Letters From Skitzo
by MF Korn

It all started with one of those free subscriber ads in the back of FANGORIA magazine:

"C.F. Howell, amateur novelist, wishes epistolary discourse, however antediluvian; author of derivative fanzine, BLUE AND COLD CORPSE; 1011 Tchoupitoulas, New Orleans, LA 70001"

 Then came a reply from Santa Rojo, California...

(scribbled hastily on a slip of yellow paper)

Do you mind if we make a song from your name. Its soooo cooooool. Do you listen to THRASHMETAL? In LA its cool. We want to play there!

W. B. Soon Lance Ozone SKITZO

 So C.F. Howell, amateur novelist wrote back:

 "My Dear Skitzo, Late of the Phantom Empire of Zoth:

I would be glad to extend you the use of the title of my dreaded tome, CORPSE. I will take no denial, I found your lettre virulently warm and genuine. The thought of my letterbox transom not being empty for the slightest nonce leaves me with rendering joy like lucid dulcet singling beltones throughout the aether. I have written a novel, Gershwin's Ghost , a most lengthy manuscript, which I have been unable to sell to the pitched publishers. It is most interesting that something of mine could be woven into the fabric of a song, but I am unfamiliar with that codicil term THRASHMETAL. Is that not the dies irae of a lost restless generation of motley youths with crack pipes, shivs, tire irons and GI Joe dolls?

I remain your oblig'd servant,

C.F. Howell"

A letter came from Santa Rojo, CA:

(with badly misspelled wordage...)

So C.F. Howell wrote back an amusing tome:

"My Dear Skitzo, late of the quivering moons of Mercury,

Did they teach you boys spelling in California? Just Kidding!!!

Things are very good here in the crescent city, they are scurrying around through the rubble of the razed cemeteries, pillaging and making enlarged beastly pentagrams. I would like to hear more about your band. My tastes aren't exactly thrashmetal, more Sibelius and Rachmaninov. Enclosed is a tape of "Isle of the Dead", inspired by Arnold Bocklin's famous painting. You gutless wardheelers over there in sunny port-o-call bay area with your clubs and slam dancing and raping of the land, are sincerely demented no doubt. But I am engaged in the throes of this correspondence because here it is boring also. I received your drawings. They were all bosh, like most modern art, quite obscene. but then I am drawn like a moth to a flame to the works of Larry Rivers, David Smith, Jackson Pollack. Out there, you probably read various bibliographical journals like Archie Bible Comix, Penthouse deadmates and other necrophilic sources. The Kaballa said once Lance writes, that Elizer of Worms is cautious, a man being can be created from the diabolism of Aliester Crowley, no other source admits this, except for Lovecraft's references to the NECRONOMICON, and the mad arab of the attributes and spatial gates...Well I am rambling but I do want to hear from those other urchins of untidy origin, your band buddies, you caustic guitar rendering fools of modern claptrap! Just joking!

Now what's this about wasting your bass player? Come again??? Now for a shot of bourbon.

I remain your oblig'd servant,
C.F. Howell"

Then C. F. Howell got a letter from another member of the band:

C.F. Howell was stunned so he did not call the number though a few nights he stayed up after trying to write more short shorts, "Rags to Riches to Jupiter", "May I present the Wizard of Gore, Mr. President", "I Married a Star Eunuch", "Oozing Sebaceous Apertures from Venus", "The Dead Member of the Club" and drank much cut rate bourbon and thought about this subject of implied murder, and sat in his hovel. He knew he was thousands of miles away from Santa Rojo and was safe from these monsters. He stayed inside that rent house on Tchoupitoulas street. He picked up his novel once in a while and weighed it mentally and glanced through it thinking about a rewrite and was that assistant editor at TOR books was just being nice when she said he could send it back if rewritten? He couldn't write that second novel , but his epistolary discourse a la Lovecraft was amazingly aplenty. But should he write to these cretins anymore?

"Dear Skitzo, of Imperial Rome, 7th Death Pyre:

Thank you boys for being so prompt with your wicked preponderance of the dread monster murder which the muck meet its feet on, jealous and green with envy! I received a tape of your group. The words "hellishly pyrrhic" are in the fore as far as your accusation of murdering one Kelly Gillis. My tolerance for such raucous soporific schlock is ebbing. Your lyrics (lirics) are unusually sadistic, have you a meat cleaver at the ready for your parade of ghoulish fans and dreadlocked zombie groupies? Exactly how did you get rid of your bass player?

