Trolley No. 1852 Read online

  TROLLEY

  No. 1852

  by Edward Lee

  Smashwords Edition

  Necro Publications

  2012

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  TROLLEY NO. 1852

  © 2010 by Edward Lee

  This digital edition © 2012 Necro Publications

  ISBN: 9781452454993

  Cover, Book Design & Typesetting:

  David G. Barnett

  Fat Cat Graphic Design

  http://www.fatcatgraphicdesign.com

  a Necro Publication

  5139 Maxon Terrace • Sanford, FL 32771

  http://www.necropublications.com

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  PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

  1934

  It was the spectral hump of Federal Hill that held the solitary man’s gaze in capture, as oft it did, whene’re he took to his work-desk in hopes of a Muse’s whisper. The westward panes framed this inexpressible sight which rose two miles distant, and for reasons the lean, stoop-shouldered man could not explicate, beguiled his aesthetic senses as if to whelm them most utterly. Near dead-center of the roof-crowned rise stood the blackly bedrabbed hulk of St. John’s Church, whose cold Gothic revival windows seemed to stare back at his gaze in a knowing despair. The man felt certain that one day this morbid and singularly sinister edifice would ignite the fuse of a new tale, yet as so often happens to the creatively inclined, there could be no tale without an accommodating catalyst.

  The same could be said of his present scribbling, cursorily entitled “The Thing in the Moonlight,” not a tale of itself but some rather desultory notes for one. It gravitated around a salient and very haunting image that had stricken him in a dream not far agone: a decrepit trolley-car rusting on its iron rails, slack power wires hanging overhead like dead umbilici. Ill-hued yellow paint mouldered around the vestibuled car, a colour akin to jaundice. A black and rather faded stencil identified the vehicle: No. 1852.

  This dream-image disconcerted the man to no end, that and the image of the car’s motorman who turned in shifting moonlight to display a heinous face that was nothing but a white fleshy cone tapering snout-like to a single blood-red tentacle…

  Like the Gothic pile of the church, the blear-eyed man yearned to harness this image and then rein it into a tale of weird substantiality. But, lo, he knew without the proper catalyst, it would never be more than a page of fallow cacography. Such was the curse of a poor and aging scribe.

  However, the door-slat’s clatter alerted him to the arrival of the day’s post, and instead of a nettlesome bill or—his worst fear—an eviction, he found a manila envelope waiting. The upper-left corner bore no name but just a New York City address. From inside, his long thin fingers extracted a handsomely designed if not suspiciously suggestive magazine. Eloquent letters spelled its uncanny epithet EROTESQUE and a sub-heading: Tales for the Selectively Bizarre. A woodcut, quite byzantine in its elaborateness, comprised the cover in a style that seemed reminiscent of Frank Utpatel.

  The style, he observed, yet hardly the content.

  The woodcut showed what—after a studied glance—could only be the silhouette of a winnowy, well-busted woman, undeniably nude and pruriently posed.

  A neatly typed cover letter read as thus:

  Dear Mr. Lovecraft:

  Forgive the intrusion of this unsolicited invitation. EROTESQUE is a privately-circulated periodical offering fictional fare of the most outre, iconoclastic, and unrepresentative, with eroticism as the central motif. Our readership demands sexually inspired fiction by the very best and most innovative authors of the day—authors such as yourself. Tales incorporating supernaturalism, experimental, da-da, alternate-history, and anti-authoritarian are most encouraged. Should you accept our offer, you will need to furnish a double-spaced typescript of no less than seven thousand words.

  You need not worry about the potential controversy of your work appearing in a publication such as EROTESQUE (nor any attendant censorship ramifications); your contribution will be published pseudonymously, and we keep all pseudonyms under the most severe confidentiality. You may be surprised by how many of your peers publish with us on a regular basis.

  We pay well above the industry standard; likewise we understand that authors of your admired caliber need not “audition” for inclusion, which is why we make the first-half payment in ADVANCE. Please find the enclosed cheque for $500.00. A second cheque for an identical sum will be rendered upon delivery of the ms. There is no deadline.

