Dread in the Beast

by Charlee Jacob

  This city was far ahead of its time. In most other places the natives simply squatted by the side of the road. But Moenjo-Daro already had an appreciation for the finer points of waste management.

  She heard the gutters gurgling in the shadows, the night air redolent with the spice of human waste. Every now and then clay pipes rattled between the buildings, sounding similar to peristalsis within a living being, the noise of consuming and digestion.

  I used to be Eska, she thought. This emerged from nowhere she might discern. Was it a memory or a dream? That she had recently been a mortal woman named Eska? Her father had been a brick layer, and she recalled he was half blind from the gypsum used to mix the mortar. And he always smelled of the bitumen layered between skins of sawn brick used in much of the construction for the Great Bath. Where was he? Because he did not see well he’d stumbled against a kiln for firing clay pots and been burned. Of her mother she had no recollection at all. When she thought of the word mother, the only thing that came to mind was herself. Did this mean she had children? Oh, yes…thousands.

  I used to be Eska. Soon I will have become somebody else.

  She put a small, wing-shaped hand to her belly. Felt nothing save a yearning hollow. For she was empty. Looking up, she saw that Great Bath, one of the city’s most imposing structures. It was the time of night when the moon was past its apogee. The time of night when the mating dance of the stars produced the strangest children. The time of night the celebrants emerged from the bathing pool in the bathhouse courtyard.

  “Aralu!” they chanted, many of them still fondling themselves or one another. Some of them abused their genitals with the baked clay scrubbers, crosshatch inscribed for abrasiveness, or pushed them into anuses…their own, or others who bent forward to invite the intrusion—meant to plug up the orifices in the same way that a gold bit in the mouth kept the soul from escaping during sleep. “Aralu!”

  They ascended the staircases on the northern and southern approaches to the pool, gripped by pain in their rectums and bladders as they struggled to withhold their receptive mass and water. They stretched lips into rictuses of self-containment, teeth clicking, hands clenching fists. Penises and labias were swollen with dew; buttocks trembled.

  “Aralu!” they cried as she stood waiting for them, veil across her face, promising again to lead them to the land where they could pour out their joys and grief. They had gorged themselves on the blood and flesh of their loved ones: wives, husbands, parents, children. They had fornicated with every movable object they could find in the moments which thrived just after twilight fell. Calves and muzzled dogs littered the streets, some still faintly twitching. Others screamed with their insides hanging out through ruptured asses amid broken terra cotta statues. The celebrants smeared themselves with every grease known to inhabit biology’s interior scapes. They had broken into the tombs of the kings and rutted with the corpses, singing as the cadavers split, burst, rubbed away into dust. Then they’d gone to the Great Bath to clean the outsides of their bodies for her.

  She made the cloud release the moon, letting them see her. Her full-lipped mouth and vulva were the color of blue knots of intestine.

  They immediately let loose all they’d been harboring of their feasting. Gourd castanets, drums, tambourines of excrement rumbled out. Flutes and whistles of waterfall urine sprayed. A few looked up in torment, having held it for so many hours, cramping double until bile—chunked with partially ingested anthropophagy—spewed, vomit cleary tracked with their sins.

  It poured out, symbolic as many a rite was prescribed to be.

  She inhaled the acidic nutmeg of it. She observed them laughing, rolling around in the stifling debris like swine in their own filth. The liquid music in moist lyre and rain harp, coming from the nearby sewers and from these befouled people, didn’t cause her to tremble. The bronze drizzle of fervid marasmus, puckering to form a lewd ringworm kiss, didn’t disturb her. For she was a humid queen.

  “I am the gateway,” she hissed and trilled.

  “Aralu!” they shouted, not caring if their cries woke up the rest of the city who would be disgusted at this evil. They convulsed on the ground in the swill, wriggling up through it on their stomachs toward her.

  She opened wide her arms. “Yes, to Aralu.”

  ««—»»

  Dorien’s eyes opened. She was lying on her side in her bed, facing the window with the brown darkness beyond. Always that sewage air, prevalent and inescapable as a rotting rat tied about the neck.

