Another doorway and flight of steps. How far below the surface were they now? An uneven corridor was adorned with a complicated fresco. Repeated appearances were made by a radiant skeleton of a girl (named as St. Aureola in a history which had been inscribed beneath the artwork). She had long yellow hair and an exquisite/prerequisite halo. A little dog yapped at her feet. She was shown in positions of prayer, of eating flowers, of crouching to shit light into a bucket.
Aureola, from aureum…the Latin word for “golden.”
The docs stared open-mouthed at this and then turned to one another. They hadn’t been expecting anything of this nature. But what were the odds that, of all those in the world who might have made this discovery, it fell to these two?
“This is our kismet,” Godard told Singer. “Our eureka that will astonish the world.”
««—»»
According to the Renaissance Italian traveler, Marco Polo, there was a pious order on the Indian Malabar Coast whose solemn members never ate a living thing. Their dietary restriction wasn’t limited merely to animals but also included living plants, since they believed that fresh vegetation contained souls. They did, however, eat dried plants. They eliminated their waste on the beach, then mixed it with sand, breaking it down as much as they could. Their goal was to destroy the waste so that no worms could be generated in it, only to perish for having been born from the order’s sins.
—Sacred Sepsis
Dr. Louis Godard and Dr. James Singer
— | — | —
Chapter 11
SUBWAY TUNNELS,
1992
In two years Myrtle Ave had filled the whole wall with her drawings. Vagrants from all over the city came to see them, pressing into the tunnel, filing by as if at any uptown gallery. They whispered reverently or laughed out loud. Kids on dates braved the dangers to go see the sewer art. That’s what folks were calling what she did: sewer art—despite the fact the location was the subway and not the city sewer.
Maybe they called it that because there was this one big piece she’d done in which she used the phrase sewer-sybil.
Like this:
s
e
w
e
razorekshun
y
b
i
l
And Myrtle knew she wasn’t any kind of real artist. Not a da Vinci or a Picasso. She just did images from her head, cathartic doodling. Little frenetic poems without style or grace. A kind of dirty, underground manifesto or—dare she contemplate it?—a bible of darkness. Cheesy cartoons, when you got right down to it.
Last week there had been a minor gang war in the tunnel. Members from two rival factions had decided to come down for a viewing at the same time, somebody carrying a big radio which hammered out a Blam blammmm ta-ta-ta-tingting ughgh hughgh! Somebody chanting behind this rhythm as if knowing the daily grind reflected in your nightmares and setting them to rhyme. Guns were drawn, heads blown halfway to pink cotton candy and cherry slush, bullets ricocheting to kill a few hapless strays and digging a canyon across part of her work like a finishing touch from the visiting specter of Jackson Pollock. The flashing of the muzzles like cameras going off, like the lights from a train suddenly POW! POW! POW! down a formerly pitch-black tunnel. POW! POW! Are you blind yet?
(How’s about deaf?)
When it ended there was blood everywhere. The vagrants quickly descended to rob the dead and dying.
As for Myrtle, she stayed with her face pressed to the cold ground for more than an hour after the killing had stopped. She shivered, eyes squeezed shut, not shamed at all that she’d shit and pissed herself. That was just the body’s way of saying, Okay, I’m cleaned out. I’m ready to leave the world as the empty vessel I came into it as.
How much later than the gangbanger thing was she practically kidnapped?
A month?
Two guys grabbed her, stuffed a foul rag into her mouth, and started lugging her down the tunnel.
“Listo’ll like this one, I’ll bet. Once he scrubs her down,” one of them said.
She jerked every which way trying to get loose.
“Should we check to see if she’s a virgin? He pays more for those…”
“Who’d fuck anything this filthy?”
“Still…”
They set her down. One of them stuck his fingers down her crusty panties and probed her hole.
“What d’ya suppose he’ll cut offa her? Both arms? Both legs? Maybe make her a new cunt in her left butt cheek?”
Myrtle freaked. Who wouldn’t? She vomitted so hard the rag was forced out of her mouth. She also lost complete control of her sphincter.
