Dread in the Beast

by Charlee Jacob

  He read passionately, pausing only as the key was fitted into the lock of his bedroom door. Click-nick. And later he heard the buzzing drone. But all he did was go to his window for a few minutes, looking out and up, hoping for the sight of falling cold rocks. Or black rain. Or maybe showers of something dead. But where his window looked out at the back of the apartment building, he could really only glimpse a small patch of sky. In a city rife with shadowy canyons, Sheol’s Ditch was made up of bricked crevasses and gulches of crumbling brownstone/brimstone. The alley running between the buildings on this side of the block and the ones on the other side was what some might have called a “defile”. A word which also meant to corrupt. That was a passageway between mountains. And here he was in his part of the mountain on the left, Jason Cave, a hollow little boy being filled lately with the most frightful of enlightening and defiling esoterica, looking up from a defile to try to find a patch of emetic night sky. Damn! He loved language!

  And if he did manage to see…? Perhaps he’d see Melanicus, the Prince of Dark Bodies, navigating interplanetary space. Not really just a sun spot: nothing so simple and mundane, so utterly without drama. But what Charles Fort thought was Melanicus—a vast, black vampire that sometimes brooded over this earth and other bodies.

  He wanted to eat just one page. Even just a single word—damned—off of one page. But there was no way he would damage this. It belonged to Garth; Garth had entrusted him with it. It was, in fact, a treasure!

  He read the entire book that night, stretching out his right hand, biting the inside of his cheek with every stab of pain in the middle and forefinger. He hadn’t told anyone but he’d broken those two fingers hitting that kid in the throat. He used the discomfort to keep him awake. He’d stretch them out, feeling: Pop! Crack!…….(blood filling the spot)…….Click! NICK! It felt like a magical gesture of evocation. The agony made him dizzy, nauseous, ecstatic. He read, and what he read and how he stretched out that invoking hand made it seem as if magic were done with a few words and a spasm.

  ‘27

  ‘Vast and black. The thing that was poised, like a crow over the moon.

  ‘Round and smooth. Cannon balls. Things that have fallen from the sky to this earth.

  ‘Showers of blood.

  ‘Showers of blood.

  ‘Showers of blood.’

  He half-expected to see that wondrous place again where hovering eyes spoke and there were no horizons to hold desire in check. If he saw it now… Hell, yes, he’d enter without hesitation.

  ‘Rivers of blood that vein albuminous seas, or an egglike composition in the incubation of which this earth is a local center of development—that there are superarteries of blood in Genesistrine: that sunsets are conscious of them: that they flush the skies with northern lights sometimes: super-embryonic reservoirs from which life-forms emanate—

  ‘Or that our whole solar system is a living thing: that showers of blood upon this earth are its internal hemorrhages—

  ‘Or vast living things in the sky, as there are vast living things in the oceans—

  ‘Or some one special thing: an especial time: an especial place. A thing the size of the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s alive in outer space—something the size of Central Park kills it—

  ‘It drips.’

  But no crossover presented itself. Still, Jason wasn’t deterred. Even if these efforts didn’t produce the place now—(and how he ached to!)—he knew he would see it again. Once it had summoned him. He would learn to summon it.

  ««—»»

  “What happened?” asked Garth the next evening, immediately seeing the broken fingers—which the principal had missed and the cops had missed. And the ambulance attendants and Ice and Bowtie had failed to notice.

  “I received a slight injury whilst defending the honor of the damned,” Jason replied, leaning heavily on the word whilst. He hoped he’d said it right.

  Garth set the fingers for him, using chopsticks for splints.

  Jason heard a slight noise from Garth’s bedroom. Whimpering? He wouldn’t be rude and inquire. It had always been an unspoken rule between them, that Jason visited as much as he liked but respected Garth’s space and privacy.

  “Have you started the book yet?” he asked the boy. If he’d heard the sound, he ignored it.

  Jason grinned. “Started and finished. Cool! Got more?”

