“Yes, you did,” agrees the Christ.
“You are innocent and I helped them do this to you,” I tell her. I begin to cry. “I am ashamed of what I’ve done.” I am weeping now, the bloody saline spilling, trying to hide my shameful nakedness. “You gave me so many lives,” I cry, “So many chances!”
Herod stands before us his pungent lit opium pipe curls tiny seductive fingers toward the inky black ceiling. He smiles at Immanuel and I his penis stained deep with the same shade of blood that is leaking out of her bottom. It drips like holy paint down the rough wood of her cross. I dangle from its twin.
“I’ve sinned Lord, and have the blood of countless innocents staining my hands,” I confess to Immanuel. “More than I can ever atone for. I deserve punishment,” I say, “I deserve Damnation.”
Herod orders his albino circus-geek Ovid to get his machete. They are right. It is time to end this madness. The albino goes around the corner to pry it from the wall.
“I know I deserve no mercy from you,” I cry out, trying to move closer to her. The distance between us remains. A few scant feet that’s a gulf, it seems to me. I wish I can make the Savior understand how horrified I am at myself. How disgusted it makes me feel. Mostly, I wish I can touch her one last time, to hold her and beg her for forgiveness.
Ovid is tugging on it. His decades’ worth of homemade tattoos wiggle and strain as he struggles with the giant blade. He makes a satisfied grunt when he pulls it free from the wall. He straps it on.
Immanuel is looking at me lovingly. She makes me believe that I am the prodigal son. I have been away for a very long time. I, she knows, feel completely different. I feel that I deserve punishment. How many have I had to kill in the last two millennia so that I may live? Too many to count, I believe. Can I even count how many have been slaughtered by me, just in this lifetime alone? And they were not all for food. I have acres and acres of blood-stain on my accounts payable sheet. It is a debt too high for me to ever pay.
I believe my fate ends with a one-way hand stamp to Hell. I accept it. An image of the Diabolous, two thousand years before, licking my ear and encouraging the washing of my hands is born whole in my mind: the dark fading laughter. Hell is where I deserve to do my Time. Eternity, I feel, might just be long enough to make amends.
“Roman,” she says to me, hearing clearly my thoughts and fears, “Look at me and heareth these words: all have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God.”
I shake my head. No. The damage is done and there’s no going Home. Not for me.
Old Herod nods at Ovid. He turns his dumb face toward the wall.
“The Father has sent me to wash away the sins of the world,” Immanuel tells me.
“But the wages of sin is Death,” from me.
“And through my suffering and death is forgiveness and Life everlasting.”
Herod hits his pipe again and watches the two of us as we hang and speak to each other in tongues that he has never heard before. Herod asks his men, many now covered from head to toe in our blood and pain, what it was we are saying. They didn’t understand what we were saying. They don’t know anything. Regardless, Herod has had enough of this.
“Kill the vampire,” he states flatly, “First.”
Ovid nods and starts for the wall on which we hang and speak in new tongues to one another.
“Can you ever forgive me?” I finally ask out loud. My head drops then, the will to live long gone. “Is it even possible?” I wonder, heart-broken and Hell-bound.
Ovid tramples over to us, the machete clanging as he comes.
“Verily, verily, I say unto thee,” she tells me as I despair, “Before today is done, we shall be together in Paradise.”
Ovid draws nigh. I know what he is going to do. I am ready for it. I raise my head to him, offering my neck. The machete is slung back, high behind Ovid’s ear. The blade reaches its peak and hangs, for the tiniest of moments, suspended in air. I await them. Do it.
“I am forgiven,” I, Pontius Pilate, state.
Ovid swings the machete and the blade flashes.
“My beloved child,” Immanuel says, “it is time for you to come Home.”
Ovid’s swing is true. The blade slices through my exposed neck; the eyes of the Roman locked with his Christ. My head falls to the plastic sheeting. Great gouts of blood are an explosive torrent from my rent neck. It smothers Ovid and he has to wipe it stinging from his eyes. He tugs on the blade until it is loose from the thick wood. Ovid turns and regards Herod.
