Dread in the Beast

by Charlee Jacob

  The man on top was much bigger than his victim. He’d jerked down the smaller man’s jeans. Dorien stiffened, not really wanting to witness a rape, homosexual or otherwise. But then the one on the bottom turned his head just enough that some of the illumination from a reasonably near street light cast its yellow glow on his face.

  It was Gavin Parrish. Not sneering now, not arrogant. Just whuff-whuff-whistling. Violet foam at the mouth and nose.

  So, maybe that woman had collected enough money to put a hit on him. Didn’t necessarily take a lot of dough. There were guys who’d kill for the price of a cheeseburger. Or maybe the attacker was a brother to one of Gavin’s names-on-a-sheet.

  A blade flashed in the same light, crisp and keen. The whuff-whuff whistle went up briefly so high in pitch it could have shattered glass. Then all Dorien heard was a gurgle.

  The assailant looked out. Did he make her, there in her car, sitting through the green until it was first yellow, then red again?

  Yes, he did. Dorien knew she ought to go then, fast as she could. So he didn’t get her license number or maybe just come over to slit her throat. But when she tried to change gears and stomp on the gas, all she heard was that piglet fart and then the car choked. You get what you pay for.

  He was coming, yes. Strolling across the black sea of mostly invisible grass like he had all the time in the world. Time was his friend, his co-conspirator.

  Dorien just watched him, wondering how Neela would feel about it when she read about Gavin’s murder.

  (Are you kidding? She was going to laugh and pop wheelies in that wheelchair.)

  (Yeah, and how would she feel when she read about Dorien’s?)

  Killer coming… A big, big guy. Shoulders so wide he probably had to turn sideways to go through some doorways. A smug expression harder than Gavin’s own, more self-possessed.

  “I’ve seen you before,” she started to whisper. “You followed me down dirty streets in a dream.”

  Into a City of the Dead. No, she couldn’t do this now. Whatever it was she was meant to do…or have done to her. It wasn’t the right moment.

  She might have jumped out of the car to run. (Was it possible she could have willed herself to vanish?) Instead Dorien slipped down a little in her seat until all he could really see of her were the dark glasses. It was in the hands of fate.

  He was saying something as he neared the Volkswagen. He had something in his fist and he murmured, “Nietzsche said, ‘Out of your wild cats must tigers have evolved, and out of your poison-toads, crocodiles…’”

  Huh?

  “Present for you, honey,” he then told her and tossed what he held through the car’s rolled down window. Then he chuckled and swaggered away, not giving a damn what she thought or if she planned to run shrieking to the cops. If she’d have been going to scream, she probably already would have. So many people cowered, mute witnesses, terrified to become involved or just so jaded that nothing phased them anymore. Dorien realized this beast of a man probably just assumed she’d pissed her undies in fear of him and would be virtually comatose long enough for him to get away.

  She looked down at what had splatted on the passenger side seat.

  It was Gavin’s cock and balls.

  Dorien picked them up and hung them from the rearview mirror, then drove on. Looking back at the place in the park, she saw a woman in a long robe emerge from the bushes and walk over to Gavin’s body. She crouched down and bent toward it.

  Dorien frowned, not knowing what this woman was going to do. But she was sure the female wasn’t going to give the dead man a kiss.

  ««—»»

  “If without knowing it one eats what is polluted by blood or any unclean thing, it is nothing; but if he knows, he shall do penance according to the degree of pollution.” Penitential of Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury A.D. 668-690. This was the same learned man (only three centuries past Saint Aureola) who demanded that women who had given birth spend forty days in purgation—as if admitting new life into the world was a sin. He further insisted that any woman who had entered a church while she was menstruating do a fast for three weeks as a penalty. Not that he mentioned how anyone was to know she was menstruating. Perhaps the powers that be struck the offending female with a pink thunderbolt.

  —Sacred Sepsis

  Dr. Louis Godard and Dr. James Singer

  — | — | —

  Chapter 21

  SHEOL’S DITCH,

  ONE YEAR AGO

  Big Garth Listo glimpsed his old friend through the security peep hole in his front door and opened it immediately.