  Garth laughed and happily provided. The Lost Continent of Mu by James Churchward, A Journey to the Earth’s Interior by Marshall Gardner, The Phantom of the Poles by William Reed, and The Bermuda Triangle by Charles Berlitz. He had a whole library on strange phenomena and theory, from dusty old leatherbound tomes to cheesy paperbacks spotted with coffee stains and yellowed by cigarette smoke that he got cheap—about fifty cents apiece—at a used book store from a guy who smelled like a urine sandwich and had dead, stuffed animals hanging from the ceiling. He brought out the philosophy again, giving more reading assignments than even the teachers at school piled on—except this stuff was neat! Sartre, Camus, Kierkegaard, Kafka, and especially oh, yeah! Nietzsche. It made his head swim, got him downright giddy. Jason didn’t even bother going to the library after school anymore. He just went straight to Garth’s place. Adjourned home for dinner, let the unc lock him in at night, CLICK NICK!, and then it was back to next door through the hole in the closet. Months passed as he seemed to read every book Big Garth had. He never took a single mouthful save to read something softly outloud, rolling the word or words about on his tongue, and then swallowing.

  “…why have all our fruits become rotten and brown? What was it fell last night from the evil moon?” Garth quoted from Thus Spake Zarathustra. Then he said, “God is dead and we are mandated to be strong, to be the new gods. You have to understand your own self in order to master anything. Nietzsche called himself ‘a philosopher of the dangerous perhaps.’ Kierkegaard held his ‘Existenz at the critical zero…between something and nothing.’ It’s about death and power and being the guy with the keys to the other side. And you might go there as god or you might send others—lesser mortals—there as slaves.”

  Jason pursed his lips, scrunched up his forehead. Dare he contradict his teacher? He said carefully, “I’m not sure I read into it what you do. ’Course I’m just a kid…”

  Big Garth was opening up a box of stolen merchandise. Jason had brought it to him, ripped off from a hospital. It could be useful to be a little boy. People often didn’t bother to see him at all.

  Glittery surfaces, keen edges that reflected in the lenses of Garth’s glasses. Some items reminded Jason of roach clips for pot cigarettes burned down to the nubbies. There were plastic tubes, hypodermic syringes, sewing needles, and thread. He didn’t really know what all was in there. He’d just snatched and run.

  “Well, the writings are like the quatrains of Nostradamus. They’re veiled as to content so that the slave masses won’t suspect their real purpose. Consider them open to broad interpretation and not to be taken at absolute face value. You’re meant to study and get out of them precisely what you need, no more and certainly no less. Then it’s you who are transformed into the philosopher and the Superman you are meant to be.”

  Jason grinned, sure he understood now. He liked being classified as apart from other people. He was no loser—he had a destiny. He concluded aloud, “Do what you fuckin’ well feel like is the only law there is.”

  Big Garth blinked at him, turning his attention from the medical equipment. “A paraphrase of Aleister Crowley. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”

  Jason crowed, “The craw, the whole craw, and nothing but the craw!”

  (whimpering, softly, from the bedroom)

  Garth nodded and went back to seeing what all had come in his medical grab bag. He loved to rummage through new toys but he was careful so he didn’t get poked or sliced.

  “He wrote a lot of books. One was The Book Of The Law where that statement comes from. Supposedly it was dictated by his Holy Guardian Angel
, Aiwass.”

  Jason’s eyebrows went up. “I was? Like God speaking to Moses from the burning bush? I Am That I Am?”

  Big Garth took out a stainless steel bedpan, held it up to the light with a sly smile. “Ought to be a practical purpose for this other than the obvious.”

  “So who is this Crowley guy?” Jason asked.

  “A magician. The magician. They called him The Beast.”

  “That’s what my mother used to call me,” Jason mused, remembering a snatch or two from babyhood. “And so does Aunt Ice sometimes, come to think of it.”

  Garth looked up again. “In his autobiography, Crowley says his mother used to call him that. And you paraphrased his law. I find that pretty interesting.”

