The Bestiarum Vocabulum (TRES LIBRORUM PROHIBITUM)

by Dean M. Drinkel

  I hope it doesn't wear itself out before we reach the shore. Before we reach Mother.

  Mother. And then what? Phone calls, I guess. The coast guard. Emergency services, and then home.

  And then?

  School: and the end of school. Tests, finals. Scores. College applications, and college. Work. All of it by myself. All of it alone. Maybe I'll live with my aunt; maybe I won't. I barely know her, so it won't make much difference either way.

  I watch the child's flapping sailcloth, billowing around its body. I keep thinking of Mom's coverlet. How much I wish I had it here. How much I wish it could cover me, cover me up, cover up the world. Cover up everything in it that's gone, that's here right now but will one day be gone, that won't and can't possibly last forever.

  The sailcloth whips around the child's legs, tangles around its feet. The child stumbles.

  I run to its side and place a hand on its arm. “You okay?”

  The child raises its face. I pull back.

  It's not a child. Crows' feet crease the skin around its eyes. Thin lines cross-hatch the mouth. The flesh is loose and slack. The person I am looking at right now has to be at least forty, maybe even fifty. How did I ever imagine this could be a child?

  But it was a child. Wasn't it?

  The child - I don't know what else to call it - pulls away, adjusts the cloth around its wrinkled shoulder. “Take to Mother,” it says. Its voice is heavy and hollow, a deep crack in dark, dry earth. I hang back and let it pass me; then, because I can't imagine what else I could possibly do now, I keep following.

  The trees are growing thinner, sparser, shedding leaves and skin. Black dirt gives way to pale sand. Salt stings my nostrils, coats my lungs. The sea roars.

  The white rocks are larger here, rising and falling out of the ground at more regular intervals; their surfaces are smoother, their shapes more coherent, more purposeful. One looks vaguely like a spine, knobbled vertebrae poking out of the sand. Another looks like an arm, a woman's arm, long fingers chipped and broken but still graceful, still reaching out.

  The child moves very slowly now. It lumbers. Shoulders hunched. Its back dips low and I see blue lines criss-crossing translucent skin. Brown spots on white flesh. We're almost out of the trees now, and in the sunset light I see that its hair is thinner than I'd imagined, long black strings shading into dirty gray.

  We emerge onto a jutting promontory of sand. The ocean spreads out all around us, swallowing the sun, drinking its light. A beach stretches ahead, and all up and down its length I see them: statues, broken marble bodies half-buried in the sand, old and shattered and scattered but still glistening, still capable of beauty. The tide washes up around a nude woman's hips. A beautiful youth's empty eyes are tide pools, filled with swarming crabs. A crowned head swirls with waterweed, its lips bright green with moss.

  The child shifts its weight from one foot to the other, and the motion makes its skin ripple. It's not pale, like I thought it was. Not pale like skin is pale. Pale like a fish's belly is pale, iridescent, striped with unhealthy color. The inside of a shell. Oil on water.

  Here there is a breeze; here there is wind. The child's sailcloth whips, catches, tears away. The child is naked, and I was right to call it ‘the child’, right not to assign it a sex, because below its waist there's nothing. Nothing at all. Smooth and blank as a doll.

  It twists around to look at me. Its body shakes. Not cold. Old. Old and palsied, dotted with liver spots, half-bald and shrunken and sere. Its eyes are thick with film but still dark, still bright, and now they have an expression, and the expression says more than I can possibly imagine.

  It bows its head and shuffles down to the beach, down to the water's edge. I follow, wanting to say something, wanting to comfort but knowing I know nothing.

  The child - the old, old child - wades into the water, stares out at the drowning sun. Already the light is fading. Already the stars are out.

  It turns, painfully, on one hip, and it looks into me. “Take,” it croaks. “Take to Mother.”

  It raises a trembling arm and points to the end of the shoreline, a cluster of great dark rocks, a gaping hole in the greatest and darkest rock. Water rolls into the cave, hisses back out.

  I look at the child and nod. “Take to Mother.”

  The child sighs and closes its eyes, and on the exhalation its body crumbles, a broken sandcastle, collapsing in on itself and down into the waves. Nothing remains but a thick red stew of blood and bone and empty skin.

