Burn, Beautiful Soul

by William J. Donahue

  My hands fight for purchase on coat sleeves, hat brims and the ears of these goons—anything to keep me rooted to the earth. A blow to the jaw dazes me.

  And a good night to you, Old Billy.

  The crowd heaves me. I am aloft, tumbling through the blackness. In the seconds before I hit, I picture my pregnant bride, sitting alone in a cold and hopeless part of the world, wondering when I will return.

  My shoulders land first. My head snaps against the stone-hard surface.

  Slowly I sink toward a lightless bottom, somewhere on the plane between consciousness and oblivion.

  Frigid water numbs my flesh.

  Darkness blinds me.

  My lungs burn.

  Then, all at once, everything goes silent.

  Chapter 33

  Blind, Bloodied and a Long Way from Home

  Basil snaps awake at the sound of his name.

  “We’re here,” Herbert says.

  Basil looks to his left, through the driver’s window. A pile of rock lies at the top of a hill across an untended plain of wildflowers. Old Glory flaps in the stiff breeze.

  Patriot Rock.

  “Thank you, my friend,” he says.

  Boothe leaps out the passenger-side window and wanders into the dry grass. Basil opens the door and unfolds himself onto the gravelly shoulder. He limps to the front of the car, where Herbert stands, looking forlorn.

  “A quarter mile across that field you’ll find the cave entrance,” Herbert says. “Then I guess it’s down, down, down.”

  “Forgive me if I ruined everything.”

  “Don’t worry about the car.”

  “I don’t mean just the car. I feel like I left a big mess for someone to clean up.”

  “You opened a lot of eyes. We were sleepwalking before you showed up.”

  “I suppose we part ways here.”

  “You’ve lost a lot of blood. Sure you’ll be all right?”

  “I’m not going to kiss you goodbye, Herbert.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Man and demon hug.

  Basil claps Herbert’s back because it hurts too much to bend. “I don’t suppose you have a torch,” Basil asks.

  “A flashlight, sure. You’re welcome to it. If it still works.”

  Herbert breaks their embrace to dig around in his trunk. He returns with an oversized, metallic-red flashlight. He shakes the cylinder twice, batteries knocking, before pressing the ON button.

  “Consider it a gift,” he says. “For your friendship.”

  “Be happy with your life. Forget your father. Go be gay with someone.”

  “I really wish you knew when to shut up.”

  “I didn’t get to give Chester a proper so long.”

  “I’m sure he’ll understand.”

  “Perhaps you can be gay with him.”

  “Just go. Please.”

  A horn blazes, a semi rumbling past. The wind of the passing freight nearly knocks Basil over. He waits for a break in the traffic and clops unsteadily across the asphalt. Boothe has made it halfway across the field by the time Basil steps into the waist-high wildflowers.

  He will miss humans, and he will miss the world: the cruelty of sunlight, the vastness of sky, the way leaves dance on the branches of an elm, the hardness of pebbles in the creek bed, the ideas he will leave behind—this new breed of poetry, advertising. Even the experiences he wishes to forget: mornings after the all-too-brief pleasures of scotch, the taste of raccoon and its ginger-ale chaser, his noisemaker, most human men.

  His eyes settle on a bank of clouds moving slowly to the west. He recalls the night beneath an ash tree in a puddled field, the night the heavens sent jagged bolts of current down to destroy him. He thinks of his uneven marriage to the clock that ticks off the hours, to the rising and setting of the sun, realizing how he at once treasures and abhors the way time passes above ground, cataloging every breath.

  The wildflowers thin toward the field’s far edge, where green stems and orange and red petals give way to beige-colored crags. As the incline steepens, Basil struggles. He coughs, and out comes a ball of blood that pops against the rock. He turns to see Herbert offer one final wave and then climb into his car.

  The light is different now, at August’s end—softer, dying. It seems to be at once holding on and letting go. He enters the cave entrance with the light at his back. The temperature drops ten degrees within one step. He turns back one last time, sees Herbert’s car pull away, make a U-turn and then head back toward Beak. The car shrinks to a speck until Basil can no longer see it.

