Blood & Gristle

by Michael Louis Calvillo

  Lau’s rouse was upsetting to say the least.

  Two years!

  Two years of after school lessons.

  When he thought about all that had been lost, all that could have been his over the past two years, Jonathon wanted to smash Lau’s old face in. To think, potential was being halted, possibly squandered, in favor of idiotic Eastern etiquette. His face went flush and his brain buzzed. He closed his eyes and twisted the streams of consciousness sluicing through the pink meat of his mind. A bend here, a shift there, a final tweak, a thought: BURN.

  When Jonathon opened his eyes Mr. Lau was sweating buckets. The old man was breathing heavy. He propped himself against a wall for support and rose a hand signaling for him to stop. Struggling with words he pleaded, “Good, but no more. We must work slowly.”

  Something big and sick, rage-full, a burning hole at Jonathon’s core pushed. His mind continued to weave Kotodama into cerebral pillars of fire. Lau coughed violently, wiped rivers of sweat from his soaking head and finally collapsed in a frail pile.

  The world in Jonathon’s head went blood red, seared and muddled, reality waving and sizzling like a desert mirage. Suddenly, the red overtook his inner vision and everything inside simply switched off. His brain of fire went instantly cold - lights out - as he fell helplessly alongside Mr. Lau.

  Hours later when he woke he felt like hell. His head pounded and his muscles ached. Acclimating to consciousness, Jonathon noticed that Mr. Lau was still crumpled besides him, unmoving, no signs of life.

  “Mr. Lau,” weakly, the words sputtering and half-made.

  “Mr. Lau, please…” weaker.

  “Mr…” Jonathon passed out again.

  The next time he woke his body felt much stronger. With great effort, Jonathon managed to stand. Mr. Lau remained still. He approached slowly. Within a foot or so of the old man, Jonathon leaned forward for a look. The kind, wrinkled face was puckered, skin dried and flaking from his aged skull like misshapen cornflakes. He looked like a sweaty, crinkly apricot with withered eyeballs and a dark craggy hole where his mouth used to be. Jonathon freaked.

  Thus began the end of his safe, albeit cruel, teenage world. Jonathon was officially a murderer, officially a man, officially free from school, from parents and puppy dog nonsense like his two-year crush on Ida Ridley’s toxic allure. He would have to start thinking about survival. No matter what happened he wasn’t going to jail. He wasn’t cut out for prison – he was too pretty, too young, too soft.

  Jonathon pilfered Mr. Lau’s car keys, his wallet and whatever else he could find of value from his pockets and the store. Stepping on the gas of Mr. Lau’s Honda Civic, he rocketed out of Chinatown and made for the unknown.

  Now the Basilisk.

  Now the power of Kotodama.

  Now the small mountain town of Sierra City, an entire township under his spell.

  Jonathon found a safe haven in his miraculous spell-casting abilities. Mr. Lau was right, he was a child of the sun (of fire), he was one of Amaterasu’s chosen.

  Fear drove him about two hundred miles away from San Francisco into the Sierra Nevada Mountains. He ended up in the mountain township of Sierra City after running out of gas. Empowered by the killing Kotodama that took Mr. Lau’s life, Jonathon began interlacing strings of characters within his brain. Apparently, the two years of study had paid off – he had indeed attained a bit of mastery. At the very least he could kill. Everything else, all other suggestion and mental implantation had to be easy in comparison. It was time to put his suggestive abilities to the test.

  First off, he needed a place to stay. Strolling into Sierra City Realty he went to work. Nerves continually broke his concentration, sweat gathered, the realtor looked at him perplexed. Jonathon stammered, buying time while his brain worked at commands. Finally, before the realtor gave up on the babbling ramblings of his rather unassuming teenage presence, the words aligned.

  He pictured a long, tunnel of ice in the center of his brain. The realtor’s eyes glazed over. The fruits of his labor manifest. Next thing he knew, without a comprehensible word on his part, Jonathon found himself hunched over a map with the realtor. She pointed out the location of his cabin. It was a little off the beaten path, a good three miles off the main highway. Dirt road access only. The realtor tackled the isolation problem with finesse, “absolutely serene,” she said completely unaware that she had just been brainwashed. It was as if she were talking to an adult.

