Dread in the Beast

by Charlee Jacob

  It was traditional to light a candle in church for the dead. The soldiers must have been at least a little superstitious to do this, even for victims they had outraged. Or they might have done this as a joke. After all, the candle for the priest had been left to resemble a pale erection, slowly melting.

  It was there she’d found the habit she’d put on. She set a wimple on her head, blessed the three corpses with her new black tongue, then blew out their candles.

  She’d walked on to Paris. She now stood before the expensive townhouse in the ravaged park. Where the little boy, Guillaume, had been taken. Where many others had vanished behind the door.

  The occupants there tried to shut themselves off from the sickness but they couldn’t resist the youngest pretty faces, paled by hunger, mouths willing to do anything for a bite of clove-studded orange. Others had vanished in the city, too. But so many people had already died, most families didn’t go hunting for them, didn’t even weep anymore.

  The house in the park, where the strolling ornamental peacocks and the turtledoves in the cherry trees had long since been taken for food, was a palace of venereal midden. Every excess which the Renaissance mind could devise was carnival there. The surviving townfolk put up horned fingers to ward off evil eye, seeing the grand mansion, believing that beyond the intricately carved obscenities on its silver filigree door was an entrance to another world. One where cruelty was as delicious as a truffle, and where the dwellers’ hearts were so black that not even the plague could darken them further. A place where the dead rose up to mock God, with ulcerous lusting until their digits and limbs cascaded from them as the autumn leaves flesh of mating lepers.

  But she knew that those in the house actually prayed for just such a door and world. They had gone so far from normal routine that they could never return to the manner in which they’d lived before the plague came. Could never rub their silks against the base lives of common men nor bow to the Church in either real or feigned reverence. They couldn’t even bear the presence of other gentry without hitching their clothes up to hips or down to ankles at the first bloom of desire.

  She saw that face at the window again. Vulpine, jaded. Searching for redemption or for degradation. Or searching for her.

  “I am the gateway,” she said, wimple framing her face like a glacier.

  She picked her way down the carcass-heavy street, entering the park where the formerly carefully-tended gardens of fleur-de-lis, camellias and amaryllis had turned to weeds. She spied half a black rat beneath a wilted oleander, fleas and maggots swarming in competition through what remained of matted fur. A cat lay dead a short distance away, a single rodent foot sticking from the death grimace. Near that a litter of kittens were merely balls of dust, tiny as snippets of gray moss.

  She went up to the silver door and wasn’t surprised when it swung open.

  Exotic beggars and once-beautiful children were draped, naked, in every possible pose across the gilded, cushioned furniture. There was a half-finished tapestry on a loom, upon it a scene depicting a broad-foreheaded woman squatting above an infant as a man in a knight’s black-plumed helmet penetrated her from behind. It was unclear whether she’d just given birth to the baby in this position or was in the act of smothering it with her spread thighs or both. On the other side of the room were tables upon which a feast had been heaped. Golden dishes of smoked mackerel and eels, platters of bacon and stuffed grouse, bowls of ginger stew and peppered cheese, almond cakes and mutton pastries were overrun with rats.

  She heard inhaling.

  Sighing.

  Inhaling.

  Sighing.

  Orgasmic gasping.

  A door was open, leading down to a latrine reserved for the servants and household clergy. It was below the house where the refuse went through a stone ditch which eventually channeled it into an underground oubliette.

  Here she found them, even with her blindfold up. The partiers were lined up along the open toilet, breathing deeply of the stench.

  There was a belief prevalent that the odor of shit and piss acted as an innoculation against the black death.

  But this didn’t make her smile.

  “Here is the gateway to Aralu,” she told them in French, in Latin, in the ancient tongue of the Indian subcontinent, and in every other tongue.

  A man wearing the currently popular pointed toe poulaines, the ends tied at his knees with precious metal chains (and wearing naught else), came up to her. With one hand he fervently worked the veined shaft of his carbuncled penis. With the other hand he boldly slipped down her blindfold.

