She Nailed a Stake Through His Head: Tales of Biblical Terror

by ed. Tim W. Lieder

  Judith leaned against the broadsword, foot playfully resting atop Holofernes' head. She rolled it back and forth along ball and arch. She wondered absently whether she could pick the head up with her toes, but it was heavy. She couldn't decide whether to grab the hair or pinch the nose.

  Judith's maid held Holofernes down. She shouldn't have been able to; he was a strong man. In his drunken flailing, he practically cut his own throat. Everything looked distorted - arms too big for bodies and heads ending at the hairline. Judith felt ugly - mannish - disgusted.

  Judith brought a manservant. He efficiently wrapped and removed the head, and Judith returned to entertaining on the harpsichord.

  Judith held a hand against the candlelight, and waited to let her eyes adjust to the darkness. Her maid knelt beside her, grabbing whatever rags she could find to wipe up the blood.

  "You're not the maid here," joked Judith.

  "Don't hold that sword so close to me," said the maid.

  Afterward, Judith wore a triumphant smile; always, she was applauded. Once Holofernes' head was off, he looked nothing like Holofernes. His body looked not like a man's body, but like a plucked chicken, silly and a little embarrassing.

  Judith took the prettiest heads on lecture tours. To these events, which inevitably sold out, she wore thick gold collars to emphasize the place where head usually met neck. She had dreams in which armies poured from Nebuchadnezzar's mouth. On good nights, she woke when Holofernes was still a lump in Nebuchadnezzar's throat. On most nights, he smiled as he worked past the jaws. Sometimes Judith dreamed that after she beheaded Holofernes, Nebuchadnezzar poured out of his neck.

  Judith didn't know how many times she'd beheaded Holofernes, but her husband stayed dead. He never came back. Not even once. She wrote some songs about it, and about the Lord, but they didn't help much.

  Jawbone of an Ass

  by Lyda Morehouse

  The first thing most people notice about my husband is his hair. It’s huge. He has tight crazy-curls, and it grows out, like a bad clown wig, despite his black Irish complexion. Then, most red-blooded women (and blue-blooded boys) tend to let their gaze linger on those bulging muscles. The neighbor ladies all peer at me jealously from behind lace curtains. They think I’ve found a real catch in Michael Morrison, hero of the Irish cause. I know better. Because, for me, it’s his eyes that always hit me first. God, I’ve come to believe, lives in those eyes, and God hates me.

  Morrison’s pupils should be unremarkable; his irises are dark and the shape of them kind of on the piggish side. Yet, even as he glances between the tellie and window, I wince in those few seconds his gaze lights upon me on the way to more important things. I feel their holy fire like a brand: burning me, setting my cheeks ablaze in a blush that sears my very center.

  My husband isn’t looking at me yet, despite the fact that I’m standing mere inches away from the table where he sits reading the Irish Times. I’ve been standing here for a few minutes trying to get up my courage to speak. I wouldn’t even attempt to bridge the chasm between us, if it wasn’t for my parents. Londonderry could burn with my husband’s wrath, for all I care. But my parents want the answer to his riddle or they will turn me into the SAS, the British Special Forces, for harboring a criminal.

  It’s a ridiculous charge since I am, after all, married to the man, but they have governmental strings to pull and I know my father could make the charge stick. Plus, my parents know where I live, and the SAS would never think to find Morrison here, in the “lace curtain” Protestant neighborhood of Londonderry. Moreover, even if they did, this is not the part of town one randomly raids. It’s simply not done.

  I shift my feet. His eyes continue to scan the newsprint in front of him. His face crumples with intensity, like Rodin’s philosopher, but from where I’m standing I can see he’s reading the sports pages. A brain trust, my lover is not.

