The Claymen Hallucination

I remember meeting the Claymen family for the first time while writing a short story. They were an ordinary family of four or five, if you included Grandfather James Claymen, who was dying of several known diseases, a few unknown, and, of course, the aptly named Claymen Pineal Degenerative Syndrome (or in laymen’s terms, a wart on the brain). The head of the family was M. Foster Claymen, an Oliver Reedish fellow of mid thirties appearance with a thick American accent, Southern Californian. Mrs. Cymbeline Winter-Claymen was like a fortyish Winona Ryder type except around the eyes and neck where she was more like fiftyish. Though their wealth permitted such luxuries of cosmetic alterations, the Claymens frowned upon the mutilation of aging. The three children included the eldest, James, a masturbation addict who loved Gothic novels and yellow highlighters, the middling, Laurine, a twelve year girl mentally enslaved by a 100 year old spinster who lived to read books about death and collected Victorian dolls, and little Baby M., named for its father who didn’t know what the asexual M. stood for.

Every evening the family gathered for dinner and philosophical conversation. Tonight’s meal consisted of crab bisque, a small kale salad with lemon and oregano dressing, thinly sliced boneless pork chops cooked rare, Claymen Zinfandel 1984, the family brand, and cherry-pie with decaffeinated coffee on the side. The toothless baby had pretzel pudding and a nipple bottle of near-beer. There was muffled chewing at the table that lasted several minutes. Mr. Claymen insisted on thoroughly chewing and swallowing every morsel of food in one’s mouth before beginning the topic for discussion. The lengthy chewing was indicative of a poor choice of topics. No one dared risk opening the conversation without proper empirical data, literary allusions, and an adequate amount of irony and litotes for droll observations and asides.

I rudely interrupted the munchy silence. “Vlad the Impaler,” I remarked, “sucked prick.”

“That’s almost a pun,” observed Mrs. Claymen through her wrinkle of a mouth. “Puns, as you know, are the lowest form of humor, right beneath Hee-Haw and just above Nyuk-nyuk.”

Mr. Claymen continued chewing, exaggerating his side to side jaw movements as if rushing to get into the discussion. The children slowed their jaw movements, expressing the opposite of their father. Baby sucked at the squealing nipple obliviously.

“Bram Stoker, or is it Stroker…?”

“One more pun and I’ll have the servant escort you from the table,” announced Mrs. Claymen.

I continued…”who wrote ‘Dracula’ with Vlad in mind. Note that you must impale a vampire with a stake through the heart in order to kill it.”

“A vampire is already dead,” Mr. Claymen pointed out condescendingly, pieces of meat flying from his mouth. “You don’t kill a vampire. You destroy a vampire.” He resumed chewing the mouthful of pink pork. A trickle of pig juice trailed down his chin. He leaned his head back till the red droplet rolled back into his mouth.

“I think this subject is dead,” I sighed.

“I warned you, sir,” Mrs. Claymen spat with fiery red eyes. "Puns are not allowed at the table." She rose slowly but deliberately, stepping up onto her chair, then atop the table. She kicked aside the bowls, plates, and glasses. The older children snatched their wine from the tabletop and went to their rooms. Baby dropped its bottle and drooped into a nap, its mouth drooling from both corners. Mr. Claymen lifted his plate of pork chops and left the room.

I was hypnotized by Mrs. Claymen’s long shapely legs and muscular calves revealed by the slit up the front of her dress rising up to the cleft of her pubic patch covered only by the sheerest of pink panties. She stood above me, her nine-inch spiked heel imbedded in my generous slice of cherry pie. My gaze traced her body from her curvaceous ankles, swelling hips, slender waist, voluptuous bust, to her mouthful of pork dripping red fangs.

“Wait a minute. Whose hallucination am I in?” I wondered aloud. Her ten-inch fingers wrapped around my neck, and I was lifted till we were face to face. She kissed me full on the mouth, her tongue slipping against mine between the great gaps in her sharp teeth. She wrapped one arm around my waist to hold me in place and released her snaky fingers from my bruised neck. In one swift motion her fangs sunk into my throat. I could hear and feel my Adam’s Apple pop. I gurgled a few syllables to draw attention from my erection. My clothes were soaked in blood, shit, drool, snot, urine, and now, most shamefully, semen. With what little strength I could muster I shoved her slightly back. Her grip on my waist remained firm. “Whose hallucination am I in?” I demanded to know.

