Free Gateways to Abomination by Matthew Bartlett Page B

man couldn't go a month without a new epiphany. And rather than gather the family 'round, he'd corner you at a reunion and regale you with the speech you'd heard him give Aunt Asenath at breakfast. Verbatim almost, but with each new iteration a change here and there...a comedian "improving" his act. He'd even execute a self-deprecating laugh or a knowing shake of the head...at the same spot each time.
    The person on the other end of the phone was a dispassionate, obdurate bureaucrat with a resonant voice--an old time broadcaster's vibrato. No, the decision had been made and was final and I, as the sole heir to this particular misfortune, had no choice but to drive from New York up through to central Vermont to fetch my great uncle and his meager belongings. Now. And he had no one left but me.
    A few phone calls to work and family across the ocean, and I was off. I drove between the sodden trees and frowning awnings lining East 79th Street and wended my way through the drizzle-hazed, Creamsicle-coned streets, and onto the FDR. By the time I hit 95 North, the drizzle had stopped but all was still black and white. The radio--alternating between talk and music--kept me company and awake during the first part of the trip up through Connecticut, then I added a strong, large coffee somewhere south of Hartford. A duo, I thought, coffee and radio, working to keep my car on the road.
    But then, a few miles before the border of Vermont, the radio bailed on me. A rental car without satellite or a CD player is what you get when you call at 4:30 p.m. on a weeknight, and that's when I'd called. So now, as night really settled in, and the coffee began to wear off, I settled into a serious fret. I needed more coffee, but I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen an exit, or a highway sign for that matter. But I resolved to keep going, and I did, pretty much until the point when I realized that going back to the last exit with Food signs would put me too far off schedule...and I wouldn't be able to do it anyway until another exit came along. So, if no coffee...I spun the radio dial back and forth melodramatically, finding only varying keys of buzzy static. I cranked the volume, hoping the static might form into music or words.
    I didn't care what I would find--talk, sports, any kind of music. Just a voice, please, or a musical note. A zither's strum, an accordion's bleat, the plastic thump of an electronic drum...a goddamned SOUND. For five minute s straight I begged the radio aloud, just to hear my own voice...and then the dissonant chord of a church organ sounded so clearly and loudly that I briefly lost control of the car. Someone watching would have thought I'd had a stroke, I thought, but the idea of someone watching in the middle of nowhere, from the towering woods...well, that was something I didn't want to think about. I wrested the car back into the travel lane with one hand and spun back down the volume with the other.
    "Through him...in him...with him...in the unity of the holyyyy spiiiiiriiiii..." warbled a male tenor, a very familiar doxology, though I hadn't been in a Catholic church since the age of thirteen. Then the priest's voice faltered, rasped, and disintegrated into a violent coughing fit...wet, hacking, productive coughs, by the sound of it. On and on it went, until the reel-to-reel at the station must have begun to fail. The cough slowed to a low, monotonous drone, then sped up slightly, faster, chirpily fast...then reversed...backward coughing for a time, then backward singing, with that lispy, hissing sound like the tongue of a serpent caressing the microphone with unspeakably foul intent. Then the loop stopped as though the reel had been violently dispatched, and after some thumping and clacking, organ music resumed, a climbing, sing-songy, carnival tune. Occasionally it reversed for a time and then righted itself, providing a disquieting soundtrack as I drove through the dark night, the walls of the woods rising