Dread in the Beast

by Charlee Jacob

Myrtle had opened with, “Oh, you must be the noon appointment.”

  “Yes,” Malvezzi said mildly. He’d always been mild, hadn’t he? Understated and cool.

  “Well, can I make some coffee?” she asked, looking from her employer to his “guest,” obviously sensing tension.

  “No,” Jim replied. “That won’t be necessary. He’d require snake venom and we haven’t any. Why don’t you call the lab? It’s been weeks. See what the hold up is.”

  “Will do, boss,” Myrtle answered and made herself look busy to the point of being fussy with the telephone.

  He went to the entrance of the inner office and gestured for the priest to join him there. He closed the door slowly, resisting an impulse to slam it.

  “Why did you send me that?” Jim demanded. “To get me to pull a retraction out of my butt?”

  Malvezzi managed a small smile behind one hand. “I do not believe you would do that. Your book has already been, shall we say, far too influential for a retraction to make any difference?”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Dr. Singer,” the priest began, “I sent you this ancient document because I believe the cult of Aureola is active again, having become so in the years since Sacred Sepsis was first published. Do you mind if I sit?”

  Singer huffed and gestured to a chair. He didn’t sit himself down. He wanted to be ready to launch across the desk at the man’s throat. (What? You carry a small, skinny woman out of a flooding building and suddenly you’re a comic book hero? Leaping tall pieces of furniture in a single bound?)

  Besides, from what he’d seen that morning, he already knew Aureola had new followers. But could that be attributed solely to his book?

  What else could it be?

  “You do not look surprised,” Malvezzi pointed out.

  “So there are anorexic girls calling her their patron saint…?”

  “Oh, no, son,” the priest argued, cutting him off, wagging a finger. Jim really cringed when the man called him “son.” Hey, this creep wasn’t his dad. “I do not mean simply followers. I refer to the dog cult. Surely you read that document I sent you before you passed it on for verification of antiquity?”

  Malvezzi had been toting a large manilla envelope. He opened it and pulled out several news clippings. He wet a finger on his tongue and then began to flip through them.

  “Let’s see. Oh, yes. These vile people leave behind text at each scene. Let’s list a few… ‘Why have all our fruits become rotten and brown? What was it fell last night from the evil moon?’ That is by Nietzsche. Quoted in your book on page 12. ‘Nothing is unclean in itself’, Paul the Apostle, quoted at the beginning of your book and also in the introduction. Then there is da da da, here it is…‘I will even appoint over your terror, consumption and the burning ague, that shall consume the eyes and cause sorrow of the heart: and ye shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it.’ From Leviticus, quoted on page 46. Here’s another. ‘During the Thirty Years War marauding bands of soldiers would attack villages. Trying to get the peasantry to tell where they had hidden their food, they would torture them by forcing them to swallow human and animal waste.’ Page 173 of your book. And this from the introduction again, ‘When we accept that there is nothing which is too small or too mean to have been created by God, we set ourselves free.’ And another gem. ‘A small black angel getting sick from eating too much licorice stick…’”

  Jim felt all the color and warmth drain from his face as he listened. Every item which had been written at a Shit Detail murder had also been in Sacred Sepsis. It must be a coincidence, he told himself. It had to be.

  What? Even material Jim had written? That was a stretch, boy.

  He glared at the priest. Guy was sure enjoying this, wasn’t he? “All right, all right! You made you point. I guess you’re saying those murders are my fault?”

  Malvezzi stopped, shaking his head. “No, I’m not saying that at all. But I did want you to see the connection. The cult is spreading abroad. I happen to believe you can help. Obviously you are a man of great influence with these people, because you are the one who discovered Aureola’s catacombs…”

  “Which you blew up,” Jim accused, “killing Dr. Godard. Guilty of a little murder yourself. Did you quote something appropriately scriptural as you set the fuse?”

  He was sweating, the pain in his gut moving low, twisting his insides. If he could, he’d attack Malvezzi. He’d do it for Louis. He glared hard at the man, expecting him to glance away, damned by the accusation in Singer’s eyes. The priest ought to at least look down at the floor with shame. But Malvezzi did not do this. He maintained a steady gaze, eye to eye with Jim.