  ««—»»

  Their mother called Dorien at the college and asked her to come home. Peter Warmer’s cancer had returned. Well, her grades had been terrible lately. She’d already known she would flunk this semester out. It gave her a reason to say “the hell with it” and retreat for a while.

  “You lose a little weight?” Mom asked first thing when Dorien came in. “You probably spend too much time studying. You don’t want to get too skinny.”

  She’d held Dorien out at arm’s length to appraise the changes. “I almost wouldn’t have known you.”

  That was okay. These days Dorien almost didn’t know herself.

  “You’re so thin and pale. That the new gothic thing I keep hearing about, girls as ghosts? You’re supposed to be at college to learn a trade, not just lure boys,” Mom added, trying to smile. “Don’t want to starve. God didn’t intend us to be skeletons until we die.”

  Mom realized what she’d just said and slapped a hand across her mouth. She’d meant it to be light-hearted, but the strain from finding out Dad was no longer in remission showed in every square inch of her face.

  Dorien slipped an arm around her mother’s shoulders and tried to give a heartfelt squeeze of support. Even if she very much didn’t want to be there, with the old man a few feet away, his sleep noises like something which would roll out of the cave of a dangerous beast. (Besides…boys? If only her mother knew. Attracting men was about the last thing on Dorien’s mind.)

  Annet arrived only about an hour after Dorien. Five years older, Annet had always been a big girl. If Mom felt surprised by how different her youngest looked, she was downright shocked when the big-eyed, wispy stick walked through the door.

  “Good grief,” Mom managed to utter. “What have you done to yourself? You leave home a healthy girl and go out to California to turn into an alfalfa sprout?”

  This from a woman who’d always displayed her love most through frequent home-baked goodies and second to third helpings you didn’t dare refuse. A few extra pounds on her children told the world she could take care of them.

  Dorien experienced a twinge of jealousy. She’d never envied Annet before, except as a child, and only then because her older sister got to do everything she couldn’t do (but this had simply been typical pre-pubescent rivalry). But now Annet fit the popular anorexic icon from every magazine cover. Even though Dorien had also lost weight—but not this much!—she looked as if she hadn’t slept in a month. She looked into the mirror and saw something ancient peering back. Annet lost pounds and looked younger than Dorien.

  “It’s my great new diet,” Annet replied, posing, showing off in an outfit so snug its size had to be in the negative range. “I’ve finally purged the evil from my body.”

  The room smelled in a way not even the hospital’s strong disinfectants could mask. Pete Warmer was hooked up to many machines, monitors, and respirators. And devices to bear his waste away. He looked very frail in the bed until he, too, resembled a child.

  He moaned. His eyes flicked open, lids at half-mast.

  “They have him on so much medicine for the pain, he’s really far gone. Cancer’s all through him,” Mom explained quietly. Then she went over and bent down to give her husband a kiss on the cheek.

  “Do I know you?” came a small, crackling voice.

  “Yes, honey. I’m your wife,” Mom told him. Then she gestured for the daughters t
o do as she had. Annet first, because she was the eldest. Mom murmured, “Don’t let it bother you. He doesn’t recognize anyone anymore. He just went downhill so fast this time.”

  “Hello, Daddy,” Annet said, offering her obedient peck.

  “Do I know you?” he asked again, staring at her, trying to place her features.

  She moved back with a frozen smile as Dorien moved up to the side of the bed.

  “Hi, Dad,” she managed to whisper but couldn’t quite fashion a smile. She gave the dutiful buss, ashamed because she was repulsed by the stench of ruin.

  “Do I know you?” he asked a third time, not recalling he’d asked the same of the previous two.

  Dorien didn’t answer.

  They sat there in the room much of the day. None would admit to suffocating. They didn’t bother with the television as sound seemed to disturb him. Because of this—and the depression of their situation—they also didn’t talk much. They read magazines or stared out the door into the hallway. There wasn’t much to do during a death watch.