  Jason picked up a scalpel from the things Garth set out from the box onto the table. He smiled at his reflection in the metal. “Think of the magic you could do with this…” And he turned and twisted it in the air, as if gutting a tall pig or carving runes into the wind. “I summon thee! Appear to do my bidding in all the other worlds! I am the master of the kingdom!”

  Big Garth shivered, studying the boy with a newfound curiosity. “Little dude, I wonder if you might be Crowley’s reincarnation.”

  “Did you say reincarnation?” Jason asked, then pulled a wad of cotton from the box and sniffed it. It had dark stains from betadyne or blood.

  “Yeah, I did,” Garth replied.

  “I thoth tho,” Jason lisped, then spit trying to dislodge cotton which had floated into his mouth.

  Garth grabbed his chest dramatically. “Thoth? A slip right from the gods.”

  He put down the new toys and took yet another book from the shelves. He searched through it until he found a photograph of an intense young man in strange Egyptian-looking garb, including a leopard skin for a cloak.

  Jason did indeed feel strange looking at the eyes.

  ««—»»

  “Nothing is unclean in itself.”

  —The Apostle Paul

  quoted at beginning of Sacred Sepsis

  Dr. Louis Godard and Dr. James Singer

  — | — | —

  Chapter 9

  FRANCE,

  14TH CENTURY

  Face down in an open street sewer, a body lazily circled, a motion almost identical to the flies which roundly buzzed to light upon the decaying head. There were other dead in sight, sprawled in Parisian doorways and over the cobbles. Apparently the carter hadn’t driven up this way yet on his daily collection route. Maybe he had perished, the seepings from other people’s bubos drenching him to a stiffening plague bone. Someone would either take his place soon or else no one would. The dead would pile up more until the very buildings seemed to be erected from them. A true necropolis.

  The body’s swirling reminded her of a raven, sailing overhead, not flapping its wings but just letting the wind direct him. Ravens—descending to thrust their beaks into apple-rotten faces and pluck out the liquifying olives of eyes—had themselves died, feathered stones dropping from heaven with a good deal less fluid grace.

  At the end of the block and across the park (also littered with decomposing French), she could see a sumptuous townhouse where the inhabitants had sealed themselves in, awaiting what would hopefully be the contagion’s eventual surcease. Brocades hung in rose and gold thread barricades to the infectious outside world. Every now and then a tired-eyed face would appear there, slightly parting the heavy drapes, searching for a saint’s sorrowful glimpse of hell, searching for a voyeur’s peek of the miles-wide lazar house. Searching for her. She could also hear the dulcimer sounds of troubadour voices and mandolins as the wealthy in this mansion were entertained.

  “Where does fire go when it goes out? Into the soul where warmth is drought, where love laments its icy doubt. Where does the soul go as black death creeps? Stealing kisses as milady sleeps, and claiming all the phantom keeps. Where does death go in dark water streams? In bloody essence and wet grave schemes, to Charon’s river of cesspool dreams. Where does blood go when it has fled? Into the fire to make it red, into our tears when we are dead.”

  In the great house, she could see a hole in one stone wall of a bay which surely contained a privy. Refuse was falling from it into a stream which ran below, sluggishly carrying the muck to the heavily polluted river, itself clogged with corpses as if with logs.

  A young woman rushed into the street from a bakery shop that had been out of bread for weeks.

  “My child is gone!” she cried, wringing her chapped hands. “My little Guillaume!”

  No one left their own homes to heed her. Their voices tricked through the wood chinks, clear as a chamberpot bell.

  “Your boy died. Leave us alone. We’ve our own troubles.”

  “Dogs dragged him off, you silly madwoman. If he wasn’t already dead then, he was soon enough.”

  “The dogs, too!”

  A macabre chuckle followed this last. The woman went back inside. There was a damprot thunk as the door’s bolt slid into place.

  But she, in a nun’s habit, scarf tied over her eyes as if the convent had been playing some forbidden court-of-love game, knew the child had been stolen. Had been carried up to that big house.

  Emilie.

  A name she thought she recognized. Perhaps she knew an Emilie. Another nun at her convent.

