Dread in the Beast

by Charlee Jacob

  “Lord, honey. He can’t have that,” Mom insisted.

  Annet dipped the plastic spoon back into the large, styrofoam cup. “Why not? He seems to like it, doesn’t he? If he’s dying anyway, why shouldn’t he have it? After all, food is comfort of the highest order. It’s what you’ve always taught us.”

  Mom didn’t even try to argue with this logic.

  He opened his mouth for every spoonful, even as he still looked at his eldest daughter as if he had no idea who she might be.

  ««—»»

  WALLACHIA, 15TH CENTURY

  Dark forests, castle with towers fisting a glowering sky, skulkers in black abducting women and children and every kind of traveler on the road.

  The local lord fancied himself a vampire of sorts. He visited his dungeon every night to torture victims and drink their living blood. He drank because he enjoyed the heat of it and its salty flavor of rust and copper. He never believed for a moment that consumption would grant him any spurious immortality. No, even though he was acquainted with fools who accepted as gospel old Romani gypsy fireside tales and other Transylvanian nonsense about a forever undead existence.

  It was on the lightless pond in the level beneath the dungeon that he believed held the possibility for superhuman transformation. A natural water source over which the ancient castle had been built, encasing the dark icy water—so frostily turgid it seemed at first glance to be viscous, so black it might have been oil.

  But it was only water.

  Into this he had his servants throw the chopped apart remains of those who perished in the dungeon. Bones, flesh, organs from a couple hundred anonymous peasants, peddlers, soldiers, and religious pilgrims. The nearly freezing temperature of the water kept the human chum from decomposition, although the older pieces did develop a kind of ebon slime, which trailed in the liquid like threads of pitch albumen in a serpentine egg drop soup.

  Once a fortnight he had the retainers set candles in a circle around the tiny pond and light them. He would then disrobe and plunge into the waters. He would swim downward, body caressed by masses of hair like jellyfish, tubes of undulating guts like the tentacles of an octopus, severed fingers and toes like schools of curious minnows. Severed breasts trailed tendrils of blood vessels—a strange anemone. There would be here and there enough of a female torso for him to fancy there were truncated mermaids spying on him. He’d go down, spiraling through the ever-chillier water, touching bottom, breath held in his lungs about to explode, brain a volatile cannon between his ears. But it was always only the muddy bottom of the pond. Never a threshold.

  One night there would be enough souls present that the weight of their pain and terror would punch right through to the other world. Where someone with his power would be an emperor of demons, instead of just some local potentate over villages of rats.

  She knew these were his thoughts as she watched the week’s dead being brought down from the level above, carried in crates, dragged in sacks, even in the big soup kettles normally kept in the kitchen. She listened to each grisly splash as the henchmen tossed in that fortnight’s total suffering with all the passion of those who held a reverence for travesties of flesh.

  Her mother had been a Turkish captive, taken when the castle’s lord had fought alongside Prince Dracul. One of these butchers was her father, although she didn’t know which one. She sometimes wondered who he was, back when she’d been Olga and a member of the castle’s contingent of sewing women. Not that it mattered. Every one of them might be him, just as all of them had bedded her. Half-Turkish girls had no status. If she hadn’t been so clever with a needle and thread, she’d have been part of that watery abomination.

  Recently she’d been more afraid than usual, shocked by dreams and changes in herself. She’d prayed to the Christian God with facsimiles of his bloodied corpse nailed to nearly every wall in the castle. She attempted to speak as she’d heard Turks do.

  Salaam aleikum!

  Now it didn’t matter. Now she crouched where no one could see her. She had stripped her own clothes off and wore only the veil she’d made herself. She hadn’t been required to wear one but she knew that proper Moslem women often did wear them. The lord and his men had thought it amusing, but she’d used it as a form of anonymity, keeping the thoughts in her head to herself, a way of cherishing her hidden soul.

