Dread in the Beast

by Charlee Jacob

  Dorien hustled into a stall and closed the door. Should she put her feet up so they couldn’t tell she was in there? She tried to do this but it wasn’t as easy as it looked in the movies.

  Why do that, though? It wasn’t as if they were making sure there was no else in the bathroom. They weren’t talking about state secrets. And Dorien doubted her sister could recognize her by her shoes and ankles alone. She’d just stand there and wait for them leave.

  But, damn it, she wanted to catch the professor and talk to him before he left the building. Not that she was certain he was going to go somewhere else. Maybe he had another class coming in. It had been luck on her part that she’d made it to this one. The man’s secretary had been about to step out of the office herself when Dorien arrived. She’d stayed long enough to tell her where Dr. Singer could be found—until 11:00.

  Dorien had thanked her. But she’d done it while keeping a good distance, wrinkling her nose.

  “Isn’t he amazing?” Annet was saying to her companion.

  The two women had gone into the toilets on either side of Dorien’s.

  “I could listen to him forever,” the other agreed. “But I wish he’d talk more about Aureola. So much of his lectures is made up of unsuitable, unrelated details.”

  “That’s just to appeal to outsiders. It throws the uninitiated off,” Annet explained. “Same’s true of any genuine apocryphal text. The infidels take it at face value. Isn’t meant for them so what the hell, right?”

  Dorien heard them as Annet pulled up a short skirt and pulled down death panties of petroleum-based fabric, and the other girl slid denim jeans. Further down, at the end of the stalls, somebody else moaned as inaudibly as possible with cramps, tights like a black snake coiled around her ankles.

  Apparently they didn’t care if anybody overheard them. The sign of the true believer.

  The groaner pulled her tights back up, flushed, and left. Two more girls came into the room, one taking a stall, the other fussing with her hair and lipstick in the mirror.

  Dorien huffed. How long was this going to take? She knew both were bulemic. Such acts normally took place at home, at a secure location. It wasn’t as if they had that much business to do in here. Leave, already!

  She heard Annet and her friend mumbling the same litany Dorien had heard Annet say in the bathroom at their parents’ house. “I purge myself of evil thoughts and the evil world. I make myself an empty vessel for you. I make myself a pure child again.” Said in babydoll voices, no less. Dorien thought she’d puke. She couldn’t, of course. Not only did she not have the interior stuff to do the deed but she didn’t dare—or they would hear her.

  Not that Annet would be likely to recognize her sister by the sound of her vomiting.

  The last two to enter the bathroom left. Shift change, three more came in. Then they left. Still Annet and her friend stayed. Obviously this was like Mass for them. A social and religious event not to be rushed.

  Well, Dorien was tired of it. She needed to hurry or she might miss her chance to talk to Dr. Singer. And that was important.

  Dorien twitched a smile, fanned the fingers of both hands into something like a sunburst. And then jumped up to stand on the toilet seat, hunkering down just enough that her head and shoulders didn’t show above the top ledge of the stall.

  The toilets began to overflow.

  She heard Annet and the friend and whoever else was in there cry out in disgusted dismay. They were hurrying now, damn it.

  Dorien waited until they were gone, water gushing over her shoes, then she opened the stall door and left. People had gathered at the far end of the hall, watching the water pour out of the ladies bathroom. She spotted the professor with them so she made her way toward him.

  ««—»»

  Jim had just put all his papers and books together and was about to head out. He saw several young women come screaming out the the ladies room and observed the water chasing them.

  “Professor!” Myrtle came down the hall, waving, smiling her quirky little smile when she saw the flood. “I’m glad I caught you! A man called, says he just arrived from Europe? I gave him an appointment to talk to you. It’s in an hour…”

  He’d turned away from the flood and toward his secretary. But then something made him look back. At another young woman who was wading out. She wore dark sunglasses. She seemed to flutter at the edges, like very old film some cinematic preservation society was trying desperately to reclaim.