  Lover is, perhaps, too strong a word. I’m not sure Morrison has ever felt anything for me in all eighteen months of marriage, not even lust. To this day I’m baffled as to why he chose to marry me. He and his soldiers just happened to be walking though the courtyard of my father’s estate on their way back to the dockyards. The spring morning was unnaturally warm, and mist formed along the riverbanks. The sun and the fresh tang of earth in the air after such a long, hard winter compelled me out of doors. The song of a lark caught my attention, and, by chance, our eyes met over the garden fence. He stopped like he’d hit an invisible wall. His men continued a few paces before they noticed their commander transfixed, presumably, by the vision of me in my dirty gardening overalls and wide-brimmed straw hat. At first I didn’t recognize him; I’d fallen too deeply into those bottomless black eyes.

  “She’s the one for me,” he said slowly, deliberately, almost as if the words were foreign to him and spoken through his mouth by another.

  His words broke the spell. Like waking from a dream, I suddenly saw the emblem of the harp on his chest, recognized the gray-green uniform of his men, and realized they were Provos - Provisional I.R.A. More than that, he was the infamous Michael Morrison who, according to legend, single-handedly defeated an entire battalion of British soldiers on the Bogside, knocking down the ghetto walls with his bare hands. Seeing him, I was too shocked to run. His men, too, seemed stunned.

  “Are you mad, man?” One of them said, “She’s British!”

  “I will marry her,” Morrison said, his voice still measured in that strange, singsong tone.

  Though my face was pale with fear, secretly I felt flattered. He was a legendary outlaw, the kind of rogue-hero you might read about in a romance novel. My parents would be horrified. They might even disown me. That too gave me no little thrill; especially as my father delighted in telling me I had a face like a horse, the kind only a monarch could love. In fact, my father had been desperately courting the favors of a certain young Windsor, a third or fifth cousin to the Queen, whom I found unbearably boorish. Not like this man. This ruffian standing in front of me was a wild, untamable thing, like the tight curls of his hair.

  I no longer remember the whirlwind courtship, such as it was, only the bomb threats from both sides, the angry shouts of my father, and the bitter tears wept by my mother. Tears I later shed myself on our wedding night when whatever passions possessing Morrison to pursue me withered. Since then, I have been little more than another piece of furniture occupying space in our Londonderry home.

  I clear my throat. Morrison continues studying the football scores, as though they held the same truths as Payne’s Rights of Man.

  “About the riddle you posed the other night,” I say.

  “Hmmm?” His eyes stay on the page.

  “I was just curious,” I say, trying to sound light, “what the answer was.”

  He looks up, revealing his face underneath the helmet of curls. Those black eyes pierce me as though they can see through my calm façade to the hammering beat of my heart.

  “Why do you want to know?” Despite myself, I still love his voice. He has a deep Connaught brogue that always seems whiskey-scratched and mellowed.

  To lie I have to look away, towards the window and the rain. “I puzzled at it all last night, and it’s driving me right mad.”

  “Truly.” He seems unimpressed.

  “Really, darling,” I tell the curtains, “you are my husband. I hate being left out of the secret.”

  I sneak a glance at him and see his eyebrow raise, as if to inquire why he should care. That’s when I start crying.

  “Now what’s all this?” He sounds more annoyed than concerned.

  My therapist warned me things like this would happen. She explained that my feelings were bollixed up thanks to the pressure of living with such a man as Morrison and being torn between him and my kin.

  I can’t stop the angry words from tumbling out of my mouth. “You never gave a damn about me, did you? I’m just part of some scheme! Like that crazy riddle of yours!”

  My words come out between gr
eat gasps of sobs. I hate myself for my weakness, but I can’t help it. I still want him. Never once has he touched me, not even a cuff in anger. On our wedding day, when the priest named us man and wife, the skin of his lips grazed mine, feather-light, almost not at all. Now, just like then, my body shakes with unrequited desire.

  I crumple into a kitchen table chair, and lay my head down on the cool oak and let the tears pour out. My therapist would say it is wonderfully cathartic, but I couldn’t stop if I wanted to. If only the damned Finnian bastard believed in divorce, I curse under my breath. It’s a lie, of course. What I want is just the opposite. I love being a rebel’s wife, and more, I love being this particular man’s wife. Despite myself, his crimes and sedition against Britain cause me to swell with pride and twist with shame.

  “All right, love. I’ll tell you.”

  Raising my head from my arms, I blink. “What?”