Someone gave the answer just as I passed out.

***

I awoke comfortably seated in a musty old armchair. It was a Civil War chair, courtesy of the Salvation Army. I was in the living room. The children were lying on their stomachs, watching the uncut version of “King Kong” on PBS. Kong was stomping on natives with his hand-like foot, smashing them to pulp. The time of night was indeterminable since the room had no windows and wall to wall drapes. The Baby M. slept beside the warmth of the TV. Kong roared and Baby M. awoke, its two mouths crying for near-beer. Its cries turned to snarls when it didn’t get what it wanted. It stood upright like a human adult and grinned wide till all its flat pointed teeth were displayed. Its fat little hands grabbed James by the hair, lifted his tubby body, and plunged its two sets of fangs into the cherub’s face. The four rows of razor-like teeth hummed like well-oiled chainsaws. Laurine raised the volume on the TV when James started screaming. Blood gushed by the gallons like in a bad B movie.

I dialed 911 on my pink cell phone.

The doorbell rang and the police let themselves in. “What’s the problem, sir?”

I pointed to Baby M. and James. The lean officer yawned and then removed his revolver, firing a silver bullet into the baby’s brain. Then the heavy-set officer checked to make sure both baby and brother were dead, patted Laurine on the behind, and wrote me a bill. The two law enforcers then left.

Laurine turned to me and pointed out, “This isn’t my hallucination. Why would I pat my own buttocks?”

Damn it. I forgot where I was. I woke up inside a dream where someone was hallucinating this Claymen family. But why was I here? The only way to know was to find out whose hallucination manifested inside my dream. Then maybe I could reproach the person to leave my dream and wake up and go back to sleep. Was Papa Claymen to blame? Was I in his hallucination? Perhaps it was James. But he was dead. No, not in a hallucination inside a dream. That didn't make sense. Everyone was still suspect.

I needed to figure it out before this fever dream shifted. Too late. I was inside the TV. The black and white cast were playing their roles purposefully, running about, escaping the danger of the giant ape. Suddenly, Kong’s smelly foot was above my head; it pressed my head into my shoulders, my shoulders into my midsection, my midsection into my hips, my hips into my knees, and my knees into the ground till I was just a mere sound lost in the crackling static of the TV static.

Then as sound, I took shape just as someone turned off the TV.

***

Grandfather Claymen rested on his deathbed surrounded by beautiful nude-magazine model nurses. I sat in a fake Napoleon chair, bothered by all the peas under the stuffing. I shifted uncomfortably until the bumps and rolls of the seat fit the contours of my cellulite buttocks. The women wrapped in tight white hospital outfits fluffed the old man’s pillow, straw fed him dinner, tidied his sheets, and injected him with Morphine laced with Viagra. To no avail, for he remained in pain and penile disinterest. He brushed aside the nurses and told me blankly, “I brought you here. You’ve been nosing around, haven’t you? These are my hallucinations. How do you like that? And just how did he get inside them anyway? Dreamers don't usually trespass across to others dreams, let alone others hallucination. Mushrooms, you see. Peyote Synth. New type of plant they created in the lab. My son got his hands on some. Thought they'd take me out, you know, kill me. But it didn't. Crossed over to the place between dream and hallucination. So, I'm happy. You see my nurses, don't you? Too bad the damn Synth doesn't make me young. Still can't get it up.

" But back to you, boy. Are you asleep somewhere on this wavelength? You know none of this is real except for you. But you got to wake up. I can give you a rude awakening if need be. You gots to be carefully not to plunge to your death in a falling dream. Or maybe you're not in a dream. Are you lying dying somewhere with a bullet or knife in your gut, the victim of some practiced ruffian? Has a taste of death put you in tune with my ripe soul ready for the Devil to pluck? How did you get here? This is not your world or your business. You’ve violated my hallucinations and now you trespass my reality. I will my family into being. How is it you're interacting with them?”