  And all of a sudden he was feeling the oppression of that dreamed-of underground network. Tunnels so far below, not hell/ near hell/smell of black shit. And a roaring as of thunder trapped somewhere…or of waterfalls.

  He thought he’d been turned upside down. His stomach lurched and he experienced a spasm inside his gut which curled and then contracted, curled and then contracted.

  Myrtle followed his gaze. She shuddered involuntarily although she couldn’t have said why. She’d met the woman at the office earlier and had no such reaction.

  “Dr. Singer?” this young woman with her eyes hidden said, walking up with her hand out. “I am Dorien Warmer…”

  Jim’s own hand stretched out on extinct. Their fingers met. And now Dorien suffered her own epiphany. For a moment she was back within that underground maze. She saw her lost people and the faceless, evil plumber. Pipes rattled and there was a rumble deep and below.

  She realized it was actually coming from underneath the floor.

  “Run!” somebody shouted, and then someone else picked it up. “Run! Get out of the building fast as you can!”

  Myrtle grabbed Jim’s arm and began pulling him toward the front door of the Science Building. He reached back for Dorien but almost couldn’t see anything for his terror. He flashed back on the catacombs exploding, caving in. He didn’t even realize it was Myrtle he picked up as he ran toward the door. In his mind it was Louis again.

  But afterward he came back to himself. He’d hurried with everyone else into the next building over and climbed stairs to be on higher ground. They pressed against the windows on all the upper floors to look out. It seemed as if all the sewage in the city was being forced up through a rent in the floor of the Science Building. Kids laughed nervously and covered their mouths against the stench which permeated even the walls and glass of—where were they?—oh, the Engineering Building.

  Myrtle smiled as he glanced down at her.

  “Man, I thought I was saving you,” she said, eyes bigger even that they usually were, shining with downright girlish awe. “Pretty good sprinting and lugging for an old prof.”

  He and Myrtle stood with about ten others, up on the fourth floor. God, he hadn’t actually carried her up several flights of stairs, had he? Surely he’d gotten them into an elevator and then set her down.

  Most of the kids standing with them were female. They all grinned at him like he was some sort of Hollywood action-film god. He figured they were wondering, gee did he take vitamins or Viagra or what? How embarrassing. And he had to just hold his breath, waiting for the heart attack which must inevitably follow.

  They heard sirens and knew help would be there any minute. How could such a thing have happened?

  “Did you see if the woman with the sunglasses got out?” Jim asked his secretary.

  Myrtle shrugged. “No, I didn’t. I’m sorry.”

  “Look!” one of the young women at the window cried. She pointed outside to the appalling tide of foulness which still spewed from the doors and windows of the Science Building. “I can’t believe it!”

  Jim stared. The one with the sunglasses was floating out upon the mass of sludge, borne aloft like a very steady surfer, upright upon the rippling current. Rats swam around her, washed up from the sewers. She didn’t seem to even be touched by it, her shoes and the hem of her dress only being wet from the water which had overflowed first. She was like a goddess, that’s what she was. Botticelli’s Venus coming up to the beach standing in her shellboat.

  Jim h
eard several of them sing out at once.

  “Oh, my God…that’s my sister!”

  “She’s Aureola! She must be!”

  “It’s a miracle, that’s what it is!”

  “It’s a sign!”

  Quivering, these people dropped to their knees.

  Jim’s jaw dropped open. He gaped at them. Was this a joke? Could it be possible that Aureola had a modern cult following?

  He looked back outside. The woman riding the crest of sewage was there one moment. Then the next she disappeared, as if she’d dissolved into it.

  ««—»»

  The tribe of Nyakyusa have a death ritual in which they liken dirt with insanity: being that those who are out of their wits consume filth. Apparently there are—in their estimation—two forms of insanity. The first is given by God; the second happens to you if you don’t perform your required rituals—a terrible thing, since any sense you have of what is good and what is bad is a knowledge arising out of those very same rituals.