  “If it bothers you so much, I’ll tell you.” His eyes are soft, like his brogue, and almost kind.

  “You will?”

  “Dry your tears.” He hands me the kerchief from his pocket. As I take it, the very tips of our fingers touch. Breath leaves my chest in a huff. I feel as if someone has hit me hard, right in the solar plexus. He looks up, and our eyes meet, just as they did over the garden gate.

  This time, however, I’m not too stunned to see it happen. Something possesses him, or, perhaps, it is the much-whispered-about “Spirit of the Lord” coming mightily upon him. His body shifts as if someone is settling into him as you would a sofa. He looks around our tiny kitchen. His gaze sweeps the lace curtains covering the rain-streaked windows, the dust motes and crumbs in the corner under the stove and the teapot on the counter next to the unwashed dishes. Once oriented, he turns back to look at me.

  Morrison’s face is transformed. He looks softer, younger and almost...angelic. Yet this thing that watches me is not like the cherubs painted on the chapel ceiling. Instead, it is the kind of angel that wields a flaming sword, and I am the dragon it stands ready to smite.

  At that thought, I back away so fast that the chair topples, nearly bringing me down with it. “Who are you?”

  “I am who am,” it says with a smile unearthly in its joy.

  I recognize that answer and it chills me. When it speaks again, I see words form at the same time in a strange script glowing in the space above my husband’s head. The symbols form from right to left, and leave burning trails, like the flight of a firefly or swirls of a Guy Fawkes Day sparkler.

  There is no doubt in my mind that this is the word of God.

  “Do you understand?” It says, speaking in English without my husband’s customary brogue.

  Strangely, I do. Though the answer makes less sense than my husband’s riddle. I nod meekly.

  My husband’s face beams radiantly.

  I am pulling at the wet handkerchief in my hand. As I look down at it, anger, as if stealing flame from the burning bush, sparks in me.

  “That I am given the answer can only mean I’m destined to tell it. What if I refuse?”

  It blinks my husband’s eyes, clearly uncertain what I mean.

  I take a shuddering breath. “His plans don’t include me, do they? Even Judas got a kiss for his trouble.”

  It flees. I can see it move through Morrison’s body, rippling like wind across water. Then, Morrison yawns and stretches his arms above his head until his shoulders pop. Picking up the paper, he goes back to the sports and ignoring me.

  ***

  The Royal Ulster Constabulary doesn’t seem as surprised as I am when I stumble into the police station. I am out of breath, having run all the way up the hill from our house. The rain trickles down my back where it dribbles off my plastic kerchief.

  The officer whose desk I am panting in front of takes one look at me and picks up the phone. “She’s here.”

  He nods a few times in response to the voice on the other end, his posture straightening until I swear he’ll salute instead of replacing the receiver in the cradle.

  “You can sit there, ma’am.” The officer’s accent is pure Belfast, hard and nasal. As I look at his auburn crewcut, I think that if my husband had an accent like that I would have betrayed him long ago.

  I sink into the chair he’s offered, and set my purse on my knees. The police station is little more than a storefront. Desks and battered chairs are strewn around the space with such cluttered carelessness that I would have thought it a thrift store instead of a police station. I sit next to a large window. Sheets of rain patter against it in time with the clacking of someone’s keyboard. Through the glass I can see brick row houses in the Catholic area, below. On the side of the walls someone has painted bright white letters which read: “You are now entering Free Derry.”

  I sneer. It disgusts me that my father thinks of me as one of them: the dirty, rebellious Catholics. So much so that he is willing to send me to jail as a political dissident if I don’t tell these policemen the answer to Morrison’s riddle. Yet, I have to admit to myself the truth. My father’s threats may have compelled me to ask, but it is my spite for God that pushes me onward. That God has chosen sides in this dirtiest of holy wars angers me beyond words.

  “Damned bastard,” I say under my breath.

  “Our thoughts precisely, dear.” A crisp Oxford accent says, thinking I’m speaking of Morrison and not his maker.