I have had much trouble meeting a female rendition of Byronic beauty to whom I can quote Rimbaud. A vision of splendor is what your aged grandsire requires. Do you know of what I speak? Quivering buttocks would be the term used to describe the coursing of my synaptical processes within the loblolly paddock of this mawkish existence. I have written two new short stories and am enclosing a fanzine, THE BLUE AND COLD CORPSE, as you requested. How it will quench that thirst for stench. California is truly a Gore Vidal dreamlike iridescent montage of mondo youths on the sly, juvenile delinquents and girls a plenty. Crimes rampant o'er hill and valley, the dreaded cemetery and boneorchard smell quaking in the morass of foggy banks, dead and dismembered ranks of your devoted fans and ex musicians of skitzo. Tell me, have you ever heard "Le Sacre Du Printemps"? I thinke not. Just kidding. I don't mean to be philistine or patronizing my dear Jasper. Rather SKitzo. If you guys ever tour over here don't come and visit me in the Big Easy! You supposedly waste inefficient musicians and all I know how to play is Ragtime. Mardi Gras is the time for carnal lusts and the seven deadly sins, but not any new ones, like MURDER!!!!

I myself have had to lock up my Aunt Sadie because of this!! I remain your most obedient servant, Quid Dulcius on the backside!

C.F. Howell

And another misspelled response from the hellishness of Santa Rojo, California:

So in the summer we are set to play San Francisco, Los Angeles, Arizona, Texas (San Antonio)! Oh this girl in TX I gave yo address to !! She is different yet so cool!! (Yes foxy she is) but she not air headed!! Anyway we are trying to come to New Orleans and Lafayette, Baton Rouge, Jackson, MISS! We play SF Oakland quite a bit! And High Schools! It's funny cause when we'd play high schools I'd vomit the school's colors to show we have spirit (happy face drawn!) I'm seriously involved in FX. I got in touch w Berman studios and several others they are very interested. I'm making a demo video for me regurgitating with control. What I mean by control is I can force the vomit out in one big heave or I can ooze is slowly and wave my toung around and the vomit spews all over.

(enclosed was a polaroid of a twentyish long haired youth holding a guitar with gobs of blue jellylike vomit spewing out of his mouth with a wicked expression, a countenance of sheer maniacal horror a la Manson).

A response from that Lovecraftian scholar-fake from Tchoupitoulas Street, C. F. Howell, who kept putting off that second novel for stupid little first drafty short shorts about aliens landing at science fiction conventions, and comics who do friars conventions in outer space, with the lovecraftian endings ARGGHHH, Chaos Ngarlathotep, and Yog Suthoth, the goat of a thousand young...Too much blase' correspondence from a person who thought he was Norman Mailer and Faulkner rolled up in one... Maybe it's because he felt superior to his correspondents...like SKITZO...

He thought he would give them a sample of his horror craft in this one:

My Dear Skitzo, Malik Sultan:

I received your letter. Now the previous letters, from you and Ozzy indicate ambivalence about whether you are putting me on. What is all this about killing your Bass player? Why would you do that? I know my last letter could probably be ascertained as the weirdest mondo-frinkin one of the bunch, we may be literally repelling each other, especially me to you guys stalking the closed McDonalds in Santa Rojo. I am really not so much interested in blue vomit coursing through your esophagus. Seriously, what is going on in that state of mind called Cal. It is superb that you are getting involved in F/X. I saw "Toxic Avenger", it was good cheap punk fodder. Now:

You see, I was walking through the crisp autumnal air, the cool air of tombs vaporizing the dew on the freshly manicured graveyard, a double matrix of dead bodies. It was after midnight, all soul's hour, and there was a large looming beast-cat in the road howling in a voice that seemed to me the essence of satanic witchcraft itself, which any mortal man would fear. The cat howled near the reeking sewage ditches aligning the road that split the graveyard into two architectural sections. When I came upon it I noticed a long-haired spindly creature hobbling through a back section of the graves, a mottled countenance that almost made me shriek out loud with horror, I could hear the eerie dissonant chords of the Magic Pipe of Erich Zann harmonizing in the very aether itself. Suddenly the ominous figure came forward in the blackness, it had a strange mechanism around it's bulbous suppurating death's head skull, and wore a cloak of night that swaddled the horrendous torso, as it came forward still more. My heart started beating, I had heard something to the effect that there was a nightstalker at large. An escapee from the Hammond State school, a man with no conscience, who had already mutilated twenty coeds after killing them, munching hungrily upon their flesh, as if he were in a nightmarish geek house of the damned. I shuddered with a cry of helplessness as the grotesque figure in the darkness came upon me, then ten yards away. I would probably now be throttled about the neck, until dead, a limp corpse who could breathe no more. In my head, I delineated nothing but fear in the foggy night. The misfit's voice tuned up and cackled: "Hi dude, I'm Lance Skitzo. I'm just listening to some tunes, have you ever heard the "Night of the Living Dead" soundtrack whilst walking through a boneorchard?"

