by J. R. Mabry
Before he could continue, Charybdis interrupted. “Look, I know we’re not going to see eye to eye. And I’m sorry I was so rude to you guys last time we met. But I’ve lost two lodge brothers to this stupid plan, and I don’t want to lose another one. Especially Larch.”
Richard whirled on him. “You’re saying Larch is doing this working? I was certain he would delegate it. He’s…” he wanted to say he was too important but realized that Charybdis might find that offensive.
“No,” Charybdis said. “He’s opted to put himself in harm’s way before asking any of us to do it. Regardless of what you all think of him, he’s not a bad guy.”
He turned and looked straight at Richard. “By the way, did you send a bunch of Latino guys to rough him up?”
Richard ignored the question. “Just stay out of the way. We don’t want you getting hurt, too. And Kat, same goes for you.” He grabbed a kit bag from Dylan and tossed it to Terry.
Both Terry and Dylan got to work. With practiced efficiency, they dropped to one knee, undid the bags, and began to stock their belts and pockets with whatever they might need to meet the dangers of the next hour.
“How about us?” Kat asked. “How are we supposed to defend ourselves?
Richard opened the trunk again. He took out a smaller bag and pulled out two crucifixes and a couple of bottles of water.
“Is that holy water?” Kat asked.
“It soon will be,” Richard said, dropping to one knee himself and fishing around in his kit for his liturgy and salt.
In a few minutes, they were ready to go. “Time?” Terry asked. Richard looked at his watch. “Eleven. Still plenty of time, unless they start early, that is.”
“Midnight’s a pretty auspicious time for working demon magick,” Terry pointed out.
“Yeah, but Dane might want to beat us to the punch,” Richard countered. “I say we shouldn’t tarry.” He turned to Charybdis. “Best way in?” The magickian shrugged.
“Ah say let’s go over the wall and through the hospital room.”
“Don’t you think the old Dane will raise the alarm?” Terry asked.
“Not with me holding Solomon’s Ring, he won’t,” Richard said, leading the way toward the hedge. A random muscle in his belly began to shudder involuntarily, and he tightened his diaphragm and willed it to be still. The voices in his head were gaining volume, reminding him of all the reasons that he shouldn’t be doing this: because he wasn’t worthy, because he was a fake, because he was a sinner, because the demons would eat him for a midnight snack. He ignored them all and put one foot in front of another.
As they approached the hedge, the Howler hissed at them, still curled into a protective ball near the wall. Richard aimed a kick at the side of the monster’s head, and enjoyed a surge of satisfaction to feel it not only connect but bang into the wall behind it as well. The demon roared, but Richard kept marching, followed by the others.
At the far end of the hedge, Richard positioned himself, dropped his bag, and intertwined the fingers of both hands to give a leg up to whoever would go first.
Terry stepped up without hesitation. Hoisting his elfin frame was effortless, and in moments Terry had spread his own jacket over the broken glass and barbed wire at the top of the fence. He jumped down and called a quiet “All clear.”
Richard helped Kat up next. “Shit!” she whispered as she jumped from the wall.
“What?” Richard called.
“Cut my hand on that damned glass!” she practically moaned.
“Careful,” Richard said to Dylan. To Charybdis he said, “Help me with him.”
“Thanks, dude,” Dylan said, sarcastically, but didn’t refuse the extra help. With not a few grunts and groans, he cleared the wall and jumped to the other side with an “oaf!” that was just a little too loud for Richard’s comfort.
“It’s okay,” he told himself as he helped Charybdis up, “if they’re doing anything really dangerous, they’re not going to notice us anyway.”
Once Charybdis was over, Richard, taller than the rest, jumped and grabbed the barbed wire through Terry’s jacket. Once he secured a grip that wouldn’t rip through his flesh, he swung his leg up, caught the edge of the wall, and rolled over the top of it, almost landing on Charybdis’s head on the other side.