Noxious, toxic tides from each end forced the men back from her.
“Jeez!”
“Gross!”
“Let’s get out of here. A few things done died inside her!”
“Yeah! Big Garth’ll cut our nads off, we bring him somethin’ doin’ that before he fixes her.”
Myrtle lay there quivering, helpless in her own waste. But she was thinking, “Hey, I didn’t know you could use this stuff as a weapon. Cool…”
— | — | —
Chapter 12
SHEOL’S DITCH,
1981
The Millionaire. The 77th Bengal Lancers. The Buccaneers. Crunch And Des. Oh! Susanna. Doc Corkle.
Shows from the ’50s. Jason started to notice that whatever funky cable channel his aunt and unc were watching, it didn’t seem to be part of anything anybody’d ever heard of. He checked Big Garth’s cable and this channel wasn’t there. Even the ads were ’50s. No modern station identification.
Even the news was from the ’50s. Sputnik. Russians putting down a revolution against Communism in Hungary. Pres Eisenhower this and Vippy Nixon that. Edsels for sale. Korean War. Elvis…a sleek, gyrating sex machine—not the sweating self-caricature who’d died a few years ago.
“You ever hear of a TV channel that’s all ’50s all the time?” he asked Garth one evening.
He’d come in through the closet hole. There was a new pot in amongst the bonsai trees. The only thing that emerged from the dark soil was a woman’s elegantly manicured hand.
“No,” B.G. admitted, not seeming to notice the bright red blossom on the sash of his kimono, the only one amidst the predominating pattern of blue chrysanthemums. “Call the cable company. Number’s in the guide over there on that table.”
There was a book over on that table, too. Microsurgery. Jason only glanced at it before picking up the cable guide. He dialed the number and asked the operator the same thing.
“We don’t have anything like that,” he was told.
Jason then asked Garth, “Do you ever hear a buzz coming from our apartment?”
His older friend shook his head. Interesting. Garth had formerly sported a full head of hair. Tonight Jason noticed the man had shaved the top off, balding himself front to back. He was starting to resemble more and more the Japanese men from the atrocity prints. “Afraid not. You ever hear screaming or gasping coming from this one?”
Jason smiled. “If I’m not over here, I’m at school or asleep.”
Garth smiled back and shrugged.
But Jason was hearing that buzzing outside his bedroom door every night now. It aroused both contempt and curiosity. Had he been wrong to assume that this was a vibrator Bowtie used on Ice because he was impotent? In his bedroom, he perched at the keyhole, trying to see out into the hall. Mostly darkness. He’d think he saw a red light, too, but he could never get a fix on it. His eyes would water and then he wouldn’t be able to see anything.
He listened. Were there whispers? Aunt and unc seemed past the prime for sweet nothings. He strained his ear against the keyhole and thought this sounded more like dirty talk, erotic and violent. Shot through with a low-key giggling and a voice hitching, sobbing. Not enough so that he could really make out any of the words, which he found truly frustrating.
Next morning at breakf
ast, Aunt Merrice gave him his cereal as the television showed the McCarthy hearings. He tried to study her for signs of injury. He didn’t want to be obvious about it. (After all, the crying could have come from Garth’s apartment, couldn’t it? He was making use of that surgical stuff the kid had given him. Maybe the buzzing Jason heard these days—or at least part of it—was a bone saw.)
Nothing wrong with Ice. Jason stuck his spoon into the cereal, noticed something weird floating in the milk. Had she changed from flakes to granola?
Still flakes. The extra bit was a nipple.
Jason stared at it, floating pinkly among the golden flakes and black raisins.
Might be an albino raisin.
Then he noticed Bowtie rubbing his chest, a spot of blood visible through his pajama top and robe. Better red than dead, Jason thought with a wry face.
Jason cocked his head, then dug out the nipple and put it in his mouth. He bit down. It would just taste like meat, right?
It was harder than he expected. And it tasted completely spoiled, as if it ought to be green instead of pink. And it…stung. As if he’d put a scorpion in his mouth. He spat it out into his napkin.