  “What the hell was that?” she asked herself, keeping her voice small just in case something awful might be eavesdropping.

  Another bad dream. She’d been having them for several weeks now, ever since her encounter with Gavin. She was someone else in them, never Dorien Warmer. Always somebody else who used to be somebody else… There would be the omnipresent middens, the cesspools. Strange people vying for a curious gross-out one-upmanship. Committing abominable acts not even the most graphic porno movie could simulate. Some of those things didn’t even seem possible once she had her real eyes open and could think about it. Except she didn’t want to think about it. Dorien just wanted it to go away.

  She supposed she oughtn’t to be surprised she was suffering nightmares. After all, what Gavin had done to her had been akin to rape. Only this had been a consentual rape, manipulating her into a position where she couldn’t have gone to the authorities that night to file a complaint. She was too embarrassed anyway. What would she have said? She couldn’t have falsely accused him of forcing her: she had no bruises. No, only her pride had been bruised. He’d treated her like a whore. Worse, as if she’d been of no more substance or feeling than a tissue he’d jerked off into and then tossed into the toilet.

  She might have sued him but then she’d have to admit to being such a pitiful thing. She’d have been the laughing stock of the college. And he’d still be big man on campus, with his closetful of seminally stained sheets. There was no law against being an asshole. He couldn’t be labeled a sexual predator if she took off her own panties and begged for seconds.

  The simple truth was that most people—at least according to television and the movies—were sexually active. If you hadn’t had at least a single one-night stand then you probably looked like a gargoyle or were in the fifth grade…or both. Nobody would care except to tell her to stop whining and obsessing and get herself a makeover. It was better to have been shtupped, then spurned, than never to have been shtupped at all.

  She’d drifted through the days, going to class in a fog, trying not to notice him whenever she attended the English Lit lectures. Not giving him the satisfaction of seeing how much he’d hurt her. She’d sit in the back with her head down, scribbling so studiously, pretending to be making copious notes. Not willing to risk looking up and possibly making accidental eye contact. For all she knew, he’d told everyone and they were staring at her, whispering, smirking. Or worse: pitying. Not especially pretty, no. Not especially appealing. Not like the bevy of lookers who she was sure had to be throwing up their lunches every day in order to keep so thin. Tits on sticks, she often thought of them. Several of them were in this class, popular girls. (Not women? Was Dorien guilty of making such a crass designation?)

  A pair of these drop-dead-gorgeous types sat down across from her. She could smell hints of their big breakfasts and whiffs of bile, barely tangible under the layers of perfume. They wore hiphuggers and had their belly buttons pierced. There were shadows between their ribs that sighed when they sat down or got up. Gavin would always sing out, “Hi, Ladies!” as he went down the aisle toward his own seat near the front. And they would reply, “Hello, Gavin!” in sync, in harmony, like a pair of starved Barbies. Dorien would scribble and scribble. Nonsense. Squares and triangles she’d color in with black ink. Spirals leading from and going to nowhere. Meaningless symbols, names and places she heard in those dreams. Gateways.

  Thresholds.

  Underworlds.

  She didn’
t hear a word the professor said. She didn’t fare any better in her other classes. Dorien would surely flunk out that semester and have to start over. She might even have to spend the summer living at her folks’ house again. The very idea gave her the shivers. Not that it was a hell on earth but Dad had always been creepy in the manner of very disappointed men, and Mom had forever been a babbling manic. Shudders, what if she had to get a menial job somewhere because she couldn’t afford to start again? Someplace like food service where she’d work her ass off but get her meals for free and go home every night stinking of fried mystery meats. Now she got out of bed, images from the latest nightmare barely faded. She stumbled into the bathroom to take a shower, feeling nasty from the dreams of filth and perversion. She glanced at herself in the mirror. Her skin had been just a little strange lately, as if it were wet all the time. Her hair, too. Maybe the pollution was starting to effect her, damp yet colorless Rorschachs of corruption, the mark of a modern Cain. She’d smell herself, expecting a sour perspiration. (She might be sick.)