  “Let’s just stay here, just lie down and sleep the dreamless sleep,” he tells Boothe. “Between worlds—a fine place for a misfit who belongs nowhere.”

  He tamps down the urge to weep, and then realizes there’s no reason he shouldn’t, as his eyes will never again see such wonders. He eases his rear into the groove of a rock and mourns the inevitable loss of everything beautiful, just sitting here, waiting to die. The tears flow freely, and each sob seems to crack him open and leave lacerations for new parasites to fill.

  They don’t know how good they have it.

  He feels warmth against his leg, and he looks down to see Boothe cuddling his calf, trying to soothe its master. He studies the undulating grasses, brushed by the wind. Cars and trucks zip by on the seam of asphalt beyond the field. They’re so far off they might as well be ants, so he imagines that’s exactly what they are.

  Finally, the setting sun tells him it’s time to go.

  “Enough of this childish musing,” he says to Boothe. He wipes away the tears spilling from the corner of each eye. He will mourn later.

  The imp scampers ahead and disappears into the mouth of the cave, as if swallowed by the darkness that bore him. Basil follows, ready to reclaim his throne, if it will have him.

  * * *

  Basil steps gingerly through the cool passageway, though his aim fails him. Each time he attempts to avoid a jagged rock, he either trips over it or gashes the skin beneath the thin pelt of fur on his calves. The beam of the flashlight bounces off the tunnel walls. When he closes his eyes to rest, he has Boothe’s insistent chirping as a guide. At least one of them seems eager to return to Our Fiery Home.

  When the route forks, he aims the flashlight toward the ceiling to seek out the three-dotted directional marking the path, the one leading him home. With each step he realizes the world below will look different, smell different, be different, given everything he has seen on the surface. Though he left the world of men in his wake only hours ago, the surface now seems like part of a long-lost dream, remote and unlikely.

  A new verse:

  The world broke me open, split me into threes and fives

  My right arm, torn free just outside of Lincoln

  And now the anthropologists fight for custody, ranting

  “It belongs where it belongs”

  My left foot, toeless and useless and writhing with happy maggots

  On a weedy roadside somewhere between Des Moines and Chicago

  My spleen and liver pulverized

  Their dust clotting the air above Minneapolis

  Organ smog

  My heart a ghost, too, though I applaud its absence

  Turned to liquid silver and spilled

  Through the scaffolding of my ribs

  To pool at her feet

  She tramped my heart puddle, taking vengeance

  A few drops hitching a ride on each sole

  To dry and return to stardust

  My liquid heart, or ninety-seven percent of it, remains there still

  A throbbing, burping mess, hopeful

  For the return of her shadow

  The shade that quickens the pulse

  Of this lonely, lowly muscle

  Despites mankind’s challenges, and all his horrors, most of the humans he met managed to retain their kindness and love of beauty. He just hopes he can find a way to bring out the same in his own people. If he cannot, why go back?r />
  Several hours have likely passed, an entire day gone, as he ponders the mechanics of time. He has taken three forks, and lost too much blood to wager, when a distant pranging pricks his ears. He crouches and listens beyond the echo of water dripping, each drop finding a new home in a shallow puddle. Then the sound comes again: the clang of metal against rock.

  His return is imminent. As he clops forward, his ears detect another sound.

  Voices.

  He beckons Boothe and whispers, “Make yourself scarce.” He then flicks off the flashlight and presses on, into the darkness. Soon his eyes catch the first glare of firelight, his nostrils pulling in the skunk-like stink of demon sweat. He hugs the side of the tunnel, inching closer, and sees a troupe of demons taking axes and burs to the ceiling, the walls, bringing down massive boulders.

  Widening the route to the surface. More elbow room for an army of demons and the kraken, Cthaal.

  He has no more time to waste. He steps into the firelight and calls out—no words, just a resonant bellow.

