by Edward Lee
No one was here.
Where is everybody, goddamn it! she demanded. It’s past midnight, and everybody’s gone!
In the kitchen, she tried to calm herself down. She drank some juice, wishing it were scotch. This was inexcusable. Martin must be at the bar, getting drunk. And Melanie must be with these new weird friends of hers. And her mother, and Milly, where could they be this late?
Images of the dream felt like splinters in her brain. She felt so disgusted she wanted to throw up. She’d been raped by women, by a hideous milk-spurting phallus and a fist. She’d watched Maedeen urinate into her father’s face. Where did Ann’s mind dredge up such obscene, pornographic imagery? What would Dr. Harold say? What did it mean?
Worse was that it seemed so real. Her sex and rectum ached dully. Harold would claim the dream meant she didn’t trust anyone, that she subconsciously feared those who seemed the most innocuous. And as for the dull ache, “conative sensory dream-supplantation,” he would say, or something similar. “It’s common for tactile stimuli to linger after night terrors,” he’d told her once.
Her mind felt like a meld of ground meat. She could scarcely distinguish between dream and reality these days. What had happened today? The store, Maedeen’s files. Had that been a dream too? No, no! she felt certain. It couldn’t have been! She’d seen the birth records. In the last fifteen years over a dozen male babies had been born, and they’d all been put up for adoption. Why? Why were the only men in Lockwood transients? Why were the only children girls?
Simmer down, she thought. She went back upstairs, to her room. She hated it here. She wanted to be back in the city, back at the firm. Everything was going wrong. Martin and Melanie had never been more distant. Her mother’s disapproval of her had only intensified. Nothing was right.
Spikes of the dream returned. The mocking, naked women. The bizarre pendants between their breasts, and the even more bizarre words. They’d implied they wanted Melanie for something.
…she’s a virgin…she’s just what we need for…
Surely Dr. Harold would claim this was only her subconscious symbolizing her fear of Melanie’s vulnerability as she approached adulthood. Why did Ann sense something phony about it all?
Through the curtains, she peered at the moon. The moon peered back. Something about the dream pendants bothered her. The pink moonlight seemed to jar something loose. The pendants, like little stones. Of course, she realized. They seemed to bear the same cryptic symbol in her recurring nightmare of Melanie’s birth. Rough, misshapen double circles.
Ann, Ann, a voice seemed to drift in her head. She was suddenly exhausted. Was she dreaming standing up?
The moon shimmered.
Go back to bed, Ann.
Ann yawned, vigorously shook her head.
Go back to sleep…
She climbed back into bed and buried herself beneath the covers.
Go back to sleep and dream…
—
Chapter 26
“It’s English,” the old man said without pause.
Dr. Harold didn’t understand. “English? But how—”
“Old English, Doctor. Or I should say it’s really more of an amalgamation, a rough mix of specific linguistic influences. Old English, Old Saxon, Old Frisian, and…something else I can’t identify. Something that looks older.”
Dr. Harold was at this moment sitting in the faculty office of one Professor Franklin M. Fredrick, who had been referred to him through the campus information desk. Fredrick was the head of the archaeology department, and also an expert on mythology and ancient religion. Various degrees decorated the cramped office, as well as many relics. Dr. Harold had brought Erik Tharp’s entire hospital file in hopes that Fredrick might shed some light on the technical aspects of Tharp’s delusion.
“I use the term Old English as a generalization,” Fredrick was saying, scanning the transcripts of Tharp’s narcoanalysis and psychotherapy sessions. “What I mean is the language of the island of England, or Angle-land, before it became influenced by the Germanic invasion of about 450 A.D. The scant Latin derivations are obvious, from the Roman Occupation of 55 B.C. Old English is a coalescence of tongues, and unique in its incorporation. But this…” He tapped one of the sheafs. “This is unusual.”
“How much of it do you think is invented?” Dr. Harold asked.
“Invented?” The old man looked at him, puzzled. “None of this is invented, Doctor. All of these words are real.”