  The Nyakyusa define filth as anything to do with shit, mud, frogs, froggy shit. They equate the insane person eating their detritus as consuming death itself, the waste being the dead body.

  Ritual keeps you sane and alive but insanity (from not performing the sanctified duties) brings shit, mud, frogs, etc., and a form of death. And if that’s what you want, then you must be crazy.

  This tribe has strong rules which must be followed to keep from touching bodily waste which they consider to be hazardous and toxic material. They call it ubanyali and it is basically derived from anything to do with sex, also the female particulars of menstruation and child-birth. It comes from dead bodies, including the blood of enemies.

  Yet the people of the Nyakyusa welcome filth during the ritual for mourning those very same dead. They broom it onto the grieving. They symbolically eat the waste to sort of immunize themselves against later going insane. All the rest of the time they avoid it and think anyone who doesn’t is mad. Yet when faced with the death of a relative or friend, they will say they have consumed this same anathema, just as the insane do, so that they will be able to safeguard their sanity.

  So, to recap, madness is a penalty for those who do not perform their rituals. Yet the tribal members will go insane if they fail to do this ritual of consuming filth but, paradoxically, they will remain sane if they do the ritual.

  Odd as it may seem, the Nyakyusa are not a partically stressed-out people.

  —Sacred Sepsis

  Dr. Louis Godard and Dr. James Singer

  — | — | —

  Chapter 25

  He’d heard them whispering when they believed he was in another part of the house.

  “Between the two of us, baby, we can do this ourselves.”

  “Yeah, what does he know you don’t? You’ve seen everything on the table. You know every procedure.”

  “And you can keep the girls in line.”

  “Shock does most of that. But, well, it does help that they see me as one of their own.”

  “Yeah, but you never had that brain-scrambling problem.”

  “I’m from good, strong stock. Nothing phased me much before—and nothing after either.”

  “I love you, baby.”

  “I love you, too, sugar.”

  Big Garth fumed. So his top assistant had been going behind his back, wooing one of the geishas, getting it on with her and plotting to start a competing business.

  He thought about bursting into the room and throttling that med school punk with his bare hands while she watched, helpless to do a damned thing about it until it came her turn. He wanted to carry her up to the operating room and show her how much she had yet to lose—and just how long it could take to die with a little bit removed at a time.

  But he managed to stay restrained, creeping downstairs to avail himself of one of the fine blades on the walls. He’d just showered and only wore a simple robe. No armor, no uniform pieces, no weaponry.

  Big Garth clenched his fists as he made it to the first floor. He’d been just about to call Jason with a curious proposition. Jason had told him about the frost between himself and his Cairo-born wife. So, what if they put Rose in underground theater, pruned yet self-renewing? She’d be a hit, a smash, a legend inside of a month. And Jason could garner some husbandly revenge for having been frozen out.

  Shame, that. Had to be some interesting meat, with those flesh veils trailing off her. What would it be like to screw her? Bizarre. One or two steps above an animal and only one or two steps—maybe—below demigod.

  But now this. Hell, Garth was master here. He couldn’t let this measely stump-grinder undermine his authority.

  Garth had only started to look around to choose a blade when his cell phone rang. He pulled it from a silken pocket, glad it hadn’t done that as he stood outside the geisha’s door upstairs. The conspirators would’ve heard it and known he’d just learned their plans.

  “Moshi-Moshi,” he said curtly.

  “Garth…”

  It was Jason. Speak of the devil.

  “B.G., listen. I got a tip two seconds ago. You know your assistant, the one you said yesterday had gone missing?”

  This wasn’t the traitorous retainer upstairs but the second one. He’d left three days ago to attend classes and hadn’t been back.

  “Yes?”

  “He’s been arrested. And word has it he spilled his guts and I don’t mean seppuku. Cops are coming. Get out…now! I’m already on my way there. I’ll get you to my place. Meet me out front or in the alley behind the deli if the cops arrive before I do.”

