I was speaking with my brother earlier and he relayed to me quite an alarming tale. It's a sordid story of grotesque horror and depraved indulgence, of sex and deceit, crazed bestial heathenry ending in ruined carpets and stained wigs. He'd been visiting a mutual friend up in the Adirondacks, a mountain range that gives birth to both the Hudson and Mohawk rivers. A heavy storm had hit the area while he was in transit, snow rained down on the winding mountainous roads, freezing winds chilled the air and turned the snow accumulations to black ice, making the mountain pass more perilous than ever. It was nighttime and my brother had secured the service of a chauffeur for a nominal fee. Given the night was so inhospitable and uninviting there weren't any other souls on the road, so the drivers were idle, not suspecting a fare.
Sitting in the backseat of the darkened automobile he noted the driver's name, Aslam. Aslam's eyes, reflected in the rearview mirror, were sticky and glazed, they stuck to the windshield like dead flies. The wipers moved like waving hands, trying to elicit a response from his waxen eyes, but they remained fixed on some invisible point in the distance. Every so often, to give off a sign of life, Aslam would hack up some bubbling mucus from his throat and spit gobs of it into a purple handkerchief on the passenger seat. The car smelled faintly of something familiar and musty. The windows were beginning to fog up and my brother had difficulty seeing anything to the left or right of the car. It created the uneasy feeling that they were floating on nothing. He felt like Wile E. Coyote after pacing off a cliff, just before looking down.
Aslam turned on the radio and began turning the small dial to change stations. This seemed to happen for what felt like minutes - all of them just static - until through the desolate hissing came the thin and tinny sound of a human voice. It was some strange late-night radioshow. The man speaking talked as though through a mouthful of bread; it might not have even been English. It was hard to hear over the strained engine and the mechanical sliding of the windshield wipers.
"Your friend, he live alone?" Aslam asked.
"What?" My brother asked, trying to understand the intent of the question.
"Up in the mountain, in the woods, your friend, he have no wife?" asked Aslam.
"Leo? No, he lives alone; he has a few goats," my brother explained.
Aslam didn't reply. He reached over to the handkerchief and coughed another glob of phlegm into it. He slowly decelerated, rolled down the window and threw the purple rag out into the snow. A violent fit of coughing took him and his right fist pressed hard against his lips. Under his weight, the car bounced and rocked as Aslam continued to cough and he placed his thumb and index finger into his mouth as if to pull out a hair. He resumed speed as he did this, his fingers still in his mouth, eyes still affixed to the glass. A viscid film coated his fingers and dripped down to his wrist. My brother watched in disgust from the backseat as Aslam hacked and whooped. Only two more minutes and I'll be there, he thought to himself. Aslam pulled into Leo's driveway, still coughing madly, and my brother hurriedly rummaged through his pockets in search of the $15 fare. His hand felt like a crane sifting through detritus and forgotten articles buried in the junkyard his pocket had become. Finally he found the $20 bill, thank you Jackson, and exiting the vehicle he handed it to Aslam, who, by this time, had his fist burrowed deep into his mouth - his jaw nearly unhinged, like a snake's - as he removed another purple handkerchief from his mouth.
"Keep the change," my brother said and quickly exited the cab.
He walked the 30ft to Leo's door and hammered against it using the gold elephant-tusk door knocker. It was frozen and hard in his hand. No answer. He knocked again, thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk. Still, no answer. Aslam's car wheezed away down the mountain and my brother stood alone outside our friend's mansion. The snow fell around him like icy, stillborn gnats. His hand was back in his pocket grasping for his cellphone. The phone was dead, great. My brother began yelling Leo's name as he knocked, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, THUNK! With the last knock the door slowly swung open, revealing an ornate vestibule housing the bust of Phallas. My brother again called out Leo's name as he entered the dwelling, but still, nothing. He walked through the vestibule and placed his bag down on the table at the terminating end. From an adjacent room he heard the unmistakable voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger screaming "I'm a cop you idiot!" My brother sighed; Kindergarten Cop, again?
Just then, Arnold Schwarzenegger darted past, wearing only a pink Santa hat - his buttocks and scrotal region dripping with milk chocolate, his erect penis jammed inside a hollowed out chocolate rabbit - brandishing a translucent 99¢-store water pistol replica of the Dirty Harry magnum he'd stolen from Clint Eastwood's brother's daughter's boyfriend's adopted son's nephew's best friend's toy box, while being chased by the reanimated corpse of Vincent Price. Price, wearing Michael J Fox's shoes from Back to the Future 2 and Michael Jackson's red leather jacket, while rapping his lost verse from Thriller and throwing stale pumpernickel bagels with a zealot's fervor, pursued Schwarzenegger with a supernatural fury burning in his green eyes. Schwarzenegger, yelling Whoopi Goldberg's name, leapt over a hoover upright vacuum onto a steel baker's rack and rode it careening into the kitchen. He appeared to be clutching a dead animal with brown fur in his free hand as he shot a deluge of water over his shoulder into the face of Vincent Price's corpse. A bowling ball ricocheted off the wall and came whizzing through the air, crashing into Leo's 120inch 4K LED television. Towing a cannon atop a 4-wheeled wooden dolly from the janitor's closet of Shaquille O'Neal's elementary school, Johnny Depp dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow followed them into the kitchen as Whoopie Goldberg came crawling after. An enormous patch of her hair had been ripped from her head by a bald William Shatner, possessed by the ghost of the bus driver from Patrick Swayze's 4th-grade class trip to the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Shatner, walking toward the kitchen, trailing Goldberg (the wrestler), yelped and barked at Schwarzenegger, demanding he return his herpes - or was it hairpiece - immediately. Goldberg held up a second generation iPad with which he took photos and played Shatner's cover of Elton John's Rocketman at full volume. My brother, following a distant cry for help, ran away from the commotion toward Leo's voice. He found himself at Leo's bedroom, the door ajar, Sean Connery splayed out on an antique Mongolian carpet made from the pubic hair of Ghengis Khan. Connery lie in his arms, his birthday suit badly bruised and glistening, a green glittery wig sat askew on his head. Dark chocolate, semen and diarrhea leaked from his prolapsed anus like a cracked Cadbury egg. He was dead, or dying. Leo told my brother to call for help, that Schwarzenegger had gone berserk and bludgeoned Connery with a king-sized bar of swiss chocolate honey and almond nougat Toblerone, and then sodomized Connery with a frozen oversized chocolate-covered banana while making bad Mr. Freeze puns from Batman and Robin, but not before unleashing Siegfried and Roy's albino Lion on all of the other guests. Luckily Price had been able to command the beast with black magic, directing it out into the mountains to call for help, just like Lassie in the 3rd episode of the first season of the 1997 eponymously named television series, Lassie, titled Swamp Thing. He assured my brother the ambulance was on the way.
"But what...what happened to...why are...and how did..." my brother stammered.
"Shhh, just put this on."
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