Marguerite stood amongst them, looking like the young girl I had married. Then all at once the vision of her began to throb, changing from my wife to the pulpous nubile with whom I had just danced, and back again, pulsing and blending until they took on a form that resembled both - and I realised they were one and the same. They were the collective, human manifestation of Veltis, whose face now glowed with tears of tarnished gold as she caressed the sick beasts at her feet, before locking them back into their prison.
And then she turned towards me.
As the cavern fell into darkness I acknowledged who she was, with a nod, and prepared myself for sacrifice.
***
There is no Rapture Club – there never has been. 12a Bishop Street is an illusion – an empty basement to an equally empty house where Veltis’s devotees staged my slow seduction. It is a house where I now lie, in a single bed in a single room with the curtains open to receive the cold light of the moon. Veltis hovers at my side, a tube permanently lodged in her mouth. She drinks and sucks in spasms from the blend of my blood and juices, which I give willingly. The rents in my flesh cause me no concern. Even the pain is pleasure as I die and revive with each of her sucks, emptying and filling with her primal force. I am addicted to her, and she to me.
Babylon says it will be soon now.
***
The cauldron has been placed before the window, almost touching the high ceiling. It sits on a cushion of dark velvet. Golden scarabs run across its surface, making a multitude of familiar click, click, clicking sounds with their tiny legs. They deposit saliva as they dart about, the bubbling spit working its way into the metal to revive the tarnished copper and I can feel Veltis’s pleasure as the locked pot returns to its original glory. The creatures fly to their mother every so often to buzz around her head. She whispers soft platitudes in an ancient tongue, her form changing to resemble the insects to whom she speaks, then back again to look vaguely like my wife.
She is plump now. I can see through her blue skin to the nerves and arteries that rush with electric ripples. Every so often she gives me a vision of Santa Margarita of Cortona, the wicked girl that seduced the benevolent Veltis – not the other way around. Veltis feeds me with memories of what happened; shows me her shrine depicting a mighty scarab engraved in stone. A wild girl dances there in worship – she is the image of the dancer I met in the cavern beneath my house. As I observe the scene I hear urgent, distant warnings – it is the priest, Babylon - but it is too late; Veltis has revealed herself to sweet Margarita, expecting adoration.
It is a trick.
Margarita has already discovered the cauldron in the cave beneath the shrine and has fashioned herself a lock and a key with which to imprison its slumbering inhabitants. When their ancient progenitor and guardian appears, the girl utters terrible words of magic and swallows the soul of the scarab-like Veltis whole, immediately absorbing the power and insatiable need to feed and procreate – which she does for day upon month upon year, irrepressible – until she is caught lying with her father’s own brother...
She lies to save herself.
The uncle is hanged.
The girl repents, and is hailed as holy.
Such cleverness, such witchcraft. But not good enough – for Veltis is immortal.
Once Margarita dies, Veltis revives the skin within which she is trapped, filling the flesh until she resembles Margarita’s original, most voluptuous form. She leaves, wandering west, and then south again through a volatile Europe towards Spain, seeking sustenance for her primordial offspring all the way. In time, the truth of her, the beauty of her shines through until she is the very picture of innocence and youth – and here I recognise my wife, as she was when I first saw her.
Veltis-Marguerite shows and tells me through visions and spasms of emotion how she married many times over in the six hundred years before we met. The perpetual widow, nurturing her husbands over decades, then seducing them with the shadow of the saint. Like me, these men had to willingly relinquish any commitment to the wife they had chosen, and submit instead to obsession with Margarita’s form until they would give anything, everything... their very lives, to be with the primal vision of womanhood. The sacrifice had to be of their own volition, or the ritual would fail. Some succumbed quickly, others took almost a lifetime to yield to their desires. And that was the hardest, my pseudo-wife whispers to me over the clicking of her needle-like fingers, because the taste of true love between a man and a woman is the closest sensation to the rapture of her own nature, making her hesitate over the bringing about of those husbands’ deaths, and accepting their relinquished souls.
She cries then, luminous globes of molten gold. The scarabs at the cauldron fly to her and dip themselves in the tears until she is free of gilt.
The shell of me attempts to move towards her throbbing form, but my skin rips and the dull light in the room begins to flicker. I can no longer keep my eyes open but my vision remains long enough to see Babylon enter, a key in his hand.
***
Clicks and turns and locks and sighs.
My breath is shallow.
I feel no relief, only sadness tempered with joy as the multiple thin tubes that feed from me into her are removed from my body. My sight has failed but around me I hear the wind, a rush of wings and tails and I know the cauldron has been opened at last.
The bed shakes; it shudders. Suckling sounds pepper the air; she is feeding her children, feeding them with my essence as it courses through her ethereal body.
She hushes them, and I feel a blade at my belly. Babylon’s pungent breath sweeps into my nostrils as he slices me open from groin to throat. Even as he peels back the paper skin to allow the spawn to gorge on my steaming organs I am filled with wonder that Veltis - most ancient of beings, more sacred than any God - chose me. Chose me.
