Dread in the Beast

by Charlee Jacob

  He let her finish and then calmly stepped from the shadows.

  She had already started to stand up and now turned to face him. From the look on her face, it was obvious she’d known he was there all along. She didn’t act as if she would run. Why should she? Clearly she had no reason to be afraid.

  “Good evening,” Jason said. “Have you ever considered going to America?”

  ««—»»

  The fascination with bodily waste may be purely puerile. It goes back to our roots, when we are infants, before we’ve been toilet trained and are given our parents’ stern commandment don’t play with that! This is also when we are at our most innocent and—according to some religions—at our closest link with the spirit and/or God. Therefore, purity becomes equated less with cleanliness and more with sinlessness. Yet beyond the infantile state, the only persons so pure must be saints. Those of us who are adult and, to at least some degree, discerning, must eventually realize our failings. We can hardly be said to be without fault, so we adopt a scapegoat for our impurity. Our waste becomes a symbol of that, one which we daily—sometimes almost ritually—shed in an act that is a combination of physical contrition and purifying penance.

  —Sacred Sepsis

  Dr. Louis Godard and Dr. James Singer

  — | — | —

  Chapter 20

  Dorien hadn’t been allowed back in the courtroom. So she wasn’t there when the judge dismissed the case. Some fucking technicality. A mistake made when the authorities took the evidence from Gavin Parrish’s room. And now he just walked scot-free after deliberately passing on his plague to all those hapless women.

  Neela cried when she called Dorien to tell her. (Dorien had Caller ID so she knew it was safe to answer. It wasn’t her sister again.) Dorien stood there with the phone in her hand, feeling dark, seeing darkness plume around her in shades of jaundice yellow, sooty browns and grays, and moonless/sunless black. She knew she murmured something, words meant to be a comfort. But how did you comfort somebody who’d been poisoned unto death and lingered long enough to understand she’d never get justice?

  The only remark she actually recalled making was, “The world is shit.” Spoken flatly, dull of sheen and emotion.

  “Don’t I know it,” Neela said softly on the other end of the line. “But I have to believe that somehow this will catch up with him. There must be forces that right wrongs, if not here on earth then after it.”

  She paused, suffering a bad coughing fit. She sounded as if she might be strangling. Dorien closed her eyes and wished it would stop. When it did, quite abruptly, Neela gasped.

  “I’m so sorry. I hope that didn’t hurt your ears!”

  “I’m fine. And, yes, I also believe in reckonings.”

  “Sarah Stanner practically had a seizure in front of the judge, she was so mad,” Neela told her, laughing hoarsely. “Later she told me she was taking up a collection to go after him again. I gave her a few dollars. I don’t imagine she’ll go through with it.”

  Neela tired so easily these days that she didn’t stay on the phone very long. After she hung up and the dial tone buzzed like a swarm of summer locusts, Dorien just held the receiver for a while, feeling the plastic in her hand, thinking deadthingdeadthingdeadthingdead thingdeadthingdeadthing.

  Then she stumbled to the bathroom, startled by a lurch in her belly. She hadn’t eaten in weeks so what could be down there that wanted up?

  Leaning over the toilet, Dorien heaved painfully. There was no scorch of bile. Perhaps her body no longer manufactured any since it seemed to have no need of food or digestion for food. A black tide rushed up and out, spilling into the porcelain bowl. Once down there it squirmed, turning out to be comprised of hundreds of insects.

  Beetles to be precise.

  They had a unique shape to their backs.

  They were scarab beetles.

  Where had she read that scarab beetles mated in shit?

  She started to flush them but her finger paused on the toilet lever. It wasn’t as if they would do any harm. They weren’t a bit like Hollywood portrayed them, as horrendously voracious as a school of piranha. They began crawling up out of the bowl.

  “Go where you may,” she said quietly. Wondering if what she was becoming could somehow be mother to such creatures.

  They overran to the toilet tank and went up the wall or spilled onto the floor and scurried every direction.