“You’re supposed to move out of the way,” Richard said, kind of by way of an apology for almost flattening his skull. “You guys don’t do a lot of this kind of stuff, do you?”
“You mean breaking and entering? No.”
“It shows.”
Terry tried the door, which, not surprisingly, turned out to be locked. Terry reached into his kit and pulled out a crowbar. “No time for subtlety,” he muttered, and with a single swing shattered the glass door. Terry reached his hand through, unlocked the door, and opened it. Without another word, they followed him inside. Richard brought up the rear but was momentarily irritated to discover that the group did not progress once inside. Soon, he found out why.
The elder Dane sat erect in his bed, unnaturally, without support. The old man’s eyes were bloodshot and wide. His thin slit of a mouth was drawn back into something halfway between a smile and a grimace. Thin wisps of hair floated above his head by some sorcery of static electricity, creating the appearance of an old man peering at them from beneath the waves.
Dane the elder ignored all but Richard. He speared the prior with the sharpest of glares. “My son is in the great hall,” the otherworldly voice sprang from the old man’s lips. “I trust, Priest, that you will not forget our agreement?”
All eyes turned to Richard, who kept his focus on the demon in the old man suit. “I remember,” he said. “I’ll be true to my word. Anything else we need to know?”
“Probably not,” the old man sank back into his bed with a wheeze that itself sounded lethal. “I could say, ‘Watch your ass,’ but you won’t survive it anyway.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Richard said, taking the lead and striding out into the hallway.
“Okay,” Terry said, trotting on his shorter legs behind him. “Exactly how many devils did you make deals with? And is this something I need to be worried about?”
“I promised him dibs on my complete collection of ’60s-era Playboys if I croak, so see that he gets those, will you?”
“Uh-huh,” Terry said. “Remind me to give you the brushoff next time you ask me an important question.”
The hallway was dark, and their feet moved soundlessly on the thick carpet. Their eyes were restless but diligent, keen for any sign of opposition.
They hadn’t long to wait. Rounding the corner, Richard froze. Terry ploughed into him, but the others took note before adding to the collision. “Holy shit,” Richard breathed. Without looking behind him, he spoke quietly but evenly, just loud enough for them to hear. “Back away. Don’t let them see you. Back the fuck away.”
But Terry had already seen, and his crowbar slipped from his hand to the floor with a ringing clang that guaranteed they would not escape detection.
One by one, the others disobeyed Richard’s instruction, stepping out around the corner and halting, either dropping their jaws, wetting themselves, or both.
Richard felt his flesh crawl under his cassock. The temperature had fallen to below zero, and breath issued forth from his mouth in a frosty haze that obscured the terrible scene before him.
He blinked and struggled to take it in. The massive dining room, which could easily accommodate nearly a hundred diners, was filled to standing capacity with a grand assortment of demonic hosts.
Moving his eyes from left to right, he took them in: Brush demons, with their sandy, scaly skin, flicking their tongues, observing him with their multiple stalked eyes; Howler demons, like a host of tall explosions frozen in time, leering down at him and screaming; Painter demons, capable of shooting streams of inky blue poison hundreds of feet from glands on their gilled necks; Gunthers, diminutive imps that were about as intelligent as d
ogs but far more antisocial and dangerous, named for the eighteenth-century German occultist that had first summoned them from the pit and set them loose upon the human world. These and many other species too numerous to catalog faced him, barring his entrance to the Great Hall, heralding the end of his sad, sorry struggle to survive.
“Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner…” Richard began, as the front line of the demonic horde, composed mainly of Howlers, began to close the meager yards that separated them.
Richard, panicked, spun his head to one side and then the other, looking for an exit. He could always turn and run back the way they had come, but he knew the Howlers would close the distance in two quick bounds. A door to the kitchen was directly to his right, about fifteen feet away, but one of the Sand demons was already headed for it, anticipating this strategy.
The yards had quickly closed, and Richard could feel the chill of the demons’ breath. “Ideas?” he called over his shoulder.