  But it wasn’t sweat. It didn’t pool in her pits or stain the V between her breasts. It was an even misting, as if she walked to and from the bus station and then to classes from the bus stop in heavy fog. But there was no fog.

  The smell of it was sort of sweet. Flowery. A garden smell or a greenhouse smell.

  This reminded her of orchids—a reek which had always permeated a recurring nightmare she’d suffered as a child. Suffered, as a matter of fact, until she moved away from home to attend college. A funny thing to dream badly of and to smell like now—orchids. There were hundreds—or was it thousands—of varieties of orchid. And they were parasites, weren’t they?

  When she woke up in the morning—having sweated this out all night—her sheets had turned dark with her silhouette. And when she came home at the end of the day, the inside of her clothes had turned dark. The way a shiny pot turned when eggs were boiled in it…or tea. “Maybe it’s the dark night of my soul,” she said aloud to the reflection and tried to grin. “Or the shadow of death.”

  Perhaps it was those dreams leaving a shit stain, mark of ancient Cain. Did orchids grow in shit? Her attempts at even gruesome levity failed. If it was a shadow, it came from insanity. She might be losing her mind. Weak and stupid—just because some boy broke her heart. Not even that! Dorien hadn’t known Gavin long enough to become that attached. Okay—just because he’d shit on her then. Gross vernacular and not really true in the literal sense…not like the roving gang of killers who did employ this to every degree. But she’d let him get to her. He’d been between her legs and apparently had crawled under her skin as well. She knew she wasn’t the most gifted of women but she’d never have taken herself for an abject loser. Yet there it was, toxic cloud looming over her, casting darker what lay in her wake. Casting her down. Underworlds.

  Thoughts of death and corruption.

  Was this the path to suicide?

  Dorien started to cry. She wiped the tears from her cheek onto the back of her hand and stared. They were a yellowish brown. Like what washed off when she cleaned her windows. Definitely the pollution. It had infiltrated her body and now came out the pores.

  If she could squeeze her flesh, how many bowls of poison would there be?

  ««—»»

  Going across the campus in slow motion, Dorien pressed her books tight against her chest. Talismans. Her breasts were swollen. Her period must be coming. They seemed bigger than usual. Did that come from losing her virginity? She didn’t think so.

  Actually her cycle was late. She really feared she might be pregnant. It might explain the mood swings. See, she wasn’t really going crazy, just the hormonal variety of postal.

  She imagined how that would go down. Walking up to Gavin. “I’m pregnant. What are you going to do about it?”

  Because it took two, didn’t it? The responsibility was shared by both partners in the act of conception. Not that she expected him to marry her. Gad, those days were gone and good riddance.

  Then what?

  She got a mental flash of a sheet with the shadow of a fetus on it, name scrawled beside: BABY WARMER. And of Gavin folding the sheet up and putting it in the closet.

  She kept her head down, not meeting anyone’s eyes. She only looked up when she passed a wall of the engineering building where workers were starting to clean off another remark left by The Shit Detail.

  “And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man, in their sight.”

  Ezekiel, lV, 12

  Dorien heard bits of conversations coming from kids and teachers who passed her.

  “A priest who helped out at the student clinic…”

  “Found him right there…”

  “…his skull was cracked and the brain gone…”

  “…excommunicant in its place.”

  “Don’t you mean excrement?”

  “Don’t ask me, I’m not Catholic. Dominum, dominance. Whips, chains, and let my people out of bondage go! What’s the difference?”

  Dorien had stopped to read the biblical phrase before soap and a long-handled brush washed the wall as if cleaned of sin. Another campus worker began hosing down the nearby grass of blood and what might have been mud but probably wasn’t. She spied a jet black rosary bead being pushed across the lawn by the force of the water. It might have actually been a pearl of impacted rodent shit but she knew it wasn’t. A holy object—or intended as one to whoever believed in such things. For all she knew, The Shit Detail revered the dropping as holy but not the rosary. Some folks thought eating flesh and drinking blood was a sacrament; others viewed it as nothing short of cannibalism and completely disdained the act of communion at Mass.