  I look up, expecting to see a suit coat attached to the voice, but am surprised by a black commando military uniform, complete with side arm and the letters SAS on his breast pocket. He smiles when he sees me and the corners of his eyes crinkle, reminding me, in a surprisingly pleasant way, of my father. “Mrs. Morrison, I presume?”

  “I have the answer you’re looking for,” I say awkwardly without preamble.

  “Yes, yes,” he says taking my hand. His palm is soft and smooth - a gentleman’s hand. “Let’s talk about it like civilized people, shall we? Over tea.”

  Tucking my arm through his, he leads me past the tangle of mis-matched furniture to a closet door.

  “My office,” he explains with an embarrassed smile. An opened door reveals a desk and two chairs. Though the space is cramped, it is lovingly decorated. A framed poster of something by Matisse hangs on the wall, and a pathetic, if well-groomed, potted plant sits at the edge of the small desk. The tiny space is infused with the robust smell of tea.

  “Milk?” The SAS officer asks, stepping over the desk to retrieve a carton from a half-refrigerator tucked under the desk.

  “Please, thank you,” I say, taking the seat opposite him. I am not sure if I should close the door, but someone outside pushes it shut, leaving just a crack open for air.

  “I am Captain Andy Braithwaite.” He hands me a steaming mug, with another soft smile. “Now, dear, you said you had something for me?”

  “I...” I’m here, aren’t I? I should just be able to spit it out.

  Captain Braithwaite leans in on his elbows and gives me a measuring look. “Mrs. Morrison, you know that if we don’t get to the bottom of this, lives are at stake. British lives. Your husband, on the other hand, has agreed to turn over a cache of weapons if we can figure this damned thing out.”

  The closet walls feel too close. I take a gulp of tea and scald my tongue. Fate curls around me like a shroud, squeezing the breath from my chest.

  “Mrs. Morrison?”

  “I...” I honestly intend to deny it all. I want to say it has all been a mistake my coming here, that really, despite angelic possession and neglect, I love my husband and am a good wife. Instead, I tell the Captain what he wants.

  “It is Samson’s riddle to the Philistines, Judges 14:18,” I explain. “`What is sweeter than honey? And what is stronger than a lion? Out of the eater came forth the meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.’”

  “Clever bastard using the Bible like that,” Braithwaite says, scribbling my words onto the blotter under his keyboard.

  I raise an eyebrow, but can not spea
k. If only he knew which clever bastard is really waging war against him, against us all - the modern Philistines.

  I leave R.U.C. headquarters ten minutes later, without even thirty pieces of silver. Once the words fall out of my mouth, Braithwaite no longer needs me. He is on the phone to the P.M., the Taioseach, and half the United Kingdom. I can almost see the wheels of the military machine spinning behind Braithwaite’s eyes. When I get up and leave, there is no fanfare, no “thank you very much, we’ll be in touch,” nothing.

  The rain has slowed, and now it is just a kiss of cold wetness against my cheeks. I walk down the street toward the bus station. It isn’t like I can go home, after all. I can’t face those haunting eyes of the madman, my husband, though I do not even know for certain if he remembers what passed between me and God. He might be just as much a pawn as I in all of this. Except, of course, he’s on the winning team.

  The rain-darkened sidewalks glitter in the street light. Salt hangs in the breeze. Above, perched on a brick wall, a crow bobs its head and laughs at me. I pass an open window; inside I can see the neon-blue flicker of a television and two shadow forms huddling together on a sofa. The clouds are breaking. Here and there, I can see pinpricks of light, stars in heaven. It is turning into a beautiful night.

  I take in a deep breath, the first real one I’ve had all evening, and make a decision. I’m not ever going back to that brick house on the Bogside or to the man whose eyes penetrate me, burn me. No, I have an old friend in Dumcree who will take me in, no questions asked.

  The bus station is nearly deserted. The usual gaggle of unwashed, pot-smoking foreign boys huddle against the wall, probably having arrived too late to get a room in the youth hostel. The place smells of piss, and my heels stick wetly in places on the smooth concrete floor. After buying a ticket at the counter, I find a seat on a cold, plastic bench. Above me, a florescent bulb buzzes and snaps, sending a nauseating flicker of light onto my knit skirt.