Hell To Heaven by D.F. Lewis, Hertzan Chimera, and M.F. Korn

The following is an excellent work by three masters...not to be missed. I do recommend that you turn the light on; and then enjoy!

It was a rheumy wet afternoon when Gary and Donna's baby Grand piano commenced to plinking by itself. As young couples were wont to do, they had put the whole nest-egg into the old Martense house, every last bit into the 250 year old Georgian monstrosity overlooking the port of Narrangansett, a port that once harboured trinkets and spice from far off Cathay. A huge hulking three storey structure, the Martense house was built by the now-extinct eccentric Hanson family long ago, of which Gary and Donna didn't care one whit at all. They seemed to care more about the Chinese ceramic tile just laid down in the kitchen and the cracked foundation than a piano plink-plonking suddenly out of the ether, as young couples were wont to do in the pecking order of caring. The house almost grew like an enormous castellation of hollow rooms and rough tree-bark.

Gary grew older, dreamed every night that he had dreamed a single dream on that single night -- the first night in the Martense house -- dreamed a recurring dream that diminished into a single dot on the screen of his sleep. He still thought himself to be a young man ... to the bitter end. Like most thrusting men of his age, approaching middle-aged torpor, sleep had ceased to be a fast bunny coiled in deep slumber, but more a Bogart film noir where fitful tossing and turnings were just one plot removed from full waking, and stumbling downstairs for a piss, a piss each and every hour or so, or a fumbling in the fridge for a lukewarm ice cube to chase the curdled spittle from the roof of the mouth. Whatever the case, our bogus Bogart, as he leg-numbed it down the oak-tree stairs for the umpteenth time in a waking dream of somnambulistic bladdered detours … as he did this very middle-aged, non-yuppie star trek towards ground-tile floor mock-mezzanine of a mid-term blues of a suffering solstice of his dark core of Narrangansett night-soil and saffron -- he heard that damn plinking start up again from the baby grand. He tried to call for Donna. But she was awake in another dream. (He knew she loved the ceramics tiles to cover any bark that seemed to infiltrate from the damp-course like gutturals of a voice made solid.)

Donna was screaming without sound. Like yew wood made translucent by losing a grip on its own reality. Her four-poster bed, as she saw it, was covered in shadows -- shadow with no obvious light source and she had the bed covers under her chin to protect herself from evil but it did no good. The shadows up and left with the bed covers and she was left in her silk night dress her mother gave her for her honeymoon, crouched into a foetus ball of horror while all around her eagles shrieked and moonbeams galloped up the walls. Donna's face was white through grey like a bit of old bed linen. Her mouth was stretched wide but no Lilliputians of sound escaped; they were all strapped down, lashed to her dry soy tongue unable to flee, escape in bawling alarums. She tore at her face, drawing blood and breaking nails. Her eyes saw things rising up from the twisting contorting floorboards, wood beings, not trees, not beasts but cubes of solid tree-bark that slammed the floor at the foot of her bed as they advanced upon her. One of them leapt onto the bed threatening to crush her skull. Finally, Gary heard Donna's tortured scream.

"Honey, wake up! Wake up!" He shook Donna awake.

"Gary! Gary!" she screamed. "It's okay! It's okay."

They sat there on the bed. The house was as silent as a fertile grave.

"These nightmares are really getting to be a nuisance," she said, as she for some reason started thumbing through floor tile samples that the architect had left her.

"I know. We'll never get this house fixed up. The pipes leak in the basement, we are having to shore up the foundation on the west side with locking wires, the roof is pitched off kilter, the cellar has broken ribs …"

"I can take the dreams every night, I guess. I am determined to make our home a dream home. Those people from the society column of the paper still want to do a special article on us. That's what keeps me going!"

Their words were stage-managed, as it were, method mannered, almost madly learnt parrot fashion and delivered like a Chinaman with soy dripping from his nose. Their speeches over, they sat there in the bed. He began to kiss her slender beauteous neck.

"Not now. I'm trying to pick out the flooring for the game room. Please!"

Garry nodded. "Okay, I'll go back to bed. And let's not forget to disguise the bathroom walls with groutings and tiles."

The house creaked and moaned with chitterings as arpeggios of Narrangansett strangeness accompanied the deep basso rumblings. The piano plinked a bit; the melody line for Gershwin's "Clap yo hands", but of course Garry and Donna didn't know what that was. It was almost too recent. Then there was more automatic piano-roll of a performance with a rather oriental flavour, reminiscent of an ancient minstrelsy that they once both loved: 'suki yaki for wood blocks and horn', but they weren't sure the title was correct. The tune was very familiar, though, from the old Hanson days, of which both Garry and Donna cared not a whit. Yet the Martense house evidently cared a whit. There was an element of déjà vu when they decided that dreams were far too common, and they should get back to the hard-edged reality of tiles: a jigsaw of willow patterns that, by day, they were trying to stick to the bathroom walls. The bathroom where old man Hanson had once committed a form of self-kamikaze for the benefit of deflating his bladder in free-fall .