My mouth has no lips to thank her.
I pray my sacrifice is thanks enough.
W Is For Werewolf
Andy Taylor
God I fucking hate myself. I’m pretty sure God must hate me too. Why else would he visit such a horrible curse upon me? I don’t think there is a single creature on this planet more pathetic than myself. A murderer, a savage, a beast without name, that’s what I am. I should have put myself down when I had the chance. I wish that damn woman had done it for me when I asked her to. All she had to do was pull the trigger and it would have all been over. I warned her what could happen if she didn’t, even told her she’d be doing me a favor but she didn’t listen. Now she’s dead and I’m picking parts of her flesh out of my teeth. I always loved Sinatra but as I hear the words to ‘That’s Life’ playing in my head, I just want to strangle the motherfucker.
I knew when I met her those many months ago I should have just ran the other way, taken off at Mach 5 and not quit running till I was miles away but something about her intoxicated and thrilled me, made me think of better times, times before the wolf. I tried, believe me I tried to fight the urge inside me but try as I might I just had to feel her touch.
I was wandering around Sauget in the dead of night, which if you’ve never been anywhere near St. Louis you wouldn’t know that’s something you only do when you’re looking for trouble. Be it drugs, illicit sex, or a good brawl, go there around one in the morning and you’ll find it. It’s also a good way to end up on the Six’O’Clock News “So and So found dead this morning in a Sauget dumpster”. Happened all the time there. That’s what I was looking for, that sweet, sweet Sauget dumpster. I’d already tried to end my own life, and by try I mean shakily put the gun back on the table and sobbed like a small child, so I headed up there in the hopes of finding someone to do it for me. The wolf might be able to do horrendous things, terrible, nightmare inducing things but the man I was the rest of the time was nothing more than a coward.
I’d only been wandering around for a couple of hours or so when I saw her, glorious and enchanting in the dim light of the pole she happened to be standing underneath. At first g
lance I thought of her as nothing more than another street walker. There were hundreds in this damned place and they’d often fed the beast inside those times it was allowed free reign of the world, but there was something about this woman that wouldn’t let my gaze leave her sight, a darkness that the wolf could sense but I could not and the wolf wanted her with all its bestial heart. That wasn’t the purpose of that night though, I had gone out not to kill but to be killed.
A small war went off inside my soul at that moment, the wolf and I played a tug of war for control of my essence. I think I would have won, in fact I’m positive I would have won, had her gaze not met mine in the instant victory was in my grasp. Her head turned slowly toward me, our eyes locked, and in that moment, that very second, not just I but the wolf inside were under her spell. We were hers.
I felt all fight leave my body and for the first time in decades I was at peace. There was no more inner war, no battle for control (a battle I mostly lost) simply peace as the wolf and I finally came to an understanding. What that understanding was I’m at a loss to say, I only knew that we were hers and as I wandered over in a trancelike state I was sure I’d never been happier.
She was taller than I’d first thought, skinny but not to the point of being bone thin, and seemingly over-confident for a woman standing in the middle of one of the worst parts of the whole damn state. She exuded confidence, in fact, she exuded confidence like she had nothing to fear from the riffraff who drowned themselves in drugs and sex, who dulled their senses and looked for violence around every corner. I couldn’t say she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen but I wouldn’t say she was anywhere close to the ugliest; what I will say is her eyes shone brighter and fiercer than any I’d ever known and it was those same eyes that drew us both in.
What happened next I can only speculate at? I know the basics of it, she told me all about it afterward, hell, she reveled in it, but I don’t remember a thing. I almost never do when the beast takes over.
Sure, there are glimpses and small visions of what the wolf did while he used my body like a butcher’s utensils, slashing and ripping his way around the city but nothing major; just a red tinged nightmare of screams and snarling. I only know that when I awoke after the episode things were much like they normally were when it finally relinquishes control. I was naked, covered in the slimy bits of something that may have at once been a person, and my head was pounding like I’d been binge drinking for a week straight. That was where the normalcy ended.
Usually I awoke in a dumpster, or the middle of a park somewhere, fuck, once floating in a swimming pool with four corpses floating around me (two of them smaller than the rest though I try and tell myself that wasn’t actually what I saw), but this time I actually awoke in a room. Not a dingy dilapidated room like the corner of some old abandoned building but a nicely furnished parlor with a pleasantly warm fire heating my exposed body. While that was strange, the strangest part of all was the very same woman who had so enticed me earlier standing above me with a bright, beaming smile. I might have had a small panic attack if it weren’t for that same calm and soothing feeling once again taking hold, easing me away from the terror I would typically be feeling.
This was repeated several times over in as many weeks. I was feeling like the world was suddenly a perfect place, suddenly free of the horrible despair brought on by the wolf, while the wolf went on a chaotic rage, slaughtering anything within its deadly reach. I would sit and do nothing more than lounge around while the wolf would do whatever it wanted, or more appropriately whatever she wanted it to do as she had complete control over the both of us.
