Dread in the Beast

by Charlee Jacob

  The waste was never discarded but kept as relics, yea every bucketful until the reek in Aureola’s catacombs could be detected above ground. Many of the dead (except for Aureola), some who had been there since the time when pagan Rome had persecuted Christians, were taken elsewhere and dumped, in order that their niches could be used as latrine troughs.

  And who was she? Taking the steps down into the cold earth, following the noises of people in deadly cramps as they strangled on the upward tide of their own stomachs and squatted over buckets, following the soft simper of prayers ringing around the unfortunate prisoners snared with fecumenical bullshit. The remains of dogs decayed at the entrance, down the narrow corridors in black rot rainbows.

  Who was she this time? Not the golden one. An Egyptian woman whose father was a wealthy trader in precious substances for temples and medicines. Oil of cinnamon in her hair, frankincense and myrrh ground into powder across her breasts, and the gold material of her dress imbued with kuphi (an incense for the dead). She had no memory of what she’d been called, only that it might have been similar to one of the ten thousand names for Isis.

  She saw no prisoners here. No, they were in another vault, toward the opposite end of the catacombs. And those that tended them lay with them on the ground, dead, visited by others only a few hours ago while these here had hidden and listened to the echoes of their slaughter.

  She knew there were two halves to this unholy group. Soldiers had come for the first, the mad children. And now she had come for the second, the beasts.

  The worshippers in their throes saw her and thought she was an angelic messenger.

  “I am the gateway,” she said. “The threshold to Aralu…”

  They believed she said, “the threshold to Aureola…”

  But she hadn’t.

  And they followed her to their sacred, thunder mug heaven.

  Amen.

  ««—»»

  Dorien woke up, so startled she fell off the sofa. Whose trashy dogma was that? She’d been raised a good Christian and this profane schism shook her down to the atoms.

  Right, raised a good Christian by a racist child-murderer and his loving, complicit wife.

  Lies were everywhere you cared to look. And where you didn’t want to see them. Besides, she had no real reason to accept anything she’d dreamed as having a basis in reality. They were the midnight ramblings of a tormented mind. The human brain stored all sorts of things and then spewed them orgiastically into dreams, the bowel movements of the subconscious.

  “I have to get out of here,” she told herself. “At least for a while.”

  She glanced at the clock and it said it was 11:00. a.m. or p.m.? Didn’t matter. She peeled off her tacky robe, also the man’s sleeveless undershirt and sweatpants she used for pajamas. She pulled on jeans, a black cotton turtleneck, and slid her feet into tennis shoes—no socks. She grabbed her handbag.

  Dorien opened the front door and found what Annet had said she was leaving. Brown paper sack. CANE printed on it. She picked it up, set it inside the apartment on the nearest table, then locked up.

  Turned out it was p.m. A tad dangerous to be walking about, alone, so late. She reckoned to remain on the street, not straying off toward the park where there were too many lonely darknesses to get waylaid in. Not that true evil laid in wait only in such areas. She could be run down on the sidewalk with others about only a few feet away. She could be raped and murdered where dozens stared out their windows into courtyards.

  Dorien walked, not thinking about how far she was going, not moving toward any special location. The nights weren’t as cool as they had been a few weeks ago. Had it really been almost two months since she slept with Gavin?

  She wished she had a car, then she might have been driving aimlessly. Which was wandering for lazy folks. Except it had to be safer, at least more private. She recalled the most recent trips she’d taken on the bus or in the subway. In mass transit you were at the mercy of people’s smells. Those with their heads in the lap of death, somebody with colon cancer who didn’t know it yet, someone else with a deceased rodent up their asses, yet another with human flesh digesting in them…several even digesting dog.

  (Wondering, “how do I know this?”)

  Tomorrow she would get a paper for the classifieds and try to find herself a cheap car.