  “Jason! It’s been fifteen years since I last saw you,” the big man effused.

  First thing Jason noticed was the netsuke around B.G.’s neck. He couldn’t help but smile. Garth hadn’t known he was coming, so he couldn’t have put it on simply to please him. Garth really did treasure it.

  In his fifties now, Garth’s large frame had fleshed out so much that he almost resembled a sumo wrestler. (He really was BIG Garth now.) He wore the classic kami-shimo, a samurai costume consisting of full trousers and a jacket with wide wings across the shoulders. He had the traditional two swords in his belt: the katana (or fighting sword) and the shorter wakizashi. It didn’t look as if he actually shaved the top of his head anymore for there was no stubble. He’d grown genuinely bald and what hair remained he’d drawn back into a tight queue.

  Jason looked his old friend and mentor over, then nodded with approval. Yes, Garth had gained weight but he still looked fit enough to single-handedly take on any average gun-toting-because-they-didn’t-have-class-or-style-enough-for-a-real-weapon street gang.

  It didn’t matter that Garth was still into his Japanese warrior mode, caught on the wheel of incarnation. Maybe it simply wasn’t time for him to progress to the next level. For the most part (save for minor excursions more out of curiosity than being-in-a-spiritual-rut) Jason had put Crowley behind him. In this life he was Jason Cave; he had new lessons to learn and anti-laws to will into being.

  “You got my letters though, right?” he wanted to know.

  Garth nodded once. “Practically from every port in the world. How long you been back in the States?”

  “About…” Jason glanced at the Rolex on his wrist, taken after a poker game with some French champagne salesman who’d considered himself a high roller, “…sixty-six hours.”

  “Two thirds the number of the beast,” Garth commented. “Didn’t have any trouble finding my house, I trust?”

  “No. This place must have set you back some.”

  “Always have to pay more when you want a lot of privacy.”

  Garth had stepped back so his guests could enter. At first he’d thought Jason was alone. Jason also happened to be a big man, though none of it was fat. He looked like he ought to belong body and soul to the Worldwide Wrestling Federation, muscles hard as concrete blocks. Then Garth saw the freckled little woman behind him and his eyes widened some.

  Jason smiled. “I’d like you to meet Rose,” he said. “My bride.”

  Garth looked doubtful. “You got hitched?”

  “Met her in Cairo. She’s from a very old native family. No Alexandrian Greek and no Euro-trash.”

  They had all gone inside and Big Garth closed the door. Jason beamed as he glanced around the living room. One entire wall was filled with an impressive array of Japanese cutlery: Aikuchi and Tanto, Daito, Tachi and Shira Tach. Tassled, finely engraved steel, scabbards of ivory/cinnabar/gold. There were three gaudy suits of lamellar armor on mannikins, comprised of many strips of iron scales arrayed horizontally and then lamenated and laced together to form plate. Not exactly cheap trinkets bought for a song at some local flea market. Garth was obviously doing well at whatever was his current underground occupation.

  “And you say her name is Rose?” Garth’s eyebrows went up and waggled.

  Jason knew what he was getting at. “Actually I have no idea what her real name is. I call her Rose after Cr
owley’s first wife. But you’d already guessed that.”

  Rose’s nose was in the air, sniffing, having detected an aroma she wanted to find the source of.

  “So, this seems to be quite a large house,” Jason stated, clasping his hands behind his back and rocking on his heels. “Taxes killing you yet?”

  “I got it for very little. It was right on the verge of being condemned. The previous owner was going to turn it into apartments, a lot like our old building. Most of these places in this part of the Ditch end up as cubicles for the slum rats.”

  “So what happened to him?” Jason wanted to know.

  Big Garth shrugged. “Oh, he had an accident. On the stairs over there. Fell down four flights of ’em. Over and over. Bet you could’ve heard them bones breaking like a marathon pig’s knuckle stew.”

  “Have much of a back yard to it?”

  “Yes, I have a lovely little Japanese garden there behind the high walls. Rocks and waterfalls, chrysanthemums and roses. Naturally, my greatest garden is ‘inside’ the house though.”