  Feeling perfectly awful and determined not to show weakness to the priest, Jim sat down. He could actually double over a little and make it seem as if he were merely leaning forward at his desk. Must have been the pizza rolls he’d had at that faculty function yesterday. These or the deviled eggs. If he could get rid of this asshole, he’d see about swinging by the student clinic. If it was food poisoning, he might need antibiotics, not to mention an industrial strength Pepto.

  The priest sighed. “No, we never did that. We were going to seal the entrance, that was all. Aureola built her strength for more than a millennium and a half. If humans may become saints of light, why not saints of darkness? Demons, even? She found her way out.”

  “I don’t fuckin’ believe you!” Jim shouted. But he thought back to that scene in his hospital room, weeks after the explosion and cave-in. Malvezzi had visited him then, too. And had been confronted with the truth.

  But was it the truth? The man hadn’t denied it. Nor had he confessed. He may have simply given up trying to talk sense to Singer who he could tell was in no mood to listen.

  (He’d sent the Vatican the video tape of that visit. As insurance. As blackmail. They’d done nothing about his writing and releasing the archaeological evidence from the catacombs and elsewhere.)

  Maybe there’d been nothing to do.

  Maybe they’d never actually dreamed the cult would begin anew.

  Did most of the modern Church believe in devils? Or did they merely view them as symbolic, not to be taken in any literal sense?

  (And all those times Jim had been on television, grinning into the camera and talking about the finds, about science. Hoping like hell that this guy in black and his cronies were watching and frustrated because they couldn’t stop him. Jim had been smug, sure this was just the sort of avenging of which Louis would have approved. Non-violent, but getting those self-righteous bastards right where they lived. Had he suffered the sin of pride?)

  The priest spread his hands before him. “I know you’ve never believed me. I am sorry for that. The Church has been responsible for some terrible things in history: The Inquisition, the persecution of those of differing faiths, the suppression of accusations of child abuse among certain members of the clergy…”

  Jim squinted at mention of this last. Yes, butterball sinner. Running down the long aisles of gleaming pews. Tormented saints in stained glass, blind-folded and gagged. The smell of Ivory Soap and roses and fear. Did Malvezzi know about how Jim had suffered as a little boy? Was that item mentioned to gig him or simply to guarantee that the priest held his attention?

  Malvezzi continued, “But in the case of Aureola, we only ever acted to protect the innocent. And she with her dog cult were anything but innocent. We did not explode those catacombs. We had nothing to do with the unfortunate death of Dr. Godard.”

  Jim laughed, harshly. “I don’t know. It sounds too convenient, too much like a bad movie. Crazed cult goes bozanga on say-so of demon.”

  He touched the bridge of his nose. His sinuses hurt. From the odor of that overflowing sewer. It might be that the gases he’d inhaled were why he was being so combative. That, and whatever was trying to backstroke into his colon.

  Malvezzi shrugged. “Look at Manson and his ‘Family’ for a modern counterpart. They were supposedly
Christians, even believing that Charles Manson was Christ. Those who killed Sharon Tate and her friends and who killed the LaBiancas claimed they were ordered to do so with love. The inhabitants of Beverly Hills were terrified they would be next, just as the citizens of Rome were.”

  Jim wondered, Could the woman with the sunglasses, floating out on all that sewage, then vanishing…might she actually have been Aureola?

  (He’d considered briefly that she might be someone else, far more ancient/primitive. The archetypal dark figure he’d pursued—at first by accident and later absolutely on purpose, with a purpose—for most of his life.)

  Then he experienced a cramp so severe he actually screamed and slid to the floor. The priest bent down over him.

  “Oh! You poor man… Help! Miss Ave? The professor is ill…call an ambulance!” Malvezzi cried out.

  ««—»»

  “O fairies, O buggers,

  O eunuchs exotic!

  Come running, come running,

  ye anal-erotic!