  She neared a closed liquor store, sign off but bright enough under the streetlights—even through her sunglasses. There was a girl in the loosely-darkened doorway. She huddled under a blanket which she held just down to her neck, as if she were inhaling strange medicinal vapors. It completely concealed her face except for hints of what might exist below from the seeping of pink mucous and smears of gray cottage cheese in dozens of places. Even as far away as Dorien stood, she could tell the girl stank of the lich house.

  A teenaged boy in an I Read The Bighead And Can Still Eat Solid Food T-shirt was stumbling away, eyes large and round from sickening revelation, ecstatically frightened. His fingers jerked as if he’d stuck them into an electric socket.

  There’d been a few of these recently, strewn about the neighborhood. Selling glimpses of deformities for loose change. Freakpeep. She always passed by, even if she heard a soft, “Wanna see? Wanna see me?” Knowing it wasn’t a sexual come-on. (Not exactly…) She’d seen those who took the bait, those curious, those jaded, and those just downright mean.

  Yet for reasons she didn’t dare pry into, Dorien suddenly decided she wanted to know what lay beneath that blanket. So, even though she’d strolled past, she turned on her heel and walked back.

  “How much for a look?” she asked in as steady a voice as she could manage.

  “Two bucks,” answered a phlegm-heavy voice, the diction of someone wearing a full metal jacket-dental brace, until the regalia they sported resembled the rigging for a circus trapeze act.

  Dorien snapped open her purse and dug for the money, all the while glancing about to verify she wasn’t going to be knocked on the head for it—or seen by anybody she knew. She produced a pair of wilted dollars she’d accidentally washed with her best black jeans about a week ago. Gray money. (Just as well…money was filthy!) She tried to control her hand so it wouldn’t tremble as she held them out.

  Very slim fingers emerged to clutch the bills, drawing them away where Dorien couldn’t see. Then she heard a most unsettling snuffle and sigh, which perhaps meant there was now no turning back (for either of them). The blanket was raised up, slowly revealing the head of the wretch beneath.

  Dorien might have fainted as she did on those two occasions with Gavin, the mind so avid to escape that it briefly and abruptly turned off the five senses and temporarily cut the strings to the legs as well. She might have screamed and run off down the street, lips stretched in almost comical rictal shock-schlock. She could have laughed nervously, totally inappropriate to both human decency and charity. (Yet, seeing this, Dorien knew there was no such thing as either human decency or charity.) She could have vomited when presented with such a savage tableau. But she didn’t do any of these things; she simply tried to make sense out of the mixture of wound and tattoo.

  Slick new orifices to either side of the scalloped splinter of the nose leaked twin rivers of snot over the rattlesnake pattern needled into the bottom lip (there being no upper lip). Eyelids were trimmed back until they didn’t close anymore, tear sacs flooding through conduits carved down to both jaws and inked a jaundice yellow. Tiny yet intricate fanged serpent heads had been drawn open to encompass each eye. Were the unrestrained tears intended to represent venom? The hair, including eyebrows, had been plucked, ears pruned like the eyelids, the area adorned with miniature panoramas of a variety of snakes in the act of swallowing rabbits, cats, cherubic children. Or in the reverse of disgorging useless bones.

  All Dorien did was stare in silence, strangely detached, as if she’d seen it all before: the degradation, the unfathomable heart of cruelty, how revulsion companioned with the arousal of sick fascination produce
d the queasy/rapturous emotion treasured by the most hardcore voyeur.

  —Yet, did she feel any of this? Did she feel anything?—

  She and the poor human wreckage gazed back at one another without comment. Eventually the freakpeep rearranged the blanket to cover herself and then shuffled away.

  ««—»»

  From LEVITICUS, XV: 2-9:

  “When any man hath a running issue out of his flesh, because of his issue he is unclean.

  “And this shall be his uncleanness in his issue: whether his flesh run with his issue, or his flesh be stopped from his issue, it is his uncleanness.

  “Every bed, whereupon he lieth, who hath the issue, is unclean, and everything, whereon he sitteth, shall be unclean.