  I stand and stare and think of nothing. The cave waits for me. I splash across the tideline and gather up the child's remains in my skirt. It does not repulse me, doesn't even make me flinch. Once I changed bedpans; threw away armfuls of sodden Kleenex; washed sheets heavy with phlegm and blood and piss.

  I did it because that was love.

  We make our way across the sands, my sad little bundle and I. We reach the mouth of the cave leaking sweat and salt water and viscera. The child's blood snakes down my leg, washes away with the tide.

  Into the cave. Black crystals glint in the half-light. Wrackweed brushes my legs. The stone is hot and close and smells of blood and milk. Soft breathing. A slow and heavy heartbeat.

  I call out. Wordless. Only a sound, a cry. It will be heard. It will be understood.

  Something slithers.

  An undulation, an unwinding. I blink, and keep blinking, until I can see through the dark.

  A nest, at the farthest edge of the cave, where light and water do not reach. Bleached bones and white marble-dust and reams of sloughed, scaled skin.

  And flesh.

  Swathes of flesh, fistfuls, armfuls, expanding and contracting, coiling and uncoiling; a tapestry of scars and scales and stretch-marks, dusted with marble and ash. The looped body of a snake, a great serpent, whorling up and up and sprouting hips, a swollen belly, skinny swaying breasts with red teats sucked dry. The longest arms, the longest neck, and atop that neck, that face. White stone on black seaweed. Skin so thin you could count every bone in the skull, watch each vein pulse in time with the heart. Lipless. Lidless. Eyes bulging from sockets. Peeled red fruit.

  I look at her. She looks at me.

  I hold out my dress to her. “Mother,” I say.

  She looks down. Her expression does not change, her pallor never lifts, but her slit-mouth opens, emits a soft keen. The long arms reach out; webbed fingers scoop up the gore. She raises it to her mouth and bites down hard. Her eyes roll. Red wet strings pull taut between her teeth.

  I watch her, and she watches me watching. She swallows. It looks like it hurts.

  “All days,” she explains. Rough words clawed up from black depths. “All days. Sunrise. Have baby. Baby grow. Baby die. Eat baby. Sunset. Never sleep.”

  She looks down at her hands, at the formless meat they hold. “Long time,” she says. “No cry now.”

  I look at her. I look at her, and I know. I know that she is what lasts. What stays when all else is gone.

  I crouch down to her level. “I had a mother. Not long ago. I had a mother.”

  She looks up at me. Her child drips from her chin.

  “I don't sleep either,” I whisper.

  She lifts the last of the offal to her mouth, slowly stuffs it inside. My eyes never leave hers.

  Her coils unwind. I catch a glimpse of something open and gaping, just below the belly. A wound? No; a birth canal, stretched bloody and raw.

  She holds out her arms to me. They're all wrong. One too many joints. “Here,” she says. “Here.”

  I pause a moment. Only a moment.

  I drop to my knees, and then to all fours, and I crawl to her, over the wet stone, through the trickling brine, over viscous slime and dry afterbirth. I am at her side and she enfolds me. Her arms, her coils. I thought she'd be cold and rough but she isn't. She's warm, very warm. And soft. So soft.

  Long fingers stroke my hair. She is humming. No words, no tune. But it could be a song I know, an old familiar song, if I wa
nt it to be. And I want it to be.

  Her red eyes watch me, swollen with blood. I think of her children, all her devoured children. I wonder if she’ll devour me, too. Maybe she will.

  Maybe.

  The world is dimming, the light from the cave’s mouth growing fainter and fainter. All I can hear is the hum, and the heart, and the surf. I think of the sea, of what it consumes and what it gives back. I think of the stone, of that which can be worn down but never, never worn away.

  I sleep, and I dream of that which endures.

  M Is For Mara

  Mythological Being of Nightmare

  Robert W. Walker

  John Henry Kagi awakes to the terror of the nightmare creature of old, the Mara; it is squatting squarely on his chest—its breath kerosene over rotting flesh and brimstone. The damnable, pointy-eared hellion stares curiously, menacingly, fixedly, and accusingly into Kagi’s eyes, a grimace on its horrible, hairy face. The eyes of a human, the Mara has the features of a creature of the wild, a mix between a bobcat and a wolf hound. It whips a bifurcated tail and digs into Kagi’s flesh with goat-like hooves.