  Should you not be interested, or are too pressed by your busy publishing schedule, simply return the cheque in the also-enclosed self-addressed, stamped envelope, and accept our thanks for your consideration.

  We here at EROTESQUE would be honoured to have your preeminent work in our pages.

  Cordially,

  F. Wilcox

  It would be superfluous to convey the extent of the writer’s surprise and exuberance. With a $500 draft in hand, and another promised upon delivery? These sums singularly exceeded any in this poor scribe’s professional history! With all that filthy lucre? he pondered, I could pay the rest of my aunt’s hospital bill AND cover our rent for a year! When the offer’s full weight sunk in, he actually shouted out a hackneyed and very ebullient, “Oh my God!”

  He visibly trembled, then, when he sat down to read…

  The magazine, as was manifest, existed for subversive readers, indeed. The man found the tales therein professionally rendered, adroitly and engagingly plotted, and flamboyantly conceived; however, it could not be denied. They were pornographic. Hence, the periodical’s “private” circulation, for fiction such as this would be deemed illegal most anywhere. Desperate as he was for finances (this past winter he’d never been closer to the bread-line) he had to make the self-admission that he hardly approved of pornography; yet on the other hand… Who am I to make judgments? A violation of the law? More than likely. But he had to admit also that most of the contents of Erotesque displayed works of notable craft and fascinating imagery (however lewd that imagery may have been), and he had to admit likewise that the reading’s wake left him aroused in a most primal and unmentionable manner—hence, the effect of the skills of the contributors. How quickly he decided to accept the offer he could not consciously say. Would he be prostituting his wee talents for money? Quite emphatically, he told himself, No. He saw this offer as a challenge, and no writer worth his salt ever turned down a challenge…

  This was all ballyhoo, of course, a cheap rationalization. The writer had no verve to write pornography but he needed the money, damn it, and he was so tired of eating cold beans and week-old cheese!

  So…

  He thought the following soliloquy: In my life of staggering travail, I’ve suffered humiliations and failures untold. Hectored as a child, forced to wear girls’ smocks until the age of eight, socially stifled such that I was unable to graduate high school… For pittances, I’ve ghost-written for dolts and stoked their vain egos by allowing them to put their names on my prose and poetry. I bungled my way to termination as a door-to-door salesman, and I stuffed envelopes for mere pennies. I’ve stood like a lackwit drone in an unheated cubby selling movie tickets to snide, chuckling human vermin. Now, at the least, I would be something much of note:

  A pornograph
er!

  But before he would scruple to live up to this F. Wilcox’s adulatory opinion of his talents, he hunted through his fairly recent New York City telephone directory (which he keep on hand due to his frequent journeys there); naturally, there was no listing for Erotesque in the business segment; however…

  Amongst the long string of Wilcoxes, he was encouraged to find a listing for a Wilcox, Frederick, at the same address as on the envelope. It made some sense that a publication of ribald literature would not have an official office, opting instead for the editor’s home residence. He stroked his over-protuberant chin, thinking, I suppose I could call Mr. Wilcox from the telephone at the boarding house across the way… , but a second’s contemplation deemed the action unnecessary. Instead came the resolve, My writing is cut out for me… , and what an energizing resolve it was!

  Ah, but then exactly what would he write?

  He’d already selected his nom de plume; it would be Winfield (his father’s first name) Greene (his former wife’s maiden name, which seemed splendidly appropriate for the author of pornography. The woman had been insatiable! She would impale herself on his groin in his sleep as though he were some nocturnal vending machine for her pleasure!) His tale’s plot, though, was something else. Forcing conscious thought upon a creative target, he’d long learned, always resulted in an abject uselessness that drained the artist’s confidence. He took to the streets, then, to stroll as he frequently did and hope that Mr. Freud’s subconscious might offer assistance. Some assistance, too, from Dante’s Ladies of the Heavenly Spring might then soon follow, or so he aspired. No sooner had he turned down Benefit than some inklings began to kindle. There could be no utility whatever of his “Great Old Ones”—to do so would rupture the tale’s pseudonymity!—but he could most appropriately re-apparel what his friend Little Belknap once called his “Cthulhuean Arena” with new garments of occultism. This ploy would not only camouflage the author’s identity—and, hence, leave his personal repute uninjured—but also allow him to flex unused aesthetic muscles. As he usually did, he would create a protagonist who mirrored aspects of himself but then plunge him headlong into a most unusual concupiscent peril.