  With soft little hands,

  with flexible bums,

  Come, O castrati,

  unnatural ones!”

  —From ‘Satyricon’ Petronius

  quoted in Sacred Sepsis

  Dr. Louis Godard and Dr. James Singer

  — | — | —

  Chapter 27

  Jason had watched for the police but seen none. Was it possible they were waiting for a judge to issue a warrant? It was two in the morning. Maybe they couldn’t find a night-owl judge this time. Or they could be on their way…

  Tacked onto telephone poles and taped on the windows of the closed deli were more posters for missing dogs than he’d ever seen at one place and one time.

  Jason got out of his car and stalked across the street. Big Garth had given him a key. Garth had always trusted him and this made him feel very honored. Normally those with brains knew never to trust anybody. But Listo and he went way back. Surely they had known one another before in a previous incarnation. They must have been brothers—or lovers—or both.

  He’d been thinking of proposing a business connection. Jason was mighty tired of Rose and her monster-disdain of him. (Hell, Crowley had driven his Rose insane.) He thought that Garth and he might exhibit her. The voyeurs of the world would pay damn near anything to see a real ghul eat the dead. Or—if that failed—what would the U.S. government—or any interested, rich government for that matter—pay for a near-human specimen with such an ability to create new body parts for itself? Wouldn’t she be furious?

  Although actually he’d never seen her when she wasn’t granite-eyed and marble-slab cold. It was why he’d never tried to force her. There was no pleasure to be had from such an icy fish-fuck. But her people never killed—she’d said this and for the years he’d known her, it had proved to be true. Even Michael with his prophet’s chainsaw had only been injured just enough to stop his attack on her. And he’d quite died on his own of those injuries.

  Jason entered Garth’s house, smelled anger in the air. Rage had pheromones every bit as potent and distinctive as those of fear and sex. A whirlwind had flown upstairs and he decided to follow it.

  “Garth?” he called out as he raced up the steps. They might not have much time. “You ready? We’d better split.”

  No sound. It was a big house; how could there be no sound at all? At any moment at least one geisha ought to be twitching or moaning.

  He checked each room, every floor. Found the one with the assistant’s head on a different side of the room from the assistant’s body. And the woman he’d thought of as gutsy-because-she-ain’t-got-much-left…those guts were still hot, still steaming on the couch and floor. A lengthy section squirmed with peristalsis until it might have been an eel. Garth wasn’t in the room but clearly he had been.

  Every place else, if there had been a living (even if severely truncated) person there, now there was a dead one. Cleanly but swiftly decapped. No time to spare on formalities or last minute cruelties. Heads sat wherever they had fallen: on couches, on beds, on floor pillows, in chairs, on carpets. Origamies of skull and death mask.

  Jason felt extremely peculiar on the top floor, looking down the hall. Blood had trailed to the end of that corridor and then stopped. A man who had just slaughtered more than a dozen might have this much blood fall off his hands and clothes and weapons as he walked.

  But where was that man?

  Gone to the end of the hall and then just disappeared?

  There had been many disappearances lately. Acquaintances and colleagues of Jason’s. Too many.

  He spied something else at the end of the hall. Jason walked over and picked it up. It was the netsuke he’d given B.G. before he was sent to fight in the Gulf War. The bone figurine of the naked man back-dooring the naked woman whose head was a chrysanthemum flower. It was bloody and it vibrated; a subtle electric charge thrummed through Jason’s fingers. Not really as from a live wire. More like a low level snake bite.

  Jason put it into his pocket. It buzzed slightly, as if it were a pager and had just gone off silently. It moved, as if the man really were thrusting into the woman.

  “Garth?” he shouted again. The sound of his voice and that one syllable echoed back at him.

  Fancy frames hung upon the walls of that hallway. Some were stills from Japanese films. He spotted one of the atrocity pieces Garth had been so proud of. Looked like a first made from the woodblock. Probably worth a small fortune.

  Yoshitoshi Tsukioka.

  What fine sleek paper like a maiden’s skin, ink sublime as blood squeezed out of weeping midnight.