I’m not sure if she was a witch of some sort, or if she just had a soul as dark as the wolf’s and capable of trapping us but I came to consider her a witch none the less.
She loved having us go on a rampage, slicing and dicing our way through a plethora of no name prostitutes. The news barely seemed to even notice, a few small stories here and there about the multiple deaths, always somewhere toward the back pages, always stating the barest minimum of facts, and always ending with the phrase “police are investigating”. Anyone reading those stories knew damn well the police weren’t investigating a thing, and sadly, most people probably didn’t really care themselves. That was just life in Sauget. Bad things happened there all the time and most of it just went unreported anyway so the fact that a few things slipped through the press didn’t give anyone cause for concern. They just made sure to stay the hell away from that awful place.
I would have begged her to stop, to let us both go so that I could continue the search for my own destruction but there was something inside of me that just couldn’t stomach the thought of losing her and I feared upsetting her to the point she actually did let us go. It was true that through her influence I had lost complete control of the wolf and the beast was now running rampant, killing on a level it never had before but the peace I felt thanks to our new benefactor far outweighed any of the guilt I felt at the wolf’s actions. Don’t get me wrong, the guilt I felt at the death the wolf was dealing to Sauget ate at the back of my skull like a carnivorous insect had attached itself there, it was just that the witch’s influence was far beyond anything guilt could do to me.
There was a part of me that I fully believe was in love with the witch, but not in a way that I’d call healthy. A lot of people might call it Stockholm Syndrome, like Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army, I had grown overly attached to my captor, and make no mistake that’s exactly what she was, my captor. Even if I had wanted to leave, there was no way I could have, though my cage was less a thing of bars and metal and more an enclosure made up entirely in my mind. It wasn’t Stockholm Syndrome, it was undeniably love just a very different kind of love, a kind that wasn’t right, the kind of love a man has for liquor thanks to the calming effect it gives him. For many, the drink can help problems go away, at least for a time. It’s true that when the effects wear off the problems are still there, but for a time liquor makes your world just a little better. She was my liquor, my calm and it was that that I was in love with.
I tried to tell her I was in love with her once, that she was all that existed for me and despite the horrible things she allowed the wolf to do I would never leave her side. She simply laughed at me and walked away, leaving me standing there like a sad little puppy unsure what to do with himself. You’d think I would have wizened up right there, realized that the wolf was all she cared about but I still wasn’t ready to give up the peace she offered me. I wasn’t ready to go back to the way things had been before, despite the warning klaxons going off inside my head, despite the fact I knew what was going on was wrong. Unfortunately for her, despite how much I wanted to stay with the witch, how much I wanted to keep her at my side, her laughter at my love divided me.
A new war went off inside my head, a war I wasn’t used to. I had grown so used to the battle constantly being between myself and the wolf that I found myself unable to deal with a battle whose only participants were myself, the wolf wasn’t involved at all. On one side was the part whom was used to dealing with the wolf, the part who had been looking to end his life the first night I met my devil and savior. That side begged for me to consider reason, to think about what I was doing, to remember how I had felt before, those times I had woken in the entrails of the wolf’s victims night after night and wanted nothing more than death. It wanted me to be who I was before the witch, to continue my quest for the end of my own existence and in turn the end of the wolf.
The other part argued for my continued existence, that I was due a little bit of relief after years of suffering. It took little pity on the victims of the wolf, preferring to instead focus on my own pain and anguish rather than the pain the wolf caused others. That part felt that those killed were only the lower dregs of society who had made the choices that had led them to where they now found themselves. I on the other hand had never been given a choice, I was forced to be what I was and being able to finally feel pea
ce after so many years of torment was worth the death of a few prostitutes. It even made sure to remind me how much I loved the one who had given me such peace and sought to argue against the other half’s assertions that the love I felt wasn’t real love but a false feeling brought on by the release of the hell I had previously lived.
It was enough to drive me mad and after what eventually happened, that might have been the better option in the end. Events were to turn much worse though. In the middle of the battle between the two halves of me that were human the wolf decided to rear its ugly head. The wolf was used to always being the one involved in these split identity arguments and had never been previously left out. The thought of losing its place did not much appeal to the beast and seemed to give him a power that outweighed any control the witch had exerted over us.
In the middle of an argument between the human halves of my being, the wolf let out a roar (in my own head understand) and that previous argument was over. The wolf reasserted his dominance and those two halves of humanity were suddenly thrust back into one as the beast and I began our old battle once again.
It might be hard to imagine an argument between a thinking, rational human being and a brutal animal. Obviously there are no words to communicate between each other but what is articulated is far more expressive. Thoughts and feelings are transferred between each other in a way that words could never match. There are no words that have been invented since the beginning of human language that can accurately describe an emotion.
Even the terms used to describe the extremes of the emotional spectrum, love and hate, seem to just fall short. As confusing as it might seem to someone who’s never been through the experience of a nonverbal argument I can tell you that it’s actually a lot more informational.
The Bestiarum Vocabulum (TRES LIBRORUM PROHIBITUM) Page 35
