Containment: The Death of Earth
Page 6
The first thing, at the very front, was a cloth bag. Wal-Mart. Inside were boxes marked CANDY. Cans labeled as CHILI, CHICKEN AND DUMPLINGS, OYSTERS.
She’d been going out—probably as he slept. Had he ever wondered how there was always produce on the kitchen counter? Right, the apple fairy.
There were two tall stacks of books within, precariously reaching the ceiling. He scanned titles: The Greater Key of Solomon. The Lesser Key of Solomon. The Book of Armadel. 777. The Book of Enoch. The Dead Sea Scrolls. The Nag Hammadi Texts. The Collected Works of Carl G. Jung. The Grimoires of Samael, Azzael, and other Learned Pandemoniacals.
There were books on botany, biology, medicine, astrophysics. There were 8 x 10 photographs. An old, grainy snapshot of a pretty but pinched-faced little girl with peculiar streaks swirling about her head…marked ‘Jeshua-age 6.’ Another marked ‘Rhine Institute, Duke University’ of a group of seven geek-serious adults, a sullen little girl standing in front of them. She seemed to get older with every picture. On the backs of the photos was neatly hand-printed “The Society of The Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans”. Listed were: Walter and Jeshua Saclas, Russell Tower, Heather Gunther, Peter and Yoo Xhang, Bold Moon MorningStar. With indigo Child Medium, Angela SaclasEX. Her ages listed: age 3, age 4, age 5 and so on. The pictures stopped with her at age 18. On the back of that final photo was scrawled:
“Animus ad amplitudinem Mysteriorum pro modulo suo dilatetur; non Mysteria ad angustias animi constringantur.”
“Let the mind, so far as it can, be open to the fullness of the mysteries; let not the mysteries be constrained to fit the narrower confines of the mind.”
Their motto?
The boy froze. In that final photo, they stood in the very same basement from which he’d had just emerged, rended and traumatized. They were all gathered in a wide chalk circle, wearing white robes. The child prodigy—Angela SaclasEX, now a young woman of 18—spun so fast in the middle of them that she seemed to half-vanish in ecstatic dance.
A message was at the top of the 8 x 10…in old blood.
It read: “lasciate ogni speranza roi ch’entrate”.
From Dante’s Inferno.
“All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”
He pulled out a cardboard box. It contained the severed heads of doves, what feathers remained crawling with mites. Each beak contained a coin, intended to implore or insult some ancient lord of the dead. And across what desperate sea had the souls of these birds been sent on a boat beset with icy waves?
The boy quietly closed the closet, leaving the room without awakening her.
His blanket wasn’t made from the wings of unfortunate angels.
The forbidden room at the end of the hallway beckoned.
The being within had its back to him. As naked as it was, the boy could tell this had no part of the human in it. It was so alien in appearance he couldn’t bear to look at it straight on. It stood up from a crouched position in the center of three circles, the outer being a ring of salt. The middle circle appeared to be some sort of smeared liquid-fat perhaps. Then the third and innermost was blood.
It whispered, “Shh sh sh. She is asleep.”
It held a practically newborn baby wrapped in an orange blanket to whom it had been softly crooning in a language of muted bells and otherworldly insect chirps. It was very tall, stooping beneath the ceiling.
“I have waited a long time for you. I knew you would come eventually. After I managed to put those messages in your book, I knew you would come. Soon. And I knew that you would arrive. Now.”
The words the boy heard didn’t match the movements of the creature’s shifting cleft of a mouth.
“Who are you?” the boy asked.
“I am Azzael who begat you on Exael’s get, who summoned, then imprisoned, me here.”
(“Give him up!”)
(“Release him!”)
(“Let him go!”)
Echoed.
From.
Far.
Away.
“Soon I shall be free,” it said to that echo, to they whom had tried earlier (that day? That hour? The time had gotten away from the boy. Oh, Time…) to free this being, not the boy.