“Her next,” he orders around a plume of opium haze.
Immanuel gazes up at the ceiling. Above her she sees all those in Heaven that await her. They all love her so, she knows. They always hate this part, no matter how many times through the Ages she has done this, they hate it. But God so loved the world…
Michael the Archangel stands nearby, also dreading the next. He waits for her, too. He waits for it to end. She did what she came to do and he waits impatiently to collect her Spirit.
Ovid steps up to the tiny Christ. With a wicked-wide smile, Herod watches. His men line up behind him to get a good view to the kill. They are watching with interest the executions. Immanuel considers them. She raises her head toward the Heavens.
“Forgive them,” she tells those who wait for her, “for they know not what they do.” Then Immanuel looks next at Herod who blows her a kiss. “Except for him,” she amends, glancing back to Michael. He nods. It will be no problem. It shall be the angel’s pleasure.
Ovid pulls the machete back again, his wide face expressionless. Michael snorts with a fury that is unseen by the humans. Oh, what he wants to do to these filthy, conniving little monkeys. He grabs the hilt of his sword. He can lay such waste to these wretches. The angel can turn them all to nothing but dust. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. He can conjure up a howling wind and blow all the ashes and dust away. But it had already been written.
The machete swings forward, blade singing. “It is finished!” Immanuel cries.
Michael releases the grip on the handle of his mighty sword as Ovid’s machete strikes home. The blade buries itself in the wood of Immanuel’s cross. Her decapitated head drops unceremoniously to the floor. Ovid scoops up both of our severed heads. He approaches the throne. With head bowed in supplication, Ovid kneels before the Herod. He lifts us up by our hair to him.
A beastly happy Herod is presented with the severed heads of Pontius Pilate and Immanuel Christ. But he doesn’t see Michael as he stalks toward him with a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound. He grips the hilt of his fiery sword and pulls it free, still moving. Herod looks up and sees a pissed off archangel bulling through his china shop. Herod’s smile fades into confusion as Michael raises his sword. The archangel slices a downward arc at him. Herod is still trying to gauge the level of danger as his torso is split from right neck to left waist. He separates top from bottom, slides apart and drops dead to the floor with two separate thuds.
The blood and filth-stained cops stand dumbfounded. Pleading silent, they stare fearfully at Michael. He sheaths his Retribution, the flame dying as he does so. Michael notices the men. They are quaking now as children that are being taunted by bullies. The angel lets loose the hilt of his sword and points to both pieces of Herod, bleeding all over the Compound floor.
“Repeat Offender,” he tells them.
And then Michael winks out, just as She instructed. Leaving the cops unmolested, forgiven and unharmed.
For God still loves this world. Inexplicably, She does.
…… END
CHARMINGLY REFERRED TO AS 'HILLBILLY HEROIN'
“OXYCONTIN”
Primum non nocere.
-Hippocratic Corpus
DR. WILLELM BLYTE:
THE MAN IN CHARGE
In that foul Year of our Lord, 1351.
Plague Raging.
Bedlam Hospital.
London, England.
IT SHALL NEVER BE as fresh as a daisy new. That’s because of t
he smell. It was vile.
The horrid and rancid decay assaulted your senses like it a living, breathing thing. The stench hung thick and tight to your clothing and hair. Even if you tried to escape it by getting out of Bedlam and down to the shores of Mighty Thames, the cloud would stay with you. Not even the cold and bitter wind could blow it away.
Then there were the pyres. Nights never darkened beyond dusk. The gentleman that stood there, by the pyre, was a man of means. He was the man in charge at Bedlam Hospital. He stood there looking out at all of the dead and soon to be World-wide, seventy-five million have died by this time. Of course no one, not even the man in the leather breeches, the black overcoat, and the wide-brimmed black hat, the man in charge, knew there were so many sad souls in the world…
With the blunt side of his wooden cane, the man poked and pointed at the dead. They were to be remanded to the great funeral pyres that lined the Thames which have been burning continuously for almost a year now. Yet, still, carts of bodies lined the roadside.