  “And whosoever toucheth his bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the evening.

  “And he who sitteth on anything whereupon he sat who hath the issue, shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the evening.

  “And he who toucheth the flesh of him who hath the issue shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the evening.

  “And if he who hath the issue spit upon him that is clean, then he shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the evening.

  “And whatsoever saddle he rideth upon who hath the issue shall be unclean.”

  And the horse upon which he rideth on…

  —Sacred Sepsis

  Dr. Louis Godard and Dr. James Singer

  (italicized text not in Bible, provided by Dr. Singer)

  — | — | —

  Chapter 14

  ROME,

  1990, JUST INSIDE THE NEW YEAR

  “I’m sure this isn’t right,” Godard said, holding his flashlight to examine the chalk arrow.

  “You don’t think someone came down here behind us and changed them, do you?”

  Jim found it hard to believe that they wouldn’t have heard another person crawling about the catacombs. They would have—must have—seen anybody else’s light. And anyone down here would have to use a light, wouldn’t they? Not just prowl about in the pitch blackness…not unless they were either blind or a demonic mole.

  Yet the chalk marks did seem different. And Jim Singer was sure they’d walked a lot farther going out than they had coming in.

  But what they had discovered! They had a video tape and many photos of the mural and text in front of the chamber which purportedly held the remains of St. Aureola. They had entered that tomb and found—as elsewhere—very old bones. Also, an epistle on paper…flaking, very fragile parchment. It wasn’t contained in a proper box but in a piss pot. Similar as the text for the mural, it told in greater detail of her imprisonment, the howling dogs, and the miracle walk upon the sewage. A most bizarre find. Gawd-uh-mighty, a most bizarre story.

  “You know, it is remarkable when you consider how long it must have taken the artists to paint that mural,” Louis said. “It was difficult for any of the artisans who came down into catacombs. Very poor light…and the stench of thousands of corrupting bodies with no ventilation to disperse the poisonous vapors which must occur. Such miasms were known to kill people. And in these catacombs, with its doing double duty, so to speak, as a privy?”

  Jim made a gagging noise in his throat. “I’m glad we have masks.”

  “The tunnel has been opened for several days since the crash. Hopefully it has had sufficient time to vent any deadliness.”

  But it was taking so long to get back to where they’d entered. They were positive they’d walked for several miles in the wrong direction. The air was very bad down there, even with the special masks they wore, the feeling so oppressive. Godard coughed and Jim scratched, feeling invisibles crawl across him with itchy little legs. He tried not to think about those legs as being covered in the dust of those who’d perished from cholera, smallpox, plague. Not that remnants of this could sicken him; it was just gross.

  The very worst sensation for both men had been as they reached a certain chamber, just prior to finding the final corridor which led out. There was a wave of static electricity, snapping and stinging at the tip of each hair. They thought they heard shouts, screams, the noises of ripe fruit being split and wet sheets being torn.

  The room was heaped with human bones, similar to the one before, only this time their deaths were marked as having been other than excruciating dysentery. Skulls were cleaved as if with swords or axes and had been pierced as if with spears. They hadn’t already been through here, yet the arrows had led them this way.

  About a quarter of a mile then, straight and marked with yet another arrow (which Louis couldn’t have drawn as they simply hadn’t been down this way before). The passage turned out to be the narrowest they’d seen down there. It reminded Jim of a shotgun hall in an early twentieth century house he’d once seen while visiting Memphis, Tennessee. The corridor was lined with shelves for the dead which held nothing but strange curliques of dust, spirals of fossilized clay. What they knew must have been the matter expelled at both ends by Romans. Had they actually crawled into these spaces, intended for corpses, to do their nasty ritual?

  “It’s almost Zen,” Singer pointed out.

  “Oh, I do not think so,” Godard politely argued.

  Jim wiped tendrils of muck from his chin and forehead, knowing that a millennium and a half ago, this stuff might have been somebody’s semi-processed meal. Some household dust was made up of things like human skin.