“I’ve read that name. Azzael, one of the Watcher angels. Bene ha’elohim.”
“My coupling with her drove her insane, although she was pretty nigh unto madness before she invoked me. I came to her as a man and she kept me here until she conceived, and that was not immediate. I couldn’t hold my human appearance. It broke, and with my inhuman appearance, it broke what was left of Angela’s mind.”
“Angela?” the boy asked. “SaclasEX? From those pictures, I found in her closet?”
That might have been either a smile or a grimace on Azzael’s mouth. Or it was nothing.
“She killed all seven, her own mother and the human stepfather among them. You know, you saw their bones in the basement. They had wanted to build an army of Nephilim, but Angela had her own twisted ambitions, for herself, for a new family, a new army of her own. But when she left me to languish in her ingenious circle—both circle and straight lines simultaneously—she descended into the house bowels, putting the hooks into her own shoulders… Although we have not wings, nor scars from where wings were removed. She wasn’t merely insane but stubborn and steadfast in her deviant delusions, delusions about herself and the child that she wanted. She turned the crank, using psychokinesis, hauling herself up. She believed she’d failed, that she’d hallucinated the swelling of her belly, not nine months but nine hours/nine minutes/nine seconds.”
(“Give him up!”)
(“Release him!”)
(“Let him go!”)
Azzael sighed. “Soon, friends. Patience. It has gone on so long, a little more time until we reunite is nothing.”
It again spoke to the boy. “The baby—the Nephilim—you—came out in a wash of primeval waters and dark brackish blood, hitting the floor many feet below. The impact would have been the end of any normal child between man and woman. But you were fine. She swung and thought she flew. And when the hooks snapped from her flesh so that she fell, she was no longer Angela but… an Angel… In her head, anyway.”
The boy frowned. “Why is that baby here? I think I saw it before.”
What was it he felt, seeing the child? In his father’s arms? Was it jealousy?
The being looked upon the babe. “Angela brought her to me earlier this day. It was the first time I have seen her in this room since you were conceived. Strange, the twists of Angela’s brain. I do not understand if bringing me the child was meant to appease me, as if it were a sacrifice to soothe my wrath.” He almost chuckled. “I am not an eater of children.”
“What am I to do?” the boy said, not necessarily to this eerie alien thing.
“Leave this house! Now!”
The boy stopped. He looked upon the being. Upon the child in his…his father’s…arms.
“But I can’t just leave you. Maybe I can break her spell.”
Again, that swirling motion about the being’s mouth, revealing fangs and a dried-up leaf of a tongue that once might have had psalms and hosannas etched into it. These were now burned as the prayers in apocrypha.
“No, son. Shortly I will be released. You have felt and seen the ground shaking. So far that has only been outside this house. That could change. Grow worse. Go quickly!”
SNAP.
The boy was pushed and the door slammed shut. He fell backward into the hallway.
(Falling! Why, damn it? Always. Falling.)
Not even the key he stole from the Angel, from Angela, could reopen the door.
««—»»
Angela woke up in her bed to find herself tied by the wrists and ankles with the chains from the basement. Stripped naked, cold in gooseflesh.
The boy stood over her, one of the hooks she’d pierced his shoulders with held firmly, resolutely, in his hand.
“What are you doing, worthless mongrel?” she asked.
Nothing but a haughty smile, as if she knew.
There were no secrets kept from her.
No lies. No screens.
No weeping save for silently.
“I’m going to find out what this angel is made of,” he replied.
How she managed to free one hand… It grabbed his—the left one, not holding the hook—and squeezed. The boy dropped to his knees from shock, the hair all over his body singed.
She murmured something.
He demanded, even within her vise grip, “What did you say?”
“It’s your name, stupid. Or didn’t you ever wonder?”
He was permitted to draw his hand back. On the entire palm was an enormous blister, black, squirming with life so tiny he could only see it because of the sheer numbers. (A voice in his head, like the charcoal words he’d written in the Book. No-nonsense mutation.)
