Edward Lee - Trolley No. 1852

“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…