He unlocked their door and looked in.
The room was empty.
But the window was still fastened shut. As a matter of fact it was stuck so hard he couldn’t open it to look outside and down. It smelled in their room. Of rotten eggs and bread thick with black mold. Of mildew and summer roadkill.
Jason checked the rest of the apartment but didn’t find them.
On a whim, he turned on the TV. Before he even saw a picture, he heard the low thrumbling blues-shout of “…I am the god of hellfire!”
“ …I am the god of hellfire!”
Then with brilliant clarity there was the place he’d seen through the hole in the closet wall, four years ago. He sat down and watched, all the rest of that night, shivering, making fists, sweating ice water, his mouth taking turns giggling and chattering the teeth. He listened to the buzz, weep, and vile murmur, watching the terror which had no horizons.
Aunt Ice had been right. He hadn’t seen nothin’ yet.
At dawn, the television set caught fire. He put it out with a cushion from the sofa but it never worked after that. Might as well have been just any old piece of shit from a second-hand store.
He never saw Ice and Bowtie again. He didn’t tell anyone this but Garth. He sold his stolen goods and paid the rent himself. Nobody ever found out. Hell, lots of kids fell through the cracks. Some of them crawled through and nobody was ever the wiser.
««—»»
Egypt’s scarab beetle, revered as sacred, was a dung beetle. Dung beetles breed in manure.
—Sacred Sepsis
Dr. Louis Godard and Dr. James Singer
— | — | —
Chapter 13
Ring!
She didn’t bother to pick up. She let the answering machine take it.
“Dorien? It’s Annet. Mom’s really depressed. Why haven’t you been back?”
Ring!
“Hi, it’s me again. The funeral is tomorrow at noon. I assume you’ll be there. Right?”
Ring!
“Dorien, how can you do this? Especially to Mom? Do you know how she freaked out when you didn’t show at the church? Or even to the graveside? Has something happened to you?”
Ring!
“Ms. Warmer? This is the clinic. Your test results show negative. No signs of abnormality. Probably just stress. Give us a call though if anything changes you want us to take a look at.”
She didn’t even glance in the direction of the phone. Or at the many blinking lights indicating messages she’d never played. She’d been sitting right there when they came in, so she knew what they were. That is, when she was awake.
She’d been sleeping a lot. Having those dreams where she was somebody else, a series of others who deep down were really just one mysterious, incomprehensible woman.
(Not a woman.)
Yeah? What then? A goddess?
Ring!
“Ms. Warmer? The clinic. Test was negative. Congratulations. Dr. Ramil says you’ll outlive us all.”
Two tests. One for pregnancy and another for AIDS. Of course she’d outlive them all. Goddesses didn’t die, did they? Well, this one apparently flitted from incarnation to incarnation like a girl skipping stones in a river.
Last night (it had been last night, hadn’t it?) Dorien took a bath, frothy with gardenia-and-rose-scented bubbles. She had a few candles burning, not merely for asthetic effect but because the electric lights burned her eyes. Mostly she wore sunglasses even when inside. But she felt stupid having them on in the tub.
Dorien had just sat back with her head resting on a vinyl bath pillow, letting the perfume and hot water soak the sin out of her. Gardenia, a white flower, and that had to be (symbolically) as clean as you could get. Rose, a saintly scent if ever there was one, unsullied and pure.
But was she sinful? In those dreams seeking out—no, summoned to and called by—the most atrocious people. All the shit humanity was capable of. Yet she wasn’t evil herself.
Outrage was simply the bell that called her forth, walking along the curbs beside sewers, stepping lightly through scenes of carnage where entrails had spilled. Looking for those who were both wasters and waste. The attraction was perhaps symbiotic but not sympathetic.
Dorien had watched the water change, darkening, gurgling around her, semi-solid. Gardenia-rose tilted into a darker substance which might have been used to fertilize them. Grossed out, she couldn’t move, couldn’t stand up to shower the filth off. It caressed her breasts, nipples hardening against her will. It tickled her between the thighs, infiltrating by millimeters the entrances to both vagina and rectum.