  He hung his head a moment, permitting a moment of silence out of respect for his mentor. He knew Garth was gone. The samurai had made it to the end of the hall and then left, somehow, some way.

  “I hope you are given your own palace and procession of damned.”

  Then Jason took the frame from the wall and busted it, smashing the glass, lifting out the muzan-e. He crumpled it in his fist and then stuffed it entire into his mouth. An electric current stronger than the one in the netsuke burned across his tongue but he wouldn’t spit it out. He chewed, swallowing. Not so difficult. He’d bitten off and swallowed larger pieces of quivering flesh. It danced through his veins and his penis erected, then ejaculated: surely a stream of ink and akurei—demon—moonlight. A beautiful figure waited for him in this pale glow, seen behind his eyes within a field of jasmine. Perfect, too perfect, unsullied, a bride for him to debauch.

  The sound of the front door downstairs being broken open brought him to his senses. He heard boots stomping on the stairs and voices yelling.

  Jason knew a nearby door and the staircase behind it that led to the roof. Quickly he headed there, climbing up fast and as quietly as he could, not quite sure what he’d do when he got up there. He tried to recall if there was a fire escape to take him down again. This was an old brownstone. Surely there was a fire escape.

  No, no…Garth told him it had been removed by the previous owner due to disrepair. It had been more than fifty years old. Garth planned to replace it but it wasn’t as if they were available for pickup at Home Depot.

  There was no other roof close enough to jump to. What would he do? Leap to the ground, several stories below? Superman from the old TV series? And like the ’50s hero, not ever entering the ’60s? That pretender had killed himself. Jason wasn’t that Superman. He was also no ghoul. He couldn’t simply cough up new legs and a new spine. (Probably a new neck would be needed, too.)

  Jason pulled both guns he’d tucked into his coat as he was leaving to go pick up Garth. Okay, he’d shoot it out if he had to. They could only come up the same stairs and through the door one at a time. He’d go for head shots, figuring they were wearing Kevlar vests. He’d shoot out eyes and blow off jaws, teeth scattering like bits of pearly shrapnel. They’d probably bottleneck at first and he’d have a chance to pick them off before they could clear the entrance. Yeah, let ’em back away, call for a chopper. Ja
son imagined shooting it down, the blades bisecting pigeons and finally meth-heads and whores on the sidewalk and street below. More fun than he’d had in the whole of the Gulf War, that would be for sure.

  He came onto the roof, closed the door behind him, and looked up. Clouds were merging from the right and left, the north and south. It had been only slightly cloudy as he’d entered Garth’s house but now a storm was about to erupt. There was still one patch of high space in-between. Jason saw in it the Prince of Dark Bodies. Melanicus!

  “Take me with you,” he whispered, feeling foolish, feeling elated. He’d searched the night skies so often, only to never see the vast black vampire.

  But Melanicus couldn’t help him. The clouds clashed together and swirled. It began to rain, hard pellets stinging like stones. A bolt of lightning struck near Jason, hitting the roof only a couple feet from him, so bright he saw it even when he squeezed his eyes closed and turned away, so hot he felt the hair on his head and in his eyebrows and eyelashes singe and curl. So hot at least a hundred little capillaries on his bare arms and forehead burst from boiling.

  And then he heard crying.

  “Garth?” he asked. But knew Garth would never cry.

  It was a kid somewhere. Hidden there on the roof? Maybe some new project B.G. hadn’t told him about who might have been locked up in a pigeon coop?

  No, I’ve heard this before,a long time ago.

  “Hello? You there, No Man?” Jason asked again, looking around, trying to gauge which direction the voice was coming from so he could find the gateway. (The gateway!) But the sharp crack of lightning, it’s deep crackle and shriek had left his ears ringing. He was lucky it hadn’t completely deafened him.

  “Yeah,” came a reply, wrapped in muffled sob.

  “So is the gate open right now?” Jason wanted to know, his own voice sly.

  There was the eyeball, floating toward him. But where was the opening to the place without horizons?

  “Take me to the land beyond the gate,” Jason told it, growling.