  Every demon in the tunnel turns toward Basil. One of them drops his ax, and the blade rattles against the rock. Three of them pounce, their makeshift weapons raised, and Basil deflects them with one mighty swipe. He mashes their bodies into the wall until bits of flesh fill the pores of the metamorphic rock. The rest of the demons—a band of eight to ten, Basil guesses—hang back, waiting.

  “Why do you assault me?” he asks. “I am your ruler, returned.”

  “Your reign has ended,” says one of the demons, the one-eyed male Basil knows as Gideon.

  “I’d like to meet the fool who has taken my place,” he responds.

  “Lord Lubos would like to see you as well,” Gideon seethes. Basil stumbles forward, and the demons give him passage. He trips over a rock torn from the ceiling, and he tumbles. His chin breaks his fall. Demons cackle in delight.

  “Get up, you stinking rotter,” Gideon says. “Get up and meet your ruin.”

  Basil’s arms strain to lift his girth from the cave floor. The desire to simply roll over and die burns strong, but he refuses to meet his end here, so far from anywhere that matters.

  “Pick him up and drag him,” Gideon directs, and the other demons hoist Basil by the armpits until he finds his hooves.

  Basil clops unsteadily toward the blur in front of him. Soon he senses a shift in the air: a slight rise in temperature. Then his eyes show him a sight that stops him, shocks him: The gate to Our Fiery Home yawns open, flames burning hot beneath the cauldrons he once stirred. He steps through the doorway and discovers a world transformed: the charred corpses of demons, piled thirty to forty high; stacks of freshly cast iron weapons, and, everywhere, frantic demons and imps and troglodytes pacing in circles, eager to do their worst.

  The denizens of Our Fiery Home halt when they see him—a leader who abandoned them, a traitor wearing a coat of his own gore.

  Lubos slithers out from between two cauldrons. An oversized ax dangles from his good hand.

  “Welcome home,” he says.

  “Where’s Kamala?” Basil replies.

  “I’m delighted to see you. You’ve never looked better.”

  “Where’s Kamala?”

  “Doing penance, as you soon will. The humans were unkind to you—such a surprise—but I will be even less forgiving.” He turns his back to Basil and utters a command: “Bring him to his knees.”

  The demons hesitate at first. Then one pounces, followed by another and another still, until Basil has no fight left in him. He feels the sting of a blade pierce his thigh, digging so deep the iron tastes bone. A net of flesh covers his nose and mouth, suffocating. The weight drives the wind from his lungs, and then … the weight eases. Basil lies motionless on the cavern floor, chest heaving, his lungs hungry for air. He watches the ceiling, where giant vampire bats claw from one rookery to another.

  “Haul him to the Room of Contrition,” Lubos commands.

  Basil closes his eyes and feels himself being dragged away. The tips of his hooves carve ruts in the soft, gray earth.

  Chapter 34

  Wasted Breath

  Kamala stirs at the commotion. Her cheek cools against the smooth, damp stone. The door to the Room of Contrition scrapes open, and two hulking troglodytes drag in a bloody, black mess. They toss the heap onto the floor, and a moment passes before Kamala realizes what she’s seeing. She thinks she has gone mad.

  Basil.

  Instinct compels her to go to him, to help her former master and commander. A jolt of pain stings the space between her legs as a jagged shard bites the rubbed-raw skin. A column of hardened semen runs from the mouth of her vagina to the floor, forming a congealed puddle around her hooves.

  Basil lifts his head. As his eyes connect with Kamala’s, he utters, “Forgive me. I should not have left.”

  “You had to,” she whispers.

  Lubos slithers into the Room of Contrition.

  “Wrap him up good and tight,” he blusters.

  “He half-dead already,” grunts one of the trogs.

  “Well, make sure nothing keeps me from taking what’s left.”

  The trogs twine leathers around Basil’s throat, around each of his horns, around each wrist and pastern. They then hoist him so he’s upright, on his knees, though he lacks the strength to stiffen his spine. When the trogs snap the leathers taut, the veins in Basil’s neck dance to the surface. He gasps. Blood pools beneath him.