  The phone rang and she cringed, hoping it wasn’t Annet again. It rang four times and then her answering machine picked up.

  “I can’t come to the phone right now. If you’re a telemarketer, I hope you rot in the worst hell available on this earth. If you’re a creditor, you might just as well be trying to sell something as get any money out of me. I’m broke. Anybody else, leave a name and number and if I’m still alive later to hear this, well…we’ll see…”

  There was the ubiquitous beep and a female voice said, “Hi, this is Vashti from Grom’s Market…”

  Dorien remembered she’d had a call from Vashti yesterday. And had there been another the day before? The week before? Who was Vashti?

  Ah, the one before (not sure whether the last one or the one before that) had asked, “When are you coming in?”

  Why would she come into Grom’s Market when she didn’t eat now?

  But this time Vashti said, “Sorry, we had to replace you. Hope you just blew us off and didn’t fall prey to The Shit Detail.”

  Replace her?

  Dorien slapped a palm to her forehead. That’s right. She’d gotten a job! She’d had to, after quitting school for the summer. How could she forget a thing like that?

  How long had she been going to work anyway? It scared her, doing things she couldn’t remember afterward.

  Dorien knew she suffered blank spaces. She’d find herself coming home at night, stumbling through the door with a splitting headache. Behind the eyes, always in the eyes. She’d go to the bathroom to splash cold water in her face and sometimes find a little blood on her cheek, or maybe trailing in a teardrop from one of those eyes. How’d that get there?

  (Hey, maybe she was the butcher’s assistant at Grom’s Market. She held the baby goats down when somebody ordered cabrito. She arranged the piglet heads all in a neat row. She swung dead chickens over her head. Gross!)

  She’d have amnesia…

  Aw, come on, working at a market couldn’t be that bad, even if apparently she’d been scheduled for the night shift.

  (Everybody knew this was when the strangest customers hung out.)

  So, why’d she quit?

  “Guess I didn’t,” Dorien told herself. “I just stopped coming. Or forgot to go.”

  So, how badly did she need money now?

  (Didn’t matter. Or rather, soon it wouldn’t matter.)

  She heard a knock on her front door.

  “Dory?”

  Annet again. Damn, wouldn’t she ever give up?

  “I know you’re there. I checked the college and they said you haven’t been to classes in a long time. And your name is still on the mailboxes downstairs. Landlord says you live here, even if you are behind on the rent.”

  Dorien was glad she hadn’t flushed the beetles, else Annet might have heard the sound in the hallway.

  “Why won’t you talk to me?” Annet’s voice whined, wheedled. “I can help. I’ve met the nicest people and I think you’d fit right in. We’ll even help with the rent and whatever bills you’re having trouble with. I read about that Gavin Parrish guy and what he did to you and the other girls. Why didn’t you tell us? No wonder you acted so strangely while Daddy was dying!”

  Dorien crept into the living room and very slowly sat down on the sofa. She sniffed the air. The sunglasses didn’t betray the expression in her eyes to any possible ghost in the room. She didn’t hold her breath. Did she even have to breathe anymore? She did breathe but it might have only been out of habit.

  She could hear Annet putting both palms flat against the door as
if trying to will Dorien to answer, as if trying to pass through in an osmosis of both physical body and psychic determination. Those palms were hot and damp. The pulses in the fingers were fast, throbbing like a hummingbird playing drums. How weird that she could hear Annet’s pulse that way. It filled Dorien’s head, going round and round, rhythmic thunder captured and descending down long copper pipes, clatter clank rumble. It got so loud she feared she might actually cry out. (Mustn’t do that! Annet will know I’m here.)

  She already knows.

  Dorien grasped the sofa cushions under her, squeezed polyester stuffing, stifling her scream.

  Suddenly it was simply gone. As if she’d made it stop, as she might have Neela’s choking.