“I-I don’t feel good,” he said. “I’ll pass on breakfast.”
“What about school? You don’t go to school, you go to prison. Know what’s in prison, don’t you, beast?” asked Ice.
“Yeah, cornholers. Cornholers and holy rollers. I’m going to school,” Jason replied, getting up from the table.
“Don’t sass your aunt,” Bowtie snapped.
That night when Jason sat at the dinner table, he carefully forked through his food, not really managing to put anything in his mouth. He’d been ignoring the television as much as he could, just wanting to get the meal over with so he could sneak next door. But he happened to look up. He didn’t know if this was an episode from the first season of One Step Beyond or if it came from Inner Sanctum. It couldn’t be an early Twilight Zone he’d never seen, could it? (He thought he’d seen them all over at Garth’s.) He’d missed the beginning.
There was this strange landscape, loopy and melted as if Salvador Dali had designed the set—an artist’s rendering of surreality almost too good for low budget fifty’s fantasy. There was an eye floating around. An overvoice (narrator? or was it supposed to be coming from the eye?) said, “Hurt all the time. Gate’s open. Names don’t pass through the gate. Years don’t pass through the gate.”
And there was the kid, ’50s traditional towhead with freckles and a striped T-shirt. He was on his knees, reaching forward to touch the eye as if it were some freakin’ butterfly.
Jason blinked, feeling his flesh freeze. But after the blink all he saw was a game show. Several people on a panel, and four teasers each saying in turn, “I am Charles Fort.”
The first was a guy who looked an awful lot like Friedrich Nietzsche, in a frock coat, mustache bristly as an exploding catepillar, one eye too wide and the other crackled like a fried marble—evidentally after his breakdown. The second looked somewhat like him but fairer and maybe a trifle heavier, glasses with lenses like thick dull toenails across his eyes. The third was General Hideki Tojo, in uniform replete with shiny medals as when he was Hirohito’s minister of war. The fourth was an enormous cockroach in a snap brim hat, sitting upright in the chair and twiddling its feelers.
Jason knew Nietzsche and Tojo were dead, the former at the turn of the twentieth century and the latter hanged for war crimes after WW2. Was the giant cockroach supposed to be Kafka? He wasn’t sure who the second man was (but given the nature of the program, he guessed by process of elimination).
The panel asked questions which he couldn’t hear for some reason. It came out garbled, as if there was something wrong with the sound. It came out in whimpers and groans and giggly half suppressed gusts of naughty talk. The panelists marked their cards. When they held them up, every one of them had written the word DAMNED. Eventually the command was given by the host: “Will the real Charles Fort please stand up!”
It turned out to be as he’d suspected—the second man. The fellow rose and opened his mouth. Out came shrieking wind, the noises of pounding artillery and hissing firestorm, the sounds of millions screaming. Out of it blasted deformed frogs, locusts, chocolate kisses, luminous splinters of metal, and black slime.
Jason dropped his fork.
Sudden switch to commercial. Two people in a sedan sped down the highway. There were Burma Shave ads around the bends.
The first read: Do What
The second read: Thou Wilt
The third read: Shall Be
The fourth read: The Whole
The fifth read: Of The Damned
Passing this fifth sign, the car spun out of control to plunge over a cliff. As it burst into flame and the people trapped inside died a horrible death, the freckled towhead in his striped shirt and the hovering eyeball crept close enough to get (what? an eyeful?).
Jason jumped up from his place at the table. Jesus, had Ice drugged his food or was he only flashing back on the stuff his parents used to hop him up on so they could party?
He staggered to the television, his hand shaking so hard that, even though his two broken fingers had healed by now, they sounded like they were full of chinkly broken glass.
“Boy, what the hell are you doing?” Bowtie cried out as Jason touched the channel dial.
“Leave that alone, you little beast!” Ice spat out, chunks of meatloaf brick spewing from her yellow teeth.
Yet he did turn it, again, again. Nothing else. Just darkness and a buzzing static all around the dial. Was there only this one channel?
“No, don’t do that…” Bowtie shouted.