But that was impossible; he must not understand. “Tharp is an escaped mental patient. We’ve determined that he escaped for a reason specific to his delusion.”
Professor Fredrick looked the part: keen-eyed in his weathered face. Countless digs and years in hostile sun had toughened his skin to the consistency of tanned leather. He was probably sixty but he looked a hundred. On his cragged hand a gold ring glittered, whose mount centered a pebble from Golgotha.
“Is Tharp a professor or language expert?”
“Oh, no,” Dr. Harold replied. “He’s a drug burnout. He never graduated high school.”
Fredrick seemed to smile cynically, if the toughness of his face would permit a smile at all. “That’s difficult for me to believe, Doctor. This mental patient of yours—this drug burnout—is using terms, syntactical structures, and even particularized inflections that are twenty-five hundred years old. And he’s doing it perfectly.”
Dr. Harold looked at him. The old man must be overreacting. Tharp had done well on the standard IQ batteries, but he was essentially uneducated.
“Let me give you some background,” Fredrick offered. His voice, like his face, seemed frayed by the impairment of years. “The island of England is linguistically unique simply because of its geography. The basis of the English language is a direct reflection of the major invasions of the island. The Celts, in 600 B.C.; the Romans, in 55 B.C.; and the Saxons, in 500 A.D. But before the initial Brythonic, or Celtic, invasion, there was another society that we know very little about. They were called the Chilterns, and they had a language all their own. So it is actually the Chiltern language that provides the first root of English.”
“What’s that got to do with Tharp’s vocabulary in those transcripts?”
“It’s not just the vocabulary, Doctor, it’s the syntax too, and the conjugations. Tharp seems better versed in the Chiltern language than the entirety of the archaeological community.”
That’s ridiculous, Harold thought. “Can you translate any of the words?” he asked.
“I can probably translate all of them.” Fredrick pointed to a random page. “This word here, hüsl—it means to sacrifice. An interesting thing about the Chiltern-influenced forms of Old English is that there was little distinction between common nouns and transitive verbs. Hüsl is a good example. It also means sacrifice victim.”
“What about wreccan?”
“Slave. The a’s, strangely, are masculine, and o’s are feminine. Hence: male slave.”
“And brygorwreccan?”
“A male slave who digs graves.”
Dr. Harold felt numbly stunned. “Five years ago Tharp was apprehended by police for burying bodies. Some of the bodies were children and infants. We assumed his vocabulary was invented.”
“You assumed wrong,” Professor Fredrick asserted. “All these words are real. Scieror, one who cuts with a knife. Hustig, a general ritual. Fek, festival. Cnif, knife. This is fascinating, and clearly religious.”
Religious? “How so?”
“These words here, oft repeated, loc and liloc. They’re general references to a demon, a female demon. Many pre-Druidic settlements worshipped female demons via ritual sacrifice. The sacrifices frequently involved children, infants.”
This was maddening. How did Tharp, an amotivate and dropout, become this learned in not only an ancient language but in an ancient religious custom? “Look at the rest, here,” he insisted, and dug into his briefcase. “These are Tharp’s sketchpads from the ward. Tell me wha
t you make of them.”
Professor Fredrick opened the first pad, then fell into a concerned silence. For the next twenty minutes he examined one page after another. He seemed to be transfixed.
“What? What’s wrong?” Dr. Harold finally asked.
Professor Fredrick glanced up quizzically. “Ur-locs,” he said.
“What?”
“Several thousand years ago, Doctor, there was an offshoot of the Chiltern race. They were called the Ur-locs. It was an occult society, and one, I might add, that we know very little about. There can be no mistake here. Tharp knows more about the Ur-locs than most archaeology professors.”
Ur-locs, Dr. Harold thought.
“They were one of the most unique societies in history, and the only settlement in England to successfully resist every invasion of the island—the Celts, the Romans, the Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians, even the Normans. We only know about them from the registries left by each invader. Every army that was ever dispatched against the Ur-locs never returned, and the Ur-locs, mind you, were an entirely female-dominated culture.”