  He chuckled—an annoying, high-pitched chuckle.

  What fun the endeavor suddenly seemed!

  Ah, but his success would demand more than an energized endeavor. Blast! I need an idea!

  The generous bank cheque would take over a week to be honoured, but he did have a dollar or so on his person, and given that this was, of sorts, a celebration, he would so celebrate by rewarding his good fortune with a can of Heinz beans—quite satisfiably cold, he could tell you—and a can of Postum pre-ground coffee. (The other brands tasted like a cacodaemon’s bile! Ugh!) So into the little Weybosset’s shop he ventured, and made his purchases with pennies to spare from the shrewd-faced proprietor (quite a disestablishmentarian) who was blaming the government for the sudden rise of gasoline to seven cents per gallon and gold to nineteen dollars per ounce.

  He smiled in silence with a nod and took his parcels just as a dour but well-attired man on the corpulent side stepped up and passed the rankled proprietor what looked like a pharmaceutical prescription, for there was a small apothecarium.

  The proprietor scowled, disappeared into the back, then returned momentarily with what was undeniably a package of barrier prophylactics. He could even read the name-brand: GOODYEAR & HANCOCK - VULCANIZED CONTRACEPTIVE SHEATHS. The buyer seemed embarrassed to make this purchase and appeared doubly unnerved by the writer’s presence as witness.

  Though there was endless government talk of repealing the fifty-year-old Comstock Act (which banned the sale of these nefarious devices), he was heedlessly opposed to such a repeal. Violations were deemed a federal offense and carried a punishment—quite rightly, in his estimation—of five years imprisonment and hard labor. After losing so many young men in the Great War, and then a half-million more souls—oddly, mostly men—in the ghoulish Spanish Flu Epidemic, what was more ghastly than encouraging lustful hedonists to perpetrate their carnal traffic without any responsibility whatever? Certainly, America’s strength came through the hard-work and innovation of its people, and circumventing necessary new births in the interest of bed-play seemed a howling affront to not only logic but a central morality. By law, these things, sometimes called “condoms” or, in the vernacular “skins,” were only to be used by couples properly wedded for either the prevention of a pre-existing disease or to allow normal sexual congress between the husband and a wife likely to suffer medical complications in the event of pregnancy.

  The embarrassed customer, after paying for his package, hurried his bulk toward the exit, but not before the vociferous proprietor called out, “Don’t you be using those on any of them harlots out there, man! It’s against the law! And them dirty women are full up with poxes that dissolve those things!”

  The buyer couldn’t have left in any more haste.

  Next, the proprietor turned his scowl to the stooped writer. “You agree with me, don’t’cha, mister?”

  “Indubitably,” he replied and left.

  This, he was saddened to prehend, is what the “cracker barrels” of the good old days had become—unpleasant and often hostile rants. Confrontations were not his forte. But the proprietor could not be accused of exaggeration on one count: the gradually rising number of “harlots” plying their trade on these once-fine avenues. Back on the street, as the sinking sun commenced to flame across the roof-pocked horizon, he beheld the rancorous man’s meaning. Visible at several corners loitered women of the illest repute, drab-faced and gaudily dressed waifs with hungry eyes. These pestilent and immoral urchins had grown in number to a dejecting degree, it seemed. Victims of President Hoover’s economic failures or simply female loafers looking for easy earnings, he struggled not to judge. One thin bonneted creature with a vulpine grin beckoned him with her finger to cross the road. He did not oblige, of course; then another, brazenly brassiereless and sashaying in the uncomplimentary look of a Flapper, slowed her gait as she passed, and asked if he had a dollar for some of her company.