  That had been when she was still Olga. But she wasn’t Olga anymore. She’d become an immortal creature, yet not a vampire of myth, not any undead shambling thing pitiful of desecrated churchyards and moonlight.

  At the pond’s edge, the master ordered the servants away so none would be there to witness his failure if—once again—the bottom of the pond didn’t open up. He took off his clothes, his body filthy with blood from not having been washed since the last time he’d entered the water. He had an erection, so excited was he to be entering his liquid graveyard. He jerked his cock until a jet of semen went out across the surface, his signature of ownership over the spirits he’d trapped therein. Then he dove.

  A moment later she emerged from where she’d been hiding. She jumped in after him. Somehow she reached the bottom first and waited for him, arms open wide. A severed hand drifted past, a single remaining digit (a thumb) snagging the edge of her veil to drag it away, as the flag of a submerged ship caught in a shark’s fin.

  She spoke to him in ripples, in bubbles.

  “Welcome…”

  ««—»»

  Dorien shook herself to consciousness. Brushed her face as if trying to fold back some wet gauze clinging to it.

  “Who’s Aralu?” Annet asked. Then she winked knowingly. “That some foreign student you met at college?”

  Mom had been gone for a while. When she returned, it was Annet who took a break.

  “Has he been okay?” Mom wanted to know after the eldest daughter left.

  Dorien tried to clear her head. She glanced at the flowers around the room. Roses in a green vase. Chrysanthemums in milk glass. Carnations and baby’s breath in a jar painted in hypnotic swirls.

  Nowhere did she see orchids. But she smelled them.

  “Excuse me,” Dorien said abruptly, getting up, also leaving the room.

  She spotted her sister going down the hall, followed in a second elevator. Saw doctors and nurses smoking outside the building, looking like the tough kids at a high school with stressed-out eyes and yellowed fingers. Saw patients hooked up to IV’s which they dragged around with them, some with faces that hung on them like wrinkled masks made from the foreskins of baboons, smoking there, too. Annet lit up.

  She claimed she’d given it up. (Like she’d forsaken pigging out?)

  Annet didn’t linger. She got in her car and drove away. Dorien grabbed a taxi.

  “See that Ford? Stay behind it,” she instructed the driver, feeling foolish, as if acting in some television cop melodrama.

  Annet went several miles away, to a short side street across from a local, unimportant park. She stopped in front of a restaurant that had a small, handpainted sign which read CANE. She went inside this place. Dorien watched through the big front window as she ordered something at the counter.

  Annet left with it, a styrofoam container in a paper sack. Same place she’d brought food to the hospital from before. Stuff she fed their father.

  Dorien waited until her sister had gone before exiting the taxi. The driver had let her off near a place where the alley and the street came together. There was a dead dog in the road, one that evidentally had been hit by a car. Yellow grueled from its eyes, and the tongue was covered with ants. She sighed and entered the cafe, walking up to a woman at the cash register and saying, “Pardon me. See that very skinny woman who just left? Would you mind terribly telling me what she bought?”

  The tiny woman smiled and shook her head. “Non capisco.”

  “Well, does anybody back there speak English?” Dorien asked.

  The woman shook her head again. “Non parla inglese.”

  Dorien reali
zed when she’d come in that the place was filled with people speaking other languages, what she guessed from tonal qualities to be French, German, Russian, Spanish. She also heard English. But when she turned around after getting nothing from the woman at the counter, the patrons had gone silent and were just staring at her.

  “Anybody here able to talk to this lady for me?”

  No response.

  “How about anybody here speak English?”

  Just blank looks. Silence.

  She couldn’t help but notice how thin they all were. Must be a new trendy place, popular with the chic sticks.

  Dorien shrugged and left. She’d glanced about for another cab or maybe a bus stop. She saw a man in cook’s whites scooping up the dead dog, then scurrying back with it down the alley, to disappear into the cafe’s kitchen door.

  There was a bus stop sign and a bench at the other end of the block, near the park. Dorien had to pass a flower shop to reach it. It was almost Mother’s Day and the place was filled with orchids. The smell filled her nostrils as she passed the door just as someone came out, fragrance from many orchid varieties coming out with them.