  ««—»»

  Dorien didn’t return to her apartment at the end of the day even though it was just across the city. Instead she stayed in her old room at home. Well, she’d been living there until just two years ago when she graduated high school. She’d only been home once, during Christmas break of her freshman year, and that only because the doctors thought Dad was going to die and it would be his last Christmas. But then he went into remission. She’d felt just fine about being too busy with school and trying to be independent.

  As much as she hated the polluted skies, she hated that house more. Both parents (and Annet) were heavy smokers. Annet began smoking in her mid-teens, having heard someplace that it was a great way to get thin. Now, combined with the pervasive smell of Dad’s unavoidable incontinence before this last (and probably really last) hospitalization, the place reeked in a manner which made her think of primitives burning their own shit for fuel. Except Dorien had never personally encountered this so how did she know? Or had she seen this done by homeless people in the park during killer winters?

  Everything in the house was yellow, seemed encased in amber. And she couldn’t simply climb in the shower to wash it all away. The porcelain was just as permanently tainted with tar and nicotine. Once the tile, tub, toilet, and sink had been pink—way back. But now it was the color of a diseased salmon.

  She resigned herself to having this miasma settle over her, covering and penetrating, as depressing as the malaise of smog outside.

  She’d excused herself from supper—which had visibly upset her mother. Mom had prepared a lot of food, as she always did. And there were cakes, pies, cookies. Hoping to fatten her children up so that no one would mistakenly think she might be an unfit mother. Annet also begged off, apologizing profusely.

  “I worked so hard to get thin, Mom,” she protested sweetly. “Please don’t take it personally.”

  And the night had fallen brown outside the yellow home. The house thickened into sepia, with the women in their separate rooms upstairs. Dorien lay stiffly in her bed, afraid to fall asleep because of the nightmares she’d been having lately. Afraid to fall asleep for fear she’d have the kind of nightmare she used to suffer when she lived in this place. Of being in the dark with only the sounds of screaming children all around. Nothing else, but it would go on and on until she began screaming, too. She never knew who the kids were supposed to be, only understanding they were in terrible pain and very much afraid. And there was a smell—always this same smell permeating the dream, drenching every unseen subcurrent.

  As a little girl, she’d dream this. She’d start crying out in her sleep. Annet would be in the bedroom next door. “She’s doing it again! Could somebody shut her up? I’ve got a big test tomorrow!”

  And usually it was Mom who came in to hold Dorien and tell her everything was okay. Just a bad dream, sweetheart. How about a cookie and a glass of milk?

  But there was this one time when Mom was sick, so Dad came down the hall. He opened the door and switched on the light. Of course, this woke Dorien up. She trembled a bit to see him there for he’d always scared her. He was a grim man, not mean but certainly hollow-eyed and unsmiling. The skin of his head and arms was spotted from having been injured when he was much younger, before either Annet or Dorien were even born. She didn’t know how he came to be hurt because it simply wasn’t spoken of, merely taken for granted and a certain measure of face value. Except the spots always made her think of him as some sort of leopard, creeping from a jungle. When she looked at him, it was a jungle she always sensed, full of dark leaves, eyes, hunger.

  “Just a dream, Dory,” he told her as he padded across the floor. In slippers, not on paws. He always rolled the r’s, especially on Dorrrrry, until the name became an integral part of the growl. (It was the main thing about his speech which might make anyone believe that English wasn’t his first language—yet she’d never heard him speak anything else.) “You keep doing this. What in the world have you got to have nightmares about?”

  It came out as a challenge, as if she were too young to have suffered, to have developed tremors or any contraband grief.

  She pulled the blanket up to her chin and shrugged. “I don’t know. I just hear children screaming. I smell orchids.”

  His face darkened, the spots vanishing in a shadow. “Did you say orchids?”