There might have been a logical explanation. Sewer backing up through the drains. The old building had lousy plumbing. And an even lousier landlord.
But the plug was in the drain; she felt it with her foot. So how was this coming up to taint her bath? (And her?)
It wasn’t an infusion of crud into the fresh water she’d drawn and had dropped the bath oil beads into. This was the water itself altering: perfume becoming rank, milky going brown, liquid slowly assuming mass.
She caught the chain between her big and second toes and pulled. Then she sat there, fixated as blackening bubbles screamed down the drain, exploding like defiled little heads.
Her own skull throbbed. It felt like an overworked anvil in a blacksmith shop. She knew better than to try taking anything for it. Nothing would help. Not aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, or Jack Daniels. She glanced at herself in the mirror as she finally got to her feet. She couldn’t look at her eyes.
Turning back, prepared to scrub the porcelain even though that would surely be a disgusting job, she spied no sign of the muck. There wasn’t even a ring around the tub. It sparkled, whiter than the gardenia flower she’d imagined and as without sin as the rose.
She stayed awake as long as she could. This might merely be a psychic contagion brought on by the shock with Gavin. She didn’t care to have to think of herself as being so sensitive (i.e. weak-brained) that she could be hurt this deeply by one cruel boy, enough to send her into a neurotic tailspin.
“I’m having a breakdown.”
She’d been lucky to miss the other disease he was carrying. She’d heard of psychic vampires who drained the emotional stability out of people. Why couldn’t there be psychic werewolves, seemingly decent at first, then whirling into hideous manipulators, able to wreak havoc in the spirits they touched, mangling the minds until…your own mother wouldn’t know you—you didn’t know yourself.
She drank pots of coffee and attempted to read the nights away, pages rustling in her caffeine-jittered fingers. She bit her tongue whenever she started dozing off, tasting something mineral-based that definitely wasn’t salt or iron. She stuck a pin into the palms of her hands to startle herself away from sleep, but then she stared in wonder (and not too small an amount of fear) when blood didn’t show at this pricking. What oozed wasn’t red; it was like the brown rain that ran down her windows during city storms. (Now why couldn’t this have shown up while she was at the clinic?)
Not that she saw the rain anymore since she’d used duct tape over every square inch of her windows, blocking out the insolent and unwanted outside. So she didn’t know if it was day or night when a knock came gently at the door.
A familiar voice called, “Dory? Little sister? Are you in there? Please let me in. I brought you some food just in case you’re hungry. I’ll bet you’ve been holed up in there because you’re down about Dad and all, huh? Bet you haven’t had a decent meal in a week.”
Dorien put her hands over her ears.
“I’ve decided not to go back to California. I’m staying with Mom because she, like, needs someone, you know? I’ve met some nice people and have a new job. I’d sure like for you to meet them. Dorien?”
She groaned very softly, had a pain in her jaw. But managed to keep very quiet.
“Hey? Mom’s worried; I’m worried. What do we have to do, call the cavalry?”
Dorien frow
ned, put a finger inside her mouth, poking at a soft spot. She then spat a tooth into her hand. Then she spat another. The AIDS test must have been wrong. How soon before she had lesions like Neela’s? It must be the reason her blood looked and smelled different. Why her subconscious was obsessed with images of plagues and pollutions.
The doorknob rattled. “Hello?”
“Go away,” she whispered almost silently. She tried to will the woman in the hall to leave. If Dorien wasn’t really Dorien anymore, then Annet couldn’t really be called her sister. And she needn’t feel guilt at how she’d abandoned her mother. Especially considering what Mom had done, protecting that monster, that child-killer.
“I’m going to guess maybe you really aren’t there,” the voice beyond the door said. “Which means I must sound silly still talking, right? I’m going to leave this bag of food here. It should heat up fine in the microwave. Call us or come by. Just get in touch. We love you.”