“Now you may continue,” Angela said, as if she were yet in control.
Silence. No weeping at all.
He opened her from throat to the meeting of the thighs.
««—»»
He stepped outside. It had just begun to rain. He saw the drops of blood on the sidewalk. He instantly cowered.
He wondered again. Had it been true? Did aggrieved angels lie wounded about him upon a world of retribution? If he looked out a few feet would the shattered marbles of his mother’s eyes, his real mother, the one who he wished to be real, be looking back?
But it was just water. Water from the sky. Washing the blood off him.
The ground began to shake again, spreading out with a mounting fury. Or was it now just everywhere at once? He ran down the street.
The ground rumbled and scratched at itself as if two personalities in a single mind were combating for control. The rumble whistled so high he thought his ear drums would burst. On the city skyline, he watched tall buildings first sway, then tumble. Houses collapsed and apartments pancaked. Sirens shrieked like whales beset by great white sharks. The earth beneath him was giving way, falling into the ocean.
He fell, down amid sudden fissures and gaping cracks, not unlike the pit that yawned that morning under the Angel…
No! Under Angela SaclasEX.
His mother.
He crawled out from the pit, dirt in his mouth. The black blister didn’t break as it hit a sharp stone.
He stood amazed. Where had the ocean gone?
It had retreated. Sucked away by a guardian who didn’t want him to drown? Behind him, where was the city? He was at the bottom of a pile of debris and bodies which seemed to stretch as far as he could see.
And, oh, he could see so far. As if he stood in a thousand places at north and south. Both where the ocean was colder and where it was warmer. As if he were where Time could be unbound, not restricted to an arrow, or traditional concepts of reality, where Space/Time’s dream of itself as a visual entity could also be malleable. If he was in one spot during the upheaval, he was in them all. He only understood this psychically, because the variety of landmarks meant nothing to him. His understanding was visceral, nothing had taught him…
Sunset.
Sunset.
Sunset… Strip.
Sunset. Sunset.
Sunset beyond a Golden Gate.
Sunset as glimpsed from Skid Row, as invisible from the old underground city.
Crater Lake, with a thousand-year old volcanic cone, Wizard Island. Water reflecting sunset as if the crater was filled with fire—which it was.
Sunset below and above.
Sunset for everyone.
But then, an enormous herd of giant white horses, so high, galloped toward the boy. The sea rushed back, sweeping him up with once bronze and glass towers, and the smashed cars, and mostly unrecognizable flesh. He tried to hold his breath against the salt water that struck him, as what an angel falling from Heaven must experience, at an impact which would disintegrate anything mortal. He tried to grab onto something to keep from being blown into the collective doom. Yet nothing still stood to clutch at. A ship flew past as if it had wings, its steel sides and keel splintering, thunderous and almost musical, as Gabriel’s horn must be.
Something struck the boy’s head—
The boy…
(What? Are you still nameless?)
(Yes, you are Nameless! She said it, your name, unless that was a lie, too!)
…grabbed whatever it was. He recognized symbols from the (Dream) walk-about earlier, the Alpha and Omega…
The surfboard.
Somehow, he got it beneath his feet.
And then he really experienced what it was like to fly.
Part Three
(25 Years Later)
The Myth of Original Sin
(Heaven and Earth Move Around All Tainted Apparitions)
“Nor dread, nor hope attend
A dying animal,
A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all.”
– “Death” William Butler Yeats
“How,” he said, “can a person who has spent his life cultivating bacteria, inoculating guinea pigs, rabbits, mice, horses and monkeys, posting about the dirty corners of the world in the study of epidemics; catching rats in foreign cellars; disinfecting, delousing, fumigating; looking at rashes, down throats and into other apertures of man and animals; breeding lice, bedbugs, fleas and ticks; examining sputum, blood, urine, stools, milk, water and sewage—how,” he repeated, “can such a person, who is not quite a scientist and nothing of an artist, presume to undertake a task which no one not an artist could successfully accomplish?”