  Tonight, first time back home in over a year, yellow walls and stench of smoke and waste, she slept, dreamed of Paris, dreamed blindly of screaming kids and orchids. Woke up, unable to breathe in the nicotine fog.

  I’m going outside. Bad as it is out there, maybe there will be a breeze. Just a few minutes of air that isn’t a complete ashtray.

  She left her bedroom and slipped quietly down the stairs. Noticed the light was on in the kitchen. Why was she so determined not to make any noise? It had to be her mother, probably already preparing for tomorrow’s breakfast, even if it was only about 2 a.m. Mom often did this. Couldn’t sleep so she dragged her insomnia to the stove to cook. Food to her was the definition of happiness. And right now she needed to celebrate, sorrow’s composure arrested by the mandate to rejoice—death was only for the damned.

  But it wasn’t Mom. Dorien peeked in and found Annet standing at the counter, stuffing her face with all manner of chicken drumsticks and wedges of cheese, hunks of fruit pies and buttercream-frosted carrot cake she propelled into her mouth with her bare hands, licking each finger and sucking from under the nails.

  Definitely don’t want to walk in there. Looks to me like a private Hell in progress.

  And why wouldn’t Dorien try to talk to Annet about it? Because this looked just plain gross. Annet gobbled as if she were positively starved—which she actually seemed to be. Maybe it was due to being in the house again. Annet hadn’t lived there in ten years. Maybe as Dorien suffered the nightmare she always had here, so did her sister in her own way.

  And they had never been a family that talked about things, who interceded to help one another. Mom had always insisted there was nothing wrong, anywhere. To do so would be to admit to the possibility of danger, of imperfection. So they pretended everything was okay: Dad silent, Mom acting happy, daughters hiding whatever must be borne as if it were the challenge that proved their worth.

  Dorien stood around the corner as Annet ate at a raptorial pace for a good thirty minutes, not always chewing, often washing food down with can after frosty can of soda pop. Dorien heard it effervescing in her sister’s throat.

  Then Annet opened a cabinet where vitamin bottles, cold remedies, and other sundry over-the-counter pharmaceuticals were stored beside drinking glasses. She just figured her sister had a belly ache after all that. (God Christ Almighty, who wouldn’t?) But Annet didn’t reach for the Pepto. She took out a clean glass, turned on the tap, filled it. Took a small bottle from her purse and poured in a few drops of some dark liquid. then…after eating all that junk…she mumbled a prayer, a blessing. After this
she drank the water.

  Dorien ducked backward into a closet as Annet turned off the kitchen light and went past her to the stairs. She followed after a minute or two, when sure Annet was no longer on the steps or in the upstairs hallway. Annet had gone into the bathroom and shut the door.

  “I’m going back to bed,” Dorien said to herself, disgusted. Her sister sure was a hypocrite.

  Yet she knew better.

  She stayed in the hallway and listened as Annet groaned, gagged and puked, farted, flushed, moaned etc. And did she hear chanting in the midst of dissonant wet rumbles and murky thunder? Dorien put her ear to the door, for what could she be saying in there? Could she actually be praying?

  “I purge myself of evil thoughts and an evil world. I make myself an empty vessel. I make myself a pure child again.”

  Dorien shook her head. Went to bed. Dreamt about a hospital room with a patient hooked up to gurgling machines, reeking of waste and death.

  But it wasn’t her father in the bed. It was Gavin.

  ««—»»

  The women returned to the hospital the next morning.

  Mom bent to kiss Dad and he asked, “Do I know you?”

  Annet leaned down and gave Dad a buss. He wanted to know from her, “Do I know you?”

  Dorien thought that the reek of his waste and the bathroom that morning at home were a lot alike as he inquired of her, “Do I know you?”

  He went back to sleep. At some point Annet excused herself and was gone for about a half hour. When she came back she brought take-out from some restaurant. The bag had a name on it: CANE. She sat down in the chair next to the bed and, when Dad woke up again, she began feeding stew to him. He readily slurped and chewed what she offered him.