That at least explained something. Tharp’s delusion was based on a premise of female superiority. All of the men in the sketches were clearly subservient to a female hierarchy.
“The Ur-locs themselves,” the old man continued, “were small in number, yet somehow they maintained a great power over large male populations. They were served entirely by men enslaved from invading camps or conquered settlements. Men did everything for them: fought their wars, cultivated their foods, built their towns. The Ur-locs reigned over a body of men dozens of times their own size.”
“But…how?”
“Probably just a very clever management of power and fear, like any successful monarchy. And then, of course, there are the legends.”
“What legends?”
Fredrick again attempted a smile. “The registries claim that the Ur-locs were witches and that they used witchcraft to enslave their attackers. That’s where the religious part comes in. The Ur-locs were savagely ritualistic. Their existence revolved around a single religious belief. They sacrificed thousands in appeasement to their god. These people made the Aztecs look like the Girl Scouts.”
So Tharp’s delusion was based on an actual ancient religious system, and that religious system was based on a specific object of belief.
“Tell me about their god,” Dr. Harold inquired next.
“Here, this right here,” Fredrick said. He pointed to the most memorable sketch, the beautiful buxom woman in moonlight whose face was just a maw of needlelike teeth. “They called it the Ardat-Lil. Tharp’s rendition is nearly perfect.”
Dr. Harold looked at the sketch again, and shivered in its obscene impact of perversion and beauty. The flawless hourglass figure and flawless breasts. The taloned feet. The three-fingered claws for hands. And the face, the face…he could only glance at it a moment before having to turn away.
Ur-locs, he thought again in a strange, slow pulse. Ardat-Lil.
Now Professor Fredrick was getting up. Was it the chair that creaked, or his old joints? A small statue of the incubus Baalzephon stared down from a high bookshelf, along with the multi-limbed Bengalian Kali and the squat Babylonian Pazuzu. Fredrick removed a thick, dusty text: Pre-Druidism: A Study of the Mythologies of Angle-Land. “This should enlighten you,” he proposed, and lay the book down at a specific chapter. “Here’s a field summary from an Oxford University dig near Ripon, in the summer of 1983. Quite by accident, the dig uncovered the original Ur-loc ruins. It was tremendous, I can tell you. I personally supervised the dig.” One photo showed several big iron pots. “Fek cauldrons,” he explained. “The Ur-locs were cannibals, and these cauldrons, which they called chettles, were what they cooked their festival meats in.” The next photo showed a great stone slab on plinths. “A ceremonial dolmen, part altar, part sacrifice platform. The Ur-locs iconized dolmens; after a thousand sacrifices, it’s said, they cut the dolmens up and made things out of the pieces: jewelry, tools, religious regalia such as fonts and tribal pendants. The very first dolmen, according to the myth, served as the central icon. They called it the nihtmir, or night-mirror. High priestesses were said to actually be able to see the Ardat-Lil in it. All sacrificial communities used dolmens, and many similarly retired the older ones for a higher use in their ceremonies.”
“At this dig,” Dr. Harold asked, “did they find the original Ur-loc dolmen?”
“The nihtmir itself? No, and that’s a bit strange. All the archaeological evidence suggests that the Ur-locs willingly dispersed themselves—disbanded, I should say—between 995 and 1070 A.D., and they apparently took their nihtmir with them, which must’ve weighed, mind you, close to a thousand pounds. It was probably about the size of a desktop.”
Nihtmir, Dr. Harold reflected now. Night-mirror. Hadn’t Tharp mentioned something similar during his narcoanalysis? And he’d mentioned chettles too, hadn’t he? “What’s this?” came the next query. A photo showed a pile of scrolls or something, as a field technician gingerly dusted them with a camelhair brush.
“It’s a manuscript,” Professor Fredrick informed him. “The only direct written record of the Ur-loc race. It had been buried in a cairn, in some very peaty high-sulfur/low-oxygen soil. The excavators were able to photograph most of it before it disintegrated. And this,” he said, “you should find very interesting.”