  He assured her he did not.

  Where are the constables when you need them!

  As he stood in wait at the corner for several motors to putter by, he heard a trolley’s bell clanging several blocks over, and then…

  Then…

  The moment strangely seized him. He stood immobile; a fugue seemed to drone in his head, much akin to the mad flute-pipings of his messenger-demigod Nyarlathotep; and all his powers of conjecture and mental function stalled in what could only be called utter aposiopesis…

  Barrier prophylactics, the words thudded in his head, and then—

  The toll of a distant trolley bell. Then—

  Prostitutes…

  These three images (two visual, one aural) shivered in his mind and gave root to an unmediated joyousness that caused him to actually shiver in place.

  Why? you may ask.

  They provided the creative lightning bolt so yearned for and so rare in a writer’s life. These individual images lay in his hands the catalyst he’d been so desperately struggling for.

  And it was in that irreducible division of a second that Howard Lovecraft had his story for Mr. Frederick Wilcox and the clandestine periodical known as Erotesque.

  Within minutes he was back in his chamber, coffee on and pen in hand, writing his new tale…

  TROLLEY NO. 1852

  by

  Winfield Greene

  1.

  My name is Morgan Phillips, and I am recounting this experience in hopes that by doing so I might unburden my mind—and whatever beneficent memories I have left—of some of the venomous and imponderable images which stalk me ever still…

  … for however long the earth shall last.

  My relocation to New York (that denizen-abyss of stridence and foul smells) had been by necessity and not—I re-emphasize, not—due to the divestment of my position at Brown, as a professor o
f mythology and ancient histories, two years ago. The latter had been the work of this bungling and greed-induced calamity they are now calling the “Great Depression,” whose attendant turmoil left no room for teachers of subjectivities. Only academicians skilled in mathematics, industry, and the sciences could be retained in such troubled times of bread lines and twenty-five-percent jobless rates. For the rest of us (history, literature, the arts) the coffers of higher learning were closed.

  Instead, I ventured hither, to this mephitic necropolis of concrete, dirt, and clamour, in the steadfast hope of ascertaining the whereabouts of my sister and only sibling, Selina, who’d relocated here some five years ago for a $14-per-week accounting position with the well-known Monroe Clothiers chain. She would be twenty (eight now—seven years my junior) and with her youth had come the zeal of wanderlust. “I want new horizons, Morgan,” she’d implored five years afore with her over-bright eyes and buoyant enthusiasm. “New places to see and new people to meet, and don’t worry, I’ll write you every week!” So she had, for three years, until her unforeboding and quite energetic missives in the post had dropped off all at once in an eerie silence. Either Fate or the god Selina believed in but I did not had seen fit to parallel my sister’s disappearance, nearly to the day, with my own woeful dismissal from Brown. I took the ten-six, with no hesitancy whatever, to Penn Station, and have been here ever since.

  Or at least, in a sense…

  It was in stifled shock that I first beheld this labyrinthine canyon of crime and leering, stubbled faces; shock that palsied my gait and numbed my mind—a seething urban mass of filthily attired bodies of clearly all ancestries save for the Anglican; bodies that moved shiftily through garbage-heaped streets pressed on either side by grimy concrete towers so spiring as to obfuscate the light of day—indeed a noisome Babel of movement, ill-will, and malodour; of sweat-shined foreheads and menacing scowls. Squalid ghettoblocks stretched shabbily betwixt skyscrapers too dizzying to look upward at; and the smell—the unsurceasing and absolutely maleficent smell—which imbued itself in my clothes and, I often suspected, my very pores. This—city—was not for my sensitive kind, but circumstances offered me little choice. I scrupled at once to take my place in the human crush so erroneously named for James II, the Duke of York, lest I be swallowed whole by its incogitable machinations.