  “Will do. Arigato!”

  Garth hung up. He knew better than to waste precious minutes sulking over this calamity in his fortunes. He grabbed the nearest weapons, a katana (or the standard fighting sword) and a wakizashi (a shorter sword usually used for committing hari-kiri). He didn’t intend to use either of them on himself.

  He also had no intention of leaving anybody behind to talk about him—or to betray him further. Garth grimaced like a character in Kabuki, rushed up the stairs to the floor where the geishas were housed, and burst open the door where his first assistant had been plotting with one of the ‘girls.’ The kid jumped to his feet, trying to get his pants up. Garth slashed down with the katana, cutting through the right shoulder, splitting him all the way to the hip. Then he beheaded him. The geisha shrieked, cursing Garth as he then turned on her with the shorter sword. She cussed him all the way to hell as he disemboweled her, leaving entrails across the ornate couch, as if a whole crate full of joke cans containing festive paper snakes had exploded.

  He stalked down the hallway, kicking open each door and dispatching each of his pretty little bonsai babes within. Ordinary decapitations here were in order, being the quickest method. Most didn’t even scream, being unable to as they were drugged to the gills or simply too catatonic from shock and abuse to respond.

  He felt pumped, knew he had to resemble one of the mad samurai from his atrocity prints. He was covered in blood and stank of death. Oh, Nanking, I have come home!

  But who was that bitch standing at the end of the hall?

  Not a part of his inventory. No, she was whole, voluptuous even, with two arms and two legs and blond hair down to her ass crack. Man, if he wasn’t on the run, he’d be considering adding her to his repertoire. Yet who was she and what was she doing there in his house?

  A cop. Sure. He hadn’t heard any sirens but they must have zoomed onto the street without them. Maybe they were all through the house now.

  He raised the long sword and pulled back the short one, prepared to let her have both, a chop and a gouging thrust.

  But she said, “Here. This is the gateway. Enter…”

  And she took off those sunglasses.

  ««—»»

  “…he bid his wife eat sparingly, because she was near her time, and that these tripes were no very commendable meat. They would fain, said he, be as the chewing of ordure, that would eat the case where
in it was. Notwithstanding these admonitions, she did eat sixteen quarters, two bushels, three pecks, and a pipkin full. O the fair fecality, wherewith she swelled, by the ingrediency of such shitten stuff!”

  —‘Gargantua’

  (From Chapter 4, ‘How Gargamelle, being great with Gargantua, did eat a huge deal of tripes’)

  Francois Rabelais, former Franciscan priest, former Franciscan transferred to Benedictine Order, former Benedictine adjourned to secular priest wandering about the world, former medical student, medical lecturer, master of anatomical dissection, actor and creator of a fish sauce, playwright, novelist, and eventual returnee to the Benedictines

  quoted in Sacred Sepsis

  Dr. Louis Godard and Dr. James Singer

  — | — | —

  Chapter 26

  Jim wasn’t feeling well. The cramps he’d experienced earlier were worse. And then to find out who the appointment was with—could this be the visitor from Europe Myrtle had told him about?

  Jim walked into his office to find Father Malvezzi waiting for him. The man still appeared much the same, except that in 1990 his hair had been white and his eyebrows black. Now the eyebrows were white as well. He was without his two Blues Brothers bodyguards.

  “What the hell do you want?” he asked the priest less than cordially.

  The man from the Vatican lifted those heavy eyebrows. “Well, I did not exactly expect to be welcomed with open arms. I trust, however, that the document I sent you arrived in good condition?”

  Jim ground his teeth. “YOU sent that? Then it must be a load of muck and a pack of lies. It looked real enough. I’ve sent it to a lab to be authenticated.”

  “It will be found quite genuine, I assure you,” said Malvezzi.

  Singer had entered his office with his secretary.