  “I don’t mean literally. I do mean, you know, how the Buddhists will contemplate rotting corpses in order to grasp concepts of rebirth. Can’t you just picture them, squeezing into these niches, going through this awful business of contortions and self-abasement in order to be—according to what we’ve read—innocent as children again? How grueling, how humiliating, and how fanatically faithful they must have been to put themselves through it.”

  “Yes, now I see what you mean,” Louis replied. “And yet there are no bones in these. So perhaps if anyone died while undergoing the septic-sanctum mini-martyrdom, their remains were taken to another part of the catacombs.”

  It was how they found the other entrance, following that last chalk arrow, climbing up the long flight of black steps, struggled over debris of what must have once—an age ago—been a stone wall constructed to seal the entrance. They pushed through a thicket of vines heavy with rotten grapes. And then discovered they were no longer at the crash site. It was a different field, and beyond it—if the rumble was any indication—there was a highway.

  ««—»»

  The docs had rented a car, not bothering to return to the place where the DC-10 had come down. That ruse was at an end. They doubted the crew would contact them, wondering why they hadn’t shown up the next day. Assuming they had seen more than they’d bargained for in the grisly field. Doubtless, using that excuse, they weren’t the only ones.

  They returned several times to the catacombs, recording what they saw on film, taking hundreds of photographs. They had the epistle and several sealed ceramic vases. Other than this activity, they disturbed as little as possible. They wouldn’t do much else until they could arrange for a proper archaeologic investigation.

  But they would have to get permission. They had already gone outside proper channels. It was time to do the expected thing and inform the authorities, requesting the necessary permits to start an excavation. They realized they would probably have to share this opportunity with Italian archaeologists.

  In their hotel room, the docs had ordered up room service. When a knock came at the door, they assumed it was their food. Godard was taking a nap on his bed, but opened his eyes at the sound.

  He said as he sat up, “Good. I am so hungry. I could eat a…”

  “Dog?” Singer finished for him, grinning. He’d gone to let the waiter in.

  “I have eaten many dogs,” Louis admitted.

  Singer chuckled as he made a face. “Yeah? H
ot dogs, right? With mustard, chili, onions…maybe some saurkraut. Or—ooh lala—snails perhaps?”

  The old man shook his head. “No, I mean ones that go bow-bow. During the war, the Nazi occupation of my country, I was a partisan. I told you…”

  Jim nodded.

  “Well, sometimes meals weren’t so easy to come by. And right after the war, I worked on my doctorate in Indochine Francaise…now Vietnam, Laos, and Kampuchea. Also, we have been many places together where we were served dog and you didn’t know it. But that flavor, I recognize it.”

  Jim’s jaw dropped. “And you didn’t tell me?”

  “Sometimes I knew we were not supposed to know. Places where we weren’t always welcomed with open arms, they fed us dog because they thought that’s what we were. They fed us dog because they could. Other places…would you rather have starved or been reduced to—not only insulting our hosts but having to eat river reeds and bugs?”

  There was a second knock at the door, a little louder than the first.

  Godard’s eyes sparkled so that his colleague wondered if he was even telling the truth about Jim having been fed dog. “Hurry, Rover is best served hot, yes?”

  Upon opening the door, he found three priests standing there. He managed not to glare at them. (Can’t blame them all for the actions of one scumbag.)

  “Doctors Louis Godard and James Singer?” one of them asked, smiling mildly.

  This one was the eldest of the trio, with very white hair and very black eyebrows. The other two were both young men, what Jim thought of as young—which generally meant just younger than he was. He was in his mid-forties and not a good judge of age for anybody visibly less than mid-thirties.

  Somehow, in Rome, he’d thought they would all be in the classic long black cassocks. Of course, he’d seen clergy at the airport when they came in, as well as a few who had accompanied the clean-up crews to the crash site. So he knew better. Still, the black suits made him think of undertakers. Or underworld assassins.