“There aren’t enough crucifixes in the fucking Vatican to keep this crew at bay!” Terry cried. “Now is probably a really a good time to pull out that ring.”
“But I don’t know what it will do—to me or to them!” Richard argued.
“I can tell you for sure what’s going to happen if you don’t use it,” Terry countered, “and it’s going to happen quick!”
Maybe I can just show it to them, Richard thought. Maybe that will be threat enough. He stuck his hand into his pocket and pulled out the ring, even as one of the Howlers hovered above him.
He plunged his right index finger into the ring and held it up for all the demons to see. The Howler recognized it at once and took a step back. Even the Sand demons hesitated. But to the Gunthers it meant nothing. Capable of only rudimentary thought, it was as inconsequential to them as any other piece of clothing.
They appeared not to have noticed that the larger demons had stopped advancing, and soon Richard saw a wave of Gunthers scrambling over their larger, more intelligent kin, closing their distance fast. A group of three of them in the lead, moving almost in formation, leaped the final three yards.
Richard saw them coming and crouched. “Shit!” he shouted and at the last possible moment punched at the flying Gunthers with his right hand, the red glow of the ring piercing the dim light of the room.
He wasn’t sure what to expect. Perhaps an explosion, perhaps the terrible rending of his soul, but it was nothing like that.
Time froze. The universe deconstructed. He saw himself, at a great distance, arm upraised as if greeting the Gunthers, a frozen tableau in a museum of the occult arts. But he took little notice of himself because all that is was also frozen in time before him. Every creature, every interaction on Earth, was visible and immediate to him. Other worlds were likewise on display, with all their myriad inhabitants, their situations and dramas. His mind nearly snapped with the magnitude of it, but some grace touched and contained him, and his perception took on even greater dimensions. What lay before him was not simply all of space but all of time as well—the hard record of the past and all the malleable, possible futures spread out like a million strands of yarn secured to the single point of the present and exploding into infinity.
There, clearly visible, was his own past and uncountable futures, possible loves, a thousand possible deaths. He witnessed these without concern, as one tiny part of a whole so vast he could literally feel himself teetering between comprehension and madness.
As he breathed into this new revelation, another facet of experience assaulted him—an overwhelming attack of compassion. He did not witness all of time and space as a distant observer but as a participant, for even the sensations of the tiniest microbe were experienced as if they were happening to his own body. Every joy, every tear, every grievous sigh, every cruelty, every sting of pride or hatred or envy, every prick of pain, every ache of longing or love or loss that ever was and ever could be, he felt as if it were his own. Indeed, it was his own.
Amid the cacophony, without effort, he felt his own insecurity and despair, his crushing sense of unworthiness. And he loved it. He loved all of it. Every creature, on every world, every rock, every sensation, every potential future he loved. His heart swelled within him, but this heart was larger than the universe—it contained it, indeed it held it, protected it, sustained it, caressed it, married itself to it, worlds without end.
His love for all that is, was, and ever would be pierced his consciousness like a lightning strike, becoming the single-pointed source and end of all of being, a point that exploded with the ferocity of a billion orgasms.
71
Richard blinked, unable to assimilate what he was seeing. Terry seemed to be hovering over him, floating in free space. Then Dylan’s face drifted into view, followed by Kat’s. He grinned warmly and broadly at them, wondering if perhaps he were in Heaven, or dreaming. Then he saw Charybdis’s face, and it all came rushing back—the demons, the danger, the vision, and now, apparently, him lying on the floor in a pool of his own piss grinning stupidly at the ceiling. And he was fine with it. He knew that only moments before, he would have found his situation humiliating, disconcerting, even untenable. But now it just seemed right and proper. Of course he would fall to the floor. Of course his friends would be staring down at him in concern. Of course he would have voided his bladder when blessed with a glimpse of unmediated Reality.