  No, impossible. She wasn’t a nun. She was nobody’s sister. Her faith did not run to men nailed to planks taken from mangled trees. Nor did she think that those who did believe in this—with or without compromise—went to heaven after they died. Although some of them did end up going somewhere…

  Her own name was Emilie. No…had been Emilie but was no more.

  And she only wore this garb because… She had been naked and needed it.

  She’d walked a long way from her parents’ farm, barefoot and wearing a dirty, torn dress. Her mother and father had died, starved to death. They had also bled, taking a knife to cut off their own flesh for her to eat. “You must live. You are young.”

  Bits from gnarled fingers, from shrunken breasts, from spare thighs. Thimbles full of warm blood, seasoned with tears.

  They had made her eat and drink them, whispered to her to continue consuming even after she found them cold upon the floor. But she couldn’t keep it up after they rotted, even as their staring eye sockets pleaded for her to eat, and the blowflies in their mouths echoed their last message to their daughter, “You must live. You are young.”

  She’d wanted to bury what was left but hadn’t possessed the strength. She’d barely managed a prayer for each before leaving to go to the convent many miles away, severed green toes in patched pockets to give her something for the journey. Her thin red hair had begun falling out, then had grown back red as ever but thick to boot.

  Emilie had fallen asleep no more than a few feet from the front gate to the convent. Three soldiers found her, stripped her, took turns. They beat her, her formerly freckled flesh purpling into a single, all-over bruise.

  They had treasures looted from the chapel. One of them had even borne away the stone statue of the baby Jesus from a nativity scene, and this he shoved up inside Emilie. They laughed and sang coarse renditions of hymns, making her give birth to it, straining to push it out, the tiny fingers and toes in rock scraping every inch on the way in and out again.

  “Our little madonna!” they called her and laughed.

  Emilie hadn’t cried out to the saints to save her. Nor had she wept, for her eyes felt as hard as the statue. The light from the soldiers’ fires hurt them; even the darkness hurt them.

  “What’s this in your pockets?” asked one as he probed her ruined clothes in the heap where they’d been cast off. He passed the toes around to the other men.

  She didn’t answer as these relics from her parents were defiled.

  “Our madonna is a cannibal!” announced another soldier.

  “You know how meat is marinated in wine so it will taste like wine?” asked a third with a chuckle. “This stin
ks sweet of death. Maybe she eats it to taste sweeter herself.”

  They took bites to test this theory, rubbing their faces in her grease, smacking their lips and sucking the shiny threads of her morsels from their teeth.

  “Ugh! Same as every unwashed country madonna,” the first one remarked. “Stringy and sour from slopping hogs.”

  “But I’ll grant her this. Hasn’t screamed once,” the second pointed out with the barest hint of some twisted respect.

  “Probably just a mute,” the third suggested. He grabbed her, threw her on the ground on her back, knelt upon her chest, and forced her jaws apart. “Has a tongue.”

  He snatched it between his fingers—pinching it hard to keep it from wriggling away, slippery. Pulled it out as far as it would go, then cut it off. He let Emilie flop back, mouth filling with blood, choking on what gushed down her throat.

  “Doesn’t now,” he said as he held up his trophy. “Perhaps she didn’t need it anyway if she couldn’t talk.”

  “And if she could, then she ought to have spoken up sooner,” the first soldier chuckled.

  They grew tired of her. She hadn’t been their first diversion. So they departed, believing they’d left her for dead.

  And maybe she had died, drowned in her own blood, and maybe she had not. She’d slept at least, and dreamed that the blood had dried into a hard, long, black clot. This was her new tongue.

  When she awoke, she knew she was no longer Emilie. She went through the convent’s gate. There were only two nuns to be found, both dead. (The others had fled or perished. Perhaps the plague had only spared these two.) They had been skinned and those skins spread upon the altar in the chapel, with two candles left burning on top. The bodies had been set together, with the fleshless face of each woman in the fleshless crotch of the other. And there was a priest in the corner, also naked. His throat had been cut. His penis was missing. In its place, solidly between the legs and pressed right up into the wound, the soldiers had put a large tallow candle. It still burned.