  Kagi, while a half-breed mulatto who passionately preaches against human bondage, had been years before fired from his teaching position and kicked out of Virginia. He detests slavery and slave-owners. He lives as a devout Christian Baptist, and thus believes in the mercy of Christ even for himself, even though he is a murderer of the innocent.

  Tonight he believes himself ready for this creature he has done research on; this time the Mara will be vanquished for good and all from his mind and his bed. This creature some believed merely a myth, an imaginary beast created out of night sweats and a guilty conscience, has heft and weight; Kagi feels it crawl atop his bed and move about him and settle onto his chest. The movement of it is not unlike the vibration of a passing train through the old farmstead foundation stones and wooden floors.

  The Mara comes with lips of a camel sucking away at a man’s resolve, courage, and being. The Mara now has so often disturbed Kagi’s sleep that it feels like a familiar visitor. It has visited nightly for nearly a year now. Ever since he and the other men he rode with in 1858 in Bleeding Kansas had summarily executed (a fancy term for some would say murdered) those five innocent men. They were camped in a war zone; they had certainly looked to be pro-slavery enemy combatants.

  News reports called the executed men surveyors and not members of pro-slavery forces. It had been war, and during wars, innocent men, women, and children were often caught up in the violence. But this had been different. That boy had pierced Kagi’s heart with his pleas to write to Mrs. Hermann Walsh of Omaha, Nebraska to explain why her son was no longer of this Earth.

  Young fellow could not have been more than fourteen, fifteen at the most. He could hardly be called a man. The four others pleaded for Kagi to spare the boy; these four died bravely, all of them saying they were surveyors working for the government in the new territory soon to become a state. None of Captain John Brown’s men wanted to pay heed to the possibility their intelligence on the camp might be wrong. Intelligence gathered by second-lieutenant Jack E. Cooke.

  In the end, when the shameful incident was reported in Harpers Weekly with artist sketches of men who’d been beheaded by sword, the boy amongst the dead became a martyr to the pro-slavery cause. The story had been published below a headline decrying the butchery of Brown and his men in a place called Osawatomie. Newspapers across the nation picked up the story as a report of the victims of mistaken identity. The true facts and background information on each of the beheaded men fueled hatred toward the freedom fighters of Kansas. The executed five proved not to be among the blood-thirsty pro-slavery men who’d killed and maimed anti-slavery men. One such freedom fighter - captured and tortured to the point of being driven insane - had been Captain Brown’s son only days before they had retaliated on the wrong camp.

  The incident has made Brown and his band the most wanted men in America. Captain John ‘Osawatomie’ Brown has a reward of $50,000 on his head. Mistaken identity was right; how wrong the captain had been that lightning-filled night thanks to Cooke’s misinformation. Still, Brown and all his men except for John Henry Kagi had put it behind them. Some men somehow had not so much as blinked over the episode. On the other hand, Kagi remains troubled by it at all. For the captain, it remains more an embarrassment and annoying regret more than an honest remorse, or so it seems to Kagi now.

  The present is now Kagi’s prison. It is a prison that he shares with this creature of hell and nightmare. He sleeps in barrack fashion in a farmhouse attic with sixteen other freedom fighters, all of whom are in hiding, all awaiting a raid planned on a place he knows well—Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Their target is the U.S. arsenal there along with a place called Hall’s Rifle Works. Just as in Kansas, they have a spy who has gone before them. Their spy has taken up residence in the town, but he is the same man who insured them that the surveyor camp was a pro-slavery camp, so Kagi distrusts the man’s reports.

  The Mara recently has begun speaking to Kagi in a voice like that of death itself. It began with a mantra at first: “Ever eat raw meat?” Repeating this question over and over has turned Kagi’s mind into a torture vault. More recently, the Mara’s mantra changed to: “Cook the meat…eat the feet.”