“How does one make amends,” he bespoke to himself, “to the dead?”
Loudly now, the strangely cloaked man spoke through a leather bird’s beak and instructed the staff to make haste. The bird’s mask, as well as the red tinted lenses, was donned daily by the physician, in hopes of quelling the spread of the Plague. His shoulder-width, wide-brimmed hat kept the bird manure (they thought caused the plague) from landing on him. The mask was made to deter the birds from infecting one of their “own”. The red-tint kept the Devil’s evil and the sight of women’s stares from cursing him. Witches roamed those cobblestone roads, you know.
Dr. Blyte knew his adornments were just totems and nothing more. It was true, his propensity with the dead ran the risk of infecting those around him, but he himself was impervious to the risk. But what would they do if they knew? It was important to keep up appearances.
When the dead were cleared and the physician was ready to begin the morning rounds, his personal assistant, Sightless Agnes, directed a young woman to be brought to him. First he used the sharpened tips of hen feathers to lance the oily black pustules called buboes that covered her. The physician plucked and squeezed each one until all were drained. The young woman screamed through clenched teeth until her eyes rolled from shock and she drifted off.
Just in time. Her eyes were next.
The Black Death, once it was transmitted through bird muck, could also be spread through the sight of the infected. Or so it was thought.
And so, at the very tip on the other side of the physician’s wooden cane was a curved concave edged scoop. The physician was so adroit at its use; he could pluck the eye whole, while simultaneously severing the optic nerves. The doctor could easily do a dozen procedures, all before lunch.
Then Sightless Agnes and her hospital helpers would trail behind, providing cloth poultices for the empty eye sockets and collect the eyeballs that used to reside therein. She would place them in a river thrush basket, which she carried everywhere. No one but the physician knew that Sightless Agnes would try them on, each one, just on the off-chance one might work in her empty ocular cavities.
Sometimes Agnes would try two or, on rare occasions, even three eyes in each of her empty sockets. The sight of Agnes doing this never failed to amuse the physician. And really, there was no harm done.
The eyes never worked, despite the shadows Agnes sometimes thought she saw. But, those that she kept in, those that let Agnes think she saw shadows, only lasted for a few days, until the eyeballs began to pucker and shrink into raisins. It was then that Agnes would prepare them to the physician’s liking. Dr. Blyte liked them best prepared with a pinch of salt (still a rare and expensive commodity) and lightly rubbed with basil, which grew in the garden outside the buttery of their City manor house.
The two or three days the eyeballs were kept in, Agnes’ sockets fermented them just right and, with the added seasoning, made them extra delicious.
The strangely cloaked man was a physician. Dr. Willelm Blyte was his moniker. He was very skilled at being a doctor and he loved his work. So it didn’t matter much about the stench, as bad as it was, and the beak mask staunched some of the odors regardless.
The dying came to the London hospital in droves. He cared for them at Bedlam as best he could. Dr. Willelm Blyte used to be a Lecturer on Human Anatomy at Oxford, but now he was needed more as a physician. There aren’t many left to lecture to about anything, anymore, anyway. So, Dr. Willelm Blyte volunteered to go to Bedlam and treat the damned. In point of fact, he felt honor bound to treat the victims of this vicious plague; this Black Death.
The patients’ health always degenerated, the physician was sorry to say. The Bubonic Plague had a couple of different manifestations. But, in the end, Death would always arrive, and Dr. Blyte had an incredibly innate sense of how much time a patient would have before succumbing to their infirmity. He had to. He had to get to them before their blood turned from sour to unusable.