His brain seemed to still be in shock from the vision, unable to fully contract to the limited field of perception afforded by his senses yet no longer receiving the information that had, only moments ago, lit up every receptor in his brain simultaneously. Although the vision had been withdrawn, the memory of it continued to shake him. He had seen the universe as God sees it; had seen all things held in love; had seen himself utterly embraced in grace, without condition, without even a hint of the judgment that he feared and so mercilessly applied to himself. He had seen only beauty—in himself, in the world, in every creature. Even in the demons.
The Eye of God, indeed, he thought. And he laughed. He laughed for all the pointless years he had carried around all that guilt and shame and anger and self-loathing that had so marred his life and his experience of the world. With great explosions of joy and relief he doubled over, laughing at all the wasted time and energy, at all the prejudice and bloodshed and hatred that had so seared the troubled world of men.
“What a waste!” he cried aloud, staring up at his friends.
Kat exchanged confused and concerned looks with Dylan and Terry. “What’s a waste, dude?” Dylan asked him, hesitantly.
Richard didn’t answer him. Overall, two things remained to him—a sense of almost infinite insignificance, coexisting simultaneously with the awareness of being loved powerfully and without reservation. He rose, light of heart and afraid of nothing. For he knew in his very bones that, despite all that was happening, nothing at all was amiss that could not be set right; that “all will be well, all will be well, and every manner of thing will be well.”
Staggering slightly, Richard surveyed the damage. The room was literal pandemonium. The three Gunthers that had come in contact with the ring were twitching and immobile at his feet. The Howlers were climbing over each other to jump out the windows—anything to put distance between themselves and the ring. The Sand demons and others were cowering in confusion, bringing up the rear of the Howler’s escape.
Richard knelt by the Gunthers. “Hey, little guys, it’s okay.” They seemed to be breathing, but their eyes were glassy and sightless. Richard felt sad in his soul for them. For all of them. He stood and addressed them, even as they tumbled out the tall windows.
“Where are you going? God is out there, too! Where can you go to escape him? What are you afraid of? Everything is fine! Everything is going to be okay! You’re going to be okay! I’m not going to hurt you. The ring won’t hurt you! No one is going to hurt you!” He had walked right up to them, gregarious, pleading, and unafraid. The closer he got, the more they cowered, the more f
rantically they scrambled over one another to get out of the windows.
Rather, what once had been windows—they were now shambles. Broken glass spilled out onto the lawn outside, and great chunks of the wall had been taken out where two largish demons had refused to take turns exiting.
Richard walked to the wall and switched on the lights. “No need for all this gloom,” he said, to no one in particular. By now the last of the large demons was gone, and the smaller ones were trailing out.
Richard walked back to where his friends were standing. They were still huddled together, mouths open, and Dylan was shaking his head. “Dude, you got fucking nuts the size of a monstrance.”
Terry broke from the pack and rushed up to him, taking his hands in his. “What happened, Dicky? What did you see?”
Richard stopped and looked up, remembering. He smiled. “I saw everything. I saw it as God sees it. And I loved it. All of it.” He turned and looked at the damage left by the fleeing demons. “Even them.” He turned back and poked Terry on the nose. “Even you,” he said, and leaned over, kissing Terry on the top of the head. Terry raised one eyebrow so high it looked to Richard as if his forehead might snap.
“Dude, do you think you’re mentally stable enough to continue?” Dylan asked, walking over to Richard and placing a hand on his arm.
Richard looked him in the eyes and beamed with sincerity. “Dyl, I have never felt better in my entire fucking life. Let’s go tell these magickians just how much we love them,” and he set off toward the doors leading to the Great Hall.
“That was not exactly mah plan,” said Dylan, looking nervously at Terry and Kat. Charybdis stood with his hand to his mouth, uncertain whether to follow. But as the others walked away, he looked around and, eyes widening at the sight of all the destruction, trotted to catch up to them.
Richard took the lead with his head held high, his shoulders broad and square, and his eyes shining. Dylan and Terry were close behind him, kit bags over their shoulders, flourishing crucifixes with vials of holy water at the ready.