  Kagi is trying now to decipher the meaning of the chant. He has accepted the first cryptic chant as guilt at having turned innocent men into desiccated flesh—food for the area wolves and vermin at Osawatomie, the old Indian Territory near Lawrence, Kansas. But this new variation on the mantra, calling for him to cook the feet, he feels is a warning of the hell to come for him alone. He knows by now the sick sense of humor of his nightly visitor. He imagines that roasted feet is likely just the beginning of his suffering in Hades.

  Kagi believes it each time this creature stares him in the eye with those hellion orbs. The other soldiers, freedom fighters all, had shrugged the entire mistake off, but these were hardened men, who’d killed before, one having utilized a bugle to murder his lieutenant in the U.S. Cavalry only to later escape Leavenworth prison.

  Truth be told, Kagi knows the mythological beast perched on his solar plexus and studying his breathing only too well. His being a man of learning, Kagi has researched the enemy. He had studied its features in the famous painting by Fuseli with the wild horse’s head looking on as the succubus squats on the breast of a beautiful, troubled woman in her nightshirt. Kagi has read of the first writings and naming of the beast most felt simply a mythological item of little interest. Yet, the thing dated back to the first civilizations. It likely visited disturbed people even before civilization. It appeared to men in every culture as sightings came from Germany, Scandinavia, European nations, Great Britain, and in fact every continent and every time period.

  These facts lead Kagi now this night to distrust the feel of this particular Mara. And to determine if he might not simply muster the faith he wanted to possess. To believe that this monster was a personal demon; that it was no more a creature of mankind’s collective fears than it was his own collective fear. “Fear either cripples a man, he told himself, “or he vanquishes it.” And if this thing on his chest is truly only a mere figment of his imagination, just as it had been for the artist Fuseli, and possibly all who’d ever seen it, then he and it were one and the same. “Is the Mara us…humankind…me?”

  Still the coded messages: “Ever eat raw meat?” and “Cook the meat, eat the feet.” It all sounds to Kagi now like the typical madness of Morpheus: the insane god of sleep where free reign is given to madness and non-sequitur of the most outrageous kind. But if the creature is horrid, unbridled imagination and not at all real, like Poe’s bloody Raven, Kagi now thinks, what matters? The cryptic words that seemed so meaningless and yet the word cook stuck in Kagi’s craw as their failed spy in Kansas, Cooke, had been put to work as their spy here, now in Virginia.

  We should fry Cooke. Cannibalize his remains.

  He should be made to pay
for his getting things so damnably wrong in Kansas, especially since Cooke had shown no conscience whatever for his role in the Kansas slaughter of innocents. None for Caleb Walsh or the four other men summarily executed by men with a righteous cause. Cooke refused to give it a word, not even as to their method of dispatching those men. The cruel way they had died. Brown had ordered the men to hog-tie them and lay their kicking bodies perpendicular to the train tracks with their necks on the rails.

  Brown and Cooke had taunted the five of them, saying the next train would take their heads off, but Brown impatiently ordered that swords should be used instead. All this under a dark, lightning-filled sky made Brown look like the hellion he seems to have become nowadays. Perhaps the captain entertains his own Mara, after all.

  Kagi came suddenly awake, completely awake, and as with each time he came awake with the Mara atop him, it turns to empty air, vanishing like a ghost never there in the first place. He is repeatedly swiping at it with a sword he has fastened tight to his arm and hand with the strongest hemp available. His plan to cut the head off the Mara has again failed.

  Eyes wide open, however, he sees the ghost of Caleb Walsh at the bottom of his bed, standing, staring, and extending a hand toward Kagi. It is a gesture that says come with me. The form is like a shadow, yet its interior sparkles with a kinetic energy within the human form. It is the shape and features of the lanky, young boy killed by Brown’s men in Kansas.

  But how? How it is here all the way in Virginia at my bed at 3AM and given shape? The work of the Mara? The work of my own mind?

  Kagi, angry at the year’s hauntings and horror inside his head and outside his reach—as with this new image—leaps to his feet. In warrior fashion, Kagi swings the sword-arm he has crafted of his limb straight to Caleb’s neck and lobs off the boy’s head all over again only to send the entire image of Caleb into thin air. Caleb’s ghost, however, is replaced by something solid, something bleeding perhaps, something showering the floor with…with a noisy substance. Kagi fears he has struck another man in the attic with him, someone who has come to shake him from his nightmare.