To give them some measure of final comfort and dignity to the dying, the doctor insisted on personally providing the final ministrations. He put aside his evenings for it. The only other person he allowed to attend was his servant, Sightless Agnes. Although blind, Agnes was a great help and comfort to him. She’d been with the doctor ever since her old master passed on, back when they were in France. She would help him by thoroughly cleansing the dead body. The doctor would begin by wrapping them tightly in a shroud, but would forgo the casket. There were already far too many unburied dead, littering every corner of Europe. The shroud would then be slathered in tar and hand-trucked out to one of the always burning funeral pyres that were scattered all up and down the river and all about London Town proper.
But before their lungs had stopped and their hearts had failed, right when they were on the precipice of passing away, Willelm Blyte, the Doctor of Medicine and a Regent Master of Oxford College, would take out from beneath the soft tissue of his forearm a very sharp surgical knife. He would plunge the blade deep within their arteries or veins, opening them wide. The physician would dislocate his jaw and with a cavernous mouth he would clamp on tight to the river’s source.
And then he would gorge.
The physician was now getting quite rotund. He was of normal girth before he arrived at Bedlam Hospital. When he was at the school of medicine in Montpelier, he was strapping and muscular. That was back before the floodgates opened here in London and before he’d left the relative safety of Oxford College to help. The Black Plague brought an endless stream of blood-filled vessels to Bedlam Hospital. The doctor bled as many as he could. It was a technical procedure and phoresing patients was a widely accepted form of treatment. But no one seemed to notice that all of the physician’s patients had died from the procedure. Nor did they seem a bit put out by all the missing blood. Sometimes there would be as many as twenty patients a day that had died in this manner, which left them all but dried husks. The doctor didn’t like the taste at first. Now, Dr. Blyte rather liked the certain tang.
Someone’s got to be willing to do the dirty work, he reasoned, while he busied himself with opening yet another patient.
THE HUNTER.
In that foul Year of our Lord, 1345.
A City Under Siege.
Inside the Walls.
Genoa, Italy.
HE WAS A HUNTER and a good one. But he hated it. He preferred the role of a spider, safely sitting in a dark corner, in some alleyway, or in some dark part of town where no one decent would dare to tread, letting the prey come to him. If they were deep in their cups and alone, he usually felt he could dispatch the quarry swiftly. And if so, he’d pull them into the darkness. His blade would be at the ready and he’d bleed them dry. But often was the case that he would starve if he didn’t track and stalk his prey. Tonight he was dreadfully hungry.
To the hunter, the darkness that he immersed himself in was as deep as it was complete. It was so inky black, with thick clouds blocking out the moon and the stars, tha
t only the hunter could see through it. Huge contained fires kept the Italian winter at bay for the Genoese of the Great Siege, who were scattered about the fires. Profound patches of nothingness lay in between.
The hunter peered out over the expanse of the spindly thatched homes of the peasants, assorted tents, saloons, and brothels. They were stretched out before him like giant game board tiles. His teeth lengthened and sharpened. The hunter’s yellow eyes missed nothing. Talons split his fingertips. He was ready for more blood.
that year a dispute had broken out between the Muslims and the Genoese. The Muslims gathered together a fierce army and besieged the city. While the commanders of the Muslims were waiting for the surrender they knew was forthcoming, the Plague broke out in their ranks. The victims began dying so quickly that frustration was broke their discipline. The Muslims began a campaign of catapulting the dying soldiers high and far into the sky until they rained down on Genoa like a curse from God. Those soldiers, who were still alive, screamed as they flew over the fortified walls and landed on the dirt streets, huts, and hovels, their bodies broken and splintered and crushed to bits. The swollen fist-sized buboes that inundated their bodies exploded on impact. The foul-smelling slimy, shiny black and waxy pus splattered in huge arcs. Within only a few short days, the people of Genoa began dying as well.
And that’s when the hunter arrived from points further east; even to the beginning reaches of Cathay.
He did not know how old he was. He had no recollections or concept of his childhood. His earliest memory was blood. The hunter remembered his first taste, it was on the steppes, where people with almond shaped eyes, grim faces, and mouths spewed out rancid breath reeking of old and rotting horseflesh.
Pills-in-a-Little-Cup Page 6