  “I’ll take it,” he smiled and pushed with his mind. He had to circumvent paperwork and red tape – the cabin already belonged to someone. The ice tunnel twisted and turned as Kotodama looped, one into the other. By the time he was finished, sweating and woozy and nearing black-out, Jonathon managed to get a hold of the cabin keys and get the entire office of realtors to assist in deleting and destroying all information pertaining to the property. Mr. Flowers, the cabin’s true owner, was in for a rude awakening when he eventually came looking for his mountain getaway. With the last of his strength he shattered the ice tunnel and erased their immediate memories.

  He woke up twelve minutes later with the crowd of realtors hovering over him. They talked back and forth, puzzled over the young man passed out in their midst. Shaking it off and rising to his feet, he thanked everyone for their concern and stumbled out of the office before an ambulance could arrive. The realtor who had given him the keys followed him out to double check on his condition and to try to convince him to wait for medical assistance. There was concern in her eyes, but nothing else – no recognition, no trace of their business transaction flittering around in the gray space of her recomposing thoughts. To her he was just a whack-job who had a fainting spell in the middle of her otherwise uneventful work day.

  The power, the control, the sudden influx of omnipotence surged throughout Jonathon’s vein trails like ichor of the gods. Over the next six months he milked Sierra City for all it was worth. From his mountain cabin – nonexistent to all (save for those beyond his scope of influence, save for those beyond the city limits) – he ruled and depleted and took advantage of the unsuspecting populace. Anything he desired – women (he lost his virginity the second day into his reign), electronic equipment, beer – anything, was his.

  At first it was heaven. He planned to live in anonymity forever. But, as time advanced and his isolation grew, Jonathon began to reconsider his lifestyle. There was something to be said for friendships and shared experiences. He was beginning to regret the countless liaisons, sexual and otherwise. It began to matter what last night’s girl or yesterday’s video game salesmen or last week’s Ferrari dealer thought. The temptation to leave memory intact nibbled at the basis of his cognition. Perhaps he didn’t have to wipe everyone’s mind.

  But no, he was in way too deep.

  If one person caught on or remembered anything he was finished. Fifteen was such a powerless age. There was no way he could set things right. Not in Sierra City anyway. He had sucked the township nearly dry.

  But where could he go?

  How could he go back to teenage servitude?

  Jonathon had allowed himself to all but disappear and he felt supremely sick and empty. Remorse grew.

  Desire: fuck it, make friends, start over, curb the addictive tendency to implant suggestion. Kill the Kotodama, or at least slow things down.

  Reality: easier said than done. Jonathon failed to heed the complexity of Lau’s cautionary words: You become Kotodama and Kotodama becomes you.

  Like a junkie hooked on H, there was no way to return to standard interpersonal relations. When in contact with others the Kotodama began instantly, automatically chewing at Jonathon’s thoughts until he issued a command and implanted a suggestion. His cerebration became an army of oroborous, snakes upon entangled snakes eating their own tails.

  There was a time when he could have stopped it, but Jonathon could not pinpoint the moment of addiction, the moment control gave it self over. Intent on breaking his addiction, trips into town became l
ess frequent. The Kotodama back-flipped in his brain and urged, but Jonathon tried to keep himself as far away from potential victims as possible. He stockpiled Honey-Nut Cheerios and Soy milk and pudding cups and cans of chili con carne and wrestled with escaping from his own thoughts. The idea of subverting Kotodama, abandoning suggestion and working on other aspects such as incantation or conjuration, something, anything to keep him busy, grew from the quagmire of his warring grey matter out of desperation and sheer boredom.

  Jonathon started small. He stood on the front porch of the cabin and channeled the restless Kotodama back flipping within his skull in hopes of willing a rock out of thin air. For days upon days upon weeks he woke at the crack of dawn, stepped on to the porch and set to work. Before long: dirt clods. They would appear from nowhere, spin slow and then break into clouds of dust as he stumbled dizzy from the exertion. Weeks went by before he actually succeeded at willing a solid rock the size of his fist into being. It happened suddenly. Jonathon felt his head go swimmy and watched the rock float before him as if viewing it through a panel of undulating heat.