"Crazee!" shouted Garry, as if scolding himself for retaining a foothold in the dream. But, somehow, he knew he needed to do so, for Donna's sake. She was still trapped in the dream and he needed to return for some sort of rescue effort on her behalf. She was evidently held captive by old man Hanson, who, though dead, still had some dreadful power over living people's dreams; his only way back, indeed, not as a ghost as such, but as near to a real ghost as one can imagine without actually believing in its existence.

The old man pointed through the skin of the dream at Garry, because Garry was now completely outside the dream. He tempted Garry to enter the dream, using a dream-like Donna as a bait. He held her in his arms like wood-chipped sack of Southern Seas contraband.

"Come on, Garry, it's nice in here," whined Garry's vision of Hanson, a vision that was the old man's spectral articulations of near-bone and mushy flesh that the dream managed to harbour.

But little did even the evil Hanson know but they too were part of a separate dream being dreamt by a future parallel genecourse of Garry's family tree. His son Jacob. And Jacob was looking out now with boyish mischief through the overbloated undersea gaze of the evil Hanson as he cradled the crumbling ragbag of bones he was using to mimic Donna's reposing form. Jacob did a clever twitch of his nose and the bag of bones shook and rattled in Hanson's arms, came clattering to the floor. The spell broken, Garry rooted out a gleaming silver axe and wielded it at the mirror of his denial and out fell his Donna from the deepest side of Hell. She was not alert, in fact she didn't seem to be awake. Her eyes were open but she was REMing left and right, still locked in some haunted dream home despite her freedom from beyond. She had scars all over her body; they were layered one upon the other, new cuts opening over old lumps and knots as he watched her writhe around in her semi-conscious state.

He lifted her up and carried her to the bedroom where the wooden cubes were waiting. Banging insistently upon the hardwood floor as he pulled the bleeding quilt over them both and forced himself to join her in her dreams -- the only solution to Face The Beast. They both woke up from a stillborn mutual timesharing dream yet again. The last in a series of semi-precious dreamlets. They appeared to be unscathed.
The piano plinked out in a wicked timber, a bit out of tune, Cole Porter's "Brush up your Shakespeare" from KISS ME KATE. Garry and Donna looked at each other like they had suddenly bounced from an ethereal Homeric hell of shades and wispy spirits, back into a reality they recognised as their days of young love. When they only needed to till their garden.

"Listen, it's playing again."

"Yes. I wish I knew the names of these songs." A spirit came towards them from the black spectral corner of the room, just as the hint of sunlight pierced through the matching luxurious faux gilded draperies that were quite in season and fashionable as evergreens.

They looked at it in horror. Jacob was in the other room crying. They couldn't move for some reason.

"My Jacob darling. We're coming dear!"

The spirit of Old Man Hanson squatted in the corner in a resigning fashion and began leafing through the carpet pile samples for the guest room, muttering to no one in particular.

"You check on Jacob. I'll start us a pot of Swiss imported coffee."
Donna smiled at Garry. Garry beamed at Donna.

"Bad breath. Go brush."

Neither of them made it alive to the refinished fine oak-panelled hand-carved door, as Jacob whimpered in the next room handsomely remodelled in a cowboys and Indian motif, mixed with junks and yellow-eyed moons. All the spirits headed for his room in an ephemeral wicked carpet of shimmering illusion.

The old Martense house was silent for a while after that. The refinished grand piano with new insides plinked out Chopin's Funeral March, with solemn timbre from another dimension.

Jacob laughed -- as all babies often do, with plenty of gurgle and backwash and sick on the shoulder of God. The Holy Ghost sown with grain and fibre.

There was an icy stillness, full of fear and wonder. The fear that everyone on the family tree dreamed that selfsame tree (upon which they either grew naturally or were grafted) from the roots upward. Miscegenation was stronger than imagination. Hybrids and foreigners hanging on to every branch amid the ghosting of the signal: an ill-tiled roomy imbroglio where -- amid the tinkles of a prepared baby grand -- inscrutabilities of humanity wandered in and out with steaming infusions (infusions steeped from strained shadow), all being offered to those on the next branch up from a series of willow-patterned trays.

END

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