There was a pause as if Annet hesitated.
“I don’t love you,” Dorien murmured. The word itself, “love,” stuck like peanut butter to her gums and the roof of her mouth.
Footsteps grew distant. Dorien felt herself tilt sideways. Didn’t even realize it was sleep sneaking up.
««—»»
“And while Satan and the prince of hell were discoursing thus to each other, on a sudden there was a voice as of thunder and the rushing of winds, saying, ‘Lift up your gates, O ye princes; and be ye lift up, O everlasting gates, and the King of Glory shall come in.’”
—Nicodemus, Chapter XVI, 1
The Lost Books Of The Bible
ROME, 399
THIS WAS HOW THE STORY WENT:
Aureola was a beautiful, golden-haired waif who was evicted with her group from their communal chapel. The councils in North Africa at Hippo in 393 and in Carthage in 397 had established canons of both the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha, deciding on the tenets which would be acceptable to Rome’s new church. Of the New Testament, only the gospels from four apostles were to be included: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. All else—the gospels of other apostles—was to be discarded from the Christian side of the Bible.
Factions had their favorites and had been warring with one another, even willing to do violence to have their theology win out. Aureola’s group had become unpopular for believing that animals had souls and for preaching from the book of Nicodemus about Christ in Hell. The patriarchs apparently felt it was counterproductive to admit that the Lord had set foot in the underworld after his crucifixion and before his ascension. Besides, there was already a story in which Jesus succeeded in winning the battle of wits between Satan and he, taking place during the forty days in the desert, told by Matthew, Mark and Luke.
Driven into the night, separated from her brethren in faith, Aureola found refuge with a pack of wild dogs. They kept her warm. One in particular, that she named Frater, always brought her back the best garbage from his foragings. Some of the other Christians chastised her for living with unclean beasts, but she argued eloquently that they were God’s creatures—as the ravens who’d fed Job. The dogs had proven their brotherhood by giving her charity.
There were many orphans in Rome then, as incursions by barbarians and disease (and squabbles over doctrine) frequently killed parents. Some of these children had begun tailing after her and the pack. It was feared her following might grow into a problem. So she was arrested on charges of vagrancy and bestiality and thrown into prison.
She starved until a guard pretended to take pity on her, for she’d grown thin as a skeleton. He brought her some meat which, being in a state so weakened, she ate gratefully. Then he admitted she’d just eaten Frater, her dog. Horrified, she reached out of the small window of her cell to grab handfuls of blossoms from an Egyptian cassia plant. Eating these caused her to undergo a forceful catharsis.
She prayed for many days and nights, tearfully pious and pure, until Frater arose from the matter she’d expelled.
Hallelujah.
The next morning all the dogs of Rome—thousands of them—had gathered outside her prison. They howled. They had brought scavenged garbage in their jaws. Drawn by the noise of the dogs, people came together. Wasted, the cachetically thin girl could be seen at the window. She held her hands up to show open sores on the palms. “I bleed for the souls of the animals!” she explained.
And she held up Frater so he could bark.
When the guard who had killed and fed Frater to Aureola came to the end of his shift and was replaced by another, he began to walk home. The dogs chased him down and tore him to pieces.
All were impressed by her beauty. Many arrived every day to pray outside her cell, others camped out to be witnesses at all times. They watched as her fasting caused her to grow smaller. The more she starved, the more ethereal she seemed in martyrdom. Even though she was a grown woman, she appeared childlike, returning to innocence without the curves which belonged to the mature lady.
“That Aureola,” they would say reverently, “she grows lovelier each extra day she suffers.”
The church fathers were petitioned to let her go. It had become too dangerous: to release her might have given the appearance of sanctioning her beliefs. They gave orders she be forced to eat so she wouldn’t die. But she would pluck cassia blossoms from her window every time. The authorities had the plant stripped away again and again, but by dawn it had always grown back. Another guard responsible for carrying out her waste bucket was bribed to show it to the crowd. Her excrement was always pale, never dark. It had a golden color, the hue for the holy.