  All of a sudden she heard children screaming.

  ««—»»

  Nandi had been her name. But she had no recollection of family, of father or mother. She saw leopards moving gracefully through the jungle and thought that perhaps she’d been a child of theirs. Maybe she’d been orphaned by poachers. Or by the White Tomorrow.

  Now she was not Nandi. She was a creature of tempest and still, of animals who killed on the veldt and mated by the river, of all the things which died and rotted and fertilized the trees in which orchids were parasites to.

  She’d seen the men from the White Tomorrow moving through the undergrowth, creeping up like vines—like snakes on the unsuspecting families who had come out from the village to collect orchids for a wedding celebration. Neo-Nazi Afrikaners dressed in paramilitary camouflage, carrying automatic weapons, grenades clipped to their belts.

  On an outting from Jo’burg. The slaughter of school children in Soweto hadn’t been longer than a few months ago. Many in favor of apartheid had banded together to keep those “kaffirs” and their insidious “swart gevaar” from ruining South Africa.

  Those gathering orchids never saw them coming. The “rooineks” opened fire. Children shrieked, everyone folded down like wheat, delicate flowers exploded. A white man threw a grenade, and a black kid picked it up and threw it back at him.

  It landed, rolled to within a few feet of him, detonating, taking away most of his lower body into the long grass. A buddy behind him caught hell in the face and on his arms.

  “Van Doorn is dead! Warmerdam is injured; he’s bleeding!” another shouted to the other attackers, going forward to help his buddy. “You all right, Petr?”

  “I think so. Hurts like a son of a bitch though. I can’t see a fucking thing.”

  The man grinned and slapped him gently on the back. “Glad I won’t have to tell your bride a sad story. But you’ll have scars I think. Spots like a leopard!”

  Blood ran in the man’s eyes as this one dragged him back a short distance. Although there was no real need, for they had killed everyone. He reached into his pack, saying to the injured man, “I’ll give you a pain pill,” and produced a morphine tablet.

  “Smells like shit around here,” Warmlander complained good-naturedly as he dry-swallowed the pill.

  When she came through the quiver trees, at first they brought their weapons up again, seeing her black skin. But they didn’t open fire.

  The injured man heard her murmur, “Aralu…” in a voice like a wind through sand. But he couldn’t see her. Yet when he heard the other men scream he got up and ran, blindly. He tripped over the bodies of those they had murdered, slipping in gore, hands coming down into devastated orchids. He got up and fled again, running right smack-face into a tree. This knocked him out.

  She who had been Nandi didn’t care to pursue him. Those who came to her always did so in their own time.

  ««—»»

  When Dorien returned to the hospital room, Annet was feeding their father whatever it was she’d bought at CANE. The old man took a bite, staring up at his eldest daughter, mumbling as he chewed, “Do I know you?”

  The waste machinery chugged, working overtime the last couple of days.

  “Where have you been, darling?” Mom asked the youngest. “You’ve been gone a long time. I was beginning to worry. Such a dangerous city we live in. People getting killed for no good reason.”

  “Lots of dangerous places in the world though, right?” Dorien countered as she set a small bag of her own in a chair. “And in most of those places, the reasons for killing are usually pretty lame.”

  Mom blinked, confused. But she still sparkled with a smile. “I—uhm—brought some cookies. There, over on the table.”

  Dad suddenly choked. Mom rose from her chair and hurried over to him. “Pete? Shall I call the doctor?”

  She tenderly touched his bald, spotted head.

  “Do I know you?” he asked her.

  “Yes, I am your wife.”

  Then he spewed, half-liquid mass spraying chunks and puree across her. She jumped back with a screech. Some of it struck Annet as well. She ignored it, quietly staring at her father. He wretched but couldn’t double up, too weak to spasm with the cramps. The tubes for the waste machine bobbed and twisted.