  The two men exchanged looks.

  “Care for a tour?” Garth offered.

  Jason grinned. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  Up the staircase. On the walls of the hallways were atrocity paintings, mostly prints but a few rare and very collectible originals. There were also stills from such modern Japanese ultraviolent pink movies such as Entrails Of A Virgin and Guinea Pig 2: Flower Of Bloody Flesh. More recent Japanese underground punk films like Rubber’s Lover and Tetsuo.

  Peering into a bathroom, Jason saw a film running, perhaps on closed loop so that it endlessly repeated its 45 minutes of gruesome mortality. Jason recognized it as being the documentary Death Women, Japan’s answer to the monumental success of the American real-gore fest , Faces Of Death. He’d seen the film in Taiwan. The scene up was the one where a woman had been crushed by a bus, her corpse virtually disintegrating when taken from the wreckage.

  Jason had taken Rose to see it, wondering how she would react to the sight of all those savaged bodies. He’d escorted her to films as they traveled around the world, including movies which incorporated some genuine act of homicide. So far she’d only sat, gazing stoically at the screen, images playing across her delicate features, cinematic blood seeming to caress her red hair like a ghastly starlight.

  He’d wondered, then, if Death Women might arouse her? Would she be filled with an abrupt all-consuming passion for a snack? Might she run amuck in the audience, ripping off heads and sucking out all the organs through the straws of necks?

  She’d done nothing. Perhaps she was like a cat with a mirror, not responding to the visual stimulis because it lacked the scent of reality.

  He’d been disappointed. But at least she didn’t try to keep him from following her when she went out to feed. He always kept a discreet distance to allow her the illusion of privacy as she trolled to cemeteries and funeral homes. He’d even accompanied her to a city morgue and assisted by knocking over the head an attendent who arrived at an inconvenient moment.

  He’d grown accustomed to watching her dine, to observing as she used a long nail to slice open a cadaver’s abdomen, reaching into the trunk’s cavity to pull out intestines which she then squeezed to push out whatever shit they’d died with. In some guts—fresher ones—this ran out like pudding. But in those dead and maybe even buried awhile, the matter might have fossilized, turning into stones of topaz, amber and jet. (Never sapphires. No, there were never any stars here.)

  Jason was a little disappointed, knowing from his vision with the Iraqi’s head during Desert Storm that she was a creature from the other side—or who at least had access to the other side. He’d seen her sewing up the vaginas of ravaged virgins in that (seventh?) hell. He’d even performed rituals Crowley had written of, placing Rose in the ornate circle’s center as a focus, as the offering’s reverse, as the demon seeking home. But nothing ever came of it.

  “You get contacts?” Jason asked, remembering Garth had always had glasses perched on the end of his nose.

  “I had laser surgery. Lasers are just amazing,” Big Garth enthused. “Wish I could afford to use ’em in my own work.”

  “Well, maybe someday, right?”

  It appeared to have left Garth with a slight squint which made his gaze seem all the more intense.

  Jason glimpsed a couple other people gliding noiselessly about from one room to another. He couldn’t tell if they were male or female or one of each.

  “My assistants,” Garth explained. “Medical students, both of them. Getting experience here they could never have anywhere else. One plans to go into ER trauma and the other into graphic reconstruction.”

  He opened doors for his guests. On hand were delicate oriental antiques of subtle pattern or grimacing demon—then indelicate manmade prodigies: grimacing, no subtlety.

  Jason’s eyes lit up. Here were a human’s darkest will imprinted upon reality. Regardless of what path destiny might have intended for these people, the true Superman had diverted and recreated their fates to serve his own vision. Where, then, did the line between god and man break? Ordinary man made history yet god planned out the future. Only a deity-in-the-flesh could generate their own personal procession of the damned.

  Rose looked into each room but he read no expression on her face. Visions of visceral shock and suffering apparently didn’t phase her. Jason already knew this, having her present during quite a few of his sojourns into wisdom-seeking depravity.