The old man scratched his head, confused. The nurses now had Medusa heads, with dozens of snakes hissing at me. "Seems my dream girls don't like you," he said. "How can you be doing this?"

“I’m a writer,” I confessed. “I’m writing this.”

“You think you’re writing me, you little piece of shit?” Grandpa grinned menacingly. “I blinded Milton for saying the same.”

“I never read ‘Paradise Lost,’ I’m sorry,” I admitted. “My field is Romantic literature.”

"Vampires and zombies, I believe,” he boasted, obscenely staring at the rear ends of the nurses.

“That’s right,” I told him. "And mountains and valleys. The stuff of fear and awe."

At that moment the nurses all faced me at once. Although their beauty remained, their life was gone. Their snakes were gone. Their nurse hats returned. Their flesh was a mix of maggots and skin. Skeletons with the make up of a geisha. The old man was playing his ace in the hole.

Zombie nurses. "You don't belong here," he said with a raspy anger. Then the undead girls in white rushed me.

I flew from my seat and tossed the chair at them. It struck one in the face, caving in her once beautiful features, releasing swirling waves of earthworms from where her mouth once pouted. The worms bore through the uniform and reentered the rotting flesh. The blow of the chair neither deterred her nor slowed her down. She and the others were on me in a split second. I was pinned to the floor by our finest hospital staffers.

“Now I’m writing you,” Grandfather Claymen laughed.

The bedroom door flew open. M. Foster Claymen entered, his fists pressed on either side of his hips. “Laurine tells me you’ve been touching her inappropriately during our guest’s visit to your hallucination. Is this true?”

An awkward silence followed. The nurses stopped and fidgeted nervously. They were no longer zombies and had returned to the lovely sexy outfits the dirty old man had imagined for them.

The embarrassed nurses released me and excused themselves from the room clumsily. I arose, brushing the wriggling little maggots from my coat. Grandfather James Claymen darted his eyes to and fro trying to think up an excuse or a carefully woven lie. “Shit,” was all he could say.

M. Foster walked up to the bedside and told his father, “This is for your own good.” He yanked the fluffed pillow from under the patriarch’s head and shoved it across his gray face. There was a brief struggle, but it didn’t last long. Within minutes the elder Claymen stopped fighting and waited for the Devil to pluck his soul from the dead branch of his life. After tossing the pillow aside, revealing Grandpa Claymen’s death grimace, the younger Claymen straightened his vest and tie.

“There,” M. Foster said, swiping his hands free of the invisible dust that wasn’t there. “Now what should we do about you? My wife hates your puns. I don’t like the way you look at my wife’s legs. And the children tell me you entered their movie and spoiled one of their favorite scenes. And to top it off, the baby won’t stop crying now that it’s dead. You must return back to your world through your manuscript. We must be quick for your wife is reading it now.”

We exited the room. M. Foster instructed to go to the end of the hall and don't stop. I stepped lively down the shrinking hallway, pretending that I wasn't afraid of being crushed alive. I was a clastrophobic since birth, my mother used to tell me. Faster, I heard M. Foster cry. The walls are closing in. Literally. I start to feel like ink. The hallway is the quill my liquid form inhabits. Its tip scratches me across a white floor make of paper. I am written like so many symbols. I concentrate until I begin to regain form; blood and flesh reattach to my bone dry skeleton.

Hurry, man, the voice behind me shouts. I am beginning to solidify. The Claymen hallucination is fading and my liquid form is leaving the story. I dry across the white walls. But the walls are still closing in on me, sealing me in symbolic characters. In a far distance I hear M. Foster whisper, "Too late". The final white page closes on me. My entire human essence, thoughts, ideas, dream, liquefied and scribbled away squirt inward as I am flattened like a butterfly in the pages of someone’s manuscript. My skin, tissue, muscle, bone, heart, liver, intestines, spleen, testicles, spine, brain, mind, and all the other atoms and molecules that make me what I am are crushed into text. I am gone. Only the memory of the dream remains.

***

“Good story,” said the Missus as she replaced the manuscript atop the typewriter. "You really poured yourself into this one. I'll toss it into the box with the others after dinner. Finish your dram and come down to eat before the rats have at our meals."