  “I’m leaving something for you. Right outside the door. Promise you’ll get it and take a look?” Annet chuckled. “It’s…well, you’ll see. Maybe you really aren’t in there, hiding from me. It’ll help you just like it’s helped me.”

  Dorien sat there, waiting. Knowing that Annet had walked a little ways down the hall and stopped, to see if she would open the door. She shut her eyes, let time flow away from her and here. Imagined underground rivers and conduits, thresholds and tunnels. If she started counting backward—beginning with a number in the trillions perhaps—would she go back so far she could never return once she hit zero?

  Eventually she opened her eyes again. They were so sore behind the glasses. Annet had come during the day. Not that it was all that visible with the duct tape Dorien had sealed the windows with and the black electrician’s tape she’d recently layered over that. But she felt the darkness, because it was as sentient as any god. And with all the poisons the city poured into it, it might even now be a devil.

  Dorien knew Annet had left hours ago. She got up and walked across the room, opened the door.

  She’d expected another paper bag with stew. She wouldn’t just throw it into the trash this time. She’d sneak downstairs and put it in the alley for the strays. Dogs eating dog. At least it wouldn’t be wasted. Everything that lived had a right to see its death be for a decent purpose—such as part of the food chain, nature’s recycling.

  But it wasn’t more take-out from CANE. It was a book, much-read and (dog-eared?).

  Sacred Sepsis.

  “It isn’t a comfortable subject. But it comprises who we are as well as who we were and will be. Every by-product is a metaphor for the end and a place for a genesis. The goddess of shit is not evil but possesses the duality that many mother deities from world religions have been said to personify: light and darkness, life and death, the sacred and profane.”

  Goddess of shit?

  Dorien’s heart stopped beating. (That is, provided it still did at all.) She realized she’d opened the book in the hallway and read a tiny passage in the introduction. What if Annet came back?

  She heard a television (or maybe it was a radio) blaring from a neighbor’s place. A news report of another recent grave found desecrated. Then a report of a series of crimes like those committed by The Shit Detail, only some of these were on the opposite side of the country and some were in Europe.

  When had Dorien last seen or listened to news? For all she knew, another war might be going on (and on…) Wasn’t there usually one somewhere? She might go outside to find the sun had shriveled and dissolved into the moon. (No, she felt it when it pressed against the covered windows, sweating like a dirty lover on top of the building.)

  Dorien quickly ducked back into the apartment and closed the door, locked it, deadbolted it, put on the chain.

  Goddess of shit?

  It was the book’s subject. First she paced the floor. What? For hours? Then she sat down, legs folded beneath her like a cat. Going through the pages, dry as a dead fly’s wings against her thumb. Reading in the dark.

  “Our history is the nightmare, full frontal and posterior exposed, outrage by outrage. Decency doesn’t enter into it. Decency only mandates shame, smothered with guilt, the pain festering until it has turned to cancer. Our trial by fire and obscenity, except that humans don’t want rational decay; they prefer a flushable riddle. We are oppressed by our toilet habits, by the mere notion that there is no choice but to submit to this undignified action, nature’s ultimate intimidation. I do not mean to suggest that the goddess of shit intimidates us. Rather, I propose that ‘nature,’ as it or she or he is perceived, is solely a construction of mankind’s, created with scatalogical and improbable nomenclature by rough beasts slouching toward nirvana.

  “There were more religions in the past that had underworlds but didn’t have heavens. Hells which were a sense of place more dismal than the earthly plain, where suffering surpassed nonexistence.

  “In Ezekial it says, ‘And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man, in their sight.’ Sublime or relentlessly scriptural? Whatever, it is yet undeniably intended as sacred.

  “And then this, purely septic, possibly classic bit from Arthur Rimbaud (before he authored A Season In Hell):

  ‘A small black angel getting sick

  From eating too much licorice stick.

  He takes a shit, then disappears;

  But as the empty darkness clears,

  Beneath the moon his shit remains

  Like dirty blood in dirty drains.’”

  Dorien tried to lick her lips. Surely they had cracked and bled. But her tongue wouldn’t come out.