  “I will succeed where the humans failed,” Lubos says. “Today, you become nothing. I’ll grant you the dignity of a private death, but my kindness ends there. Quite a shame you’ll miss the public dismemberment and the roast to follow. All of Our Fiery Home will gnaw every last morsel from your bones—a fitting meal before battle, I’d say. I should pluck your eyes from their sockets, pry your horns from skull and snip your shriveled genitals from the dead space between your legs, keep them as reminders of my triumph. What fine talismans they would make.”

  Basil gurgles.

  “Yes, a pity you won’t be here to see our new world take shape,” Lubos continues. “You deserve much of the credit, after all. If not for your nomadic longing, I may not have found the inspiration to lead every cur out of this place and savage all corners of the civilized world.”

  Lubos moves to a metal rack affixed to the near wall and studies the arsenal, the many implements of torture. He steps to the left, letting his fingertips graze the warm metal of each weapon, and then turns on his right hoof and does the same, left to right, with his other hand. He settles on a crudely made ax: heavy, dull, the blade dingy from ash and time, nicked from overuse.

  “Say goodbye to all things,” Lubos says as he plucks the ax from the wall.

  “Even the simplest beast craves the sweet pain of life,” Basil starts, the words strained by the leathers closing around his throat.

  Lubos tests the ax’s weight.

  “To have the winds of time fill his lungs with their breath …” Lubos brings the weapon to his face and lets his finger ride the blade.

  “As the last puff of air passes through his lips, what will consume his thoughts?”

  Lubos raises the ax overhead.

  “The sticks and bricks of the structures he has built …”

  Lubos inhales, flexes his arms, his three-fingered hand struggling to grip the gnarled handle.

  “Or the blueprints of things his hands will never touch?” Lubos heaves the ax toward the floor, and the blade finds its juicy target. The ax parts Basil’s forehead. Blood splatters Lubos’s eyelids and lips. A chipped piece of Basil’s right horn skims off the wall and spirals to a stop at the base of a burnished guillotine. As the trogs release the leathers, Basil falls forward. His left shoulder slams to the floor. The ax blade digs deeper into the cleft in Basil’s skull, grinding against the stone with every twitch. The right leg kicks wildly every few seconds, and then the body goes still.

  Lubos stands above the fallen demon king. His jaw hangs open, stunned at
his achievement. Slowly, he comes around, as if realizing he now has serious work to do.

  “You’ll never have what you think you want,” Kamala says. Her words trail off as a horrid taste builds in the back of her throat. “You will fail.”

  “Shame you won’t live long enough to prove me wrong,” Lubos tells her. He turns to one of the trogs and orders the hulk to seal the door closed. “You’ll choke on the stench of your own decay.”

  * * *

  Kamala stares into the lifeless eyes of her former king. The muscles of his face have relaxed. He looks peaceful, a far cry from the bruising bastard at his worst. Now, though, she can remember his better days, the tenderness he showed only when all others had their backs to him.

  Her arms dangle loosely, her body parallel with the floor. She tests her bonds again, but they do not give. The flesh of her wrists has torn away to expose the moist, pink layer beneath. The knots will hold no matter how much she struggles. Only then does she permit herself to weep.

  She stops when she realizes she’s not alone.

  Something chirps in the shadows by the room’s closed door. A dark, squat shape moves with the curvature of the shadows. Then, the shape bumps into the hilt of a pike, and the lanky weapon knocks into a blood-blackened chopping block and brushes the links of a long, rusted chain. The chain unfurls noisily, link by link, and coils onto the floor. The commotion spurs the creature to panic and, in its panic, reveal its form.

  A reddish-black imp leaps onto a table heaped with whips, bone saws and crocodile shears, then ping-pongs off the near wall and dithers in the middle of the room, looking for a place to hide. It then weaves its fat body into the bony prongs of a candelabra fashioned from the antlers of an unknown beast. A toppled shield spirals to a stop in the center of the room, its ruckus melding with the cries of the screaming imp.