Telegram Sam
Aurelia De Quincey feels exposed, their eyes piercing through her clothes. Going further, faster, through flesh like a razor nosed bullet train.
Down to her skeleton. Down to the marrow.
Denuded has been Aurelia’s continued experience of life since childhood. Her jumbled toys still stir in the attic of her mind. They are soft and hard edged and plastic and plushy.
Her soul is shadow-scorched, and bad energy comes off of her in grave-waves.
She sits alone at a cafe, hunched over her tablet, doodling.
He sits at a nearby table.
Aurelia has identified him. His cop heart and soul. She feels his dagger optics lance her. Prurient fingers probing her like they were forensics experts seeking brain-embedded bullets.
She looks up, straight at him, daring him to respond. His eyes are hidden behind shades. Cop stache and attitude.
***
They began to operate in her apartment complex at the beginning of the longest summer she can remember.
They started by inserting their grubby fingers into her mailbox. She could see the scratches on the metal where they’d left their signs. The Aleph, the all-sigil, the Masonic signs, the Illuminati dog whistles.
She knew of their operational tactics having read Borges and Poe in childhood dreaming in her aunt’s house over dark magic tea and conversations that floated with spirits like red tea lights.
She was a legacy stalkee. Generations of the De Quinceys had passed through the gauntlet of the stalkers.
One time she was trying to walk across the street and a black Pontiac came out of nowhere and nearly crushed her.
They sent their agents into her dreaming world, clutching and clawing at her with long metal-taloned fingers.
It was impossible to free herself from them.
She heard scraping sounds from the apartment above hers as they moved the machine with the beams across the floor. Knowing how much it hurt her, they turned the weapon up to 11. It burnt her brain up so bad. She wept and gnashed her teeth and bit her lip and drooled and bellowed into her pillow.
***
She was a mark from the start.
She saw them park alongside her when she went to the grocery store. They brazenly made eye contact as their hands sauntered across the device, the Raven’s claw.
She saw their heads reflected in shop windows.
She heard their voices in her head when she paused by the apartment of the one friend she had, the cripple who was never home. Where did he spend his days?
She saw the Morgellan’s threads spill out of her palms like alien stigmata.
She drew a map from memory of the better timeline where she reigned like a mantis queen.
Aurelia knew that in the end nobody could hurt her, because she had much like Lurian Kabbalah resolved herself out of spacetime. Still the Nova Mob pursued her.
She wasn’t out of the woods just yet.
She sensed them hissing in the wee hours, like some kind of guerilla radio. Surface to air serpents filled her head with dread.
She ordered in but the pizza restaurant on the corner had her clocked. Their efforts would one day result in a body washing up on shore. Not hers, perhaps, but adjacent.
She was wrecked and ruined but still in good spirits when the officers showed up asking about her former roomie.
Of course she lied. The roommate still received mail. Aurelia told them that Eileen Glass had disappeared to Estonia to form a riot grrrl outfit. Which was partially true.
***
Eerily once in awhile her head split open and black bugs poured out.
Aurelia collected the bugs in a jar. They spoke a gossiping language that was entirely pictorial.
She wrote about the bugs in an online journal. Hers was a letter to the world that never wrote to her.
She was possessed by something or someone. She fell in love with a ghost. Perhaps the ghost issued from her future corpse.
She saw abjection rain down from the sky. She saw copper snakes curling on the ceiling. When her lovers took her, male and female, she evacuated her flesh body and joined the snakes.
She knew bi erasure was a thing and probably occurred to St. Bowie.
Her random architectures faded away in the light from a thousand suns.
She made soup out of bone broth. She imagined the skulls of the Buddhas bobbing in her soup like divinatory dreams.
She drew comic art of a woman whose twin sister lay in perpetuity in a hospital bed, big with hysterical pregnancy.
She made a comic book called Pen and Incubus.
She published panels from the book on Facebook, and slowly began to gain a readership.
She began to feel like her life wasn’t so damned after all, and she might be able to redeem herself in the fullness of time.
Aurelia De Quincey was no longer sad.
She took up yoga and pilates. She spent hours of languor wrapped up in her lovers’ bodies listening to the Cure’s Pornography album.
Acid melted her and dripped her face and she delighted in that.
When they made love she merged with all the creatures.
It was a celebration. A mart of joy.
One day she heard a noise from the kitchen. Nude, she shuddered awake. Her lovers were out cold, still dead from the party the night before.
She walked into the kitchen and saw the Man with the Hat.
And recognized him: Telegram Sam, an agent of the dream world. A shadow man.
He beckoned her.
Her stomach clenched. Her nerves shrieked. She wanted to scream and run away, but he had her in his power.
The solar flares began to lick the inside of her skull.
He fired off a series of telepathic instructions she could not refuse.
Then he was inside her and she was inside him, like interlocking Russian dolls.
The suffocating heat closed in around her. Her feet froze to the floor.
He locked her in his fell embrace, whispering tender nothings about frost and genocide.
He knew her, evidently.
Was the ghost, her ghost from the future. The one they spoke of in the black books.
Telegram Sam.
She would never escape his grin. It enveloped her. She felt his bloody temper rise as his miles of razor sharp teeth descended.
Horror Sleaze Trash 