  Joy, joy, joy, before he passed out and fell into dreams of nothingness – when he awoke a short while later, the rock lay big as day, impressive, genuine, a few feet away. Day after day, all day, with nothing to do but concentrate and shape had finally paid off. His excitement made his hairs stand on end. And instantly the desire: more. He was ready for more. He was ready to conjure something dynamic. Despite all warning, he was ready to go deeper.

  As lost as Jonathon was in his conjurations he had allowed his supplies to dwindle. If he hoped to remain here he had to make a trip to town. More importantly, he had to get working on recapturing the populace in a haze of suggestion. Cops had already been by – a routine check – he was quick to erase their memories, but he suspected more visitors soon if he didn’t get back to the city and re-stake his claim. Dominion was definitely waning. Visibility was imminent.

  The rock of course halted any plans to leave. He knew he had to stay smart and go, but the rock, at long last the rock. It was solid and beautiful and real and conjured from thin air by nothing but the inner shifting of his miraculous brain. Trips to town be damned, the achievement was more than just a little distracting. Town could wait a little longer. Hell, maybe he would create his own city.

  Without much thought on the matter he went right to work on a living being. Again, he would start small – this time a harmless lizard, just to see if he could. After only a day’s concentration it worked. The creation of the rock must have initiated the proper neural paths. Conjuration time dropped from weeks of concentration to mere hours. Jonathon thought about a lizard and after a few hours of twisting a flash of scaly skin flooded his image centers. Before he got a good look at his handiwork, his hairs danced in prickly affirmation and exhaustion brought him down yet again. Consciousness drifted away.

  Success! On his very first try, success!

  He hoped the lizard didn’t run off before he came to.

  Anti-dreaming, smiling, success.

  Except later, when he awoke, instead of a tiny reptile scampering to and fro he got his first glimpse of the basilisk. It was nothing like the tiny lizard he envisioned in his mind’s eye before passing out. It was dinosaur like in size – komodo dragonish. Needless to say Jonathon’s delight did not return with his awareness. He leaped three feet into the air and screamed like a girl.

  A few hours of sheer concentration one moment, the next a two-ton monster perched two feet away. Jonathon’s fright made his tongue swell and his eyes sting. Sweat dripped from everywhere. He ran into the cabin and slammed the door behind him. The beast loafed around for a few hours as he peered at it through the front windows. It didn’t seem aggressive or angry, nor did it try to eat him while he was passed out. Gathering his courage, Jonathon dug through the mountains of stuff he had taken from town and grabbed a chain and padlock he had pilfered from the hardware store (why steal a chain and padlock? Because he could. That’s why). He exited the cabin and approached the lizard very, very, very slowly. The basilisk crouched on its hunches and locked him up with a steely gaze.

  The stare liquefied all thought. Jonathon’s brain felt like it was swirling within his skull semi-solid. The basilisk pushed harder. He closed his eyes and shook it off. Refusing to allow the beast’s glare to penetrate deeper, he looped the chain around its scaly neck and in a trance-like state led the basilisk into the cabin where he chained it to an exposed cluster of water piping. No fight. No clawing or snapping. Pale as a ghost, head throbbing, feeling violated and less, Jonathon collapsed on the leather couch he had falsely purchased from a high-end furniture store in town.

  Why he didn’t leave or attempt to kill the creature was beyond him.

  Why he was trying to sustain it was beyond him.

  He was simply too drained to even think and after a few days of avoiding the basilisk’s stares he finally had to go into town for supplies and damage control. During the trip Jonathon had a tough time focusing. He visited the library and scoured the internet for information, but had to give up when his head started aching. The basilisk’s first glaring intrusions had definitely done some unidentifiable harm to his brain chemistry. It had managed to implant an odd disquiet within his being.