  She felt a tap on her shoulder. Turning, she found another young woman standing behind her, hair loose about the face and neck, hanging in the eyes. This woman tried covering up really bad skin with make-up but it only served to make her look worse. She looked as if she’d recently had a really bad sunburn, one that still left her blistered. It actually made Dorien wince as she considered she’d seen her before, in the cafeteria. Nobody ever sat with this person. Well, her skin wasn’t very appetizing. And, while this close, Dorien also noticed an unpleasant odor rising from the young woman’s body. Dorien congratulated herself upon managing not to flinch.

  “Hi, I’m Neela Wilson. I saw you with Gavin Parrish at the movies a few weeks ago,” the young woman opened with.

  “Yeah? We did go out that one time,” Dorien admitted cautiously. Two heartbeats, three. She awaited the purpose of this.

  The young woman bit her lip. She blushed, which made the blisters seem even angrier, the edges hardening with a crackle, liquid centers pulsing red and white like the epicenters to tiny atomic explosions. She clearly wanted to talk about something that disturbed her. Dorien wished she’d just spit it out.

  Then she did. “Did you sleep with him?”

  Dorien snorted with aggravation, starting to turn away, blond hair swinging. “I don’t see where that’s any of your business.”

  She did toss an angry look back and saw as Neela shrugged self-consciously and then tilted her head. “I know. That’s true from the usual perspective. And I’m sorry because I know you don’t know me from Eve…”

  Right, instead of you don’t know me from adam.

  Neela was so embarrassed she twitched around the rheumy eyes and the pimpled mouth. “Don’t take this wrong. I’m not some religious freak or anything…”

  An odd thing to say, given the murder of a priest that had gone down by the wall of the engineering building the night before. Dorien waited for her to ask something like, “Have you been saved, sister? God forgives everything. All you have to do is grovel a bit and you come clean.”

  Instead Neela said, “Gavin…he’s a really bad guy.”

  I found that out all by myself, Dorien started to reply. She decided not to. This person might be an ex-girlfriend of his. She might be stalking him
and on a mission to kill anybody he might have dallied with.

  (Dallied? What happened to just plain old fucked over?)

  When Dorien didn’t say anything and even started to walk away again, Neela went on, keeping her voice down. If she was stalking him—or the hapless ladies he betrayed her with—she wasn’t hysterically loud about it. “He’s hurt a lot of women. It’s a thing he’s into, charming them, setting them up. You’d think chivalry wasn’t dead at all.”

  Dorien shook her head, not caring if this chick had a gun in her pocket, torn between committing suicide and going postal. She tried walking faster but the woman kept pace with her, almost putting out her hand, then not. Dorien thought if this creature touched her again, she’d knock the bitch in the head with her books and start running.

  “He knows all the tender things to say, has all the right moves…” Would this creepette never get the message and go away?

  “Jeez, I’m late for a class. Do you mind?” Dorien said irritably.

  “You’re late for more than that, believe me,” Neela pressed, wheezing. Getting out of breath? Try shutting up! “You’re so late, whatever your personal itinerary is, you’ll never find the way back to it again.”

  The woman’s body odor was making her sick. Definitely not flowers. She didn’t want to resort to violence; she hated violence. But who the hell was this person? “Damn, girl! Don’t threaten me. Okay, so I slept with him. Get over it. Not like it’s going to happen again. We’re through. Gavin and me—and you and me. Get lost!”

  Neela stumbled, brushed against Dorien. Dorien gave her a disgusted shove. The young woman actually fell down into the soft new grass. Dorien gasped, appalled at herself, yet hurried on.

  Neela called after her. “Are you one of the sheets in the closet?”

  Dorien stopped for a moment, turning around to glare at the other woman who was awkwardly getting back on her feet. She spat out a hostile, “Screw you.”