  He did this for about a minute. It seemed longer than it really was. When he stopped, Dorien approached the bed and bent over him, leaning close.

  His rheumy eyes tracked her, going wide as they could.

  “I know you!” he exclaimed, voice louder than it had been at any time during her visits to see him. Pink and brown crud flecked his lips as he glared at her, terrified. “You were in the jungle!”

  Their eyes locked as his spotted hands came up from the bed sheet, raking in claws at the air as if he was trying to push something horrible away from him. Then his eyes rolled up to the whites, filthy mouth hanging slack. The heart monitor shrieked a single high note to punctuate a flat line.

  Mom cried out. Annet ran out into the hall, breaking her peculiar silence to shout for help. Mom punched the call button over and over again. Now it was Dorien who simply stood there, gazing at the man who had always frightened her.

  “Help him! Do something…” her mother begged, tears springing into her eyes as she stared at her unmoved youngest child. “He’s dying!”

  “No, he’s dead,” Dorien corrected her, then retrieved the bag she’d brought in with her. She opened it and took out what she’d bought at the flower shop.

  She set the orchid on her father’s chest.

  Her mother’s jaw dropped and she trembled, looking at Dorien with guilty eyes. So, she’d known! She’d helped this monster heal, change the family name, move to America to hide.

  Annet returned with aid but the old man was gone. She got her purse and took out a plastic cosmetic vial filled with gold glitter. She unscrewed the top and sprinkled some of this onto Petr Warmerdam’s head and into the narrow fringe of his hair.

  She said softly, “So the angels will know him as one of their own.”

  ««—»»

  The venerable Hindu spiritual leader, Mohandas Karamchand Ghandi, believed human waste to be as holy an object as that from any sacred cow. He used to take walks and he would pick clean the roadways. He would say, “Removing the excreta of others is a form of communion.”

  —Sacred Sepsis

  Dr. Louis Godard and Dr. James Singer

  — | — | —

  Chapter 10

  DECEMBER 21, 1989,

  ROME

  “Three days ago,” the captain said to the his co-pilot, “we took her up and what the Italians call the Tremontana shook us until we were halfway to Albania.”

  The co-pilot was familiar with the northern stormy wind that blew over this country during winter. “Doesn’t seem to have let up,” he ob
served, the gusts striking the old DC-10 on the left side as it steadily increased its ascent, having just taken off from Aeroporto Ciampino, returning to Istanbul and flying into the sunrise.

  People wanting to get to Turkey before the Christmas vacation rush started in a day or two (when seats would be scarce) had packed the plane to capacity. 346 passengers crammed into the McDonnell Douglas three engine super jet which was 181 feet long, seating eight people at every aisle.

  The captain grit his teeth as the plane rocked, lifted, dipped. They had only taken off five minutes ago. At this rate it was going to be an awfully long trip. He glanced at the altimeter. Right where it should be.

  “Could be worse,” the co-pilot remarked. “Could be snowing, as little of it as they get here.”

  “So, is this your first trip to Rome?”

  The co-pilot nodded. “I met this woman at a club. An American, red-haired, big plastic breasts. She was drunk and walked up to me, saying, ‘Hi! I’m from Ohio!’ And I said, ‘I am from Batman.’ You know where that is?”

  “Sure, not far from the borders with Syria and Iraq. Then what?” the captain asked.

  The co-pilot shrugged. “Well, she misunderstood me. She shouted out, ‘You’re Batman? Hey, everybody, this here’s Batman!’ Laughed her apple ass off and then bought me champagne.”

  The captain chuckled. “She sleep with you?”

  “Her and two other tipsy ladies. Same time. You know the new steward out there?” He thumbed back toward the cabin.

  “Ali? Yes, I met him when we boarded.”

  “He joined us. I told them he was Robin.”

  The captain laughed and slapped his knee.

  “It gets better.”

  “Better than that?”

  “Yeah, they’re all three on the plane, in first class.”

  “You’re shitting me!”