  Mr. Lau, over and over again in his brain: You become Kotodama and Kotodama becomes you

  The game was never ending. The basilisk thrashed and smashed anything Jonathon gave it. All it wanted to do was lock eyes. Ever since day one, with the exception of a few accidental glances over the weeks, Jonathon refused the beast. Avoidance however was getting to be too much. He wasn’t sleeping. He wasn’t eating or showering or doing anything beyond trying to figure out how to placate the basilisk. He went to town and walked amongst his brainwashed denizens with the gait and presence of a corpse. The search was all-consuming. Everything he brought back with him was rejected, tail-swatted, stomped.

  Leave, his brain pleaded.

  Leave, leave, leave.

  But the demand was futile. He was trapped. The basilisk was in control.

  When the answers finally surfaced, originating in the goopy fluctuations of Jonathon’s heart, the core of the basilisk’s disturbing internal presence, they seemed so obvious. At once, Jonathon rushed outside and drove his new Ferrari into town laughing at his stupidity, at his omission of the apparent the entire way in. He finally knew what to feed a basilisk.

  Driving onto the lawn of Sierra City Elementary produced a large ruckus. Administrative employees crowded around and children gaped wide-eyed along the periphery. He got out of the car, mowed the crowd with a wave of Kotodama and snatched two small children, a little dark-haired boy and light-haired girl about the ages of six or seven. Speeding back to the cabin he could feel a calm spreading throughout his internal organs. This is what it felt like to get things right. Jonathon smiled big and stepped on the gas. His head swam with reptilian praise. The cries of the children shoved into the anti-backseat of the Ferrari swirled into oblivion and threaded his thoughts with what could only be characterized as sweetness.

  Jonathon grabbed both kids and lugged them into the cabin. He threw them to the basilisk and then sat on his leather couch. The world around him fractured and fragmented. Everything felt right. For the first time since the basilisk’s conjuration the odd alarm at his core evened out and subsided.

  The drug-like hold of the beast subsided a bit. Jonathon puked and shook and thanked heaven he was lucky enough to have faded out during the feeding session. Unfortunately evidence of the slaughter was in ample supply.

  Kid parts: unrecognizable.

  Kid clothes: shredded.

  Kid blood: everywhere.

  The basilisk was covered in viscera and hair and all manner of human refuse. Its forked tongue darted in and out, rolling in the large puddle of blood that spread out from under and around the monster. Jonathon puked again. The basilisk strained against its chain in an attempt to lick it up. This made Jonathan puke
yet again, widening the small lake of vomit already steaming at his feet.

  The arrangement was simple. Keep the basilisk well fed and happy and everything, save for guilt, felt good. Let the basilisk go hungry and everything ached and liquefied and felt like complete hell. Jonathon fought tooth and nail, but to no avail. As the days passed the need grew and grew, until it was all he could do to keep from ripping his own head off and throwing it deep into the woods. Luckily, guilt be soothed, the basilisk didn’t solely require children. They were less cumbersome to handle and fit the Ferrari, but with a little Kotodama adults were swayed and led to their doom just as easily. Jonathon had to park his sports car and acquire a truck though.

  He followed the status quo for several weeks before the basilisk started to push for something else. It worked feelings within Jonathon and after a few days of agony the message came clear. He wished the communication between him and the basilisk didn’t require so much damn pain, yet what could he do? He didn’t imagine the basilisk would be learning to speak English anytime soon. The eyes then.

  They whispered: conjuration. The implication broke through loud and clear.

  Conjuration.

  As with all things of late, Jonathon had no idea what life form the basilisk was hoping for. His brain seemed to operate on two planes of consciousness. One was his fifteen-year-old cognizance: doubtful, nervous, guilty, powerless to stop the wheels of destiny he unwittingly set in motion. The other was ruled by the basilisk. Though it took a little time to establish serpentine authority, the lizard’s power was deep-seeded. It pulsed, maddening at the base of his cerebration. When the basilisk wanted something, say human flesh or what have you, its hegemony spread like a river of red and flooded away all rationale or control Jonathon thought he had. Next thing he knew, on auto-pilot, a trip to town yielded a brain-washed victim. Next thing he knew, several intensive nights of building unfamiliar Kotodama resulted in the birth of something else, something dark and soulless.