“Stop the little beast, cumcakes!” Ice urged. “We’ll send him to the cornholers!”
The knob felt full of blood, as had that spot on the kid’s larynx when Jason punched him in the throat. It thrummed beneath his hand. It discharged a jagged static that he could see twisting around his fingers and wrist, a chaotic interlocked knotwork raising the hair up his arm. Stunned, he turned it off. The square screen went black, like the patch of sky above the defile between the mountains at night. Where a hollow boy searched for Melanicus to be gliding from one world to another, carried by a dark wind that roared between stars.
Bowtie had left the table, too, and now grabbed the boy by the ear.
“Need to learn some respect,” Unc said as he began to drag him down the hallway to the kid’s bedroom. With his free hand, he pulled his keyring from his pants pocket.
Jason jerked in the man’s grasp, kicking him like he had when they’d found him cutting the hole in the closet four years ago. He’d just turned thirteen and was as big as a high school linebacker. Bowtie was just a frail old man. How had he ever allowed this old coot to lock him up? Not anymore.
Bowtie’s leg bent entirely wrong in the middle of the calf. Jason simply pushed him into the couple’s bedroom, then stalked back to the kitchen table for his aunt. She put up more of a struggle, hissing and spitting like a cat, her gray hair standing on end, thin lips shriveled back to bare her corn-like teeth. He reached down and scooped her up, throwing her across his shoulder, wrinkling his nose at her flaky old lady stink, shuddering at the way her backbone coiled like a slinky toy hidden within a ham. He carried her to that bedroom and set her down, not all that roughly—considering. Unc was turning around and around on that knobble of a leg where it lay with the inner part of the calf horizontal and pressed to the floor, spinning on it as if trying to invent some weird new dance craze.
“You fucked up good, boy!” Bowie Cursky told his grandnephew, squinting so hard it seemed there was nothing in his eye sockets but egg shells.
“You better start learning to bend over and spread ’em, because that’s how they pray in prison church!” Merrice Cursky added vehemently. “You’re going to find you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. No matter how bad what you already seen was, it won’t compare…”
“Yeah yeah,” Jason muttere
d as he wrenched the keys out of his uncle’s hand, walked into the hall, and closed their door. Then Click NICK! What a satisfying sound. For once not hearing it as he was locked into his room but only as he locked them into theirs.
Jason went to his own room and entered the place next door via the hole in the closet.
“Garth?” he whispered.
There was no reply.
“Are you home, Garth?” he called louder.
Now he heard a frantic yet muffled whimpering coming from Big Garth’s bedroom where the door—as usual—was closed.
His friend wasn’t there. He crawled back through the closet aperture. He wanted to stay close, just in case his guardians started to scream for help and the neighbors called the cops. Because if the cops showed up, they might find that cache of stolen goods in his room.
“Shit,” he said to himself, biting his lip. “Am I going to have to kill them?”
Well, they had never liked him. Was it possible they could refuse to take care of him anymore? Was it true what they had always threatened him with, that he could end up in the juvie? Not that he didn’t believe for a second that he couldn’t hold his own against the teenaged rapists and the callow cripplers and the adolescent zombie flesh-eaters. But he’d be separated from B.G., just when he was learning so much.
He read in his room but couldn’t really concentrate. He tried to lie down but couldn’t sleep. He paced the floor, going to the window from time to time, looking out, hearing noises in the alley down below: cats fighting, rats fighting, some hooker being whaled on by either a john or her pimp, drug deals in raspy whispers, a drunk or addict seeing shoggoths as he threw up on some homeless guy’s cardboard hut and the homeless guy pretending to be Cthulhu—scaring the literal crap out of the fool in a thunderous fart which echoed off the apartment walls like a gunshot.
Hours had passed. Jason hadn’t heard a peep. Not cursing aimed at him nor the usual buzzing. Maybe he’d handled them too roughly and they’d developed blood clots and died. Maybe they’d tied the sheets with blankets together, escaping through their window—or tried to escape and were now lying in a broken heap of scabby limbs in the alley.
Dread in the Beast Page 14
