was in his world: a high-backed sofa with a wide seat (for another, perhaps, but not for him), facing a small black and white television on a lace cloth over the round tabletop, supported by a rod that ended in four twisted feet. He always thought the table was like a glass, one of which he had not drank in a long time.

He walked through the house and into a narrow corridor. On his walls, photographs taken by plump people, some amid other so-called aberrations, mutilated persons, hairy monsters, Siamese brethren, or simply people with beyond tolerable appearances.

The bathroom light went off with a click and barely penetrated the mold-filled gaps between the jade-green tiles. Squeezing himself first to the edge of the sink, then to the toilet, he reached the small square where he could stand without holding his breath, just past the toilet, just before the shower screen.

He clumsily removed his shirt, then unzipped his pants, knocking them down with little jumps. He leaned against the wall and reached a sock, then the other. With his arms he lowered his underwear as far as he could on his thighs and brushed with his legs to make the piece join the pants on the floor. Panting, he finished the exercise, in which he considered himself well-trained.

He lifted one arm backwards, into a built-in closet that had no doors since he was still a child. He rummaged through pieces of broken scales and picked up a closed box. He manipulated it with fat fingers, yanked out a brand new scale and with it disappearing under his arms, he entered the shower area. He set the scale carefully on the floor and with the same care he put one foot on it, letting all the weight of the limb change the pointer of the meter. Then, with an impulse, he went up with the other, without taking his eyes off the pointer.

The device showed its maximum capacity, giving almost another turn, to then make a noise of something metallic breaking. With the object, along broke the man, who leaned against the wall, felt all his weight and began to cry.

The office had something of anachronism. The wooden shelves covered almost all the walls, and when they did not, they were replaced with frames containing old glories. Glories that were not of the man who now watched them.

Sitting behind a heavy oak desk in a padded swivel chair was a young psychiatrist, this glory still hanging in his old room. He'd finished wiping his glasses on his shirt, which he put on to see the rest of the room better.

The air was heavy there, addicted to study, stagnant because of the closed windows. The medical books on the shelves had not been handled for years. He always considered it a bad habit for his father to collect old books. He bought old tomes and stuffed them on the shelves of the library, until seven years ago the daily cigarette packs charged their debt. Only one of his father's employees could enter the library, but only to clean, never to organize the books that were stacked over the desk. His father still thought he would put them in order.

The day before, he finally admitted that he could not. The cancer had laughed at every therapy or treatment the old man had undergone. His father, Anthony Carlos, who demanded to be called just like that, sent for his son, who shared the name but not the demand. "Tony, said the dying old man, enter the library and organize my books. Make them neat."

The father did not remember having ostracized the son's professional choice neither not talking to him since he entered college. He treated him as if he were still a boy. Anthony would not attend his father, but he was forced to. That day, in the morning, the cancer stopped laughing.

And death seemed to write a hidden law, an imposition. Organize my books. Make them neat. If he did it, would that be asking for excuses he thought he did not owe? Was he wearing the boy who had grown up? Was he accepting the ostracism, the grumbling of an old man to the passing of time?

The young psychiatrist sat in his dead father's chair, the dust in the stagnant air dirtying his glasses without him noticing, drying his tears before they fell.

Those who entered the office were greeted by sober words painted on the glass: MD. Anthony Carlos Lecchesi II – Psychiatry. This showcase offered the waiting room as a product. In the perfect position of surveillance over the few arched chairs, behind a counter, stood Leila. She was what Anthony's father would call efficient, an euphemism for a dispassionate woman. Over her brown eyes, she wore thick-rimmed glasses that polluted her face like a mask, contrasting more with the pallor of his skin than with her white clothes. The brown hair was hidden in a bun.

There was a person in the waiting room besides Leila, when the fat man came. Obese was a limited term to describe it, by the inherent education of the word. Fat, for its grotesque and almost pejorative sonority, preceded by an extraordinarily superlative, would begin to reach the figure who pushed the glass door.

Receptionist Leila lifted her eyes, drawn by the disturbance of her peripheral vision, and though she refrained herself at once, she could not look away from the skin fold in the man's chin. He was wearing a set of gray sweats that Leila measured in her head, imagining that the pieces could serve as sheets, or perhaps curtains. Then she wondered what the size of his socks, or his underpants would be.

I have an appointment, he said, obviously trying to get around the embarrassment.

Leila noticed and looked directly at the papers she had on the table, stirring them unnecessarily, until she sorted out her thoughts and reached the daily schedule. Under the 15th of March, it was noted: Patient MD. Joscelyn 3:00 PM.

Doctor Joscelyn, is that it? The receptionist received a letter from a MD. Joscelyn Mares, Endocrinologist, scrawled almost illegibly.

Politely asking for a moment, she carried the letter through the closed door on her left. When she came, she instructed the fat man to come in. The psychiatrist sat waiting, but he rose with the effort of the voluminous patient at the door of his office, more out of astonishment than anything else. In awe, he watched as the fat man got past the door frame and walked towards him. When he was close enough, the doctor pointed the chair with his