You see, it was you, with a silly walkman bejeweling your skull. I breathed a sigh of relief and walked homeward, only to be hit in the lungs with a gardening tool by my vicious Aunt Sadie who was just released from the snakepit sanitarium. There, she had been biting the eyes off poor cats and chewing them like Rolaids,.... Enough of that weirdness, unless you want more,

I remain your oblig'd servant,

C.F. Howell

 Dear C.f. Howell:

bye your friends Lance and SKITZO!!!!!!

Dear Lance, Late of Skitzo, Wipeout Guitarist:

Okay... you are kidding right? I really can't tell. As for me, I am a sentient creature resembling Jello who dines on the mutilated torsos of children found at the mall, with four appendages of murky stench unparalleled since the days of charnel houses and glue factories and dog mulch. I have a slight birthmark running from my harelip to the amazing flat subordinal ridge near the vigamatic arches of my little eyeballs, and I lost my legs in an alligator attack whilst swimming for plankton in the cesspool in Amite. My mongoloidal face is offset by my webbed cheesy feet and instead of arms I have two little hands that stick right out of my armpits. You see I was a Thalidomide baby. I used to be a geek in a freak show tent revival, I used to tour the states selling adrenalin snake oil from ripped out spleens of small black boys. And yes, I used to eat glands myself. Have you ever been circumcised with a McCullough chainsaw? I am dwelling into the Kaballa and the dreaded NECRONOMICON that the mad arab gleaned from centuries of ancient lineage and beyond, back before Jesus was playing street ball and Julius Caesar was slamdance-jerking down at the vomitorium. Et Tu Brute? I've really got to go, write soon. Tell those babes to write your aged grandsire!

PS: I showed your letter to some friends of mine. Just for laughs. I know I am out of it, but you guys have the weirdest stories. They saw it and laughed. I really like you guys, I like your music tape you sent after I got the letter. Please say you are kidding about that mutilated corpse, KELLY GILLIS. And any other ineffective musicians. That is really a bad way to get a good band together, don't you think? HA HA.

I remain your obliged servant, C.F. Howell

Before he got a reply from SKITZO, he went to the college library and did some research on newspapers from the Texas area. He saw something that made him want to retch immediately... small articles...

"The mutilated remains of a teenager were found on Highway 36 near Brownsville, repeatedly stabbed. Authorities identify the victim, a caucasian, Kelly M. Gillis of Santa Rojo, CAL."

 What C.F. Howell found in his mailbox two weeks later made his heart lurch. It was a letter from Skitzo: Lance, Ozzy Dirk and Timmy.

He opened it up: There were photos, polaroids of some bloody entrails, arms, legs cleaved and hewed to the bone, separated. A highway, with Lance Ozone (he recognized him from the blue vomit photo) smiling, and two other long haired freaks, holding machetes and bloody knives. THE POSTMARK WAS FROM HOUSTON, TEXAS!!

All the letter said was this:

We told you not to tell anybody! We are touring now, heading east since last tuesday. We are coming threw texas, then Louisiana, playing clubs. We know where you live!!!! This is what I have to say for you, C.f . Howell:

These are our lirics for BLUE AND COLD CORPSE:

IA MAAKALLI!

(Preliminary invocation of the calling of the spirits of the dead who dwell in Cutha, of the Lost, the Book of Calling.)

He had his copy of the NECRONOMICON that he bought in B. Dalton , these kids' newest song was rife with the stuff.

The letter continued..

 That's what it said. He knew it had been a big mistake all along. Why had he bothered to keep writing? They were on their way, they were probably in Louisiana! Damn!

There would be a knock on the door soon. He would pack and leave, go over to his comic book buddy's apartment. Yeah!

These grisly bastard's grisly were supernatural, he thought.

He heard a knock on the door, followed by more. He freaked. There was banging and hammering with fists, and yells and screams of a stygian nature.

"Lance here, you COLD CORPSE C.F. HOWELL!"

He knew they had heard his stereo, Rachmaninoff's "Isle of the Dead" had been blasting away. Rotten luck...the door was giving way.

SKITZO had arrived, as timely as the letters had.

THE END

©  MF Korn

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October 1999