– Rats, Lice And History
Hans Zissner
Narrator
Manic and catatonic Time, discover how the dream splits: the stuff of gnostic eidolon. If it makes of him a heretic, so are you all. Get in line; close your eyes.
Here I wait, parallel with zero. Absolute are the after world and the before. Foolish Man and Woman, you were always the church upon resurrected rock. You were always the altar and the incense, salvation and oblivion. All else is fitful moonlight through the long-vanished cedars of the desert.
EL ELOHIM, ELOHE, TZEBAOTH, ELION, ESCHERCHIC, ADONAI, JAH, JEHOVA, TETRAGRAMMATION, SADAY, YOD
AMEN! AMEN! AMEN!
Chapter 6
————
‘Dies irae, dies illa,
Solvet saeclum in Pavilla,
teste David cum Sibylla.
Quantus et futures
Quando judex ext veturus,
Cunata stricte discussurus;
Tuba mirum spagens sonum
Per sepulchral regionum
Coget omnes ante tronum.’
‘Day of anger, day of terror,
all shall crumble into ashes,
Witness David and the Sibyl,
What a tremor shall assailed them
when the Judge shall come to Judgment
shattering all at once asunder!
Sounds the trumpet with awful note
through the tombs of [deathly] regions
summoning all before the throne.’
– Thomas of Celano, 1250
————
Adam was used to cameras after all these years.
The interviewer began.
“Dr. Grigori, I notice you have a copy of that famous photo of yourself, taken after Pacifica. You were the very first survivor to make it out, only a couple of days after the event. They said your footprints were full of seawater, despite the blast having desiccated an already dry desert. You also have a list under the picture, posted on the wall behind your desk, enumerating what caused it.”
Adam Grigori smiled politely. Another interview. Another typical observation about ‘the list.’ He sighed, then answered. “We still don’t know what caused it. We had marvelous observatories—you’d think they would have seen a meteor, an asteroid, or a comet. And they did see them, yet it was always too late to report them…before Mt. Pa
lomar and the others were suddenly destroyed. People still postulate pet theories about some extraterrestrial trigger. Others maintain rockets or a nuclear device used by any of a number of terrorist groups with an ax to grind. Any nuclear device should have left behind substantial evidence, above and beyond the nuclear power plants.”
The photo had won a Pulitzer Prize: a teenaged boy walking alone and naked through a fall of glittering dust in Arizona’s Painted Desert. It was sunset but the usual colors on the western horizon were blacked out by the devastating clouds behind him through which no sun shined, even one about to be swallowed by the mountains. Lizards, tortoises, snakes, spiders, kangaroo rats, and jackrabbits littered the earth. Even cacti had been killed by the poisonous winds, thorny leaves—formerly as leathery as wings—crumbled at the slightest touch.
Should have been worse.
Adam nodded, smiling seriously as the interviewer continued.
The photo. The boy now the man before him. No memory, and the boy never found in any computerized records, never claimed by any family. His matricular DNA was inconclusive, and the nuclear DNA, the paternal side, made absolutely no sense.
“Could the effects you endured by Pacifica’s unusual circumstances actually mutated your DNA?”
Adam shrugged. “We’ll never know. The doctors pronounced me healthy. A phenomenon.” He said it with no ego, no condescension. Just fact.
The talk went on about how he was completely unscathed and unscarred, none of his organs nor one square inch of skin had been touched by water or rebellious land.
They had trouble guessing his age.
Despite his severe identity amnesia, he possessed a keen mind and a vast education he couldn’t account for. In addition to several modern languages, he also understood, to a large extent, Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Due to his height, sexual development, and other medical assessments, it was guessed that the young man could be about 18 or 19 years of age.