  “This book is intended to encompass a full range of archaeological and socialogical information and commentary on our obsession with waste. It will include findings by Dr. Godard and myself at the sites, as well as mythology, art and literature. It may appear to be sensational but it was never my intention to simply shock. Those who find they are too easily offended by the information imparted in this treatise may wish to examine their own motives for unreasonable stricture and anal retention.

  “When we accept that there is nothing which is part of us too small or too mean to have been created by God, we set ourselves free.”

  “Who are these guys?” Dorien said out loud.

  According to the book’s jacket there were two authors: Dr. Louis Godard and Dr. James Singer. But the introduction admitted the book was written after Godard’s death. (In the Catacombs of St. Aureola! And she’d dreamt of this place. She’d been in it with the cassia flowers and the stink of dog inside bowels. There were photographs of the murals inside the tomb, and it chilled her to the bone to see the resemblance with how Annet appeared now.)

  The text showed a copyright date of 1993 and numerous reprint years following. She had to talk to this Singer. He must have answers for what she was going through. Well, actually he’d probably think she was a nutcase but Dorien knew she had to try.

  The biographical information didn’t say where this archaeologist could be found. But she bet anyone with a book this popular might be listed on the Internet. She actually did own a computer, a creeker of an old redo she’d bought cheap to use for her school work. Right now it was covered with dust. But she wiped off the screen, blew at the keyboard, and got it up and running. Connected to the Web, went to GOOGLE, typed in Dr. James Singer, and hit *SEARCH*.

  A long list came up. Apparently there were quite a few doctors in the world with this name. She tried Sacred Sepsis. Bingo.

  Goddamn, the man taught at a college across town. Not her own but close enough to drive. What were the fucking odds?

  Maybe there were no coincidences. Everything that really mattered to you might just be lined up and waiting. They called that fate, didn’t they?

  Dorien finger-combed her hair, grabbed her purse and car keys, and headed out the door.

  ««—»»

  She’d stopped at a red light across the street from the park where she and Gavin—and others—had been walking after the movie. Where they’d witnessed The Shit Detail’s murder of the old homeless woman. The lights along the road glowed like dirty yellow rainbows in the dark smog. The Volkswagen coughed as it idled,
purring cat-on-its-deathbed coronary occlusion-rhythms to make up for her not having the radio on. Piece of shit, but it was all hers.

  Another car rolled up next to hers, the bass in their music so loud she actually felt it dissolving marrow in her bones. Its windows were down—as were hers since the funky air conditioning had expired. It was August and steamy hot. So hot the pollution at night seemed to mate with itself to spawn shadowy dinosaurs of poison, which stalked the roadways and climbed the skyscrapers and fought in the widest alleys.

  There were four young men in this car. They ogled her and one smiled with a whole mouthful of moonstone teeth. He said, “Baby, you lookin’ like some mighty tasty shit.”

  Another told her, “Built like a brick shit house…”

  “Why you wear those sunglasses at night?” asked a third.

  “So everything I see will be dark,” she replied. Not the truth but what the hell. What was the line from the famous film? It amounted to the fact they couldn’t handle the truth.

  “No shit?” countered the fourth young man, grinning.

  “Oh yes, definitely shit,” she answered with a curt nod.

  The light changed to green and they took off, squealing tires, leaving streaks of black rubber like rankled skidmarks in equally dark underwear. She started to take her foot off the brake, to step on the gas, but something at the edge of the park made her pause.

  What was going on there? A mugging. Not rare for this city.

  Happened all the time.

  One man had another on the ground. The one on the bottom tried to scream but only managed to whuff-whuff. Gag in his mouth or maybe he’d been chopped hard in the throat, collapsing his windpipe. Yes, there was a bit of the bubbly whistle in the whuff-whuff. (Amazing she could hear this but her senses had sharpened lately. Goddess senses.) She considered helping until she understood the man on the bottom was dying and would indeed be dead very shortly.