The next photo showed a drawing on a manuscript page. Dr. Harold recognized the sleek body and long flowing mane of hair, the talons and tiny slits for eyes above the stretched maw for a face, and the stubby protuberances, like little horns.
“The Ardat-Lil,” he muttered. “It’s almost identical to Tharp’s sketch.”
“Indeed it is,” Professor Fredrick replied. “No doubt Tharp researched the Ur-locs at a college library, and based his delusion on the information.”
Of course, Dr. Harold tried to agree. What other answer could there be? Still, the proposition pricked at him, like briars. “Do you think it’s even remotely possible, though, that some very distant remnant of the Ur-loc culture still exists, some cult or something?”
Professor Fredrick’s eyes fixed on him. Then the old, cragged face broke, and he began to laugh.
«« — »»
“I suppose now is a suitable time.”
“Yes,” Dr. Heyd agreed.
Milly and the wifmunuc peered down from the foot of the bed, the breasts bare, the faces intent in glee. Dr. Heyd opened his black medical bag.
“Nis hoefonrice gelic tharn lige,” said the wifmunuc.
“Fo hir doefolcyniges,” Milly finished.
Dr. Heyd filled the 10cc syringe, watching a few droplets sparkle.
“I want his death to be relishing,” the wifmunuc ordered.
“Nice and slow,” Milly added, her dark nipples erecting at the thought. “Nice and slow, for her.”
Dr. Heyd nodded. The pale figure on the bed seemed to tense a little, jaundiced eyes staring up, mouth propped open.
“He’s served well, in his own way.”
Goodbye, Josh. Dr. Heyd inserted the needle into one of the pulsing veins of Joshua Slavik’s upper arm. Then he slowly depressed the plunger.
“Wîhan!” whispered the wifmunuc.
—
Chapter 27
“You two! Hey!” Sergeant Byron shouted.
The figures scampered away into the woods.
“Come back here! This is the police!”
Giggling fluttered up. They’d looked like kids, hadn’t they? Several tree trunks seemed pasty with some dark shine. Byron touched a trunk and his finger came away red.
Blood, he thought.
Chief Bard had dispatched him to search the woods around the edge of town, which made little sense to Byron. A lot of things didn’t make much sense lately. Bard wasn’t telling him much. Had he gotten a tip? It infuriated Byron that his own boss didn’t trust him with confidential information. What made Bard so sure Tharp would be hiding ou
t in the woods?
And now this…these kids. Who were they? What were they doing?
Byron delved into the thicket. Fallen brush crunched underfoot. He tried to follow the giggling, and their sounds, but the brush grew so thick in places that he could barely pass without a machete. The late-afternoon sun drew mist up from the forest’s moist ground. He felt pricked, perspiry, and pissed off.
But then the thicket subsided. A trail seemed to etch a line through the woods. Byron followed it. He noticed more wet trees lining the way. Someone had painted them with something, something like blood.
Byron then stepped between a pair of gnarled oaks.
He stared down. What in God’s name…
He’d stepped into a small dell, a clearing. Three girls stood there as if they’d been waiting for him. They were grinning.
They were also buck naked.
“Who the hell…” But then he recognized them. Wendlyn Fost, Maedeen’s daughter. Rena Godwin. And the third, Josh Slavik’s grandkid. What was her name? Melanie?
Byron looked around for guys. A bunch of naked girls usually meant that a bunch of naked guys were close at hand. But there were none, he saw. There was only him.
“What the hell are you girls doing?”
They only grinned in response. They were passing something around, smoking. Pot smokers, he concluded. But this stuff didn’t smell like pot at all. It smelled light, cinnamony.
“We’re waiting for you,” one of them, Rena said.
Byron stared at them. They didn’t seem the least bit concerned that they were standing naked in front of a police officer. He gulped, though; he couldn’t help it. They were just teenagers but—Christ, he thought. Three pairs of breasts stared back at him, three pubes. Rena, the youngest, barely had any hair at all. The other two looked fuller, more shapely. But what were those pails on the ground? And brushes?
“Peow,” Melanie Slavik said. Her eyes looked bright but… funny.