  Yet B.G. expected a reaction: a female’s natural empathy for other women, or maybe arousal if she weren’t the sympathetic type. She might at least perspire a little, flick her eyes, bite her lip, make a secret fist, press her legs together…something to show emotional response. Yet she didn’t sweat or flinch or blink. As if she saw through the freak show into another realm, a place better equipped to hold her rapt (raptor) attention.

  Jason, however, was impressed. This was surely near to the mastery and beauty available in that horizonless place. It was almost as close as anyone on earth could reach.

  God created a violent planet of disease and murder and atrocities-beyond-murder. Humanity invented the pretense of peace—the Pax-not-bloody-likely. Sweetness and light was not and had never been intended as man’s natural condition. The Superman understood the universe’s mandate and even improved upon it, not thoughtless cruelty as any predator animal employed on innocent instinct but a masterful merging of ego and evil, furthering the soul’s ambition to triumph over the commonality alotted to most spirits.

  It seemed as if the great philosophers preached a non-violent course. Jason knew better. He knew to read between the lines!

  They had to cloak their messages in order to get them published at all. One had to FEEL for what they were really saying, spotting and interpreting the symbols in their language that announced You are one of us, of the few. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

  You are the law.

  Read between the lines!

  (The old God is dead; You are God now. Read between the lines! You have always been chosen.)

  Professors and fools claimed it meant something else which they, in their terror and jealousy, called lofty. But they either didn’t know or were too whipped to recognize it aloud.

  This poetry of blood in the free form, night’s blank verse/blank stare/onward into a place without horizons, without rules. Where scorpions and maggots and beating hearts fell from the sky in constant deluge. Where the grins of Supermen were turned up to the darkness, watching for Melanicus, the Prince of Dark Bodies, and where the possession of the damned was served up eternally for the tiger’s palate.

  Read Between The Lines!

  “Jason?” Big Garth spoke softly, knowing his former pupil had been pushed into deep revelation. This flattered Garth, understanding it was due to the room after room of gorgeous bonsai. But now he’d taken them to the top floor which consisted of a single, large room. “This is my greenhous
e.”

  Jason saw long silvery tables, needles and suture threads, Fogarty catheters, bipolar cauteries, vascular clips of varying sizes, jewelers forceps, microscissors, microtipped vessel dilators, microirrigators, fiberoptic lights, bone saws and bone screws, introosseous and intramedullary wires. It was awesome, not in the trite way that kids used the word, but in the way it was truly meant: overwhelming one with wonder and respect that made the head dizzy and the heart pound and the bladder leak a spontaneous sixteenth of a teaspoonful of urine.

  He heard Garth gasp. Rose had wandered over to a bin marked BIOHAZARD in a corner. (Actually at first Jason misread it as reading ALHAZRED.) She’d opened it to find all the ‘scraps’ of Garth’s medical trash. And she’d begun nibbling.

  Jason’s old friend was taken a bit aback. He turned to Jason for an explanation.

  “She’s a ghoul,” he said quite plainly, without inflection. One did not overstate truths or people might suspect the truth was being invented. Leave the drama out.

  “Cairo, you said?” Big Garth asked.

  Jason nodded.

  “A genuine ghoul! So, is she from some bygone era? Does she harken back to the time of the pharaohs or does she personally remember Napoleon? Anything like that?”

  “I have no idea,” Jason admitted with a crooked smile. “Apparently it isn’t cool to ask a female of any species what her true age is.”

  Garth chuckled. He next got a hopeful gleam in his eyes “I don’t suppose she’s shown you the doorway?”

  But then, had she done this, Jason wouldn’t be standing there to answer, would he? For who would return—if they could return—after managing the crossover?

  Jason shook his head sadly. “No. Not yet.”

  ««—»»

  “The religious enthusiast Antoinette Bouvignon de la Porte used to mix with her food excreta in order to mortify herself. The beautiful Marie Alacoque licked up with her tongue the excrement of sick people to ‘mortify’ herself, and sucked their festering toes. The analogy with sadism is also of interest with this connection because here also manifestations in the sense of vampirism and anthropophagy arising from disgusting appetites of the organs of taste and olfaction produce lustful feelings. This impulse to disgusting acts might well be named koprolangnia.”