Soldiers were dispatched every day to chase away the dogs. Sometimes they resorted to killing them. But more returned at daybreak, howling, all the best garbage in their jaws as offerings.
One morning the nearby entrance to the sewer began to bubble and then flood up from Rome’s Cloacus Maximus, bringing out a tide of crapulent bilge.
A sign!
“Free Aureola!” some folk began shouting, cries blending with the baying of what were now thousands of dogs. In the stink from the miasms of sewage, dizzy people spied shapes in the steam and gases, glimpsed images of martyrs and apostles. “Free Aureola!” they demanded.
The guard, fearful for his life, quickly unlocked the cell, then fled as the sewage rose across the yard.
Aureola appeared at the doorway, little Frater in the scoop of one reed-thin arm and a bunch of cassia flowers in the other. Her skin was stretched tight across the bones. Sores ringed her skull like a crown of thorns. She smiled wide and floated out, walking upon the feculent waters.
Someone hissed, then said, “Filthy! Corrupt the body, pollute the soul!”
Aureola’s head turned. She stared unblinking at this person. “All that is of the body is made by God, and all that has been created by God is sacred.”
Then she tilted back her head, lifting her eyes to heaven, jaw creaking in her beatific smile, and burst apart into a flurry of cassia blossoms. Frater did this, too.
The dogs stopped howling. Everyone gasped, then sighed. Even the dogs sighed.
Then someone near the jail’s doorway shouted, “Aureola’s body is still in the cell!”
They looked, having to wade through the slop which had just ceased to churn up from the sewer but which still oozed across the ground. There she was, lying on her back in her own excreta, quite still. Dead and cold for hours with the corpse’s grin. Flies squatted in the portholes of her nose and skated across the frozen ponds of her eyes. Her golden hair was matted with yellowish waste.
A great cry went up. “God has even turned her shit to gold!”
When they went to lift her up, she weighed so little she might have been measured with a few feathers plucked from an angel’s wing.
“She’s become as a child again,” a woman commented softly.
“I don’t understand,” wondered another. “We all saw her outside.”
“It’s a miracle, that’s what it is,” yet another to
ld them, as if it ought to be plainly obvious.
“She’s a saint!” the shout went up.
They tried to take her to the cemetery but were refused entrance by another faction disgusted by her stench. The rivals claimed she was a suicide who had starved herself to death.
They tried many places but no one would take her body, especially seeing the dogs following in a number not unlike a horde of invading barbarians.
In one place, two soldiers came out.
“We will make sure she’s dead,” they declared and one drew his sword.
Another test for the martyr! Proof of her holiness!
Her followers cried, “Yea, verily! Plunge it into her side, like they did with the body of Jesus!”
The soldier with the sword scoffed, turned her body so it lay face down in the dirt, then slashed her back open with the blade, down and across in the manner of a reaper with a scythe. Then the faithful were permitted to bear her further-insulted corpse away.
Eventually they carried her to a graveyard tunnel outside the city.
A sect began, the members emulating her spare beauty, starving themselves, always taking cassia leaves if they chanced to gorge in weakness (as both a penance and a sacrament). The Church began to persecute them, so they held themselves secret.
Men and women both began to turn their bodies back into the pure child. They even began kidnapping fat Christians and dragging them down into the area which came to be known as the Catacombs of St. Aureola. They forced these prisoners to eat dog meat and then made them consume large amounts of cassia and other herbs, praying deliriously as their victims suffered terrible bouts of vomiting and diarrhea. These were the new sacraments, dog flesh and cassia-infused wine. “We are made in God’s image and it means our bodies are temples like unto the Lord. And what comes out of those temples is holy, for nothing profane can exist within the sacred.”
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